Explaining Yourself is Cringe.

Good artists don't explain themselves. They let the work speak for itself. 

Daniel means "God is my judge" in Hebrew.

The opening of the video is a self-parody venting as though at a therapist's about being misjudged by people. 

The bookending vignette parodies the introduction ([Max Bemis] "I have to record the spoken-word introduction to the record." [Peter Bemis] "Still?" [Max Bemis] "Yeah. It's only a few lines, but I'm having anxiety about it") and final track ("I worry about how this album will sell/Because I believe it will determine the amount of sex I will have in the future") of my favorite album, ...Is A Real Boy. It lends to two things: One, a sense of time overlapping with itself (Time travel is a big theme in most of my books, including the ones referenced in this video/rant.), with the opening and concluding tracks occurring at the same time. Also, the beginning of the album is a conversation between a father and a son. If my middle name was not "Daniel," I would be a Jr.

Including my cat with a stock sound effect of a lion's roar is further assert that the short is not to be taken seriously by doing such an obvious, hack joke. Also, the reference to a lion calls back to the Biblical Book of Daniel.

​Jesus turned water to wine. I parody that in Conditional Love, with the character Wes transforming from an alcoholic to sober. An image at the end of the book is his glass of water next to another character's glass of wine. The joke here is that in the shot, the glasses of both water and wine are half empty.

The cross made out of cans is a reference to the alcoholomy tattoo mentioned in the audio (it in itself using converting a non-Christian concept, that being alchemy, into something used in a Christian sense). The alcoholic containers are turned into a holy object. The title of the chapter read in the video is "The Son is the Light of the Moon." The moon gets its light from the sun but as a metaphor for Christ working in unconventional ways (paralleling the focal character in the chapter's struggle). It's also paralleling the dichotomy of woman as a whore (the girl in the bed whose hair gives her a halo like a painting of Christ and framed like a painting by the doorway) and as a virgin (Mattie, the former step-daughter). The three female figures in this also reference the Holy Trinity as women, one we can see (Christ) and two we cannot (God and The Holy Spirit). Dirty the Monkey appearing cruciform on top of the cans could be seen as a callback to my second self-published book, The Final Gospels, but really, I just wanted to reassert the cruciform imagery in the audio and wanted to give Dirty a cameo.

​Nebuchadnezzar was a king who denied God and was stricken down, essentially living like an animal before finding God and regaining his composure. The triptych of my books is a retelling of that. 

​The picture frame thing is an obvious Life (Young Adulterer), Death (Conditional Love), Rebirth (Honest Work) metaphor as well as the artist being framed as a work of art, him- or herself, and being uncomfortable with that perception. I went into hiatus after completing Conditional Love and re-emerged with Honest Work, my first book published under the name "Todd Daniel Crawford" rather than just "Todd Crawford."

​Wes gets prescribed glasses shortly after reprioritizing his life. Whereas, he was a Falstaffian buffoon (ie: living like an animal, back to the story of Nebby), once he gets his glasses, obvious visual metaphor for him seeing what's in front of him. The Scooby Doo Velma looking for the glasses (known to academics and dance enthusiasts alike as, "Doin' The Velma.") is that. Also, glasses were the original cover for the book they're placed on (Honest Work)--I changed my mind once I was prescribed glasses, myself, because I didn't want people mistaking the metaphor for autobiography...hearkening back to the self-parody's anxiety about being misunderstood.

Brendan being naked before the moon and comparing it to a peeping Tom is obviously a parallel with Adam and Eve being ashamed of their nudity before God after eating the fruit of knowledge.

​Billie Bear is a metaphor for Brendan and his role in raising Mattie.

The dove in the window is...a hint. The Biblical parallel should be self-explanatory. 

Nebby had a vision of a tree that was chopped down and growing back, an allegory for God giving us the opportunity to get back down after we fall down, essentially, and the punching bag/phallic inversion of that is how artists create this underdog narrative to gas themselves up and how it's really just mental masturbation rather than a legitimate struggle. Hugging the punching bag is just a silly way of representing how mythologize and love our own struggles.

The Bible with a sticky note placed on it reading, "For Shane <3" is an old prop from an episode of the Renaissance Men production, Plan 9 Reviews. A crazy fan mistakes me for Shane Dawson. The meta-joke was that I used to get compared to Shane Dawson in high school and hated it (and maintain that I never have and never shall resemble him). Here, it is a realization of my anxiety about being misunderstood or mistaken for someone that I'm not. There's a bit in The Book of Revelations where we all have a secret name that only God knows and will share with us in time. The context here is that God sees me for what I am, a washed-up prettyboy fraud. Except, God didn't write on that sticky note. I did, back when we were filming the Plan 9 episode it was originally used in. This adds to the theme of artists manufacturing struggles to overcome (making mountains to climb out of mustard seeds) but also how our views of religion are often shaped by our neurosis from the past.