I had completely forgotten about this skit until today, and it is still fucking brilliant.

That’s just plain a brilliant script. It perfectly satirizes the Seventies children’s programs that all seemed to be produce by, on, and for drugs. The people involved were incidental. They were only a means by which the drugs and their drugness could propagate.

How much do you want to bet that Tom Kenny has used the Professor Ellis D. Trails voice again on Spongebob? He even looks kind of like Squidward.

I never got into the whole Sid and Marty Croft trip myself. I think I was born a little too late. 1973 kids like me didn’t grow up with the Banana Splitz or H. R. Pufenonajoint (I mean Pufenstuf), we grew up with The Muppets and Sesame Street. Arguably, way less trippy.

So neither Croft mean anything to me. Jim Henson, on the other hand, is still, and will always be, an absolute god in my personal pantheon. His brand of silly comedy, wacky puppets, and real warmth is written deep into the very DNA of my psyche, and I will love him and his memory forever.

We won’t mentioned his death.

I seem to be between writing states lately. I am bored with what I have been writing, all the professorial philosophical deep stuff, but not yet ready to take on some new direction.

In fact, I keep forgetting that I have made no particular obligation to myself or anyone to keep doing what I have been doing, writing an article a day for this blog. Writing 2875 words a day in order to meet my million word year goal last year made that habit of thinking so deeply ingrained that I have trouble remembering that I am free to put my energies into something else, if I feel like it. What matters is not the format, goal, or form, but that I continue to express my creativity and lately, putting words on a page on a blog that only has a twelve reader audience just does not feel like enough any more. I want to do something more vivid and creative and expressive. I grow tired of this stringing words together.

Hence my reversion to a more chatty “bloggy” style of writing. I guess for a while I was trying to sound professional or pursue some sort of vague idea of a more “serious” writer, but for the most part, I just ended up writing dull professorial prose.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s a fun style to write in for a while, and provides its own invaluable structure for the expression of complex ideas and tricky concepts and so forth. And of course, I have not expressed anything that way that I don’t agree with any more. In fact, there’s probably a hell of a lot more of my ideas and beliefs and so forth just waiting to be encoded into academic talk and turned into essays.

But seriously, who the fuck cares? It’s not like the world is beating a path to the door of the world’s most insightful philosopher or most incisive observer of humanity’s psyche. I don’t sit around reading other people’s blogs to see who has the best grip on the eternal verities. Mostly I read science fiction novels.

Maybe I should write one of those.

I guess this is just that valley of discontent between creative highs. I will ponder and brood and grumbl for a while, and then, hopefully, a new path with appear, one I find more satisfying.

Part of all this falderol is simply trying to learn to follow my muse and my intuition, instead of more or less just living with them and using what they produce, but not allowing them to influence my actual will.

What kind of artist keeps his muse in a cage like that?

Having done that for so long, though, I probably should not just let her out of the cage all at once. She would probably wreck the joint, honestly. All that pent up power and sheer reality-warping electromagnetism should not be let out all at once. It would probably drive me round the bend, honestly.

Or maybe that’s just what my cowardly side wants me to think. I don’t know.

But for now, anyhow, the plan is to let the whole thing build and find ways to increase the voltage and amps of my brain’s output slowly but steadily.

I can’t even imagine what it is like to be out of creativity. To be empty. My problem is that I have so much of it, it all wants to come out at once, and gets stuck in the door.

One at a time, please.