New Adventures in Escapism

Work has been ramping up again lately, necessitating focused bursts of escapism while I struggle to stay on top of an untenable and ever-expanding mountain of needs-doings and needs-thinking-abouts. I’m aware on some level that the stress is all in my head, that a different person in the same situation would be much less stressed simply because they would see it differently. Maybe that person has a mythology that copes better with too much to do and too little time to do it, whereas the one I escape to isn't really related to my daily activities at all. So then, do I have the power to change that? Could I turn my curse of mythologizing into a self-affirming career-management strategy by crafting a more work-oriented mythology? Could I turn Helmut Kravitz into a work horse, and skyrocket through the ranks of Capitalism?

Probably not. Unfortunately, the emotional pressure of the moment tends to define the situation on its own terms, and I don’t get much say in it either way. I’m either stressed or I’m not. So I’m left with a mythology only good for escaping to. But as far as that goes, I’ve been indulging a lot lately. If this were a real twelve-step group, I’d have to turn in my 24-hour chip and regretfully admit to zero days of sobriety.

I’m still thinking episodic-office-endtimes scenario, but I’ve lapsed back into thinking about whether I should actually *make something* beyond just thinking about it, completely destroying the hard-earned progress I’ve made so far with my therapy blog. I’ve been envisioning a series of short filmed episodes, five to ten minutes long, that could be aired on the intertubes and adored by the faithful audience of this blog. Each story would take place inside a small office, where I would use the lack of any budget or actors or set pieces to my advantage, letting the few actors I could pull together tell the story of their fantastic world-gone-mad from the contrastingly uninspired setting of the Spigot Corporation. It may sound boring, but that’s because I haven’t yet told you about the Pods - oh, the Pods, and the wondrous plot-twisting things they would do. I can't even bring myself to tell you about them or their awesome pocket-sized potential.

I’ve been fantasizing about the sinfully alluring motion graphics that would consist the title sequence, animated silhouettes telling the story of the mythology against a clean backdrop of color. The end of the sequence resolves to the Spigot corporate logo (which also happens to be the name of the show), and then, ingeniously, we zoom out to see this final image emblazoned on some device, a Pod, a TV, a computer screen, which would be different every episode. And in some way, either prominently or just as a subtle cue, that device would be the key to the episode. The clue to the puzzle.

I could, right now, hammer out full scripts and storyboards for at least five of these episodes, and cobble together the mental inventory of resources needed to see them to fruition. I’m really good at that part of the process - the immediate hypothetical assessment. What I’m not so good at is the enduring follow-through required of self-indulgent and hopelessly overwrought personal projects like this. I refer you to the now still carcasses of The Bishkek Daily Steingard, the Penguin Republic video game, etc. etc. I would like to think that I will return to these projects, and perhaps I will, but honestly, completely realistically, I would only be doing so out of a sense of obsessive task-completion. My mythological passions are largely escapist and rarely productive - to take on more would be choosing to further embroil myself in things that have no practical end or culpable artistic benefit.

Now, if I could make money doing them, that would be something.