A correction on a post from last week: As I was informed by the formidable trivia team of Hot Dog Water, I was incorrect in my belief that the video for Asia’s classic “Heat of the Moment” had this vague Raiders of the Lost Ark theme. That song’s video consisted of a heck of a lot of video monitors showing band related images. The Asia song I was thinking of was “Don’t Cry”, whose video does actually contain the band members falling into quicksand, bursting into flames and getting chained to walls. I was also wrong in the involvement of guitars but I think that is due to the last trap being a table similar to the one a guitar is placed on in Def Leppard’s “Rock of Ages” and the one that a Wilson sister from Heart (the one married to Cameron Crowe, not the one only filmed from the neck up) emerges from in a video as if she was poured into a mold.
And yes, I spent a heck of a lot of time on YouTube today determining these facts. I’m not sure what fact is more disturbing here. That I, someone with a number of degrees and believed by many people to contain actual intelligence, had the major focus of his life being searching out clips of nearly twenty five year old Asia videos or that someone a) recorded those videos on a tape, b) held on to that tape for two decades and c) decided to upload it to a website. Somehow I feel that this isn’t the best use of the internet. Coolest, yes, but maybe not the best.
Had this thought cross my mind as I was racing through Best Buy this morning to pick up my copy of How I Met Your Mother on DVD. Given the amount of free publicity I’ve given that show over the past year you’d think I’d get a copy of it gratis. Don’t get me wrong, it’s my favorite show on tv by a long shot (especially since the Simpson’s has decided to go into full on suck mode) but don’t I deserve something for being such a proselytizer of the show’s awesomeness? Of course, I bought a copy anyway and am now going through all of the commentary tracks waiting for them to say something like, “People keep on asking us where we get the ideas for the episodes. Well, there’s this guy in Kansas City…”
As you can tell, this has been a day for a lot of great thinking on my part. (Seriously, someone posted Asia videos on YouTube. I want to know why. Sure, it was of great benefit to me but who the hell kept a copy of those for two decades?) I do want to mention one idea that has been floating through my mind recently that would be good to discuss. I was given the suggestion recently that instead of writing a novel maybe I should write a collection of pieces in the manner of David Sedaris.
It’s a really good suggestion for a number of reasons. First, while I’ve been writing a lot I haven’t actively been writing fiction for five years and haven’t been writing long-form fiction for more like eight. All of my focus over the past few years has been on these shorter pieces. Plus, I think that is where my strength lies. I don’t know if I could build a plot that holds up over two hundred pages. Finally, I’ve been reading a lot of things in the Sedaris mold like Sarah Vowell and Chuck Klostermann so I think I know how to do that style.
So while I haven’t officially decided that is what I’m going to do next year I’m leaning in that direction. It will be a collection of fiction and memoir and pop culture analysis, hopefully with one thread that connects all of it together. I’ll probably expand some blog entries and add a few stories that have never made it in here for various reasons. I’m still open to suggestions or ideas. But mainly I think this might be the best way for me to move towards writing that one major work I feel that I have in me.
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