I am an indoor cat. The indoors is where all of my favorite stuff is and where one of my least favorite things—the sun—isn’t.

I don’t hate everything outdoors though, as I’ve grown quite a fondness for roller coasters, thrill rides, and anything that can offer me a brief respite from constantly reviewing all the mistakes of my life. So when I was coerced into taking a family vacation earlier this summer, I spent a lot of time on the roller coasters of Busch Gardens, slowly rising above my lot in life before plunging back down to Earth.

In fact, I spent a little too much time on the roller coasters and not enough time at the drink stand, because I managed to work myself up a decent dehydration. I recovered well from it, but in the process I broke my almost month-long streak of solid, no-wipe-needed poops, leaving me with a feeling I can only categorize as “heartbreak.”

So while the rest of the family was floating down the lazy river, I was back in the hotel room playing on the computer and wiping my ass (not at the same time; I’m still paying off that computer). It wasn’t all bad though, because being inside surrounded by screens is all I really wanted anyway.

Sometime between bathroom breaks, one of my screens lit up with a message from This Podcast Will Kill You asking if I’d like to be on their Cystic Fibrosis episode. I, having more words than I know what to do with, immediately said “yes.” Two weeks later, I hopped on Skype and had a wonderful conversation with Erin Welsh and Erin Allmann Updyke, the best parts of which you can hear right here, introducing and closing their excellent episode on Cystic Fibrosis. 

No disrespect to An Introduction to Cystic Fibrosis for Patients and Families, which is/was my go-to CF resource for years, but I wish this episode was available when I was younger. Erin and Erin are able to communicate complicated ideas in ways that only the best amongst us can and this episode taught me everything I know about the actual discovery of CF.

They were also nice enough to offer me the opportunity to play some music on their show. The smart thing to do would have been to ask them to play a song off of the latest All Hallow’s Evil album No Gods, Only Monsters, which is currently available at https://allhallowsevil.bandcamp.com/album/no-gods-only-monsters or wherever digital music is sold. However, none of the songs on that felt thematically appropriate to the conversation we had so I wrote brand new song for the episode, “Complete Somatic Rebellion.” It’s currently available at https://allhallowsevil.bandcamp.com/track/complete-somatic-rebellion and will probably show up on streaming services in a month or so.