Today I'm playing a guest show by one of my favorite radio producers Bianca Gaver

Bianca's been on rumble strip before most recently I interviewed her for the show that I made about turning 50 the total

eclipse of the Heart show and I interviewed her because she is much younger than me

and she said in that show that when she turns 50 she And she hopes to feel like weathered barnboard.

So, she has a new podcast called Constellation Prize and it's really good.

If you like this show, I'm pretty sure that you're going to love her show.

You can find it wherever you get podcasts. Again, it's called

Constellation Prize. Today I am playing her very first episode called

Crossing Guard. Here's Bianca. From The Believer magazine, welcome to Constellation Prize.

Last summer, the main thing that felt good to me was sitting in cafes and reading novels.

The book that struck the deepest was a work of existentialism called Naja by Jean-Paul Sart.

It was written 80 years ago, but to me it perfectly described my experience of being a freelancer in Brooklyn in 2019.

Like this line, for example, Wednesday I must not be afraid or this one three o'clock an odd moment in the afternoon

today it is intolerable the main character is named Antoine and this book is his diary. He's so lonely that things are starting to get weird.

If you look at yourself too long in the mirror, you'll see a monkey.

What I see is well below the monkey on the fringe of the vegetable world.

Am I myself not a wave of icy air. That summer of reading SART, I was confronting a new

feeling in my life, a feeling of loneliness. It was like there was something between me and the people I was speaking to, like I existed in another realm.

There's no socially acceptable way to tell my friends, I'm lonely. No Bureau of

Loneliness I could report my feelings to. So instead I got on the internet and I

started reading articles. I read that loneliness is a public health epidemic with real physical

side effects. As a predictor of early death it's on par with obesity or smoking. Almost a third of Americans

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