Stream Of Thought

Stream Of Thought is a conversation between two friends, Rix and Victor, and it makes no pretense of being anything more structured. Each episode opens with a brief rundown of what is coming and ends with a simple sign-off. In between, the talk goes wherever it likes. The title is an honest description. A story about a cup of abandoned change at a Target self-checkout turns into a personal history of found money, including a fifty-dollar bill that a colleague insisted should go to the Japan Tsunami Relief Fund. A complaint about a sleepless night slides into melatonin, ice water kept by the bed, and a spirited debate over the top three beverages, where Coca-Cola, cold-pressed juice, blue Gatorade and hot chocolate all make their case. Stepping in a heaping pile of dog mess at Runyon Park gets a full, grimly comic retelling. The two share a long history, and it shows. They trade memories of middle school projects that felt impossible, of wrestling images into a word processor and sliding the finished report into a plastic binder for extra points, and of poker in a high school friend's basement. Their adult lives look very different. Rix's stories often come from ministry: officiating weddings, handling a service on his own, sharing vodka shots at a reception. Victor's tend to begin in Los Angeles, at a park, a library or a retail job. Work is a constant thread. There is frustration with condescending management, an argument that extra effort only makes sense when everyone gives it, a commission-only sales pitch that never appealed, and a restaurant job where customers only later turned out to be Jason Derulo, Travis Barker and Kourtney Kardashian. Rix writes fiction too, and one conversation follows his saga Angels and Demons, begun when he was fifteen, as it moves through edits toward self-publishing and the question of whether to bother with an agent. The language throughout is salty, and some stories, like an uncomfortably close massage, push into awkward territory. But the show is not only jokes. Rix marks seven years in Gamblers Anonymous and talks plainly about the program's hard line on what counts as gambling, the trap of chasing losses, and the kindness that got him to the next day. Another conversation closes on the idea that people come and go, and that this is all right. Titles such as 'Beware the Birds', 'A Gift of Chips and Salsa', 'Holy Water w/Ice' and 'What’s the Value of a Quarter?' map the range well: small, specific and usually funny. It plays like a catch-up call with friends who always have a new story.