0:00

- Check, check. Yeah. Okay. We got the thing working.

0:05

You are tuned into what's the matter with we podcast,

0:12

the God the Dad podcast, the fishing podcast.

0:18

We went on a family record

0:22

shopping expedition. More on that in a moment.

0:28

Meanwhile, you are tuned into the what's the Matter

0:33

with me podcast. My name is John. I'm 44 years old.

0:39

Husband, father of two small business owner, radio DJ

0:45

podcaster, and I have multiple sclerosis

0:50

trigeminal neuralgia. And I made this podcast to share what I'm going through.

0:57

It's have a lot of multifaceted narratives.

1:01

We had our neighbors over for dinner last night.

1:06

We had pulled pork sandwiches and cold slaw.

1:10

Every time I make a pulled pork sandwich, I'm like

1:14

the thing hopping hot sauce needs hopping hot sauce.

1:18

I put it on it. I put hopping hot sauce on my, on my sandwich

1:25

and it was the jam. Speaking of the jam

1:31

- Hopping hot sauce. It's the best hot sauce hopping on sauce.

1:37

It's the best sauce in the world.

1:41

The world, I'm telling you. - All right. It was the jingle.

1:47

A lot of people say, I wish the jingle just played all the time.

1:55

All the time. Everywhere I went, I have to go places.

2:00

And they aren't playing the jingle.

2:03

And I'm like, you shouldn't go there. You're going places you shouldn't go.

2:10

It's the jingle. Check out hopping hot sauce on Amazon.

2:16

Wanna give some shout outs when just to get us rolling.

2:21

Get this thing on the road. Shout out to the Sandman.

2:26

He wrote in for fresh fish market

2:30

recommendations in the South Bay.

2:34

So I gave up all my spots to him.

2:37

Not really, not really at the place on 13th Street,

2:42

there's a place out on 13th

2:46

where it becomes old Oakland Road in San Jose.

2:51

It's like a wholesale fish market.

2:54

You go in there, there's just plastic tubs.

2:58

It is not like a grocery store.

3:03

It has no a acument.

3:07

It's the floor is wet, there's drains in the floor.

3:11

There's tanks with crab and fish and lobster.

3:16

It's pretty hectic. I told them Whole Foods was the best in the South Bay.

3:23

It kind of is that the downtown Whole Foods on, um,

3:28

the Alameda, they have a pretty good fish market.

3:33

That's not really like giving up your spots

3:38

to be like go to Whole Foods. But I was like, go to the Secret Wholesale Fish Market.

3:46

Shout out to the Sandman. Shout out to Jersey girl and Max level two.

3:53

They, they wrote me about a mayhem special on

3:58

KFJC. I think I do want to get involved in it.

4:03

They sent me emails, shout outs. They sent me emails.

4:09

[email protected].

4:13

Jhn at at H-O-P-P-I-N-W-O-R-L

4:17

d.com. You send me an email, I'll send you a shout out.

4:23

Possibly, possibly. Come on. You know it.

4:28

Possibly the best shout out anyone's ever had

4:32

or anyone will have or anyone could have go to.

4:37

What's the matter with me.org? Hit subscribe.

4:42

Subscribe to the podcast and get the selfie.

4:47

You get it in your email box. That's really all it is.

4:52

I'm just trying to propagate the selfie.

4:56

So subscribing. You'll get the selfie every time there's a new episode,

5:02

you'll get an email. And in that episode it'll be a selfie.

5:07

I, I reminder, I gotta take the selfie right now.

5:14

Can't forget to take the selfie. Let's see.

5:19

Here we go. How we looking? How we looking?

5:22

I know I take the selfie here. I should bring my comb out here.

5:26

I know there's going to be a selfie.

5:29

Let me get myself all together. Can comb my hair with this stick?

5:35

Yeah, let's get that selfie. Its time. Yeah. Okay.

5:40

Mission accomplished. So shout outs.

5:44

I went record shopping with my family on the weekend.

5:49

I'm always, every weekend I'm like,

5:52

let's go record shopping. What do you want to do? I want to go record shopping.

5:57

So I went record, record shopping at Amoeba Berkeley

6:02

with the family in my wheelchair.

6:06

Not for anything in particular, just to kind

6:11

of browse, you know, I wanted to just go out,

6:15

see the people. Telegraph Avenue. We went to Telegraph.

6:21

It was a scene. It smelled like incense.

6:25

Where did we park? I think we parked on this street.

6:30

Yeah, we parked on this street. We street parking.

6:35

We took the wheelchair with the wheelchair lift.

6:39

So all that worked out. We got into amoeba.

6:43

It's kinda, they, they shopping amoeba isn't great because,

6:49

and record shopping in the wheelchair just isn't

6:53

that great because the stacks are

6:59

above your eye level. So you can barely peek into the CDs

7:05

and see what it barely. And I need help seeing what's in the back

7:13

of the, I, you know, I can only shop like the front half,

7:18

front two thirds of the stack, what's in the back.

7:23

I am kinda out outta luck. But they have the featured records

7:30

and the featured CDs featured stuff is

7:34

above those stacks kind of in the back.

7:38

And I can see that. So a little bit.

7:42

I get to, and that's where I've been shopping

7:45

for quite a while now. 'cause I like to go to the record store

7:50

and see what the people

7:53

who work there are like pulling out

7:56

and amoeba the jazz section.

8:00

It's a lot like my John Coltrane, miles Davis, they,

8:05

they take out, it's like there's no other,

8:09

no other artist you can find except those two.

8:14

But actually I found, I found it Dawn Cherry cd

8:19

and it was up there before the, all the Coltran kicked in

8:26

and Dawn Cherry. And the thing that caught my eye was it had Nana

8:32

Vasconcellos, who's a

8:35

Brazilian percussionist.

8:39

Um, he plays Barba

8:41

and like all the Brazilian percussion

8:44

instruments are pretty in.

8:47

Interesting. I think he died a couple years ago.

8:51

I think it's fair to say he's like a master percussionist.

8:57

So I was like, okay, cool. Dawn Cherry.

9:00

Dawn Cherry is a multi-instrumentalist horn

9:04

and reed player, a trumpet flute, you know,

9:09

he's like in it with Colin Walcott,

9:15

who's like a dude, white dude playing sitar.

9:19

That's like an easy way and gongs and stuff.

9:23

So it's like proto world music. They were all into that.

9:28

Dawn Cherry, none of us, Conello

9:31

and Colin Walcott, they're getting together kind

9:35

of jamming with this expanded

9:40

world music kind of instrumentation.

9:44

So the band is called Kona, which is like

9:49

Colin Don Nana

9:53

Kodo Kona.

9:57

And it's, it was a three cd, three CD set

10:02

and it was on ECM, which is like, they have a lot of euro

10:07

jazz and kind of froggy jazz and stuff.

10:12

So interesting label.

10:15

And the artist that nana gon sold me,

10:20

and it was a three CDs that used, so the

10:26

Kona Kona trilogy

10:29

and it's um, out of stock outta print at ECM.

10:35

They have seven copies of it on dis cogs

10:39

and the cheapest one is $37.

10:44

I think I got the this for 26 bucks at Amoeba.

10:50

So I was like, okay, I'm getting a deal.

10:53

So I was like, okay, I'll pick that up. ECM three CD set, Brazilian percussionist.

11:00

I'm in code. Maybe I can find a a, a YouTube video.

11:08

My son was all into hip hop as soon as we got there.

11:13

He wanted, you know, and I, I told him when I was a kid, my parents

11:18

didn't buy hip hop for me if he had had a parental

11:23

advisory label on it, which is all of them.

11:28

When that's when he told me. And I'm like, yes, you're right. Like I remember that.

11:34

So we got around it. We're always kind of having legal work around in my family

11:40

to make things work. You gotta kinda fudge the edges sometime.

11:47

He didn't buy it. I bought it. Okay.

11:49

So I got the Marshall Mathers to

11:53

CD by Eminem. He picked that out. That's what was available.

11:59

Used for like seven bucks.

12:02

It wasn't really about what you could, it was,

12:07

I told him, you gotta look at what's used.

12:10

That's what you can get. You make a dollar 50 a week.

12:17

So I bought it for him, you know, because I, I had already previously said that bit about

12:23

won't get it if it's got the parental advisory

12:27

and you know, I was like, how do I get it out of that?

12:30

Having said that, so I got it for him. He was happy.

12:36

I think it probably has some adult themes,

12:41

but as far as rapper rappers go,

12:45

Eminem isn't as bad as it as it could be.

12:51

That's, uh, the way I looked out at it

12:54

and I was like, okay, at least there's some level of

13:00

straight honest dealing here with Eminem

13:04

that you might not get with like Nelly, right?

13:09

I don't wanna have talk bad on Nelly,

13:12

but it seems like Eminem might have

13:17

less pop. I'm not sure where I'm going here.

13:21

I'm trying to justify why I bought this record.

13:26

I did it to make my son happy.

13:29

He was happy briefly.

13:32

And then a an hour or two later he was freaking out about something.

13:38

Okay. So my wife and my daughter were all, were also there

13:42

and it's like, I got a cd.

13:45

My son got a cd so my wife

13:48

and my daughter went in on

13:52

and I, you know, they, I I am not sure

13:55

how they negotiated this. I was busy dropping the jazz

14:00

and hip hop sections. My wife and my daughter went in on the Taylor Swift

14:08

cover CD Taylor's version.

14:12

She does a bunch of covers and then in parentheses writes Taylor's version

14:19

after each one. And you know, she's been all over the TV and the media.

14:25

It's like, don't you

14:28

remember when Cat Power did a covers record?

14:33

She called it the covers record,

14:35

but it's not like every song she was like

14:38

Cat Power's version. Like that's kinda understood.

14:46

So I thought that was something a little odd to insist upon

14:51

writing that it was your version.

14:54

Maybe there's more to that. And also I didn't wanna hit on Taylor Swift

15:01

because of the propensity of men

15:05

to tear down women, uh,

15:08

in every aspect.

15:12

So a little bit, maybe I'll just let her go away with it.

15:16

Get away with it. And so Taylor's version, who cares?

15:21

I put it on the CD player on the way home, we listen to it.

15:25

It's like electro pop. It's powerful music.

15:30

That's what I thought. The frequencies of the movie, of the, the frequencies

15:36

of the song, the way it's mastered,

15:39

they're just like on a hundred percent blast mode.

15:46

They're very strong, very loud.

15:49

It's pop music, but it like peels your eyelids back

15:54

and curls your eyelashes. It's powerful. And so I thought that was something cool.

16:00

Like I think that people who listen to that kind

16:05

of music and inhabit that space and feel powerful

16:10

and like I said about men constantly

16:14

tearing down women in every aspect all the time,

16:19

that's probably good to be powerful.

16:22

And it probably, I can't experience what that feels like,

16:26

but I was like, dang, this Electropop is like

16:32

take no prisoners. Electropop not looking back.

16:36

We're gonna have a dance party and we won't look back powerful.

16:42

Join us in the dance party

16:44

or we'll rip your body to shreds when I say it.

16:49

It'll peel your eyelids back and curl your eyelashes

16:54

or else get the hell out of here. It's Taylor's version. Taylor's version.

17:00

Plenty Riz. I was trying to like throw around

17:05

young people slang at my Super Bowl party

17:08

and everybody was like, we're just going to ignore you.

17:13

So I'll do it here where it's a one-sided conversation.

17:18

Taylor Swift has Riz

17:21

and she has more drip than I expected.

17:26

And I think guys that aren't feeling Taylor Swift

17:30

or Sus alright, alright.

17:32

Enough, it's, it's obvious, pretty obvious why she's a major

17:38

spectacular pop star Taylor Swift.

17:44

I was nervous, <laugh>, I was nervous about that segment

17:49

because if I screwed up my Taylor Swift review,

17:55

the internet would kill me. I'm pretty sure. I wonder if there

18:02

are people who will listen to this just

18:06

to make sure I don't talk any smack about Taylor Swift.

18:11

Well the thing is, I can, I liked it.

18:14

I thought, I thought dang, but I did think, dang, this is powerful.

18:20

And it made me think how men are always tearing down women.

18:25

So we turned up the block from Telegraph

18:29

right after Rasputin.

18:32

We turned up the block and like it's hard.

18:35

I, I spent a lot of time on Telegraph,

18:38

but I hardly recognize it and I realized what was going on.

18:44

People's Park was gone. I didn't even know what side of the street people's park was

18:52

'cause I don't recognize rec.

18:54

Why do we keep saying that? I don't recognize things, the things they built

19:02

across the street from People's Park.

19:06

So people's park is gone, but whatever's across the street it's different.

19:13

And they have these shipping containers

19:17

blockading the sidewalk where people's park was

19:22

and there's cops hanging out. There were three cops guarding the shipping containers,

19:29

blockading Peoples Park.

19:31

And it had bad vibes. Like I was over there a little bit.

19:36

We didn't go all the way, I didn't say anything.

19:39

We didn't go up the blog. We went part of the way

19:43

and then I was like, someone's gonna throw like a Molotov

19:47

cocktail and I'm in my wheelchair and I'm going to get burnt

19:51

and pepper sprayed. Like definitely the person in the wheelchair is getting

19:57

pepper sprayed 'cause it's musty tv.

20:03

I didn't hang out in people's park.

20:05

People's park was already like

20:10

homeless people were living in the trees.

20:13

There was kind of the stage we, we really used it

20:18

just to cut across. We would, that's Peoples Park was useful

20:24

for cutting across, but not anymore.

20:27

It's a bad scene. Bad vibes, BV Berkeley, bad vibes.

20:33

Being inspiring all the time is kind of a drag

20:38

when you are a disabled person, everyone is like

20:43

expecting you to give some angle.

20:47

That's like inspiration. I kind of was thinking about that,

20:52

about disability inspiration

20:56

and I, I googled that idea.

20:59

I came up with this article from Forbes

21:02

from April, 2022 by Andrew

21:07

Andrew Ang. He writes, in 2014,

21:14

disabled Australian disability activist Ella Young

21:19

gave a TED talk titled, I'm Not Your Inspiration,

21:24

thank you very much. It has become an essential text of disability culture

21:32

and a touchstone for people with disabilities

21:36

struggling to describe their experiences.

21:41

Young's presentation and even just the title

21:46

put into tart succinct words, something people

21:50

with disabilities all over the world instinctively feel,

21:56

but often can't explain. Disabled people have complicated relationships

22:03

with a lot of words, but the one other, the disability itself

22:10

disabled people feel most intensely about

22:15

maybe the word inspirational.

22:19

Skipping down about why the word inspirational

22:24

is a problem rather than conveying

22:29

admiration and respect. Inspirational tends to suggest condescension,

22:36

condescension and sentimentality.

22:40

It's not just the word itself,

22:42

but the tone of voice so often used

22:46

to articulate it. Vague, dreamy, childish.

22:51

It seems to offer disabled people's lives

22:56

to supply emotional satisfaction

23:00

for non-disabled people.

23:04

Why do people continue to use the word?

23:07

There are good reasons too.

23:10

Sometimes they literally mean it. It's a word they know.

23:15

In order to compliment a disabled person, instead

23:20

of calling a disabled person inspirational,

23:25

use more specific adjectives that refer

23:29

to the person's unique and positive qualities.

23:34

Not just broad stereotypes of disabled people in general.

23:40

If you find inspirational on the tip

23:43

of your tongue when discussing people

23:46

with disabilities, stop and think.

23:50

You don't necessarily have to censor yourself,

23:54

but be aware that rightly or wrongly, the word is at best problematic

24:01

and it worst toxic for many disabled people.

24:06

And then maybe think of something more specific, personal

24:12

and original to say. So I'll put a link to that kind of interesting thinking.

24:18

Is there a healthy place for inspirational

24:22

and disability culture by Andrew Pol?

24:26

Rang April 21st, 2022 in Forbes.

24:33

Yeah, that can be a drag.

24:35

But I was thinking about the radio.

24:39

You know, I was on the radio and it, I really connected with the listener

24:45

in the radio, it's four disabled people,

24:50

unpopular people. The voice on the radio, you're talking

24:55

and the listener is hearing you. It's like a one-on-one. It's just like this.

25:00

It's broadcasting. It's a one-on-one conversation with the listener

25:06

and for disabled people, unpopular people,

25:11

weirdos, homeless people, people in jail,

25:17

anyone who tunes in can listen.

25:20

That's kind of the same with this podcast.

25:24

If you're able to, you can listen.

25:27

It's democratic in that way.

25:30

And anyone who wants to, you can listen.

25:35

Whoever you are, you can listen. You're welcome here.

25:40

It's in the equal space. With that said, I gotta put it in here. Email me.

25:46

I'll give you a shout out. The best. Shout out [email protected].

25:51

Huge shout out JH Agent at

25:55

H-O-P-P-I-N-W-O-R-L d.com.

25:59

Thanks for tuning in.

26:02

I went record shopping, a family record shopping

26:08

expedition, an incursion in Berkeley.

26:13

We had our neighbors over for over for dinner last night.

26:17

It was pretty good. Pulled pork sandwiches with hopping hot sauce.

26:23

Shout out Sandman jersey Girl Max level.

26:27

Subscribe, get the selfie. I went record shopping at Amoeba

26:33

with the family in my wheelchair.

26:36

I got Kona, my son got m and m.

26:39

My wife and daughter got Taylor Swift.

26:42

There's no more People's Park, but the bad vibes are there.

26:47

Being inspiring. Kind of complicated.

26:51

The radio broadcasting, it's democratic.

26:55

Everyone is welcome. Pull up a chair, gather round, send me an email.

27:01

Thanks for tuning in to what's the Matter With Me podcast.

27:08

I'll check you next time.