The Conduit

What can be written about today? A movie, a podcast, a book? A random event or the news of the week? The giant flailing hammer of weather that squeezed the world on a daily basis?

Not so long ago, or longer than you might think, I stumbled across a podcast called 'The Tobolowsky Files'. It's a sequence of stories told by the noted character actor Stephen Tobolowsky ("Ned... Ryerson!"). Despite the rather mawkish sounding topics it was a podcast, and now is again, that serves as a guiding light somehow. A podcast that forms part of the conduit to the emotions that are buried most of the time.

The conduit to the heart is a tricky thing; It gets blocked so easily for one thing, but is then unblocked consistently with certain learned triggers. For example, I know that the 'Due South' season one finale called 'Letting Go' will open me up every time, 'Star Trek II' too, and 'The Tobolowsky Files'. Other things work but there's no predictability. The conduit is tricky. 'Mary Poppins' is unreliable in this respect, despite being practically perfect in every way. Oh, Mary Poppins, you smudger!

'The Tobolowsky Files' is a great podcast, a rare gem unafraid to go to personal places without becoming intrusive, unafraid to be free of swearing while still tackling adult material on many levels. It is hard to overstate just how rare podcasts free of swearing are on the Grand Old Internet. So far there's Tobolowsky, 'The Thrilling Adventure Hour' and 'How Stuff Works' that I have found in my ponderings. Obviously there are many more out there and they remain to be discovered. Oh, I forgot 'Filmspotting': A show that freewheels frequently off the cliff into the ravine of pretention but manages to come back to be interesting anyway. None of them really competes with Tobolowsky though; that show serves as a surrogate source of experience for someone who hasn't lived the fullest of social lives, and also more significantly illustrates explicitly at times the differences between an American lifestyle and mindset to our own. They can be so strange sometimes across the Atlantic!

Back to the conduit, the mystic cranky beast of a waterway for the emotions. A crooked canal that goes nowhere and everywhere. Human sentiment crashing through scientific mindset and for a moment re-establishing that elusive balance that vanishes so easily. Music can unleash its power, movies and television and radio too, but never books. The intellectualisation of reading is perhaps too much of an effort and forms a block of its own? This will take some extra thought.

Here endeth the ramblings for this week.

O.


The Quirky Muffin: Confused, unstable, annoyed and annoying, but persisting still. Never give up, never surrender!