Speaker 1: Joy is that thing that we enter when we practice
Speaker 1: our entanglement, when we actually submit to and practice being
Speaker 1: entangled with one another, which we are when we can
Speaker 1: fight it, and when we fight it, that seems to
Speaker 1: lead to misery, But when we practice it, maybe that
Speaker 1: is joy. Welcome to the one you feed throughout time.
Speaker 1: Great tinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have,
Speaker 1: quotes like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what
Speaker 1: you think, ring true. And yet for many of us,
Speaker 1: our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity,
Speaker 1: self pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't
Speaker 1: have instead of what we do. We think things that
Speaker 1: hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not
Speaker 1: just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent,
Speaker 1: and creative effort to make a life worth living. This
Speaker 1: podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in
Speaker 1: the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. Thanks
Speaker 1: for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Ross Gay,
Speaker 1: the author of many poetry and essay books and a
Speaker 1: teacher at Indiana University. He's a founding co editor of
Speaker 1: the online sports magazine Some call at Balin. In addition
Speaker 1: to being an editor with q Avenue and lege Mule Press,
Speaker 1: Ross is a founding board member of the Bloomington Community Orchard,
Speaker 1: a nonprofit free fruit for all, Justice and Joy project.
Speaker 1: He's received fellowships from Cave Cannum, The Breadloaf Writer's Conference,
Speaker 1: and the Guggenheim Foundation. Today, Ross and Eric discuss his
Speaker 1: book Inciting Joy. Essays, Hi Ross, welcome to the show.
Speaker 1: Thank you. It's going to be with you. I am
Speaker 1: excited to have you on. We're going to be discussing
Speaker 1: your book, Inciting Joy, which has the shortest subtitle of
Speaker 1: any book I've seen in a long time, which is
Speaker 1: just essays. So I mean almost every book these days
Speaker 1: is like inciting Joy, the miraculous practice for cultivating joy.
Speaker 1: And you know it goes on and on and on
Speaker 1: and on, and here's this Inciting Joy essays. I love
Speaker 1: it so totally right. Well, we'll jump into that in
Speaker 1: a minute, but let's start like we always do with
Speaker 1: the parable. In the parable, there's a grandparent who's talking
Speaker 1: with a grandchild and they say, in life, there are
Speaker 1: two wolves inside of us that are always at battle.
Speaker 1: One's a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and
Speaker 1: bravery and love, and the other's a bad wolf, which
Speaker 1: represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the
Speaker 1: grandchild stops and thinks about it for a second and
Speaker 1: looks up at their grandparents says, well, which one wins?
Speaker 1: And the grandparent says, the one you feed. So I'd
Speaker 1: like to start off by asking you what does that
Speaker 1: parable mean to you in your life and in the
Speaker 1: work that you do. Well, I mean many things. It's
Speaker 1: such a beautiful parable. And one of the things that
Speaker 1: it makes me think about is, I've been thinking about
Speaker 1: this a lot in various ways lately. Is sort of
Speaker 1: what it feels to me like an imperative that I
Speaker 1: often find myself recommending to students or people who ask,
Speaker 1: you know, talking about my work or whatever, which is
Speaker 1: that we study what we love. Because I teach writing,
Speaker 1: and I go around talking about books and reading poems
Speaker 1: and essays and stuff, and I do have the occasion
Speaker 1: for people to say, well, what if you give any
Speaker 1: advice to like a young writer or I'm not young writer.
Speaker 1: I sort of think about, well, one of the things
Speaker 1: that we're often not necessarily encouraged to do, or in
Speaker 1: my opinion not encouraged to do enough is to devote
Speaker 1: our fullest, most abiding attention to that which we love,
Speaker 1: and by that I mean also probably that which loves us.
Speaker 1: I probably mean that too, And partly that feeding the wolf,
Speaker 1: the wolf that is, you know, angry or vicious or whatever,
Speaker 1: you know, versus feeding the wolf that maybe is compassionate
Speaker 1: and curious, but also the wolf that will love you,
Speaker 1: you know, something like that. I just feel like we're
Speaker 1: so inclined and trained to some extent to attend to
Speaker 1: what we hate. Actually, and I feel like there's every
Speaker 1: reason to attend to what we need to duck to
Speaker 1: the extent that we need to duck it. But as
Speaker 1: far as mastering what we don't want to be, that's
Speaker 1: a bad idea, I think. Yeah, I mean there's certainly
Speaker 1: that idea. You know, I've heard it in political talk before.
Speaker 1: Is you know, not what are you against, but what
Speaker 1: are you for? Easy? Yeah? Right. You also used a
Speaker 1: word in there, which is devote. That's a word that
Speaker 1: I love you and I are later are going to
Speaker 1: record a little bit for our episode of Mary Oliver,
Speaker 1: and she famously said that attention is the beginning of devotion. Yeah,
Speaker 1: when I talk to poets, I'm always interested in attention
Speaker 1: because I think one of the things poets to do
Speaker 1: is they have a capacity for attention or a way
Speaker 1: of paying attention that's often different. It's why I love
Speaker 1: to read poetry, because it makes me look at the
Speaker 1: world differently and focus my attention differently. And so the
Speaker 1: other thing I'll say about devotion is this is a
Speaker 1: little bit of a long story, but I'll bring it
Speaker 1: back around, which is I had a really profound mystical
Speaker 1: spiritual experience. At one point it was just a a
Speaker 1: ecstatic unity experience and it went on. It lasted for
Speaker 1: a while, and it changed me profoundly. But like many
Speaker 1: things in life, had faded and I was talking to
Speaker 1: a spiritual teacher by the name of Audi Ashanti Wants
Speaker 1: about it, and what he said to me has landed
Speaker 1: on me and it was so powerful. We said, devote
Speaker 1: yourself to what remains of it. And I thought that
Speaker 1: was a beautiful thing, because even if the things that
Speaker 1: we love, as you said, or the things that love
Speaker 1: us in those moments, the feeling isn't necessarily there, we
Speaker 1: can still devote ourselves to the feelings that have been there. Yeah, yeah, beautiful.
Speaker 1: And as you were talking, I was thinking, it's also
Speaker 1: there's something that feels really compelling to me about also
Speaker 1: devoting ourselves to the feeling of love that has been
Speaker 1: bestowed upon us, but that we do not know who
Speaker 1: gave it to us, you know, but we know it
Speaker 1: was given to us, like there are people who loved
Speaker 1: us long before we were born, you know. And you know,
Speaker 1: you might extend that to sort of like I like
Speaker 1: to say that when the goldfinches are planting the sunflowers
Speaker 1: in my garden, that's an act of love, you know,
Speaker 1: that's an act of love. Or when it rains and
Speaker 1: we need rain, that's an active love. Or you know,
Speaker 1: the person who holds the door open from me when
Speaker 1: my hands are food, or you can go on and
Speaker 1: on and on, you know, which is a kind of
Speaker 1: to me. It's a kind of ever present and kind
Speaker 1: of threaded through our daily lives. You know, we're walking
Speaker 1: around and it's like it is a miracle again and
Speaker 1: again and again and again and again, you know, And
Speaker 1: it feels really important to articulate the ways that we
Speaker 1: are capable of and in the midst of profound care. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, and I agree. I think I think that's
Speaker 1: so beautiful of that thing of like if you can
Speaker 1: sort of I forget exactly how adiosund you put it,
Speaker 1: but like cultivate or attend to what remains so beautiful,
Speaker 1: so beautiful. Yeah, So I want to ask you a
Speaker 1: question about delight and joy. Those are both of your books,
Speaker 1: and citing joy in the Book of Delights. Those are words,
Speaker 1: and as a mildly repressed, you know, Protestant white guy right,
Speaker 1: who also suffers from depression and low mood, words like
Speaker 1: joy and delight sometimes feel like an octave above my
Speaker 1: emotional range. But I don't think that's how you're intending them.
Speaker 1: I think that you're using those words differently and maybe
Speaker 1: more subtly than at least the typical idea of joy
Speaker 1: or delight. Can you just say a little bit about that? Yeah,
Speaker 1: and one thing to mention Mary Oliver again, and that
Speaker 1: thing about attention. In a way, I sort of feel
Speaker 1: like that Delights project is really an attention project. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, what does it do if we give ourselves
Speaker 1: the task of witnessing, articulating and then like sort of
Speaker 1: possibly sharing what it is that delights us? Turns out
Speaker 1: for me there's an abundance of that. You know, it's
Speaker 1: not the only thing that there is by any measure,
Speaker 1: but there's an abundance of that. Sometimes it's like sort
Speaker 1: of grand and like you said, sort of like a
Speaker 1: register above or something. Periodically it is. But mostly it's
Speaker 1: like you know that there's a kid wearing those shoes
Speaker 1: with the flashy lights, I mean, like whoa, or or
Speaker 1: you know, it's the fact that the cardinals are back again,
Speaker 1: you know, or it's you know, all of these things
Speaker 1: that we might say are sort of are profoundly daily actually,
Speaker 1: And as far as the question about joy, I feel
Speaker 1: like the way that I think about joy is it's
Speaker 1: a profound emotion, like as profound an emotion as I
Speaker 1: can think of. But the way that I think about
Speaker 1: joy is that it's absolutely tethered to like sorrow, you know,
Speaker 1: not necessarily profound sorrow, but profound sorrow too. But it's
Speaker 1: connected to the very daily fact that we and what
Speaker 1: we love are disappearing, you know, in the midst of it.
Speaker 1: You know, we and what we love are probably in
Speaker 1: some kind of pain, you know, and if not, now
Speaker 1: we'll be part of what I think of is joy
Speaker 1: is the way that we attend to one another in
Speaker 1: the midst of that, or the way that even that knowing,
Speaker 1: or maybe not even that knowing knowing, but the sort
Speaker 1: of deeper, subtle knowing of that might incline us to
Speaker 1: behave in certain ways, might incline us to sort of
Speaker 1: be in the process of reaching toward one another something
Speaker 1: like that. You know, it's funny. I wrote this book
Speaker 1: and I did all this kind of thinking about joy,
Speaker 1: and then afterwards I was like, oh, actually, in that book,
Speaker 1: I say joy is what emanates from us as we
Speaker 1: help each other carry our sorrows. And I think that's true.
Speaker 1: But I also think, maybe even more to the point,
Speaker 1: is that joy is that thing that we enter when
Speaker 1: we practice our entanglement, when we actually submit to and
Speaker 1: practice being entangled with one another, which we are when
Speaker 1: we can fight it, and when we fight it that
Speaker 1: seems to lead to misery. Yeah, but when we practice it,
Speaker 1: maybe that is joy. And it doesn't just mean like
Speaker 1: happy happy. It might mean, no, I'm practicing helping you die,
Speaker 1: like it seems like you're soon to die, and I'm
Speaker 1: going to try to be with you. You know. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that to me is like joyful. Actually, in your mind?
Speaker 1: Is joy an emotion? Is it a way of being?
Speaker 1: Is it an action? Is it all three of those things?
Speaker 1: I don't want to get too definitional here, pinned down
Speaker 1: this thing that we all have a sense of. I'm
Speaker 1: just kind of curious because in just in hearing you
Speaker 1: describe it, if you've hit all three of those things. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it kind of is. Sometimes I'll think about that and
Speaker 1: I'll be like, yeah, what is it? I'll be writing something,
Speaker 1: Is it an emotion? And then I'm talking about I
Speaker 1: think you're right, there's elements of all three. And then
Speaker 1: another way that I sort of think of it is
Speaker 1: like a kind of a noun almost for some reason,
Speaker 1: you know, I sort of I can't remember if I
Speaker 1: talk about this in the book, but I sort of
Speaker 1: do think that the metaphor that I love is like
Speaker 1: that my ceiling I'm running underneath the healthy chorus, like
Speaker 1: that sort of that you sometimes know is there and
Speaker 1: you sometimes don't, you know, But if you know that's there,
Speaker 1: it's a kind of thing that's there that you can
Speaker 1: kind of enter into, or you can kind of join,
Speaker 1: or you can kind of like celebrate or something like that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that didn't answer your question at all, but I agree
Speaker 1: it's a good question. Yeah. Well, it's interesting. There's a
Speaker 1: phrase I use on this show, maybe more than any other,
Speaker 1: that I learned early in my recovery journey, which was,
Speaker 1: sometimes you can't think your way into right action, but
Speaker 1: you could act your way into right thinking. Right. And
Speaker 1: I've loved that because I've thought about that with things
Speaker 1: like gratitude, which which is a cousin of delight, right,
Speaker 1: which is that I can feel grateful and it just
Speaker 1: emerges spontaneously, right, and that's good. There are other times
Speaker 1: that I can decide to look for something to be
Speaker 1: grateful for, and by looking, by engaging in an action
Speaker 1: a practice, then maybe some of the feeling then tends
Speaker 1: to come along. And so so much of this stuff, action, behavior,
Speaker 1: thought their bidirectional things to me, right, like, it's not
Speaker 1: one causes the other. It's sometimes yes, one causes the other,
Speaker 1: but sometimes the other causes the one, and back and forth. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: And I think back to the parable. I think to
Speaker 1: some extent they also those feed each other back and forth. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, yeah, I think that feels important to be
Speaker 1: aware of that. Practicing the thing can make the thing
Speaker 1: sort of grow in itself, and that then can sort
Speaker 1: of increase one's desire to practice. Yeah. Yeah, I was
Speaker 1: reading your work and thinking about joy and you said something.
Speaker 1: I don't know if it was in the book or
Speaker 1: another conversation I heard you say, And I may not
Speaker 1: have this exactly right, but it was something about, like
Speaker 1: you feel joy when you see people care for each other,
Speaker 1: you know. And I thought about, I'm a softie, like
Speaker 1: watching a TV show or whatever, like I'll cry it
Speaker 1: nearly anything, right, But I've thought about what makes me cry,
Speaker 1: and it's not the I mean the sad moment sometimes,
Speaker 1: but that's not what it is. It's a moment of
Speaker 1: tenderness between people, and that what is coming out is
Speaker 1: tears is joy actually, But I never named it that
Speaker 1: until I heard you say that, and I was like,
Speaker 1: that's exactly what I've I've heard the term moral elevation,
Speaker 1: and I've recognized that that's what it is. Moral elevation
Speaker 1: being you feel good when you see somebody act good. Right,
Speaker 1: there's something to that, But I just was able to
Speaker 1: put a name on an experience I have very often
Speaker 1: of what I would consider pretty profound joy, and it's
Speaker 1: when I see tenderness between people, often in either a
Speaker 1: deep sense or an unexpected sense. Totally, totally, yeah, me too.
Speaker 1: I was in the airport the other day and someone
Speaker 1: was you could just tell I just sort of took
Speaker 1: it upon herself to help this other person who maybe
Speaker 1: didn't speak English or me or whatever. There's something about
Speaker 1: reading the science and it was just like I could tell,
Speaker 1: like at the ticket thing that they had kind of
Speaker 1: assigned themselves to. And then I saw them, you know,
Speaker 1: twenty minute later in the airport, like just sort of
Speaker 1: walking and like walking them to their gate. You know,
Speaker 1: every day like if we kind of opened our eyes
Speaker 1: like that is available, that is happening. Or this time
Speaker 1: I remember, and I write about this in the book,
Speaker 1: where I was like doing this zoom things like sort
Speaker 1: of more than the zoom times a class, you know,
Speaker 1: a high school class, and this kid like read something
Speaker 1: very moving to him and he just broke down and
Speaker 1: he finished and it was beautiful. And after the class ended,
Speaker 1: at the time, I was sort of like, you know,
Speaker 1: I wanted to kind of reach through the screen and
Speaker 1: like care for this kid. And at the time, no
Speaker 1: one was doing anything, and I was like, oh no,
Speaker 1: we're doomed, you know. And then after the class ended,
Speaker 1: like very slowly, like the kids kind of came and
Speaker 1: they kind of like checked on him. And then within
Speaker 1: like three minutes, every child in that class was formed
Speaker 1: into a big hug around this kid. They were all
Speaker 1: hugging and it was same to him, like I'm watching
Speaker 1: the zoom thing and like crying, Yeah, that too is
Speaker 1: who we are, you know. Yeah, it's interesting. I'm preparing
Speaker 1: to interview another poet who lives here in Columbus, OHI
Speaker 1: with me, Maggie Smith. I know Maggie, and she's got
Speaker 1: a new memoir coming out, but in it she's referencing
Speaker 1: her poem Good Bones, And I was reading it last
Speaker 1: night and there's points in it where it says, like
Speaker 1: for every child that something good happens too, there's a
Speaker 1: child that something bad happens to the world is at
Speaker 1: least half bad. And I read that and I thought,
Speaker 1: I don't think so. Actually, I mean, yes, there's lots
Speaker 1: of awful like there, you know, any moment, anywhere, anytime,
Speaker 1: right this second. There are countless awful things happen in
Speaker 1: this world, But there is so much love and beauty
Speaker 1: also all the time, and it's not to say that
Speaker 1: we should ignore one or the other, and that's clearly
Speaker 1: your message is not. But I do feel that the
Speaker 1: proportion of kindness and love, to me, it feels like
Speaker 1: there's more of it. Yeah, I know. I was just
Speaker 1: in a talk, like an academic talk, and it was interesting,
Speaker 1: and there was I guess there's a thing called I
Speaker 1: can't remember, something like metaphysical pessimism or something. I can't remember.
Speaker 1: It was something like kind of philosophical differ. But the
Speaker 1: premise is that they're sort of like trying to figure
Speaker 1: out a way to articulate why it's okay like to
Speaker 1: you know, to indulge in with This person was calling
Speaker 1: like sort of guilty pleasures, like you know, like the
Speaker 1: dumb TV or whatever. But the premise was that if
Speaker 1: life is purely miserable, it's truly misery, then the point
Speaker 1: is not to get to know life better, not to
Speaker 1: understand the true nature of being or something. The point
Speaker 1: is to avoid It's so funny to me because it's
Speaker 1: like a real sort of it's a serious philosophical endeavor,
Speaker 1: I guess. And I was sort of like, well, it
Speaker 1: seems to me that you could enjoy you know, dumb
Speaker 1: TV while also believing that life isn't fundamentally awful, you know, yeah,
Speaker 1: and also seems to me that if your premise is
Speaker 1: that life is fundamentally awful, you must spend a lot
Speaker 1: of time avoiding attending to a lot of the stuff
Speaker 1: that's not fundamentally awful. Right right now. I was sort
Speaker 1: of like, this seems like an attitude more than like
Speaker 1: any kind of relationship to two events or you know, phenomena.
Speaker 1: Like in phenomena, it's like, oh, yeah, someone helps me
Speaker 1: unload the goat ship from my garden. That is not
Speaker 1: fundamentally horrible, right right, you know, doesn't mean that there's
Speaker 1: not also the fundamentally horrible next in. You know, it
Speaker 1: doesn't diminish or the get anything, but to suggest that
Speaker 1: it is, I was just like, Okay, yeah, I guess
Speaker 1: to give Maggie's view of the world of fifty fifty
Speaker 1: a little credence, there's the old Buddhist idea of the
Speaker 1: ten thousand joys and the ten thousand sorrows, which I've
Speaker 1: always loved, you know, because it just says like, yeah,
Speaker 1: every life has both. And so one of the things
Speaker 1: that you've talked about is that you've been criticized before
Speaker 1: for focusing on delight or joy and also being a
Speaker 1: black man who is aware of systematic racism and injustice
Speaker 1: and inequality and all that, and that you know this
Speaker 1: is not the time for trifling things like it's joy
Speaker 1: or delight, right right, Yeah, totally. And to me, it's
Speaker 1: sort of like the you know, I have a whole
Speaker 1: essay in that book, so I sort of devoted to
Speaker 1: that question. But you might almost call like a command
Speaker 1: to focus on quote unquote serious. Steph implies first of all,
Speaker 1: that what makes us glad is not serious. And if
Speaker 1: it's the case that what makes us glad is not serious,
Speaker 1: and I'm just saying glad, and I'm saying glad actually
Speaker 1: I'm using that as a word that's like, um, sort
Speaker 1: of a light word. I mean, it will be a
Speaker 1: light word. If what makes us glad is not serious,
Speaker 1: that's an interesting life. That's an interesting world, you know,
Speaker 1: for any number of reasons that we could probably talk
Speaker 1: about for a long time. But furthermore, when I'm talking
Speaker 1: about like joy and gratitude, I'm actually not talking about
Speaker 1: what makes us glad, though it might touch on those
Speaker 1: things periodically. I'm actually talking about how we survive, how
Speaker 1: we've been survived for. You know, I'm talking about like
Speaker 1: all of the love that we've been given in our lives,
Speaker 1: you know, in the midst of horrible shit. You know
Speaker 1: that we've been cared for, We've been looked after, We've
Speaker 1: been imagined into being, you know, by people who didn't
Speaker 1: know us. At this moment, we are still being imagined
Speaker 1: into being by people who don't know us, Like people
Speaker 1: are loving us without knowing us. You know, somewhere someone
Speaker 1: is like saving seeds for a plant that's really not
Speaker 1: only delicious and beautiful and good for the birds and
Speaker 1: everything else, but it might actually grow at a time
Speaker 1: when some other things aren't growing, you know, like at
Speaker 1: this moment, you know, it's just going on on our behalf.
Speaker 1: To me, that sounds like for those people who might
Speaker 1: you know, sort of shit on the idea of like
Speaker 1: joy or something. To me, that sounds like rigorous and
Speaker 1: also as serious as hell. And also life and death. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm talking about life and death. Actually, all this stuff
Speaker 1: gets to the question of what does it mean to
Speaker 1: live a good life, to be a good person? Right,
Speaker 1: And I often reflect on that. I do think that
Speaker 1: the suffering in the world is essentially infinite. And what
Speaker 1: I mean by that is there's just more of it
Speaker 1: than I could ever imagine, think about, tackle do anything about. Right,
Speaker 1: to me, it's essentially infinite. You know, if there's a
Speaker 1: guide out there, maybe it's not infinite to that being right,
Speaker 1: but to me as a human, it doesn't matter whether
Speaker 1: it's one hundred units of suffering or infinite units of suffering.
Speaker 1: It's way beyond my capacity to remedy. Yeah. So given that,
Speaker 1: what is my quote unquote responsibility or my moral obligation
Speaker 1: to try and remedy that versus my moral obligation to
Speaker 1: have some degree of delight and joy and love the
Speaker 1: people that are around me. And I mean, I just
Speaker 1: think these are there's no answer to these questions, right.
Speaker 1: We all want someone to tell us. I know, you
Speaker 1: lost your father, and my father passed up just actually
Speaker 1: a couple of weeks ago now after a long battle
Speaker 1: with Alzheimer's, and my partner's mom did also, and you know,
Speaker 1: as we were going through those things, I just remember
Speaker 1: wanting someone to tell me, like, what was enough? Am
Speaker 1: I doing enough? And there's no answer to that, right,
Speaker 1: because I'm my own person, with my own set of
Speaker 1: values and my own relationship with my father and all
Speaker 1: kinds of circumstances. But I think that's the same thing
Speaker 1: when we start looking at what is enough to give
Speaker 1: to the world versus to give to ourselves. But I
Speaker 1: love what you're talking about with joy is that it's
Speaker 1: not giving to ourselves. You actually say you're wondering what
Speaker 1: the feeling of joy makes us do or how it
Speaker 1: makes us be, And you say, my hunches joy is
Speaker 1: an ember four or precursor to wild and unpredictable and
Speaker 1: transgressive and unboundaried solidarity, and that solidarity might incite further joy,
Speaker 1: which might incite further solidarity. Yeah, it's funny when you
Speaker 1: were sort of saying the list of things that taking
Speaker 1: care of people you love, you know, like loving people,
Speaker 1: being delighted by stuff. You know, how am I supposed
Speaker 1: to respond to the suffering of the world. You know,
Speaker 1: it's a little bit like that is responding to suffer
Speaker 1: in the world too, Yes, you know, a little bit,
Speaker 1: and in part because it's like you're adding to the
Speaker 1: love I think. Yeah. But the other thing I've been
Speaker 1: thinking about lately, I was just sort of walking around
Speaker 1: trying to think about, like what is the point of it,
Speaker 1: Like what's the point of being alive or something, you know,
Speaker 1: like a meaningful point. And I was thinking, Oh, it's
Speaker 1: just to care and be cared for. Maybe that's it.
Speaker 1: It's to care and be cared for. There's so much
Speaker 1: machinery to sort of prevent us from believing that or
Speaker 1: even to like doing that in certain ways, you know.
Speaker 1: And I've been kind of going hard on like these
Speaker 1: fucking menus that you scan with your phone. I'm like, man,
Speaker 1: fuck that, give me the paper put in my hands.
Speaker 1: You know. I might ask you, like what's good? What
Speaker 1: you like? You know? You might lean over my shoulder
Speaker 1: and tell me what you like, you know, and I
Speaker 1: might look with my friend that they're what they're thinking
Speaker 1: about getting. I'm saying that's the positive, and the negative
Speaker 1: is that there's all of this machinery that is trying
Speaker 1: to alienate each other from these daily and more than
Speaker 1: daily acts of care that are sort of positing themselves
Speaker 1: as acts of care. Like there's the idea that like, oh,
Speaker 1: if you don't have to touch something that I touched,
Speaker 1: I'm caring for you. Precisely the opposite precisely the opposite,
Speaker 1: like if we don't touch each other, you know, like
Speaker 1: that is sort of the absence of care. You know.
Speaker 1: I'm just becoming acutely aware of how easily we can
Speaker 1: slide into that, thinking that that's like a reasonable way
Speaker 1: to be, when in fact, it seems to me the
Speaker 1: meaningful way to be is to be like bumping into people,
Speaker 1: you know. And when I say also bumping into people,
Speaker 1: I also mean like, you know, bumping into the trees
Speaker 1: and bumping into flowers in your books. I noticed this
Speaker 1: several times, and it's one of your delights, which is
Speaker 1: you call it pleasant public physical interaction with strangers. You know.
Speaker 1: One is maybe tell us about you're working in a
Speaker 1: coffee shop and a young girl comes up. Do you
Speaker 1: do you remember that one? Totally tell yeah. And I'm working,
Speaker 1: I'm like getting ready to go to or reading them,
Speaker 1: but I'm like actually revising some of these delights, the
Speaker 1: first book of Delights. I'm revising them, and this kid
Speaker 1: comes up to me, and I noticed, I'm like listen
Speaker 1: to my music. I'm like in my alienation zone actually
Speaker 1: like landphones on and this kid comes up to me
Speaker 1: or I noticed this child, you know, she looks like
Speaker 1: a kid to me, like a high schoo kid or
Speaker 1: something like, standing to my side with her hand up,
Speaker 1: and I kind of look, what do you do here?
Speaker 1: And she screams to me like, you know, working on
Speaker 1: your homework. Good job, Come on, give me a high five.
Speaker 1: It was the cutest thing I ever saw, you know,
Speaker 1: And of course I high five this kid, and but
Speaker 1: it just was like one of those moments where it's like,
Speaker 1: oh right, one of the pleasures of being alive from me.
Speaker 1: You know, not everyone like not everyone has the same delights,
Speaker 1: but like, you know, I love. I used to go
Speaker 1: to this bakery in South Philly called Sarcon's is really
Speaker 1: great bakery, and you know, I was probably brought up
Speaker 1: a certain kind of way, you know, I don't know
Speaker 1: what it was, but like a little bit like self contained,
Speaker 1: like my mother's from Minnesota and you know, a little
Speaker 1: bit midwestern. Yeah, and I'm in South Philly. I'm at
Speaker 1: this bakery and it's like it's really not how it
Speaker 1: goes there, and I'm standing in line and there's no line.
Speaker 1: It's just like a bunch of these people like pushing
Speaker 1: to get their bread. And at some point this woman's
Speaker 1: and maybe if you don't shove a little bit, you're
Speaker 1: not gonna get any bread. So sweet because she's a
Speaker 1: little bit tough on me, but she's also like, come on, honey,
Speaker 1: you gotta push. This is what we do here. You know,
Speaker 1: we actually like bump into each other. You know. It
Speaker 1: was so lovely, and those to me like constitute among
Speaker 1: many others, but that constitutes to me like the fabric
Speaker 1: of light. Yeah, yeah, you mentioned that, you know, Midwestern.
Speaker 1: I'm in Ohio, so I've got that whole you know,
Speaker 1: Midwestern sort of buttoned up. Yeah. Yeah, you know. It's
Speaker 1: so funny how ingrained that gets. Yeah, you know, like
Speaker 1: how profoundly I would be like get in line, folks,
Speaker 1: you know. You know, but it's what I was sort
Speaker 1: of talking about earlier. I was sort of making a
Speaker 1: joke of being like a semi repressed Midwestern, you know,
Speaker 1: white guy is like, you know, it's not that I
Speaker 1: choose like I want to stay in this little thing.
Speaker 1: It's that I've been squeezed into it for so long
Speaker 1: totally that anything outside of it can make me uncomfortable.
Speaker 1: And I have to really work on that, you know,
Speaker 1: like just let the world in a little bit yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: like there is that. The button up is a great
Speaker 1: metaphor because button up also sort of implies like nothing's
Speaker 1: gonna fly out, yeah, you know, like everything is contained,
Speaker 1: I'm not porous, when in fact we're totally porous. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, as button up as we try to be,
Speaker 1: we're actually like we're in the world, we're of the world.
Speaker 1: But it is beautiful, Like I'm totally the same way.
Speaker 1: So it's sort of this exercise of being like, all right,
Speaker 1: when I'm in the launder match, it's just like talking
Speaker 1: to people. It makes the launder man so much nicer,
Speaker 1: you know. And it's also the risk. It's also the
Speaker 1: risk that someone's gonna want to keep talking to you. Yes,
Speaker 1: and you can, and maybe they're gonna talk about stuff
Speaker 1: that you don't actually want to hear. Yeah, And I
Speaker 1: find that too as like a kind of reason to
Speaker 1: sort of restrain sometimes my desire to actually be interactive,
Speaker 1: and I have to be like, yo, it's it's okay.
Speaker 1: Sometimes people say stuff you don't want to hear. It's okay.
Speaker 1: You know, you can live on through it, you can
Speaker 1: live on it, you know. Yep, No, I agree. I
Speaker 1: think there is risk to all of that. It's funny.
Speaker 1: There's a number of social psychology studies that are out there.
Speaker 1: They're all various forms on this particular sort of thing,
Speaker 1: which is, let's study a group of people who ride
Speaker 1: home on the train and just stay in there. I
Speaker 1: don't know what, you just called it, my depth, buttoned
Speaker 1: up restriction zone, whatever, right, Who do that? Versus people
Speaker 1: who make conversations with people they don't know. And there's
Speaker 1: two things that are interesting that come out of those studies.
Speaker 1: The first is if you ask people which is going
Speaker 1: to make them happier, they all almost always think just
Speaker 1: staying to themselves will make them happier, So a our
Speaker 1: prediction of what will make us happy is that. But
Speaker 1: then when they do it, most people report that it
Speaker 1: was more enjoyable, more meaningful when they actually did it,
Speaker 1: and it wasn't as risky or scary. So so I
Speaker 1: think it's both that we don't think we will like it, yeah, right,
Speaker 1: which restricts us, but then also that in reality we
Speaker 1: tend to if we give ourselves that freedom. And I
Speaker 1: think a lot of it comes down to how do
Speaker 1: we enter into those situations and what do we think
Speaker 1: our responsibility is or what do we think our need
Speaker 1: to be performative is? Right, Like, I've got a partner
Speaker 1: who's incredibly She's one of the warmest, kindest people I've
Speaker 1: ever known. I we just go out in public, and
Speaker 1: she's just making friends with everybody, right, and I'm astounded
Speaker 1: by it. I also know, though, for her, that sometimes
Speaker 1: she ends up feeling like she has to be performative,
Speaker 1: like she has to make it everybody feel happy. So
Speaker 1: in those cases it's draining for her, but when it
Speaker 1: emerges naturally for her, it's energizing. Yeah. Absolutely, absolutely. All
Speaker 1: of that sounds very familiar to me. And I also
Speaker 1: like what you were saying that we often think that
Speaker 1: maybe it isn't going to be pleasant, but partly because yeah,
Speaker 1: we have the idea that it's not gonna be pleasant,
Speaker 1: But then we often have the interaction and it's like, oh,
Speaker 1: that was that was sweet, that was really nice. Yeah.
Speaker 1: You know, part of the reason I love being in
Speaker 1: airports is that those things happen all the time. I
Speaker 1: just feel like, I mean, they're dramatics places anyway, but
Speaker 1: they're like sites for all of these sort of maybe
Speaker 1: slightly extra carry, you know, because because everyone's in transit.
Speaker 1: Every we're all a little bit like caught, and so
Speaker 1: people are just like, I mean, many things, but I
Speaker 1: feel like I often am in airports and having these
Speaker 1: really dear little interactions, you know. Yeah, yeah, I mean
Speaker 1: I had one the other day on a plane. I
Speaker 1: was coming back from my father's funeral, and I was
Speaker 1: sitting in an aisle seat, and across the aisle was
Speaker 1: a little boy. And I'm very sound sensitive. Yeah, you know,
Speaker 1: just racket. It troubles me, right, and so I'm just
Speaker 1: hearing this rustling over and over and over. In my mind,
Speaker 1: I'm thinking, you know, with this, kids, stop it, right,
Speaker 1: that's my first reaction. I'm not proud of it, but
Speaker 1: there is sure. I'm coming from Orlando, lots of kids
Speaker 1: it right, you know, I've had maybe enough. But I
Speaker 1: look over and I'm what I noticed is he's trying
Speaker 1: to open his little snack bag. So I just reach over, yeah,
Speaker 1: and I take the snack bag and I opened it
Speaker 1: up for me. Looks at me, which was nice and sweet.
Speaker 1: But the best moment was his dad from across the
Speaker 1: way just looked over at me and gave me a
Speaker 1: smile and a thumbs up. I was just this little moment,
Speaker 1: but it was so so enjoyable, and it was for
Speaker 1: me pivoting from being annoyed yeah at a sound that
Speaker 1: I didn't like, to trying to go, oh, what's going
Speaker 1: on over there? Totally totally yeah, to reaching toward it
Speaker 1: rather yeah, like reaching toward rather than kind of holding up. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so so beautiful, so beautiful. I feel like that's one
Speaker 1: of the projects of my life because I'm very inclined
Speaker 1: to sort of you know, wall up. Yeah. It's something
Speaker 1: that I'm more and more aware of it myself, and
Speaker 1: more and more aware of it is like that's a
Speaker 1: lonely way of being, yeah, you know. Yeah. So I
Speaker 1: want to talk about laughter. You've laughed a ton during
Speaker 1: this interview, which is great. I love you seem to
Speaker 1: be somebody who laughs easily. And you were describing in
Speaker 1: one of your books you were you were talking about
Speaker 1: being on a porch with some friends. Yeah, and you're
Speaker 1: talking about people dying, you your own parents dying, and
Speaker 1: you guys get really laughing about it, and you say,
Speaker 1: you know, I can't in good conscience even say what
Speaker 1: we were saying at this moment, right, because you would
Speaker 1: you would think awful of me, right, And I was
Speaker 1: just reflecting on that because I also have a sense
Speaker 1: of humor that I am saying away. I'm like that,
Speaker 1: I'm not I cannot bring that on air, right, Like,
Speaker 1: that's not it's not going to work. But how should
Speaker 1: I say this differently? It seems like it's off the rails,
Speaker 1: and you know, some people might say it's offensive, right,
Speaker 1: but there's a great joy in it. And you make
Speaker 1: a distinction that I think is really important you make
Speaker 1: it in the book, which is between laughing together with
Speaker 1: people versus laughing at someone. Yeah, totally. Yeah. I'm remembering
Speaker 1: being on the ports with our friends and they live
Speaker 1: right across the way, and everyone's dad was dead, I think,
Speaker 1: and some of them sort of recently. And I also
Speaker 1: love that that little moment of sweetness you were talking
Speaker 1: about on the airplane comes on the way home from
Speaker 1: your dad's funeral, right, yeah. And it's just sort of
Speaker 1: like you know how sometimes you like go extra far,
Speaker 1: and in a way going extra far, I don't even
Speaker 1: know what it is, but it seems like as a
Speaker 1: way to sort of understand or tolerate the intolerable, or
Speaker 1: maybe sometimes as a way of sort of articulating just
Speaker 1: how absurd everything is, you know, and look at this
Speaker 1: and we're still here together, We're still having popcorn on
Speaker 1: the ports, and yeah, isn't this isn't this something else?
Speaker 1: You know? Yeah, it might incline us to actually like
Speaker 1: say really ridiculous shit, you know. Yea, My best friend Chris,
Speaker 1: who's also the editor of this show, we call it
Speaker 1: up the Street and around the corner because it's just
Speaker 1: you just keep going, you just keep going. It just
Speaker 1: building absurdity upon absurdity, you know. But I'm a firm
Speaker 1: believer that levity is a is a spiritual virtue, right, Like,
Speaker 1: I mean, it's just so important. Yeah, and it is
Speaker 1: one of the fundamental ways that I cope with. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And it's difficulty totally, I agree. Yeah, it's the difficulty
Speaker 1: of course. And like very good thinking is done through comedy, yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, and it needs to sometimes be transgressive. That's
Speaker 1: the point of it. Like you think, well, by thinking
Speaker 1: too far, you know, you butt up against stuff. And
Speaker 1: it's sort of like what I love about comedy is
Speaker 1: that it provides us all these spaces to do all
Speaker 1: of this stuff, you know, all of this stuff and Ultimately,
Speaker 1: there is this bottom line thing, which is that it's
Speaker 1: sort of about reaching towards someone. Yep, it's about like
Speaker 1: sort of articulating something about our existence or about what
Speaker 1: we don't understand or about what we in common sort
Speaker 1: of are hurt by and like. And that is understandable.
Speaker 1: But then it's also and I love this that and
Speaker 1: that essay I kind of talk about is that when
Speaker 1: you laugh, your breathing changes. You become acutely aware that
Speaker 1: you have a body, you know, yeah, or at least
Speaker 1: your body becomes an acutely aware thing in the universe.
Speaker 1: And bodies die, bodies die, you know, laughter and death.
Speaker 1: To me, it's like they're tied up. They're really tied up. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you know. It sounds like you're a comedy fan. Are
Speaker 1: there comedians that you sometimes experience as like, all right,
Speaker 1: that was too far or that felt means spirited? Do
Speaker 1: you feel into that for yourself or you kind of
Speaker 1: like whatever anybody says is fine. I'm just kind of
Speaker 1: curious because there's a lot of debate about this, Yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, I mean there always has been, I would think,
Speaker 1: you know, but it seems more acute right now about
Speaker 1: is that okay to joke about yeah, you know, to me,
Speaker 1: like the point of joking is actually to go fucking
Speaker 1: far right. You know, I'm like a Richard Pryor. It
Speaker 1: really feels like one of my most important teachers. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, and Eddie Murphy too, Like I grew up
Speaker 1: like on Eddie Murphy. You know, George Carlin. You know
Speaker 1: George Carlin. And I'm interested in thinking that it's possible
Speaker 1: by going to the edges, you know, the thinking that
Speaker 1: it is possible by going to the edges, and that
Speaker 1: is often difficult. My question is sort of like I
Speaker 1: haven't been thinking about it, you know. One of the
Speaker 1: things and I think Carlin really teaches this beautifully. One
Speaker 1: of the things that comedy does beautifully, or I think of,
Speaker 1: is it wonders about inside and out. The comedy that
Speaker 1: I'm interested in is often kind of fiddling around trying
Speaker 1: to figure out in a way who's left out or
Speaker 1: something like that. It's wondered about boundaries, but it's also
Speaker 1: wondering about power often. You know. That's that's a comedy
Speaker 1: that I'm often interested in. And in order to sort
Speaker 1: of articulate those questions or to get into those questions,
Speaker 1: Obviously that's messy as hell, because power is complicated and messy.
Speaker 1: But I'm also interested, you know. I was watching that
Speaker 1: Carlin documentary recently and then kind of got back into
Speaker 1: his work. His objective, and I think it's the objective
Speaker 1: of a lot of comedians, is to actually trouble the
Speaker 1: idea that they're trying to come for who thinks they
Speaker 1: own the world, you know, like Carlin is trying to
Speaker 1: like come for power, and not to have power, but
Speaker 1: to disrupt the idea of it, which is also to
Speaker 1: disrupt the idea that people would be not disempowered, but
Speaker 1: like abused or something that to me is really interesting
Speaker 1: and it's difficult work. And it's also like it's the
Speaker 1: reason I love comedy, you know. And I love comedy
Speaker 1: in the many ways that it tries to wonder about that,
Speaker 1: which is all kinds of ways, you know, all kinds
Speaker 1: of ways. There's another thing you and I have in common,
Speaker 1: which is your mother described you as possibly I don't
Speaker 1: have the exact line here, but in my mother's opinion,
Speaker 1: the single worst paper boy in the history of the occupation.
Speaker 1: And what's funny is you and I are similar in this.
Speaker 1: I was a good paper boy in that I always
Speaker 1: delivered what needed delivered on time. I actually took that
Speaker 1: responsibility very seriously. But what I didn't do was what
Speaker 1: you didn't do. Share that with us. I kind of
Speaker 1: where your paper boy problems came in when you're talking
Speaker 1: about like not collecting. Is that I drove my parents
Speaker 1: crazy because they both actually had paper rods too, maybe
Speaker 1: slightly after us. But my mother made her crazy because
Speaker 1: we would like, if we would go visit our grandparents,
Speaker 1: for instance, for a couple of weeks in the summer,
Speaker 1: and she would take over the paper route, my whole
Speaker 1: thing would be just a mess. It would be you know,
Speaker 1: a little paper book you remember, you said, a paper
Speaker 1: book that you out, and it would be such a mess,
Speaker 1: and she would get it all up to date, you know,
Speaker 1: because I would just do it by memory. I would
Speaker 1: just like remember who had paid me and who hadn't
Speaker 1: paid me. And so I would only collect basically when
Speaker 1: I needed to go to the movies, or I would
Speaker 1: only needed some you know, candy or something. Oh. That
Speaker 1: made them crazy. That made them crazy because they were like,
Speaker 1: of course, well you could be making forty dollars every
Speaker 1: two weeks, so what's wrong, And you're like, I'm making
Speaker 1: eighteen that's all I really need right now. It's pretty good.
Speaker 1: You know, I might make fifty six next week, you know. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I was struck by it because it made me think, like, well,
Speaker 1: why was I like that? Because I was very faithful
Speaker 1: in the duty. Yeah, you know, it was very faithful
Speaker 1: in the duty. And I can't remember now. I mean,
Speaker 1: part of me thinks I did like asking people for
Speaker 1: money even though they actually owed the money. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, I think there's a little of that, Like,
Speaker 1: you know, it's just put somebody out a little bit
Speaker 1: made me uncomfortable, so I only did it when I
Speaker 1: had to do it. Maybe that was part of it,
Speaker 1: but I don't know. It's just a curious phenomenon to
Speaker 1: be like, well, I'm not lazy, yeah, because I'm out
Speaker 1: here doing the work. But there's something about showing up
Speaker 1: and getting what's mine there, Yeah, that I just don't
Speaker 1: take that seriously, I know. And the thing that I
Speaker 1: was also I realized, oh, two things about jokes too,
Speaker 1: also about comedy. I was thinking, there's also like bad jokes.
Speaker 1: There's jokes that just suck, you know, and they suck.
Speaker 1: They might suck because they're like, oh, that was supposed
Speaker 1: to be trying to like trouble something. It was mean
Speaker 1: and it was just stupid. Yeah, but I think that happens.
Speaker 1: And I also I'm like, yeah, okay, that's part of
Speaker 1: your job. Actually, a comedian's job to me as much
Speaker 1: as anyone, maybe not as much as anyone, maybe all
Speaker 1: of us, maybe there's human creatures. That's what we do.
Speaker 1: It's to actually like try a lot of stuff and
Speaker 1: sometimes that it's actually stupid. You know, it doesn't work
Speaker 1: and it's done. But that to me is like that's
Speaker 1: just part of the job. And if it's perpetually done
Speaker 1: or persistently them there's another comedian you know that I'm
Speaker 1: gonna actually listen to, you know, like I don't watch
Speaker 1: Stephen Colbert, yeah, because I don't think it's funny. I
Speaker 1: just think it, you know, I just don't think, you know,
Speaker 1: and other people have other opinions, you know, that's cool,
Speaker 1: like you know, I don't have to, you know, but anyway,
Speaker 1: But to the other thing, it's like I used to
Speaker 1: like little Buddy and capitalist in me. I used to
Speaker 1: get a kick out of like someone owed me four
Speaker 1: bucks and then two weeks later they owed me eight
Speaker 1: or nine bucks, and then three weeks later, and so
Speaker 1: everyone I'd be like, oh, yeah, I'm not collecting, but
Speaker 1: this time I might get twelve bucks. Were you charging
Speaker 1: a big on your paper up many? I didn't know it,
Speaker 1: but yeah, yeah, but so yeah, So there was an
Speaker 1: element of that too, like I don't care if they
Speaker 1: don't pay me this time, because can be big next time.
Speaker 1: Eighty What can you do with eight books when you're twelve?
Speaker 1: You can do a lot. It's funny you just said,
Speaker 1: you know, you think maybe the job of us as
Speaker 1: creatures is to try And the very short subtitle of
Speaker 1: your book inciting joy essays, the word essay tell us
Speaker 1: where it comes from. What it means. Yeah, it means,
Speaker 1: I guess. I think it's a French word to mean
Speaker 1: to try to attempt. Yeah, there's an essay that's who
Speaker 1: I love? And who's really a model for those essays
Speaker 1: named well, I say Montane. I think it's Montagna. And
Speaker 1: his essays were really just sort of wanderings. He would
Speaker 1: just wonder about things about friendship, about humor, about liars. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't know if he's a humor, but on liars,
Speaker 1: he has a great one on liars, and he sort
Speaker 1: of talks about he's really funny too. Sometimes. The whole essay,
Speaker 1: as I recall, is well, the part that most struck
Speaker 1: me was that he's trying to explain why he's not
Speaker 1: a liar, and the reason he's not a liar is
Speaker 1: because his memory is so terrible that he couldn't lie
Speaker 1: if he wanted to. So he's like, when I'm lying,
Speaker 1: I'm actually I just forgot. But it's brilliant. But they're
Speaker 1: all these like strange things, and they don't have a thesis,
Speaker 1: they don't have a kind of objective, they aren't like
Speaker 1: mapped out clearly. They're just his sort of like wandering
Speaker 1: through some thinking. And they are to me just beautiful.
Speaker 1: So some of my favorite things to read. Do you
Speaker 1: know whether he edited. Did he go back and try
Speaker 1: and edit it or was it just like stream of
Speaker 1: consciousness and he drops it on you. I suspect they're
Speaker 1: so beautifully written. I mean they have the element of
Speaker 1: like it's really like a beautiful mind at work. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so you do get to sort of follow the thinking happening.
Speaker 1: But they're they're so kind of clear, and because he
Speaker 1: wrote a million of them. I mean, he really might
Speaker 1: have written five hundred. Yeah. Yeah, he's known for the form. Yeah, yeah, totally.
Speaker 1: It would be interesting to see like the first ones
Speaker 1: that he wrote versus the last ones, and to see
Speaker 1: if the last ones are more crafted, or how they're
Speaker 1: different or something like that. I haven't done that, So
Speaker 1: that makes me think about your process, right, because your
Speaker 1: essays they have that following you as you think through something,
Speaker 1: and they have a very stream of consciousness element to them, right. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I don't think this is an offensive term, but like
Speaker 1: run on long sentences, they kind of go on and
Speaker 1: jump all around. And so are you also editing because
Speaker 1: the language is beautiful, so I assume to some degree, yes,
Speaker 1: a lot, okay, but you know how to edit in
Speaker 1: such a way that you don't tighten yourself up. And
Speaker 1: that's part of the trick with my edits is that
Speaker 1: I'm trying to make it seem like what you're saying, Like,
Speaker 1: I'm trying to make it seem or not seem necessarily,
Speaker 1: but I'm trying to allow it to be meandering sort
Speaker 1: of streaming, while at the same time not being as
Speaker 1: sort of all over the place. It's like a sort
Speaker 1: of proper stream of consciousness would be. And this I
Speaker 1: started doing kind of with the poems where I started
Speaker 1: thinking hard about how do I make this sound like
Speaker 1: a spoken like really like a speaker. Yeah, yeah, And
Speaker 1: that takes quite a bit of work, you know, because
Speaker 1: one of the things we have to learn I had
Speaker 1: to learn as a writer is actually to have this
Speaker 1: voice thing, to write like a person talks. Yeah, And
Speaker 1: that's difficult because we often think of writing is like
Speaker 1: not how we talk, but it's like this idea of
Speaker 1: good writing yea. You know, we often try to write
Speaker 1: aspirationally towards what quote unquote good writing is, which I
Speaker 1: don't know what that is. There's a million things that
Speaker 1: constitutes to make good writing totally. You undoubtedly have a voice.
Speaker 1: Thank you. I think you're writing. I think I could
Speaker 1: pick out of a pack for sure, you know, like, Okay,
Speaker 1: I think I know where that's coming from. Yeah, because
Speaker 1: he's like, hey, friends. Another of your delights that you
Speaker 1: talk about is you talk about the delight in blowing
Speaker 1: things off. You talk about you know, I had to
Speaker 1: revise my position in regards to the occasional lack of discipline.
Speaker 1: You also tell a story about you know, trying to
Speaker 1: get your dad to blow something off? Do you want
Speaker 1: to share that little story about your dad? And then
Speaker 1: I've got to follow on sort of question where I'd
Speaker 1: like to try and take this. Yeah, in the essay,
Speaker 1: I'm sort of wandering around and I sort of talk
Speaker 1: about the pleasure of blowing stuff off periodically, and how
Speaker 1: in a way like coming back to this sort of
Speaker 1: like you know, buttoned up thing. It's like, that's like
Speaker 1: not you know, and he know I played sports and
Speaker 1: I was like, I like literally never missed a practice
Speaker 1: except this one time and I messed up, but I
Speaker 1: just oversaw left and it was terrible. But anyway, the
Speaker 1: essay arrives at my father shortly before he died actually,
Speaker 1: and he's getting dressed on his way to work. And
Speaker 1: we had a tough so it's sort of embedded in
Speaker 1: the in the essay. I don't know if anyone gets it,
Speaker 1: but it's for me. Then we had a sort of
Speaker 1: a difficult relationship. We love the hell out at each other,
Speaker 1: but it was sort of challenging and late in his
Speaker 1: life because things got easier. So I was around or
Speaker 1: something and he was going off to work. He worked
Speaker 1: at that point that might have been his job at
Speaker 1: Applebee's or something some shitty scene. And I was like, yoh, man,
Speaker 1: just blow it off. I knew he wouldn't and couldn't
Speaker 1: blow it off, but I said it anyway, you know,
Speaker 1: in the event, and he was like, yeah, I wish
Speaker 1: I could. I really wish I could. And that's from
Speaker 1: a dude who had been working jobs that I presume
Speaker 1: he kind of hated for, you know, the years that
Speaker 1: I knew him. And so the essay is sort of
Speaker 1: about I mean, the essay is one thing about my
Speaker 1: father's devotion to us. Actually now, he didn't blow stuff
Speaker 1: off because he had us. But the other thing is
Speaker 1: that how lucky it is when we have that opportunity
Speaker 1: to be luck you know what. I'm just gonna sit
Speaker 1: in the sun today. Actually, what you just said was
Speaker 1: beautiful about you know, my dad couldn't blow it off
Speaker 1: because he had us. Yeah, I felt something there. My
Speaker 1: question was about knowing the right balance of those things, right,
Speaker 1: because you're clearly a pretty prolific guy. You write books,
Speaker 1: you're always doing talks, you're teaching. I mean, you've got
Speaker 1: a lot going on, so so you're not blowing a
Speaker 1: ton off you know, I'm just curious about how you
Speaker 1: think about you know, like today I'm just going to
Speaker 1: give myself some grace and some slack and you know what,
Speaker 1: like I'm just not Nope, not today, I'm going to
Speaker 1: sit in the sun. Yeah, I'm gonna spend more time
Speaker 1: in the garden, you know wherever versus Okay, you know what,
Speaker 1: I don't feel like it, but you know I need
Speaker 1: to hang in there here, right because because good things
Speaker 1: come out of hard work. Yeah, totally, totally. It's a
Speaker 1: good question. I think of that too, because you know,
Speaker 1: like I'm like a busy writer. I like to give talks,
Speaker 1: I like to give readings. It's funny. Recently I got
Speaker 1: a little bug, and you know, it was a kind
Speaker 1: of thing that I could tell it was like a
Speaker 1: day long or two day long thing. But I was like, oh,
Speaker 1: that's your body saying settle down from it. You know,
Speaker 1: you need to settle down. And it felt a little
Speaker 1: bit like the settling down was not only just that
Speaker 1: you don't feel great, It was that you emotionally need
Speaker 1: to sort of slow down for a second. You know,
Speaker 1: you need to sort of like touch into some stuff
Speaker 1: that you might not be paying attention to that's one thing.
Speaker 1: But as far as the sort of balance, it's a
Speaker 1: great question, and I don't feel like I know the
Speaker 1: answer to it. I do know one thing, and maybe
Speaker 1: some of those stoppings like that like sort of just
Speaker 1: stop for a second, or your body being like you're
Speaker 1: gonna stop for a second, like you got to week
Speaker 1: off now. One of the things that that can afford
Speaker 1: us is to be like, oh, wait a second. You're
Speaker 1: spending a lot of time doing stuff you think you
Speaker 1: need to do but you don't really want to do,
Speaker 1: or you think you need to do because you think
Speaker 1: people are depending on you, or you think you need
Speaker 1: to do because you think it's going to be good
Speaker 1: for something. But just to be like, but is any
Speaker 1: of that true, and to the extent that it's true,
Speaker 1: like how do you want to respond? You know, just
Speaker 1: to at least raise the question, because I feel like
Speaker 1: a lot of us are sort of, you know, just
Speaker 1: kind of built that way of like get it done,
Speaker 1: get it done, get it done, more and more and
Speaker 1: more and more and more, get it done. It feels
Speaker 1: like in a way the kind of you know, kind
Speaker 1: of a capitalistic mode. Actually, even if it's not that
Speaker 1: we're trying to make money out of it. Even if
Speaker 1: it's just like accomplishment, you know, for the sake of
Speaker 1: accomplishment or something, it does feel worthwhile to settle down
Speaker 1: and be like, well, you know, all kinds of things.
Speaker 1: I guess in one of those things, it's like, what
Speaker 1: do we avoiding too? I think being busy is such
Speaker 1: a good way to avoid all kinds of things, including
Speaker 1: sometimes connection. You know, think about that. Sometimes I've been
Speaker 1: feeling so glad giving readings and stuff, and I want,
Speaker 1: though also to be in rooms of people asking beautiful
Speaker 1: questions and all that. I also want to be acutely
Speaker 1: aware of how that itself can be a kind of
Speaker 1: blowing off, like my relationships, you know, how that could
Speaker 1: be a way of actually escaping a different kind of intimacy,
Speaker 1: which is actually you know, more vulnerable than sort of
Speaker 1: risky to come back to risk yeah, you know, or candy. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, I think you make a great point there,
Speaker 1: which is it's kind of about asking the questions and
Speaker 1: being intentional. Yeah. Yeah, you know, that's just thinking a
Speaker 1: little bit about it versus just reacting out of our
Speaker 1: sort of habitual patterns. Yeah, I mean, I certainly have
Speaker 1: the habitual pattern of like, if it's supposed to get done,
Speaker 1: I'm going to get it done, and that serves me
Speaker 1: generally well, and it's good to be intentional. I also
Speaker 1: think it's really helpful to know your tendencies, right. I've
Speaker 1: done a lot of you know, coaching work with people
Speaker 1: in the past, and what I realized very early on
Speaker 1: was like, you can't say something like you should be
Speaker 1: easier on yourself as a general principle because for some people,
Speaker 1: absolutely right, But then there are other people Yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's not really the right about right, you know, And
Speaker 1: so I think knowing where we tend to fall, where
Speaker 1: do I tend to go to, Oh, I tend to
Speaker 1: go to pushing myself too hard, all right, then when
Speaker 1: in doubt, I might think about dialing it down a
Speaker 1: little bit, or I have a tendency to not push
Speaker 1: myself very hard and later feel regret about not getting
Speaker 1: enough done. Okay, maybe then I need to push my
Speaker 1: needle a little bit more in that direction. So I think,
Speaker 1: you know, like you said, asking the question about like
Speaker 1: what am I doing? And life is just so complicated
Speaker 1: with competing priorities, right, because for most of us, like
Speaker 1: there's more that we would like to do, could do
Speaker 1: than there is time to do it. Yeah, yeah, and
Speaker 1: so you have to make difficult decisions absolutely, yeah, and
Speaker 1: again like sort of discerning, like what are those things
Speaker 1: that we would like to do really and that we
Speaker 1: would like to have done. I would like to say
Speaker 1: that I have done you know, yes, yes, And that's hard.
Speaker 1: And I feel like our conditioning is strong, like and
Speaker 1: I even think about, you know, growing up, how I
Speaker 1: grew up, like we were kind of broken. So like
Speaker 1: if you didn't accept an invitation to make some money,
Speaker 1: it was just like crazy, Yeah you didn't. You didn't
Speaker 1: turn that down, you know. And so that's actually a
Speaker 1: thing that I am acutely aware of that is inside
Speaker 1: of me, even though my bills are very paid at
Speaker 1: this moment, you know, to not be enticed out of
Speaker 1: I need to pay my rent, you know, like I
Speaker 1: gotta take this, I gotta take this as opposed to like, oh,
Speaker 1: I would like to do this thing actually, you know, yeah,
Speaker 1: that kind of you know, I guess it's sort of
Speaker 1: like you know, deprivation or scarcity or whatever. It's trying
Speaker 1: to have like a relationship to what is in fact
Speaker 1: the conditions of one's of one's life or something. Yep,
Speaker 1: I have another slightly deeper dive on on something you
Speaker 1: just said. You said the things that I would like
Speaker 1: to be doing versus the things I would have liked
Speaker 1: to have done. Yeah, when it comes to something like
Speaker 1: writing or edit in your writing, for a lot of people,
Speaker 1: a lot of writers will describe that as difficult. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you know that they don't always want to do that,
Speaker 1: that they may not feel like it. How do you
Speaker 1: frame that up in the context of what we just
Speaker 1: talked about, which is like, you know, I kind of
Speaker 1: want to have it done, but I don't necessarily feel
Speaker 1: like doing it right now, and yet I know it's
Speaker 1: something that's important to me and I love How do
Speaker 1: you think about that, and you're talking about like writing
Speaker 1: and difficulty. Yeah, Like, you know, if you were to
Speaker 1: just go off of do I want to do it
Speaker 1: versus do I want to have it done? I'm certain
Speaker 1: there's times you don't want to write in that moment, right,
Speaker 1: You don't feel like writing, so but you still do. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's a great question. I've been thinking, like there are
Speaker 1: some days when before I like settle down to write,
Speaker 1: I'll kind of like clean up, you know, let me
Speaker 1: do that thing, you know, because I mostly think of
Speaker 1: like I'm just excited to get back to whatever I'm
Speaker 1: working on, an almost very rarely unless it's like an
Speaker 1: assignment or something. When I have assignments, I often have
Speaker 1: a hard time. But when it's my own work, I'm
Speaker 1: almost always pumped to get back to it. But sometimes
Speaker 1: I do find myself like I have a day of revising,
Speaker 1: I gotta get to I'll find myself sort of like
Speaker 1: figuring out other stuff to do, kind of warming up,
Speaker 1: and it might, you know, procrastinated. This is one of
Speaker 1: the words for that. With that work, the writing work.
Speaker 1: One of the things that I just know, and it's
Speaker 1: a little bit when you were talking, I was like, Oh,
Speaker 1: it's a little bit like exercising, or it's a little
Speaker 1: bit like you know, doing yoga or something, you know,
Speaker 1: where it's like sometimes getting there's a little bit challenging.
Speaker 1: But the thing that I know about writing that is
Speaker 1: so exciting to me about which why I love to
Speaker 1: do it like love to do it, is that I
Speaker 1: will often approach something, get into something that I feel
Speaker 1: like I know a lot about, and in the process
Speaker 1: of writing about it, and that thing I think I
Speaker 1: know a lot about is often me and then the
Speaker 1: process of writing about it, which really means sort of
Speaker 1: thinking very hard with syntax and language and sounds. I
Speaker 1: will be like, oh, you don't know anything about that.
Speaker 1: So I get to sort of pleasure of kind of
Speaker 1: unknowing myself or revisiting my experiences, my thinking, my relationships, etc.
Speaker 1: In such a way that when the rethinking has sort
Speaker 1: of commenced for the time being, I'm like, WHOA, that's
Speaker 1: an entirely new way to think about my relationship with
Speaker 1: my mother, you know. I can't wait to tell my mom,
Speaker 1: you know, or whatever. So there is some kind of
Speaker 1: like I don't want to say reward, I am actually
Speaker 1: thinking the word reward. But there is some sort of
Speaker 1: like depth of understanding. That's the reason that I write. Really,
Speaker 1: it's it's a kind of the often difficult depth of
Speaker 1: understanding that I get to. I get to better understand myself,
Speaker 1: you know. And also, and this feels to come back
Speaker 1: sort of all the way back what I'm sort of
Speaker 1: curious about. I get to more deeply understand what I love.
Speaker 1: That's one of the things. And I think that's really
Speaker 1: well that is a beautiful place for us to wrap up. Ross.
Speaker 1: Thank you so much. I have so enjoyed this. You've
Speaker 1: been somebody I've wanted to have on for a while,
Speaker 1: so I'm glad we finally got to make it happen.
Speaker 1: Thank you very much. It's good to talk to you.
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