if it weren’t for the twenty minutes just preceding everything i ever do, i think i could be quite successful.

but those twenty minutes, they’re a total drag.

it would be better if i had an assistant. someone whose sole responsibility it was to know what i was going to do so i wouldn’t have to know and then everything would be a surprise and the twenty minutes leading up to that surprise would be spent in a blissful haze of unknowingness rather than a maelstrom of knowledge and fear.

for instance, my assistant person would meet me after work, take me to my home, turn on my computer, hand me a coffee and say, and now you are going to facilitate a conversation with the author of a book that you’ve read and loved and we’re going to record it for this here podcast.

and i would be all, ooooooh, what a lovely opportunity. how grand. oh, hello there, author of the book i read and loved. let’s chat!

you see how easy that went down? it’s so much simpler than knowing for months that you’ve taken on something that involves three pieces of technology you do not know to use.

but without my assistant and with that knowledge, instead i manufacture dramas. like, amazingly stupid, ridiculously impossible albeit epic dramas. for instance, as of late, the feature presentation playing in my head has been: what if someone i’m interviewing has a heart attack on air?

come now. let’s be real.

never mind that it’s not even a live show, that is freaking NEVER going to happen.

add to that, the fact that it’s not even a creative scenario as i know i’m drawing heavily from the plot of gary paulson’s children’s classic hatchet, wherein the pilot of a two-person plane has a heart attack and the plane crashes in the canadian wilderness and our hero brian robeson- a kid who was simply on his way to visit his divorced father- is left to fend for himself in the wilds.

we’re talking about a podcast. it is in no way comparable to flying a two-person plane over the canadian wilds. and yet, somehow, in the mess that is my brain trying to come to terms with the things that i find difficult to do, the experiences are nearly identical.

this is why i need an assistant. someone who would tell me the things i need to do only as i need to do them. someone who would take hold of those twenty minutes just preceding everything i ever do.

because when you add those up over a lifetime, that’s so many minutes i’ve wasted. so much time i’ve squandered preparing for plot twists derived from children’s books.

i want to get to a point where i do not do this. a point where the twenty minutes just preceding everything i ever do are as euphoric as the twenty minutes coming just after. those moments where i feel as though i can fly that two-person plane over the canadian wilds, for myself, by myself, entirely on my own.