Today’s episode is guest hosted by Myka Kielbon.

Transcript

I’m Myka Kielbon and this is The Slowdown.

There were two things I had to do when taking up this host seat.

The first thing was to talk about pinball, because the writers in my life are adamant that I write about it. But honestly, part of why I love pinball is that it’s pretty… non-literary.

It’s a deeply nerdy obsession. It’s a game that invites you to perfect your technique, but always throws in some unpredictability. I play mostly on vintage machines, and they’re fluid beasts. The same machine at a different location is different based on its wear, based on how the operator has set it up — how responsive the flippers are, how much you can nudge the machine before it tilts, disqualifying your ball.

Pinball is one of the LA communities I found myself in after finishing undergrad. Or maybe, more specifically, bars are where I often found myself at the time. But the regularity of hosting tournaments, of having something to do when lonely, of people that I knew how to find without a text or a call, was something that kept me going. It helped me feel like I’d actually, finally, grown up.

After the pandemic, I gave living in New York City a shot. It put me through the wringer. And I had a great time. But as my second winter set in, despite it being the first winter ever where the city wouldn’t see any measurable snowfall, the place started to get to me. So I went looking for pinball. It’s a national community, so I knew that here, too, I could find some like-minded people at a tournament in the back of some bar. Or at least, people I could commune with over some loud, bright box of wood, glass, plastic and metal.

That’s when I met Loren. He was kind of a mystery. We had third degree mutual friends on the West Coast and a lot to talk about. But when I did some fact checking, I couldn’t make any connections because he had changed his name. Still, there was something familiar and comfortable about him. We would go to see movies at the IFC theater and eat noodles. Eventually, we fought about something and stopped talking. I went back to LA and he went back to Detroit.

But briefly, Loren was the person I knew in New York who was the same kind of lost as me. There is a magic to how we find each other when we need each other. It seems like our souls sort of… orbit until they reach out. They land. They find ground and we find a friend, even if it’s temporary. I think there’s an indelible beauty in that.

The second thing I had to bring you is today’s poem, my favorite poem. It grounds me in the air, in the weightless feeling of a future that loves its own past.

Poem
by Frank O’Hara

Instant coffee with slightly sour cream
in it, and a phone call to the beyond
which doesn’t seem to be coming any nearer.
"Ah daddy, I wanna stay drunk many days"
on the poetry of a new friend
my life held precariously in the seeing
hands of others, their and my impossibilities.
Is this love, now that the first love
has finally died, where there were no impossibilities?

“Poem (Instant coffee with slightly sour cream)” by Frank O'Hara from LUNCH POEMS. Originally in Poetry (May, 1957). Copyright © 1957, 1964 by Frank O'Hara. Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of City Lights Books.