Am I blogging...or am I pitching my existence?
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| High Concept Am I blogging...or am I pitching my existence? |
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Thursday, September 18, 2003 The Pitch: It's like The Last Starfighter meets Barton Fink! That's actually the header I thought of several hours ago, where my entire life seemed to be either: (a) video games; or (b) the newsletter. I would play Simpsons: Hit & Run for an hour and then work on the newsletter for three (thanks to Diamond and/or UPS, I started working on the newsletter about six hours later than usual). Hit & Run is a pretty decent little mix of GTA and the Simpsons, where you drive around, bash things, try and find hidden coins and complete missions. Very open-ended, the game starts easy and gets hard--after spending an hour swearing at the TV in the mid-morning, I switched back to an earlier level to find all the bonus goodies and enjoyed it much more.Fortunately, before I did so, I went outside and walked up to Balboa Park, just to soak in the lovely weather. And I peeked around the community pool which I hod no idea existed until it got a mention in the Bay Guardian's recent (and, I think, best) Best of the Bay issue. A pretty leisurely walk back too with one bad impulse purchase (flip-flops for the gym, which I now realize aren't plasticy enough and will retain too much water from the showers) and one good one (mmmm, sugarless gum). And I've got 5,000 words of the New Comics out of the way, which means all I have to do now is write the Fanboy Rampage. If I'm lucky, I can craft a light and easy riff on pop culture just under 2K by the end of tonight and have time to run errands tomorrow before work. If I'm not lucky... This is one of those disturbing things about doing FBR, a humor column. I don't know how it is for other people, but for me, writing funny is like catching butterflies. If I'm lucky, I spotted a butterfly earlier in the month and I go 'round that particular meadow to see if it's still there. If I'm not lucky, I have to roam from place to place, looking for damn butterflies. Earlier in the car this week, I thought I came up with a pretty good idea but last night I started thinking I'd already used this idea, as a casual toss-off line in one of my earlier columns. I've been doing this damn thing for five years now, and it turns out I'm starting to lap myself. It's not unusual for me to think of doing a riff on something I've done before (God knows, if Stan Lee hadn't existed, I wouldn't have had a column) but now I'm starting to think of ideas that I think are new and worrying now that they aren't. So I'm looking, on the computer, on the CE website, for the column I think I mentioned this in. I know the exact column but I can't find it. Apparently, there are little bitty gaps in my collection of my own columns. Gee, that's swell. So it looks like I'm gonna have to bite the bullet and hope to god this isn't something I wrote about (by my estimate) roughly a year ago--albeit as just one punchline in a column that tried for a dozen. I hope. If this is what being old is like, I'd like to get off the ride now, please. posted by Jeff Lester | 7:06 PM | |
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