Podcast trauma

I have a listening routine that goes like this:

Mid-month I get credits to purchase a new audio book. It takes me about two weeks of gym sessions and pram walks to finish it. Then I move on to Swedish podcasts until the next book is available to me.

I am currently in the podcast fase. That's all well and good, but yesterday I ran out of my fun and cheerful podcasts and had to fall back on documentaries.  They are mostly excellent, but also mostly on grim subjects. I quickly skipped over one with "child murders" in the title, knowing there's no way I could deal with that.

Instead I started with one titled "The black metal murders". Long story short, it all begins with a young man taking his own life and his thoroughly disturbed friend and fellow band member finds him and takes photos of the body before calling the police. In the end the young man's brother talks about how (even though this happened in the early '90s) the photos live their own life online. Then, for some entirely unknown reason, I decided to google the photos. Somehow thinking they can't be THAT readily available. Like an idiotic old fart with no internet experience at all.

But take my word for it, the photos are most definitely easily accessible. I now know what a person really looks like after having shot themselves in the head, and I really don't feel like I needed to know that. I've spent all night alternatively dreaming about and thinking about the story and the photos. Marvellous.

Then I listened to another documentary about the tragic deaths of nine young men at a Pearl Jam concert at the Roskilde festival in 2000. Somehow the accident had either passed me by unnoticed or slipped my memory. And this was the second trauma of the day for me. Not only was it soul killing to hear the mother of one of the boys speak. There were recordings of Eddie Vedder desperately trying to get the massive crowd to take three steps back to allow trapped people to get up, and suddenly that brought back a memoy of seeing Pearl Jam in Hyde Park, London, in 2009 (or 2010?) and Eddie saying "Everyone, on three, take three steps back!". I never knew why he was doing that. Such pain and sadness. The whole story also brought back a muddle of memories of festival concerts (Roskilde included in 2008), of my feet no longer touching the ground in the tightly packed audience, of swaying waves rippling through the crowd and threatening to tip everyone over. Of reaching down in a gap as it closes to pull another person back on their feet. To be pulled up myself in the nick of time. Too close, way too close.

Dwayne called as I was half way through the documentary, and I tried to explain and remind him of Hyde Park. But I was a blubbering mess and he had no idea what I was on about.

Now, let's see if I can't find some light-hearted comedy for today's gym session.