Hi, I’m Rolfe from ‘The Sound of Music’ and I like podcasts.

Hi, my name is Rolfe, and you’re probably wondering how I got into this mess, the mess being my aiming a gun at my former crush’s father while lurking in the middle of a gated community. Well, you might be surprised to hear this, but I was moved to act neither by a political rally nor the family’s butler. As great as he is at opening doors, it was not him that made me do it. No, it was the podcasts.

It all started in the gazebo while I was instructing Liesl on how to face a world of men. She so rudely interrupted me just as I broached the topic of feminine timidity to say, “Why don’t we just listen to a podcast, Rolfe?”

Not having listened to a podcast before I tabled our lesson about shyness for another time, perhaps when she’s older, like going on seventeen.

We then listened to a Bachelorette podcast and from what I can tell, The Bachelorette is a show about a woman surrounded by bachelor dandies. You know, drinkers of brandies, real eager young lads. Well, I really wasn’t into it and by the time Liesl’s hand slid onto my thigh I had had enough with talk.

All I could think about was getting a job with Amazon so I wouldn’t have to ride my telegram bike around Strasburg, Pennsylvania, anymore. It gets so hot wearing feldgrau wool in summer. So I pretended to hear a not so distant rumble of thunder and ran off to map out a clear career path. Hopefully something STEM-related.

But I couldn’t stop thinking about that Bachelorette podcast. I needed to know which of the contestants was going to get picked. I needed all the fun facts and hometown information. Who was a governess and who was a baroness? And I especially needed to know more about this so-called Fantasy Suite. What happens in there? Is it like a glass gazebo? Pretty soon I wasn’t just listening to all the Bachelorette podcasts — I was listening to all the Bachelor podcasts too.

And pretty soon after that I was listening to all the podcasts. And my job with Amazon would have to wait until I finished the True Crime series I was onto by then. Did you know we’re surrounded by murderers?

When my father discovered me listening to podcasts in secret, he was perplexed to say the least. His father had Limbaugh back in the day, and his father had the words of a certain German fellow before even that. You know, just voices grounded in the human experience , trying to fill that void in the pit of the stomach from when the dog bites or the bee stings. But that wasn’t what bothered my father so much as he didn’t think I was listening to the right kinds of podcasts.

“Aaron Rodgers isn’t on any of these,” he remarked, scrolling through my recent plays on Spotify. “You wait, little boy, for fate to show you a darkness retreat.”

And it was in that moment of my life that podcasts really started to bring me closer to my father. We started listening to all the classics from Adam Corrolla to Rogan and Shapiro. It was all very informative–even transformative. But listening to Call Her Daddy is what set me on a very clear and dangerous path.

Around that time, we made our first highbrow gorilla art investment, and it should have been a moment to really cherish between father and son, but I asked a question about mother and father smacked me in the back of my head for the out-of-line comment, saying, “You’re on the brink. Only I can call her that.”

“Sure thing, Pop,” I would then say as I rubbed the back of my head and thought about what four and five letter terms of endearment were left for me to use. Whose words was I allowed to speak? Why were some words okay for some and off limits to others? These questions kept me up at night.

Then one day father handed me a gun just like in the days when we used to go pheasant hunting on the Von Trapp manor grounds. That was all the way back in the quiet hush of a cuckoo clock, before Fantasy Football and trash talking on the old message boards, before paintball and laser tag even. Saturdays, after all, were always for the boys.

“What’s this, Pop? Is it for the birds?”

“I’ve got orders.”

“Orders?”

“Yeah, they need someone to teach these elites a lesson. We’re going to deport anyone who doesn’t have the proper paperwork, son.”

“Paperwork? Like to write on?”

“Yep. Just you wait, little man, we’re going to write on them all.”

“Who’s them?”

“The enemy within, Rolfe, the enemy within. Don’t act like you haven’t heard me ranting since the day you were born.”

And now here I am face to face with Captain Von Trapp in a Wawa parking lot. A gun and a bagel in my hand.

“Rolfe, my boy,” says the war hero before me, “we’re not going back to Austria.”

“Without a Tesla truck, I should say not, sir. How would you even cross the Ocean without one?”

“We’re not going to stay in Strasburg, Pennsylvania, either, Rolfe. It’s too dangerous.”

“That’s what I’m trying to tell you. It’s a battleground. You’re being deported. We’re showing all the refugee elites we mean business.”

The Captain has my gun now, and the bagel is a nun’s habit smear of cream cheese on the black pavement.

“You’ll never be one of them,” says the Captain.

And I don’t know what he means exactly because his children are watching us now. Pronouns, am I right? But I do know I’m no loser — I’m a subscriber. In fact, I’m more than that, I’m seventeen going on eighteen, so I don’t back down. I start to call my supervisor, who also happens to be my dad. Damn it. Straight to voicemail.

“Come away with us,” the Captain says. “We’re going to Vermont.”

But I can’t do it because the podcasts haven’t told me so. And there are no Wawas north of here.

Shrill whistle followed by more shrill whistles. I’m told these are my favorite things.