[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: So, you’re getting older, correct?
Rick Rosner: We all are. I’m older, yes.
Jacobsen: Okay, I mean colloquial not technical. How do your values change when you feel the sense of running out of time?
Rosner: Well, I’ve engaged in a lot of foolishness, with a lot of that foolishness involving just wasting precious time. We’ve published our books on Amazon and stuff but I’ve written big chunks of books and even had a book deal for like four days until that deal went away because the editor couldn’t convince the publisher to make to complete the deal. I’m going to be 62 in three months and I have yet to publish a book. I wrote a shitload of TV but that’s collaborative. My work in TV, there was some personal initiative but there was also a lot of just me being part of a team. We have a theory but I haven’t pushed it into the realm of completeness or legitimacy by throwing it at legit scholars. I’ve done a lot of shit that just eats time like bouncing bars for 25 years, stripping, art modeling, I’ve done a lot of foolishness; suing a game show ate a lot of time.
At the same time I am doing other stuff when I’m engaging in foolishness and taking a shitload of IQ tests. So, 30 tests times an average of, they didn’t all take 120 hours, but I’ve probably spent close to 2000 hours total on IQ test which is a full year of work. The last test I took, I turned it in a year ago. I think the deadline was December of 2020 but in the eight years that you and I have been talking with each other that’s really the only test I think I’ve turned in which may reflect that I just don’t have the patience or the time to waste spending 150 hours taking a super hard IQ test which is what it takes to do well on one of these insane tests plus I may no longer have the chops.
They say that on average people lose mental ability as they age or as they go from say 50 to 60 to 70. I don’t feel like I’ve lost mental ability and probably the ability to do well in IQ tests is a developed practiced ability which really wouldn’t degrade that much since at least partially in my case I learned skill. But in any case like there was an IQ test, a super hard one I started on about eight years ago and probably put 80, 90, or 100 hours in but didn’t reach enough correct answers I felt were correct for it to be worth my while to turn it in. And then I went back to it a couple months ago to see if I could come up with some more answers. I think I’ve pretty much abandoned it.
I’ve been working on a book that really I think has a better chance of getting a deal and being completed than maybe a couple of my other attempts. One problem I had with the books that I’ve tried to write that are autobiographical is that there’s some fucking over of other members of my family; that’s one issue. The book I’m writing is not really about me, it’s about a very smart dog. So I don’t have to worry about fucking over my family.
What I’m saying is that I’m maybe a little less foolish now that I’m in my 60s and have less time obviously than I did when I was in my 40s. So I’m hoping to do less time-consuming foolishness and maybe actually accomplish something. The book has in its various chunks which need to be organized into a sequential narrative; I’ve got many many tens of thousands of words like pushing a 100,000 words. I mean there’s the guts of a book there if I can knock them into shape.
[Recording End]
Authors
Rick Rosner
American Television Writer
Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Founder, In-Sight Publishing
In-Sight Publishing
License and Copyright
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at http://www.rickrosner.org.
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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen, Rick Rosner, and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen, Rick Rosner, and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
Rick Rosner 