In retrospect, it wasn't a huge surprise. I knew I was risking burning out when I blogged every day in 2008. Sure enough, little by little, fewer posts until finally, I stopped entirely in 2010. It's been almost a year and a half since I eked out the fifth of five posts in 2010.
Besides getting burned out, I kept finding a lot of what I was interested in being written better by others. Yeah, maybe no one can work in a fart joke out of left field the way I can, but still, it made me wonder why I was bothering. In addition, all that grown-up, real-life stuff was happening, making me, for lack of a better expression, not in the mood for writing.
So now I'm trying again. There are still people doing stuff better (in fact, a future post will feature one such site), but like Ben Folds said, there's always someone out there cooler than you, so what the hell, right?
Here's something I should have blogged about from last summer:
So back in July 2010, the Rifftrax folks had a contest in which fans could submit jokes for specific scenes in the cult classic "Reefer Madness" to be included in the live riff event that would play in theaters across the country. I dutifully knocked off jokes for each of the scenes in the contest video. The show itself was going to be in August.
August rolls around, and I get an e-mail that includes the following: "Hi Jeff! We used your ninth riff in the movie, where would you like your swag mailed?"
This was pretty much my response:
So in addition to all the swag, which included a signed Mike Nelson bobblehead (it stands next to Count Chocula on my desk), a T-shirt, and a mess of buttons and stickers, MY NAME would be in the end credit roll. My name. On a movie screen. Eight-year-old me was proud of aging-nerd me.
I'd planned on going anyway since it was going to be streamed to a theater in my town, but now I had to go. And it didn't occur to me till I was sitting in the dark theater, waiting for it to start, but I'd get to hear an audience react to something I wrote. One of the things I get to do at work is help write for one of our shows, but I don't really get to see how the jokes are received.
When my joke came, delivered by Bill Corbett, it got a respectable amount of laughter, and I have to admit--it felt good. The whole show was hilarious; if you get the chance to catch a live event, you really ought to. As the movie ended and the parting comments commenced, I waited for the credits to roll.
Instead, the feed just stopped. I think my theater had started playing the feed a bit late (yeah, it's not LIVE live in California, but what else is new?), so that might have been part of it. Regardless, I had missed my chance to see my name on the big screen. Yeah, I can watch the DVD at home, where my name is indeed present, but it's not the same, you know?
I guess this wasn't just in my theater, as Rifftrax released a short video on YouTube that listed the winners a while later.
So everyone in sixth grade who constantly told me I wasn't funny can go suck it see where their encouragement got me.
