The ping from the email client sounded impossibly loud in the quiet studio. Subject: ‘That thing you said in episode 47?’. My heart sank. It wasn’t a bad feeling, not exactly. It was the familiar, dull ache of impotence. The sender, a listener named Mark, was lovely. He was complimentary. He just had one simple question: “You mentioned a specific technique for aging metal signs around the 37-minute mark with Rachel. Could you remind me what it was? I can’t find it.”
I couldn’t either. Not easily. I knew the episode he meant. It was a fantastic conversation with Rachel D.-S., a woman who restores vintage neon signs in a dusty workshop that smells of ozone and old paint. She speaks in beautifully constructed paragraphs about bringing light back to forgotten things. And somewhere, buried in 77 minutes of WAV file, was the specific chemical process he was asking about. Finding it would mean manually scrubbing through the audio, listening intently, stopping, starting, guessing. It was like trying to find a specific word in a book with all the pages glued together. The information was there, I created it, but I was locked out of my own work. A frustrating echo of standing outside my car just yesterday, keys sitting visibly on the driver’s seat, completely and utterly useless.
“The information was there, I created it, but I was locked out of my own work.”
“
The Ship in a Bottle