104 - One Hundred Four

[TRANSCRIPT]

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Breaker, breaker, this is Whiskey, sitting on the hood of my car, looking at newspaper rock. 

You know, the further West you go, the newer all the buildings get, but the older the land. Does that make sense? Maybe it’s just that there’s more of it out here—more land I mean—but it feels like back East we completely destroyed what evidence there was that people have lived on here for a long time. I don’t know of any place like this on the East Coast. 

So. What is this place, you ask? Newspaper rock. Well, it’s a rock, obviously. And it’s got all these carvings on it. Petroglyphs, I think they’re called. From…I don’t know, thousands of years ago? And they’re of all sorts of things—animals, people, animals and people together, people riding horses, that kind of stuff. I can’t…I’m not sure if it’s telling some kind of story, but given the name, I assume historians think it’s a depiction of a significant event, or a few significant events. 

I wonder how much we were really able to figure out about it. I don’t know anything about archeology or translation or if this is even a language or just, you know, a nice painting. I recognize the shapes, but I don’t understand what it’s trying to say. 

There’s a metaphor for my whole life. Or, at least the last six years of it. Even now, talking to you, Birdie, I understand the words you’re using, and the order you’re putting them in makes sense, but I don’t know what you’re saying. Harry always spoke deliberately, with perfect diction and five dollar words and I’m not sure I ever really understood her. I’m not sure she ever really understood me, either. At least, not what I was really trying to say. 

How do historians learn to translate dead languages? How do they know they’re right? How do I know that anything I ever say is being heard in the way I mean it?

Maybe this is all too philosophical for ten in the morning. I just…I wish I had my own Rosetta stone, you know? Something to make it all make sense. Something to tell me the meaning behind the words. 

Signing off. 

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