Hello, friends. Before we get into this episode with Robert Phoenix, which is the

199th episode of the show, we are almost at 200 episodes, and the 200th episode is going to be

pretty massive. You'll see what it is. Soon soon i want to talk about my childhood in small town

pennsylvania because this episode is all about the pennsylvania dutch healing tradition of powwow

um which was all around me when i was a kid but i I didn't see it. So I'm just start by sharing

a short thing that I wrote for the journal, that I.e. here in Ireland, about growing up in

Pennsylvania, and then maybe talk a little bit about the spiritual traditions around me, which

would have been helpful.

So once, a teacher made fun of me for saying that it rains frogs sometimes.

In a class in high school in Pennsylvania, I made a comment about that strange weather,

and she told me to prove it, a request which was not so easy to fulfill pre-internet. The next day, I brought in a book that had a short story on the rare event. She wouldn't look at it, but ridiculed me and

told me to return to my lab table and my cut-open frog splayed and pinned to its dissecting pan.

My hands and clothes and everything smelled like formaldehyde.

Of course, of course in Pennsylvania, it didn't matter if you were right, only if you're in control.

Later, another teacher who years before had punched my brother in the side of the head,

and weeks before threatened to strangle me in front of the class was talking about Nazis.

Not the World War II Nazis, but kids in our area down the street in our school.

You've got to listen to him, my teacher said, about one of my neo-Nazi classmates and his Nazi ideas.

He's got some good points.

In my town, there was nowhere to go and nothing to do. We were landlocked far from

any cities except the post-industrial landscapes of shattered factory windows and fenced off

parking lots that made up Allentown in Bethlehem. There were diners open all night, and those

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