Everyone Needs a Hobby, I Guess.

 For a while I had a YouTube channel called FOM+T (Fat Old Man Plus Tech), which I enjoyed doing and which, after maybe two years, had nearly 400 subscribers.  I had posted a few videos to YouTube over the years randomly,  but I thought it might be interesting to share my thoughts on the contemporary world, a world I think was pretty well described sixty years or more ago by Teilhard de Chardin, Alvin Toffler, and Marshall McLuhan.  So, encouraged by a couple of friends, I bought a cheap tripod to hold my phone and started a new adventure.  What I had to say about the modern world, that the modern world is pretty much the same as it's ever been except that we're on a time line with an exponential curve, and that can be disconcerting, really didn't take too many videos, and I started delving into the popular genre of unboxing and review videos.  Now, I like a good bit of kit,

so it was convenient to have an excuse to buy some of the big and small new things and to share my thoughts and feelings on camera. It was a pretty laid-back channel, with coffee and the occasional cigarette disrupting the seriousness of it all.

Then came my adventure with the virulent virus, and I spent hours lying in bed thinking I was thinking although mostly I was delirious.  When I read my emails or journal entries from those days and nights, I can't recognize what I was writing as English.  But I thought I was re-evaluating the things in my life, and I filled a big box with stuff that no longer served me.  For the most part I was right about those things, although the friend who was taking the stuff to the free store pulled a few things out that she knew I would regret losing, and she was right.  I won't miss the boots that were too small.

One of the things I thought I would quit was my YouTube channel.  After all that time, I still didn't have even a thousand subscribers.  I had made only about $5 with the Amazon Affiliate Program, and I thought that if I quit YouTube I would have more time to read and write and draw or something, to do things that were more 'productive'.  So I deleted the Fat Old Man and his Tech unboxings.

Except, I didn't find the things I did instead to be more productive.  I made a rather desultory blog about some of the folks I have known, a project that is a result of the memories I had while I was under the spell of the virus.  I have drawn a bit more.  About reading, I guess McLuhan was right.  I do still read, but I spend more time watching videos of authors discussing their ideas, a medium in which I can see their faces and hear their thoughts directly.  And, I found that my ponderings as I prepared for a video were some of my most productive times, even if no video resulted.

So, I have forgiven myself for not being a wonderfully serious and productive fat old man and accepted that is alright to make videost that are less than Fellini quality if I enjoy it as a hobby. 

 I have a friend who makes furniture from discarded lumber as a hobby.  His hobby is more useful than mine, I suspect, but his takes up more room, and I live in a tin can.  I like to pretend it's a space pirate ship.  Waking and sleeping delusions get confused in my old mind.  So what?  You're only old once.