Dolphins!

The acclaimed WALKING Podcast returns with its acclaimed "Special Election Night Coverage Counterprogramming Special." A fine hike for tumultuous times: along the shore and through the woods, featuring chittering birds and the distant, patriotic thrum of state-run ferries shuttling American commuters across Puget Sound. [Misophonia trigger warning: at around 15:00, I pick and eat a wild apple.] This walk is sponsored by "Gondos: The Novelization of the Major Motion Picture Gondos," my novel that you can read for free. When sea monsters invade the Venice canals, it's up to a team of scientists, soldiers of fortune and traditional gondoliers to battle them back in militarized, Batmobile-style gondolas called "gondos." It's the blockbuster literary event that readers are calling "addictive," "exeptionally strange," and "bananas bananas good." Read it: TODAY!  Take care of yourselves and each other, America.  

Here, in the darkest, dourest, deadliest, bleakest doldrums of Winter 2020, I don't feel like making any more podcasts, because what's the point, but I thought I'd slip last year's holiday extravaganza episode back into your feeds, in which we exploded the usual format of the show to bring you a star-studded, Yuletide spectacular that harkens back to the homespun, holiday podcast specials of days gone by! With special guest appearances by: Decemberists guitarist Chris Funk, fine arts photographer Meghann Riepenhoff and friends, TV producer Jesse Ziebart, Grammy-nominee Korum Bischoff, and restauranteur and businessman Harvey Wolff from Proper Fish. Come along on a wintry ramble around the island, chasing away a case of the holiday blahs!  The WALKING Podcast Holiday Special is brought to you by Dresden Stollen Bakers. When Irmgard Maron came to the United States in 1928, she brought a cherished recipe for stollen from her native Dresden. She began baking for friends and relatives during the holidays and, at their urging, started a small bakery business. Ninety-one years later, three generations of her descendants still gather to bake this deliciously rich holiday bread once a year and sell it to families like yours around the world. It has been a comfort these last couple of months, during the pandemic, to pass by the Maron homestead on my walks and see the silhouettes of various Marons, all masked up, still busily packing stollen in the outbuilding to ship around the world, their long tradition undeterred and unstoppable.

Walking on the beach, in a contemplative mood, I gaze out on what used to be an undersea minefield and discover an atrocious-looking jelly fish, oozed haphazardly over the rocks at my feet. This week's walk is sponsored by The Wild Wine Club, a new online wine shop based in Portland, Oregon that exclusively sells natural and organic wines from around the world. Choose from a monthly subscription box or select your own bottles to enjoy. They offer free delivery in the Portland area and shipping to select states in the U.S. Check out their selection of orange, skin contact and funky reds.

I accidentally walked into a creek. This week's walk is sponsored by Chris Funk's new solo record, "Songs for Dog Fitness." Pandemic music for walking your dog, or for not walking your dog.  (You may know Chris as the creator of the WALKING podcast theme song from last season, or as the guitarist for The Decemberists. Check out his new record on Bandcamp and you can even buy it on purple vinyl.)

I see many funguses. I encounter a massive buck hopping improbably high out of the ferns. Isaac tells me about someone he just met while walking, and I tell him about my imaginary friends. I walk home, in a tiny bit of a rush.  

Four hours, 10.4 miles. I had to stop at a bakery in the middle.  This election night special coverage special is, as always, just a recording of me walking. I hope you'll come along as a way to relax or be distracted. As special coverage theme music, I used "Fanfare for the Frontier" from Mike Verta's Hollywood Masterclass. This walk is dedicated to Wendy Macnaughton, who will be hosting an election night drawing party / birthday party for herself on Instagram live at 5pm pacific/8pm eastern. Why not draw with her if you need a calm, restorative place to be online?

While investigating mushrooms at Yucky Pond, I lean over, somehow unleashing the voice of Matthew McConaughey from the phone in my pocket. Then: off to the harbor, where I confront two of life's awe-inspiring and unknowable phenomena: marine mammals and behavioral economics. Special guests: dolphins! Accidental guests: Matthew McConaughey, Dax Shepard.

I put the word out on social media that if people made a donation to a cause they believed in, and sent me the receipt, they would be entitled to one (1) classified ad--a message about absolutely anything--which I'd during the ad break in the middle of the walk. I was thinking of my fave podcast Election Profit Makers, which has raised $20,000 for voting rights organizations. I didn't expect to raise that much--that would have been hubris. But I thought we'd get more than two donations.  You can submit your donation receipt and classified through the email address on my website.

Missing one cohost (medically excused from action; foot injury) the two of us soldier on, and decide to visit the neighbors' goats. Will they bleat? Will we get some bleating on tape? They do not bleat. And they are far away. After recording this walk, I felt a strange melancholy. Is there something about goats that's sad? This is the third episode of the third season of The WALKING Podcast, a special pandemic mini-season where I am walking with my daughters and giving them the revenue from your classified ads, because my children won't go on a walk with me without getting paid. Ads only cost $1! Keep them coming and help support family togetherness. Venmo Jon Mooallem LLC and put your classified in the comment. Thank you to this week's sponsors: Mark in Bloomington for Art Beat Bloomington, Daniel Alarcon for Radio Ambulante, The Cantona Kung Fu football club (@cantonakf), Sam Green, and this season's flagship sponsor, the Garden Girls, Bainbridge Island's only Golden Girls-themed farm stand and the official Golden Girls-themed farm stand of the WALKING podcast. (@pinkfarmstand).

This is the second episode of the third season of The WALKING Podcast, a special pandemic mini-season where I am walking with my daughters and giving them the revenue from your classified ads, because my children won't go on a walk with me without getting paid. Ads only cost $1! Keep them coming and help support family togetherness. Venmo Jon Mooallem LLC and put your classified in the comment. Thank you to this week's sponsors: Reyhan Harmanci for Patrick Hoffman's new book CLEAN HANDS, Grain Design, Ann Friedman, the Barcott-Dederer family, Todd Vaziri for Feeding America, Sam Green, Drew Hansen (shout out for our very first political ad), Alexis Coe, Bay Nature Magazine, and our flagship sponsor this season, the Garden Girls, Bainbridge Island's only Golden Girls-themed farm stand and the official Golden Girls-themed farm stand of The WALKING podcast.