Yup. Another dang karaoke vid.

In retrospect, this was inevitable.

Eh. I don’t know why I do these karaoke vids. I am always deeply dissatisfied with the results, to the point where I feel a little ashamed for even doing one, let alone posting it where the whole world will see it.

I have a song cooking in Riffusion but this time I wrote the lyrics then set them aside so that I can look at them again with fresh eyes and tinker with them as needed.

At least I can dodge a little shame that way.

I keep telling myself, “of course it’s not perfect, it’s karaoke!” but it doesn’t help much.

The problem is that I can’t edit audio nearly as well as I edit video, so I don’t know how to take my vocal track and spruce it up with Autotune and taking the best of multiple takes and so forth and so on.

I mean, cutting and pasting is easy but I have no idea how to splice music of all things together so that it doesn’t sound like multiple takes stitched together.

I could try looking it up, I suppose.

Or maybe there’s some kind of magical AI vocal cleanup tool now that does it all for you.

That would be nice. I am very comfortable editing video but I only do pretty basic stuff. Cut, paste, add titles, maybe some music. Easy.

Anything more technical is beyond me.

I almost sort of have technical skills, which is frustrating. I have been saying for decades that I am a nerd in all ways that aren’t job skills.

Nobody is lining up to pay me for my ability to remember obscure songs or my scattered knowledge of science or my socially awkward introversion.

But I somehow missed getting all the technical skills that are supposed to be our compensation. I am not a programmer or a sysadmin or an engineer. I don’t have an intuitive grasp of system design or higher math. I don’t think in code.

I also don’t have Asperger’s, which is something I suppose.

And, of course, I’m incredibly talented, creatively gifted, and sparklingly charismatic.

I just need help turning those into, ya know, money.

I keep coming back to the idea of needing someone to hold my hand through my journey into relevance. My problems are both emotional and practical but the practical ones I could solve myself given time if I only had that strong, sure hand to hold to help me calm down and focus and deal with the chaos in my head.

I’m such a fragile, sensitive thing. A hothouse flower through and through.

Now where’s the hot guy with a house?

What I really need is Robin Williams from The Birdcage. A smart, competent, organized, driven person to manage and handle a super talented bundle of nerves like me.

It would be amazing to be able to just relax and concentrate on being me, instead of having to do everything myself.

Obviously what I need is an agent. And I have a list of 38 Canadian agents open in a tab, just waiting for me to apply for one. ^[1]

But so far I am still too damn timid to try. When I try to imagine myself applying to be a client of one of them, this crippling voice inside me asks, “And just what do you have to offer them to convince them to take you on?”.

Nothing, I meekly reply. I have no publications of note. The fact that I’ve written millions of words on this blog since 2011 is impressive but it doesn’t prove to an agent that someone else thinks my work is worth something.

And that’s what they are looking for. They are far too busy to figure out if you work is any good by themselves so they rely on other gatekeepers to approve you for them.

Which means getting myself published.

Which means writing things worth publishing.

And a whole new set of gatekeepers. Sigh.

I need an agent to get me an agent.

More after the break.

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On managing me

I’m pretty sure being my agent would be a fairly easy gig… at first, at least.

I’m not that complicated. Give me a task and I do it, and odds are, if it’s a writing task, I will do it both faster and better than you thought possible.

That’s the payoff for all these years of building up my writing muscles on this blog.

And I am not fussy. If I can do it and it pays, I will do it. In fact, I can see myself telling a prospective agent, “Give me all the really crappy tasks nobody else will do. I will clear them off your plate lickety split. ”

And I will. I would relish the challenge. I don’t care what it is. As long as it pays, even if it pays way too little, I will do it.

And obviously, that would be my way of tempting the agent into taking me on as a client. Just think of all the stuff you’ll finally get done!

And I know I probably wouldn’t be calling my agent in the middle of the night to talk me through my latest nervous breakdown nor would I throw a hissy fit if my intricate and fussy demands aren’t met.

Well, probably not. There’s only so much of people screwing up simple things when they were told exactly what to do one man can take.

But I can roll with the punches.

Plus writers often work alone, and that reduces the chances of drama.

But I suspect that once I was famous some ugly sides of my personality would come clawing their way to the surface of my mind and I would have to contend with that.

As does anyone who “makes it”, I would imagine.

Society does not prepare us for large differences in status between us and those around us. We grow up roughly equal to others.

Fame and/or money can fuck that up completely. There is a lot of primal primate programming that we have no idea is lying latent in our brains until it rears its ugly head when we get power or status.

Will Smith has been saying that he wishes everyone could get everything they always wanted so they can see how it doesn’t really solve anything.

I’d like the same thing, but as a test to see if someone can be trusted with power.

Real character is what you do when nobody can stop you.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow