Don't Get Excited!
This is not a new show release announcement, It's an update.
I am not sure what to write here, but I thought some sort of an update was warranted.
It’s March 25th and I haven’t gotten a piece of audio content out this year. Now, some mitigating factors are involved.-Life intervenes (some hand surgery for arthritis, plus some normal family stuff), but I don’t think that’s the main issue.
After much introspection I think it is just hard to talk with passion and enthusiasm (and improvising with no scripts) about events thousands of years ago on the history show when such momentous ones are occurring to all of us right now. And I’ve tried doing a “Common Sense with Dan Carlin” show several times to deal with all of THAT, instead only to be thwarted by the scope of the problems and the pace of events (what if I’d done an in-depth CS show on the Greenland fiasco for example? Or the “eating the cats and dogs” affair?).1
And I don’t think I gave this Substack page enough forethought in terms of the way I put it together either. Theoretically I could have been using this to fill the audio release gap with some written thoughts. But, for example, when I first joined Twitter I made sure to have two separate accounts. One for the History show and one for Common Sense (dealing with current events/politics/opinion, etc). That way, people who had no interest in the latter stuff didn’t get bombarded with it. I didn’t do that on Substack and so I have limited it’s value as a tool to use when I can’t seem to get the audio done. I’ve not created a space for the current events commentary to live. Not yet anyway.
But, we ARE living through absolutely momentous times (and dangerous ones). Don’t allow yourself to be gaslit about that. Any fan of History can see it. And as someone who fretted for years (and bored the people around me to tears) about the trends we are now seeing play out, it’s personally a bit of a crisis for me. I spent my life since I was a teen paying attention to ideas, and approaches and arguments to keep from reaching the point we’ve reached. I wrapped my whole career around it. I am less well equipped (and of course totally inexperienced) with dealing with things now that we have arrived here. I feel I have less useful commentary to offer. I don’t know how to get us out of the mess we’re in. At that point what’s there to say that’s helpful? I am sure there’s something. But I haven’t figured out yet what it is.
But it’s haunting me. And it is thwarting me. It is sapping my energy and I feel angry and I feel stuck. Normally when I have things to say I will talk your ear off. I am silent these days. I’ve turned inward and want to read and study, rather than communicate. Even around the house. My wife is driving me nuts saying “are you ok?” all the time. But I am worried about the future. I think all intelligent Americans are. And like a computer that gets co-opted trying to figure out the value of pi to the last digit, my mind goes over our circumstances, endlessly and without answers or resolution.
I’ve tried to keep a foot in the game. We have two accounts on the designed-to-divide, international propaganda hellscape that is Twitter (I’m too old for name changes). The History one, @hardcorehistory is really more for updates and release announcements (which you’ll get from me on Substack too), but the @dccommonsense one is the one where I try to give my two cents. It’s surely much easier to type a few sentences on there than to find the vim and verve needed to put together a good, improvised show. And I seem to be just as able to upset people and bots even with the app’s character limit (If “Ben” asks what I’ve been doing on Twitter I say “Just culling the audience again”.).
I still go in the studio every morning. It just is slow going and frustrating, and the days when the energy and Muse/inspiration come together as they need to for a successful end result are fewer per week than they used to be. And maybe this is just age, maybe it’s that the traditional vast amounts of coffee seem almost powerless over me now, or maybe its the weight of the times in which we live. It would be nice to not be thinking about politics or the latest dangerous, divisive nightmare every day from the moment we wake up. But that’s not the reality in which we currently live.
Stay Safe everyone. I hope you’re all ok. I will release anything I get done that I like, whenever I get it done. Thanks for being so patient with me. “May you live in interesting times” right?
This is mostly deliberate-Making something a huge, hot button issue for a short time and then quickly moving on to the next contentious issue du jour. Steve Bannon named the tactic “Flooding the Zone with Shit”.