The Biggest Thing For Me Is That I Thought We Would Talk More

Sitting at my desk today at Jazz88 I got one of those short washes of regret. Not a thorough wash, not a painful wash. But some nostalgia, mixing with some kind of uneasy mood and together it ends up being something describable. I’m forty two years old and day by day, year by year, the things that felt infinite are all slowly and at the same time feeling finite. And one of those things is conversation. I just imagined the talking never stopping. Before kids, but say after age 17, there was just this surplus of conversation. If you had asked me twenty years ago how many nights I would spend talking about music, politics, women, racism, great food, movies I think my truest heart would’ve envisioned the number north of 10,000. It just seemed so commonplace to talk for hours, to dissect a different thing, with a different group of friends. My ex-girlfriend turned friend Anna to me seemed like this unending font of conversation and of wisdom. I thought we were going to get to it all. Now I count her among my close friends and I probably get six proper conversations with her on a good year. Now of course some of that is because we aren’t partners. She’s got her wife, I got mine. But we hang pretty often. But we often have our kids. And we have the dynamics of our partners. Conversations are now interrupted not because they ran their course, but because the babysitter can only go until 10:30 on school nights, or because “she naps better if the car is moving”. I get it. But I hate it. I miss it and I don’t know if everyone misses it like me. I love conversation. I have a relatively free flowing conversation every Sunday with my best friend Martin. We are talking one and half hours to two. Sure, sometimes there’s more left to say, but generally we got to “it”. I’m in a season. I’m in a season where my ears don’t belong to me. They belong to my children, they belong to my job, they belong to my rest. It’s an uphill battle to find a conversation. It’s also hard to conduct the type of conversation I want exclusively with my wife. If me and Rachel are going to talk we will of course have to stumble into all the mundanity that surrounds our life. Things will naturally drift to our children, to our schedule, to our needs. It’s just part of the deal. Make any rule you want, you might delay it, but you’ll still fall into the conversations that need to be had, not the ones that want to be had.

This is what I love about listening to the conversation based podcasts I go hard on. And I don’t mean interview based podcasts. I mean conversation based podcasts. Easy top 4: Juan Ep is Life, The Political Gabfest, The Rewatchables, Bill Simmons when it’s with Ryen Rusillo. May I take an aside?

It’s Bill Caperton’s birthday. Gold medal conversationalist. Wide, and deep and so curious when he does find something he doesn’t know about. Hilarious but never cracks a joke. A straight man with one of those unassailable controls of the creativity of the English language. A man who coined the term “bum son” for the feeling of doing something vaguely juvenile or immature while in the blaring presence of more traditional adulthood. For example: Lifting weights in the middle of the day at your parents house because you are just working as a touring musician at the time. Enjoying two beers on a back porch at an uexplainably early hour. He’s a man who used to say “grit me” when it was time to smoke a cigarette. He has opinions about Neutral Milk Hotel records that were only released in Denmark on 8 inch acetates. He will read a poem with a conviction that is startling and heartfelt. Seeing him love a song is better than listening to the song alone. You go back and look up the artist after the hang is done, it’s good, but not the same. Aside Aside: Have you listened to this song that is super not well-known but matters so much to me and Muad’dib?

<p>Hello, Have a Listen You Coward!</p>

Back to podcasts and the importance of conversation: These podcasts capture some of the vulnerability and free association that went into the conversations I had back then. There’s a thesis, there’s a centerpiece, but there’s something else. There’s where the conversation because of the exact people who are having the talk. It’s not a regurgitation of Wikipedia. It’s not as formulaic as an honest to goodness interview show. This is something that is shared with a handful of personalities negotiating how they move together. I believe this will be the kryptonite for the AI folks. Will I listen to an AI be Drake. . .maybe but probably not. . . . . .Will I listen to AI Marc Maron? Absolutely not. These podcasts demonstrate a growth that is absolutely not exponential. It’s incremental. I need to hear their life move at a similar pace to mine. Or at least a comparable one. I feel some sort of connection to Bomani Jones because on his personal podcast he compellingly makes his P1 listeners feel like they are the journey with him. I love Juan Ep is Life because the hosts are honest about their travails, their jealousies, their neuroses. They show their bruises, they involve their failures, they critique their own relationship with their appetite for fame. It’s not raw, it’s presented, but the artifice is light.
It is something deeply important to me to get these types of conversations in my life, and I’m not getting the mental real estate from the random stuff I used to read before I had an iphone. One of the huge shortcomings of the contours of my consumption patterns now is my access to written content that isn’t about politics. The era of music magazines, and just fuck around graffiti mags and all sort of random periodicals you read because it’s all you could at the time, they weren’t fully immersive. If you gave me a magazine of yours to read in the early 2000s you weren’t saying “put down that sandwich and watch this clip right now”, you were saying “see what part of this works for you”. There was an exploratory nature to my reading that I just don’t have. I read shit I had no interest in. I remember thumbing through magazines and thinking “this article looks stupid” and then reading the whole thing. It forced a breadth of knowledge that I can pretty easily avoid. I’m aware of the most recent meme things, I’ve read the three big articles that everyone is supposed to read this month, but I haven’t learned about a butterfly collector in Florida that is suing a pet store for using a photo of one of his butterflies. Back in 2005, I’m reading that. No questions asked. And reading with very low expectations.
I look forward to getting some of this back. Because a lot of it is is not the presence of children, it’s the age of those children. I remember having amazing conversations of this nature with my parents and my parents friends. I also now realize, my parents were getting these long conversations in with their friends and me and the rest of the kids were just running a whole separate fair conversationally. I dream about being 67, semi-retired, having a talk, discussing a couple movies with a couple people, some close friends, some friends of friends. You’re talking, you’re laughing, you’re sharing experiences, you’re sharing common thread cultural experiences even if you didn’t experience them with these people. It’s special. It’s coming back. It will be finite. You’ll be interrupted by other things. But the gift of gab will be back, it will be different, and I’m getting these podcasts in in the meantime.