What's up? It's Major.

Today's episode is hosted by poet and slowdown producer Micah Kielbond.

Don't worry. I'll be back on November 25th.

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

Rock Bottom is a funny place.

I'm not sure that it's real.

Yet, it's also a place I've been to. If anyone has been there, then I suppose we all end up in our own rock bottom at some point. The summer

I turned 21, I was sleeping in late most days. I would hear of something my friends had been

up to only after it happened and feel left out. I spent a hell of a lot of time talking on the

phone with some guy 1400 miles away in Austin, whom I poured my enwee into. I went to the campus print shop every day to putz around on the

unguided summer research project I had finagled funding for, a letterpress printed pamphlet of poems.

I had bitten off way more than I could chew and was stewing in self-doubt. It was my last summer before my senior year of college.

I had just returned from a semester abroad in Korea, and Los Angeles was hot and dry and lonely.

The nights were heavy and dark and endless. I felt like I was always in the wrong place, doing the wrong thing, doing not enough.

I got through it. It took finding purpose, and then I thought that I would never feel that way

again. I thought that I knew what purpose was and that I wouldn't lose it. I thought I knew that my brain

works better when I get up early and answer all of my text messages, when I do things with my hands

and set up scenarios to get all my friends together, when I allow myself melancholy and exploration,

when I let fun and love in.

But maybe I was giving myself too much credit to control my own experience of the world.

Life, as beautiful as it is, is also rather disturbing.

It is vivid and grotesque, loud and uncontrollable.

...