This week, Merlin and John talk about:
Table of Contents
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The Problem: John thought of himself as welcome everywhere, referring to him being part of many distinct communities who didn’t have anything in common, but he was welcome in all of them and considers that part of his charm.
The show title refers to John’s experimentation phase in college where he was trying to find out who he is and what path he was on and he somehow uses a metaphor of nodules in a lung.
John starts off asking how his packets are and Merlin says they are handsome so far. John likes them arrive 100% packed with no loss of any of the content. Way back in 2014 it was one of Merlin’s resolutions to keep his packets tight.
Raw notes
The segments below are raw notes that have not been edited for language, structure, references, or readability. Please do not quote these texts directly without applying your own editing first! These notes were not planned to be released in this form, but time constraints have caused a shift in priorities and have delayed editing draft-quality versions to a later point.
John going skydiving on a date, his experimentation phase in college (RL139)
They say you shouldn’t let somebody else pack your parachute, but every time John goes on the Internet somebody else is packing his parachute a little bit and he doesn’t like it. What if they are way better in packing it than you are? John has jumped out of an airplane and a professional parachute packer packed his parachute, not himself, some one-time Charlie, they didn’t even offer him the option (see OM246). It opened just fine.
John did skydiving when he was 22 years old. He was going to the university, trying to figure out the kind of women he wanted to spend the rest of his life with. He had gone through several experimental phases, he was comfortable saying that he was heterosexual and he is interested in women, but who was his other, his woman-partner? He wanted her to be confident and strong and capable and his own person, there were so many examples in college of people and he didn’t want to be that kind of man and he didn’t want to be around that kind of man or with that kind of woman.
There was a gal in one of John’s classes around 1991/92 with blonde hair that was braided into a braid that was as thick as a baby’s arm and that went down past her hand-tooled turquoise-accented leather belt. She always had dusty rough-out cowboy boots and sometimes she wore a Gaucho-hat. She always was really engaged with the professor and was always sitting in the front row, so John could see her braid because he was of course sitting in the back so he could survey the class.
John asked her out, they went out on a few dates that were middling because it turned out later that he did not really want a Santa Fe artist type. At one point she wanted to go skydiving, which felt like the kind of adventurous date that John had always dreamt of. Of course John will go skydiving! They spent the whole day skydiving and they had the option to have an actual skydiver as a backpack or go by yourself, and John didn’t want anybody humping him on the way down.
It was pretty amazing. John had spent a lot of time in small planes, so he wasn’t uncomfortable or anxious. John went first and they asked him to put his feet on the wheel which he had done a million times, although not in the air, and it wasn’t feeling weird at all. Then they asked him to reach out and grab onto the strut with his feet on the wheel, it was a Cessna 185, a high-wing airplane, and at last he was supposed to slip his feet off the wheel and hold onto the strut.
John expected to hang on the strut like Superman, flying behind it and he was going to be able to decide whether or not he wanted to jump or not. Of course you slip your feet off the wheel and all of a sudden your whole body weight and the friction of the air is pulling at you and there is no deciding to jump, but you cling to this plane until you are swept off of it. It is a genius move! You don’t stand in the doorway and the guy says: ”Okay, whenever you are ready!” because they have been doing this for years and people will stand there in the doorway paralyzed.
There is a picture of John holding onto the strut with his tongue completely out of his mouth like a Golden Retriever sticking his head out the window of a car and he was only hanging there a couple of seconds before he was swept off the plane. The parachute is connected to the plane with a cord and as soon as you fall away it rips the cord. Merlin wouldn’t jump into a pool that way, let alone into the sky, and during John’s telling of the story he frequently interjected with: ”Oh my God!”
Many people black out because the experience of falling from an airplane is so unfamiliar that your body just reboots. As soon as John was swept off the wing of the plane he has a very clear memory of falling away backwards, looking up, and he saw the plane getting rapidly smaller as it went away from him and he got total tunnel vision and he was on the absolute verge of blacking out, but managed to fight it off just barely. It ended up being totally fantastic!
All of a sudden the parachute opens and you are hanging under a canopy and only then do you realize that you are hanging under a canopy 4000 feet above the ground, and that is a completely outrageous feeling because your feet and your butt keep trying to find the chair. Merlin would surely shit himself already in the plane, again on the strut and he would continue to shit himself as he fell through the sky from 4000 feet.
It was a maneuverable parachute with handles on either side that you could pull to make the thing turn, which is amazing, like a little plane, but the more maneuvering you do the faster you descend, and you have to balance the amount of goofing around you want to do with the time you want to spend in this extraordinary state of flying. There is no sound, you just hear some flapping fabric. It lasted a couple of minutes, but they were peak minutes.
As you come in for the landing you pull down on both sides of the rope and it stalls you and John made a pinpoint landing right on the circle and stayed on his feet. It is not like World War II when you land and maybe break your leg. Those parachutes were not maneuverable and they were falling at a steady rate and had no control over how fast they were going or how to steel. That is why all these guys ended up in trees or hanging from church steeples.
John’s date also jumped and did great, maintaining total confidence throughout the whole thing, and at the end of the day on the drive back they had some kind of argument in the car and it became clear that this had been their last date. It was better that they went parachuting to try and save their relationship than having a baby. It didn’t bond them, but broke them apart.
Later that summer John was down in Seattle’s Ritzy (?) neighborhood walking past a ritzy French restaurant with outdoor seating, and she jumped up, like: ”John, hey! I want you to meet my fiancé!” and he was some really preppy rich-feeling, rich-smelling guy. That summer John was going through a phase where he was trying to find out what he was. Was he a Grunge looser? Was he a straight guy who should get a banking job?
John wished them good luck and he realized that he was not the type for her. At least that part of college where you are looking for your mate and then you are going to go off on your life’s path together, the big question is if John decided through trial and error, did he learn that that was not who he was, or did it end up that this wasn’t who he was?
Merlin and his wife met when they were both on the rebound from long serious relationships and they bonded quickly and talked a lot about the other person, and they have been together maybe a week when they were walking past a coffee shop and she said: ”That is him!” and Merlin felt like Woody Allen in Manhattan (he first said Annie Hall) when he meets Wallace Shawn and says: ”I wasn’t expecting this homunculus of a man!” It was so uncomfortable and Merlin hates that feeling.
Eventually they decided to get married, which John never did and he wonders what that would be like. He would probably have to change the house a little bit, but that was true for having a kid, too, and John did some basic baby-proofing and put the poisons on a higher shelf. She is still free to look at the braille Playboys because how is she otherwise going to learn braille?
A lot of people can look back at their college experimentation phase and feel like it was part of a project that delivered them somewhere. They can impose a structure or plan on it in retrospect, but for John none of that seemed to ever add up to a path. It was just different little Nodules inside of a lung, he was building a lung-shaped experience, but it turned out that he didn’t even need a lung, but some different kind of organ, maybe a liver, or maybe he wasn’t even bioengineering. Ultimately a lung architecture is fractals, it is lungs all the way down, and John was building a fractal lung. They continue to talk about what a heart is made up of and throw around a lot of anatomical words like Aorta or corpuscles.
John doing Theater Sports improv in Gonzaga (RL139)
In Gonzaga John was also in an improv group called Theater Sports (see RL410, RL431), and it was completely off of whatever your normal reservation would be. A lot of them were religious. Merlin knew a lot of those kinds of people, there are the ones who are reading the Keith Johnstone book (Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre) and skip the section on masks, and then there are the people who really read he section of masks.
Merlin wants to be the Del Close guy, the Upright Citizens Brigade guy, and for them it goes deeply into something about their mind and psyche. The people he knew in theater in the late 1980s were very into psychoanalysis, their improv was more that they would come into your house and ask you the most uncomfortable thing in he world, which John is also very good at.
Merlin used to introduce John to people: ”This is John, but be careful! In the next couple of minutes he is going to try and find the thing that you don’t want him to know about that is most going to make you cry!” John doesn’t try, but the thing they least want other people to know about is just there on their face and John wishes he did not have that ability to see and could blind that eye because it often is not a friend.
John’s Theater Sports troop, given that it was at a Jesuit college, had a lot of those people and all of the psychoanalysis and the hyper-thinkiness was tied up in their 20-year old wrestling with their religion. A lot of them were deeply Catholic and were really engaging their Catholicism by going into psychoanalysis with their Catholicism as their guide, which is a heavy trip. Half of the Jesuit population are just rich jocks who are headed towards owning Pontiac dealerships, and the other half are true intellectuals and combined with Catholicism that gets so tangled up in people. Their Theater Sports group would get on retreats together because: How do you rehearse Improv? You just do it over and over and get inside one another’s minds.
John never revealed his memberships in those groups to one another, he never tried to bring friends from one place and take them to another place, but he would leave his Stoner Metal party, get outside in the cold air, take a deep breath, walk across town, and into some brightly lit lunchroom where all these super-earnest intellectual Catholic kids were doing Theater Sports.
After the first year their Theater Sports group was really popular in Spokane because there wasn’t a lot going on there and they were selling out the big theater at the college, selling tickets to the town, not just to the college, and the 24-year old guy from Canada who had come into town and started this group called GUTS (Gonzaga University Theater Sports) was leaving them after the first year, going on to the next place to start another group somewhere else, and they were terrified of changing any one element of it because it was working and they were all getting somewhere.
The guy appointed John as his successor as the leader of GUTS for the second season, and John became a monster or a despot immediately. The guy had an open friendly attitude and a feeling where people were doing hard work, but they don’t resent the work because every time they look over at him he is smiling at them specifically. Very few people can do that authentically, it is a kind of magic, and he somehow managed to keep people out of the initial group of people as much as he kept them together. There were inner competitions and rivalries, but it also had a real family vibe.
In that second year it seemed like the mandate that had been handed to John was to open it up and make it bigger and invite everyone in and spread the love. The guy was Steve Jobs and John was John Sculley and John ran it into the ground. They started having auditions to bring new people in and because it was successful it attracted all the attention-starved. John was like Michael Douglas in a chorus line, a shadowy figure with smoke around his head and everybody just: ”God, I hope I get in!”
They had been an egalitarian group before with an outside leader with a mustache who came from Canada with big smile who made you think it was your idea, but he kept the thing on the rails, and all of a sudden John was sitting in the back of the room with a beret, shrouded in cigarette smoke, going: ”Next! Next!” and the other people in his original group felt like what John was doing was not in the spirit of he magic, while John was trying to preserve the magic by keeping all those dorks out of their special place, but they wanted to invite everyone in.
Eventually there was a coup and John was deposed. He arrived at a meeting that had obviously already been going on and as we went in the conversation stopped and everybody was looking at him and he knew where this was going. He was given the choice to be just a member of the troop again instead of their fearless leader, and the leadership was going to switch into a democratic form where there are going to be 4 leaders, but John would rather burn and burn this theater with all of us in it than be a member of this garbage arrangement.
He stormed out into the snow, one of the girls chased him out into the field: ”Shane!”, at one point he might even have tripped into the snow and fell and she came and tried to console him, but they were theater artists. John stayed away, but he watched the final show of GUTS season 2 from high up in the rafters above like Phantom of the Opera and at one point the girl who had chased him out into the snow, his love-interest on GUTS, in a scene somebody said: ”Give me an animal!” - ”Eagle!” and she looked up and pointed up: ”There goes the eagle!” and she saw John hanging up in the ropes and she made eye-contact with him and gave him a big smile and John smiled down to her from 5 stories up and it was: ”Mhm… My life really is a movie! I am member of no group!” He rolled a Sweet Jay up in the rafter. ”Everybody’s talking at me!” (lyrics from I Said Goodbye to Me by Harry Nilsson)
Having a High School experience like in a John Hughes movie, The Montana Boys in Spokane (RL139)
In the past much of what High School was supposed to look like in Merlin's mind was based largely on John Hughes movies or reading The Outsiders (?), but in retrospect there is a lot more subtlety to it. Freaks and Geeks really captures the striving to have cooler friends, but you have your less cool friends and even that can change when your friend gets a growth spurt and becomes a sports star. It is all a lot more fluid than Merlin remembers at the time. It all felt very carved in stone, but it was just such a clusterfuck for everybody.
John’s High School experience was very John Hughes! In college he got confused and didn’t understand where he belonged. The people from college that are still his friends today are the guys whom he wasn’t friends with back then or their relationship was at least very fraught. Because the college was in Spokane people - all Catholics - came from Montana, North Dakota, and Idaho. By Alaskan standards they were clearly wild kids from tiny Western towns where you drive for 7 hours to get to Billings.
John thought of those guys as The Montana Boys. They all had grey Cowboy Boots and they all dipped snuff. At a distance you would think they were all just hicks, ignorant dummies, but when you meet them you realize that this kid was the smartest kid from his town, the kid that got to Spokane to go to college. These guys were wise and sharp! Their small-world religious background created a culture clash initially because even though he was coming from Alaska John was much more worldly. Their initial take on John was that he was a fag because he was wearing a bow tie to school: ”No thank you, this guy is queer!”
But John was willing to throw himself through a plate glass window and over time they understood that he was a Pretty Rowdy Queer, which was also his drag name. Now he is still good buddies with those guys today because their relationship evolved over time in a way that they had a lot of suspicion about him and he also thought they were just hick Republican nobodies, but now they are the ones he is still close with.
At one point doing college he went on a road trip with these guys to Sun Valley, a car full of The Montana Boys, and they were bringing John along like a mascot: ”We are all going to Sun Valley and we are taking the queer! Haha! Anything could happen!” One of them had an uncle in Sun Valley who took them into his house and who walked around the house smoking a cigar and who had a walk-in safe full of machine guns, a fucking vault behind the bedroom, like a panic room with an arsenal inside, and that was the aspect of his house that he was willing to show his nephew’s college friends.
They went to Butte, Montana, which you can charitably describe as the asshole of the universe, although Richard Hugo liked it, Merlin’s second favorite American poet. A lot of them were from Butte and they visited one of the guy’s house. He was from one of the best families there with old silver money, and their home was beautiful with stone columns, a gracious living room, and a very elegant family. In San Francisco this would be a $40 million home and yet it was two blocks from the Berkeley Pit in Downtown Butte. John still believes that an enterprising software person could buy the entire town!
The whole place has a feeling like a bomb went off in the center of the town, which it did in the form of the silver mine, and John had thought of this guy as a Western town dingaling, but he was from this incredible, beautiful, elegant, gracious family in a gracious home in a town of a few thousand people, perched on the lip of the world, and John had no way of understanding where he was from and couldn’t get his head around the study in contrasts of that one kid’s experience, let alone that his uncle had a safe full of machine guns.
What communities Merlin and John were part of in the past (RL139)
Merlin used to very much think of himself as a member of the tech community, but now he is a secondary or tertiary member. He used to think of himself as a seasoned technologist, but now he doesn’t think that at all. One way to determine how much of a tech person you are is how much you are into technology for its own sake, and Merlin is increasingly perplexed by the people who are genuinely interested in things like chips speed. He was probably more of a content person than a tech person, although he hates that word.
On pictures from college Merlin looks like a pan-man with his Dread Pirate Roberts mustache. He used to be compared to three people in terms of looks: Cary Elwes, Michael Palin, and someone else (see RL386, RL38, RL12). On his best day he looked a little like Cary Elwes. He was a smiler who was in the New York City subways with his Army jacket and his big shit-eating grin on and his little blonde mustache, he was very Cary Elwes.
Merlin went to a very small school, he had a lot of friends, and he felt very connected to several music-type communities, like he was a member of The Dead Milkmen fan-club and they considered him a member in good standing. He saw them live in Tampa back in the day and he saw Dread Zeppelin in the same venue. John used to love going to see them! Merlin doesn’t think of himself as a stoner dummy, but he was very interested in the Church of the SubGenius (see OM172) and what would become the super-annoying research-magazine culture.
He was interested in extremity like Walter Hudson, the heaviest man in the world who ate 4 BigMacs, 4 Double Cheeseburgers, 8 large orders of fries and a quart (ca 1l) of Coke for lunch every day and weighed 1400 pounds (actually 1200 pounds, 550 kg). Merlin was a cheerful paranoid, being a half-assed post-Marxist and he was very interested in all things paranoia, not strictly conspiratorial, but how hegemony was sometimes deliberately being used to manipulate us. That was a huge part of college for him and he was part of all those communities.
John was a member of a lot of different communities that didn’t interact with each other. He felt a kinship with the community Merlin was describing. Before that was called Alternative Culture, all those things were swirling around on the Punk Rock side of culture. When They Might Be Giants first arrived at the scene they were clearly coming out of that culture, you never knew what Punk Rock was going to produce next. There was an excitement about weirdness and extremity.
When John was driving to the office today he saw a poster for a band on a phone pole using a Soviet-type font and fake Soviet iconography, maybe like the poster for The Interview, but not as watered down, referencing communist totalitarianism in a way that was a little admiring, but not completely certain, like they used to do in the past. Merlin and his wife really liked Maoist propaganda art, which is also a thing they bonded over early on. It is unbelievably gorgeous, especially given that it is about the cultural revolution or the great leap forward. In the 1970s it became almost Norman Rockwell.
It wasn’t about Ra-Ra-Communism, but: ”How different is Stalin from Reagan?” as a response to Reaganism. Some of that Maoist art makes for some of the best Rule 34 porn. The hyper-realistic, but cartoony Chinese revolution art made into porn. Merlin doesn’t think of China as a nexus for porn, but there is a lot of Japanese porn.
John always felt a kinship with that culture, but he never thought of himself as a member of it, because then he would leave that party and go across town to the party where everybody was wearing the first generation of Patagonia fleece jacket and they were all talking about waxing their boards, back when that still was technical gear and hadn’t become college kid clothes, it was meant to be worn when you were getting some fucking bodacious air. There was a time when you could count of that gear even if you were hanging by a thread. (see RL14, Demanding satisfaction).
John was a member of the community just as much of the people who were living on their longboards, but he also wasn’t a member of that community and more than he was a member of the research unsane (?) community. He thought of himself as welcome everywhere and he still does, which is part what he hopes is considered his charm. Sometimes when he arrives somewhere he knows that the party has now officially started, he is always the guest of honor wherever he goes.
For a long time he might have even walked in the door and said: ”It is fucking started! Where is the canned ravioli?” until he met his match, a guy that he was standing in the kitchen with at a party once and he was like: ”This fucking party is boring!” - ”Yeah, sort of!” and the guy reached over into the cupboard and pulled out an industrial size gallon of honey and poured it on his own head. The party just got really interesting and John was glad he was not the guy covered in honey. Merlin wonders who that was good for, including the guy himself, and it wasn’t good for anybody, but for the 15 people who watched it happen it was unforgettable. He basically took a sweet shit on the floor and it took the party to another level and John is still talking about it 25 years later.
Merlin listened to Jesse Thorn interviewing Nick Offerman (probably in Bullseye) who plays Ron Swanson in Parks and Recreation. He has the rep of being a manly man guy, he was raised in rural Illinois, and he finds it funny that he has employees to do woodworking, but he was also the only one in his family who went to school for theater and took two semesters of ballet. Often you have a one-bit description for everybody in your life, and the older we get the quicker we make that decision. When you get too much past that one-bit thing you quickly go from: ”I get you because you are in this box!” to ”You are weird!”, which means you don’t understand why your apprehension of somebody feels like a conflict.
That is why John asked Merlin that if he not a member of the tech-community anymore, what community would he describe himself as most a member of. Merlin used to think of himself as a blogger, he has thought of himself as a podcaster, and that both describes what he does, what he likes, and whom he wants to hang out with. He is not at all into the technical aspects of podcasting, he finds it super-fatiguing, but he really enjoys the genre and likes the people who do it by and large.
Merlin admires Bob Dylan, Neil Young, and the kind of people who as soon as somebody puts a label on them will say: ”Oh, you have no idea!” and they do something else. Merlin thinks that is true for John as well who doesn’t like being labelled by others, like people telling him that he is a fan or that he is this or that. Also, after 3-4 days with one particular community of people he will always go: ”Okay guys, time to get out of here! See you later!” and he goes and joins another community for a little while. During his middle age he got embraced by the nerds in a way that was very different than Indie Rock, because Indie Rock and Rock’n’Roll don’t embrace you, but they are things you try to gain admission to.
If you are John Doe (John Nommensen Duchac) and every Rock’n’Roll situation you walk into you fell like you belong… Debbie Harry… John Doe looks amazing and he is genuinely super-nice, he talked to Merlin’s daughter way more than he talked to Merlin, he is the Sam Shepard of Rock’n’Roll, he is from another era and he belongs into Rock’n’Roll, but it is not meant to embrace everybody, it is an aspiration.
But with the nerds John was going: ”No thank you! No thank you!” like walking through an airport and having the Hare Krishnas approach him from all sides, and yet they were relentless and eventually John accepted that he was a member of this community because he had so many fucking beads on himself now that it would have been a little disingenuous to claim that he would not be part of this gang.
Every week John has 3-4 gatherings, even in Seattle, where he is with a group of 5-6 people he considers his friends, they have a long history together, they sit and talk about the old days, and they make plans about the next thing they are going to do, and those people do not know really anything about the group of people he is going to visit next and have that same experience with, he is still an extra-community person, and whatever community he is a member of he is the only member, and that is not really the description of a community.
He wonders what is next and he wonders about the idea of the artist: He wants to make art and he is comfortable with the fact that he is not a genius, but he wants his art to be good, which was a problem for years because initially he wanted to be a genius and be recognized as such and people to go: ”This is fucking genius!”, but when people go: ”Hmm, this is pretty good! What else you got?”, and it has handicapped him until he started to recognize that this puts a lot more emphasis on the work and you have to really work hard to make the best thing you can and there is a line somewhere and John is on it. If you do lazy work, then what you are making just doesn’t get over the hump.
Merlin has a beef with the so called Seduction Community, every second you spend with them is taking away from what you are nominally there to be doing, every time you are talking about how to neg chicks so you can bag an eight (8 out of 10) you are sitting at a fucking computer, talking to other men, you are not even good at the Seduction Community. John has no idea what Merlin is talking about and nothing Merlin just said has he heard anything about.
The Ramones did the same thing over and over for 40 years, and it was so great that they could just keep doing it and everybody wishes they were still alive and still doing it. Merlin’s favorite Ramones song is 01:34 seconds long and the last 4 seconds is fade-out. ”Now I want to sniff some glue. Now I want to have somethin’ to do” (song Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue by Ramones).
John feels increasingly that the real culture or community he wants to be a part of, are the people who are making good things and no matter you think about them, and there is no pretense that it is genius, but you look at it and go: ”That is fucking well made! Good job!”, a community across all spheres. It is very informal, you don’t sit around every Saturday, and John has been living a bit on the fringe of it for a long time. This year he really hopes to focus less on feeling excluded and more on making a place for himself in the community of his aspirations. He should make a Facebook group: ”Community of John’s aspirations”. They won’t neg any chicks and there is no rank of Salami Commander, and if you get to be an 8 you get 24 cock-block experience points.