Or at least that’s what I’m telling myself.
Had a lot of trouble getting to sleep this morning. Had one of my attacks of being sleepy until I lay down and then suddenly I am wide awake and extremely tense.
So I lay there a while, hoping I could relax myself via stretching and other motions, but eventually I had to give up and get up and do stuff.
So I got up and did some of my pushouts, and that helped. Pacing to and fro probably would have helped even more but I was too depressed.
I’d have to feel better in order to do the things that would make me feel better. Fun.
After exercising, I fucked around on the computer a while and eventually got tired enough to go to bed and sleep for real this time.
Time elapsed since first attempt :around 80 minutes.
Time I spent asleep : around three hours.
Clearly that’s not enough.
Yay, another sleepy day.
Not happy with how my video turned out. But that’s as far as I can take it for now. When I can, I will try adding some bells and whistles, but right now, it is done.
I would probably be better off making peace with the fact that I will never be the sort of person who hangs on to something he has made until he has made it as good as it can possibly be before putting it out into the world.
That’s just not possible for me. I am too emotionally unstable. If I don’t push it out into the world the moment it is done, my belief in it will collapse and it will never see the light of day and probably will get deleted.
It really limits me as an artist, but it’s the best I can do. I can never be the kind of person who says “Not till it’s ready!”.
Instead, I say “The next one will be better”.
And iit will be. I do make better first drafts over time. But still.
I want to do so much better. And I suppose I will, eventually.
But boy do I wish I could do things the way others do.
Maybe what I really need to do is rework how I see my day.
Accept that odds are, I am not going to get anything useful done in the afternoon, at least for the rest of the summer.
Imagine my day as basically starting at 5 pm. By then, I will probably have caught up on sleep and be ready to actually tackle things.
I have resisted this idea for a long time out of some misguided desire to be more “normal” and because for some reason, I find the idea depressing.
But what the hell. I am a creature of the night. Might as well get used to it.
Maybe even try being productive when I am up at night in the wee hours of the morning. Those can be my most active hours sometimes.
Oh, but then I would lose precious video game playing hours!
Maybe what I really need to do is convince myself that being productive is just as safe and fun as playing video games.
Wouldn’t that be amazing?
More after the break.
Leveraging my assets
One of the things I like about my recent “call to libertarians” video is that it allowed me to use more of my assets than just my writing skill.
Yes,I know…. with writing this amazing, how could there possibly be more?
But there is! The video also makes use of my skills as an orator. I have talkedabout that skill here before when I told the stories about how I held an impromptu D&D game and a room full of medical students absolutely spellbound with my charm and wit and likability, and of course, my charisma.
It’s not a standard kind of charisma, but it can be quite effective.
Plus I also have what I will call force of presence. When I am “on”, I come across very strongly both in person and on camera.
This would be a problem without my also being charming and lovable. But I am, and I think that gives me the true charisma that can make people happy just by being around me, basking in my glow.
And that’s like, you know, important.
On the other side of the coin, the video features my potential as a firebrand. I can totally imagine myself being a galvanizing and polarizing figure for my flaming hot speeches that hit people right in the feels and make them good and angry about the world.
Some people would love me for that, some would hate me. Like my hero Martin Luther,. I could end up opening divisions that would last for hundreds of years and really turn the whole world upside down.
I don’t want to do that. I always want peace, enlightenment, and harmony.
But those might not be mine to give. My job, as it were, might be to be the one who starts the fire that burns down all the old dead trees in the forest and makes room for the new trees to find root.
But like another hero of mine, Paul Atreides from Dune, I want to avoid all that if I can. I don’t want millions of people screaming my name as they wage a bloody jihad.
And yet, there is so much hypocrisy and corruption and evil and sheer fucking stupidity and regal galloping buck-naked lunacy in the world today that I can’t see any way to deal with it surgically and precisely.
It feels like the only option I have is to scream back at the void as loud and hard as I can. It’s like an ideological gag reflex that makes me want to violently regurgitate all the poisonous bullshit I have had to swallow right into the face of this terrifying age and force it to deal with its own mess for a change.
And I bet I would feel so much better afterwards.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.