Podcast Episode 5 Things to Talk About

In a small town, things are simple. Especially the ideas. Or, if they’re not simple, they’re just not thought through very well.

One of the things Kyan and I like to do is frequent the local Dollar General. We love to walk, ad if we’re walking, why not walk to Dollar General and pick up a Venom Energy Drink for 95 cents?

Venom is one of those rare items that apparently has not been affected by inflation. People who think about economics for a living, who measure economic activity and the causes and effects thereof, might tell you that inflation has been caused by disrupted supply chains caused by the pandemic and war in Ukraine and increased energy prices and vast corporate profits and things of that nature, but in a small town, that would make too much sense.

So there Kyan and I were standing in line at Dollar General waiting on the self checkout. Behind us were some conservatives who were saying the usual talking points. And I couldn’t help but hear that inflation was really caused by Joe Biden giving out $1400 stimulus checks to Americans in desperate need of money during a global pandemic. I’ll be damned.

And it doesn’t help that the immigrants get welfare benefits! Never mind the stipulations about what immigrants can get welfare benefits, for how long, and what the real economic consequences of such a a thing would be anyway.

But that’s a small town for you, where you see Trump flags flying over the decrepit porches on ramshackle excuses for houses, the pain peeling off, rusty trucks with confederate flag stickers in the windows in the front yard.

Kyan and I like thrift stores too. We were in Mt. Ayr at the Neighborhood Center not long ago, getting a few books. Some of them happened to be political books. The guy taking the money for the books tried to engage me in conversation about politics, but I steered away from that. I wasn’t in the mood. He said, “You like politics?” I said, “I like it better when it has become history.”

Another place Kyan and I frequent is the library. There’s a lady who works there who is very good at selling us books. And some of them are political books, but the thing about the political books we buy is that they tend to be older books, relegating them more to the status of history books, even if it’s recent history.

Then there’s the history books per se. I once took some sort of psychological test in my younger years where I was asked, “Why is it important to study history?” I gave the trite answer that we should study history so that we are not doomed to repeat our mistakes of the past, or something like that.

My answer now would be different. Now I would say that we should study history because it’s interesting. Because history is a source of ideas, and ideas are interesting. I love ideas, the good ones mostly, and I make no apologies about that.

Speaking of history books, I wasn’t much interested in history for much of my life. When I was a freshman in college, I told my history professor, “History is too hard. There’s too much of it.” He said, “And there’s more of it every day!” It’s only in the past few years that I have really become interested in history and started reading a considerable number of history books.

One of the things i like about history is that it’s pretty much all connected. And there were real people living these histories. People with real thoughts, feelings, and emotions, and I think that it’s especially amazing when we can read voices of the past.

I just absolutely love books. Nothing gets me more excited than books. Here at my home, I have a pretty well stocked personal library, because books make me happy, and I think people should be surrounded by what makes them happy.

Books. Religion. History. Small towns. I’ll be attending church in Lenox on Sunday. I might start attending some churches here in Corning to get a feel for them. Because I suspect the God of the Lenox Presbyterian Church isn’t your typical god in a small town. The God at that place of worship is complex, and I have a feeling that most small town people worship a simpler God.

But that’s a couple days from now, and I hope to draw some inspiration for future podcasts from going to church.

Two books that I have seen for sale in the library are The Iliad and the Odyssey by Homer. I haven’t read these books in their entirety, but I also can’t quite get myself to buy them, because they’re not exactly nonfiction. They’re Epics. Although I do have the Bible, the Book of Mormon, and the Quran, as well as the Epic of Gilgamesh.

I spoke in a previous episode of this podcast about to be fallible is human, to forgive is divine, and that the gods need not be perfect themselves; indeed, Homer’s gods weren’t perfect, nor even particularly well-loved. The Greeks even fought against their Gods. Or so the stories go. Which is why I don’t usually buy books that present the gods as real. Because they’re stories that aren’t real, so is it nonfiction?

I like to read books on cultural and psychological aspects of religion, however. I actually love reading about religion, but it goes back to my rule against reading fiction. I don’t know where the rule same from. Maybe I was made to read too much fiction when I was in grade school and high school and when I discovered nonfiction, I realized how much I had missed out on and vowed never to read fiction again.

But perhaps that, too, is a fiction. the Myth-of-Dustin’s-Rule-Against-Fiction origin story. Or maybe I’m on to the same sort of idea as Solon, ancient King of Greece. I spoke with my brother Andy on the last episode of Understanding Us about comedy and Dionysus a little bit. Dramas were also written for Dionysus by Thespis. Solon asked Thespis why he entertained with his lies. Thespis said that it was make-believe, not lying, to which Solon warned that make-believe could creep in more serious business.

Even when reading what is supposed to be serious ancient history, fiction runs into our history like when Herodotus talks of giant golden ants, Cyclops, griffins, Egyptians having their viscera removed by enemas for mummification. Maybe I didn’t trust history much when I was younger, and that’s why I didn’t read it much.