Maybe it’s the pouch.

Should Dutch New York be a launchpad for podcasts, or a rich blog with embedded media? Are they mutually exclusive?

Next week, I will be going to PodCamp Philly for the two days. Unlike PodCamp NYC, I will come armed with an actual project, DutchNewYork.com (see previous post), for which I have a fairly overarching question. I suppose it would be good to get my quality-if-not-quantity readership on the case as well.

The plan would be to provide the most reliability through the blog, which would serve as the backbone property, delivering a post at least once a day, maybe with regular weekday features, such as Links Wednesday. I feel adept in all Internet media that can be embedded in a WordPress blog, and hope to use them all. The subject matter will dictate the choice of medium. If I’m concentrating on an artisan with examples of her work, it gets a Flickr slideshow. If it’s an event with much activity and people doing stuff, nothing but a short video will do. A meaty interview with a guy in a necktie sitting in an office calls for an audio recording, and a little play-control widget embedded in the post. Whatever makes sense between two blog paragraphs that bolsters a point being made right then and there, that’s what dictates the embedded media. I think.

The thing is, after a number of such recordings — say, five interviews — there will be the argument that I should post them and syndicate them into a podcast. Or even that I should plan on doing that from the start.

There are some good arguments in favor. There will be those who discover the podcast first, maybe never get to the blog or use it for show notes, and care not to go beyond that. Producing with them in mind is good for overall audience count, which will be valuable come monetizing time. (Sorry I used that word.)  To postpone this is to leave money on the table.

To me, there are even stronger arguments against the idea. A podcast is, for good or ill, an unwritten commitment to consistency, usually one episode every week or two. This means that my attentions to punctuality are split three ways: the blog, an audio podcast and a video podcast. What if one week there are two things that happen that would be best on audio, but neither are suitable for video? To satisfy the subscription demand, I’ll put onto video something that doesn’t belong there. (This is assuming I can find the time!) Also, each snippet will now have to be packaged like a free-standing show, not only with an opening and closing, but with cross-network pimping. While I subscribe to and like Mitch Joel’s Six Pixels of Separation podcast, the first ten minutes are wasted on me, because he’s going on about every other Web stronghold for which he wants to up the odometer. I don’t want to do that. I would rather drive traffic expressly to the blog, where they’ll discover at their own pace the connections to all the other places and media I’ll have up, but mostly get enthralled by the content.

What would you do in my case? Can audio and video start out as just enhancements and illustrations on the blog and later convert to podcasts? Should they ever? Should the podcasts be established right out of the box? Remember, this is a nights-and-weekends project at first. I have a staff of one (me), and no money to pay anyone else.

What are your thoughts?

P.S.: I made sure to get the .com, .net and .org of the domain DutchNewYork. Which I bought from GoDaddy for about $24. Does that make me the Peter Minuit of the blogosphere?

“What good is sitting alone in your room? Come, hear the music play.” —Joel Gray

Visualize you’re walking along a dirt path. There’s a fairly tall barricade behind you, of earth and vertical logs. You’ve just been let through the main gate. The path gets wider as you go — south, judging by the sun’s position. There are farm animals wandering among the people; picket fences keep them out of the many yards. A woman with an odd headpiece is carrying two buckets of water on a yoke, and wishes you a “Guten dag.” She’s followed by a sheep. At the end of the path, near the shore of a great sea, is a fort, a pair of tall A-frame buildings, and to the right, a windmill.

Quick: where are you? A fairer question: when are you?

It’s the mid-1600s, and you’re in America. No, not Jamestown. Not Plymouth. You didn’t just bid good-morning to a “pilgrim”. Where you are standing will eventually be the corner of Wall Street and Broadway, in Manhattan. (Careful you don’t get hit by a downtown bus.)

Welcome to the world-capital of historical incongruity that is New York City.

Since I was married, slowly at first but with gathering momentum, the history of western civilization has been one of my wife’s and my (Dare I use the word now? What will they all say? Oh, screw it, there’s no better word)… passions. This interest, this mental itch that demanded scratching, was vindicated in the 2005 publication of a book by then-fellow Putnam Valley resident Russell Shorto, titled Island at the Center of the World: The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan and the Forgotten Colony that Shaped America.

Meanwhile, on the home front, my cubicle job is ending, and the smell of change is intoxicating. The same kind of work I’ve been doing for a wage I used to do as an agency freelancer (okay, temp), and I got such a reputation that I was kept busy, working an hourly rate 10 years ago that my wages have only recently matched, but with 2008 dollars. If I went back as a temp, my hourly gross rate would go up 40% instantly. I could match my current income working four days a week. Whatever would I do in that fifth day? (And probably the weekend, and nights, till all hours?)

A blog. Spanning the Hudson Valley, western Connecticut, New Jersey and Delaware — the boundaries of New Netherland — in search of remnants of our 17th-century colonial past, and the marks those Dutch, and the native peoples they met, left on the American psyche that remain today. In search of the stories, the folklore, the places off the beaten path and absent in the tour guides. The hard science and the tall tales,  labeled accurately. The Dutch colonists had, and still have, a reputation as profit-seeking above all else. This blog will handle that issue forthrightly, dispelling falsehoods, admitting shortcomings, and defending Capitalism as a value the Dutch passed on to the English, for the benefit of the independent nation to come.

And the timing is ripe: next year marks the 400th anniversary of Henry Hudson’s foray, past the straits already observed the century before by Verrazano, into what would be New York harbor and the river that eventually bore his name. From that moment until the Dutch gave up the colony to the English in the 1660s (not once but twice!), the Netherlands imparted a cultural and economic momentum so strong that the English were unwilling to fiddle with it, beyond some cosmetic changes. For generations afterward, on the northern frontiers (we’re talking Albany here), if the English wanted to communicate with the native tribes, they needed a Dutch interpreter.

Sounds good to me. Does it sound good to you? No? Too bad; I’m doing it anyway!

You who’ve followed this blog (my thanks to your readership and support!) will observe that this idea doesn’t appear in my Portfolio of Schemes. It is mentioned in the comments section as an idea I was mulling with marketing impresario Mark Davidson in his free one-hour consultation, which I can’t recommend enough. Not to say that I took to heart all that he suggested. He recommended go in with monetizing guns a-blazing (if I heard him right). I want to lead with my passion. (Yeah, I said the P-word again.)

In the book Freakonomics, there’s a chapter comparing beauty pageant contestants to drug dealers. (I haven’t read the book, but heard it discussed.) In both “industries,” the allure of riches at the top of a pyramid is made possible by a lot of strugglers below who, if they knew the odds they face of ascending the pyramid, might not have made that career choice. I’d add two others: Amway (of which I have experience) and for-profit blogs. And yet, here I go, into the latter. The difference is, I’m aware of the odds, of the links to a place where there used to be a blog, of the promise of a lot of hard work. On the other hand, it’s nuts like me who figure out ways of making things like this work. And of course, since I follow smart Twitterers (and FriendFeeders and Facebookers and Plurkers and Seesmicers and Stumblers and, oh yeah, bloggers), I’ve been for some months now in the path of a steady firehose of advice and tips and encouragement for doing just such a thing, from other nuts with whom I identify strongly. (I’m talking particularly about you, Liz.)

So what will you find on the site? Clearly blog posts about the above subjects, as they appear in the news. (Here is an example.) Anticipating the needs of tourists from both near and far, there’ll be plenty commercial content that advertising will bring. Affiliate marketing is a possibility, through Amazon with such books as Mr. Shorto’s, to period music, home furnishings, clothing, and home crafts via Etsy, all with as much of an emphasis on local artisans as I can manage. Other possibilities are helping the sale of historical real estate, and of tourist packages for visitors.

There’ll be much photo and video. Probably too little from others to consider the Ning-style social site, at least at first. Dependence on reliable third-party sites, like Delicious for links, Google Maps for a mashup, Flickr for photos, a site to be named later for high-res video. (Your suggestions welcome, for this, or anything.) And since I’m a fairly adept graphic designer, it will look as much like a blog written in the 17th century as legibility and clarity will allow. And in the works is a viral, DRM-free, whitepaper-style PDF that’s so hot, I don’t think I’d better spill the beans here!

Whither this blog? I’m certainly not going to kill it. I think it will move with me to a hosted WordPress site, where I will likely make “rickwolff dot com” land on my graphic design samples, and some other URL go to this blog. As things pick up with Dutch New York, though, expect my posts here to dwindle.

Whither the other items in my scheme portfolio? Collecting them, thinking about them, none of this actually got me out of my room and on a path somewhere. I have to pick something, and it may as well be something about which I feel strongly, for which I have a community for help, inspiration, and success stories. If my action doesn’t produce the blog I’m considering, or a blog at all, at least it will get me out of the house, starting something, and in front of other people with whom I can network.

But how do I know that this is the venture that will pan out? What if I picked wrong from the portfolio? What if I get discouraged? Will I revert to old habits? I don’t know.

But what the hell else am I going to do in the time I have left? You got a better idea?

Catholicism is my discredited old friend; atheism is my credible new friend. When one talks trash about the other, I don’t listen.

I can’t believe how tiny that blacktop playground is, where I once watched from the corner as girls played hopscotch and boys played kickball. While I continued to attend Catholic school until three days into my third year at Archbishop Stepinac High School in White Plains, NY, the beginning of the end came during preparation for confirmation, in the third grade at Holy Name of Mary School in Croton-on-Hudson.

I remember the dreaded catechism. (”1. Q. Who made me? A. God made me.”) The warning from the monsignor (Fr. Joseph P. Moore, a gnarled man with the resin-coated baritone of a chain smoker, who could rattle a confessional with his absolutions so loudly that we all hoped for Fr. O’Brien, but we could never tell which one it was until we were kneeling and the window slid open — but I digress) that since through our confirmation we were endorsing our baptism and embracing the church, we’d be expressing our free will, and if we didn’t believe in even one tenet of the catechism, then our confirmation would be a travesty and a sin. Amazingly, nobody exercised their free will toward any misgivings about the catechism. (The message that wasn’t lost on me was that this was a difficult document to swallow whole, and that some sections were harder to digest than others. I wondered how many others thought this, but I dare not ask anybody.)

What really did it in for me is when, once the catechism was stuffed into our heads as thoroughly as it was going to be, we practiced the processional. Our small line, white-shirted-navyblue-tie boys on the left and blue-plaid-jumper girls on the right, were dwarfed by a cavernous and dark Gothic interior, the kind they stopped making once nuns took up guitars and put down the hickory switches. The echo of a cough was counted in silent Mississippis. Especially those of Fr. Moore.

The nun, Sister John Marie, was particularly emphatic about the hands. You’re praying the whole time, of course (though probably not for the intended reason), so the position of the hands was crucial during the whole procedure. We were to point our fingers directly vertical. To heaven. Straight up. That, she assured us, was the only way our prayers would get through to God. (Apparently we had been doing it wrong all along before then, and everyone we knew in church was doing it wrong, and the priest does it wrong.) Yes, there was a tendency in this posture for one’s elbows to go flying out, like a baseball player at bat. This was to be fought the entire time.

The actual breaking point for my credulousness, the moment of my birth as a skeptic, was when we learned it was also terribly important that the correct thumb overlap the other. (I don’t remember which. Which says something right there.)

Later that day, this same nun taught us her subject. Science. Where different rules apply.

As I say, it took me until halfway through high school to see how much of a barrier to continuing in Catholic school is a lack of belief in everything that makes a Catholic Catholic. It was quite a revelation to know that everyone else in my grade pretty much bought the whole thing, and when I asked about their state of belief would squint at me suspiciously and whisper, “What do you mean?” Another equally stunning revelation is that my father had been dutifully paying school taxes while paying extra to the Catholic schools. Somehow he’d kept that from me, and of course, the priests had no economic incentive to make sure we all understood. So I plunged headlong into public school, with more relaxed dress, easier courses, a social life where I could at last be called “Rick” and not “Richard”. Oh, and did I mention girls? Granted, I didn’t do much more than look at them, but vive le differénce!

There will be more on the history of my unbelief in future posts. Amen.

Placing the name to a movie star’s face proves a challenge. Internet to the rescue. Is that such a good habit, though?

My wife and I were channel flipping at the TV last night, and we came across what looked like a made-for-TV movie about Noah’s ark. I could identify John Voight as Noah and Mary Steenbergen as his wife. They were looking over the rail of the deck down at another small boat filled with Middle Eastern-looking trinkets, piloted by a bearded peddler, played by an actor with a very familiar face.

My wife said he was Robert Redford or some such. (I love her, but she sucks at identifying actors. I’ll occasionally quiz her, and laugh at the answers.) I knew who it was, what he’d previously done, some things I’ve seen. One of my earliest bosses resembled him, especially in the jowls. Which is one of the reasons he’d spent such a long time in my mental short-list of pop culture figures. But last night, I just couldn’t make the memory of the face produce the name.

Before, I’d just keep thinking about it. Let it haunt me for the better part of an hour. Pace the floor. Play that game where I’d think really hard, then stop thinking, go and do something completely different, then think again. That would make it pop into my mind.

Now, I had my wife make another Firefox tab on her laptop, go to IMDB, enter Name: John Voight, look for the listing of Noah’s Ark movie, click, look for peddler…. James Coburn.

Tip of my tongue!

Now granted, James Coburn’s career is what it is whether I remember his name or not. And since I’m no casting director, I don’t think I’m at a loss for having a big mental Rolodex of movie stars at my mental fingertips.

But I’m surprised how much of the ephemera of pop culture that I used to keep in my brain I’ve relocated to the renderfarm that is the internet. What am I using the remainder of my brain for? Clearly the analogy of the brain as a thought-attic needs to be re-examined.

What I’m more curious about is the mental rigor of remembering something you used to know, and the exercise you get recalling it. And that I do it less and less.

Back in time now, to the early ’60s. My first favorite TV show was the game show Concentration, hosted by Hugh Downs. I got several editions of the home game, and found I couldn’t wait to find playmates who were as into the game as I was, so I played by myself. This meant that I would have to give the solution of the rebus puzzle that’s underneath all the squares my very best effort, because it was too easy to just pop open the little window with the solution printed in block letters. (One player was designated MC in the rules.) One puzzle had a big hot dog on a bun, plus an ampersand, plus a big German-style beer mug with a lid. I think I said “Hot dog and mug” every different way one could for the better part of a day, trying to distribute the stress among the syllables, bunching some together, drawing some out. No luck. Finally, the next day, I took the game board to my father and asked for his help. He gave me some hints, but that didn’t help either. (The solution was “Frankenstein”, of course. Frank + stein.) The problem is, I didn’t know what a stein was. Some German-American I turned out to be!

The point is, I never put myself through such mental discipline since. I still wonder why I cared so much about not cheating. I was the only one who’d know.

If today life (as opposed to a game) should give me as bewildering a puzzle, I wouldn’t even think about it. I’d tweet it. I’d Google it. I’d do most anything other than reason it out.

Is this kind of mental laziness a sign of age? Should I be grateful I’m so connected and agile with online tools? Or is it simply progress, the shucking off of a vestigal skill, like hunting and gathering? Should I worry? Are you?

Can a guy have a knight in shining armor? I think I’ve had two.

I sat in the car, waiting for everyone else to show up and unlock the door to the law firm office. On the radio, Colin Powell was making the case for WMDs to a UN committee, pointing to photos that reminded my mind’s eye of the visual displays of Dr. Strangelove. There was a battle of a different kind brewing this morning: I was about to be deposed pursuant to a lawsuit.

When the summons came in the mail a few months prior, it was this bulky stack of double-space type. In my ignorance, I reacted like it was an invoice for a million dollars. I freaked out.

Five years before that, I caused a car accident that supposedly injured the driver of the other car. He didn’t seem injured to me that day.

Eventually, there were four of us: the complainant, his lawyer, me, and the lawyer sent to defend both me and GEICO. Mostly my lawyer told me to use few words, and not get conversational. Still, she had to step in more than once to get me to shut up. At the end, it was determined that too many of the medical conditions were pre-existing, and there was no legal way to parse what was before and after. So the suit was dropped, right then and there.

I was free to go. My lawyer saved the day. And probably my life. The emotional shock of being that vulnerable came to a head at that moment. It was then that I noticed, my lawyer was this beautiful young woman. And sure enough, a little piece of the back of my brain fell deeply in love with her.

Mind you, the front of my brain knew exactly what was happening. And was surprised that the knight-in-shining-armor effect didn’t discriminate on the basis of gender.

I did nothing about this emotion I was feeling. (I was and still am happily married.) I kept it professional. We shook hands, I showed just the right degree of relief, made the proper amount of eye contact. She drove off, and I never saw her again. This talented woman who saved my neck. My heroine.

Fast forward to the autumn of 2007. Depression and loneliness were creeping in, for reasons I’ve covered before. I was lonely. I followed my nose online, and discovered Twitter. I read of people raving about it, and took their word for it, but I couldn’t find the front door.

I signed on to follow a woman whom most of you know, especially if you’re on Twitter. There were a few exchanges, I said something kind of petulent about the service, and instead of taking it personally, or retorting in a way that I’d take personally, she just sent me a link to a marketing site’s then-recent blog post about Twitter’s uses in the office and at home.

And I got the idea. Not just of Twitter, but of the whole concept of connecting with other human beings online. Something many of you got much earlier, and take much more for granted. I now have a social life online.

This woman had for some time posted all kinds of things about her personal and professional life, to a degree that at the time I found uncomfortable, in all media. Tweets too, of course. I saw her, heard her, got to know her. Admired her poise and determination through her life’s junk. (Detail here would give her away.)

And sure enough, it happened again.

On the plus side, experience made this time even more familiar. Again, an emotionally vulnerable time. Another saving of the day, one I’m sure she still doesn’t realize she did. On the minus side, since we now travel in some of the same circles on- and off-line, there’s no riding off into the sunset.

Again, I’m sworn to do nothing about it. But already I’ve seen her at a function we both attended, and I was a little more distant than I usually am. Sorry for that.

It’s wearing off. But not fast enough.

So, dear reader, something I should do more often: ask for your reaction. Have you ever had this experience? Were you at liberty to do something about it? Did you? How’d it go? Any guys able to sympathize with me, or am I showing too much of a feminine side?

No guessing who. I have the moderator’s prerogative.

Take this job and blog it.

“Are you alright?”

That was the question from my supervisor, as I felt his hand on my shoulder. Clearly, a concern for my welfare.

The day before, he had also caught me with my eyes closed. Oh, okay, sleeping. Microsleeping. The day before, there was a progress bar making its pokey way toward the finish line. One of these operations I don’t want to disturb, out of a decades-old fear of a crash, which I justify today by maintaining the fastest tasking, for people or computers, is unitasking. So my eyes close briefly.

But today, I was looking at a printout of something I’d just finished designing. I was sitting up, and my chin was resting on my chest. I had worked through my lunch to get this design through, and was having blood sugar issues, which I had much worse four years and 40 pounds ago. I would have startled myself awake in a few seconds, had my supervisor not come along.

“I’m fine,” I said. And explained that I should just go to lunch, that I’d be ready for action in the afternoon.
He recommended I just take the rest of the day off. Which was very odd. I assured him I’d be okay, but he insisted. I was not prone to argue with a free, consequence-free afternoon off. I certainly wouldn’t sleep at home, but I supposed, since he was the keeper of the sick-day tally, and might also justify a juggling of the weekly hours, that maybe I deserved a break today.

I remembered a time a few years ago when I came in with bronchitis, and passed out at the keyboard next to a bottle of cough medicine — which made for a funny photo I never completely lived down. He let me go home early that day, too. So maybe he was showing some humanity today, I told my wife that night. She disagreed, predicting they’d use it against me. I thought she was paranoid.

Thing about paranoia is, if they’re out to get you, then it ain’t paranoia.

Today, I was called in to the department head’s office.

I was told in no uncertain terms that in today’s economy and the state of the business, that we couldn’t afford people who sleep in the office. It hurts productivity.

Mind you, that I worked through my lunch hour, to meet a deadline. That I’ve done this maybe two or three times a week, usually about 3pm, since I started working there nine years ago, with no consequence.

The skunk had written me up. The charge: sleeping two days in a row. (Yeah, I know. What’s that sound like?) His promise was that the next time I’m sent home after sleeping at work, it’ll be without pay.

Excuse me?

This begs the question, was I sent home out of sympathy for a possible medical condition, or as punishment? If it was the latter, then why did he come off as the former? Should there be a next time, can he imagine I’d refuse to leave? Would he call men with guns to take me away because he wants me to leave, because of the accusation of sleeping?

I’ve always avoided facing the binary decision of either revealing online the name of my workplace and say nothing if I can’t say something nice, or keep them anonymous and lay into them in a way that might otherwise constitute libel. I’ve avoided doing either, since the “cubicle hell” sob story is a cliché I saw coming as soon as I understood what a blog was. I knew they’d be big on problems, light on solutions. Because after all, if you find your way out of the cubicle, there goes your theme, right?

Here’s the thing: I’ve been suffering from insomnia for several months, because at about 5am it would occur to me what a hell my life is when I must report to this little corporate drone day in and day out for a living. I can see the inspiration for every soul-sucking, parasite-implanting science fiction plot projected on the inside of my eyelids until the alarm clock goes off. And how many years I’ve sentenced myself to it, and how many years I have yet to serve. Before what, exactly? Before I get a career?

When the insomnia is light and not yet cumulative — say, Monday and Tuesday — the worst that happens is the 3-o’clock drowsies. Later in the week, and I get irritable, anti-social, confused, short of memory, depressed. One Friday morning I even had a panic attack.

Over this piece-of-shit job.

With a supervisor who is reduced to following me around and getting things on me, apparently with no disturbance in his conscience.

So I did it. I put a date on it. By Thanksgiving, I announced, I’ll be in another job.

Between you and me, at the rate I’m going, it might be a lot sooner. I have a two-week vacation coming. Another woman who escaped recently went on her vacation, and resigned when she returned. I don’t remember whether or not she announced her attentions before the vacation. I may already have screwed this up!

But no matter. I have a five-figure checking account balance, a wife who, in spite of a debilitating disease, works just the same, for the extra income, and soon for the medical plan. I’d like to retire her someday, and when we get out of debt, I will. I got me the skills, and while I’m light on portfolio structure or strategy, I’ve got enough work that I’m proud of, which has gotten tougher and tougher as the years go, because what’s the sense of pleasing these people, anyway, when the reward is just more of the same level of work, no more of my brain called into play…?

I breathe.

When I got home tonight, my wife noticed it immediately. I was goofy, and kidded with her. This weekend, we’re going to experiment with something else that’s been difficult with insomnia. I’ll do that. And I’ll run, and mow the lawn, and do push-ups. And my online portfolio.

And sleep like a baby.

When the time is right, I’ll talk to my supervisor, who used to be a designer too before he became…this. I’ll remind him that the place he must call to find my replacement could just as easily be his exit strategy, too. He’s eight years younger than me, and has more of a career in front of him. In fact, he’s almost as old as I was when I started under him. I’ll tell him it’s not too late. That we work for the Titanic, and he’s the boiler room supervisor. Nobody deserves this. He should join me, out in the real world.

I wonder what he’ll say. How hard he’ll fight the symbiant at the base of his spine.

“Freedom of choice is what you’ve got. Freedom from choice is what you want.” —Devo

One of the things that hit me like a ton of bricks on my 50th birthday in October, which triggered my social media odyssey, is tragically typical to men my age: the realization of how little I’ve accomplished, as compared to how much anyone from age 1 to 49 assumes they’ll get accomplished by now.

I won’t describe my current domestic and career situation too much, since you’ll only think I’m depressed about it, which I’m not. In fact, I anticipate this post packaging things in such a tight little nugget that it will actually help me proceed. It’s like how a panic about money ends or lessens when you arrive at an actual dollar amount, even if it’s worse than you thought. Or when a doctor names the illness you have, because a diagnosis is less agony than not knowing.

Also, at the end, is a shameless request for your advice and counsel. This is a therapy blog post (good idea for a category), and I’m on the couch!

I am a man of ideas. And since my job doesn’t require ideas, or at least not of a broad range, I think of ideas on my own, for my own edification. All sorts of business plans, careers and avocations lay seige to my forebrain for weeks on end. Let me share some:

The Zero-G Council

My new fiscal-conservative Twitter friends should like this one. It’s a charity clearinghouse where conservatives can put their money where their mouths are. It would find charities and programs which pledge to either never take public money or to stop in their next fiscal year. After an audit, they’d be awarded a special seal of Taxpayer Friendliness, and would be welcomed into a suite of causes, kind of like the United Way. The goal would be to never make the charities miss the public money, by raising many times more cash for them. At an imagined tipping point, it would actually be cool to refuse government money, which would provide a grass-roots pressure to lower taxes, since all those programs put money on the table with fewer and fewer takers. Think Matthew Lesko, in reverse.

Medieval Reading Glasses (Spectacles)

My wife and I were active in the Society for Creative Anachronism, an American organization that re-creates the atmosphere of the Middle Ages at its social events, as far as people’s budgets allow. Unlike many historic re-enactor groups, this society has fairly lax authenticity requirements, relying not on rules and review but on encouragement and example. All but the most devoted authenticity-lovers wear their modern eyewear, and since the need for them is medicinal, it’s overlooked. Besides, an alternative was never very satisfactory.  While dressed in my period clothing, I had a need for reading glasses, which historically is the first application of lens use. So I cannibalized a cheap pair from a dollar store and made wooden frames modeled after spectacles found in a dig in London, which hinged in the middle. I mass-produced them, and in a few weekends of work, I had a stock which we took along with us to its big August confab we used to attend as our summer vacation (this year’s is on as I write this). The sales paid for the whole vacation that year, and then some. I had plans to make the frames out of all the historically proven designs and materials: steer horn, pewter, brass. (Wood is actually pretty crummy, and not authentic.) I hadn’t known about outsourcing at the time, and my skills with those materials were non-existent. Last I checked, the need for period eyewear still goes unfilled.

PainForecast.com

This idea is obviously more recent. A web-based widget accepts a subscriber’s diary entry every six hours: her location and her self-assessed, 0-to-10, degree of arthritis pain (or really any disrupting transitory symptom). The back end would take that data and compare it to known weather for her area, an algorithm would detect sensitivity patterns, and the widget would deliver, in a pretty graph, a customized five-day pain forecast for that subscriber. Now she can plan on good days, and steer clear of bad days, with the confidence of a weather forecast. This would be for people who, while getting on in years, are not finished with the prime of their lives, and while they may want to prevent or forestall these conditions, they could now also dodge them. This idea was almost presented at a start-up weekend in Boulder, Colorado, but time and format didn’t permit, since I was presenting it through streaming video, and first dibs were given to paying customers, which is only fair. Again, I thank Laura Fitton for giving it a shot.

Media, so much media

Since I was a kid, and realized you could use a super-8 movie camera to tell a story just like Hollywood did, I wanted to do just that. And in spite of my career going in a different but parallel path, tantalizingly close to it, I’ve continued to want it, and to settle for only wanting it. I thought, and still think, that generations before us prospered because they made the disconnect between dream jobs and jobs that paid the bills. When they’re the same thing, that’s great, but if they’re not, well, that’s life. I’m beginning to wonder.

And so, media ideas:

2D animation.

As I’ve written here before, I’ve managed to amass a nice assortment of software and hardware, to start to teach myself the craft, from the smallest building blocks of character movement and walking and talking, all the way to complete pieces. I thought there’d be some need for animated titles, promos and interstitials for web videos, which could showcase my talents and availability. Eventually I’d produce short-subjects, several of which I’ve brought to shooting script stage. One, Sleeping Death, is about a guy who must dream to access some memories of his waking past, and remembers (correctly?) that he killed someone, and now must find a way to confront his waking self to relieve his guilt. Then there’s an idea that would be easier to produce: The Babysitter, an allegory comparing the hiring of a babysitter to the U.S. Constitution. It was originally intended as a viral video supporting Ron Paul’s presidential candidacy. Then there’s an atmospheric piece, considerably more advanced, using ancient Celtic imagery to tell the story of the song She Moved Through the Faire, for which I have already composed a temp track using Apple GarageBand.

Political/economic analysis.

Imagine James Burke’s Connections series, only dealing with American domestic policy, law, economics, the Constitution and the ideal of liberty. Picture Reagan-era Milton Friedman meets post-millennial George Carlin.

Audio drama podcast anthology.

At first it would have been a one-shot, just to prove it could be done. My first script took place inside a pizza truck stranded inside the Woodstock festival in 1969, where father and son find out secrets about each other.

Medieval cooking podcast.

To be titled Cook Medievally. This would involve some friends from the SCA, and be masterminded by my wife, who’s a great historical cook. I have a standing invitation from Fearless Cooking’s Grace Piper for advice and introductions.

Cheesology, a cheese podcast.

I figured there were many good wine podcasts, so why not? I could get a sponsor in a big cheese shop in New York, and use an existing cheese-maven for talent. It’d be a chance to travel the civilized world in search of the source of cheese, finding all kinds of incidental historical and cultural side-stories. I even did a concept for the opening animation, and even some cheesy music.

A Medieval Hand.

Live web video calligraphy lessons, via BlogTV. You’ve already been briefed on this.

Code-name: the Stone Chamber Project.

The idea was to start a travel blog about the supposedly mysterious stone structures that proliferate southern New England, with a concentration very close to where I live. Then, as things unfold, the reportage gets decidedly weird, and actually fictional. The subtle invitations for readers to comment and mash up the content, which is disemminated through all the top social media sites, make the face of the effort look like the ravings of a guy who’s witnessed the paranormal.

Well, you get the idea.

So, you ask, what’s the upshot of all this?

It’s always good to have plans. All of these plans have taken their turn at the front of my mind for at least several days, in the case of some others, months. Some, such as a semi-career as an animator, I’ve revisited over and over, and is there currently. What usually happens is, either an inability to focus will draw the act of beginning out so long that I lose attention, or some obstacle comes along which looks like a challenge. Either way, I stop for a while, then pick up where I left off… with some other idea in my mental portfolio. I don’t stick to one thing.

And it’s been like this for years and years. At first, I’d get all revved up on one of these ideas, especially if it was new. I’d be sure to tell everyone, so as to impress them with my cleverness. Then either the momentum would die or an obstacle would stop me, and I’d be on to something else. A few acquaintances, who value frankness over loyalty, have let me see how this obsessive behavior looks to them.

Lately, though, even though I know I have to latch on to one of the ideas to the exclusion of the others if I’m going to get out of my hole of obscurity, I don’t even get excited about the prospects of success any more. A voice in my head assures me that this time won’t be much different from the others; that I’ll be on to the next hairbrained scheme soon enough. As a result, I haven’t been enthusiastic about anything for quite some time.

I’m not even sure how to introduce myself. I’ve been an “aspiring animator” for years, it seems, yet I’m no closer to the step after “aspiring”. It’s a big joke. (That link in the upper right corner, inviting you to keep track of my animation progress at my Channel Frederator Ning site? Yeah, you guessed it: nothing yet.)

Help

What would you do if you were in my position? Please realize, I’m not presenting the above list of ideas for you to pick the one I should devote my life to. This is not a call-to-vote reality show. How do you think I’m stuck? How did I get here? I re-decorate my rut with new blueprints from time to time. How do I get out?

Welcome, Liz Strauss of Successful-Blog.com and your Blog-To-Show entourage, to my little corner of heaven.

There’s no real functionality here except the posts. They came hot and heavy the first two weeks I started this, but got boring even to me soon after. I usually allot early Sunday morning to updating, which is why I’ve reconciled myself to doing a sort of meta-post today. I’ve gotten better at it; in particular, my recollections of a visit to England and a parsing of the Declaration of Independence on the Fourth of July stand out in recent memory.

Tomorrow’s post should be a turning point for me. I’m inviting as many replies as I can garner, because it will be in the form of a huge question, a solicitation for advice. The subject: what should I be when I grow up. Or more to the point, which. I have this attic of viable ideas, any one of which could bring me satisfaction and success, some even an income. The reason why they’re all in this metaphorical attic is the crux of the question.

I can’t devote the time to typing it all out today, but I’ll give it its due attention tomorrow. So stay tuned! I’ll be pinging particular Twitter followers whose opinions I would value. Previously, I attempted quantity of readership. Tomorrow, I’ll be hoping for quality of response.

Thanks, and again, welcome. If you see any thing you like, name your price!

It’s the challenge of a new Internet friend, blogging impresario Liz Strauss, that I take a super-big aspect of my life and summarize it, hopefully in a poetic way, into exactly 25 words. I hope my attempt gets in under the wire. Here goes:

I’ve spent my first half-century
in a waiting room reading a magazine article
about the kind of life others have,
that I deserve too.