A Fall Cleanse

Sunday September 21st, 2008 - Kenosha, WI/Lake Villa, IL

I spent this first day of fall cleaning out the constipated festering bowels of my severely backed up email list and I couldn’t feel any more satisfied. That was something I’ve been needing and wanting to do for months but today was the day I finally took some action.

This has been an ongoing problem in my life but I can’t believe I’m the only one who is fighting it. Email is a fact of life in the 21st century and for me it’s more than that. It’s my bread and butter and much if not most of my living is made by emailing bookers for gigs.

Not only that I’ve acquired a ton of friends and acquaintances and former students over the years and they send me things I need to respond to and I only have so much time so it becomes harder and harder to keep caught up once they start piling up. I was way behind.

I got up at 7am and went right to the computer and started working. I weeded out all the ones that concerned events that already expired and unfortunately there were several. I did not get to them in time and it’s over with so there’s nothing I can do other then move on.

Then I took the time to answer as many as I could and I kept typing and apologizing and typing some more and finally by about 7pm I had the list down to under 100. That’s a big jump and even though I didn’t finish I did answer a lot of the difficult ones that required a longer answer and after every one I felt just a little bit better. It was like a colon cleanse.

I can’t guarantee I won’t get in this situation again but I sure am going to attempt to not let that happen. This is like letting a huge back log of dirty laundry accumulate or a lot of yard work. Little bursts of regular maintenance prevent an all out assault like I did today.

There were some emails I’ve been meaning to get to for many months. On the good side I reconnected with a bunch of people I’ve been out of touch with so that’s a huge positive. There were comedians and friends and women I like and now I’ll see who writes me back so I can reconnect with those people who I need to be connected with now. I needed this.

Slowly but surely I’ve been making some good decisions lately. Getting back with Rick Kaempfer and restarting the movie script was a winning decision as was today’s full day of catching up. It had gone unattended far too long and there was only one way to fix it.

That doesn’t mean I’m finished though. I still have almost 100 more to get to and by the time I get back from WLS and Zanies tomorrow there will be a ton of fresh ones to get to. And I haven’t even done a mass emailing to bookers yet even though I did interact with a few in the process of answering the pile throughout the day. That’s next on the to do list.

Tonight’s Mothership Connection radio show on WLIP in Kenosha was one of the best we’ve done so far. We had great guests and it flowed very well all the way through a two hour show. We’ve been improving steadily and now it’s time to start thinking about ways to make this project turn a buck. This was a very productive day and I’m giddy about that.