text: \*\*An Interest in Waterboarding\*\* &#x200B; “I’m interested in waterboarding. And not in any sort of masochistic way. At least as far as I’m aware. I had already sort of been fascinated by it, but I’ve sort of been taken by the notion that you can never really know someone, you can just have images of them. I think that illuminated the path to that, admittedly, rather strange desire. &#x200B; “Before, I thought that I thought it was interesting because a lot of the time I feel like I’m drowning while also being fully aware that I’m not. And I figured there was some deeper need to experience a real, physical manifestation of that feeling. Like if I could experience real drowning, it would put my daily miseries into the proper context. If I’m experiencing drowning at like a 6 because I’m tired of my job but have specialized myself into a corner where I won’t be able to pay back the money to achieve that specialization unless I continue. And my baseline of drowning is like a 3, I feel like I’m drowning twice as much as normal. But if I got waterboarded which would be like a 30 or whatever, that would sort of make it feel small in comparison, right? &#x200B; “But now I’m thinking that if we only have images of other people, isn’t that true of ourselves too? We have really a very small range of experiences most of the time so we have some reasonable expectation of how we’ll react. But how many people will really, actually be tortured in their life? And it’s depicted in movies all the time isn’t it? I think people have some idea of whether they’d give in and reveal the location of the secret base or whatever. But you can’t know, can you? And waterboarding is supposed to be torture without the damage. At least physical anyway, I’m not trying to minimize what I’m sure can have a lasting psychic trauma associated with it, especially when repeated I’d imagine. But my feeling is that because mine would be a voluntary ordeal I could do it if someone I know was trained to do it. &#x200B; “I read about this terrorist who would laugh and count down the seconds that they were legally allowed to waterboard him for. I think secretly we all think we’re that guy, you know? It’s really sort of a masculine thought. Like I kind of understand now why guys drink themselves into the ER thinking they’re Andre the Giant or something. We feel like we can take it, you know? I used to think of all the biological variables that go into alcohol tolerance and just pity these ordinary looking people for thinking they could possibly be extraordinary in that totally useless way. Isn’t it better to have a low tolerance anyway? Like it’s cheaper and doesn’t take as long. &#x200B; “But anyway, now I think my fascination with waterboarding is more about revealing that dark corner of my self portrait. And now that I’m explaining it this way, I’m kind of realizing that the way we know ourselves isn’t actually different to the way we know others, it’s really just different in degree, and so maybe you can really know people? Or does it mean you’re just a stranger to yourself?” &#x200B; The man across the table blinked and said “I meant interests as in like... podcasts.