Writing with Rox WEEKLY—I'M Grateful for YouTube

I don't watch TV. I don't do Facebook. But hot damn, I love YouTube.

I love the funny cat bloopers. I love the interviews with actors and musicians from my childhood, the obscure clips from the Love Boat or Z Channel. And god knows, I love those 80s videos. I love that I can YouTube my childhood summer camp, go back in time to a simpler place, long before personal video cameras were on anyone's radar.  I love that I can join a kirtan any time of the day, practice yoga with Saul David Raye, learn to play the ukulele (or sousaphone for that matter), brush up on my tap dancing, learn Arabic, attempt origami, prepare pompous pastries (or pom-poms if I dare!) make my own drum if I so choose, make my own feature film, be read to by famous poets, sang to by long gone musicians, welcomed into communities (and living rooms) just about anywhere.  Not to mention, if I look hard enough, I know I can find myself doing something rather silly out there in Bhaktiland, but why bother with that? I've been there!

I'd rather travel timelessly, across the planet to gape at wild animals, to ski the alps, to bathe in Kawaiian waterfalls, dance with Fred Astaire, run with wildfire, remember the Santa Anna's, blow with the soft spring breeze in Palm Canyon. I'd much rather go back to that stretch of Oregon I biked with my dad in the early 90s, round the long green bend we did that one summer afternoon. I'd rather bike around the world, in fact. 

Heck, I'd rather fly a plane, chase a train, stop the rain... all possible in the Seusville that YouTube has become.


Of course I can go somewhere really dark with an intro like that. I can talk about how even though we  have such a cool thing—that we can go anywhere, anytime with a simple click—we are lonelier now than ever before. We are isolated in our abundance. 

But no, I won't go there. Not today. 

Because what I really love about YouTube are the helpful tips that folks are putting out there, free of charge, where the shiny human spirit comes blazing through, all the better when it comes blazing through someone's tacky, unkept, dusty, one-bedroom apartment, where cats or wild children or drunken uncles are coming in and out of the frame wily-nily. More and more, this is what I seek out in YouTube: the unedited, raw, human condition that has nothing to do with show business or sparkly anything put on.

In fact, my YT du-go-to usually takes me to someone's dining room or kitchen in a town I've never heard of. Year after year I find myself searching for DIY fixes or projects, my version of cyber thrift shopping or better yet, the matrix free-for-all.  Just yesterday in fact, like every winter when my skin begins to turn a rougher shade of reptile, I began the search for a homemade humidifier, given the ten I have cost a lot to run, don't last long, don't really work, and are generally a pain in the ass. I'm convinced that SOMEONE out there has an easier solution, fully aware that YouTube has perhaps warped my psychology in this way. But can you blame me? No sooner than I type in "DIY humidifiers," pages upon pages load with everything from bomb lookalikes to model airplanes coming at me in multiple languages.

I'm not saying it's all good. Overwhelm sets in rather quickly.

Just about to give up,  I come across a man who talks to me like the two year old I am... "First you take a bowl..." He pulls one of those cheapie ceramic-platstic (cerastic? plastamic?) Target type bowls out of his dark wooded cupboard, demonstrating, in case we don't know how to work our own cupboards. "Next, you take the bowl and set it on the counter." He does. Meanwhile, all we see of this man is his Buddha belly and his arm with the occasional profile working diligently in the same apartment kitchen we have all seen in our lives; I know I've lived in many apartments with that same kitchen. (And if you are not sure where this prompt is going, take "apartments;" there's a goldmine of prompts in that one!).

Well this is getting interesting. I wonder where this is going. I'm tracking so far. 

"Then you take your bowl and fill it with water." Okay. I can do that. But he demos just in case. "And there it is. That's your homemade humidifier." You can put it just about anywhere, he tells us. And for better results you could put it atop or next to your radiator. 

Of course, failing that,  you could always do the old reliable humidifier thing, he says.

Old reliable—?

You could just take a wet towel and hang it up. 

Well, I'd be lying to you if I said I didn't try them both. 

From there, things get a bit more complicated, but I won't spoil the surprise; let's just say a coat hanger is brought into the frame and leave it at that. Oh, and "surface area" is mentioned quite a few times.

Why am I so endeared to these videos? Is it the raw truth of the "characters" we are seeing? The good will nature of it? The reminder that life a'int so bad because good folks are out there helping us save money and heartache, not for self promotion, but out of their own good hearts?

I suppose I oughta pay if forward and make a little Writing with Rox You Tube vid of my own; would you watch it? Maybe I'll send it to the humidifier guy as a little token of thanks.


WRITE WITH ME?
WHICH YOU TUBE VIDEO ARE YOU MOST GRATEFUL FOR?
IF YOU MADE ONE, WHAT WOULD IT BE? WOULD YOU EVER MAKE ONE? 
FAILING THAT: "APARTMENTS." GO!