Ignorance Was Bliss

I broke my back in 2014, and while I can move around a whole lot better than I could then, I’m still often stuck, as an acquaintance once pointed out, sitting on my couch listening to true crime podcasts all day. One thing I’ve noticed is that, quite often, I would hear someone ask, “But why would he do that?” or, “How could that happen?” or, my personal favorite, “Well, that’s crazy. That could never happen to me.” After a while of talking back, alone, long after they had moved on to new things, I decided to give this podcasting thing a try, myself.

I do give some background, of course, but I’m not trying to create a deep-dive, detailed, narrative style podcast. That has already been done, brilliantly, by so many people I admire. I can’t see any reason to try and compete with them, or even just add to the noise, when I already cannot find enough hours in the day to listen to everything I’d like to hear. My goal, instead, is to try and answer some of those questions, at least from my own perspective. I don’t pretend to have all, or even most, of the answers… but I can usually come up with one or two.

Over time, the focus of my show has widened to include the normal, the average, the ordinary, that all of us can understand… but we continue to think of ourselves as somehow screwed up, weird, wrong. We’re not. You’re not. Honest.

Just make sure you really want to know. Because the most important certainty I carry, from all my time working with inmates and patients and onlookers, is that the only real difference between “us” and “them” is a key. And that everything we experience, from crippling anxiety to serial murder, is maybe not rational, but there is a logic to it. I can make things understandable.