Good Morning, John. I apologize for my crappy birthday text. 

In other news, we recently made an episode of Dear Hank and John - which is a banger, by the way - if you wanna check it out. We had a great time. 

In that episode, you read me a poem, and I confided in you that I cannot hear poetry. Now, I don't know what this is about, but the story that I tell myself is that it probably has something to do with the very hard work my brain had to do early on to get good at understanding both spoken and written words. I am one hundred percent talking out of my butt right now, so I apologize. 

But it seems to me like there's a muscle memory to language processing.  And I'm, like, a very muscle-memory strong guy. I'm never gonna pluck out an improv, virtuosic something on the guitar, but I can absolutely brute-force a strum pattern onto some combination of the twelve chords I have previously forced my fingers to learn through thousands of repetitions.

And this feels analogous to how I feel about certain kinds of language, where if people start talking to me differently than I expect, my brain loses its ability to lock on to anything. 

It is as if I worked very hard to practice understanding meaning in certain forms - largely the typical syntax of spoken language or the commas and periods and paragraphs of written language, in like book-form. 

And if you do it different from that - if you break up that syntax somehow, I can't parse it anymore without a lot of effort. And maybe that's part of the point of poetry? That it's forcing you to do effort. 

I don't know. It doesn't seem like it's that hard for you. It's very hard for me. 

I find this interesting because if there is some amount of truth here, which there probably is not. But if there is, then listening to poetry as an adult might actually help me understand what it was like for six, seven, and eight-year-old me. 

That little kid has to focus extremely hard on understanding both spoken and written language. And then eventually my brain got used to it. I developed those pathways, and now it is super-normal to talk and listen and write and read.

But was everything like poetry, at first? And if so, how did that poor kid figure out how to do this? He must have worked very hard. 

I'm also like this with graphic novels, though it's not as bad. It's just like the different ways that words work  make it much more labor for me to immerse myself in the story.

But then I'll see you reading poetry and parsing it into a story super cleanly, or I'll see Orin reading a comic book and being entirely absorbed, and I find myself just kind of perplexed. I do think there's something going on there, like I just can't hear poetry. 

I used to go to poetry readings because I was in a writing program, and I'd go and I would have no idea what happened. 

There's something going on in there, and I don't know what it is. I have poetry blindness. I don't know if I'm alone. It is a thing. There's a phenomenon at work.

It's just a reminder for me that we're all moving through subtly different worlds from each other. Two people in exactly the same circumstance: their eyes and their ears and their minds are having different experiences. This is obviously true, and yet I have a very hard time remembering it.

So, it's always good to take opportunities to be like, "Oh, right. People are different." 

John, I'll see you on Tuesday.