Wipe Your Feet

I recorded an episode of the podcast This American Wife last night with Ned and Eric. First of all, this meant admitting that I don’t listen to podcasts nor was I completely air-tight on what they were or what they did; then, when in the ensuing discussion podcasts were compared to the radio, I was faced with the fact that I have also never been on the radio, except once in college when I read a short story on Molly’s evening show. And one time I answered the phone at my friend’s reggae show, but the person hung up. Anyway, this train of thought of course led me to become really self-conscious about how I sound when I talk, and not even just how I sound but the way I try to go about expressing my thoughts as words out loud; I use “like” a lot which I know makes me sound kind of dumb but I don’t have the willpower required to overcome this tic, I also talk way too fast and sometimes my tangents become tangled and I forget what I was trying to say in the first place. I am an overtalker. I am an interrupter, even though I usually hate interrupters (obviously the people most annoyed at being interrupted are the people who also can’t stop themselves from interrupting; this is something I toil at trying to change, I really regret interrupting, every time I’ve done it it’s made me feel small). At times I speak so quickly that I throw in a little runaway train of garbage-talk (habadabadabdadaphhhshh) right in the middle of my speech and usually no one even notices because they can’t understand me to begin with.

You dig?

For example, the piece I read on BSR for Molly? Six pages in five minutes flat. This was a high-concept story which I still think of fondly even if it’s probably too embarrassing to publish: it was a student’s essay on Hamlet which also served as a passive-aggressive note to her professor, with whom she’d had an affair, followed by his critique of her essay and his passive-aggressive message back. By the way, this is not something I ever would have performed or read in front of a large group of people who were not also up for a grade; I liked the fact that I was just reading it aloud to an empty room and a microphone, because the way I tend to visualize radio is: nobody is listening.

I guess that what’s neat about a podcast is that it’s like a radio blog (not ephemeral and transitory like non-archived radio, which I guess is something I feel some nostalgia for, as now it’s possible to browse radio archives and this convenience brings with it a sort of wistfulness), and since you can’t edit what you speak as efficiently or thoughtfully as you can when you write, before you hit publish, there’s that kind of “ooh, what will happen” vibe while still allowing for whatever you made to exist in perpetuity. The internet loves to preserve things forever. It saves your cookies. As aside: who made techno-talk so cute? Cookies, bugs, zips, mice…it’s written in the language of Katamari Damacy. I like this fact. It’s like the opposite of an onomatopoeia: this tiny gray electronic cube has a bug. No it doesn’t, it’s just not working. This little plastic oval is a mouse! 77.68.45.001 is a cookie!

Anyway, I hope you’ll like this podcast. It was fun. I remember thinking, while I sat there and drained Eric’s beer supply, that talking seems almost dangerous when you’re speaking to a group of people who might see it after becoming familiar with how you express yourself through written words. What if I said something that couldn’t be taken back, that when looking over the transcript as if it were a blog there would be something that would make me go, “Oh, sheesh, delete, delete!” if I were editing it at home. Every new format you encounter, when you’re the kind of person who yammers at the general public a lot via blogging or life-casting or auditioning, makes you realize certain inconsistencies in yourself and the way you express who you are in different media. Would anyone recognize my voice, speeding down the highway of this or that topic, clam pizza, NPR, as the me who’s been writing here for a couple of years? And if not, which one am I?

Ned told a story about catching a former roommate singing and making eggs while drunk, totally without a self-conscious thought; there was something evocative about it, and I remembered that at one point a friend of mine misheard the lyrics of the song “Low” by Cracker (sorry — regrettable earworm) as “being with you girl/is like being alone.” It’s actually “like being low,” (obviously, this is the title of the song, but who knew or cared when it was on Star 98 FM and not your favorite anyway? The next lyrics talk about “being stoned” which of course we were able to make out) something that I wish Cracker would consider changing if they were into making a song about something totally different than the one they made, which of course was popular and so I’m wrong to suggest this. However, if they were interested, they might want to re-release and re-market “Low” as “Alone,” and then they could explore the far more interesting relationship between two people who can be together and yet enjoy all the freedom of being alone at the same time. If being with you were like being alone, I would want to be with you all the time; I would walk around the house without washing my hair and wearing green eye cream, singing The All-American Rejects and cracking my knuckles: it sounds really great! One some level, writing is like being alone; you get a considered authenticity that’s probably impossible when you’re adapting to other people in the conversation, interacting — you know, the tricky shit — but this is also why it’s great to deviate from that, to remind you of the self you present to other people when they’re engaging back. Something markedly different happens, and so the outcome is somewhat unpredictable; it’s why Blog/Off was so much fun, and the Hungry Ladies video, and Coming & Crying — each of them a simple chemistry set, like a Fake Dinner Party that I didn’t write.