Tearing The “Asshole” Out Of YouTube

I’m yanking the dead meat off of YouTube like fat ole Uncle Jessup at Thanksgiving grabbing a drumstick.

I’ve been mulling over removing many of my videos from YouTube for a long time. Occasionally in stupid emotional fits, others in cold rationality, and yet again after enough drinks to put down a medium sized caribou. But this time it’s in the works and I won’t take any bitching about it, mainly because the videos aren’t really leaving as such. They are just migrating.

Anything that contains copyrighted material is being torn out and remastered. Any video that I think is either topic-based and long past it’s expiration date or is not work I am proud of will be ripped from it’s sockets. After the peices are scrubbed and primped, they will be Frankensteined here for those of you who actually enjoy the videos.

Allow me to explain: Haberdashery is a big step for me. Huge, actually. It’s a reinvention in the most extreme sense of the word in that I don’t plan on going back to the old state of mind. Ever.

YouTube appealed to me originally because it was the upstart rebel platform to the established, hulking giants of the media. Now, it IS the damn media and the nastiest people are settling in like maggots in a rotting log. I saw the revolutionary turn into the dictator, and I decided it best to leave town.

What I mean when I say I’m not going back is I never want to be the person I became during those two years on YouTube. The slightest taste of pseudo-fame was enough to inflate my ego and waistline to cartoonish proportions. I became bitchy, boring, and starved for inspiration. My muse had moved out, taking everything with her, including the coat hangers and ice cube trays.

When I left that site for what was originally supposed to be a few weeks, I felt alright. No… better than alright. I felt fucking fantastic. It was a liberation to not stress or evaluate myself based on comments, views and subscribers. It was a relief to not feel any pressure to produce anything on demand and it was a godsend to not have to deal with the asinine and sometimes destructive feedback from my work. To truly let that which does not matter slide.

My “work”. Pfft. I’ll tell you now what you should have already known: that wasn’t shit. I don’t mean to offend you all who enjoyed it, but I’m generally not proud of my first two years’ worth of work¹. I was more proud of my achievements than the work I had done to get them. To this day I am mortified whenever someone watches one of those videos in my presence.

I was a talking head screaming into a microphone and cussing my way into the most subscribed list on a crest of teenagers who were just thrilled to see someone older than them just as angst ridden and surly².

Boil it down guys and strip it of sometimes witty one-liners and my editing style³ and what have you got? A bitter waiter-cum-critic throwing himself around his bedroom in fits over the inconsequential. Makes me feel like the goddamn Tourettes Guy, sans fashionable neck-brace and Tony the Tiger shirt. I guess I understand why people liked that to a degree, but that’s no way to make a name for yourself.

My father used to tell me that I should remember my name will be attached to whatever I turn in. Meaning, of course, that whatever you do should be worth having your name on. Haberdashery is the first of many projects that I am working on that I am proud to attach my namesake to. I consider each frame of every video a “Hail Mary” to my muse and an apology to the people who enjoy my sense of humor but not the way I acted initially.

So that is it. YouTube is now nothing more to me than a video hosting site. I intend to host Haberdashery there in the meantime, but I have no qualms about yanking it out by it’s root and planting it on another site. Youtube loved me, fucked me, beat me and left me for dead. It’s hard to feel anything nice about a site like that and a community so fickle.

Any rants or videos that qualify as “videoblog” turf will be hosted off of YouTube and embedded here in blog posts for your enjoyment.

I value all of the people who supported me there for so long, and it’s my dearest hope that they keep up with me either here or through the channel. I hope you understand that I cannot be a part of that world knowing how I reacted to it.

Consider this my pseudo-farewell. I don’t plan on answering comments there any longer⁴, nor do I intend to write another word on the subject. I’ll hobble my fingers and cut out my tongue if I so much as mention YouTube or the drama it farts out on a daily basis. I’m shrugging off the weight of that site, and lemme tell you I feel as if I can fucking FLY.

THIS is my new home, and I intend to make it the best it can possibly be within my abilities.

I’m standing on a rock surrounded by sea, but this is MY damn rock and I’ll paint it how I like. I’ll shout whatever I want from it at the top of my lungs without apology. I’ll make a lasso out of my words and art to snare your eyes and minds. I’ll chisel it into funny shapes and stand on it one-legged and covered in blue paint if I damn well please.

You’re welcome on my rock. We’ll make bonfires out of the scrap wood we pull from stiff overpaid actors and celebrity tabloids. We’ll have satirical intellectual orgies so lush and extravagant Caligula will peek out of his grave long enough to say “fuckin’ show off.” We’ll hyperbole our simile like a metaphorical swordfish ten miles long and powered by rocket fuel. But mostly we’ll get drunk and wonder what the fuck I meant by that last sentence.

I don’t need whatever YouTube might have to offer me, and I prefer the distance this site puts between myself and the casual watcher there. If someone isn’t interested enough in my dealings to come to this page then so be it. They aren’t invited to the party, which is all the more snackies and booze for us.

So thank you all again for subscribing, commenting, or even just popping in for 20 seconds to sneer and click away.

I promise you the work I do from now on will be the best I can offer, and I can only apologize for the mistakes of the past by actions and not words.

Welcome to the rock.

-B

¹: With a few exceptions, which will be left on the boh3m3 channel.

²: Not my words there, but the words of a commenter. Checking my insight demographics, he’s absolutely right.

³: Which, let me tell you, is nothing special. All I did was obsessively remove the “umms” and “ahhs” and dead air amongst my ramblings.

⁴: Not that I really did that much anyhow…

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