Show Notes and Insights on Episode 1 (Why I Started a Podcast)

Joel was a unique person. Then again, we all are.

Joel had what could be described as more compulsion than habit -- each morning he would stack, or attempt to stack, nearly 100 salted crackers into a little tower. This habit had persisted for 20 years, starting when he was in middle school.

He would stack as tall as physics allowed. Once the cracker tower fell, he would eat one of the crackers, then start again, again, and again -- eating until at the crackers were gone and his coffee had gone cold.

And so on it went, day after day, year after year. The ritual would take roughly an hour.

Some days it was a meditation practice. Other days it was carried out as an almost required straight-jacket nuisance. But it never ended.

Good thing salted crackers have always been relatively expensive.

He visited therapists, psychoanalysts, mystics, hypnotists, shamans, and grocery store employees for relief, but it never came. He tried to replace the crackers with different items, from pennies to cookies, but it never took. It always came back to crackers.

It always did.  It always will.

Life is always crackers.

For you, for me, and for Joel.

Anyways then one day I found an old microphone in the street and started this podcast.