But now I was! I’d been tryna say.

This was the fourth pod I’d recorded on Sheila Heti over the past four years—with ex and two subsequent baes—only they’d all been on How Should a Person Be? (2010).

And this pod was with no baes; this pod was dolo.

All those previous pods had been unabashedly, excessively positive; bc, let’s face it, that book was fire.

Not that Motherhood wasn’t.

It was just that…

Last June, rather than ramble, to ex bae, everything ex bae bringing up Sheila Heti’s pod had made me think, I instead wrote down and emailed all those thoughts directly to Sheila herself.

Slept on and edited em over and everything.

Only—she’d never responded!

Hanging a left at the next alley to avoid a dude going to town with a leaf-blower, I explained all this into my voice recorder. That, given she hadn’t, I’d be pulling no punches. Follow-through-ing all jabs.

Would dwell fully in both sides of how the book made me feel.

Wouldn’t solely dick-ride.

Things were more interesting that way, when you didn’t solely dick-ride.

•

That night, I walked to the park on 15th and California, where I’d been running to.

Walking, bc whatever happened to my hip when I ate shit balling out the other day.

Listening over the Motherhood pod.

Thinking about what my ole man’s ole man wrote me in a long, rambly, honestly worrisome (for both his and my health) email this morning. From his bunker-cabin somewhere in Mendocino County none of his kids had ever been to, even seen.

About how making it through whatever I was dealing with skin-wise might require a deeper sort of treatment.

Medicine from a medical breakthrough that had yet to break.

Or, in any case, one that surpassed what every doc I’d seen so far had prescribed.

I mean, this skin shit. Wasn’t anything new.

For every one of my earliest memories of running around playing footie saying things like “bloody ace!” as a wee lad in Scotland, I had an equal number of memories of laying up, unable to sleep, scratching my skin all skressed, the Aberdeen sun’s refusal to set for hours after ‘bedtime’ not helping things.

The mama having to tend to me damn near as much as she had to the villagers.

Like Malcolm, who’d go up to whoever was closest to him and go Mahn? or, to me, Dahn? (‘Sean’) Ahn ah gah tah-lit, whenever he ‘needed to go to the toilet.’ Then spazz out, spastically sieg heil-ing with one arm raised while biting his other arm’s hand and yelling/stomping, till someone—usually my dad—took him to the toilet.

Roderick, who’d go Bicky! I want bicky! till my dad’d go Bicky-what, Roderick? and he’d go Bicky, plee? and my dad’d go OK Roderick, bicky please is right, giving him a biscuit.