Jake Rivas: "A Poison Tree" And How to Escape Your Inner Monster

This was my first LIVE IN-PERSON interview and I had a blast. I hope Jake had a blast too!We talked about a lot. Our poem was "A Poison Tree" by William Blake. (yaaay JAKE chose BLAKE!) We opened the discussion with some spiked egg-nog and the mass exodus from blue states to red and then discussed why Jake, like myself, is a poetry hater.Then we dug deep to investigate why this poem in particular spoke to a cloistered West Texas boy.We got into the problems with building your life around a fake persona, the masks we wear and how they destroy us, the destructive power of repression and even some movie recommendations.*Full disclaimer: Listening to this I must apologize to Jake because I was quite loopy. I was at the beginning stages of a fever and had only gotten around 4 hours sleep the night before. In a desire to be at the top of my game I downed two caps of dayquil a few hours before his arrival. Oh then I drank a red bull right before he arrived. Oh and then we had bourbon... So if I'm more loopy than normal, now you know why.