Welcome back to horizontal, the podcast that makes private conversations public, or, in the words of listener ghostheart, "takes you into my bed and lets your ears watch as I unzip intimate conversations."

In this episode, I lie down with my closest friend from high school, Joe McCue. I have a couple of guys who went to other high schools that I considered my "older brothers," whom I'm still in contact with, but you might say that people from that time in my life are few and far between. Which makes my friendship with Joe all the more precious to me. Joe and I went to an arts magnet school at Gibbs, called Pinellas County Center for the Arts, or PCCA for short. His major was Visual Art; mine was Performance Theatre. He was one year ahead of me in school.

Joe is now an osteopath. He spent eight years in undergrad, because he just adored the act of study, and kept starting majors and nearly finishing them, only to become swept away by another major and course of study (or at least, that's how it seemed to me). Eventually, he decided to become a doctor, and went to school for, I don't know, 9 more years or so. He's now finishing out his fellowship in Osteopathic Neuromusculoskeletal Medicine in Bangor, Maine.

This episode was recorded in Joe's sweet old house in Bangor, where he lives with two cats, a wife, a child, and the occasional miscellaneous borrowed pet.

Joe's house was the second stop on my 10,000 mile cross-country road trip, and this episode marks the first release from the series of recordings I made on my "horizontal does america" tour. In October and November of 2017, I, a couple of suitcases, and my recording equipment circumnavigated the United States in a Honda Civic - in order to lie down with people in their homes, in their cities.

Joe and I got horizontal in his guest room — his wife next door making phone calls from their bedroom, baby asleep, cats locked out, dog-sitting dog downstairs, cars going by on the sleepy country street. The next morning we went to Treworgy farm and did a photo shoot among the pumpkins. (For visual aids, such as photos of my Vargas girl-style pinup among the pumpkins, head to horizontalwithlila.com and sign up for the mailing list. You'll get behind the scenes images, special stories, and discounts on live shows delivered directly to your inbox!)

If you enjoy lying down with Joe and I, become a patron of the horizontal arts! Patreon is an innovation in the life of the artist. It's a website that crowdsources income on a monthly basis. It can make it possible for me to continue creating independent, uncensored, ad-free, homemade radio. There are lovely perks when you become my patron. For instance, for $25 a month you'll recorded love poems (the upcoming poem will be "She Walks in Beauty"). You'll also get two tickets to a live recording of horizontal, quarterly lullabies, an invitation to my secret FB group, and a post of what I call GPG: Genuine Public Gratitude (or not! If you want to remain a private patron, I will honor you privately!) There's loads of other perks on patreon.com/horizontalwithlila

Because I cannot bear to see them go to waste, here are some other titles I considered for this episode:

the paper anniversary

the nose couple

And

the vanilla episode

So you know what you should do, right? You should come lie down with us.

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Credit where credit is due:

Here's the moment where I give credit where credit is due: This episode was edited by Chad Michael Snavely! Peruse Chad's other podcasts on chadmichael.com. My sinuous cover art is by the illustrator Shana Shay, whom you can hire through 99designs - she's a pleasure to work with. Horizontal's theme music is by Alan Markley, on Instagram as plasticcannons.