When I was working on Channel 9 (for those not in the know, 9 is a fascinating, atypical way of connecting with customers, and my job was to conduct interviews on video), I sat once and edited a video for thirty-six hours straight. I arrived at MS in the morning (unusual for me), yanked raw video off the camcorder's hard drive, and got to assembling the sucker.

I don't remember what the content was. I was so much more interested in the process than I was in the result. Editing video is meditative. It takes you out of your element the same way drugs and alcohol do. If there's something on your mind and you want it out, cutting things up into an order that pleases is one of my favorite ways to repress all negative thoughts. I have this pile of unhappiness in my brain, kind of like a dirty laundry hamper, and it's where I try to stick things that suck. I'm told by people who like to tell other people what to do that I'm eventually going to try to stuff more laundry into the hamper than will fit, and that, on this day, my life will come crashing down. I think that's both gloomy and stupid; if my hamper overflows, then I'll just get another one at Ikea. They deliver now. Problem solved.

I worked on that video right through the late night clean-up crew. I drank coffee, ate energy bars, got around to smelling really bad, ran my fingers through my greasy hair, and clicked a lot. I almost got carpal finger. It was that bad.

Want to see the video? You can't. I never posted it. Which is strange since my performance at work was judged largely on posting videos. I wasn't going to get a huge bonus because I spent one and a half days without pause working on a video I never made public. Maybe that's part of the reason I don't work there anymore.

On Thanksgiving, the family got together as it usually does, and things went wrong as they usually do. I've been on the outs with my mother for a long time. On and off for, oh, my entire life. We have profoundly different ways of going about everything in life about which there is to go. Sometimes that works. In our case, it doesn't.

Things went badly. That's all anybody needs to know.

When things go badly, I disappear. I've noticed that a lot of creative people feed off negativity, but I've never been like that. It drags me down, and I want to go away. I changed my outgoing voicemail message on Friday, notifying any callers that I wouldn't be picking up the phone or listening to messages for a few days. Talking to friends means talking about life, and that would have meant talking about my mother, and that would have put all the problems at the forefront of my thoughts, and we'd discuss them, and with two or more people talking about it, those thoughts would be amplified until they took over.

In the past year, I've learned that isolating myself when things go to crap is the best way to get over them. A few days keeping to myself, and I'll come out the other end more or less all right.

Keeping myself occupied during these periods is one of my coping mechanisms. Video editing in particular, as I've written, takes my mind off things. You can't focus on much else, and it's so involving.

So, I made some videos.

I didn't feel like writing. Writing tends to make me think a lot, and if what's on my mind is negative, then I don't want to do it.

Editing video, however, is completely different. It isn't intellectual; it's a craft, and it pulls you along. As soon as you've finished one task, you see another that you want to do. It must be what life is like for people who play World of Warcraft, except that I've seen daylight.

To edit video, though, you need video.

Another coping mechanism is taking something in my life that's sucking the effing lameness and reshaping it nogginward.

Thanksgiving sucked, so I outdid it by making The Neopoleon Thanksgiving Celebration video.

It was a lot of fun.

I'm posting the first one today. The other will go up on Friday. I'll return to my creation story when I've gotten last week out of my system. I like to write when I'm happy, because I like to think the stuff I write is happy (even if I might affect irritation or anger for kicks).

So... I give you A Neopoleon Thanksgiving Celebration :)

Before going, I should add that Mass Effect is another fabulous way to disappear. It was worth the wait...