Ep. 475: "A Panic Animal"
Hello.
Hi, John.
Hi, Merlin.
The Skype ring was so chill this morning.
I don't know what my settings are, but it was just like really vibey.
Huh.
Huh.
Are you sick?
You sound like you got a little cold.
Ugh.
No, do you not want to say?
It's fine.
For the first time in what?
Four years.
Really?
My daughter came home from her polluted little school and was like, I have a stuffy nose, daddy.
Wipe, wipe, sneeze.
And I said, you know, what happens is that you and your mother get sick for two days.
And then I get the same thing and I'm sick for 14 days.
Yeah, you're very vulnerable to these things.
There's other ways in which you're, don't seem vulnerable, but it seems to me that cold type things have historically gotten you.
And now that everything's back to normal, John, we're back to normal.
Everybody's walking around, shucking and jiving.
Yeah, they are.
The little fucking sponges, with all due respect, they're little fucking sponges.
Yeah, they are.
You know?
And they bring sickness into your home.
And they touch so much.
Licking doorknobs, and I guess they don't have to wear masks anymore.
I would have had them wear masks the rest of their lives.
Cut down on all that high school kissing.
Oh, yeah, public display of affection, PDA, they call it.
But so here I am, and I'm just sick.
How far in are you?
Well, it started probably, you know, her mom's out of town for two weeks, so she and I have just been, you know, having a good old time.
And then probably Friday is when I started.
Are you okay to do the program?
Oh, yeah.
You know, I'm not some damn Benjamin that cancels the show when he's got a sniffle.
Okay.
Good.
Oh, dear.
Okay.
He's back, everybody.
It's a comedy cough, but it's also a real one.
You know, I was so scared because if you recall –
Um, I was several years ago in the, in the aloha era.
Um, you know, I was, I was having panic and a lot of the panic was triggered by sick by feeling like I, like I couldn't clear my nose or my ears, you know, that the claustrophobia of it and that, you know, I, I don't have to tell you or our listeners about panic.
No.
But, you know, I got into a cycle of thinking about it such that when I wasn't sick, I could work myself up just by thinking about the future time that I got sick.
Yeah.
There will one day be a time that I get sick and it will be like this.
What a nightmare.
And then I would off to the races, right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
You can't tell normal people about this.
No, no, no, no.
But this is how... The idea of something in your head feels even more real to you than the real thing feels to me.
Yeah.
Yeah, that's pretty close.
Yeah, that's pretty much it.
So when I felt this first coming on, I was...
dealing with what had probably been five years of suppressing panic around the idea that I was going to get sick one day.
Because when was the last time any of us were sick?
I haven't been sick since...
You mean with a normal cold?
Well, with any kind of thing.
I think I stopped licking doorknobs probably in 2017.
I don't remember the exact last time I got sick, but I broke that cycle of getting sick twice a year for two weeks each time.
Anyway, it's been a long time, probably one of those times, you know, probably during a low hop period.
There were a couple of times on airplanes where I just was sick and on an airplane and awful.
So I felt this whole thing of like, oh no, this is it.
Like the last five years I've been, um, on the edge of, uh,
panic anytime I sat and thought about what's going to happen the next time you get sick.
Even though you, just to be clear here, even though it was sort of the dread of potentially getting sick,
And that's apart from the whole actually being sick, right?
It's thinking about it.
It's the anxiety, the panic of imagining that you could get sick, and then you become over-attenuated to the symptoms and stuff like that?
Yeah, there's like a panic animal inside that 99% of the time, walk around, panic animal is just curled up in its nest.
You don't know it's there.
You're not thinking about it.
But for me, you know, the idea of a head cold and a chest cold triggered all those, you know, I had connected it to all these claustrophobic feelings, to all these, you know, buried alive panics or whatever.
Yeah.
I don't know how I connected it, but, but, and so if I'm walking along on a sunny day, and the idea would come into my head, like, well, you know, one day you're going to get really sick and you're not going to be able to breathe anymore.
And panic animal just would wake up out of its nest and suddenly just be like a little weasel.
Almost like it was the panic animal sitting there in its little panic animal dog bed.
And then some kind of alarm goes off or some dog howls and it hears it.
And that panic animal knows, oh, this is my time to shine.
Yeah, and it's just spinning around and it's just chasing its tail.
Sitting there like at the... Because, you know, I used to get what they call stress bumps.
And I don't get them so much anymore.
They get less... You know, talking about cold sores.
They get less severe over the years as the amount of virus in your body sort of dwindles.
But I am so with you because...
Anybody who's gotten cold sores, who has stress bumps, who has whatever that is, herpes simplex, whatever, there's a feeling that you get.
When you look in the West?
I get whatever.
Oh, you have a piece of gold sword.
That's right.
You got it.
Yes.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Lord of the Rings.
Exactly.
Call him.
He's the evil one.
But it's difficult to describe because this does sound completely mental.
But I don't know if this is a result of being the sort of person who frets about these things.
But when I used to get them, like in high school and college, it would lay me low when I'd get a gold sword.
Because, you know, it's essentially...
I'm somewhat immunocompromised in a number of ways.
And that's one of the ways, which is like, if I run it down, if I run down too much, used to be if I smoked too much weed, if I stayed up too late, if I did all these different things, I could pretty much guarantee I'll get one.
But what I'm trying to describe and failing to describe here is this feeling of like, huh, I wonder if I'm getting a cold sore.
And you do that kind of thing where you go like, because if you're a veteran, you know what those feel like.
And it seems almost, and this might be a heuristic, but it almost always feels like the cold sore is preceded by the panicky feeling that you're getting a cold sore.
And I don't know what's hooked up to what, but I do know that, yeah, then you do get one.
Because guess what?
Now you're even more stressed out.
You know what I mean?
Is it kind of like that?
Does the panic animal have a role, do you think, that could be positive?
Or it's mainly just another, it's the pet animal of the Welsh troll?
You know, I always think of the cold sore thing as one of those tiny little tinkly bells that someone in Downton Abbey rings up in their room.
Tinkle, tinkle, tinkle, tinkle.
Oh, it means come up here and empty my chamber pot or whatever.
Yeah, where you just barely hear it and you're like... Tinkle, tinkle, tinkle bell.
Oh, here it comes.
No, I don't... I have been trying to find like a use case for Panic Animal...
And I don't see one other than just like, like the pure, the pure, like I'm being, I'm being chased.
Yeah.
I'm being chased by a Dracula on a bridge in Romania.
I need to run.
Right.
There's the kind of panic animal, panic animal jumps up, starts barking.
Maybe, you know, I think this is such a human condition thing is, you know, maybe, maybe what, two, three, four times a year, the panic animal was maybe not such a bad thing.
But then all of those other times, it's just sitting there going, my turn, my turn.
Is it time for me to come out?
Because it's not actually connected to anything.
Real, you know, Panic Animal is not, it's not the same as like, do I have quick reflexes?
It's not even the same as hitting a fire alarm that would turn on the sprinklers.
It's really just more that, like, let's have more people run in the crowded theater at once.
Yeah, it doesn't, I can't see how it helps me.
The only way it has helped me to have Panic Animal is to understand, it really helped me understand
what a lot of other people were going through.
Because up until that point, up until just a few years ago, I had never connected anxiety feelings or any of the other things going on in my life to actual panic.
And so when people would talk about panic attacks or when they would sort of make decisions based around panic
Whether a panic animal is going to appear or not, I was always like, what are you talking about?
Like, you know, man up or whatever.
I mean, I've certainly been the sort of person that would say, well, how about you just calm down?
Couldn't you just calm down?
Right.
Nothing's happening, to quote the great Walter Sobchak, nothing is fucked here, dude.
There's nothing wrong.
You are, as your friend Dan Benjamin liked to say, you're just a guy in a room.
There's nothing happening right now.
That's all happening in your head and in the vicinity of your panic animal's dog bed.
And it was only having it that I realized, oh, right, of course that doesn't work.
It's the same as telling a depressed person that there's nothing wrong and they should- Yeah, cheer up.
Cheer up.
But also, I think, so in addition to, like, showing me there's a whole other world on the other side of a curtain that I didn't know was there, and everyone now has my explicit sympathy.
Yeah.
It helps a lot for it to affect oneself.
Yeah.
Yeah, it sure does.
It can be a real booster dose of sympathy in some ways.
It can because, you know, it's just like, oh, we're... Because it's not rational.
It's really not rational.
And words are insufficient to describe it.
So there's no account that I read in a book where I'm like, I get that.
It's really... And I think that's another thing that it taught me was that, oh, I see.
So there are a lot of things out there that I'll never understand if it doesn't happen to me.
But also...
people that it's happening to have to also realize no one's ever going to understand this.
So you can't, you can't expect people to know, right?
You can't, when, when I was depressed, the reason I talked about it so much was that I understood no one could understand.
And that wasn't their fault.
Right.
It wasn't, it wasn't somebody's fault not to understand.
I appreciated their sympathy, but you know, you can't help but be frustrated with them, but it's not their fault either.
Right.
And so panic animal, what it taught me was I needed to learn to self soothe, which actually helped me across the border into normal life because actually I did need that.
You know, I did need to figure out how to, uh, call myself down.
Not, not in a panic context, but like, like when you know, when somebody, uh,
When some teens give me a little bit of guff out in front of the drugstore.
Do I engage these teens in a battle of the wits that turns into an actual battle?
Or do I self-soothe and get in my car and go on with my day and have a nice day?
There's a lot of levels.
I feel like there's a lot of levels because, you know, there's a part of you, part of one, that...
That maybe is the same sort of person who will go, well, why don't you just calm down?
Why are you freaking out about something that's not happening?
Where you could try to do a certain kind of self-talk, even as you know that it's not very effective.
But that kind of self-talk that's like, you know, what I've come to call the mean dad voice.
The like, you know, what are you doing?
Like, knock it off.
Like, you know, but there's more, there are levels to it where it's like...
Sometimes your brain is trying to tell you something.
A lot of the time it's not, but we get crossed connections.
I don't like to bring up all the things I read on here because who cares?
But, you know, I've read a lot about anxiety.
I've read a lot about trauma.
I've been reading a lot, as you know, about, you know, a kind of...
updated, modernized kind of version of the role that mindfulness meditation can have.
The thing that a lot of those things have in common is, well, apart from me, is that whether or not anyone else thinks it's a real thing, it feels more real than real when it's happening to you and even the prospect of it happening.
You know, is so real.
But I feel like there is something, the reason I think the trauma part is so interesting, it's like, why do we get like that?
Well, we must have gotten like that for some reason.
It sounds a little oversimplified, but I think part of it is that one's wires get crossed.
Yeah.
And a thing that would suit us well in some circumstances has now been so agitated.
And at a certain point, you've got a kennel full of panic animals about all kinds of different things who are just like, oh, please.
like having some kind of like a, one of those breeds of panic animal that like, especially like likes to pop up at the worst possible time.
You're stuck on a plane, you're in a seat, you're next to somebody, they're sneezing, like all that kind of stuff.
But like a lot of it does come back to a very, to me, a very simple feeling, which is this feels like a feeling I had, I have had before.
I don't want that feeling again.
Yeah.
And the trauma people will tell you, well, sometimes that's a feeling of helplessness.
That's a feeling of regret.
That's a feeling of I should have done something differently or more like I should have said something or whatever.
But like, I as learned as I can be and rational as I can be thinking about it, it is.
It doesn't make it go away.
It doesn't make it better.
But it is a way in to realize that my wires got crossed at some point.
And my panic animal is way overreacting to something that is not beneficial to me.
And then the way that you do something about that can be real complicated.
If you want to.
I mean, who wants that?
I mean, who feels good about that?
That makes me feel like not who I am.
I knew it was going to come, and that was part of the panic animal, too, right?
There's no way you're going to go the rest of your life without getting sick.
And so these were the little kibbles that I would put in panic animal's little dog bed.
Yeah.
Like, you know, you know one day you're going to get sick again.
And when you feel it coming on.
Rest my pretty.
One day I shall need you.
Yes, pet, pet.
When you know it's about to come on, you know that you're at the start of 14 days of agony and
And so, you know, be ready.
Discomfort, inconvenience.
It's going to upset the apple cart and you're going to feel like shit.
Oh, no, no, no, no.
By this point, I had turned it into, you won't be able to breathe and you will die.
You know, panic is always like... You're going way beyond the little itches that we get about something we prefer not to happen.
You're going straight into the back of the cop car or an early grave.
Oh, absolutely.
Absolutely.
It's just like, I'm not going to be able to clear my head.
It'll be my undoing.
That's what they all end up at.
It's the same as being suffocated, right?
It's the same as being waterboarded.
So I'm sitting in my bathtub, of course, where I spend eight hours a day.
That's where my office hours take place.
Sure.
And I feel it.
This is more than just an allergy.
It's happening.
I can feel the tickle.
I can feel the... And so it begins, right?
And Panic Animal wakes up.
And I knew this was... I'd sketched this all out a thousand times.
I knew this was how it was going to go.
And...
I couldn't be in the bathtub anymore.
You know, I shot up out of the bathtub and I'm pacing in the bathroom.
Like, how's this going to go?
Like, what are we going to, you know, what are we going to do?
In anticipation of this thing, you feel like it's definitely coming.
It's happening.
Yeah.
Sorry, the feeling sick or the panic?
The feeling sick, which is going to lead to the panic.
The panic is going to go from, what is it used to teach us about, you know, like a bow and arrow, kinetic versus the two kinds of energy, potential versus kinetic.
But the potential energy of panic animal is going to become, is about to get very real.
Well, and then, of course, the panic animal recapitulates panic animal.
So then panic becomes the problem, right?
Then it's panic that's going to kill me.
And so I'm pacing in the bathroom and I'm like, what are we going to do?
Are we going to go for a walk?
I mean, are we going to walk out into the night in a towel and walk all night in order to keep this at bay?
You know that that's not going to work.
You've walked up and down and it doesn't keep it at bay.
You're slapping band-aids all over this thing, trying to make yourself feel better.
But as you're doing that, you're paying more and more and more attention to the potential or the kinetic or actual potential.
panic animal.
I mean, it's ironic because that's one reason that those kinds of fixes often don't work is in trying to talk ourselves out of how we feel right now, we're really zooming in on how we feel, which makes us more attenuated toward it.
It feels like it would help and it really doesn't.
Yeah.
The first time I ever had a real panic attack, I made the terrible mistake that
I think I told you at the time of Googling panic attack.
Like, what do I do?
You know, I'm having a panic attack.
What do I do?
And I Googled panic attack and oh my God, don't ever do that.
Oh no, God.
Because it's just like a bunch of people talking about,
panic attacks.
And it's just like this, this isn't, you know, it's all, it's just, it's, it's the nightmare scenario.
This is not a thing I want to hear other people talk about.
It turns out.
Yeah.
Here we are anyway.
So I, I went through this sort of not quite hellish few hours of,
where it was nighttime.
I was trying to lay down.
This is the worst combination of circumstances, right?
I'm trying to lay down.
Now my nose is stuffy and I can't breathe.
There's no amount of medicine in the world that will help me.
I could be chugging Dimetap or whatever, and it's not going to clear up my nose.
And
And it was very much like there were several times where I laid down, turned off the light, lay there for a minute.
Panic Animal was just on his little wheel, running, running, running.
Turned the light back on, sat back up, got up out of bed, walked around.
Did that a few times.
Kind of tired myself out, but always kept, I was self-soothing, kept it at bay.
And the next morning I realized I have it now.
I'm sick.
And I survived the night.
And actually being sick is just the same as it ever was.
I had put so much food in Panic Animals Bowl over the last five years.
Worried about this.
That all I had to do was make it through that first few hours.
To get to a point where it's like, you know what?
Being sick is actually one of the more familiar and comforting states of being in.
You know, I've been sick like this so many times in my life.
I know what this feels like.
I know what this is.
And it hasn't killed you yet.
It hasn't killed me.
And I know what the progression is.
Like, like day two.
Like you say, it's familiar.
It's that all there's the two of the familiar ones are the definitely getting worse and the probably getting better.
I feel like are two where like the day you wake up and you're like, oh God, it's still getting worse.
And then there's that one day you wake up or, you know, usually it is waking up and you're like, oh, this seems less bad than yesterday.
And that does feel familiar.
Yeah.
I mean, no less familiar than getting in and then getting rid of a cold sore eventually.
But it doesn't take – there was one of these anxiety books I read.
I heard a guy, I think, in an interview, and I picked up his book.
And he – I think it's called – I'll find the title of it.
It's something like My Age of Anxiety or something like that.
And it's about this guy who has a – gosh, I hope we're not triggering anybody here –
a lot of people have a uh or a number of people like have a an abject anxiety and fear about vomiting and this guy had that so bad he had he's every moment of every day he's like what led him to this journey of finding all the ways that he might choose to address this was that he spends every waking moment thinking i'm i'm totally gonna throw up i'm gonna throw up i'm gonna throw up in front of people it's gonna be embarrassing and
To where, like, even when they tried to do exposure therapy on him and gave him, like, Ipecac, he could keep himself from vomiting.
John, the guy had not vomited since 1977, is the punchline, if you like.
Which is that this is a grown man, you know, over 40 years...
he hasn't vomited, but that does nothing to change the fact that that's still the overriding anxiety in his life, even though it's not, it's not like something that happened just yesterday, but like feelings are real.
Anxiety is real.
There are ways to address it, but like just for the, for the neuro tips, I call them just be aware, be aware that it feels extremely real.
Yeah.
Oh, John, I'm sorry.
So I woke up this morning, and I've got a cough.
Now I have the cough, right?
I didn't have the cough yesterday.
But this is a very natural progression for me.
It always starts with a stuffy nose, then day two is a sore throat from the stuffy nose, and then day three is a wheeze, and then day four is a cough that sounds like I'm going to die.
And so walking through it,
Panic Animal had no job to do.
There's just no, you know, what can you do?
You can't help me here.
Does he go back to sleep?
What's he do?
I don't know.
And that's kind of where I am right now.
I fed him and cared for him for this moment because I was not consciously doing it, but
But this was all about what's going to happen that day when I finally get sick and they put me in a coffin in handcuffs.
Slam the lid with the back on your head.
And in fact, what happened was I spent a few hours trying to keep myself, you know, like tamped down, just using absolutely normal techniques of like, you're fine.
It's fine.
You know, just it's fine.
You're going to be fine.
And then what have I learned, right?
I can sit here right now and talk about it.
I can sit here and not be able to breathe and have a cough and I'm fine.
And so I don't know whether this experience of spending all these years in this state where I was
where I knew it was there, but I was also always talking to it, always thinking about... Because I didn't just say, this is going to happen, I'm going to die.
I then would reflect on that, right?
I would reply to that and say, it will happen and you won't die.
So I don't know where I am.
I don't know whether when I get better three months from now and I think about getting sick again, whether... But I can't imagine that I'm going to be as panicky that...
when I'm better, when I'm well again, because I've walked through this.
But you're still a little bit in the warm, soothing light of a victory, sort of.
Yeah.
In that you didn't die, you're not in a coffin yet, right?
But it's in that state of mind that we can become more like a neurotypical person who would go like, oh, see, it wasn't a big deal, I'll remember this next time.
Yeah.
I feel like we very – well, I mean, I don't know if we really can.
I don't know if it would be useful to remember that next time.
We always tell our kids that.
At least I have.
Like, hey, look, see, it wasn't so bad.
You did fine.
I don't know how much it helps when you tell yourself or a kid that.
I'm not sure that's really how that process works.
But the issue has not been the actual –
panic it's been the it's been the years of being fine and just walking through daily life and and the you know and the little voice wakes it up and so this is at least some energy I can direct to that voice when I'm walking down the street on a sunny day and and the voice says yeah it's a nice sunny day but what if somebody puts a bag over your head and gives you the flu and puts you in the trunk of a car
I'll say, well, remember how much we spent on this and what the payoff actually was?
I don't know.
I mean, I honestly don't know.
The cold sore analogy is really good because there's never a time when you start to feel that first tingle where you don't think, oh, fuck, I'm on a 10-day ride.
Right?
Like I look in the mirror right now and I look like a normal person and my life is going good and I've got a date tomorrow, but
I know right now I'm at the top of a water slide.
There's no situation that's made better by a cold sore.
No.
And because it does make you feel, it's not just that it's unsightly.
It just, it really does make you feel like you're like, you've got the flu.
Yeah.
You're sick.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And I mean, it could be something as silly as like, just, I have to go, you know, I have to meet a person in four days.
I have to take a trip.
It could be a new ID photo, like whatever it is, there's all this stuff.
And like, for me,
I guess it's a canine relation of a... I don't know if it's... It's a demon dog of some kind, but they are off to the races, and they are all running in... All my panic animals are running in different directions in explorer mode to go out and find all these different ways that this is going to be my undoing.
And, I mean, I don't sit around and morosely think about, like, death or undoing, but, like...
I don't know.
See, this is such a big topic for me.
I could talk about this all day, but like, you know, one thing is like, I do think it's, it's a good starting point is to realize some of the distinctions between like fear and anxiety between like anxiety and panic.
Right.
And it's like, there are, there are these things that they have a role in our lives.
They have a role from an evolutionary standpoint about helping us to get better about things.
But yeah,
Or to find fuel and mates and things like that.
But it's that... I don't know.
We are... God, how can I put this?
I think...
that the fear I may have, I don't think of myself as somebody who sits around having a fear of death.
I think what I do have is a fear of something I didn't expect being my dissolution.
If I wanted to trade, if I wanted to like really trace a lot of this stuff, I think it comes down to, well, this is it.
This thing that is not happening right now, it's gonna happen.
It's gonna be worse than I thought.
And like, whatever that thing is, it will be my dissolution.
And I can't even imagine how bad that will be, except that I know that it will be extremely bad.
And I think everybody's got their own flavor of that if they suffer from this.
But it's even on the sunny day walking around and, you know, saying like, oh, this is no big deal.
Like, I just, I don't know...
I don't know how effective that is at inoculating you against future panic and concerns because you're a different person then.
You might be more vulnerable that day.
And I get into a certain kind of magical thinking where it's like, oh, well, that happened and now this is going to happen.
And it's like, what are you doing?
You're a grown man.
Don't do that.
I definitely don't think that this has cured me of being afraid of being in handcuffs with a bag over my head.
Because what is going to cure you of that?
I would hope never to know.
But I – it's all – these are all data points, right, as you would say.
And it's – it at least feels good to be here right now, which is to say sick and miserable, but also not out of control, right?
And that's not what I, you know, and I think part of it is, yeah, your, your body and your mind all recognize like, well, you can't be in a straight up panic attack for 15 days.
That's just not going to, you're not going to be able to, you don't have the excess energy to do that.
And so, you know, settle in, but also, yeah, I'm, uh,
I'm right in the middle of it, and so it's hard to be merry about it.
No, but I'm with you, though, because it would be nice to think that, like, well, you know, I certainly did not benefit from all of that panic animal, you know, lollygagging.
And now is there a way for me to benefit from realizing that, like, I've...
that I've gotten through this.
You know, can that be something that's useful?
You know, another part of this that I, it's not fun to talk about, but I think a big part of this is also the role of shame.
I think shame makes everything worse.
And there's so many things where like, whatever the thing that happened was, like, if you're somebody who's worried about something that's straight up as like, what's my status in the community?
Or like, what will the people I love think of me?
All those kinds of things.
I used to just go, I don't care about that.
I don't worry about that.
I'm not the BMOC.
But the truth is, like, I think that has a role in it.
When you think about your dissolution, and again, from an evolutionary standpoint, like, we need the tribe.
Like, we need these people.
So, like, it's not just like, oh, I'm weak and I'm going to get voted off the island.
It's also a case of, like, I don't feel like a stable person that people can depend on.
And guess what?
That makes me feel even worse.
And that makes me feel more...
ashamed, because, I don't know, I've just, there's been these few breakthroughs for me in the last few years, none of which has led to anything of, you know, permanent change, but it does help to be aware, like, how much, in my case, I go like, oh, well, how much of this is some fear of shame, or a fear of, you know what I mean, a fear of, like, looking weak?
You know what I mean?
There's all those things.
But, you know, what you're kind of stuck with at the end of the day is, like, however your wiring is today, it's hard to yell it down.
It's hard to send it to its room.
You know, it's fucking hard.
I love the idea, and I spend a lot of time thinking around the idea of, like, what is this?
What is the...
As John Styrcusa would say, what is the evolutionary value of this trait, right?
How did this trait evolve to benefit me, us?
Yeah, how did previous generations' genes move forward and benefit from some kind of emotion, a feeling, you know, on through to like a behavior, right?
Yeah, that's just evolution, right?
It's just what everybody knows is the science of evolution.
You feel something, and then you pass it on to your grandchildren, right?
I mean, that's what Syracuse taught me.
Yeah, it usually happens.
You can even, with cockroaches, it can happen inside of a generation.
Yeah.
What they call a nano evolution, they call it.
Exactly.
I don't like potatoes, and I passed it on to my daughter through evolution.
If you put potatoes on your daughter's plate, she's going to walk into the kitchen.
You know what she's going to do?
She's going to go outside, take her clothes off.
Let's throw a garbage can through the window and set the place on fire.
Unfortunately, she loves potatoes, so I'm just surrounded on all sides.
We're pronouncing potatoes.
What I want.
What you want.
What I look for is just exactly what you're asking.
Like, what role does Panic Animal – what's a positive role here?
Can I connect this to this idea I have of myself as a 10% Neanderthal person –
some combination of Celt and German and scallop wandering across the northern plains with a spear in one hand wearing a bearskin.
A bearskin bathrobe.
A bearskin bathrobe and a sword, a sword of his own crafting.
And obviously, as we know from reincarnation theory, I would be a king of some kind, right?
Some sort of, some lordly fellow up there.
Not a lot of trees or whatever, but I'm just, it's windy.
It's often windy in these visions.
A lot of world building, this thought experiment.
Yeah, you know, there's peat, a lot of peat.
Oh, a lot of peat, so you might be in a bog, so you landed the Scots.
Yeah, a little bit of a bog or, you know, the Danes, somewhere between a Dane and a Scot.
Walking around up there trying to get things done.
And so how does panic animal help in these situations?
Which is to say I'm laying in my bearskin hut at night.
What is it?
This isn't like a fight or flight.
Like I heard a sound.
Jump up and be ready to be attacked.
This is I didn't hear a sound.
But I'm laying in my enclosure and I'm freaking out about a thing I thought.
and thinking about might happen one day.
And yet it's having an actual physical effect on me in the moment.
This isn't planning.
I'm not working out a strategy for a future battle.
I'm laying here, you know.
With the information and thoughts that you have, what can you divine about what's going to happen in the future?
And it feels like when I pace it out,
It feels like this is an element of religiosity.
Because it feels like a supernatural possession of a kind.
Oh, I see.
Like an external thing.
Yeah, this isn't me.
I'm not doing this.
You would have no reason to do that.
Yeah, this is a visitation.
And there are lots of things that happen to us that if you try and get yourself back to bearskin times...
The only justification or the only thing you could have interpreted this as at the time is that this is a – that there's a demon in you or that there is somebody in your tent with you.
There is a demon – there's a monster in your soul, not in your campfire.
And that religiosity –
we know plays a very large role in civilization building.
Religiosity has a map has a massive role in making human beings different from other creatures.
It's why we, I don't know.
I don't know whether it's why we invented jewelry and song and dance, but it's,
It played a role, right?
And that feeds into what you were saying before around the concept of shame, because now in the modern day, it does feel like a disease of the soul in the sense that it feels like a failing of something spiritual or of something...
something deeply true about myself.
Or a moral failing.
Yeah.
A moral failing.
What's wrong with you?
Yeah.
Like, why are you so like this?
And so it is a thing that's happening in that realm, in the, in the, in a mystical place.
And I don't know, you know, and I, and I, and I, and I, and also feels like a lot of the, the work that we do, that we think of as psychological is,
is psycho-spiritual you know a lot of the woo stuff and what what woo what about woo appeals to oh it's and so it's like this this this thing you're talking about religiosity but like another way to think of is like something external to my own you know existence has has brought this in and is it possible that something from beyond this uh this mortal coil could also take it out
Is that part of the religiosity, is like looking for a solution?
I think if you were there, if you were in that situation with no other context, you would be driven to the monk.
You would go immediately to the witch and say, I am being tormented by a demon.
Can you help?
Right.
And it would reinforce the kind of tribal bond that...
is shared by a belief system because what it does, you know, it's the thing, it's when you see the Virgin Mary in a piece of toast, like you, you would feel it.
Or getting a cross made out of ash on your head.
You could not help.
You walk around seeing other people who just got the ash on their forehead, you know, on Ash Wednesday.
It's a way of, you're also, you're kind of demonstrating a dedication to the, to the tribe in some ways by, by taking the cure.
Well, or that there would, you know, a puff of smoke is,
if you have been taught is the Holy ghost, or if you've been taught, it's the great Raven, that's what you see.
And I would feel this.
Now I feel it.
And I'm like anxiety and panic, but then I would have said demon or, uh,
or some Norse, whatever the equivalent is of a Norse possession, a ghost.
Maybe like a snow sprite.
Snow sprite, it could be a Welsh troll, actually.
Yeah, is that too on the nose?
No, I think, you know.
Is that a player character?
I think Welsh troll is, right?
I mean, he'd be hopping from craggy top to craggy top.
Is he speaking rhymes like Rumpelstiltskin?
Because in my head, he's a lot like Rumpelstiltskin.
He's a lot like Rubble Stiltskin, except he looks like Richard Burke.
The following is an unpaid advertisement for Roderick on the line.
Bob, did you hear what happened to Donna?
Donna, you mean that healthy and vivacious woman from our church group?
Yes, that woman we know very well who seemed so vital and full of life.
She totally died, Bob.
Oh, crap.
What happened?
No one is sure.
But her husband, Morris, who we also know very well, is so upset.
Ma'am, that sucks.
Luckily, they had really good life insurance and gave money to Roderick on the line.
Do we do that, Bob?
Um.
Bob, I asked you to take care of that.
Err.
Darn you, Bob.
But, Betsy isn't supporting a podcast with money really expensive and dangerous.
Not anymore, it isn't.
We can support Roderick on the line for as little as $5 a month.
$5.
Wow, that is surprisingly affordable.
What do we have to do?
You just go to patreon.com slash Roderick on the line.
Will that website give my PC a virus?
Shut the fuck up, Bob.
Your timidity is killing me just like it killed poor Donna.
Wow, this is a lot for me to process.
Just go to patreon.com slash Roderick on the line or give Roderick your money.com.
Do you think you can handle that?
Death makes you really hostile, Betsy.
It's not a great look.
Keep moving and get out of the way, Bob.
The only thing I know for sure is this.
A horse's head is ultimately unknowable to me.
Yeah, the Welsh, man.
Don't fuck with the Welsh.
When I think about it, it has no value in terms of making me a better warrior or a better...
leader or whatever except that it does humanize and and and humble a person yes totally totally agree uh this this is one thing i've been reading lately um the evolutionary uh psychology guy talking about uh
You know, these traits in Buddhism.
There's a lot, I mean, again, and I just want to always say, like, I have not vetted this.
I am not a scientist.
Like, I don't have a word.
Well, not, you know, I'm a scientist of rock.
You talk to Dan enough that you're probably a Buddhist by association, right?
See, now you want to have fun with that, and that's fine.
But no, I'm not talking about reincarnation and stuff like that.
But one thing this dude says in this book that I think makes a lot of sense is that, and this goes straight to, you know, your pal Mike and feelings are real.
Those Mike Squires, right?
Yeah.
Feelings are real.
Feelings are real.
It's the only thing he ever said that, you know, it's his epitaph.
I'm at an interesting point in this book where he's talking about, kind of about the, you know, he has a whole section called, like, you know, how do we know our feelings are true, da-da-da-da, all these things.
But the case that he's making that makes some sense to me as a, not a scientician, is feelings are...
Feelings arose as a way to give experiences – this is my own words, but it's really good.
Are you ready?
Ready.
Feelings are a way for experience to make an impression on you for the future.
Okay.
Like, to learn, to grow, to not die.
And, you know, it's really easy to, I mean, like, who knows what we're talking about.
I don't even know what period of theoretical time we're talking about here.
But in the, you know, in the Grog the Caveman times, like, you would get a feeling, a good feeling, because you ate this high caloric food and didn't get killed.
Over here, you had a panic attack because you almost, you didn't get any food.
You're really weak and you almost got killed.
you know, out on the savannah.
And the feeling, the feelings from an evolutionary standpoint are a way for our mind to imprint on things that have happened before and to lead us toward things that will be good from an evolutionary standpoint and to avoid things that are not so good from an evolutionary standpoint.
Which I think is a really interesting way to think about it.
So it's not that feelings aren't there.
It's not that feelings are fake.
Feelings are real.
They're all of those things.
But it's interesting to me as a way in to think about feelings as... And he even makes the case that you can't make yourself do all these different things.
What you can do is have your feelings help motivate you.
In ways, like we like to think, oh, it's rational thinking versus emotional feeling stuff.
And he's like, well, no, that's not it at all.
Like they all come down to feelings.
Even the stuff that's the most rational thing that you come up with has a basis in how you feel about that rationality, which is a little bit of a mind blower to me.
But I do, I feel like there's always like a good news, often I should say, like a good news, bad news with things like this.
And in that case, hey, the bad news is, you know, those terrible feelings you have are real.
The good news is that, like, you don't have to always have those forever.
But to me, some of these breakthroughs and realizations, for me, a big one that I had in talking to Syracuse about anxiety over the years is I realized I had this mental model for anxiety.
Because what is the thing with anxiety?
Anxiety comes along.
Panic comes along.
And the most overriding fear or the most overriding feeling is I need to not have this feeling anymore.
It's kind of meta feeling, right?
I need to not feel panicked.
I need to not feel like I'm going to die in a police car.
I need this feeling...
to go away, right?
And the trouble is, the thing that I discovered was as an anxious, a naturally anxious person, to me, anxieties might as well be presented in a box like Kleenex.
Because the second I grab one, another one pops right up.
Now, that's a bad news thing in some ways.
Guess what?
You've got a Costco-size palette of Kleenex that will last you for the rest of your life.
But that also then, at least that mental model, gives me a way in of going, okay, that's interesting.
So what you're saying is there's always going to be something that when I resolve the thing that's making me anxious and panicky, well, I should be good forever, right?
No, no.
Well, the bad news is you're always going to have another Kleenex waiting when you pop one up.
Another anxiety will always take the place.
It's a notional stack that is endless in some ways.
But then that also then does give me a little bit of expansiveness to say, well, if they're always going to be there...
stuff comes to my mind.
Like, well, does every one of those have to be my, uh, my dissolution?
Does every one of those have to be like the end of days?
I mean, these are the kinds of things that I don't want to say just give me comfort, but give me an angle into thinking about this as something other than a thing that's utterly out of my control and irrational, inaccessible and shameful, right?
Right?
So if I think, well, I look at that, and of course I could think of myself to death, but I might go, oh, the next Kleenex that pops up is, oh, you know, it turns out this really reminds me of this bad experience that I had, like, in middle school, and I don't want to feel that again.
And then I get to look at that and go, well, you know what?
If I pull that one up, there's going to be another Kleenex right underneath there.
I could feel that as a kind of...
uh, intellectual or emotional death sentence.
But instead I choose to look at it as, Hey, this is just the thing that's going to happen.
Just like, just like bad days and, you know, uh, just stupid shit that comes along.
And I don't, but the, I don't have to be the Kleenex.
Um,
Be the Kleenex.
Be the ball, Danny.
See the ball.
Cinderella story.
Tears in his eyes, I guess.
We watched Fletch this weekend.
Are you ready for the Fletch with Jon Hamm?
I've watched it twice.
Okay, go on.
It's very good.
And it got a crummy release.
But you know what I'm saying?
I'm not trying to give you advice here.
I'm trying to give myself a pat on the back for realizing that, like, let me just say it in the most dumb, bald way possible.
Feelings are real, but feelings don't define who I am.
And that's a thing that I have some amount of executive authority to keep in mind.
I can't always, that's not always going to mean I'm guaranteed a good day any more than I'm guaranteed a bad day.
But that presence of mind to look at this, and I realize this is a kind of intellectualization about something that's very emotional, but maybe I need that.
Maybe I need a way of going, you know...
I don't have a solution for this, but I feel like just knowing it exists in a particular way, how you feel, how it happens, how that process works, becoming more acquainted with that is really valuable.
Yeah, well, all we can do is—all we are is what we are.
All we are is— I thought you were going to do Kansas.
All we are is what we are.
I could never understand.
If there's a bustle in your hedgerow, don't be alarmed now.
No, that's the thing.
It's just a spring queen for the May queen.
A spring queen?
Spring queen for the May queen?
And that may be it.
You feel a bustle in the hedgerow, and you think it's a panic animal, but it's really just a spring queen for the May queen.
You heard, there's a bustle in the hedgerow.
Yeah.
And then the voice says, it admonishes you, don't be alarmed now.
No, don't be alarmed is what that's.
John, what happens when you realize the Piper's calling you to join him?
Does that have any effect on you?
Again, I sit up around my fire and I go, is that the Piper?
Is he calling me to join him?
I think a modern person might say, is that my Snapchat account that's calling me to log in and snap?
With my friends and say, oh, my God, so sweet.
You look so cute in that.
Oh, my God.
You're so skinny.
Oh, my God.
Is that the piper that's calling me to join him?
Oh, I don't know.
You say there could be multiple pipers, multiple pipers, multiple panic animals.
I think it might be only one piper.
It's just culturally we all think it's a different thing.
What in Hinduism we might think of as an avatar.
This is the William James issue, right?
This is the comparative literature thing where it's like, wait a minute.
William James is not Henry James, is that right?
That's right.
Who wrote The Ambassadors?
Henry James.
Okay.
I didn't like that book.
I thought it was a little overrated.
William James, is he varieties of religious experience?
That's right.
And...
And so, you know, it's what we all wanted to do when we first started college, which is – Oh, I'm going to – All right.
I went to school in Florida.
It was different.
A lot of us, you know, you go to college and you're like, oh, I'm going to come up with the unified field theory, right?
I'm going to figure out where.
Oh, yeah, this is finally going to be the last lock, the last key for the last lock.
And now it's all, I'm just going to, all this other stuff.
I've already been kind of gleaning all of this information for my Velt and Chong.
And now I got the last key.
I'll probably be done with this in six months.
And it's why there's comparative religion as a major, or at least a class, and it's why Einstein said God doesn't tickle your fanny with a feather.
Nope.
Because everybody's trying to figure out, like, well, if this is true and this is true and this is true, what does that tell us, right?
About what's true, there's got to be a thing.
Because this says there's a thing, that says there's a thing.
We should turn this into a PDF.
This would be a good e-book, what we're talking about right now.
We need Randall Monroe to do it because it would just be one of those flowcharts he does that's got like 9,000 little bubbles.
And that's what it ends up being because nobody – because what happens is somebody is like, well, I guess it's string theory and there are a billion universes.
And it's like, oh, that's not what I was looking for.
I was hoping that it was –
like a welsh troll that looked like richard burton and you're telling me that it's an unfathomable like what are you even how tall is he do you have a sense he's small that's what makes him so scary i don't mean this to be ableist at all but there's a certain size of biped human that i find very upsetting um
When you see something that's not full size, if the Welsh troll was like three and a half feet tall, sorry, Sir Richard Burton, I assume he's a sir, that would be really upsetting to me.
Would he have one of those gnome, one of those pointy gnome hats?
Well, that's the thing.
He kind of looks and acts like Dobby.
uh from harry potter the house elf yeah yeah except he can sing and he's very like a lute could he be like a tom bombadil type situation he's the thing about tom bombadil is he's one of the oldest characters he's one of the oldest characters in middle earth marilyn he he dates back to before the before the wizards how do they know that well they don't because of the history problem
This is just long conversations I've had with Ted Leo about Tom Bombadil that I'm not going to get into now.
I've never read the book.
I just love saying Tom Bombadil.
It's a wonderful, wonderful name.
Nice mouthfeel.
I do definitely feel like whatever...
I still believe that there, I still believe the children are our future, and I still believe that there is a thing that brings us all together.
I see no color, Merlin, in this house.
Oh, thank you.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Okay.
And culture, et cetera.
Am I right?
Yeah, you're doing great.
Can I get a high five about that?
Absolutely.
This is all going straight into the e-book.
And so culture, if I'm right, like everybody has a panic attack, everybody's got phones, and...
And presumably the house elf in other cultures does not look like Richard Burton, but looks like something.
Oh, you're not.
Okay, so now if I understand correctly, you're pivoting to somewhere between Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell.
Right in there.
Right in between.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, because it's not, it's the troll's journey.
It may not be Welsh, it may not be a troll, but it's for sure some kind of Welsh troll.
That's just what we call it in our culture.
That's right.
Something's doing that job.
Some people might call it the Great Spirit.
Because you've got to put that energy somewhere.
Little Richard, they call him.
You know, last year, right around Rosh Hashanah, I was with some friends and they were, I don't know, I might have talked to you about this.
And they said, oh, we're going to go down to the ocean and we're going to take a piece of bread.
We're going to take a loaf of bread and we're going to rip it up into pieces and we're going to throw little bits of bread into the ocean.
And those are going to be all the things we want to get rid of this year.
And I was like, oh, okay, that sounds like cool.
That's a cool thing.
And so we went down to the ocean, and they all had some little crust of bread, and they went, you know, they threw, they ripped it into four pieces, threw it in the ocean, and then they were like, back to the campfire.
And I had this crust of bread.
And I just was like taking little pieces and thinking about what the little piece represented and flicking it into the sea.
And then break off another little piece of the bread and put...
the thing in the piece of bread that i wanted to be rid of sit with the bread and look at it and go and now it's like a transubstantiation yes yeah this bread now is this thing i want to be rid of this small emotional corner of my life that i want to have uh taken thank you you know thank you power greater than myself take this and to the sea with you and after a while
the people that were then around the campfire were like, Hey, you know, come hang out with us.
And I was like, look, I didn't start still stuffing bread with regret.
Yeah.
I didn't, you didn't, you know, like I didn't come up with this, throw bread in the sea, but, but nobody's going to tell me when I'm done.
And I was there.
Are you done when you run out of bread or do you just keep smaller?
Yeah.
As I got, as I got closer to the end of the bread, I was like, am I, am I through?
No, I'm not.
There's more to, there's more to do here.
Yeah.
And it's dark, and the waves are kind of lapping at my feet, and I'm just out there like, no, this is serious business now.
I'm hard at work, and this is real.
And depending on...
on how important you think I am to the campfire party.
Maybe I ruined it for everybody because all of a sudden I'm down having a, some kind of, you know, mystical experience and that's not, and everybody else is like, let's have another, but it was very meaningful to me.
Sure.
And,
And I realized, like, yeah, this is the varieties of religious experience.
You can – I'm not woo, and I don't take from a smorgasbord of religious little ramekins of little hot dogs.
You're not a cafeteria Buddhist.
No, I'm not.
Like, oh, and I'm going to have a little bit of mindfulness and a little bit of pop psychology and a little bit of –
Yeah, sure.
No, I'm not doing that.
Home decoration.
I mean, I think you get some candles and a bell and a bowl.
The Jews have been doing it for a long time.
They've got some insight into this.
And so it's like, I don't want to eat the bitter thing, and I don't want to eat the salt water or whatever.
Enough from wandering in the desert, do you feel like, John?
I didn't do that.
I wasn't in the desert.
I was in a peat bog.
Peat bog.
Peat bog.
Yeah.
And then tearing bread into smaller and smaller pieces.
Smaller and smaller pieces.
And, you know, I have to acknowledge the privilege of having a crust of bread that I didn't need.
Thank you.
Wow.
You're doing so well with this.
I didn't need the bread enough that I could transubstantiate it into my anxiety.
Well, it must be nice to have enough food that you can throw it away to wrap your regrets in.
It must be nice.
You know what, Merlin?
Hashtag do better.
Do better.
A lot of kids can't even get Wi-Fi.
That's the thing.
Thank you, Starlink.
Thank you, Starlink.
Yeah, the Welsh troll, man.
I'm still thinking about him.
I'm looking at these pictures of Richard Burton.
I don't know, man.
I don't know.
I don't know.
No, I know you don't.
I know.
I don't either.
But I'm there.
I mean, I'm there.
We're both there.
We're in it.
We're in it.
And maybe not to win it.
No, I think I'm just in it to finish it.
But if I do, will that be my dissolution?
Will I lose status in the tribe?
Hmm.
What if Dan Benjamin steals all my elk?
It's Thursday.
It's elk day.
And what if I don't get my elk?
He wouldn't steal it.
You know, causes him pain just to, if you tell something that's not true.
So he wouldn't steal my elk probably.
Would he not though?
Would he not?
He'd be late for my elk.
Yeah.
See, that's what it is.
I've started to walk around a track of,
You ready for this?
Yes.
My little girl is on a swim team.
She doesn't want to do it.
We have three times a week she comes and she's like, please don't make me do this anymore.
And I'm like, look, I am not going to make you do something that you don't, that is actually tormenting you.
But is that what this is?
Or do you just not want... Because her coach is not... I struggle with that because I'm very much like, I'm not going to make you do this.
But there's also the part of me that is sort of like, sometimes if you push just a little bit further, you'll find a thing about this that's fun that you didn't expect.
And her coach is not a supportive coach.
She's a punishment coach.
You tell me she's in it to win it.
The coach is like, get back in there and let's see your best effort.
And my little girl wants the coach to be like, oh, my God, you did so amazing.
Absolutely.
And even in that moment, I'm like, well, now, not everybody you work with in your life is going to be supportive.
It's true.
And so that alone is probably not a reason to quit just because she doesn't make you feel good at the end of every lap.
Yeah.
But it's something we're going back and forth every day because half the time she's like, I love to swim and it's where I want to be.
And the other half she's like, please don't make me do this anymore.
And I'm like, ah, I don't want to be my dad where I'm standing on the side of the –
the baseball field going, God damn it, coach, you're missing a good game over here.
But I do want to not be somebody that's just like, whatever, baby, you know, let's go get a popsicle.
I think there's a downside to that a lot of people don't realize, which is like when you, I think you have to be, you have to always be supportive, but I think you also have to be as a parent, like sometimes you need to be a wall they bounce against.
gently better they bounce against my wall than another wall and if I say if you say like the most crazy ass thing in the world that you've never said or thought before if you're just the hormonal teen for example like I may not agree with everything you say the second you say it because like
You know, if you tell me that you actually are, you know, Sir Richard Burton, oh, honey, that's good.
That's so good for you.
And Elizabeth Taylor.
But, like, you know what I mean?
Like, I think there is a line or there is a balance somewhere between, like, you don't want to be, oh, God, the fucking people in the park right now, John.
It's soccer season.
And these tiny, tiny kids are getting yelled out.
We can hear it.
We can hear it, of course, because it's right outside our window.
Just screaming, screaming, screaming at their kids.
And Dexter was not...
covering his position in a way that made anybody happy poor dexter was really singled out that's that's one way i don't want to be that but then on the other side i don't want to be like ned flanders's parents and just like you know everything's cool you know because that the problem is not that you're you're you may feel like you're saving your kid from inconvenience or pain but what you're also doing is telling them that whatever they imagine will probably turn out to be true
Right, and so I don't want to do that.
So one deal I made with her was I said, look, all right, you're going to go in and do that.
Here's what I'm going to do.
The swimming pool is over by the high school.
While you are in there swimming, I'm going to be walking.
I'm going to be fast walking around the track around the baseball field or around the football field.
And so I'm also going to be, as the winter darkens, I'm going to be out there in the rain.
doing my two miles during the, during the time that you're at swimming practice so that it's not just, I love this project, John, this project is so up my alley.
When you come up with like, when you can snap a thing, do another thing.
Like, I think it helps so much as a simple one would be like, well, I'm going to take a walk because then I get to go get a Starbucks coffee or whatever.
You know what I mean?
Like, I think it's so smart that you've, you've made this into an omnibus project for both of you.
And, and so I've never walked around a track.
I always scoffed at it because I was like, why would you do that when you could walk through the city like John Travolta at the beginning of... Do you carry paint cans when you're doing it?
You're going to be meeting people.
You're going to be wearing really uncomfortable looking shoes.
My hair.
He touches it.
Hey, hey.
And so walking around a track, that just seemed like a weird thing that people, that slobs and truck suits did.
Just go walk them all with the olds.
There you go.
But so I'm out, I'm walking around the track, walking around the track, walking around the track is its own thing.
thing it's not the same it's totally yep yep i'm not going to use any words or mention any things but yep it's it's definitely it can be a real good thing oh yeah your body gets into a thing and your mind goes into a place and you're just like what am i doing i'm walking
Well, you've also, like, you've taken away, I mean, as much as I think there's a different kind of benefit to, for example, walking around in the greenery, and there's shown benefits for people with ADHD of being around complex natural patterns like leaves and grass, it stimulates dopamine, but we're talking about something else here, which is let's move all of that other stuff aside, and this is just going to be me doing a quarter mile and another quarter mile and another quarter mile with nothing to think about except...
Being on that quarter mile.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Right.
Right.
And it's like being on a treadmill except there's wind in your hair.
And I am really into it now.
Whoa.
But I'm out there and there's nothing to do except this is an actual living high school that has actual sports teams that are also out doing their sports balls.
There's a girls soccer team that practices for the first half of every time I get out there to go.
And then they all get to the end of it.
They're shooting goals and then they get to the end and then they're packing up to leave.
And then the boys football team comes out.
Meanwhile, the cross country running team is setting up over in the corner and then they run off into the trails.
And I'm this old dude in the center of all of this action, trying to stay out of everybody's way, trying to stay invisible and
on this kind of crazy loop where I'm moving either faster or slower than everything else.
And it's having a real effect on my well-being.
Is there anything you can talk about?
Are there feelings?
It sounds like one thing that's easy to lose this in the shuffle is that you aren't hating it and you probably want to do it again.
Don't sleep on that.
That's good.
It's really good if you found something where you're not dreading doing it again.
Yeah.
does it i don't know do you is there anything you can share about the experience of it well what i what i was what i expected was that if i'm if my body is in motion like this and my mind then becomes untethered which is my favorite space to be but the danger is that i go completely out into uh into a world of the imagination
and that can be that world of imagination is very telling about where i am in life at any given that's a version of the kleenex box except in this case one of those kleenex is going to push itself out yes right and so here i am i got nothing to think about now i'm on now i'm untethered from my body now i'm thinking about everything now i'm lost in time do i start to go through
revenge fantasies or am i thinking about what i would do if i were made emperor of europe or am i thinking about how i'm going to get that idea patented or am i thinking about what am i thinking about what if you've been there like towards the beginning of of the great war could you have done anything to prevent that from happening thank you if you had i saw an interesting one the other day if you had time travel
But you could only go someplace for 60 minutes and then you would immediately be returned to now.
So you're not going into the past or the future to live there.
You have 60 minutes.
Oh, I like that.
Where would you go and what would you do for that 60 minutes?
And I was like, whoa, okay, all right, there's an idea that I will chew on, right?
Like, you need 60 minutes.
I always think about that for at least three laps.
Yeah, you can't even, I mean, 60 minutes, you can't even introduce yourself to a stockbroker in that time.
You have to have something really well planned out.
Yeah, exactly.
Exactly.
And you can't, there's no cheats, right?
No infinite wishes.
You can't wish somebody else.
You can't time travel somebody else to have been there to lay out the violin case for you or anything like that, right?
No, no, no.
You got to land and nobody's ever heard of you before.
And you're like, hi, I got 60 minutes and here's what I need to tell you about the future.
But I've noticed that in my laps, I am not going to bad places.
There are a lot... Like you'd feared or... Yeah.
There are a lot of people that belong in a shipping container in the desert, but that's not where I'm at right now.
And that is also recapitulating.
Like, if I can do an hour's worth of walking around this track and not once...
find myself in some like ferret hole in
But I'm just, you know, I'm still up in space and like, la-di-da-di-da.
Well, and I know this is not what you're saying.
This is something that I would think, though.
But also to be aware that if the thing you dreaded or feared does come up, you'll just deal with it the way you would deal with any other thought, which is, you know, that it kind of passes through.
You go on to the next thing.
But it is ultimately we who decide how much we're going to cling to the bad thoughts.
Yeah.
Right.
Yeah.
Well, and, and learning how to, you know, it, it took me a long time to learn how to go.
Wait a minute.
You've been thinking about this for an hour and this is, how's that working out for you?
This is not good.
This is not helpful.
And you're not happy here.
You don't have to do this.
Yeah.
The first thing, the first thing you needed to do was recognize that that's what you've been doing.
This isn't, you know, this isn't nature.
Your heart grew three sizes that day.
That's a big deal.
That's a big fucking deal.
Yeah, and I went back and gave all the presents back to the Who's.
And about halfway through, I was like, what are you doing?
Did you carve the roast beast?
These are extremely valuable presents.
They don't know they're gone.
So there's that, right, that you learn how to not do that.
But, oh, my God, I had a moment the other day where I was on the verge of lucid dreaming.
Oh, boy.
I was in my dreams.
And I was standing there and I was like, wait a minute, you're in your dream.
You're in the dream.
Uh-oh.
And I was like, I'm in the dream.
In the dream.
And you could see things were starting to like...
It was an environment.
It was turning into an environment.
You tested the edges a little bit because you said, do I dare?
You're going to eat a peach.
You're thinking to yourself, hey, I think I might be in one of the dreams and I know I'm in a dream, but that is a classic way to end that dream as soon as you, right?
So how do you not crush the bunny?
That's what happened.
Oh, fuck.
And I was like, oh, you, you.
And the thing is, I did it, I think, because as it was coalescing, I was like, I'm in the dream.
Is this good for me right now?
Like, it wasn't, is this a good dream?
Because you can make the dream whatever you want.
But is this where I should be?
Good distinction, yeah.
Because I don't know if this is what I want to play at, be in the dream.
There have been times in my life where being in the dream was like, wow, I get to fly around the neighborhood.
But right now, I don't think I would just fly around the neighborhood, I'm afraid.
And so anyway, all of a sudden, I'm like standing outside the door, and I don't remember the key code anymore, and I'm holding a dozen roses, and I'm like, fuck, what happened?
You didn't make it.
You were inside the lobby.
Yeah.
And now you're back out.
Yeah.
I don't know.
There's a lot going on.
What do you wear when you walk around the track?
That's a very good question.
Thank you.
Do you have a special costume?
Do you have a special costume for laps?
Well, there's the now.
And in the now, I happen to be wearing my Mack Weldon pea green soup colored super pants.
Yeah.
As well as a little Mack Weldon white-colored zip-up hoodie.
I'm wearing a Mack Weldon long-sleeve t-shirt right now.
Well, there you go.
But...
There will come a day when youth will pass away.
And also, it's coming very soon, where it will be dark and cold and raining on me while I'm walking around the track.
And my little tennis shoes will be going squish, squish, squish, squish.
And I don't know what I'm going to wear because I have always been really opposed to Northwest-style
waterproof workout clothes.
Oh, technicals, they call them.
I don't want them.
I've never wanted a technical.
You know, you tend to dress more like a fisherman.
Maybe you've got a full-on fisherman outfit, like the Gordons Fisherman from Gordons of Gloucester.
You got one of those big, cool yellow hats.
But those are not good to walk fast in.
How do you know?
Well, because I've been in my fisherman costume and been trying to get away from somebody, and it's like, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah.
And it's my usual costume of like boiled wool isn't going to work either.
I need, you know, I'm sorry.
I'm sorry.
I complicated this for you.
I just, I, so I don't know.
I don't know.
I don't know if Adidas is going to help me here.
Hmm.
Boom.
Boom.