Zero Audio

Welcome to episode number 90 of tangentially speaking.

Amazing. I can't believe we're pushing a hundred with this thing.

But very happy that we are. Glad you're here with me.

This week is Caitlin Dodie. She was on once before. She was on episode 25 back in the archives.

She is amazing. She is a mortician.

You can see her if you go to YouTube and look at Ask a Mortician.

She's super smart. She's sexy. She's articulate. She's funny. She's fearless.

She's one of my favorite people and she's got a book coming out this week called Smoke It's in Your Eyes,

which is hilarious and very well made. I've got to say, I, you know, as an author,

it makes me happy to hold a book that's a beautiful piece of material.

You know, it's got a really nice cover. It's well put together. It's a beautiful book.

If you're interested in death, if you're interested in the way American culture pathologizes death,

if that makes sense, you know, we make it. We take this thing that's a part of life just as much as sex or food

or all these other things and we make it into a sickness, although it sounds weird to call death a sickness,

but we pathologize parts of life that make us uncomfortable and we do that with death.

And so we hide it and by hiding it, we deny ourselves the opportunity to become familiar with it.

And so like the monster you run away from in your dreams, it keeps getting bigger and bigger and scarier and scarier.

And the only way to ever defeat these monsters, whether they're in our dreams or in our waking

life, is to turn around. Turn around. You don't run away from a mountain lion. You don't run away

from a grizzly bear and you don't run away from the knowledge of your own mortality. You turn around

and you face that shit and you make yourself look as big as possible and you at least pretend you're not

...