The Death and Resurrection of High Oddness

“All right, guys … I’ll think about it.”

I am Lazarus, come from the dead,
Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all

– T. S. Eliot
“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”

A few of you know back in early 2008 I started a humor/parody blog I called High Oddness: The Universe According to Daniel Brenton. And those same few of you probably know that I shut it down after only a very short run, frustrated and disappointed.

After much deliberation I have decided … in fact, feel lead … to relaunch it, which I did Saturday, August 14.

Naturally, I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if most people reading these words are thinking: you idiot, why would you walk back into it?!

This is a good question. The short answer is: it is what I need to do.

The long answer is, well, longer.

Sorry, No — the Truth isn’t Out There

Late in 2007 I was blogging here on The Meaning of Existence (and all that) about some pretty esoteric subjects. There was (and continues to be) a focus on material that probed and questioned the nature of our existence, but paranormal subjects were of interest to me as well, including (yes, I’m confessing this) UFOs. For a time I became something of a name in the online “community,” in the circle of the producers and audience of a leading blogcast/radio show about the paranormal, The Paracast.

(For those unfamiliar with my stance on the subject, just briefly — I do not believe that these things we call UFOs are “other people’s space ships,” but neither do I believe these can be dismissed as swamp gas, hallucinations, CIA mind experiments, or top-secret military technology. Also, I will say that the subject takes some time and critical thought to examine properly, and I will point you at work by Jacques Vallee [see my "Books I Recommend ..." page] and leave it at that.)

My relationship with this audience began to sour when I floated the idea (which Paracast co-founder Gene Steinberg graciously invited me to present on an episode of the show) of creating a UFO research organization that would attempt to establish itself as the “go to” source in the mainstream media for serious answers to the subject. It would do this partly by deliberately exposing the charlatans that run rampant in the “field” and contribute to making the subject a target of ridicule, and partly by holding its own membership accountable to a code of ethical conduct — conduct that appears to be optional at best in that fine community. The level of hate subsequently directed at me from some corners of the “community” after I proposed this idea was disturbing, and the fact that this kind of vitriol was not only tolerated but to some extent encouraged set me back, and made me re-think my relationship with it.

So, I decided to have some fun with the subject matter, thinking that others would enjoy it as well.

Enter … and Exit … High Oddness

If you’ve spent any time following the memes of UFOs, Parapolitics (conspiracy theory to the rest of us) and the Paranormal, I think you’ll see that not only is there a lot of just plain silliness, but that what might seem compelling at first blush usually doesn’t hold up under proper scrutiny.

With the launch of High Oddness, for several weeks I wrote parodies on presidential UFO briefings, time machine entrepreneurs, police officers arresting aliens (little grey aliens), an obituary for the Loch Ness Monster, and so on. Some of the responses were extremely positive. (Friend and author of Surfing the Tao, Angela V. Michaels, was so entertained by one piece called “I Know Why the Aliens Really Don’t Land” that she asked permission to re-post it, and you can find it still posted here.) In that short period, the traffic stats on High Oddness reached an equal level with The Meaning of Existence (which, frankly, wasn’t a lot) though I had been working on The Meaning of Existence steadily for about a year.

However, one pattern I saw regarding my material that really surprised me was that, despite what seemed like some pretty broad writing on my part, there were people who actually believed the patently absurd things I was cooking up were factual. (An example can be found in the comments posted on Angela’s site to “I Know Why the Aliens Really Don’t Land.”)

(As tempting as it might seem, I don’t think this should be written off as the responses of … well … idiots. There is a large segment of the “community” that are as gullible as is humanly possible, but I think it’s more a matter that the audience is almost painfully tunnel-visioned.)

One unpleasant aspect of our fine internet came to light pretty quickly — when someone writes good material, other people … steal it.

My irritation at that point was that I had written this stuff for people to come to my blog, not to supply material for readers to come to other people’s blogs. In a sense this is a compliment (albeit a left-handed one), and now I’ve re-thought that position (the internet has changed publishing forever, and it’s foolish to ignore that little fact), but at the time I recognized my life could be consumed with forcing people to take down material they didn’t create, leaving no time to create anything new.

Between this and finally recognizing a big piece of the audience I had gravitated to wasn’t really getting me at all, I threw in the towel, took down the site, and with it a lot of material on this blog as well. Eventually I began writing material in a more overtly spiritual/ personal development vein, and you can find my thoughts about that transition here.

Highly Odd Lessons Learned

In the spirit of trying to gain some wisdom from those experiences of, well, falling on my face, let me share my 20/20 hindsight “take-away” of the original High Oddness attempt:

• I was talking to an audience that didn’t (possibly couldn’t) understand what I had to offer. (Kin you say ‘frustration’? I knew ya could.”) Fortunately in the time since, I believe I’ve found the beginnings of an audience that “gets” me. And though I may stray occasionally into the kinds of subjects I focused on in the original High Oddness, there are plenty of more accessible things to write about.
• I was not as savvy with social media as I am now (though I’m not sure I could call my level of expertise “savvy”), and didn’t see a point in (or have the patience for) learning how to leverage it as well as I could.
• I didn’t stick with the original High Oddness long enough for it to really pay off. I didn’t do this in part because of reasons I’ve already expressed, and in part because I was divided inside about what I really wanted to do.

And What Did You Learn About Life This Year, Daniel?

Like a lot of us, I just went through a tight and trying period financially. But, once I felt I had my had feet under me again, in the back of my mind I kept asking the question: what direction do I go in now?

I found the process was one of actually finding the right question to ask, which turned out to be: what do I have that other people would want? (Notice I didn’t say need, here. Want is more immediate.)

The answer? I can make people laugh.

(People need to laugh. This is one of those things where want and need seem to coincide.)

While going through the process of figuring out how I would express this, I had something of a “major truth” hit me. I’ve wanted to be a novelist since my early teen years, but my propensity for humor preceded this. I had done very well in a fifth grade talent show which, despite using someone else’s material (Bill Cosby’s classic routine “Noah”) showed me I instinctively understood comic timing.

I did more of this through the junior high school level, and at that point the desire to become a published author came into the picture. I’ve had a bit of success in that area, but now, all these years later, it is utterly clear to me that I was short-circuiting my creativity by forcing it into a framework for which it was not suited.

(For you metaphysically-inclined folks out there, I have been noticing little signs that are hinting to me that I am in fact going in the right direction. I don’t know how many times recently I’ve glanced up at a clock to see a string of the same number, such as 11:11, 2:22. 3:33 … almost eerie. And it just happened again as I’m writing this.)

(Okay, guys … I’m getting the message.)

Having relaunched High Oddness in this new light, I am experiencing a sense of purpose I haven’t had before. Just last Monday, for instance, I woke up not dreading the work week as I normally do — and here I find myself living out a theme personal development writers express repeatedly, of the power that a sense of purpose gives us in changing our lives by changing how we feel about them.

I am managing my non-job hours better, and despite working what is essentially the “second job” that High Oddness really is, I am feeling greater levels of enthusiasm and energy toward my life than before.

Ladies and gentlemen, I may just be on my way this go-around, and I’ll be spending most of my time over on High Oddness. Give it a visit.

(C’mon, tiger — live a little.)

•

© 2010, by Daniel Brenton. All Rights Reserved.