Hey, it's Major.

Today's episode is hosted by our very own Micah Keelbaum.

Hang tight, and I'll be back on November 25th.

I'm Micah Keelban, and this is the slowdown.

Thank you. Kielbon. And this is the slowdown. When the pandemic kept everyone isolated, my roommate Madison ardently followed a pitchfork

series chronicling every song ever to hit the

Billboard Top 100. We filled our days with video games, movies, and Wikipedia pages.

I started watching old episodes of The Monkeys sitcom, and we watched the movie Head,

their response to the success of the Beatles feature films.

It's a can of cinematic worms, but I loved it. I still love it.

In the opening scene of Head, a bridge is being dedicated, a ribbon cut, an official mumbling in a megaphone.

Then come the monkeys, running from their rabid fans.

They run right off the bridge, and the pseudo-psychedelic Carol King dreamscape of Porpoise song starts up.

Shots play of obviously fake stunt dummies flying through the air. Their bodies hit the water.

The monkeys start canoodling with mermaids. Wait, I pointed at the TV. We know that bridge.

It was the Gerald Desmond Bridge, which links San Pedro to Terminal Island, suspended high above L.A. Harbor.

Just before we were constrained to our apartments, my friend Stevie had driven Madison and me over that bridge to eat Civeche at Port-A-Col.

I had curled my body into the truck's jump seats, windows down, the sea air blasting through my hair.

That bridge was my bridge. That life was my life.

Today's poem holds its epiphanies close. It lives in that space which grows from wholehearted obsession, specificity, and the knowledge that the act of returning is the kind of love

that keeps us going. Letter to a young poet by Megan Fernandez. If you haven't taken the Amtrak in

Florida, you haven't lived. At 2 a.m., seven months into the pandemic,

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