[Seth Says] Part of This Complete Breakfast!
The other day I was chatting with a friend about following through on inspirations. Inspiration is as natural and important as breathing, which is probably why it's another meaning for the word. (If you don't have inspiration, you'll have expiration.)
But since we all have a limited amount of time, money, energy, motivation, and cheese (I mean, if anyone has unlimited cheese, TELL ME), we can't realistically follow all of our inspirations -- and trying to means that we end up with a lot of half-finished projects. (I, for example, have 3 books and an album that were started but will probably never be finished.)
Conversely, following none of our inspirations also seems bad, because that's how you become a joyless husk. (Also, why are there never joyful husks? Y'know, just big empty shells a-singin' and a-dancin'? Maybe next cicada season, we can get some marionette rigging and make it happen.)(Actually, I'm now recalling we sort of did this back in college with lobster shells where we had one lobster wear another lobster tail as a wimple and sing "How do you solve a problem like Maria?" -- now that's a joyful husk!)("Is she stubborn?" "She's a bit lobsternate.") (I think that may even have been the era in which I wrote the original "Whoa-o-o-o, for the langoustine" song.)
WORKING FOR SCALE
So yeah, probably it's good to find a balance and follow some inspirations, but not too many. As it turns out, a lot of my inspirations tend to share two qualities:
1) They require a large amount of work, because my idea is a massive encompassing THING.
2) They are completely ridiculous.
The latter is probably why they appeal to me, but also frequently prevents them from being, y'know, lucrative inspirations. Years ago I had a ridiculous idea for a travel documentary, but it would have required filming in all 50 states, which is a whole lot of work even for someone who doesn't hate travel as much as I do. So I decided not to follow through on that one. (Still a great idea though, in case any of you are budding documentary filmmakers in need of a massive ridiculous project.)
I had another ridiculous idea to translate the entire Torah line-by-line into rhyming couplets. And that one I did follow through on, and it took me a decade, and I spent more on marketing than I made from book sales, not even counting the time I spent writing it. So, as mentioned, not so lucrative financially, and also exceedingly spendy temporally.
What I've realized is that I'm usually better off following through on ridiculous inspirations which can be completed within a day or two, because it not only means I'm more likely to stay the course and see them through, but that when I do so I haven't accidentally spent an entire decade working on a ridiculous idea.
BALANCED: BREAKFAST
All of this, of course, is lead-in to this week's column, which was a very ridiculous idea, but one that I ended up following through with anyway, because sometimes you just have to take your ridiculous ideas and run with them. (Unless your ridiculous ideas are scissors, natch.)("Scissors, natch" sounds like "Scissor-snatch", which I think is when you use scissors like tongs to pick something up but also risk destroying it.)("Beware the Jubjub bird and shun the frumious Scissorsnatch!")(Arguably a Bandersnatch's jaws are scissor-snatch like, catching and tearing all at once.)(Enjoy the nightmare fuel!)
Anyway, this whole thing started because a certain felonious ex-president gave a rambly press conference in front of some cereal and then starting rambling about cereal, and I thought:
Donald Trump: Cereal Offender
So that's a very ridiculous column which will nonetheless inevitably offend some readers because I said factually true things (with links to news stories for verifiable veracity!)(vis-a-vis vehement vilifications and viciously violent vices)(look I'm Jasmine Crockett). But those people can eat a bowl of wrong flakes, because I'm not in the habit of pretending two sides are equal when they're not, and I just watched Kamala Harris's acceptance speech about putting the common good above self-interest which offered a pretty stark contrast. (I was going to make a joke about an Iron Man makeup tutorial, but that's too much of a stretch even for me.)(By which I mean I had the inspiration but couldn't find a way to make it funny.)
I AM IRONY MAN
(Duh duh duh duh duh, da duh da duh da duh duh duh duh duh.) (Oh sure, great title, very convincing. Everyone loves irony and sarcasm, it's such a witty and urbane form of humor, and certainly wasn't already played out in the 90s.)(As opposed to Marvel superheroes, which are a fresh new thing that certainly hasn't been oversaturated over the past few decades.)(Help, I'm inescapably sarcastic!)(Clearly the Marvel universe needs Captain Sarcasm. Actually, I suppose most of the heroes are sarcastic already, come to think of it. What if no one needs sarcasm anymore?)(Gee, what a great tragedy that would be.)(Inescapably!)
Well, I hope at least my latest column gave you something to chew on. As always, I thank you for reading, will be back in two weeks with another column, and remind you that if you take cranberries and stew them like applesauce they taste much more like prunes than rhubarb does. (There, now my detractors can call me a Marxist.)
Hello I Must Be Going,
Seth