Before we get started, all the names you’ll hear tonight are either omitted or fictionalized, with the exception of Scott Santens and Sara Niemietz who are public figures.  Natalie is also the real name of a friend of mine, but I don’t think she’ll mind.  I don’t name names without permission. 

I’ve just completed my 3-part science-fiction mini-series, “Universe Selectors, Incorporated.”  The final episode is, I think, the greatest work of Art I’ve ever created.  It caused me to think.  I never intended to get here.

Prior to last week, the greatest work of Art with which I was ever involved was “Horace’s Final Five.”  Any serious listener to this show has heard me discuss it frequently.  I like to believe most of you have heard that episode.  It was number 50, and that was intentional.  50 is a significant milestone.  It was also my 50^th blog post.  (Yes, Natalie, I have a blog.  It’s in the show notes.)  http://frededer.home.blog    

I also expected it to be my final episode.  I expected to be dead immediately after it was released.  I was facing homelessness yet again, and when I wrote it, I could see no way out of eviction and the ugly death that would surely find me while I was living on the streets.  Depression is a frequent visitor, even when things are going well for me.  When life is more difficult, depression floods in like it just broke through the Hoover Dam.  If I didn’t die living in my car, I would still have filled my syringe with a lethal dose of insulin.  I’m not interested in living if it will be nothing but pain.  As it turns out, I don’t enjoy pain.  I know there are people who do.  I’m simply not among them.

What happened?  What am I doing here 100 episodes later?  It was Art.  Art is what happened.  Puccini told us in Tosca.  “Vissi d’arte.” “I live for Art.”  “I sang to the stars and the heavens shone more brightly.”

I didn’t do “Horace’s Final Five” alone.  I couldn’t have made it into what you’ve heard.  I had help.  The help gave me a reawakening.  I never knew Art of that sort was possible.  It certainly wasn’t possible for me to create.  The sound was glorious and new.  It put me into the scene as though I were actually there.  The soundscape was a holodeck.  I experienced it along with Horace and Marc Antony.  And I wanted to do more.

The man who brought about this Renaissance, saved my life from the Prosecutor who lives in my head to remind me I’m worthless, and made Universe Selectors possible at all, hasn’t talked to me in months.  I have no reason to believe he will again.  I’m not going to go into the reasons for the falling out.  I see it one way.  He sees it another.  We’re probably both right.  We’re probably both wrong.  It’s not worth my minutes to rehash what I can’t change.   

You might think this would cause me to disregard him.  And while I’m far more arrogant (particularly about my show) than I really ought to be, I have to accept reality.  If I’m going to talk about how we got from there to here, I must give credit to the man who saved Fred’s Front Porch, whether he likes me anymore or not.  I’m going to explain what has happened since “Horace’s Final Five.”  Tonight, I’m going to take you on the Journey from Episode 50 to Episode 150.  And “… what a long, strange trip it’s been.”

After “Horace’s Final Five,” I immediately returned to my normal fare.  I covered an essay by the great Scott Santens, one of the world’s leading advocates for Universal Basic Income.  The content is perfectly fine.  The sound is badly lacking.  I didn’t have the equipment to make it sound like my show sounds today. 

By the time we got to my next artistic work, “Time Jumper Radio,” my new producer had written me a new theme song, and now he was using better equipment than I had to make the show sound the way it ought to sound.  He was convinced that I had to have a Mac Book so that I could use Logic, so that I could create that kind of sound, myself.  And he was right.  I did need one. 

I explained it just wasn’t possible.  I had two roommates who had control of my money, and if I spent that kind of money, they would quite probably throw me out of my home.  The Mac Book would be of little use if I were homeless.  He had just gotten money from Unemployment, and he wanted to buy it for me.  I fought bitterly against this idea.  There was no way I could ever repay him.  The idea that I would ever live alone and be able to spend any money I might earn in my own way was unimaginable at that point.  He wouldn’t hear it.  He bought me the computer on which I have been producing this show since I got it.  In that way, he gets credit for “Universe Selectors.”  Several months ago, he threatened to take that computer back, and that was the beginning of our ending.

I had no idea how to use Logic Pro.  I didn’t understand the finger mouse pad.  I was lost.  My mentor took many many hours to teach me how to use it.  I learned, although it takes me forever to do that now.  My brain is much slower than it was when I was thirty.  “Dave, my mind is going.  I can feel it.”  He gets credit for “Universe Selectors” in that way, as well.

We worked together closely for more than a year.  We created extraordinary theater pieces.  We worked with more than a dozen people to produce Art neither of us could have created alone.  When the girls told me they were moving in January, 2021, he gave me a place to live in Sierra Vista for six weeks while I waited for my Disability to arrive.  He gets credit for “Universe Selectors” for doing all of that.  It’s a shame he couldn’t have taken a run at “Universe Selectors.”  I’m sure it would have been even better than it is.

I didn’t do it alone. 

I had help from Miles O’Brien, too.  I taught him when he was in 4^th grade, and for the next couple of years.  I made a difference in his life.  We stayed in vague contact for the next 25 years or so.  And he listened to Episode 73: “Do I Have to Hate All 70 Million?”  Prior to that, he didn’t even know I had a podcast.  He became interested in that.  He called me to talk about it, and when he realized I was living in California, only 20 minutes or so from him, he insisted on coming to see me.  That story is chronicled in Episode 124: “Unlocking the Gate.”  It explains that I left Sierra Vista, where I had gotten an apartment I could afford on my Disability, and where I was less than a mile away from the home of the man who saved my life and this show, to move to California on the promise of a future in which I could live alone and never pay rent again.  That turned out to be an unmitigated disaster.  Miles saved me from it.  He brought me back here.

He wanted to do a podcast of his own, and I introduced him to the man who helped me to make this podcast what it is today.  Miles joined his team, and he is now making a podcast that is at least as successful as this one.  I expect that in another month or so, “Interstellar Frequency” will have a larger audience than we have, and I’ve been at it more than two and a half years.  I taught Miles the basics of Logic Pro for six hours one night when he was here.  His mind is much faster than mine is today.  He is now better at Logic than I am.  I sent him all three episodes of “Universe Selectors.”  He worked out the “LUFS,” (Loudness Units to Full Sound) which was something of which I had never even heard until it was brought up in a Facebook podcasters’ group Miles invited me to join.  LUFS are the reason you shouldn’t have to adjust your volume more than once.  Set it at the beginning, and it should work throughout the show.  Miles added sound effects.  He made the voices consistent.  He made the episodes better than I could make them, myself. 

I realize I have done nothing on my own.  I owe much to many people.  I can’t hope to repay all I owe.

But, I also wrote the words.  I did that alone… except for Glenn Frey, Don Henley, Don Felder, Arthur C. Clarke, Douglas Adams, and Margery Williams.  And, really Stanley Kubrick is in there, too.  So is my Dad.  Yeah, okay, I didn’t even write it alone. 

Still, each of us is the product of our experiences, and those experiences are at least influenced by the choices we make.  When I read from The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock at my father’s memorial, a friend congratulated me on the tribute I’d written for Dad.  I told her the credit went to Eliot and the others I quoted in those pages.  She made the point I couldn’t have quoted them if I hadn’t learned them.  And that’s a good thing to remember. 

During this long, strange trip I have made choices.  They’re pretty much unavoidable.  The Existentialists tell me that everything is a choice.  Others maintain that life is just a reaction to forces that are, for the most part, beyond our control.  I think there is truth in both of those ideas. 

I didn’t choose to be rid of my former roommates.  It was beyond my control.  I keep reminding myself and anyone who will listen that we can’t control anyone but ourselves, and even that can sometimes be difficult.  But I made a choice about how to deal with that situation.  I didn’t have to accept my mentor’s offer of assistance.  I could have tried to find a place here in town to live, but on the money I had, it would have been just short of miraculous to find that.  I had cause for concern about going to Sierra Vista.  I had heard the Artist meltdown more than once, screaming at people, and it made me incredibly uncomfortable.  I don’t do well with yelling.  I made the choice to trust him that extra step further.  And I believe it was the right choice.  For six months, I lived happily in Sierra Vista, aside from the fact that I had a probably mentally disturbed neighbor who, although he said he had three doctorates, was a Major in the US Military, and was now on Disability just as I was, still lived next door to me in the cheapest place in Sierra Vista.  He insisted on talking to me every time I went out for a cigarette, and it was almost like having a roommate again.  He was never unkind.  He was, however, a human being who insisted on talking to me.  I have, in case you were somehow unaware of that, a difficult time tolerating that. 

When Anthony Tagonist offered me an opportunity to live rent-free for the rest of my life, I thought it over very carefully.  When something seems too good to be true, it usually is.  This is something my experiences had taught me.  Both he and his wife were former students of mine, however, so I decided to believe this was the Universe paying me back for the half a lifetime I had spent trying to make a difference.  The Universe has a sense of humor, evidently.  Those were the most traumatic months of my life.

I produced some good work there, but only one of the pieces is one of which I’m proud.  “Father and The Lady” is a beautiful story, and it was born from needing my dad again.  I looked to his example to deal with what scared me.  That’s not in the story, itself, but that was its Genesis.  Good things came from a poor choice.

Miles points out, though, that if I hadn’t moved to California, he wouldn’t have a show, and I wouldn’t have the help I do now.  And that’s true.

I’ve had something resembling a love life in the last six months or so.  (There’s a reference to that in Episode 3 of the mini-series.)  This is to say I’ve been busy falling in love with someone who loves me only a little at a time, and who is often willing to allow me to love her.  This is particularly difficult for a man who lives in terror of other people.  Fortunately, she’s 1200 miles away, and our relationship depends on the one thing I do well.  It’s about words.  Mine seem to help her sometimes.  You’ve met her on this show.  She’s the subject of Episode 128: “My Brief Brush With Happiness.”  She’s having a difficult time healing from the bad relationships of her past, and I do my best to help.  No, I won’t be getting married again, have no fear gentle reader (or listener), but it’s lovely to find my heart functioning like a man’s heart again.  Sometimes I get to feel loved by someone who is not Speedy Shine.

President Bartlett used to ask, “What’s next?”  I don’t have the slightest idea.  I’m emotionally, physically, and creatively exhausted after “Universe Selectors, Incorporated.”  I had thought of doing “The Velveteen Rabbit,” but I made it fit into the last episode, so there’s no reason to do that now.  I’ve learned, though, that, as Sara Niemietz reminds me in my favorite hymn:

We don’t need to know
What the future holds
Just put your hand in mine

I don’t have to see
What’s ahead of me
Let’s just take our time
And shine

— Sara Niemietz and W.G. “Snuffy” Walden “Shine”
from “Get Right”, 2019