The Story of John Roderick

RL461 - The New Alignment

Sat, 07 Jan 2023 17:34:35 +0000

This week, Merlin and John talk about:

D&D character alignments (Dreams and Fantasies)
Following the War in Ukraine on Twitter, seeing high-ranked military getting taken by trolls (Military)
Never talk to a cop, cops who don’t want to take care of the problem but ask you back what they should do (Attitude and Opinion)
Democracy being considered a lesser tribal form of government (Politics)

The Problem: John seeks out cops to talk to, referring to Merlin warning people never to talk to cops, while John seeks out cops to talk to.

The show title refers to character alignments in D&D and the fact that their listenership should rise up and form a new alignment that would not see democracy as the final form of society.

Merlin thanks John for his patience, but John knows how it is when you take your computer apart. Merlin hadn’t slept very well and he had two different dreams about two different boarding schools, it was not a good night, it is not good when the Paris airport dream and the Las Vegas dream get together and the two powers activate in a shape of an anxiety ladder. Sometimes Merlin feels like a digital farmer who has a digital family farm he takes care of, and some days he wakes up and his fence went down and his breeder cows are all fucking off (reference to MineCraft). Everything is connected!

John doesn’t have a house full of Internet of Things, so he can say for sure that some things aren’t connected. Before he could record with John Merlin had to fix things and there might be som Seltzer arriving after a while during the show that he had forgotten about. Merlin is just a simple farmer, but the modern world has taken us away from the simplicity of just being a simple digital farmer on a digital farm. Merlin works From Can Till Can’t (?), those are his hours, and he is working blood, sweat and tears and sacrifices a lot for people. As a digital farmer he also doesn’t get and subsidies.

D&D character alignments (RL461)

If this were D&D, then Scott Simpson would be a digital bard. To Merlin bards and monks have always been very interesting. Farmers are not a class, but Merlin thinks John is a digital cleric, which John was for a while, but he always wanted to be a paladin, although cleric might be closer. John’s problem with the cleric and paladin classes was that he always had a Chaotic alignment and you have to be at least Neutral for those and he would have to be allied with something. For along time John thought he was Chaotic Good (see RL326) magic user.

Not long ago he felt that his alignment had switched to Chaotic Neutral, although he never felt like it, but it was the result in every personality test he took. It felt like he had lost something until he felt the power of Chaotic Neutral. John always felt that the Good axis necessitated that you believe in a higher order whereas you can flip that around and say that the Lawful axis talks about a higher order, but in that case it is the order of an institution.

John is a Liberal, although he knows that all of their listeners who are evil or who are Elon Musk followers are rolling their eyes at him for calling himself that, and as such he necessarily believes that Good means that you believe in the collective effort, the idea that human beings are all pulling on the oars to get their Viking boat to another shore. In a different society that was ordered differently he might have gone into some clerical role like Father Pyrlig (from The Last Kingdom) could have been a warrior monk. Evil on the other hand is naked self-ineres that often reads as cowardice, working only for your own survival. Even the great evils, the ones playing 3D Chess, are sill trying to accomplish ultimately a selfish goal.

Merlin didn’t play his game very often, but they mostly sat around drinking Mountain Dew and made character sheets. He spent hours and months of his life and almost got late-on scoliosis from carrying around a duffle bag with every book and die and character that he had in it. He was a very cool value in 9th grade, but he didn’t actually play campaigns that much.

John says that we are thinking about neurodivergance as being on a two axes, but there should be more of them. The people who are actually rolling dice and are writing things down on a piece of paper… you turned a game into sitting at the DMV. Merlin has been using the phrase Saving Throw as a metaphor for 40 years and he is always looking for one. John has been using D&D as a metaphor for his whole life as well and without that intellectual sub-religion he would have a less colorful life. Merlin doesn’t quite call i a religion, but these are valuable analogies about life for the lonely boy.

What kept John from being a proper member of the D&D religion instead of being a Jack Mormon of D&D who either takes the law too seriously or decides the law is something else… He started playing D&D in the fall of 1980 as an early adopter and he still has all of the original Series 1 books with his name stenciled in them with that plastic stencil that you got from back-to-school packages with all the letters cut out.

There is an impossibly 1990s font called Template Gothic, most famously used on the poster for Reality Bites, that was designed to look like those green see-through rulers that let you draw all the letters. Reality Bites was with Winona Ryder, the girl from Edward Scissorhands that used to be with the guy from Lemonheads (probably Dave Pirner from Soul Asylum) was Template Gothic as an actress. Apparently Ken Stringfellow made out with her at some party, but John doesn’t believe that.

When John was 12/13 he really needed a 16-year old dungeon master, but all they had was 12-year old dungeon master, which just doesn't work. Your dungeon master should probably be 20, but any 20-year old who is hanging out with a bunch of 13-year olds is a bit suspect. It is like when you first get into college and all your professors are not PhD:s, but just instructors. There is that class of professors that have decided not to go into research, but into teaching, and some of them are older, but they didn’t feel the need to write a book every 3 years or finding something new in Hegel, and those people are bad teachers. The good ones are the ones who have been teaching intro to enlightenment for 15 years.

That is not how you succeed in academia, but that is who you want as a teacher. The same is true for dungeon masters: If you are rolling that die every time anybody says anything, then you are not telling the story. John has watched a lot of D&D being played because he has been nerd-adjacent for a long time and tends to walk into a room where D&D is going down, and sometimes it feels like there is really something happening there and sometimes it feels like you have walked into an accounting office and that never enticed John.

Merlin adds an ad break here so he could get his Seltzer

John was looking at the alignment descriptions during the break and he is wondering if he is actually Neutral Good. Chaotic described him at a younger age and maybe he has moved into Neutral Good which still acts altruistically, which John believes is true of him without regard for or against lawful precepts such as rules or tradition, which feels different from a Chaotic Good character who does what is necessary to bring about change for the better and disdains bureaucratic organizations, but places a high value on personal freedom. Listeners have surely written character sheets for them long ago and there might be an argument on Gary’s Van about what their alignments actually are.

Maybe it is like being a poet, like Merlin’s poetry teacher used to say: You are writing verse and it is up to other people to decide whether or not you are a poet. In this case, other people should probably decide your alignment based on how you act and not on how you think you are. There is an aspirational alignment! When John was saying he was an INFJ character it was Dan Benjamin who said: ”No, you are not!” and he told John exactly what he thought John’s Myers-Briggs was, which he could not have been more wrong about, but he claimed that is what John was. Maybe that is Dan’s own alignment.

Following the War in Ukraine on Twitter, seeing high-ranked military getting taken by trolls (RL461)

John has always been a military fetishist because he has the child-like sense that the way wars got won is that somebody in a tuxedo lit their cigarette with a pack of matches and then threw it over their shoulder into a bunch of bombs and they all went off, and here come David Niven with his briefcase (probably from Force 10 From Navarone). Watching the commentary on the war in Ukraine he realized that what wins wars is dungeon masters who are boring, not the story telling ones. All military officers in the US think they are Lawful Good, and they are in general, because the military trains you to be that way, and if someone in the military does something evil they generally get caught and busted.

If you talk to officers and listen to the way they think you will realize that they think they are doing good and they have a lot of principle, as opposed to the Russian Army that is more Chaotic Incompetent. John spent a week with a US Army captain in his 30s and he was Lawful Good Incompetent, while John has met a lot of people in the military who are Lawful Good Competent. Just being around the Lawful Good Incompetent person almost turned John into Chaotic Evil. The guy could not look forward into time and did not understand anything. He had matriculated into the officer corps out of college and had Murphy’s Law:ed himself up to the rank of Captain (actually called The Peter Principle) and no Lt Col is every going to put him into Major.

John is watching the war in Ukraine get talked about online by a new celebrity class of military commentator and noticed that at the level of the people doing the actual fighting and shooting their guns, the Sergeants and below, you have to actually empower them to make decisions and to be a little bit flexible and Chaotic, and hopefully these young Lieutenants are Lawful Good Enough. Neutral Good Enough might be Merlin’s alignment. As you move up through the ranks you have to get more and more competent and lawful and less wiggly. If someone throws a grenade into your fox hole you got a trolley problem and it is a matter of a split second how to solve it.

There is a video of some Ukrainian guys throwing grenades over the top of a 7ft wall and there a couple of Russian dudes hiding under a van and the grenade bounces once and goes under the van and you see an arm come out with he grenade and huck it over to a group of his fellow soldiers and blows them all up.

They continue talking a long time about what character traits you need in different positions in the military.

A lot of those military commentators have displayed their particular fragility in terms of interacting with an online community. A couple of people early on seemed to have some inside scoop on stuff and they got a lot of attention, it was exactly what everybody was hungering for, but in reality they just knew some upfront stuff, they got from 3000 to 300.000 followers, but when they reached the extend if what they had to offer and ran out of inside information they wanted to keep that energy and they started offering commentary, which they were not good at, they were just good at inside information.

There were a bunch of Generals and high-ranking guys who had been on Twitter for a long time, but all they had ever gotten back from people was ”Thank you, sir!” and all of a sudden people are telling them: ”You don’t know shit! My grandfather…” and a couple of them did a little Twitter-freakout. Some 24-year old troll took them on and you can see the pattern when they are going back and forth and although they are strong, competent, and charismatic, they have just 20% resilience to criticism, and John recognizes the same weakness in himself.

Merlin has very little resistance to the feeling that he is deliberately misunderstood. It should not bother him, but sometimes it gets under his skin. John once yelled at Merlin because Merlin concluded every sentence with ”Does that make sense?” and it really offended John, but it was just out of a total fear and desire to never be misunderstood. Merlin is a big fan of context and sometimes you can needle a fellow by leaving out some context that is really important. If you present the opinion without the context, which Twitter is made for, it makes you crazy and now you have +5 Twitter Brain. John believes that the context is the opinion because once you put the context down the opinion is foreordained.

Never talk to a cop, cops who don’t want to take care of the problem but ask you back what they should do (RL461)

Merlin says that you should never talk to a cop because whatever you say is never going to help you but is only going to make your life more difficult. John on the other hand seeks out cops to talk to because he wants to get into their head. One time he was just outside of London, walking through some fields, when he heard a rifle-shot in the distance. Later he met a police car and they asked him if he by any chance had heard a gun shot and John turned his walking stick into a chair and sat down and told them what he as an American knew about the kind of shot that was and where it came from.

Sometimes the cops hide their car behind a bush next to John’s house when they are looking for people speeding and John will go over and talk to them., although he doesn’t know any of them by name, but he recognizes them. Why would you not talk to cops? They are fascinating! It is like talking to sports people.

John once found somebody’s wallet, a landscaping guy who had obviously put it on top of his truck and then driven off. It had money and his business license in it, and John looked it up on his phone, but his company was a shell company owned by another shell company. He called a couple of numbers in Tacoma where those businesses are placed and they were all dead lines. This was one inconvenience that this guy did not need today, to have also then lost his wallet, so John went on a mission to see how long it would take until he ran into a cop if he just drove around the neighborhood.

It took less than 10 minutes, but it was on a busy road and John drove behind him but didn’t know what to do. Flash his lights at him? He decided to follow him until he took a left-hand turn by the lumber yard and John followed him there and flashed his lights at him. The cop pulled over and came over with a cop attitude of ”How may I help you, citizen?” John explained the situation and the cop said he didn’t know what to do and suggested John to go online and see what he could find, but John countered that the right thing to do is to find a cop and give the wallet to the policeman who has all the technology and ability to find somebody. He could just look up the guys phone number and call him!

The cop put the wallet in some evidence bag in the trunk of his car and it felt like the same situation as when the Renton police department kept John’s 100oz silver ingot on a drawer for a year, and this poor guy’s wallet is maybe still sitting in a box in the Normandy Park police department.

Merlin had a similar situation with a cop who asked him what he wanted him to do when he called the non-emergency number of the police station next to his house about a guy who was hitting cars and several neighbors were concerned about him. Merlin continues to talk about the situation and how he wanted the cop to do something about this public safety risk.

John replies that this is one of the places where Conservative America and Liberal America both are playing whack-a-mole. Conservative America wants everybody to get busted by the cops and Liberal America wants everybody to get the treatment they need, but both of those things are whack-a-mole because the solution is somewhere way higher, funded at a very different level, a whole different take.

Both Conservatives and Liberals think they understand what the high-level take is that they need, but there is a higher level take that neither group and no-one in America is talking about: ”What do we do with vulnerable populations that have no resources that nobody wants to take responsibility for?” Cops and EMTs are the wrong people, but social workers are also the wrong people. They are just whack-a-moling, too! They think if they could just get them housing it would solve the problem, but housing doesn’t save a mental illness problem and there are always going to be people who aren’t going to be able to get into the system and more and more are getting bounced out all the time, and: ”What do we do?”

We got all these academics writing papers on Hegel, but we have eliminated social psychology as a theoretical discipline. In the 18th and 19th century there were theories of prisons and of society that we now look back at as colonialist or whatever, but so many theories about how to manage society came up against the American idea that democracy and personal freedom a) can coexist and b) are the highest form.

People are getting thrown off of airplanes because they don’t want to be told to wear a mask, but nobody in America is going to sign off on: ”Some people in America need to be involuntarily hospitalized!” and we have to have humane systems for that in place, but there is just no other way to deal with this problem. A certain number of chronic people is just never going to be well and there is no amount of counseling or drug treatment or God that is ever going to make them able to live in San Francisco. To continue to try is just whack-a-mole on both sides.

Democracy being considered a lesser tribal form of government (RL461)

The other day John was reading of the Ukraine accounts breaking down the history of Crimea. During the autocratic Ottoman empire Crimea was a Democracy which at the time was considered a primitive and lesser tribal form of government. They were living like a tribe where everybody gets a vote and they don’t have anybody making decisions, which came as a lightning-bolt to John, understanding that Democracy has been around for 2000 years and nobody chose it, not because they weren’t an enlightened civilization, but because it was thought of as a tribal form of government, and all subsequent forms of government were considered advancements on it.

Then came the United States of America, which at the time was just a collection of tribes with not any more people than there were Tatars in Crimea, and through the lens of enlightenment the fact that everybody got a vote turned into a lofty ideal, but history has not concluded with Democracy as its final resolution of the question. John doesn’t say that we should become an autocracy that he will lead, although if some podcast listenership decided to rise up and be the nucleus of a new alignment, then: ”Welcome to the new alignment!”

by jroemling

RL460 - Rikki-Tikki-Cancelled

Sat, 07 Jan 2023 17:25:43 +0000

This week, Merlin and John talk about:

Pushing the start of their recording (Podcasting)
All different electronic devices from the 1990s are now on your phone (Technology)
Most movie plots being made irrelevant by the invention of the cell phone (Movies)
John’s security cameras (Technology)
John’s trip to Moloka‘i in Hawaii, finding a phone booth next to the grocery store (Hawaii)
Mad Magazine printing fake money that you could put into coin changers (Stories)
John discovering a 24-hour car wash and coffee kiosk (Currents)
John keeping digital technology away from his daughter as long as possible (Daughter)
Learning to let your child be independent, not always having all the information, her wanting her first phone (Children)
Natalie Wood, watching a movie on an airplane but missing the last 15 minutes (Movies)
Meeting Marc Olsen from Sage down at the beach in Normandy Park (Music)

The Problem: Here comes Baby Yoda, referring to a kid who doorbell-dashed John in a Baby Yoda hoodie.

The show title refers to imagining how he would get cancelled every week if he had an OnlyFans where he would read things like Jabberwocky.

Pushing the start of their recording (RL460)

Merlin likes to blame a lot of things on COVID, but he might have just forgotten how to manage his time and he asked John for a little extra time today to start their recording. Over the years there have been times when John was setting his alarm to 10:55 in advance for their 11am recording, and he would sometimes text Merlin and ask if they could push it, and for a while they were pushing it all the time. Merlin is ready on time for lots of things, but he also got ADHD and sometimes he gets on a task journey in the morning because that is when different hooks into his attention are presenting themselves.

John wonders if that is a Lemmiwinks journey for Merlin, but that is the only pop culture reference John ever made that Merlin didn’t get. It is a South Park thing. Merlin’s first CD of stolen software and serial numbers that his friend Allan gave him that helped him launch his career including the South Park video that started as a Christmas card in 1994/95.

All different electronic devices from the 1990s are now on your phone (RL460)

There were the blow-ins that came with newspapers and magazines, which Merlin’s family would call circulars, for example cards that would ask you to subscribe to the magazine, and John would know because he worked at the store with the diaper and golf magazines, but there was a Radio Shark ad from 1991/92 where every single electronic item was advertised as a Christmas gift, and every single one of those items are on your mobile phone right now.

Merlin sent John a page from a Radio Shack flyer from 1991 (see shot notes) and they talk about some of the things on there.

Merlin says that just because technology is available doesn’t mean that we need to pursue it, especially if we have not figured out how it will improve what we do. The idea of a microwave didn’t make a ton of sense until you had one and now what did we ever do without a microwave and Merlin is the master of the microwave, but then there are other products that are first sold under the ”think of the children!” umbrella, but that is the thin end of the wedge and then it gets used for everything.

Merlin started watching Slow Horses on Apple TV+ that takes place in England, and his was equally true in Skyfall: Every square centimeter in London is covered by CCTV and it is supposed to stop crime and do all those things, but once that thing is something we use to catch child predators it becomes used for whatever, and Merlin hates that.

Most movie plots being made irrelevant by the invention of the cell phone (RL460)

Watching episodic television with John's daughter’s mother / partner is one of the glues that binds them together. Recently they have been watching The Last Kingdom about the Vikings, a show where every single plot of every single episode could have been resolved if they had cellphones, which is true of 1980s teen comedies, too! The reason the world is so boring now is that there is no more plot!

John has 6-7 cameras around the house and he can lay in bed and if somebody knocks on the door he can raise his head off the pillow, look at the camera on his phone, and see who is at the door. Even in 2015, if you had told him that! And at the same time it doesn’t quite work!

Merlin calls Walgreens the store that has almost what you need. They rarely have what you need, but almost what you need, which is worse. He discussed it recently with friend of the show John Siracusa that there are product managers who think that you need to get things just to the point where they can do a demo on stage, like facial recognition that barely works, but even when it works you can’t do fuck all with it. There is no way to send you alerts if it sees a face that is NOT familiar, which is the one thing anybody would want. Merlin recently tore most of his home automation stuff apart because it was just not working.

Last night Merlin was watching one of his favorite TV series, Veep. She is running against Brad Leland (Buddy Garrity from Friday Night Lights) and she is about to concede the race to him when new information comes in, and then Mike (played by Matt Walsh from the Upright Citizens Brigade) has to run down the halls to transmit that information because she is about to walk on stage and there is no way the information would get there fast enough, which can totally work.

But look at The Matrix from 1999 and the basic concede of the movie, which is still a fucking good movie, and Merlin can’t explain to his dumb kid that when Trinity first did the bullet time thing and starts running on the walls we had never seen that before outside of Hong Kong martial art films, and they put a new spin on it. But when she got out she had to get to the payphone. The phone is such a huge part of the movie.

Merlin’s lady likes to run and when she is doing some trail running in Marin at this point now he will fret if she is not available on Find My Friends for hours because that is the kind of family they are. They have a 3-person Find My Friends network and each of them always knows where the other two family members are and they leave it always on, it is always there, and they never have to ask: ”Where are you?”

The question is if all that makes it more difficult for young people to understand old movies. Another one of Merlin’s favorite movies is Little Miss Sunshine where they accidentally leave Olive at the gas station, or think about Home Alone: People with a house that big don’t know anyone else in Chicago who can go and check on Kevin?

John’s security cameras (RL460)

John bought a bunch of security cameras to put around his house, which is how he discovered the boys that came to harass him, and he nailed them up in all the trees, and he can look at them on his phone. They were very cheap and they kind of record if somebody were to walk in front of them, and he kind of would be able to play them back and freeze on someone’s face.

That is only true with the big asterisk that everything has to work exactly properly all the time. In 1992 John would have believed in flying cars before he would have believed that he could have this. They thought more about light speed travel than about sending a message somewhere.

John wants facial recognition to work, but he doesn’t want the city to spy on him when he walks around. He wants to be able to look out and have his cameras that he bought for $20 each tell him every single person who comes up to the front door, but he doesn’t want the cops to subpoena that, he doesn’t want it to trigger every time a car goes by on the road 100 yards away, and he just wants to look at the war in Ukraine on his phone and it does a great job at that.

Being in a relationship with a person with Borderline Personality Disorder is that they make you think that if you just solve this problem that is right in front of us then everything is going to be fine, but until then everything is a disaster. That is how his relationship with technology feels: We are so close! When John first bought his house friend of the show Matt Haughey told him to put in CAT-7 line in all the walls so he can have cameras everywhere and lightning-fast computers, and when John asked his contractors about putting CAT-12 in all the walls they told him that you can’t even get CAT-12.

The other day a kid doorbell-dashed him, which they in New England call Ding Dong Ditch. He was young, he wasn’t one of those swim club kids, he was not more than 12, wearing a Baby Yoda fleece hoodie with the ears and Baby Yodas on it, like a Deputy Dawg Halloween costume from the 1970s, a cheap mask and an apron with pictures of Deputy Dawg on it. John was sitting in the bathtub in the middle of the afternoon and hears a noise outside, he picks up his phone to look at the camera and nobody was there, so he looked at the replay feature and here comes Baby Yoda up the walk, he knocks on the door really fast and then he runs, which was sweet.

The camera was pointed right at him and John could see his face, but because it is 2022 and not 2024 John couldn’t have told you… he had bleached bangs, he was a moneyed kid, and John is worried that he is the younger brother of one of the swim team dudes and all of the bad teens are around the corner, telling him to go knock on the door. John is hoping that if he has become Old Man Smithers (from Scooby-Doo) in this neighborhood, that is fine, he just doesn’t want anybody to firebomb his house. Kids don’t have boundaries!

John has this video of this kid in a Yoda shirt knocking on his door, but it is not worth anything. He is not going to put a picture of an 11-year old kid on Next Door, but because he has the security system, little things like that become emergencies in your mind in order to justify having the cameras, and John has caught a scofflaw, even though it is a non-thing. At any other time in his life if he had been in his bathtub and heard someone knocking on his door (he would have just ignored it, Merlin doesn’t let him finish his thought).

Not that this show needs a Ukraine segment every week, but there are all these fires happening and then the train goes off the rails, there are things happening in Russia and Ukraine is not claiming responsibility for any of those fires, but a cow knocked over a tar pot over somebody’s lamp, and Ukraine is not even commenting on it at all. John sat up in bed this morning, thinking that it was Stuxnet that was turning the coffee pot on in the middle of the night and then making it short out because it is one of those home network coffee pots that you can control from your phone! That is what Mr. Robot did to the thing where all the financial records were stored.

Although John knows that the PLO does not want to get into John’s phone in order to turn his cameras on so they heat up and make a black spot on a tree, it is why John doesn’t have any cameras in the house, he doesn’t want to be walking around and have the cameras uploading his underwear pictures, they should pay for that, it is an OnlyFans thing, and John thought about doing that, somebody suggested he should just go on there are read Jabberwocky (by Lewis Carroll) or (Rudyard) Kipling, imagine how cancelled he would get every week! Rikki-Tikki-Cancelled (Rikki-Tikki-Tavi is a short-story by Kipling).

John’s trip to Moloka‘i in Hawaii, finding a phone booth next to the grocery store (RL460)

When John was in Hawaii he saw a lot of Mongoose and he thought of Rikki-Tikki-Tavi every time. In front of the grocery store in Moloka‘i (see RL458) there was a phone booth that had a phone. John was looking at it for a while he was waiting for his daughter’s mother / partner to come out of the grocery store that had a sign ”One family member at a time, please!” He was talking to a woman in her 60s who had left Moloka‘i when she was a teenage in the 1970s for America, did drugs and partied, she said she was sexy and Rock’n’Roll, but now she is back on Moloka‘i because she is old.

She said John wouldn’t believe the things she has seen (reference to Blade Runner), but he would absolutely believe them. That goes almost into (Samuel Taylor) Coleridge territory and it feels a lot like The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. John should go to weddings with an albatross. Merlin is so glad he went to Liberal Arts school to come up with those references! He will put the Coleridge reference back in his pocket and next year there will be another opportunity. ”In Xanadu did Kubla Khan - A stately pleasure-dome decree” (first two lines from Kubla Khan by Samuel Taylor Coleridge), which is for Citizen Kane (Xanadu is the name of the estate in Citizen Kane).

John looked at this phone booth for 20 minutes and despite COVID he took it and put it to his ear, but there was no dial tone. Merlin wonders if people take phones out of phone kiosks to use them for something. If they have a Cap’n Crunch whistle they can get free long distance (reference to phreaking). Merlin can’t whistle like he used to.

Mad Magazine printing fake money that you could put into coin changers (RL460)

One time Mad Magazine printed fake money and under a period of two weeks you could put those notes into money changers and get coins back. It was the rare instance where John had the magazine, he had heard you could do this, and he went to a self car-wash place next to the laundromat and put Mad Magazine money into the coin machine before they fixed the bug.

John discovering a 24-hour car wash and coffee kiosk (RL460)

The other day John was at a freestanding coffee kiosk next to a car wash, one that looked like a Photomat, and as he was getting the coffee he asked how long this place has been there because he had never seen it before and she told him that it was there 5-6 years and they are open 24 hours. It is not on the way to anywhere or next to anything and John was expressing his incredulity about the fact that they have to sit there at 3am waiting for someone to get a coffee, but she said that the car wash place is owned by the same guy and he keeps them both open 24 hours. Merlin thinks that must be money laundering!

As they were talking somebody came out of the car wash in a zippidy-zapped-up car, doing a burnout and she rolled her eyes and said that John wouldn’t believe how many times a day this happens. It was a like a microcosm, a small universe with a television-show worth of content. ”The car wash as seen from the coffee kiosk!” John is sure that this is all owned by a very large former professional sports person.

Merlin has a photo of the first time his kid ever saw a phone booth. She was in toddler-age, they were on the way to the zoo, and the kid had no idea. It is the same when you are in a hotel room with a kid that is old enough to watch TV, but not old enough to have been in a lot of hotel rooms, and you have explain that they can’t just watch what is on the TiVo, but you have to watch whatever is on and you can’t skip the commercials. Merlin used that as a great teachable moment.

Merlin’s kid believes that almost every story Merlin shares from his childhood is sad, which is mostly true. He only has a handful of good and happy stories, but most of them are sad stories about privation and sometimes he finds a way to leverage to that, but he really tries to move out of the ”You kids have it easy!” lane.

John keeping digital technology away from his daughter as long as possible (RL460)

John’s family has tried very hard to keep digital stuff away from their kid. They are not judgmental about it, they don’t mind if anybody else thinks differently, many friends have digital relationships with their kid from young, the classic Coulton vs Hodgman dilemma, but John’s family didn’t see a reason for it, they definitely didn’t want her to have an iPad, even though you can extoll the virtues of those to the heavens, but they just didn’t want it.

Now she is 11 and she wants some measure of independents, she wants to walk to the park by herself or do other things on her own, she wants to be left alone, and they are looking into the future, and a lot of the stories John tells from his childhood that aren’t about privation but have a joyous element, nobody used to care where he was! He would walk out the door and would be gone all day and nobody even knew he was gone! It was amazing! He would start fires in abandoned houses, and his daughter rolls her eyes about that, but she is also very intrigued by a time when kids weren’t monitored.

Merlin’s wife was the youngest kid of seven and grew up on Rhode Island and not only was she asked to be home when the streetlights come on, but in the summer she was not even allowed to come home before the streetlights came on. She was not going to be in there watching TV, that was for damn sure!

Learning to let your child be independent, not always having all the information, her wanting her first phone (RL460)

John’s dilemma right now is that those times when she does get a measure of independence she says that she is going to ride her bike to point X, which feels fine, but then in between here and there they don’t have an AirTag on her and she doesn’t have a phone. This is something Merlin’s family actually practiced. The one time he lost his kid out of his eyes was for 45 seconds at a Target and he almost lost his mind because he is that kind of guy, and not only does their kid need to practice not being able to see them, but they also need to practice not being able to see the kid and tolerate a lack of information.

John and his daughter would play this game all the time when they went to a mall or an outdoor event: He would tell her to go through the Sears and out the other side all the way to the end of the mall where she could see that escalator, and then turn around and wave. As soon as she starts to move she is in a crowd and you can’t see her, and she would get all the way to the end where you could see her in the haze of distance, and they would wave at each other. It was all part of their operation.

Now they are not quite at a point where they are at the mall and meet up again an hour later and what she wants is a phone because she knows that a phone is the solution to the issue. She would absolutely sign off on letting John see all the time where she is, she would probably feel more secure with that too, but a phone is also a portal to hell. It has been for John! He could fill it with restrictions, but she might also just be up in the middle of the night texting her friends, going: ”OMG, did you see what she was wearing?” and that type of stuff that John doesn’t want to be the thing that dominates her downtime.

Merlin’s kid is on an electronic device all the time, and so are her friends! That is the world now, it is not 1991 anymore, and there are upsides and downsides to that, but Merlin has lots of Aloha for parents who don’t want their kids to become like that. It is not particularly realistic if you know what kids are like today, but Merlin totally appreciates it.

Hodgman’s oldest girl got into a prestigious New York High School that is a path to getting into Yale, which otherwise is impossible to get into from New York, but she did get into Yale. When she was in 8th grade in this feeder school it required of her that she woke up in the morning, walked to the subway, take the subway out to Coney Island or some crazy thing, and go to school and take the subway home. She was confident that she could do it, and that was the last they were going to talk about it and her parents were okay with that. Kids in New York take the subway, that is just a thing.

John’s family doesn’t live in the city, but he lives out in the country and his own forest could be full of child predators. If you listen to Congress, they are everywhere! Looking out the window right now John can see groomers everywhere he looks. All he sees is push-broom mustaches in Ghillie Suits!

John’s daughter goes to Montessori school where they do the SAT with blocks and she has yet to come and tell their parents that they are ruining her life by not letting her have a phone because all those kids have similar parents, like: ”The newspaper!”, many of them Millennials who haven’t seen a newspaper either, but they have an app on their iPad that emulates a newspaper. Try training your dog on an iPad, or when your bird dies, are you going to wrap it in an iPad?

Although every other kid in her class does have an iPad, they all have Montessori parents and they play games like Minecraft because that is supposed to be educational and because LEGO are healthy toys. She has yet to say that if she doesn’t get an Instagram account she is a Nobody or all her friends are texting each other at night and she is not included. John doesn’t know what to do, maybe he will move to Italy and maybe in Italian it will be even harder. ”Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday, Sunday” - ”Apollonia, too soon!” - ”She is so pretty!” (reference to The Godfather)

John was such a late bloomer! ”White sauce? Not a problem!” Merlin says: It sucks to have a crush on a dead woman, a Pictures of Lily kind of thing. All of John’s crushes are on women 40 years older than him. Pictures of Lily really landed on Merlin not just for the implied onanism, but for the whole: ”OMG, I have a crush on someone and I didn’t realize they were either really old or totally dead!”

Natalie Wood, watching a movie on an airplane but missing the last 15 minutes (RL460)

One time John was on an airplane, watching whatever movie, and he came upon a black & white movie with Steve McQueen and Natalie Wood (Love with the Proper Stranger), a very progressive movie from the early-to-mid 1960s. She had just been in West Side Story, a crazy movie where they had a one-night-stand, she got pregnant and the whole first and second act of the movie is about her trying to get an abortion, which are illegal in New York. She is so captivating in this film! Merlin she was absolutely stunning in the problematic John Wayne movie The Searchers. In Rebel Without a Cause she was in her 20s!

But just as they were clearly were about to fall in love John’s flight reached their destination and they shut the video system off. How can they play a movie on the flight where you can’t see the end? John went on Amazon when he got home because he had to see the end of the movie and it was $5.99 to rent, but paying that just to see the last 15 minutes? Now John is in a crazy state, like being in High School, falling in love with Natalie Wood, and then she dies and it is never resolved and you are always in love with her from then on.

Meeting Marc Olsen from Sage down at the beach in Normandy Park (RL460)

Merlin always imagines everybody at the age they were when he knew them. His best friend from 1st grade Rob died recently and it was weird looking at the photos, Rob was a very fit and handsome guy. Everybody he knew is probably old now! John agrees, and especially in the last few years they have crossed a certain line where some people look amazing and some people have fallen off.

The other day he was down at the beach in his neighborhood, he had been introduced to a young couple who used to work in restaurants on Capitol Hill like in Spinasse, which was interesting, and John felt thrown a little under the bus because his daughter’s mother / partner had told him about this woman and had pronounced the name of the restaurant ”Spinass” and maybe that was a secret code when they were talking to each other, like the way the astronauts say ”Gemini” Then John called it ”Spinass” while talking to her, but later she said it and she said Spinasse. John had known it correctly from the beginning, but he got bamboozled into saying it wrong.

When John was down at the beach talking to them he saw a guy who looked like Marc Olsen, a Seattle Rock musician from the early 1990s who played in the band Sage which John was a big fan on. They were in the family of bands around Hammerbox or The Posies where everybody knew who was going to be huge Grunge Rock stars even though it hadn’t happened yet, but who were going to be the next bands, because Seattle was going to make new bands for the rest of time. Of course most of those bands were slightly too interesting to be big. Those second wave bands were Indie Rock for all intents and purposes, and that is not what the culture was buying at the time.

John was a big fan back when he was just a worm and he would go up to Marc after shows and ask him about what kind of knobs he had on his amps, and Marc was always like: ”Yeah kid, stay in school!” even though they are the same age. John hadn’t seen him in a long time and over the years Marc had gone through some rough patches involving drugs and other hard times. What would have to happen to see Marc Olsen on the beach in Normandy Park? He looked good and healthy, his skin was good, and he wondered if that was really him, but the group of people around him including the girl who had worked at Spinasse was just 5 years too young to have every heard of Sage, they were all Millennial cusps who weren’t there in 1991/92.

John was not just going to walk up to a guy on the beach, going: ”Hey, if you got clean 10 years ago you might be Marc Olsen from Sage!”, but he couldn’t start looking at him. He was dressed like John, like a Hipster, and this is a neighborhood where there aren’t very many hipsters. John couldn’t be on the beach with Marc Olsen and not say: ”Hi!” because that would be a crime, so he had to risk it not being him and he marched down the beach, walked up and went: ”Marc?” - ”Oh, hi John!”, but he said it too fast because he had already seen him and thought: ”Is that John Roderick?”

Then they had an hour-long conversation on the beach and Marc lives by the fire station, they were both less crazy now, both clean and sober, both doing great, he had a couple of kids, living a life, John never would have expected it because everybody else they knew along the way are all Soylent Green by now. John was like Tom Hagen and Franky Pentangeli, talking about how everybody is gone now (reference to The Godfather II). They continue mimicking the voices from the movie.

by jroemling

RL459 - Ukrainian Prank Calls

Sat, 07 Jan 2023 17:13:08 +0000

This week, Merlin and John talk about:

Merlin getting organized, using smaller bins instead of large boxes (Merlin Mann)
John’s plans of a personal museum in his new house not coming very far (Mid-century modern)
The war in Ukraine, the importance of logistics in military and applying that to your own life (Military)
John having to dismantle his faith in institution, the CIA has failed, defeating the Russians as easy as keying their car (Military)

The Problem: John is the Russian Army, referring to John learning from the war in Ukraine in that logistics is far more important than combat and that his situation previously in his life has had a lot in common with the Russian army.

The show title refers to Ukrainians sending fake messages to Russians over unsecured walkie talkies.

The audio starts with a few seconds of the song Panama by Van Halen.

Merlin getting organized, using smaller bins instead of large boxes (RL459)

Merlin is always doing projects, and right now he has returned to his energy project, trying to get his energy straightened out. He is also spending a lot of time with bins and bin systems. He is also going to take his bricked MacBook Pro to the Apple Store today.

By the time Merlin was in college he was moving 5 times a year, and there is a funny Zeno’s paradox of moving, where you repeatedly take half the distance and you get closer but you never actually get there. You start moving things, especially if you have some help, but even after you have moved some big things and it looks like you have made some progress you are not even close to being done. Liquor boxes work really well for books because otherwise people are putting too many books in one box. And especially when you come to the kitchen with all the drawers you are doing so many steps but you are still not done.

Merlin went from putting tons of of crap into a big box to putting little bits of well-organized things into a small bin. Having boxes of the same size is useful for purposes of stacking on a moving truck. He is getting organized now, and that involves a lot of half-steps that make you feel you are getting closer, but you are just taking smaller and smaller steps. You should never organize stuff that should actually be discarded. Moving stuff to a nicer box is not getting organized and you are inhabiting a personality disorder. He recommends the Akro-Mils stackable bins.

They continue talking about what different bins Merlin uses for different organizational processes. He mentioned his good pal Chris Contran (?) from college who used to take on personal experiments and wanted everything he owned to be visible, which also requires to get rid of a lot of shit.

John wonders what Merlin will do with things that he might need one day, like a power brick or something you don’t know what it is for, but it feels important. He learned a trick from Martha Stewart Magazine 15 years ago: If you have a box that you have not opened since college, you tape it up, you write a date 6 months in the future, and if you haven’t opened it in 6 months you just throw it away. It is also how Merlin cleans out their junk drawers.

The place where you store something should almost always be the first place you just looked for it.

They discuss if they put their phone down in weird places sometimes, which John does, but Merlin doesn’t want to put down valuable things in places where he wouldn’t want to have them overnight, and his phone is always in his left front pocket.

John’s mind looks for things the place he looks for it, and it is usually there, but it would be unfindable by anybody else.

It is catalog season again and Merlin lists a few catalogs he recently received. John got a Patagonia catalog in the mail although he has never ordered anything from them. It didn’t even sell anything, but it was just a whole catalog full of stories of people doing mountain things. It was a magazine that looked like a catalog looking like a magazine, and he actually read some of the stories in it.

John’s plans of a personal museum in his new house not coming very far (RL459)

John is a fan of the Roland Juno 106 synthesizer from the early 1980s and he has a couple of them and they are worth more than gold for him. It is not the Dr. Dre one, but the doctor character in Prince and The Revolution had one, definitely Nick Rhodes had one. It is pre-DX7 and it is a weird in-between analog and digital with pre-programmed sounds and analog controls. At some point along the way he came upon an outboard programmer thing you would hook up to the Juno 106 through a 32-pin cable and in 1984 this would have been a dynamite piece of sequencing kit that allows you to make loops.

All it does you can do on your watch now, it is a non-essential kit, but it is super-groovy and John has it in a box. He pulls out the keyboard all the time and plays it, but he never uses the sequencer, and no-one would because now you would just play the Juno 106 into your computer. It is a curiosity, and it is not a small thing, and for the last 20+ years he has had this box with this thing in it and a couple of drum machines with associated power bricks. The 1984 in John looks in the box and thinks this is a box full of gold bricks, while anybody subsequent to 1993 looks in there and goes: ”How is this stuff still in the world?”

Merlin has an Atari 2600 with the controllers and everything, but he can’t bare to throw it away because he wanted an Atari 2600 so much when he was 14 and now he has one and he is 55 and it is in the garage and sometimes he goes to look at it.

When John was looking for his current house he had the vision of a wall of shelves with an Atari 2600 arranged artfully, next to his Mac Classic II that would be on and on the screen there would be cool flying toasters flickering, and this little thing from post-war and his 1952 radio was going to be on, playing Jazz softly, and walking into his house you would be transported to the coolest place you had ever been. The shelves would have cowboy boots on them and it would be a catalog that looked like a magazine, like a personal museum.

John does have those things, but they are all in boxes stacked on top of boxes, and he has found better boxes and he has gotten rid of so many things, but every time he thinks he is cutting to the bone is not anywhere close to the bone, but he hasn’t even started shaving his mustache. His wall currently has a bunch of cigar boxes full of things, there is a jug from an Ohio potting company from 18-whichever.

Merlin has a collection of metal he found on the streets and he once tried to create an entire deck of cards from cards he found on the street. They are probably in a box somewhere. One time John found a playing card with a bullet hole in it that he carried around as a good-luck charm, but he never got anywhere close to putting together a deck. In a box somewhere he got… Merlin used to collect Chick Tracts (he calls it Chick Publications), but he mostly gets another copy of ”Hi there!” because that is the one that weirdos buy in bulk to leave instead of a tip.

John found the ace of spades outside in Athens Gerogia, which was significant, and he carried it for a long time, but now it is in a box and he doesn’t know where. He also has 3 mugs with CB-lingo from the 1970s, which is exactly the right amount.

The war in Ukraine, the importance of logistics in military and applying that to your own life (RL459)

But all they have talked about so far, putting things in boxes and putting boxes on top of boxes, is what the Russian Army doesn’t know, and John doesn’t think they are pretending to be incompetent. Merlin has stopped following the war in Ukraine too closely because it was making him too sad, but they have talked about the 40-mile single line of trucks they couldn’t keep fueled (see RL455). He gets the part where nobody tells Mr. Putin bad news, but he doesn’t get how 8 or 9 generals are already dead right now.

John in trying to learn from the war in Ukraine and trying to apply the lessons to his own life. When he was young and would meet a person serving in the armed forces he would always ask them what they did. Whenever they said they worked in supply or drove a truck or were part of the administration he was always disappointed because at 15-20 years old he thought that everybody was Sgt. Rock.

John’s dad flew supply planes in World War II and John was always a little bit disappointed and maybe his dad was too. George HW Bush flew a dive bomber and John F. Kennedy swam across the ocean, pulling his PT-109 (torpedo boat) by his teeth, which is quite good for a guy with Addison’s disease. The stories John’s dad told from the war were always stories from the high adventure, but really his job was a methodical job where you fly things in, drop them off, come back, get more things, and take them back out.

As John has gotten older he has gotten more and more interested in the logistics and when he went to Africa with his friend Lt Col. Matt Martin retired, (see USO tour), Matt explained through the whole process that almost all officers in the military are engaged in a process of moving pallets of bottled water from this place to that place. You can’t do the armying without bottled water, it is incredibly important! The confusing part is that at a certain point they expect the people who are really good at moving things around to make more complicated decisions, and that is where you run into problems, at least in the US military.

John’s lady friend is job searching right now, she is in marketing in cyber security (so it is his daughter’s mother). They don’t have tangible products, but they are shipping solutions. In modern business the first idea is often to start a business and only the second thought is figuring out what the business does.

What Matt Martin explained was that the beauty of being in the army is that you have goals that are knowable and that you can execute on those goals and then you have accomplished the goal and that is how you gain rank. But at a certain point you walk through the membrane and the goal becomes some statecraft or you are interacting with people who have 700 years old tribal rivalries and not only is there no goal you can achieve, but there are no goals there.

The war in Ukraine has pointed out that all the logistics stuff that John used to laugh at is what the Russians weren’t doing, they were not systematizing the moving around of boxes and that is the sharp point of the spear. What John realized is that the way he manages his own life is like was Col. Bo Gritz and he was in charge of the vision of the military. His whole life he thought that being a successful grown-up man was to be an effective combat team and that everybody who was moving boxes around the world were a bunch of pencil-pushing pencil-necks.

A part of John thinks he is the Russian army because there is a lot of corruption in him, there is a lot of skimming of resources, there is somewhat a lot of sending false reports up the chain, sometimes when the president of John Roderick wants a report he gets something that eliminates some of the variables, and the long tail that would support a functioning enterprise got neglected, the boxes get pushed over to the side, and nobody is rotating the tires because it is not the glamorous work.

Also: Nobody in the military keeps their job for 15 years, but the opposite: You do it for a year and then they move you to a different job, which seems dumb because why would you move someone that just got good at their job, but the point is not the person, the point is the job, and everybody should be able to do the job and it is a way of eliminating the problem that there is only one guy who knows where the forms are. Everybody keeps moving, everybody can do every job, and a person at a particular rank you can slot in anywhere because you know that at that rank they can do this set of jobs.

Also: Only some of the people get promoted and you get stopped at the level of your incompetency and at some point you are even too old for your rank. The funnel really narrows between Lt. Col and Col because that is where you are in command. There are a lot of really good Lt. Cols and they have a wealth of people to choose from and maybe it is the ones that can give really bad news in a congenial way that make the extra step, and not many people get their first star.

John has been contemptuous of logistics, not because he didn’t love watching it, but in his mind. Merlin once had to cancel a camping trip because he couldn’t fit everything in the car and now they will always rent a crossover SUV that they never would want to own, but it fit everything comfortably with room to spare and all the stress has gone away.

Merlin talks at length about that not being able to tell Putin bad news is a loss of opportunity to improve the situation.

His whole life John wanted to hear generals and State Department guys and spooks in khaki trench coats and people who had the satellite information sitting on nightly news shows, talking about the strategy and Putin’s mindset and all this stuff, that was what this whole thing was about, but somehow he got linked into this world on Twitter that he is lurking around in, not commenting, that is the interesting part of the war because he can listen to Command Master Sergeants talk about the quality of the gasoline that they don’t have, and that this operation failed because they didn’t rotate their tires.

From the satellite it looks like they are undefeatable, but in 16 hours they are not going to have any more sandwich meat and nobody knows about it, especially not Putin, and that is actually the problem. None of the pundits on TV are talking about this and even the soldiers might not know that tomorrow at 1600 hours there is no more lunch meat and that is the end. He is also fascinated by people saying that because they have seen that there were things welded to a thing that don’t belong there must mean that they are already in deep trouble because doing that is only a last resort.

John is thrilled not only to see the Russian Army fall apart, but also the whole Western intelligence strategy, the whole 10-layer cake of what we think of geopolitics and war analysts. Even the Lt. Cols in the US Army that had been to Ukraine or that had been stationed anywhere were saying: ”For Russian to be able to just walk in and overwhelm the Ukrainian Army you would need to see this many containers sitting on the tarmac of this airport, but they are not there, so our satellites are telling us that they can’t do what they are saying!”

John having to dismantle his faith in institution, the CIA has failed, defeating the Russians as easy as keying their car (RL459)

Nobody loved the CIA more than John in 1980 and by 1990 he was very disappointed by the CIA and by 2000 he did not have a good word to say about them, and now he feels like they are not doing anything and their intelligence is so bad that they are almost like a foreign agent. They miss so much because they are as an institution up their own ass, they have all the money but no accountability because nobody can challenge them because it is all secret. That whole side of American foreign policy has just failed, although it was so cool and there were so many great movies about it with people with little pens with daggers in them and stuff on their umbrella, but it is all just terrible and not working.

The NSA is built around the idea of monitoring every single cell phone conversation in the world, looking for somebody to say ”Castro’s beard”, but it turns out in this war the Russians were just using walkie talkies they got at the drug store and they blew up the 3G towers that would have let them use their secure communications. Ukrainians were making prank calls and talking to the Russians on their walkie talkies telling them that the guys were on their way and be there in 6 hours and the Russians at the airport outside in Kiev were holding their ground while Ukrainians were throwing molotov cocktails at the trucks (see for example this article).

Some soldiers were also told they were on a training mission all the way until they were crossing into Ukraine, and then they were told that the Ukrainians would welcome them with open arms because they were going to liberate them, but just because two groups nominally speak the same language does not mean that they will welcome the other’s army with open arms. Ohio wouldn’t welcome the army from Alabama to march in and tell them how to make barbecue.

John has always been against conspiracy because it seems impossible to keep a secret even among 5 people and nobody who is a conspiracy theorist has ever managed a project, and how can the world be ruled by a secret cabal of bankers and tech billionaires when it then comes down to if they have rotated their tires or not?

When John is talking to his lady after her job interviews it turns out that nobody knows anything, which is astonishing! Kurt Vonnegut said that anybody who can’t explain what they do for a living to a 10-year old is a charlatan. Merlin explains that whenever you can’t understand someone’s motivation, it always comes down to money or fear. John adds that the other thing is just plain dumbness. In Vonnegut’s Kilgore Trout short story two pieces of yeast are debating about the meaning of life while they were eating sugar and suffocated in their own shit, and neither of them ever realized that they were making champaign.

John has to dismantle a lot of faith in institution and his own arrogant and smug relationship to it. He has always been counter-institutional, but that alone requires that you believe in the institution. Merlin likes to go back to not feeling like he has to follow the news every single day because it has become an existential threat to him, he liked it better when things were boring and he didn’t have to know how Congress works. He never wants to be the smartest one in the room ever!

When you are on social media you think that the world is really fucked up, but as soon as you get off you realize that social media is the thing that is fucked up, and you can’t know it if social media is your world and you are in it. John stepped away from it for a year and realized that 80% of that is just in that closed system and when you step out of it is all just disappears because you are not hearing those voices anymore.

You apply that to Aldrich Ames, the spy that was a KGB guy and all these guys that were complaining that for all these years they had been giving away their agents’ phone numbers and 15 CIA agents died because Aldrich Ames put a piece of bubble gum under a park bench in Washington DC, and now it turns out that actually defeating the Russians is just about letting the air out of their tires. All of the ICBMs are sitting in silos out in Iowa, still fueled and ready to go, but all you needed to go was to key their car!

There is a video of Boris Yelzin being drunk and dancing, and he is doing the Trump double-handjob gesture. There is also a picture of Brezhnev with a swimming cap on in a floatie in a swimming pool with two KGB agents on either side of him keeping him from sinking. John looked at that picture so many times, trying to figure out how the Russian bear was going to respond to Casto’s beard, but it turns out we are all just making Champaign!

by jroemling

RL458 - Beck’s Situation

Sat, 07 Jan 2023 17:06:32 +0000

This week, Merlin and John talk about:

John getting anxious on a plane (Anxiety)
The US should be 100 states, many states being very different on a detail level (Geography)
John visiting Hawaii, staying on Moloka‘i where there is no tourism industry except for one abandoned hotel (Hawaii)
John trying to apply the energy he brought home from Hawaii to other parts in life (Hawaii)
Clash of the Titans (Movies)

The Problem: You’re responsible for keeping the swimming pool clean, referring to the abandoned hotel complex on Moloka‘i where people still live in condos after the hotel closed and the ownership company is still responsible to keep the swimming pool clean.

The show title refers to leprosy that is now called Hansen’s Disease because Beck had it at one point.

John getting anxious on a plane (RL458)

As John answers the call he is concerned about his volume in his headphones. Merlin used to be concerned more about his mass, but now he is concerned about his volume, the space he takes up. John was just on an airplane yesterday, so his mass is really well established. The airlines are really trying to keep all their friends, so they gave him an upgrade to a window seat, which John does not prefer, but beggars can’t be choosers, and he was sitting towards the bulk head and overheard two flight attendants candidly running down a list of the insane events that have happened to them in the last 8 months, rolling their eyes so hard, looking at the people in the plane to gauge who will barf or throw a pie.

Next to John was a 7 year old boy with his dad and they were packing up all their video games and John thought: ”I can’t be here! Get me out of here!” It felt like someone was bricking up the wall and he was looking for the bottle of wine. He had to do what he was trying to learn to master his panic. He was thinking about throwing his phone in the ocean a long time, but now he pulled it out and was looking for some kind of brick breaker or card game he could be playing. He did have headphones, but they were in the bag he had pushed under the seat in front of him and he didn’t like the prospect of bending down. For Merlin all of his other senses will feel overwhelmed until he can dead with what he hears, and noise cancelling headphones will take the edge off. When pulling something over his eyes he will still hear all the stuff.

John has been on a hundred billion trillion flights, but this time be became aware of a low frequency noise that was going through the plane the entire flight. It was a familiar sensation and for a long time he was trying to figure out what was exactly happening, it was probably not some piece of machinery. He is still 100% thumbs up on flying, though. Last week he flew a couple of times on a much smaller airplane, a Cessna 208 and he was all about it. He was sitting behind the pilot and his knees were touching the back of his seat, which he didn’t like, but then the pilot came in and pulled his seat forward and all of a sudden John had 10” (25cm) of room and he felt much better, just thanks to that small change.

The US should be 100 states, many states being very different on a detail level (RL458)

Knowing things about Hawaii is a specialization, and Merlin has lived on the west coast for 20 years and he should know more about it, although there is so much to know about California and there are still tons of things he doesn’t know about it. If someone asked him to write down all the neighborhoods of Los Angeles he could probably do 6.

California is the 9th largest economy in the world, about the size of Italy. Cars not taking leaded gas anymore can surely be traced back to California. Many people also don’t know that it is not a blue state and they elected Ronald Reagan and no matter what you know is probably wrong or not complete. Merlin was a weird kid and in early High School he was reading a book called Megatrends about 10 big things that were likely to happen in the US based on movements, and a lot of them turned out to be true.

Merlin continues to talk about the demography of California that is different than you might think. Merlin lives in the politically most conservative in San Francisco, at least at a recent point, because it is a lot of upper-middle-class Chinese people who have a world view that is not the same as people who moved into a place in SoMa (South of Market) last week. Any kind of rounding up we try to do about people tends to fall apart as soon as you get a count of how many people were being rounded up. You don’t say ”California is…” because what is California and what is ”is”?

John thinks that California should be 7 states (actually 6) and the United States should be 100 states. Then everything would be fine and we would love each other a lot better. Think about fucking Ohio! Both Merlin and John’s mom are from Ohio, but whenever somebody says: ”Ohio is…”, Cincinnati is unique in the true sense of the word, especially as a city in Ohio, because it is very conservative, very close to Indiana and Kentucky, and more culturally to those similar in many ways. Merlin’s family is from Kentucky, they were not born in Toledo, while John’s mom is more from a Midwestern farm area.

But if Ohio is 6 states and you want to have 100 United States, then you would also have to lose some states, like Delaware is really just part of Philadelphia. Merlin’s wife’s whole family obviously is from Rhode Island which could be folded into three different states. Merlin’s wife is from Barrington, which is a dry city and you can drive into Massachusetts, which takes 3 minutes, to get beer on a Sunday. Both Rhode Island and New Jersey, both states where Ted Leo is from, could be easily folded into other states. Merlin suggests that this should be a class for the entire year of 5th grade: Discuss 6 different ways to reorganize the United States arbitrarily. It would be much more interesting than Indian burial grounds and Papier-mâché maps of Ohio! It is a Randall Munroe thing and John usually gets a kick out of it.

John has never been to Australia and although he knows some things about it, when people ask him about the geography, that is really the extreme example. New Zealand is actually beneath it, not just to the side, and there are two New Zealands!

John staying on Moloka‘i where there is no tourism industry except for one abandoned hotel (RL458)

John was in Hawaii for the last 10 days and he went to Moloka‘i, which he had never been to, the one that everybody thinks of the Leper Colony island. Although the actual historical leper colony was a tiny peninsula on a very large island John thought as a kid that one of the islands is only for lepers. Now it is called Hansen’s Disease because Beck had it at one point, Merlin calls it Beck’s Situation, and there has been a cure for a long time, but some people are still living there who have lived here their whole lives. It is a bacterial infection and you can get antibiotics for it.

In the old days, they would just declare you dead, take you from your family, and put you on this island where you could never leave again. Like in the movie Cool Hand Luke, any hard labor they made you do was just to make your life miserable and potentially kill you. It is not a resort, but also not specifically like a prison, and you do have the risk of your nose falling off. You could live there for a long time with the disease, but also after you were cured you might not want to move from there. You can’t really go down there because there are no roads and you have to take a donkey trail, which John didn’t do. It is a very different experience than going to O‘ahu or Maui or The Big Island. Merlin has only been to Kauai where John has never been.

Moloka‘i is an example of an island that is very complicated to describe. The roads that appear on the map like a grid of a city are ghost roads, the farms are abandoned, and you need to be in a 4-wheel drive truck to make it down the roads. Kaunakakai is the big town with a population of about 1000 (actually 3500). The entire island has a population of 7000 people. O‘ahu next door has 1 million (about 20 times the density). The experience on Moloka‘i feels like Hawaii and the people are Hawaiians.

John was staying in a giant and super-awesome complex at the far Western edge of Moloka‘i called Kaluakoi Villas that is basically an abandoned hotel and golf course that looks like a 1970s version of a Hawaiian village. It couldn’t look more like a 1979 idyllic golf course hotel and it had a 4-lobed swimming pool (actually 3-lobed) like the ones they invented skateboarding in. At some point the entire island was a giant ranch, dating all the way back to when there was a king of Hawaii. They grew cattle, sugar cane, and pineapples, but all those industries one by one… when John was a kid they grew so many pineapples and so much sugar cane on Hawaii until it became easier to do that in Asia and Latin America.

In 1970s TV ads for special offers at Kmart or Sears they would always say ”Prices differ in Alaska and Hawaii” at the bottom of the screen because the supply chain is very complicated, and that is still true. There are only 4 grocery stores on Moloka‘i and none of them are what you would recognize. The biggest one is like a neighborhood grocery store, and it wouldn’t be the one that you went to. Most of the stuff for Sale still has its CostCo price tag on it with another price tag put over it.

The resort changed ownership several times until it was in the hands of a succession of corporation who tried to develop it as a luxury resort and as home sites for millionaires and billionaires, as is true in every direction. What made it difficult is that there is not a lot of water on the island. Nobody in Hawaii wanted it to become an incredibly expensive vacation destination, but i happened on Maui and on O‘ahu in ways that took everybody by surprise, like a third wave of colonization. Hawaiian culture had always been super-hierarchical where the top 1% owned 99% of the land.

That development in the 1960s/70s didn’t happen on Moloka‘i because it was owned by the giant pineapple ranch, and when all of the economy fell away it was late enough in the game that the Hawaiians of Moloka‘i did not want this to convert into a millionaire-resort anymore and they actually fought a resistance movement where they blew up the water pipes and tore down the street signs. If that resort had been opening in 1978 it would have been a killer place, but the people of Moloka‘i put up enough of a fight that they decided to just shut it all down.

Now there is no tourism industry on the island and the only hotel is a Magnum P.I hotel that still feels like 1969. It doesn’t quite feel like a reservation, but there is no money there. There are even signs in people’s yards saying: ”Visit! Spend! Leave!”, all the restaurants are catering to local people, and it might be the only place in America where there is not a Sushi, Chinese, Mexican, Thai, or Italian restaurant.

John spent a couple of weeks there and it was a lot of food for thought and he was profoundly wondering about Hawaii which he has a lot of experience with. He is always looking for Aloha, and there is lots of it there, but it is in a different package. There is no place there for escaping history. Back in the 1970s John could stand on a beautiful beach with no sign of human beings or habitats or development at all. You are never far away from signs of war, violence, resistance, and anger.

In other places in Hawaii you can put your head under the water, the turtles are prehistoric, and you are in an environment of Aloha while the anger is just up above the water if you lift your head up, while in Moloka‘i it is always there. There are still $5 million homes that would be $20 million on Maui, but those people would have to fly their food in every day because there would not be food in the stores across the island on the level you are accustomed to. John also realized that he belongs in an abandoned hotel that feel post-apocalyptic and tropical at the same time.

You can get a 1-room apartment there for $150.000 and if you don’t want to go to a restaurant or a movie and you want to be in seclusion and have access to the natural beauty of Hawaii, this is one of the last places in the world where you could be in paradise, you just have to navigate the sense of living in a ruin where people don’t want you there. When they closed down the hotel, the people in the condos kept living there in half of the buildings with new roofs, and they sued the company because the bylaws still said that the company is responsible for keeping the swimming pool clean, and they won in Hawaiian court, so there is now a perfectly maintained swimming pool looking out over the cliffs and John’s daughter went there every day.

They just put the entire property for sale for $260 million, which seems like a rounding error for Larry Ellison and all these Silicon Valley people that are buying resorts on Lanai, infuriating people for buying thousands of acres of land. But when they do they due diligence and realize what the vibe is, there has not been any buyer yet and probably the State of Hawaii should buy it and turn it back into a park or something. It was really a head-trip for John, he didn’t come away with a clearer picture of everything or a solution of how it should or shouldn’t be, he was just walking up and down he beach chewing on the side of his cheek, going: ”Hmm… wow… what would you do?”, which is also a form of Aloha.

Merlin talks about how ”Measure twice, cut once” sounds like a very good idea until you realize what it really means. It is not about a 2x4, but that something has happened in your situation is now irreversible.

John never came back with a head full of Aloha and used that energy to reorganize his kitchen or actually managed to banish anxiety, but it is just a lot of food for thought. He doesn’t know how to vacation by sitting on a beach and relax, but he is always going to be with his head under the water, looking for something.

John trying to apply the energy he brought home from Hawaii to other parts in life (RL458)

John is watching the war in Ukraine on Twitter and he is reading all the threads of 1000 armchair experts all commenting on exactly what is happening and what should be happening and what NATO needs to do and what Ukraine needs to do, but coming back from Moloka‘i he has that feeling of honestly having no idea what he would recommend. He understood the ground rules of it, but this is not its final form and this cannot be what their hope is for anyone living there, it is not Moloka‘i in its purest form, but it is in a state of change, and normally in situations like that John’s instinct is to have a plan.

John could talk for years about Israel and Palestine, he has a plan for everything, for his neighborhood, what his next-door neighbors should do, that is what makes life interesting to him, but when it comes to Moloka‘i he doesn’t know enough and couldn’t know enough to have a plan, and that means it is probably out of people’s hands and whatever is going to happen is going to just happen. It is good to be confronted by things in the world where the only thing you can do is say: ”There is no solution to this that I know of, except for the passage of time!”

Maybe that is the thing John can bring to the rest of his life, like the dispute with his neighbors. He is constantly in trouble because he is looking for solutions, and that is so baked into him that he is struggling even to know how he could look at it directly, it is like looking at an eclipse. Finding a way to live where you are not looking for solutions is not something you can do in a long weekend. Looking at everything as a problem is what John does: He wakes up, puts his belt on, hikes up his pants so you can see his socks, and he walks out the door and goes: ”Who has got a problem? These street lights should have been 3 meters taller!”

Clash of the Titans (RL458)

”They call him Johnny Solution, they used to call him Alphabet Gun!" Merlin is very proud to remember the name Perseus, he almost said Harry Hamlin (who played Perseus in the movie). John is impressed, and he just read the Ovid a year ago. Merlin loves Clash of the Titans with Laurence Olivier. It was a long time since John saw it. When Merlin lived with his step father they had cable for certain times and they did not always have both HBO and Showtime, it was almost $40 a month, but in 1981/82 the movie came on HBO or Showtime all the time, Burgess Meredith was in it, it was one of the first movies from when Merlin was getting into Siskel & Ebert on PBS.

John was going to show it to Marlo, but Merlin thinks it has not aged well, although it got some (Ray) Harryhausen in it, the guy who did the amazing Stop Motion in 1960s Hercules movies where he fights the skeletons, but John’s daughter is not into any of that. Lately she has been watching I Love Lucy and is cracking up about it. Every episode Lucy got a scheme, she is going to pretend that she fell down the stairs and has a cast so that Ricky… and that is how they discovered once again that Fred Mertz has killed a prostitute.

by jroemling

RL457 - Hard Pants

Tue, 03 Jan 2023 20:21:42 +0000

This week, Merlin and John talk about:

John never having taken his daughter to Disneyland (Daughter)
John’s daughter wanting to spend her 11th birthday at a trampoline warehouse (Daughter)
John getting into disputes with his daughter’s friends’ mom and many other random people (Daughter)
John being invited to the Army War College in the midst of the war in Ukraine (Military)
John being back on Twitter doomscrolling, Will Smith slapping Chris Rock during the Oscars (Internet and Social Media)
Choosing not to be part of the cultural commentariat anymore (Internet and Social Media)
John’s daughter having own opinions now (Daughter)
Having a language for at home and a different language for the public (Parents)
John’s mom initially being against his life being published in the newspapers (Parents)

The Problem: You have to learn to be fake realistically, referring to how today’s parents of John’s generation try to teach their children differently from how they were taught, meaning they can’t be themselves in front of their children in order to not pass racism and other things to the next generation.

The show title refers to Merlin now referring to blue jeans as hard pants.

The construction noise that has been in the background of Merlin’s office for the last few episode has now stopped. They poured the concrete, they repainted the crosswalks, and he thinks they are done with his area for now.

This week is Jubilee Week in Merlin’s family because it is spring break. They have granted mom a couple days away because she had some work to do and she could really use he break, so it is going to be mostly Merlin and the kid, or mostly the kid because she is at an age where there is no so much dad needed. Is is now two years since they had a trip to Disneyland planned and had to cancel it because of COVID and that fact really landed on him today for some reason.

John never having taken his daughter to Disneyland (RL457)

John has done a bad job as a man in that he has not yet taken his child to Disneyland. She is 11 now and she has a lot of interest in things like Dark Vader. The picture with the teacup of the cover of John’s is at Disneyland in Anaheim, which Merlin calls the inferior version of Disney World. John missed the 6-year old window when she would have been amazed by the princesses, and he missed the 8-year old window when she would have been gobsmacked by the gobsmackery. Merlin’s kid’s first park was LEGO-land which was a perfect entree because you don’t take a 3-year old or anybody who still needs a nap to an all-day theme park.

And after the last two years John doesn’t want to do anything or fly to any places where there are 1000s of people and walk around with them. Amy Schumer said last night at the Academy Awards that the only thing better than this would be for her to be at her house at home where all her pills are, and that is exactly how Merlin feels. He now refers to blue jeans as hard pants.

John’s daughter wanting to spend her 11th birthday at a trampoline warehouse (RL457)

John’s daughter just had her 11th birthday and she wanted to go to a place out in the industrial area of town where they have taken a huge warehouse and put trampolines in it, it is super-duper dangerous and it is in a manufacturing facility, a building with no qualities at all, it is 4-story tall empty space, they probably have trampoline-facilities-designers among their listeners who come up with some foleys. There are also foam pits and you can jump on the trampoline and go into the foam pit.

If John had walked into that building on the day they leased it when it was empty and had no heat and no light and was just a cavern, he already would have been emotionally overwhelmed because there is a lot of energy in abandoned warehouses. Now fill it with 600 trampolines and 2500 kids between the ages of 5-13 and crank techno music in an environment where the only thing that can make its way across the room is not the bass but the treble, but leave all the warehouse style blinding high blue-temperature fluorescent lights, and sequester the parents to some very dirty tables where people have changed diapers and barfed and there hasn’t even been a curesy wipe-down, and of course it is also a super-spreader event!

This is where John’s daughter wants to spend her 11th birthday and as a doting father he said: ”Yes, of course my love! I will go sit in this environment!” He should have dropped them off like any sane person would do. When he was a kid at 11 years old neither of his parents would have spent more than a fraction of a second in a building like that. But he is a good father and he was going to tough it out and he sat there in that chair at that dirty table for the 3 hours that this whole thing went down and it got to the point where they had a party room and presents and a cake.

She had invited 8 of her closest friends, and by the time they got to the party room John was ready to explode and he served the kids all of the garbage pizza, he walked around and put some Fritos on everybody’s plate. John did not run this all by himself, but his daughter’s mother was there and she is very non-plussable and there were two other moms.

John getting into disputes with his daughter’s friends’ mom and many other random people (RL457)

At one point one of the moms in a joking voice started to lean against the wall and tell him that he was doing it wrong and at one point she said: ”I told him he was doing it wrong and now he is just going to keep doing it that way because he is a guy and that is what guys do.” and when he was about to light the cake she came over and told him: ”You need to take it out of the box first, you are going to light the box on fire!” and John turned and said: ”Back the fuck off!” - ”I was just teasing!” - ”Seriously, back the fuck off!” John had said it in a very low voice, nobody else heard it, but now he had arrived at a place at a bouncy place where he had to use the word ”fuck” to communicate to another parent and he realized he had gone too far, he should have left a long time before and driven around.

Of course it created a minor international incident because we are living in a world now unlike before and it involved a lot of workshopping via text message. She had talked to her husband and he wanted to talk to John about it and John said: ”Why don’t we workshop this? This is a great opportunity for all of us!” and of course he is running the script in his head all the time now where he wonders if he is he baddy because he has this situations all the time now with his neighbors (see RL454) and various people. Yesterday he was walking down he streets and a woman was taking her Christmas lights down and he said: ”Ha, if you have left them up a little longer they could have been Easter lights!” and she gave him a very pinched smile.

On the same exact walk a guy pulls up to a crosswalk in a really super-customized Nissan 300ZX that was in the middle of being customized and it had crazy wide body panels, twice as wide as a stock one, but it was primer colored and he didn’t have all the bumper components bolted on yet, you could see what he was going for, this was going to be a Fast & Furious 15 kind of scene, but the first thing he bought was a trap-kit exhaust the size of a mortar shell. John gave him the shaka brah sign, the guy was so pleased and gave a little shaka back and he gunned it and was tearing ass up the road, showing off.

The next person coming down the sidewalk toward John was a lady walking her small dog. She gave him a very disapproving look because she saw that he had shakaed their friend and then the friend was a social offender with John as the enabler. As they passed John said: ”That is quite a muffler, wouldn’t you say?” and she glowered at John, going: ”He is going too fast, exceeding the speed limit!” Her dog was 29 years old and was struggling to take a poop right at that moment, accentuating the moment between them because she had to stop because the dog was trying to squeeze something out and John said: ”The whole thing about a loud muffler is that it only really matters if you are going over the speed limit! They are hand in glove” and she gave him the eye roll that is not funny but that is like a spit on the floor.

Merlin says that people have gotten weird and people don’t know how to be around other people anymore and they have gotten very touchy. John doesn’t want to be touchy one, but at the same time he is the touchy one, he will steam and he is not going to give a perfunctory apology to somebody, he will not say: ”I am sorry!” just to smooth things over if he is not really sorry, that doesn’t serve a man in his 50s very well!

When they did the big show and afterwards John and Hodgman had a big fight (see RL47) because of the way he hijacked the show and John was mad and wouldn’t let him off the hook. At one point this deep and protracted argument looked like it was going to be the end of their friendship, and Hodgman said: ”I just want you to say that you are sorry that I feel bad, not sorry about what you did, but sorry that I am sad!” At the time that was new, but now it predominates in disputes. John did feel bad that Hodgman was feeling bad and that was all Hodgman needed him to say. John was really ill-equipped to know that!

John asks himself now all the time if he is the baddy because he is trying to resolve and not just trying to heal. Merlin says that John is not a comfort animal, and if somebody asks him what the deal is with a person he will sometimes say: ”It is not my day to watch him!”, which is snarky, but Merlin is not your emotional sherpa, he can’t make you feel any way. There is this entitled culture of: ”You made me feel a way and that is your fault and now you need to be my buddy. By apologizing for how I feel bad, you are also implicitly admitting that it is everybody's but my fault!”

There is no fault, it is not Merlin’s day to watch you, he is out of the guarantee business and the assurance business, he is tired of being asked to guarantee at what time the food will be here and he is tired of being asked to assure people about things, which is odd because he likes being assured about things. What could be more needy than a bunch of angry and entitled people wandering around, it is like Olive Oil’s father in the movie Popeyes: ”You owe me an apology!” This never ends, and everybody wants you to apologize for how they feel.

John also doesn’t respect people who can’t endure a little bit of discomfort, but at the same time his experience of the last year was that the world had changed and there were new rules that were real because rules are real if everybody agrees they are and his old rules aren’t the real rules compared to the new rules. John has a complicity in that because he watched the new rules getting written, he was standing there being very online as they were getting made, and he watched them all get stacked up.

Like a lot of people of his generation he thought you can’t be serious, as they became a new canon he was like: ”Well, yeah…” and one might decide to quietly opt out of them, but then you can’t stay in at the same time. If you are in you have to live by the rules, or take the consequences, and that is what happened to John. Maybe it is true everywhere that the rules now are different and it no longer matters that we are ever going to try to get to the bottom of an issue and everybody gets better and we shake on it, but now it is not about that anymore, but it is about how John’s neighbors feel and about whether he took their feelings into consideration.

John being invited to the Army War College in the midst of the war in Ukraine (RL457)

John is back online, they pulled him back in, because the war in Ukraine is right in the middle of everything that he knows and wants to be a part of, and he has finally been asked to come to the Army War College in June by Col. Ed (retired). John has been trying to go to this thing, Ed has asked him 3/4 years ago, for a couple of years John’s application was rejected because he wasn’t enough of a community leader, and then they asked him during he pandemic (see RW176), but they were going to do it virtually and John politely declined. Now he applied again and go invited and he is going, which is the most exciting thing.

John is going to spend a week at the Army War College in the midst of the largest European war since World War II, it is the most exciting time to be sitting in that room with newly minted generals and they are all going to talk about everything. John’s mind is already swirling and he got a stack of books a mile high. Also for a long time his friend Trevor was cherry-picking Twitter-threads by all these cooks out there (see RL455) and this war has brought out all the people on the spectrum, but also all the people on the military hardware fascination spectrum and the global geopolitics spectrum.

John never gets tired of them, but right now he is not commenting because he is not on the Internet, but it is a slippery slope and pretty soon he maybe will look at his own mentions just in case and since he is there he could just look at his old feed where he learns that Grey DeLisle is trying to date and: ”look at this!”, Soul Brother is there doing some bits, and Bad Banana is still around every once in a while, and John actually unfollowed some people because he saw their super thirst-trap tweets, like Jesse Thorn and Paul Sabourin. Now John is on there!

John being back on Twitter doomscrolling, Will Smith slapping Chris Rock during the Oscars (RL457)

Last night John was lying on the couch, long past his bedtime, and he was just doomscrolling, not even about the war in Ukraine anybody, but just scrolling what Andy Levy is talking about, and then there was a moment where everybody on Twitter went: ”Did that just happen?” and John wasn’t aware what they were talking about because he didn’t know the Oscars were just happening (the story that Will Smith slapped Chris Rock in the face) and he went: ”What? The nukes? What? What?” and then he was in! He watched the slap on Japanese television 15 times and went: ”No, cut back to Jada Pinkett Smith so I can see what her facial expression is!” John was not commenting, he was not even here, but he was there!

Then somebody said something, Soul Brother maybe, and John faved it, which was the first time he had faved in 14 months. Then Maggie Vail was talking about how drugs kill people in Rock, which is a Taylor Hawkins conversation (member of Foo Fighters, who died 3 days before the recording of this episode) and John faved a tweet of hers. Drugs do kill! Then it was 2am and the crack pipe was burning his hand, it was so hot, and it takes only that to fall… because John doesn’t give a fucking shit, but he does care about the war in Ukraine and Twitter above all else is great for that.

Merlin says that on the Ukraine list he was pointing John to, you are getting the uncut feed, like the Russians are stalled at X and there is the one guy with a whole thread about how the truck tires have to be maintained regularly and if the trucks are in storage before you start a war of adventure. If you take them out every month and drive them around the parking lot it keeps the tires supple, and if you just keep them parked and then drive them around on the Russian and Ukrainian mud that ended the Nazis. Now when John goes to the Army War College he can say: ”What about them supple tires, am I right?”

Merlin wonders if 40 miles of trucks on a barely 1-lane road is a good idea because you have to keep them gassed up so that the people can stay warm and you spend over a week just exposed on a road? It is like shooting Womp Rats back home!

Then there is the one guy who is giving a 200-tweet thread about wars in the Caucasus dating back to 900 AD and John is their audience. He got 300 faves for this tweet and 290 are from John: ”Hello! Where were you this whole time and why was I following comedians when you were out here writing about Crimean Tatars?” This person was the biggest nerd on campus just like John and no-one cared and now he is a hero and it is such a great time to be alive and at the same time such an awful time to be alive and you can’t have one without the other.

One reason Merlin likes his political Twitter list is that he likes that David Scoff (?) is making jokes, he likes the stuff that is not just what they do for a living, but the focus on that Ukraine and Russia list is extremely focused, there is not a lot of shucking and jiving and sirens personal news shit.

Choosing not to be part of the cultural commentariat anymore (RL457)

As John was doomscrolling about the slap that was heard all around the world and the initial and subsequent commentary and the clapping back on the second tier of commentary, he had the feeling that he in one way or another, for better or for worse, he wanted to be part of that world for 10 years, at the top level he wanted to be part of Hollywood and at the next level the commentariat of Hollywood. He never expected to be sitting in that room, getting an Oscar, but he did hope to be sitting behind a microphone and host some channel’s Oscar night commentary.

There was a time when Merlin was part of the cultural commentariat and then he made a conscious and very ultimate decision that he didn’t want to be a part of it, but he wanted to have a walled garden and do his own thing and he did not want to be part of the celebrity culture. Put in today’s terms he doesn’t want anybody to tell him about this shit. He cannot get his friend Alex to stop telling him about the woman who farts on rose pedals and then sells them, they really love telling him about it, and he never wants to have to look up that story about that couple who are popular on YouTube and one of them fucks somebody else Merlin doesn’t know.

There is no answer to that that will make his life better and he needs to step away from the dopamine and adrenaline rush that comes from feeling included in something and taking the the trivial and blowing it up big. Merlin just didn’t want to pick a side in every fight and he was not going to spend his days being theoretically mad about strangers.

John is not a standup comedian, he never was, maybe in High School he wanted to be one, but that is not the direction life took. When he picked up a guitar he a pretty contentious dinner with Paul F. Tompkins at one point (see RW91) where he had transitioned into the long-form story telling style of doing comedy and John really admired it and thought it was very funny. Paul F. Tompkins was doing a show in Seattle called Comedy Bang Bang and he invited John to be a guest and they went out to dinner beforehand as friends, and John said he really loved his long-form stuff and it is something he does as well and he felt like it would be a fun thing for him to try as a style of creativity.

Paul got very upset and said that he had been doing standup since he was 16, they are exactly the same age within a few weeks of each other, and Paul said he didn’t go to college, but he has been doing this since he was a teenager and this was all he ever wanted to do, this was all he has ever done, while John plays guitar or sings or whatever it is that John has always done, and now John is saying he can just come over and do this thing that Paul does? John was not saying he was anywhere in Paul’s league, he was just saying it was a thing he wanted to try.

Somehow John flipped a switch in Paul and he got upset because he thought John was saying his buddies think he is funny so he can do that, way more than people say they play guitar and should be in a big band everybody thinks they are a comedian. But John has been on stage a lot, he is not a noob, he has done a lot of different kinds of shows, it is not that he just stepped out of his job as a manager of a Quickie Mart. From that moment their relationship had changed and they were never friends again. John wrote him and Paul replied something like: ”I am not upset, I don’t know what you are talking about!”

For the last 10 years Twitter did this to him and made John feel that he was part of the comedy commentariat. John never cared about the Oscars or movie people or celebrities, but he wanted to be on the panel with Michael Showalter, he wanted to be invited to be in the mix. There was no passion in it for him to talk about celebrities or to be next to Michael Showalter, but it seemed fun and it felt easy and natural, and he is not uncomfortable on stage, and he feels like there is a place for him.

John was also watching that happen at Beandad, there was a first line of replies, now they are replying to the replies, and now it is not about him at all but about people’s hair and John didn’t say anything about that. As this was going by, John would not have stayed out of this, but he would have been in there. In that whole ”do we punch Nazis?” argument he was all over it (see RW128, RW129), dancing around that grave, and people were writing him: ”You have no idea! Out here in Manchester we punch Nazis!” and all of a sudden John was on the side of not punching Nazis and now he was a Nazi by association.

John was laying on the couch at 2am and realized that this was all bad, the culture is bad, the people are bad, everybody is bad, and everyone is crazy, not just the meat heads. John read a thing that said that 1 in 5 people believe in QAnon and 90% of them do not have High School education. Cool! But they are also not the ones who are off the rails, they are just doing what they do, they are just swamping as they have done the whole time, but now we are asking them questions which we never used to do, but it is John’s people, the world, the people who are on stage with Michael Schowalter who have lost their minds.

John wanted to be there so much for so long and now he doesn’t and he is grateful to not, but he felt the crack, he touched his lips to the pipe just because it was New Year’s Eve and he wanted to show himself that he wasn’t on crack anymore, he just wanted to take one little hit to show that he wasn’t a drug addict, and now John has to go on a long walk today and ask himself if he can be trusted with a phone. Maybe he needs to live in a van down by the river? Merlin thinks John would need to find a Slack with likeminded people where he could hang out and say terrible things. John has never been on a Slack.

Merlin treasures his little text channels with his friends, although sometimes it will leak out. The other day he posted a photo of Justice Clarence Thomas (?) and he said to a loved one: ”He has become a full-time lifestyle Eddy Murphy (?) character!” He would not say that on Twitter, but he will post a photo of the thing he said on Twitter, that is all the insight you are going to get. Merlin hopes everybody out there has a place where they can say the thoughts that they can’t say in public.

So many things are not private anymore, and as he said in his Wisdom Project: ”Try to save some parts of your life to be just for you. Including some special things that you’re happy about or are even a little proud of. If your only private things are shameful things, you will become very sad and will eventually despise your own company.” On the face of it that makes sense, but we are also supposed to act as if we don’t have an interior world anymore, and Merlin thinks that 20 years from now this will have gotten worse instead of better. Nobody is allowed to have a bad day anymore, especially black people, he recently heard a podcast about it that was about going back to the office.

John’s daughter founds Colin Meloy’s first kids book on the shelf and read it where his wife Carson did the illustration. One of the characters in the book is called Jock Roderick and Carson sent John the original illustration as a nice gesture. Now she is reading his other book and John took a picture of the books and sent him a text: ”Hey, my kid is reading your books and that is fun and funny!” and they had a brief back and forth. In the course of it he made a comment that wouldn’t have played if he had made it on Twitter, he used a word or two between friends that he would not want to have introduced into the public record. It felt like a gesture of friendship and like a little bit of intimacy. They both knew what he meant by that, he was making a joke.

John’s daughter having own opinions now (RL457)

John’s kid is at the age where she is having opinions now. She gets in the car and talks about what they told her at school today and she disagrees and says that this person overreacted to a thing that was a lot simpler than it ended up being. John thought about her classmates going home and saying that to their parents and what her classmates’ parents might say to them about it. Knowing adults and people his own age and having friends with kids, he could hear those parents telling their kids how to respond to having their own opinions in a way like: ”That is not how we talk anymore! That is not who we are! Here is the correct opinion to have about this and there is only one!”, coming from a place of very real fear that their kid is going to say something in school that is going to get them in trouble.

We have also decided as a group of college-educated Generation X and adjacent people a long time ago that the way to make a better world is to get into our children’s brains and tell them what to think and how to think and what the correct thing to think is, and then we won’t have racism and sexism or a patriarchy because the argument always is that the reason things are bad is that we learned it in childhood. That whole logic means that John’s generation of parents are portraying themselves to their own children falsely and they are teaching their children to be false: ”How to be fake realistically?” Here are the correct opinions, here is how to do it, whether or not you feel that way or if your parent feels that way you will never know because they are not going to do what Colin Meloy did to John, which is to give his kid a shibboleth between them where they feel safe being themselves.

When John’s daughter said that the thing they told her at school was baloney, they have started to have the conversation where John explains that there are tiers of safely in expressing ideas. They can both talk about anything in any way she wants to talk about it. Then there are things you can say at school, there are things you can say if you phrase it as a question, but there are things you cannot say phrased as a question because people will see through that. She was listening to John and he knows that even in her 11-year old mind she knows what he is talking about because she has already been in the schools.

Merlin says that many school projects are bullshit and she knows it and in many cases the teacher knows it, but that doesn’t mean she doesn’t need to do a good job at them. Also: She is never supposed to talk to a cop, until she gets better advice, and she knows exactly what he is talking about. Those Hollywood big shots don’t want to tell you that there are people out there whose whole job in life is to fuck you up and get you in trouble and to work a corrupt system that is undermining our entire society, and Merlin needs her to know about that, and if they ask her if she would like a juice box, she is supposed to say: ”Where is my lawyer?”

When Merlin’s daughter was born he was trying to get her into music and books and movies that was the good stuff.

Having a language for at home and a different language for the public (RL457)

When John was growing up his mom had a language they used at home and a language they used in public because she was incredibly introverted and did not want the world… she believed already in the mid-1950s that aliens had been on Earth and had interfered with evolution for hundreds of thousands of years as part of a giant petri dish experiment, she was reading Science Fiction and she came up with this theory that was the only thing that made sense, that we are a petri dish place where every once in a while they come down if things are moving in the wrong direction and they switch things slightly.

She was looking for the missing link, why were there gaps where there was nothing and all of a sudden a higher… somehow through natural selection, although there is no evidence of the interstitial stuff, all of a sudden a new thing is there that is more evolved… First there were cells in the ocean and all of a sudden there are crabs walking around. Whenever they discovered Lucy in Ethiopia, why aren’t there also hundreds of thousands of sets of remains taking us from Lucy to Australopithecus? Her explanation was that the UFOs come down and move the bar a little bit in one direction instead of the other.

When John was a little kid that was what they were talking about at home, but they went to Methodist church on Sundays because his mom liked the hymns and in order to be member of society you have to have some experience of American protestantism and she thought the Methodists had the best hymns so they were going to go there and John was going to learn the story of Jesus, but also: Never forget that the UFOs live under the ocean and every once in a while they come and move the slider a little bit. John always grew up with a private language and a public language.

John’s dad was a politician and at home they could criticize the Democrats and could say: ”That guy got sausages for brains!”, but when they went to the Rotary Club meeting there was a clear distinction what you would say among Democrats and what you would say to the world on behalf of Democrats. There was never a time in his life where John didn’t have multiple layers of what we can say.

John’s mom initially being against his life being published in the newspapers (RL457)

During John’s Senior year in High School he started to get into the newspaper because there were some reports had decided to follow their Senior class all the way through and were going to write a series of articles about their class, following 10 students through their Senior year and John was one of those kids. The articles were just Sunday puff pieces, they didn’t get deep down into their hearts and souls. But the whole business about whether or not John was going to graduate or not and that the other kids in the student body had been taking bets and money was being exchanged.

It wasn’t clear until graduation day as they had a conference and took the eraser out and changed that F into a 1 or whatever. When John walked across the stage at graduation the gymnasium went crazy, there were airhorns and the whole thing, and this all was in the newspaper and John’s mom was furious because he had his shit out in public and that was going to affect her reputation at work and she was going to walk across her floor and she was going to hear the buzz of her coworkers and her employees looking up from their newspapers.

John was trying say that that was a delusion and no-one cares, but she was adamant and this was unacceptable. John said that he was going to have his name in the newspaper for the rest of his life, and: ”Know me now! My name will be in the newspaper over and over and over!” and they had a moment and she stormed off and went up to her rooftop airy and was showing the mercier light (?) at the clouds and she came back down, having sat with that, and realized it was true and realized there was nothing she could do except to accept it and to reorder her own needs.

They had to deal with it a few more times in life! There were a few times when shit got into the newspaper and she felt that was beyond the pale and she couldn’t have her life known, but John was going to have her whole life known. When they started podcasting she listened and came to him and said: ”That is not how it happened!” - ”Mom! That is how it happened as far as history knows because I told it and not you!” and each one of those has been hard, but John’s daughter is probably going to do some version of this.

Just the fact that John’s mom’s grandfather stood at a street corner, drinking a Dr. Pepper (see OM293), and the fact that everyone in the town knew that he liked Dr. Pepper might have been as much as he ever revealed. ”What does he do at 10, 2, and 4?” - ”Gee, Dr. Pepper you say?” and that was in a town where he, his father and his grandfather had lived since 1802. ”My father was a pepper, my grandfather was a pepper!”

by jroemling

RL456 - The People’s Traffic

Tue, 03 Jan 2023 20:07:29 +0000

This week, Merlin and John talk about:

Construction noise outside of Merlin’s office (Merlin Mann)
Snow plowing in Alaska (Early Days)
John getting his 1979 Suburban detailed in a shady shop (Cars)
John’s daughter preferring to stay at her mom’s house (Daughter)
John not wanting to use guilt on his daughter, John’s family having used guilt and shame on him as a kid (Daughter)
Feeling guilty for not being able to help, even though it is not at all your fault (Daughter)

The Problem: John has some minor electrical problems, referring to his 1976 Suburban that has a few electrical problems.

The show title refers to some countries people having their own traffic rules like driving in 11 lanes on a 3-lane highway.

The audio starts with a voice reciting: ”They fuck you up, your mum and dad. They may not mean to, but they do!” from the poem This Be The Verse by Philip Larkin.

Construction noise outside of Merlin’s office (RL456)

When John picks up the call they both laugh heartily. Merlin still has construction noise outside of his office and you hear the beeping of trucks backing up. He tries to maintain a positive attitude about it. Merlin refers to John a long time ago saying that the people of Czechoslovakia don’t like bureaucracy, but bureaucracy is what fixes a hole in the road (see RL17, it was about missing manhole covers in former Eastern Block countries). God makes the rat (see RL218), not the city of San Francisco.

For one of a nail the lady with the fly was lost. The lady sold he fly in order to buy a nail and then the carpenter sold the hammer in order to buy a flyswatter. Like the guy from Razorfish says: ”People don’t really want a painting on the wall, they want to be happy, and they buy a drill to get a painting on the wall!” Merlin has decided he is going to focus on the positive, as the man says in the song: ”accentuate the positive, eliminate the negatives!” (lyrics from Ac-cent-tchu-ate the Positive by Johnny Mercer). E-liminate should have been a startup name.

We abuse the word Masterpiece, but the road outside of Merlin’s office is truly their masterpiece, the are making the grecian urn that we are going to look at from many sides for many years (reference to the poem Ode on a Grecian Urn by John Keats).

John is a little jittery because his mom has just recently realized that she can get him to do anything if she shows up at his house unannounced with two donuts, he is powerless to resist.

When John was originally hiring a contractor they told him that some contractors would do a bid on the whole project while they prefer to do it on a weekly rate because that gives him better value, and John agreed to that, but then the project goes on and on, another week and another week, because they have no incentive to finish it quickly. John guesses that the people who are doing their masterpiece outside of Merlin’s office are on a weekly rate as well instead of on a project rate.

As a retired project manager Merlin has to imagine that so many steps in that project had to be crazy with meetings over the last 5 years about changes to the street car line where you can’t make changes without a lot of other stuff happening. It looks like they might get a traffic light which he is really excited about. A new addition to it is singing, and the beeping of the trucks might be considered a regional instrument.

Snow plowing in Alaska (RL456)

That sound is a very early triggering memory because when he was a very young child at 3 years old they lived in Alaska and that is the sound the snow plows make when they back up, and backing up is a big part of plowing snow. There are a lot of different plows and John tries to explain some of them to Merlin. Every 5th person has a snow plow blade on he front of their truck as a way to earn $50 real fast. Then also as Michael Stipe says: When you put the snow away, where does it go? It will not only snow once, so you have to account in your plan that it keeps happening.

On the big roads they will plow the snow into the middling into a big berm between the lanes and then they come along later with a thing that will scoop up the berm and put it in a dump truck. John and Kevin would go out as teenagers because Kevin’s dad had a Suburban and Kevin got really good at driving along really fast and steer into the giant berm in between the lanes and the truck would launch up into the air and come down high-centered on the berm, sliding like a skateboard on a rail with all 4 tires off the ground. When the real wheels would finally engage they would pop over in a 4-point slide and back over the berm, he was really good at driving. John was 15 and was just along for the right, it was right about the time when his dad would send him out to practice the car (see RL26).

At the time John and Jim McNeil had the idea to buy a Suburban for $500 and… when Merlin lived in Cincinnati Ohio, in the one house they lived in fro 1976-79 their neighbor had a Suburban, and that thing seemed comically long and large. Now you would call it an SUV, but those terms didn’t exist. You can google 1976 Suburban 4x4 for a picture.

John getting his 1979 Suburban detailed in a shady shop (RL456)

John currently has a 1979 Suburban, which looks the same as a 1976, and it has a few electrical problems. John took it to a guy yesterday on Sunday evening to get it detailed, he pulled up out front of a shady place, but it turned out that the place he was looking for was around the back in the basement of the shady place and was three times as shady. The kid was really tall and handsome, but could use some lotion, he was in the 80-95 IQ rating, his name was something like Travis and he promised John’s car would be in showroom condition, but their credit card machine was down and he wanted John to Venmo him, but John didn’t want to do that and asked him to figure it out, so he called some number at the side of his credit card machine.

There were so many red flags and John should have just backed out of there, but he is bad in those situations and didn’t want to let Travis down who even introduced him to his business partner Raul who apparently bullies Travis all the time. Raul said he was in the business since he was 15 years old, implying he was in a chop shop like Adventures in Babysitting.

Merlin uses the mute button to take out the construction noise, but John wants him to leave it in and just let it ride. Now there is a third machine outside, like an asphalt pounder that you push around.

There were all kinds of cars in different states of being chopped up, but no Lamborghinis, just (Pontiac) Fieros, and there was the smell of bondo in the air. When John bought his first car, it was a 1974 Fiat Spider and his friend Jim McNeil who had the plan to buy this Suburban and bash out all the windows including the front window and drive it Demolition Derby style wearing motorcycle helmets, they were going to put netting in all the windows to keep logs from flying in, and they were going to make the bumpers out of literally logs.

Jim was from Arkansas and he explained to John what bondo was and there were a few little rust holes in John’s Fiat that they were going to fix with bondo, but the first thing they had to do was get a disc sander and sand the paint off, and when they did this it was revealed that the paint was holding the car together. This is why John has a very strong feeling every time he smells bond. They eventually did bondo it, although the holes were so big that they had to stuff them with newspaper and chicken wire and bondo over it.

This is why you don’t buy any Vespa from Vietnam, even if you see a really beautiful vintage Vespa from the early 1960s, you need to determine if that Vespa has been to Vietnam, because very few of the 1960s Vespas in the United States have been in the United States the whole time. The average Vespa from Vietnam has a trillion miles on it, like a 1952 Chevrolet that has lived in Havana and where the carburetor is made out of a Pepsi can and all of the hoses have been jerry-rigged so many times that it has turned into a new technology. The have invented a whole new way to do all the functions of a car using found items.

In Cuba they don’t have Pepsi, so the only Pepsi cans you can make a carburetor out are the ones who float across he oceans and had already been found many years ago. John has seen Vespas that were actually made of cans. Those people are also really good at bondo and paint, and a lot of those countries with tons of Vespas are also the countries where there are two official lanes of traffic and 11 lanes of actual traffic within those two lanes, the people’s traffic, which also means that every vehicle has been hit and dented 100 times, repaired with cans, bondoed and painted so that they are beautiful.

Right now Travis and Raul are returning John’s 1979 Suburban to showroom condition and John will have to go down there and walk around it and if it isn’t showroom condition he will have to be the one to tell them that. Merlin has seen John negotiate with people, which is extremely upsetting to everyone involved, and he and Sean Nelson have wet each other’s pants while John was negotiating one time. There is a lot of room between low and high showroom condition and John does not expect it to be high showroom condition and he would be incredibly pleased if it were only mid showroom and he will absolutely find it acceptable if it is in low showroom condition.

John has Venmo integrated into his bank app, which is amazing and incredible, Everything is so easy now because technology and people and God and The Bible. John gave Travis the money and at some level there is accountability because the banks in recent years have fully faced up to the fact that money is fake. This happens with Amazon, too: John got a thing, opened it, one of the corners was damaged, and they told him to just keep it and they would refund his money. You can’t depend of them doing that, sometimes they will ask you to repackage it and send it back.

John thinks he can make one phone call to the bank and they will just give him that money back and put a flag on Travis’ account and he wouldn’t be able to use it anymore and will have to ask people to pay in Crypto.

Last night John was driving along and all of a sudden the word Dogecoin popped into his head. He doesn’t even know what that is, but if he had been buying Dogecoin back then he could be paying Travis in Dogecoin and none of it would be real. You can now buy fractional interest in a painting!

In Merlin’s neighborhood someone has been fixing up an 1980s Winnebago on the sidewalk for hours, and it was the first time Merlin heard a vehicle that speaks in a prerecorded voice of a woman in her early 30s, maybe the owner, going: ”The vehicle is backing up! The vehicle is backing up!”

John’s daughter preferring to stay at her mom’s house (RL456)

What John really wants is for the Suburban and Travis to disappear forever. He is at a point in life where he wishes that all of the things that he thinks are worth money, even though he knows that money isn’t real, and the money were just all gone. He also wants the new truck gone and he wants his house gone and he really wants to live in a 1-bedroom apartment. He hit a wall just recently in a very positive way that nothing matters. He probably needs a 2-bedroom apartment so his daughter has a place to keep her crap. She is currently very upfront to him that all her stuff is at mom’s and they could keep a bunch of stuff at his house, and she likes hanging out at his house, but she is going to go home to mom’s if she can.

When John was a kid an lived in two houses he wanted to stay at his mom’s house, even when in 9th grade she turned his room into a guest room and told him to live with his father (seel RL148) he wanted to live in the guest room at his mom’s house rather than in the room at his dad’s house that had a cheaper facsimile of what his room would look like. John’s mom took all of his stuff out of the room and decorated it with pictures of flowers, but it still felt more like his room than the room at his dad’s that had video-games and toys and posters.

He was a misbehaving child and he got kicked out and had to live with his dad 1.5 miles away while she very definitely and purposely turned his bedroom into a guest-room with a quilt on the bed and no art on the walls and all of his clothes in boxes although she never once had a guest in her life even stay one night in her house. For several months John wasn’t allowed to spend the night at her house, he could come for dinner, but then he had to go home to his dad’s.

One night he was there late and everybody went to bed and he snug into the guest-room and spent the night. He tried it again some other time and pretty soon he had snug back in and was sleeping in he guest room. She knew what was happening, but she never said he was welcome back, he just gradually started spending the night at her house more and more and gradually hung up a couple of shirts in the closet over the course of months until eventually he was living there again and his dad didn’t even notice. His room at his mom’s house was his room.

John doesn’t have a television at his house while his mom does. Staying the night at John’s house she would arrive at around 7:30pm where at her mom’s house she would watch Star Trek Rebels while at dad’s house it is time to get out the old UNO cards or sit down and look at a National Geographic together because it is 1955. John made no enticement, but he also remembers how he himself felt so guilty preferring his mom’s house because he loved his dad, but the room in his dad’s house never felt like his room, and he never wanted to put that on his kid.

John not wanting to use guilt on his daughter, John’s family having used guilt and shame on him as a kid (RL456)

Guilt was used in John’s family so much, almost entirely by his dad, and he didn’t want any of it and he never has guilted her. It was how John’s dad lived, he had been guilted by his people so badly, it was the way they manipulated him. John never guilted his daughter and that is why she speaks so plainly. He found really cool Peter Max sheets for her room at a crazy vintage store and she finds them amazing and makes a fort out of them, but at 7:30pm she wants to watch Star Trek Rebels and says: ”Good Bye!” and John has a fort made out of Peter Max sheets in one of the rooms and he can’t tear it down because it was made by his darling, but at the same time he was doing archery practice in that room.

John needs to have a room where she can feel like it is her place to do whatever she wants, but he knows he will never going to have a room that feels like the room at her mom’s house because there is no mom there. John still would need to have a 2-bedroom, and one day she will be a teenager and show up, slam the door, and tell him that she will never talk to mom again. This is John’s first kid and his sister’s and mother’s relationship is not a good example to draw on, he never saw a normal mother-daughter relationship because it is so weird how alike they are in the ways that you wish they weren’t, and the ways that they are not alike are so dramatically important for there to be peace in the valley.

They are constantly trying to be friends, but they are really both full of murder and they will lock talons and fall to their death. John’s daughter is the same, but John and her mom are not, and she will try to lock talons and her mother will tell her she doesn’t even have talons and John will tell her he made a fur and also nails. Families are very complicated, and everybody hates dad. Merlin loves that show.

Guilt and shame had such a role in Merlin’s whole life in making him how he is, and from the day John met him he knew Merlin felt guilty and shameful and he suggested he get a shirt that said: ”Governed by fear!” Guilt is such a fucking lazy way to at the least win an argument and to at the most best somebody with potentially long-lasting effects. Guilt is shitty because guilt is lazy. John thinks about this a lot because he was raised with that and it had a profound effect on him.

John wonders how much of it is innate to him and would still have been there if he had been raised by the animals and had been taken by rabbits and raised as a rabbit. We think of guilt as a cultural thing that is shoved into you, but there are so many things that feel like so many emotional things, because emotions are real, and for them to be real they have to exist outside somehow of just what your mom told you. There is talk about trauma being communicated through generations and if that is true, then every single person has it because every single culture has at one point been traumatized.

Merlin talks about a book about trauma called The Body Keeps The Score (by Bessel van der Kolk)

Psychology is still a very young art and it is very compelling to talk about guilt and shame as part of the new part of the brain that we transmit to each other through action and that we can change through behavior, but he increasingly thinks that they are both deep in the old part, they are like breathing, and they are going to find a thing to attach themselves to. It gets you into the psychologist’s office, it gets you to buy he book about it, and it tells you that you can cure your way out of it, but it is more than that and John has been working on it for decades and it is immutable and it is in some more than in others, there are people without guilt and shame and that is not because they were raised perfectly, they just don’t have it.

Like so many mental illnesses the paradox of it is that it is in its very nature to look for reasons for it, and you cannot see it using the same mind that is full of it. Like John used to say about depression: When you are depressed you feel like you deserve to be depressed and you don’t seek a solution because being depressed feels right and legitimate, and with guilt and shame it is like you have guilt and shame and that is the same mind you are using to figure out what they are and how to solve them and your psychologist will ask you what your mother used to say to you, but it is all just a dance about a thing that is more deeply embedded and fills an important role in some of us. Maybe it is not harnessable or curable.

Feeling guilty for not being able to help, even though it is not at all your fault (RL456)

When Merlin’s kid was born he wished that she was healthy, but also that she would like books and music because those things have made his life good. He also tried to promise himself to try to not pass anxieties to his kid, particular those that were very damaging to him, which is its own problem because now you are feeling anxious about being anxious and passing on the anxieties to your kid. John’s mom and dad worked very hard to protect him from things that tormented them, but those things didn’t even exist in his life and a lot of the work they did created a whole new situation in his life.

John will get sad sometimes and he will sit in a chair and stare at a spot on the wall and he is just sad, and there are a lot of people who when their kid was around they would try to never show that they were sad, and that always felt wrong, dishonest, and dangerous to John because your kid can tell and if you are pretending not to be sad and they can tell something is wrong and also that you are being false, it is just bad! John has explained it to her, that it is not about her or anybody else. She will sometimes come into the room without John noticing and put her hand on his head and just stand there, calling it ”giving him care” and John will become aware of her, but not say anything, and then she will go away again.

John has asked her how she feels about that and it pushes a button of guilt in her, even though there is no guilt, but she feels guilt because she can’t help and that is so basic that it feels prehistoric. It is a basic fundamental feeling, that she wishes she could help but can’t and therefore she is responsible. She is not a ”let me solve everything” person either, but it is her animal brain. That is the guilt John feels a lot of the time, and most of the guilt he carries around isn’t even his dad’s guilt anymore, he just feels guilty because he can’t make things better for people, and he can less so all the time, weirdly. That guilt just populates and nobody is putting it on him and he doesn’t even hear his father’s voice anymore. It just feels like an element.

by jroemling

RL455 - The Birds Aren’t Real Party

Tue, 03 Jan 2023 20:00:08 +0000

This week, Merlin and John talk about:

John following the war in Ukraine via indirect social media post sent to him by his friend (Military)
John being interested in war technology (Military)
The military being mostly a logistical operation (Military)
Exporting democracy (Military)
How capitalism is now fighting the war on behalf of the West (Military)
Did we make any changes after the pandemic? Will me make any changes during this war? (Military)

The Problem: The Bang Bang Machine brought some friends, referring to the construction outside of Merlin’s office.

The show title refers to the problem that there are a lot of dumb people in a democracy that also have to get to vote.

The audio starts with 10 seconds of construction noise outside of Merlin’s office. As they start to talk there is a beeping noise from trucks backing up in the background. They are using the big loader to slam long steel beams into the ground, and Merlin decided he is into it because when will he be able to prove himself this way again. It is testing him and it is testing their listeners for sure. The 50 listeners who routinely complain about the sound quality should have kept their powder dry! Merlin is not trying to mute this because there is just no way.

Merlin and his kid love Portlandia which is so God-damn funny and it is a shame they never had John on, where they used the Hanna-Barbera library of sound effects and Merlin got a giant set of those off the back of a truck.

They decide to continue doing the show and not try to mute this although Merlin has a foot switch for that, because all their listeners from New Zealand who have not heard a piece of machinery or even a car in weeks are surely enjoying this. Merlin loves New Zealand, they have good bacon there!

Nobody is going to complain about John’s mouth noises now!

John following the war in Ukraine via indirect social media post sent to him by his friend (RL455)

All the world is watching Ukraine and we are all wanting to do our part in our way. John tried to follow it on the news, and he had a lot to say about social media in the last year, but there is one thing that it is amazing at, which is breaking news from the front lines. The mainstream media is still going to tell you that the Russians have invaded Ukraine while on Twitter there are people posting from out in the foxholes.

John already followed a lot of Western journalists working in Russia and Ukraine back in 2014 during the annexation of Crimea and John is already fascinated by the East Block people, and those journalists are still out there, writing long think pieces, but John really wants to see short videos of farmers stealing tanks. Merlin’s Twitter list is good for that.

John’s friend Trevor has taken it upon himself to take all the good tweets about Ukraine and text them to him. He initially texted John, apologizing for spamming his Twitter feed with all those amazing videos, but John explained to him that he is not on social media anymore and Trevor was blowing up a ghost.

Trevor used to retweet things to John like: ”Watch this Japanese dude jump off the side of a mountain on skis!” There are a lot of extreme skiers in the world and both Trevor and John are very interested in that. Merlin became very attracted to the Slovenian girls doing the big jumps at the Olympics, they were fucking amazing! How do you jump 100 feet and land on skis and not break something?

Another crazy thing about social media is that a lot of people, including Trevor, actually have John’s phone number, and Trevor texted John to apologize for tweeting, and John suggested that he could just text all that stuff to him. The problem is that they are not screen captures, but John has to click on them and go to Twitter, and now he is back on Twitter and he clicked on his home button to see what is going on with the people he used to follow, which is like going back to elementary school. He saw all the thirsty comedians and all the engagement hustling, and most of it was not about Ukraine, and John unfollowed a lot of people that he had been following since 2009, a thing he hasn’t done for a long time.

Merlin says there is a hot member of parliament who really likes being photographed with a rifle.

Merlin is not trying to make this an entertainment event, but he does want to know what is going on and he is feeling uneasy and anxious an impotent about what to do. He wants to know if there is any chance this might be over soon.

John being interested in war technology (RL455)

John grew up playing war in the woods and for most of his childhood they played World War II while they were in the middle of the Vietnam war, but he never played war against the Vietnamese, it was always against one of their two World War II enemies. But around 1978 John switched over to being a cold warrior. It was the Soldier of Fortune Magazine years where he became aware that there were all the proxy wars in Rhodesia and in Central America.

John started reading Jane’s Military Magazine and it was an era where Reagan was rebuilding the military and weapon systems that had been devised during the Vietnam war came online during the 1980s, like the F15 or the F14, the M1 tank, the A10 Warthog (?), the Minuteman III (?), Star Wars, it was a time when military hardware was blowing up literally and figuratively. There was scenarios like the movie Wargames, basically, and as a kid John was into this stuff like kids are into trucks. He was living in Alaska where a lot of that military technology would fly over your head. John was in the Civil Air Patrol and his dad had access to the Air Force base and they were there all the time.

While watching Ukraine now, you can see in a lot of the videos the Ukrainian soldiers having the same kind of giddiness about the technology of the gear, also in the comments there are a lot of the Jane’s types who are in their corn (?) right now and they are now as happy as can be, it would be like all of a sudden John would be called upon to identify Les Pauls. Normally John would hate all those ”Um, actually” military hardware dudes…

When there was the mass shooting in Las Vegas John was still on 4Chan and at the time Twitter was about breaking news while 4Chan had the ability to be spooky, which is where Qanon initially came from because people would say something and 5 hours later it would turn out to be true, and there was a guy on 4Chan who before the police had even broached the room was saying that it was not the fire of automatic weapons, but it was a bump stock of a certain caliber, which was spooky because it was still happening.

It is a fact of war that a lot of war-making is just train sets, people buying cool stuff that is really expensive that does blow up, which is one of the major critics of the military since 1920s: This is just a game with toys that produce death, and we don’t think about if that is a good thing, but we will think about that in a different meeting. It is like a big chess board where you move the knight and you don’t worry about it doing something you didn’t expect, and you don’t worry about the human factor.

The military being mostly a logistical operation (RL455)

When John went to Africa with his friend Matt Martin (see John’s USO tour) and he was just really good in explaining the basic truth about the military to John, which is that it is all logistics and that the number of people who are ever actually going to fire a bullet is very small compared to the number of people who are moving crates of water.

Merlin finds it very strange that you have a single file with 40 miles of trucks, and all it takes would be making three big holes in the road of the first 1/8th of that convoy, they would be pretty fucked. All it takes is for somebody to throw a Molotov Cocktail at the first of 5 trucks. They have people sitting in trucks right now running the engine because it is so cold out, and how are you going to refill all of those? Never invade Russia in the winter, and never be Russia in the winter, invading anything else!

In Iraq the United States got stuck in a logistics gyre (?) because they did have their logistics worked out which made the Army command think that that was success in war. Nobody in Aleppo loves the Americans, they are not calling for democracy, but if you ask the Russian Army how they were doing in Aleppo they had it all buttoned down according to their metrics. Matt Martin was an officer in the Air Force in Iraq during periods where by all accounts the American military had it completely buckled, they just couldn’t account for the fact that there were bombings every night and why as soon as they left an area it immediately…

Exporting democracy (RL455)

As a middle-aged Liberal guy you don’t want to say that the guns, tanks, and airplanes are cool because you sound like a dope or a gun nut, but John is getting something else out of it: One month ago it seemed to a lot of us emotionally like we had become a divided world where the United States was no longer a leader and could no longer lecture the world from any moral high ground, there was no longer any confidence that democracy was even working in the United States, let alone anything that could be advocated and exported.

In a lot of cases it seemed like social media had perverted the idea of democracy to the point that nobody even was really sure if that was ever what we wanted. We had been pushing hard to make democracy universal because to not do that would be to not be democratic. We can’t even agree on fact patterns, we can’t agree what happened on January 6th after a brief moment where it seemed like people were coming together, but now we are back to the mean where we have to ask if anybody can be trusted with democracy.

There are a lot of stupids, and it is not even a Today problem. If we had universal suffrage in 1901, would the people have been capable? It is a terrible opening to conversation because from the standpoint of the Left universal franchise is a core value, and to advocate for anything less makes it not a true democracy because you have exclusive groups or elites controlling the government and that will end up perpetuating unfair institutions. But if you lay out one person one vote, there are a lot of dumbs and there is no amount of information, even if the funnel only had truth in it, one of them will say: ”I don’t know! Birds are not real!” and then you lose 10 dumbs to the Birds Aren’t Real Party.

Even a month ago John didn’t know at what side to come down on, while 3 years ago he was online arguing vociferously in favor of the idea of America and democracy and he knew those things would survive at all, while now… In the last 3 years, the argument that Both Sides was a contemptible thing for a person to entertain, to say: ”…, but on the other hand…” The Charlottesville Both Sides is: ”Obviously Donald Trump is a contemptible dumb!”, but to say that that somehow delegitimizes any argument other than the agreed upon party line was ludicrous, it is too dumb to even consider, but John was getting 10 tweets a day going: ”Both sides, boomer!”

Now we are seeing the UFO factor. There was always an argument against the idea that revealing UFOs to the world was going to cause mass chaos because if we understood that there were UFOs it would bring the entire world together and we would either have a common enemy… the experience that the early astronauts had looking down at the Earth and going: ”Wow, whatever my politics were before…” That first color photograph of the globe from space had a profound political impact globally because everybody looked at it globally and went: ”Wow, we are on Spaceship Earth!”

How capitalism is now fighting the war on behalf of the West (RL455)

Within a couple of weeks Russia invading Ukraine and failing has brought not just schadenfreude, but a recognition that there are profound differences in the way we conduct our political life, and the United States and Western Europe and the nations of the world believe in the 20th century version of collective action, free access to the media, and human rights. Merlin also says that peace benefits economics more than not.

Part of the gloating that is happening right now is the recognition that because there were VISA cards in Russia and VISA could turn that off with a switch, that was a way for us to connect with the 30 year old who was shopping in Russia and going: ”What do you mean, my VISA doesn’t work?” This global capitalist web feels powerful to us right now to be able to remind the world that this is located in London and New York, and it never was completely decentralized and it never belonged to you, it is a tool that we have a switch to.

In the aftermath of this China and Russia are now going to try and build a global economic counter order, recognizing an existing vacuum in the banking universe, and they are going to start their own global banking. It is a bit like Trump’s social media. But to divide the world into two banking systems is basically the cold war again in a different way because after China and Russia’s banking system it is going to take a long time to rebuild a global network.

A lot of the global distrust,… among nations that are now all banding together, like Hungary and Turkey were really trending the wrong way in terms of being part of a network of friends of America, but they were headed toward being military dictatorships and there is a lot of work to do before they are reintegrated into a liberal NATO universe, but now they sided with the West, and that is galvanizing. The way we chose to run the whole run-up, which was very unique, giving all the intelligence to everybody, seems so smart now because by the time the invasion happened, not only were we not surprised, but we were already unified and before the first bullet was firing we already agreed what was true, which was super-cool!

It preempted any kind of Charlottsville both-sidesing, we just eliminated that possibility so that the Fox News talking heads couldn’t say that the Ukrainians did bomb an orphanage, but all that was agreed upon ahead of time, which was a novel way of using the intelligence community. All through the Cold War John was wondering why that stuff was secret. Revealing it doesn’t hurt us! Tell us every Russian agent you find! All of that secrecy piles up around your ears until you lose the ability to tell what is really important and what isn’t. There are buildings full of Top Secret classified material that if it was all released it wouldn’t matter, but you are guarding it and putting more and more stuff on top of it, while the stuff that we really need to keep secret is a small little nut of stuff.

John isn’t even worried about the Alex Jones types, but about the legitimately intelligent college-educated leftist intellectuals who believe that the entire world is controlled by a conspiracy of underground bankers and committees, the consensus on both the left and right that what we see is not real and all these nations are actually controlled by General Dynamics and the board of directors of Shell Oil that live under the North Pole.

Right now global capitalism feels almost like it has the moral imperative, fighting the war on behalf of the West. Good job, stock market guys! We are changing the way the banks are propping up the Ruble, but at the same time global capitalism is terrified of what is happening. Already gas-prices are up in the $4.50 and that is just the beginning! Talk about global supply chain problems!

Did we make any changes after the pandemic? Will me make any changes during this war? (RL455)

Two years ago at the start of the pandemic a lot of us, including Merlin, really believed that this was a reset and why don’t we not get into our cars ever again? Why don’t we not all rush back Downtown and cough on each other? There were statistics showing pollution dropping off a cliff, even in Manhattan over a period of weeks it was pretty wild. Someone posted a picture today of people returning to work and the lobby of the office building has all these ridiculously dispiriting signs, like: ”But your dog misses you!” or ”At least you are out of your jammies now!” The other day Merlin referred to blue jeans as hard pants because he is lifestyle sweatpants now.

Did we actually make some profound changes during the pandemic that now we just accept as a new normal and so we can’t celebrate them because celebrating our victories is not in our nature, or can we only look at how bad things are and how we went back from the pandemic and are causing the same old problems? We are talked about all the tremendous opportunities in choosing how we might want to live differently and about what causes all the God-damn extroverts to want to run around and breathe on each other? We were on the cusp of a handful of pretty interesting changes and how we choose to conduct ourselves rather than go back to what money white people call normal.

In any war there is going to be a lot of focus on the destruction and on the pain and suffering of the people, but wars are diplomacy by other means and the longer this goes on, the more it potentially represents an opportunity for a reset of a lot of things. No matter how it ends, it will not be a simple matter of: ”Okay, let’s start buying Russian oil again!” and the longer it lasts, the more the West starts to compensate for the lack of Russian oil. Is there a chance we could find ways to using less oil? After the embargo in 1972/74 the cost of oil certainly had an impact in getting people to at least consider the idea that they didn’t need to have a 2-door Chrysler New Yorker to go pick up milk. Compare that to the 1980 Chrysler K-Car!

John read an article this morning about the International Space Station and the fact that the tension is now in the space station with the question if the Russians are now going to detach, but more importantly, the motors of every rockets we use including Space X and Amazon are all made in Russia. We do have a certain stockpile in warehouses that will allow us going to space for a certain amount of time, but we have stopped making our own rocket motors, which is a great idea if you believe in a global economy where when it comes to space we are putting our differences aside, but what are we going to do when we run out of Russian rocket motors? Maybe those Saturn car factories in Tennessee could be repurposed to be rocket factories? Maybe the band Superdrag could start performing again?

by jroemling

RL454 - The Ghost Bushes

Tue, 03 Jan 2023 19:50:14 +0000

This week, Merlin and John talk about:

Street car construction work outside Merlin’s office (Merlin Mann)
John’s sump pump in his basement, atmospheric rivers in the Northwest (Mid-century modern)
John being in disputes with his neighbors about adverse possession of a part of his property (Normandy Park)

The Problem: John needed to get the sump pump functioning, referring to the setup in John’s basement where a pump removes the water that comes into the house during a strong rain.

The show title refers to bushes that John wanted to plant on the far end of his property that his neighbor had taken over and turned into part of their lawn.

John had a long conversation with Dan about Brit Pop (see RW249) and halfway through he realized Dan was not Merlin.

Street car construction work outside Merlin’s office (RL454)

They are doing some road work outside of Merlin’s office, replacing tracks for the street car and lots of other things, and in keeping with the mood internationally things have escalated. The San Francisco Transit Authority has not threatened nuclear war, but they are on standby and one piece of shit guy standing by a tank was telling civilians to stay calm right before he was shot with a fucking grenade launcher.

Merlin found a really good list on Twitter of ra-ra-Ukraine writers and maybe he is going all Louise Mensch, but he is really excited to browse through that list and see videos of people throwing Molotov Cocktails into tanks that are out of fuel, which is so fucking funny. John doesn’t want to go on Twitter, but he does want to see that!

Merlin has been calling the equipment that makes noise outside his office the bang bang machine. It is like a super-jackhammer where you get a cool big-old John Deere or a Caterpillar yellow things where you can change the kit and put different stuff at the end of the big claw crane arm. It is like the way they did tanks in World War II where everybody laughed when they made scissors at the front of the tank. In this case they put a Caterpillar-sized jackhammer at the end of the arm to break up the pavement and then there is a different Cat to scoop up the pavement.

Merlin just goes out to watch because it is amazing! Now they have even started putting down big pieces of metal to cover up holes, and they also started putting in planks of metal like a super-rebar to keep an area open like a surgeon, and that made the entire block rattle like thrice the biggest earthquake that Merlin has ever been in. Today: Enter the concrete cutter, a big saw, and Merlin went outside with the noise gauge of his Apple Watch and it was about as loud as a concert by The Who.

There is also a guy out there directing traffic with an airhorn.

John’s sump pump in his basement, atmospheric rivers in the Northwest (RL454)

There are some sounds at John’s place, too, because they are getting another atmospheric river, but this one is not one of the Gaia bombs that they had earlier, but they did have record freezing temperatures of 22 degrees (-5°C) only last week and it warmed up just in time for a tropical cyclone to dump unprecedented amounts of water and unlike the last rain event, this time John has his sump pump functioning (see RL448). Merlin asks John to explain what a sump pump is in pigs and bunnies.

John’s house is built on the side of a hill and it should have good drainage because water goes downhill and should go around the house, but because it is a mid-century house that is built long and narrow like a train station, it is athwart the hill and on the uphill side water collects and because the downstairs is half-buried it has been known to collect water against the uphill side of the basement wall and then the water seeps in. The family that was selling the house was trying to remediate the problem.

There is a thing called a French drain where you dig down along the foundation, lay a bed of gravel, it is an elaborate thing with a pipe with holes drilled in it, and the water seeping through the ground will go into the pipe and pipe will run the water out and around and down, it is Roman technology from a time where the French were whom we turned to for new technology. John had assumed that they had built a French drain because they had excavated, but then inside the house in the corner closest to the problem they slammed a giant hole and put a pump and a basin in, and the water that would normally go into the home would through a series of pipes and tubes to the basin where the pump would automatically pump it out.

John doesn’t understand what is happening because he doesn’t have X-Ray vision, although people think he has, but he suspects that the French drain, rather than run along the outside of the house and around the corner and down collects the water at the outside of the house, brings it into the house, and then into the basin and pumps it out.

In the summer the sump pump started beeping at John because it needed a 9V battery, only a year after he had already replaced the battery. It is like the smoke alarms that are hardwired into the home but still need a battery. John was getting frustrated because he couldn’t get this thing to stop beeping, even when he took the battery out, and he unplugged it and forgot about it and one time during the winter he had 6 inches of water in the basement. When he plugged the sump pump back in it pumped the water out in 30 seconds, but the damage had been done and John had ruined everything that he had stacked on the floor that he was in the process of sorting through.

John spent a few weeks to solve that problem and now it is like a magic machine and it is very random when that sump fills up enough to activate the pump. It is like a medication issue, where now he needs to check on the sump pump 24 hours a day for the rest of his life. John’s house is a wonderful house, it is a wonderful life, but any time there is an atmospheric river event, which there are more and more of, as God has decided, it has nothing to do with Man, we make plans and God laughs, and now John buys the 9V batteries by the case because he doesn’t want this beeping at him and it needs to be on even in the summer when there is no rain because if John unplugs it he will forget until the winter.

In Merlin’s park with the confederate soldier ghosts (see RL2) if it hasn’t rained for a long time and then there is sudden rain then the water overwhelms the land, and the snails and ants get thrown out of heir house and move into Merlin’s house, it gets saturated and then the Eucalyptus fall over and you better not be on the path then! Those are some shitty-ass invasive exotics that were cheap to get a long time ago, but they have a shallow root and that is going to be your undoing! Over time they have taken down a lot of them preemptively because they know they are going to come down.

John sent Merlin a video of the creek and there are some tall ladders in the shot which makes it not the most beautiful video, but he took it from where he is sitting right now. You can see the stakes that the hippies left at the 900 plants they put in. Merlin’s in-laws live in Gold Country, or increasingly Fire Country, on a body of water that looks very similar and Merlin loves to go and walk around there because it reminds him of his childhood when you go walk around the creek and throw things in it.

John being in disputes with his neighbors about adverse possession of a part of his property (RL454)

John had a weird couple of days involving invasive species, talking about people, where halfway through the process he wasn’t sure if he was the invasive species.

John’s two neighbors

John has been restoring the native habitat on his land, he is very involved, he has two neighbors and has been in low-key disputes with them over their conduct. They both encroached on the property years ago when the previous owners were old and couldn’t defend the other side of the river, they got away with it so long it started seeming okay, and one of them, the lady who runs the daycare center, actually throws real garbage, bags and bags, a dumpster and a half of actual pure garbage.

John was interacting with them over the last 2 years and then found their garbage, she is very nice, she is the one neighbor always leaves a tin of Christmas cookies on the holidays, she is the type of person who learns your birthday and gives you a gift, even though you are not friendly with each other, which feels very insincere when later the same afternoon you pull out old Dr. Pepper bottles where someone has put 7 cigarettes and then pissed in it and put the cap back on out of the backyard.

The second neighbor is a little lady who used to be a stewardess and she threw a lot of food waste down the ravine, but not any garbage, she just used it as her yard waste dump, but she also landscaped an area, probably 30x15 feet that is part of John’s yard that she just claimed over time, built grass, installed in-ground irrigation, the whole bit. For decades nobody was even aware what they were doing because it was on the other side of the forest. John hired a surveyor and she showed up, he was very friendly to everybody, he is here now, not the old people, and he knows where the property boundaries are, and both of them were well over the line and he was going to claim the land back because it is part of what he bought.

Over the last two years, little by little, the relationships have deteriorated in different ways and John came up with an elegant solution. He came up with an elegant solution and he wrote them both that he didn’t want to build a fence because it is too intrusive and it would be a bad vibe, but he wanted to plant all native plants in the ravine and he wanted to build a giant hedge along the property line that would be made of all native bushes that support the native wildlife, and all he needed from his two neighbors was that they would not fuck this up somehow (see RW257).

The second neighbor was the one who said that one of the trees was threatening her driveway and John went up there with a couple of arborists and concluded that even if the top of the tree would break off and fall to the ground, it might touch part of her driveway, but it was not an emergency and they would deal with it when it happens (see RL442).

John’s neighbor’s son inviting him over to talk about the situation

Now John got a message from the second neighbor’s son who is in his 30s, a big guy with a long beard who lives at home, and it is a lovely home, and he said they really wanted to figure out what the plan was with the hedge and he invited John over and walk the ground and tell them what he was planning to do, which was exciting because he was finally going to meet the son who seemed like a reasonable guy, and John was going to explain his plan that he got a little monomaniacal about, a little single-minded because he has read 40 graduate student research papers on creek restoration and he a little bit in the weeds.

They invited John in and talked about their refrigerator that was leaking and John talked about his sump pump, but then the son go serious and asked about the hedge John was going to build and said that they liked to keep everything just as it is. There are not only survey stakes in the ground, but you can also see the line of sight from where John’s fence ends and where the street is, that they go all this way over the line.

His mom is sitting there with her jaw clenched and he says in a very ”well actually” way that they have been there for 30 years using this property and they were prepared to sue for adverse possession, which is a pretty Punk term, a thing enshrined in English law back to ye olden times that says that if they were using his property as though it was their property and he didn’t do anything about it for 10 years and everybody who looked at it knew that it was their property.

John summarized it that they invited him over and served him biscuits on a tin in order to talk about his plan, but they were really telling him that he could go screw himself and they are going to sue him to take legal possession of the land that they stole, but the son said that he wouldn’t put it that way, they were here to negotiate, and their negotiating position was that everything stays exactly the same because they have been there for 30 years.

John’s neighbor threatening to sue him over adverse possession of his land

John had been so excited about his bushes and his native berries that he didn’t see it coming, and this happens to him a lot where he gets into a situation like this where he feels like a noob. He came over with his brochures of his berries and they were going to sue him to steal some corner of his property. John was trying to keep his cool, but he was not sure if that was going to fly and he couldn’t understand why they couldn’t see the beauty of his bushes and his wonderful plan.

The law of adverse possession absolutely favors he stealer, while you would think that in our capitalist society that is based in its first principle on private ownership of land, but possession is 9/10th of the law. As soon as a case like this ends up in front of a judge it is anything-can-happen-day, but recently Washington passed a further law that said that the loser pays the legal fees, which before both people had to pay their own legal fees and just the pain in the neck and the expense of it kept people from suing their neighbors over a 30 feet piece of grass.

John suggested to go look at it so he could tell them more about the bushes with the berries, and they did. Ken even did an Omnibus (see OM207) about how grass lawns are an environmental catastrophe, they squander water, all the pesticides, and John’s neighbor’s yard was a fashionable way to do a yard 30 years ago and times have changed. Their beautifully landscaped place is a habitat for rats and this muddy patch of grass where you never step is not better than a beautiful hedge.

You could tell that they both were very emotional because they perceived this to be their yard, they have lived there for 30 years, and John is the new guy who lives on the other side of the river, what is he even doing in their yard over there? They don’t understand it is a habitat, and think about the owls! There are berries, and there are so many articles he could share with them right then and there.

John feels like a noob in the sense that he is so persuaded that he doesn’t even remember what is was like to be back in a place where he would look somebody in the eye and go: ”English Ivy is a welcome decorative plant that we have trained!” - ”Well, we trained the ivy!” - ”The ivy you planted in your yard 30 years ago is 50 foot up in the trees around here because you can’t train ivy, it got away from you my friends and it is an environmental catastrophe of your making!” - ”Right here you can see where we trained it!” - ”You guys are training your ivy in a 15x15 foot planter box, but 20 feet over there outside of your yard, do you see that ivy? That came from you and that is a freaking skirch (?) on the land, it is murdering things! It is a habitat for rats, my friends!”, but John can’t get far enough back to a time before he knew all this stuff, where he would walk around the campus of an Eastern college and go: ”Look at the ivy, it is so beautiful!”

John’s neighbor calling the police on him because John raised his voice

They are obviously very upset and he was talking to John in a slow, pedantic, hyper-rational online libertarian style as if he was going to defeat him with logic. Are they going to sue him over 15x15 feet of grass? And they are playing is as if John is going to make a big issue over 15x15 feet of grass, but it is on John’s side of the property that he is going to determine the future av. This is one of those suburban issues where John is arguing with the son of a lady over whether or not he is going to put in some local berries or if they are going to keep on putting round up on their grass while on the other side of the world the Russians are on the outside of Kyiv and people are starving.

The guy told John that John was not willing to compromise, but a compromise is where two parties each come with an idea and then meet in the middle, but his view of a compromise is that John is going to agree with everything he wants, and that is not a compromise! They are trying to intimidate John, they have money, this is a wealthy neighborhood, they have money enough to live in this house and neither of them work, she is retired and he is living in the basement, but when dad died he left a bunch of money to them and they are living there now and it was very clear that they had already talked to their lawyer before they even invited John over for tea and crumpets.

At a certain point he says: ”We are trying to negotiate!” - ”You are not negotiating, you are just stipulating!” - ”No, we are negotiating!” and John raised his voice and said: ”That is not what negotiating is!” - ”I feel unsafe!” Merlin says that for this fellow the same is true that John probably said about Merlin in the first year of their friendship: ”There is nothing wrong with you that couldn’t be solved by a pretty solid ass-kicking!” and he thinks that beardo needs a punch in the nose and needs to pump the brakes.

The guy outweighs John by 100 pounds and he is doing it in the liberation Internet atheist argument way by saying: ”I feel unsafe!” just like when John said to the guy at the Firestone: ”Are you fucking with me right now?” - ”There is no need to use profanity, sir!” - ”Wait a minute, you don’t need to go there!” and now he has the moral high-ground because John used a bad word and he has been to a training where they told him what to do when someone uses a bad word. This kid is the same situation and he pulled his phone out and said: ”I don’t want to have to call the police!” and John immediately got very calm and said: ”I am terribly sorry that I raised my voice!” - ”I don’t believe that you are sorry, I feel threatened!” - ”In that case I think you should call the police!” - ”I don’t want it to go there!” - ”No, you feel unsafe, I really think you should call the police!”

John hates more than anything a specious theatrical call to the police, but he does know they live in the suburbs where the police are not busy, they are probably across town dealing with another property dispute between two 65 year old men where someone else’s planterbox is 6 inches over the line. This is 99% of what living in the suburbs is, apparently! John was calling his bluff and the guy has to stick to his guns and he punched in a bunch of numbers and looked at his phone like it didn’t work and John asked: ”Does your phone not have 911?” and at that point John had pushed him too far and he did actually call 911.

The guy gave his address and the police wanted to connect them to the Shoreline police department, and both of them were now on the same team, dealing with someone at the police and fire who doesn’t know where they are because Shoreline is 50 miles away, and Edmonds (?) was not any better either. Eventually it got send to the right dispatcher and John had to listen to the guy explain that his neighbor was here and spoke to him in a threatening manner. John was loving it, he was like Red Fox with one hand on his chest: ”Take me!” and the 911 operator suggested they should go back into their home and they will send an officer and now John had to stay there and wait, he couldn’t just go home.

Waiting for the police, wondering how we got here

While he was waiting John was wondering how it got here. He was replaying the situation in his mind, thinking where he went wrong. He is a friend to all birds and animals, he has done his research and thinks he is doing the right thing and what he is doing is logical and sensical and explainable. He has tremendous powers of persuasion, he is articulate, and yet he is in a death spiral with both of his neighbors over the same issues, a thing that seems to be very basic: ”Don’t throw garbage into a forest! Respect the property boundaries and try and eradicate invasive species!”, but now he was standing there in the rain, waiting for the police, wondering if this was a situation where he somewhere back up the stream made some assumption or has behaved in a way that created or fueled this problem.

A lot of John’s friends, like Merlin, avoid conflict by avoiding conflict and they wouldn’t confront the neighbor who is throwing the garbage over the fence, and they would be upset about the putting green, but they wouldn’t confront them either, and there would be no confrontation because there would be no confrontation. John was never able to do that. Yesterday he did not have this in his life, but now he is standing there in the rain, with the police on the way, and his neighbors threatening to sue him for adverse possession of a corner of his property. He does feel a bit like Larry David or Ronny Dahms.

Merlin says he doesn’t like social media because he doesn’t like getting pulled down to someone else's frame.

John has been there for two years, and the entire time he believed about himself that he was gently helping his neighbors understand what his vision was, and for two years he has watched their faces harden at the suggestion that the property was his and as soon as he was talking about a butterfly sanctuary he had already lost them and could see it in his eyes. The one who is throwing the garbage is a sociopath, but the other lady has just absolutely a way that it has always been.

She was a flight attendant in the 1960s where people did not stand up and throw their yoghurt and piss on the flow and scream about vaccines, but she was wearing a pillbox hat and had white elbow-length gloves and served people steak tartar on flights where a first class ticket cost $70.000 or whatever it did in 1975, and her way of dealing with things is to get very sweet, to bat her eyelashes, to be charm-offensive, which is weird because she is trying to be cute, but John can see in her eyes that he is a threat and as soon as he was talking about a butterfly sanctuary she was back to the frame of: ”Well, I have trained all the ivy!”

John had done two years of patient tip-toe around the fact that she had lived there for 30 years and believed that she has trained the ivy, and yet he is standing there in the exact position on the property line with the cops on their way, he could have just as well two weeks after he moved in thrown up a shitty fence and they would have called the cops then! The two years he spent trying to be good have resulted in him being in the exact same position as he would have been if he had showed up as the biggest imperialist dick of the universe and had showed up on day 1 and taken a can of DayGlo spray paint and sprayed a line right across their grass where his property line was and put a sign that said: ”Keep off!”

The police arriving

The cop showed up, a 5’1” blonde woman who looked like Ms. Mechane (?) from the TV show, she is a go-getter kind, and like all police now she is wearing 700 pounds of tactical gear: bulletproof vest, 17 different clips, 4 different weapons, a jetpack, all the different stuff! She came over, smiling: ”How is it going out here?” - ”Well, you know, just standing here!” - ”Did you call?” - ”No, I am the one that the property owner called about, I am the neighbor who raised his voice!” - ”Why don’t you fill me in?” - ”Oh, not much to fill in, we are having a little boundary dispute here!” John didn’t want to be the person who goes: ”Hey cop, be my friend!”, but was trying to say: ”I am standing here because I didn’t want you to drive up and have to come find me!”

John explained that the guy had called her because he had said: ”That is not what negotiating is!” in a raised voice about the fact they they were having a little property dispute, and at that point they both came back out from their house and the guy said he had to call the police because John had lunged (?) at him. She said: ”Let me just stop you right there! Here in Normandy Park we do a lot of property disputes, a lot of situations where two 65-year old guys are upset at each other over where the recycling bins are supposed to be and we deal with this a lot. Here is my job: I am going to mom this situation. I can’t really make you do anything but I want you both to look at each other and say right now in front of me that you are going to try and work this out!” - ”I am really sorry that I shouted at you and I really want to work this out!” and he didn’t add a ”but”.

John was not embarrassed for himself, but he was embarrassed for the world, and he was looking at the grass and at the Ghost Bushes that he had pictured in his mind 100 times and birds and he owls feating on the mountain beavers. What has he done? How much did his vision of this thing put him there? How complicit was he in the fact that he was standing there, talking to this police officer who was talking to them like they were children because form her perspective they were. ”Do we know where the property boundary is?” - ”Yes!” - ”Yes!” - ”Okay, that is a great place to start!” She was great! She was small and blonde and perky, like Reese Witherspoon!

John deciding not to fight them over this

John went back to his house, his hand gracing over the tops of all the native bushes in his forest, thinking that two years in he was now in a situation where he was at war with his neighbor. He called a lawyer friend who deals with property because he had read the statutes of adverse possession and he was afraid that they had a really good shot on it. There are 5 criteria and they meet all 5, even if they had only been there for 10 years. The property was unguarded by the old people who had lived there and John could tell the judge that they were 95 years old and incapable of climbing up the side of the hill and the judge would say that this meets the definition of not guarding your property.

There is a whole urban school of adverse possession, coming from a Punk Rock squat mentality where it is seen as a way of reclaiming buildings in Downtown, but a judge is going to be a lot less likely to award adverse possession to a San Francisco townhouse to some squatters than out in the suburbs where they did train that Ivy.

John was covered in a feeling of sadness. He doesn’t want them to legally get titled to the land and all he can do is back off. John’s lawyer friend is a buddy and he did an online introduction to an actual guy who does this actual work, and they just talked about the law in a funny way and what it came down to is that if the loser wouldn’t have to pay the legal fees, then let them sue, let them spend $60.000 to try and get 10 feet of land, but if the loser has to pay, then John doesn’t want to pay $60.000 to give them his land.

Last night at 11pm John got an email while sitting in his bath tub with the subject heading ”An olive branch”, a long email from the son where he said: ”Things have gotten so crazy… I still remember when I was just a boy, 5 years old, my parents in our old Suburban…”, trying to explain where he was coming from and that this was how it has always been and they love this land and this property that has been exactly the same for his entire life, and now John showed up and one morning there were 30 hippies in the bushes in Carhartts, planting little pink flags.

He argued that they are not hurting anybody, why was John trying to hurt them? John was not trying to hurt them. As John looked out across the ravine for the last 2 days it looked like a battleground because on the other side of that stream there was a family that was going to sue him, but this morning it no longer did because John is going to reply to the guy’s letter saying that he didn’t need to build a hedge there, he got all the native bushes he can handle.

All he was trying to do was make a habitat for the mountain beaver, and if those guys want their putting green to stay the same he is not going to be the one to change their lives. He had read too many articles about habitat restoration and believed everybody in world did. John is going to let them keep their windmill!

On one hand, if you have formally granted a person the right to use your property they can’t sue for adverse possession because you have allowed them to be there, and it seems that one of the only paths for John to avoid being vulnerable to this kind of suit is to in writing say that he grants them the right to have this intrusion on his property because the whole thing about adverse possession is that it is adverse. John also thinks that in his mind the son is closer to John than to his mother because he is 30 years old and has listened to her talking about training the Ivy long enough.

Merlin thinks John needs to get his neighbors on his podcast! Imagine how many mouth sounds he would make into his mic! ”Well, actually…”

by jroemling

RL453 - Guardstone

Tue, 03 Jan 2023 19:38:20 +0000

This week, Merlin and John talk about:

Mr. Show, different people associating actors with different shows (Movies)
Magical thinking (Personality)
John and his daughter’s mother watching a lot of TV recently, recognizing a TV show track as being by Mountain (Music)
Rock music with swing being outlawed in Seattle (Music)
Comparing your problems to everybody else’s problems (Depression)
John’s daughter being very different from him, getting into a manipulative phase where she is performing feelings (Daughter)

The Problem: There’s Magic John and Science John, referring to the different internal character voices in John’s head.

The show title refers to a thing in curling and Merlin suggests that it should be the name for the place where John will put Dick Cheney in his shipping container in the desert.

The audio starts with a 2-second clip of the song Mississippi Queen by Mountain.

In the middle of the episode between minutes 26-45 the audio of the two hosts starts drifting apart and is almost unlistenable.

John starts singing Merlin’s name in the usual way. Merlin replies with something undecipherable. John goes: ”Are you a sight for sore eyes!”, ”In this economy?” Merlin asks John if he is a magical thinker, but then diverts for 20 minutes, talking about TV shows like Mr. Show because John says that he has to call upstairs.

Mr. Show, different people associating actors with different shows (RL453)

Merlin has been watching a lot of Mr. Show and his kid is pretty into it. He references the sketch ”Change for a dollar” There are some episodes like the Jeepers Creepers episode, No Adults Allowed and Sulu the Australian Hot Neck lizard where Merlin can just about recite the whole sketch. He always looks forward to Bob Odenkirk singing, like: ”The laserbeam of love” He also finds it so funny when Bob Odenkirk goes: ”God dammit!” It is a really special show and so far ahead of its time.

John saw it first in 2000 when he was the keyboard player in Harvey Danger on a VHS tape in the tour bus, brought to them by Jeff Lin, the least likely band member and somewhat humorless guitar player. John had never seen the HBO static before and every time it pops up on any screen he will think about Mr. Show. For Merlin it is pretty close between Sex and the City and Mr. Show. As with everything, like the first time you see the one with the New Zealanders and Eugene Mirman called Flight of the Conchords, or the first time you hear the first Jane’s Addiction record, you are going to think you don’t know about that until later it hits you like a ton of bricks.

Merlin thinks Flight of the Conchords is a good example of that because he is balls deep in What We Do in the Shadows. Like The Mighty Boosh you think: ”What the fuck was this? Who is this for” John tried to show The Mighty Boosh to his little gang of adults, but it did not translate to the modern day. It was too many drugs.

For Merlin Mr. Show stands next to Monty Python and they quote it a lot, like scenes from The Godfather. At the time he was pretty into Comedy Central, but that was so repetitive and you would see the same ads over and over. He was super into Dr. Katz, and then Mr. Show and The Velveteen Touch of a Dandy Fop might have been his first episode (S2E06) and it became the show he would watch every Friday night while his lady friend was getting ready for them to go out on a Friday and when he showed up at the clubs he was already pre-jazzed.

The first time John saw the British Office was in Merlin’s house in his underwear on Merlin’s TiVO and he first had to explain what a TiVO was. How many times did they watch that 3-second segment of Charlie Rose interviewing Jeff Bridges? John doesn’t even smoke pot, but that was top-level smoking-pot-behavior. Merlin had been flipping channels and had landed on that scene and Jeff Bridges seemed super-high and it was very funny when he said: ”I like… errrr… line reading!” and then they all in John’s band had a version of that and Eric Corson used to say it all the time.

Merlin imprinted on Mr. Show so hard and he would videotape it every Friday night. A listener was kind enough to give him all of the DVDs, but Merlin had already gotten them off the back of a truck and they are all on his machine at home. There is one called Life is Precious and God and The Bible where they are in a life boat with 5 people. It all seems like it was ahead of its time, but looking back it was what they were talking about then, and now all that stuff seems new to us, it was what John wrote about in the 1990s, he was saying all the same stuff, except he was calling it The Ukraine.

John can’t hear the voice of The Ice King (Tom Kenny) without immediately thinking of the skid Druggachusettes. It was a lot to digest when it first came out and you had to get a feel for it. Merlin loves the show Community, where John met the guy (Dan Harmon from the All the Great Shows bit) and got really into it last year, but when he thinks about Chevy Chase he 95% thinks about season 1 of Saturday Night Live where he was the break-out star, or about Fletch or Caddyshack. John still thinks of the two movies Chevy Chase made with Goldie Hawn: Four Play and the other one (Seems Like Old Times). Merlin thinks of Bob Odenkirk 95% as Mr. Show while his kid knows him as Slippin’ Jimmie from Better Call Saul. He was in a crazy action movie that nobody saw called Nobody where he trained for 2 years.

All of that is predicated on the audience at the time having still only monolithic media in common with each other. Mr. Show makes mockery of 50 media properties that you had to understand in order to really get the jokes, and Community, too! It is a mockery of a kind of thing, a mono-culture, be it Happy Days or The Six Million Dollar Man. That is what they talked about at recess the next day because of course everybody had seen Happy Days, it was what you watched when you were 9 yeas old, no subsequent generation will ever have that kind of referential humor.

Who was even the audience of Happy Days in 1977? They were not making that TV show for kids, it was made for adults. Garry Marshall was cashing in a little bit on the combination of Grease that had been big on Broadway and American Graffiti, which Ron Howard was in. John always thought it was Sha Na Na at Woodstock. Happy Days, Laverne & Shirley, Three’s Company, or The Love Boat was all adult entertainment and it is incredible to think that it was what middle-aged people were sitting down to consume together with their kids. John didn’t get all the innuendo that was on The Love Boat or all the politics that was in every episode of M*A*S*H, but he was there at his parents’ knee. John’s mom loved Magnum, P.I.!

Merlin’s mom hated TV and very overtly did not watch TV and she despised the fact that TV and Coca Cola were Merlin’s favorite things in the world. John’s dad loved TV and his mom talks about him loving TV back in 1959. He loved The Tonight Show and he loved watching sports on TV and he loved the late movie. His mom had strict rules and on Tuesday night they could watch TV from 7-8pm, which was Happy Days and Laverne & Shirley, on Thursday night they could watch it for another hour, which was The Love Boat and Fantasy Island.

Melin thought that was on Saturday, but John never watched TV on Saturday. Saturday was the graveyeard and Merlin remembers it was a big deal when they moved All In The Family to Saturday. Merlin is now much older than Carroll O’Connor was when that show started, and of all the things that one freaks him out the most. He is now 55 and Carroll O’Connor was the canonical 50-year old man when the show started and he was only 47 back then. They are going to make the 1970s look like the 1940s!

Magical thinking (RL453)

John is conscious of magical thinking, it is an internal conversation between Magic John and Science John. Magic John never says anything where Science John hasn’t something to say and it not necessarily vice versa, but almost. Neither one believes in copper pyramids, he doesn’t believe in manifesting things, but it is variations on scale: This seems regular, at a different scale it would seem magical, at a larger scale than that it would seem regular again, it feels like magic is always a question of how far in or out you zoom. When the tide is out you see all the starfish on the beach, but when you speed the camera up all of a sudden the starfish are crawling around, socializing with each other, and you would never have known how active they are because you can’t see infrared.

Merlin starts talking about the availability heuristic when you say that every time you wash your car it starts raining, and he thinks that it is a kind of magical thinking to let two completely unassociated things guide your logic and cognition in a way that you haven’t interrogated. For John when something goes wrong he always blames it on himself. He doesn’t think God is watching him or puts obstacles in his way or out of his way. He always gives him 10% more than he can handle at any time, he is a real joker! Any kind of magic that is based on the idea that there are sprites in the forest or a God looking down… he never attributes sentience to happenstance, but he definitely goes: ”Well, you crossed the street at exactly the wrong time!” - ”Why are you criticizing me? I crossed the street and I got hit by a water balloon, that is not my fault!” - ”Who’s fault is is then?”

Magic vs science are just two sides of amazement.

Merlin banter (RL453)

Merlin says that he may be John’s sin eater because as John’s sleep improved (see RL450), his sleep disimproved and he only slept for 3 hours. Two hearts beat as one (song by U2), Merlin had a 12” of that, there was a dance remix of that. Merlin is into Bangles, while John loves that Bananarama shit. Bananarama didn’t have the charts-topping hits.

Merlin thinks that all of the Olympic winter sports are the same sports, it is just go faster when it is cold. He got into Curling and he finds it all so confusing. John used to watch that for hours on television because they are close enough to Canada. There is a guardstone in Curling and that should be the name for where John puts Dick Cheney (see Dreams and Fantasies) and you could say: ”We have renditioned him to Guardstone!”

John and his daughter’s mother watching a lot of TV recently, recognizing a TV show track as being by Mountain (RL453)

John’s family is in a TV habit right now, which is not a thing he has been in very much, but his daughter’s mother is a TV watcher and loves it in all of its forms and she will watch Love Island Australia all night long. This is why Merlin thinks that he and John should wife-swap because he likes talking about what that person was in. John agrees that Merlin and John’s daughter’s mother would love each other and would sit and talk all day about TV and they would watch House Hunters International six episodes in a row.

They are in a TV habit when they will watch a little Star Wars with Dark Vader with their little girl, then put her to bed, and then they will watch an episode or two of episodic television, but then you run out, you get to the end, you are not really ready to start another thing, they tried watching the Olympics, but that is televised terribly on NBC and YouTube, so John’s daughter’s mother suggested they watch a movie, which they don’t normally do, and John suggested the Tony Soprano movie (probably The Many Saints of Newark) and about halfway through there is a track that John didn’t know, but it sounded like Mountain, a bands that had just one undeniable solid killer track Mississippi Queen.

John was playing a lot of shows back East in some of those venues like The Fillmore, which is now only in San Francisco and there is no more Fillmore East in New York, but back then there were big clubs where all the bands like The Allman Brothers or the Grateful Dead did East Coast circuits, and those venues always had a framed pictures of Leslie West (guitar player of Mountain) with an inscription like: ”Mountain played here 16 times!” and he was always taken aback because Mountain just has that one song, it is like Funk #49 (song by James Gang).

When that track started playing in the movie John immediately knew that it was Mountain although he had never heard the tune before, and he wondered if this was like Baker Street where you think that it is the only song on the album and then you listen to the whole record and realize that every song on there is just as brilliant. Is every Mountain song just as killer as Mississippi Queen, just none of them ever made it onto the radio?

John went into a deep dive of Mountain 12” and they are an incredible band! In the 1980s they used to party to Steppenwolf! Who puts Steppenwold on? And even Steppenwolf has 5 great party tunes! Why did none of them have a Mountain record? Talk about magical thinking! How would John’s life have been different if he had listened to Mountain instead of Steppenwolf? Merlin had the same experience with the song Smokies by Barefoot Jerry from a Swamp Rock compilation of the early 1970s and it makes him feel like having a very incomplete education.

Rock music with swing being outlawed in Seattle (RL453)

The kind of music that in Seattle is called Choogle was banished from the music scene all through the 1990s and 2000s, anything that went chicka-chicka or had any swing at all. It is like the gated snare: When John first started making records in Seattle if you said the word ”gated snare” everybody had to take 15 minutes off and go sit outside and think about their lives. You couldn’t use it even though it was a great idea!

John came up in a time in the 1980s when everything they listened to went chicka-chicka, all of ZZ Top, Aerosmith, it was in all of Rock and it was taken from Funk. Into the early 1990s one of the things that set John outside of the local Rock culture was that everybody was self-consciously coming from the Punk side and Pearl Jam wasn’t, they had a lot of chicka-chicka in their stuff. John was in a band with his best friend Kevin from High School and he really loved Choogle.

Merlin had never heard that term. If you break Pearl Jam down, the rhythm section and everything that is happening at the basic level of the tune is very funky, and Modest Mouse is, too, just that Modest Mouse is a Funk band with a guy on top of it that has been sniffing glue. John’s musical journey through the 1990s was gradually weaning the chicka-chicka out of what he did and by the time you get to The Long Winters there is no Choogle left in him, even though it is native to him.

Comparing your problems to everybody else’s problems (RL453)

Merlin watched the big game yesterday (the Super Bowl) and when Dr. Dre was playing his very memorable keyboards he thought of John who on his first album has a credit for Dr. Dre keyboards. Dr. Dre also famously told the world that the cello is the most sinister instrument and John carries that with him everywhere he goes.

Merlin has very irregular sleep at the moment, sometimes 12 hours, sometimes 3 hours, and he has a very big omnibus project on the way, a triple-decker, a wizarding-bus, where he is working on a lot of different things in the long term that involve trying to get energy right, but he also needs a unified field theory about time off. He is working on a bigger effort about direction of energy and known amounts of time-away time off, and last night he realized it is not optional and he needs to get better at this and potentially not apologize for it. He and his friend Alex call it , the dependent clause that you have to append to every sentence to express that you know you are really fortunate and other people don’t even have 3 hours of sleep.

John laughs mockingly like a guy who is 27 years old and makes $250.000 a year designing background characters for Angry Birds and has a $2.5 million condo and has one poster on the wall of a white Lamborghini, a bean bag chair and a cube of tungsten, which is very fun to say.

Merlin tries to avoid Rex Chapman type shit, he doesn’t like ”Oh, here is the thing I found!”, but this one got him yesterday as a name for a thing on his list of things that need a name (see this thread of tweets): ”4. Relative Privation, an all-too-common fallacy where people dismiss a concern because something else is worse. “How can you talk about X when Y is happening?” By this logic, how can anyone ever talk about anything other than literally the single worst thing in the universe?” (by Gurwinder)

They used to one-up each other in the Vegan community when someone was wearing leather shoes.

During the last year John’s daughter will be sitting somewhere, doing the thing that all kids do, which is like: ”Meh, I am bored! This is dumb! There is not enough Macaroni and Cheese! This ham has been sitting on the counter for 6 weeks!” and as a parent you inevitably start saying: ”You have 17 Barbies, admittedly 15 of them are hand-me-down, which is a lot of Barbies, and to complain about any aspect of having 17 Barbies in unseemly!” and somehow something got into her from somewhere else and about a year ago when John said something to this effect her face collapsed in shame and she said that she felt awful that there are people in the world who don’t have any Barbies and she was so entitled.

John told her that she didn’t have to go there and everybody in the world is different and has different things about their lives that are great and that are hard, and she is not responsible for that and doesn’t have to carry their weight on her shoulders, but it is just important to think about your context and check in with the fact that she has a very nice life. She doesn’t have to compare it with other people and she is not responsible. Merlin goes on a rant how kids need a way to get their emotions out and how he was constantly ashamed as a kid and is now overcorrecting and doesn’t want his kid to feel shame.

John thinks what Merlin just said: ”I am not trying to send a message right now!” is such a great phrase that is T-shirt worthy. Sometimes you just have a bad day and there is nothing behind it. Merlin doesn’t want people to ask people why they don’t do something or why they stopped doing something because it implies that there was a decision when often there was not. Can’t we just have an emotion that is not moored to something that just happened or is trying to telegraph something about what you want to be different in the future? That is how you make the people around you completely fucking crazy!

John’s daughter being very different from him, getting into a manipulative phase where she is performing feelings (RL453)

Merlin refers to his Wisdom Project where he says: ”Your kids are not little versions of you; they are little versions of themselves”. John’s daughter is very different from him and a long time ago they both had to understand that and they have a language for it now which freed John from the thing that plagued his parents: They both could only think of him as little proxies of themselves and when he behaved differently they couldn’t understand how this could even happen.

Now that she is older they have a shared language of ideas and John can explain to her the fact that he cannot get inside her motivations and tell her how to love or whom to love or how to feel, he can only tell her what he would tell himself and he can only listen to what she thinks about that and whether or not that met her needs. They are entering a phase where she is trying to be manipulative and she will for example perform being sad so that the person who just criticized her will get off her back. John explained that this behavior is visible to others and although most people won’t challenge her they will feel resentment because she is manipulating them, and she will think she is getting away with it, but others will store a little kernel of a feeling about her. John’s job is to help her learn how to make herself happy and he can help, but he can’t do it for her because he doesn’t know her emotional life. Merlin always hated when people said it is not his job to make his kid happy.

Merlin talks about the phrase Vatican Cameos from the Sherlock Holmes TV show that is used a bit like a safe-word between Holmes and Watson when shit is about to go down. Sometimes he just wants to be sad without it having a meaning to others.

John’s daughter is old enough now for him to understand that she does not have any of the mental difficulties that he has, but what she has is anxiety. John never felt he had anxiety for decades, and when he did confront it it had morphed into 1000 other things, while hers is still very pure. Yesterday she had a bad day, she broke a thing that belonged to her mom and her mom was mad and a get-together with friends go cancelled and she is burying it all and at some point she knocked over a can of Seltzer and immediately picked it up, but a little tiny bit of Seltzer went on the carpet, which probably only improved the carpet, but she lost it and didn’t know what to do. John is very familiar with that kind of brain freeze of: ”I don’t know what to do and also: This is the worst thing that has ever happened!” and she just completely melted down.

John explained to her that the Seltzer thing is not what happened, but she had a full day of things that happened to her, and learning how to know what is happening when your brain is actively trying to confuse you about what is happening, is very hard and it requires a long time of thinking and practicing and reflecting back on times like this. Her pouring 2oz of Seltzer (60ml) onto the carpet is not a big deal, he could pour an entire can of Seltzer on the carpet and all it would do is mitigate the fact that the cat probably wiped her butt on the carpet right there and the Seltzer lifted the cat butt into the room. Cat Butt was real in that instance (see RL62)!

What then happened to her in her emotions and her mind is not related to the can of Seltzer, it was just a trigger, and she doesn’t need to understand that yet, but she needs to just note that. She is very much an individual person who is already encountering difficulty with the way people respond to her at school and out in the world because she is intense and she feels and John can’t manage her feelings and he can’t even interpret them, all he can do is tell her that these are feelings and feelings are real (see RL363). She is almost 11 and these are just the preliminary feelings, but knowing that they are real and that we have feelings and we also have feelings about feelings, which is one thing about her: She has real feelings about her feelings, and thankfully she is willing to talk about her feelings with John and they have a language, and he hopes that she will keep the level of questioning that she has about it.

John tries to develop this topic a bit more, but Merlin ends the show by asking: ”You wanna swap?” - ”Sure, would be fun!” - ”What do you go?”

by jroemling

RL452 - Among the Scumbags

Tue, 03 Jan 2023 19:31:50 +0000

This week, Merlin and John talk about:

John being on Facebook late at night again (Internet and Social Media)
Merlin getting weed delivered (Merlin Mann)
John’s friend Jeff who was bartender at The Off-Ramp contacting him 25 years later via LinkedIn (Stories)
Fred Astaire’s early career with his sister (Movies)
Facebook group about The Off-Ramp in the early 1990s (Stories)
The other people from The Off-Ramp Val, Bobby, Sage (Stories)
John being on Facebook again, looking at Gary’s Van (Internet and Social Media)
John missing his window where he was supposed to go to bed, not sleeping much last night (Sleep)
John spending the day on Capitol Hill, realizing it might be time for a war (Currents)
Merlin watching a lot of World War II documentaries (Merlin Mann)

The Problem: Davey always should have been famous, referring to Punk Rock Davey who recently passed away and who John once had as a guest for Roderick’s Rendezvous.

The show title refers to John having been a known person among the Scumbags in Seattle before he later became a known commodity.

John had a little hot plug situation, but he fixed it. He assumes it is daemon running scripts in the background.

John being on Facebook late at night again (RL452)

John’s sleep is all screwed up again (see RL450), but only last night. He had turned a corner and started sleeping like a regular person, but the other day against all better judgment he was on Facebook because he had a friend die, a local guy Punk Rock Davey (not spelled Davie, see RL103). He would have said he never thought he would live to be 52 and John would have agreed with him. When he was 19 he had said he was going to die at 40 and now he outlived it.

Merlin getting weed delivered (RL452)

Merlin says he told the Weed Delivery guy that he has lots of levels of filtering on his phone, so they should just send it through the dingus, and if they call him he is probably not going to get it or at least not immediately, and he got a stern lecture from them because they were trying to call him for half an hour. It is probably a form of 2-factor authentication. In Merlin’s part of town every street is named alphabetically, all the avenues are named numerically, and all the buildings have numbers on them.

John’s friend Jeff who was bartender at The Off-Ramp contacting him 25 years later via LinkedIn (RL452)

One of John’s friends he hadn’t heard about for 25 years wrote him through LinkedIn. He was processing his Inbox like a Merlin Mann with 53 folders, zeroing it out, deleting another newsletter from Wayfarer although he had unsubscribed 40 times, and although he had set up every filter against LinkedIn there was still a mail there that was mentioning a guy John knew as P. Jeff and they always just called him Jeff, but in the mail it said Paul Jeff. John hates going to LinkedIn, but he clicked on it anyway.

John first thought it was a solicitation and they were going to offer him a great job in the mining industry, but there was Paul Jeff, one of the fellows that John never thought would have a straight job ever, his sideburns had 17 layers, he was listening to Skinny Puppy when the rest of them didn’t even know they existed. He had a utility belt, and one of the things in it looked like a flashlight, but it was a telescoping baton that came out 5 feet. Merlin always wanted one of those. People in Seattle always say that they had such a nice city that now has all gone to shit, but in the early 1990s Seattle was a shitty and scary place!

Jeff is not the tallest dude, but he is a formidable guy and he was the head bartender. After John got fired from the job where they worked together where John wasn’t drinking, The Off-Ramp, there was a time he decided that alcohol was bad for him, but drugs were not and had still lots to offer, so he quit drinking for 18 months and just pursued drugs, it was a very fruitful time, but at the end of it he had gone from being addicted to alcohol and dabbling in drugs to being addicted to drugs. He had thought he had so much to learn, but by the end of it he wondered why he was just on drugs when he could be on alcohol, too, which was a lot cheaper, and he went back to drinking, about a year after he had been fired from The Off-Ramp.

John started showing up in the bar. He and Jeff were friends and John asked him to serve ’em up, which was bad, but this was the times, the bar was a zoo and people were climbing on the walls. John was much older and wiser now, he was 23-25, ages where he thought that he now really understood. One day when he was drinking in there, Jeff was running John’s credit card from a bank that was sending him a lot of letters to different addresses that he didn’t live at anymore. Jeff wore a Pork Pie hat with the brim turned up, a long soul-patch that went all the way down, he had sideburns, he had the whole thing! One day Jeff came back and snipped John’s credit card in half in front of the whole bar, that was the end of that, it was the last money John was ever going to see and he owed it to the US Bank now, and the US Bank pursued him for 15 years for those drinks.

Then John would come in, sit at the bar, and go: ”Come on! Come on!” and Jeff would give him a drink, but at some point he would get the soda gun, leaned over like he wanted to talk to John, and hit him right in the face with soda water, which was the cost of every once in a while getting a free drink. Everybody in the bar liked it and John loved it! John had started doing meth and at one point he started to freebase it and later the guys who were running meth in town were also in the bar and it started to get really seedy in there because the meth guys started to take over.

John was exacerbating it because he was also one of the guys in the bar and he was also over in shady situations with these shady dudes, and he didn’t have any money, so it was even shadier. Jeff is the one kind of bartender who just wasn’t going to have it, and out came the baton: ”You all go!” and John replied: ”But not me, right?” - ”You too, fucker!” and John was out and he didn’t see Jeff for a long time. This was in the 1993/94 timeframe. Later when John was already sober Jeff opened his own bar and when John later became a known commodity in Seattle he felt Jeff was cheering him on from behind his bar.

Now Jeff is the GM of a big restaurant, which of course he is! John could absolutely picture that. He said something like ”Davey didn’t make it” and they were going to have an event for him at some point because somebody who knew him had called Val to get all the people together who knew him, and Val doesn’t know when, but maybe Sue will be there. John was communication with him through LinkedIn, although he might still have his number in his phone.

When John started doing Roderick’s Rendezvous at The Rendezvous, an hour a week, always with a guest, with some music, some bits, they read reader mail, and over the course of the year John tried to put everybody up on there who came through town like Hodgman. When John first showed up at The Rendezvous to do the show and he was walking through the bar he saw Punk Rock Davie and it turned out that The Rendezvous was his bar now. John hadn’t seen him in a long time, but all of a sudden they saw each other every week and they reacquainted, sat and talked, having a good old time. John always loved him.

One time John invited Davie to be they guest because he thought Davie always should have been famous, he had a lot of charisma, and they talked about some stuff and Davie had a lot of wisdom to impart on everybody.

Fred Astaire’s early career with his sister (RL452)

Fred Astaire had a whole career with his sister in Vaudeville, they were a dancing team in the years before movies and they were massively famous in Vaudeville and they were Broadway superstars so much so that his sister retired and married a duke, an English lord (Lord Charles Arthur Francis Cavendish), when she was 35 or something, while her brother went into pictures and he couldn’t keep dancing with his sister in romantic films. John was reading about the Duke and he had died of alcoholism at 39.

Merlin says that also the Marx Brothers had a career before the one that everybody knows and they had to start over.

Facebook group about The Off-Ramp in the early 1990s (RL452)

All of this drew John to Facebook because there is a group about The Off-Ramp in the early 1990s where all the people who worked there in the early 1990s can share their blurry photos taken with disposable cameras of one another totally shit-faced, fallen down, a group just for the staff. It does feel like a High School reunion page, and there were maybe only 35 people who ever worked there, it is always the same people posting.

The first straight person to get a job at The Off-Ramp was Sue. Before that it was a gay bar, it was right by an Off-Ramp, and Lee Rea decided that this Grunge thing was happening and he had a big theater there with drag shows and lesbian night every Wednesday, and the leather community coming in every Saturday while the other clubs in town were selling out with this Rock music, so he was going to also have Rock music there. Merlin’s New Wave nights in Florida were also usually gay bars.

He was trying it out on slow Tuesday nights and ended up selling 600 tickets and $10.000 worth of booze and decided to have it on Thursday, too. The problem with lesbian night is that they get 1000 people there, but they all nurse one drink all night long, while on Grunge Rock night more drinks get spilled than they sell in all the lesbian nights in a month. By the time John got hired he wanted to get some straight kids in there because he needed staff that was like those Grunge kids.

John had never worked in a bar before, the didn’t know how to do anything, he didn’t have a home, he had just arrived in Seattle, and the way he got the job was that his High School girlfriend Kelly’s sister Peggy was spending a year and a half as a lesbian in 1990/91 and she was leaving Seattle and moving back to Anchorage and she told John to get in touch with her boss Lee Rea who wanted to hire a straight guy. John was the second person who got hired and the third person was Davie.

He was from San Diego and he wore tight denim which was very cute and everybody fell in love with him including John. He had worked there for 4 months before Lee Rea asked him for his ID and it turned out he was 20, and then he had to sit in the restaurant for 1.5 months, he couldn’t work, but he didn’t have anywhere else to go, so he would come in for his shift time and was made to sit in the restaurant with a black X on his hand, and the day he turned 21 he was rehired and went back to doing his old job. By that time the staff was 90% straight Grungers and only the real die-hard 10% was still from the old days.

The other people from The Off-Ramp Val, Bobby, Sage (RL452)

John looked at the pictures in the Facebook group, a lot of them taken right after he was fired. This was all the people John knew and worked with, all of his friends, the people he met when he first came to Seattle, and they were all doing stuff with each other, laughing, Robert was holding Davie up and Davie is pretending to bonk him on the head and Jeff is there with a pork pie had and elaborate side burns and John was not in any of those pictures. Sue was there, Sage, but not John. They hired Sage to replace John and Sage was in every picture. Sage was there for 6 years, then he went to work at The Rock Candy (RKCNDY) for another 6 years.

The last time John saw Sage in person was at Val’s bar. Val is from Bulgaria, showed up at The Off-Ramp, didn’t speak a word of English, had left Bulgaria with his best friend, they had been in a Rock band in Bulgaria, and they were leaving Bulgaria to go to Germany, Val learned German, and his friend Bobby learned English just in case, somehow they made it to America, all the way to Seattle, showed up at the bar, and even Bobby only spoke three words of English. They showed up as a team and at this point John was assistant manager at the bar and wasn’t sure about them, but Lee Rea told him to hire them, so Bobby became a bar back, Val became something else, and 3 years later Val spoke fluent English and was managing the bar.

Bobby got a job as a graphic artist at Starbucks and now he is Vice President of Graphic Arts there and lives in a helicopter that is hovering over Sweden somewhere.

Val went on to own his own bar. John was there one time just a few years ago, Sage walked in, it was a birthday party for a high muckamuck in Seattle, and Sage had been hired as the magician and he did 40 minutes of comedy and magic that was not funny or magical, but he is a beloved character in Seattle and it was a birthday party, so what are you going to do.

John being on Facebook again, looking at Gary’s Van (RL452)

While John was on the Facebook anyway, then why not go over and see what people are saying?

They are going to have a ceremony for Davie, they are all going to be there, they are all going to pour one out, Sage might do some magic, Sue might be there, it is all very exciting. John learned the first time he went to a High School reunion that even though he hasn’t seen you for 30 years we have known each other for 30 years, and we know each other intimately. Richard is probably not going to come, but maybe? Who knows! The other Richard died a long time ago. He was the first guy to stick his tongue up John’s nose.

John was looking up at the top bar with all the little red notifications flashing, and he decided to have a look, which is always a risk, and he ended up at Gary’s Van where our friends collect. One of the things that defines that group is that they speak truth to power. They don’t mess around, and if they say something on the show they don’t like they are going to call it out. It is dangerous because some people over there are friends and long-time supporters and sometimes they can say things that hurt his feelings. Somebody in the comments of some post somewhere said: ”John didn’t want to start sleeping better because he was afraid that normal sleep would make him normal!”, which was a very concise way of putting it. John has been normal for the last month and a half and it had been awesome.

John missing his window where he was supposed to go to bed, not sleeping much last night (RL452)

Last night at his house he put his little girl to sleep at 9:30pm, they had been hanging out down at the beach and had been playing cards. She is very good when the hammer comes down and when he tells her it is 9:30pm she goes right to the bathroom, brushes her teeth, and goes into bed and the lights are off. But if John’s daughter goes to sleep at 9:30pm and he is normal-man, then there is only an hour before he needs to start feathering his own nest. He was doing some laundry downstairs, and then he ate two little Dark Chocolate Peanut Butter Cups from Trader Joe’s sized for a Barbie head.

It was time for bed, he planned to read a little David Copperfield, it was a reasonable hour at 10:45pm, he had the virtue of a prince, he was reading in bed, not looking at his phone, but then he just wanted to look at his phone for a second and when he looked up it was 1am. He is now on the whole Wordle thing with all the adjunct and subsidiary Wordles.

Randall Munroe last week posted an XKCD comic panel with two stick figures saying: ”Are you playing Wordle?” - ”No, I am in the control group!” You can also say: ”I don’t even have a TV!” or ”I am a ceramicist!”, which Merlin says if somebody pretends that they want to know what he does, but they actually want to guess how much money he makes. It started with other parents.

Randall Munroe (from XKCD) sent Ken Jennings a link to wikitrivia.tomjwatson.com, a thing where they throw up a picture of something in history and you are supposed to drag it onto the timeline in the correct order. Merlin interjects that Jon Kimball from Election Profit Makers does this with looking at a picture and trying to identify where it is, John used to play that and it used to drive him absolutely crazy because 98% of the pictures of the world are a dirt road in the middle of nowhere, and they blur out all the signs that tell you where you are (probably GeoGuessr).

Anyway, John maxed out at 21 correct answers on the history timeline, which beats both Ken and Randall’s top score, which infuriates them both!

John didn’t look at the time and it was 1am and he had a very narrow window, he had to stick the landing, but because it was 1am he was able to do next day’s Wordle and the GuessMyWord and because it was late he got his worst score on either. John laid down in bed and these Peanut Butter Cups had his foot going. He tried to do his normal sleep routine where he imagines all the members of the Bush administration in a shipping container buried in a desert and John is slightly gaslighting them by changing the walls. There is always somebody new who can be introduced to the gang, like Tucker Carlson.

Merlin was watching a lot of Hitler stuff lately. He suggests John should have Dick Cheney see a lot of his impersonators in the mess-hall to make him wonder.

At this point John was listening to the advice of his psychologist: If he can’t sleep, don’t stay in bed, but get up! He went up, wandered around the house, was too tired to do anything, his foot was bouncing he couldn’t get to sleep, and so he didn’t get a lot of sleep last night, but he is not going to let this throw him off but he is going to use that 9:30-10:30pm window to get the house ready for the night and go to bed. He has gained too much ground already and he is not going to lose it to despair that would propel him into further screw-ups!

Merlin recommends John to not punish himself and instead adopt a lightness about this because he is going to be fine. John is trying really hard and the thing that is motivating is is: It is not that some door opened and happiness and light flooded in, but he was removing suffering and eliminating things that were causing him suffering, and he was not in a state of newfound happiness and enthusiasm, he didn’t go sign up for a gym, but in the space of a couple of weeks he eliminated four of the main things that caused him massive grief.

There was a lightness and - in the Gary’s Van lexicon - a normalness that he had not experienced and that he did not find objectionable. John was about to say that he would listen to a Buddhist podcast with Merlin and Dan, but the truth is he wouldn’t, but he would be glad if it was there, it would let the steam off for everybody, and all of Merlin’s fans would be glad it is there because they were waiting for it, like the Beatles podcast and the Hitler podcast that they keep promising people. Merlin says he will start preparing a curriculum of all the things he has been watching recently.

John spending the day on Capitol Hill, realizing it might be time for a war (RL452)

Yesterday on Sunday in the middle of the afternoon John turned a corner: He went to town and spent the day on Capitol Hill, he walked around, saw Jason Finn, Seattle’s luminary Gen-X drummer, they hung out a little bit, he was with his little girl, they watched a softball game, they went to a Rock concert featuring one of her little friends that was specifically on Capitol Hill to give the kids a taste of what Rock is really all about. Capitol Hill was the gay, Rock and theater, the arts neighborhood. He was looking at the people who live there and he realized that this was his neighborhood and now it is theirs, which is the way of nature. He could bore the shit out of them what this Kentucky Fried Chicken used to be!

John had a few interactions with people and was feeling the general vibe and he thought that it could be a lot easier if there would just be a couple of generally accepted revelations or realizations about how to get along with other people and how the world is like, endure a bit of suffering before you write a letter, and he had a sudden feeling of: ”Maybe it is time for a war!” Every six years people up there feel like they want a war and over the last 20 years John was always countering: ”No, no, no, that is not what you want!” And John means a literal war on Capitol Hill, not just a neighborhood stick fight.

At the time of the George Floyd protests they had the CHOP (see RW188) and it is no back to being a baseball field, but this was the place where they actually drove the police out of the East Precinct building and established an autonomous zone in the center of the town where the cops weren’t allowed, it was a free marketplace of ideas, like a Capitol Hill Checkpoint Charlie. It lasted about as long as you would expect before it became a hazardous and dangerous place.

It was like John with the meth guys at Jeff’s bar: It was all fun and games and John was getting some spritz in there until pretty soon the meth guys were in there and pretty soon John was part of the problem - although he was always part of the problem, but the problem got more serious.

It feels like all the people on Capitol Hill want a war, but they think they are going to war with Arkansas. John was in Arkansas recently and those people think they are going to war with Capitol Hill in Seattle, but that is not how it is going to play out! The people on Capitol Hill are going to go to war with each other and the people in Arkansas are going to go to war with each other. We are getting closer, that is just the vibe on the street. It is a sunny day, upscale restaurants all around up, everybody is traipsing around in their pink roller-skates, but there is a blanket of violent negativity just on the side.

Merlin has experienced a similar think when going past the bars where the 49ers fans were out screaming at each other, he imagines this is a little bit what 1968 felt like. Something is not quite right and this could break bad any time! In retrospect the Boomers made it seem like a hopeful time, it was exciting because the enemy was clear, but now it just feels like all against all. To the people who are manning the barricades it might not feel like that because to them the enemy is clear.

John does not think this is how it is going to play out, it is closer to French Revolution where the end-result is going to be Robespierre or Napoleon, but we are going to have 20 years of this. 5 years ago John was still saying that punching Nazis is wrong, that is their language, and we need to talk to them in our language of liberal humanism (see RW128, RW129). If you punch them, then they have all the reason to punch you, and they are much better at punching than you are and they are the nuts who are hoarding guns and shit!

Over time John agreed to punching Nazis, and now it is about the first time he ever felt this way: ”Fuck it! Every once in a while you need to go to the mattresses!", ”Today is the day I settled all our family affairs!” (references to The Godfather) People don’t remember the last time blood was spilled, and everybody has a plan until they get punched in the nose. It is not that John feels hopeless, but he thinks: ”May you live in interesting times!”

Merlin watching a lot of World War II documentaries (RL452)

Merlin finally broke down on the World War II in Color series on Netflix. The Stalingrad episode is really Choice! The footage has been colorized, but it look terrific. It is a story Merlin knew roughly, but he had no idea how crazy and resistant such a small group of Soviets were. John watched that Jude Law movie Enemy at the Gates. They continue talking a bit more about things in World War II that they have seen in various documentaries, like the Hitler pills that Merlin read about in a book called ”Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich” Merlin also watched one about liberating the labor camps that was pretty rough, and Band of Brothers is so good, it came out two days before 9/11.

John was on some 10-hour International flight, and as he was flipping through the entertainment system in the back of the seat he came upon the first episode of Band of Brothers, he had never seen it, and he decided to watch it and ended up watching six episodes of it back-to-back on this flight (see RL76, RL211), it was the greatest experience of his life. It is like taking Saving Private Ryan and taking out the dumb parts and adding 15 more people you cared about. It has fucking Michael Fassbender and Tom Hardy, how can’t it be the greatest TV! John wonders why the show The Pacific is not as good.

Outro banter (RL452)

With the movie Suicide Squad Merlin didn’t think beforehand it was good, but then it turned out that he loved it. Not the recent one with Angelina Jolie, that is Eternals, don’t watch that! In Suicide Squad Sylvester Stallone plays a shark that thinks he is smart, but isn’t. A fish? No, a shark is a mammal, technically. No, a shark is a fish. ”Big fish! Y’all know me. Know how I earn a livin’. I’ll catch them fish for you! … or catch that bird!” (reference to the movie Jaws) - ”I was the only one who caught a fish. Nobody else could catch one except me […] every time I said a Hail Mary” (from The Godfather: Part II) - ”It was all real proud of you, John!” (from The Godfather: ”We was all proud of you. Being a hero and all.”) - ”That’ll do, pig!” (ending to Babe)

by jroemling

RL451 - The Slick Back Kid

Tue, 03 Jan 2023 19:17:07 +0000

This week, Merlin and John talk about:

Merlin getting Chinese takeout that was not good and had too many 5-star reviews (Internet and Social Media)
John leaving a review for his doctor that later got a bunch of faves (Internet and Social Media)
John being pushed into leaving a 5-star review when he bought his truck and editing it later (Internet and Social Media)
People putting too much value into a simple rating without any context (Internet and Social Media)
John cleaning his Twitter from bad words, but still keeping the account alive (Internet and Social Media)
The beginning of the end of social media for John 5 years ago (Internet and Social Media)
Paul F. Tompkins referencing Beandad in his year-end list (Internet and Social Media)
Social media no longer moving the needle for selling anything (Internet and Social Media)

The Problem: You can’t talk about wood paneling, referring to John deleting problematic tweets including when he was talking about wood paneling.

The show title refers to the dealership where John bought his new truck that had salesmen who still had their hair slicked back, a thing that he didn’t knew still existed.

Merlin sounds a little scratchy.

Merlin getting Chinese takeout that was not good and had too many 5-star reviews (RL451)

Merlin trusts people too much, especially strangers! Last night he wanted an easy dinner, the family had gone to the East Bay to watch on of his kid’s friends dance in a parade, which sounds weird, and Merlin was in the mood for Chinese food to get for everybody when they came back, he was going to be super-dad and take care of everything and not ask any questions. He wanted to try a new place. They usually get the number of things they would get +1 or sometimes 2 and he got a lot of stuff. He likes honey walnut prawns, but his family doesn’t, and being a self-involved dad is a lot about the appearance of sacrifice.

Merlin did not listen to his better angels and he should have known by looking at this place because there were a lot of warning signs. The name was not particularly distinguished, the signage and the logo is the same generic that looks like somebody made it in Microsoft Word. He has ordered from this kind of place before. He went into the stupid food ordering app and made a sort by best rated. His does not usually review things, but last night he was very tempted to leave a review for reasons he will be as subtle about as possible. The restaurant had 5 stars with over 2000 reviews, which seemed really high for a place he had never heard before that was practically in his neighborhood!

The other day Dan was telling John that he got COVID and it was an engineered virus by the way it felt (see RW245)? John probed him for a while, but then he go off of it. Merlin knew about the first part, but not about the second part.

The dude delivering it took a long circuitous way and Merlin - because he is a magical thinker - already knew that this was going to be a thing. They had 14 pounds of food, he carried it up, yelled: ”Food!” how he usually does, everybody had things they were excited about, Merlin had Wonton Soup and some Garlic Chicken, but about half the food was grey in color and didn’t pop. The Lo Mein and the Chow Fun was extremely grey. The Garlic Chicken was kind of good.

If you order something with vegetables in it, be carful! The hugest red flag is too much cornstarch, they they have tried to make something with a sauce that is not really a sauce, also if you can identify celery it is a red flag, also big slices of carrot that are gut in a cute fancy way. This was not 5-star food, and this morning he had a couple emergent appointments in advance of recording his program, and he is tempted to leaving a rating and review. he leftover situation is not a stitch! His lady friend is the youngest of 7 and that was the only way she could find any food, crawling around on the floor, looking for food, because everybody else eats first and the dog ate better than her. She loves her leftovers, but they agreed by mutual consent that not only will they never be ordering from this place again, they also didn’t save a stitch of it. Lesson learned!

John leaving a review for his doctor that later got a bunch of faves (RL451)

John left a rating and review earlier this year, one of the few he has ever done, maybe it was the first: He rated and reviewed his doctor, the one who took off and John felt so powerless in that situation, so abused, that he left a review of a doctor, and it was a bad review. He contextualized it, he said that he was very professional at the appointment, he was very engaged, John had been so excited, but: ”Let me tell you about my experience!”

Merlin lost a lot of grade points as a kid for his sloppy handwriting and he didn’t think that was fair, but today - although he still thinks it is wrong - he understands what they were trying to do: In life we evaluate people based on not only what they did, but how they did it, and you might have liked mostly what the doctor did, but in the end you may not like how she did it.

John got a lot of flack from his neighborhood busybody moms about the fact that she was working for a Catholic medical institution, but what are you going to do? On one hand you got the Catholics being bad about health access, on the other hand they hired a muslim lady doctor, and where is John supposed to go? He left this review and forgot about it, but a month later, something popped up in his email: ”Hey, your online review has gotten a lot of faves!” - ”What?” His name was on it because he had signed in with Google. This was in a moment, it was like yelling at United Airlines on Twitter, he go it off his chest.

He had left that review not that hour or even that week, but something had arrived in his inbox hat said: ”Hey, how was your experience at Catholic Medical Thing? Would you like to leave a review?”, and John was so insulted by this cheery corporate prompting, that he was like: ”Oh, you want me to leave a review? Yeah, I will fucking leave a review!” and now he realizes that the Catholic Medical Thing is not the one trying to get a bad review, but the general architecture, the understanding of what the Internet is and what we are supposed to do, are happier… no engagement is bad engagement! You are going to log on with Google and then you are going to leave a review and it is going to get 600 faves and all of that benefits not just Google, but the whole concept of rate and review.

When John was a kid, a doctor was like a priest, a professional person, they weren’t a mechanic, somebody you rated and reviewed, what does that even mean relative to a doctor? But she is now a young doctor in a world and an institution that things of doctors as a thing you rate and review. One of the things that horrified him about this when he realized that this review had been sitting out there, collecting faves, was that she surely couldn’t help but see it because she surely gets mails in her inbox that say: ”A new review!”

John is now sitting here as somebody who is conscious of the fact that he got rated and reviewed, and there are people out there right now who have never met him who are reading his review and he is perpetuating the problem, he is rating and reviewing somebody else, and whatever her deal that day, whatever his problem… Merlin is still mad at Allmusic and their review of the first Long Winters record because they had never heard of The Long Winters and they pitched it to some young person who then said it sounds like R.E.M. They had just gotten done listening to the first New Pornographers record and they were missing the mass romantic, there was no hit on this.

The problem was that for the next 8 years, every time you googled The Long Winters, the first thing you saw was this Allmusic review of their first album. Merlin also knows John is still mad at Travis Morrison about his chili (?), but let’s talk about his solo record (called Travistan, see review here), which Merlin is still angry about to this day. Not only was that a zero, which was almost unheard of, but he likes Dismemberment Plan! It was just about shitting of people and be able to tell that you have written the worst kind of review, it is a fun exercise, like the review of the worst meal of all time that made the round a month or two ago, a ridiculous 27 course meal of vapors and foams. Getting interviewed by Isaac Chotiner or Ronan Farrow (both at The New Yorker). Merlin can’t believe people pick up the phone!

The 0.0 review of Travis Morrison’s record was the most famous thing that reviewer ever did, and for two weeks they were on top of the world because everybody was talking about their review. That person works in an Amazon fulfillment warehouse now and that is it, that was their moment, and they were basking in it. John did not want to bask in his review of his doctor and he immediately deleted it. At some human level she and John knew what had happened. She had gotten several messages from him that he had called the front desk, that he had talked to a different doctor, that he had talked to her nurse three times, she knew that there was a dissatisfied customer, which is not even the relationship you should have with your doctor, you are not a customer, that is such a reduction of the relationship to its meanest, basest level!

Half of people’s jobs now is customer service, dealing with students and parents over email, people who rate their professors. There are all these levers now for people to get to you and get at you, and Merlin had a career in that racket back when he was Merlin Mann because half of America suddenly felt like it had a second job of dealing with the caprice of emotional strangers. A college professor should never hear from a parent ever! It is not Kindergarten! A parent has sent away their child to college. The End. The parent is done, and if there is a problem the last person who should be intervening on their behalf is the parents. If there is a job for a university administrator it is to take those comments from angry parents and filter them so the professor never hears them.

John took his review down and he was humiliated that his bad review of this doctor had ever reached the doctor, let alone influenced anyone in the world, even though he did at some level want to say: ”This behavior is bad behavior for a young doctor, and maybe you are young and don’t understand yet that part of your doctor job is to deal with anxious patients who can’t get their meds and you can’t just blow them off or re-route them through a phone tree!”, but part of that problem was that if you called Catholic Medical and said that your doctor was not responding, then some other doctor would get on the phone and helped you, which would enable John to solve his problem on his own without leaving an online review because there were other professional people who recognized that this was a profession and not a job, for the love of God!

John being pushed into leaving a 5-star review when he bought his truck and editing it later (RL451)

The only other online review John ever left was when he recently bought his new truck. He was exhausted, he was at a used car dealer, getting the hard sell from a bunch of smarmy dudes who had gel in their hair, which he didn’t even know was still a thing, like Patrick Bateman from American Psycho, they were writing numbers on a piece of paper and sliding it across the desk, and John just wanted to get out of here, but his daughter’s mother had told him that he could no longer shop and he had to buy a truck that day, he had been shopping for years and today was the day. She was trying to be helpful.

John in his search had been to 15 car dealers where he kind of liked the people, where they were really straight forward, and unfortunately on this day he was at a bad car dealer called Northwest Motorsport who deal with jacked-up pickup trucks, they are selling pickups and big trucks, and that is what John wanted, but the guy John went to at one of their locations had a ”Let’s Go Brandon!” thing behind his desk! He was looking at trucks online and he ended up at Northwest Motorsport in Lynnwood and they were giving him this smarm.

He just wanted to buy the truck, the amount was fine, but they were gearing up to tack on a $5000 maintenance contract that they don’t present as optional, but they just asked if he wanted the Gold or the Platinum. It is not letting a little kid decide when they want to go to bed, but they can pick which jammies to wear. It is a scam, a racket! The ended up selling him a truck that wasn’t quite a lemon, but still had a lot of problems and it has been at the Ford dealership 5 times since he bought it, and of course there are supply chain problems and they take 14 days to fix the issues and they never offered him a loaner vehicle.

The day he bought it John was sitting in the lobby, waiting for the greasy guy in the back to come out with his gold star service program that John had no idea what that was, he just wanted to get out of there, and the slick-back kid who had slid him the piece of paper across the table: ”Hey Billy Beane, this is our offer for you to manage the Red Socks!” came over with an iPad and sad: ”Hey man, I would really appreciate if you gave me a 5-star review on DealerRater!”

He handed him the thing before John even had closed the deal, but he took the thing and wrote some comment like: ”I bought a truck from these guys and they seemed like they were doing a good job!” and he sent it out into the world although ever since the day he bought it he had felt like that was a terrible experience and they were awful, sleazy car dealers, and out there in the world is a review with his name on it, saying: ”Yeah, Brandon and Jeremy were great!” As John is saying this he is going to go on there (review from January 31st, 2022. Page number will change over time), saying that these guys are sleazes!

People putting too much value into a simple rating without any context

Merlin says that we have had some power taken away from us and we are bringing a bit of frontier justice to this to bring some power back to us through ratings and reviews or webcomments. What Merlin wants… is when he gives Everlong by Foo Fighters 5 stars or when he hearts a song on Spotify, that is for himself, and if it is being used by anybody else it does not really concern him. Especially back in the days of iTunes that is how he could identify songs he liked, include stuff like skip counts and all that cool stuff and make playlists, but he did not rate any of that as a performance for other people. All he wants is to mark this place to remember it was the gross one where he doesn’t want to get food anymore, he doesn’t want anyone else to see his rating, neither other customers nor the business itself, he wants to create a legacy of historical quality.

John would give Merlin a 5-star review, he likes to talk to him. But Merlin’s feeling about John are complex. For example 1998 Merlin’s dear friend and bandmate Mike Coleman gave him the Pet Sounds box set (probably The Pet Sounds Sessions by The Beachboys) which was wonderful and had all that a capella stuff, and one time he looked them up on Amazon and there were a lot of really bad reviews coming from super-fans who were mad because they thought it was a naked cash grab to keep releasing all of these. There are so many bands who have so many Greatest Hits albums!

Most people are just looking for: ”Should I buy this or not?”, and then there are comments where somebody is mad that this didn’t have audio commentary by Van Dyke Parks. Merlin has talked to Siracusa about this, facets are very interesting because they provide context and don’t just have it be a ”Yes!” or ”No!” Merlin loves Outlandos d’Amour (album by The Police), but when it first came out on CD it sounded like shit and if you asked him if you should buy this CD he would have said: ”No, don’t get that record!” It as an outstanding album with an unparalleled energy, capturing a moment, but it is not mastered very well and you are probably better off just enjoying the LP until a better version comes out, and that became what is now called ”Merlin’s Shitlist” You ask him what email app he uses? He uses the currently least shitty one, but all email apps suck. Next question!

John says that Yelp and Pinterest both suck ass because every time he clicks on a link somewhere and it takes him to one of those they pester him to sign up. John’s daughter’s mother goes on Yelp and if something has 4.5 stars she will decide to go to that one because the one with 4 stars must have shit all over the floors and the 4.5 star place must serve it on a golden tray. They do it on Netflix, too: If it only has 4 stars, what a fucking piece of shit this must be!

Merlin thinks the best reviews are the 3-star reviews, and he had a funny list on 5ives on this once, because those people have thought about it.

John was sitting in San Francisco at one point with a bunch of San Franciscans and everybody pulled up their Uber app and looked at their ratings. John didn’t know there was such a thing, it is somewhat hidden in the app, and of the whole group of 6 people who all used Uber all the time he had the highest rating and they wondered how he of all the people could do that, but John is first of all a talker, and he never leaves a review for the driver. He does this on eBay, too: No stars is the same as ”either 5 stars or it never happened!”, it affects their rating not at all, and in most cases that is fine with them. ”nothing” is ”fine”.

At the very end of the episode John is reading his review that he just wrote on DealerRater. Merlin thinks the review merits 3 stars, but then he changes his mind and gives John 11 stars because this was literally the greatest thing he ever heard. ”Will you follow me back?” - ”Merlin, I love your review, but we don’t monitor those reviews!” - ”I used to be a big fan of John Roderick, but - alas - I have to change this to a 2-star review because he doesn’t know my name!”

John cleaning his Twitter from bad words, but still keeping the account alive (RL451)

A lot of their listeners work in computers and are part of some small cog in building this architecture, but they don’t see themselves that way, they see themselves as doing something good, trying to make this better or more efficient, but at a key level the whole idea of what the Internet is and should be doing and whether or not it makes our lives better is wrong. Whenever he says this type of thing he will get plenty of letters from people saying that back in the day he didn’t used to be able to call his mom and now he can, so he is wrong because the Internet has done a lot, you didn’t used to be able to get toilet paper delivered to your house and now you can.

John is not saying that progress hasn’t happened, but there is something fundamentally wrong. Merlin says that being able to find your English teacher on Facebook, which is the one good thing with this platform, does not mitigate against all the incredible shit that comprises most of the day-to-day Internet.

It has been a year since John has been on social media. For 9 months he never went there at all, and then he was reading the news and there was a link to incredible footage of a helicopter crashing into a baby carriage and how can he miss seeing that? He clicked on it and - surprise - it was taking him to Twitter where he hadn’t been for 9 months and he had some messages that were all nice, except maybe one that told him to feed his kid.

He had made his Twitter private as soon as Beandad happened and he scoured it with exactly the same program that whatever millennial troll used to find ever instance that he used the word Jew and deleted them as every millennial friend he has ever had told him to do years ago. So many people he knew deleted everything from their Twitter except the last 10 posts, but John could not do that because Twitter was an archive with all his thoughts and feelings. This had been his life and he was going to look back at it 50 years from now!

He couldn’t help himself but open up his feed and there were 8000 people saying: ”Beandad should be in jail!” and he would shut it down, but in one of those he saw a tweet from Matt Haughey that said: ”I am really disappointed in John for shutting down his Twitter, he should be here to face the music!”, speaking as part of the Twitter culture, like shutting it down is the coward’s way and you need to be here to face the music, referencing somebody who had been in a similar situation who had stayed there to face the music.

John cleared it all of every bad thing he ever said, every word he could think of, every time he said: ”Merlin, stop being a bitch!”, or wood paneling? No, you can’t talk about wood paneling! But he left the account alive, it is still up there, and all you 4Chan trolls who got tired of outing cheerleaders who had sex with their boyfriends and had migrated into a world where you thought you were working for justice by finding every time somebody said something in 2011 that you don’t like can go and look for the words he might have missed.

After that first time he shut it down and didn’t look at it again until he was following another news article of a helicopter that crashed into a baby carriage and he ended up on Facebook and over on Gary’s Van, a place where he used to love to be where people are talking about his shows he followed something there, had an interesting little bit, and then he saw somebody say something he didn’t like and he shut it down, but around Christmas time of 2021 he noticed that he was creeping back. He was looking at Facebook and commented on a thing, he went on Twitter and sent somebody a tweet, then he read the timeline.

By the time he put the mouse on the thing and scrolled down one time he saw a thing he didn’t like. It was never about him, it was just some friend from the old days who was thirsty for faves and attention, posting something like: ”Can you believe this!” although they were better than that, they are a good person, and it was the first thing John saw after 30 seconds of being on there, somebody taking a stand about a thing they didn’t care about and in the indignant tone of a smart person who can’t believe something they saw, in the same way that 500.000 people around the world had been talking about John, a thing they didn’t know anything about. It took one second to find a friend he hadn’t talked to in a year, being on there, thirsting, and he knew that every person he know that is still on Twitter is doing that all day, it is all Twitter is now.

It went on Facebook and it took him two scrolls to find somebody who was mad about something that they weren’t really mad about, and he had to sit alone with his head in his hands and tell himself: ”Do not go on there! It is not a question of you being safe from criticism, or that you are not going on there because you are afraid of that somebody is going to say: ’Feed your kid!’, but it is because it is awful and it makes everyone awful!” and he lost respect for anybody he saw doing it.

The beginning of the end of social media for John 5 years ago (RL451)

4-5 years ago we all started telling each other that all social media was bad. It was no longer what it was, and we should not be on there. The first time John said something about politics, a Bernie Sanders supporter who was a young beardo and had been listening to the podcast for a long time, wrote John and was unaccountably furious at something he had said about public policy that seemed like an innocuous thing, and back then he used to reply to people: ”What the fuck are you talking about?” - ”You don’t understand! This is what is going to happen and Bernie is going to fix it!” - ”Who the fuck are you, 22 year old telling me that I don’t understand? What the fuck have you ever done?”

Then a third person chimed in and said: ”Hey John, that is a bad look for you to talk to somebody who cares about the world!” - ”Who the fuck are you? Not only who the fuck is he, but who the fuck are you to talk to me like that? This kid doesn’t know shit and you don’t know shit!” and all of a sudden John was wondering why he was doing this. The second person was a dumbass, but he was right about one thing: This was not where John wanted to be, but he kept doing it and kept coming back and he went through 6 months where he was screaming at people: ”What books have you ever read, asshole?” at some kid.

That was the beginning of the end for him and the problem is that he spent another 5 years on there, arguing and saying shitty things to people, embarrassing himself, full of rage, spending all night awake, thinking about what somebody was saying to him on Twitter. What is it going to take? It is just a drug and everyone is on it and although he hasn’t been on it for a year he is still on it, that crack pipe is still sitting on the table. What if he went on there and said something funny?

Paul F. Tompkins referencing Beandad in his year-end list (RL451)

John has no idea how much Beandad is still a thing and how much that is going to be an asterisk on his life for the rest of his life. If he were on Twitter he would have a better idea and he would be on there, filling the void with new material that maybe would redeem him? Then Paul F. Tompkins sent his own year-end list to John that someone else had posted on Facebook. He is a guy John has known and has done a ton of things with, although their relationship is complicated and John would not say they were friends, but they are certainly well-acquainted with one another for over a decade.

The year-end list was about bad things that were going to happen in 2022, and 5th or 6th thing down the list was ”Beandad redemption arc” He was already in front of it, like: ”Here is the joke: This is the year that Beandad is going to do something!” and he said Beandad, not John Roderick, a guy he knows or his friend or his compatriot. He was already shutting it down before it was on anybody’s lips. But it is not just negative there for John, he can see how bad it is for everybody and he was probably lucky enough to get hit with it like a ton of books.

Social media no longer moving the needle for selling anything (RL451)

There are tens of thousands of people listening to this podcast, and they are all on there, except for the ones that aren’t, and John hears from them, too! They all think that to one degree or another they are immune, not from getting publicly shamed, but to the caustic day-in-day-out grind of it. They think they get more out of it than they put in and they think they need it to promote their craft beer or to connect with people or they have to be on there for their job, but nobody has to be on there!

There are probably 20.000 people who are interested in the music of Dave Bazan and they know who they are and he tweeting about his new record does not sell a single record. Maybe reminds the people who know about him and like his music that he put out a record, but none of social media moves the needle anymore. People will join your Facebook group, but that doesn’t mean that they will buy anything or listen to your thing or engage with you. They are busy putting their own shit out there!

The listeners of this program have been with them for years, and John could be tweeting out the new episode every week and maybe it would remind 10 people that they hadn’t been listening for a while, but it is not moving the needle, even if it was 100 people. That is probably true of everybody, it is no longer an engine of commerce or promotion because there is too much! You can’t follow everybody’s link to their Insta, meaning you can’t follow anybody’s link to their Insta, especially now where they are putting an ad every 4th post. John hadn’t seen that before and he was stunned when he logged on recently.

by jroemling

RL450 - The Dawn and the Dusk

Thu, 29 Dec 2022 23:08:53 +0000

This week, Merlin and John are talking about:

Merlin learning about himself how little of certain things he really understands (Merlin Mann)
John being okay with having been wrong about things, having never done the same thing twice (Attitude and Opinion)
John getting to bed early, waking up rested, and feeling good about it because he thought he could never do it (Sleep)
How John met Ted Nugent back when he was in High School in Alaska (Early Days)
John no longer seeing his psychiatrist, but a psychologist (Depression)
John writing on his book about his walk across Europe, writing a 15-page essay influenced by Beandad (Currents)
What Merlin gets from writing, the book he was supposed to write that gave him a really bad time (Merlin Mann)
Follow-up: Richard Garnett apparently listens to the podcast (Currents)

The Problem: John made a divot, referring to John always sitting on the right side of his couch, making a divot in the cushion over time.

The show title refers to the fact that the dawn and the dusk are no social constructs, but they are just as they are and you have to work with them when it comes to your sleep schedule.

Merlin learning about himself how little of certain things he really understands (RL450)

Merlin does not like learning about himself. Self-knowledge is for suckers! According to his Wisdom Project you haven’t fixed a problem if you don’t understand what caused the problem and/or you don’t understand what you did to make it better. Life is not all beer and Skittles! The older he gets the less he gets, and getting how much he doesn’t get is a form of self-knowledge that he doesn’t prefer.

John was in the middle of reading a blog about all of the unexploded ordnance in No Man’s Land in France (called Zone Rouge, created after The Battle of Verdun) and how they closed up big stretches of it because it is toxic and explosive when Merlin was asking to delay the show for 15, 20, and then 30 minutes. Merlin had decided to break all his audio and then trying fix his audio, and he went on a Ken Burns kick watching his World War II documentary The War.

As Merlin gets older he becomes a bit more vulnerable and open to the idea that he is not perfect. This weekend he has been working on an audio thing, which is a long story, and he was saying to a friend who makes a lot of the software applications for podcasters that he loves so much about what he does, but so much about the technology behind the scenes he doesn’t understand and when he is trying to fix his setup because he has some audio bleed he has no idea what is happening. At this point John got muted by a ghost in the machine and took a while to unmute himself.

Right now John just sits on his couch and he noticed that at the right end of the couch where he sits every day the cushion is starting to have a John-shaped divot, but he doesn’t want to go through life leaving divots everywhere he goes, so he decided to sit on the left end of the couch with his laptop on the couch and his Apogee Quartet on the coffee table right next to his copy of David Copperfield and he is living large.

When John records with Ken he is sitting at a table in a proper room, and for the last 4 months Ken has been saying that he hears a buzz, and John will verify that the buzz is also on the audio and then he will wiggle everything and gently hit a couple of things until the buzz goes away. Merlin also has a buzz when he plugs in his guitar cable and he should probably solder it in better. John doesn’t mess around with solder because he is the world’s worst solderer. Merlin is the world’s worst supergluer, so maybe they should start a shop? He tried to superglue magnets into keycaps and it just got everywhere.

When you buy things at the guitar store they will tell you that there is a lifetime guarantee, but when you then bring your cable back they will tell you that you have to send it back to the manufacturer yourself, you can’t just bring it back there, so there is your lifetime guarantee!

John being okay with having been wrong about things, having never done the same thing twice (RL450)

John is learning stuff about himself right now that feels not bad. Just recently he has been experiencing the sensation of having been wrong, not only about elections in Georgia (see RL353 when Merlin gets really mad at John about his opinion about the election to the Georgia secretary of state), but he was wrong about things and now something has changed in him and he is willing to have been wrong about things. In a lot of those things he has been wrong about himself.

Usually he is so hard on himself that it is weird to have been wrong about himself and have that be actually a lifting of a weight. He thought he needed this or he thought he was this way, and that way he thought was immutable and there was nothing he could do about that, and to have: ”You are wrong!”, a thing he tells himself all the time as a cut-down, actually be a revelation in terms of: ”Wait a minute, I am doing this thing right now that I didn’t think I could do, that I thought I would never do!”

The hardest one has always been that he is just a simple man as God made him, and habits, sitting and making a divot on the couch, doing the same thing every day, having dinner at 6pm, being regular is not bad, negative or a failure. He always thought the if he did something once it was a mistake, if he did it twice it was jazz, if he did it three times it was the new melody, and if he did it 4 times it was starting to get stale and if he did it 5 times it was a cliché, which meant he never did anything 5 times! They somehow reference the TV show King Lear based on a play by William Shakespeare.

The problem was that this extended to relationships. If John was dating somebody and he went over to her house on Tuesday and Wednesday, even if he would go over there and they would kiss, by Thursday he felt that after two days he would need to have a day where he didn’t go over to her house, and she would not understand why that was the case. The idea John had about himself was that he was improving and you don’t repeat the same melody!

Already as a kid he knew that you can’t walk the same way to school every day, even if you have determined that it is the fastest way, at least when you come to that tree you have to go around the other side of it today because maybe there is a leprechaun with a pot of gold? Digging a rut, making a trail, feels soft. ”Two roads diverged in the wood and I took the one less travelled by”, it is right there in the poem (The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost)!

John getting to bed early, waking up rested, and feeling good about it because he thought he could never do it (RL450)

During the last two weeks every day at 10pm John has been looking at his time piece, thinking: ”I should be getting ready for bed!” One month ago at 4am he would look at his time piece and he would say: ”Ah, boy! Do I really have to go to bed? It is 4am, you have to get up at 10am, and every second you stay awake now is eating away at your precious sleep which you need to live!” and at 5am he would say: ”You have to get up at 10am! What are you doing to yourself?” He did this for years, but for the last 3 weeks at 10pm he pulls his time piece out, yawns, and tells himself: ”Time for bed!”

He has been waking up between 7-8am all on his own, his eyes open, and he is awake, and he has slept for 8 hours! He gets up, pads in his stocking feet, his little pointy-toed slippers with the little tassel at the end of the toe, he pats his little jewel-encrusted tortoise (reference to Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban) and he has his morning ablutions, he goes into the kitchen, makes a coffee, and it doesn’t feel like labor.

Not only has he believed for decades that this was impossible for him to do, but he also equated it with everything that he didn’t want in life: Being regular, mid-century modern architecture, Republican Party politics. Thousands of times he has been still awake at 6-7am out in the streets, trying to find his way back home, and he has seen people bustling! It was all the things he didn’t want to be and he could never do it, although he was broken by the lack of sleep and he couldn’t even conform to his own bodily needs, constantly fighting himself every day.

He trained himself to believe that about himself and he felt cursed. He wanted to live in a 27 hour day, stay up until 4am, sleep 8 hours, and wake up in time to be part of the world. There is dawn that is made by God and there is a dusk, and in Seattle the dawn and dusk in January are pretty tight. 8:30am is the dawn and 4:30pm is the dusk. They are not social constructs, the bowler hat people - daylight saving time not withstanding - did not put the dawn where they wanted it to try and frustrate John, but the the dawn and the dusk are just there and you choose! For billions of people the dawn and the dusk have no bearing on how they feel about themselves.

Every day for his whole adult life he has opened his eyes and his first thought is: ”Where am I in relation to dawn? How much have I used already? How much have I squandered? How much do I have left?” You have to get to the bank, the model train store closes at 4pm because those guys are in bed by 8pm and how are you even going to start building a model train? Instead John was living in a dark world full of vampires with nobody else there, they don’t like each other, it is like alcoholics: You get done drinking, you say you are not going to drink anymore because alcoholics are assholes, and then you get out into the world of normals, claim you are a normal now, but it is clear right away you are not, and you end up finding solace only with other alcoholics who have stopped drinking, and they are the worst people!

Now that he wakes up in the morning, his usual first conflict of the day: ”How much have I squandered? How disappointed should I be of myself?” is off the table! Instead he looks out, the sun is coming up and he thinks: ”What am I? A farmer?” - ”Yes! I am a farmer!” Now the coffee is a bit of a treat, not something he has to get inside him so he starts to be able to think halfway through the show with Merlin.

There are still 30 things in a day that John chastises himself about. Yesterday at 2pm he asked himself why he didn’t have any food today yet, and he pulled out some Trader Joe’s Chicken Parmigiana out of the freezer, microwaved it, plated it, went out to his dining room table that sits six, sat there alone, started to eat it, and about halfway through he thought that this was one of those miserable bachelor meals. It was not very good, he took a bite and the middle of it was cold and he had to get up and re-microwave it. It felt like punishment food! It was bad!

It was not the worst, he has eaten way worse, he has been way sadder, he sat at much larger tables alone, but although he is the master of his own decisions and can have any food he wants, he chose this one for himself and he caught it and he noticed it and questioned his decision. There are no fresh vegetables in this meal or anything fresh, he has chosen it because it is the path of least resistance. If he is capable of getting up at 7:30am, is he capable of eating better than this on his own when he is not performing for someone by eating a vegetable?

A couple of times in the last 3 weeks he has gotten derailed, he looked at his time piece and it had been 1am and when he asked himself how he got there, in every instance his answer was: ”my phone!” He was reading about unexploded World War I ordnance, following some dumb-ass thing, he made the mistake of reading the news, and every time of reading the news is like: ”This white girl went missing!” or ”Listen to what Trump said today!” It is awful!

He must have clicked on something that was like: ”Did you know how Eddie Van Halen tuned his guitar?” and now his phone - through the portal of Google News - thinks that every day he wants to hear what Ted Nugent said about Eric Clapton (see RW249) and that his song with Van Morrison (The Rebels) didn’t go far enough in being against vaxers, or whatever.

Over the last 3 weeks John has gotten to the 1am place, turned off the lights and went to sleep, he woke up at 7am anyway, and he got up out of bed, got a coffee, sat down and started to work on something, and the next night he went to bed at 10pm. He doesn’t curse the day before the twilight (a Hungarian proverb according to John) and he doesn’t despise the dusk, and he gets back on the rails.

Merlin counters with a Polish proverb: ”Not my circus, not my monkeys!” and his friend Marco (Arment) says: ”It is not my fault, but it is still my problem”, which happens to John all the time although he has never had a problem where he didn’t think it was his fault.

Although it seems like the sleep is good for John there is still a voice as he looks out the window right now that says: ”Yes, you sound good because you have surrendered onto the comfortable middle! You own a property and you sit there going: ’Taxes are sure high!’” and he hears the voice of Jochen saying: ”You used to do interesting things, but now it seems like you watch a lot of television!” Merlin thinks that before you can get better you need to stop getting worse and it sounds like John stops getting worse.

How John met Ted Nugent back when he was in High School in Alaska (RL450)

John has gone 40 years of his life, not caring what Ted Nugent thinks. He saw him one time in 1987 when he and his friend Peter were baked in the middle of a winter day, walking around Downtown Anchorage, there was nothing to do, but when you are stoned everything is amazing, and they went past the Convention Center which at the time was newly built on 5th Avenue, and there were a bunch of dudes that very clearly were on some sober event. In Alaska you can tell because they looked so haggard as if they were always drunk, but clearly none of them were dunk, and John has a special eye for that. Also these guys would otherwise never be at the Convention Center. They would be on 4th Avenue, but this was 5th Avenue, which is like the difference between Washington D.C. and Baltimore, they couldn’t be further apart.

John said to one of the guys: ”What is going on?” - ”Ted Nugent is playing!” and John and his friend Peter decided to march right into one of those big convention room where all the folding chairs were facing what today would be a PowerPoint demonstration, he was the entertainment for a sober event because he is famously in favor of marrying 13-year olds, but he is against drugs. The stage was 2 feet high, the room was lit with fluorescent lights. There were hundreds of dudes in big overcoats that they got for free from the pipeline, nobody was looking at the stage, and John and Peter walked all the way up to the front row, right up to the stage, and there was nobody in the first couple of rows because every single one of those 600 dudes were the kind of guys who never sat in the front row of class.

There was a bar in Spenard in Anchorage called Mr. Whitekeys Fly By Night Club (John says Mr. Whitekeys Flying Circus). Mr. Whitekeys was a Weird Al or Dr. Demento type. He would write a show and he had a cast and they would perform parody songs about Alaska, which was a big thing in Anchorage in the mid-1980s, there was no hotter ticket. He would make fun about current political events, or they would dress as salmon. He seemed smart, even when he was wearing a top hat and a bow tie that squirted water out of it.

As John sat down in the front row and looked up onto the stage, the backing band was already there and it was Mr. Whitekeys and his band. John had seen his show several times with his girlfriend’s parents who would laugh themselves stupid watching this show while his own parents were skeptical about it. Mr. Whitekeys was not in his tux and tails, but he was dressed as a Rock person, which was like seeing Captain Kangaroo on the street wearing jeans. Then out a side door up onto the 2-foot tall stage came Ted Nugent with his guitar and the band launched into Great White Buffalo, which was the most searing great white buffalo John had ever seen - it was 8 minutes long, the band was killing it, Nugent was all over the place, and although John and Peter were baked they were sitting there with their head thrown back.

John and Peter used to sneak into strip clubs, that is where they saw Lola (see RL44, but with another friend or maybe John changed the name)), pulling their hats down low and drawing a little ink pen mustache on, but that was not even in the Top 10 of ”How did you get there?” kind of things, and here was Nugent in the middle of the day in a convention center sober party with Mr. Whitekeys’ band called The Fabulous Spamtones. As Nugent was done with the song John and Peter thought they had just seen the greatest thing in their lives, and then he gave a 5-minute long speech about how he never once in his life has used drugs because drugs are for losers, and he sang this to a bunch of guys who had only not been on drugs for 16 hours. He did just not read the room and he did not get it.

John no longer seeing his psychiatrist, but a psychologist (RL450)

John recently stopped seeing his psychiatrist because he is a medical doctor and met his wife when they were residents at 24 years old, they get married, had 3 kids, and live in a beautiful house and they ski on the weekends and they are very healthy. His practice of talk therapy involved him replying to John when he would say: ”I stay up all night and never go to my girlfriend’s house more than 3 days in a row because it feels like I am making a divot on her couch and who wants to do that?” - ”Well you know, one thing you might try is marrying your High School sweetheart when you are 24 because that really worked for me!” He doesn’t know another world except the one he lived in!

He is a nice guy, he treated John’s bipolar, but that is the difference between a psychiatrist and a psychologist…

The lady doctor (who once said: ”I didn’t come to you!”, see RL257) one day told John very unceremoniously that she was leaving her practice because she had been appointed the Swedish Hospital weight clinic, not ”weight loss”, but it is about weight in some ways, and all of a sudden John was without a doctor again. She was a similar age and she was supposed to be John’s doctor until they were both in their 80s. John had been abandoned by so many doctors!

Merlin interrupts John to talk about his mechanic Jerry who was a 65-year old gay man who got eye-surgery and retired and sold the place, he was the one who kept telling them about the timing belt.

John’s mechanic was a Grunge Rock bass player who also fixed Eddie Vedder’s car who one day retired to open a bar and he didn’t know anyone else he could recommend to John instead.

John is seeing a psychologist now who just sits there for an hour and listens, and he made it clear to him that he is a podcaster who talk about his problems with his friends and he doesn’t know why he is here except that he needs to get his bipolar medicine and he outgrew his psychiatrist.

Merlin and his shrink still zoom once a month because his prescription requires to have monthly check-ins, but they mostly talk about home automation.

John goes to his guy every week in person, sits down on the couch, the guy asks: ”What has been going on?” and John will talk about this and that, things that have been bothering him and that have been weighing on his mind, and the guy will just listen for an hour. He is engaged, he is totally there, he does get John’s jokes, he is a nerd, it is a bit like talking to somebody from the JoCo Cruise who is smart, but also not 100% on John’s wavelength, like going to see Storm once a month. When John says something like: ”Well, this would not be popular to say, but I believe it is true!” he goes: ”Mhmm” and he doesn’t recoil. Merlin would like to hear things like: ”Eh, I heard worse!”, and John’s guy said not that long ago that it is really great to talk to somebody doesn’t feel like they are on the absolute verge of exploding, which was a wonderful compliment.

John writing on his book about his walk across Europe, writing a 15-page essay influenced by Beandad (RL450)

John has been writing every morning in his book about his walk across Europe which has been an albatross around his neck for 22 years, this book that he wanted to finish in 2001, that he should have finished in 2006, and he is still working on it after almost everybody in his life is telling him to just move on and write something else because this thing is a 450 page drag. John has made a ton of progress over the years and he is working on it again and is enjoying it very much.

All of the attitudes and the polemics that John felt have been new in his life in he last 7 years… in 2015 something changed, and in the space of 9 months Twitter went from really fun to really awful. John doesn’t even have that strong a feeling about Bernie Sanders, but he wanted to scream at others about him. All the things he has been saying, all the screeds he has been rehearsing as he drives in and out of town, he is now reading this book that he wrote in 1999 and he is saying exactly the same things about contemporary life in the 1990s. John was shocked about realizing that fact!

About 4 months ago John wrote a 15-page thing about life. aA lot of it is knock-on effects of BeanDad, he is always processing that he is out now, he has been rejected, and he is never going to be invited back. What does that mean? Is he free to say whatever he wants? No! It doesn’t feel like that! What is he? On a key level he feels liberated, but in a big way he is still in exile, he is still ostracized, and he wrote this 15-page thing that was influenced by that. What if he wanted to a benefit auction for a local cause? Is somebody going to come up to him and say something? John has zero idea how cancelled he is because he is not in a world where he would know. He doesn’t put a thing on Twitter and then get replies of any kind.

A month later he started working on his book, he got 3 days into it and he read a 4-page thing that was almost in the same language, the same words, about how alienated he felt from the world of 1999. It felt weird at first, then it felt spooky, but also good. John lived 22 years after having written that, unaware that his attitudes and perceptions are consistent. What does he do with that? Maybe he can take these things and put them to bed? Maybe he doesn’t have to keep making this argument to himself? Maybe he can go: ”Yes, these are my feelings I no longer have to come up with a justification for them all the time!”, but he still can’t say them aloud or publish them anywhere!

What Merlin gets from writing, the book he was supposed to write that gave him a really bad time (RL450)

Merlin feels the same way and he has been writing again too on his Wisdom Project with all the good advice he has ever heard. It is nice to disappear into something for a little while and to get to do it on his own terms. He enjoys getting up at a decent hour before the family got up and working on it.

Ken has written 15 books, but Hodgman, those guys who have written books as well? John no longer feels at liberty to ask Hodgman what it is like to write. When Merlin was writing his book, before it became a drag and a thing he hated, did he enjoy it? He liked writing all the stuff that made people want him to write a book. Writing for his website was really fun! A lot of non-failure in adult life is getting out of your way, which is especially true for adolescence.

Merlin felt fortunate because it was a style of writing that he likes and he thinks he is good at, but one of the biggest troubles with writing the book was that he has nobody else to blame for it and he kept getting in his own way because of what he thought the book needed to be and it kept getting bigger and bigger, and doing anything but that bigger book felt like a disloyalty to the reader and to himself. It is really fun to write, it takes him away from MSNBC and Twitter and all the noises outside. He did a whole episode with Siracusa about how proud he is about himself for noticing and rejecting the attractive nuisances that have screwed him up in the past.

When Merlin was writing for the web he had his greatest successes and enjoyments writing between 1500-4000 words, but writing 50.000-70.000 words is a really different thing, and he doesn’t know what made him think he could just do that like it was the same kind of thing. No John is his therapist, how does that make him feel?

John’s mental health is so much better writing a little bit every day than it was when he wasn’t, and he credits waking up earlier in the morning because it is giving him time to do it, and it is the writing every day that is making him feel proud because he did something.

Follow-up: Richard Garnett apparently listens to the podcast (RL450)

Last week talked about Richard Winfield Garnett, the lawyer (see RL449, John’s bandmate in The Truly Awful Band who needed to read up on it), and apparently he listens to the show and within an hour he sent an email to all of John’s friends from High School with a link to the show, going: ”Guess what!” and the only thing that saved John is that Rick has no idea how to link to a podcast and also none of their mutual friends have any idea how to click on a link or have ever listened to a podcast and there were 4 replies going: ”I clicked on it and nothing happened!” and somebody else was like: ”My father doesn’t love me!” and the topic was gone. Merlin suggests that John should have him as a guest on one of his other programs. Maybe he has his own podcast called Above The Law or something, it is no world where super glue is (?)

by jroemling

RL449 - Galaxy’s End

Thu, 29 Dec 2022 23:02:56 +0000

This week, Merlin and John talk about:

Childhood compulsions (Personality)
The Indie Rock Doctor, Dr. John (Career)
Merlin’s family talking very loudly (Merlin Mann)
Merlin playing in a cover band with Stephen Fox (Merlin Mann)
John’s High School band The Truly Awful Band, Rick Garnett (Career)
John spraying a stencil for his band Chautauqua and getting arrested for vandalism (Stories)
John’s band Chautauqua never playing a single show (Career)
John's ravine having been declared a critical wetland (Mid-century Modern)
John meeting Tom the bass player of Chautauqua and hiring him for his yard (Currents)

The Problem: A stencil plays into the story, referring to Merlin making spray stencils for his fake band and John made a stencil for his first band Chautauqua when he first moved to Seattle in 1990.

The show title refers to a 6-minute song of John’s band Chautauqua about an astronaut on a space mission that was so unlikable that the other astronauts wanted to throw him out of the air lock.

The audio starts with two seconds of an unknown Rock song.

It is early, they haven’t recorded at 10am in years!

Childhood compulsions (RL449)

When Merlin called John first he sounded like he was under a blanket. It is early and Merlin has had only part of his iced tea. He never learned why John had hippies in his ravine (see RL448) and he is not even done blowing his nose, which is a multi-stage process, and he wishes he could breathe more and tells John that he could use his CPAP machine if John is not using it.

John’s doctor looked into his nose and said it was full of scar tissue from all the years where he was not able to breathe, which is now making it even harder. He already had no shot at breathing because of his face architecture and this has only screwed it up more. There is apparently a way to roto-router it out. Merlin’s friend Alex did that and it didn’t help. Merlin was thinking of having it done. There is a thing to suck the snot out of your kid’s nose and John has previously used that on the baby.

Merlin was a very sensitive kid, he hated blowing his nose and he thought he could fool his mom by putting the Kleenex up to his nose and sucking it in, but that it is a very different sound. Hypodermic needles were the worst for him and he lived in constant fear of hearing a balloon popping, getting s shot, closing a cat in a door, and other things. When John would visit Merlin and would be in the bathroom to urinate and he didn’t close the door all the way it would slowly open unnoticed, John has a closet door like that in the hall right now. Everything in Merlin’s house is a joke and is built on some grade.

Merlin continues to explain why he was afraid to close the door on a cat and how that was supposed to work. John thinks that when you cycle through a 1000 different possible anxieties that is not what he would typically settle on unless there was a triggering event, but Merlin didn’t even have a cat and as he says in his Wisdom Project document: ”We don’t get to pick what we love in life!” The same is true with compulsions. Merlin had a lot of compulsions as a kid, but around 5-6th grade things started to settle down. 6th grade was a very good year.

The Indie Rock Doctor, Dr. John (RL449)

John’s sister Laura was an anesthesiologist, not Susan or the other sister Susan. She worked with Dr. John, the Indie Rock Doc (John first called him Dr. Bob but realized that it doesn’t make sense to anonymize him because John is just as much an untraceable name as Bob) who walked in Tacoma (see RW119 where John said that Dr. John was from Olympia). He loved Indie Rock and would drive up to Seattle to see every show. Eventually everybody knew him and if you broke your ankle or twisted your finger you would call him and he would come to see you. It was apparent that he was on the spectrum.

John was looking up some guy in the UK who started seeing shows in 1973 and has written down every show he has every been to, he has every ticket stub, and he has put it all in a website where he documents every show. He says he has been to over 5500 gigs since 1973, but Dr. John might rival him.

They talk about how you don’t need to come out with all the details immediately, you can just say you are from San Francisco and only if the other person wants to know more they can still ask. It is like when you say that you are a ceramicist (see RL56). One day John still wants to become the sheriff of Twisp (see RL28), which is a real place. They closed the North road to Twisp, so in the winter it is hard to get there.

Merlin’s family talking very loudly (RL449)

Merlin mentions that he loves all of his family, some more than others, and he mentions his ill-fated poorly thought-out trip to Rhode Island this summer where everybody was drinking and talking loudly with no masks on while Merlin’s family did wear masks and nobody could understand them.

John’s school had 2700 kids in it, it was enormous and from one end of the hallway to the other you couldn’t see the other end, it disappeared into the ozone. Merlin thought he was at a large High School, but they only had 666 kids when he was in 10th grade.

John was watching Sense and Sensibility last night with Kate Winslet (John first said Rose McGowan) who was in Titanic and at one point his daughter asked why everybody sounded like they were talking to a microphone, and it turned out they had very echo-y homes and everyone was enunciating.

Merlin likes to watch police interrogations on YouTube. He watched one yesterday about a mother who had Munchausen's Syndrome by proxy and mistreated her daughter. Merlin’s wife Madeleine came into the room and was asking if that was the same one as last time, but it was a different one. It is a very low-effort type of YouTube video.

Merlin playing in a cover band with Stephen Fox (RL449)

One time Merlin played in a 1990s cover band together with Stephen Fox. Apart from Stephen’s band Flanders it was the most popular band that any of them had been in in Tallahassee.

The bar Cow Haus was owned by Merlin’s friends and his band would practice there and at one time the drummer from Flanders needed a band to open for Annabella and Baw Waw Waw who came through town. Why wouldn’t Merlin spend 3 weeks learning 20 1980s covers, most of which he already kind of knew, in order to be in a band with fucking Stephen Fox who once tried out for Foo Fighters?

Stephen always knows the parts and Merlin doesn’t even know how he does it, it is a fucking gift!

John’s High School band The Truly Awful Band, Rick Garnett (RL449)

His John’s very first band in High School was The Truly Awful Band. Their guitar player Rick Garnett had learned early 1980s British Heavy Metal songs by Judas Priest and others and he would play them in practice, but John didn’t know the music well enough to recognize that they were songs by other bands and John would write his own lyrics to them. Rick never informed him that this was an Iron Maiden song.

This was back in a time when learning guitar and being a guitar stud was one of the 5 ambitions that any boy in High School had. Rick was one of the kids in school who was good at that. He was one of the rare kids in school that was a little bit younger than John (who was always the youngest kid in school), but he was not immature, he was raised in a large Catholic family that was well to do and he was an achiever, a handsome kind and he was popular. In his bedroom he had a drum kit and a whole guitar setup.

At some point their friend Jim McNeil, a transplant from Arkansas, started to play the drums in their band. Jim was working construction Downtown and after work he would sometimes show up at Kevin’s house to hang out and get a beer and at one point Kevin said that every time Jim showed up at his house he was wearing his tool belt and his hardhat, but in order to drive there and get in his truck he had to take those things off, which means he put them back on when he arrived at Kevin’s house.

Jim was the drummer in the band and Rick could play The Hellion / Electric Eye (by Judas Priest) and John got recruited as the singer because he was the only one with charisma. John would write songs about how the Great Alaskan Moose came down from the mountains to bestow his wisdom on all of them, some wizard music except about Alaska. Rick was one of those terrible people who was great at everything. As one of the King Conserves he dated a Sosh, which was an absolute scandal. This was the moment when the Soshes realized that they would look up to the Conserves one day.

Today Rick, whose full name is Richard Winfield Garnett is a professor at Notre Dame: ”Paul J. Schierl/Fort Howard Corporation Professor of Law, Concurrent Professor of Political Science, founding director of Notre Dame Law School’s Program on Church, State, and Society”. Merlin calls that title a data dump and when he has a rule in his house that for the first hour after he gets home no data dumps are allowed, but John counters that Merlin is already supposed to know all that because they have been podcasting for 11 years. Whenever Rick sends John an email it has that whole title in his signature and at the very bottom it has a link: ”Download my scholarly papers here”

Rick is very Catholic and his family converted to Catholicism. When Amy Coney Barrett got elevated to the supreme court Rick claimed she was the best candidate and he was extremely offended about all the personal attacks that were levied at her during her supreme court confirmation process. He and John have argued about politics since they were 14 because he was conservative then and John was a Leftist.

Rick was the one that famously shouted down the hall at John something when they had been arguing about Jack Kemp and he shouted ”Go read the constitution!” - ”You need to read up on it!” and all of their friends were standing in the vicinity and it became a thing that they would all say to each other (see RL381): ”You should totally read up on it!” - ”What, is this your first day?” (see RL218) It was a scorching burn, but it was also funny because everybody knew that Rick had read up on it and John was telling him to read up on it.

The Truly Awful Band (who called themselves TAB) only ever played two shows: For one of them they moved all of their kit from Rick’s bedroom into their rec room and played 5-6 songs for his 8-year old sister and her friends, all these loud Judas Priest songs with John’s lyrics about magical moose, and they were culture-jamming enough that John wore one white glove and Jim wore a painter’s cap with the two long safari flaps in the back, which was dynamite! The other show they played was in front of teens at the tennis club party for their senior graduation, and there was shock and awe on the faces of the other teens as they watched them completely earnestly rocking out these tunes.

They and many of their friends would sit in class and doodle TAB album covers and then pass them around. John has a whole stack of them! Having a band is a new version of a made-up club. In 5th grade Merlin really liked the idea of Animal House and he started a Fraternity and gave out titles to people. At John’s High School there was one called Tappa Mega Kegga and one of them ended up at the University of Colorado and kept doing it. People in Colorado love beer. Merlin always wanted a Punk Rock band called Flesh Bullets and he went so far as to make a spray stencil and they made shirts.

John spraying a stencil for his band Chautauqua and getting arrested for vandalism (RL449)

A stencil also plays into John’s story. When he first arrived in Seattle in October of 1990. His friend Brian had gone to Gonzaga with him was a drummer and had played in a lot of Hardcore bands in Seattle in the 1980s and had decided independently that Punk Rock had run its course and wasn’t the future anymore because they had done it all and it couldn’t possibly continue because there was nothing new there. When people look back at the Grunge era they don’t know because the comprehensive story has not been told and all those books about Grunge are all just telling one side of the story.

In 1990 and 1991 before the Nirvana and Pearl Jam records had come out there were so many bands in Seattle that were not Grunge at all, like The Walkabouts, the Posies, or The Young Fresh Fellows. John and Brian put a band together and from the newspaper they got a guy to play bass called Tom Roberts. They were rehearsing in Brian’s dad’s house’s basement’s tiny little TV room, and as Tom showed up he had very long hair, big gold hoop earrings and a Paisley shirt buttoned up to the top, he looked like the guy who played extra guitar in Nirvana for a little while before Kurt Cobain kicked him out for being too metal, but Tom wasn’t metal at all, he was really into the Posies and into Jangle Pop.

The formed a band called Chautauqua (see RL313) when that whole Mudhoney thing had played its course, the future was not playing Punk Rock in a High School auditorium, but they had all been influenced by Full Moon Fever and the future was Rickenbackers and Jingle Jangle. It was all going to come back around to Benmont Tench and Stan Lynch (both from Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers) and it was going to be The Birds again, and these buttoned-up shirts were going to make the 1960s look like the 1940s. At this point in time R.E.M. had not become a huge band yet, they were still a cool college band. There was The Cure and My Bloody Valentine and those didn’t sound Grunge!

John’s band practiced 4 times a week, they went to a studio and made a professional demo tape with 5-6 songs on it and they made a two-color stencil (see OM188) designed by John’s other friend, a different Tom. It was bigger than a pizza box and it was not as easy to apply as it looks because they had to have 3 colors with them when they went out at night. In 1991 when Grunge was exploding around the world there were Chautauqua stencils all over the place in Seattle. They even put them right on the pavement on the crosswalk of Broadway and John St and everybody waiting for the light would look down and see the orange / yellow / black logo of Chautauqua.

One time in the middle of the night they were tagging a building Downtown and they put their stencil right next to the famous Pearl Jam tag of a little stick figure guy with dreadlocks holding his hands up in the air, they might still have been Mookie Blaylock, and all of a sudden a door opens right on the wall where John was standing and he saw a brightly lit warehouse full of women sitting at sowing machines and a guy came out: ”What the fuck are you doing?” and he ran after them through whole Belltown, which at the time was a scary neighborhood at night and he jumped in a car and started chasing them in a car.

As they were running out onto 2nd Avenue the guy was going the wrong way up a one-way street, John came up over the top of the hill and there were two cops sitting there and it was a big kerfuffle. The cops put John in the car because he was the ring leader and admitted that he had done it, so the other guys left. The cops took John down to the building and asked him: ”Did you do this?” - ”Well, yeah!” - ”This is the best stencil I have ever seen!” - ”Thank you!” - ”But I have to arrest you for vandalism!” and they did.

The problem was that when John was supposed to come back for his hearing he skipped it because he was too Rock’n’Roll which turned into a $500 bench warrant which he ignored and turned into a $1000 bench warrant which he couldn’t pay and at one point John had been going to the movies with a guy and was riding in his car afterwards through Bellevue. The guy was black and the cops pulled him over being black with a white guy in the car and they ran their ID and pulled John out of the car and cuffed him and took him to Bellevue jail.

The guy Howard Wooten had to take $500 out to bail John out and he bailed him out under his name and although John paid him the $500 back, but when he showed up to the court hearing and asked for his bail back they told him that the bail belonged to a Howard Wooten and John hadn’t seen Howard in 2 years at that point and he never got his bail back, at a time when $500 was a lot of money. Bellevue is near Redmond where Microsoft is and it is just the rich people from Microsoft.

John’s band Chautauqua never playing a single show (RL449)

The worst thing about Chautauqua is that they practiced 4 times a week for all of 1991 while Grunge was exploding all around them and even the worst band in the city was selling 400 tickets a night, and they never played a show. They had a demo tape and everybody in town knew their name because it was stenciled everywhere, but they never booked a show. If only they had 10% more Jane’s Addiction in the band and 10% less International Pop Underground, if they had been slightly less Brit Pop! They had been not quite self-aware enough about the moment.

John had a song called Galaxy’s End that was 6 minutes long and was telling the story from the perspective of an astronaut on a spaceship who was so unlikable that the other astronauts wanted to put him in the airlock and throw him out. Imagine if John Carpenter had done that in the Dark Star era (1974)! It came to John as a plot because they had Major Tom over here, the guy who is saying ”… got no soup!”, but they didn’t have the actual real scenario of being 5 years into a space mission where everybody is really tired of this guy.

If they had put that song next to Touch Me I’m Sick (by Mudhoney), which is 2 minutes long, they would have gotten beer bottles thrown after them. The song was in John’s style of the time and had 14 chords and it was a total drone.

John's ravine having been declared a critical wetland (RL449)

Because the hippies have taken over John’s ravine they have put a set of little flags in the ground and have said that it is now a critical wetland habitat and he was no longer allowed to mess around down there because they had put 1000 new plants down there as part of a program that has saved John from the city of Normandy Park shutting him down. They filled out all the paperwork and as a part of that they keep him out of there and he can’t monkey around there anymore, which is fine for John because the alternative was that the Corps of Engineers was going to put him in rendition somewhere in Dubai, they were going to put him in a Dick Cheney container (see Dreams and Fantasies) because he wasn’t in compliance and hadn’t filled out the paperwork and hadn’t gotten the critical wetland study done.

Now the rest of John’s yard, the domesticated quadrant, which he had just been covering in a foot of wood chips to kill the grass and get the moles out of there while he was down in the wetland. It was a biome and John was growing mushrooms you wouldn’t believe in the wood chips. The wood chips kill the grass because John didn’t want the grass and the moles eat the grubs that eat the roots of the grass, it is an ”old lady who swallowed a fly” type situation.

Now John has to turn his back on the ravine and start focusing on the yard where he was going to do a neo-Chinese garden in mid-century Seattle style. He likes to buy his plants at the nursery on sale and any time he sees a pallet of plants for $5 marked down from $50 he will buy them and find a place for them, but he is trying to do this with native plants. Now John got overwhelmed in the same way that you do when you realize that publicity or graphic art is actually a real job, it is not just people who used Photoshop for 6 months on a job and call themselves graphic artists.

John realized he needed a garden artist and a landscape architect because this was over his head. John used to plant gardens, but it was always along a fence, it was a 2-dimensional thing, but this garden needs to be 4-dimensions because it is in three dimensions, but also plants grow and how is it going to be 5 years from now? Is it going to be close to that?

John meeting Tom the bass player of Chautauqua and hiring him for his yard (RL449)

John was over at a friend’s house who is a great Rock musician who has just started an artisanal delivery pizza service that he drives around in a van and drops off to people, they were outside in the front yard talking about music and he was offering John all those pizzas which he gladly accepted, and a guy walked out of the house next door and said: ”Hey John!” and it was Tom, the bass player of Chautauqua whom he hadn’t seen since 1991, but he had lived in Seattle this whole time and has followed John through the newspapers.

John asked Tom how he has been doing and Tom said he is a landscape architect now, and John told him that the hippies had taken over his ravine and he needed a landscape architect for his yard. Yesterday Tom came out to John and they walked around the garden all day, like: ”Right here you could put a tall Oregon Grape and right here you could put a Wax Myrtle!” John hired Tom who normally architects big parking lots, but he promised that on the weekends he was going to come up with a plan for John so that John and his mom could buy plants by the pallet at the discount rack and Tom is just going to provide some guidance and tell John where to put them.

John’s mom was there when Tom came over and she said to him: ”Tom, we have never met, but for 30 years I have been listening to Galaxy’s End and I want to compliment you on your bassline!” - ”For 30 years I have been waiting for somebody who had ever heard Galaxy’s End to tell me that they liked by bassline!” Making that tape and practicing 4 days a week was for Tom the pinnacle of his Rock years, but they never played a show! She could have hummed it to him, she knows it so well.

The hippies have now left, but had to leave their flags for the next 3 years. It was already a wetland and John discovered it. His mom said: ”I know we are not supposed to touch anything, but we are going to have to move a couple of these plants and we are just going to move the flags, they are never going to notice!” They are young hippies who were walking along the trail that John made and are planting plants in the middle of the trail behind them, it is like they are painting themselves into a corner!

When John was in High School everybody wanted to be a Marine Biologist and now there are whole colleges devoted to hippie majors that didn’t even exist when John was a kid, like Habitat Restoration, Creek Hydrology and Invasive Species. They have a master’s degree in restoring John’s backyard ravine and all the stuff John was doing by just putting some boots and some gloves on and throwing stuff around is a thing they spent years working out the geometry of it. They went to college to wear Carhartts to work everyday and have big muddy boots. It is a big job!

They will grab 30 Civilian Conservation Corps kids wearing Helly Hansens, paying them $10 an hour, college kids who couldn’t get the job sitting up in the fire watch tower in the mountains of Oregon, and all the kids down in the ravine, every single one of them a hippie, they are all nice, and Merlin overreacted there a bit because he doesn’t like hippies who quit smoking and then hate everybody who smokes and keep yelling at them.

These are Northwestern Eco Hippies who climb up into Redwood trees and tie themselves up there so they don’t cut down the trees, they are honorable in a way, they are lovely people, they like to be in the creek, and John also likes to be in the creek, they are the same type of people, but it is their ravine now - we will see about that!

As John took Tom around the ravine Tom said that this was his fantasy, he was touching every leaf of every plant and he knew everything, he was naming all the mushrooms, but he said: ”Don’t eat anything just because I said so!” - ”What good is it to know every mushroom if you can’t tell me which ones I can eat!” - ”No, no, no, no, no! I am not going to tell you which ones to eat!” He touches every leaf, he is communing, he has probably met John’s dresser before.

by jroemling

RL448 - A Little Bit of Fire

Sun, 21 Aug 2022 14:43:40 +0000

This week, Merlin and John talk about:

Brad Gillis (Music)
John having hippies in his ravine (New House)
Lea Thompson vs Elisabeth Shue vs Mary Stuart Masterson, 1980s John Hughes movies, Some Kind of Wonderful (Movies)
Age gaps being more and less significant, dating older/younger people (Aging)
Everything had changed when John came back from his walk across Europe (The Big Walk)
Babe the Blue Ox, a plentitude of great local bands in the 1990s (Music)
Are you living the right life? Living in a neighborhood where there are a lot of kids to play with (Early Days)
John’s basement flooded after he unplugged the sump pump, his Rock posters getting destroyed (Currents)
Sleep hygiene, getting a CPAP machine, getting into the right sleep rhythm after the holidays, watching 30 Rock (Sleep)

The problem: John lost his movie rights, referring to John bringing Harold and Maude to his High School movie night and was never again allowed to choose a movie for the rest of High School.

The show title refers to the house in the movie Synecdoche New York that is always a little bit on fire and that Merlin uses as a metaphor for John’s smoke alarm in his stoner house that beeped every 30 seconds for a solid year.

John starts the show singing Merlin’s name in the usual way and Merlin replies with singing John’s name to Masters of the Universe. They continue ”Here comes the Merlin Mann!” - ”Here comes the John again!” Merlin even takes his guitar and strums the song he is thinking about because John thought it was a funeral march. John wanted to join Merlin, but that doesn’t work because of Skype syncing issues. He eventually chimes in, but their guitars are extremely out of tune. They play around for quite some time.

Brad Gillis (RL448)

Crazy Train (by Ozzy Osbourne) is one of Brad Gillis adjacent song where the shitty music video involves train tracks. Brad was playing on the Live one while Randy (Rhodes, Merlin calls him Randall) was playing on the Ridge (Ridge Farm Studio?), and Gillis also plays the lesser of the two solos on Don’t Tell Me You Love Me (Lay Your World on Me).

John met Brad Gillis in a bar in Mill Valley California one time. He is the nicest guy and lives there.

Merlin recommends that if you are a widely regarded lead guitar player from Birmingham, then don’t work in a sheet metal factory like Tony Iommi (from Black Sabbath).

Todd Rundgren always had a Marin vibe (Marin Civic Center), they get a wine dad vibe, just like Jackson Browne, which sounds like a euphemism, but just barely: ”I got to see Jackson Browne. It is called a load out!”

Merlin didn’t come up to Marin (Marin Civic Center) when John played at Bob Weir’s Magic House because he doesn’t like crossing a bridge, but he saw him in Oakland with the vampire guy (Ken Stringfellow) and his wife dodged a bullet that night (see RL3).

John having hippies in his ravine (RL448)

John has a ravine full of hippies, which is a collective noun like a murder of crows, and they are having the time of their life tearing it up on this rainy day. This morning the hippies kept screaming and it is like: ”Clarisse, you can hear the hippies screaming!”, but John doesn’t know where they are now.

Lea Thompson vs Elisabeth Shue vs Mary Stuart Masterson, 1980s John Hughes movies, Some Kind of Wonderful (RL448)

Lea Thompson reminds Merlin of Elisabeth Shue who is very good in The Boys on Amazon Prime. Lea is the mom in Back to the Future, and Elisabeth Shue was in Adventures in Babysitting and Leaving Las Vegas. John had never seen Some Kind of Wonderful (with Lea Thompson), but he was recently forced to watch it. The other blonde is the Wilson Philips (?)2 girls, she was not in there, but should have been. It was the other girl with the Pixie Cut, but John did not like that Pixie Cut. Merlin finds her adorable, Mary Stuart Masterson (who was also in Some Kind of Wonderful), who is one of the 3-name actresses like Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio or NPR’s Carol Anne Clark-Kelly who has 4 first names and she is having fun with it.

Some Kind of Wonderful is a John Hughes movie from the 1980s, but John had never seen it because he was just a little too old for it. It was the same for Merlin and Breakfast Club, he was 6 months too old for that, and he had almost graduated already and thought it was ridiculous and took itself too seriously. He loved that guy, of course, the bully who gets the horns. He gets assaulted by a real gorilla in Trading Places (??? Doesn’t make sense). He is a great 1980s-heavy, like a William Atherton. Merlin never saw St. Elmo’s Fire because he knew it wasn’t for him. It was supposedly for college people, but it had a saxophone in it in 1985, played by Rob Lowe who had a roach clip earring.

Merlin loved Pretty in Pink, but it was awkward because he went to see it with a platonic lady friend and ex-girlfriend whom he was supposed to take to the prom, but didn’t and there was that prom scene in that. Breakfast Club came out in the middle of John’s Junior year and it was a pitch right down the middle for him. It is about the uncertain future and there were other movies who weren’t so on the nose about that like Harold and Maude.

John and his friends in High School used to have a movie night where one of them would rent a VHS tape and John brought Harold and Maude at some point. Kevin, Kelly, Eric, Rick, Mary were all there, not Sonja, but Tamy. Halfway through the movie it was such a downer, not what anybody wanted, they wanted a movie where they could laugh or kiss each other. It resulted in John losing his movie rights for the rest of High School and when it came around to him again they would say: ”Nope!” They used to say ”Harold and Maude!” to him every time he did something that they thought was dumb to provoke him.

Merlin can’t get his kid to fucking put down the phone and watch a normal thing, let alone a moody one about a guy who is a Jesus figure. Bud Cort (Walter Edward Cox) was also the father in But I’m a Cheerleader, which is a big household hit and Merlin hopes he can leverage some Bud Cort energy. John thinks that Harold and Maude was not the right hill to die on, but he would die on the hill of Being There. Merlin named his dog John C. Gardener.

On New Year’s Eve 1985/86 all of Merlin’s friends were depressed and they were into being depressed and they were a little bit existential, but they were also Woodie Allen fans and that was the night they learned the Ricky Nelson had died in a plane crash and it was the night when Merlin’s friend Bob brought in the Woody Allen movie Broadway Danny Rose, which might be even less entertaining than Harold and Maude.

Some Kind of Wonderful was the one for John that he didn’t see because he was over, and the person he was with was 2 years younger and the movie was resonant to them. It is a ménage à trois movie and it has the blonde girl in it (Lea Thompson) and Eric Stoltz who was supposed to become Marty McFly in Back to the Future. Lea Thompson just the year before almost walked away with Red Dawn.

Age gaps being more and less significant, dating older/younger people (RL448)

They talk about kids that were born 1-2 years before or after your own kid and what that means for their interests. Sometimes that almost feels like a different generation, although it goes away by teen years and then it becomes significant again. When John was 25 he thought that people who dated 22-year-olds were creeps. Merlin had a 14-year old classmate in 8th grade who was widely believed to have a 19-year old boyfriend, which meant that she was probably really cool, but from the POV of a 25 year old? What are you doing? That is so gross!

Everything had changed when John came back from his walk across Europe (RL448)

Every girlfriend John had was 0,5-1 years older than him until he turned 30. When he was dating Laurell he was 27 and she was 29, which was scandalous, but she was very sophisticated and it looked good on John. In 1999 when the Western State Hurricanes broke up he should have quit music and gotten a job. He was 30 years old and he had been part of the 1990s scene and he had just been 2 years too young to actually be Grunge, he was there for the birth of Indie. The kids in all the other bands were 23 years old, like Death Cab for Cutie and Modest Mouse.

The following year every single person of John’s music scene that was his age or older was out. All the bands that were big in the clubs in 1995/96 were gone by 2001 and got replaced by new kids that had been raised in DIY, and John hadn’t, he was raised in DUI, which meant that you start Sub Pop and then become as big as the bigs, or you become a little big. They did not intend to make a career out of making their own T-shirts.

Then John went on the Walk Across Europe and when he came back he hadn’t really changed very much, but he stepped back into a world where all of the bands he knew were gone, all the people he knew had gotten jobs over the space of a long weekend, and everybody was now 24-25 years old and he was 31. He got into Harvey Danger in 2000 and those guys were all 6 years younger than him. They had been big in 1998 with Flagpole Sitta.

John should have gone the other way and he should be working at Amazon now. This is why 1997 didn’t happen, the only thing that came out in 1997 was OK Computer (by Radiohead), the rest of it was 311 and Five Doors Down (actually 3 Doors Down), but none of that stuff exists.

He left at the last minute of his scene and it seemed like the world was going on and everybody else was going to be the same, but when he came back he was the same and everybody else was different, which is a Johnny Michell-esque concept. John was the one who did the crazy thing while everybody else stayed at home and slouched into Bethlehem. John was the Silver Surver who did the sick kickflips.

The other day John realized that his walk seemed like a big adventure and it seemed like a manic period, but he was totally depressed the whole time and he was forced out of bed each morning by the voice in his head that said: ”Move, you lazy ass!” and you would either go South or East and he would go until he found a river and he would tack (sailing term) until he found a bridge and so on. And when he came back all the bands were gone, his city was gone! There was a whole new generation of kids in too-tight T-shirts, wearing pegged pants again, and all the bootcut jeans people were gone.

There wasn’t any other job for John if not a musician. What would he be? A college professor?

Merlin wonders if the impulse of walking across Europe is at all chemically similar to running for city council, and John always wanted to think so, but looking back at his creative years… John should have put a band together with Laurell, she was 29 and he was 27 and she could play the drums. When he saw The White Stripes for the first time he thought that he had already had that idea before: He and Laurell used to sit in the basement and jam. She wasn’t a great drummer, but personality goes a long way and she had so much personality!

Babe the Blue Ox, a plentitude of great local bands in the 1990s (RL448)

Babe the Blue Ox came through Tallahassee all the time and Merlin found them an amazing three-piece with a lot of personality and character and a girl just ripping it on drums. They came through Seattle right when the Western State Hurricanes started to become a thing and they were all at The Crocodile to see Babe the Blue Ox. The place wasn’t packed, but they were a national act or a touring band. Merlin can’t keep a straight conversation together and mentions Archers of Loaf, Black Flag, Minutemen that were so fucking good and so electric, like Sebadoh or Babe the Blue Ox, but they all ended up selling only 10.000 copies of their record and every single one of them started a Brian Eno cover band

John really loved Babe the Blue Ox and thought they had so much personality. John pulled a Merlin Mann and went up to them after the show and asked them if they had a place to crash tonight, which they hadn’t. John had a huge warehouse loft on Capitol Hill and invited them to come, which they did and they spent the night with John in his loft. It was the only time John ever took a band home and put them up. One of the girls in the band, maybe the bass player, made out with John’s bass player. They were a Rock band and they knew another Rock band, and for the rest of the year they were name-checking them whenever the opportunity arose.

Merlin made a playlist the other night. These were Merlin’s formative years, and also of Chris Walla, they knew all these bands and they really changed who they were. Merlin always thought he had pretty good taste and sensibility in music, but this was the first time as an adult-ish young person where he felt he was begin wonderfully outpaced by the ambition and execution of a lot of music around him. There is a cover band called Jeteye in Tampa. The very first show Merlin ever saw when he moved 1991 was The Young Fresh Fellows.

The Young Fresh Fellows were one of the first alternative bands that John ever saw. He took them out and got them stoned after the show. Merlin really misses college for the easy conviviality and the easy access to people and friends. You just see your friends all the time and there was never a need to make a plan unless you had to buy tickets for something. He misses that from a social standpoint and he misses the mid 1990s from a music standpoint.

Are you living the right life? Living in a neighborhood where there are a lot of kids to play with (RL448)

John sometimes asks himself if he is living the right life or if there is another one that he should have been living. The other day he was talking to his mom about her childhood and he asked her what her favorite movie was when she was a kid. Of course it was everything with Roy Rogers, she loved him and when he married Dale Evans she was really disappointed. She also liked Johnny Weissmuller as Tarzan. John wondered if when she played with other kids in the neighborhood if she would play Roy Rogers cowboys and Indians or if they would play Tarzan, but she said she didn’t play with other kids.

John had just been to her town in North-West Ohio in August and she showed him the neighborhood, the route she would take to town or to elementary school and he could picture it very well. She just said it so matter-of-factly that she never played with other kids. John moved to the suburbs partly because they wanted their daughter to have the experience that he had as a kid, that there were kids all over and you just go out the door in the summer and you play. It turned out that their neighborhood does not have that and she is like John’s mom, she is an avid reader, and although she is a very social person she has gradually settled into a life where her books and her fantasies are her main companions. John was kind of the same, except he had kids all around him all the time and he could opt in or opt out.

There were many instances where a kid would come to the door and say: ”Hey, can John come out and play?” and John’s mom would look in his room and he would wave her off: ”No! No, no, no, no, no!” because he was doing something, he was making spells, he was reanimating a dead frog.

In that context there are a lot of other lives…

The first time John visited Greece he was sitting in a ramshackle rattle-trap hotel at the water on Corfu, looking out the window, and there were bronzed young teen Greek kids doing the cliché things like diving in the ocean, wearing almost nothing, and even 100 years ago they wouldn’t have been wearing anything, and this is how JFK Jr grew up and as John was looking out the window he was thinking that this is also a life, but one that is very different from his. It is a situation where your relative poverty is completely mitigated by the fact that you have the ocean of the ancients around you, which is very different from growing up in the Bronx where you don’t have any money and also you don’t have the world’s greatest ocean.

It is a midlife crisis thing to think that John could choose a life rather than continue to live in this one. He has been talking to a lot of friends about this. When he thinks of a simple life, which he doesn’t currently have, although he doesn’t have an overcomplicated life. Just because something is simple doesn’t mean it is easy.

John’s basement flooded after he unplugged the sump pump, his Rock posters getting destroyed (RL448)

One of their good friends of all the great shows Jochen, who lives in Sweden now although he is a German, posted somewhere or sent John a letter in that German style where they are not mincing words and they don’t even have a filter for rude, and he said that in the first 5-6 years of Roderick on the Line you were telling interesting stories about when you were interesting, and recently you just have been thinking about your life a lot in a way that is a lot more boring, something to the effect of: ”You ran out of interesting stories!” John is not fighting any buffalo, but there is Half & Half he has to get, which is not exactly as interesting.

The other day John’s basement flooded, and this story is for Jochen, talking not being interesting anymore: John has a sump pump to keep the water off the floor… and it is like those smoke detectors that have a 9V-battery even though they are hard-wired into the house and it is just a backup battery, but they suck battery power faster than a battery-powered one. John once lived in a stoner house where the smoke detector beeped for a solid year every 30 seconds and none of them could hear it anymore because they were all drug addicts and nobody wanted to deal with it, while any visitor to the house were sitting on the edge of the couch. It was like the house in Synecdoche New York that is always just a little bit on fire.

The sump pump had a little outboard gizmo in case there was a power outage, but in two years it has run through three 9V batteries and it will just sit down there and beep, so John unplugged it to get rid of the beeps because he can’t keep putting 9V’s in this, and then they had an atmospheric river and the next day there were 2 inches (5 cm) of water in the basement. Talk about an interesting story! On one hand there is Dead Rubber Girl in the Closet (see RL21), but on the other hand there are 2 inches of water in his basement floor. There is your Roderick on the Line! John is not 40 anymore, not even 45, and life catches up on you!

The sump pump detects water and turns on and it works in combination with a French drain, a drain that runs outside along the front of the house that collects the water, puts it in the sump pump, and then the sump pump pumps it out, but John had turned the sump pump off and it no longer pumped the water out of the house. When he turned it on again it immediately pumped it all out.

John had been sorting through all of his Rock posters for a long time and they were all stacked on the floor and all of them were completely submerged. John is not somebody who believes in signs or that this was meant to be, but he does believe that when something happens, this is what happened, that is the new truth. All the way back to when he had the office down in the immigration building (see [Packages), the one with the birds outside, he had these Rock posters stacked up and was wondering what he was going to do with these posters, all the way back to before he ran for city council, the one constant in his life had been: ”What do I do with these posters?” For a while in 2013 he was going to buy a flat file from a guy. Now the decision has been made for him in part by the flood and the lack of a 9V battery.

A lot of these posters, which he might have strapped to his back like the stick farmer on Led Zeppelin IV and all the naked kids climbing up the side of the mountain, he would have been both the man with the sticks, the bundle of sticks, the bundle of hiss, and he would have also been the naked kids climbing up the mountain with these stupid Decemberists posters that he really just wanted to burn in effigy, and now the wave came in through he French train, past the non-operating sump pump, and removed all those posters from contention. They all went soggy wet into the bin and now John wonders if he should be living in Greece, jumping off the side of a rock. These posters were a sea anchor, like in that Robert Redford movie where you throw the sea anchor out and it pulls you off the shipping container. Merlin talks about the Wuwei philosophy in China.

One of the key elements is: It could have been worse because there were a lot of things down there that didn’t get destroyed, it is almost like a warning shot. All the guitars were 5 inches above the water line!

Sleep hygiene, getting a CPAP machine, getting into the right sleep rhythm after the holidays, watching 30 Rock (RL448)

The other crazy thing: John has been talking about sleep problems for years and it has been awful. He couldn’t think straight on his shows anymore, he kept forgetting what he was talking about, everything hurt, and he got a CPAP machine and tried to use it and the problem was that the primary issue was that John has a hard time going and getting to sleep, he stays up until 6am. His thinking was that maybe he didn’t want to go to sleep because he thought he was dying the whole time and with a CPAP machine sleep would be restful. When they did the tests on him he only had 6 apnea events, which was just borderline to where they will do a CPAP because there are people with 100-200 events. Imagine choking 100 times a night and you are not even aware of it unless your spouse tells you! Merlin slept on the couch last night because he was too God-damn loud.

John used this CPAP machine for 3 weeks and when he laid in bed he was still unable to go to sleep, but he was also wearing a Baron Harkonnen (Vladimir Harkonnen from Dune) mask, really unable to go to sleep. It wasn’t even uncomfortable and he got used to it, but he still didn’t like to go to sleep and there were now four more things in the way: A sound, a feeling, a restriction, and he just didn’t go to sleep. He developed a cough and stopped using the machine until the cough would go away, he was using the humidifier function and it was probably filling him up, and in the lead-up to the holidays he was going to sleep at 8am, sleeping until 2pm, he was walking around in a daze, falling down, sleeping on the couch in the afternoon, watching nine 30 Rock episodes in a row, hoping that Tina Fey would lay him down, he was absolutely out of control.

At a certain point John thought he would just stay up all night and rock on through like when he would get jetlagged, but that just resulted in him staying up until 4pm and hitting a Mondo Wall (?), collapse, and sleep from 4-11pm. He was off the rails! It was the sleep cycle of a serial killer. But right around Christmas, when they were sitting there, opening presents, John had not been to sleep for 35 hours, he was so exhausted he couldn’t keep his eyes open, and suddenly he hit the jackpot and he fell asleep at midnight and woke up at 6:30am.

That day he stayed up until 10pm, he was falling asleep on his feet, and he went to bed and woke up at 6am, and for the last 2 weeks John has been going to bed between 10pm-12am and has been waking up between 6-7am and he would sit down at the computer and write 1500 words a day, staying awake all day, not taking a nap in he afternoon, and he had the experience when he had already done a bunch of stuff and when he looked at the clock it was 9:30am. He does more before breakfast than the Army does all day, and it is going to make the 1960s look like the 1920s.

He woke up this morning without an alarm at 8am, and Merlin was sitting there, pushing and delaying, because he thought John was probably not even awake yet, but John already went out rollerblading around the neighborhood, leaving little boxes of sugar cookies on his neighbors’ doorsteps, and it feels regular - knock on wood! And it turns out: If John writes 1500 words in a day he feels like he accomplished something and he gets a little attaboy and he didn’t even have to steal that time from anywhere. He hadn’t felt a feeling of daily accomplishment in years where every day he did a thing.

Now he starts to feel tired at 10:30pm where normally he would be leaning into the first of nine 30 Rock episodes and now he is sitting on the couch with his daughter’s mother / partner who has decided together with his sister that they were watching The Man in the High Castle for some reason, which they claimed was his type of show, but it was 10:30pm and he was tired and not even Nazis could keep him awake. It also feels like he is not missing anything, he has never missed anything except writing 1500 words at 8am, and right now that feels sustainable because he got up at 8am, he has already done some stuff, and he is going to stay up until 11pm when he starts to feel tired.

John didn’t watch 30 Rock in the 2000s, he didn’t even have a TV, and he started to watch it on Amazon, but then they took it away and put it over somewhere else where he was also able to see it. He also didn’t watch Tina Fey on Saturday Night Live because he didn’t even have a TV, and he didn’t know anything about any of these people. The sense of humor in that show is very Generation X, there is a lot of irony and a lot of stuff that wouldn’t fly now, but that actually is funny. Merlin thinks it was a God-damn shame to take out Jenna (Maroney) in Black Face.

John watched the entire series, a thing he had only ever done with The Sopranos and The Wire, and he was doing it alone, it was his private moment in the bathtub, his little weird special time capsule that made him not feel gaslit, but made him remember when he enjoyed things, it reminded him of ”Does anybody remember laughter?”, the characters are all so wonderful and he loved everything about it.

A few weeks ago he came to the end and after the last episode he was walking around for a couple days, missing his 30 Rock friends and he tried to watch Seinfeld, but he didn’t want those friends. He told his daughter’s mother / partner about the situation and asked her if he could just start watching it again and she said: ”How many of your fans have listened to every Roderick on the Line more than once?” - ”A lot!” - ”You can! You are allowed!” John hadn’t realized this was a thing, and he made some toast, drew a bath, put his computer on the toilet, and it turned out he didn’t even remember anything from the first episodes that he had watched 2 years before at the beginning of the pandemic.

John still feels a little fragile about it, he had never mentioned it since he started, because it felt a little dirty anyway watching a Sitcom. At one point he started telling friends that he was watching 30 Rock, and it was like he had said he was doing hot yoga, but he wanted that reaction because then he could make his case that 30 Rock is really good. It was like when Merlin told people he was watching Rome. John watched that at the Nada Surf house when he stayed there for two weeks and Ira had it on DVD. Merlin couldn’t stand that guy on Grey’s Anatomy, which his family hate-watches, the Trainspotting guy, and he liked him so much in Rome that he started liking him in Grey’s Anatomy.

There is no 30 Rock spin-off that John wouldn’t somewhat approve of. John told Christopher Frizzelle, the guy who runs his book club, that what he needed to do was not to read Moby Dick, but to watch 30 Rock.

John started it over, he is not even halfway through season 1 yet, and he is doling them out to himself like little bonbons. Merlin loves all of this and didn’t not expect it today.

When John wakes up in the morning the sun is just peeking through the trees, he is up at first light, and he gets some coffee, sits at the computer to see what happens. Merlin recommends John to do some phone-it-in Walter Matthau style Calisthenics with tiny little weights, butter-maker style, like a Pee-wee Herman workout, that is all his can handle right now. His daughter was trying to show him some yoga moves and he said: ”You want to see a yoga move? Throw those balled-up little socks there in front of me! Now watch me try to pick them up!” and he made groaning noises as if he couldn’t reach them.

by jroemling

RW257 - Emotional Facts

Sun, 21 Aug 2022 14:31:57 +0000

This week, Dan and John talk about:

John having bad thoughts in the morning and not being able to really sleep (Sleep)
John being threatened with a lawsuit, feeling under siege by a lot of different social conflicts (Currents)
John being careful about not telling the stories because people have misinterpreted him before (Podcasting)
Acting like an asshole vs. being an asshole (Attitude and Opinion)
Emotional facts, people having their own truth with alternate facts (Depression)
Seeking for the truth (Depression)

The show title refers to people creating their own truth because they don’t like The Truth.

John having bad thoughts in the morning and not being able to really sleep (RW257)

It is a beautiful day in Seattle, here in paradise, but John is having a rough go of it because stuff is just piling up. The last couple of mornings he has woken up without very much sleep, just come awake, and immediately his head is filled with bad thoughts, which is a new experience for him. He likes to sleep, he rolls back over, thinking he would just going to go back to sleep, but it is hail-on-a-roof level of bad thoughts. He tosses and turns, there are moments of respite where he can banish the bad thoughts, but it is an anxiety attack and it is the first thing he has experienced both this morning and yesterday and it is really debilitating. If you can't take refuge in sleep, what can you do?

Dan has never had refuge in sleep, he has had insomnia his entire life, going back to single digit ages. There are even stories how he couldn't nap when he was two years old. The last nap that he ever took was when he was two. In school when they would have nap time he would just lay there, he never slept there, he has never fallen asleep accidentally in his life and has never fallen asleep in a public place in his life, he never slept on a plane or any of moving or stationary vehicle, except one time when he was on a road trip with one of his college girlfriends, they were driving from central Florida to Tennessee and on the way back after camping for 3-4 nights and not sleeping at all he was able to sleep for an hour and a half in the parked car at the rest stop, but they also got scabies.

What John just described is a typical morning for Dan, and there is nothing he can do except to get up because having this is not going to be productive. He is essentially driven out of bed by demons every morning. Sometimes you get a blessing where you get to sleep more than 6 hours, maybe even 7, and you wake up and think that this is what it feels like to be God. One of Dan’s big takeaways from being a practitioner of Vipassana or Buddhist meditation, what is now called mindfulness meditation and has apps associated with it, Buddha probably would have liked them, although he was against ball games (see OM378).

One of Dan’s biggest takeaways from that practice is understanding that sometimes you just feel a certain way and you don't have to have… He talked to Merlin about the concept of the second arrow. The story is that Buddha was talking about being enlightened and having the choice, but even if you are enlightened you still feel pain, but how you react to the pain is different. If you got shot with an arrow, that is going to hurt, but there is also the concept of The Second Arrow where you got shot with an arrow and it hurts, but then you start a dialogue in your head of: ”Why did I get shot with the arrow? I wish I hadn't gotten shot with an arrow. What if I hadn't been there?”, essentially shooting yourself with a second arrow by creating all this extra suffering around the first arrow’s pain and discomfort. We do that to ourselves a lot.

John being threatened with a lawsuit, feeling under siege by a lot of different social conflicts (RW257)

John is being threatened with a lawsuit that he has discussed before, and they won't relent. He would happily revisit the story with all of his Internet friends and explain everything and name the people and give their address, but they have specifically now mentioned not podcasting, but defamation in their legal documents and there are people that listen to this program who live in Normandy Park and they are coming at him from all sides.

John has been struggling with this a lot lately because for most of his life he was very comfortable with the standpoint most people have: ”I am the benchmark of sane and rational and as people deviate from my world view, those are the people that are wrong!” In personal relationships he has always felt like the benchmark of rational and calm, and people who bring in outside information that is not relevant to the problem, people that use emotional appeal, people that blackmail people, all of that is emotional illness.

Most people do that and think that: ”Well, I am sane!” and these conflicts are because everybody else is crazy. But you get to be a certain age or have a certain amount of experience, and you think: ”If I am having the same problem over and over with multiple people, it seems like the common denominator is me!” And if you are the benchmark, either everyone is crazy or maybe you are the problem. There are some situations where John realizes he is pretty stubborn and he should let it go and should call them and apologize, and learning to do those things was hard for him, but produced good results.

But there are other things like relationships and it is even easy to look at bad relationships and go: ”That relationship was crazy, I felt really mistreated, and it is very hard for me to understand what they were thinking and what they were getting at!”, but they were thinking something. What every wise person says to someone who is being unwise: ”Chances are that the person that you are worried about is not thinking about you at all!” You are putting yourself at the center of every story or as the protagonist, and it is easy to feel in those relationships like: ”This person is just out to get me! They spend all day trying to think of ways to torture me!” and even when that person is the closest person to you, that is not true. They think they are doing the right thing.

Right now John is embroiled in a dispute with a neighbor (see RL454), he got the mother of one of his daughter's friends mad at him (see RL457), and she is a key in a social group and the fact that she is mad at John now means that the whole social group is thrown akimbo and nobody can socialize with each other, it is all a big, crazy thing. John apologized and she accepted his apology, but not really, and John wrote again and said he got the sense that his apology was not enough and he was apologizing again and he got no reply, but he heard that his second apology made it worse somehow.

John being careful about not telling the stories because people have misinterpreted him before (RW257)

From John’s position as the benchmark of what is sane and reasonable he could go for 45 minutes telling the story about how he was doing and saying reasonable things and this person, because of the many challenges she faces in life, misunderstood him both willfully and as a result of her own stresses. She is going through something that has nothing to do with him, she misread him, and he is also always a little bit of an asshole. He could tell the story from his perspective, and it is very entertaining, and he does believe it, but he is trying to zoom out and say: The details of the story aren't relevant to the question why he is at the center of these imbroglios all the time that have a common thread?

It is 100% possible that everybody in the world is crazy. He has emails from the people that are in the legal dispute with him and from this mom and from people on the internet and people that he used to podcast with, if you published them, the whole world would go: ”Wow, that sounds crazy!”, but the world also does things where they read things and go: ”This sounds a little funny, but it also sounds like they have a point!” John feels besieged right now by people and situations and he can't understand how he is there. Everything that has happened in the last year and a half, at a very basic place, he doesn’t understand how it came to this.

He bought this house, he had it surveyed by a professional surveyor, he got to know his neighbors and was nice to them, he explained that he had the property surveyed and that there were places where the old boundary line had clearly been lost and people had done things, had put things across the line, and now he had established it again and he was going to improve his property, hoping not to inconvenience them all. That just sounds as reasonable as a person could be, but now he is fighting a legal battle over ownership of property he paid for because they are asserting that it belongs to them, and the law somewhat supports their efforts. John can accept that, but the problem is that they want more. They are trying to take now a quarter of his property.

This mom that John is in a dispute with will not be satisfied until he has sat in a chair in front of her and she has lectured him for 2 hours on contemporary politics, but he is unwilling to do it. He is 53, he is not going to sit in a hard chair in front of somebody and have them lecture him because they felt insulted at a child's birthday party. He is giving these strange thumbnail sketches because for maybe the first time he is conscious… he has always been conscious that people listen to these shows and that he speaks out of turn or he speak too candidly.

John has some friends from Anchorage, and some mutual friend listened to the show and called up John’s old friends and said: ”He is talking about your dad!” and then they listened to the show and they didn't like how John talked about their dad (see RW244). The brother who was John’s friend ensured him it was no problem, but then their dad got sick and died and this was the thing that was on their mind while their dad was dying, that John was on a podcast talking about business deals in Anchorage in the 1980s and they are mad. John was just talking about history, kind of. These were real people, these are friends, but it is also the history of our time and John is not trying to profit off of gossip about your parents from 40 years ago.

Acting like an asshole vs. being an asshole (RW257)

Telling the stories of these things is easy for John, he could tell the story of this mom and the story of these people behind him and it would sound right and true and he would believe it, but there are people listening to the programs that are more dubious or skeptical about John as the protagonist in every story. Everyone is the protagonist of their own stories, but John has never been just trying to make himself into a comic book hero. The funny thing about storytelling is that at the end of a lot of the stories that they tell on these shows he is the goat, not the hero every time. A lot of the stories are about mistakes he has made, situations he has gotten in that sucked, but by telling all these stories where he is the goat, the loser, he has built up a costume around a character that…

John was talking to his daughter's mother the other night, he shrugged off some situation where he was like: ”Well, you know me, I am kind of an asshole!” - ”Sometimes you act like an asshole, but you are not an asshole, which is a massive difference! People react to you when you act like an asshole, but you are not an asshole!” John has been using that: ”I am an asshole!” thing for so long, but he wasn't clear of what distinction she was trying to make and he is still not sure what that means. It sounds like a compliment, but if he is not an asshole, what she is saying is that when there are a group of people standing around and somebody says: ”I got a Booboo!”, and four people go around the circle going: ”Oh, you got a Booboo!” and then it comes to him and he goes: ”Well, Booboos! This is the stuff of life! Suck it up, fuzzball!”, or whatever it is he says.

His daughter's mother is saying that he doesn't not have compassion for them or he is not actually callous about their feelings, he just acts like an asshole or performs like one, but that is not the same as being one, and a lot of times people mistake that behavior. These days there is so little subtlety and so little subtext allowed that a lot of people just assume that John is earnest in not caring about their Booboo. The next door neighbor wrote John a letter about how in 1989 his dad ran over his dog in his driveway and they buried the dog in the forest and that is one of the reasons that supposedly gives them an ownership claim over the land, this overgrown forest that they hadn't been in since 1989, but they pushed their way back into the bushes one time and buried their dead dog that their dad ran over. What a crazy email!

Maybe there was some expectation that John should have responded: ”Oh my God! I am so sorry about your dog! We should find the grave and put a marker there!”, but his reaction was like: ”Wow, if I owned every plot of land where I buried a dead pet. Shit! I would be Andrew Carnegie! I got dead pets buried all over the West!”, but that is not what that person is looking for and they have no other alternative but to come away from it thinking that John is a monster because he didn't respond to their emotional appeal, an emotional appeal that he felt was not genuine, but crazy and exploitative.

John has spent a lot of time training his brain to survey situations, establish himself as the benchmark, and then measure how much people are deviating from his mean and then assign them credibility based on how far from benchmark conditions they are. It took him a long time to understand and acknowledge emotional intelligence as a different metric, and to say: ”I will try and recalibrate how I measure people's intelligence to include the idea of emotional intelligence. I can't carry around nine yard sticks everywhere I go, but I do try to put together a composite picture of people and go: Oh, this person has a lot of emotional intelligence, but it is not exclusive of rational intelligence and I am willing to go on a journey with them. I may have that, too, for all I know!”

Emotional facts, people having their own truth with alternate facts (RW257)

Somebody said the other day, talking about someone, and they said: ”That person has their own emotional facts!” and they had a powerful moment as they both considered the term ”emotional facts”, which was a new coinage from where John was standing. The thought technology explained a lot, that a lot of people nowadays have emotional facts, which is in the family of Donald Trump alternate facts. You can call the things that aren't facts alternate facts, but that is not what they are. Emotional facts seems to be something that a lot of people are transacting now. It boils down to a ”This is my truth!” kind of thinking. They are not looking for The Truth because they either don't believe there is such a thing as the truth, or more likely they feel that the truth always puts them at a disadvantage for a variety of reasons, so they no longer want to be governed by it and they have a different truth. You hear it a lot now, people say it with pride, it is a form of self care or a liberation theology, almost.

There is a lot of good scholarship behind that initially: The dominant class creates the conditions of the world and then calls it the truth, and if you line up against the dominant class and its conditions, you get called a liar, but the whole postmodern experiment of having diverse truths… for a long time, since the 1990s, John has felt like that cat got out of the bag and no-one can get it, but you can't put the Genie back in the bottle. If one thing has ruined the world, it is the idea that in order to liberate ourselves from the dominant theology we introduced into the world a shattering of what truth is. We always had alternate versions of reality, but we fought to establish their legitimacy, not just took it over here and planted a flag and said: ”This is my campground, and over here, this is the truth. You can live over there in your campground!” We share a world and nobody is interested in shared truth anymore.

That is John’s Generation X guy clinging to an inner tube with a hole in it and shouting: ”Help!” over the dark waves, feeling like that dream sequence in Escape to Witch Mountain. ”Emotional facts” was new and very a simple way of phrasing it. It rang in John’s head like a bell because when you are dealing with people now and when you are in disputes with them, you have an obligation to figure out whether you are dealing with somebody who is trying to figure out what the facts are or whether you are dealing with somebody who has their own emotional facts. Mike Squires used to say: ”Emotions are real!”, but John always would say to him: ”But are they true? Emotions are real, yes, but are emotions true? You can do terrible things under the influence of an emotion that is real, but later on you wish you hadn't done because it turns out the emotion wasn't true!”

John is in disputes with people who are basing it on emotional facts, but they use the same language, they also have email, and they can put emotional facts into an email and if they are good enough writers it sounds like a reasonable proposition. This is an email just like the email you got from Delta Airlines. They all live in the same world of typewritten communication.

Delta Airlines also has emotional facts because they put him in a middle seat, and they are telling him that the flights are sold out and there are no other seats, but he can look on their app and see that there are some seats that are blocked off with X's that aren't chosen but you can't select them. John called the Airlines and said he can't sit in the middle seat if there is anything he can do, how can he get one of those blocked-off seats, and Delta's emotional facts are that those seats are not available. They are not taken, nor are they available, which feels as much an emotional attack as the worst girlfriend John ever had. Everywhere John looks in life there are three aisle seats that are ghosted, and the customer service agent tells him that they are afraid they can't help him.

John is already prone to arguing with himself and taking the antagonist's side in a dispute in his own head. He is just walking down the street and a voice in his head goes: ”Boy, you really fucked that up!” - ”What?” - ”You just walked past that person and they looked at you and you looked at them and then they didn't like how you looked at them. You blew it!” - ”Why? I was just walking down the street. I didn't do anything!” and then John the observer goes: ”Well, he got a point!” He is already doing that to himself all the time, siding with the bully over the innocent self, but he is also trying to do better and not just swagger through life with that terrible mentality of: ”Well, you either get it or you don't! You either like me or you don't!”

Seeking for the truth (RW257)

Plenty of people are telling him: ”You can't be a friend to everybody. Not everybody is going to like you. There is power in just saying: you like me or you don't!” and when he sees somebody who really lives that way: ”Some people don't like me. Don't care!” he admires it, but that is a bad look on him. It is too easy to say: ”You either like it or you don't!” and you end up being a small town Sheriff in a way. John doesn’t want people to have to pick sides to be his friend, he doesn’t want to be one side of a dispute where people are like: ”I really like John, I want to be over there with him, but in this case he is wrong!”

He has always believed that there was eventually a truth, not one from God, but one that we could agree upon, that we could settle upon, because there is a lot of evidence for that. History is full of evidence of people going: ”Why don't we settle on this?” - ”That works!” and bridges are built. John believes in it and has always wanted to be an agent of it, but you can’t be an agent of finding truth if you are like: ”Some people like me and some people don't!” That is not what somebody who is looking for truth says. It is something that someone looking for comfort or a place in the world or their own little 40 acres and a mule.

Somehow looking for truth, trying to figure out if he is the bad guy, John ends up in all these situations where he is like: ”Why am I fighting with you? I got the paper right here that says that it goes from here to there!” - ”That is not my emotional truth!” and now they are in a war. John also doesn't want to be a crusader.

They have been doing studies on twins, and one of the really popular things to study with separated twins is the whole family of morality. ”Is morality heritable? Do separated twins share a moral code and does that then extend to politics? Are you ethically and politically predetermined by your genes?” A lot of studies are suggesting that there is a heritable component to morality and to justice, and people that are comfortable with moral ambiguity and people that are not, that is an inheritable trait. John is very comfortable with moral ambiguity, and his daughter is not.

In talking to her about it and trying to get to know her and talking to his other relatives John knows where she got it. Her mother is very easy going, but scratch the surface and she has a very strict code. John’s mom does as well! John’s daughter did not learn it, she had it before she could talk and John always wondered and marveled at it. His dad was very comfortable with moral ambiguity although he spent his life fighting for the underdog, but he also knew that there were a lot of stories in the naked city.

It is a trick to be very comfortable with moral ambiguity and also believe that you are working together to seek truth because most people equate truth with moral rigidity: ”This is true and this is false! This is so and this is not!” and John doesn't think that is true. In order to find an agreeable truth, an agreed-upon truth, you got to bring moral flexibility to the question, and these are not those times. John is not even talking about politics and online, but about the way he interacts with his neighbors.

John doesn’t have any expectation that anyone has any common goal anymore. The goal is not one that is held in common, but the personal is political, all politics are personal, and every single issue both explodes out into the widest possible cultural reach and then collapses back into a hot black mega gravity in each person's soul: ”Hey, can you pass the salt?” - ”You asking me for the salt is assault!” - ”Huh?” It is everywhere, and not just with people that you would deride as snowflakes, but everybody feels under siege.

The mass media culture that is providing everybody with their own individual binder of reasons to feel personally affronted. You can pick and choose, it doesn't matter what your politics are, what your religion is, or what your history is. You can find 50 things online that you can collate together as: ”These are my things that I am upset about and I am going to carry this with me, and every day every person I meet I am going to scan across this benchmark, not a benchmark of my own, not a benchmark of sanity, not a benchmark of truth or of cooperation, but a benchmark of conflict!” and everyone is a moral absolutist.

by jroemling

RW256 - Side Clothes

Sun, 21 Aug 2022 14:21:36 +0000

This week, Dan and John talk about:

Dan working his new tech job (Dan Benjamin)
Dan working at an aerospace company in 1998 (Dan Benjamin)
Formal vs casual clothes over time (Style)

The show title refers to people dressing more and more casual and people no longer expressing status through clothes.

Dan working his new tech job (RW256)

Everything is crazy around Dan. When people on a team work hard and then something happens, a bug or a glitch or a technical challenge that was not anticipated, and there is nothing you yourself can do, but the other person has to do it, that is holding things up and can be a stressor.

In the olden times Dan went to a corporate office and was sitting in a cube, and when you are working with other people they are in their cubes and you feel like you are working together. Zoom, Google Hangouts, Slack and things like that are helpful, but they only go so far. A lot of people in software development, design, writing, and other things tend toward introversion and for them it is a wonderful thing, they can be left alone to just do what they want to do and get it done and then see people when they want to see people.

Other people lean toward extraversion and they wish they could hang out with people and talk to people and they wind up sitting in coffee shops, which are unpleasant, generally speaking, because the barista is making noise of the grinding and the banging and you can't ever really get what you want, and although you are around other people but you don't know them and you are not talking to them. They are just sort of there. It is a weird time!

Dan working at an aerospace company in 1998 (RW256)

Dan currently has a C-level job title in a company that expects to grow, which typically means he would have an office with a door and a window or even a corner office. Can he picture himself in a tie, sitting behind a desk in an office with a big window and some chairs in front of his desk? He used to have that and he kind of liked it, but he was not in a CTO role at the time, but much lower. His second or third real corporate job out of college he wore a tie every day to work and dress shoes and slacks, sometimes a sport coat or even a suit, depending on who would be visiting the office.

Dan worked in an aerospace company at the headquarters where all the accounting and HR people were and he oversaw the network there and interconnected the network strategy stuff with the other people. They were on the 13th floor in downtown Orlando, you could look at the Sun Bank Center, it was a beautiful skyline and everything right there in the heart of downtown. It was called the Signature Plaza, and they had a tunnel tube thing that would lead from the parking garage into the building and when you would walk on it the whole thing would shake, and Dan always felt dangerous. It was a nice time, it was a good building, Dan had his own office, he had a beautiful window and he could shut the door and it was great and Dan never had that sense, not even in his own house, and this was in 1998.

John knew a lot of people out of college in the early 1990s that had jobs where they wore ties and worked in office buildings and it seems for sure that that world is gone, but they were 22 years old and already had a job, usually in computers, that was a job with some responsibility, but none of those people continues to wear a tie and work in an office. John’s daughter's mother was a C-level…

Formal vs casual clothes over time (RW256)

The times of wearing a suit and a hat outside are gone

Dan misses wearing nice clothes to an office, he misses the time when men wore suits and ties and fedora hats. His granddad wore a hat his entire life, so did his dad. If he was putting on a suit, he had a fedora that would match the suit, and if he was going out and about, even when he retired, he would wear a small Florida beach fedora thing. You dressed up and you cared and Dan misses that!

There is no going back, obviously, not even to whatever any of that symbolized. All that stuff symbolizes respect for your fellow person, it is a generosity in living in a city or in tight quarters with other people that you not take your shoes off in an airplane or in a church, and it felt for a while in the last decade, that the whole return to handmade clothes, people are going to start wearing nice things again, they are going to spend some money on a hat, that might be a kind of future, even though we knew that it was never going to be mass culture probably, but it was a way of saying you like nice things and in the end nice things are less expensive than buying tons of cheap things.

Although that still exists in pockets, it is like the return to vinyl: It is a very specific group of people that are acting out a romantic way of living, but surely there is a future where formality is reintroduced, but not representing what it did, representing something new and different. It is probably not going to have fedoras, but you can’t any get more casual than we are now. People wear pajamas outside now! When Dan was at the airport not long ago he saw so many people in line for the TSA in freaking pajama pants! His general rule is: ”If I have or would sleep in it, I don't wear it out!”

Dan has a class of T-shirts in his closet that are for house only, and if the house was on fire and he needed to get out he might change the shirt first, that is how he feels about these shirts. John has gotten pushback over this topic for the last ten years from people that basically say: ”Why shouldn't I be comfortable?” People that listen to the show that are regulars and fans will continue to push back on this forever because being comfortable is a priority. As John drives down the street he sees people in pajamas, and it is not a question of the fabric or the cut, they are just pajamas, they have elastic waistbands, they are made out of flannel, they are plaid, and they are not outside pants.

It can’t get more casual than it has become today, getting ready and dressed even if you work from home

John doesn’t think there is more casual than that. There is less than that, there is swimsuits, there is literally robes and underwear. There are probably people somewhere in a community college right now sitting in class in a fleece robe with nothing on underneath except underwear, and no-one would dare say: ”Hey, you can't wear that to class!” In the inevitable way of human beings and style and fashion and the times, that will change.

Dan may sound like a super out of touch old person, but it is changing for the worst, it is not getting better. When he first started working from home back when very few people were working from home, decades ago, one of the things that was effective for him is to preserve a little bit of a routine and take a shower and get dressed or even just put on clothing and don't stay in your sweatpants or your underwear. Get dressed, wash yourself, do the things that you would do, and then begin your day! You feel better! You are going to feel more productive! You are going to feel that there has been some transition between person in the bedroom and person doing a job.

Dan would focus better, he would feel better, he would be more alert and attentive, and those things mattered. He was not putting on a suit and tie to sit in front of his computer in his own house, but he was getting dressed, he would put on a pair of jeans and a shirt, and what that led to was that if somebody would text him and ask if he wanted to go grab coffee later or lunch, or he needed to go to the bank or the grocery store he was already ready for it and that helped him with the procrastination part that encourages the hermit life of just staying inside more and more and more.

But if you are sitting there ready to go, all you got to do is put your shoes on and someone says: ”Hey, let's grab a coffee!” - ”I will be there in 15 minutes!” It is easy! When Dan started doing that it really changed things up. But now it is getting worse and people just wear those pajamas out, sitting there in their dirty sweatpants and their flip flops and their chipped toenails, it is nasty!

We are not at the end of history

We always have the bias in our present moment of thinking that we are at the end of history. It is inevitable that you think that the present moment is the end of history, which is true if you believe time is a linear thing, but it also feels like now is the culmination of history. We make that mistake all the time: ”This is it! This is the culmination of everything that has come before!” We necessarily are living in a time that is a product of all the information, all the science, everything that humans have ever done. It led us to here, and that is a bias that isn't true.

Everything that has come before, we can look at it, we have access to it, or we can interpret it, but where we are now is not the inevitable result of all of that. We go up blind alleys, we arrive at dead ends, we turn around and go back, things fall apart, it is scientific. For a while we make a faint in this direction, the arts and crafts movement of the 1890s, and then: ”Oh no! In fact it is not going to be that, but there is going to be a world war!” and we are going to come back from that and it is going to be Bauhaus. This is just in the last 120 years.

It is important to remember that this is not the end of everything. Socrates does not culminate in someone waiting at the bus in pajamas playing a game on their phone, it is not a linear progression. This is why science fiction always gets it wrong, trying to prognosticate, trying to imagine what comes next, because you never can, but you can't get more casual, and so it has got to get more formal.

The movie Gattaca having people wear nice 1940s clothes

Dan thinks this goes along with the movie Gattaca, an American dystopian science fiction thriller film that presents a biopunk version of a future society driven by eugenics where potential children are conceived through genetic selection to ensure they possess the best hereditary traits of their parents.

In this world, depending on how much money you have you get to control a certain degree of your child's genetic traits. Of course you want to eliminate all diseases, all imperfections, baldness, needing glasses, having great skin. Everybody in this world, aside from most people being genetically good, there are some people like Ethan Hawke's character, who are just conceived the old fashioned way where two people just have sex, not just for fun, but to conceive, like: ”Wow!” He is a regular person and he has problems, just like regular people have problems, and he is trying to hide them because based on your genetic profile you get access to tons of different things in the world. You get a better job if you are better genetically, you get to live in a better apartment.

In this movie they all dress the way that we used to dress in the 1940s, meaning suits and ties and hats and things like that. The cars that they drive also look 1940-ish, which in this movie wasn't just a stylistic choice, but it was also a choice that made a statement about the way that society had gone and they have a morally uptight perspective which is reflected in the clothes with a very clear social hierarchy, and all those things are meant to be seen as bad. It is dystopian in a lot of ways, even though it is very organized, it is not a pretty picture of the future but one that eliminates a lot of people's freedoms and implies a lot of discrimination. And it would not be a fun place to live. There is surveillance and monitoring everywhere, they are constantly checking your DNA every place you walk in. It is not a fun world, except for the clothing.

They are doing exactly what John said that we might do, have a rebound where people are going to start dressing nicely again and caring about how they look and making themselves look good and trying harder to look good. Styles are changing and there isn't really a style anymore. When Dan went to High School you had the jocks, you had the metal heads, the nerds, and you could tell what somebody was because if they were wearing a Megadeath baseball shirt you knew who they hung out with and you knew a lot about them. If you played Dungeons and Dragons, you might get beat up. Now all of those things have completely changed. You can listen to any music and there is no indication of what music you listen to based on how you look, whether you play D&D is not obvious.

Dan wants to think that John is right, that people will be trending toward dressing up again and looking nice again. He would love it if he could put on a black suit, white shirt and a black tie and dress shoes and walk around like that during the day and people would not think he was working in a mortuary. He would do that! John thinks Dan could absolutely do that and it would blow people away and everybody would be super excited to see somebody in a trim suit, because Dan can wear a suit well.

In SciFi movies everybody is wearing jumpsuits

If you think back to the SciFi of 1980, like of Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, Dune, the Disney movie The Black Hole, Star Wars even, most people in Science Fiction were wearing jumpsuits. In Buck Rogers in the 25th Century everybody was wearing 1980s Lycra disco jumpsuits. In the most recent movie Dune everyone is in a military outfit, but they are all basically jumpsuits. Star Trek, every single person is dressed identically, the only difference is in the color of their tunic. There was something in the air, all of this started in the 1960s, probably as a result of watching fighter pilots wearing flight suits and astronauts wearing astronaut suits, everybody got it into their head that the future was people wearing jumpsuits.

The only problem with the jumpsuit is that they are hard to get into and out of. Putting on the pants part isn't hard, but getting those sleeves up over your shoulders? If we can resolve the jumpsuit tailoring issue primarily, meaning that for a jumpsuit to look good it has got to look a little tailored, you don't want to look like you are Violet Beauregarde or Veruca Salt (characters from Charlie and The Chocolate Factory), the one who blows up. You don't want to turn into a blueberry, so has to look tailored, but it also got to be non-restrictive. Maybe jumpsuits need an extra zipper, Velcro is not the solution.

We may be headed into that future because all of those people in science fiction that are wearing jumpsuits, we don't look at those costumes and think: ”Oh man, they have totally given up! They are just walking around in pajamas!”, but Ww think the opposite: ”Whoa, they are so tailored, they are so manicured, they are so clean and fresh and formal!” A lot of science fiction of the 1960s/70/80s presumes a degree of social leveling where none of those people are wearing jewelry. Star Wars introduces jewelry in the later / earlier episodes, episode one, two and three, for lack of a better term, the Jar Jar Binks stuff, we get an introduction to Padme and a world where people are wearing jewelry.

In the first three Star Wars, other than the awards where Chewy doesn't get one, all the clothes are practical. Even all of Leia's outfits, minus slave-Leia of course, that costume deserves its own franchise, they are practical and unadorned and socially level costuming of what we imagined the future was going to be, where there was still rank, everybody has rank, the Empire always has those little Chiclets on people's shirts, throughout the Star Trek movies all of a sudden kirk was and Admiral and he got more bling on his shirt, shirts got blingy, they became tunics rather than shirts.

That is probably the next direction, or at least a direction: The desire to be formal, a lot of people like that. It is native to human beings. Status and class, at least post-Marx is something we are always trying to eliminate or at least mute.

People no longer realizing that they are dressing down

You go out to eat at a nice restaurant and people are in the nice restaurant dressed the same way that they dress if they are at a Chili's or a Taco Bell: ”Why not? I want to be comfortable!” - ”It should be an event and there is a way to commemorate the event!” Dan has a Google Nest Hub and he will ask it about the news in the morning, and recently there was an interview with a dude who was an expert of some kind, and he was sitting in his house because everyone is in their house, talking over some video chat that they recorded, and he was wearing the T-shirt he slept in and you could tell. ”You are on national television, maybe even international, millions of people are going to see you in this!”

In most Jewish synagogues it is a sign of respect that you dress nicely, so you are going to wear your nice clothes. People who are Christian denominations for many, many years would also wear their Sunday best because they want to look nice, and then there was this: ”It is casual!” and it was jeans and a T-Shirt, and that is the end of that then. The last bastion of hope gone!

Part of the world we are living in right now is that the early tech people thought of themselves as revolutionaries and were coming from a libertarian revolutionary mindset where tech was going to set us free, tech was leveling, it was accessible to everybody eventually so that a poor person and a rich person were going to have access to the same information and information meant everything, so there was within the tech entrepreneurial class a combination of:

”We are all engineers, so none of us are thinking about fashion anyway. We also think of ourselves as revolutionaries, so we are not about expressing status, we are about the opposite, and as we get more and more successful, we are positing ourselves against what we perceive to be IBM culture of the 1960s/70s which we think of as ties and white shirts and the mentality of that is stultifying and against innovation because everybody is so worried about these tight suits that they are not letting it all hang out and away we go!” It all combined into the tech mythos of the 1990s, casting back at the 1970s/80s.

In the 1970s/80s those computer people were like: ”Oh yeah, they are over there doing that, keep them in a corral somewhere and feed them paste!”, but in the 1990s when all that stuff was really ascendant, all of a sudden we started to see photographs of Paul Allen looking like a Teddy bear, none of them had ever seen shampoo, it was the glory days. That produced Generation X tech CEOs who continued in Steve Jobs wearing very casual clothes.

Steve Jobs maybe was the last guy that had his own uniform. Everybody else, Jack from Twitter, Ding Dong from Facebook, the SnapChat dudes, all of them Sergey and the other one, they all wear T-shirts and jeans, just casual dudes, because they are still part of that revolution, except they are putting themselves as revolutionaries against the thing that doesn't exist anymore. There is no IBM culture, IBM and Xerox are not setting the tone for corporate America.

Then corporate America, which is just a slavish bunch of drones, see Jack in his T-shirt with his long beard, and they want that, too, whatever that energy is, because it seems to be making money. First it is casual Fridays and then everybody has gone to shit. How does Elon Musk dress? Presumingly in black T-shirts, or does he have tunics? His uniform seems to be some kind of jacket, sometimes a leather jacket or a black sport coat or suit jacket with a white shirt, which is a real college dude from the 1990s idea.

All of this is bullshit! You look at Zuckerberg and you just want to kick sand in his face. That is intentional, he could look any way he wants. He could have had a mustache transplant. He could have angel wings. But he makes himself look like the last kid to get picked on the softball team because he thinks it camouflages the fact that he is worth billions of dollars.

But even he donned a suit and tie when he had to go to court and talk about Facebook. That is the one thing that is changing: We used to say: ”For my job I wear a T-shirt and jeans and to go out to a dinner I wear a T-shirt and jeans, but if I have to go on TV or if I have to go to court or if I am going to a wedding, of course then I am going to dress up!” People know that they are dressing down, and that is what has changed: People no longer know that they have dressed down. They are just getting dressed in what they have, it doesn't even occur to them that there is something else.

Dan going to an Edward Tufte conference

17 years ago Dan was going to some kind of… Edward Tufte is a genius, an artist, a statistician. He is focused on usability, he runs something at Yale, he is a big deal, very smart, super academic. Dan was part of a remote team of software developers, all working in different places, and they were brought together by their boss, the VP of technology or something, to go to some Tufte conference in Arizona in Phoenix or Scottsdale. Dan packed clothes, mainly jeans and button-front shirts, what people call button-down shirts, which is erroneous, by the way. A button-down shirt is a shirt with buttons going up the front and a button-down collar, but usually when people say button-down shirt they mean a shirt with buttons going up the middle in the front.

The people that Dan was with were all in T-shirts and jeans and everyone gave him such a hard time about being so dressed up. Here is a picture of him when he was a freshman in college, wearing the same exact shirt and a pair of jeans and Converse. This is just what he has always worn, he probably started wearing it when he was a bag boy at Publix when I was 13/14 years old. They are versatile shirts. You unbutton a couple of top buttons and you look casual, you roll up the sleeves you are casual, you untuck it you look good, you got to be a little bit more dressed up you tuck it in. You do a French tuck. They are versatile, lightweight and breathable, but he received backlash for wearing a shirt that was somehow out of touch because 15 years ago, wearing a button-front shirt you were out of touch somehow. Dan couldn't believe it, this group of a dozen people freaking out.

Casual clothes are not a social leveler

In the 20th century we started to privilege a mask of social leveling that nobody actually believed. It is not in our hearts at all. We do not believe Jeff Bezos is just one of us because he is wearing ripped jeans that cost $900. He decided at some point he was going to look like Pit Bull and he is expressing real wealth by being really in shape, which is a way that people express status now, they still are just wearing T-shirts, but the fact that they are really in shape is a thing that is expensive. It is still possible to be a working class person and be in shape, but the working class now suffers from sugar malnutrition, and to really eat well and be really fit takes a lot of work and time.

The idea that we actually are status-leveled because everybody is dressed casually is totally baloney, and we all know it. When these nerds put on suits and ties to go testify before Congress, seeing Zuckerberg in a suit and tie is a performance that actually is contemptuous. He puts on the suit and tie not to be respectful of Congress, but in a way as a diss: ”Oh, I am going to wear your little monkey suit! I could show up here in a gold Lamé jumpsuit with a headdress, but I am going to wear your little cheap suit, your J. Crew suit, because that is the dumb game that you are playing, that I am seven dimensions higher than!” John doesn’t think it is in any way a sign of respect when these guys put on suits, but it is the opposite.

It says that to the world and to all their acolytes: ”Oh look! He put on a suit! LOL!” It is already 10 years old that there was a certain Jack Donaghy worship in the world: ”What am I? A farmer?” (quote from 30 Rock) Everybody loves that quote. Everybody loves the fact that he dressed really well, that he looked great in a suit, and that was an expression of that 10 years ago idea in men's fashion that maybe it is a renaissance and we are all going to dress like Edward the Prince of whoever he ended up being.

John doesn’t think we are ever going to go back to tweed and saddle shoes, but some person is going to acknowledge their own status and we are right now in the absolute nadir of fake disavowal of status. Everybody is scrambling over each other to deny that they have power, to deny that they have wealth because it is unseemly, it is seen as anti-Liberal, while wealth consolidates like crazy! It is a mask, a defense against it. If Zuckerberg walked around wearing a costume like Galtieri or like Franz Ferdinand. We would hate him more, that is his presumption, because he would be flamboyantly expressing his wealth. That is why he lives in some dumb McMansion in a suburb of Palo Alto instead of, as John has suggested many times, living on an aircraft carrier or in a giant dirigible that just floats over Palo Alto. That shows some imagination! He has none!

If you look at Andrew Carnegie, he is wearing a black wool three piece suit, buttoned all the way up to the top with a silk cravat every day of his life, and that wasn't unusual and probably the guy that was cleaning his chimney was also wearing a three piece suit.

Everybody in South Korea taking great pride in their appearance

When Dan visited South Korea 10-15 years ago he was in bigger cities like Seoul and Busan, not only were most people dressed very well when they went out, and of course you have your salary man type person going to their job, everyone was in suits, and the people who worked in blue collar jobs, whether they were taxi cab drivers or gardeners or whatever, they all took great pride in their appearance and how they looked. The guy who was literally shoveling mulch wouldn't be in a suit, but he was in clean pressed slacks with nice shoes and a dress shirt and gloves and his hair was quaffed and it was obvious that he took great pride in his appearance. The whole concept of uniforms, even if your uniform is a suit and tie, there is a great respect for that. Things have probably changed in the last decade, but Dan was really struck by that.

On the weekend, when they went to see an ancient Buddhist temple and some rock carvings, all the men were still wearing suits and ties on a Saturday at 3pm doing something completely recreational. That seemed weird, but yet it was somehow consistent. That is his position and his station in the world, of course he was going to wear that!

Being proud of your social station, Punk Rock having had a formal style

The pride of acknowledging your station is also a thing that we lost in this fake presentation of social leveling. The idea that a working class person would have pride in their social station and would dress accordingly out of a sense of: ”This is who I am!” in the same way that a noncommissioned officer wears their uniform with as much if not more dignity and formality than any officer ever would.

If you think about the early days of Punk Rock, although the ultimate expression of contempt for the IBM Xerox style of fashion, Punk Rock was such a mannered and incredibly formal style. The amount of work and costuming and signification in those outfits is to the level of Franz Ferdinand, not the band. The medals, the badges, and incorporating scars, even! It was almost a warrior culture. Even Punk Rock at some point along the way that costuming got defanged by the eventually ubiquitous black T-shirt and jeans that became the costume of hardcore. Now if you were a band that showed up with your hair spiked and ripped clothes held together with safety pins, all of which was very mannered but also - if you listen to the mythology - ”Oh, my shirt was ripped and so I had to stick it together with staples!” - ”No, yes, okay, sure, but also: No!” There were charity shops then also where you could get fine clothes for cheap.

But if you showed up as a band in enough high style it would really stand out and it would be exciting, but you would have to be good in order to justify the costume. Imagine a David Bowie now! Imagine a Ziggy Stardust now! It is just not going to happen! It might because there are examples, there is a Missy Elliott, people that step forward and say: ”You are going to have to accommodate me in your world!” and obviously Bowie was an outlier even in his time. Even when Robert Plant stepped on stage in super-tight blue jeans and no shirt at all, his body expressed more wealth and status than 1000 uniforms because ultimately your body is your wealth in a lot of ways.

How can we get more formal again?

We can't get more casual, and how do we get formal again? Maybe there needs to be actual social leveling for a period, what a lot of people are hoping for, which is some form of redistribution of wealth, which is going to be violent. There is no version of redistribution of wealth that isn't violent in some way. Not preaching civil war, but no-one gives up wealth voluntarily unless they are middle-class Liberals who are like: ”No, take my status, please!”, but that is insincere, too. No one sincerely surrenders their status unless they are Pete Seeger, and Pete Seeger didn't either. He is on magazine covers, it is not like Pete Seeger went to work making molasses.

But once there is again an honest expression of what is an innate human desire to possess status and to express it in ways that are easy to parse. Right now it is a blue checkmark, the number of followers you have is as much an expression of status as anything in the world. It is a raw number, it is a kloud score. Basically: ”What is your kloud score and what is your blue check mark?” and we don't have to wear a head dress. It is going to be avatars, weirdly, although John is doing the science fiction thing which is trying to predict what it is going to be and it is almost never going to be that. We think: ”Oh no, it is going to be avatars and to have the right headdress on your avatar is going to cost money because it is an NFT!” - ”No, that is 2022! You think we are at the end of history and 2050 is going to give one good goddamn about avatars!”, but just looking at his daughter and the way she gets dressed in the morning, she wants her clothes to say something, and John gets out of her way because she is onto something!

by jroemling

RW255 - Moving Boulders

Sun, 21 Aug 2022 14:06:41 +0000

This week, Dan and John talk about:

Problem with the Patreon bonus content (Patreon)
Dan getting a new tech job as CTO of a startup (Dan Benjamin)
John imagining being on some board, which hasn’t happened yet (Dreams and Fantasies)
Internet of Things (Technology)
John having gas-powered landscaping in the background, electric chainsaws (New House)
Listeners from Jerusalem, the Mezuzah (Podcasting)
John not letting his body heal completely and screwing it up again and again (Aging)
John having a giant boulder in his ravine, trying to move rocks (New House)
Houses made out of brick vs houses made out of wood (Architecture)

The show title refers to John trying to move a boulder in his ravine.

Problem with the Patreon bonus content (RW255)

Dan spends some time at the beginning of the episode explaining the problems he had with integrating Fireside with Patreon in order to serve custom feeds to subscribers. First the Patreon API is buggy and doesn't work well, then many listeners didn't have a tier because there were no tiers in the very beginning of their Patreon, and then podcast apps would not recognize the custom feed but revert to the main feed. John is also quite frustrated with the Patreon app and the backend systems, but says that it is better than nothing and it has helped him a lot.

Also, the show sounds a lot better now that they are using CleanFeed instead of Skype. It makes it easier to record the whole thing.

Dan getting a new tech job as CTO of a startup (RW255)

Fireside is doing well and keeps Dan pretty busy. Also his tech job is going well. Dan’s friend James Boggs who was at Apple for 17 years where he ran iTunes podcasts and then Apple Podcast, he and Scott Simpson are homeboys. Dan saw a tweet from him in which he said: ”Thanks for 17 great years, Apple! Peace out!” which was surprising because it is a big deal leaving a place you have been for 17 years. Dan reached out to him and asked what he was working on and James replied he was looking around, seeing where things are, which is code for: ”I am doing a startup!” - ”Whatever it is you are doing, I always enjoyed working with you!” because Dan had known him through the Apple Podcasts stuff way back in the early days. ”If you are doing something cool, tell me! I would love to learn about it!”

A few weeks later he reached out: ”Were you serious when you said you might want to work with me on something?” - ”Yeah, of course!” and he told Dan about his vision and what he wanted to build and Dan was pretty impressed and wanted to work with him, helping them out, consulting, doing a little development work, and then James offered him a bigger more involved, engaged role and Dan liked that, actually! It sounded fascinating, challenging and fun, and he still has Fireside despite having people that he is paying to help him with it, and now Dan just works constantly non-stop seven days a week all the time, but he likes it. His title is Chief Technology Officer and it is not his first time being a CTO.

John imagining being on some board, which hasn’t happened yet (RW255)

John is still not a C-level anywhere and he is not on any boards. If you had asked him eight years ago if he would be on the board of a company by 2022 he would have given it a 50:50 chance, but he doesn’t understand how things work and no-one has offered him a seat on their board and likewise John hasn’t really pursued a seat on anybody's board. The only C-suite job he would be qualified for is CEO. He is a strategist and every other C-level job seems to require that you have a specific set of skills, whereas CEO feels more like a general set of skills. A lot of those skills he does possess, some of them maybe not. He doesn’t have an MBA, for instance, but that also insulates him from having a lot of jargon-based business ideas.

John is more a board member because you have responsibility and agency, but you can turn that on and off when you are out of the meeting you are not expected to do anything. You can bring some vision to bear and John is a very good listener and he would just listen and figure out what is going on and everybody has an agenda, but he wouldn't have an agenda, his agenda would be to make the company do the best job possible, but that is not how business works. People feel obligated to give those board seats to investors and other people who are not helping. Investors aren't helping. You know what they want and why they are there, they just want to ask the marketing people over and over again why they are not bringing in more Glengarry leads, but they want to cut their budget at the same time.

What you need is a visionary on your board, somebody that wears tweed. Nobody wears tweed anymore, but you want one guy on the board that is wearing tweed and a rumpled bow tie. Every spy movie has one rumpled flamboyant tweedy guy up in intelligence headquarters, that is how you know a thing is serious. There is a reason he is here: For the nutball opinion!

Internet of Things (RW255)

John is convinced that in the current war in Ukraine both parties are going to start weaponizing the Internet of things. Why wouldn't they? If the Russians were feeling like they were getting pushed out of Crimea, why wouldn't they make all of your smart light bulbs start turning on and off in San Francisco, just to annoy you! Probably most people haven't changed their password three times this week, which would be required for safety. Without that, smart light bulbs are extremely vulnerable to attack because they put a worm into your firmware. That is how they get you!

John is going low tech, every single one of his light bulbs is dumb as a brick, as far as he knows. Somebody could have snuck some stuff into his light bulbs, but he wouldn't know about it because he doesn’t have one of those scanners that you hold next to the lights and see if there is a bug in it.

John having gas-powered landscaping in the background, electric chainsaws (RW255)

It is raining in Seattle and yet the landscaping company that handles the landscaping for the big development across the street, they come periodically and all of their landscaping equipment is gasoline powered. They still are using gas powered blowers and gas powered trimmers, and when they come it is a full 4 hours of suburban two-stroke landscaping motors while they manicure this place so that it looks like A Child’s Garden of Verses, which is a suburban problem that you don't have in the city. There you have people's car alarms going off and people screaming in the middle of the night, which seems intolerable until you get out here where you have people walking around with tiny high-revving gas powered two cycle motors removing micrometers of plant life to keep everything square. Something about that makes John just madder than anything!

There are electric machines now that work pretty darn good. You can have an electric set-up on the back of your landscaping truck, switch the batteries out. John has an electric freaking chainsaw that can get him through a six inch log. If you can have an electric chainsaw, you can sure as chuckadoodles have an electric leaf blower! John takes his battery powered chainsaw all the way down in the ravine, he has it next to him all day, if he needs to chainsaw something, it is right there, the he puts it in the garage, doesn’t take the battery out and charges it again, just leaves it in there.

Three days later he needs to take the chainsaw with him again and it works all day again for a second day! It is phenomenal. and it wasn't expensive! On one level we are living in the future, it is 2001 A Space Odyssey in chainsaw land. Who even knew? We were promised jet packs. Actually, we were promised battery powered chainsaws, and: ”Wow! Hallelujah!” A lot of listeners probably don't use chainsaws that much, but in the Northwest there are chainsaws that are 6ft tall, literally. John has never used one of those. Out on the Peninsula, down in the county, there are Stihl chainsaw dealers that look like motorcycle dealers and some of those chainsaws are terrifying to consider even lifting. John has always admired those.

Growing up as a kid, there was a lot of timber industry out here, a certain pair of boots and a certain kind of chainsaw. It was like putting on your Mandalorian armor. John always thought a chainsaw was something that you graduated into and he has had gas-powered chainsaws and there is surely somebody listening who is sneering at a battery powered chainsaw and they are caressing their 4-foot tall Stihl chainsaw.

Listeners from Jerusalem, the Mezuzah (RW255)

You never know who is listening to your podcast! John hears from people all the time who tell him they are listening from Jerusalem, which is wonderful and John wishes he knew more and he wants to hear their podcast! The number of chainsaws in Jerusalem is probably very low compared to the number of chainsaws in King County, Washington. People there surely have another thing that they reminisce over and say: "When I grow up I want the biggest Mezuzah there is!”, although size is not one of the ways you assess its quality. There are all kinds, some made of silver, some made out of plastic, but that doesn't really matter, except the nicer houses or buildings or edifices are going to have nicer ones.

There is a commandment found in the book of Deuteronomy 6:9 that says: ”and thou shalt write them upon the door posts of thy house and on thy gates!”, which is the reason for the Mezuzah, the item affixed at an angle to the doorpost of a Jewish home. The Hebrew word Mezuzah actually means doorpost, but over time it has evolved to mean the doorpost and what is affixed to it. It contains a tightly rolled piece of parchment made from the skin of a ritually clean animal with handwritten words from Deuteronomy, the 5th of the 5 books of Moses.

Super-observant Jews are going to have one in every doorway of their house except the bathroom because every time you go through a doorway you are supposed to think about it. Like John’s old friend who said: ”Every time you get a drink of water out of a drinking fountain I want you to think of me when you see a particular thing at the bottom of the drinking fountain!” - ”You are a nerd!” (see RL268), but still 30 years later John remembers it. John’s Covenant with God comes up in conversation occasionally, not in an insignificant amount. He thought about it yesterday, but thinking about it every time you go through a door? You wouldn't think of anything else!

The analogy of it with a chainsaw is probably not equivalent, but if you are a young person in Israel, you get to a certain age, they give you an M16, do you get to keep that M16 after you are no longer in the game? Is there one in every closet? Dan hopes not. John thinks that is the principle, if you are going to invade Israel you are going to have to deal with an Uzi in every closet. There is not a chainsaw in every closet in the Northwest.

John not letting his body heal completely and screwing it up again and again (RW255)

John was chainsawing yesterday and the day before and he has ruined his body again. He has a bad tennis elbow, and he will let it heal and get right to the point where it barely hurts anymore and then he goes down and chainsaws a bunch of things and lifts a bunch of heavy trees and logs and does some training montage all day and then he screwed everything up again, his tennis elbow hurts and everything hurts and it takes him a couple of days to recuperate and then he is halfway through a project, he got all these things torn up and even though he hurts he will have to go down and finish it because he can't bear the half-finished project down there and that day is where he really screws himself.

Dan works out, but he tries not to injure himself, and being 49 years old and working out is different from being 29 or even 39 years old and working out. He used to be able to go in there and give it 100% all the time. Now if he goes as hard as he can go the potential for getting hurt is there and he tries to avoid that now with slightly lower rates because you are going to have your gains, but you don't want to have them at the expense of getting hurt. You can get hurt in stupid ways, like tweak something in your neck when you are doing something else and that is going to hurt really bad for a week and you have to let a massage therapist person work on it and you are in pain and you are not sleeping well.

John having a giant boulder in his ravine, trying to move rocks (RW255)

That definitely happens to John. The work he is doing is very gratifying, but then you encounter a rock, as he did a couple of days ago. There is a giant Boulder in his ravine, a glacial anomaly that was brought there many thousands of years ago. It is extremely large. If you were to try and move it, you would need to build a road, drive a huge crane on a truck, dig underneath this thing until you could put a sling under it, it would require a team of people and a giant piece of machinery to get this rock out of here. You wouldn't want it out because it is a killer rock, blue and green and big enough to climb up on top of, three people could sit on it and not touch each other.

When John discovered this rock it was covered with plant life, so nobody had seen it in a dozen years. He pulled the plants off of it and there was this big rock, the only one in the whole property. In the Northwest there are a few glacial anomalies. Some of these rocks are as big as houses. In Seattle in a neighborhood there are little pocket parks and then there is this giant two story boulder and nobody thinks about them because anywhere you go there are rocks in parks, like in Central Park there is all that exposed rock that is a feature of Central Park and if you grew up there of course there is all this rock sticking out of the grass. These boulders are not bedrock, but they are a giant huge rock that only a glacier could have moved.

John started to dig around this rock because he wanted to see more of it, he wanted more of it out of the dirt. It had dirt piled up all over it by centuries of avalanche. The more of the rock you see, the more phenomenal it is, but deep under the dirt there turned out to be another rock that had cleaved from the larger rock. John got down around this rock and then the idea came into his head that maybe he can move this rock. It was still very big, but maybe he could move it, although he didn’t need to move it, but he has never seen a rock he didn't want to try and move, it is intrinsic to man's relationship to a rock!

He dug up this very large rock and he was in a situation again where he was alone in the forest, there was a rock that is too big to move, and he set about trying to move the rock. Talk about tweaking your back, talk about giving yourself pain in the neck!He loves the rock and part of wanting to move it is out of love because he wants to see all sides of it and he wants to interact with it and put it somewhere else. It has been resting there for hundreds or thousands of years, and now he was going to move it over here where we can see it.

John ended up moving this rock at great expense to his body. He thankfully did not hurt himself in a permanent way because a big rock can screw you up if you get it halfway out of a hole and then it falls back in and you got a body part underneath it. Then John had a big hole where the rock had been and he didn't want there to be a hole. This is just what he is doing when he doesn’t have responsibilities. He could be doing a lot of other things, like painting, writing manifestos.

Dan has no interest in moving rocks, he doesn’t think: ”What if that rock was over there?” Sometimes as he drives around the Hill Country in Austin and if you dig down a couple of feet you get rock. Austin is just a giant rock! That is why there are almost no basements anywhere in this part of Texas. Parts of Texas Loop 360, a road called Capital of Texas Highway, has areas where it was clearly blasted away years and years and years ago to make the road from just giant rocks, a hill that might be a solid rock, and detonating Dynamite into the sides of them to maybe this seems fun.

John is not trying to break any rocks, but the rocks he has are manageable, a lot of them are the size of a large watermelon, and those are movable in a strongman way. You can't lift them, but you can push them and roll them. When you get to one that is the size of a county fair winning pumpkin, those are too big for one person or even two people to move, but the danger is the ones right in between watermelon and a large pumpkin, this middle ground where you look at a rock and think: ”I bet I could move that! If it was just a little rounder, I could get it going, but it is not because it has a flat side.”

Houses made out of brick vs houses made out of wood (RW255)

A lot of the new development in Austin, the houses are made of rock. When you think about McMansions in the Austin area, there are whole neighborhoods where it seems like they just took the rock out of the ground and built big houses out of them.

Almost every house in Washington is made of fir, because that is what they had here. Fir trees all around! When John is looking out his window there is Fir, Fir, Fir, Hemlock, Fir, Alder, Cedar, Cedar, Fir, Maple. They don't have any hardwood, there is no Oak or Southern Pine, for obvious reasons, it is right in the name. All the houses are made out of softwood and if you went all through Seattle and counted the brick houses, there would not be that many. There are some, but they don't make brick here and anything you build out a brick you have to bring the brick in. There are other cities in America where everything is brick. Everything is brick in Philadelphia and some of it has the vines and some of it doesn't. There are some old half wooden colonial structures, but a lot of East Coast places all brick. It is so interesting to John what it would be like to live in a brick house.

by jroemling

Seattle Living

Sat, 07 May 2022 14:47:38 +0000

Fold

Table of Contents

John’s warehouse loft apartment between Pike and Pine with walls from old windows (RW160)

John's farm house on Rainier View

Millennial Girlfriend wanting John to sell his house and buy a house together (RW160)

John's current mid-century modern house in Normandy Park

This page is about John's apartments and houses in Seattle where he lived after he moved back from Alaska in 1991.

John’s warehouse loft apartment between Pike and Pine with walls from old windows (RW160)

When John was in his 20s he lived in a warehouse loft in Seattle on 11th Avenue between Pike and Pine, which then was Capitol Hill, but not any part of it that anybody would want to go to. It was just a no-man's-land while today it is the center of the zone. John built that apartment! Two days before he moved in it was still a warehouse, but they put walls and electricity in it themselves.

The owner had bought the building on a 100 year lease for $1 million and John did not understand why you would lease a building for 100 years. How does someone inherit that? It didn't register with him that the guy who was doing this was already 40 and in 50 years he would be 90 and he could hand it down to a beneficiary who was 40 years old at the time of his death who would live to be 90 also and the lease would still be there.

100 years is a long time! When John was 26 he thought 100 years later he would still be living there. At the time, paying $1 million for this place seemed crazy, but now it is a sprawling warehouse with probably six businesses and 25 enormous loft apartments and he probably makes $1 million a month in rent!

When John was younger this warehouse loft was his dream style of living because it was a completely raw space that seemed urban and you could make it whatever you wanted. If you wanted to create a room over here you just arranged the furniture and you had a new room, almost. You would find some doors in an ally and bolt them together to make an intriguing loft wall of weathered old doors.

John was making probably $700 a month at that point, the others there didn't have any money either, but they lived in this place with the bathroom down the hall and walls made out of windows from a dumpster. John had borrowed some guy's shopping cart, filled it up with windows, rolled them home, unloaded them, took the cart back to the dumpster, filled it up with windows, and came back. They built a little frame and built a room out of them that you could hang curtains in and it became John’s bedroom. He was having a lot of fun, but didn't think so at the time but thought he was a miserable sad sack.

John's farm house on Rainier View

see House and Neighborhood!

Millennial Girlfriend wanting John to sell his house and buy a house together (RW160)

When Millennial Girlfriend moved to Seattle she told John he had to sell his house because she couldn’t live in his house and they would instead have to buy a house together. She loved his house and for a year and a half she came up and said: ”This house is so amazing. Let's build a life here together!”, but within a week of having actually moved to Seattle she said: ”Most psychologists say that you should never move into someone else's house. You should always buy a house together because the the old house has too many memories!” - ”I don't know. You used to say you loved it here!” - ”Yeah, but I don't want to live in a place where you just cleared a drawer for me!” - ”Well, I guess I see that!”

Within a day they were on North Queen Ann‚ looking at white colonial houses in a neighborhood where every other car is an Audi A7. ”How did I get here? I don't want to live up here! This is terrible!” She only lasted a couple of weeks in Seattle, but part of it was: ”You got to sell your house!”

John was ready to do it, but the money he would have made from it would not have been enough and he would not have been able to contribute half of the money to purchasing one of the grand homes that she thought they were going to live in. She was a tech lawyer and had more money than he did. It was a really sketchy proposition because he was going to sell his house and put his money into a house where he would be the junior partner.

John's current mid-century modern house in Normandy Park

see Mid-century modern and Normandy Park!

by jroemling

RW254 - My Little Mule

Wed, 20 Apr 2022 12:28:54 +0000

This week, Dan and John talk about:

Climate change (Politics)
Background noises during the recording (Podcasting)
Moonwalking out of a situation, breakdancing (Attitude and Opinion)
John just coming back from a 10-day trip to Hawaii (Hawaii)
Electric cars and self-driving cars, advocating for self-driving infrastructure during his run for office (Cars)
Dan dreaming of a 1964 Lincoln Continental Convertible (Dan Benjamin)
Buying a cheap car or a power boat and going on a big road trip (Cars)
Restoring an original Ford Bronco (Cars)

The show title refers to the name for the Ford Bronco in the movie Romancing the Stone.

Climate change (RW254)

It snowed a little bit in Seattle. It is pretty late in the year for snow, but there is climate change stands. Climate change!

Dan doesn’t understand climate change. A lot of people talk about the cause of climate change. For people who would say the climate has not changed, that is preposterous, and debating about the cause of it also is a little preposterous. It has become a little bit of a straw man argument because it doesn't matter whether it is completely natural, whether this is the Earth's cyclical pattern, or whether it is clearly and definitively caused by human beings and pollution, whatever we can do to make it stop is good. Can you argue that we should not try to be better about pollution and whatever is happening because of us? Should we not just be better about that as a people?

John tends to moonwalk out of scare quotes debates about climate change. He hardly fracks at all, he doesn’t have a reason to drive, so he doesn't and his gas expenses are pretty low, given the boycott right now on the nation of Russia, the former Soviet Union, he is driving even less, just trying to use less of everything. The only thing that he depends upon is roast beef, and that its own whole set of cascading problems.

Background noises during the recording (RW254)

There was the sound of a cricket in the background which is Dan’s ringtone for numbers he doesn’t recognize. John thought it was a little buzzer that Dan had for whenever John starts to bore him.

John’s next-door neighbor is doing yard work with a gas-powered thing, it is just somebody with a gas-powered thing cutting his hedge, but it sounds like lumberjacks in the forest, and all of the work they are doing could be done with a battery-powered hedge-trimmer. John has seen that yard, there is nothing over there that needs all that excitement. Dan has heard that all the yard equipment is causing all the problems now because it is the least efficient. Most of the world's problems are caused by landscaping and it is another thing John is moon-walking out of.

Moonwalking out of a situation, breakdancing (RW254)

It is pretty much all he does now: He walks into place, surveys the situation, somebody says something to him, and he just Michael Jacksons right back out the door. Even though it is a super-dad move now, nobody actually is moon-walking except dads who say: ”Check it out! I learned to do this in the 1980s! I can still do it!” It is not that physically demanding, but it always gets a laugh! But does it always get a laugh?

Dan never learned to moonwalk, he never felt qualified to try that kind of thing. The other kids on the playground at lunch would sometimes bring out a cardboard box and do breakdancing on it, they would be spinning and stuff, they were open to all creeds, all races, all genders, but Dan never felt like he was good enough to stand up to the ridicule that would happen in middle school just in general because by just being there he suffered enough bullying and ridicule and he didn't want to add to it by attempting a break dancing move of any kind publicly. He didn't even want to do it privately, that is how much he knew it wouldn't work for him.

John tried some breakdancing at one point. There was a breakdancing battle happening and John jumped in and did some popping and locking and he was terrible and at some point he was doing some move and somebody kicked him and he stopped and he looked up and everybody standing around was not amused by him at all, and he was like: ”Oops, sorry!” and he got up and moonwalked right out of there, too!

Dan googled after break dancing moves and there are seven basic types of moves in breakdancing: The top rock, the footwork, the drops, the floor rock, the power moves, the freezes, and the suicides. John always felt that his footwork was pretty good, he could freeze and he could robot, but he did not have a ton of good popping. John admired everything about early Hip Hop culture and was very invested in some of it, he really enjoyed the Rap music and the graffiti art. He didn't admire the movie Breakin’ as much. Dan thinks Turbo in that was great. It made its way to Anchorage pretty quickly and they were all fascinated by it and got in on it. Then it went through many changes, like everything does.

John just coming back from a 10-day trip to Hawaii (RW254)

John just got back from a 10-day trip to Hawaii. He recorded last week’s show from there, but didn’t even talk about it. He was also going to record Roderick on the Line last week and then it got canceled last minute. He was all set up with his microphone and everything ready to go on his little bed. It never came up last week that John was there because they were talking about something else and there weren't the usual roosters in the background.

Talking about using fuel and climate change: Flying to Hawaii and back is inexcusable and there is no defending it. The Airlines are trying to do their part by putting as many people in airplanes as they possibly can. There is no room, you couldn't even get one more person on the airplane, even if they would be willing to stand in the bathroom. There was already somebody in there. That is how it was every single flight for a decade that Dan lived in Orlando because everyone has to go to Disney. Every flight packed, every time! The last few flights, mainly going from Austin to New York have been empty enough that he might not have someone next to him for the first time in 20 years. He doesn’t even know what to do with himself.

John used to be on those planes where there was nobody in the back half of the plane. The only way they could have done that was that gas was cheap and nobody cared about anything. He would get on a plane in Frankfurt and fly back to Seattle with a whole row empty. The plane would take off, he would undo his seatbelt, lay down across six seats and buckle his belt again and wake up 8 hours later on approach. Those were really the salad days! Nowadays there is no salad, or maybe it is all salad. It is hard to tell and it depends on how you feel about salad. It is all the kind of salad you get where it is already in a bowl and there is plastic wrap over it and it is iceberg lettuce and there is one cherry tomato, that kind of salad. Everything!

Electric cars and self-driving cars, advocating for self-driving infrastructure during his run for office (RW254)

Speaking of conserving energy: Dan had a question relating to that: John enjoys vintage automobiles, older automobiles back from the salad days of the automobiles when you had a different key for the trunk that you did to open the doors and start the car, which is absolutely true of John’s Suburban, it has two different keys. People got super-upset when they found out that you couldn't swap an iPhone battery. That was the death knell for the iPhone. No-one will ever buy this because not only does it have a hardware keyboard, but you can't swap the battery out.

Then Apple continued that trend to bring unreplaceable, unswappable batteries to their laptops, God forbid, and we somehow survived all this, and now we have computers that you can't upgrade anymore. You can't put your own RAM or hard drive into them and no-one will buy those. And yet people still buy those! Same thing happened with cars: It used to be that you would get a car and of course you could maintain it yourself with a few simple tools. Now the new vehicles that come out and the next level is the electric vehicles where you can't do anything to them, you just look at them in amazement.

Dan had lunch with a friend yesterday, and she just got a Polestar, which are made by Volvo. She took him out into the garage to look at it where she had parked, and she said it looks a little bit like a Dodge and the reason that she got it is because they needed a vehicle now and you can't get any Teslas. The next Tesla was not available until at least October and now it was April and that was too long for them to wait. She got one of these Polestar because you could go and buy one.

What is John’s take on the whole electronic vehicle? Will there be a world where the kinds of vehicles that Dan and John like will be special-purpose-only vehicles and no-one would buy a gas-powered vehicle without a very special reason to do it?

Ken Jennings bought a Polestar, and in one light it looks like a Dodge. Dodge loves to make the Challenger and the Charger and the big three American auto-makers love to do these throwback-looking cars and they go so far out of their way to make them look sinister. There is so much work put into making the Cadillac CTS look really sinister. The Polestar is very plain and very boring-looking from most angles, but when you look at it more closely or from a certain angle, you realize it is very sinister looking, especially head-on. The 1960s cars that these latest ones are trying to emulate looked badass for a different reason, and taking the styling cues and Chip Foose-ing them doesn't make them look cooler. It makes them look dumber.

As far as electric cars go: John feels like his next car is going to be an electric car. He talked about this a lot during his City Council run and nobody wanted to hear about it, and he did the 1969 thing where I said: ”We are all going to be in flying cars in eight years!”, and you heard a lot about this 4-5 years ago and you don't hear very much about it now, that Google and Apple and all the companies like Uber were all working on self driving cars and it was the big exciting thing. They were talking about it a little prematurely, and they didn't roll the technology out, there were more bugs than they thought there would be. It was a Google Glass problem where they said the future was here, but then immediately everybody said this is dumb. They keep trying to do it and it keeps being dumb because it is just not quite there, but the idea is not dumb and some version of this is in our future.

The thing that John said during the City Council run was that a car company is going to successfully bring out a self-driving car that is going to interact with a bunch of dumb grandmas on the road driving old K-cars. That is going to be too difficult. That is not the way it is effectively going to work, because it needs to be a municipal system. The city needs to get ahead of this because in order for self-driving cars to work efficiently and best, the roads will have to have special marking, there will have to be new lines on the roads that enable the cars to interact with, some digital communication between the roads and the cars. Also: the number one expense in building new roads is not the pavement, but the signaling: the stop lights, the crosswalks, all of the electronics, certainly building bridges over little streams and stuff is expensive, too.

It is all the business of trying to keep people from getting run over and trying to keep cars from crashing into each other that is the cost, and with self-driving cars a municipality or a county is going to be able to make an investment in the infrastructure that will change the nature of the signaling. The cars aren't going to need to see stoplights. The only reason you are going to have stoplights at all is opportunities for people to go across and the efficiency of self driving cars, the way it will transform cities, is that you are not going to need street parking, you are going to free up thousands of acres of urban land that is devoted to parking right now, and what are we going to do with all that new property?

You are going to be able to put 15 cars all going 50 miles an hour in the space that two cars fit in now because you are not going to need the clearances. Everything is going to be communicating with each other. John is very excited by it, and it sounds like we have said this about a lot of things and it is a lot harder to do than it seems, and all that is true, but it is inevitable. People are not willing to surrender the privacy and autonomy of single-occupancy or family-occupied vehicles. Public transit is great, but people that can afford it are going to want to travel privately, and when John was running for City Council he said the next car he will buy will be his last privately owned vehicle and his daughter will never own her own car.

Why would you? If you could call up a thing on your phone and a self-driving car arrives in minutes and you get in, your destination is already in the app. John was using Uber a lot then, he was flying to Los Angeles to visit Millennial Girlfriend, he was taking Uber in from the airport, Uber out to the airport, they Ubered wherever they went, he Ubered home when he got home, and every week he was interacting with Uber a lot. Uber doesn't want these drivers and the whole business of that company is to eliminate human drivers as fast as they possibly can. All of the legal business of drivers trying to unionize or sue them, Uber is just kicking that can down the road in the fervent hope that they can just bully everybody until they can have no drivers anymore.

That is why Google and Apple and everybody are so interested in it: You are going to eliminate the human component from traffic, which is that humans are the problem. John is just inviting Skynet here, but in answer to Dan’s question: If you want to own a 1964 Corvette: Already in London they have congestion pricing and most of the day you can't drive into the city without paying a big fee, and when John was on tour there they were aware of the signs: ”You are about to enter a congestion zone. This next left is your last left before you have to pay!” and they were always trying as long as they could to skirt the city, even if it was the most efficient path.

Seattle is never going to enforce a congestion zone because they are just not going to be able to get their shit together in time. But you are going to start having zones where only self-driving cars can access the zone, because for them to work properly they can't have dummies driving around on the same roads as them. It is only going to make sense that in an urban core everything will be either public transit or self-driving and pretty soon if you want to drive your own car there are going to be a limited number of access points that you can get close enough into the city that you can get on public transit.

Classic cars with internal combustion engine being for enthusiasts only in the future

The internal combustion engine is breathing its last breath even as they speak. The only car you are going to own is if you live way out somewhere, and the self-driving infrastructure universe just hasn't gotten there yet. You are pooping in an outhouse, driving your own vintage Tesla, and those who like the internal combustion engine are going to have certain areas, certain roads, where you trailer your Cobra out to some mountain road that has been retained as: ”Here is where you go to drive your old cool car!”, like going out and riding a steam engine lunch train somewhere, for enthusiasts only.

Like most science/fiction or most prognosticatory science, you want to think that you can conceive it and see it and the technology technically exists, so it is only a matter of a few years, but of course the problem is that we could see flying cars in 1969, too, and whatever the insurmountable problems were, they were just slightly more insurmountable than we thought. This isn't even talking about all the people trying to develop self-piloting hovercraft vehicles for the truly wealthy or even maybe the middle class. If you could open up your little phone, have a self driving car arrive at your house in minutes, and then get in it and for what will at the time seem like a small number of credits, like Will Smith in iRobot.

They become public transit in the sense that the computer knows that there are 15 cars that want to go between here and there and they are going to be linked up and they are all going to draft off of each other, separated by a centimeter bumper to bumper, and they are going to travel as a single unit, probably drafting being able to conserve electricity so that it almost has the efficiency of public transit. It goes over all the way to the right into the non-local lanes, accelerates up to whatever it can, and because the computers know where everybody is going there is no: ”We had to slow down because somebody was lost and had their blinker on!” and all this stuff that makes modern driving so awful.

One of the things John was saying to the city of Seattle was: Right now we maintain the roads and all the signaling and all this stuff as a public utility, and it costs the city and the state and the federal government and we pay that money because this is public space, but when self-driving cars colonize that space and the company that builds the car and runs the system is all private and there is no public access to it in that sense that there is a private intermediary, then we need to be prepared to tax them, they should not have the unfettered access to this public space that the public is paying for, that they are profiting from, that there is no separate public access to except through them.

If municipalities understand that and get ahead of the legislation as the technology rolls out, because what a boon to Uber that they have freshly paved roads everywhere they go, paid for by the public and with integrated communication in it, all paid for by the public, which is what they will do, it is the same as getting sports stadiums built with tax dollars because supposedly it is such an influx of cash to cities, and that will be the argument, too: ”No, the city has to maintain the roads because think of all the commerce, think of all the trickle down that happens!”

John talked about this on the campaign trail a lot and just got eye rolled to death, partly because they were right. What you argue about when you are running for office is not that your city should start investing in municipal scale batteries to power the city and to keep energy prices low by loading up the batteries at night when nobody is using electricity. Nobody wants to hear that! They want to hear you tell them that their rent is going to go down or stay the same and all this municipal battery talk and self-driving car stuff just made John seem like a nut, but he also was talking about using gondolas as public transportation (see RL87) and now he sees articles about that in the newspaper.

John being unsatisfied with having bought a Ford truck with a gas engine

Electric car is next for John. He was so excited to buy this Ford truck that he bought, but immediately not only was he kind of unsatisfied with it, but he regretted it. It wasn't the right direction. It felt a little bit like going to war with the army of the last generation. It just felt like he was at the start of World War I and he was trying to buy hats for his cavalry with the biggest feathers he could find and it turns out a year later that was the wrong hat for the job. He really was excited about the Tesla truck, that felt like a thing that a five year old John would love, and he understands that everybody hates Elon Musk or that he is a goof or maybe a dangerous goof, but the world is full of dangerous goofs. Henry Ford III wasn't not a dangerous goof. They are all goofs.

The Rivian truck that looks like a Blazer is cool, but it looks dumb from the front, it doesn't look sinister, it is trying to look friendly or something, and John doesn’t like it. The Tesla truck looked so stupid that it was the kind of stupid you could really get behind. ”Yeah, that is right! I am driving a car that was drawn by a child! A child got a ruler and drew a truck and that is what I am driving, and it is electrical. How do you like them apples?” John was really into it.

People should EV-swap the GMC RV

When John was a member of the GMC RV Owners Group, The Black Book (actually Blacklist), he realized in his travels that there are a lot of these GMC RVs that didn't make it, that got neglected, and they had a lot of complicated parts and the suspension broke down or the water got in and they end up parked somewhere behind somebody's barn, like most RVs. They are hard to recycle. You can take a 1975 Buick LeSabre and just put the whole thing in a crusher and it just becomes a cube of steel, they did it in the original Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle Terminator, they put him in a crusher. A lot of these RVs are made out of fiberglass and other stuff where you can't really put it in a crusher.

There is a place in the East Bay, slightly south of Oakland, where it is just a big yard that probably got 60 GMC RVs sitting in it in various stages, torn apart, disrepair, but the framework of a GMC RV is perfect to get completely converted to an electric vehicle using Tesla Motors and batteries. You take the Buick engine out of those things or the Cadillac engine out of those RVs, you gutt them and rebuild them using super light modern parts, and you could have an eight wheel drive perfectly balanced living room on wheels.

It is almost too good to not do, but you have to just be a crazy person to say: ”My business is going to be that I buy old RVs for pennies on the dollar, spend tens and tens of thousands of dollars turning them into something nobody is really asking for, and then sell them for $200,000 to this generation of #vanlife millennials who currently are spending that much money on sprinter vans!” Instead there will be twice as big, 30 times as cool GMC RV electric redo with a Queen-size bed in the back. They are just shy of being a hovercraft and it is one of the things John thinks about when he is driving along in his Ford gas burner: ”Oh, man, if only I could live long enough to see GMC RVs all converted!” There is no RV that is cooler!

Dan dreaming of a 1964 Lincoln Continental Convertible (RW254)

Dan has gone through different stages and phases, but right now the ideal vehicle for him that he most wants is a 1964 Lincoln Continental Convertible, it has the creepy Adams Family feel to it, there is the Kennedy Assassination, down there in Texas anyway, it is the great vehicle. These things are not cheap and if you are lucky enough to find one in good condition you are going to pay probably close to $70k for it, which makes it not a trivial decision and Dan is not ready to get one of these at all. The problem with this in any older car, forget the fact that you are going to have to fix them yourself and you can't really get parts easily and all that other nonsense, is that these have seatbelts, but that is all they got, probably just a lap belt.

You can't really rely on this thing as being a vehicle that you are actually going to take out and drive around more than just: ”Hey kids! It is Sunday afternoon! Let's hop in the Lincoln Continental Convertible and take a quick drive in the countryside!” You don't want to be sitting on Mopac in rush hour or I-35 with this thing. All of the cool cars from these older time periods, aren't you worried about getting the steering wheel through your chest because these things don't collapse if you are in an accident? There are zero safety features in these, nothing, and that is a risk!

John argues that anything is a risk and all your safety features in the world aren't going to help you if you lose control and hit a semi on the side. It is exactly why you buy a car like that: On a Sunday you traced out a road that goes up and around and goes over there, and then we stop over here and this is where we get ice cream. It is a totally legit way, especially if you bank your carbon offset by not having a gas-powered weed whacker, this is just something that you budget. You do this for fun and it is less damaging than a million other things you could do and less dangerous, too! You set the old cruise control at 45 and it is one of life's joys!

Buying a cheap car or a power boat and going on a big road trip (RW254)

John thinks about this sometimes: Buy a car like that in Texas and take a month to drive it to someplace that if you were in a hurry you could get there in five days, but take a month to go up to Maine, and the whole way you are just on back roads with the top down. At the end, the whole experience you might be able to have and pay less than you would have spent if you had gone for two weeks vacation to somewhere. If you think about it as a vacation, buy this old car out of Craigslist for $5000, a Jeep or something, and drive it from here to there, stay in roadside motels, and by the time we get there it will cost less than ten days in Hawaii. If you put it to yourself in those terms, it almost feels like a way to live.

Thinking of a Norwegian forest cat as being expensive, but it is not

A couple of years ago John’s mom was really hot to get a Norwegian forest cat (see RL272) and John believed in it and thought she should get one. They are enormous and very nice, apparently hypoallergenic. John would like a cat as big as a dog! She looked into it and came back and said that even if you get a neutered one they are $700 and if you wanted to get a breeding one, they are up in the thousands of dollars, which is crazy! But just recently John was thinking: ”$700 for a little friend that you are going to have for 15 years? You spend $700 getting regular maintenance on your car!” The number of times in the course of a year when you are forced to spend $700 on something that you are like: ”Well, I guess I got to spend it just to keep this system running!”

Every time John gets the oil tank for his oil-burning furnace filled up it is more than that! $700 for a fat, hairy kitty that is bigger than a dog and that lives in your house? That is an incredible bargain! Pet owners listening to this will say that their last three vet bills were more than $700 because their dog keeps eating their keys.

John having money for retirement for the first time

Everything is confusing now and John’s relationship to money keeps changing because it just seems more and more unreal. He realized this year that because of taxes and this and that it makes sense for him to put money in an IRA in a way that he has never been able to. He never had any money and he has no retirement, but it made sense for tax reasons partly because of his Patreon to put some money in a retirement. He was talking to a financial advisor as a result of that who had some sentences that they had obviously said a lot of times to different people that were the same sentences that you would read if you picked up a brochure in a bank about financial advisement, all pretty much the same stuff.

They feel somewhat designed to obfuscate the language itself, like legalese it is meant to keep you from understanding because it could be simply explained, it doesn't need all of its own catchphrases. All of a sudden John was in this conversation where he was talking about inflation and his retirement with someone who is used to talking to people about their retirement who had income-matching relationships with their employer, where some amount of their check was taken and matched and put into a special bank account that they never had to think about.

John doesn’t have any of those things. You can just skip ahead on the brochure all the way down to what you do if you don't have that. It made John feel more and more that maybe he should just buy a Jeep for $5000 and maybe it is cheaper for him to just stay on the road, to just be on the highway, than it is even to live in the world!

The Great Loop

The Great Loop is a power boat loop where it doesn't matter where you start, let's say you start in the Great Lakes, you go up the Chicago River, you get into all the different river systems that take you to the Ohio River and then into the Mississippi River, you go down the Mississippi, you pop out down there and you stay inside of this whole set of barrier Islands along Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, Georgia, Florida, then you go all the way down around up the East Coast, all inside these barrier Islands, like a naturally protected waterway, all the way up to the St. Lawrence Seaway, all the way up through the locks to the Great Lakes again and you do this giant loop. It takes months to do and it is like the Appalachian Trail, but for power boaters.

As long as you can keep your boat going there is an infrastructure. You pull in, there are places to get gas and empty your bilge and hotels, and presumably you are in a boat big enough that it got some beds. You almost can't afford not to do it. If John was doing it he would set his throttle at whatever idle was, and you just let the day take you. For a long time John wanted to take a canoe down, start at the headwaters of the Missouri and take a canoe the whole way, and then he read an account of it and all through the Plain States the Missouri is damned in such a way where there are giant reservoirs where the water isn't moving and there is nothing around. There are many days where you are just paddling all day through a lake that has no features, and you are in an incredibly dangerous fast-moving freight corridor for weeks and weeks,, and that might be above John’s skill level as a canoeist.

Restoring an original Ford Bronco (RW254)

Dan says there is a company that goes out there and they find a vintage Bronco, something between 1966 and 1977, the salad days, an increasingly expensive old junk truck, and they don't just bring it back to vintage state, they go further than that and they modernize them. They don't do anything but Broncos, the whole team is Bronco-obsessed, and they bring stuff into it. They obviously do all the bodywork, paint it, they put in a better engine, a modern transmission, fuel injection, air conditioning, power steering, power breaks, disk brakes, new suspension, all brand new interiors, high-end leather stuff…

… they add in Bluetooth stereos, navigation, a backup camera, heated seats, it is basically a completely safe modern vehicle except for all intents and purposes it is an OG Bronco. Dan got very excited about these when he found them on Instagram, this is what he wants, because the new Bronco, as excited as he was when it first came out, he has now seen them on the road and it is not what he wants. These things clock in on the low end at $200k and you can get up into $300k with these things.

There is a company in Venice, California that does these resto-mods and they are very expensive. It is awesome, who wouldn't want that? You could buy an airplane for that, you can even get an airplane and a car to take you to and from the airplane, and a pilot to fly the plane when you need it. But they are totally badass. There is a full sized Bronco in the movie Romancing the Stone. John likes that Next Gen Bronco, the 1978/79 Bronco, The Little Mule. Romancing the Stone probably does not meet current standards for inclusivity and non-racial stuff, but it probably holds up as a romcom. There is actually a lot of things that probably don't hold up from that film, but that was a good scene.

by jroemling

RW253 - 1997 Problems

Wed, 13 Apr 2022 19:36:05 +0000

This week, Dan and John talk about:

Trying to set up two factor authentication on Facebook (Internet and Social Media)
John still using a laptop from mid-2015 and not wanting to upgrade, not being excited about new gadgets (Technology)
John lurking on Twitter again (Internet and Social Media)
People getting rich without really doing anything, companies not yet knowing what their product is (Money)
John crossing a line where he is no longer connected to things (Attitude and Opinion])
Anthropologists finding that pre-industrial tribes mostly did nothing (Factoids)

Bonus-content for Patreon supporters:

People having trouble with the Patreon feed (Podcasting)
How Dan and John use email (Technology)
John’s daughter documenting the ceramic knobs in their vacation house (Daughter)
Cutting all the Kurt Cobain names out of Rolling Stone Magazine (Early Days)
Accepting payments via Zelle (Podcasting)
How to get beyond the idea that dating is the next step in life? (Relationships)

The show title refers to John having trouble setting up two-factor authentication on Facebook and wondering if he is the only one who has this problem that seems like they should have solved in 1997 already.

John can barely hear Dan, like he is talking through the computer and not through the box.

Trying to set up two factor authentication on Facebook (RW253)

Dan is not on Facebook, he has an account for the websites that forced him to use Facebook, but he doesn’t follow anyone and no-one knows it is there. John doesn’t go there anymore wither except that there are people that mail him there, people who actually have his phone number and address, but they still send him messages there and he wouldn't hear from them other ways, so he goes there once every ten days and reads his mail.

Three weeks ago Facebook said: ”You don't have two factor authentication and for your own safety we are locking you out of your account until you set up two factor authentication!”, which is the latest in a long line of security theater measures that just makes everybody feel better. ”Take my Facebook account, Russian bots!”

They offered three options, one of them is to use an outside Authenticator service like Google Authenticator or some other Authenticator, but John doesn't want to download a service. The second option was even more convoluted, but the third option, the normal one, the logical one, is that they will send you a text on your phone as the second factor. Facebook auto-loaded his phone number although he is not sure he ever gave it to them, but no authenticating text arrived. He did it again, nothing came, he did it again, and it said: ”You have to wait two minutes!” He did it again, nothing came, so John bagged out.

Ten days went by, he went through the whole thing again, it came to nothing and he bagged out. This has probably been going on for a month and a half. He went in and tried to get to the bottom of it. He went on a Lemmiwinks journey where he kept arriving back at the same place, and the best he can come up with is that at some point he toggled a switch inside of Facebook saying that they couldn't text him things and he did not want to receive messages from Facebook on his phone, for obvious reasons, but now he cannot get into Facebook to untoggle it and to let them send him the code.

It feels like a 1997 problem, a year that didn't exist because: They haven't worked out this bug? Aren't there millions of users of this program? Surely John is not the only one. Isn't there somewhere down in San Jose a warehouse that goes alongside the freeway that is 40 miles long, full of 25 year olds, sitting at open plan offices, whose sole job it is to get to the bottom of this kind of glitch? They are all getting paid $280,000 a year, right out of college, but that doesn't cover their rent and they can't afford to buy. It sounds like a lot of money, but they are actually going into debt every year.

John still using a laptop from mid-2015 and not wanting to upgrade, not being excited about new gadgets (RW253)

John has a laptop from mid 2014, and a lot of times with these consumer devices he has not gotten the money out of it. A lot of times you buy a thing and it is like: ”Really? That was really expensive and it only lasted a few years!”, but he is starting to think he got his money out of this laptop. It is throwing up stuff, it is telling him it wants to upgrade the OS again, but one more upgrade and John will brick it forever, and it still works for everything he needs it to do, he is not a gamer of course, he has yet to calculate the trajectory of a rocket.

You used to be able to do that work on the back of a Matchbook cover if you were good at math. They used to have the Speedmaster watch that people took up into space because they could do calculations with it. A wristwatch, a pencil, maybe a China pen, and a little something to write on and they could calculate how to reenter the Earth's atmosphere safely. Steve McQueen could wear one of those watches underwater in a car.

John is worried that he is not excited about buying a new consumer product, but he is starting to feel like this thing is throwing up a lot of problems. Whenever Dan buys something now he is not excited about it and he is not looking forward to it, generally speaking he doesn’t want to spend the money whereas even not that long ago he was always fairly excited to get a new thing. John thinks that we have arrived at a place where there is no killer app for everything. The Internet has matured, we have two generations that have grown up with it, this is it, it has arrived. Looking at Meta and virtual reality conferencing and Elon Musk owning Twitter and the war in Ukraine and all of the drone footage, the only thing John is excited about is the drone footage!

Back in 1980 John dreamed of Genie and he could already then imagine a rocket-firing drone that he was looking at through a little TV screen on his remote, he was excited about backpack drone warfare so long ago and now it has arrived and it is even shoddier than he imagined it would be, but it is still great, he is not complaining, and there is no other thing about the Internet that is interesting. We are all used to it, it does what it does. We go on it.

The excitement of buying a new laptop was always connected to: ”Now I can finally make movies!” or: ”Now I can finally get Logic Pro and this is going to be the moment when I make my thing!”, ”I can finally get that new program that requires the new hot thing!”, but there is nothing like that now. All a new computer would do is get you into this sad, sun-baked environment with something slightly faster? When was the last time there was a killer app that you were excited about?

Dan doesn’t care about anything right now. He is in this whole podcasting industry thing, and there all these amazing apps coming out, like this one allows you to do lightning payment so that if you are listening to a show and the person made you laugh on the show and you decided right after they made you laugh that you love them and you wanted to toss them $10, and you could just hit a button and: Boom! $10!” Dan knows a lot of podcasters, but he doesn’t know anybody who is either using this service as a listener or is receiving money this way. ”John made me laugh, I will give him $2, I bought him a coffee!”

It feels like you are in a hospital bed and you have a morphine drip and you have a little button and you are giving morphine to yourself when you are giving somebody a dollar every time they make you laugh. That feels like an app that is designed a) by a committee in a room, and b) of people who have never lived in the world, and that is a generation for whom it was always possible to become a billionaire simply by accidentally building a tool that stands in between this person and that person as they conduct their business.

John lurking on Twitter again (RW253)

John is embarrassed to say that he has been lurking on Twitter a lot. A friend sent him links to interesting tweets by Ukraine scholars and army people, and he started sneaking on there to see these tweets. People are doing 40 tweet long threads full of information. Each one has a link to other tweets and threads and videos and John is getting so much information out of them. He didn’t really remember, nor did he particularly care about the war in Chechnya, but he knows a lot about it now, and he is very engaged and curious, and it is activating that part of his brain that likes this kind of thing, not the killing, of course, but the statecraft and the history and all this.

Immediately you are on Twitter, it is his place, his little Twitter world, he still has 40,000 followers there, and he is following all these people that he used to know, a lot of them he is estranged from. One of the first things he did was stopped following most of his old friends and started following all these Ukraine accounts, meaning his Twitter is a very different world now, but Twitter itself will not accept this. Every third tweet is an ad now, and the ads are tailored so that one in five times you almost click on it because you think: ”Interesting! Randelman Rowe cartoons!” (?), but it is only somebody that looks like that.

John is on there for Ukraine stuff and then there are some people that he didn't unfollow that are old friends and all of a sudden he is lurking and he is reading about Will Smith and his marriage to Jada Pinkett Smith and how a lot of black comedians feel that she doesn't love him and the reason that he is freaking out and misbehaving is that he is in an abusive relationship. As he reads these things he goes: ”That explains a lot! Will Smith is in an abusive relationship!” and then he remembers that he doesn't care at all about Will Smith, what kind of relationship he has, or what anyone else thinks about it.

But John is back in so fast to that and to the feeling as he walks around: ”I should go check in and see what is waiting for me there!” John knows about Elon Musk and about what he is doing, but he doesn’t want anything to do with him. He is on the board and he is doing all these things and memes. Every person that John knows that is still on Twitter at least once a day makes a joke about how miserable they are on Twitter. It is always the same joke: ”Oh my God, can I quit this yet? Maybe this is the final straw? ”, ”Maybe this is it. Maybe this will be the thing! Can we agree that it is all over ”

People getting rich without really doing anything, companies not yet knowing what their product is (RW253)

It was always possible for anybody under the age of 30-35 to get rich, not because they built a factory and not because they designed a new carburetor, but just because they either did Angry Birds that was worth $1 billion or some other thing. There was the kid that spray-painted the wall at the office at Facebook and they paid him in stock instead of money and he is worth $200 million or something and he doesn't want to talk about it. Everybody wants to interview this guy.

If you grew up thinking that it was normal and that maybe you even knew somebody. Dan knew a bunch of people in the early days that ended up being billionaires or 100+ millionaires, he hates them all now, but how much have they actually built versus how much did they just have an idea that was in its moment? John has zero idea how much work Jack Dorsey did. Was he a genius or were there just a bunch of guys sitting around like: ”I know! Here is one!”

John can't look back to 1901 and say for sure that there weren't a whole bunch of people in 1901 that became rich just because of some dumb thing, but it seems more like an industrial process. You had to actually make something to sell, and that was hard and it required that you hire people and whatnot. Obviously Jack Dorsey hired some people that did computer maths, which shouldn't even really require a High School degree, but Jack Dorsey now walks around in a Monk's robe, but it is also a hoodie, weirdly not cool. He might have a house on Lake Cuomo and be up there throwing disco, but John doesn’t get that feeling from any of those guys. All those guys in 1901 built gigantic houses in Connecticut, which seems even dumber than living in Palo Alto.

What Dan is describing, hey, the next wave in podcasting is that we set up this thing where everybody can send you $10 when you stroke them with your show, and that that is what people are looking for, is just being built by people that don't have any real idea of what money is or what the world is. That is not solving a problem! Nobody wants it! And yet they will get funding, and then they are worth $100 million briefly before they become just another one of the 50 startups this morning that went through two rounds of funding and then never could make a product.

John’s daughter's mother has been doing a lot of job interviews lately, and she has these comments like: ”Yeah, I interviewed with them, I went through five rounds of interviews, and the CEO this and the founder led that and this, that and the other, but I really couldn't tell you what they made! If they offered me a job, I don't think I am going to take a job offer from them because I couldn't really tell you what the product was. I feel like they are looking for a product!” The businesses have got lots of people working there, they just haven't figured out what they sell or do yet.

John crossing a line where he is no longer connected to things (RW253)

John feels like he is going across a line right now. He is on a ship… In the old days when you would cross the equator they would throw a celebration for you or you would get a certificate. John still has a certificate he got in the 1970s for flying over the North Pole. He was on some airplane and it was like: ”You went over the North Pole!” and everybody got a certificate. It was really fun! They looked out the window and it was like: ”The North Pole!” It really did feel like you were at the North Pole.

Right now John is on a ship and he is crossing some date line or some Tropic of Capricorn where he may be on the other side of it, and he is just going to sound less and less connected to things and feel less and less connected to things, but he doesn't know what to feel about it.

John feels like he is crossing a line in the ocean where if it ever actually becomes okay for him to do nothing, if he ever really reads a thread like that and finally feels like: ”Oh, doing nothing has been the point the whole time! It is a wonderful way to live out your day!”

You go to some tropical place or subtropical place, you sit, look out, you go to Margaritaville in Florida, you buy a two bedroom, you get a golf cart. John definitely feels like whatever the next twist is he may miss the turn and he doesn’t know whether he missed the turn and goes off the cliff into the Pacific Ocean, or whether he missed the turn and keeps driving into the desert.

Popular culture and everybody else and all the excitement goes on some next wild ride, some VR headset driven super future where you can send a person a dollar every time they make you laugh and John is just headed out onto the beach on a golf cart, not even conscious of having missed the turn, looking back at the lights of Las Vegas, but just going on until his battery runs out.

Anthropologists finding that pre-industrial tribes mostly did nothing (RW253)

The other day John was lurking on Twitter, following Ukraine, Ukraine, Ukraine, and you bounce off the bottom of it, you have watched all the videos, you have read all the threads of people arguing with each other from their living rooms in Pennsylvania about what Ukraine should do and all the atrocity and all of what America should have done, maybe it did do, maybe it is doing, maybe it is not, maybe a year from now, and suddenly John was on a different thread of an Indian guy, Southeast Asian, who is an anthropologist and he says that in the 1960s and 1970s anthropologists went out and lived with Aboriginal people for a year and just sat there by the campfire with them, living with them, trying to integrate into their culture, but also monitoring them and recording what they did.

This became very unfashionable, the whole concept of a Western person going and living with a pre-technological tribe and doing this ”I am just going to write down every time you pick up a coconut!” because it is condescending and it is colonialist et cetera, but this anthropologist said there is this incredible data compiled by all these anthropologists that no-one has ever really dug into because it was a lot of data to interpret at the time and then it became very unfashionable and there is a cadre of people in the University-world that would say: ”We don't go look at Mengele's data either!”, although this is completely not equivalent to that. That is just the level of discourse in today's world.

This anthropologist said he was digging into the data and one of the most fascinating data points is that universally across anthropologists living in Central Africa, in Indonesia, in South America, everywhere you could find pre-industrial people, the thing that United people around the world and that constituted the largest chunk of their time was doing nothing, not doing anything, just crouching and looking out, not even whittling or poking at a fire with a stick, but just sitting and staring into the middle distance.

It goes against what you would think a subsistence lifestyle would require. You wake up every morning and everything you are doing is struggling to survive all day, but in fact the work that it took to survive was a manageable amount of work, you had to hunt for a while, you had to fix the ropes, you had to dig up a thing over here, repair the roof, and then all of it seemed to be in service of this 40% of your day that you just sat and looked out, probably in your mind's eye. Just sitting and thinking, but not trying to solve a problem. Who knows what! Who knows what any of us do?

This anthropologist was in the process of suggesting that we have of course eliminated doing nothing almost completely from our lives because we don't ever do nothing. We are always doing something: reading, surfing, doom-scrolling, puttering. Does Dan ever sit in a chair and just stare at the wall? If he is tired, which is most of the time, then he will definitely do this. When his kids were little, especially his son would say: ”Dad, let's play a game!” - ”I would like to play my most favorite game!” - ”Do you mean sitting in a chair staring at the wall?” - ”Yes, and the way you win is whoever can do it the longest!” and he never won, he would just leave or annoy Dan until he stopped. But now Dan can lay on the sofa, staring at the ceiling.

He can't fall asleep easily anyway, and he is not going to fall asleep doing that. He never slept in a vehicle, never slept on a plane, never slept in a public space, never fallen asleep in a class, as hard as he has tried. He can't even barely fall asleep if he is exhausted in a perfect bed in a perfect situation. He hasn’t napped since he was about two. His mom would come in the room and he would be standing in his crib looking around, so he was definitely standing looking around back then too. But there is something nice about that. You don't even have to think. You just let go and you are not thinking about anything really.

It is a major part of John’s day and always has been. He used to joke that he would sit and look at a wall and then he would realize that the shadows had completely changed in the room as the sun arcs across the sky and he wouldn't be conscious of watching the light change as the day progressed, but he would notice it when he came back. ”Oh, look at that! Time has really passed!” and the suggestion that John took from this Twitter thread that he read out of one eye while at the same time telling himself: ”This is crack! You need to stop being on this! This is bad! You already feel when you are not on Twitter that you want to be back there!”, even though John has unfollowed and eliminated all the friends, so he is not on there looking at what he used to, which is: ”What are my friends doing? What do they say about Will Smith's relationship?” That is all gone and it is now back to a news place, just getting popular press.

If you go onto Google News, which is a thing, it is the same as CNN Headline News was in 1986: Here is the story that is at the top of the news, and it is the same as it was yesterday, and then down here there is a bunch of garbage, but it is so slow and so dumb. On Twitter you can follow these threads from a guy who has been studying the Russian Empire for 30 years and has written 17 books and for some reason he is giving away all of his knowledge for free and is with such enthusiasm designing these threads that all told he is writing a thesis every three days. It is just there!

There is a group of us who have collectively decided that Twitter is still… John used to feel this way and he would put so much creative work into that place because he felt like he was sharing it with his fellow man and that was Noble and it validated him, but he was also making an important contribution to the log cabin of human endeavor. That is what you feel about some of these Ukraine threads. ”You should be awarded a Pulitzer Prize for the work you are doing here and I don't know why you are doing it. You are getting more followers!”

John remembers what getting more followers felt like, and it is not the same as getting a good job. This doing nothing thing has always been very hard for him to accept that it was legitimate. He does it, it feels always like a guilty pleasure, he is always pushing against the other voice that says: ”What are you doing right now? Shouldn't you be doing something? This is why we can't have nice things! This is why you never went to Yale! Look at you now! You are just sitting and staring!”

He has always had the simultaneous knowledge that sitting and thinking is important and good. It is where you reset. It is why we are creative. He has always known that because some child psychologist said that to his parents when they were like: ”He just sits in stairs!” In 1978 some child psychologist that looked like Jeff Bridges said: ”It is important that the child be able to look at the wall!” Psychology is whatever you want it to be. Just like Punk Rock!

BONUS CONTENT

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Dan thinks there is something to be said for the ability to toss someone a buck if they made you laugh, like a person peddling on the streets. They are playing their violin or whatever, and you toss a buck into their little violin case. We are all begging for money! John thinks it is like these kids and the venture capitalists behind them are starting a business to stand in between you and a busker and take 20% off the dollar that you throw into their hat. That is their business model! ”Hey, that hat is a little bit out of your reach over there as you walk past. Do you ever have a problem when you walk past a busker and you want to give them a dollar but you don't want to pull out a lot of money, you feel weird, so you just keep going? Well, have we got a solution for you! You give us the dollar and then we will give the busker $0.75. That is our business!”

Talk about being in an abusive relationship. John feels like he is in a relationship with Jada Pinkett Smith, except every time he goes to a website it throws so many ads at him, content-blocking ads, your eyeballs are trying to read the text in between a flashing box above, a flashing box below, a flashing box on the side, and then they throw another thing right in front of all of it. This can't be real! This cannot be the best we can do! The people that are writing the stuff on this website do not want you to be experiencing this as you try to read what they have written. This isn't what the writers want! It can't even be what the Editors want! We all have bats or something, it is evil. This is Capitalism, commerce in its current form, and it is turning 32 year olds against the whole idea of capitalism, but this isn't what capitalism is! Capitalism is a lot of things! This is a perversion!

People having trouble with the Patreon feed (RW253)

Dan said last time that he were going to go through and find some good letters. Most of the letters are from people who are writing in to say that they can't figure out how to get the feed working in their player and Dan has been replying to those people one by one because if they can't figure it out then they are also not hearing this and there is no sense in doing it. He actually made an audio recording and put that up on the site, walking them through it. Friend of the show Matt Haughey also chimed in with some instructions somewhere. Dan doesn’t know where those were posted, but Dan is reposting what he said what he did that made it work.

How Dan and John use email (RW253)

When John uses email he uses the Mail app that comes with the iPhone and the i-computer. The only times he ever goes into the Gmail app is when two factor authentication demands that he actually goes into the app itself to click on the button. Some two factor authentication things don't port through to your mail and you have to actually get it out of the Gmail app and then he has to go scroll through his phone and find where he has the Gmail app and click on it and find the number.

People like Merlin and a lot of people go to gmail.com and that is how they interact with their mail. Everything is through the browser. As somebody who builds web applications, and most of Dan’s career has been about building web apps, what we used to call database driven websites back in the 1990s, you would think that he would always defer to using the web version of anything, but if there is a client that he can download from his computer or his device, even if that client is just a WebView embedded in the iOS app or something, he is still going to use the client.

Dan uses Mail app, he has tried all the different ones, but he is one of these dinosaurian creatures who feels that if something has historically been free and there are really good free versions of it, then it is really difficult to get him to change and now start to want to pay, even if the thing that he would be paying for feels better. There are a lot of other mail clients out there that are really supposed to be cool and they change the way you work, and he will download one of them and he will see right away that it only works with Gmail, and almost everyone is on Gmail and Dan has Gmail accounts, but his primary email account is not hosted with Gmail, it is on a third party service because he doesn’t need to give Google everything.

Dan really likes Fastmail, Marco (Arment) recommended them many years ago and they have been great and that is where he hosts his personal email account. Nothing for business goes on in there, he uses Google for all the business stuff because it is just easier. Immediately any application that is designed to use Gmail he can't use. Behind the scenes most mail systems use something called IMAP, and when you are using Mail app on your phone or on your computer it is going through IMAP, which is just an email protocol that came out many years ago to replace the ancient POP3 protocol.

They always say: ”IMAP support coming soon!” Just start with that! Dan’s advice to anyone making a third party email application is to start with IMAP support because then everyone can use it. It is like coming out with the best diesel car in the world, but most people aren't using diesel. Dan uses the default client, but there are monsters like Merlin who are using Gmail in a browser. Dan doesn't get that!

John feels definitely like there is a pro-way of doing things that he doesn't do. He doesn't do it the pro way because he doesn't understand what the pros are getting that he is not getting. His daughter's mother, he will look at her computer sometimes and she got 80 tabs, so many tabs that you can't see them, and a lot of those tabs are to the same places, but they are two different places within the same place. There are so many tabs, she can't possibly be able to go up to that tab bar and know where she is going. It feels a little bit like not wanting to relinquish a tab because ”What if I need to go back there?” It feels a little bit like John collecting vintage socks or something.

Every once in a while he just wants to go and close it out, but he doesn’t do it, he is not somebody that is on somebody else's computer closing stuff out, but he walks by and just wants to close that out, and you just have to rebuild it.

John’s daughter documenting the ceramic knobs in their vacation house (RW253)

John is staying in a vacation house because it is her spring break right now. The vacation house has little ceramic knobs on all the drawers and closet doors, little hand-painted knobs, each one different, and this morning John was getting a cup of coffee, and she walked by him with a notepad, basically a clipboard, and she was stopping and writing stuff down, and then she would move a little bit further in the room, and she would write some more stuff down. She was talking under her breath to herself, hold the pen to her mouth and think about something, and then she would go back to writing.

John watched her for a little while, she was engrossed in this, and he said at some point: ”Sweetie Heart, what are you doing?” - ”I am going around and I am cataloging all of the knobs!” - ”Can you read me from your list?” - ”Yes, of course!” and she flipped back three pages to the front and said: ”Upstairs, closet door, unlocked, knob on the right, red flowers in a circle of green leaves with thorns and a pink outline.” and she started reading that she had described every ceramic knob in its location. John watched her do this and thought: ”Oh my God, I have done this!” 100% he has gone around with a clipboard and made a descriptive list of some thing, he has done it a lot, actually! ”Somebody needs to write all this down. So it is going to be me!”

Cutting all the Kurt Cobain names out of Rolling Stone Magazine (RW253)

One time when he was very stoned after Kurt Cobain killed himself he went through a Rolling Stone magazine and cut every single mention of him out (see OM421), he made a little basket of Kurt Cobain's name as it appeared throughout all of these magazines, as a way of mourning his death, as a way of saying in a very Generation X way: ”See what you have done to him? He is in this magazine 80 times, he is on every other page. This is why he killed himself, and I am going to take all those Kurt Cobain names out of this magazine and put them in this basket!”

John wanted to free him as a rebuke to the people that had imprisoned him here. The guy that owned the magazine wasn't that thrilled when he came home and found that John had done this, but it was a difficult time for us all, and he forgave John. Then he had a basket of the word Kurt Cobain over and over on different pieces of paper and different fonts and different sizes and he didn't know what to do with that, and he just pretended that he hadn't done it until it went away one day. Maybe he intended to make a collage? There were a lot of things he did where his intention was ultimately to make a collage, but the number of actual collages he ever made trends towards zero and he definitely doesn't currently decorate with collage, although he does have a guitar that he collaged, a beautiful collaged acoustic guitar.

John watched his little girl do this and he wasn't sure whether to laugh or cry, whether to celebrate it, and he patted her on the head and said: ”Good work!” and she strode off in her Majesty, but clearly was not interested in whether or not he thought this was worth her time. His praise was irrelevant to her. She was on a mission. She is going to be great in the new commerce!

Accepting payments via Zelle (RW253)

Dan thinks [dan/john] would be a great logo for a consulting firm! Dan slash john dot io.

This email is not intended to be read on the show per se, but that was interesting. Only the people who are already subscribing via Patreon can even hear this, so most of them doing that are comfortable enough with Patreon that they don't feel like they need to switch, but if there is anyone else out there who thinks that they would like to subscribe or pay with a different service, Dan would be interested to hear it.

The problem is the Patreon integration with Fireside.fm, the podcast hosting company that Dan started and runs since 2016, is integrated with Patreon to put these episodes into the feed, and the only way that you can get that custom feed is to come through Patreon, so even if other people were to write in and say: ”I really would like to do something different!” they are probably not going to be able to support it because all the machinations behind the scenes go through this service. It is not likely to happen, but Dan would be curious just to hear what people are thinking and feeling about all this because that is interesting to him.

John does have a Zelle account, but he has no idea how to share that with anybody, it is probably just his email address, which is a thing that should be obvious, but also back in the day we kept our email addresses secret, even though pretty much every one of us who was on the internet in 2007 tried and in most cases succeeded in just getting our names at Gmail. You could probably email moc.liamg|drofnosirrah#moc.liamg|drofnosirrah. There is no big secret. Merlin and Ken Jennings both have email addresses that they give to people that are not just their name at Gmail, but it doesn't mean they don't have their name at Gmail.

The only drag is that if you weren't on the Internet in 2007, if you weren't on Twitter in the very early days or had Merlin Mann as a friend, he probably wrote John and said: ”You need to go to gmail.com and get your name!” - ”Why?” - ”Don't ask questions, just do what I tell you!” Jonathan Colton told him: ”You need to go to Twitter.com and get your name!” - ”What is Twitter.com?” - ”Don't worry about it! I will tell you later!”, and so John has his name at everywhere. If he were named John Roderick somewhere in Australia and he was a real estate agent and his email address had to be moc.liamg|25kciredornhoJ#moc.liamg|25kciredornhoJ, what an indignity!

But if he went to TikTok right now, would he be the first John Roderick there? Maybe he would, it is an old fashioned name! There is surely a Braden Roderick already on TikTok. If you Google John’s name it doesn't take long to get to porn actress Brande Roderick, she is probably the most famous Roderick, at least as far as the Internet is concerned. John might write that person and tell them his Zelle account, which he basically just told everybody already.

John thinks that because they said ”mobile number” they might be from Europe. Dan would never say ”mobile”.

Dan has always been a huge fan of talk radio and he used to listen to AM and some FM talk radio all the way back, starting Junior High. When cell phones first became a thing you paid by the minute, and in some cases it was prohibitively expensive for most people to have a cell phone. You would have a pager and you would have a cell phone and someone would page you. It would come in from your girlfriend's number and it would have a 911 next to it, which meant it was urgent enough that you with great reluctance pulled your StarTAC phone out and call them, knowing that it was going to cost you $0.20 a minute just to have the conversation.

When people would call in to a radio talk show from their cell phone, they would identify and say: ”Listen, I am calling in from a mobile number!” and they would prioritize the call because they didn't want to make them sit on hold for 15 minutes to say: ”You are wrong!” and so whenever they would come on, they would say: ”Mobile!” and that is the only time it is appropriate to use ”mobile” and that is 1995.

John thinks that their friend on Vashon Island is probably from Amsterdam.

How to get beyond the idea that dating is the next step in life? (RW253)

Dan is about 5’7” and he weighs just around 145 pounds, all muscle, organs and bones, but if you are a good 3-4 inches taller than Dan and you weigh the same thing, you are pretty thin! It just sounds like Jacob has got the world by the tail. If he would have said that he is 25 and is making $250,000 a year John would have said: ”Oh, man! Jacob, that is not how to do it! Whatever you are doing to make that much money, it is stealing your soul!”, but he is making $66,000 and that is exactly what you should be making. You are rolling in it! You are 25, you are at the absolute top of what you should be making, which means you are doing well!

Dan’s friend Carl was a very well-paid software developer who couldn’t have possibly been more miserable. He was miserable at his job, he was miserable at home, he was just purely miserable, and he made probably $200K a year. He would sit there sometimes, sitting and staring, thinking: ”When I was 23 years old, I made $25,000 a year and I could buy anything I wanted and I could do anything that I wanted and I was so happy. I make ten times that now and I am absolutely miserable!”

Do you say PNW or just say Pacific Northwest? John says Pacific Northwest, but there is a lot of Pacific Northwest pride and always has been. Portland used to not be a factor in the global economy or even the regional economy, but the rise of Portland starting in 1999 brought into the world a whole new generation of Pacific Northwest rabid boosters of the Northwest. Portland became a key culture generator and they recognized that San Francisco can just say San Francisco and mean everything while Portland can’t really do that, so they ally themselves with the Northwest, by which they mean Seattle, but also Vancouver and down to Eugene. They are the ones that are actually generating the energy. They are the ones that are making all the tote bags that have pine trees on them and really pushing things like PNW with a shovel through it, all that stuff. It is very exciting. He may actually say PNW, but John would say Northwest. He says The PNW, which is a whole other thing, like The Ukraine.

John’s reply

There is an awful lot in our modern day that wants to gamify dating, and it is goal-oriented. There have always been people that are goal oriented in dating, probably 50% of the people are goal oriented in dating, and there have always been people trying to gamify it.

When people say: ”I am a musician and I don't know how to break into the scene!” you have to understand that the last scene is never going to let you in. When John had a band in 1995 in Seattle, there was no way! What everybody talked about was the dying embers of the Grunge scene, but there was no room in there for him, he had to go to a lot of shows until he knew all the bands and then the people that he met at those shows ended up being the people that were in the new bands, and they ended up being a scene although they didn't intend it. No-one ever thought: ”I am going to go Downtown, meet a bunch of people, and start a new scene!"

They had an affinity for Rock music and when you are sitting in a café and you are talking to somebody and ask: ”What do you like?” - ”Rock music! What do I like?” - ”Rock music! What bands do you like?” - ”We should go to a show!”, or: ”Did you see that show that is tonight?” - ”Yeah, I will see you there!” and two years later it turns out you are the core of a new Rock scene and five years later people were coming up to John asking: ”How do I join the scene? It is impossible to join the scene!” - ”It is impossible to join this scene because it started six years ago, but it is not impossible to start a new scene! You are doing it right now by standing here and yelling at me about it, frankly. Go find some other people and yell at them and then you are a scene!” and that is how all scenes are.

The same is true with dating in the sense that the best dates you are going to go on are going to be with people that are already doing something that you know you like. You like to bicycle, you say: ”The PMW!”, Portland is full of people that like to bicycle and that say ”The PNW”. You narrow it down by affinity. Maybe that is wrong in the sense that now you can go on a dating site and let the machine tell you who you are going to get along with, and maybe in John’s case the people he met that loved Rock’n’Roll ended up being a really mixed bag of girlfriends, but it seems that going into it with a plan or with a goal is only going to bring you heartache because other people are never going to meet your goal. Another person can never be a goal because they are always going to be too different, and then you are in that weird place where it doesn't measure up.

There are those moments where you are like: ”This person is beautiful, they are smart, they have a good job, they are friendly, they are fun, I really like them, but every time we have sex it is terrible and I can't understand why every other thing about them is incredible and I just cannot seem to get into it with them. I can't lock in. Every time I do this, they do the opposite! I try to use all my words, I try to use all my body English, and they are just not on the same wavelength with me!” and on the other side this person over here and you barely have anything to say to each other, and yet you have this incredible connection in bed.

What do you do if you have a goal? What is your goal? If you meet the perfect person, they are perfect in every way, but the sex is terrible, do you want to marry them or do you want them to be your number one because they are so right in all these ways and then you walk around all the time covered in sadness because you either have terrible sex or you don't have any sex. Or do you have a relationship with someone who drives you absolutely bonkers and you don't understand where they are coming from at all, but you have this incredible sex life?

John is not saying that those are dichotomous or that those are your only two options, but if you go into a time in your life where you are like: ”Now I am going to get a lot of sex!”, or: ”I am going to meet a lot of people and I am going to be out on the town!”, the first person you encounter is going to be exactly this complicated, and whatever your idea was, whatever your goal was, this isn't the problem you thought you were going to have to solve! That requires that you even care. There are lots of people out there that are terrible at sex and don't know it. You have to put yourself out there into the real world and be brave and then be flexible and follow rather than lead.

Dan’s reply

It sounds like he is feeling an urgency or pressure, he feels like he wants to have a girlfriend, but he didn't say: ”I really want to get married. I really want to start a family. I really want this, that, and the other thing!” Dan’s question actually goes back to his motivation for this. Why does he want a girlfriend? For many guys, having a girlfriend is something that you do because you want those things, you want a significant other, you feel a loneliness, you want to feel complete, et cetera. Those are things a lot of people feel, regardless of their gender, just: ”I really want that person. I want to share my life with somebody!” and then there are the other things, or maybe they just want to get laid, maybe it is a status thing: ”My other friends have girlfriends now! We are in our mid/late 20s, and this is when people typically tend to want to settle down in a way!” and maybe all his friends have a couple of things going on and they say: ”Come out with us, bring your girlfriend! Oh, and sorry, you don't have a girlfriend! Sorry, this is really a couples thing, but maybe if you bring a date?” or maybe he just is feeling something that Dan hasn't listed, who knows?

Dan wonders what the motivation is for that and he would tell him to go focus on the motivation, on why he is doing this. Is he doing this because he is feeling this internal need? Is it because other people are telling him he should? Is it because his mom is asking: ”When are you going to settle down?” or is he just lonely and wanting to do it? But if he in his mind has this feeling that he needs to go up and ask these people out, then: Why do you feel like you need that? And also: Have you tried dating apps? Because COVID is mostly over in a lot of areas and horrible in other areas, but dating apps can be helpful for that, you get on an app, you are able to address the personality of the person, get to know them a little bit before you feel exhausted.

Why does he feel exhausted? If he does, then there is something wrong with that, unless he is talking about the exhaustion of going through a face to face encounter with someone, in which case maybe he has some social anxiety or introversion that might make it more difficult. Dan’s only advice or thought is that he should maybe question why a little bit, why he is doing it.

John’s reply

John always felt in his situation at his age that there were a lot of ways in which he was thriving, but he was not thriving in terms of being able to go up to somebody, ask them out, keep his shit together long enough to get to know them, and even find out one thing about them, let alone make it all the way to a first kiss. He did feel exhausted before he had ever done anything because it felt: ”What are we here for if not that? What is the point of anything if not to be able to cosplaying finding a mate?” We don't really need to find mates as though we are roosters or walruses, but it felt like a whole side of life that all the songs were written about and all the novels are written about and that everything is about, it is why people put on makeup, it is why you care about your shoes, it is in a way all about that dance, and John wasn't participating in it.

He felt incomplete and he wasn't really squeezing the marrow of life, he wasn't getting it, he wasn't clicking, he wasn't in sync, that weighed so heavily on him. He did feel propelled or driven to join the world in that way, but didn't know how, there were no good instruction manuals, it seemed like women that he was interested in also should be experiencing this, but when he would sidle up to them they couldn't have seemed less interested and that was exhausting: ”Well, wait a minute! I know you like me! You were looking at me from over there and now I am standing here and I came over and now you are looking away!” What he didn't realize was that all he had to say was: ”Hi!” and then they would go: ”Oh, hi!” Instead he would walk over and they would look away and then he would go: ”Oh, I guess they don't want to talk to me?” and he would go away.

He couldn’t get it, he didn't get the signals right, he was a combination of too shy and anxious, and it was so exhausting! He wasn't doing anything, he wasn't getting to the first kiss because he was overthinking it and confused and if you had asked him what he wanted, he would not have been able to answer. He definitely didn't want to get married, he wasn't even sure he wanted a girlfriend, he wasn't even sure he wanted to have a first kiss except that to not do it was to not be part of anything. You are not part of civilization! What could your songs possibly be about if you are not trying to get that first kiss right? What are your songs about? Plants?

John rived in that space in agony, not understanding why across the room he looked at her, she looked at him, she smiled, he stood up, took a deep breath, walked across the room, and when he got there, as he was walking up to her she turned away. He just didn't get that that was just the simplest part of the dance, he expected her to also stand up and walk toward him and they would meet halfway across the room: ”Hello!” - ”Hello! I saw you there! - ”I saw you!”, and instead it wasn't that. He had to walk over and then she was whispering with her friends and he would have to tap her on the shoulder: ”Hi! I noticed you!” - ”Oh, what?” John couldn't get through that. It was awful!

If there had been dating sites, what would he have done on a dating site? He would have written them a letter, and he would have said: ”Hello, Milady!” and it would have just been like: ”Swipe whatever direction to not be in that!” ”Hello! I have a funny joke. Have you heard this funny joke?” He wouldn't know how, and that is why he developed a persona of swaggering confidence, because he had none, he had zero swaggering confidence and it all just became a costume. Make a costume and step in it and you are in a basketball mascot costume, a giant Tucan that jumps on a trampoline and slam junks a basketball.

by jroemling