good podcasters are deserting me


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Too many dissolving into stupid partisan blather and/or commercials and/or cutting themselves in half to charge for the part that just got interesting because you'd been listening for an hour, that sort of unbearable crap.

And so I got creative. Even though I was too young to get to see him very often, I always thought Steve Allen was the only really good late night host. I enjoyed it when he just sat around and shot the shit with whomever he did, but the whole silliness was so much more organic, human... you know, sincere... and plenty's enough the times when he was going on in the other room as I was sleeping... which is the imperative, after all.

As are dreams.

I've just been down in Mendoworld, with some kind of malevolent hippie kid out in the yard, needing removed, but how, and Peggy and Jim fading into the task of it while I attended some fellow deeply familiar at a mall parking lot over the hill in Ukiah. We were walking together and I was giving him some sage and liberating advice, but he kept interjecting with hopelessly dim half-jokes that were supposed to be evocative of his deep existential misery.

I threw my desk water jar at him to break the invisible barrier and he ran off across the parking lot like his hair was on fire, so I went about returning to the turmoil back on the coast. On the way, there were billboards of the hunks of the two problem girlfriends he'd dispatched with a machete to end his existential crisis his way.

This made me decide to camp out for the night instead of go all the way back to my friends' house. I met Jack Kerouac at the campground canteen, and then again on the dirt road between where I would be camping and his vacation cabin that was just across from it and down the hill. He invited me down.

It was a very old cabin, made of stone and timbers and I wish I could produce an image of it from my dream life for you, but we were all out in the front yard, with a fire pit, preparing to spend the evening out there together. It was near completely dark by then. I had to use his bathroom. He, of course, only had a semi-attached fancy latrine he'd never used.

Jack Kerouac was showing me the utility and helping me figure out what was the general idea of this outhouse that looked like it was some kind of eighteenth century scholar's library. We were vexed to find a bathroom sink sunk into the opening where your butt goes and he decided there had to be a way to do one's business without then having to try to smoosh it through the drain grill of a sink, fer crapsakes, so to speak.

I don't know how it turned out because, of course, I woke up and had to use the bathroom.

Missed my evening under the stars with Jack Kerouac.


pipe up any time....