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Benjamin Franklin had some excellent advice for aspiring writers: “Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing about." The goal for my upcoming year-long motorcycle tour of The Land of the Free: both. And then some?
The “then some” being video blogging. Vlogging. Motorcycle-related vlogging. Motovlogging. Pouring TikTok, Instagram and/or YouTube viewers a motovlog cocktail, if you will.
Not sure I have the will, but I reckon I have the way, what late-blooming Boomers called mad skillz.
Thank you “Bob,” the chain-smoking CNN News Director who banned me from the editorial side of the business for the crime of not kissing his ring. Skinny ass? That too…
Editor? I Just Met Her!
The Powers That Be exiled me to CNN’s Editing Department where I learned the not-to-subtle art of creating a “news package” without once using the preview button.
Deadline much? I literally threw 3/4” tapes to playback as the anchor introduced “the package.”
Fast forward 10X to 2024. Camera, microphone, battery and memory combined are smaller than an airborne 3/4” cassette. Better quality on every level.
Editing? Super easy! Barely an inconvenience! I can do it on an iPhone, just like Only Fans.
I mean “one.” “One” can do it on a phone like watching Only Fans. Not that I do.
Where was I? If a motorcyclist falls in the forest on The Tail of the Dragon and it’s not on video, did it really happen?
As my father used to say, if you want to shoot ducks, go where the ducks are.
If I want a large audience for my peripatetic peregrination, I’ve got to forget about using big words, strap an Insta360 X3 to Charley the Gold Wing and make pithy remarks while blasting through dramatic scenery.
Better yet, crash spectacularly. Or video someone else doing something stupid, crushed metal resulting. Find cops and have them request ID that I refuse to provide?
Regardless, creating and editing video takes time and attention. I don’t know if the same calculation applies as it did during the Eisenhower era, but I used to figure one hour of editing per minute of finished video.
If I motovlog, I’m going to spend my evenings alone in a motel room editing – when I could be following Samuel Johnson’s sage advice (“If you be solitary, be not idle; if you be idle, be not solitary”).
My cigar amigo Carl “Who’s Better Than You?” Champagne recommends hiring an information worker to edit the videos.
That’s a preposition proposition up with which I will not put. There’s no way a Ladakh freelancer can create content reflecting my Jewish humor and white privilege perspective.
More than that, when you look at the world through a camera, searching for compelling visual content, you miss life as she is lived.
People, places and things become filmic fodder, rather than stimulating intellectual insight for transmogrification through the mystical lyricism of language.
Or something like that. Basically, vlogs are to blogs as a Liga Privada T52 is to a Swisher Sweet. And, for me, take a lot longer to create than a pithy post.
Shoei Me the Money?
While editing these rants also eats up the hours, I can hunt for errant thoughts, inelegant expressions and maddening typos in restaurants, coffee shops, cigar lounges – anywhere in public on my laptop or iPhone.
Without headphones. Maintaining some semblance of situational awareness and interpersonal connectivity.
For better or worse, I’ve abandoned my “side gigs” to dedicate my time and talent to the literary arts. I am not going to stop writing.
So it’s not either/or. If I go down this road, it would be blogging and vlogging.
Can a man serve two media masters? Even if he can, two marriages and a sky diving accident taught this guy that just because I can do something, doesn’t mean I should. What’s your take?
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