The Captain's Blog

How can I stand out in this competetive world of content creators? That is what I hope to figure out, because I want to perform, on stage, my music and theater, in front of a live audience. I have the music and the theater, and there are lots of stages. What I need is the live audience. So, how do I draw a crowd? Well, I did a search for just that question, and I got a lot of hits on how to draw a crowd, as in sketch a group of people. Not what I was looking for. I want to do sketches, as in theater pieces, in front of a crowd of people."

With those bright, glossy pages, scissors, and a fair quantity of clear tape, I would piece together interestingly wrapped packages for birthdays, Christmases, and other gift giving occasions. I remember one particular birthday, a classmate of my son in the grammar school days, at the local pool, I'd wrapped up the gift he'd picked out in a glossy glowing patchwork of NG pages. When the gift opening time came, all the kids crowded around, mesmerized by that odd looking package that stood out against the store bought gift bags, and the traditional wrapping paper. I don't even remember the gift, but I do remember how the kids were interested in something different than the usual. I suspect the parents were secretly rolling their eyes. "Oh, he's one of 'them'" I could imagine them saying to each other in psychic conversations. Them being a hippy, a cheapskate, an eccentric, or some other category of other. And it was not just my paranoia speaking (though it pretty much always is). I've gotten plenty of feedback in life that my oddities make people uncomfortable. I suspect now, that if there was any criticism going on the minds of the other parents, it was more about how sloppy my work was. The glossy pages of National Geographic were spectacular, and with thoughtful, well executed effort, a packaged wrapped in the improvised paper, patching together complementary pictures with coordinated colors and lines, why it's a work of art, worthy of praise. My effort was less well executed, for while I did pick pages I thought blended well, and aimed to cut and tape them together so the transition from one image to the next was pleasing, I lack the patience and the precision to pull off well executed artistry necessary to create a skillful cut and taped collage. Unless it's a small gift, it takes multiple pages to cover the package. Even with a full sized roll of wrapping paper, my gift wrapping lacks precision. It didn't stop the kids at the birthday party from admiring the appeal of those bright, glossy National Geographic pages repurposed into wrapping paper. We all like the shiny. We are often drawn in by something new, if it has a shiny appeal. So, dear reader, does this blog piece sparkle? Is this webpage wowing you? Does my code tingle your interest circuits? I think I'm pretty clever at stringing words together, and expressing interesting ideas, but is that enough? Do I need a shinier package?

I created this webpage, using code I cut from various tutorial websites, and pasted into a text editor, notepad++, then modified it to look like this page looks. My dear friend, KC Wilder, used Wix to create the website for her podcast, Cellar Door Stories, and it looks fabulous, functions well, with features users are used to using. Why don't I do that? Why am I insisting on this DIY approach to my marketing? People love a glossy page, that's familiar and easy to navigate. Give the people what they want, right? Isn't that the motto of show business? That is my business, show business, and there's no business like it I know. Using easily available tools, at very affordable prices, I could build a website of glossy pages, whith much less time and effort, and yet I've created this clunky space, hosted for a monthly fee by a company that doesn't keep sending me offers to upgrade. Why? I would answer that, if I knew, but I don't know myself that well. Instead of a definitive answer, I offer the following speculations.

Metaphorically speaking, the chemicals and processes used in creating the glossy pages of National Geographic, and other such publications, yet another supplier to the stream of toxic waste poured out into our environment. The pulp mill that once created the paper NG used was here near my home. There's a joke a friend told me about two old timers sitting on a bench near that very pulp mill. One says, "what's that god awful smell?" The other takes a whiff of the horrid stench that poured forth from that now defunct smoke stack, and says, "smells like money." Here's another delightful anecdote about the smell our dwelling in town endured when that factory was still operational. I'm a gassy person. Before I gave up (for the most part) eating dairy, I generated some less than pleasing odoriferous air on a regular basis. One fine day, as we exited our vehicle in the parking lot of the building supply place, Pierson's, home of the big hammer, downwind from the nearby pulp mill, my daughter, maybe 5 at the time caught a nose crinkling whiff of that smoke stack emission, and sincerely said in a disapproving tone, “Daaad,” believing I had produced the odor, since that was not unusual. Her mother, my wife at the time, laughed uproariously (as did I). The point being, there is a price we pay beyond the monetary for the production of the glossy page. The odor itself, allegedly harmless, was but one inconvenient side effect of industry. The aforementioned toxic waste had to be dumped somewhere, and that somewhere is up above our shared water table. Under the battle cry, save the planet, I tried to find ways to cut down on the need to produce that waste. We used to buy unbleached paper for our dot matrix printer. We tried to cut back on our consumption with the reduce, reuse, recycle philosophy by doing things such as wrapping gifts in old National Geographic magazines. That is why I had two milk crates full, stored for years. Eventually, I let them go. Somebody else took them on, one milk crate at a time, because my sentimentality (among other desires) made it hard to let go of them all at once.

What does that all have to do with building a better website? The glossy page on the screen doesn't require toxic chemicals to shine. Well, it actually does, but the same amount whether my page functions well, and is visually well designed, or looks and functions like this one does. If I'm going to participate in this energy hungry, chemical dependent chip manufactured online world, it's not any more environmentally costly to have a glossy webpage. So, perhaps I'm just a cheapskate who doesn't want to spend money to earn money. Well, I'll tell you what, dear readers, when enough of you have become my supporters on Patreon, and I have a consistently sufficient revenue stream, I will hire a team to handle all my marketing for me so I can focus on my artistry. What's that you say? I don't have a Patreon account? Why observant reader, you are correct, I don't have one, yet.

Because another factor in my insistence on this DIY approach, I have paranoid distrust of all things corporate, of big business, of big brother, whoever that other is with all the power, I don't trust them. So why would I willingly put my trust, my work, my fate into the hoppers of their money making machines? Have you ever experienced the stench that comes out of those factory stacks? Oh, it's not the kind that offends your nose like the pulp mill pipes of old. I'm referring to all the social ills that are caused by corporate control. I have no idea who Wix is, or Patreon, or really Site5 who I pay to host this site. I have intense, mild paranoia, which might sound oxymoronish, intense mild, so perhaps I should explain. It's intense, because it's deeply ingrained into my psyche, this paranoia. I experience, overwhelming, debilitating fear that has crippled me at times. But that's historically speaking. These days, it's this ever present distant roar of fear, in the basement of my brain, that makes me mildly uncomfortable as I force myself to do things like make a doctor's appointment, or choose a website building service to host my blog. I'm seeking balance, to honor my sincere beliefs in ongoing protest and boycott of the socially destructive forces within the corporate structures, while participating in the beneficial services provided by those same structures.

Do I want a glossy page? Why yes, I do. I really do want to put on a good show, with high production quality. The thing I struggle with, what price must I pay? Financially speaking, it's hard enough. I don't yet have much of a budget. The bigger question, the real source of my reluctance to surrender to the realities of this tick tock instant platform world is the social cost. How can I publish the glossy page, and remain Ordinary? Well, answering that question will definitely be a primary theme in the ongoing journey of this blog. Meanwhile, instead of give the people what they want, I will follow this motto I learned in a book whose title I've long forgotten: tailor what you do to the audience at hand. So I will continue to participate in this online world, while remaining true to my desire to remain Ordinary.