No big pile of links to share today, so I will start off with today’s vid.

Hey look, I managed to make something that had one thing to say, said it in a high density way, and then ended it. It’s still not up to the standard of professionalism that I desire, but it’s a promising start.

And let me tell you, I could have gone into so much more detail. It took a real act of will to just explain the thing in a reasonable efficient manner instead of pouring every thought I have about the subject into the vid.

As is, I think I sort of ended it abruptly. But this is my first time attempting such concision. As I practice it over and over, I will no doubt get better at it.

Ideally, I would love to be able to condense all these “the deal” type things into a really lean, muscular ten second sound bite, and do six per episode, bang bang bang. One minute, six questions you have always wondered about answered. Smokin’.

That would be some pretty Internet-friendly content, and I think I might be able to pull it off. It was very interesting taking my original three minutes of video and paring it down to around half that minus the credits. There were large sections I clipped out because I realized they were unnecessary. I hope to further develop this ability.

Plus, it’s a fun way to share my zillions of theories with the world. I know that the format sort of implies I am giving people facts, and I am definitely going to give a lot of thought to how to remove that without causing the format to lose its appeal.

Maybe I should sign off with “And as far as I am concerned, that’s the deal with that.” Or something along those lines, but more compact and pithy.

Or I suppose I could just put a disclaimer on the end that says “Michael Bertrand, while amazingly intelligent, is not an expert in any field and the views expressed on this show are his alone, and not endorsed by science, culture, or God. ”

That should cover it, I think.

Other than making the vid, it was a pretty quiet day here at Casa Del Mio. In fact, today’s vid took so little time to make, even with the pictures and text, that I was left adrift and purposeless for a couple of hours. So what did I do?

I took a stupid fucking nap. That shit has to end. There must be all kinds of things I could do, real value added meaningful things, that might even lead to opportunities and shit, that I could do for myself when I find myself at loose ends.

Taking a random nap when I do not even feel sleepy, just for something to do to make the time pass faster and to reset my anxiety clock, should be the absolute last resort. I am forty years old now and the last thing I should want is to make my slide to the grave any faster.

I want to reach out and grab life, devour it like the feast it is, and get the most out of my life. I have spent two decades wasting my life by trying to get the least out of it.

Hell, just trying to get out of it period. Living like I am in the world’s most piss-poor version of the Witness Protection Program, hiding out, afraid to be recognized, only going out into the world when it is absolutely necessary and even then, never alone.

But nobody is looking for me. Trust me on that. I am not hiding out from anything but reality, and frankly, I am getting sick of it.

And it is hard, sometimes, to take things step by step. There is a big part of me that wants to do something big and crazy and then just dare the world to ignore me.

But of course, the world is not ignoring me. In order to ignore something, you have to know it exists. That is what divides ignoring from ignorance.

After all, there are billions of people in this world that you know absolutely nothing about. That does not mean you are ignoring them. You just don’t know. You couldn’t know.

I think one of those unintended side-effects of mass media culture is the deep down feeling in many people that if you are not famous, you don’t exist. The people you see on TV or in movies, and heck even the people you see on YouTube (hi there!), seem so much more real and important than your completely ordinary and unrecognized life that I think people start to feel like that reality, the world of fame and exposure, is the only truly real world and that the rest of us are somehow entirely real, or at best, just extras in a crowd scene of life.

After all, part of media saturation is that you see far, far more people via media than you ever do in real life. Each individual exposure is very weak, being many places removed from being as stimulating as a real world encounter, but the sheer volume of them overwhelms the boundaries of our personal realities and create this zeitgeist world where things we know definitely are not real (they’re fictional) still have some of the effects of real things on us.

I mean, it’s hardly genius cultural analysis to talk about how characters in people’s favorite show begin to seem like members of the family to them over time. But I wonder if we really understand just how much that means in terms of the public consciousness and how it relates to each and every one of us.

We are all swimming in the media ocean, one we increasingly contribute to ourselves as well.

I don’t think we have even begun to understand just what that means.

Hmmm. Interesting theory. Maybe it will be a Deal some day!