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Downloaded from
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Official YIFY movies site:
YTS.MX
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And I'll start it up...
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[switch clicks]
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[continuous electronic tone]
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-...and we'll start generating.
-[dial clicks]
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[quivering electronic sounds]
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[sounds echo and intensify]
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-[switch clicks]
-[electronic sounds continue]
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[sounds fade]
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John has a very special mission in life.
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He is trying to contact aliens.
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[rhythm of taps and beeps playing]
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It was started by myself.
My grandfather helped me.
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I lived with my grandparents
in a small cottage in Northern Michigan.
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I started building
the electronic equipment to make contact
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with whatever might be out there
beyond the Earth.
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It grew to encompass an entire bedroom.
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That equipment continued to grow.
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In the next two years,
it was migrating into the living room.
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It became more and more massive.
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[music intensifies, bass synth swells]
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Most everything I did was self-taught.
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I envisioned an idea
and completed that vision,
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built it into a physical reality.
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I was always seeking to explore,
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to look beyond what we have here.
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I pictured many alien worlds,
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imagining what it would be like
to make contact.
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The moment of sharing extreme knowledge
and thoughts
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and communication with another species,
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is just beyond anything
most of us even imagine.
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[music fades]
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I seem to be picking up a radio signal.
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[radio crackles]
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[device humming quietly]
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Okay, fine.
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[humming continues]
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[indistinct voice on radio]
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[slow, high-pitched ping]
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[John] I decided that the best way
to try and make contact
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was to broadcast a signal
into outer space.
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I thought the best signal would be music.
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[high-pitched ping repeats]
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Technically, we were achieving
the actual transmissions
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from a large tower out in front
of my grandparents' home.
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[high-pitched ping repeats]
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[high-pitched ping repeats]
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I sent music into space
because it represents
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a certain, uh, universal language.
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And I'm talking
about non-commercial music as such.
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I'm talking about jazz,
uh, electronic music...
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Kraftwerk, Tangerine Dream, Harmonia,
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and there were many others.
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African music,
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Eastern music, which covers a broad area.
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Reggae, Afrobeat...
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And one of the things I really liked
to send out was gamelan music.
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It was a really beautiful form.
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[reporter] John Shepherd has devoted
all his time, money, and energies
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to a personal search
for outer space aliens.
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[John on news report] I send
cultural or creative music out into space.
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I beam it out for approximately
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half a million, million miles
out into space.
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About twice the distance of the moon.
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This is Project STRAT Earth Station One,
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broadcasting to you
from beautiful Northwestern Michigan.
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You are listening to the group Harmonia.
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["Watussi" by Harmonia playing]
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[electronic pulsing, music fades]
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This is Project STRAT Earth Station One
signing off from another broadcast day.
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If you ETs are out there,
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we'd like you to tune in again
tomorrow night at nine p.m.
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for more cultural music.
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This is John Shepherd.
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[gamelan music playing]
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[John] I don't remember much about my mom.
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Things were rough in the early years.
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It wasn't the best home environment
to raise me in.
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My dad left while I was just born,
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and my grandma felt sorry for me
and took me with her.
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I had very little contact with my mother.
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She was always
a little different than I was.
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Almost... Not alien.
That's not the right word, really.
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Just different.
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[gamelan music continues]
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The fondest memories
were after my grandparents adopted me.
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Took care of me, raised me.
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[music ends]
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[faint traffic noise]
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Sometimes taking the course that I have
in my life and the path
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is like a... maybe a lonely mountain road
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to some higher elevation peaks,
to see the view,
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to check out something
most people don't see.
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So, you tend to go it alone more.
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You don't have much company in this.
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[gentle ambient music playing]
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[John] I set up this whole operation
inside of a small cottage
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in the middle
of a kind of sparsely populated area.
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Small town, you know, rural.
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My lifestyle,
relative to the local lifestyle,
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was quite, quite removed, quite different.
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[dog barks]
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My mind was in space and in other realms,
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where my body was in this local community,
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this little... real quiet, peaceful area.
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But my mind was traveling,
traveling the cosmos.
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[ambient music continues]
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Uh, probably 12, 14 years old,
I realized that I was a little different,
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that I was gay.
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Growing up gay in Michigan
was rather difficult.
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That's one of the tougher realities,
and especially in a rural area.
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You don't get as much,
well, shall we say, understanding.
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You don't get as much of that.
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I think the real tough part
to deal with sometimes is loneliness.
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You don't go right out and, so to speak,
date somebody for very long
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that they don't find out
you're a little different.
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To find someone that is on the wavelength
that I am on
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and be able to share my life
with that person in any degree or way
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is nearly impossible.
Although I believe it exists.
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I believe for everybody there's someone.
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[radio static and electronic bleeps]
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["Notre Dame" by Harmonia playing]
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As time went on, the equipment got
consuming most of the house.
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It became obvious
that we needed more room.
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My grandmother and I got together
and pooled our funds to build an addition.
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It had plenty of room to expand.
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The project could be fully realized.
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[mechanical hissing]
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[music continues]
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[whirring]
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[electrical crackling]
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[male reporter]
John Shepherd calls his project "STRAT."
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That's an acronym for Special Telemetry
Research and Tracking.
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[electronic device powering up]
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There are 60,000 volts
running through his basement,
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powering a signal
that's beamed straight out into space.
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[radio whine and static]
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[John] So, I built this two-story-high
deep-space transmitter, basically,
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a tuned circuit resonator.
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It allowed me to reach deeper
and further out into space.
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Project STRAT
had become a major operation.
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I was busy developing other kinds
of devices for communication.
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I never gave up trying to make contact.
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And the excitement, for me,
was always there,
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always the anticipation
that something might happen.
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We're now going to bring you some Afropop
to warm up your evening.
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["Harusi Ya MK"
by D.O. Misiani and Shirati Jazz playing]
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[singer singing in Swahili]
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[John] It was always an exploration.
It was always a sort of a dream state.
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So, I kept going.
I kept doing that throughout...
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well, 25, 30 years of my life.
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[music fades]
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Can't say I found a lot of... hard data
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that would be of great significance,
necessarily, on the UFO front.
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But as far as inspiration, creative ideas,
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it gave me the chance to do all of that
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and to share the results with people,
with others.
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And it filled my life.
It gave it something, meaning.
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What remains of Project STRAT
is what's stored in this building.
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A lot of the equipment
is disassembled for storage,
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but it's still here in its spirit,
you might say.
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And this was... [blows]
...one of the data mapping consoles.
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[blows]
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There were endless components,
all kinds of unique things.
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Satellite communication equipment,
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high-power microwave tubes
that used to transmit microwaves.
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So, it's lots and lots of stuff
that was all parts of the lab,
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including
the high-voltage transmitter accelerator
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that we used
for sending signals into space.
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So, these are just the remnants,
or little leftover pieces of thought.
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[chuckles]
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[gentle ambient music playing]
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Well, having had to give up,
due to lack of funds,
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was deeply frustrating, almost depressing.
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But also realizing
that maybe it was time to move on.
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I never really had any serious boyfriends
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or anyone that I went steady with,
that sort of thing.
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But in 1993,
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I met somebody I really love very much
named John Litrenta.
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We were both at a club one evening.
That's where we met.
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When he first walked in the door
of the club, I was still there...
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I was quite...
taken by his appearance.
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His look...
the fact that he was different.
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There was an attraction almost immediately
to the way he looked.
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[John Shepherd] When I first met John,
I had this impression that,
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"This fellow's really kind of different.
He gives me an interesting impression.
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I think I wanna meet this guy."
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It just came over me
to go ahead and get up the courage
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to go over and say hello
and introduce myself, at least.
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And after that, it just seemed like...
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we were, well,
we were off and running a bit, I'd say.
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We started discussing music
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and some of the more obscure things
we love about music.
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John's character is really warm.
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What I really like about him
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is that warmth
and that understanding that he has.
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Once I met him and realized
that he was that sort of person:
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warm, loving, sensitive, patient.
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I was like, "Wow, that's really...
That's really something.
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You don't find that every day."
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And that's what everyone, I think,
in this world to some degree seeks
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and doesn't always find it.
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I was one of the lucky ones.
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I feel I found it. Found it in John.
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So, contact has been made.
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[ambient music continues]
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[music continues]
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My interest is in finding out the unknown,
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and the unknown is just that, unknown.
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And you search, and you continue
searching because of your desire,
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because of that
you know there's something there.