March 31, 2024 • 34 mins
Margaret reads Gare a story about everyday magic, teen angst, and mixtapes.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Cool Zone Media.
Speaker 2 (00:07):
Book Club Club book Club book Club, and welcome to
cool Zone Media book Club, which is your weekly fiction
podcast of book club that comes from Cool Zone Media.
I'm your host, Marta Kiljoy, and my guest today is
(00:27):
gar Hi Gare.
Speaker 3 (00:28):
Hello.
Speaker 2 (00:29):
How's your Let's pretend like it's Sunday, because that's when
people are listening.
Speaker 4 (00:34):
How's your Sunday going?
Speaker 2 (00:36):
Pretty good? Isn't it Easter coming up soon? You would
think I would be the person in this conversation who
would know.
Speaker 5 (00:43):
Yeah, really, really really betray your Catholic upbringing, Margaret.
Speaker 2 (00:48):
Yeah, it is two weeks from now ish and one
week from when this podcast comes out.
Speaker 5 (00:54):
Okay, so we still you still have time to get
your Easter feast together.
Speaker 3 (00:57):
That's good.
Speaker 5 (00:58):
Yeah, in order to do my weird pagan celebration that
we've decided to call Christianity exciting.
Speaker 6 (01:05):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (01:07):
Hello, dear listener, Margaret was wrong. It is Easter. I sure,
hope you have your little chocolate eggies ready for the celebration.
Eat well, eat well.
Speaker 2 (01:27):
Actually that's a good segue into today's thing, today's story,
because today's.
Speaker 5 (01:35):
Well, I'm not gonna tell you what it's about. It's
a story you'll hear what it's about.
Speaker 4 (01:39):
But wait, wait, wait are stories about things? Some of them?
Speaker 5 (01:43):
I just thought there were things that happen. Yes, Actually,
all fiction is true. That's what the word fiction means.
Speaker 2 (01:51):
Everything possible to be believed is the image is an
image of the truth, said William Blake.
Speaker 3 (01:56):
So true, bestie.
Speaker 4 (01:58):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (01:59):
So today's story is called The Last Beat of My
Heart and it is by Edward Morris.
Speaker 4 (02:04):
It is Edward Morris. Well.
Speaker 2 (02:06):
Edward Morris is a proud pagan who studies Buddhism and
is a queer, disabled retired bouncer from Portland. He's a
twenty eleven nominee for the Pushcart Prize in Literature. He
was nominated for the two thousand and nine Reesling in
the two thousand and five BSFA. His short stories have
been published over one hundred and fifty times and have
made it into Italian, Polish, Finnish, Spanish, Hungarian and even Canadian.
(02:28):
Oh wow, which is the language that you grew up speaking?
Speaker 3 (02:30):
Yeah? That was my native tongue. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (02:32):
He has a novel called Alphabet of Lightning that is
out from Broken Eyebooks. The Last Beat of my Heart
by Edward Morris zero zero zero one zero zero zero
two power. The plug is seated in the wall by
spinly little hands. The juice flows. The tiny piercing green
(02:55):
light comes on. Two young girl's voices, rapped and fascinated
by an old new toy. Do you remember when they
used to use these for real? Before even CDs? As
if I'm only two years older than you, It's eighties music.
Speaker 4 (03:10):
Look on the.
Speaker 2 (03:11):
Label all different, okay, So how do you make it play? Ahem,
let me see sis side a stop auto reverse, crunch, crunch, crunch,
blank tape hiss. Then, just like Heaven The Cure Electra Records,
nineteen eighty seven, I have to put this song first
(03:33):
on the tape. Laurie will know why it was playing
the last time we hung out. It was playing when
she kissed me. That's why it goes first. There are
rules and steps to everything, everything a kiss, leaving your body,
taking a punch, making a mixtape. Laurie's older brother, George,
is a DJ, and he says you can't put more
(03:55):
than one song by the same band on the same
side of the tape. It just doesn't work. I understand that,
just like I understand that I'm stuck here stuck being
a kid, stuck doing this thing that takes forever. There
are parts about this tape and this night that I
don't want to remember, but I can't shut this off,
Like it's all a bad dream and I'm just about
(04:16):
to wake up, except that I never do.
Speaker 4 (04:21):
I never do.
Speaker 2 (04:22):
It's this hot night, August twenty first, and seventh grade
is about to start in a week, and things are happening.
I'm pissed off at Dad. I'm going to sneak out
and go to what's left of the dance anyway, after
i make this mixtape, I already feel like I'm starting
to leave my body again. I think that when you
get out of your body, you have to learn to
(04:42):
either stay out and move around or come back and
make yourself move. There are rules and steps to it.
I want to know them. See, I just learned how
to leave my body for longer than a minute or
a second or whatever. I'm going to try it again soon.
I remember all the words, are enough of the ones
(05:03):
that I took away from Uncle Walter's house on the
last day. I remember how I do I do. I
remember how to take a punch too. I've had the
practice you have to learn how to hit, back, block, fall,
or hide. Even when a body thinks it can't, the
mind finds a way. It's like that anytime something awful
(05:25):
happens very fast, I have a lot of time to
think until until until, oh God, I'm done copying the
last song on this tape, and Dad's passed out, and
I can sneak out to the dance. Chris Clark from
down the street is bringing this giant bottle of homemade
wine he ganged from his dad. And the last time
I went to a dance, the coolest girl I know
(05:45):
kissed me. This time, I'm bringing the tape just in
case Laurie's there. Anything can happen when I'm done, When
the tape is done, when I'm Saturday Night a Holocaust.
Dead Kennedy's Alternative Tentacles nineteen eighty two, which is a
thing that you can buy because it's an album, much
like the things that you can buy that we advertise,
(06:08):
which also bear the complexity of being anti capitalists like
the Dead Kennedys and yet making their living.
Speaker 4 (06:16):
Through the sale of products.
Speaker 2 (06:18):
Here's ads, and we're bec done. It's still now, It's
still then. I'm still right here wanting something I can
(06:40):
never have, dreaming the real world again where it is
some year I don't even want to hear. I don't
want to hear it. Don't want, don't, don't. Decay has
its rules and steps too. I don't get played much anymore.
I haven't. I can't. I can't remember Laurie's face. I can,
(07:00):
I can. I have no idea if I remember it right.
But I remember Laurie's mouth, like raindrops and strawberries, the
way she put her hands in my hair and looked
into my eyes just like her, like nobody and nothing
else but her, which was the only way I ever
wanted her to look in my eyes. I remember her face.
I think I have to.
Speaker 4 (07:18):
Believe that it is Laurie's face.
Speaker 2 (07:21):
I have no idea where I'll go when I finally go,
when the ribbon on this tape breaks, or its iron
oxide emulsion eventually cycles down to nothing. I was almost
done learning how to leave my body in dreams and
sometimes awake when the awful thing happened, the one I
don't want to remember. I was almost done learning to
(07:41):
say those words that Uncle Walter was saying that one
day when I walked in on him in the back
room of his garage where the kids weren't supposed to
go when we were over to visit, back when I
was only eleven and there were still visits. I heard
Uncle Walter saying those words when I saw him walk
up out of his body. He was chanting them in
his throat like he could sing in three different tones.
(08:04):
But Uncle Walter wasn't singing really, He was sort of
shaping the notes where his body was because his essence was.
At the time, I lost my balance and stumbled where
I was standing and trying to be quiet, cracking the
back of my head on the doorframe. Uncle Walter's essence
was walking up out of his body where he sat
(08:26):
in that broken backed, farty, old lazy boy of his
in some kind of strange posture. Then his essence stopped
walking up out of him. What happened wasn't pretty. Uncle
Walter ended the process. He was startled I had startled him.
We exchanged some words of our own then Uncle Walter
(08:46):
and me, not very nice ones. He cut me out
of his life until he wrote that letter. We were
both horrified. We should have calmed down. Later on, by myself,
I parroted those initial words I heard Uncle Walter say
to make himself walk up out of his body. I
said them as well as I could in the dark
in my own room. Later, I could feel the words
(09:09):
in the back of my throat. It felt like swallowing
a bee. I needed to sit down so I could
stand up out of myself and climb the spiderweb ladder.
The silver cord thing that came up out of my
head and pulled me to my feet, making me look
toward the ceiling and sing more of what weren't quite words.
(09:29):
I could sense that there was a world on the
other end of that silver cord, maybe even one with
lions and wardrobes and scary sorceress queens, giants and singing
harps and magic beans, anything I could imagine. Maybe I
tried and tried to get up out of here. Maybe
I never wanted to come back, but couldn't figure out
how to cut.
Speaker 4 (09:48):
Off and float away. Not in time, Not in time.
Speaker 2 (09:53):
I could do it in school if I really thought
about it for a whole minutes, pretend like I was sleeping,
and then go out through the top of my head
along the ceiling towards the clean, bright light that whispered, come,
but I couldn't yet I was still alive. It wasn't
time Rabbit over you the damned Big Beat Records, nineteen
(10:14):
eighty three. I've been having better luck leaving my body
right before I lay down to sleep while saying those
weird words I somehow knew in my bones to be
Scott's Gaelic, the ones I heard when I walked in
on what I shouldn't have seen. Then there were the
nasty words we had, and the first ones that good
old Walter ever said on the subject shortly before that,
(10:37):
when he came back into himself.
Speaker 4 (10:40):
Yeah, I'll teach you to do that.
Speaker 2 (10:42):
When your balls drop, Uncle Walter told me when I
walked in on him when he got done being startled.
But his dark eyes were still doing that weird thing
they did sometimes. The lights were starting to flicker in
that room, the way that lights always did around Uncle
Walter when he got upset. They did when he walked
back into his body, just before he spoke. First, I
(11:04):
never asked the question that immediately preceded his actual comment.
Uncle Walter pulled the question straight from my head. I
felt him do it, and that made me remember something
even earlier, the way the candles flickered in the garage.
When I was six and I walked in on Uncle
Walter and Dad shouting at each other. There was some
(11:24):
kind of a circle drawn on the concrete, half finished.
It didn't look like paint. They looked like they were
going to fight. I remember the nasty words that they
had that day, too. I remember all the nasty words
everyone Dad, or Uncle Walter or anyone else ever said.
I have to strange, remember Laurie's face, but I remember
all those nasty words. Dad never talked to Uncle Walter
(11:48):
again after I was eleven, but I could pick who
to listen to, one or neither. I can't be in
touch too much. Uncle Walter wrote in that one weird
letter not long later, it would break a lot of words,
whatever the hell that meant, and cause a lot of
problems between me and your dad that I would never
ever be able to solve. Not like there aren't enough
(12:09):
of those anyway. I'm sorry, have a good life, Walter.
I brought this on myself now I have forever to
be sorry. But we don't talk about things like that
in this house, not until this tape is done. Then
maybe we will because I'm done. I was almost done.
It's almost done. I'm almost done rubber ring the Smiths
(12:33):
Sire nineteen eighty seven. And you know what else is problematic,
like the Smiths.
Speaker 5 (12:40):
The advertisements that you may or may not hear on
this podcast.
Speaker 2 (12:44):
We've been having some bad ones lately, and we've been
working to get them out of here. But in general,
if you think to yourself, do Margaret and Garrison support
you becoming a jailer? Think I can speak for both
of us when I say the answer is yes, yeah,
you could probably refer to our body of work.
Speaker 3 (13:06):
And come to that conclusion yourself.
Speaker 4 (13:08):
Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 2 (13:10):
And you know, so here the other ads that are
hopefully not for the state of Israel or becoming a jailer.
Speaker 4 (13:21):
Hopefully those have been excised by.
Speaker 6 (13:23):
Now and we're back.
Speaker 2 (13:40):
I am an endlessly repeating placeholder on the skin of
this emulsion that decays down to nothing even now. Lodged
in the hot, dusty left hand cassette deck of a
little Sears component stereo I bought with lawnmowing money in
eighty nine.
Speaker 3 (13:54):
That was it last year.
Speaker 2 (13:57):
It has a CD deck in the top, but I
don't have any CDs just a whole bunch of these
mixtapes I started making for my big sister Hannah's old
records before Dad burned half of them for having skulls
and stuff on them and band names like Suicidal Tendencies
or the Butthole Surfers nineteen eighty nine. Last year, when
everything but Dad made sense, I can tell where the
(14:20):
skip is, the little leader between each song. Just once
I got stuck, stuck, stuck, and now the smiths are
telling me not to forget the songs that saved my life.
I was wearing George's big DJ headphones when I snaked
the extra long cord fifty feet through the room and
out onto the roof to go smoke a cigarette. That time,
(14:42):
I didn't care whether Dad smelled it. You could damn
well come up and yank me down. Mom was on
the back porch twenty feet below me. I was more
worried about her. She always went back there and did
a lot of wash or dishes or something to get away,
to get her head away. I remember Walter yelling at
Dad in his garage when I was six, don't you
(15:05):
hurt my sister, you lousy drunk. But back then I
couldn't put two and two together and get anything. I
was six six six. All of a sudden, the back
door banged, and Mom was screaming up at me, Get downstairs,
get downstairs.
Speaker 4 (15:21):
And I saw.
Speaker 2 (15:23):
Hallelujah Leonard Cohen, Columbia, nineteen eighty four. I saw the
column of fire lick up the side of the back porch,
the flamethrower belch from the dryer vent. I had time
to be fascinated, just time. I opened my mouth to scream,
and I didn't even think about what I was screaming.
And I was screaming the words, those words, those sketchy
(15:44):
Uncle Walter words at the top of my lungs. I
saw Mom jump back a bit and make the sign
of the cross. And then those headphones had a long cord.
I mentioned that not silver, but curly plastic coated copper wire.
It led back in the window to the tape deck.
When the awful thing happened, I remember the song, the
(16:05):
one I was copying, The last Beat of My Heart.
Susie and the Banshees, Polydor Records, nineteen eighty eight.
Speaker 4 (16:14):
Ah God.
Speaker 2 (16:15):
Susie's operatic voice starts out slow and goes up up
up as my skin goes up, up, up, and my
heart just keeps going faster, faster, faster, And to the
last beat is immolation. The last beat is twenty nineteen,
eighteen seventeen. Click Crunch, crunch, crunch, crunch, auto reverse play.
(16:39):
Sometimes I dream like now or the other dream I
had where powers Berg FD put my tape deck in
a bin with a bunch of stuff to take to
the Goodwill. I may be there still, but dreams decay.
Part of me knows that, just like part of me
knows it was a bad idea to go out that way,
whether I was right or not. When I was only
(17:00):
halfway through making this mixtape for LORI no reason payback
for that kiss. It was just after dinner. The old
man popped me in the mouth for spiking at my mohawk.
Then he called my music satanic. I said what I said,
and then Mom goes, don't use Dad's logic against him, honey,
it bruises his ego. And then he hit or a
(17:21):
lick too. And then that was an hour or so ago.
It's almost seven. I'm away to the roof of smoke.
Just as soon as I finish, I'll leave another tape
in maybe the Misfits or gg Allen, just to give
Dad nightmares when this song is done. Those tapes are
in the file cabinet where I keep my smokes, where
(17:42):
Dad doesn't know. The drawer goes all the way back.
And there are other things, the ones I started making
the words of my own that you won't find on
any backwards records because the witches in our family never
worshiped Satan.
Speaker 4 (17:53):
Dad then crack.
Speaker 2 (17:56):
I remember his fist connecting with my mouth, flattening my
lips to my teeth, knocking me sideways and down. I remember,
I remember the blood of a newly wakened witch spilling
an anger on that floor, and the curse I shrieked
at my father, the curse that comes back to me
one thousandfold as I stop the world and melt, and
(18:16):
the first song comes on again, and I wake into
the hot August dream a little while longer, restless and
wanting to be out the door, waiting to finish this
mixtape and bring it down to the school dance. That night,
Dad accused me of talking to Uncle Walter behind his back.
I wish Uncle Walter and I would have talked a
(18:36):
good bit more that's the end of the story.
Speaker 3 (18:41):
I have a one main question.
Speaker 5 (18:43):
Okay, what's a tape deck?
Speaker 4 (18:51):
Uh?
Speaker 2 (18:52):
When I was a kid, there was a cartoon called
Dark Wing Duck and one of the jokes, the only
joke I remember from this pretty mid car tune. YEA
was the younger kid being like records are those like
big CDs? And I remember thinking, I'm in like fourth
or fifth grade. I remember thinking it's a pretty bad joke.
Speaker 5 (19:14):
Wow, wow, Margaret, I'm sorry, my sense of humor is
worse than your fourth grade sense of humor. That's right,
I'm attempting to say. I just I think it's really fast.
I love the like the like what's a fax machine jokes?
You know?
Speaker 3 (19:28):
Yeah?
Speaker 4 (19:28):
Yeah, yeah, I actually really like them.
Speaker 5 (19:31):
I briefly had a tape deck, but I transitioned to
CDs pretty soon. Yeah, but I do remember some old,
some old it's probably some kind of like weird like
Christian music tapes that I had.
Speaker 3 (19:46):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (19:47):
My first tape was Smashing Pumpkins Siamese Dream that my
sister dubbed for me, with a bunch of ram on
the other side and some new water.
Speaker 3 (19:56):
Okay, well it's like two out of three.
Speaker 4 (19:58):
Yeah, no.
Speaker 2 (19:59):
Yeah, that's I'm not a big Smashing Pumpkins fan anymore.
But new order thumbs.
Speaker 3 (20:04):
Oh yeah yeah.
Speaker 2 (20:05):
And the what was the first like CD you bought?
Speaker 5 (20:12):
Oh, this is probably gonna be embarrassing. It might have
been in an Owl City CD, which is which is
quite embarrassing.
Speaker 4 (20:22):
Okay.
Speaker 2 (20:22):
So the reason that like old people like to think
that young people don't know anything about the past is
that old people don't know anything about the present or
the recent past.
Speaker 5 (20:30):
I have no idea who al City is. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
you actually did know what a tape deck was. Yeah,
And and I knew all but one of one of
the bands in the story, which I'm which I'm actually
pleasantly surprised by.
Speaker 4 (20:42):
Hell yeah, no, owl.
Speaker 3 (20:43):
City was like a like.
Speaker 5 (20:45):
A Christian electronic like sound producer. Oh okay, the guy
actually created most of the sounds for like the fifth
generation of the iPhone. So he both made music, which
some of which is like okay, but like like Christian Moby,
I don't I don't know what Moby is. Maybe, oh,
interested add that to my list?
Speaker 4 (21:04):
Okay, uh self?
Speaker 5 (21:06):
Right? Just Vegan who is almost almost radical, who made
a lot of electronic music in the nineties. It kind
of sounds like the postal Service, but slightly more electronic
and slightly worse. That's kind of that's kind of owl
City in my mind.
Speaker 2 (21:22):
Okay, I like the postal Service. I also like the
post I don't know if I like the worst version,
but see that's the thing, right, Yeah, I found that
very fun. It is It is definitely always startling once
you get sent back into your body by another like
corporeal form entering the room that you're traveling from.
Speaker 5 (21:42):
Yeah, that always that always does take a sec to adjust.
Like I can totally handle like some like grotesque like
earth spirit showing up, but if another like actual human
being walks in, that's like incredibly jarring.
Speaker 4 (21:57):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (21:57):
I like this story because it's it's a magic set
in the real world story that feels like real, like
it feels like yeah, yeah, absolutely casting fireballs or whatever.
He's no, this is this is what like actual like
occult practice looks like. Yeah, and then just talking about
(22:18):
how like you know, there's the whole genre is not
the right word, but maybe trope of like people with
shitty parents, especially dads, who need to find ways to escape,
and they escape into their music, right and I like
the idea of taking that literally and seeing what it
looks like. I love that the silver chord, you know,
(22:39):
the headphones with their cord is the same as like
the silver chord that allows you to move in the
astral plane.
Speaker 4 (22:46):
I just I loved that.
Speaker 3 (22:47):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (22:48):
Yeah, and I also am a sucker for this like
generational thing that has come down through time but is
like not wanted the modern context, you know, the like
the weird Scott's Gaelic magic or whatever that they're referring to.
Speaker 5 (23:06):
Yeah, and it definitely has like like a like an
American Gothic kind of feel like doing magic and like
an old like basement garage as opposed to like doing
it in like a temple or like cathedral, and like
the like the like the general like.
Speaker 3 (23:19):
Western esoteric tradition. Yeah, where you have like robes and.
Speaker 5 (23:23):
You're doing like ceremonial stuff versus like you're drawing chalk
circles and like the basement.
Speaker 2 (23:29):
Yeah, and laying on a lazy boy in order to
be comfy while you leave your body.
Speaker 5 (23:34):
Yeah, there's like there's like a dryer and like washing
machine in the background 'or like that's Yeah, I kind
of enjoy that style of like Gothic American combined with
this like very like low fi occult current, which is
honestly pretty well reflected in the uh in the mixtape uh.
Speaker 3 (23:52):
He and all of the artists mentioned.
Speaker 2 (23:54):
Yeah, it's also funny. I usually don't like stories where
I'm not entirely sure what's happening, Like.
Speaker 5 (24:01):
I actually who interesting. I love stories that I don't
know what's happening.
Speaker 2 (24:07):
Okay, and for me, like I feel like often I
think sometimes it's just and is not the case. I
really like the way that I don't totally know what
happened in this story. I've read it several times, right sure,
And I am not entirely certain whether this is the
voice that is coming from the mixtape. Like I'm not
(24:27):
certain whether the framing story of the two girls who
find an old tape, whether they're like hearing this as
an audio narration between songs. I also don't know whether
like the idea is that the protagonist has died and
then like is now sort of living in this tape
inasmuch as they're living anywhere, Like I don't quite know,
(24:49):
and I actually like that I don't know, and I usually.
Speaker 5 (24:52):
Don't I definitely love stuff where it has that level
of like it has the level of ambiguity that I
experienced my actual life.
Speaker 3 (24:59):
Yeah, I like when that happens, when.
Speaker 5 (25:01):
I'm like, I'm not sure what the voices in my
head that I'm talking to, Like, where do they come from?
Speaker 3 (25:06):
Is that? Is that just me?
Speaker 5 (25:08):
I really appreciate that sort of thing, And like, yeah,
the the notion that you can like continue to live
in some way through a recording that gets played back, Yeah,
I definitely find to be a very fun concept and
very like evocative of like the whole point of making
art as well. It's like, is our just this really
(25:28):
like almost sad attempt at immortality?
Speaker 3 (25:32):
Yeah, but no, I definitely enjoy.
Speaker 5 (25:36):
When I have I don't have like a firm ground
underneath me, because I feel like the ground we experience,
I think people assume is slightly more firm than what
it actually may be.
Speaker 2 (25:50):
I think that that was like a big part of
the growing up process for me was learning that the
the ground under our feet is not as firm as
as we thought, and like realizing like once you're like, oh,
there isn't really a neurotypical you know, yeah, yeah, yeah,
like and the more you realize that, you're like, oh,
everyone is just different levels of like higher low functioning crazy,
(26:10):
Like it's useful.
Speaker 5 (26:12):
And all the stuff they're talking about in the story
of like with with their mention of like dreams and
waking up from dreams and the slow intermeshing of dream
and wakefulness.
Speaker 3 (26:25):
And I think a lot of these concepts for young.
Speaker 5 (26:27):
People specifically, are easier to envision via dreams, Like it's
hard to figure out where like the bottom of a
dream is, like how like how far can you keep going?
Sometimes you think, oh, this is all right, this is
just I'm awake, I'm doing going through my tasks, and
then boom, you're totally somewhere else.
Speaker 3 (26:44):
You're like, oh, that was actually a dream.
Speaker 5 (26:46):
Yeah, and you just see like this like almost like
eternal descent and how there's certain ideas of that that
are absolutely reflected in our kind of everyday waking existence
as well.
Speaker 4 (26:58):
Yeah, yeah, no, I.
Speaker 2 (27:02):
Love all this stuff and it actually ties into I'm
gonna read the notes from the author from Edward Morris
that he sent me. He said about the story one,
it ends with the stories for Jackie Kessler and the
ties that bind, and then the notes about the stories
I could rant for a week. It's of course mostly
drawn from life, but it's also an homage to the
(27:22):
great writer who's work crossed my axis at the same time,
Jackie Kessler and her horrifying the ties that bind. There's
a two thousand and six story her narrator didn't get
stuck on a mixtape. She got her face eaten off
by Jack Russell. It was more of a mean girl's scenario,
but it hit me so hard I had to try
my own. I have enough other things to rant about
the subject matter for a full blown interview, trying to
keep this concise. That was a basically he was like,
(27:48):
there's so much to it that I kind of can't
get into it.
Speaker 3 (27:51):
Yeah, No, I think that I think.
Speaker 5 (27:55):
Underlines some of what we were talking about a little
bit with yeah, like the uh, how you can like
capture the human form within like linear experiences of art yea,
even though I would say it's it's hard to usually
view the human form in that fashion because it is
both a linear experience but now it also exists independent
(28:16):
of linear time, Like it is this this thing from before,
but now it could be played in the future and
it's still there in the future, it's still repeating that
same moment.
Speaker 3 (28:24):
Yeah, I don't know.
Speaker 5 (28:26):
I think the day that this comes out, I'll be
investigating ghosts at the Oregon Ghost Conference. And there's certainly
some people that view ghosts in a similar way. They
view ghosts as like a moment of a person caught
in time that keeps replaying the same action over and
over again. They're not really like even like interactable, but
(28:47):
it's just it's just replaying this thing that like imprinted onto.
Like I don't quite know how tape decks work, but
I assume if you have like two tapes in a
little bit of the first one can get pushed into
the second one if it like is done in directly.
Possibly I'm totally like constructing a terrible metaphor, but as
if like a person going through a specific motion was
(29:11):
so strong or impactful to them that it gets imprinted
on the next person who's going to.
Speaker 3 (29:15):
Enter into this space as well.
Speaker 5 (29:17):
Right, And there's certainly people that view ghosts in that framework,
which I find to be a really interesting way to
think about that concept.
Speaker 2 (29:26):
I like that I have ever told you my theory
on ghosts. I don't think so My theory on ghosts
is that I don't believe in ghosts, but it's a
conscious choice because of the.
Speaker 5 (29:36):
Way that I live, Like, I mean, that's more or
less my view on ghosts generally.
Speaker 2 (29:42):
Yeah, yeah, because I'm like, at some point I was like,
I you know, I was like, I live in a
van by myself, sleeping in the middle of the woods.
And then later I was like, now I'm in a
cabin in the middle of the woods, and now I'm
in a house in the middle of woods.
Speaker 5 (29:54):
It just doesn't do me any good believe that, like,
you know, totally something to be around that has mean,
that's that's kind of some more of my like chasmetic background.
Speaker 2 (30:03):
But yes, absolutely, yeah, because I mean, and that doesn't
make me right or wrong.
Speaker 4 (30:07):
It just makes it like it's the way that I.
Speaker 3 (30:09):
Need to cope.
Speaker 5 (30:10):
Believing a ghost would just more or less be like
an inconvenience. They start of how the human mind works. Yeah,
sometimes it's easier just be like, nah, I'm just I'm
just not going to deal with that right now. Yeah,
Like I've I've totally thought about which beliefs I currently
hold that would that I would change if I were
to move into like an isolated forested area. Yeah, of
(30:32):
course I would change certain beliefs about how reality works.
Speaker 4 (30:35):
Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 2 (30:38):
There used to be, like, you know, I used to
live in this this off grid barn and guests would
stay in the other room in the barn, and they
would like report ghost sightings in this barn. And so
it came up at a meeting people were like, oh,
we should talk about the ghost in the barn. And
I was the only one who lived in the barn
full time. So I was like, there is no ghost
in the barn on the agenda. And they were like,
(30:59):
why are being so dismissed, And I was like, because
I live here alone.
Speaker 5 (31:03):
Like I mean, that is kind of why I appreciate
the role of like the city magician. Because you're surrounded
by people, you have a little bit more flexibility to
allow certain things into your like orbit of being and
like your orbit of experience. But I absolutely like respect
(31:25):
the kind of witches and mystics that like take the
hermit path and and like go out and I can
totally see myself doing that at some point, Like I
totally respect the log Lady journey, yeah, because yeah, I
think that is an incredibly valuable method of kind of
experienced reality, and I think it can it can have
(31:47):
you also be much closer to certain other types of
experiences than in the hustle and bustle and constant like
consciousness and light that is just perforating human cities.
Speaker 4 (31:59):
Yeah, I think they do.
Speaker 2 (32:00):
Both have really specific advantages for like ways of finding wisdom,
you know, I think that. Yeah, But before we get
totally off track, we should probably and end this particular episode,
and to end it with plugs from Edward Morris. Edward
Morris says broken Eyebooks dot Com is a wonderful small
press that needs everyone's help. They run Gwendolen Kisseday, they
(32:23):
run Matthew Bartlett, and they gave my highly experimental alphabet
of Lightning a hope. Alphabet of Lightning is the beginning
of a novel series called There Was a Crooked Man,
which is about as long as Dies the Fire or
maybe Song of Ice and Fire, which are two of
my favorite book series. So that was promising. I haven't
read this yet. This story was the first thing I
(32:44):
read by Edward Morris, but I really liked it, so
I'm going to look out more. Yeah, it is a challenged, difficult,
challenging and tremendously important work that took me three decades
to nail, and all my friends who have read it
deliriously love it. So everyone should check out Alphabet of Lightning.
And if they want to check out you and your
work and they're not currently listening to that, it could
(33:05):
happen here feed, but instead listening to my feed, where
can they find you?
Speaker 5 (33:10):
Well, you can find me only it could have it
here feed. I recently put together an update on the
situation in Atlanta, Georgia ree Copcity. I tried to summarize
the past six months of events in like forty five minutes,
so that was a very very interesting task. And then
also I'm I'm You can probably check out my my
(33:31):
feed on Twitter dot com at Hungry Bowtie for some
timely coverage of the Oregon Ghost Conference, which will eventually
turn into some sort of episode, but not not until
I have time to process the experience. The everyone should
check out the Atlanta update. It's a it's a very
good episode.
Speaker 2 (33:52):
And as for me, if you're not listening to this
on the Cool People Did Cool Stuff Feed, I have
a podcast It's called Cool People Did Cool Stuff it
is about cool people who did cool stuff. And also
my most recent substack post is called Afraid of the
Woman in the Mirror and it is about transness and monstrosity.
Speaker 3 (34:10):
And about becoming Blenny Mary.
Speaker 2 (34:13):
And we'll see you all next week.
Speaker 3 (34:16):
It Could Happen here as a production of cool Zone Media.
Speaker 5 (34:19):
For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
Coolzonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can
find sources for It Could Happen Here, updated monthly at
Coolzonmedia dot com slash sources.
Speaker 4 (34:33):
Thanks for listening.
Cool Zone Media.
Speaker 2 (00:07):
Book Club Club book Club book Club, and welcome to
cool Zone Media book Club, which is your weekly fiction
podcast of book club that comes from Cool Zone Media.
I'm your host, Marta Kiljoy, and my guest today is
(00:27):
gar Hi Gare.
Speaker 3 (00:28):
Hello.
Speaker 2 (00:29):
How's your Let's pretend like it's Sunday, because that's when
people are listening.
Speaker 4 (00:34):
How's your Sunday going?
Speaker 2 (00:36):
Pretty good? Isn't it Easter coming up soon? You would
think I would be the person in this conversation who
would know.
Speaker 5 (00:43):
Yeah, really, really really betray your Catholic upbringing, Margaret.
Speaker 2 (00:48):
Yeah, it is two weeks from now ish and one
week from when this podcast comes out.
Speaker 5 (00:54):
Okay, so we still you still have time to get
your Easter feast together.
Speaker 3 (00:57):
That's good.
Speaker 5 (00:58):
Yeah, in order to do my weird pagan celebration that
we've decided to call Christianity exciting.
Speaker 6 (01:05):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (01:07):
Hello, dear listener, Margaret was wrong. It is Easter. I sure,
hope you have your little chocolate eggies ready for the celebration.
Eat well, eat well.
Speaker 2 (01:27):
Actually that's a good segue into today's thing, today's story,
because today's.
Speaker 5 (01:35):
Well, I'm not gonna tell you what it's about. It's
a story you'll hear what it's about.
Speaker 4 (01:39):
But wait, wait, wait are stories about things? Some of them?
Speaker 5 (01:43):
I just thought there were things that happen. Yes, Actually,
all fiction is true. That's what the word fiction means.
Speaker 2 (01:51):
Everything possible to be believed is the image is an
image of the truth, said William Blake.
Speaker 3 (01:56):
So true, bestie.
Speaker 4 (01:58):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (01:59):
So today's story is called The Last Beat of My
Heart and it is by Edward Morris.
Speaker 4 (02:04):
It is Edward Morris. Well.
Speaker 2 (02:06):
Edward Morris is a proud pagan who studies Buddhism and
is a queer, disabled retired bouncer from Portland. He's a
twenty eleven nominee for the Pushcart Prize in Literature. He
was nominated for the two thousand and nine Reesling in
the two thousand and five BSFA. His short stories have
been published over one hundred and fifty times and have
made it into Italian, Polish, Finnish, Spanish, Hungarian and even Canadian.
(02:28):
Oh wow, which is the language that you grew up speaking?
Speaker 3 (02:30):
Yeah? That was my native tongue. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (02:32):
He has a novel called Alphabet of Lightning that is
out from Broken Eyebooks. The Last Beat of my Heart
by Edward Morris zero zero zero one zero zero zero
two power. The plug is seated in the wall by
spinly little hands. The juice flows. The tiny piercing green
(02:55):
light comes on. Two young girl's voices, rapped and fascinated
by an old new toy. Do you remember when they
used to use these for real? Before even CDs? As
if I'm only two years older than you, It's eighties music.
Speaker 4 (03:10):
Look on the.
Speaker 2 (03:11):
Label all different, okay, So how do you make it play? Ahem,
let me see sis side a stop auto reverse, crunch, crunch, crunch,
blank tape hiss. Then, just like Heaven The Cure Electra Records,
nineteen eighty seven, I have to put this song first
(03:33):
on the tape. Laurie will know why it was playing
the last time we hung out. It was playing when
she kissed me. That's why it goes first. There are
rules and steps to everything, everything a kiss, leaving your body,
taking a punch, making a mixtape. Laurie's older brother, George,
is a DJ, and he says you can't put more
(03:55):
than one song by the same band on the same
side of the tape. It just doesn't work. I understand that,
just like I understand that I'm stuck here stuck being
a kid, stuck doing this thing that takes forever. There
are parts about this tape and this night that I
don't want to remember, but I can't shut this off,
Like it's all a bad dream and I'm just about
(04:16):
to wake up, except that I never do.
Speaker 4 (04:21):
I never do.
Speaker 2 (04:22):
It's this hot night, August twenty first, and seventh grade
is about to start in a week, and things are happening.
I'm pissed off at Dad. I'm going to sneak out
and go to what's left of the dance anyway, after
i make this mixtape, I already feel like I'm starting
to leave my body again. I think that when you
get out of your body, you have to learn to
(04:42):
either stay out and move around or come back and
make yourself move. There are rules and steps to it.
I want to know them. See, I just learned how
to leave my body for longer than a minute or
a second or whatever. I'm going to try it again soon.
I remember all the words, are enough of the ones
(05:03):
that I took away from Uncle Walter's house on the
last day. I remember how I do I do. I
remember how to take a punch too. I've had the
practice you have to learn how to hit, back, block, fall,
or hide. Even when a body thinks it can't, the
mind finds a way. It's like that anytime something awful
(05:25):
happens very fast, I have a lot of time to
think until until until, oh God, I'm done copying the
last song on this tape, and Dad's passed out, and
I can sneak out to the dance. Chris Clark from
down the street is bringing this giant bottle of homemade
wine he ganged from his dad. And the last time
I went to a dance, the coolest girl I know
(05:45):
kissed me. This time, I'm bringing the tape just in
case Laurie's there. Anything can happen when I'm done, When
the tape is done, when I'm Saturday Night a Holocaust.
Dead Kennedy's Alternative Tentacles nineteen eighty two, which is a
thing that you can buy because it's an album, much
like the things that you can buy that we advertise,
(06:08):
which also bear the complexity of being anti capitalists like
the Dead Kennedys and yet making their living.
Speaker 4 (06:16):
Through the sale of products.
Speaker 2 (06:18):
Here's ads, and we're bec done. It's still now, It's
still then. I'm still right here wanting something I can
(06:40):
never have, dreaming the real world again where it is
some year I don't even want to hear. I don't
want to hear it. Don't want, don't, don't. Decay has
its rules and steps too. I don't get played much anymore.
I haven't. I can't. I can't remember Laurie's face. I can,
(07:00):
I can. I have no idea if I remember it right.
But I remember Laurie's mouth, like raindrops and strawberries, the
way she put her hands in my hair and looked
into my eyes just like her, like nobody and nothing
else but her, which was the only way I ever
wanted her to look in my eyes. I remember her face.
I think I have to.
Speaker 4 (07:18):
Believe that it is Laurie's face.
Speaker 2 (07:21):
I have no idea where I'll go when I finally go,
when the ribbon on this tape breaks, or its iron
oxide emulsion eventually cycles down to nothing. I was almost
done learning how to leave my body in dreams and
sometimes awake when the awful thing happened, the one I
don't want to remember. I was almost done learning to
(07:41):
say those words that Uncle Walter was saying that one
day when I walked in on him in the back
room of his garage where the kids weren't supposed to
go when we were over to visit, back when I
was only eleven and there were still visits. I heard
Uncle Walter saying those words when I saw him walk
up out of his body. He was chanting them in
his throat like he could sing in three different tones.
(08:04):
But Uncle Walter wasn't singing really, He was sort of
shaping the notes where his body was because his essence was.
At the time, I lost my balance and stumbled where
I was standing and trying to be quiet, cracking the
back of my head on the doorframe. Uncle Walter's essence
was walking up out of his body where he sat
(08:26):
in that broken backed, farty, old lazy boy of his
in some kind of strange posture. Then his essence stopped
walking up out of him. What happened wasn't pretty. Uncle
Walter ended the process. He was startled I had startled him.
We exchanged some words of our own then Uncle Walter
(08:46):
and me, not very nice ones. He cut me out
of his life until he wrote that letter. We were
both horrified. We should have calmed down. Later on, by myself,
I parroted those initial words I heard Uncle Walter say
to make himself walk up out of his body. I
said them as well as I could in the dark
in my own room. Later, I could feel the words
(09:09):
in the back of my throat. It felt like swallowing
a bee. I needed to sit down so I could
stand up out of myself and climb the spiderweb ladder.
The silver cord thing that came up out of my
head and pulled me to my feet, making me look
toward the ceiling and sing more of what weren't quite words.
(09:29):
I could sense that there was a world on the
other end of that silver cord, maybe even one with
lions and wardrobes and scary sorceress queens, giants and singing
harps and magic beans, anything I could imagine. Maybe I
tried and tried to get up out of here. Maybe
I never wanted to come back, but couldn't figure out
how to cut.
Speaker 4 (09:48):
Off and float away. Not in time, Not in time.
Speaker 2 (09:53):
I could do it in school if I really thought
about it for a whole minutes, pretend like I was sleeping,
and then go out through the top of my head
along the ceiling towards the clean, bright light that whispered, come,
but I couldn't yet I was still alive. It wasn't
time Rabbit over you the damned Big Beat Records, nineteen
(10:14):
eighty three. I've been having better luck leaving my body
right before I lay down to sleep while saying those
weird words I somehow knew in my bones to be
Scott's Gaelic, the ones I heard when I walked in
on what I shouldn't have seen. Then there were the
nasty words we had, and the first ones that good
old Walter ever said on the subject shortly before that,
(10:37):
when he came back into himself.
Speaker 4 (10:40):
Yeah, I'll teach you to do that.
Speaker 2 (10:42):
When your balls drop, Uncle Walter told me when I
walked in on him when he got done being startled.
But his dark eyes were still doing that weird thing
they did sometimes. The lights were starting to flicker in
that room, the way that lights always did around Uncle
Walter when he got upset. They did when he walked
back into his body, just before he spoke. First, I
(11:04):
never asked the question that immediately preceded his actual comment.
Uncle Walter pulled the question straight from my head. I
felt him do it, and that made me remember something
even earlier, the way the candles flickered in the garage.
When I was six and I walked in on Uncle
Walter and Dad shouting at each other. There was some
(11:24):
kind of a circle drawn on the concrete, half finished.
It didn't look like paint. They looked like they were
going to fight. I remember the nasty words that they
had that day, too. I remember all the nasty words
everyone Dad, or Uncle Walter or anyone else ever said.
I have to strange, remember Laurie's face, but I remember
all those nasty words. Dad never talked to Uncle Walter
(11:48):
again after I was eleven, but I could pick who
to listen to, one or neither. I can't be in
touch too much. Uncle Walter wrote in that one weird
letter not long later, it would break a lot of words,
whatever the hell that meant, and cause a lot of
problems between me and your dad that I would never
ever be able to solve. Not like there aren't enough
(12:09):
of those anyway. I'm sorry, have a good life, Walter.
I brought this on myself now I have forever to
be sorry. But we don't talk about things like that
in this house, not until this tape is done. Then
maybe we will because I'm done. I was almost done.
It's almost done. I'm almost done rubber ring the Smiths
(12:33):
Sire nineteen eighty seven. And you know what else is problematic,
like the Smiths.
Speaker 5 (12:40):
The advertisements that you may or may not hear on
this podcast.
Speaker 2 (12:44):
We've been having some bad ones lately, and we've been
working to get them out of here. But in general,
if you think to yourself, do Margaret and Garrison support
you becoming a jailer? Think I can speak for both
of us when I say the answer is yes, yeah,
you could probably refer to our body of work.
Speaker 3 (13:06):
And come to that conclusion yourself.
Speaker 4 (13:08):
Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 2 (13:10):
And you know, so here the other ads that are
hopefully not for the state of Israel or becoming a jailer.
Speaker 4 (13:21):
Hopefully those have been excised by.
Speaker 6 (13:23):
Now and we're back.
Speaker 2 (13:40):
I am an endlessly repeating placeholder on the skin of
this emulsion that decays down to nothing even now. Lodged
in the hot, dusty left hand cassette deck of a
little Sears component stereo I bought with lawnmowing money in
eighty nine.
Speaker 3 (13:54):
That was it last year.
Speaker 2 (13:57):
It has a CD deck in the top, but I
don't have any CDs just a whole bunch of these
mixtapes I started making for my big sister Hannah's old
records before Dad burned half of them for having skulls
and stuff on them and band names like Suicidal Tendencies
or the Butthole Surfers nineteen eighty nine. Last year, when
everything but Dad made sense, I can tell where the
(14:20):
skip is, the little leader between each song. Just once
I got stuck, stuck, stuck, and now the smiths are
telling me not to forget the songs that saved my life.
I was wearing George's big DJ headphones when I snaked
the extra long cord fifty feet through the room and
out onto the roof to go smoke a cigarette. That time,
(14:42):
I didn't care whether Dad smelled it. You could damn
well come up and yank me down. Mom was on
the back porch twenty feet below me. I was more
worried about her. She always went back there and did
a lot of wash or dishes or something to get away,
to get her head away. I remember Walter yelling at
Dad in his garage when I was six, don't you
(15:05):
hurt my sister, you lousy drunk. But back then I
couldn't put two and two together and get anything. I
was six six six. All of a sudden, the back
door banged, and Mom was screaming up at me, Get downstairs,
get downstairs.
Speaker 4 (15:21):
And I saw.
Speaker 2 (15:23):
Hallelujah Leonard Cohen, Columbia, nineteen eighty four. I saw the
column of fire lick up the side of the back porch,
the flamethrower belch from the dryer vent. I had time
to be fascinated, just time. I opened my mouth to scream,
and I didn't even think about what I was screaming.
And I was screaming the words, those words, those sketchy
(15:44):
Uncle Walter words at the top of my lungs. I
saw Mom jump back a bit and make the sign
of the cross. And then those headphones had a long cord.
I mentioned that not silver, but curly plastic coated copper wire.
It led back in the window to the tape deck.
When the awful thing happened, I remember the song, the
(16:05):
one I was copying, The last Beat of My Heart.
Susie and the Banshees, Polydor Records, nineteen eighty eight.
Speaker 4 (16:14):
Ah God.
Speaker 2 (16:15):
Susie's operatic voice starts out slow and goes up up
up as my skin goes up, up, up, and my
heart just keeps going faster, faster, faster, And to the
last beat is immolation. The last beat is twenty nineteen,
eighteen seventeen. Click Crunch, crunch, crunch, crunch, auto reverse play.
(16:39):
Sometimes I dream like now or the other dream I
had where powers Berg FD put my tape deck in
a bin with a bunch of stuff to take to
the Goodwill. I may be there still, but dreams decay.
Part of me knows that, just like part of me
knows it was a bad idea to go out that way,
whether I was right or not. When I was only
(17:00):
halfway through making this mixtape for LORI no reason payback
for that kiss. It was just after dinner. The old
man popped me in the mouth for spiking at my mohawk.
Then he called my music satanic. I said what I said,
and then Mom goes, don't use Dad's logic against him, honey,
it bruises his ego. And then he hit or a
(17:21):
lick too. And then that was an hour or so ago.
It's almost seven. I'm away to the roof of smoke.
Just as soon as I finish, I'll leave another tape
in maybe the Misfits or gg Allen, just to give
Dad nightmares when this song is done. Those tapes are
in the file cabinet where I keep my smokes, where
(17:42):
Dad doesn't know. The drawer goes all the way back.
And there are other things, the ones I started making
the words of my own that you won't find on
any backwards records because the witches in our family never
worshiped Satan.
Speaker 4 (17:53):
Dad then crack.
Speaker 2 (17:56):
I remember his fist connecting with my mouth, flattening my
lips to my teeth, knocking me sideways and down. I remember,
I remember the blood of a newly wakened witch spilling
an anger on that floor, and the curse I shrieked
at my father, the curse that comes back to me
one thousandfold as I stop the world and melt, and
(18:16):
the first song comes on again, and I wake into
the hot August dream a little while longer, restless and
wanting to be out the door, waiting to finish this
mixtape and bring it down to the school dance. That night,
Dad accused me of talking to Uncle Walter behind his back.
I wish Uncle Walter and I would have talked a
(18:36):
good bit more that's the end of the story.
Speaker 3 (18:41):
I have a one main question.
Speaker 5 (18:43):
Okay, what's a tape deck?
Speaker 4 (18:51):
Uh?
Speaker 2 (18:52):
When I was a kid, there was a cartoon called
Dark Wing Duck and one of the jokes, the only
joke I remember from this pretty mid car tune. YEA
was the younger kid being like records are those like
big CDs? And I remember thinking, I'm in like fourth
or fifth grade. I remember thinking it's a pretty bad joke.
Speaker 5 (19:14):
Wow, wow, Margaret, I'm sorry, my sense of humor is
worse than your fourth grade sense of humor. That's right,
I'm attempting to say. I just I think it's really fast.
I love the like the like what's a fax machine jokes?
You know?
Speaker 3 (19:28):
Yeah?
Speaker 4 (19:28):
Yeah, yeah, I actually really like them.
Speaker 5 (19:31):
I briefly had a tape deck, but I transitioned to
CDs pretty soon. Yeah, but I do remember some old,
some old it's probably some kind of like weird like
Christian music tapes that I had.
Speaker 3 (19:46):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (19:47):
My first tape was Smashing Pumpkins Siamese Dream that my
sister dubbed for me, with a bunch of ram on
the other side and some new water.
Speaker 3 (19:56):
Okay, well it's like two out of three.
Speaker 4 (19:58):
Yeah, no.
Speaker 2 (19:59):
Yeah, that's I'm not a big Smashing Pumpkins fan anymore.
But new order thumbs.
Speaker 3 (20:04):
Oh yeah yeah.
Speaker 2 (20:05):
And the what was the first like CD you bought?
Speaker 5 (20:12):
Oh, this is probably gonna be embarrassing. It might have
been in an Owl City CD, which is which is
quite embarrassing.
Speaker 4 (20:22):
Okay.
Speaker 2 (20:22):
So the reason that like old people like to think
that young people don't know anything about the past is
that old people don't know anything about the present or
the recent past.
Speaker 5 (20:30):
I have no idea who al City is. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
you actually did know what a tape deck was. Yeah,
And and I knew all but one of one of
the bands in the story, which I'm which I'm actually
pleasantly surprised by.
Speaker 4 (20:42):
Hell yeah, no, owl.
Speaker 3 (20:43):
City was like a like.
Speaker 5 (20:45):
A Christian electronic like sound producer. Oh okay, the guy
actually created most of the sounds for like the fifth
generation of the iPhone. So he both made music, which
some of which is like okay, but like like Christian Moby,
I don't I don't know what Moby is. Maybe, oh,
interested add that to my list?
Speaker 4 (21:04):
Okay, uh self?
Speaker 5 (21:06):
Right? Just Vegan who is almost almost radical, who made
a lot of electronic music in the nineties. It kind
of sounds like the postal Service, but slightly more electronic
and slightly worse. That's kind of that's kind of owl
City in my mind.
Speaker 2 (21:22):
Okay, I like the postal Service. I also like the
post I don't know if I like the worst version,
but see that's the thing, right, Yeah, I found that
very fun. It is It is definitely always startling once
you get sent back into your body by another like
corporeal form entering the room that you're traveling from.
Speaker 5 (21:42):
Yeah, that always that always does take a sec to adjust.
Like I can totally handle like some like grotesque like
earth spirit showing up, but if another like actual human
being walks in, that's like incredibly jarring.
Speaker 4 (21:57):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (21:57):
I like this story because it's it's a magic set
in the real world story that feels like real, like
it feels like yeah, yeah, absolutely casting fireballs or whatever.
He's no, this is this is what like actual like
occult practice looks like. Yeah, and then just talking about
(22:18):
how like you know, there's the whole genre is not
the right word, but maybe trope of like people with
shitty parents, especially dads, who need to find ways to escape,
and they escape into their music, right and I like
the idea of taking that literally and seeing what it
looks like. I love that the silver chord, you know,
(22:39):
the headphones with their cord is the same as like
the silver chord that allows you to move in the
astral plane.
Speaker 4 (22:46):
I just I loved that.
Speaker 3 (22:47):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (22:48):
Yeah, and I also am a sucker for this like
generational thing that has come down through time but is
like not wanted the modern context, you know, the like
the weird Scott's Gaelic magic or whatever that they're referring to.
Speaker 5 (23:06):
Yeah, and it definitely has like like a like an
American Gothic kind of feel like doing magic and like
an old like basement garage as opposed to like doing
it in like a temple or like cathedral, and like
the like the like the general like.
Speaker 3 (23:19):
Western esoteric tradition. Yeah, where you have like robes and.
Speaker 5 (23:23):
You're doing like ceremonial stuff versus like you're drawing chalk
circles and like the basement.
Speaker 2 (23:29):
Yeah, and laying on a lazy boy in order to
be comfy while you leave your body.
Speaker 5 (23:34):
Yeah, there's like there's like a dryer and like washing
machine in the background 'or like that's Yeah, I kind
of enjoy that style of like Gothic American combined with
this like very like low fi occult current, which is
honestly pretty well reflected in the uh in the mixtape uh.
Speaker 3 (23:52):
He and all of the artists mentioned.
Speaker 2 (23:54):
Yeah, it's also funny. I usually don't like stories where
I'm not entirely sure what's happening, Like.
Speaker 5 (24:01):
I actually who interesting. I love stories that I don't
know what's happening.
Speaker 2 (24:07):
Okay, and for me, like I feel like often I
think sometimes it's just and is not the case. I
really like the way that I don't totally know what
happened in this story. I've read it several times, right sure,
And I am not entirely certain whether this is the
voice that is coming from the mixtape. Like I'm not
(24:27):
certain whether the framing story of the two girls who
find an old tape, whether they're like hearing this as
an audio narration between songs. I also don't know whether
like the idea is that the protagonist has died and
then like is now sort of living in this tape
inasmuch as they're living anywhere, Like I don't quite know,
(24:49):
and I actually like that I don't know, and I usually.
Speaker 5 (24:52):
Don't I definitely love stuff where it has that level
of like it has the level of ambiguity that I
experienced my actual life.
Speaker 3 (24:59):
Yeah, I like when that happens, when.
Speaker 5 (25:01):
I'm like, I'm not sure what the voices in my
head that I'm talking to, Like, where do they come from?
Speaker 3 (25:06):
Is that? Is that just me?
Speaker 5 (25:08):
I really appreciate that sort of thing, And like, yeah,
the the notion that you can like continue to live
in some way through a recording that gets played back, Yeah,
I definitely find to be a very fun concept and
very like evocative of like the whole point of making
art as well. It's like, is our just this really
(25:28):
like almost sad attempt at immortality?
Speaker 3 (25:32):
Yeah, but no, I definitely enjoy.
Speaker 5 (25:36):
When I have I don't have like a firm ground
underneath me, because I feel like the ground we experience,
I think people assume is slightly more firm than what
it actually may be.
Speaker 2 (25:50):
I think that that was like a big part of
the growing up process for me was learning that the
the ground under our feet is not as firm as
as we thought, and like realizing like once you're like, oh,
there isn't really a neurotypical you know, yeah, yeah, yeah,
like and the more you realize that, you're like, oh,
everyone is just different levels of like higher low functioning crazy,
(26:10):
Like it's useful.
Speaker 5 (26:12):
And all the stuff they're talking about in the story
of like with with their mention of like dreams and
waking up from dreams and the slow intermeshing of dream
and wakefulness.
Speaker 3 (26:25):
And I think a lot of these concepts for young.
Speaker 5 (26:27):
People specifically, are easier to envision via dreams, Like it's
hard to figure out where like the bottom of a
dream is, like how like how far can you keep going?
Sometimes you think, oh, this is all right, this is
just I'm awake, I'm doing going through my tasks, and
then boom, you're totally somewhere else.
Speaker 3 (26:44):
You're like, oh, that was actually a dream.
Speaker 5 (26:46):
Yeah, and you just see like this like almost like
eternal descent and how there's certain ideas of that that
are absolutely reflected in our kind of everyday waking existence
as well.
Speaker 4 (26:58):
Yeah, yeah, no, I.
Speaker 2 (27:02):
Love all this stuff and it actually ties into I'm
gonna read the notes from the author from Edward Morris
that he sent me. He said about the story one,
it ends with the stories for Jackie Kessler and the
ties that bind, and then the notes about the stories
I could rant for a week. It's of course mostly
drawn from life, but it's also an homage to the
(27:22):
great writer who's work crossed my axis at the same time,
Jackie Kessler and her horrifying the ties that bind. There's
a two thousand and six story her narrator didn't get
stuck on a mixtape. She got her face eaten off
by Jack Russell. It was more of a mean girl's scenario,
but it hit me so hard I had to try
my own. I have enough other things to rant about
the subject matter for a full blown interview, trying to
keep this concise. That was a basically he was like,
(27:48):
there's so much to it that I kind of can't
get into it.
Speaker 3 (27:51):
Yeah, No, I think that I think.
Speaker 5 (27:55):
Underlines some of what we were talking about a little
bit with yeah, like the uh, how you can like
capture the human form within like linear experiences of art yea,
even though I would say it's it's hard to usually
view the human form in that fashion because it is
both a linear experience but now it also exists independent
(28:16):
of linear time, Like it is this this thing from before,
but now it could be played in the future and
it's still there in the future, it's still repeating that
same moment.
Speaker 3 (28:24):
Yeah, I don't know.
Speaker 5 (28:26):
I think the day that this comes out, I'll be
investigating ghosts at the Oregon Ghost Conference. And there's certainly
some people that view ghosts in a similar way. They
view ghosts as like a moment of a person caught
in time that keeps replaying the same action over and
over again. They're not really like even like interactable, but
(28:47):
it's just it's just replaying this thing that like imprinted onto.
Like I don't quite know how tape decks work, but
I assume if you have like two tapes in a
little bit of the first one can get pushed into
the second one if it like is done in directly.
Possibly I'm totally like constructing a terrible metaphor, but as
if like a person going through a specific motion was
(29:11):
so strong or impactful to them that it gets imprinted
on the next person who's going to.
Speaker 3 (29:15):
Enter into this space as well.
Speaker 5 (29:17):
Right, And there's certainly people that view ghosts in that framework,
which I find to be a really interesting way to
think about that concept.
Speaker 2 (29:26):
I like that I have ever told you my theory
on ghosts. I don't think so My theory on ghosts
is that I don't believe in ghosts, but it's a
conscious choice because of the.
Speaker 5 (29:36):
Way that I live, Like, I mean, that's more or
less my view on ghosts generally.
Speaker 2 (29:42):
Yeah, yeah, because I'm like, at some point I was like,
I you know, I was like, I live in a
van by myself, sleeping in the middle of the woods.
And then later I was like, now I'm in a
cabin in the middle of the woods, and now I'm
in a house in the middle of woods.
Speaker 5 (29:54):
It just doesn't do me any good believe that, like,
you know, totally something to be around that has mean,
that's that's kind of some more of my like chasmetic background.
Speaker 2 (30:03):
But yes, absolutely, yeah, because I mean, and that doesn't
make me right or wrong.
Speaker 4 (30:07):
It just makes it like it's the way that I.
Speaker 3 (30:09):
Need to cope.
Speaker 5 (30:10):
Believing a ghost would just more or less be like
an inconvenience. They start of how the human mind works. Yeah,
sometimes it's easier just be like, nah, I'm just I'm
just not going to deal with that right now. Yeah,
Like I've I've totally thought about which beliefs I currently
hold that would that I would change if I were
to move into like an isolated forested area. Yeah, of
(30:32):
course I would change certain beliefs about how reality works.
Speaker 4 (30:35):
Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 2 (30:38):
There used to be, like, you know, I used to
live in this this off grid barn and guests would
stay in the other room in the barn, and they
would like report ghost sightings in this barn. And so
it came up at a meeting people were like, oh,
we should talk about the ghost in the barn. And
I was the only one who lived in the barn
full time. So I was like, there is no ghost
in the barn on the agenda. And they were like,
(30:59):
why are being so dismissed, And I was like, because
I live here alone.
Speaker 5 (31:03):
Like I mean, that is kind of why I appreciate
the role of like the city magician. Because you're surrounded
by people, you have a little bit more flexibility to
allow certain things into your like orbit of being and
like your orbit of experience. But I absolutely like respect
(31:25):
the kind of witches and mystics that like take the
hermit path and and like go out and I can
totally see myself doing that at some point, Like I
totally respect the log Lady journey, yeah, because yeah, I
think that is an incredibly valuable method of kind of
experienced reality, and I think it can it can have
(31:47):
you also be much closer to certain other types of
experiences than in the hustle and bustle and constant like
consciousness and light that is just perforating human cities.
Speaker 4 (31:59):
Yeah, I think they do.
Speaker 2 (32:00):
Both have really specific advantages for like ways of finding wisdom,
you know, I think that. Yeah, But before we get
totally off track, we should probably and end this particular episode,
and to end it with plugs from Edward Morris. Edward
Morris says broken Eyebooks dot Com is a wonderful small
press that needs everyone's help. They run Gwendolen Kisseday, they
(32:23):
run Matthew Bartlett, and they gave my highly experimental alphabet
of Lightning a hope. Alphabet of Lightning is the beginning
of a novel series called There Was a Crooked Man,
which is about as long as Dies the Fire or
maybe Song of Ice and Fire, which are two of
my favorite book series. So that was promising. I haven't
read this yet. This story was the first thing I
(32:44):
read by Edward Morris, but I really liked it, so
I'm going to look out more. Yeah, it is a challenged, difficult,
challenging and tremendously important work that took me three decades
to nail, and all my friends who have read it
deliriously love it. So everyone should check out Alphabet of Lightning.
And if they want to check out you and your
work and they're not currently listening to that, it could
(33:05):
happen here feed, but instead listening to my feed, where
can they find you?
Speaker 5 (33:10):
Well, you can find me only it could have it
here feed. I recently put together an update on the
situation in Atlanta, Georgia ree Copcity. I tried to summarize
the past six months of events in like forty five minutes,
so that was a very very interesting task. And then
also I'm I'm You can probably check out my my
(33:31):
feed on Twitter dot com at Hungry Bowtie for some
timely coverage of the Oregon Ghost Conference, which will eventually
turn into some sort of episode, but not not until
I have time to process the experience. The everyone should
check out the Atlanta update. It's a it's a very
good episode.
Speaker 2 (33:52):
And as for me, if you're not listening to this
on the Cool People Did Cool Stuff Feed, I have
a podcast It's called Cool People Did Cool Stuff it
is about cool people who did cool stuff. And also
my most recent substack post is called Afraid of the
Woman in the Mirror and it is about transness and monstrosity.
Speaker 3 (34:10):
And about becoming Blenny Mary.
Speaker 2 (34:13):
And we'll see you all next week.
Speaker 3 (34:16):
It Could Happen here as a production of cool Zone Media.
Speaker 5 (34:19):
For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
Coolzonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can
find sources for It Could Happen Here, updated monthly at
Coolzonmedia dot com slash sources.
Speaker 4 (34:33):
Thanks for listening.
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