F78-023
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Neil: And this is from 78, episode number 0 2 3. And this is a podcast which is about the subjective experience of time. How are you? Whoever you are, wherever you are doing whatever you're doing. I hope you're doing well. I, I'll be having a good morning. If it's the morning, good afternoon. If it's the afternoon, good evening.
If it's the evening, good. Small hours of the morning. If you're listening to this in the small hours of the morning. I am recording this episode in the office where I see patients. I drove from my home here and on the way here, I stopped at the grocery store and I picked up some raspberry kolacky, and I can see them right now.
They're sitting a little outta reach on my desk and they look really good. And I've got a cup of coffee that I've been drinking. When I finish recording this, my plan is to sit back, enjoy my coffee, and eat three of those kolacky. Now, the truth is, the plan is to only eat three. That might not be how it goes.
I might eat more than three because they're really good and eh. I might not be able to resist how good they are. I might. There are times where I can do that. There's some times where I can set a limit for myself and say, no, no, I'm gonna do three and I do three. And there are days where I set a limit for myself and say, no, no, I'm gonna do three.
And I blow right past it. We don't know what kind of day it is yet. We're gonna find out. And on that same note, let's just talk more about plans. As I drove here today, I had a plan. There was this thing that I wanted to talk to you about. I had thought about it, I had written things down about it. I was ready to go, and then as I drove, I was thinking about that and for some reason, my thoughts did not stay put on the topic that I was planning to talk to you about.
They wandered. And where they wandered to was place the importance of place in my subjective experience of time. And at first I was like, no, no, no. Don't do that. Don't do that. Let's not think about place. I want to talk about this other thing. This other thing is what I have planned to talk about. I will do that.
And I tried to bring my thoughts back to the original idea. They weren't cooperating. They kept on going back to place. This is what I wanted to think about. And so it didn't take too long. At this stage of my life, when this thing is going on, I know that there might be, I know that it's foolish to try to force myself to think about or talk about.
Something when I want to be thinking about talking about something else. Now, there are times in my life where I do need to do that. There's some times where, you know, you just gotta make yourself stay focused on this thing, even though you're really want to be focused on something else. Maybe anything else other than that thing.
But you gotta focus on that thing. But this podcast is not that I don't get money for doing this podcast. I do this because I like to do it. It's fun for me to do it. It's fun for me to talk to you about these things, and I learn things about me by doing this. There's this thing that happens for me, like I imagine that you're out there listening to my voice on your car speakers and your headphones doing whatever it's that you're doing, and [00:04:00] because I imagine myself talking to you.
It helps me take this kind of chaotic, random head noise stuff that exists in my mind in the form of thoughts, which are just super disorganized, really, and I organize those thoughts somewhat and put them into speech that you can hear and understand. I speak them out loud and in speaking them out loud to you, I am also simultaneously speaking them out loud to me, and I make these episodes and I release them well.
Another thing that I'll do sometimes, I don't do this all the time, but I will re-listen to the episodes of the From 78 podcast. After I've made them, I don't tend to do this. Shortly after I've made them, I make them and I release them and I'll, they're out there for a while and some time goes by and then what I'll do is I'll go for a walk or something and I will tee up my own podcast and listen to me talk, which is.[00:05:00]
Weird admittedly, but the reason that I do that is that I find that when I listen to these episodes that I made, and some time has gone by, my subjective experience of time has increased from the time where when I originally made it. I can kinda revisit this previous version to me that I have captured in the form of a podcast, and that's.
Sometimes interesting. Sometimes it's not, but sometimes it is. Sometimes I think, oh wow, there was, I was onto something there and or I listen to something that I said and I can think to myself, okay, that thing that I said there, that idea that I expressed that's still in my life in this way and that I'm kind of tracking along, that I'm sticking with that.
There's other times where I say something and I go back and I listen to it and I think, you know what? That's, uh, that's not where I am anymore. I, I really wasn't there that long. I kind of moved on from that pretty quickly. I can [00:06:00] learn things about me. I can learn things about my own subjective experience of time by making this podcast.
And I like doing that. I like learning from me, and that's why I do this. So there's no need to stick to a plan. I can have a plan. Plans are nice. Sometimes you stick to them. Sometimes you only eat three clutch. Other times you don't. But you need, I find I need to have a plan so that it gets me started, I guess, is what it comes down to.
The plan is a starting point, but it's, it's not a demand that I need to stick to in the, when I'm talking about this podcast, there's other things in my life that are not like this. When there's a plan, I kind of gotta follow it, but this is not that thing. And so when I was driving here and I had this idea that I'm gonna talk about this thing.
This is, this is my topic for today, and then my thoughts went in this other direction. I was like, yeah, let's, let's indulge that. [00:07:00] Let's go with those thoughts. So where did the thoughts go? What was going on in my head noise today. I was thinking about place and the importance of place, the role that place has played in my life over time because.
I am somebody who's lived a lot of different places. When I was a kid, I moved a lot. I went to three different elementary schools. Is it, was it three or four? Uh three. It was three elementary schools, so that's K through fifth grade. I went to two middle schools. I went to one middle school for sixth grade, a different middle school for seventh and eighth.
I went to two high schools. Then I went to a community college. Then after community college, I went to a big state school. Then after the big state school, some time went by, but it, I ended up then going to a small liberal artsy college where I got my masters and eventually my doctorate. [00:08:00] So I've moved around a bunch.
I've been in a bunch of different places, mainly all over the Midwest. I, I lived a lot of places in Illinois. I lived places in Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin. And my dad's family's from the East coast, so I would travel out there a lot for the summers and and things. I was somebody who did not have the experience of living my whole life, or not my whole life, but a whole big section of my life, the formative years of my life in one spot.
And when I talk to people about this, sometimes they ask me, was that hard? And the answer is, yeah, I was. But my assumption is that if I had a different experience, like if I lived all my life in one spot, that that would probably be hard too, because living is hard. Just being a person is hard. It's also fun.
Sometimes there's times where it's really great and you're having just a wonderful time, but there are an addition to that many times where you're having a really hard time and your soul just hurts for different reasons. And those reasons could be because you're stuck somewhere and you would like to leave, but you can't.
And those reasons could be that you wish that you had more stability, more consistency. They're both hard, right? But my version of hard was that I moved everywhere, but wherever I moved, this happened as I got into middle school, maybe not so much when I was in elementary school. A little bit then, but when, whenever I moved somewhere, I would find places and they were places that felt good to be in.
There are places I liked to be. They tended to be the kinds of places where other people who were similar but also different than me would be. And where I could meet those people and start talking to them. These places were thing, were places that had a huge effect on who and what I am today. Some of the places that come to mind, I'm not gonna name them all, but some of the places that came to mind for me, I.
Was there was a game store when I was a kid. I got really into playing Dungeons and Dragons and Vampire the Masquerade and other kinds of roleplay magic, the Gathering the Card game. I got into that for a little bit, but it didn't really stick. I was more into the d and d. Kind of stuff than the magic stuff because the magic stuff was just really expensive, honestly.
And I didn't have money for that kind of thing. And like there was other kids who did have money and they could build these decks where they'd just stomp people. And I was never that kid. But when you played d and d, when I played d and d anyways, I dunno what anybody else has experienced would be like, you would get like the player's handbook and or maybe the DM handbook and some other things, then some other kid would get.
Some other books. And what you would have to do is you'd have to combine your books together so that you would have enough books to and adventure modules that you'd get in like Dragon Magazines and stuff. You could cobble this together and if you got enough kids who had enough of this stuff, you could make a pretty cool game because you'd have the resources to do it.
So that was kind of fun. It added to the cooperative element. In addition to that, d and d is a pretty cooperative game. It's a game where you need to, you can't play on your own. You need other people and everybody can't do the same thing. You need a fighter and a spellcaster and a healer and the, you know, it's, it's so cooperative and kind of communal in a way and, and I really liked that, where Magic, the gathering is just pure competition.
It seems to me. When I played it as a kid and looking back at it as an adult, I still see it that way. And that was not nearly as appealing to me as d and d was. So there's this game store that I would go to. And they would host DD games there. They'd have magic games there. And they also sold comic books, which was another thing that I was really into.
And I met other kids there, and I had the, I'm still friends with many of the people that I met at that store today, many, many years later. We're talking 20 some years after the fact. I am friends with a lot of these people who originally I met at this place where we would go and we would just play games.
And even if we weren't playing games, we would go there anyways and we would just see who else happened to show up. Because if you sat there long enough, inevitably somebody who you wanted to see would also show up and you could hang out together. And it was great. It was so much fun to have that, to have this place in.
Space and now this place in time for me that isn't there anymore. If I go back to where this game store is today, the building has been torn down and the area where it once was, has been turned into a park, which is great. Now it's serving some other purpose. I'm not upset about that, but , I'm, whenever I, I drive by that place, or if I, I've gone back to it a couple times just to go there.
You know, I'm gonna go to this place. That was an important place for me. And the structure that was the place isn't even there anymore. But I like going there and just kind of being with the absence of it. And I also don't like, and I mean, it's kind of sad in a way, but at the same time it's not, it's like it's sad that it's not there.
And sometimes I kind of feel sad that that. I don't have the kind of time that I had like I did back then when that place was around, when I had all these tomorrows in front of me. But at the same time, I'm so immensely grateful that that place existed and that I was able to [00:14:00] exist within it and that I was able to meet the people I met.
It was it great place. And uh, another place that I would go to that I got a job at was Borders, books and Music. Those were, I dunno if anybody listening to this will remember those, but they were a bookstore that existed in the, for me, this would've been in the nineties. The 1990s. And I would go there first as a customer and then eventually I ended up getting a job there.
And it was a great job. I was around all these really fun people who are really into books and really into music, really into movies. And I could just talk with them about these things, these productions that comprised culture. And just through talking about those things with them, I got turned on to things I, somebody, I remember when somebody told me I should read Bukowski, and I [00:15:00] read Bukowski and I was like, whoa, I like Bukowski.
And when somebody told me I should listen to Tom Waites and I was like, oh, I really like Tom Waites. I didn't know that I liked Tom Whites, but then somebody's like, Nighthawks at the diner. Listen to this. And I was like, oh yeah, that's so good. I love this album. I didn't even know that something like this was out there.
But now I do, because somebody at this place where I was and where they were and we, we would go there consistently and see each other there regularly. They told me about it. They got to know me, they got to know my tastes. They got to know things that I thought were really interesting and cool. And they said, because they inferred that because I thought X, Y, Z things were interesting and cool that I would like this thing.
And most of the time they were right. And that place just had this immense impact on I think my aesthetic. And I think that our aesthetics are an important thing. What we like and why we like it. That's a significant thing. It's, it's easy to dismiss it maybe. And, uh, it was more important to me when I was in my adolescence than it is to me as an adult, but it's still important.
I think aesthetics really being into a thing and knowing what that thing is and knowing why you like it, and being able to explore other things through it. This is a really important thing, and I got that experience through place. Going to a place, like I said, I can't, this is, this is the idea maybe that I'm kind of trying to get at.
The Game, store and Borders. These are two places that I would go to frequently and other people would go to frequently. So I formed a relationship with the place as a regular and other people. They formed a relationship with that place as a regular as well. And then because I was a regular and they were a regular, we started to recognize one another.
And because we started to recognize one another, we started to talk to each other because we started to talk to each other. We started to get to know each other. Because we got to know each other. We started to have an effect on each other. This is something that I don't think could have happened if there wasn't.
The place is a common point of reference between us. That seems like a really significant thing. The place was a common point of reference between us.
Another place that was like this, that was a extremely common point of reference between me and other people was Denny's, the restaurant. I would go to the Aurora, Fox Valley, Denny's. I would go there all the time when I worked at Borders. I would go there after work when I didn't work at Borders, I would go there still.
Uh, sometimes I would, I'd have a big break in classes when I was doing my undergraduate degree at the big state school that I mentioned a little bit earlier. And during my breaks I would go to a Denny's and I would sit there and I'd read the things I was supposed to be reading or read things that I wasn't supposed to be reading, but I thought were really cool.
I would do that. I would bring my red Sony disc man and I would listen to different CDs that I would also cart around with me. In my car, and most of the time when I was there during the day, I didn't see a whole lot of people who I knew who didn't work at the Denny's. Like I'd see the wait staff and stuff, and they knew me because I was in there so often and I'd talk with them and I got to know them.
I got to know things about their lives. I got, they got to know things about my lives. I don't think we really became like friends, but we, we did get to know each other. And I do think that there was a sort of shared. Uh, what do I wanna call this interest, maybe consideration for each other's wellbeing because we are, they worked at this place and I was a regular at that place.
It was like, I hope they're doing good. They hope I'm doing good. I kind of know what's up with them and you know, whatever they have going on in their lives. And they kind of know what's up with me and what I have going on in my life. They see what I'm reading. They ask me how the class is going. I asked them if their kid still has a cold.
Like we, we got to have that kind of a rapport because there was this place as a common point of reference. But then the other thing that I would do, the main time that I'd spend at Denny's was once it got dark, there was not a lot of places I could go. This is before I was 21 years old when I could go to bars and stuff.
Before that time, you know, Denny's was this place that was open and it was open late. People could smoke inside. At the time when I was going to Denny's and there was actually two smoking sections at the Denny's that I would go to, which, which is kind of funny. I think we called one the ghetto and one the suburbs just 'cause we needed to call them something, you know?
Um, 'cause if you said you were in the smoking section, the question was, which smoking section were you in? I'd never smoked cigarettes. I, I tried one time and thought this is terrible. I never wanna do this. But most of my friends did smoke cigarettes. That's, that's a thing, actually, let me take a bit of a digression here.
When I was going to the community college that I went to, there'd be breaks in classes where, you know, okay, teacher teaches some stuff, maybe there's some class discussion or whatever, and it gets to a point where it's like, okay, let's take a 10 minute break. And I discovered that even though I wasn't a smoker.
It was actually more interesting to go outside with the people who were smokers and hang out with them because they were just really fun people to talk to. They, more often than not, were they had conversations that, to me, were more interesting than the conversations that people would have. If they were staying inside, not smoking the non-smokers, there were sometimes some very interesting [00:21:00] non-smoker people too.
I, you know, don't wanna be overly generalizing here, overly sorting people into categories of smoking person equals interesting person. Non-smoking person equals boring person. That's just way too simple and not true. But my experience was that. Very frequently the people who would go outside to smoke were just really fun to talk to.
And so I would go outside with the smokers and they'd be like, why are you out here? It's cold. You're not even smoking. I'm, I'd say, because you people are the most interesting people to me. I like talking to you more than I like talking to the non-smokers, I guess. And they'd be like, oh, okay, okay. So I, I had that, that's again, it was a, it's another small example I suppose, of how a common place of reference.
It was necessary for me to start to form relationships with people that were useful, that were interesting. They, I mean, like I, I'd meet people while they were smoking and I was standing outside in the cold, not smoking, but listening to them and talking with them. And we would talk about the class that we were in and we would talk about what was easy and we'd talk about what was hard.
And I'd learned from somebody that there was this other professor who taught this other class that was really fun and if you hadn't taken it, you should probably take it. Then I would take that class. And you know what? It turned out that professor wasn't fact really great and none of this would've happened if there wasn't the place, the common.
Point of reference. But anyway, that was my digression about smokers. Back to Denny's word. There was two smoking sections that were separated by a non-smoking section. You'd go there, you'd be, somebody would say they're in the smoking section, but it would be like, well, which one? Well, you could just walk to either one and find them, but as a cheat code, people started to say, I'm in the ghetto, and you'd know, oh, okay, that's the smoking section.
You walk in right away to the right, or I'm in the suburbs, which is okay. You walk straight back past the non-smoking section to the second smoking section. Great. I met so many people. At this Denny's, and many of them I am still connected to today in some way. Some, a small number of people I'm close with, I'm friends with them.
Uh, a somewhat larger number of people I'm acquaintances with. We still talk, we kind of know what's up with each other, what's going on in one another's lives and stuff like that. We don't hang out a lot, but we, we talk here and there a couple times a year maybe, but a few people have became really close friends.
And this was because of the having this place that we all went to. And it was, you know, we were teenagers and in our early, early, early twenties, and we couldn't go any place else. And Denny's was open. You could smoke there, it stayed open. 24 I, it was, it provided a place for people to go and it was the place where my ilk of people went and.
I would walk in, I'd see somebody who I knew and they'd be sitting at a table with people. Oftentimes people who I also knew, but sometimes with people who I didn't know or somebody new would show up, somebody new would come into town somehow, and if they were kind of of this ilk, they would find themselves 'cause they knew that's where you should go.
They knew that was the place where you could go to find people. Who were your kind of people? You could go there and they, they'd be there. And so somebody knew would show up and they'd sit at a table by themselves and they'd read a book or listen to CDs on their discman. And eventually somebody would walk up to them and be like, Hey, we don't recognize your face.
You knew in town you knew to this Denny's. And the person would be like, yeah, I just moved here from some other place. And you'd be like, oh, what brought you here? You can start to have a conversation. And this place provided. A place you could go to to have that kind of experience, which was incredibly cool.
And I'm so massively grateful that I had that. I'm just thinking about it right now as I talk into this microphone, I'm thinking about how incredibly, massively just grateful I feel that I had Denny's. Borders and the game warden is these places in my life where I could have these experiences. I don't know what I would've turned out like if I didn't have those places, but my assumption is, and I can't prove this in any way, my assumption is I would've been a lot more lonely.
I would've been a lot more frustrated, probably could've turned a lot more angry and resentful, but. Since I had these places and I could go there and I could have these experiences, these connections, these conversations with these people, I felt less lonely. I felt more connected, and I think that that probably made me a better person in many ways.
Again, don't know for sure anything else is just a counterfactual, but that's what it seems like to me that those were really important to me. Which brings me to where I kinda. I think wanna wrap up here today? I don't know if these places still exist for people today. I'm sure they do, but do they, they don't seem to exist in the same density, the same frequency.
There seem to be less of them and maybe they're there and I just don't see them. I would love if that were the case, that would be a really wonderful thing, but I don't see them. I don't know where they are. I think that one of the main reasons why place maybe has become less significant in the lives of many people is because of technology.
You know, now you don't need to go to a place to meet up with people and have a conversation. You can call them, you can text them, you can use other things in order to. Converse or argue or whatever with large groups of people without leaving where you are, you never have to actually take your body to the shared point of reference in order to have the conversational experiences.
It's just super easy to have those conversational experiences while staying home, and I think that's had a huge effect on the urgency that maybe people felt when I was a kid, when I was a young person. Going to places where like I needed to do that. That was, that was an urgent thing for me. It was important.
If I didn't do that, I would've gone crazy. And now my guess is I don't, again, I don't know this, but my suspicion is that people maybe don't feel that urgency as much because it's so easy to talk to people in, in a way, with the technology which is so ubiquitous. Maybe the people feel it more, maybe I'm wrong, maybe.
Maybe. The communications technology has increased. The hunger, the thirst, the desire. For space as a common point of reference, that would be cool. If that's what you are finding, let me know. Email me. My email is neil NEI l@surplusance.com. S-U-R-P-L-U-S-J-O-U-I-S-S-A-N-C-E.com. Lemme know. That'd be neat. But I'm not sure.
I just, it just doesn't seem like that's what's happening. And as I was driving to my office today, I was thinking about that. I was thinking about these places and the role that they had in my life, the effect they had on me as a person, feeling really grateful that I had that. Feeling a little bummed out, a little sad that maybe today people don't have that as much, knowing that I don't have it as much.
And this question occurred to me, how can I. How can kneel find or create spaces at this point in my life, at this point in my subjective experience in time? How can I find or create those spaces that might have a similar role in my life? A similar effect in my life as the ones from my past, from a previous point in my subjective experience in time?
And here's the thing, I don't know the answer to that question. I don't know. I thought the question, I pondered it. Then I pondered it some more, then I pondered it even more. And I didn't have an answer. I still don't have an answer right here, right now saying these words into this mic. I don't know how to do it.
And that makes me think it's an important and interesting question. It's definitely an important and interesting question for me. I hope that in some way's important or interesting to you, whoever you are, and that you'll get something. I don't know what, get something out of pondering it as well. And since I don't know the answer to this question, this seems like a good punctuation point, a good moment to stop making the podcast.
So I'm gonna stop talking here. I'm gonna say thank you to you, whoever you are, for taking the time to download this and listen to it. There's a lot of stuff you can listen to so much you picked this. I don't take that for granted. I appreciate it for real. And uh, you know, whatever you're doing next, have fun doing it.
Make those glorious mistakes that you learn from. And, uh, hopefully I'll get a chance to be in your ears again sometime soon. Till then, you take care.