The Nth Degree
There’s an old Arcade Fire song with a chorus that starts ”between the click of the light and the start of a dream.” That’s the place where this podcast invites you to reside, for just a little while. It’s a place where the lines between awake and asleep are blurred, where sanity and madness become interchangeable, where magical thinking reigns. You can’t stay here forever, it wouldn’t be healthy, but you can visit and ruminate while you pass through. I’m Natalie Patton and this is The Nth Degree.
Episodes

Friday Jul 26, 2024
Friday Jul 26, 2024
With words by Natalie Patton and music bed by the band Scale Worms, this story is a meditation on time, memory and loss told across three parts. Here: part 1 of "The Slippery Nature of Time."
In this part, I explore my desire to manipulate time as my mom was dying. I tried to slow it down, then speed it up. And in some ways I was successful in doing both of those things, because time is a spectrum of our own mindset.

Saturday Jul 27, 2024
Saturday Jul 27, 2024
With words by Natalie Patton and music by the band Scale Worms, this story is a meditation on time, memory and loss told across three parts. Here: part 2 of "The Slippery Nature of Time."
In part 2, the time period is leading up to and immediately following the birth of my first child. For most (all?) women, the postpartum period is a particular one. For me, it was accentuated by grief that burst out in ways I wasn't expecting and definitely wasn't prepared for.

Saturday Jul 27, 2024
Saturday Jul 27, 2024
With words by Natalie Patton and music bed by the band Scale Worms, this story is a meditation on time, memory and loss told across three parts. Here: part 3 of "The Slippery Nature of Time."
The conclusion to this story digs deeper into the pain of loss and the euphoria of life. While the story isn't tied up neatly with a bow, it does come to some kind of more full understanding.

Wednesday Aug 28, 2024
Wednesday Aug 28, 2024
There's a curious cactus in a nondescript pot. And then there's the strange ritual of collecting a body. This continues this season of The Nth Degree exploring death and grief and all the confusing details therein.

Wednesday Oct 30, 2024
Wednesday Oct 30, 2024
When my mom died, I somehow had the foresight to export the text messages with her that were on my burner phone. This is the story of how that idea came about, and what happened after I got the 219-page PDF. Written and read by Natalie Patton with music composed for the episode by Phil Giraldi.

Tuesday Dec 10, 2024
Tuesday Dec 10, 2024
From a strip club to a gas station, this episode explores the weird and personal memories that come up in the grieving process. Eventually, grief has a way of fitting itself into a person's life like it was always there. This story, Lessons in Lip Reading, takes a humorous and surprisingly light-hearted look at memories that have come up for me over the years of digesting the loss of my mom.

Wednesday Jan 15, 2025
Wednesday Jan 15, 2025
Sometimes, enough is enough but it's hard to tell where the line is. And sometimes, there's no two ways about it. What starts with an episode of Story Corps ends with a needle in a biohazardous waste bin. This is Bloodline on The Nth Degree.
With music by Rosalyn Magnatta, from an EP available on her soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/rosalyn-magnatta