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. And this is the slowdown. A couple of years ago. A couple of years ago, I got tired of the questions at parties and bars.

The, so what do you do for work kind of talk?

My friend Sean and I were dead set on perfecting what we called riffing,

turning conversation into something more like jamming than a performance.

So I came up with an inciting question,

something to start a conversation about nothing at all in the best way.

Not about what anyone had or what they had done, but how they saw the world and how they received it.

A slippery, delicious way of talking. Something to access the strangeness. I would ask, are you a vessel or are you a portal? I understand how

ridiculous that sounds. It is an imperfect question by design. Vessels and portals aren't

opposites, nor do they form clear metaphors for any human way of being. It's not about saying there's two kinds of people.

It's a way to get people a little riled up. The question genuinely confused some people. Others were

game from the start and would answer with certainty right off the bat. We were at a restaurant

when my sister, who is not the

kind of person who enjoys this linguistic, theoretical play, pulled out her phone and started reading

out the definitions of the two words. This pissed me off, but I tried to repress that. The definitions

had many lettered entries, and those of us at the table turned our ears close and listened.

Despite my resistance to the technical approach, I loved the tactile specificity of these definitions.

They made the potential metaphors even weirder, better.

...