Hello and thank you so much for joining us again. It is the Nightly Pleasures podcast. I am your host and the author of The piece you're about to hear today. The Grey Knight. You can call me, Daddy, you can call me Jack. You can call me whatever the fuck you want. I don't care. I don't like doing the intros or the plugging away or anything like that. That's just not me. Hi. I'm not in a bad mood.

I promise. I promise. I'm not in a bad mood in any way, shape, or form. I just don't know how

to start her into fucking podcast, even after all this time. A long time ago, I went through an

interview with Ira Glass.

That makes it sound like I did it.

But I just like, I don't remember if it was in, it's a long time ago,

and I don't remember if it was the written word or if it was audio,

is why I said it that way.

But Ira Glass talked about how after so many years of doing a podcast,

he couldn't go back and listen to the way that he would conclude things or the way that he would introduce things because he had grown so much. And I think I've gone backwards. I think I've gone backwards. That's the only thing that I've got available as to my podcasting ability and my own information is, I'm getting worse at this.

It's like a night's tale when Heath Ledger is learning how to joust at the beginning.

I just keep getting worse and you can all see it.

But you show me love anyway, and that's the important thing.

And much more importantly than the love that you show me, after I said it was so important, is the love that I show myself.

And I think that's true for just about everybody, just about all the time.

So I have to give a little bit of a win to myself, and I am not the most self-awarding person in the world. That is to say, my anxiety has come

way, way, way down. And when I read like a local news story that's really scary or kind of like

when I see something that's a little scary like a car accident happening in front of me and it's a really kind of like, ooh I see something that's a little scary, like a car accident happening in

front of me, and it's a really kind of like, ooh, one person was just totally being, like,

in the wrong. One person was like really being scary, and it could have happened to anybody

else on that road. When I see something like that, it is amazing to me how little of an effect it has

compared to even just a few years ago. I've talked recently about how I can now just plan out

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