The New Hour

Events, by their definition, happen. I will admit right up front that that is maybe my most pithy or profound pronouncement, but the contemplation of it if you're of a specific kind of anxious disposition can be, to put it in technical medical psychological terminology, kind of a lot.

If you're anxious, you don't want events. You don't want happenings or interruptions or, the worst possible outcome of all possible outcomes, fucking spontaneity. I gave myself a little bit of an attack of the bubblegut just typing it out. Like, I can barely tolerate live theater. First of all, is live theater part of my regular, non-spontaneous routine? Absolutely not, so we've immediately arrived at Problem Number One. And it's not just plays, it anything, like if you ask me if I want to do something, my immediate response is: fuck off, that is going to conflict with my sitting at home time. And I don't mean that in the precious sense, like "I prefer to be cozy" or something, I mean literally there are parts of each day that I have an expectation (not a schedule since I'm not one of those sociopaths with a schedule. If you keep an actual schedule but then miss something on it? Yikes. You're just setting yourself up for another, separate anxiety cascade by choice) that I will be able to sit uninterrupted and not be bothered. This was one of the reasons why I hesitated to get my cat, but once I learned that sitting and doing nothing was her primary modus vivendi, well, we started to get along just fine. If anything, I'm interrupting her.

All theater, to advance on to Problem Number Two, is all happening right now, right there in front of you, with human mouths saying human words that they're all just supposed to know in a very specific order and with knowable, interpretable narrative and emotional intent. Guys, that is SO MUCH. And you're very specifically told not to help them if they fuck up! You just have to sit there and take it as they risk disaster, over and over again, hundreds of times per minute. Would I know if they missed a mark or a cue or dropped a line? Of course I wouldn't, but it's the potential to do so that births the tension like a thousand toothy butterflies in the chest cavity of the Anxious Watcher.

I bet you're thinking: well, what about improv theater? No lines or marks to hit there, right? That's even worse! You have to be coherent and cooperative and interesting in the realest of real time, under the judgment of the watching audience? I showed up to watch some goofs and some spoofs, not to be the jury on someone's already deeply impractical career. Also, there's a chance they could go out into the audience and ask you something, which, I'd rather they just hit me in the face with a fireplace poker or have my chest cavity filled with a thousand toothy butterflies. And even then, I'd probably second-guess whatever reaction I had to that for the whole drive home.

So I don't want Events. I don't want things to be other than how they are, which is not to say I won't accept things getting better, it's just that growing up an anxious person with a lot of economic uncertainty, you become accustomed to the idea that, however fucked up things are in this double-wide you're sub-leasing and having to sometimes share with the landlady's in-recovery adult son, they could always be worse. Like whose to say next time you don't end up in a single-wide? Or the adult son is not in recovery?

That's the baseline for how I took the news that Marc Maron's podcast is going to be coming to a close this fall. Now, this is not a recommendation as I find podcast recommendations have by far the lowest hit rate for any other kind of media or activity. There's something deeply personal and soul-tailored about a podcast that they almost never, ever translate to another person's ears or context quite right. There's no worse social position to find yourself in in the year of our lord 2025 than to be sharing your favorite podcast with someone for the first time, watching their face to see if/when they "get it." Reader, they will not "get it," now or ever. And you will never, ever, if you live to be a thousand, understand the appeal of that shit they listen to about child murderers or the history of peppercorns or whatever. Their taste is so hyper-specific, it becomes objectively bad. And so is yours. And so is mine.

That's sort of belied by the fact that plenty of other people like the things you like and probably listen to the thing you listen to. And you can definitely point to some good things that most people find compelling on the outside. But I've already got people recommending replacements to me, which is the fastest way to ensure that I will NEVER listen to that thing they are recommending. Hell, the Dax Shepard podcast is probably the closest thing out there, and even openly acknowledges WTF as a direct inspiration, but this is all so personal, like I said. Like, I find Dax Shepard to be a weird phony. Which is 100% based on nothing and completely unfair, but he's not my real dad and you can't make me call him that.

I dunno what I'm gonna do, man, but I've got a few months to figure it out, I guess. That's the best an anxious person can ask for, a few months to sit in intensifying agitation and anticipation as the date of The Big Change You Didn't Ask For looms. I figure if I'm going to spiral anyway, might as well get a good wind-up going.