Published August 22, 2015
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Hidey hidey hidey hi! Hidey hidey hidey ho! It’s me, mjp, Michael Phillips, and here we are again for 30 minutes of Disney-esque wonder and joy. Or something. I don’t usually have very good dreams, or I just don’t usually remember my dreams, one of the two. Carol dreams every night, and sometimes I do awful things in her dreams and she’s mad at me for what I did in her dream when she wakes up. I always apologize, but maybe it doesn’t seem sincere. But the other night I dreamed that I bought a Stradivarius mandolin for a couple hundred bucks. I thought it was a good deal, because, you know, it was a Stradivarius for a couple hundred bucks. But then the guy who sold it to me said, “Well, there are a lot of them, so they’re really not that valuable.” I don’t know why I had such a dream, I don’t even play the mandolin. Or I never have before, it’s got strings and frets so I suppose if you gave me a few hours with it I could figure out how to play you a tune, but I’m not a mandolinist or whatever they’re called.
But since I remembered the dream and I usually don’t, I went and looked up – even though I thought it was ridiculous – a Stradivarius mandolin. But as it turns out, there actually are two known Stradivarius mandolins, made about 325 years ago. Go figure. I’m quite sure I didn’t know that before I had the dream. It’s just one of those things. I thought I might read you a story today. I don’t know if reading you something I wrote here on the electronic wire makes it less desirable or valuable or acceptable to an ink-on-paper publisher, but I’m going to do it anyway. That’s how much I love you. And also I don’t care what the ink-on-paper publishers think. There are so few of them left. And the ones that are left need to get with the times. So this one is called ONE HOUR PHOTO.
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I’m not going to include the text of the story here, you’ll have to listen to the episode.
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You know, reading that to you here, I have to wonder if it isn’t better to read it yourself on the page. Maybe I’m a purist. But there’s nowhere for you to read it on the page at the moment, so this is all we’ve got. Spoken word. Performance art. Slam podcastery. Do they still have slam poetry? What a stinking bag of shit that was. What dark days. Well that’s a subject for another time, isn’t it. Thanks for listening, thanks for being alive here, now, and I will see you on the flip flop. Or next time. Whichever comes first.