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PODCAST

the rohn report

dissertations on almost anything about being human / contemporary and humorous observations / bulletins and notifications / tips and quips / sermons rohn.substack.com

All Episodes

17:44

van life

the rohn report ·

2022/08/05

I’ve often thought about outfitting a van and traveling around, living in it, sleeping in it, self contained like a turtle. Living the nomad life, no address, following the seasons and the currents of life. I’ve watched van life videos on YouTube (of which there are hundreds). For example, meet Frank and his cat Sunny: I’ve reviewed different designs, dreamed of owning a Mercedes high roof diesel extended van and how I would rig it up with everything I needed: shower, toilet, kitchen, bed, work

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18:36

Bliss

the rohn report ·

2022/07/28

This post is about a song. Two songs actually, Bliss and Dunia, both playlisted by Buddha’s Lounge on YouTube. It’s also about the power that music has to cause transformational effects to our normal reality, to take us to a new level. It’s not just emotional, it’s a real life transformation that happens. You find yourself changing into something you weren’t before, a new experience, a new feeling, seeing the world in a new way, having an epiphany. Plug in the ear buds, click and sit back.

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13:57

chaos / and the second anniversary of 'the rohn report'

the rohn report ·

2022/07/21

Yeah, so I’ve been publishing ‘the rohn report’ for two years now, 117 posts. I’m proud of that so I’m including the very first post below, as a sort of celebration and because I’m sure most people haven’t seen it. A nice compliment to the one published yesterday which was basically about the end of the world. I mean the END of the world; Opeth’s song ‘Ending Credits’ which is admittedly naive, or at least that’s how the band’s front man, Mikael Åkerfeldt, introduced it. Anyways back then, two

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12:01

a flash fiction and the opening of the universe

the rohn report ·

2022/07/14

“I just thought I’d throw myself a curve ball” said Jim. “Something straight down the line but unusual.” “Yeah, I know. I do that. Just to be weird or whatever.” “No. Being weird is different.” “Straight down the middle isn’t being weird?” “It is but in a non-weird way.” “I like the way you define everything according to your own dictionary. No I think it’s adorable.” said Sally. It was their first actual meeting, like at a cafe or something and the possibility of falling in love

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7:20

7/7/22 summer

the rohn report ·

2022/07/07

Now that it’s 100˚ every day with no relief in sight, I guess it’s summer. I don’t like it much. I’m a rainy day guy or even better yet a cool drizzly day guy. A blazing sun and a cloudless sky just makes me feel like hiding inside somewhere until it goes away. Tedious. I’m suffering.Meanwhile, Sydney Australia is hit with it’s fourth major flood in 18 months. Now I know where all the rain went. It landed in Sydney. It sure as heck didn’t hit here. I could climb on the climate bandwagon at

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12:18

writing in the cafe

the rohn report ·

2022/06/30

I don’t have a sense of adventure like Ko and Masa, my couch surfing guests who stayed at my house a few days ago. They’re riding their Walmart bikes thru the Chihuahuan Desert in the 100 degree heat, live streaming to their friends in Japan along the way. While they were here they were doing live telecasts from downtown San Antonio rolling around looking at murals and exploring everything. It’s brilliant, it’s a new media - it’s the Gen X experience. I’m realizing the power of the thing.

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14:59

Flash Fiction 202

the rohn report ·

2022/06/23

Frank had a hard time finding anything he was passionate about for the mid-term exam in Public Speaking 101. Everyone had to give a 5 minute speech about ‘something you’re passionate about’ and nothing came to his mind. It was disconcerting. Finally he came up with “How Frightening the World Is”, not because it was something he felt passionate about, exactly, but because he was truly bewildered. He figured if the point of it was to humiliate himself in front of the class then that was

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14:49

the bog filter and the little people

the rohn report ·

2022/06/16

In my backyard sits a fairly large in-ground swimming pool encased in concrete and tile - the home of 10,000 fish. I haven’t counted them all but there’s a lot. The little dark ones at least. The goldfish are fewer in number but much larger. In aggregate they form a biological community that swims around all day and eats algae off the walls of the pool as well as the fish pellets I throw in there. The reason I have fish swimming in my swimming pool is because I put them there. Ha! I put them

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7:21

Shakespeare or something . . .

the rohn report ·

2022/06/13

I’ll let someone else point out that systems based on greed will inevitably crash. It’s not my job to mention that living unsustainably on planet earth will result in turbulence. It’s up to the pundits to point out such things. They’re smart after all. They have experience in such matters. I’ll just say that it’s gonna be a wild ride. Hold on and buckle up buckaroo. If you enjoy the thrills and spills of a good movie or a carnival ride then it will be fantastic. We can all pull together like

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11:20

Lock Down and Other Joys of Life

the rohn report ·

2022/06/09

Honestly, lock down and covid restrictions have suited me just fine. I’m happy to stay home and be a hermit, listen to music, read and write; garden and ride my bike when I need to get out of the house. Right now I’m enjoying a tasty Cafe de Anatolia playlist. From 1:27:09.Yes I’m privileged but I worked hard for this. I did my time in the workforce, working for the man even when I was the man. That was even harder, actually, more responsibilities including coming up with the motivation and the

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11:55

common ground

the rohn report ·

2022/06/02

So I’m having this big long Facebook conversation about the evils and virtues of the vaccine. And he says Is it my right to choose not to vaccinate myself and my family? And I say Yeah it’s absolutely your right but then what is your responsibility to society knowing that you’re most infectious before you even have symptoms? And back and forth we go searching for common ground and not finding any.We’re friends actually and respect each other and I make the point that a worse disease than the

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3:39

here we are

the rohn report ·

2022/05/30

Happy Memorial Day, if you can say it that way.Here’s a special edition I published for paid subscribers a while back. It’s kind of an essay poem. With music. I like it alot so I wanted to share it with everybody. No more war.here we arein the 21st centuryfighting with each otherlike this was biblical timeslike this was the medieval agelike we were childrenarguing over a toythe toy is this worldits land its richesits peopleits motorcycles and its mountainsthat’s ridiculous of courseits motorcycles

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15:10

assemble the world

the rohn report ·

2022/05/26

So, as it turns out, we can’t experience the world at all. All we know of it is what our brain assembles out of the nuanced cacophony of electrical impulses surging along our optic nerve, thru our auditory nerve, and all the other nerves from their attendant stations on the periphery of our body. They relate to something, yes, but they make no sense until our brain paints a picture with them, creates a world that is recognizable and sane. It does the same in our sleep; it’s called dreaming.I find

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21:17

Sailing to Byzantium

the rohn report ·

2022/05/19

Listen to this podcast on your favorite platform with the podcast app above In his famous poem, Yeats goes on about sailing the seas to ‘the holy city of Byzantium’. Once there he proposes to escape the bonds of mortality and find new life as some sort of a magical bird ‘set upon a golden bough to sing’.That’s how I read it anyways with a little help from Andrew Spacey.Byzantium of course was the ancient capital of the Byzantine Empire, the center of European culture for a thousand years after the

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20:41

an epidemic of pandemics

the rohn report ·

2022/05/12

Ever since history has been recorded, pandemics have visited their destructive power on humanity - viruses and bacteria running amok, crossing borders, seas, mountain ranges, empires, and killing massive amounts of people. Smallpox, one of the most pernicious, is (or was, it has now been eradicated following a global vaccination campaign led by the World Health Organization) a tiny little virus that managed to kill between 300-500 million people during its long rampage thru the annals of history.

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11:07

Stories from the River

the rohn report ·

2022/05/05

Ah ha, I intended to do this podcast without music, unsure if people like the music I use or not. But I couldn’t manage it. When I heard this it was like, this is it! This is the rhythm of the river; or the rhythm of the natives living around the river more accurately. If you haven’t listened to the podcast version, I recommend it. It’s 11 minutes. You can download the podcast app or play it from the website, or you can play it directly from the email, just hit the play button. Put on the

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10:45

News and Views

the rohn report ·

2022/04/28

A big shout out to all those who have subscribed to the rohn report. We have reached 100! And a special thank you to the paid subscribers, all 14 of you! I am deeply appreciative of your patronage.Well we finally got rain. Felt good. It rained for several hours, soaked into the ground and fed the little roots of the little arugulas and the spinach and the collards and the kale and the sweet corn. They had been struggling. I love God again.Gabriela Novevska from Macedonia is singing her folk

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World Music in the House

the rohn report ·

2022/04/22

I’m so into music. It has healing vibes.Borders, countries, language, culture all separate us and define us. In fact our identity is based on what divides us. Even though we live on one planet, we don’t think of ourselves as ‘planetarians’. Even though we’re all humans we don’t think of ourselves as human first, we think of ourselves as American, German, Swedish, Dutch, Irish, Russian, Japanese, Indonesian, South African, Argentinian, whatever. An unfortunate characteristic of our human spirit

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21:45

I won't be here

the rohn report ·

2022/04/14

Days go by and weeks go by. Years go by. They don’t stop. After awhile you’re old.Everything that has happened in your life has happened in the past and everything that is going to happen in your life is in the future. It’s just that your future is a lot shorter than your past.My perspective has changed a lot over the years from ‘I’m going to live forever, hey how do you know I’m not?’ to ‘I won’t be here one day. Everybody else will but I won’t’.Nothing wrong with that. I’m just sayin. The

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22:21

Tales from the crib

the rohn report ·

2022/04/07

Enjoy the audio version orAfter writing about refugees in my last post I got a comment from Mary Ann pointing out that not only are people refugees but animals are refugees too. Pushed out of their natural living areas by humans, AKA ‘development’, they have to adapt or perish.My veterinarian once told me that when he was a kid there were deer roaming about in the wild savannah on the other side of Eisenhauer Road which is just a few blocks from my

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