Small Voices and the Claw-Bearing Alarm Clock

First With the Pun

As you all are smart enough to know, I use mostly songs, albums, band names and parodies of those as my post titles and headers. That is the only reason I am writing "The Claw Bearing Alarm Clock" bit, because it is like the 60's one hit wonder "The Strawberry Alarm Clock" of Incense and Peppermints fame. Of course in this case, I am talking about Juliette, who has managed to turn my hair trigger readiness to her advantage.

She sleeps with us and since she and Atticus is restless and doesn't sleep through the night, we close him out. This necessitates having a food dish, water bowl and restroom facilities for the cat in my bedroom about which I expressed my extreme consternation many, many blentries ago. Juliette has taken to using the very expensive carpet in our room as a scratching medium. To stop this, I have to sleep several layer more lightly than I normally would and either snap my fingers or find the energy to admonish her vocally. The latter doesn't usually work since my throat is dry and I was just awakened from a sleep.

Juliette, the dear, now uses this against me. See, she doesn't enjoy being locked in the room, either and in the mornings, when she's really ready to go, she starts scratching the carpet perniciously, knowing it will wake me up, I will look at the alarm and notice it's not worth going back to sleep and get up and let her out.

I open the door and Atticus is always right there in the hall. He wants us to be up, too. She sees him, rears back, looks at me with fear and loathing as if to say "I thought I told you to take care of this!"

This chain of events has played out more or less the same way for much of the last week. I think it Juliette is so restless to get out and play, we need to reinstate the open door policy, or close them both out completely. I am tired of this song by the Claw Bearing Alarm Clock.

Small Voices

Small voices can sometimes have big impact. Driving home from Detroit last night, I got a bolt from the blue. "It said quite clearly call Magna Zimmerman." Actually, it didn't say that at all, but I am not going to put the real name of the person my psyche told me to call as I don't know whether she would appreciate that or not.

Anyhow, we used to work together until one day, she was not there. I still don't know the circumstances surrounding her exit and I frankly never attempted to get a hold of her at the time, which I feel badly about. In a former life she was a head hunter and recruiter and had designs on doing public speaking gigs and was putting some stuff together.

Within seconds, I found her on speakerwiki and sent an e-mail. I hope she calls me. My e-mail was simple, it had to be as it was limited to 100 characters to avoid spammers. The voice was so clear in my head that I have a strong feeling about it. Keep your fingers crossed that if I build it, they will come.

Podcast

So, I have had no time to put real energy into this idea, which sits in an incubated section of my mind where my book is keeping it company. It is safe there, and it will grow, but the process is often slow as this spot is way in the back of my mind. I have to move a lot of things to get there. But I like this idea enough to at least do some poking around and investigating.

In one day since I posted about the possibility, I have had a lot of positive response. I have a person working on instructions for how to make and distribute a podcast courtesy of Heather O. in Illinois. I have a new blog template courtesy of TMcR which will bow sometime next week if all goes as planned and I have a couple spit-ball ideas of what do do and how to format the cast.

First, it will be audio for now, but I hope to include some sort of graphic if possible. I will consult my multi-media friends about this soon. It will be about 1/2 hour max and maybe more like 20 minutes, once per week.
The first segment will be an "In the news" type of segment... perhaps called "Our Messed up World" where I can make jokes about horrible things that happened in the world that week. I'm sure I can't out-daily the Daily Show, or be more Colbertian than Colbert, but I believe I can run behind them and catch the scraps.

The second segment will be me and possibly a guest or guests either telling funny stories we lived through (some of which may be nay, will be, blog repeats) or doing some improv type comedy stuff or bits we have written, or discussions of books or movies or the like that we can make funny. This segment will be the bulk of the podcast.
Segment three will be the close with a random thought or gag and perhaps, if we ever get this advanced, a bit of a preview of the next cast.

I know none of this breaks ground, but I don't know what the heck I'm doing. I think keeping it simple will make it a reality faster. People say you should have a goal when starting an endeavor and that goal should be clearly stated and all decisions you make should be clearly steering you toward that goal. This is good advice and it is where I almost always doom myself because I usually just do things because they sound fun.

In the interest of self-improvement and the betterment of all the free world, I will state a goal.

"The Podcast is meant to be entertaining first and foremost and bring joy to a joyless world. If anyone accidentally learns something, or some wisdom burbles up from the ground like a bubblin' crude, then so be it but I swear it is purely accidental. If anyone gets offended, it is also accidental, however no apologies will be made.
"We will explore the fun side of dark things and do it in a conversational tone that hopefully everyone will be able to enjoy.
"In the end, I hope the thing goes viral and I can stop working for a living and do the podcast, speak publicly and do things I love to do rather than what I have to do and spread that love around and hope it takes root and grows."

Stay tuned peeps. This could be fun!