Woke to pee. That was my first mistake. (Not that the alternative would have been ideal.)
But despite the consciousness-defying, pinball-stagger that was my 13-foot odyssey to and from the bathroom, once back in the toasty goodness of my bed, my mind would snuggle down into complete wakefulness.
Work. Other work. Other other work. My financial situation, the world’s financial situation, my questionable significance to my significant other, the virtue of minimalism and its contrast to the state of my apartment…
I’d gone to bed at a respectable hour—that was probably my first first mistake. So when my mind found my body up at 2:00am, and smacking itself into things, it must have thought it had received the day’s 4-hour allotment of downtime, and assumed it was time to resume over-thinking things.
It’s been a long run, lately.
Back in August, we launched “The Grandpa Diaries” on YouTube, alongside a few car videos we produced in collaboration with Workshop 337. The one Jaguar video has received [14x] the views of all 13 episodes of “The Grandpa Diaries” combined, proving the corporate overlords at YouTube favor the ad revenue produced by those searching for the world’s best-loved classic car over that produced by the 4 humans who have ever typed the words “grandpa” and “diary” into a search window—an inherent bias I’ve long suspected, and now know to be true.
While I’ve been wading in a sea of thumbnails (a phrase I now can’t un-coin), my fellow Squirrel, Michael, has been corralling our first feature through post: a documentary following an insufferably talented group of high-schoolers, called “We Rise.” Signs point to that hitting the festivals by year’s end.
And then there’s Outside Clients—the Squirrel-for-Hire stuff.
Michael and I both have day jobs, on top of (beneath? Supporting? Definitely supporting…) our Atta Squirrel endeavors, so we only have time for the one client. For a good stint now, that one client has been a cyber security startup called Lucidum, and we’ve been a bit spoiled by the whole thing. The CEO, Joel Fulton, is “missed calling”-level creative, and working with him is an unadulterated pleasure.
Sometimes another client shimmies its way in edgewise, and we curse our own idiocy for taking on more work than our already-taxed schedules can bear. That usually goes something like:
SQUIRREL #1: So, I’ve got a bead on this gig. It’ll be weeks of work for days of pay, and we’ll pretty much wanna stab ourselves in the face by the end of it.
SQUIRREL #2: That doesn’t sound great.
SQUIRREL #1: I already said yes.
So, yeah: It’s been a little too much of that lately. On top of the day job, preproduction on the next season of “The Grandpa Diaries”, post-production on “We Rise”, simultaneous production and post-production on seven episodes of a new series for Lucidum, and this nagging feeling that the world coming to an end might mean the world’s coming to an end…
Not the time to wake to pee. A mind is gonna jump all over that window.
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Show Notes:
*I know, I know; find me another proper coffee that tastes like bitter dirt, instead of sour blueberries stomped on by hipsters, and I’ll drink it.
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