I have 24 minutes to write this blog entry. Hope I make it!

First up, did you know Joan Rivers has a show on TV called Fashion Police?

And did you know that this comedy legend hired some of the brightest, funniest comedy writers in the business to write for her show?

And did you know that she didn’t really feel like paying them what they are worth?

Yeah. They’re not happy about that.

I wish I could say I was surprised. But I have heard stories of Joan behaving like this before, and it really paints her in a bad light. \

Despite being 80 years old, JC is still being a very sharp and funny lady. Sadly, though, this has not prevented her from contracting a very common disorder of the elderly where two factors combine : the fact that their ideas about what things should cost are hopelessly out of date, and the sort of paranoia and irrational fear of others that comes with getting old.

These things combine into Clutch The Purse Disorder, where the moment the subject of money comes up, the older person reacts as though you are personally trying to rob them and all rationality flies out the window. They are not merely reluctant to negotiate or mistrustful of your intentions.

It’s more like a sudden volcano of emotion that is the voice of their deep fear and mistrust of the world that comes from a dulling of the sharp edge of their mind and that feeling of insecurity that makes people feel like everyone is after their money.

You can imagine that if, deep down, you feared you could not actually tell if someone was trying to rip you off, you might start assuming everything was.

As far as I can tell, there’s no cure for this. The old person could have billions and you could just be asking for a fifty dollar a month raise, the reaction will be the same : one of primal rage and fear.

I just hope JC doesn’t lose her show because she can’t help but freak out.

And then there’s this.

That’s audio only, but it’s worth a listen because I think this man’s story says a lot about men’s struggles in the world and how outdated and frankly quite pathological attitudes about not showing weakness and being independent and never asking for help can lead to far more than personal ruin.

That man nearly killed some of the men he had worked with, had nearly become the center of a national tragedy and gone down in infamy and brought shame and horror to his family simply because he could not admit to himself that he needed help.

And his story is far from unique. I have looked into the hearts of evil and terrifying men, and nearly always there is some deep and terrible pain driving them to increasingly hostile acts because these men have been raised to never show weakness and so to them, in a deep unconscious subrational way, it is better to become a violent, out of control monster than to ever admit weakness or concede defeat.

Think about that for a moment.

Often there is not just pain but fear. Fear of an unjust and unkind world that is deadly to the weak and so you must not only be strong to be safe, you must constantly broadcast to the world that you are strong, and scary, and definitely not to be fucked with ever.

A lot of men had done a lot of terrible things just to prove how dangerous they are. Why? Because they feel that is the only way they can be safe.

So to me, anything that encourages men, especially men who are not sensitive intellectual types, to open up to others and let go of the pain and fear that drives their rage is a good thing.

Not just for the men, and not just for their poor shattered families, but for the whole damned world.

Finally, we have today’s vid.

I decided that I would try a little science commentary of the sort I usually reserve for the Friday Science Whatever today. I am not super happy with the results. I feel the piece was long on commentary and short on facts. And I was having a bad day when it came to spitting out what I wanted to say, so there are a LOT more edits than I would have preferred.

Once more, I find myself wishing I could be more concise and focused. To me, my writing, whether it’s in blog or vlog form, always seems vague and diffuse, and I always want it to be more tight and focused, but I don’t quite know how to get there.

I feel like I have this vast amount of talent and scads of creativity and genius, but I have trouble bringing it all to focus on a single thing. Everything I do feels like it is a loose handful of gravel with a number of rough semi-precious stones in it.

And I want to make diamonds, dammit. Big bright beautiful diamonds that shine for the whole world to see. And I know that I am getting there in my own strange nonlinear way. My writing is far more focused and expressive now than it was a year ago.

But I guess part of being an artist is never ever being entirely satisfied with your art. Even if others think it is great, you can always see a dozen things that could or should have been better, and if you are a healthy artist, that is what leads you to keep on trying.

It is a painful process, because it means that over and over again, you will come to the point where you hate everything you have done and hate whatever it is you are doing even more and you just want to scream in frustrated rage at the universe for denying you the beauty that seems just barely out of reach.

But with time and experience, you survive enough of those that you can always work your way out of them again, and think of another way to tackle the problem at hand, and thus work yoru way out of the mud.

Being an artist can be like being born over and over again in a single lifetime.

True art, thank goodness, is worth it. \