100% True Murdery Stories from Zevon's Real Life

0:00 Warning, Kind of Murdery contains adult themes, explicit language, and descriptions of violence. It is not suitable for anyone, and we recommend you stop listening now. True crime with a dash of the paranormal, the garish, the strange in the darkly comic. I'm Zevan Odelberg, host of Kind of Murdery, a podcast that's about more than just murder. It's my very own pocket dimension, home to a curated collection of bizarre and compelling stories, the unsolved, the unsettling, and the unbelievable. I cover it all just so long as it's kind of murdery.

0:48 I'm z Evan Odelberg, and this is kind of Murdery. Happy Thursday, everybody. Thank you for choosing to be here with me. Sorry, today's episode is out a little bit later than usual. My folks are in town visiting, and I've got a bunch of plates spinning in the air right now, and I'm just doing the best I can to keep my nose above water. Right at the top, I gotta tell you, today's episode is going to be a little different than usual, but hopefully we've built some trust over the years and you'll be willing to join me on this little journey.

1:20 Now, if you're a new listener and you don't trust me yet, I got two things to say. One, thanks for listening, and two, please trust me. Although I should follow up by offering the same advice I give my daughter, which is trustworthy. People don't tell you to trust them. I'm sure there are exceptions that prove the rule, but I've generally found it to be a good policy not to trust anyone who says trust me. So I guess, don't trust me, make me prove it to you that this episode is worth listening to.

1:48 But either way, you got to listen, right, you know how I'm often reminding you, guys to call the kind of Murdery hotline eighty eight Murdery that's eighty eight six to eighty seven three three seven nine to tell me your kind of murdery stories so you can inspire an episode of the show. Well, a few of you have, and I'm sure to appreciate it, but I want more of you to participate. I want to hear your stories, and I know I can be a little slow on the uptake, but I finally realize that if you want to get a little you gotta give a little.

2:17 So today I'm going to tell my own personal kind of murdery stories from my own life. Then I'm going to respond to some listener feedback that I think is important. Also, today is going to be a lot less scripted than usual. I'm just going to tell you the stories. Like we're sitting together having a beer or a soda or whatever you drink, So please preemptively do forgive me my ums, my ohs, and my brain fades and let's do this thing. Kind of murderies, true kind of murdering stories from Zevin's real life starts now.

2:49 I'm going to kick it off by telling you the true story of the inspiration for this show, because I think it's a fun story and it also illustrates what kind of murdery as an adjective, what a kind of murdery story means to me. So spring break, when my daughter was six years old, so this was about six years ago, we decided to take her and her best friend to Las Vegas, because that's what good parents do, right they take their six year olds to Vegas for spring break. So I'm driving back from Vegas to Los Angeles with my wife, my daughter, and her best friend and we're low on gas and we're getting hungry, and there I see right along the side of the highway a Coco's restaurant and a gas station.

3:38 So I go, perfect, we can get gas, we can get food. So I take the exit and I pull off, and I'm pulling up to this gas station. Then when I'm about I don't know, thirty yards out, I suddenly realize that the gas station and this is one of those gas stations that has like a concrete ceiling overhang over the pumps, and then a mini mart. But I realize that every conceivable inch of all of this concrete is completely covered in graffiti, day glow graffiti, rainbow colored graffiti, every possible color of Crylon spray paint.

4:13 But it's not just the colors that jump out at me, it's the nature of the graffiti. Much of it is extremely obscene. There's a giant yellow day glow penis that someone has spray painted. There are creative and also correct spellings of every single swear word and obscenity that you could possibly imagine. And unfortunately, there are also racist statements, slurs, epitaphs, and symbols. The whole thing is just this massive painted vomit expression of human angst and frustration, nothing that is appropriate for children.

4:52 And I realize as I get closer that it's all completely abandoned. I screech the car to a halt road in reverse, I burn rubber back out to the highway, and when we're rolling again, I turned to the back and I say to the kids, Wow, that place was a kind of murdery. And that was the genesis of the term kind of murdery, which I see as an adjective that describes everything strange and garish and yes, sometimes horrible and sometimes tragic that might be encountered in our lives. For me, dark humor is a way to armor myself, is a way to protect myself from just how horrible things are, so when I encounter something disturbing, I don't have to feel like I need to go take a shower every single time, because we all know that life is full of the dark and disturbing.

5:43 So that was the genesis of kind of murdery. It was an adjective that described this entire human stew of horror, but also strangeness, humor, all of that. So that's what I mean when I say call the hotline eighty eight Murdery and tell me your murdery story, and that it doesn't have to be about murder. Just tell me something strange, bizarre, unsettling, humorous, something that happened to you that's stuck in your mind as a singular, compelling event that you'll never forget. That is a kind of murdery story.

6:15 So now I'm going to tell you some kind of murdery stories from my life. But I'm not just going to start with the kind of murdery. I'm going to start from the beginning. I was born two months premature, and when I was born, the doctors told my mother that I probably wouldn't survive, and I spent weeks in an incubator in the ICU. Likely as a result of the difficulties with my birth, I have cerebral palsy. It's been one of the central challenges of my life, and it's the reason that I want kind of Murdery all of us, myself and you the listeners, to be a community where we can support each other about the difficult things going on in our lives.

6:51 If you have a disability, I'd like you to share your stories of challenge and triumph with all of us, and hopefully, if it's okay with you, I can share those stories on the show. And now it doesn't have to just be disability, if it's something else that you're going through that you feel like is different than what most people are accustomed to. I want us all to share our stories so we can get to know each other better and hopefully build a little empathy that way, because God knows we're too hard on each other these days.

7:19 All right, So back to my story. I was born the two months premature. I have cerebral palsy and I'm a very sick baby, and my mom chose to name me Zevin because it means vitality, and I think for her it was something of a benediction. She named me Zevin as if to say, this baby is going to live now. When I was born, I weighed two pounds and fourteen ounces, and I was so small that my mom brought me home in a size ten woman's shoebox. That's the truth. I have photos of this me, a little tiny baby I fit inside a size woman's shoebox.

7:57 On my parents fourth anniversary, when I was about a year old, they went on a small trip to stay in a nice hotel to celebrate their anniversary, and they actually made a bed for me in their open suitcase and that's where I slept. That's how small I was. It's funny because now I'm six four, about two hundred and thirty pounds. I'm a big guy. I'm about the size, although not the fitness level of an NFL tight end. So I sometimes think of myself like those little sponge capsules that we got when we were kids.

8:29 You know, the sponge capsule and you drop it in a glass of water and a few days later, the sponge inflates and becomes like a dinosaur. So yeah, that's a metaphor for me. I'm basically a sponge dinosaur. But besides being born premature with cerebral palsy, I should mention that my cerebral palsy affects primarily my left side. Now, cerebral palsy can be very severe, like Daniel day Lewis and my left foot, he could only move his left foot. I am blessed in the mildness of the case that I have to deal with, and I know that there are a lot of people with cerebral palsy and other challenges that have a much harder road to hoe than I do.

9:07 And I'm very aware of that and appreciative and sympathetic to that. So I don't ever want anyone to feel like I am inflating my own difficulties or trying to assume an identity that isn't mine. But mild though my CP may be, it still has been one of the central challenges of my life, both physically and emotionally. When I was really young, I limped pretty significantly. I sometimes say I was a bit like Quasimodo. I was kind of hunched. I really dragged my leg around. I had my first gay corrective surgery when I was seven.

9:40 I had another when I was twelve where they rebuilt my entire left side from the hip to the toe, and another when I was seventeen. So now I can move around pretty well, but I still limp. I look like maybe I got shot in the hip and recovered or something, which I did not. But there's a whole host of challenges that also come along with being disabled and being somewhat able passing. People don't want to bring it up. They just kind of silently wonder what's wrong with you, or you park in the handicap spot and somebody thinks you're not really handicap and gets angry with you.

10:13 Again. I'm not saying any of these challenges are on the level of what other people go through, but they are what they are in their mind, and I own them. And I also don't want to downplay my own difficulties too much either. Because of how unbalanced my body is. Different lengths to ligaments and bones and muscles, different strengths, far different mobility levels. I can't move the toes on my left foot hardly at all. It's very difficult for me to move the left side of my body independently from the right, and because of how unbalanced the literal construction of my body is significant.

10:51 Chronic pain, especially back pain, but also foot and knee pain, has been a daily reality for me since very young childhood, since as long as I can remember. I know that many disabled people have it a lot tougher than I do, and yet I think it's important that I give myself some credit, that we all give ourselves some credit for just how challenging the things we go through are. It's easy to say somebody else has it worse and call yourself a whimp and give yourself no emotional space the process what you're going through.

11:25 I certainly don't want you to do that to yourself. I shouldn't do it to myself either, So disability is not the only thing atypical about my early life. I also grew up in the middle of the woods in far northern California, in Humboldt County, in a little community called Maple Creek that's about an hour from the nearest town of Arcada. And I say community because Maple Creek is just that there are some homes out there. Our closest neighbor was a mile away, but in total, probably only fifty people live in Maple Creek, and there's no town or anything like that.

11:58 There's just a little elementary school, a two room wooden schoolhouse with kindergarten through third grade in one room and fourth through eighth grade in the other room. In fact, my mom was my teacher fourth through eighth grade. And I grew up completely off the power grid wood heating, wood cooking, solar and water power. We actually didn't have the solar power till I was about fourteen. We had a giant old gas generator about the size of a bedroom that we had to turn on if we wanted to have any power, watch TV, what have you.

12:28 Otherwise it was kerosene lanterns and things like that. In fact, we didn't have hot water unless we ran the generator either, except that the hot water pipes went through the firebox in our wood burning cook stove and that would heat the water, or we would have to heat big pots full of water on the stovetop and use them to take a bath. So there we were, way off the grid, an hour from the nearest town, behind a couple of lock gates, and about fifteen miles of one lane gravel road that looks like something you would expect in Costa Rica or something like that.

13:04 Needless to say, we had pretty much zero unexpected visitors. We barely knew how to get to our house, let alone somebody that wasn't from there, Which leads me to my first kind of murdery story. As I mentioned, my mom was a teacher at the elementary school, which is the only public building in the community of Maple Creek, and somehow a man from town found his way out to Maple Creek School. At this time, I was probably three or four years old. So this strange man got to the school, not sure how.

13:37 He was probably from Blue Lake, Arcada, which were the towns that were forty minutes to an hour away on that fourteen fifteen miles of one lane road. But he got to the school, and I guess he saw my mom, although she didn't realize it at the time. So the school days over, it's later in the afternoon, my mom has gone home. Now we lived about six miles from the school and behind two locked gates, so it's late afternoon. I'm three or four years old. My mom is at home, but two of us are taking a nap.

14:08 And at this point, all the years my parents have lived out there, because of how remote it is, no one has ever unexpectedly come to visit. While my mom and I are sleeping, and all of a sudden, there's a knock at the door, and of course my mom's terrified, and she goes to the door, and who should she see out there but this strange man who she had seen at the school but thought not much of it at the time, and she's like, oh my god, what is happening. So she opens the door and it turns out the guy was a Jehovah's witness, and he had walked the fourteen miles from town, made it to the school, and then followed my mom home, followed the dust cloud of her car.

14:52 I guess all in the hopes of spreading the word, of finding somebody whose life would be changed by reading a Watchtower magazine she offered to her. She said no, thank you, and he left. So not that kind of murdery of a story, after all. Now, a couple of years later, I'm five years old, and like I said, I lived in the wilderness. And when I say wilderness, I truly mean it. I'm talking forests and meadows and lots and lots of wild animals. We have deer and elk and foxes and coyotes and black bears and mountain lions, cougars, the ghost cat man.

15:27 If you have ever heard a mountain lion roar from a distance, it is absolutely kind of murdery and terrifying, because what it sounds like is the blood curdling scream of a young woman being stabbed over and over. Now, I actually, of course don't know what that really sounds like, but it sounds like what I would imagine that's sounding like. So when I'm five years old, my mom and I are in the kitchen and we have these big bay windows that overlook our driveway, and our driveway is a long, steep gravel driveway or like a country road, not a driveway in any sense that you might imagine.

16:04 And we're in the kitchen looking out the bay windows, and what do we see but a full grown male mountain lion walking right up our driveway, right by our front yard. This cat, from the tip of its nose to the tip of its tail, was probably eight and a half feet long. And the mountain lion just saunters right up our driveway without a care in the world. I mean, they have no natural predators in the wild, walks up to our car port where my parents parked the car, which is, you know, probably twenty five feet from our front door, does a full circle of the car port, and then saunters back down the driveway.

16:39 At this time, my family didn't have a dog. We just had a beloved cat named Tops. But after that mountain lion walked right up the driveway, the next day, my mom said to my dad, we're getting a dog. And we didn't want a puppy because we wanted something that we felt like could actually deter a mountain lion. The truth is just about any dog will deter a mountain lion because in the wild, wild animals don't want to get into fights because there's no antibiotics or medical care or anything. If you get any kind of an injury as an animal in the wild, you're probably going to die, and mountain lions are smart enough to know this.

17:13 Also, wild animals know that dogs equal humans and humans equal danger. But still, we didn't want a puppy that looked more like a snack than a deterrent, and so we went to our neighbors at a nearby ranch who happened to have an adult bloodhound named Jasper that they were looking to have someone adopt. The thing is, they weren't moving, they had a giant ranch, and they had several other dogs, so it wasn't as though they needed to give up Jasper for adoption, which leads me to an important point.

17:45 We all know how much people love their dogs, So if someone is looking to give away their adult dog without an obvious change in circumstances that would require that word to the wise, be careful about adopted that dog, but that didn't occur to us. So we adopted Jasper, and, as you can imagine, like any five year old boy who didn't have a dog and then suddenly does, I loved that dog so very much and he loved me back. Then one week later he killed our beloved cat, Tops, grabbed her by the head and snapped her neck.

18:20 And my dad he loved that cat. He loved that cat a lot more than he loved the dog that he'd had for a week. And so the day after Jasper killed Tops, we took him to the pound. I can remember being so sad I'd never had a dog. I got a dog. I was thrilled I lost the dog. Plus our poor cat was dead, and I remember that I insisted on riding with my parents and Jasper to the pound, and my main memory from that car ride is that Jasper, of course, was terrified and threw up all over the car. Another kind of murdery story from the same period in my life, my parents had a lot of friends who were sheep farmers, and we got a couple of baby lams, little adorable black lambs, and we were raising them, and I loved those lambs.

19:06 I bottle fed them, I petted them, I treated them like pets. I named one of them little Lamby. I don't recall what I named the other one, but they lived in our fruit tree orchard, and I doated on those lambs. Now, I was raised largely vegetarian, except for a little bit of chicken and fish, so we rarely ate red meat. Well, time went by, and one day I sort of noticed that the lambs were gone, but nobody said anything to me about it, and I was just a really young kid, so I didn't think about it too hard.

19:33 I just kind of noticed that, huh, I haven't seen the lambs for a few days. And then one night for dinner, we were having lamb chops, and suddenly horrible realization dawned on me. And as I took a bite of that delicious, juicy lamb chop, which was a real treat because, like I said, I never got red meat, I said to my dad, Papa, these aren't our lambs, are they? And he said, well, yes they are, son, And I remember that I got so mad at him, but it wasn't expressed as mad at him for killing the lambs and feeding them to me, although I'm sure that's what it really was.

20:10 I remember I said to him, you should allied to me. You shouldn't have told me that these were my lambs. Obviously, it was a traumatic experience because I remember it so clearly, even though I was so young, and at the same time, I can't help but wonder if it wasn't a worthwhile lesson. I think so often we are divorced from the realities of the food that we eat. It's just there in the supermarket, so I think it was probably good for me to learn the truth of where our food comes from. Also, around the same time, probably a year or two earlier, gosh, I was probably only three or four, so again this would be one of my very few memories from that age.

20:49 But an old friend of my dad's came to visit us with his girlfriend, and again, we rarely had visitors, so any visitor was so exciting. And I remember that he gave me a Curious George stuffed animal, and I loved that Curious George. I loved it because it was a cute, little stuffy and I loved all my stuffies at that age. But I also loved it because my folks were are kind of back to the land hippies, and so I had very few toys that were branded toys. I had a lot of educational toys. I had wooden toys.

21:24 I had all kinds of stuff that might stereotypically be the sort of toy that a parent that wanted to raise their kid in an alternative manner and not buy into commercialism might give them. But Curious George had a TV show, he had books, he was a known pop culture property like Mickey Mouse or something. He was Curious George, and so I loved that about that doll too. It was my favorite stuffy at the time. And then a year or two later, or at some point when I guess I was old enough to know this, or maybe I just asked about my dad's friend Jeff, and it turned out that Jeff had become a really serious methamphetamine addict and he developed paranoid schizophrenia.

22:05 He believed the government was after him. He would hear things in the walls, and tragically he took his own life. And I remember that when I found that out, and again I was quite a young kid. All of a sudden, that beloved Curious George doll became like a cursed horror doll to me as though drug addiction and suicide could be something that was contagious and that I might catch. And so while most of my stuffed animals at that age were strewn about my bed and my bedroom, I put that curious George doll in my closet on the highest shelf I could reach, and I never touched it again.

22:44 I would sometimes just look at it fearfully when I happened to open my closet and think wistfully longingly of back when it used to be my favorite stuffed animal. This is probably a good time for me to remind you all as I can do, of the free three digit lifeline number nine eight eight that you can call anytime twenty four hours a day, seven days a week to receive counseling for mental health, substance use, or suicidal thoughts. That's nine eight eight. Please do program it into your phone now, and if you find yourself in a dark place, please do call nine eight eight, and always remember that you are loved and the world is a better place with you in it.

23:32 Now. I'm not qualified to help you if you are facing something really difficult, because I'm not a professional and I wouldn't want to give bad advice, but if you're just going through a tough time and you'd like to make a connection with someone, please do. Feel free to reach out to me at kind of Murdery on all social media, kind of Murdery at gmail dot com, or you can call the kind of Murdery hotline eight eight eight Murdery that's eight eight eight six to eight seven three three seven nine and share what you're going through with me.

24:00 I would love to connect with you. I'm here, I care, don't hesitate to reach out. So, as I mentioned previously, I was born two months premature. I was born at seven months, which today is generally not a huge issue, but back in nineteen eighty one when I was born, medicine wasn't quite what it is today, and one of the issues I had was that my lungs were very underdeveloped, so that I would have trouble breathing, which is why, in part that I stayed in the hospital and an incubator for so long. And I don't know for sure if this was because of that, but when I was a young kid, I used to get these croup attacks.

24:37 It would always happen sometime in mid to late November. Eventually I grew out of them when I was ten or eleven, but between the ages of like five and ten, sometime in November, I would wake up and not be able to breathe, like my breathing passages would be totally blocked. I'm going to imitate the sound that my breath made, just warning you here in case it's something that's upsetting. But essentially, when I tried to breathe, when I woke up, I would be like this, and even as a little kid, every time it happened, I thought I was going to die.

25:10 Now in my parents house, their bedroom was upstairs in one part of the house, and my bedroom was downstairs on the other side of the house. So when I woke up and couldn't breathe, I mean, obviously I suppose I got enough oxygen that I didn't die, but I always felt like I couldn't breathe at all. I also couldn't call out for my parents because I couldn't get any breath, so I would stumble out of bed, lurching like some kind of a zombie, and usually end up crawling and croaking to the bottom of the stairs trying to call out for them and then they would wake up.

25:45 Now, when the attacks weren't so bad, we were able to run a humidifier in my bedroom and then I could breathe a little bit. A few times they were so bad that I had to be taken to the hospital and put in a breathing tent. The trouble was, as I mentioned, I lived an hour from the nearest town in about an hour and twenty minutes from the hospital. So I remember those car rides when I would have the croup attacks as the most terrifying time of my life because for that entire hour and twenty plus minutes, I would feel as though I couldn't breathe at all and I was going to die.

26:18 And you guys know the expression and watch pot never boils. Time goes by slowly when you're waiting for it to go by. The flip side good version of that is when on Christmas morning you're not allowed to get up until a certain time. For me, it was seven am, and then I'd wake up at like three am and watch the seconds click by on the clock and it seemed to take forever. Days Well, this was that same experience on the car ride into town, except I couldn't breathe the entire time, and I just remember the sheer terror terror of it.

26:50 But also because of croup, I love windstorms. And here's why. Also, usually sometime in November, which was when my unexpected croup tacks would strike, we would get out in Maple Creek really high windstorms. Eventually my dad got a wind gage. Now, the fastest the wind was ever blowing was sixty plus miles an hour. Now that is a hard, hard blowing wind. And sometimes when I got the croup attacks, it would be during one of these super intense windstorms. These windstorms were so intense the trees are swaying back and forth.

27:24 In fact, we had this one oak tree in front of the kitchen window of our house, and the wind would make it like a sling shot and it would be flinging high velocity acorns at the front kitchen windows and even shattered them. But here's why I love those high winds, because sometimes when I got those creup attacks and I couldn't breathe at all, my dad would pick me up and carry me and he would take me out into these windstorms. And it should have been scary, I guess, because the trees are going back and forth like crazy, and you feel like you might even get blown over, or that your dad carrying you might get blown over.

28:00 But for me, I felt like the high velocity wind would force the air into my lungs. So I always associated high windstorms with being able to breathe with life. So I liked the wind all right. Moving forward now to my high school years, I suppose, although this story is not directly related to me, I mentioned that I went to this two room wooden schoolhouse with kindergarten through third grade in one room, fourth through eighth grade in the other room. The average population of the school was usually twelve to fourteen students all grades combined.

28:35 Years after I had left, a new man became the principle of the school. Totally sweet guy, totally wholesome, glasses, kind of nerdy, just such a great guy. He had five kids, he had a wife, he lived in the community, and he was beloved. Great teacher, great guy. Well, appearances are not always what they seem, I suppose. Now, some of you may be aware that the re of the country and of California that I'm from. Humboldt County is famous for being the United States number one major pot growing region.

29:09 It's not as much of a thing now, only because now in California anyway, marijuana is legal all over the place. But back then it wasn't legal anywhere, and Humboldt was really famous for it. I mean, getting pot from Humboldt was like getting Dompeignon Champagne from the Champagne region of France or something. So it turns out that this sweet, nerdy mister Rogers, seeming new school principle at the elementary school that I went to, was like a secret marijuana drug lord. Now it sounds like I'm being dramatic when I say marijuana drug lord, because most people think of Tony Montana running cocaine or the Taliban selling heroin.

29:48 But it turns out that this guy with his five kids and his ass shuck's demeanor, was raided by the Feds and they found hundreds of marijuana plants, dozens of firearms, and under the floorboards in the house one hundred and fifty thousand dollars in cash. So he was like Humble County's weed Walter White. Here behind his mild mannered persona, he was running an empire. So when I was in high school, I had this friend named Erland, and I still lived way out in the woods, but my high school was in the town an hour away, and that's where Erland lives.

30:24 So sometimes on the weekend I would spend the night at Aerland's house, and we would often go to the midnight movie, and we usually would go to the movie. But going to the midnight movie wasn't really about going to the midnight movie. It was about us having time to hang out bum around town and get up to hijinks. So I remember one sunny Friday afternoon in particular, we went down to the plaza and we found a homeless person and he agreed to buy vodka for us, and we bought a leader of Popov and we took that leader of Popov up to Redwood Park.

31:00 And if any of you have ever seen a redwood tree in person or even a picture, they are huge. They can be six feet in diameter, thirty feet circumference or even bigger. Well, in Redwood Park, some of those trees over the hundreds of years have been hollowed out by forest fire. So it's like a cylindrical ceilingless tent. Inside you can essentially go into the trunk of the tree and kind of hide yourself. So we went into the trunk of that tree and pounded a bunch of that vodka. Now, I was a bit of a partier in college, and at one time or another I've drank enough of just about every type of alcohol to be sick, But to this day, vodka is the one that I don't particularly enjoy.

31:43 But anyway, so we are in the tree pounding this leader of super cheap vodka. I think it was pop Off, it may have been come Chotka. So then we get pretty drunk, but we're still feeling pretty good. So we leave the tree and we go sit on the lawn and Redwood Park and it's a beautiful sunny day and we're enjoying that beautiful sunny day sitting there talking whatever. We are planning to go to that midnight movie many hours later, and this man walks up to us and he has a dog, totally normal looking guy, and he walks up and we are thinking, oh, he's gonna ask us the question, which he was, but it turns out that he must have been deaf, because he starts signing to us and signing very emphatically.

32:25 So we were concerned. Of course we were intoxicated, but also concerned that this guy probably needed help or something. So he's signing and signing, and we don't know sign language, so we don't know what he's saying. Finally, he gets frustrated, not like in a rude way, but clearly like we're not figuring out what he needs. So he goes back to his car and he gets a yellow legal pad and a pen and he starts writing on it furiously. He's writing and writing and writing, and then he comes over and he hands me the legal pad, and I mean, I don't know what it's going to say, but I'm thinking that it's something serious, like my family members in the hospital.

33:01 I need to get to this place. How can I do it? Can you help me? Etc? And I look down and what he's written on the pad is, do you know where I can find four pounds of hallucinogenic mushrooms?

33:19 So I guess that tells you a little bit of something about Hubble County as well. But boy, I've never been so surprised in my life if that scenario played out an infinite number of times, like Avengers in game, where doctor Strange is seeing every possible scenario if you gave me an infinite number of guesses of what this apparently distressed person had been trying to sign to me, where can I find four pounds of hallucinogenic mushrooms? Would never have been something I guessed, even if you gave me centuries to try to guess it.

33:52 So anyway, we did not know where he could get four pounds of hallucinogenic mushrooms, and he went on his merry way to try to find somebody else who did. Then we drank some more of that vodka and eventually went to the movie, which was Godzilla and which I was passed out for, which made for a funny breakfast the next day when my dad started asking me questions about the movie and I basically just had to guess at all the answers. Fast forwarding again now to two thousand and eleven, I'm thirty years old.

34:23 My daughter Daisy is one month old. My wife and I are living in a loft in the downtown industrial district of Los Angeles on Molino Street. Her mother stayed with us for the first month of Daisy's life to help out, and this was right after her mother had left and gone home. So Daisy had had kind of a tough night that night, a wide awake, a fussy night. And if anybody's ever been a new parent themselves or heard a new parent tell stories, then you know or you can imagine what it can be like when you're totally exhausted because you don't sleep at all, and then your baby can't get to sleep, and it gets later and later, and then finally, finally, when the baby goes to sleep, there's this instant feeling of relief and serenity that is like something people try to achieve by meditating or something like that.

35:15 But you're like, thank goodness, the baby's happy, the baby's asleep. We get a moment's peace. So Daisy has just gone to sleep. And even though we're tired, we've been so busy, we need to wind down a little bit. So Margarita and I are watching television again about two in the morning, certainly not a time that one would expect visitors. When knock, knock, knock, there's a knock at the door. I think to myself, what the heck could that possibly be? So I go to the door, because again we are this is downtown industrial district Los Angeles.

35:45 It's not a place that you want to be outside at two in the morning, and it's certainly not a place that you want to be letting people into your home, your home with your wife and you're sleeping baby at two in the morning. So I walk to the door and I look through the people hole, and what do I see but a full armored machine gun carrying helmeted swat team. And I opened the door, terrified and careful to keep my hands visible, and the leader of the swat team tells me that there's been reports of an active shooter in the building and that we need to evacuate.

36:20 And this demonstrates what an exhausted new parent I am. But I don't even really register the danger, even though there are police with machine guns right in front of me, and I've been told there's an active shooter, as in shots fired, which I didn't hear, but thought that I ought to have because apparently they were called to my neighbor down the hall. Now these days, we all know about the phenomenon of swatting, where somebody will call the swat team on someone as a kind of revenge, I guess. But anyway, he tells me there's reports of an active shooter in the building and that we need to evacuate.

36:56 And my first thought is not of the danger, nothing like that. I actually say to him, really, oh my gosh, my daughter, our baby just went to sleep. Do we really have to evacuate? And he's like, yes, sir, you and your wife and your baby need to get out of this building. Well, I still don't want to do it. I'm so tired and I'm so happy Daisy's asleep, and it just doesn't really seem to make sense to me. So I say to him, I say, but if there's really an active shooter on the loose, are we truly safer standing in the open on the street outside than we are behind a brick wall, because this was a loft building, a formerly industrial building, and all of our walls were actually brick.

37:39 And he says, oh, yes, absolutely, the bullet from a high powered rifle will go through brick like it's Swiss cheese. Now I'm still thinking to myself, because I'm such a smarty pants in my own mind, Yeah, but out on the street will have no cover of any kind. But honestly, there's only so much arguing you can do with a group of machine gun toting SWAT officers, and I'm aware that I'm pretty lucky that whatever small amount of disagreement I put up didn't go worse for me. So we get Daisy. Marguerite and I get Daisy, and we follow an officer outside, and we sit on the sidewalk at two thirty in the morning in downtown LA with a carpet.

38:21 A cockroach is scurrying by until the police have decided that there is in fact no active shooter in the area, which there was not. One sort of fun fact about this experience was at a certain point, we'd been out there for over an hour, and Daisy, being a one month old baby, had soiled her diaper and we really didn't want to change her on the filthy sidewalk of Molino Street, and so one of the officers kindly opened the trunk of his cruiser and we actually changed Daisy's diaper in the trunk of an LAPD police car, which I don't think a lot of people could say that they had their diaper changed in the trunk of an LAPD police car.

39:05 And I do have to say that all the officers were super professional and kind and friendly and did everything they could to make us feel safe, but wow, that was a crazy, crazy experience. Well, those are a bunch of the kind of murdery stories from my personal life. I hope they held your attention. And as you'll notice, not a single one of them actually had anything to do with murder. There's a broad range of what's kind of murdery, and so I truly do hope that you will take a moment to call eight eight eight murdery.

39:34 That's eight eight eight six eight seven three three seven nine, and share with me your own kind of murdery stories, and so you can inspire an episode of the show. And now I'd like to share a listener email I got which I think offered some very important feedback and that I ought to respond to it. Listener Terry Burke Wolan emailed me. Now you may remember Terry, she's facing real challenges with MS and I did share her story on the show. Well, she emailed me again three days ago, and this is what Terry had to say.

40:07 She says, I listened to your podcast when not so long ago you were a champion of the disabled. I sent you a story of my MS, my brothers CP and the story of my mother's stroke and our attempts to play cards. You read it on the air, and I had hoped to hear more, but now you've dropped that whole intro and that of the suicide hotline. Yes, it got a bit redundant at times until you need it, so just to be annoying, I have another story for you, not from twenty five years ago, but starting this June, I developed a new party trick that is, quote, I've fallen and I can't get up unquote.

40:44 I ended up calling my son or a friend once when I fell in my room at four am. I then called nine to one one, telling them how sorry I was for bothering them, etc. And they said that's what they were there for, so they did their thing and left. I've now had bad falls re wiring the er, waiting for a neighbor's car to pass, and I've had to start yelling for help. I texted my kid and one of their spouses since my daughter won't speak to me, and I told them that words mean nothing, action does, and things had to change or I would just take the final solution into my own hands.

41:17 Besides, my son coming from California to Albany, New York. They feel that I need babysitting, not help. Figuring out a new way to do things is not something anyone has ever done for me. I guess you're doing social media now. I don't used to, but most people I know well are no longer on Facebook. I'm not a twit so I don't tweet, and Instagram is more of a biannual deal. Sorry this is so long, but I needed to get it off my chest. It was wonderful thinking there was an ally out there, but now you're just another voice.

41:48 Thank you for letting me vent Terry Burkewolen. First of all, I just want to say, Terry, thank you so much for taking the time and having the courage to reach out to me. And I also want to say that or frustration is totally valid, and I am so sorry that you, or that anyone else who's struggling with something feels as though I've abandoned them. Or maybe I was just advocating for people with disabilities or other challenges as a marketing employer or something. Neither of those things are true. I feel really bad that there are people out there who feel let down.

42:23 It is true that I haven't been talking about it as much lately, and I don't always mention nine to eighty eight. I do fairly regularly, but not on every episode. I suppose at times I get caught up in the story and don't want to interrupt the flow of the narrative. But the truth is more than that, I too, am struggling now. I hesitate to even use the word struggle because the struggle that I'm referring to is not even in the same universe as what Terry or a lot of other people are going through. But I struggle to meet the content demands of podcasting, of putting two episodes out a week plus.

43:01 I have a full time job because kind of murdery, although I hope someday it will be, my full time job doesn't generate anything close to enough money to support my family. So I work full time. I put out two episodes a week plus. I'm a dad and a husband and a son and all those things, and I have my own challenges with CP to tackle now. I don't know. Hopefully it doesn't just sound like I'm making excuses, because who cares about excuses. I'm just trying to explain myself a little bit in my focus to get episodes made and put out for all of you to listen to.

43:39 I suppose I have lost track of the advocacy that is so important to me and have been more focused on just getting the story out there so that I could move on to the next responsibility in my life. So it was certainly never my intention to let anybody down or feel like I was just saying something because it made me sound virtuous or whatever anybody could have thought. And I have to tell you that I feel absolutely awful if any of you feel let down or abandoned or not heard, or that I was just sort of a carpet bagging fly by night advocate for people with disabilities.

44:15 Having a disability is at the core of my identity and who I am, and so Terry, I hear you. I'm so sorry again for everything you've gone through. Please please, please no final solutions. You are loved. There are people here for you. I'm here for you. I can offer nothing but apologies that it feels like I haven't been. I really hope that things start to look up. Feel free to reach out to me anytime. Everybody. Feel free to reach out. You can email kind of Murdery at gmail dot com. You can reach me at social media at kind of Murdery on all platforms, or you can call the kind of Murdery hotline eighty eight Murdery.

44:53 Please don't feel alone, Please don't feel abandoned. And I promised to do better, So Terry, please accept my sincere apology. And when I say I promised to do better, please do hold me to it. So I've been thinking about this a lot since Terry reached out to me, and it really is true that I feel like my bandwidth just as a human, not just a podcaster, but a human with all the hats that I wear, because we all wear so many hats and have different identities that are at the forefront of our consciousness.

45:26 At any given time, I am struggling to keep up with two podcast episodes a week plus everything else, and to the extent that that struggle may be causing me to fail to live up to what people feel like I've promised, or maybe causing me to put out episodes that aren't as good as anyone hopes. I think what I'm going to try going forward is I'm going to put out a full length kind of Murdery episode, like the episodes that you're used to hearing on Sundays and then on Thursdays. I think I may try to do just a shorter format where I talk about something that is kind of murdery for maybe ten fifteen minutes, or maybe I just share listener emails or feedback, or we talk about what's going on in the world.

46:13 I'm not exactly sure what that is yet, but I think that maybe if I put a little bit less pressure on myself to produce so much content, maybe I can make better content and be more successful at being there for all of you in the ways that I want to be. It means so much to me that you listen to the show, that you care about the show, and that you trust me enough to share your lives with me. I hope you enjoyed this episode. I hope you enjoyed hearing some of my stories from my life, and I hope it inspires you to tell stories from your own life again.

46:49 Email me kind of Murdering at gmail dot com, or call please do call the kind of Murdery Hotline eighty eight Murdery. That's eighty to eight six eighty seven three three seven nine. Terry. Thank you for reminding me what's important and everyone. Kind of Murdery will be back this Sunday with a more traditional episode, but certainly please do know that mental health, suicide and addiction prevention, and sharing the stories of disabled people and people that face challenges that not everyone may be aware of remains very important to me, and I will do my best to make sure that those issues and that advocacy and that awareness of humanity never disappears from this show.

47:36 Thank you so much for listening. I'm Zevan Odelberg and this has been kind of Murdery.