encoded notions

The Show with Ze Frank is complete. It has run for a full year, just as Ze declared at the beginning.

I am sad. I will miss the songs, the commentary, “are the new viewers gone yet?”, and the frequent discussion on topics of a philosophical nature. If I had to pick one thing to take away from Ze’s show, it is the notion of brain crack.

I spend a great deal of time reading books, documentation, tutorials, articles, and websites trying to reach some state of information-enlightenment. I have several random ideas for websites, essays, and fiction books, but I put them off because I feel that I don’t know enough to implement them properly. To solve this, I go back and read more, which then repeats the cycle and I don’t really get anywhere.

This is exactly what brain crack is. You feel like there is this teeming sea of originality and creativity behind your eyes, squirreled-away in the folds of your wiggly grey-matter; if only you knew the proper incantation you could entice pure-gold to slither out of your head and into the world. We, as human beings, only exist for a brief amount of time; if you allow yourself to grow addicted to brain crack, you’ll end up with a lot of dreams that slowly wither away. A quick peek at Ze’s site will show you what you get if you try out everything without pre-convincing yourself that your idea will suck if you implement it right now. Cruising through the ORG’s galleries will show you what happens when thousands of other people also give up on their addiction to brain crack.

Over the last year, I’ve tried to give up on the brain crack in my life. To my dismay, as I purged the detritus from my idea pool, more and more stockpiled ideas floated to the surface. This vast sea of unimplemented ideas had been sitting in the corner whispering to me “you are awesome” leading to a skewed sense of purpose: “I’ll be so awesome after I get a chance to implement all of these great ideas!” What I really want is to be awesome now, and that starts by doing awesome things.

Now that The Show is over, and Ze isn’t thinking for me anymore, I guess I’ll have to start.

Number one on the list, start being awesome.