Chris Tisdale's Blog

It’s the evening before my 33rd birthday, and I’m sitting in my ‘nerd den’, with Alice in Chains’s ‘Frogs’ providing the background music, and a solitary desk lamp providing that moody kind of writerly spotlight I enjoy so much, and I’m thinking about the past year.

Some good things and some terrible things happened this year, and unfortunately, it feels like the latter outnumbered the former, and I am hoping to swap those statistics moving forward.

Last year started with the return of the incredibly awful panic attacks that I had managed to stay free from for about 5 years, and that had owned my life for almost two years before that. Never a good way to start a year, especially when they were almost always occurring at work, in front of my boss, co-workers, customers, etc. By February, I’d had about half a dozen nerve-knocking blind-sides, and there was no discernible reason for them.

Not making me feel any better about myself was the fact that I was gaining weight again. I topped 270 lbs in February, and suddenly 300 was meaning much more than a group of sweaty Spartans in leather battle panties killing the Persian touring circus. I was pretty messed up when I hit the deuce and a half mark years ago, so the fact that I was realistically due to score a fat-trick was not one I was pleased with. I started using fitday to try to at least prevent further inflation.

April was a giant shining puck of 200 Flushes Blue in the Trainspotting toilet that my 33rd year turned out, for the most part, to be. In the EIGHT (holy fuck!)  years that my wife and I had been together, we’d never been on any kind of real vacation, so when the extremely charismatic and handsome (just ask him) wine guru, and object of some amount of obsession on my part, Gary Vaynerchuk announced that he was hosting a 7 day wine cruise, we decided screw it, let’s go for it, and booked a three week holiday; one week in Orlando; the (thunder)cruise; and then a week in Fort Lauderdale, where I happened to learn that Denis Leary was performing live stand up. Tickets bought.

That was probably the best time I’ve had since I was in Vegas with my family when I was 21. In spite of the gluten free thing, we were able to eat some amazing food, even on the cruise, we had a blast at amusement parks, I swam in the ocean for the first time, we met some of the coolest people and drank some amazing alcohol on the cruise, and, even though we caught what may have been swine flu (it was just as the news was blowing that whole thing out of proportion) at the end of the cruise, we still managed to drag our fevered asses to the Hard Rock in Lauderdale to see one of my heroes, Denis Leary, blow the fucking roof off.

I had a couple of panic attacks during the holiday, but mostly from getting over-excited, but on the plane home, I needed serious ativan supplementation just to keep my vibrations down to a level that would keep the bolts that held my seat to the fuselage from shaking loose. It was my brain and body kicking and screaming like a petulant child, not wanting to go back to the dull complacent drudgery of home and work and lack of fulfillment. It only got worse when we got home. So much worse.

At first I thought it was some lingering effects of the brutal flu, combined with the psychological tantruming 4 year-old. The panic attacks started coming faster and more furious than before, and now brought with them a nearly constant upset stomach and lack of appetite, and my left shoulder, which has been a bit unhappy since the first go around with panic attacks, was now almost constantly in pain.

My doctor suggested that I had IBS, and told me to try a bland food diet, to try and eliminate common gut-troublers, and to try meditation, exercise and water to help with the panic and the shoulder.

By paying attention to my caloric intake, I had managed to lose about 10lbs between tipping the scales at 270, and the time of our trip. In the 2 months following the vacation, I dropped another 40, but it had nothing to do with careful menu planning and portion control, but because nearly everything I ate made me feel sick, and brought about the panic monster. I was on the Double A Diet. No, not batteries, I’m talking about a steady intake of Ativan and Advil.

I honestly don’t remember much of those months. I was a zombie at home, tired and depressed, and at work I oscillated between cold and angry. I hated having to interact with anyone, because I felt so shitty that I couldn’t focus on conversation, so it became a chore to the point that I had to try really hard not to just walk away from people when they started talking to me. This included my co-workers, my friends, even my wife. I was stating to become agoraphobic. I had to step down as best man at my friend’s wedding, and didn’t even make it to his bachelor party because, 2 hours before it started, I was dry-heaving and crying from the anxiety of having to be around people. There were so many plans made with friends, things we wanted to do, that we had to bail out on because I was so fucked up.

I’ve done a lot of damage to relationships, which is probably what bothers me the most from all of this shit. I wasn’t myself, and I continue to work my way out of that today, though I’ve come pretty far in the past few months.  I’m unbelievably grateful that my wife was able to deal with me through it all.  She’s phenomenal, and whatever cliche you want to attach to it about being lucky to have her in my life is absolutely true.

I wasn’t even aware of how bad I was, and it wasn’ until we went to visit my family during the summer that I got the wake up call that I needed. We were out at the lake, and I spent most of the first day either sitting and shaking, hardly able to be a part of the conversation, or napping. The lake is the most beautiful and peaceful place in the world that I could be, and even there, I was completely on edge, exhausted, and it was the first time my family had seen me without that extra 50 or so pounds, so needless to say, everyone was very worried about me.

When my sister told me how upset and worried my wife was, and that I should go to an emergency room and refuse to leave until someone had an answer for what was going on with me, a switch flipped in my head. For the first time, I stopped seeing my situation from my own head, and instead through the eyes of a bunch of people who loved me and were genuinely frightened for me in a way I had never seen before.

On the drive back home, I made a decision to take control of my well-being, instead of being a victim of it. I would see my doctor about getting a complete physical, as well as the $300 food alergy/intolerance test that he was pretty sure would help point me toward other foods that might be causing me grief; I would see a therapist about the anxiety, a massage therapist and physiotherapist for the shoulder, and accupuncture/chinese medicine practicing friend to work on everything in a general sense. I also took a closer look at what food I’d been eating over the preceding weeks, and estimated that I was eating between 800 and 1000 calories per day, (in order for one’s internal organs to function properly, a person needs to consume a minimum of 1250) which was almost certainly contributing to my mood and energy problems. So I resolved to make sure I ate 1500 calories a day minimum. Suddenly, instead of using the fitday website to make sure I wasn’t eating too much, it was helping me make sure I was eating enough. It was kind of awesome to ‘have to’ eat a couple of cookies and a spoonful of peanut butter before bed, instead of it being a shameful stab at the self esteem.

My physical came back pretty normal, other than low vitamin D, (which made snese considering I hadn’t seen the sun very much since leaving Florida) but the food intolerance test came back with a shocking list of foods that I have been avoiding ever since. (notably: dairy, eggs, peanuts, bananas, garlic, soy, yeast, pineapple, cranberries) Ironically, the test says that I should be okay with gluten, though I haven’t tested that theory just yet. By the end of this month, I can start reintroducing some of the verboten vittles, to see how I react to them. It’s been difficult to eat with so many restrictions, and there were some grocery store trips in the beginning that ended in me wanting to simultaneously cry while smashing a stock boy in the head with a brick that has the phrase ‘May Contain Traces Of…’ engraved on it, but after a while I got into a decent pattern of food that I could eat and make taste okay.  The downside is that I have to do all my own cooking, as dining out is nearly impossible, and I can’t eat anything that is remotely quick-fix. But, the change in diet seems to be helping, and that’s what matters.

I saw a behavioural therapist for a few sessions, and she gave me quite a bit of good advice, meditation techniques, and even called me ‘brilliant’ at one point in our conversations, (I do understand that I was paying her good money for those conversations, but it’s still pretty cool when a stranger calls you brilliant) and she got me thinking differently about anxiety and panic by giving me The Mindulness and Acceptance Workbook for Anxiety, a $20 workbook that I can not recommend enough if you suffer from any kind of anxiety related disorder. It took quite a bit for me to actually see a therapist, because I never thought they could do anything for me I couldn’t figure out for myself, but now that I’ve had the experience, I think everyone could benefit some amount of professional therapy.

Massage therapy, accupuncture, and physio helped get my shoulder back to a manageable place. Unfortuntely (and the same can be said for my anxiety homework) I have trouble keeping up on the exercises when I’m feeling okay, so I go through these waves of feeling good, not doing the maintenance, getting in pain again, and then getting back in a routine until I feel okay again, etc. Now my goal is to keep stretching and working on myself even when I feel okay, so that I can do some longterm good.

I also need to work on fitness. Sure, I’ve lost about 55lbs this year, but it was completely due to starvation, and had nothing to do with exercise, so while I’m lighter, I am actually in worse physical condition that I was a year ago, and I’ve been feeling it lately. The relatively rare times when I do get into anxiety or panic situations now, such as when in line at a store, or at the airport, are usually preceded by some amount of strenuous physical activity, (like, you know, walking, or having to stand for more than five minutes) and that physical stress combines with the social anxiety and makes me start to feel like I’m sharing a phone booth with Michael J Fox, Mohammed Ali, and a space heater.

So, the good news is that this, my 33rd spin around the sun, has ended on a note of improvement. Slowly but surely, I’m getting myself put back together, and with any luck, I can continue riding that wave into coming years. Hopefully we will be relocating this year, to a nicer part of the country, and find a house that doesn’t share walls with noisey, ignorrant, white trash breeders, and maybe I’ll acquire enough peace of mind to figure out what I want to be if I grow up, and be able to start pursuing it.

Okay, it’s getting late, and I have a very low-key 33rd birthday celebration tomorrow. I hope we all have a great year.

Oh, and in lieu of presents, this year I will be accepting donations of cute Asian servant girls. Thanks in advance.

C.

Check it out, a website with my name on it. What are the chances?

This will be the new home of my renewed interest in blogging, as well as a hub for all of the other shit I do on the internet.

Speaking of said shit, in addition to the webcomics I am still fiddling with, I recently came up with a new idea for a novel, and I should have enough time to prep it between now and November, when I will try to write the bulk of it for NaNoWriMo. On a music-related note (PUN!) I plan on getting some more of my original songs recorded later this month, while my wife is on a retreat in the mountains. The woman’s seen me naked, but for some reason I have a hard time not being self-conscious when doing music stuff while she’s around. Maybe therapy will help with that.

In the scant minutes when I’m not either working at my day job or contemplating all those other projects, I’ve been refining an idea I had for a web show. With any luck, that will come together in the next couple of months as well.

In the past, I have taken a very negative view of the fact that I want to do too many things, and am unable to just pick one and focus on it (according to the therapist, I may have something called Passive ADD on which I can squarely dump the blame) which in turn leads me to giving up on all of it, which in turn makes me feel like a failure, blah blah blah, cue the trombone.

A little while ago I decided to change my attitude from the one above to one that says ‘fuck it, let’s just do it all’, and that seems to have helped. So, as I work through any of my various projects, I will do my best to update here about the process, the progress, and unrelated shit that I feel I need to digitally excrete.

-Stay tuned, friends.

Chris.

I haven’t really made resolutions since I was a teenager. I learned early on that the pressure and stigma attached to them was basically a recipe for failure, and, for most people, declaring a resolution at the stroke of Dick Clarke (or Seacrest now, I guess. Creepier) actually just provides an easy out.

“Oh, yeah, I didn’t quit smoking like I said I would. It was a New Year’s resolution, and nobody sticks to those”

So at that point, why even bother? Why automatically set yourself up for a level of disappointment that’s even higher than the amount you give yourself for your daily failures and flaws?

However, just because you don’t stand on a table at 12:05AM and slur to a crowd of beparty-hatted revelers how ‘This year, I’m gonna stop pirating porn, for serious!’ Doesn’t mean that the New Year can’t bring with it some kind spirit of self-improvement and positive change.

That’s why I do something a little different than resolutions. Rather than having my mouth (or blog) write cheques that my lazy(ficient) ass can’t cash (which it already does too often, ie: every time I announce a new comic that doesn’t end up getting posted) I choose a more general approach, to thinking of things in my life that I can work on, and spend more time focusing on. Instead of “I resolve to lose weight!”, how about, “I am going to focus more on improving my eating and exercise habits.”?

For me, this kind of passive goal setting is less intimidating, and feels less like I’ve failed before I’ve even begun, if that makes any sense. I would love to be the kind of go-getter who sets determined goals and stops at nothing to achieve them, (and if those people have the audacity to make New Year’s resolutions, they should be punched in the face for rubbing in the rest of ours) but let’s face it, I am NOT that kinda guy. At least not yet.

I have just recently thought of the term “New Year’s Focal Points” to describe this kind of non-rigid, low pressure, achievable self-improvement January 1st goal setting idea. I think “Focal Points” is a just buzz-wordy, and douche-baggy enough phrase to catch on, so I’m sticking to it.

And with that, here are some of the things I would like to focus more on in 2009 and beyond:

-Health and fitness
-Doing fun, cultural things with the wife
-Family and Friends
-My webcomics misplaced and Imaginary Enemies
-My video webcast idea
-My music blog www.downloadablecontempt.com
-Blogging in general
-Helping my wife build her business
-Making music
-photography
-Pirating less porn

There are probably others, but those come to mind right now. I’m curious to know how many of you make resolutions, how often you follow through, or what kinds of things you hope to focus on in the new year. Don’t be shy, leave a comment!

I hope you all have a happy and healthy 2009, and achieve whatever you either resolve to do, or focus on in the next 12 months.

-Now let’s get drunk and blow on a wizzy retractable paper snake coily thingy! Wooo!

C.R.

With the help of something a good friend of mine once said, I have come up with a formula.

[Laziness] + [Cleverness] = [Efficiency]

While I suppose there are some people out there who are efficient for other reasons, for me, and probably a lot of people, laziness is the true mother of that invention, and that kind of efficiency (which I have now dubbed Lazifficiency, because I think made-up compound words are awesome) has helped me quite a bit in the past.

Back when I worked for Chain Video Rental Store, I had every element of that job down to it’s simplest, quickest, and most effortless, from prepping movies for the rental shelves to counting out my till at the end of the shift, I had a system for everything that could rarely be improved upon. When I became the assistant manager (youngest ever, at that time, which is one of my many inconsequential lifetime achievements) of that store, if staff had a closing shift, they knew that I could get them out of the place within 5 to 10 minutes after locking the last customer out, when any other shift supervisor would usually take a half hour to an hour.

In other jobs, I would devise checklists, organize workstations, and invent little systems in my head that could achieve everything I needed to do in the least amount of time possible.

My motivation? The down time, baby. If you get everything done quickly, you can spend more time not having to work.

And that’s great, if you’re always going to work for someone else, but it can kind of cripple you when you’re trying to do something on your own.

With all these personal projects I want to do; webcomics, blogs, music, writing, etc, the time I have to spend on them comes out of that precious ‘down time’, so my brain is reluctant to do anything that I don’t HAVE to do, if it means impeding on that time. Why do I work so hard at working smart, to give myself all this extra relaxing time, if I’m then going to use it to do more work? Often, this causes my brain to become a petulant little shit when I want to get it motivated to, for example, try filming a webcast on the weekend, or work on a novel outline, because I’m cutting into precious ‘do nothing’ time. Even if these projects are things I love to do, honestly, I still love to do nothing even more.

But here’s something that occurred to me this morning: I’m not looking at the bigger picture, because if I did, I would realize that my lazy-assed brain was actually going against its tendencies.

You see, rather than applying lazifficiency on a small scale, to individual tasks, or just my job, or just housework, or just shopping for underpants, I need to look at my LIFE as the task to optimize.

I work a job that takes up about 44 hours a week, a job that I will likely have to do (or one just like it) until I am in my sixties or beyond. How is that Lazifficient? There is a fucking OCEAN of downtime that I am throwing away on this poorly organized task called existing. I need to optimize my time on the earth, and a ‘job’ in general, even when made extremely efficient, is still time spent in a place doing things you would not be doing if you had complete control over your time. Before today, I had never zoomed out of my life and thought of it quite like that.

Could be a breakthrough. Which would be nice.

However, as an elite group of military cartoon people used to say, knowing is half the battle. What I need to do now, is figure out how to blend this new revelation with my lazifficiency skills, and come up with a plan to optimize my life.

-I need to start making some lists…

C.R.

I’ve mentioned it a lot recently, and it’s only because it has been the most predominant thing on my mind for the past two weeks; this “video game concept” thing. I mention it again today, because it’s a good example of how easily distracted I can become when I come up with the Newest Great Idea.
Earlier this month, I did this crazy week-long road trip, 20 hours of driving, and 6 customer visits, in five days. I do so much driving for my job, and all that time alone with my thoughts is most often where the ideas that fill the bottleneck originate.

So I’m driving along a mountain pass in B.C., when I have this vision. I remember reading something Stephen King said about his idea for the novella The Mist. He said that he was at the grocery store, when he suddenly had this image of a pterodactyl crashing through the window and flying down the aisle. The story he wrote just built upon that.

That’s kind of what I experienced while behind the wheel, this vision of a scene from a video game, and by the time I finished that 3 hour leg of my journey, I had most of the game ideas figured out. The rest of that week was spent mentally refining those ideas.

The whole time this is going on, there’s a part of my brain, that ounce of common sense mixed with inner-critic, telling me, “You realize that you don’t have any experience, resources, or contacts in the game development community, right? This is the biggest waste of time, considering you DO have the resources and tools at your disposal to do any of the other projects you want to work on. Why aren’t you putting more effort into your webcast idea, or writing scripts for your comics, you dumb shit?”

And that voice is right. However, I always get irrationally obsessive about the Newest Great Idea, and it almost invariably affects everything else I want to do.

Cut to this past Saturday. I feel like crap; frustrated, grumpy, I want to work on something creative, but nothing’s happening. Mentally constipated. I was trying to find some kind of project planning software, where I could start putting all the pieces together for my game idea, on the off chance I can flesh it out to become a real pitch that I can take to a developer. Nothing that I found was quite what I wanted, and I was letting it get to me.
The wife needed to get some supplies from Office Depot, and I needed to get out of the house, so off we went. On the drive there, I told her about my frustrations, and she suggested, “Why not put all of the ideas down the old-fashioned way, with a pen and paper?”

She’s thinks she’s so fuckin smart. And that’s because she is.

I looked around the Orifice Depot, and found a 5 subject notebook, and some of those elementary school workbooks, the kind where only the bottom half of the pages are lined, and spent the rest of the day mind-mapping my ideas into one of the workbooks.
By Sunday morning, I found that the game was not pushing nearly as hard at the front of my cortex anymore, and I was actually able to work on comics without the Newest Great Idea interfering. It was magical, the most focused I’ve been in a long time. All thanks to a 99 cent workbook, and a wife with a Great Idea of her own.

-I don’t know if this brain-dumping technique is the final piece to the puzzle of enabling me to do more with myself, but I do know I’m going to go buy some more of those workbooks today.

C.R.

So this is how school fucked me up, or at least contributed.

I loved to read when I was a kid. I picked up the skill pretty quickly, and devoured books as fast as Icould get them. Also, I read them. My earliest memory of a favourite series of books were the Charlie Brown Encyclopedias. Do you remember those? They were awesome. Educational and fun, and easy to get into, like sex with a librarian.

By the time I got to the first grade, my reading and comprehension was at an advanced level, and somehow, so was my understanding of math. I don’t know why, I’ve never really had a love of numbers or anything, but math was always quite easy for me.

In light of my super-geniousity, it was decided that I would take grades 1 and 2 in the same year, and effectively skip into grade 3 the next. Apparently the whole skipping grades thing isn’t done so much anymore, but then again, failing kids isn’t done anymore either, so I guess it all evens out.

Looking back, I’m not sure if skipping grade two was a good thing or not. It set me up for a lot of high expectations from myself and my family, took me away from the friends I’d made that were my own age, dropping me into a third grade class full of kids I didn’t know the next year (which was terrifying, I still remember that first day. They all seemed five years older than me). It also probably contributed to my becoming a (mostly self-imposed) social reject in high school.

But at the time, I was just excited. I was getting all this attention. I was “special”, but not in the way that the guy with the hockey helmet who drove around the school looking for sticks to store in the back of his giant tricycle was “special”. I was fucking smart, yo, and being recognized and praised by all these adults for my brilliance.
And all because I liked to read. Not because I tried really hard.

In Elementary school, there never really was an emphasis on homework. As long as you could pass the standardised test for your grade, and showed up, that’s all the government really worried about. Just give the little fuckers enough of a basis so that they aren’t a total waste when they hit high school. Thusly, I was a straight A student all through those grades. I had perfect attendance, and I learned all the stuff the exams required me to learn. Done.

I didn’t start getting lower grades until grade 9, because, all of a sudden, this ‘homework’ shit was actually a significant part of your final grade. “What? Why? If I learn it in the hour it takes the teacher to teach it, what’s the point of spending another hour regurgitating it repetatively? That’s redundant, and a waste of my time.”  So I hardly bothered with homework. I would do the mandatory assignments, papers, etc, and always got great marks on them, and exams were easy, but I became a B student because I refused to waste my time on things I already knew.

My report cards always sang the same refrain. “Chris has a solid grasp on -insert subject here-, is very bright and contributes well to class discussion, but just needs to put more attention into his homework assignments to achieve that better grade”

But my stubborn, spoiled, too smart for its own good brain refused to buy into that. School is about learning, and I was learning perfectly well without having to solve thirty slightly different algebra equations every damn night. It was worth that 10-15% of my mark to basically be lazy. And why not, when you continue to be successful and praised and rewarded and pass all the exams.

Here’s why not, and it’s only recently hit me this simply:

There are no exams in the real world. Nobody cares about what you’ve learned, as much as they care about how hard you work to apply what you know.

Damnit, why didn’t anyone stress that in school? Well, chances are they did, and I was too full of my own awesomeness to pay attention.

So there I was at 17, the youngest in my graduating class, a life full of beliefs that work is for suckers, and that I can do just fine by being smart and a quick learner, reinforced by teachers and parents and the system, only to get dumped into a reality that is somewhere in between where I come from and where someone like my father, the hardworking just to scrape by, old-school work ethic, comes from.

-Uh… shit. What do I do now?

C.R.

Getting things done, follow-through, motivation, hard work.

These things tend to go directly against everything that makes me the person that I’ve become, and I’m starting to realize that, if i’m going to be successful at something other than my marriage and a job that pays just enough to get by, then I’m going to have to overcome some pretty deeply ingrained and conflicting aspects of myself.

I was the youngest child in my family by a few years. An accident. Whoops, here I am! By the time I came along, my mom was much more laid back about child-raising, not the stressed out and hard woman my brother and sister had. My dad made enough of a living to provide a childhood for me that was basically middle-classy, but it was a luxury compared to what my siblings had when they were little. I was spoiled, I was ‘the baby’. My sister spent a lot of time looking after me, in the early years when mom was working, so I essentially had two moms. My dad had transitioned from being a ‘company man’ to being self-employed, so he was generally around more when I was a kid.

I never really wanted for anything, never really had to do chores. Life was good, and I didn’t have to work at it.
I don’t know if there’s a man I know with a stronger work ethic than my father. The guy is in his sixties, and is currently building their new house, with little help. If monetary compensation was equal to work ethic, we should’ve been fucking loaded, but I learned early on that life isn’t like that. I saw how asshole celebrities and people who played sports, greedy politicians and corporate douchebags, people who really didn’t seem to have to put in a gruelling 14 hours of work every day, or contribute anything worthwhile, made an obscene amount of money. I saw first hand why hard work is its own reward, because it’s the only damn reward. My dad still has to go work a job in order to pay their bills. I’m not sure if he can afford to retire, and I’m not sure if he’ll know what to do with himself if and when he retires.
Somewhere in my youth I made a decision, that I would not let myself get tricked into a life of working my ass off for nothing. For example, the job I do now, is the most money I’ve ever made, and the most, I don’t know, noteworthy, I guess, kind of position -in that I’m the number-one guy in the country for what I do- and I don’t have to work that hard at it. It’s time consuming, sure, at 40+ hours a week, and I deal with people who make me crazy, and I have to travel a lot to not very glamorous places, but as for actual, real, honest hard work, most days, it’s one of the easier jobs I’ve had. This only reinforces everything I learned from my childhood, and watching what my parents went through.
Now this doesn’t mean I blame my parents for everything that’s wrong with me, (I’m actually very pleased with the person I am, and I largely have my family to thank for that) but how I saw work and reward as a little kid, in my little monkey-sphere part of the world, definitely laid the slacker foundation for the things I now realize I would like to change about myself.
-But nothing fucked me up as bad as school. We’ll get to that tomorrow.

CR

I turn 32 in 53 days, and I’ve decided to do a blog entry every day between now and then. Mostly self-analysis shit, with the goal being that, by my birthday, I have a better understanding of who I am and where I want to take my life. This is something I feel I need to do, and I hope you guys don’t get bored form it, and maybe even get something out of it for yourself. Let’s begin.

I want to start with a couple of my favourite Jack Kerouac quotes, because they sum me up to a certain degree:

“I like too many things and get all confused and hung-up running from one falling star to another till i drop. This is the night, what it does to you. I had nothing to offer anybody except my own confusion.”

and

“My fault, my failure, is not in the passions I have, but in my lack of control of them.”

You see, I have ideas. Oh sweet mercy fuck do I have ideas. So many, so often, and I want to see them all happen. To name a few:

-My webcomics, misplaced, and imaginary enemies.

-Two very different themed video blogs.

-A weekly video introduction on the front page of this site.

-About 3 dozen songs to record.

-About 10 different books to write.

-A dream house to build with my wife. (and some cool ideas surrounding all that)

-An animated feature film that only uses the Nine Inch Nails 2 disk epic “The Fragile”, played from start to finish, as its soundtrack.

-An incredibly awesome concept for a massively multiplayer online game that has (as far as I know) has never quite been done before.

And those are just the ones that currently occupy my mind. There will be more added next week, I’m sure.

While ideas are great, and creativity is what keeps our brains from becoming mere zombie-fodder, I think there is such a thing as idea-overload, and I suffer from it, and it becomes a huge hamper to my ability to follow through. It’s like, all of these ideas make a mad dash to escape my brain, and they all slam into the doorway like some Three Stooges bit, and they just repeat that routine endlessly, which results in nothing happening.

Or, like in the case of the two webcomics that finally managed to escape the bottle-neck, I get on a roll, and start having a lot of fun in the making of them, but then I become distracted by one or more other ideas that are still in the doorjamb brain-scrum, and somehow dwelling on those things cause me to lapse in the existing projects, the follow-through brakes get put on, and I give up on all my ideas, deciding it’s just easier to imagine how cool they would all be, then actually attempt to realize them.

With some ideas, it’s purely a logistics problem. I don’t know anyone in the video game industry, and I would be worried that if I told some random someone my idea, it would get taken and used and I would get neither credit nor compensation. (a scenario which I believe actually happened to my brother-in-law) So that idea will likely not see fruition. That doesn’t mean my brain can just throw away the idea, in fact, I continue to keep thinking and building on my impossible video game concept, I really can’t help it.

Of course, the other roadblock, or excuse (which, if I’m being honest, is probably what it really is) is my job.

What I do to earn the money that pays my mortgage is often stressful, mentally and sometimes physically taxing, and has me traveling for often days at a time, and by the time I get home, whether at the end of the day or end of the week, in one way or another I am simply exhausted, and by the time I have a chance to visit with my wife, play with the dog, and wind down from the day, it’s time to sleep and start it all over again. I’m not saying this to whine, it’s just the truth, and I bet there are a lot of people out there who can relate.

I am working on all of this however, as I think is evidenced by my recent relaunch of misplaced, and finally realizing Imaginary Enemies. It’s a start, but at the same time, it’s not nearly enough. Not nearly as much as I know I could be doing.

Tomorrow, I discuss my biggest obstacle. It’s bigger than my job, or the idea bottleneck. More of a stumbling block than money, time, connections, skill or talent.

-It’s me.

CR

Hey there, my blog-reading peoples!

It’s been a while, and I hope to rectify that with more frequent postings. I also hope to rectify my lack of commenting on all of your various internet homes. I have been reading, just, for some reason, not feeling very interactive for the past while. Can’t explain it.

Anyhow, I am very excited, because I have officially relaunched misplaced on its own domain:

http://www.getmisplaced.com

I know a few of you told me I should have done this a long time ago, but better late than never, right?

This time I’m going about it much more ‘professionally’, making the comic RSSable, Diggable, and all that stuff. You’ll see elements like that pop up over the next week or so.

Next week (I’m pretty sure of it) I will be officially putting my new comic endeavour out into the world. I can’t tell the name yet, because I still need to get the domain set up, but you’ll find out as soon as I do. I know I’ve been talking about it for ages, but it’s finally coming together in a way that I’m really happy with. If nothing else, there will be a teaser ‘coming soon’ image up, while I get a few comics ahead.

After they’re both up and running, I’m going to start working hard at promoting the comics, getting some eyeballs on them, hopefully build a decent fan base or something, who knows?

So that’s my big news. I hope all of you are doing well, and I will check in later in the week.

C.R.

My dad sends me quite a few forwarded emails (fewer since I introduced him to snopes.com) and most of them are groaner jokes or interesting conspiracy theories about oil, regular dad-forward type stuff.

He sent me this the other day, and I finally got around to reading it. If you have a chance, give it a read, and then at the end I have a little exercise for you to try.

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