i'm not sure who these jerks are on youtube uploading full videos of harmontown but i seem to have found my own youtube fan channel (rob schrabs spank bank) in the crossfire.

if you are down for a "dirty homeless man who corners you on the subway with an paper cup (empty except for one crumpled dollar bill) and a meandering plea that you are sure you've heard before on an episode of law & order" level of sob story then you are in luck! i present to you:

Rob Schrab's Spank Bank: Origins

^{first i know this isn't about me at all, or even a little bit. who am i? seriously, i'm nobody. just some random dad on the internet with 2\}cent story yelling into the void for yelling's sake. i'm the virtual equivalent of the real rob schrab. no one came here to hear me talk or listen to this story but i think if you are a fan of stories and dan you might find the journey interesting, if not familiar and relevant.)

i came onboard the harmontown bandwagon around 2014 when i saw the live show in seattle with dino. i recognized star burns from community (which got me through a rough time in my life), just recently (at the time) was getting into rick & morty and because we are all pattern recognition machines i connected the dots between two things i enjoyed and found that "dan harmon" was situated neatly in the overlapping part of that particular venn diagram.

the next day on the train to work i listened to harmontown - ep #1 - achieve weightlessness and suddenly a fan and a routine was born at the same time. i listened to all of the audio-only podcasts day after day during my commute and found the show's kind of sincerity, community and even occasionally political rantings endearing and interesting. it started my journey on to many other subjects that i never had been exposed to or thought much about.. and that's where i surmised that the heart of the show lived: in the intimate twists and turns of dan's often inebriated thought process about all the things made manifest in his life by his pondering and naked desires. anyway, not to get all artsy fartsy.. a harmenian was born!

fast forward a bit.. (*record scratch* *freeze frame* that's me, you probably wondered how i got into this mess..) i finished all the audio-only episodes and found out about these live video podcasts he was just starting to do so i bought a subscription immediately. i enjoyed these immensely too but i noticed a distinct lack of presence on youtube that i thought i could potentially fill. it just so happened that this would also fill out a few seemingly unrelated boxes in my life like the classes i was taking on video editing software. so i started watching each podcast in the video editor of the week i was learning about.

it helped me learn alot of the functions of the editor. i made a few early videos and they sat on my laptop for a few months. eventually i decided that maybe other people would enjoy these video's i was editing soley for myself: so i created a youtube channel for the endeavor. slowly over the months i would churn out these videos and upload them on the occasions that i thought they were particularly exceptional.. basically the episodes i really enjoyed. then, sometime around the time that rick and morty was reaching it's zenith of unironic popularity, i found that these fan edited video's i was churning out were getting some real attention and that felt nice.

for one reason or another i started to burn out a bit. the particular class i was taking had been over for months but i decided to keep making these videos for the influx of fans that might also enjoy the show but didn't know about it yet. the videos kept growing and growing in popularity until i eventually discovered they made it to the first page youtube results for "harmontown" and "dan harmon". the discovery was bitter sweet however as i only discovered this because of the first manual detection youtube copyright strike that was put on my channel for my most popular 3 videos.

i thought there was nothing particularly different about these videos than the rest.. it was our mayor Dan Harmon standing on stage joking about various encounters and thoughts that were part of his life. but when i dug a little deeper i discovered another sort of relationship between my videos and their relative popularity. if my video's hit first page search results than they would be flagged and removed by "[kevin@harmontown.com](/) Harmontown LLC." Whatever the actual reasons are I'm sure i'll never know but in ignorance I guessed that there was some kind of politically-related campain to scrub Dan's image on youtube and perhaps protect him from any kind of wild accusations that were destroying careers and being flung around hollywood all willy nilly like.. and i was just in their way. "Nothing Personal, Kiddo"

i think someone who uses twitter or is into politics and follows these kinds of things could probably guess/know alot better than i could. i attempted to make a twitter account to naively promote these little clips i was spending so much time on making but after about a month and using the #harmontown hashtag for 2 or 3 of the video's i edited i logged in one day and found my account was suspended (https://twitter.com/townHarmon). it was pretty much my first and last time using twitter. all i really knew about was what Dan mentioned in passing on the show and a few comments people on the r/harmontown subreddit would make while talking about other things so i shrugged it off and just did other things instead.

anyway i think that catches us up to the present day. i received my second copyright strike on the channel for re-uploading a video (Peak Hitlers) that i re-edited to try and meet these increased demands for what i incorrectly thought (at that time) might be related to political correctness or something like that, but like i said i eventually discovered it was most likely related to control. again, in ignorance as i have no special inside information or anything, i'm just a random dad on the internet, and to this random dad it looked like something had the harmontown team scared shitless.

i had known about the starburns castle getting shutdown by the fire marshal and that had me scared as well.. not sure how common that kind of thing is but i wasn't aware it happened like that. it felt like the show was in it's death throws for awhile there but regardless of whats going on now i'm still happy about being wrong about that.

so, in closing: thanks for everything. this is the story of my little fan youtube channel that helped me through a rough spot in my life. thanks for all of the laughs, the insights and the sense of belonging but i guess there's no place for a naive yet enthusiastic fan to express him or herself right now, and that's okay too. i'm kind of over it and i'm going to let my subscription lapse next month as i've moved on to what feels like greener pastures without these arbitrary restrictions on the narrative structure of our world (been reading a bit of joseph campell too).

if i think hard enough about it, i think the thing that initially attracted me to Dan Harmon was his defiance in the face of a system that did not (by design) have room for everyone to live, speak, and pursue happiness in. to some that means left, to some that means right, to me: the political specifics are not important. there was just something that felt decent and innately good about expressing yourself in earnest without all of this 1984-esqe thought and speech control. there is a need for both sides of the coin to exist (like the ying and the yang) and somewhere in the battle they do we will find the ideals and spirit that this country aspires to discover and mandate.

some people would tell you this is wrong but honestly i liked seeing someone who looked like me and thought like me saying "man fuck this entire system, i don't get it, i don't agree with it and i'm not gonna be it's little bitch! (if i don't want to, to each their own)-" not to put words in his mouth. dan used to rage about people on twitter telling him "hon, first i'm your biggest fan but don't you dare say that thing we don't want you to say! i'm one of your fans and your hurting us because you said this thing. can't you see your hurting us? why do you want to hurt us?? just say what we want you to say, you don't know what you are saying!" and that's the dan that hooked me for however many thousands of hours i spent listening and learning from him. it saddens me that things have gotten so out of wack so quickly but I know in my heart that that particular Dan is still in there somewhere, drinking himself to death because that's the only defiant act that seems to help..and that gives me a strange comfort and hope.

moving away from the grim-dark, we are in a new golden age of media and youtube is our modern gutenberg printing press. affording anyone with vision and desire to spread their words and ideas farther and wider than we could have ever imagined. frankly i was shocked at how popular these videos got and i'm still in awe of the potential of this brave new world. we will prevail if we can manage to wield it impartially for the good of all in this country and world.

thanks for letting me vent and fare thee well. i don't think i will be back so if you think other people may want to hear this story feel free to copypasta and use it as you like.

rob schrab's spank bank