First episode, first recording, no intro music yet and a silly background that neither of us wants to change, so here is the rundown of what happened. Why this show exists at all. We have been recording together on The Unreasonable Art of Living for ten or twelve episodes now and something kept showing up in those conversations that did not belong to that project, a different energy that wanted its own room, so we built one, and the deal here is that we can wander wherever we like, consciousness and meditation and longevity and donuts and whatever film one of us watched last week, without carrying the weight of representing anything. The names that did not survive. We spent a long time noodling and produced, in order of increasing embarrassment, The Justin and Gerhard Show with Justin and Gerhard, Eleven Donuts, which sat too close to Eleven Dunbar but gave us one donut short of a full box as a description of our general condition, Glazed and Confused, which was very nearly perfect, One of Us, which we both loved because of the little chant we do every time a new member joins, and Oonga Boonga, which came from Justin spending an entire silent meditation wondering what the first human word was while I was sitting three feet away being at one with the source of the universe, and which we had to abandon after discovering it carries connotations nobody warned us about. How we actually got there. Justin, in the middle of all this, said the words are out there, we just have to go find them, delivered with the full sincerity of a man in a marketing meeting, and it was so good that it became the working method, so I went and asked for words, and levity came back, an old word for lightness that the Greeks and Romans used for upward motion, the actual opposite of gravity, and once we had gravity field and Levity Field sitting next to each other there was nothing left to decide. Ideas as things that visit you. Justin brought up Elizabeth Gilbert’s Big Magic and the notion that ideas are entities floating around looking for someone to commit to them, and if you say not now they simply move on to somebody else, which is exactly what happened with this name, and when I asked how he caught it he said with a slime gun, which is not the answer I expected from anyone. The salt pellet wasp turret. Austria has a wasp problem this summer, there are Chinese salt guns designed for shooting flies, and somewhere in between those two facts is an AI-guided turret mounted outside every house, which Justin insists I should pitch at an American public access town hall, an institution we do not have and which now sounds like the greatest civic invention in history. Arcades, roller rinks and holding hands. Dance Dance Revolution as the machine everybody watched and nobody played, the very American ritual of the roller rink with the DJ and the slow song and the cute girl, and the confirmed fact that eight-year-old Justin could hold hands going around the circle while wearing four-wheeled skates, a level of coordination neither of us has retained. A summer camp in a castle. Three weeks, bunk beds, a homemade Olympics where I took silver in the high jump, and a great deal of Magic the Gathering, all of which Justin refused to believe until I explained that Austria simply has castles the way North Carolina has parking lots, including small ones. The hardest thing a human can do. Not naming things, not physics, but explaining a card game out loud to someone who has never seen it, demonstrated by my attempt at the drafting rules, and by his great aunt Peggy, who at eighty-eight hands you a sheet of her own handwritten rules, will not let you read the actual rulebook, and somehow the game works perfectly the moment you stop asking questions and start playing, which is a lesson about most things. Camp Woodmen of the World. Riflery, archery, potato sack races, a half-mile marathon, and a talent show that Justin’s friend Travis nearly missed because he was playing in the mud, then walked on stage covered head to toe in it, sang Take Me Out to the Ball Game and won gold, which is still the purest description of commitment either of us can offer. The Pentagon files. Justin had not seen them, I have been going down the rabbit hole for two weeks, and we ended up less interested in whether they are aliens than in what would actually happen if it were confirmed, whether it would break religion and finance and the whole structure of how people see reality, or whether we would all do what we did after the Facebook data breach, which is to say nothing and carry on exactly as before. One question, on behalf of humanity. Justin’s is how you doing, man, and then, because a member of Eleven Dunbar would immediately reject good as an answer, the follow-up, how are you really, asked while handing the visitor a donut, which by his account should not be chewed but slowly sucked through the hole as the intergalactic sign of peace and goodwill. Twelve donuts. Publix bakery glazed, ordered as one, delivered as six, previously delivered as twelve, eaten in a single day by a man who freely admits he has no self-control and therefore does not keep them in the house. The invitation. Tune in when things feel heavy and let something silly do the lifting, and if you want to try the version you can do today, ask someone how they are, wait for the automatic fine, and then ask again properly. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit levityfield.substack.com
