Not only has it not bothered me to just keep making vids like I have been doing for two months, after all the pressure and excitement of yesterday, today almost felt like a vacation.

Granted, I didn’t add a lot bells and whistles to today’s vid (linked below), but then again, I am becoming less and less keen on trying to make my talking vids more visually dynamic anyhow.

Everything I do along those lines has started to seem more irritating and distracting than anything else. I think I am an interesting speaker with a lot of interesting ideas, and so, arguably, I don’t need a lot of pictures, cutaways, or anything else to adorn my speech.

Nevertheless, I am going to look for a good source for open source photos. They have to be open source because I want to be able to click that “monetize” button on my YouTube vid in good conscience and without avoidable legal risk.

After all, in the unlikely event that I become wildly successful, I don’t want anyone showing up saying that all that cash belongs to them.

So it has to be either public domain, or fully owned by yours truly because I made the damned thing. Getting all my pictures from Google Image Search, while easy and fun, could end up getting me in trouble with the copyright police and I don’t want that kind of hassle for any reason.

So if you know of a place where I can get fully public domain photos (where I have all rights, including commercial use), drop me a line in the comments.

An of course, public domain video clips would also rock. Despite what I said earlier, the right bells and whistles (the ones that illustrate the point without distracting from it) really do make my stuff seem more professional and accessible, and I want my stuff to come across as well as it can.

Like…. wearing a shirt and stuff.

It’s all well and good to be a head in the clouds thinker like myself and not be worried about superficial and meaningless things like appearance and first impressions, but if you want to make it down here in mundane reality, you have to worry about that kind of thing.

I suppose ideally, my serious talky stuff would come across like one of those cheap but highly effective documentaries that are all just talking heads, stock footage, and slowly zooming in on photos.

That would be really all the non-political stuff needs. The political speech needs to be more dynamic than that, because I seriously want to raise the rabble before it’s too late, and so the sorts of things I have been doing, with on screen text to punch up key phrases, is more like it.

And in general, I feel like I should be focusing more on myself and my relationship with the camera (strictly platonic, I swear) and developing my nascent charm, wit, presence, and so on rather than concentrating on extraneous externalities like video tricks.

I will still be on the lookout for ways to punch up my videos, of course, but I will stop devoting so much time on technique and keep things simple so I can develop the performance/personality aspect instead.

And besides… something my therapist said has got me really thinking.

It’s something I have heard before but it never really landed for me like it did when I heard it yesterday. My therapist said that the reason why I keep thinking about things like how much of my life has been wasted by my disease (depression) and how I can’t seem to get over it, is because I am not done mourning all those years yet.

And I think he’d right. I think I am grieving the life that I never had, and until that is over, a certain amount of depression and obsession is perfectly natural.

This also explains why it all seems so circular because I keep ending up in the same place over and over again. That is what grief is like. The grieving mind processes a bit of the pain that is too large to process all at once, and that makes you feel better for a while, but then it comes time to process the next piece and down you go again.

And it can take a lot of cranks of that handle before you are done.

Declaring myself to have a new life at 40 was a very good start. But it will take more than that to shed the skin of almost twenty years. I will have to really work at processing everything if I hope to get this goddamned bus moving, and that is what I want to concentrate on for the next little while.

Not that I know exactly how to do that. But that’s rather the point. I don’t have to know what I am doing. When it comes to one’s emotional being, it’s fine to just go by instinct and see where you end up.

And if I say that often enough, I will eventually believe it. Right?

Oh yeah. And here is today’s vid.

Basically, if you truly believe in your liberal ideals and you say you are dedicated to doing whatever it takes to see that they win out against the aging ghouls in charge, then you should be willing to deal directly with people who are far less intelligent than you and who are normal and boring and maybe even remind you of the kind of people who never understood you back home.

Because they are the majority, and they are only conservative because liberals ceded all populist ground to the conservatives and retreated into ivory tower idealism that is more concerned with pursuing its own ethical perfection than sully itself with actually being in power and having to make tough choices.

Liberals don’t have to be timid and cowardly. The liberals of the past certainly weren’t.

We just need to be honest about what we are doing, and humble enough to do it right.

Rise, rabble! Rise!