Yesterday HE tried to get the hang of Zoom, as the first “Misfits” Zoomcast is set for Sunday afternoon with a peek-out sometime later that evening or Monday morning.

Alas, HE mostly failed in this effort, and I am therefore grateful to Glenn Kenny for having generously offered to do the Zoom inviting, due to my woeful lack of facility with this extremely user-unfriendly software.

I spent three or four hours yesterday trying to figure out the protocols, and I’m just not smart or patient enough, it seems. And so to protect my sense of self-worth I’ve decided that it’s Zoom’s fault, not mine. As a result I’ve come to despise Zoom with a burning Ahab-like intensity.

Zoom has actually re-awakened long suppressed feelings of stupidity and self-loathing within me…feelings that I experienced when I was 13 or 14 years old and bored to death in history class. I so hated studying mind-numbing textbooks that I would invent my own answers to pop quizzes. When asked who was James Watt, the 18th Century Scottish inventor of the semi-advanced steam engine, I would answer that he was a pioneer in developing and measuring the illumination levels in electric light bulbs, hence the quantifying term “watt” as in 75-watt GE bulbs.

This was my burden, my plight, my anguish. For I was inexplicably hostile to standard terminology and accepted doctrine, and felt stubbornly inspired to defy it any way I could. And now, thanks to Zoom, I am re-living the dull panel-colony horror of being the dumb guy in class. Or, you know, an intellectually rebellious 13 year-old or whatever.

Again — HE’s very first Zoomcast will happen as planned, but only because Kenny has stepped into the breach.

Ray Bolger‘s Scarecrow: “Oh, I’m a failure because I haven’t got a brain.”