Duncan Trussell Family Hour - 421: David Stuart MacLean

Episode Date: January 30, 2021

David MacLean, brilliant author, re-joins the DTFH! Check out both of David's books, How I Learned to Hate in Ohio (2020) and The Answer to the Riddle is Me (2009). Original music by Aaron Michael Goldberg. This episode is brought to you by: BLUECHEW - Use offer code: DUNCAN at checkout and get your first shipment FREE with just $5 shipping. BetterHelp - Visit betterhealth.com/duncan to find a great counselor and get 10% off of your first month of counseling! Athletic Greens - Visit AthleticGreens.com/Duncan for a FREE 1 year supply of vitamin D and 5 FREE travel packs with your first purchase!

Ghost Towns, Dirty Angel, out now. It's my dirty little angel. You can get Dirty Angel anywhere you get your music. Ghost Towns, Dirty Angel, out now. New album and tour date coming this summer. Greetings to you, my beautiful, sweet human family. You're listening to a new dad. I just had my second son.

Well, I didn't have, obviously I didn't have my son, but I went through a very long, beautiful labor process with my very beautiful, very fertile goddess wife, whose breasts are now dripping streams of golden milk that my second son is suckling at. I'm in the Garden of Eden over here. And that means that we're not gonna have some kind of complex intros.

For the next month or so, we're just gonna cannonball right into the episode. I'm gonna take paternity leave so I can enjoy the incredible psychedelic primordial time-destroying experience of being a parent to a newborn. Today's guest is a dear friend of mine. I went to college with him, not only did I go to college with him,

I traveled through India with him and Emil Amos, the musician who sometimes shows up on the DTFH. We parted ways and David McClain had a pretty hair-raising experience in India, which you can read about in his first book. The answer to the riddle is me. And it's one of my favorite, I guess you'd call it an adventure travel book,

meets like William Burroughs naked lunch. So I'm gonna say about it, just trust me, it's really good. And he has outdone himself again with his newest book, a novel called How I Learned to Hate in Ohio. It's a beautiful, beautiful book. I hope that you will order both of his books. But before you do that, strap in my sweet darlings

and welcome back to the DTFH, the brilliant author, David McClain. Welcome, welcome on you, that you are with us, shake hands, no need to be blue. Welcome to you. David, the last time you came on, you had written, I guess, kind of an autobiography, not really. It's like a, what would you, what's the genre that you would call it? Memoir. A memoir. And a brilliant memoir about something incredible that happened to you in India and terrifying. And it really is just an, it's not blowing smoke here and it's not because you're my favorite, it's one of my favorite books. Oh, thanks. I love it. And a lot of people who were introduced to you via this podcast have really enjoyed that book.

That's really great. Thank you. Now you go and write a genius novel. What are you doing to us, David? How dare you? How dare you take like seven years to do it? I believe you. It's, it's that good. And it's, you know, it's not just, you know, like when your friends make stuff, you, you have the sense of like, God, I hope it's, I hope it's good. You know what I mean? Like you, because you love your friends. But then when you realize what the fuck this is genius, it's really exciting because it's like, I went to college with him. It's, man, this is like, I love it because I've been reading all these hardcore, like Buddhist books and it take a break from that to just jump into this book, which just, I don't, like you've done the thing that I, when, as an eternally aspiring writer, I'm always curious about how authors create readability. You know what I mean? Like you can encounter books that are good and like, like the, the, the, the language is, is like flowery and feels like it's coming from another realm. Like, I don't know, like Tolkien or something. Those are good books. I've read all of them, but they, sometimes they're slow reading, right? You know what I mean? But then some books you dive into and you feel like you've jumped into like a river, like that's just flowing so fast.

So it's a delight. You know, that's my favorite. I like that. But, but those are the best books. This is like that. You know what I mean? It's like powerful. The, the, what you were talking about and the symbols you're using to, to, to, to talk about things that I don't even know how, how to address as a or powerful, but also you've got this like wildly great book. I'm sorry. I don't mean to keep, I'm not going to rave on and on about it, but congratulations. Please do. Tell me about it, man. Tell me about those seven years, right in this thing. You know, the seven years between these books was a crazy time. You know, my memoir was about losing my memory. And I was still sort of dealing with it when I wrote the book. And then some time went on and I felt like I had boxed that trauma up like I was, I had gotten to better terms with it.

And then like two years after, and I'm going to say this because I know you're expecting your second child, but like six weeks after my son was born, I went into the hospital for routine surgery and went into cardiac arrest. I mean, not cardiac arrest, respiratory arrest and had to be in the ICU for four days. And then I was just all of that trauma that I thought I had dealt with was reactivated and I was right back into it. Jesus, Jesus. I mean, that's the nature of trauma, though. It's like, as soon as you have another traumatic experience, it just brings all that other trauma forward. And it was awful. Just absolutely awful. And so I had to like deal with it again. And this time, the way I dealt with it was I started writing this book. And so I wrote it in a kind of trauma fugue.

And because of that, like it brought up all this trauma from high school that I definitely had boxed up, hadn't thought about put away. But then the fact is that is that from your high school? Yeah, I went, I was called that. You were called yo yo fag. I was called yo yo fag. Briefly. Wow. Yeah.

Yeah. And when I when I went and talked to a teacher about it, a teacher I really liked, and I told him that this guy was calling me that he bust out laughing. Oh, God. And so this is like, but, but it sucks. But the teacher just thought it was the funniest thing. Well, this is, you know, the, not to shoehorn Buddhism into this dammit, I've been just on a Buddhist rampage lately, but I'm sorry. Buddhist rampage. It's my favorite video game.

Oh, I take your suffering and give you my joy. The, the, but the, the idea and Buddhism of the hell realms. You know, the, the, there are these like, you know, there is the possibility mythologically to reincarnate in a place where you're being sort of dipped in molten lead over and over again. Jesus. And all you're doing is screaming forever. It's probably a metaphor for, for high school. You know, like you can, you get what's different between what's different between that. I mean, clearly you're not being boiled in molten metal, but it's more sophisticated than that.

You know, it's like you're a kid. Yeah. And the protector, the person who's supposed to help you is demonically laughing. Yeah. At you being bullied. Yeah. How is that not hell? Right.

Right. And that like your suffering is clear amusement for someone else. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It sucked. And also I would say your skin is on this weird slow boil where like these pustules are just coming up and you don't know what you're going to look like from day to day. Oh, yeah.

Yeah. That's right. You have a pox. You have a pox. An Old Testament style pox. Like in the pox seems to somehow coincide with crush, a crush that you have your, you're falling in love somehow. It's impossible that you would be, but you're experiencing like maybe in your entire life, a love of such purity because you don't know about impermanence. You don't understand about taxes.

You don't understand about pragmatic utilitarian sex. No. You know what I mean? But your blisters, your zits are appearing to like harmonize with your crushes. You remember that? Like you're like getting one on your nose and your nose balloons out. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Do you remember every once in a while maybe trying to put a bandaid over one? Brilliant. Which just makes it so much worse and so much more visible. Yeah. You might as well like figure out a way to like mount some kind of spotlight apparatus that shines a spotlight directly on the zit because everybody knows what it is. And the same thing with like young women putting on foundation over their acne riddled face. Oh, yeah.

And you can see like how the foundation is sort of cracked like a bad sidewalk. Oh, yeah. It's so awful. Yeah. And you know, I think also like mixed into the, the, that or there's so many different things like happening, which is probably you do have some hormonal stuff happening. So your emotions are already. Right. You're wildly out of balance.

But then on top of that, you are existing in some kind of state imposed hell realm where people your age or have, they don't know. They've never, maybe they've never heard the word compassion. Right. You know what I mean? So all they know how to do and God knows I was, I was one of them man. Oh, yeah. I remember being sucked and vacuumed up into that. Like just you, what are you going to do?

You either, you're either someone holding the pitchfork or you're somebody getting stabbed. Yeah. You know, but yeah, acne is like, yeah, that's it. That's one of the things. Wow. I forgot. Yeah. Awful.

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You can try it for free. Thank you, Blue Chew. So here you're having something that even without having a family is terrifying, but now add to your brush with your second brush with your own mortality. The fact that you have a family that you could lose. Yep. And yeah, so this like connected you to an earlier trauma. Yeah, like the ER trauma.

And so as I wrote, I was able to connect with that experience of being bullied really well. And just remembering just that feeling of having to go into school every day and knowing that it was just going to be awful. Wow. Right. Like they're getting ready for school, like picking out clothes and being like, which one will they hate less? Wow. Yeah. Dude, I remember.

So my mom took me shopping and I don't know why I thought this would be a good idea. But I decided, you know what? I'm going to start wearing really night like button up clothes. And I, and you know, I think your mom just recognizes that their kid is like, they don't know for sure what's happening, but they know it's not great. You know, they know you're getting, you're, they know, they don't know what to do. What can you do? You're working here. So in some gesture of, I think, confused motherly love, she took me to the mall and bought me these ridiculous corduroy pants, some kind of purple,

veloury button up thing. Nice. And I think like black, black shoes or something. I just remember thinking like, yeah, I'm going to be the kid who dresses good at school. Yeah. I'm going to be, you know what? I'm going to be a dandy. Let me be a dandy father in high school.

That's definitely going to stop the bullies. They're going to see me and be like, look at that dandy lad. I was going to shove him into a locker, but wow, the velour. Yeah, pulls that off. I'll never forget. Like, I think it was, I was probably had gotten off the school bus had avoided. I'd gotten already gotten weird stares from people, but I think it was like four minutes walking through the halls when someone yells out, Hey, look, it's the joke. Nice.

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So you how you know when you sound great, by the way, there was a period when I chatted with you where you were going through a lot, man. I don't remember. I don't think I'm trying to think where it landed before after this. But I think you had some concern that maybe your experience with larium had permanently altered you. Do you still feel like that? Absolutely. There's no doubt. I mean, it's I mean, at a chemical level, it's a neurotoxin.

And so it has killed off parts of my brain. And it's just like now, I mean, luckily the brain is plastic. And so it can work around damage. But there's damage there that I live with. Wow. Just sort of getting the right meds, sort of learning how to live with it. P.S. for those who didn't listen to the last episode with David or miss what we were talking about up front. David experienced a hardcore, awful reaction to the what?

What do they call anti malaria? Yeah, it's a what if it's a malarial prophylaxis called larium or mefliquin. Mefliquin and it gave and it gave him a amnesia. And which just is so that it's such a terrifying thing. So how are you, you know, to me, having not finished this book, but gotten through some of it, I don't think it has done. It seems like you're at least the part of your brain that writes seems to be doing great. But did was there a struggle in writing this book? Did you was there?

And was there an added challenge on top of all the other stuff of like having to deal with some kind of brain damage while writing this? No, I mean, I mean, luckily, I mean, this is weird to have this works. But I see this stuff I wrote before larium and the stuff after. And I think the stuff and maybe this is just the difference between when you're in your 20s and when you're in your 30s and 40s is the stuff before. It was like I was so desperate to prove to everybody I was smart. Like I felt like writing was a cerebral activity, and I was going to out clever the world. And that like a book was just an elaborate prank. I was pulling off on the reader.

And and since then, like, I don't try to do that anymore. In fact, the more I can shut off my brain and just write listening to the music of the writing and listening to what the characters want and need and how they would react is so much better than writing brain forward stuff. And I think that's that's one of the big benefits of whatever brain damage I have is I'm no longer trying to wrestle the world with just my intellect. Was it was it tough to switch from memoir to fiction? You know, I all my studying had actually been in fiction. And so it was really nice to come back to fiction. I had to learn how to write a memoir.

It was like this stuff I had to do after school was learn how to write a memoir. But fiction, it was just like, Oh, right. I know how to do this. So it was nice to relax back into fiction. Forgive my like, I'm going to ask a few just pretty boring technical questions. But I'm always fascinated by the like nuts and bolts of the way. Good writers do do their job. I think it's like a kind of fantasy I have that like some kind of weird cargo cult idea of like, Oh, that's that's the problem.

I'm using the wrong pen or something like that. I think all of us who love to write and like want want to accomplish that what you've done. You know, we just want to know everything. So on behalf of all of us, I'm going to ask a few boring questions. So what what time of the day do you write? It changes. I mean, right now, because of COVID, my kids are out of the house from three to six. So that's my time.

Do you have a preferred time? No, not really. It's just nice for it to be kind of around the same time every day. Because it just sort of gets my brain sort of set. So so you're three hour periods a day. Yeah. So three hours. Yeah.

And how do you like, how do you know when to stop? Oh, I mean, it's just when the time is up. Oh, because you feel like you could just keep going, but you've got parents that you got to do. I've got all this other stuff. You know, I there are some writers who say they like to stop in the middle of the scene so that they know exactly what to do the next day. And that that's helpful. So I'm not just creating a new something out of whole cloth and said I can jump in midstream. But it really is it's like however far I get, I'm thankful for.

Right. And when you when you're how much of the time spent working on this novel how much in those three hour periods or in your working periods how much of that time is spent with revision versus. God, creation. I'm one of those writers who writes a lot in my first draft or write big messy first drafts, all the way through, and then go back and revise and revise and revise. How do you keep yourself from going back and revising midstream though, do you know what I'm saying like there is like that thing where you look at an earlier paragraph you're like, Oh, God, that's shit I've got to cut that old sentence out. Yeah. Sometimes I mean I got to say, maybe I'm lying a little bit. And I feel like whenever I talk about writing process.

I'm always going to be lying a little bit because it's acting like I'm in control of it when actually I'm not. I can set up the parameters for engaging with the work, but how it happens is sort of beyond me. But what I find is when I'm starting something, I have to write and rewrite and rewrite a lot just to find tone. Yeah. And once I find the tone I find I can write that large messy draft, because at least I know now the parameters of that tone and how that tone works. Right. That's cool. It's like when you're painting, you've got to pick out a few colors.

Right. You're not going to use that. Is that kind of like what you mean by tone? Yeah, absolutely. Okay. This is how it's going to appear. Yeah, okay, cool. That's cool.

Do you, you were mentioning listening to the writing, but do you listen to music while you're doing that? Always. Always. What do you listen to? For this book, I listened to a lot of no name. Do you know this woman? Yeah. She's a rapper, Chicago rapper.

Just love her work. And what else? And a little light. I listened to a lot of spiritualized and John Prine. Just wow. That's so cool. And then the other is like Godspeed you black emperor and holy shit. Yeah.

How do you, especially with John Prine, how do you keep that from bleeding into the writing or do you care? God, if I could have it bleed into the writing. Oh God, would that be amazing? You know what? I really think that, you know, for better for worse, we are 10 years out from being able to like take ingredients. Like I'm going to grab some John Prine, the shining.

Let's throw in this picture of like an old boot by a railroad track. And then I'd like to mix in like, I don't know, Mount St. Helens explosion. Right. And you give that to an AI and you're like, so make like a really cool dystopian sci-fi out of that. Come back the next day and you've got a whole book. Amazing. It would be.

Yeah. Because I think that's what we do on an intuitive level. And so if it actually could be written into code into if then, if this then that, that would be amazing. Well, this is, you know, the as, as you know, you know, not that long ago, you hear like Elon Musk, he's shitting bricks over AI. And, you know, you want to listen to him because, you know, what, what the fuck am I doing?

I'm podcasting. He's like launching people into space. You know, so you would think he might have like some edge on us, but then also it feels like an overreaction. But I just read that some AI is produce is producing comments that they did a study and there no one could differentiate the AI's comments online from a regular person. And, you know, in every one of these announcements, it really poses like a legitimate threat to industries that felt immune.

Right. Because, you know, automation, you know, but this is the part you, it feels like you're, you're getting at when you're talking about your process, the sense of like, who the fuck is writing this? Right. You know what I mean? It's already an AI writing is what I mean. Like it's so I guess it would make sense that this, we would be able to disembodied the

process. Yeah. Would you, do you think you would? Be AI phobic when it came to your right, your reading choices? Like, you know what I mean? Like, would you feel like you would only read human books or would you feel weird reading a book if you knew it was written by a machine? I think, I think like the first five would be all about novelty and would be all about

like, I can see the strings on this. This isn't that clever. Yeah. By the six one, I'd be, I'd be deep in. I'd be, I'd start to have favorite AI subsystems. Oh man. Genesis two. God, it can write a book.

Oh God. Did you read the new Genesis two book? Which one? It comes out with a new book every five seconds. What do you mean? A big thank you to athletic greens for sponsoring this episode of the DTFH. I'm not trying to vitamin shame anybody out there, but I can't tell you how many times I've gone to a friend's house and slipped on one of their empty vitamin bottles that

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because there's a big one out there. I want to thank athletic greens for sponsoring us. Remember, by supporting them, you support us. Thank you, athletic greens. When you say it took you seven years to write this, do you mean it was just seven years between books or it literally took you seven years? No, it was seven years between books. It's probably two and a half years of writing.

Wow. Do you play around with the idea that even though it was two and a half years of writing, it was actually seven years of some kind of subconscious process happening that was already writing the book without you even knowing it? Yeah, I definitely think that because part of what I was doing when I was writing that book about memory loss was actively trying to cultivate my memories. And so I was trying to re-remember my life using anything I could and then the trauma happened and then so the trauma sort of met up with that process of reclaiming my memories

and so it inflected it and so that's how this book sort of came to being. So yeah, I would say those seven years were really essential. Do you have any theories on memory and time? I know there's clearly like a biological process involved in the creation of memories. People have tried to explain that to me. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about the connection between memory and where we place ourselves in the time-space continuum. Yeah, I'm sort of recently I've been really interested in the theories about how dreams

function with our memory. What are those? Dreams, REM sleep sort of weeds out is like the first revision of our memories is our dreams and it sort of washes stuff out of our memory that we won't need, that it thinks we won't need. And so that's why the next day it's hard to remember what you ate. The previous day it's because this theory says like your REM sleep is sort of editing and discarding a bunch of that.

It's like I'm going to turn your experience eating that shitty pizza that you cooked into you being eaten by a falcon and then we're going to be done with it. And then we're done with it. Yeah, and so I'm interested in that because we have no say in that. But we can work against it because if you think real hard you can recapture that memory, right? Yes. And so I'm interested in that and I'm interested in how there's probably memory detritus within us that we just have to figure out how to reactivate in some ways.

Because I don't think it's gone forever. I think it's there. It just, we've had no use for it. Right. Yeah, I'm interested in the detritus aspect of it. I'm doing this 30 day meditation challenge thing. You meditate 20 minutes every day, not a big deal, but right around day 17. That started happening where like just fragmented, seemingly unimportant, uninteresting, like today

I remembered going to a shopping mall when I was a kid to return a, this is the early days of computers to return a external sound card called Sound Blaster that I couldn't get to work on my computer and the guy was really pissed because I'd wrapped it in the wrong thing. He's like, you probably erased it. But what's that? Like that, I haven't had that memory in, I don't know, 15 years. Like why did that float up to the surface? These totally useless memories.

Yeah. And I'm interested in those useless memories because it works against the idea that I'm a useful person. What do you mean? Is that like this idea of REM sleep sort of editing out our memories is this idea that it gets rid of the stuff that we have no use for. And I would say like, I don't want to be a purely useful person. I don't just want to be composed of the things that make my life easier. I want to be composed of the stuff that's aberrant and that makes my life difficult.

And the sort of weirdo stuff that I don't know the use for, but it's still part of my experience. So I want it. Yeah. Yeah. Right. You know, there's a butcher like alien butcher quality, whatever part of ourselves it is that's being like, nope, nope, you don't need this. We're slicing this one out.

This one's going. Like if there were like instead of having an automatic function in our nervous system that did that, we had to go to some form of doctor. Right. Or like, you know, the way people go to get their kidney dialysis or something. Yeah, that we would go there and allow the doctor to sort of make the hierarchy of needs of our memory. Yeah. Like you would see your memories of what you did the last few days on some screen and you'd be like, oh, yeah.

See, this is the moment that you got up off the couch and went back to the kitchen because you left your coffee there. We don't need that. So we're going to wipe that. And then you would be like, wait, what'd you wipe? And the doctor was like, don't worry about it. Yeah. Yeah. Don't worry about it.

I got it for you. And then the, but so if you consider the collective version of that, that every day all of humanity has excised from their psyche, probably like infinite like billions of terabytes of theoretically pointless memories. It implies like an antimatter universe of memories. Yeah. Yeah. And where all of our useless memories go. And what a, what a world to be just purely useless. Right.

What if you were just composed of your useless bits? What is that personality? Probably relaxed. You know, usefulness is stressful. And also like pleasure isn't usually seen as useful. That's why like, I don't know, like eating a good apple, it's like eating it for the first time. Like I wonder like how many apples have been wiped from my memory because usefulness. I mean, pleasure wasn't seen as useful.

Jesus Christ, like that poor fucking apple. Right. Gave up my life. Barely tasted. Maybe it was an apple that you hurriedly ate. Yeah. You know, so it was like, you didn't barely taste it. And then your mind was like, forget that.

Come on. Half past apple bite you took. We're not remembering that back in 1986. It was the summer that was right before your dad burned you with a cigarette. It's wild, man. I've never heard this before, but yeah, it's like the usefulness itself. You know, isn't it kind of wrapped up in like industrial revolution? Absolutely.

Thinking. This idea that we're going to streamline the process and what we lose when we streamline the process of ourselves is fascinating. And it's I will say this is also the way people will talk about books often is they'll talk about plot and they'll talk about what they got out of the book or they'll talk about themes or whatever. And it's like, yeah, but the experience of reading the book was the pleasure of these words coming together and this pleasure of having somebody else's voice singing in your

head. Like that's the experience of writing, of reading something good. And I think what happens is people make the mistake that how they read and how they think about reading is how they should go about writing. And that's not how it works at all. Like if you want to set yourself up for failure, you think a lot about the themes you want to accomplish in your book. You think a lot about like plot and you really like get it all down before you start writing.

That's the worst way to go about writing. It's really like letting go of the handlebars and sort of letting the bike take you places. But the problem is like if you want to do like a publishing deal or something, you do have to do that kind of, don't you? You have to do that sort of talking. That sort of what? That sort of talk. You got to right engage in that sort of talk.

You have to put your elevator speech together. You have to do all of that nonsense. Yeah. Yeah. But the great thing about publishing is everybody understands that it's, it can change. Oh, right. Because they're all, they're working with writers. So they know that whatever the fuck you think you're going to write, it's not going to be

what, which is weird because they're probably buying an idea that they know is going to transform into something else. Yeah. And if you write exactly what you thought you were going to write, how depressing is that? Oh my God. You went through this whole process and nothing changed. Like that's so sad. Good Lord, man.

You know, your students are lucky to have you. That's, you know, are you still teaching? Yes, still teaching. Are you doing Zoom teaching now? Yeah, I love it. Really? I do. With my graduate students, I loved it.

My undergrads, man, Zoom silence. There's nothing like Zoom silence in a classroom. Stop and kill you, man. But my grad students, I got to see the inside of their homes. Oh yeah. And there was something just so sweet about it. There was something so intimate about it. Oh yeah.

Wow. Yeah. That is, I think, that is the Zoom gift, is that it is, thank God, taking everyone down a few notches. You know, it's like the illusion of the, whatever the presenter may be, is being this buttoned up being is immediately destroyed when you see like, Jesus Christ, look at that. Look at that weird fucking room in their house. Yeah.

These people are maniacs. You have a bunch of teddy bears on a bookshelf. I was so intimidated of you, and then I saw your bookshelf of teddy bears. I'm cool. Yeah, you've got a teddy bear bookshelf, and you're like talking about like the incoming economic collapse, you know, and then it all kind of makes sense, it's, yeah, it adds a new dimension, you know, not to like get back into the writing thing, the, like when, when you're listening to certain types of music, like hyper produced music, there are

all this static, static, much like the useless memories gets intentionally wiped out. Right. You don't hear the coughs in the recording room, you don't hear doors opening, you don't hear shuffling or rustling. It's all taken out. So you get this thing, which is called like a produced, some, you know, a produced super expensive song. And then you get lo-fi and all the like stuff like saboteur and you hear something more

so you feel more connected to it, but with writing, it is a natural filtration. It's like a real, it's even, it's so pure, you know what I mean, because it's just words. Like, in its words that have been printed on paper over and over and over again. So you're loo- you're loo- not only are you losing that thing you get with Zoom, you're like, you're losing so much. Yeah. And yet, why does it feel like when you're reading a good book, the author's spirit is somehow living inside of it?

It's amazing because like the best thing about writing, about really good writing is when it feels like it's going after things that are beyond language. Like you can feel like the language butting its head against the sort of sublime and it's like that's when writing is so exciting is like when you're reading the words, but what's going on is something so far beyond words. It's like music, it's rhythm, it's all of this stuff that's sort of just using words to get us to this place beyond words. That's when I get the most excited.

What is that place, David? Why is it that when I'm reading a great book, and this is a great book, I feel, I feel like it's not like an illusion or something. I literally feel like connected with your mind, you know what I mean? What is that place because I don't mean like it seems like it or it's just some, that's just great writing. I feel like I'm enveloped in the mind of the author. It isn't like something like that.

It's real, like in the way like when I'm walking outside and the wind blows. What is that space? Is there some as of yet unmapped realm that somehow the putting words into sentences and sentences into paragraphs, packaging those into a book somehow teleports us into? Are we literally, do you think people are literally sharing some kind of mind space when they're reading a book? I think what's happening is they're creating a mid-space between the writer and themselves, and they're creating this sort of place in between that you get a lot of these stuff

from the writer, but so much you supply yourselves, and so you sort of have this joint area that feels like one of the most intimate things in the world, because it's something that you've created that you have ownership of, but also that you don't. You know what's not yours, but you feel so entangled with another brain. I feel like that's another soul actually, not a brain. You feel like entangled with another self, and that's to me everything. Everything. The familiarity.

You know, it's a weird thing reading a book that your friend wrote because I do know you, but other great books that I've read, it's that really poignant familiarity with this being that you've never met. Tell me, I was doing a podcast with this wonderful musician called Daedalus, and they were saying that they have a theory. I would love to know what you think about this, that at the quantum level, every time a song is listened to, it changes it a little bit. What do you think about that with writing?

That's interesting, because that's the theory about memory, right, that every time you remember something, you change it molecularly, and that this idea that every time you listen to a song, you change it. I love the idea that here's an incredible book, and here's the reader, and number one, it adds a kind of contribution that the reader is giving to that space. Obviously, there's no way for this, like a book without a reader is just a bundle of fucking paper with weird shit on it. It's nothing.

It doesn't exist. The reader brings it to life or recreates it, but I don't know, maybe I'm getting too woo here or asking you more, I'm like asking you to get too woo, but do you think, is that space unique to the reader, or is there some possibility that a book is a map that draws consciousness into a kind of shared collective zone? At any given time that you're reading a popular book, you're in that space with countless other people. Right.

Yeah, and maybe that's why it's such a charge to read something outside of what anybody you're surrounded with is reading, that in some ways you get to experience new territory, and that's why sometimes reading popular books, only popular books, sort of starts to feel, I don't know, like you're just always on guided expeditions or cruise packages. When you do some extreme reading and go out and find stuff that nobody else is reading, that it feels like, oh shit, this is new territory. Anything come to mind when you say that, extreme reading, like does any kind of off the top of your head, any example of that pop into your head?

I've been reading this woman, Rebecca Brown, and she's a nonfiction writer, she's an essayist, but she's doing stuff that I can't believe she's doing. Like what? Well, she, you know, nonfiction has this built-in idea that what we're writing is true. But what she's doing is she's a gay writer, and she's saying that her identity, the history of her identity has been sublimated throughout history. And so she's reclaiming this sort of imaginative space of what is fact when you've been sort of kept out of the factual history of the world, and what is fact to you.

And that has gotten really exciting. And she plays with, she fucks with you in terms of, like, mixing fact and fiction. And it's really, it's amazing stuff. Wow, that's so trippy, wow, that's so weird. And say the priest is just sublime, it's so good. It comes out of a book called American Romances, and it's just so good. How do you find these books? I mean, like, what's your, who's recommending these, as someone who's a...

My students. No shit, they just say, hey, did they call you, what do they call you, Mr. Professor? David. Okay. No, I really think, like, I always make a point to ask my students what they're reading. Because they're out there reading stuff that I would never come across. And so it's the greatest. Yeah.

I got a pile of books from this last semester from all the things my students recommended for me. And they're brilliant, all of them. You know, another thing that I think people accidentally forget, or maybe they don't mention it, is like, when you're reading a good book, you're under this temporary spell. Yeah. Every single day is going to be colored a little bit by that book, and the love you feel for the book.

You know, that exhilaration you feel, that you've finally found a book you like again, you know? And it's like, oh my God, this is so wonderful. And it's like the opposite of a curse. A great book gives you this blessing. And if it is a dark book, even if it's like your world is a little creepier, it's still a blessing because the book ends. I wonder what you think as an author about Twitter and looking at it from the same perspective

in the sense like you follow Trump and it doesn't end. You know what I mean? And somehow there's like an insidious creep that gets into you via all the information streams that you've chosen to absorb. And it's a true curse. What are your thoughts on that, man? Like right now the big debate among people who authentically tried to do a coup is that they should be allowed to plan overthrows of governments online without being censored.

But not just that. They should be allowed to voice complete lives that are designed to make people take political action in one form or the other that is based on misinformation and that it's like dangerous. Even Jack at Twitter said, it's a dangerous president that I did. What are your thoughts regarding that? I'm sorry if it's a circuitous way to get to your thoughts on free speech as we grapple with the internet. Yeah.

I got to say Twitter is just a panic attack for me. I try to minimize my contact with it as much as I can because it is, it's, yeah, I finally took it off my phone. I got off Facebook. I just couldn't handle it anymore. I like my Instagram because it's filled with cosplayers. So I love looking at people making handcrafted vision costumes like I'm ecstatic about that shit.

What's a vision costume? You know, the Marvel character vision, like some low rent foam core vision that got made out of shit bought at Michael's. Foam core? Did you say foam core? Yeah. Is that a term or what is that? It's a material.

Oh, it's literally called foam core. Yeah, it's called foam core. I thought it was like a movement or a cosplay genre, foam core. It should be. I've gone full foam core on this bitch. Why did you decide to start? Why? Why are you into cosplay?

Not that I don't mean I'm not in any way saying why. I mean, you just see my fucking Instagram. It's like either pictures of Buddhist saints or just like smutty hot models or friends. It's like people playing people playing synthesizers. It's like terrible. Yeah. I know, man. I don't know.

That's like what you were talking about before the AI that could put together John Prine and Mount St. Helens and whatever. You've done that. You've created that. Yeah, I have. It's like a beautiful, beautiful, enlightened being that is kind of into like fetish stuff, but also is like Pink Floyd or something like that. I'll take it by the way.

Oh my God. Imagine that if you could turn your Instagram feed into a living being, what would it do to you? What would yours do to you? If you took your Instagram feed and ran it through some kind of matter assimilator and had a human-sized thing, what would it look like and what would it do to you? It would be sort of a fascinating sort of fetishy, kinky, nostalgia machine that had the face of my cousin's baby.

Oh my God, that's so wild. What a confusing machine. Yeah. Wow. I don't know what it would do to me, but I can say it would probably look like a homemade catwoman costume with my cousin's baby's face. Man, this is, do you have any internet probably like as a writer, how do you deal with the addiction, man?

How are you maintaining any kind of focus when it comes to writing and reading with these terrible gravity fields that are coming out of our phones? Yeah. It's awful. It's awful. Yeah. I don't know, especially when your phone also can stream anything. Yeah.

Yeah, no, it's terrible. Have you noticed, I'll tell you, as a comedian, I was at the Denver Comedy Works and Dave Chappelle had been there and he left those bags. People have to put their phones in that they get back when they leave. And I was backstage listening to a room where people couldn't use their phones. And it was a completely different sound than a room where people are looking at their phones before a show and a completely different mood. But as a writer and also as someone who's like encountering people at various stages

in their development as a writer, have you noticed any like over your years of encountering them, do you think there's been any kind of like change that's related to absorption into their phones? It's interesting. Over my course as a writer, I've seen people write more and more fragmented stuff, more collagy stuff. And I wonder if that's sort of this thing of trying to integrate your personality and your thoughts with all of this unlimited data coming at you.

Yeah. Like what you're getting is these sort of beautifully fragmented, faceted pieces because that's what experience is like. Yeah. Yeah. I feel like that. I feel like if I was going to say if anything's changed, but maybe that's just because last semester, that's what everybody was doing, but it feels like that.

You'll never know. I mean, you know, you see like, I saw this picture of a, I think it was a wasp nest maybe, but somehow the wasps had figured out how to use plastic in the nest and it was pretty and like also like blasphemous, you know, it's like, but yeah, you will never know. Like we do have these great books from pre-internet and, but we'll never know if like our technology is acting as a kind of like, it's doing the same thing to whatever that was creating those books in the past that garlic does to vampires, you know, like it's impossible, the technology or is it helping, is it helping us?

I mean, it's a stupid question, but. Right. It's neither, of course. Yeah. It's neither. It's the one great thing about the internet is the democratization of knowledge and the ability to sort of open up publishing routes for lots of different voices, but who knows like what it's damaging, like our ability to pay attention, our ability to see a thought

through from a single perspective. But that also could be a positive. Who needs to just see something from a single perspective anymore when you can have 20 perspectives? Yeah. Yeah. We don't know. And also it's a process. We don't know what it's turning into.

I mean, it's still in it. I think of an intermediary phase where we still have an externalized device. I'm sure it's a matter of time before, you know, phones are going to be melted into our heads. Yeah. And then, and then who knows what that's going to be, David. And then that will collapse and we'll enter into a new phase. Yeah, exactly.

Like it just, it just doesn't stop. It doesn't, yeah, it doesn't stop. And it also, it seems to be accelerating. This is one of the, my wife was listening and I don't know, I don't really want her to listen to the podcast because she has to listen to my ass all day every day. She was listening to, she was listening to one of my podcasts that was not that long ago and she's like, you know, it sounds weird because you didn't mention the insurrection. And like, I was thinking like, dear God, things are moving so fast at this point that just

releasing a podcast within a few days, it's dated because you didn't mention the bizarre fucking thing that happened. Yeah, no. And we're talking right now before inauguration. We don't know what's going to happen on inauguration. But right before we did this podcast, I did see on the news that they had to stop the rehearsal because a homeless encampment nearby had burst into flames. I'm sorry, but that has got, I mean, like, if you saw that in a movie, it would seem

cheesy. Yeah. Like really that's your statement on homelessness and capitalism that the, oh yeah, I get it, the homeless encampment is going to disrupt the whole political system. And like, there's got to be a more nuanced way to say that. Come on. Come on reality. Yeah, it's like, it's so wild, man.

These events are happening with such great rapidity that who knows. But I wonder if you could, I wonder if you could let people know where they can find your book. And if there's anything you want to say to promote this wonderful book, because it's really good. I'm sorry. Thanks. By the way, is this available?

When does this become available? Tomorrow. Hell, yes. Perfect. Are you excited, David? That's got to feel so crazy. I'm pretty excited. You know, the book release date got pushed back.

It was supposed to come out in October. Yeah. I feel like I've been sitting on this for a while. So I'm really excited to get it out in the world. Have you started doing other interviews in this yet? Are you about to do a press tour? I'm not really much of a press tour. Releasing a book during COVID is going to be really interesting.

Yeah. I'm going to have a conversation with Gillian Flynn tomorrow night at Bookseller. In my neighborhood, there's a book place called Bookseller. But yeah, it's just... You feel we're an object of a book tour? Are you like... You probably won't be able to do a book tour until... Yeah.

I won't. Good or bad? I don't know. I mean, the best part about it is I get to just get back to writing. No. Let me tell you how you feel. It's bad, David. You need a book tour.

You deserve a book tour for this, where you go and you read passages from this book to people who are dressed in hot cosplay outfits. That would be awesome. Yeah. But no. Are you... What are you going to do? Like...

Yeah. The last time I released a book, it came out during a polar vortex, where it was like negative 40. Yeah. And so like every book is going to have its problems when it's launched. So if this is the problem, okay. Yeah. You're right.

You're right. Yeah. It's like hundreds of thousands of people have lost their lives. I'm upset because you can't go hang out with them. Furries. I'm a little upset that I can't hang out with furries, but oh well. You know, if they would just put filters into those masks, everything would be fine. Holy shit.

And with that, David McClain changed. The pandemic was over and a week as the world started wearing furry masks with HEPA filters in them. David, I'm sorry for the clumsy end of this podcast. I am really excited for you. This book is so fucking good and it's going to do great because it's so good. All the links y'all need to find this book are going to be at dunkitrustle.com. Also after you finish reading how I learned to hate in Ohio, definitely pick up the answer

to the riddle is me. That's David's memoir about amnesia in India. And it is right up there with God, what's that freaking awesome book by Crack Hour about Everest? What's that called, David? Into thin air. Into thin air. I put it on the same level as into thin air.

It's that freaking good. David, thank you so much. I love you. Thank you. Best to your family. Thanks for being on the show. I love you. Good luck.

Good luck. Good luck with the big change in your life coming up. Thank you, friend. Hare Krishna. Hare Krishna. That was David McClain, everybody. His order is book, how I learned to hate in Ohio. Follow him on Twitter, reach out to him through the astral plane and give him a big fat kiss

on his beautiful, beautiful nipples. Big thanks to our sponsors and most of all, a big thank you to you, my listeners who have allowed me to have the coolest job on planet earth. I love you and I'll see you next week and maybe somewhere in here I'll find time to tell you the wild story of the birth of my sweet second son, lots to talk about. I'll see you soon. Hare Krishna. A good time starts with a great wardrobe.

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