The TL/DR: A podcast interview with Jay Morse. Listen to it here.
I like the written word. Few things provide me as much angst and joy. Love, perhaps. Or things confused with love, like a boyhood crush or the potential for adoration or my childhood relationship with the Oakland Raiders (or my adult relationship with golf). I like the spoken word too, though it offers less opportunity for revision: The written word is always available for change, modification, reflection. The spoken word less so. There are no do-overs, no take-backsies (Wicktionary: “Childish. The act of taking back, or going back on one’s word, promise or gift.” Sounds pretty adultish to me).
My grandfather, in his later years, kept a giant cordless phone in his back pocket. He’d occasionally misdial his daughters, tactile speed dial buttons responsive to some configuration of his gait, or when bending to feed his third or fourth installation of Brutus, his dachshund. You could hear him padding around the house in his leather and fleece Walmart slippers, talking to himself, or his dog, or his wife, dead for a decade by that point. The television volume cranked, his double-wide trailer filled with sound, masking his daughter’s yelling on the other end of the line.
Not so for me: My days are filled with silence. I sometimes play a game, seeing how long I can go after waking up without speaking a word, without hearing the spoken word (I make accommodations for the singing one; Nina Simone is currently seducing me with words of summertime while I watch snow fall through my window. Angst. Joy). The silence allows me to think (or the thinking allows silence), to revise words and feelings and thoughts in my head, neurotransmitters firing like a solar storm, my brain seemingly never still. The problem, of course, is when my tongue is unloosed. Because sometimes I have shit to say. That’s a long windup, a burying of the lede if you will, to this: my brief interview on Overcoming Adversity, a topic about which I definitely have some shit to say.