Lifegasm Book I: Marshall's Promise
26 episodes - English - Latest episode: over 2 years ago - ★★★★★ - 6 ratingsIn October, 2016 I looked death right in the eyeballs and the truth of the universe/ life/ love/ God/ infinity cracked open before me. Truth is the best news in the world (YOU CAN END YOUR SUFFERING RIGHT NOW!!!) (if your human rights aren't being violated), and this book is my best effort to sing its sweet melody from the rooftops. ******************************************** During my journey, I ended my marriage (amicably). I explored my sexuality (enthusiastically). And I carried on my shoulder an enormous, colorful sugar skull named Maestro—which I’ll explain later. I lived transiently (voluntarily) for the better part of a year, which got me asking A LOT of big questions about private property and human rights and legal versus spiritual freedom. And yet, from the heart of the storm that was my new life, I was finally at peace. I was finally in balance. I was finally... a homeless divorcee with no marketable skills?******************************************** Marshall’s Promise is the first of a three-book series. Each podcast episode is a chapter read aloud, and I recommend you start with the introduction and listen through chronologically. Questions? Find me @evywallace across all social media platforms or send me an email.
Homepage Apple Podcasts Google Podcasts Overcast Castro Pocket Casts RSS feed
Episodes
La Grande Observer Article (Inexplicably Unpublished!) Read Aloud
August 20, 2021 07:00 - 11 minutes - 8.13 MB8/20/21 UPDATE: EO Media Group (the owners of the paper) say the story was prematurely posted online, and that it should be running FRONT PAGE sometime next week! Hooray! The La Grande Observer sent a reporter to interview me on August 6 about my protest against mass incarceration, which was GREAT. The article was published on August 14 (along with a dope photo, if I do say so myself), which was also GREAT. Then, the story was inexplicably UNPUBLISHED! Which was NOT great. As of today (Augu...
La Grande Observer Article Read Aloud
August 20, 2021 07:00 - 11 minutes - 8.13 MB8/20/21 UPDATE: EO Media Group (the owners of the paper) say the story was prematurely posted online, and that it should be running FRONT PAGE sometime next week! Hooray! The La Grande Observer sent a reporter to interview me on August 6 about my protest against mass incarceration, which was GREAT. The article was published on August 14 (along with a dope photo, if I do say so myself), which was also GREAT. Then, the story was inexplicably UNPUBLISHED! Which was NOT great. As of today (Augu...
Chapter 21... Lifegasm Book I: Marshall's Promise
August 05, 2021 00:00 - 32 minutes - 22.1 MB*Who's Your Daddy?* EXCERPT: Some of my girlfriends raised their eyebrows when I told them the plan, but they knew better than to tell me I was nuts. I wasn’t stupid! I’d survived a good long time in this world walking the road less traveled. Clare admonished me gently when I told her about Mr. Florida: “Ok, if you think that’s safe, godspeed. But I’ll tell you something, Evy, about why I like you as a friend: you’re the opposite of boring.”
Chapter 22... Lifegasm Book I: Marshall's Promise
August 05, 2021 00:00 - 5 minutes - 4.12 MB*The Sugar Skull* EXCERPT: I set up my phone, hit record. But something felt… different. “I know I’ve been calling these meditation videos,” I explained. “But that doesn’t feel entirely true. “Meditation” doesn’t feel like the most accurate word. There is a word, satsang, that translates to “meeting with truth,” but I don’t like to use Sanskrit because it feels like it keeps people out. It’s like if you don’t speak that language, you’re not invited. I haven’t come across a word in English ye...
Chapter 20... Lifegasm Book I: Marshall's Promise
August 04, 2021 19:00 - 24 minutes - 16.9 MB*Manhattan, Manhattan, Manhattan* EXCERPT: Online degrees were a dime a dozen, especially those with religious affiliations, so it would have been easy peasy if I self-identified as Christian. But because I was unwilling to earn a degree from a Christian institution, my 4,000 options dwindled to approximately four. And two of the four were Harvard and Yale. So, mere acceptance was already looking like a pitfall. Then, assuming I could jump the hurdles of getting into these schools, the short...
Chapter 20... CONTINUED!
July 28, 2021 19:00 - 9 minutes - 6.38 MBHey guys! Sorry for any confusion. I went to record what I'd written as chapter 21, only to realize it really should have been part of chapter 20. BUT. Instead of making you go back and re-listen to an updated version of chapter 20, I'll just give you the separate audio file for a few weeks, then I'll merge it into one full chapter and any new listeners won't have to deal with this cut-and-paste version of chapter 20. And don't worry! The REAL chapter 21 ("Who's Your Daddy?") will drop on Fr...
Chapter 19... Lifegasm Book I: Marshall's Promise
July 16, 2021 07:00 - 14 minutes - 10.1 MB*That's Private* EXCERPT: So. It was looking like the institution of private property was a real problem. Private property allows us, one human to another, to say “this is mine, you aren’t allowed to physically exist here, even if you need to sleep, even if you need to eat, even if you need to piss. If you exist here, I can call men with guns who we have collectively agreed have the authority to take you away. Or if I choose to let you exist here, you must give me money. If you don’t, I’ll c...
Chapter 18... Lifegasm Book I: Marshall's Promise
July 09, 2021 07:00 - 22 minutes - 15.8 MB*Giving Thanks* EXCERPT: This would be my first NFL experience, and I was moderately excited to do a thing I’d never done. But I’m not going to go into the details of how the Giants lost to the Redskins that day, or how institutional racism is so embedded in American culture that an official NFL team can still call themselves the “Redskins” with impunity (or could do so in 2017), or my discovery that an important component of spectator sports is shit-talking, or that most people really do se...
Chapter 17... Lifegasm Book I: Marshall's Promise
July 02, 2021 07:00 - 25 minutes - 17.6 MB*The Sex Club* EXCERPT: In theory, I was familiar with the concept of a spank bank, but I had never consciously cultivated my own inner reel of sexually-charged moments. This was probably because I’d been so ashamed to have sexual thoughts in the first place, especially if the sexual thoughts involved fucked-up cult sex, like in Martha Marcy May Marlene. But how unhealthy was that? I was a thirty-six-year-old human adult and I was ashamed of having sexual thoughts? What the fuck, right? Are ...
Chapter 16... Lifegasm Book I: Marshall's Promise
June 25, 2021 07:00 - 20 minutes - 13.8 MB*Jingle Bells* EXCERPT: We spent the rest of the weekend engaging in hilarious, articulate, informed discussions about everything with Madeline and the village. We visited her classroom and got introduced to her reptiles: there was Houdini the ball python, Milkshake the milk snake, ET the red eared slider turtle, and Frogzilla the African clawed frog. We explored the area, from the Padgetts' back yard to the Vassar campus to the extended Hudson River Valley. As an engineer, Jingle Bells was ...
Chapter 15... Lifegasm Book I: Marshall's Promise
June 18, 2021 07:00 - 26 minutes - 18.3 MB*Things Fall Apart* EXCERPT: If the grocery store was a strikeout, the rest of the week was a losing streak. One of the reasons I’d been so attracted to Little Jack was his willingness to dominate me. As a good feminist, I’d never known I was allowed to want to be dominated. It was never a spoken rule, just an assumption: strong women can’t be held down by men. But, as a lover in Los Angeles later told me, “I’ll hold you down, but I’ll never hold you back.” I’d come to terms with the fact t...
Chapter 14... Lifegasm Book I: Marshall's Promise
June 11, 2021 07:00 - 12 minutes - 8.75 MB*Much Ado* EXCERPT: I was traveling Southwest, my favorite little airline. What makes this scrappy little discount company such a treasure, you wonder? I’ll tell you why. First, they’re just friendly. And that matters. But also, it’s because Southwest made all the right policy choices in all the right places. For starters, they don’t charge you extra for checked luggage, so as long as you pack with that policy in mind, you can kiss all that will-there-be-room-for-my-carry-on anxiety goodbye...
Chapter 13... Lifegasm Book I: Marshall's Promise
June 04, 2021 07:00 - 18 minutes - 12.5 MB*London Calling* EXCERPT: At one point back in London, Olivia mentioned how noticeable my weight loss was. And she was right. I’d dropped over twenty pounds since she’d last seen me in Mexico. It was all rather entertaining to me at the time. After decades of food obsession, body-obsession, self-abuse and anger, I’d finally let it all go. Once I discovered the truth of who I really was, I recognized that my value was uncorrelated with my weight. Our cultural fixation on weight loss is really...
Chapter 12... Lifegasm Book I: Marshall's Promise
May 28, 2021 07:00 - 26 minutes - 18.5 MB*The Dating Game* EXCERPT: I’ve been careful not to disparage the men I’ve slept with, especially for qualities that are unable to be changed (like natural endowment, for example) but I want to point out that there are some general, universal guidelines that you must follow if you want to be a good lover. While it is still true that what turns me on is probably different than what turns you on, and that neither of us are wrong even if we would be wrong for each other, it is also true that no...
Chapter 11... Lifegasm Book I: Marshall's Promise
May 21, 2021 07:00 - 13 minutes - 9.16 MB*Meeting with Truth* EXCERPT: As I looked up at the stars, I reflected on what I’d learned about the sacred essence of shelter: a place to sleep is not like a pair of pricey Italian boots. Shelter is not an indulgence we can live without. So if someone you love asks you to share your roof and you refuse, you’re essentially casting them into the darkness. Yes, we live in a world where that darkness can be mitigated by hotel rooms, but that’s capitalism’s answer to the problem. When someone as...
Chapter 10... Lifegasm Book I: Marshall's Promise
May 14, 2021 07:00 - 20 minutes - 14.5 MB*My Grandma, The Moon* EXCERPT: I prepared myself for a seven-hour stretch in the car, which wasn’t terribly challenging after so much practice. I had Peaches the artist to keep me company (“keep on it, keep on it, you own it…”) and perfect faith that seven hours was no big deal, that I could eat it up, that it was a privilege to have so much uninterrupted time to myself. And so it was. Road-Trip-gasm!
Chapter 9... Lifegasm Book I: Marshall's Promise
May 14, 2021 07:00 - 8 minutes - 6.09 MB*Harriet's House of Healing* EXCERPT: My last scheduled night in Colorado came and went, so I’d have about a week to account for before seeing Gangaji. ‘What’s another seven days of shelter manifestation?’ I chuckled to myself. However, it felt wrong to ask my Colorado people to extend my stay with them. I knew it felt wrong because my gut said so. Or my intuition said so. Or my deepest heart said so. Or God said so. Tomato tomahto, God is good. Leaving Colorado was the right thing to do. I ...
Chapter 8... Lifegasm Book I: Marshall's Promise
May 07, 2021 07:00 - 20 minutes - 14.1 MB*The Birthday Surprise* EXCERPT: I’d never been into a strip club before (except for that one time in Guam…) because I’d always made assumptions about what they represented and what kind of people spent time inside. Now, of course, I was making a habit of questioning everything. Were strip clubs the naughty, gross, exploitive, venues full of lowlifes that I’d been conditioned to believe they were? ‘Let’s go find out,’ said my deepest heart.
Chapter 7... Lifegasm Book I: Marshall's Promise
April 30, 2021 09:00 - 6 minutes - 4.65 MB*Privilege* EXCERPT: The following chapter was written contemporaneously with its release (that is, in April of 2021).... Now that the book is complete and I am releasing it, in standard Evy Wallace unconventional fashion, as this podcast, it occurs to me that the time I spent wandering and wondering and writing were merely placeholders, giving me something to do until I got here. Now. Now I know what I was born to do, and it involves fighting (nonviolently!) to demand that the birthrights o...
Chapter 6... Lifegasm Book I: Marshall's Promise
April 30, 2021 08:00 - 13 minutes - 9.42 MB*Broken Promises* EXCERPT: It’s challenging to explain my level of hunger, because I was many steps away from starving to death. But there’s a wide swath of human experience that lands somewhere between feeling fully satiated and dying of starvation, and while I was never worried that I wouldn’t have enough, and I’m certainly not complaining, I was more grateful for the miracle of food than I ever had been. I loaded up my plate with cheesy eggs, hash browns, and grilled asparagus, go figure,...
Chapter 5... Lifegasm Book I: Marshall's Promise
April 23, 2021 08:00 - 32 minutes - 22.1 MB*The Spiritual Road Trip* EXCERPT: When I arrived in Utah, I was surprised at how many people were milling about the public park who seemed, by their appearances, to not have reliable shelter. It’s hard for me to call people homeless, because then it becomes their identity, their title, their permanent truth; this same inescapable labeling tends to happen with anyone who has worked as a professional dancer at a gentlemen’s club, which is why all the women I know who have been employed as str...
Chapter 4... Lifegasm Book I: Marshall's Promise
April 16, 2021 07:00 - 26 minutes - 18.4 MB*The Goddess Chakra* EXCERPT: In those early months, my learning curve was steep. I learned that sexual needs represent an appetite that is just as legitimate, important, and unattached to shame as hunger. I learned that men weren’t the sex machines I’d been falsely conditioned to believe they were. (As it turns out, men are people, too!) I learned that meeting new lovers and checking the multilayered categories of compatibility takes a lot of energy (i.e., cost), and sometimes my body wasn...
Chapter 3... Lifegasm Book I: Marshall's Promise
April 14, 2021 18:00 - 4 minutes - 3.05 MB*Self First is NOT Selfish* EXCERPT: In walking the walk of my shifted value system, in following the constant call of my deepest divinity, in prioritizing the needs of my own heart and spirit, I was often accused of acting selfishly. My mom certainly seemed to think so. Others who had never expressed one iota of concern for my or my children’s well-being were now suddenly reaching out to offer the unsolicited advice that everything would be okay “as long as the kids [came] first. But I will...
Chapter 2 .... Lifegasm Book I: Marshall's Promise
April 09, 2021 07:00 - 1 hour - 46.8 MB*To All Things A Season* EXCERPT: Let me be clear: I was not pretending there wasn’t a loss to be mourned. Transformations come with growing pains. My fifteen-year marriage was ending; this ending was correct and necessary, and it was extremely uncomfortable for (what felt like) unbearably long moments. And yet, just as my heart kept beating after the excruciating discomfort caused by Marshall’s death, I knew my heart would keep beating after the turmoil of divorce. DISCLAIMER: You will hear...
Chapter 1... Lifegasm Book I: Marshall's Promise
April 02, 2021 07:00 - 45 minutes - 31.3 MB*I Am A Strange Loop* EXCERPT: This saga started two full summers ago, when I saw the writing nook for what it really was and heard Maestro, who had just died, say from behind me, “it’s always been a book.” No, that’s not right. It started in the autumn of 2016, when Marshall left us and cracked the universe open on his way out. Or maybe it started in 2001, when I spent a weekend in Yosemite with my girlfriends and flirted with a strapping young ranger in uniform. Or, come to think of it, le...
Intro... Lifegasm Book I: Marshall's Promise
March 31, 2021 19:00 - 9 minutes - 6.86 MBWelcome to Lifegasm Book I: Marshall's Promise, released in podcast form for your (free!) listening pleasure. EXCERPT: In October of 2016 I looked death right in the eyeballs and I woke up to truth. When I hear myself say this, I hear how it might sound arrogant or egotistical. But the moral of this story is not that I am any more or less special than anyone else, quite the opposite, actually.... Additionally, I make no claim to be the first or only human to have experienced such an epipha...