Meeting of The Minions II: Time to Lawyer Up

The beauty of rocketing towards poverty is it leaves Tuesdays free.  Not really free, Tuesday's I drive around looking for dead things in the ditch to take pictures of so technically I'm working. Yep, I gave up a lucrative career as a temp/day trader to shoot roadkill.  You know why I'm sharing this? I will dedicate my first book to any tipster who knows where there's a carcass with flowers growing out of it.  (Shhhh don't tell Cliff I'm ripping off his shot.)

Jotsalot Media LLC held its second weekly What-Are-We-Doing meeting, this year, to discuss what exactly it is we're doing.  And if you remember the last time we had a meeting, I made the mistake of asking The Minions what they thought.  Never ask tenured employees what they think.

The Two Rules for Building a Media EmpIre:
1) There is an I in EmpIre
2) Cater the semi-annual weekly meeting and ask questions only when The Minions are chewing 

This morning, The Minions did make some garbled, chin-wiping sense between bites mostly having to do with me.  It's always me like they don't have jobs around here.  I love The Minions, they're like facets of me, but they need to step up, grab the bull by the horns and put their noses to the grindstone.  Not to sound cliche, but they need to give themselves a life wedgie and focus.

Ms M mentioned us needing a lawyer.  But what kind?  Personal injury? Corporate? A shyster willing to bury money in a Swiss backyard?  Lawyers are good letterhead because they scare people.  Their breath smells like they've been licking peanut butter off a dog and they use Latin, but they keep the jackals away.  I agreed to prepare for thinking about a lawyer.

What else happened this week?  I found a one act I wrote in college and added rewriting it to my list of Things That Will Someday Make Me Feel Guilty But I'll Never Do.  And we're a week closer to the Promised Land.

Relativity

I've reached the age when the only women attracted to me have expiring eggs and father issues.

And to be perfectly honest, dealing with that is taking up all my blog energy.

Fudging the Line Between Multi-Tasking and Polygamy

I never asked where babies came from, but one day a doctor came to school and told the girls in the morning and the boys in the afternoon.  I must not have paid attention because I don't have any and the topic of where babies don't come from wasn't covered in fourth grade health.

I don't have any babies to show from Jotsalot Media this week either.  Oh sure, there were the usual scratchings and plannings, but nothing really got done.  It's not that we weren't working, we just didn't actually finish anything-like the corporate laundry.  I washed it and put it in the dryer, but I lacked the attention span to move beyond damp and I have clammy socks to prove it.

Did you know people with ADD are natural multi-taskers?  It makes perfect sense if you think about it.  Eureka! we were multi-tasking and ran out of time.  That's what the week was about.  The good news is, within the next few days, lots will suddenly be finished.  Rationalization complete.

Next week I might try my hand at polygamy.

I went to shoot flood shots today for Timpkins' book.  The thing about Montana is there's always a person or electrical wire or something trying to be in every shot.  Today it was the sun invading and I couldn't get an exposure long enough to make the water move.  I slapped on a neutral density filter and a polarizer and still couldn't get any movement.  But you know what's fun about that?  I changed plans and shot video to sell to an animator I just happen to know.  AND the Genius Bolt zapped me with an idea for my stereoscopic camera.  AND I know where I'll be shooting tomorrow night.  Do so work around here.

Oh and a little tease for next week, I'll be posting Norma Timpkins' "Love Like a Litterbox."

Journey to the Beginning of Time

Do you remember Garfield Goose and Friends?  If you do you're probably maturish and from Chicago.  I don't why it came to me today, but if you remember Garfield Goose and Friends you'll remember a serial about four boys who get lost while rowing in Central Park (yes, the one in New York) and end up in the age of dinosaurs.  Anyway, something prodding my memory after forty-five years was worth at least five minutes of YouTubing.  There's a new verb for you and here's another one Clutch Cargoing (to creep people out using lips).  Okay, not a real productive use of time unless I ask, "What makes work last?"  Why has I Love Lucy been on for almost sixty years?  And how long have people been staring at the Mona Lisa?  Why?  Why?  Why?  If I can answer the why then I just need to answer the how to become immortal in a viral internety way.  Such are the questions I use to rationalize watching Brady Bunch reruns.

I spent the week trying to pay more attention to what's happening outside of my office/dungeon/domicile.  This involved a lot of news watching versus interacting, reading instead of writing and YouTubing.  Am I the last to hear of YouTube?  So, I poke my head out of wherever I keep it and this is what I see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oS4C7bvHv2w  I can't compete with this reality thing.  Be honest could you have imagined this?  Maybe this is what keeps I Love Lucy and the Brady Bunch on all these years.  They're thisclose to reality without ever crossing the boundary into absurd.

Alright, so maybe some of my ideas need a second pair of eyes on them.  And maybe The Minions are developing into flesh and bone characters that are a little too real to be healthy.  And I definitely need to get out more, but I'm not sure I can do reality.

You want fun.  You want to be entertained.  You want almost-kind-of-possible-reality, right?  Okay, because that's where we're headed.

XXX Post

I know you came here expecting to read a fluff piece about matricide, but something important happened last night.

I don't know, if you know, that I've been battling insomnia for the last three years.  I'm afraid to go to bed unless I've been chasing cough syrup with bourbon and sometimes that isn't enough.  Admittedly, I've never been very good at sleeping.  For you it's a natural skill but for me it's about as natural as eating gum off my shoe.  I wish it was only night terrors or mid-night empties, but it's much worse.  There's a demon trying to kill me.  I go to bed a healthy, fearlessly whoozy, self-medicated CEO and wake up an armadillo that works nights as a speed bump.  Today I almost wet myself during the twelve foot trek to the toilet because the stabbing pain in my left buttock left me unable to walk.  An innocent looking, pillow-topped demon named Mattress attacks me at night.

I baubled the Beast with 1200 count sheets and $150 down pillows, but she attacked me all the more-enough.  Evil Mattress will die in a sanitary landfill with diapers and pizza boxes.  She'll be all of three years old.

Okay, now the countdown.  I have three minutes before the fifteen minute blog is finished.  Did you know I set an egg timer and fifteen minutes is what you read?  Pretty simple system.




 

Waiting for the Rapture

What do you mean I can't take the dog?  I can't take The Minions either?  Explain this Heaven thing again.  Oh, they're going.  I guess that makes sense.  Heaven needs a shoe chewer, salmon slapper and helium huffer to keep Their EOE status.  Really?  Just thinking about it was enough?  And I'm guessing the blind thing is true too.  Oh, so not all once it adds up and smacks you when you hit forty.  So every person I see holding a menu at three feet has been. . .  We should have formed a league or something.  Not helping my case, huh?

We had a morbidly introspective week here at Jotsalot Media and it started on Monday.  A Monday morning mirror is a cruel mistress, all about mortality, deadlines and comparisons to classmates doing really well.  Not, we-used-our miles-to-upgrade-to business-class well; we-always-fly-business well.  I fall short of that.  Tuesday I tried on a suit for the first time in nine years only to discover they've all shrunk.  I think it's existential withering from not feeling fulfilled as a garment.  I am the same svelte person I was when I could still see my toes and not time or pizza will change that.  Wednesday I was a debutante waiting to be courted after sending out a resume.  Thursday was plain ugly and I was trying to pretend my resume was just buried in a busy person's cyber in-box.  Today I wrote my little fingers to the bone as it should be.

I suppose some of you are wondering what just happened.  I couldn't resist clicking on the inverted quotation marks and presto! I made this post look really long.  All-in-all it was a productive week and I shouldn't be too hard on myself or The Minions.  And as for the classmate thing, that's a 36x48 sheet of blank paper to fill-every day.   I want to see them try that in business class.

A Tip of the Hat

I know you're here to read my usual self-absorbed ramblings about starting a business, diva employees and finding enough time to do everything.  But this one is going to be different because it's an experiment in attracting attention which I suppose gets back to self-absorbed.

This week I read a book about social marketing and it stated that to attract readers a person should use "topical" words gleaned from search engine lists.  But how to organically work Kleenex, a Kimberly-Clark product, into a post?  I suppose I could mention I attended a private high school in Beaver Dam and write a tear jerking account of my first night there that would have you reaching for a Viva paper towel, but it seems so contrived.

Maybe I could write a glimpse behind the business and allow you into my private world.  Not just the products I use like Yuban coffee and Newman's Own pretzels, but the music I listen to and that sort of thing.  I still listen to Mott the Hoople (and who doesn't?) and a day without the Foo Fighters is a day incomplete.  Johnny Cash, Elvis and Neil Young make me happy too.  Well, and so does the Megan Boyer Band and the Stonethrowers and Bill Evans and Andy Webb.

I like photography.  This could be hurtful if I start mentioning names of people I know and the list is incomplete so I won't do it.  Besides photography is part of work and you already know all about that.

Don't worry this will all be over soon because I really want to watch the Red Wings and eat a Tombstone pizza dinner.

Did I remember to mention Jotsalot Media LLC? Norma Timpkins? The Road Taken Project? Scary Fairy Films? Elana Kemp Honey? Malaysia?