The difficulty in life is the choice. And this week the choice came fast: an hour before we sat down, a tree took a lightning strike around the corner, dropped a branch on a woman’s car, smashed a transformer, took out the block. Genesis’s people — Josh, Kyle — ran toward it and pulled her out. Then they walked over and made a podcast about the creative life.
That’s the register of this second episode, recorded at the corner of 4th and Market, the intersection of a city that is itself a crossroads. Genesis poured a Scotch bottled somewhere between 1929 and 1940 — a hundred years in someone’s collection, traded for one of his paintings — and we talked about permanence, and how the people from a hundred years ago are speaking more resonantly to us than ever. (No, that pour you hear is not AI. That’s the real thing.)
Some of what we got into:
* The Waffle House poet. Genesis met a woman writing “immaculate poetry” at 3 a.m. who’s been at it twenty years and is certain it’s not for her. The whole episode circles back to her: the gap between a real gift and the permission to claim it.
* The compromises we make with ourselves. From a Seinfeld bit about the trashman to Chad’s first year of seminary mopping floors as “the minister to commodes” — the dignity of honest work, and the moment a gift asks to be shared anyway.
* When to keep going, and when to stop. Bukowski’s twenty years at the post office. The friend who built a $50M company and blew it up because chaos was his home. The bandmate who wouldn’t sign the deal. If you love the work like you love ice cream, the sugar high fades. If you love it like you love your children, you keep going — even if it costs you.
* What is good art? Bob Dylan’s voice. The mystery in Roethke’s line, “Light takes the tree; but who can tell us how?”
* The invisible layer. John O’Donohue’s “invisible choreography” between the heart and what it beholds — and how the receiver often finds something in the art the maker never knew was there.
Two poems. Chad read Theodore Roethke’s villanelle “The Waking” (“I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow. / I learn by going where I have to go.”) — and Genesis answered with Chase Twichell’s subway poem, the one that ends on “I don’t know who speaks / when the horse speaks.” Then Kyle Kasper, a poet who moved to Chattanooga last year and just published his first collection — and who’d run out to that wrecked car an hour before — read his own poem, “Kind to Me”: “We must be kind to ourselves… be good to your soul, like you would to a child.”
We closed on the question we’re keeping: What are you alive to right now? And what are you closed to? Genesis is alive to the opinion that challenges his own — “if nobody likes you, I wonder why not; let’s hang.” And what he’s closed to turned out to be the most open thing he said all night: the God question, from an experience in a 2002 storm he can’t un-know. “I don’t have the answers, but I have the experience.”
Listen above. New conversations from The Home Bar, and Mondays and Thursdays wherever you get your podcasts.
From Chattanooga, a crossroads city, at a bar on an intersection — this is The Difficulty. Brought to you in part by Crossroads Publishing Group.
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