100% True Murdery Stories from Zevon's Real Life
Including:
- "The Unexpectedly Murdery Proseltyzer"
- "The Shocking 'signs" of a Good Time"
- "The Elementary School Drug Lord,"
Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/kinda-murdery-true-crime-murder-stories--5496890/support.
Zevon Odelberg is a true crime podcast host and disability advocate. Zevon has cerebral palsy and he wants Kinda Murdery to be welcoming community for people with disabilities and for people living with challenges of any kind. Life can be hard, but being together makes it better.
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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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.
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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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.
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. 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. 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. 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.
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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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.
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.
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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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.
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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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.
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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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?
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.
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.
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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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.
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. 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.
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. 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. 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. 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. 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.
Thank you so much for listening. I'm Zevan Odelberg and this has been kind
of Murdery.
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