John's podcasts and poems are frozen still moments recorded as mental photos that run in the reader’s imagination like full films. As both participant and chronicler John removes himself from the action, makes his observations quickly (and hopefully cogently) and then escape. If John is a good observer, he sees things that by themselves are extraordinary revelations about each of us which seem as caricatures rooted in ordinary life and amplified by the focus of each person’s mind on the “other” … ourselves. In other words, if a kid is “an indefatigable nose picker with bluster all his own” we get a complex message about human behavior that we got from an unmentionable source: us. Long after hearing John's podcasts and poems, the scenes he describe live "rent free" in the reader’s mind.