Man Gives Up After Years Spent Planning YouTube Video

A bad take during shooting led Seattle resident Albert Dykstra to abandon his dream of uploading a video to YouTube after spending three years perfecting the art of balancing miscellaneous stuff on top of other stuff.

Dykstra reached the decision during the first take of the video, in which an attempt to sit a boat engine precariously on top of a unicycle ended just the way one might think it would.

"Albert was devastated," cameraman Jose Aguilar said. "I tried to convince him to just try again, but he said he doesn't work that way. He does it in one take or not at all. He's an artist."

The shock of the failure hit Dykstra's wife and children hardest of all, as he'd almost completely neglected them to spend vast spans of time holed up in a shack in the Seattle forest teaching himself to find an object's center of gravity just by setting it on the edge of a desk so that it wouldn't fall, then pulling it slightly farther over the edge, watching it start to fall, and then trying to find that place in the middle where it wouldn't fall but would kind of sway a little and look like it was about to fall.

"I had to work two jobs to support us while he spent all his time out there dropping stuff on the floor," said Dykstra's wife, Laura. "The whole time I kept telling our 4-year-old triplets 'Don't worry, sweethearts. Soon Daddy will be back with a new skill and we'll be able to afford your insulin.' Now we'll have to solely rely on my ability to flip quarters into distant cups."

Contemporaries in Dykstra's field also felt gut-wrenching remorse when they heard about the meltdown. He was regarded as one of the best modern YouTube-oriented balancists, taking influence from such legendary greats as Francois the Steady-Handed and One-Leg Benny Sanchez.

"It's shocking. Absolutely shocking," amateur balancist and Dykstra admirer Derek Jeter said. "I mean, I never actually saw him do anything because he never got a video online, but I read in his blog that he made one of those champagne glass pyramids and then put it on a German Shepherd and it didn't fall over, even when the dog took off after a rabbit. That's pretty damn good, assuming it's true."

Dykstra declined to be interviewed for this article, though a source close to him (it's his wife) said he has devoted himself to planning a new YouTube clip in which he will vomit into a toilet for hours while his children cry in the background.