6/29/2022 - The name of the candy bar I couldn't think of that I had just eaten was Reese's FastBreak. Nice.
A classic episode, one of my favorites, finally restored to the feed!
From July 25, 2018:
I spent most of my Monday at the hospital (and yesterday and today, of course, and this will go on for a few more days - NOTE - It went on for 21 days!) waiting while my father was in surgery. To pass the time, I listened to Tom Snyder interviewing Harlan Ellison over the years on old Tomorrow Show clips posted on YouTube.I watched one a few weeks ago after Harlan Ellison died and I was just blown away. There is so much good stuff that he says, great stuff in fact, that I think people need to hear.
Of course, only a very few people listen to my podcast but I decided for the benefit of those folks that it was important enough to go interview by interview and write out the starting and ending times of certain clips so I could go back at my earliest convenience and edit them into one nice, consumable audio file.
I keep returning to this quote. It opens the podcast. I've been feeling guilty about not writing ever since I heard it.
"It's a very simple philosophy. Anybody who can be deterred from writing should have been. People who want to write really want to write and they WILL write." - Harlan Ellison
I have not been writing. It's not that I don't love writing. Maybe it's that I am distracted by life lately and maybe I shouldn't be letting life distract me. Maybe it's laziness. Maybe it's lack of focus. Maybe it's all of the above.
Whatever it is, the wheels are turning in my head and my fingers are moving across the keyboard again. I'm writing and it feels good.
Now, if I could just harness one percent of Harlan Ellison's confidence and conviction:
"Are you loyal to the United States of America or are you loyal to your writing? Forget it, jack. The country could sink into the ocean for all I care. I only care about the integrity of the work. That's really all I give a damn about and I'll kill to keep those words that way. I spent twenty years of my life doing what I do and I think I do it very well indeed and I'll be damned if I'm going to let people mess with it. That's my religion. That is precisely where I am." - Harlan Ellison
6/15/2022 - I'm still goofing around with ideas here. I want to get back to being more of a personal podcast and less of a "reacting to the horrible news that surrounds us all" podcast. So today we have general updates on my life here in Armpit.
I have not restored all of the 2022 archives here yet. I said I was going to do it just a few minutes ago but I thought I would spend time getting this out instead.
This is episode 611 for those of you keeping score at home. I am posting this on Friday, June 10th, 2022.
This episode represents a new podcasting beginning for Up In This Brain (I hope). The podcast consultant chickens came to me in the yard this evening (please see the cover art/picture accompanying this episode) and had some ideas I want to look into which might help take this thing in a more interesting direction. We shall see. I am not sure I trust chickens but I am giving them a chance since I am all out of ideas myself. Seinfeld only lasted nine seasons and guess what season it is here on the podcast? Season 10! Yikes!
As Jerry famously told George in season nine, "When you hit that high note, you say goodnight and walk off."
I bet you wish I was as smart as Jerry.
That brings me to a podcasting question - why do we need archives? Podcasts like mine have a very short shelf life. If I was asked to go back through the archives and pick the episodes out that stand on their own regardless of when they were recorded, I might have ten that I could pull out and share with you out of over 600. The rest of the episodes are probably pretty time specific and lost their relevancy about two weeks after they were posted.
So, as of this moment in time, no archives - I'm going for the complete reboot. How many episodes at a time will stay on the feed? The chickens haven't told me yet.
