PODCAST

: lower black pain.

Jd Michaels - The CabsEverywhere Creative Production House

Life’s lemons into rich, dark chocolate. lowerblackpain.substack.com

society & culture performing arts

All Episodes

9:05

Gutenberg. Kirby.

: lower black pain. ·

2025/08/28

So there’s this thing you can do with masking tape, where you make a little loop over two fingers and fasten it together and then put one of those loops in each corner of a piece of paper in order to place it on a wall. Though not recognized as an acceptable form of professional art handling at any major museum or gallery, in the late part of the last century this strategy did hold sway as the preferred method to display the carefully curated poster collections of young people in bedrooms across the

7:13

The Boxful Of Magical Time Ribbons.

: lower black pain. ·

2025/08/21

We’re celebrating the beginning of a “new school year” because at least one person in our home is going “back-to-school” in a few weeks. This means that the rest of us get to glom on to their excitement - purchasing our favorite pens, boxes of artisanal pencils, and the occasional odd-sized notebook that we absolutely do not need as we haven’t yet filled up last year’s notebooks with particularly compelling pencil or pen marks.As part of this pre-academic nesting, our household shared a mutual

7:50

The Perfect Summer Read.

: lower black pain. ·

2025/08/14

I have always enjoyed a good comic book - it’s a portable, colorful adventure. I have even been described as a “comic book kind of person”. Quite a few times. Hmn. Anyway, comics are great, but they are not my favorite kind of book.Of course, NOVELS, who doesn’t like a thick, engaging novel to get lost in? Or POETRY - inspiration to the very soul, essential expressions of the human spirit! I humbly respect all forms of the literary arts, but there is one category I find the most intriguing, most

7:32

Hum-da-dum.

: lower black pain. ·

2025/08/07

I hum a great deal. Not really humming exactly, there’s a rhythmical aspect to it, kind of a “bum-ba-dum”.Bum-da-dum dum dum dum dum…Going up the stairs to work, filling out forms, waiting in grocery lines, cleaning the house. Bum-ba-dum. It’s a bit like having a personal soundtrack.In many cities, this would be considered a problem. I’m lucky enough to live where we gently ignore one another, automatically assuming that people who seem to be speaking to themselves are either on the phone or

6:10

Vintage Cheeses.

: lower black pain. ·

2025/07/31

It’s the time for bread and wine as the year moves steadily on, days now getting shorter, summer both in full swing and ever-so-slight decline. Many of us can’t help but look past the sweltering days ahead of (and just behind) us with keen anticipation of the autumn and winter holidays, already anticipating how thematically unified those pumpkin-orange shoes will be, or the pretty of the streets with the houses once again covered in lights.But first, summer. The other half. The half when it’s

8:09

Cliffhangers.

: lower black pain. ·

2025/07/24

1958. A Nebraska editor creates a series of study guides for Shakespeare plays that sell over 58,000 copies in six months. The editor’s name? Clifton Hillegass.By 1964, his company was selling over one million books from the “Cliff’s Notes” series annually, summarizing everything from Greek myth to classic literature.It took much less time to finish one of these pamphlets than to read the actual novel or play, and they were categorized to show all the things that teachers cared about in school -

6:47

Sleeping With The Enemy.

: lower black pain. ·

2025/07/17

I’ve always had a problem with Darth Vader™ sheets, a specific concern that does not include the tapestries, house slippers or “comfy throw blankets” depicting the character, as it is not the simple combination of legendary cinema maniac with home textiles that disturbs me. It’s the children’s bedsheets depicting Darth Vader in a classic menacing stance, or sometimes as many as four or five action poses. I suppose I also must include the matching comforters and pillowcases.It’s not the creation of

7:46

The Kansan.

: lower black pain. ·

2025/07/10

Birds are easy to draw when they’re flying - pointy oval with a triangle coming off of each side.A basic airplane shape, admittedly, closely mimics that of a flying bird, at least for the models and styles most often seen above our cities.But PEOPLE, even with their hands on their hips, do NOT look like pointy ovals with two triangles coming out of them… even from far away. This is why the whole Superman™ meme confused me:“…it’s a bird!”“…it’s a plane!”“It’s SUPERMAN!™”REALLY? Surely a guy with a

7:06

101.

: lower black pain. ·

2025/07/03

Last week it was stiflingly hot; a result of which was the unprecedented difficulty I had writing my column. The little room where all my creative-y stuff is sequestered doesn’t get the air conditioning from the living room, so the temperature was about 94 degrees.My computer kept shutting itself off because it is more intelligent than I am.As it turned out, full sentences that I was absolutely certain I had included in the piece had not been added, and when reading the audio version I actually

7:17

100.

: lower black pain. ·

2025/06/26

About 100 degrees. For three days. Humidity: 70 percent.Such heat can add weary to worry, extreme to exhausted, and vaseline edges to focus. Even in air conditioning, the sun penetrates brick, mortar, steel, skin, and bone.Yet and still, I saw people jogging. In the park. Without a lion behind them, or an open full Brink’s truck rolling ahead of them.These are not “my people”; they do not exhibit a logical measure of self-preservation, as any physical benefit of exercise is nullified once the body

7:40

Garage.

: lower black pain. ·

2025/06/19

We have a storage unit, a 6 foot by 10 foot room in a gigantic warehouse building down by the docks: most likely used to be a processing factory for something that came in off a ship a couple of blocks away. It is a de facto “extra room” of our apartment, one of three we desperately need in order to not vividly project the lifestyle of “artistic madpeople”. Or at least make it a little less obvious to visitors. And random passers-by.As defined by its contents, this unit would be our “garage”:

7:10

Got To Be Real.

: lower black pain. ·

2025/06/12

I’m allergic to milk. While others stood in line at Baskin Robbins for ice cream cones, I sat on our front porch eating ice milk bars.Yes, it has the word “milk” in it, we saw the irony, but our before-the-internet and no-one-in-our-family-was-a-doctor logic assumed that CREAM was a more harmful word, since as everyone knows cream has more milk in it than milk does.Non-surprisingly, ice milk bars were significantly less enjoyable than ice cream, if for no less reason than the distinctive CRUNCH they

5:45

Planting Seeds.

: lower black pain. ·

2025/06/05

I started a little garden at work, in the window.Our office is on the ninth floor of one of those old-time office buildings that looks like an old-time office building - all brick and stone and evenly spaced windows with bold lentils. It’s a building that is easily drawn with a pencil, perfect for Superman to fly by or Spider-Man to swing from as he’s rushing uptown.The building is about 100 years old, and while the interior has been updated a few times, no amount of industrial carpet and pastel

5:16

Rusted Yet Untarnished.

: lower black pain. ·

2025/05/29

I left work yesterday whistling a sea shanty. I do not know many; I understand they are a quite popular genre in some circles. One of my first “favorite songs”was “What Shall We Do With The Drunken Sailor?” which for some reason we sang in Montessori - an odd choice given our landlocked position in Kansas City and lack of experience with alcohol.I don’t know that I can categorize the song I sang yesterday as a proper shanty, as it was written by John Denver, a very popular folk and country artist of

5:01

That. There.

: lower black pain. ·

2025/05/22

I have been called a maximalist, by both absolute strangers as well as people with whom I share the same silverware drawer.I’m forever “cleaning up”, “straightening”, and “organizing”. The trick is to just put things “back where they belong”. Most things have “a place to go”… books, for instance live on the bookshelf, vertically. Except for the few that are too large for the case, which have to go on top of it. And then the ones that don’t necessarily fit and have to be placed atop the others,

6:05

We've Only Just Begun.

: lower black pain. ·

2025/05/15

There I was, after work, standing at the front door looking out at the pouring rain, feeling all misty-eyed and wistful. So as the soundtrack for my two-and-a-half block walk to the subway, I played a song called “Rainy Days and Mondays” by The Carpenters.[Note to youth: The Carpenters were an incredibly popular brother and sister band in the 1970s, like Billie Eilish and Finneas.]The song is indeed kind of a wistful one, written by the same man who composed “The Rainbow Connection” for Kermit the

4:21

all of the buildings that used to be bookstores.

: lower black pain. ·

2025/05/08

“…hey. pal. how do i get to town from here?”“…well, just take a right where they're going to build that new shopping mall, go straight past where they're going to put in the freeway,take a left at what's going to be the new sports center,and keep going until you hit the place wherethey're thinking of building that drive-in bank.You can't miss it.”* Laurie Anderson [Big Science]If I was, and I’m not going tobut if I was to attempt to summarize 12 monthstie it in a bowwith a pithy phraseor twee

6:17

Content.

: lower black pain. ·

2025/05/01

The penultimate column of the third year of lowerblackpain. I never saw it comin’. But here we are, together. Thank you for your time.There is a popular internet trend where two photos are displayed next to each other, the first labeled “how it started” and the second “how it’s going”. The juxtaposition implies that between the first image and the second a great deal has occurred:First image:a summertime photo of two kids in overalls sitting by a lake on a dock, laughing.Second image:a summertime

5:30

Next Stop, 145th St.

: lower black pain. ·

2025/04/24

Dear Grandpa,I haven’t been up to much: went to a new dentist this week because our old one stopped taking our insurance. The hygienist took 45 minutes to survey my mouth, racking up a list of potential things they could charge for: I felt like a car on the rack at a disreputable mechanics shop. You could almost hear the “ca-ching” sound of an old cash register every time she poked and prodded something. My teeth are actually fine – our old dentist just examined them.The family’s doing well, but the

4:23

Light Verse.

: lower black pain. ·

2025/04/17

April in the US has been officially designated National Poetry Month. April in the US has also been officially designated National Brunch Month, National Jazz Appreciation Month, and National Welding Month. Not wedding; WELDING.April is also Stress Awareness Month as well as National Cannabis Awareness Month, two Awarenesses which seem to entirely offset one other.It’s a lot of things, April - a time when quite a few incredibly important issues are annually commemorated, and in this mix is “National

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