Tags:
audiobook
humor
memoir
Script:
The first entry in the dating sweepstakes was Donnie, an aspiring actor. He fostered dogs for the SPCA, worked as a handyman, was divorced with two estranged daughters and a vengeful ex. He was a recovering alcoholic with a full year of sobriety under his belt. He attended AA meetings religiously. He was also of Scottish descent, wrote poetry—truly abominable, I soon found out—and liked to wear a kilt to formal gatherings. He had a sailboat and enjoyed live theater. He loved dining out at interesting restaurants. He confided all this at our first meeting, a walk around a nearby park dragging a dog of uncertain origin whom he was fostering. I don't mind dogs. I've loved a few but never owned one, because keeping animals seems to me akin to being responsible for a prisoner. This one growled low in her throat when I tried to stroke her, and so I kept my distance, sizing up Donnie while trying to keep out of the dog's way. Donnie was considerably shorter than me, with a totally bald, tanned pate, round glasses emphasizing dancing green eyes, an actor's deep, vivacious voice, a workman's sinewy body and the face of a wicked leprechaun. It was barely like at first sight, but heaven help me, I decided to give it a try. He turned up for our first date with a damned dog in tow, which should have rung a warning bell.
Tags:
fiction
romance
audiobook
Script:
He wanted to kiss her, wanted to drink the rain from her lips, and feel the water on their bodies turn to steam. You should go inside, he said instead, get dried off, because anything else would be a really bad idea. Yeah, she looked up at him blinking the raindrops from her lashes, then she held out her hand. I thought we already called a truce. He didn't want to shake again, he wanted more. Apparently, she was smarter than that. This isn't a truce, she said, this time we're making a pact. Her eyes fired with resolve, to learning from our mistakes, sticking to our lists, and choosing better the next time, whenever that might be. Yeah, that resonated. He closed his fingers around hers, to choosing better, which right now meant getting in his truck and going back to Mustang Ridge before he did something stupid.
Tags:
scifi
audiobook
fiction
Script:
Brothers in Arms Chapter 5 She smiled at him, but her eyes were cold. It's your fault, you know. There was a pang in the center of his chest, deep and piercing. He winced reflexively, touching his sternum gingerly. There was a frantic pulsing there, fast and insistent. Why are you here? He could feel an aching pressure in his chest now, and he wanted nothing more than for it to go away. You know why. You know what you did. Lightning flashed, and his body jolted with a numbing impact, sending him staggering back against the wall. He clutched at his chest, wheezing and gasping for air as the last shocks jerked through him. His chest felt tight and heavy, as if something was weighing down on his ribs. She seemed to be waiting for something, sitting there watching him with glittering eyes as he struggled to catch his breath. As he slowly pushed from the wall and stumbled towards the table again, she leaned forward, her hands flat on the table. Behind her, the window suddenly shattered, and the storm swept in through the broken shards. What did I do? Her lips tilted again in that empty smile, her eyes like mirrors. He couldn't breathe, couldn't see for the raindrops lashing his face. You were born. Another hard jolt shook through him, merciless in its intensity.
Tags:
selfhelp
nonfiction
parenting
audiobook
Script:
Once the tantrum begins, most parents engage in a range of strategies to get their child to pull themselves together. They try to talk them out of their upset. It's okay, you'll get to go back to the playground tomorrow. They make threats. If you don't stop screaming and crying, you won't get any screen time tomorrow. They offer rewards. You can get a special treat before bedtime if you calm down. While some of these strategies work some of the time, they can have an unintended negative consequence. When you make it all better or threaten your child out of his upset, it is a missed opportunity for him to learn to manage his difficult feelings and see that he can cope with the challenges he faces.
Tags:
audiobook
fiction
Script:
CHAPTER 26 MARIA There had been bruises on her arms. Did he try to rape her? Did she jump into the water to escape him? Did she hit her head on the platform, or did he knock her out with a weapon? I didn't know. I couldn't know. All I knew was that my baby had to have been terrified. My little girl had been trying to act so much like a woman, trying so hard to be grown up, to make decisions for herself, albeit poor ones. She thought she was so independent, on the road to freedom from me and my rules. I was certain that, at that moment on the platform, she was reduced to the little angel of a child I used to carry around on my hip. The little girl who called me Mommy, who thought the sun rose and set on me. Whenever I thought of her final moments, I felt her fear, a ringing, retching terror in the center of my chest. It made me want to scream and pound the walls. It once made me strike my little daughter, Julie. It was hard to admit to hating one of my children, but for a few days, I believe I did hate Julie for her part in Isabel's death. It wasn't until much later that I realized it was myself I loathed, but back then Julie took the brunt of it all. She took the full weight of my grief. Sometime in the last 41 years, I'd been able to make a sort of peace with that night. Peace might have been the wrong word, but I'd at least been able to live with what happened and with my failings as a mother. I'd forgiven Charles for his permissiveness with Isabel, and I'd taken comfort in knowing that the man responsible for her death and for those last horrible minutes of her life was rotting in prison. I'd felt such hatred for George Lewis, and that hatred extended to every other black man I'd see before my intellect would take over, and I could remind myself that Lewis was one man who acted alone and was not representative of his entire race and gender. Now it seemed that all the hatred I'd expended on him might have been misdirected.
Tags:
nonfiction
audiobook
business
Script:
Gildan Media, a division of Recorded Books, presents Engine of Inequality, the Fed and the Future of Wealth in America, by Karen Petru, narrated by Randy Kay. The Economic Recovery Mirage The Federal Reserve touted a robust U.S. economy starting in 2015 and then up to and even after COVID hit in March 2020. President Trump cited stock prices, gross domestic product, GDP, and record employment numbers when it suited him. When it didn't, he blamed the Fed, arguing that big economic gains on all of these counts would have continued were it not for a miserly central bank or, after COVID, unduly cautious public health officials. Mr. Trump had a far better sense of the electorate's mood and how to move it than the Fed. But each of their statements, nonetheless, portrayed a prosperity remote from the lives of many, including the large percentages of those who voted for Donald Trump in 2016.
Tags:
audiobook
selfhelp
Script:
Not everyone can identify his or her decision to get clean so precisely. Not everyone finds recovery at the same pace or in the same way. But addicts who make the transition from being an active user to a recovering addict seem to follow similar steps along their journeys. These steps include becoming aware of the problems addiction is causing in their lives, experiencing deep unhappiness with their situations, deciding that they want to overcome their addictions, and finding meaningful support for their efforts to recover. As one therapist who has worked with addicted clients for more than 25 years explained, most addicts want to get clean even if they are not ready to admit it. I don't know anyone who likes waking up dope-sick every day. I don't know anyone who says, when I was a kid my goal was to sell my body on the street or to live in crack houses and go to jail. They have a terrible disease, but most of them want to get better. The trick is to tap into that desire and help them build on it. He went on to say that three things affect how somebody changes. 1. The unique set of strengths, weaknesses, and resources, including personality and family, the individual brings to the situation. 2. The skills and tools, including education and awareness, the individual acquires through treatment and experience. And 3. The support of a healing relationship with somebody else, such as a therapist, minister, or sponsor, a mentor in a 12-step program such as Alcoholics Anonymous or Narcotics Anonymous, who can help the individual mobilize personal strengths on his or her own.
Tags:
nonfiction
selfhelp
Script:
What's fascinating about patience in love is that when we accept one another as we are, we actually increase the possibility of change. That's because our partner's patience produces a safe haven where we are accepted, warts and all, and in the warmth of that acceptance, we may actually feel safe enough to risk growing. Thus, our partner may even end up changing in the ways we desire precisely because we have given them the space to do so.
Tags:
memoir
nonfiction
schizophrenia
audiobook
Script:
I took a good look at my son, taking inventory. Wrinkled, dirty clothes, perhaps the second or third day in a row he had worn them, hair filthy, face unshaven, eyes frighteningly vacant. Then, I said as calmly as I could, stop this, talk to me. He wrote some more, I can't. How are you going to get a job if you won't talk? He shrugged again. And you can't look for a job like that, you're a mess, Ben, you have no food, you have no money, you were supposed to have a job by now, what have you been doing? Ben pointed to the board again and shrugged. Then I spotted his pillbox on the crowded kitchen table. Three more compartments still filled in with his pills, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday. That added up to five days now, I calculated, with no medication at all. I pushed past Ben to the fridge and looked in. The food he'd filled it with over a week ago was now in various stages of decay, uncooked, untouched and moldy. Has he even forgotten to eat? Maybe this is it, I thought. Is this bad enough for him to be admitted to the ER, what am I supposed to do now? I did the only thing I could think of, I treated him like a toddler. Ben, I can see you don't want to talk to me, all right, I don't know why and you don't want to tell me, but your place is a mess and I can't keep my promise to give you food money if you don't keep your promise to clean up. Not fair, he now scribbled. Maybe not, I said, but that's what I've decided to do and, more important, Ben, you're not taking your meds. Have you taken them at all since you moved in? He stared at me blankly.
Tags:
nonfiction
science
audiobook
Script:
There's a reason gravity's been the odd man out. Where all the other forces involve particles that follow the probabilistic rules of the quantum world, allowing these forces to be united into one grand mathematical scheme, general relativity's key parameter, at least in the way Einstein formulated it, is geometrical – curvatures in space-time. It's as if nature has set up two different sets of rules, one for gravity and another for all the other forces. The tools that work so well in one realm are difficult to apply in the other.
Tags:
audiobook
selfhelp
story
Script:
Anyway, in rehab, they talked about a higher power. I didn't know what that meant. I mean, I love nature and sunsets, things I obviously didn't make. Something bigger than me made them. I didn't see what that had to do with my life. But someone suggested I pray. That night and the next morning, I got on my knees. I don't even know what I said. I just jumped up and started laughing like, whoa, I can't believe I just did that. I did that a few times. I didn't know if I believed in God. I felt ridiculous. I remember when I was sitting in group one day having a craving, and I could see myself sitting on the toilet or sitting on the bathroom floor, because that's where I used to get high a lot. Instead of seeing the high, I saw the empty house and myself feeling like shit after the ringer. And that's when I remembered. I thought, oh my God, this worked. Maybe there is a power bigger than myself. This thing is so much bigger than me. I can't control it. I thought for so long I had willpower and could stop. Now I realize that whatever made me out there is higher than me. That's the only thing that can help me.
Tags:
nonfiction
new age
meditation
audiobook
Script:
The 3 Power Points Meditation 1. Centering Sit in a chair with your feet on the floor and your palms resting face down on your thighs. This creates a closed circuit of energy flow within your body. Adjust your posture so your head is level and so you feel evenly balanced between the left and right sides of your body. Close your eyes, breathe evenly, and bring your attention inside your skin. Draw the energy from above your head into the geometric center of your head, and imagine a point in the middle of your brain between the pituitary and pineal glands. At that imaginary spot, let a pinprick of light break through. Through that white hole, allow the pure diamond light of your soul to emerge and form a tiny crystal ball. Go into that spot and stay there. Imagine the glossy light radiating through your brain in all directions, clearing away all thoughts of fear, doubt, and confusion. 2. Shifting Shift your attention now to the base of your spine and imagine a spot just in front of your tailbone. At that imaginary spot, let a second pinprick of light break through. Through that white hole, allow the pure diamond light of your soul to emerge and form a tiny crystal ball. Feel the vibration, or tingling, which begins in that root energy center. Let the vibration spread in all directions, filling the bottom of your pelvis with a pool of clear light. Imagine that the liquid light becomes heavy and starts to drop straight down from the bottom of your spine into the earth below you. Watch it melting through the ground, magnetizing toward the center of the earth and forming a thick column of shimmering clear light. When the light from the base of your spine merges into the clear light in the center of the earth, you may feel magnetized downward or heavy in your chair, as if it would be difficult to even stand up. As soon as the downward connection to the center of the earth is established, an equal flow of energy starts to rise up the column from the earth's core into your body.
Tags:
fiction
children
fantasy
young adult
classic
audiobook
Script:
Perhaps John had not behaved very well so far, but he's shown out now. Then I refuse, he cried, banging the barrel in front of Hook. And I refuse, cried Michael. Rule Britannia, squeaked Curly. The infuriated pirates buffeted them in the mouth, and Hook roared out, that seals your doom. Bring up their mother, get the plank ready. They were only boys, and they went white as they saw Dukes and Checo preparing the fatal plank, but they tried to look brave when Wendy was brought up. No words of mine can tell you how Wendy despised those pirates. To the boys, there was at least some glamour in the pirate calling, but all that she saw was that the ship had not been tidied for years. There was not a porthole on the grimy glass of which you might not have written with your finger, Dirty Pig, and she had already written it on several. But as the boys gathered round her, she had no thought, of course, save for them. So, my beauty, said Hook, as if he spoke in syrup, you are to see your children walk the plank. Fine gentleman though he was, the intensity of his communings had soiled his rough, and suddenly he knew that she was gazing at it. With a hasty gesture, he tried to hide it, but he was too late. Are they to die? Asked Wendy, with a look of such frightful contempt that he nearly fainted. They are, he snarled. Silence all, he called gloatingly, for a mother's last words to her children. At this moment, Wendy was grand. These are my last words, dear boys, she said firmly. I feel that I have a message to you from your real mothers, and it is this. We hope our sons will die like English gentlemen. Even the pirates were awed, and Tootles cried out hysterically. I am going to do what my mother hopes. What are you going to do, Nibs? What my mother hopes. What are you to do, twin? What my mother hopes. John, what are we? But Hook had found his voice again. Tie her up, he shouted. It was Smee who tied her to the mast. See here, honey, he whispered. I'll save you if you promise to be my mother. But not even for Smee would she make such a promise. I would almost rather have no children at all, she said scornfully. It is sad to know that not a boy was looking at her as Smee tied her to the mast. The eyes of all were on the plank, that last little walk they were about to take. They were no longer able to hope that they would walk it manfully, for the capacity to think had gone from them. They could stare and shiver only. Hook smiled on them with his teeth closed and took a step toward Wendy. His intention was to turn her face so that she should see the boys walking the plank one by one. But he never reached her. He never heard the cry of anguish he hoped to ring from her. He heard something else instead. It was the terrible tick, tick of the crocodile. They all heard it, pirates, boys, Wendy. And immediately, every head was blown in one direction, not to the water whence the sound proceeded, but toward Hook. All knew that what was about to happen concerned him alone, and that from being actors, they were suddenly become spectators. Very frightful was it to see the change that came over him. It was as if he had been clipped at every joint. He fell in a little heap. The sound came steadily nearer, and in advance of it came this ghastly thought. The crocodile is about to board the ship. Even the iron claw hung inactive, as if knowing that it was no intrinsic part of what the attacking force wanted. Left so fearfully alone, any other man would have lain with his eyes shut where he fell. But the gigantic brain of Hook was still working, and under its guidance, he crawled on the knees along the deck as far from the sound as he could go. The pirates respectfully cleared a passage for him, and it was only when he brought up against the bulwarks that he spoke. Hide me, he cried hoarsely. They gathered round him, all eyes averted from the thing that was coming aboard. They had no thought of fighting it. It was fate. Only when Hook was hidden from them did curiosity loosen the limbs of the boys, so that they could rush to the ship's side to see the crocodile climbing it.
Tags:
nonfiction
selfhelp
audiobook
Script:
Difficulty remembering the past is an enormous frustration. Familiar feelings of emptiness, anxiety, fear, and panic bring an emotional intensity to bear that seems all out of proportion to what's recently happened, yet you can't recall any earlier defining event. You want to make sense of the intrusion of panic and gain mastery over your emotions. I feel as if big chunks of my childhood memories have been amputated, said Sanford. What accounts for these periods of childhood memory blackout? Recent studies have shown that stress hormones play an important role in forming memories and lapses in them. First, a review of our mini-science lesson on the emotional brain. Remember the hippocampus, the small, seahorse-shaped structure within your emotional brain? Unlike its companion, the amygdala, which controls the way we form emotional responses, the hippocampus records memory details of the actual event—the fact that you were in a car, that the car crashed, that someone was hurt, that an ambulance arrived at the scene, and so on. The hippocampus then relays the facts to other parts of the brain for long-term memory storage. Why are the earliest childhood experiences the hardest to recall? The answer has to do with the fact that the hippocampus completes its development later in childhood than does the amygdala. In adulthood, when you experience an emotional emergency, like an abandonment, it triggers fragments of emotional memory from, for example, your birth. But because your hippocampus is not yet fully developed at birth, you have no corresponding memory of the actual event—no context in which to place the emotional memory you do have of the way you felt. What about gaps in memory that occur after the hippocampus has been developed? This is where stress hormones come in. Depending upon the type, intensity, and duration of the crisis, stress hormones can either heighten memory or impair it.
Tags:
audiobook
memoir
Script:
He met and married his wife and they had their first child at the time I didn't think I could have kids Ben recalls. I ended up having my little chocolate daughter and things were going good. I Am hoping against hope that the story ends here Ben is a good man He reminds me of my father my brother the boys I grew up with But he is a convicted felon and I know far too well the struggle for money and for employment that so many men have endured Fighting to make a living Ben got back into the game selling drugs. Then his story took a strange turn