I did a sort of vid.

It’s technically better than me just sitting there talking, but… ehh.

It’s still not making me happy. I get the feeling that if I want to make the best videos I can make (and I am pretty sure I do), I am going to have to put far more time and energy than I am right now.

At least at first, when I am developing the format.

Once the pieces are in place and I know what I am doing (it could happen), it will presumably become more routine.

I know what elements need to be there to make my little vids the slick satirical commentary news-style program I want it to be, so it’s just a matter of pulling enough of myself together to get all those things into one project.

But I know how I operate. Incrementally. I build things up layer by layer. I add a thing, test it, see if it’s working and if so if it could work better, and the next day I do it again.

That’s just how I work. I tinker. I test. I analyze the result. I think about it. That thinking goes into the next model, and the next, and the next, and so on.

I can’t imagine going on to step B before verifying that step A is solid and trustworthy, or at least is as solid and trustworthy as I can make it.

I guess it’s sort of an application of my fundamentally cautious nature. Deep down I don’t trust things to go well unless I make them go well and that naturally leads to a certain slow but sure approach to things.

Today, I gave looking to my BlueSky for inspiration a try. When it was vid-making time, I had no particular inspiration for a vid and my mind seemed reluctant to come up with one (stupid summer brain) so I figured it was time to look to the news.

Clearly, static images while I talk is not much of an improvement at all. Technically, there’s more to see when I am talking on the screen.

So obviously my technique needs to be refined a tad.

What I really should do is stop being so damned lazy and put in the hard work to come up with enough images and clips to accompany what I am saying.

It doesn’t have to be a non-stop slideshow. After all, that’s not how Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, or Seth Myers do it.

But it has to be enough to keep the visual presentation going and make things look slick and cool and like I might even know what I’m doing.

I don’t, really. But it feels nice to pretend.

I provide the genius. The competence tends to come from others. Or at least I wish it would. I would be so much more relaxed if I had a trustworthy crew.

There’s that word again. Trust. I don’t have it. I only trust what I can know and verify and that leads to a very limited life.

At some point – a point I can only call “faith” – you have to trust that the universe is not out to get you and that disaster does not constantly lurk waiting for you to foolishly trust that things will be okay and then POUNCE and that the world is, in fact, pretty okay.

And on the surface of my mind, I know all these things. Logically speaking, my level of suspicion and paranoia is insane. None of it is remotely justified.

But deep down I have a lot of unhealed wounds and infected scars and those refuse to let me ever truly relax and trust that everything will be okay.

Because by default, everything sucks and everything that can go wrong will and the only hope of any kind of safety is to watch in all directions at once.

And that’s impossible.

More after the break.

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The dire deep

It started with this :

(warning, video is somewhat emotionally disturbing for non-scary reasons)

I needed to see that video because it pushed a lot of emotional buttons for me that I really benefitted from having pushed.

Her descent into and out of madness helped me process some stuff.

But it also left me in a temporarily perilous state. When the video finished I felt my frustration with my life very keenly, like the video had honed it to a point, and I felt dizzy and confused and a little crazy.

More than a little, really.

But there was no need to panic. I knew it would be temporary. In fact, I wish I had thought to grab that feeling and hang on to it because it had managed to penetrate my usual cloak of numbness and made me feel emotionally real and present and alive for a while and I wish I had made that last as long as possible.

Those rare precious moments are when I truly get some emotions processed, and it’s almost always because something made me really really sad and/or upset.

Not the most comfortable way to piece one’s insanity but not the least either.

When I have these moments, it’s like for a little while I know how normal people experience life. How they just go forward feeling what they feel and making the best decisions they can based on an emotional logic that eludes me.

It’s like a calculus that takes their emotional needs as a foundational variable and therefore produces well rounded and psychologically healthy solutions.

That seems achingly beautiful to me. Sure, they may not be as “smart” as me, but those people are a hell of a lot more functional and wholesome and complete than I and so my hot n’ greedy little heart wants to reach out and take what they have for myself.

I’m no angel. Or rather, I am an angel, but I’m a hell of a lot of others things too.

I know that the cold, broken world inside me is wrong on so many levels. It came from a small boy withdrawing into the world of the mind to escape the unthinkable happening to him and it alienated me from my own emotional core in order to create this eerily calm and secretly coldblooded ice cold snake inside me that intellectualizes everything as a way to make it digestible.

And I am still hiding inside myself from myself and from the big bad world out there.

And I wish I could just make myself be real and normal for a while. For long enough to worth through some very strong and deeply buried emotions.

But I can’t.

Not yet, anyhow.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.