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Hi, podcast listeners. It's Ann here, and we've got an in-house story for you this week. That's from our producer, Charles Monroe Kane, and here's what you need to know up front.

Charles is a legendary bar storyteller.

He's got this collection of amazing stories from different periods of his life.

He grew up in Rust Belt, Ohio.

He was saved at a summer Bible camp, became a teenage missionary and faith healer, and then

lost his faith, and he spent his 20s in the underground rave scene in Prague and Amsterdam,

where he took a lot of drugs. Charles is also manic, and he hears voices. I've known him for 15 years

since he first started working here, but he's just published a memoir called Lithium Jesus, and it tells a version of him I didn't know.

The first idea for the book was I even had a title for it.

And it was going to be the slightly exaggerated bar story version of my life was going to be the name of the book.

It was just going to be exaggerated bar stories with like a podcast that went along with it. Isn't the definition of bar stories that

they're already exaggerated? Yes. Yes. So that was like the first idea of it. It turned

into something else. So I want to hear one of the stories, not as you tell it in the book,

but if we were in a bar and I say, so, what's the most effed up you've ever been?

What's the story you tell?

Well, the most effed up I've ever been was this amazing experience.

I had been taking lithium for many years.

I had been institutionalized probably six, seven years earlier, and I had decided one day, literally

one day, like, no more.

Every psychiatrist and their brother had warned me that if you quit taking your lithium,

after the half-life goes away, you will be the most manic you've ever been.

...