Out of Trouble

Out of Trouble

Links to Out of Trouble [https://linktr.ee/nikharter] and my new website nikharter.com [nikharter.com] and my new Instagram [https://www.instagram.com/outoftroublenik/] for the Pod. New episodes up every Thursday!  Big things to come, stay tuned! Please rate and review if you have a second too, it's super appreciated. Thank you!    Other Resources: Movement for Black Lives [https://m4bl.org/] is a leading organization nationally. Wikipedia page [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defund_the_police] about Defunding the Police.

Dan The Cocaine Hurricane

Email: nik.harter@gmail.com [nik.harter@gmail.com] I got into this crazy fucking situation when I was trying to score an interview with this wacko, right, and he makes it a condition of the interview that I join him for a dice game. That's how I end up hanging out with a group of drug dealers and miscreants at a gay bar in the Castro at 10 in the morning on a Wednesday. I show up not really knowing what to expect, and quickly realize my friend (the wacko) Gary has more or less set this whole thing up to put his seedy dice friends on display for me. It's a queerly deranged sitcom and Gary intends to be the star, until The Cocaine Hurricane steals the show. Gary knows the microphone will draw a performance out of all of them, and in fact, I believe that’s the point of my being there. They tell jokes, go on rants, and share the most personal details of their life, while I muse on the power a microphone has to draw people out. So I spend three hours playing dice with a megalomaniacal hobo, a drug-addled über drivers and computer programmers, a skinhead, and straight-up drug dealers. We play dice and I’m amazed at how the microphone seems to cause a change in all of them. The booze and whatever substances they’re coming off of only exacerbate the effect I know that microphones already have (they help people be vulnerable). I leave carrying this guy Dan’s whole fucking life story on my recorder. Gary actually waits until afterward to inform me that they were all drug dealers and users and liars (especially Dan according to Gary). So I just held onto the for months, because... wtf do I do with it? Is any of it even real? Well…thank you corona, now you get to decide for yourself.  Btw, if you ever want someone to tell you their deepest darkest secrets— maybe it’s someone close to you, and it’s something you’ve wanted to know for a while— pull out a recorder and have a couple of drinks. Tell them why you're interested. See what happens. Hell, they might even perform for you! This story is about the power of a microphone.

Audio Poems

Chill Vibes. Beauty. Art. Glorious Distraction. Venmo: @Nik-Harter Email: nik.harter@gmail.com [nik.harter@gmail.com]

Find a Grave

Dana Galloway reconnects folks with their deceased and estranged loved ones via findagrave.com [http://findagrave.com/]. On this episode, I accompany her to Cypress Lawn Cemetery on one of her Find a Grave missions, just south of San Francisco. We tour the cemetery while discussing death, burial rituals, and bay area history. Dana shares how she became a grave hunter after someone found a lost family member for her.    The music for this episode was done by Golden Living Room. Check him out on Spotify, or find him here [https://goldenlivingroom.bandcamp.com/] on Bandcamp.    If you're interested in pauper's graves, cemeteries, taphophilia, ancestry, or alternative burial ideas-- beware. Not only will these topics be covered in this episode as we explore the bay area's Necropolis, Colma C.A., but Dana and I will also have serious (and sometimes humorous) discussions about death. What does it mean to die, for yourself, and the people in your life? How does life change after the first time someone close to you passes? Have you thought about how you'd like to buried? Have you ever felt the urge to visit a grave? This episode is not for the faint of heart. But if you do choose to journey with me deep into the bowls of the mausoleum, you'll come away with a sense of peace and wonder. That's what it means to visit a cemetery. That's what it means to find a grave.

Adult Learner

In the “College Dropout” series we examined why the dropout rate stands at 47%, and how becoming educated is related to becoming an adult. But what if you’re already an “adult” when you go to college? In this episode we answer the question: are you behind in life if you go back to school in your 30s, 40s, 50s, or beyond? How can we can think about going back to school when you’re older in a way that’s not so discouraging?   I’ll be presenting a series of interrelated interviews with some Adult Learners I met at the City College of San Francisco, along with an interview I conducted with the chancellor of C.C.S.F., Mark Rocha.   Chancellor Rocha was an Adult Learner himself; a lifelong english teacher, he went back to school at 55 to get an engineering degree. Chancellor Rocha has some wise words (or not) for one of our Adult Learners, Max, who’s feeling a little “behind the 8-ball” being on a campus with so many angsty young adults.   Music by Eli Siegel