ashow by Ze Frank
“This post was due an hour ago.”
It’s 1:30 in the morning, I have 200+ words to write, and that phrase is all that’s running through my head. In other words, I’m familiar with procrastination.
Procrastination has always been an easy pattern for people to fall into, but, now that we employ space age technology to achieve the high purpose of showing us videos of cute animals or Stephen Colbert dancing, it’s gotten almost unavoidable in the 21st century.
This time my procrastination ran up against a YouTube video that does something very different: Ze Frank’s “Invocation for Beginnings.” (Fair warning: the linked video would definitely incur an FCC fine).
Ze Frank first became widely known when he spent a year hosting “the show with ze frank,” one of the very first video blogs — a new short video every day, many of which involved quirky projects that called for participation and submissions from viewers around the world. (A particularly cool example is the “Chillout Song,” which is mixed from more than 30 separately recorded renditions of the chorus from Frank’s viewers.)
Anyway, Ze is back now with a new project, it’s called “a show,” and is a successor of sorts to “the show.” (It was launched via crowdsourced funding on Kickstarter, raising almost $150,000 from people who apparently were willing to throw money at Mr. Frank just to see what he would do with it.)
And apparently he struggles with procrastination too. But he has decided to start anyway, with an “invocation for anyone who hasn’t begun, who’s stuck in a terrible place between zero and one.” I’ll let the rest of the invocation speak for itself — and take a moment to be grateful for some evidence that procrastination doesn’t have the last word, and even blogging can lead to wisdom.
