HBM134: Questionable Hobbies of the Socially Isolated

Here Be Monsters

Here Be Monsters Podcast

Science, Society & Culture, Social Sciences, Personal Journals, Documentary

4.6 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 1 April 2020

⏱️ 20 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Searching for something to do during government-mandated social distancing, Here Be Monsters host Jeff Emtman recently digitized his cassette collection, and re-edited them into blackout poems and proverbs.

While in the process of doing this, Jeff re-discovered a mixtape he made in 1999, the product of endless hours of waiting by the boombox in the basement with a hand hovering over the 🔴 button. And on this old mixtape, a 10 year Jeff attempted to make a fancy edit: swapping out the intro of one song for another’s. It didn’t sound good at all, but it may have actually been Jeff’s first ever audio cut, predating the start of HBM by over a decade.

On this episode, Jeff shares a couple dozen of his recent blackout proverbs and short poems, made from a variety of bootlegged self-help audiobooks found in the thrift stores of New England.

Producer: Jeff Emtman

Editor: Bethany Denton

Music: The Black Spot, August Blicher Friis

Transcript

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0:00.0	The case of the man is a man.
0:05.0	The city of my state in my state.
0:10.0	From case I'm going to be in the state. This is how much it's us.
0:15.0	I'm sure. My dad called me the other day to talk. He asked me what I thought of the world right now and what I was working on. And I told him I didn't know. He thought I should
0:37.1	do episodes about the virus, about fear and uncertainty. But I said I didn't feel like I had anything to say that hasn't been said already.
0:45.0	Just that every sneeze I have, every cough I hear, every time someone on TV doesn't wash their hands the right way,
0:52.0	it seems like a disaster waiting to happen. The thing I do know is that the birds in my neighborhood chirp loudly twice a day for a couple of hours and I like that. And ever since last week there's been this old Santa hat on the street outside.
1:19.0	It's never in the same place for long because there's this squirrel who comes by and moves it somewhere else on the block and I like that too.
1:29.0	So much of being a person is about learning what you like and then learning how to stop apologizing for it.
1:36.4	And what I think I like best is all the cracks in the armor that we wear.
1:40.5	Like we all have our protections, right?
1:42.3	And all those protections have little cracks and beneath those cracks soft underbellies
1:48.4	We try to hide them but we can't because the world is a ridiculous and arbitrary place that doesn't ask us before it submits us to stresses.
1:57.0	And that leaves us, whatever we are, oceans or meat baffles or just a bunch of armadillos, wandering around the
2:06.2	plains, waiting for the day when a fox finds us, flips us over, and eats us. Anyways, I've got this small pile of cassette tapes that I've been meaning to digitize for a long time.
2:27.0	Nothing special, just homemade cassettes that I find at thrift stores and yard sales and whatnot.
2:32.0	So lately, I've been playing them one by one. stores and
2:35.0	it's the yard sales and whatnot. So lately I've been playing them one by one and recording them onto my computer.
2:37.0	And it's the first time that I've listened to most of them.
2:40.0	And they're mostly either like music
2:42.0	or bootleged self-help books from the library. and it's probably within each of us.
2:55.0	And it's probably just my age,
	...

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