Queue is a fun word to type.
Anyhow, what I am talking about is the result of procrastinating by default. Eventually, you have so many things you “should” do that your mental “in” tray has been crushed under three tons of tasks and tackling any of it can seem impossible, or worse, completely and utterly pointless.
Because what’s the point of doing one task when there will still be so many left?
I think that describes my current mental space. There are, of course, billions of things I could be doing, and millions I should be doing, but at this point I can’t even imagine having the strength to choose one, let alone actually do them.
Why? The main culprit is an inability to delete tasks from the queue. If I had the intestinal fortitude to simply say “That’s never going to happen and I am fine with that” and clear things off this inner list, I could hack it down to a manageable size.
Or just delete the whole thing. I guess that’s what my attempts to tell myself that there’s no such thing as “should” amount to.
But the real deep down dirty secret is that I don’t know how to deal with life without that infinite queue to hide behind. As long as I am crushed under the weight of possibilities, I don’t have to deal with life and I don’t have to figure out an actual path for myself.
And that keeps me warm and safe under all these possibilities.
Whenever I try to select one possible path and follow it, I feel all the other possibilities pulling back on the one selected and back it goes into the pile.
Like I have discussed before in this space, I can envision so many possibilities that it makes it hard to ever believe any choice I make would be the right one.
I mean, what are the odds? A million to one, right?
But that’s specious bullshit too. Because it’s not like I literally have a list of possibilities in my head. It’s more a sense of possibilities, and given my mental illness, such mental sensations are suspect as hell.
So maybe it’s all just my usual concatenation of bullshit excuses for not getting on with life. Maybe all my reasons for not doing things are nothing but lies I tell myself in order to keep my mind busy and to produce the feeling of progress without really changing anything at all.
If so, I have no idea what to do about it, and I am pretty sure that’s the truth.
I can feel the sick part of my mind trying to spin up so it can weave a new web of bullshit to keep me from dealing with life.
But I don’t want to do that this time.
I want to find out when I am out of excuses.
Maybe it will be my salvation. Maybe it will be my annihilation.
Maybe it will be both. The self is dead, long live the self.
But I am so god damned sick of this bullshit life of mine that I can’t wait to find out.
More after the break.
Just when you thought it was safe to go back on YouTube!
… I am back and bigger than life.
Unless you have a very small monitor.
Presto chango ta da!
I swear to God, I was not sitting too close to the camera this time. The original video has me at a safe, respectful, normal distance.
But somehow, when I uploaded it to YouTube, I got an involuntary close-up.
Anyhow, whatever. Point is, I made a video – a real video – for the first time in ages, and wow, does it feel good.
I’d forgotten how much fun making and editing video can be. And this is only the beginning. This was the video equivalent of clearing my throat. Many wild and wonderful things will be forthcoming.
I’m not sure how often, exactly. I know I don’t want to lock myself into a “one a day” timetable again. That led to a lowering of quality.
So as much as it goes against my deep seated need for predictability, I guess my schedule for the future is “Whenever”.
Damn, I hate that.
Of course, I had also forgotten what a pain in the ass working with video could be. In order to make the simply offering above, I had to go through three or four free webcam recording problems that flat out did not work to find one that does, then use that to record myself a bunch of times (took a while to get it right), and then discover that Video Studio doesn’t like the format the webcam thing uses, so then I had to download a video format converter, and then I accidentally deleted the main video and had to start all over, and only after all that could I edit the thing into shape and then upload it.
But the important thing is, I fucking won. I took on the forces of fuckery and bad juju and kicked their ass to actually make a frigging video.
And the great part is that a lot of the fuckery I had to go through today is the kind of thing you only have to do once, so future videos will be way easier to make.
And that’s good, because I hate – hate – having to fuck around with technical BS when all I want to do is create.
But that’s part of the price of being an artist.There is no such thing as a purely abstract art. There is always some technical BS to deal with, whether it’s making your programs work together or leaning how to mix paint.
It’s always something. I think one of the things I like most about writing is that it is very nearly completely abstract. The only technical skill is being able to type, and then with just these words of mine, I can paint pictures in people’s minds.
Assuming I can get them to read the frigging thing.
But now I am moving into video, and therefore I am taking on a greater technical burden in exchange for creating something that is both more readily accessible than a thousand words of text and allows for a much, much, much richer form of self-expression.
It’s an entirely different level of storytelling, and I look forward to fucking around with it.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow,.