I am in a weird sleep space. Weirder than usual I mean… sleep and I have had a highly nuances and difficult relationship ever since I was a teenager.

But today’s permutation of my bizarre patterns of somnolence is weirder than the mean state. I spent all afternoon in and out of sleep, and yet it didn’t really seem to get me anywhere. I woke up feeling pretty much exactly as sleepy as I had when I fell asleep.

This, needless to say, is really fucking annoying.

Eventually, at around 4:30 pm I had to just put my foot down and accept that I was going to stay somewhat sleepy and get to work on today’s vid.

I originally had the idea of doing what I did for In The Grotto . which was to write an original bit of music and have today’s video be the video for it.

If you get my drift.

But after around 20 minutes of dicking around, I realized that composing music required far more perspicacity than I could muster in my muzzy fuzzy brain, and so I reverted to a simpler notion, namely practicing my ranting skills by bitching about a few things that bug me.

Three of them, in fact, due to my odd compulsion to do things in threes. Here they are.

It’s not my very best work. Watching it now, I can see that my points are coming across a little more incoherently than usual and I am clearly having trouble focusing.

But what the hell. You take the good, you take the bad, you take them all and there you have… my creative output. Being thus far incapable of doing art the more traditional and linear by making a thing and then just refining the hell out of it until it’s perfect, I am left with doing things in a way that I am sure would be anathema to a more typically perfectionist person : I just do my best then shove it out the door in whatever shape my day’s energies can get it into, and forget about it.

What progress I make, I make over time, via practice. That means that I have not produced anything with a high level of polish yet, and I know that is very bad, career wise. By now I should have produced at least one thing that is as good as I can make it, period, but my muse doesn’t seem to work that way.

So my development as a writer, like everything else about me, runs perpendicular to the normal way. I seem to be destined to always move sideways rather than straight ahead, and I need to accept that the way other people do things simply will not work for me.

I am just too damned weird.

Still, I am thinking of putting together a demo reel for myself. I might not be able to produce one thing that is nearly perfect, but I can fake it by taking the best moments from sixty different videos (plus others I have done) and make it look like I am awesome.

Call that the “Best Of….” effect. You can make anything look awesome with judicious editing.

Of course, it would be a demo reel of the funny stuff, not the serious talky stuff. The talky stuff is just plain not commercial. That won’t keep me from doing them, of course. I am a thinker and a communicator and that means I need to communicate my thoughts.

But if we are talking about what sells, my strongest point is comedy. I can make funny stuff. It’s weird funny, of course. I am not what you would call a populist humorist. I am not looking primarily to make comedy that appeals to the masses.

When it comes to comedy, I am an ariste. I want to make the best, funniest, most kickass comedy that I can, and if that loses a certain percentage of the potential audience, I can live with that.

As long as my comedy appeals to the sort of people who like Monty Python, Red Dwarf, and Hitchhiker’s Guide, I am doing my job well.

Plus, past a certain point, you just have to make the art that makes you happy. That way, even if absolutely nobody enjoys it but you, you still got creative joy out of you, and you can exercise artist’s privilege and blame the world for not appreciating your genius.

Of course, if someone came along and offered me money to make comedy that was a tad below my standards, I would pounce on that like a starving wolf on filet mignon. I am currently scraping by on $8,000 per year. Minimum wage would more than double my income.

I will churn out lameass comedy for a while for that. I would just approach it like any skilled labourer, as a challenge to my abilities. Sure, it would not be the work I dream of doing. But nobody starts out at the top. Work a couple years in the CLS (Comedy Like Substance) factory, meet like-minded people in the biz, get a shoe=string pilot together for something decent, and try to make it that way.

Of course, this all takes place in the fantasy factory of my mind, where I have found a way around around the big block that keeps me from promoting myself and the other block that seems to keep me from being noticed even when I do.

I need to learn to decloak, man. There is a vibrant and violent conflict in me between the part of me that wants all the world’s attention and adoration, and the part that wants to be invisible and undetectable so that he can be safe.

Until I resolve that conflict somehow, I will be stuck, semi-visible but ignored. It would be great to be able to cast off my shell and say to the world, “This is me as I am! And I am ALIVE!”

But that doesn’t make it happen.