Episode 31: Transcript

"I look forward to yelling at my grandchildren to hand me my hip." - with Bill Braine

Doug French: I learned something this weekend! I learned the singular of “pączki.“

Magda Pecsenye Zarin: It's “pączek.”

Doug: And I love that. It's the idea that, you know, we need to emphasize that plurals have singulars. Anybody who says they are “an alumni” makes me want to just gouge my eyes out.

Magda: To me it's the same way as when people say they're gonna go get “a tamale.” 

Doug: Or “one panini.”

Magda: Because it's “un tamal, dos tamales,” right? And it's one pączek, two or a dozen pączki.

And thank you for showing me that there are pączki before Pączki Day. I just thought they all came out day of and people just sold a ton of them. It was like Black Friday for bakeries.

I think that's what it's turned into in America. A friend of mine who's very in touch with his Polish heritage says that the real big Pączki Day is the Saturday before Mardi Gras. And that's when everybody goes crazy, and they kind of go crazy from Saturday through Tuesday, Mardi Gras. But you know, I mean, Americans are gonna American, right? And so like, why not release the hounds? Might as well go for it.

Doug: Release the belts.

Magda: And it doesn't bother me at all because the whole point of it, it's all the getting prepared for Lent thing. It's the day before Ash Wednesday, when you're supposed to go into austerity in preparation for Good Friday and Easter. So I don't have a problem if people are pre-gaming for a month. If you want to have a month of using up your fat and sugar, why not?

Doug: Right, but you know, I feel like one of those non-Irish people on St. Patrick's Day, you know, I'm having all the calories, but I don't observe Lent, so it seems like I'm having my pączki and eating it too.

Magda: And if people are listening to this who don't know what pączki are, they look like a jelly donut, but the actual dough is laminated. It's almost like brioche dough.

Doug. Ha. “Laminated.” Like a conference pass. Like a lanyard.

Magda: Exactly, put it through the laminator machine. Laminated dough just means dough that has layers of fat in it, right, like croissants are made out of laminated dough.

Doug: Yeah, if you've ever watched croissant dough being made, you know the score.

Magda: Yeah, exactly. So it just has layers in it and it's also dense. You know how jelly doughnuts are like super light and fluffy? The pączki skeleton is just heavier. Pączki exist in the United States in what I refer to as the pączki belt, which is where Polish people came at that particular time.

Doug: Which is loosened.

Magda: Yes. And so now it's sort of turned into just like a generic art form. The pączki that I got while I was visiting you were from the Italian bakery. I got a traditional raspberry pączki and traditional custard pączki, but I also got a cannoli pączki.

Doug: I tried one of those. And I think the reason why you mentioned the laminated dough, that's why it felt to us like a hat on a hat. You know? Also a plural! A “cannolo pączek.” The cannoli need the crunch in order to offset the ricotta cheese.

Magda: I agree. I just love that other ethnicities that are not Polish are like, “Hey, pączki, let's roll with it, right? Can we make a pączki that's us and them at the same time?” It's the melting pot.

Doug: Yeah, but you're verging into overkill. It's like, you know, pumpkin spice Oreos. We got to stop.

Magda: I don't know. There's a lot of flavors of Oreos that are maybe not necessary, but are still enjoyable.

Doug: Yes, remove maybe and you hit it on the head. There's one thing I wanted to ask you as well about this interview with Bill Braine. And you mentioned bullet journals. They were huge. Why did you stop?

Magda: Because I have ADHD. I mean, really, like, you know, everything I do, I do very passionately and intensely for anywhere from three days to three years. And then just one day, forget that it exists.

Doug: Well, why is it more successful than just keeping a diary? I guess it sounds like this was a new term that was invented to sell diaries. You're just kind of... 

Magda: Well, when I first started doing it, there was no bullet journal that you could buy. It was just you use any notebook, and the guy actually who started it liked to use a notebook that was unlined paper. Like, I think if you go to the Bullet Journal website, which I don't even know what it is, probably like bulletjournal.com, because this thing's been around for 20 years. It's just a method, and he's got an explanation for it, and then he's got a little video that shows you how to do it, and the whole thing relies on having a notebook with numbered pages, and then having an index in the front of the notebook. So you have daily pages that are basically like a combination of a to-do list and a log of the day's events, but also it's your to-do list and you have different categories of to-do things. And then anything that you didn't do that day, you just pull over to the next day. But the pages aren't assigned days because if you have like a new project or a meeting that you're taking notes at, or something like that, you just start a new page and then you go back to your index and you put in, you know, “meeting notes from blah blah blah page whatever” so that if you're going to use the bullet journal later and are looking for your notes on something, you just look in the index to see where they are. And they're all interspersed with your daily pages. Because a lot of people have a diary and then maybe they have a notebook that they record other stuff in, and it's just cumbersome to have the two.

The other thing about the bullet journal is that you're encouraged to put all of your personal and life stuff and your work stuff together, because we think of it all together. And, you know, it's like having to have two phones. It's just cumbersome.

Doug: And so putting all your stuff together, you gotta have, you know, you gotta be off the grid for some of that stuff.

Magda: I love the bullet journal. I am accepting about myself that there is not anything that I am going to do every day for the rest of my life. Like, people just find these different ways of doing things that make sense to them and work for them, and I think the problem comes in when somebody's enthusiasm about something gets another person to try it, and it doesn't work for that other person, but that other person thinks that the problem is with them, and not just that the method is a mismatch, right?

Doug: Which is why I really love the idea of this Getting Things Done placard, this huge visible sheet of paper. Because you would display it prominently in your office, see it every day, and that would inspire you to keep contributing to it.

Magda: Right, but that wouldn't work for some people. Some people would hate that, right. 

Doug: Because it feels like it's a constant reminder of shit you’ve got to do. 

Magda: I was happy to hear it when Bill was telling us about this, and there is nothing as charming to me as a person who has figured out how to organize their life and is excited about talking about it, right? Because I feel like organizing your life is like THE existential crisis, especially of the 50-year-old. Getting organized in your life is a mitzvah for the whole world.

Doug: So, yeah. It's the illusion, yeah. It's Tina Fey walking around through 30 Rockefeller Center with her plastic boxes and then getting run down by a bike messenger. You put it really well, the whole idea of how being in your 50s is all about the minutia.

Magda: Yep.

Doug: You know, I think if there's anything, any time to find a way to be as organized as possible, you know, especially when you've got a new hip and a CPAP machine and you just turned 55 years old. We interviewed him the day after his 55th birthday. So he's right in the midpoint.

Magda: Wow. Yeah. There are a lot of people who listen to us who are going through like chronic health stuff, speaking of my brain zaps.

Doug: Oh, right. Yeah.

Magda: Yeah. I was interested to hear about Bill's story. And a lot of what I thought was interesting was sort of him figuring out how to get his head around the fact of the recovery from it. You know, because I think like when doctors say, “oh, you need a hip replacement,” they're kind of like, “oh, well, you're going to feel better from the second you wake up.

because your hip was in such bad shape,” and I think recovery is not a joke and we have to build that in to how we see ourselves.

Doug: Well it's kind of a joke if you decide you're going to spend your old years waving your femur over your head.

Intro music fades in and out.

Magda: I joined this group on Facebook called Dull Men and I found it hilarious. I think it’s started by these British guys who consider themselves dull, and it’s just a place for people to post things that they think are horribly dull. One guy posted his dad's log of things that their two dogs had barked at and how many times. It's just really funny. I'm completely enjoying the group. It's like, there are no problems in this group that are that large. Some guy recently posted a video of what his new job is, and it's feeding things onto a conveyor belt. And he has to count and wait 20 seconds between each thing that he puts on the conveyor belt. And he doesn't have to place it precisely, because at the other end of the conveyor belt, it gets wobbled around into place. He literally just thunks it down. Every 20 seconds. It’s like, oh my god, this is amazing.

Bill Braine: I have two thoughts. One, that is a job that if it is a real job could be replaced by a machine this very second.

Magda: They're in the UK. Socialized medicine, right?

Bill: And number two, I don't think that's a real job. I think that's a psych experiment.

Magda: It might be.

Doug: This reminds me of a dad blogger. When I first started dad blogging, there was a guy who mapped out his new daughter's nap schedule on a spreadsheet. He would basically map out 24 hours and do the toggle of asleep or awake. And he did this over years, and you would see how two naps became one nap. And it was this really beautiful flow, this design that he put an artistic aspect to it, to indicate how much less sleep his daughter was getting as she grew older.

Magda: Did he create an app so she could check in on her naps and stuff from, like, college?

Doug: This was before apps. Remember, you're a young lady. You're only 50. Bill and I know more about what it was like to live without apps and email in college and that kind of thing.

Bill: My wife was born nine months after me in 1969, so she missed the moon landing and Woodstock.

Doug: You never let her live that down.

Bill: She couldn't understand what it was like to be alive in the 60s, you know, when those things were going on.

Magda: My mother claims that part of why I am the way I am is that when I was a baby, she was watching Watergate trials on TV and she would just set me up there in my high chair, like eating my banana and avocado and whatever. And we would watch the Watergate trials together when I was, you know, however many months old you would be when you were eating banana off a tray. That's a solid foundation. Mistrustful, cynical, cold.

Doug: I remember when you told me that and I had a valid idea, especially because you famously also had no hair as a baby.

Magda: That's true.

Doug: So I'm picturing you in the high chair with that bow taped to your bald head.

Bill: Wow, you were probably like one of 50 Senators at the time. You were a small bald person watching the trial.

Magda: Exactly.

Doug: Well, we were talking about CPAP machines. Speaking of abrupt segues.

Bill: And of dull men, but go on. Yeah, I mean, you can dive down a deep, dull rabbit hole very quickly when it comes to any of the things that I believe we’re slated to speak about on today's episode of your podcast.

Magda: Isn't that the essence of being in your 50s? Everything is unbearably dull.

Bill: The dull stuff becomes very important very quickly.

Doug: What's the experience now been? You've been on a CPAP machine for a week, a few days, right?

Bill: Exactly.

Doug: I mean, have you adjusted to having this octopus on your face all night? Or can you sleep? Especially when you've got the other thing we're going to talk about, this huge hole in your hip?

Bill: Yes, I am sleeping better than I was certainly while I had the to-be-revealed hip replacement. But I also am, I believe, sleeping better than I was prior to the surgery. For whatever reason, I feel like I was predisposed to go with the flow on the CPAP. Friends of mine and people I've heard about, you know, report using it for a day and then tearing it off in panic or just not enjoying it, not feeling it was doing anything. I felt the benefit pretty much right away, but I also first tried one. I was given the opportunity because I happened to stay overnight in the hospital for this hip replacement. And during that hospital stay, I kept waking up abruptly for a number of reasons, but one of them I felt might have been apnea. So I buzzed at 3am and 10 minutes later, somebody wheeled one in and said, “How do you like it?” And I said, “I don't know, I've never had one.” And they set me up for it and I put it on and slept for about three hours. And I did wake up at one point tearing it off my face. Or removing it from my face in a controlled manner because I was dignified. But I put it back on.

Doug: I will leave one of those two versions in, yes.

Bill: I put it back on and slept for, you know, the remainder of the time I slept, which is about three hours. And my wife has had one for a while. That set me up to understand it a little bit better, to understand how it works and to well, to witness how much it benefited her and so on. And my apnea is quite mild. So allegedly, I mean, that's the sleep study results that I took. And my cardiologist didn't even suggest that I... He said, you don't necessarily need one, but at the hospital I decided to try it.

Doug: I've been told more than once I may be on the road to getting one of these, but I'm also a side sleeper and I can't figure out how anyone, a side sleeper, could put that thing on their face and sleep. So are you on your back a lot or how do you... Have you had to adjust how you sleep because of the machine?

Bill: My understanding of the medical situation that's going on is that the interior of our body as we age becomes a sort of plastic jello substance that molds itself to the contours that gravity provides. So we're sort of more of a bag of skin as we age with no internal structure or integrity and therefore it doesn't matter what side we sleep on, it doesn't matter if we're on our back or our front or whatever. If we attach a relatively hard thing to our face, our body will simply sort of schmorph around it.

Doug: This podcast episode brought to you by Boniva.

Bill: I don't know what Boniva is, but we need it. It's the calcium supplement you directly inject into your veins?

Doug: I don't know.

Bill: In any case, you attach it at multiple points and it kind of just holds on, and as long as the side of your face is above ground, then for me it doesn't really push off to the side or anything.

Magda: Doug, you could retrain yourself to sleep any way you want to.

Doug: I'm not sure I could. I've tried. I've tried to sleep on my back.

Magda: If you had a reason to, right? Like, I mean, women, when they're pregnant, are told you can't sleep on your back. It's bad for the baby, it'll compress the cord, blah, blah, blah, all this kind of crap. And so like, women all retrain themselves to sleep only on their left sides. And then, you know, your kid's 13 years old, and you're like, Oh, my God, I can sleep any way I want to now suddenly. Because you've been sleeping on your left side the whole time.

Doug: But I've already achieved that. I've already trained myself to sleep on my side. So why undo a good thing?

Magda: If you had a reason to, right? Like if the CPAP machine, which I, as a non-medical doctor, feel very strongly you should give a try. If the CPAP machine was doing good things for you, you would just facilitate it, right?

Doug: Well, yeah, if sleep becomes an issue, I could see a sleep study. In fact, I could probably put a sleep study on my Getting Things Done 2024 large gift wrap year planning premise that we're also going to talk about.

Magda: Are you allowed to get a CPAP without having a sleep study? Like, could they accept a note from the person's ex-wife in lieu of a sleep study?

Doug: Oh my god. 

Bill: “This MF-er snores.”

Doug: You wouldn’t even know, though! I have lived two full lives since we divorced.

Magda: I’m not diagnosing this based on how you sleep at night, which I am not aware of. I’m diagnosing this based on how you speak and hold your body and move during the day.

Doug: Well, that’s just the ordinary beatdown of life, I think, but we’ll see. Before we leave CPAP, I wanted to mention that one of my favorite stories about this job I had, I used to work hosting podcasts for equity crowdfunding for new event inventions. And this one guy figured he had the whole CPAP thing licked. He says, this is the machine that you need to help you keep your CPAP on at night. And it was a robotic arm that attached to your bedside, and so you went to sleep and then the machine, the AI machine, reached over and put the CPAP on your face after you were asleep.

Bill: I like it. And then what part of it plugged into the base of your skull to harvest your energy to power the machine?

Doug: That's exactly it. I could not get past, you know, John Hurt birthing a xenomorph the whole time because it looks like you're being implanted with alien babies. It detects that your mask has fallen off and grabs it and puts it back on your face and holds it over you.

Bill: As a new convert, A, that's born out of a fear that is completely irrational of how it works, what you do with it, how you put it on, whether you put it on yourself, etc. But B, even if putting a CPAP on was somewhat more challenging than it is and keeping it on, it's such a great example of somebody pretending to have some form of innovation that they think will solve a problem. It's sort of like creating a problem to solve a problem that A, doesn't exist, but B, the solution is so much worse than the problem itself.

Doug: And C, gives you abiding nightmares in perpetuity.

Bill: They've got billions of dollars invested in this now, I'm sure.

Doug: Yeah, that's the goal. Mostly in crypto and it's an AI.

Bill: Yeah, understood.

Doug: Yes, funded with Dogecoin.

Bill: Well, listen, I would say this, if anybody listening to this is seeking advice on a CPAP machine, if you're over 50 and somebody has told you that you snore a lot or you've had a sleep study that recommends one. I say this in total quotes, and this is not what my real advice is, but “nut up and put on your frickin' CPAP and go to bed.” Because they work. It's good, you can get used to it, etc. The real advice there would be not toughen up and put it on, but “relax and put it on.” Because it's that relaxation that is key. You sort of do have to trust in a system that is larger than yourself that has experimented with and developed this thing that people say works. I'm saying it works. And when you relax into it and let it do the job and don't try to control it, I think you find out you're going to breathe easier.

Magda: It's essentially physical therapy happening to you as you sleep, right? And we sometimes have problems with physical therapy because the first couple of times you do physical therapy, it can be really uncomfortable and feel confining and weird because you've gotten used to accommodating a different kind of movement. So just getting used to those physical therapy movements. You can know they're healthy for you but they can still feel really weird ,and I think one of the nice things about turning 50 is that I'm able to accept “this feels really weird and it's good for me and I will get used to it” in a way that I didn't accept when I was younger.

Doug: Yeah. Even when you were pregnant?

Magda: Oh god, I hated every minute of that.

Bill: “What to expect when you're expecting: You will hate every minute of this.”

Magda: Exactly.

Doug: Well, what struck me about this invention was the fundamental irony of the fact that the more uptight you are about that particular physical aspect of getting treated for this, the more freaked out you're going to be at the view of a robot bringing it into your face.

Bill: It's exactly the way to make it calm down. Don't worry about putting a mask on your face. We have a robot that will slap it on your face and hold it there while you're trying to struggle.

Magda: I don't know if it's still being marketed, but for a while there was one that didn't involve a mask at all. It was really just like the part that goes into your nostrils, right? And they were marketing that as sort of the solution to people who were feeling too claustrophobic by having an entire mask. And I thought, oh, I could handle that, right? It's just like breathing through a straw. There's a gadget that runners use. You have it in your mouth while you're running and you breathe through your mouth and it gives you more oxygen somehow as you're running. And I know people who've used it who are like, “it's weird, but it's kind of amazing.” Like it increases their stamina and everything. And I think that kind of thing is sort of like the opposite of this robot arm. Like the robot arm is just like “we’ll force you to breathe. We’ll put you in a bottle.”

Bill: There are multiple mask types. The cannula one, and another that just fits over your nose only. If you’re a person whose mouth falls open while you sleep but you only want the nose mask, they actually make a chin strap that you velcro around your head to keep your mouth shut. I use the one that goes over my nose and mouth, and again, it took me a couple of nights. I wore it all night last night as I celebrated my 55th and, you know, went to bed with a CPAP on with my artificial hip after doing my bed physical therapy exercises and checking off my stuff on my spreadsheet.

Doug: Wow, that's exactly the kind of sum-up comment that we can segue anywhere from. Because we are here to talk about all those things. So first of all, happy birthday.

Bill: Thank you. Apparently I don't qualify for cheaper coffee at Perkins or Denny's, but I can get a discount on Southwest and American.

Doug: Outstanding.

Bill: I googled, “what are the perks of being 55?” And after I checked off CPAP, hip replacement, you like spreadsheets, I then got to discounts.

Doug: Page after page after page of perks now that we joined the Silver Army. Once you're sworn in, man, you're part of the coming gerontocracy. It's good times.

Magda: Gerontocracy. Okay, so what's the whole story with the hip replacement? How long were you having hip problems before somebody said, “just have this replaced.”

Bill: At least two years where I had started to notice it and mentioned it to my doctor, and did my six to eight month denial phase where the doctor said, “oh yeah, it's arthritis.” And I said, “no. Come on, you get out of here.” And then she went, all right. And so I left, we left it alone for a while. And then I noticed, you know, it was just progressively worse, but it just, no one had said to me, you need a hip replacement.

But in March of 2022, I went to Ireland. And, you know, certainly this was during-slash-post COVID. I would drive on the left, you know, hop in my car on the left side and no problem. But when I'm a passenger in somebody's car, I had noticed that it was harder and harder to bring my right leg up into the car. It just hurt to lift it. And when I went to Ireland, I was driving a rental car and I was hopping in on the driver's side every time. And by the end of my four or five days in Ireland, I was lifting my right leg into the car. They drive on the left and the steering wheel's on the right in Ireland.

Magda: In Ireland, I would have thought they would have fought against the side-of-the-road-dominion of the Queen.

Bill: I think of the many, I wouldn't say losses, but of the many adjustments that the Irish had to make in response to British aggression, one was probably which side of the road they got to drive on. So, getting in the car, I was pulling my leg in, and, you know, I thought, well, that's not right. I used to be able to just get in a car. I still did a, you know, four or five mile walk on that trip, and it hurt, and I was tired, but it wasn't like, I wasn't dying. But it just got progressively worse. I went for some physical therapy. I went to an orthopedist. And they said, yeah, you know, you've got your hip is bad and here's where your cartilage should be and you don't have any or you have very little. And normally you'd get a hip replacement for this. And I said, okay, can I get physical therapy instead? And they said, sure you can. So I got physical therapy and I did that for a month or so and got trained up on all the exercises and did them for another month or so. It did alleviate the pain a little bit. It helped strengthen the muscles around the joint and everything, which, you know, helps you hold it so that the lack of cartilage is a little less noticeable, that you're not so much impinging the different joint surfaces. And then I went back to an orthopedist and they said, well, now you need a hip replacement. And I said, what about, you know, an inversion table? My friend just got an inversion table. He lies upside down. And they said, you could do that. You could get acupuncture. You could do more physical therapy. You could hang from the monkey bars and then come back when you need a hip replacement. I said, okay, thanks. I will. And at that point I was entertaining it, but also that guy seemed kind of sweaty. And I was like, I don't know if I want a real thirsty orthopedist. And my wife said, and I'm very fortunate in that I have a helpmate and companion who was supportive enough and also impatient enough with my repeated “Well, I think maybe the inversion table.” And she said, “Hey, let's go to the Hospital For Special Surgery and talk to them. I just did all the research, this person's in your network.” And so we went in.

And there was a point in the initial consultation with that doctor with the surgeon, where he and my wife were discussing the timing of this. And I was kind of staring off into space. And I kind of turned back and I said, “What's happening, you guys?” And they said, “You're getting your hip replaced next month.” I said, “All right, okay, I guess I am.” So

Magda: My husband hasn't given into the fact that this is what's about to happen to him.

Bill: As with anything, I think you have to come to it yourself, or at least believe that you came to it yourself. If they're putting a robotic arm that's pushing your face down on the table and saying, here, put this CPAP on while we take out your hip, that's not going to work for anybody. And by the time I did it, since I live within striking distance of this particular hospital, every single person I spoke to, those were the words that came out where you say, “yeah, I'm going to get my hip replaced.” They go, HospitalForSpecialSurgery? Yeah, yeah, yeah, HospitalForSpecialSurgery. And it's like one word, kind of, because that's where everybody in this region believes you need to go for your hip replacement. Amusingly to me, it's where my dad had his first hip replaced about 20 years ago. And it's also, amusingly is right, next door to where I used to work, Sotheby's Auction House. My son came down with me for the pre-screening appointments. And it was just a little bit of a moment. I was laughing about the family heritage because he was born in the middle of the day and he was three weeks early. So I was at work and got the call from my wife that “they tell me I'm having the baby right now.” And I ran out those doors and jumped in a cab. I was there for the birth, but to go meet my son for the first time. And we were coming down to the hospital where I had gone from work also to see my dad with his hip having been replaced in that hospital. And so we kind of got there and I gestured at both the hospital and auction house. I said, “son, someday all this will be yours.” I don't know, this seems like our neighborhood somehow. So the hospital itself, just every aspect of the experience was incredibly well run, from just making me understand, you know, giving me the expectations, spending time being consultative, everything that I would have wanted in this, kind of, what I felt to be a really major upheaval and a very high stakes kind of moment in life. I don't feel that I could have been better handled. 

Doug: How long ago did this consultation with the hospital happen?

Bill: I think we scheduled it in, I want to say early October and the surgery happened in mid-December. You know, they said “we do three a day.” And when I was in pre-op in the hospital, I could see a monitor and my surgeon's name was listed nine times on the day's schedule next to “hips and knees.” That evening, he came in to consult after my surgery. I had the first one of the morning. So that evening he came in and I said, “I saw your name next to nine surgeries today.” And he went, oh, stop. And I said, “yeah, but it was on the screen.” And he went, well, no, ah, no. Never gave me the real explanation. Anyway, so I think you can get in there pretty quick. You say you want it next Thursday, and they'll say, “as long as you qualify.”

Magda: How long does the actual surgery take? I guess like in my head, I imagine there's like, a lot more detail work, like, I don't know, like frenching a lamb chop somehow, like to get the old joint free.

Bill: I made the terrible mistake afterwards of reading the surgeon's narrative written account of what they did to me while I was under. I think the whole thing took 45 minutes, something like that. They do a lot of test fits. So first, while you're under there, yeah, first they take out and then they go, huh? Better or worse? Better like this or worse? Better like this. And I'm going, I'm having a picnic. I don't know what's going on. Last I recall was them saying, help us roll you over. And I said, okay. As I rolled over, I thought, oh, I'm, I'm now meat. And then the next thing I remember, they were all going, hey, wake up. You did it. Good job. And they were clapping.

Doug: That was, yeah. Last time I heard that was my colonoscopy.

Bill: Exactly that kind of thing. They were startling me awake. So I startled awake and I said out loud “Oh, man, I was having a great dream.” I literally think I was dreaming of a picnic and I, just the most bizarre, and then I don't really remember much until, you know, recovery But then within an hour and a half, they had me walking up a flight of four stairs.

Magda:  Wow.

Bill: Yeah, isn't that's the amazing part? 

Doug: Yeah, because I saw the pictures that your wife posted and you walked out of the place. I mean this is I

Bill: Well, I stood a moment with a wheelchair just out of frame next to the car that I'd been holding the door frame moments before and I said, “hey, see if you can get a picture of me standing” and I stood and then I reached out and grabbed a hold of all my supports. I did not take a step unassisted for probably four days or so. There was a point where I leaned my cane against a desk and turned and walked to do something else and realized I had taken three steps. And I suddenly felt like I had swum out too far. I was kind of like, oh, my cane is over there.

Doug: And were you home that night? Or did they keep you overnight just to watch to make sure everything was circulatorily intact and everything?

Bill: Well, you know, interestingly, the anesthesia, my blood oxygen wasn't getting back up to where it needed to be right away. Even though I was first one in the morning, and it was only 11 o'clock or so, my number was just not vaulting above 95% as it is supposed to. And they said, you know, with your history, your diagnosis of mild sleep apnea, and the fact that your number won't jump up above 95 unless you're physically concentrating on breathing deeply, we’ll keep you overnight. So they kept me overnight, which I feel in retrospect was the best thing. I don't know how I would have adjusted to going home right away. It was disorienting and strange to have gone through that. And you know, there's a ton of chemicals in you. And I was just sort of like,

Doug: Well, my dad talks about the disparity of the two experiences. He's had both hips replaced and they were about 15 years apart. And the first one, he had to stay for a while because he was worried about blood clots. And he had to wear compression socks and he couldn't shave for a year. He had this big white beard.

Magda: He couldn't shave? For how long?

Doug: No, because for over a year, just to monitor.

Magda: A year?

Doug: He was on blood thinners to keep, you know, he didn't want any embolisms working or clots working through his system, which may have been independent of the surgery itself, although it wasn't even an issue the second time around. And I think he's got one titanium and one ceramic. I think he's doing comparisons for Consumer Reports, I guess.

Bill: He's a multimedia artist. He works in ceramic and titanium.

Doug: Yes. And we hope to replace most of him throughout his life so he can live to be a thousand and just kind of talk to us through the metal grate

Bill: I have requested to receive back the removed component.

Doug: Of course you have.

Bill: When I asked the doctor about that, he said, oh, yeah, you can’t do that. It's gross. Based on what I read that he did while I was under, you know, my surgery, if he says something is gross, it's going to be pretty gross because he was there.

Doug: When a doctor says “it's gross…”

Bill: So I'm nervously anticipating the receipt of a bone fragment in the mail in about eight more weeks from now.

Doug: They have to mail it to you? You can't just take it home in a bag?

Bill: I can get it from his office, but my follow-up comes sooner than it will be ready for release. So that would require another trip to the city. I made the other awful mistake of reading the pathology report of the removed bone, where they described what it looked like. You know, to me, I don't know what aspects of what indicate damage, you know, but it all sounded terrible, the way it was described. It sounded like a broken, worn away, messed up hip joint that I don't ever want to see again, and yet I've asked for it, so I will be receiving it again. And my intention is to put it into a decorative cane. I don't need a cane, but someday maybe I'll need a cane. And then I look forward to yelling at my children or grandchildren to hand me my hip. And my children have assured me that there is no way in hell they will ever hand me my cane if I refer to it as my hip.

Doug: So how much of your femur do you have left? I mean, as I understand it, you put the apparatus in and essentially what's left of the femur grows over and fuses with the new... It's so exciting.

Bill: I don't know what size the implant is, to be honest. I don't know what size the top of one's femur is. I mean, I feel like I've seen fake skeletons and possibly real ones in various museums and doctor's offices, but they take off most of the top of the femur, but then the femur, like most of our bones, is essentially hollow and there's a space inside where marrow is created and there is a long protuberance on the bottom of the implant that goes down into the femur. And as it heals, it fuses into those holes so that it becomes a single integrated piece. If this is a service podcast for those who are also of an age... This is all for Magda's husband, you should know this.

Bill: What's his name? Let's send him a special shout out.

Doug: His name is Mike and Magda's been taking copious notes.

Bill: Hey Mike, this is going out to you buddy. I want you to know that if you have a question like I did about what exactly happens over the eight weeks post-surgery where you're not allowed to cross your ankles or rotate your knee inward or bend more than 90 degrees. What changes after eight weeks that makes those things possible again? The answer is the muscles get strong again as you do all of your physical therapy exercises just to hold the joint in place because during the surgery they stretch and move and pull things in ways that they're not used to being moved and basically when they put the new hip socket in, the new joint in place, it's a very stable piece of equipment, but the joint itself, you don't want to move it in a way that would ordinarily direct the forces acting on it outward from the joint. So you want that ball to stay in that socket. That's normally something that happens because your leg just holds itself together because you've got all those muscles and ligaments and tendons that are kind of directed that way. But they get pretty scrambled during the surgery, so it takes about eight weeks, or in my case, eight weeks. I gather that they do it six weeks for some people, eight weeks for some people, and some people, they say, you really should not really ever do those things again. And that's, I assume it's got to do with age and musculature and things like that. But that was a question that I recently raised with physical therapy and with the with the doctor's office to say, what exactly am I doing for the eight weeks that then you say, oh, yeah, go for it now?

Magda: Okay, so this podcast is really about talking about like the minutiae because at this point in life, it is really about the minutiae. I feel like we need to do an entire episode on getting a colonoscopy. It's like it's a big thing now for people our age. I do feel that I'm duty-bound to correct any misconceptions. My husband Mike is not about to have any joint replacement surgery. I meant that he needs to adjust to the fact that he's sometimes not going to know what's going to happen to him next because it's going to be decided by me and the professional.

Doug: Okay, so it's more along the lines of of how Bill found out he was having the surgery.

Magda: Yes, exactly. A couple years ago–He’s a dancer. Like, not professionally, but he dances for fun. And was noticing that he was having some knee pain. And you know wasn't doing anything about it and I think sort of catastrophized a little bit and went finally I got him to tell his regular doctor and his doctor sent him to a knee guy, and he came in and saw the knee person was like, “So how long can I go before I have to have this replaced?” and the doctor's like what are you talking about I'm sending you to physical therapy and so Mike got into the physical therapist and was like, “Well I'm hoping to not have it replaced for a long time,” and she was like, “You never,” like it was no big deal.

Bill: “There’s nothing wrong with your knee.”

Doug: This seems like the opposite approach of what most guys are, which is like, “I have knee pain. And I guess this is what my body does now.”

Magda: Right! He was kind of acting like that, except he made the fatal error of mentioning it to me and I goaded him into telling the professionals about it. But then, I mean, Doug, you know him, he's also the kind of person who goes to physical therapy, and they show him the exercises and give him the list of exercises. And he does them every single day. Like, you know, 98% of the people in the world just take the exercise and like, “Oh, okay. “ And then like go in and say, “Well, I don't know why this isn't working. I'm doing them every day,” but don't really. He does them. He legitimately does them. And this was, I don't know, two years ago and he still does those physical therapy exercises like three, four days a week.

Doug: He would also move heaven and earth to make a CPAP machine work, too. He would not tear it off and decide not to use it and throw it in the corner and forget about it. He would make it work come hell or high water.

Magda: Yes, his main characteristic is being intrepid. One of his other characteristics is being incredibly compliant with peer-reviewed proven solutions.

Bill: That's commendable. And also a little weird. No, it's funny. I feel in a sense that was one of the biggest components of like, growing up for me or adulting as I understand the children call it. To just chill the F out. I don't, do you guys curse on the show?

Magda: Yeah, we do. We do.

Bill: Chill the fuck out as many times as you want to say, I could never, there's not enough time in the day. I have many fucks to give.

Doug: And the world keeps soliciting those fucks. That's the best part.

Bill: Yes, there is a constant demand. I mean, wow, you know, it's so funny, like thinking about the topics that Doug wanted to bring up here today with the the CPAP, the hip replacement, and the Getting Things Done discipline, all of these things are kind of in a tornado vortex of, you know, everything is interrelated, obviously. But let's go back just 24 years to 2000 when I had an anxiety attack and went to a therapist and learned about anxiety and learned about therapy. And then fast forward two years, you know, we were having a child and all of that therapy and anxiety was related to the fact that we were planning to have children. You know, I was cured the week that he was born, the week I ran out of the auction house to go get in the cab, etc, etc. I wasn't cured, but you know how it goes. I had reached a really good plateau. And in that same year, I got into Weight Watchers. And this was the first example that I recall. Basically, I went to this first meeting of Weight Watchers. And I was the only man in the room and there were a lot of women there in various stages of their weight loss journey. And the convention at Weight Watchers is to applaud anybody's successes. And so people would recount a success. “I lost a half a pound” or “I avoided a cookie” or whatever it might have been. And then everybody would clap for them. And I was just like, I couldn't think of anything more cringeworthy. It just was so upsetting to me just the first two or three times. And then there was interspersed within those what felt like over-enthusiastic forced applause moments, was discussion of food and how much we worship it and, you know, all of these things and it just felt like this weird like, oh god, the psychological forces in this room that are like pulling and pushing are just so strange. And then some voice in my head said, “Hey asshole. Shut up and next time they say I lost a half a pound, clap.” And so I clapped. And then I lost 68 pounds over the course of that year, etc, etc. Anyway, going back to being compliant with peer-reviewed, scientific, well tested and tried and true, you know, mechanisms for doing things. That was one of the big moments that allowed me to do it. And I kind of often say that I got a master's degree in being a grownup was. It was therapy, Weight Watchers, I took up running. Transformed my running into training for marathons. I ran a couple of marathons. And then along that journey, partway through that journey, I was handed a copy of this book called Getting Things Done. And that's a system for organizing your time and attention. I imagine that people who still listen to podcasts probably are familiar with Getting Things Done. Podcaster Merlin Mann was a very big proponent for a long time. I had never heard of him, but I got the book. And then I heard of him, started listening to his podcasts. And this all segues into the other topic that Doug said we were going to talk about, which is my big Getting Things Done, year start, giant sheet of craft paper.

Doug: It's part of the serendipity of having you on now because we're all getting ready for this, what Patton Oswalt calls this Razor Circus of 2024 and assembling all of our emotions and trying to map out our lives over the next months and get to November, and it's a good time to be talking about it. How to focus our attention given the demands that they have and just trying to maintain a level of discipline in terms of when to walk away.

Magda: Okay, I don't know enough about getting things done ... 

Doug: In general.

Bill: Ouch. Okay, now Doug, you'll be able to speak in a moment, but this is Magda’s time.

Magda: I'm ideas, and he’s execution. No, I don't know enough about the Getting Things Done method to know anything more than I have always assumed it was sort of like vision boards for database developers.

Bill: I'm sure that it can be applied in such a way. I'll just tell you my understanding. I've read the book a bunch of times. And I when I first read it, I actually followed this discipline for a while. But basically, it's a way of, I mean, there's so many little jargony things that he's got. It's a way of, it's applied common sense, as the author, David Allen says of it. And it is essentially just taking inventory of all of the things that are in your inbox, and your inbox may be physical, it may be mental, it may be your house, it may be your office space, wherever you have a collection of things that require work. He defines work as anything that is not in the state that you wish it was. So anything where something has to happen, that's work. The first time I did this was in 2006. Literally a guy, a project manager at my job was walking down the hall to hand it to somebody else. He said. Maybe it was me. And he did a perfect little shmaloozle there where he said, “oh, I was just bringing this to Mike.” And I said, “let me see it.” And he gave it to me. Basically, I went into my office and I took every single post-it note and scrap of paper and note and my email inbox and everything. And I cataloged it all and put it into a giant stack. And then you process that stack. This is how you start this process. Anything that takes two minutes or less to do, you do it. Everything else, you either defer it or you dispose of it or you store it as reference. So, you know, there's a sort of flowchart aspect to it. I think I mailed my poster to somebody else who was really intrigued, but there's a poster. And basically you catalog these things and you decide whether and when you will be able to do them. So you do end up with a next actions list, which is essentially a to-do list. But it's an action that is in a context related to where it falls in a project overall. So let's say something is a 10-step project. The next action is the next thing that's going to take two minutes or less to do. And that might be dial somebody's phone number and either leave them a voicemail or, you know, talk to them. So it's just a way of framing and organizing these things. But one of the things that I took from it was just this sense that, how to say it, I created a little template of to-do lists for myself that have sort of a hierarchy of category, project, next action, dates, owners, things like that. And I use that in most of the work that I do for my job. But the other thing that I do is what Doug is referring to is that at the beginning of the year, and this began in 2010 when it was end of the year and I was trying to prepare myself for whatever that year's Razor Circus was. There were congressional elections. 

Doug: That's when Paul Ryan became the Speaker of the House. That was like the Tea Party, right? So you're saying that you're doing this corresponds with Congress going to shit?

Bill: Yeah, maybe I shouldn't have done it.

Doug: Maybe just take the day off next year and see what happens.

Bill: No, not this year. My wife and I went out on a date night and I had a little notebook and I said, look, we've got two kids. We're this age. This is the year that it is. Here's our life expectancy. Here's our life expectancy.

Doug: You really know how to bring the romance. Actuarial tables. Oh, talk about dull men.

Bill: And so, and I said, look, all things being equal, if everything continues, you know, here's when kid number one will graduate high school, here's when they'll graduate college, here's when kid two will graduate high school and college, here's when, you know, our likely retirement dates if we're lucky enough, all of those things. And I sort of put them on a little map. She ordered another martini. And essentially, it was it was an anxiety, you know, trying to enact some measure of control over, you know, life. And then I said, you know, but it's a finite number of days, like you could actually run the number, you could ask a website to tell me how many days is it till I'm likely to be able to retire. And then you're sort of like, well, what do you do with those days? Even for me, it would have been too much to catalog every single day in advance. But what I could do was say, based on this Getting Things Done discipline, we have something in our lives called Areas Of Responsibility. And those include such things as work, school, family, home, civics, volunteering, administrative things, health. Vacation, travel, creativity and exploration is about 12 or 15 that I've kind of identified in my life. We focus on these things every year, but it's scattered, you know, if we don't know that we're actually giving each of these things equal time. So I took a big sheet of craft paper and I just boxed it out and I wrote those words in each one. Health, family, home, work, school, and then just listed some of the stuff that fell under each of those things. I don't think I had civics in 2010 on there. But certainly in 2017, civics became one of the biggest boxes after Trump got elected, and just wrote the names of projects in there. So it wasn't like a planning to-do list of, you know, this is every single thing I'm going to do related to some work project. Maybe I put the three biggest things that I had to face that year at my job, or, you know, if I was working on a novel at the time. So I wrote the novel as an item under “creativity” and that was–

Doug: Available at fine bookstores everywhere.

Bill: Yeah, somebody published a novel with the name Bone Hollow about two years after mine. So yeah, it's a young adult kid story, having been published not independently, as mine was, their’s has a marketing budget. So their’s comes up first in SEO. So put my name with it, Braine, and you'll find mine. So, I put the novel under “creative”. You know, that was the kind of thing that I would put in there. And it just evolved. And so we've done it, my family, you know, it was mostly me, and still is mostly me, although now they kind of enthusiastically get on board with it. And we've just started our new one for this year. And in 2018, I think it was, I would post a picture of the thing on Facebook at the end of the year and say, time for my new sheet of paper. And people go, I love this. It's so great. So I did what I do, which is I wrote a three page manual for how to do it. And I created a template and a PDF that you could print out at Kinko's or something like that and have a big sheet of paper to work with. I did my templated version a couple of times, I usually just, you know, roll out a sheet of craft paper, put some tape around the edges to stabilize it and then draw things. I like to be moving a pen on paper. And it's just something that we do. And it's basically you write down the projects that are in there. Anything that you do that falls into one of those categories, you write it in and check it off. I have a friend who said, Oh, I love that sheet of paper that you do. I'm doing one for my family. And she just wrote a list of rules and requirements that are kind of like, you know, no punching, you know, kind of, uh, 

Doug: So how do you check that off? 

Bill: Yeah, there is a box on ours called “general principles and notes.” And in that it says things like take a tree plant to Black Lives Matter, oppose fascism, sell it on eBay. That's a big one. When my daughter was six, she wrote “be nice.” And and then she wrote “be BFFs.” Because she had learned the words BFF. That was nice.

Magda: Okay, so here's a question for you. Does this intersect with the bullet journal at all? Because I used to be a big bullet journal person.

Bill: Yeah, I mean, if you like that, so my understanding of that is you do either that or Getting Things Done. They're very similar in the sense they help you organize your time and attention. I haven't done it, and I've only read descriptions of it. But to me, Getting Things Done, it kind of became a framework that I just, I don't even think about it in those terms anymore.

Magda: It hinges on the big paper, right? So we can see everything. Because the bullet journal hinges on a notebook. So all of your projects are like inside the notebook. You can't look at them on a big piece of paper. Yeah, that's okay. That's interesting because I'm the kind of person who would appreciate being able to see it all the time.

Bill: Yeah. Yes. Well, you know, at my job more recently, we've started to use monday.com, which to me works like you can make it conform to the way getting things done works. And I suspect you can also replicate bullet journal style in there as well.

Doug: Right. Well, I love the concept of like the way Magda phrased it. It's perfect. It's a vision board for software architects in that it's part checkbox. You put checkboxes in there as an aspirational thing, just as something you want to get done over the course of the year. It gives you that boost, that little shot of dopamine when you do cross something off. And I'm a big fan of just finishing doing something then writing it down on a to-do list and cross it off as soon as you write it down, just because it feels like an accomplishment. But it's something, you know, if you ever have an idle moment, you can go back to this placard and you can say, oh right, I remember I wanted to get that done this year. Maybe I'll put some energy toward that. And it just, it keeps you on board a bit in terms of remembering what the goal was when you started so you don't get to September or October and think, oh my god, another year's gotten away from me.

Bill: Yeah. One trick that's built into it for that purpose is that I write the months, and you're just supposed to go in and check off the month. So if you're still alive at the end of any given month, you can go in there and check it off. But that means you're unrolling this piece of paper and you make the check for the month of March, but then you look and see what else, oh, what else did I do in March? And you can write stuff down and check it off, and you can look at things that you haven't gotten going with yet. Now, I emphasize that I don't think of it as a to-do list because I don't want the pressure of having to do everything that's on it. It's more capturing the things that I'm thinking about. So, like, I have “paint purge,”

throw out old house paint, right? It's just, it's just there. That's a thing that's in my head. I know there's a shelf or two shelves with like eight buckets of house paint on them. Some of them are half dried. Some of them aren't dried. Some of them are closed. Some of them are new. Some of them are to be thrown out. I don't know what those statuses are. And it will take me two hours to go through and figure out, do I keep this? Which room does it match? Et cetera, et cetera. So it's a little bit of a project. It's not a major one. It's something that could be done. It's just, it falls aside every time because it's never the priority. I wrote Paint Purge on the home section of the sheet, and it's been on there for two years, and we haven't done it, just because it hasn't risen to the level of needing to be done. 

Magda: But there's no pressure to finish it, it's just giving you a place to hold it. So it won’t just wash off into the ether.

Bill: Right. So that I don't feel like I'm not thinking of it. And also so I don't feel like I didn't capture it. Like this is the big thing in getting things done. You're capturing everything that would otherwise live in your head as a vaguely sensed, unfinished piece of business.

Magda: That was how I approached bullet journaling when I was doing it, but I  noticed that people seem to not be able to interact with anything that vaguely resembles a to-do list in that way, right? Like, and I don't think it has anything to do with the method. I think it has to do with those people, right? You can tell them there's an entire category in the bullet journal of ideas. Write it down here. You can tell them there's a whole place in Getting Things Done for things to think about. But because of the Protestant ethic or whatever they watched on PBS when they were six or whatever, they feel if it's written down, they have to do it.

Bill: They have to do it. Yeah. I mean, the label he gives for those is Someday Maybes. And the idea is that as much as you can semantically define something as not needing to be checked off, you call it a “someday maybe.”

Magda: Right.

Bill: And his recommendation for that is, if you have the same someday maybe on your list for a long time, you either eventually convert it into a project and you do it, or you just say, well, it was a maybe and it's now a not.

Magda: To me, the things that I would allow to be in that category are things that I would not feel would be a burden to my kids if I died with them unfinished, because my kids would either be interested in them or would just be like, oh, just throw it away. You know what I mean?

Bill: Yeah, they can be tasks and chores, or they can be projects that you might like to do yourself.

Magda: Well, but what if you had like vignettes or something written? I'm thinking in terms of for a lot of women, we have bits and pieces of like heritage craft projects that might have been inherited from mothers or aunts or grandmothers or something like that. And that can either feel like a burden, like, wow, I have to shepherd this into being this new creation. Or it can feel like, oh, wow, this is cool. I have this one quilt block. What am I going to do with this one quilt block? Am I going to start quilting and build something around it? Am I going to frame it? Am I going to take a picture of it and frame the picture and then throw away the block? Like, what am I going to do? And I think with any kind of creative output, like I have my slush file on my computer of just like random stuff I've written. I don't know that I want that just to disappear. I kind of feel like I would want my kids to at least read through it. But then do whatever they wanted to with it.

Bill: Sure. Well, that's what Lulu.com is for. You know, just print it in one single volume, delete it from all your devices, hand them the volume and say, there it is. It's small.

Magda: That would be the weirdest volume ever. I can only imagine.

Bill: You know, to your point, my father-in-law collected and built plastic models for his whole adulthood and childhood. He had a massive collection of unopened, brand new Revell models and things. And then they moved to Florida and he did a big purge. So he sold off a bunch and donated a bunch and gave them to his friends. And when they moved

yet again to a retirement community. They said, oh no, we have a model shop here. And so he ended up bringing, you know, a whole bunch more of those into this continuing care retirement facility where they live. So it's interesting, you can keep some of that stuff going. My in-laws are, I think, really prime examples of the non-sentimental method of downsizing your stuff. And they sort of do like annually say, do you want XYZ? It's kind of a nice model.

Doug: Oh, you've got me thinking about all sorts of things now about our parents. You're one of five siblings and you have older parents who are still living autonomously as mine are. Do you have conversations with them about what your in-laws are up to or how is that progressing along? Because ours doesn't progress at all.

Bill: We have a spreadsheet for that, I can tell you right now. We've been in long decade-plus conversations about downsizing and moving to somewhere smaller, and that hasn't happened. But, you know, as my parents age more, 91 and 88, you know, that becomes a little bit more of the reality. Among the things that are written on the big sheet of craft paper for 2024 are, “help my parents transition their lifestyle in a dignified, fun, and companionable way to another living arrangement with fewer things closer to the bulk of the family.” The big hulking thing there is the collection. You know, the 54 years in a single house with five kids. You know, there's a lot of stuff.

Doug: Do you think, you know, when the time comes for all five siblings to come together and try and take care of the parents, how are your sensibilities going to mesh?

Bill: Rob, if you're listening, we're going to sell the Mad magazines and I don't want to hear any argument.

Magda: There's got to be a better way. Dude, just rip out the fold-ins, fold them in, and frame them all folded in.

Bill: Some of these predate the fold-ins. And they're not worth anything. That's the, you know, it's very funny.

Magda: Well, if they're not worth anything, then fold them all in and display them that way.

Bill: Display them.

Magda: Yes, yes.

Doug: The goal is not to have a sixth sibling weigh in on this, Bill. I apologize.

Bill: You know what? The outside focus is possibly the best one. My recommendation to my dad was, hey, I found this massive box of stamps. And he's like, yeah, it's my stamp box. And I said, you know, I don't think you've opened it since 1985. What if we took them all and spread them out and took a very high resolution photograph of them and then posted that photograph to eBay, where the avid collector could scour through visually and find the one 1981 error Ugandan stamp, you know, that was upside down, and buy the whole thing for $10,000. And he said, let me explain. I don't want to sell these stamps. I want to run my hands through them, like King Midas running his hands through a chest full of gold coins. And I said, Okay, well, get with it. Keep doing that for a while. And let me know when you're

Magda: Did you make an agreement with him that when he dies you're gonna lift up the coffin at the viewing and tip all the stamps in to surround him in the coffin so you can roll around?

Bill: I'm gonna spread them out on the lid of the coffin, take a high-resolution photograph, and then sell them.

Doug: What a great sum up I mean and we could go on for another hour at least as far as I'm concerned. As you know, you have a political career, so now, if people want to learn more about Bill Brain, where do we find you online?

Bill: Well, my online presence is somewhat concentrated in one specific area, which is, if you'd like to buy the book Bone Hollow, you can go to HudsonHeartland.com and click Buy. You can also find me in conversation with critically acclaimed author Julia Dahl in Cornwall, New York at Good Books. 7 p.m. on Tuesday, January 30th. We'll be in a sort of fireside chat author conversation at the newest bookstore in the Hudson Valley. And you can find me on Mastodon at Bill Braine at Newsy.social and that is where I will occasionally post photographs of moss and make pithy remarks about politics and or digital life.

Doug: What do you like about Mastodon? What distinguishes it from all the other nonsense out there that it's fragmented into?

Bill: Well, I jokingly say, I love it. I can't find anybody. Nobody bothers me. There's zero engagement. And it's perfect. That is what I love in a social media platform these days. I logged in once and it showed me the total of all of the engagement I had had on my account. to date, which was, I don't know, like 70, 80 likes or something like that. And that was after a couple of months of having been on it. And so I saw in my notifications, I saw the number 80 popped up. And my first thought was, ah, shit, I gotta delete this account.

Doug: You should talk about what Bone Hollow is. It's a mystery. It's about... 

Bill: It's a suspense thriller set in the Hudson Valley. When New York City hipsters Jeffrey and Serena Gale go on a house hunting trip in the Hudson Valley, they find two dead bodies and complications ensue. I was pitching it to agents and describing this to a friend of mine who's a publisher of textbooks, and he said, yeah, well, when you get sick of that, I'll publish it. And so we did it together and made it a completely local venture. We sold it through his website. I did a promotional website for it. And we sold it, you know, on consignment in bookstores up and down the Hudson Valley and sold out a first printing of 500 and are into a second printing now. So buy the book, come to the bookstore. If any listener reaches out and says, please, I will be at the event and I'd love to learn more about the giant sheet of craft paper. We call it the Annual Schematic, by the way.

Magda: Annual Schematic.

Bill: I'll bring it with me and I'll unroll it there and check off “book event.”

Magda: It's like the name of my ska cover band, the Annual Schematic.

Bill: Annual Schematic. Oh, my God. That's going on the Someday Maybes: “form band called Annual Schematics.”

Doug: I'm so glad you guys, you came on to just share the day after your birthday and the CPAP was working and I mean, I'm so glad you came and talked with us today. This was fun.

Bill: Thank you for having me. I like talking to you guys. It's fun. I told Doug before we recorded this, I said, really, 75 minutes? And he said, you're going to be able to fill 75 minutes. And I said, yeah, I guess. But I could probably do it on a single breath if you really... 

Doug: And thank you all for listening to episode 31 of the When the Flames Go Up podcast with Magda Pecsenye Zarin and me, Doug French. Our guest has been Bill Braine, who one day will be threatening his grandkids with his hip, his disembodied hip. When the Flames Go Up is a production of Halfway Noodles LLC and is available on all usual podcast platforms and at whentheflamesgoup.substack.com. Please subscribe there for our weekly episode every Wednesday and a newsletter every Friday. If you listen to us on Apple Podcasts, and many of you do, please offer us a review there. That really helps us out. Thanks again, and we will see you next week. Until then, bye-bye.