Preserving a short story opening here, because I’m about to completely rework it:

The question was, how could I make sure I didn’t get demonetized?

We all know that YouTube lets plenty of nasty things slip under the radar: hate speech, weird kink, parents who harass their toddlers for content. But my two-minute, forty-six second video—link in the description—blew past a million views in ten hours. Previously, my most-viewed video was a four-minute product review about this kind of strappy platform shoe Target sold, the “Women’s Emmeline Crossband,” where I warned people that the super cheap glue used would melt away in heat. Heat like downtown sidewalks in July, which is exactly the kind of place you’d want to wear your “Women’s Emmeline Crossband” platforms. About ten thousand people cared.

So I’m honestly several orders of magnitude in over my head with the portal video.

It was in my laundry room, which is also the bathroom. Have you ever cleaned your dryer duct? Go do that, right now, I want to know what you find. Tell me in the comments section. Mine are those snaky ducts: cheap, cylindrical aluminum with a zillion crinkles, sold curled-up in bundles. You can see it’s suspended from the ceiling, barely hanging on with Velcro straps and zip ties. I just kind of left it up there. It sags worse than a suspension bridge that got tackled by Godzilla, right? So, where this all started is that I decided to clean it. When I unhooked it from the wall, I really just expected an explosion of lint. You’re supposed to clean your ducts, by the way; it’s a fire hazard.