Joy in Repititon — It Turns Out the Naming Rights! Membership Option Was For Real and Someone Is Now Five Hundred Bucks Poorer Presents Nat

As you may or may not be aware, I am doing a project at my Nathan Rabin’s Bad Ideas Substack newsletter where I write about all of the entries in the Fast & Furious series, including the 2019 spin-off Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw.

The column was inspired by a freelance assignment I got from Fatherly to write a charticle on the amount of family content in each of the films. It seemed like a poor use of time to spend something like twenty to twenty five hours watching a series of extremely long films and only get one article out of it when I could get twelve meaty pieces instead.

To that end I’ve been binging the series these last two weeks. As of today I have watched and written about ALL ten official entries in the franchise. All that’s left is Hobbs and Shaw.

The series, which I call The Fast & Curious, has done quite poor when it comes to page-views. I feel like I’m doing a really good job with it and have a good angle on the series at once appreciative and irreverent but I also feel like a very small number of people come to my site to read about weird shit they won’t find anyone else, not to read about the big movie, or big movie series, of the moment.

That’s frustrating, because I feel like I’m knocking these bad boys out of the park and not a lot of people seem to be noticing. I’m watching all of these movies for a freelance assignment but over the course of the project I have kind of fallen in love with the Fast and the Furious franchise.

There’s a cumulative joy to experiencing the franchise’s gleeful absurdity in one massive binge. Two and a half weeks ago I was a casual fan of the Fast and the Furious series who had seen maybe half of the films.

Three weeks later I feel like an expert on the series. The more you know about something, the more pleasure you’re likely to receive from it and I am VERY familiar with the series at this point.

I’m getting much more out of watching all of these movies in one big sprint than I would if I saw them when they came out. I feel deeply invested in this weird world. Has Stockholm syndrome kicked in? Possibly but I like to think that over at Substack I’m making a very strong case for franchise as legitimately good, ambitious spectacles and not just vulgar nonsense for dullards who like cars.

I tend to go all in on projects like this because I am obsessive by nature but also because when you’ve got a broke brain forever beckoning you to go back to bed and give up on life momentum is incredibly important.

Without momentum it’s very easy to get discouraged by the million other things everyone has to deal with all the time. For example I started two projects for Nathan Rabin’s Bad Ideas, on the entirety of Saturday Night Live and James Belushi’s complete filmography, respectively.

I was excited to begin the project but, as is generally the case, life got in the way and other things took precedence so I had to put both series on hold temporarily until I’m done with the Fast & Furious project and can devote more of my time and energies to them.

I couldn’t put the Fast & Furious project on pause because I had a hard deadline/assignment from my only freelance outlet at this point. I similarly could not hit pause on my upcoming book The Fractured Mirror because that similarly has a hard publishing deadline and there are patrons who pre-ordered it and deserve to receive the book in a timely fashion.

Working ahead on the big Fast & Furious has given me a big backlog. I’ve got entries slated to run at the end of August that I have already written.

Being ahead alleviates pressure and stress. Being behind exacerbates pressure and stress but life is overwhelming, confusing and sometimes just plain cruel so it feels like I have been behind since the first day of this site’s existence, if not beforehand.

So I am happy to say that I’m working weeks ahead on these Big Whoop blog posts because they’re coming to me easy these days and the more work I do in advance, the better and more confident I feel about the site and my career.

I have devoted my career to the idea that there is joy in repetition and much to be gained from immersing yourself entirely in your obsessions. That’s the thinking behind The Weird Accordion to Al, The Fractured Mirror, the Travolta/Cage podcast and my Ernest P. Worrell and Fast & Furious projects at Nathan Rabin’s Bad Ideas.

Momentum is the grease that makes great things possible and now that I have roused myself from my deep fog and funk and feel prolific and eager to make positive changes I feel like I’ve got that going for me, which is a lot.

Check out my newest literary endeavor, The Joy of Trash: Flaming Garbage Fire Extended Edition at https://www.nathanrabin.com/shop and get a free, signed "Weird Al” Yankovic-themed coloring book for free! Just 18.75, shipping and taxes included! Or, for just 25 dollars, you can get a hardcover “Joy of Positivity 2: The New Batch” edition signed (by Felipe and myself) and numbered (to 50) copy with a hand-written recommendation from me within its pages. It’s truly a one-of-a-kind collectible!

Or you can buy The Joy of Trash from Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/Joy-Trash-Nathan-Definitive-Everything/dp/B09NR9NTB4/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr= but why would you want to do that?

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