This week, Merlin and John talk about:
- Accidentally answering a Skype call with video on, Merlin not wanting to be on video (Podcasting)
- Doing interviews by email vs by meeting, music journalism is not like ”real” journalism (Career)
- Music journalism, music and movie reviews (Humanities)
- John using Yelp reviews to find a particular restaurant in Silverdale (Currents)
- John having frozen bacon and coffee with two much half & half (Food and Drink)
- People should remix this podcast (Podcasting)
- Merlin experimenting with store-bought gravy (Food and Drink)
- Death row last meal orders (Food and Drink)
- John making a revolutionary cabbage soup with 8 pounds of vegetables and 2 pounds of animals (Food and Drink)
The Problem: People have artisanally weaponized stroganoffs, referring to restaurants who put stroganoff on the menu, but then it is not just the peasant food you were looking for, but it is something strange just like all the other items on the menu.
The show title refers to those big bunches of celery that they sell you as the only serving size available.
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 Please do not quote these texts directly without applying your own editing first!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.
Accidentally answering a Skype call with video on, Merlin not wanting to be on video (RL145)
The first time John ever answered a Skype call from Merlin he pushed video call and the picture of him showed up on Merlin’s screen and he started screaming: ”No! No! No! Turn that off!” Merlin does have a little PTSD about it. John was scrambling around to try and turn off the video. Merlin is persuaded by the fact that lots of different people have lots of different ideas about what Skype is for and how you use it, and when two people who use it differently encounter each other it can be a little bit rocky. John has noticed that there are some people, not many, who want to socially network with him through Skype.
Sometimes Merlin is on a call and up comes some guy with a meticulous haircut who is shaved, wearing a Polo shirt in an office! ”What are you doing? Don't show me that! Put that away!” People leave their video on, it is like they are living in the future. John does not often get people who want to be on video with him. He gets the thing where people want him to go to his home studio and record a 30 second spot for a thing, and the way people toss that off it is obviously something that people do all the time and John is the dummy. Ted Leo probably tosses off some 30 second spot 50 times a day! You know what it would take for John to toss you a spot? It would be eleven weeks!
Merlin used to have a camera on his monitor pointed at his face with the thing open so that it could accidentally fire off video, then he went to keeping the little sphincter closed, then he went to turning it sideways so it points at the coffee pot, and now he disconnected the camera and does not want to be seen.
Doing interviews by email vs by meeting, music journalism is not like ”real” journalism (RL145)
Back when he used to type more people wanted to do an email interview and he greatly preferred the email interview because he got to punctuate everything correctly, but part of the disproportionate nature of electronic media, particularly email, is that somebody could send you a two line email that requires six months of work and there is nothing to keep you from basically setting everything aside to take care of whatever that person asks for. It makes it very easy on the interviewer because they just send you seven questions and John or Merlin will spend three days answering that. Now Merlin prefers to just get on the Skype and then they can go make a thing out of it, but it can be very time consuming.
Back in the days when John was doing a lot of interviews in the alternative press, some guy gets you on the phone and immediately starts asking: ”So, why should somebody listen to your band?”, or worse: ”What kind of music do you play?” - ”Seriously? You are calling me on the phone and you are asking me these dumbass questions?” And then you do your best to answer them in a good cheery voice, you walk the person through what their questions should have been without being too pedantic, but then the article comes out and they don't know the difference between your and you’re, and they are making that mistake in transcribing John’s comments, so the reader cannot help but feel that John has spoken the wrong your and that John is the idiot. If the person doesn't know how commas work, let alone a semicolon, they can change the complete meaning of what you have said.
After a while John used to say: If it can't be an email interview, even an in person interview. There was a terrible event where John had come off of a tour that was a very fun tour where they were all giving each other the sauce, and John said some certain things about everybody on the tour in the spirit of the kind of monkey business that they were throwing at each other on the tour. The interviewer was writing a big article about John’s upcoming record for a major magazine and he was a prominent journalist and they met at a French cafe and he was very charming and he expressed that he was a great admirer of John’s band, and he wrote a five page feature with six color photographs in a glossy magazine.
The problem was that he had an axe to grind or was in that journalistic scoop mode or something, and there was a whole paragraph where the spirit of the way John was saying what he was saying was like, ”I love these guys, these jerks, these dummies, these dingalings!” and the guy just put it in his article and bookended it in a way that when the article came out John got four really upset phone calls from people: ”Why would you betray us like this?”, and it turned out was that this particular writer hated one of the bands for a long time and had written a bunch of smear pieces about him, everybody knew who this guy was and didn't like him and: ”Why would you tell that guy all that stuff?”
From that point on John was like: ”Send me your questions! I will go over them and answer them, and when you get it back, it will read like you are a good interviewer. Don't worry!” Ethics in Indie Rock journalism are also not really a real thing. It is not like you are interviewing a presidential candidate. You are just talking about bands and it is not important that you transcribe the quote exactly right. It is just a good article. Fuck you!
John started on Twitter following a lot of real journalists, people who are embedded in Ukraine (John accidentally said The Ukraine again), people who are in Africa, real people reporting on real issues in the real world. Their job is very difficult and they are going trying hard to not misrepresent what is happening. A lot of times the things they are seeing with their own eyes are fairly incredible and if you are a journalist out in the middle of a battlefield and you are the only person there and you are the witness of history, they must feel tremendous pressure to record it accurately.
If you are one of 60 journalists in a news conference where there are seven television cameras, it is pretty well covered, we can go back and find out what happened. This whole thing with Bill O'Reilly, where he is talking about the Falklands War as though he were in the trenches and it takes us 40 years for somebody to say: ”Hey, wait a minute, there weren't any trenches in the Falklands War, and also no-one could get there. No-one was there!” For years he had been shouting people down about how he was doing a bayonet charge, that is an example of a journalist misrepresenting something for his own glory.
Music journalism, music and movie reviews (RL145)
But what the hell is music journalism? John understands the impulse to do it, the impulse to write it, and the impulse to read it because John used to read with a mad hunger people writing about music. But it isn't really journalism, is it? It is reporting of a kind, but they are features mostly. People who mistake the job of writing about music that it needs to be hard-hitting or you need to expose something. You can use music and contemporary music all the time as a lens through which you are trying to expose a bigger vein of the culture, but that is not usually how it plays out. Most of the time it is about the band or about the family of bands and largely about the writer’s feelings about bands. What role does veracity have? Who cares?
When Merlin was still watching TV news in the 1980s/90s he would watch the Sunday morning shows and a character like Sam Donaldson was the Howard Cosell of ABC News who wanted to become part of the story because it was Sam Donaldson who was saying it. The bombs were dropping behind him and his eyebrows are waggling and he is your guy! He had personality and a point of view in an industry where usually you would try to recede into the background and be an uncredited pool reporter for AP and Reuters and be evaluated mostly on how quickly you got an accurate retelling of the facts into print, and then that gets distributed across the world.
In music journalism today you got A.V. Club or Pitchfork, mostly addressing fans of a genre and band with your coverage and in some cases you are trying to introduce like an up and comer. What is there really to say about what the Rolling Stones are up to that isn't a story about something bigger than music, where you have to turn it into a personality story or a money story or something. The difference between the Sam Donaldsons then and today is that you don't just want to tell the facts. You want to find something that nobody else noticed, even if it is not really there, and you get into the ”turns out” stuff where you are the one person who went to that press conference and came up with something, maybe a funny tie tack somebody is wearing, but you got to find something nobody else is doing, otherwise you don't really a name for yourself today.
John still loves those pieces like the reviews of Vampire Weekend that are really a review of Ivy League privilege, because it is good feature writing. He used to read 600 reviews a week of new records, of live shows, of reissues, he would sit and just read reviews, reviews, reviews of stuff he never intended to listen to, of stuff that he knew backwards and forwards. Writing reviews and reading reviews felt like a completely separate art form and he does not do it anymore. It is so strange! It is like somebody that used to buy 7” and then stopped buying 7” except he can't even really look over at the milk crates full of record reviews that he read and paw through them. He could find an old copy of Snipe Hunt from 1993 and he probably still love it.
The role of the review has always been as much about the reviewer as the reviewed. Certainly in film criticism or movie reviewing it wasn't until the 1980s and the introduction of Siskel & Ebert’s Thumbs up/Thumbs down. Before then you would have stars and stuff, but by and large it was about what this movie meant… John doubts that they had stars back then. People magazine used to have Cheers & Jeers, but even in TV Guide as a little kid they would have stars for the movies. Think about the difference between being a movie reviewer.
There is a really funny website called Kids in Mind specifically for parents to get reviews of what happened in a movie. It ends up reading almost like porn. They have a star system, which is how much profanity, sex, and violence from zero to 10, but then there is an entire exhaustive page of all the actual specific things that led them to give those ratings: ”SpongeBob pulls down the bathing suit on a starfish and you see his butt crack!” John wants a supercut of all those moments.
Is that journalism? No, it is practical! Rotten Tomatoes is Merlin’s favorite for movie reviews, just to get a feel. It doesn't mean he is not going to like it because it got 50%, but if it did get 90%? It is more the aggregate. Merlin is not that super-interested in what any one critic in the United States had to say about the movie, but that aggregate picture is very interesting and that ain't journalism.
The promise of the Internet was that through aggregating a million voices we were going to get closer to the truth because we wouldn't have gatekeepers anymore. It used to be that if you picked up the New York Times you could count on that being nominally the best and brightest in reporting, but it was a very specific point of view that was virtually hegemonic. The Internet was going to democratize everything and you would have essentially the voice of the borg. Everything would be seeable, everything would be knowable, and you would eliminate the 5-star review and the 1-star review and then concentrate on aggregating 5000 3-star reviews into some sensible idea about it.
John using Yelp reviews to find a particular restaurant in Silverdale (RL145)
Last night John was in a town called Silverdale in Washington, a place that used to be Navy support personnel and then people who ran out of gas and just started living in their car, but in the last 25 years it has turned into a giant suburban metropolis. It is just suburbs as far as the eye can see. They were hungry, they went on the Internet, the first thing that comes up is Yelp, and John has never written a Yelp review and he has read enough of them that he almost owes it to the community of humans to add Yelp reviews because he takes and takes and takes and he never gives back, but he hates Yelp, and so does Merlin.
John was looking for a Mediterranean restaurant because he felt like having some stuffed grape leaves and here this program pops up out of nowhere, it tells him where one is that is nearby, and then it gives him a Sisyphean choice because the reviews are inconclusive. Then you are rolling the dice, imagining that you are full of information, but in fact you are rolling the dice in exactly the same way as if you had looked it up in the phone book and pulled up out front of it and said: ”Do you want to go in there? Does it look okay?” You go in full of information, but with actually no information because what it boils down to is that you are going to walk into a place, sit down and try it out, and none of those reviews helped.
They ended up to be the only people in the restaurant, the waitress was great, the food was amazing, but how would John’s Yelp review add to the conversation? The next person that comes along and reads that it might be 5am, there might be 200 people in the restaurant, it could be a completely different situation.
Merlin thinks that many people treat it like a blog a lot of the time, and there is a certain amount of status to being somebody who reviews a lot and gets their reviews meta-reviewed, being a top reviewer, that is how the Internet works now. But a normal person would only leave a review if something very unusual and unexpected happened or a surprising ”Everything was great except this one dish!”, or: ”I was visiting town, I knew nothing about this neighborhood, and I had a surprising experience here because I didn't know this place would be this good!” It still comes down to you. It is still about your personality.
John having frozen bacon and coffee with two much half & half (RL145)
John had a really weird experience this morning. His frozen bacon process. He made a bunch of bacon, he had been going to the German Butcher and getting the hand-made bacon that had been lovingly hand-padded. This morning he was just at a chain grocery store and there was a mega 3-pound bag of bacon for $5, but he was hungry and confused and bought a 3-pound bag of Hormel bacon, took it home and did the bacon method
He ran out of paper towels and did not have a system by which he could pad the grease off, but people have been eating bacon for thousands of years before paper towels were even invented. ”Am I a man or a mouse?” and he just put the greasy bacon in individual bags and put it in the freezer, so the bacon had a pretty good coating of frozen grease on it. He has been enjoying this bacon quite a bit, it is just normal bacon.
But this morning on his way rushing out to go to the office he grabbed a bag of frozen bacon, he took a cup of two day old coffee and microwaved it as he normally does, poured some half & half into it to take the edge off, but it was a new thing of half & half and he put a little bit too much half & half, he doesn’t usually like it to be creamy, he wants it to just be a little coffee with a little splash, just a little like fireworks in there.
As he was walking out the door he got his microwaved coffee in one hand in a beer stein, his frozen bacon in the other, and as he was warming up the truck he ate a couple of pieces of delicious frozen greasy bacon and he took a sip of over-microwaved two day old coffee with too much cream in it and the combination of those two substances, hot and cold, greasy and greasy with the coffee as a bonding agent created a new polymer in his mouth and on his tongue where it was like the inside of his mouth had itself been processed somehow, so that his tongue no longer felt like a friend that he had known for a long time.
Instead it felt like someone wearing a helmet was in his mouth and was trying to strip wallpaper out of an abandoned house. This was really not what he was expecting, but it wasn't entirely unpleasant. It persisted, John put the car in gear, he was driving down the road, and he was exploring his new mouth with this new helmeted ally, and it lasted probably for half an hour. There was a tingling because the salt was also playing a role. John is still reeling from it.
John is glad that it is no longer going on in his mouth, he is not sure if he will repeat it immediately, but he does feel like that particular polymer might be of use in science. If there are people out there listening to this program who are in the science, maybe experiment with those ingredients as a new anesthetic, you never know what that stuff is going to do. It could be a cure for polio, although we don't need one of those for now. We don’t need to go all the way up the Amazon to find new grasses that contain curare or whatever. John may have manufactured curare in his own mouth by combining these beakers of material that shouldn't ever or maybe should be put together.
This is like 100 monkeys typing on typewriters: How many millennia might it have been before somebody came up with this particular mixture? Frozen bacon is not very common, microwaved over-creamed coffee is pretty common, but there was also the big beer stein and John was sitting in a cold truck with a big motor that was vibrating him, it is not quite a centrifuge, but there was a mixer. People have been eating bacon and drinking coffee for millennia, but it is unclear if this particular set of circumstances had ever occurred before!
People should remix this podcast (RL145)
Everything on this podcast so far has been Creative Commons, everybody just gets to take it and make a shirt of it. As long as you credit it to us, you can go ahead and remix it and make your own albums, make your own podcast just out of remixes. If you took this podcast and you sped John’s voice up so that it was at the pitch of Merlin’s voice and you slowed Merlin’s voice down so it was at the pitch of John’s, it wouldn't be that much of a monkey, but you would have to monkey with their voices a little bit. How would that change the dynamic of the conversation for the listener? Probably a lot!
If an intrepid thought-scientist was out there and was like: ”You know what? I am going to slow one guy up and speed the other guy down and then apply that algorithm to all the past podcasts!”, create a multiverse where no-one expected it and then play those episodes to someone who had never heard the show before and ask: ”What do you think of these guys?” It would probably be very unsettling! Merlin encourages science, it is a good idea and experimentation is interesting.
This podcast is basically a bear talking to a raccoon. If you took a conversation between a bear and a raccoon and you made the raccoon sound like a bear and the bear sound like a raccoon, that would upset the animal Kingdom. John doesn’t know if that coffee was okay, he doesn’t even know how long that cream was in the refrigerator. He doesn’t remember buying it, and he was out of town for weeks.
Merlin experimenting with store-bought gravy (RL145)
Merlin hates to bring up gravy again… John expected people would respond to that episode by saying: ”I love gravy!”, but he got 3-4 people that were like: ”Gravy? No! What you really want is leak soup or lentil butter!" They had something else besides gravy that was better or changed the calculation somehow, but this is the beauty of the ecosystem of the gravy multiverse: There are so many options and so many combinations! John and Merlin just want to be more sauce-positive! Whatever it is that people want to do, Merlin just wants them to feel free and encourage them to try sauce in more things, maybe sometimes have a couple of sauces.
John went through a real sauce phase recently that was in addition to his normal sauce phase. It was a sauce level above the normal level. Anytime he cooked something and there was anything left in the pan he would start making a sauce. He would take the thing and put it over on a plate and let it go cold while he sat and focused on the sauce. The problem was that he loves Marsala wine in a sauce that gives it a little punch, but he couldn't get away from the Marsala and he would always throw the wine in and every sauce ended up tasting the same, including cheese sauces. He couldn't stop!
One of the problems with John’s cooking is that he knows basically what 10 ingredients do, but there are 800 ingredients he doesn't know what they do, and he ends up putting those 10 ingredients in everything. Merlin is the same way. He does so few things like a man, but he really cooks like a man, and not in a good way. It is going to be kosher salt, garlic powder, Mrs. Dash, and he will put some Accent (MSG) in, which his wife doesn't like. No disrespect to the people who think that they are allergic to MSG, but Merlin will put that in, it is an activator. Hate crime!
At the end of last episode (see RL144) they ended up talking a lot about the various sauces and gravies that they enjoyed and how when they had been on a cruise three weeks ago, they were able to have access to sauces and gravies of many kinds all you care to eat anyway and it made them into gravy scientists. A few days later Merlin went out and had his quarterly comic meet up, and for an hour and a half all he did was talk about gravy. Maybe that is why John is getting so much mail. Maybe it is from people who were there!
Merlin’s idea of having basically a mall restaurant that is all about sauces is apparently something he has gone through before. Long story short, he wants some fucking gravy in his life and he wants it to be easy. He went to the store, the Safeway, he went to the aisle with the gravy, and he bought a bunch of different canned gravies and gravy mixes, he was like a little child going into this, so excited for some fucking gravy, and every one of them so far has been a literal abortion. There is some emulsifier or stabilizer that they put in there that makes every canned gravy tastes like you are licking a dirty pan in a restaurant.
Merlin is an ingredient reader, even if he is not always the healthiest eater, but he does like to know what is unhealthy about what he is eating. He doesn’t have high standards, but basically there is a flavor that he wanted somewhere in the first 10 ingredients, and then 6-8 things that he generally tries to avoid in everything that he buys. Somewhere in there is chicken broth, but then you got corn starch and ”Fuck that!” The first ingredients are all grains that he tries to avoid and gums and stuff, but given the choice he will avoid a grain or a gum because in a non-gravy environment those are not things that you want adulterating your food.
He tried 6-8 little envelopes of powder that was like taco mix and a couple of jars. It is a board meeting in a bag, basically: ”What is a bunch of shit we got that we can put a photo on and charge $1.89 for?” He got the nicest envelope of sausage gravy he could find because you add milk instead of water, obviously. You add two cups of milk to this pocket of powder, and it was so disgusting! It was what he imagines maybe Soylent tastes like! John wishes Merlin had called him because John has tried every packaged sauce, and you need to run from so many of those, like the Swanson! Merlin never bought those. He doesn't buy McCormick packs or Taco packs, he know that is real downscale food!
John asks: What if you want a stroganoff! How does a man make a stroganoff? You could get a Stouffer’s! John’s talk about the Salisbury Steaks really took Merlin back and he is going to explore some Salisbury steaks and some stroganoffs. He loves a stroganoff! It is one of the all-time great foods, but stroganoffs have become one of these secret artisanal food weapons.
People have artisanally weaponized stroganoffs, so you walk into a restaurant and you don’t know what any of that stuff on the menu is and you don’t want any of it, so you pick a peasant food that is perfect the way it is, you don’t need any beef tongue carpaccio, and then it is Mediterranean stroganoff with a bang of Southwestern spice and they obviously put a New York steak in it. Why is this full of New York steak? Merlin thinks that that is the order on Death Row, it is not the food for a person in a free society.
Now Merlin is on the horns of a dilemma because he does have these packets, it was not a large financial investment, he will try maybe one more, but now he is trying to figure out what his options are. He might move up the line a little bit, see if Whole Foods has a line of gravy, he could look on Amazon, but he hasn’t seen much on Costco. His goal was to get it where it is like John’s frozen bacon program where he can have a ready supply of small amounts of gravies and sauces that can be deployed tactically as needed.
There are surely blogs devoted to this, but John read about them in Sunset magazine, where you basically use prepackaged foods as a component in making what ultimately looks like a home-cooked meal. You decant some fairly good quality package stuff, and then you contribute your own fresh ingredients to it and pretty soon it is not clear where the processed food stops and the home-made food starts. It is an artisanal version of the 1950s Campbell soups, you start out with this as a component, as a building block, but it is not the center of the meal like they want you to.
John’s first policy is: If you buy something, make it all. Don't reserve half of the package for later. Make it all! Get your biggest pot out, start with this garbage gravy that cost $0.59, but that you feel pot-committed to enough that you don't want to just throw it away, and then build on that with actual gravy making techniques until you have made a pot of gravy. It is like stone soup, you start out with this little circle thing, and you build and build and build. You keep adding! Those gravies that don't say add milk? They are wrong! Add milk!
You throw a little bit of gluten-free flour in there, at Trader Joe’s the other day he bought cashew flour, he doesn’t even know what it does, it looks like flour, but it is just ground up nuts. It is fascinating! One of these days it is going to be a situation where a burglar comes into the house and he is standing in the pantry for some reason, and the only weapon he has is this thing of cashew nut flour and he will just throw it in his eyes like a ninja, and because of his nut allergy he falls to the floor and gets an anaphylactic shock.
John would use those just as starters and then build a much bigger pot of stuff. The danger of that of course being that if the thing turns out to be terrible, then you have a huge thing of terrible instead of a small thing of terrible.
When Merlin thinks about the Windjammer, the all you can eat restaurant on the cruise, and the fount of gravy for the cruise, he is realizing he needs to man up! It is also about the ease of the sauces and gravy and all he had to do was say goodbye to his family, walk away for 35 minutes, and he could have gravy on anything! If he is going to make a gravy he is going to have to make a gravy!
Death row last meal orders (RL145)
John has a 3-ring binder of his death row foods. He hasn’t read Shakespeare because he is saving it for prison and there are some things that he is saving for death row, if that is how this all plays out. He has seen some amazing menus! Dry white toast, two fried chickens, and a Coke? That will be the one time that John will eat tapas without wrinkling his nose at the affair because he is going to want a little bit of the following 60 foods.
Merlin read the other day about a woman on death row in Georgia who had a pretty amazing last meal stacked up. She wants two cheeseburgers, two large orders of fries, lemonade, cherry vanilla ice cream, popcorn, cornbread, and a salad made of boiled eggs, tomatoes, bell peppers, onions, carrots, cheese, and buttermilk dressing. John can point her to some restaurants in Nebraska where she could get that right on the menu. It is actually a platter!
John would have some comfort foods. A food that he really have always liked is chicken cordon bleu. One of the first times that John really felt like an adult, he was in college, probably sophomore. The party didn't happen at his house because even when he was feeling like an adult his house was generally uninhabitable, like there was the pony keg that he had let go sour and the party a few days before where at a certain point in the night people just started putting their cigarettes out on the floor.
It was at a friend's house, but it was John’s party. They invited all the girls they knew and they all came. It was a big enough group of 20 people that it felt like a party and not just a gathering, and John’s idea was that they were going to assembly line some chicken cordon bleu. They had all the ingredients, all the bowls of milk and egg and breadcrumbs, people were on board with this, and it was during a time when just the nature of how they threw parties they were always a little hungry.
They got this assembly line going, they were pounding these chicken breasts flat, rolling them up, they had gotten all good ingredients, and they had the best time! The whole party was just making chicken cordon bleus, they were cycling them through the oven, and they came out and you let them cool down and then everybody would try one and then another one would be ready. It was a really good time!
The problem is: That was maybe 1989 and John is pretty sure he has never made a chicken cordon bleu since that time because it is a lot of work. You don't just toss one of those off, but you can buy them in a box.
Merlin was reading that in 2011 Texas stopped the last meal tradition after Lawrence Russell Brewer asked for a large final meal, including two chicken fried steaks, triple bacon cheeseburger, and meat lover's pizza, and refused to eat it. He dogged them right at the end and ruined it for everyone! Now anybody who is one of the many people sentenced to death in Texas can't get a final meal just because this guy was being ornery. They are mad about the $30 that the guy that was about to die didn't eat? John is guessing that mentality in Texas comes right from the top down from Rick Perry.
John making a revolutionary cabbage soup with 8 pounds of vegetables and 2 pounds of animals (RL145)
The other day John made some cabbage soup. He got the biggest pot he owns, which is a pretty big pot, and he just started throwing cabbages in it. A cabbage is not a thing that in the top of his mind is a thing he thinks he is going to like, but it turns out every time somebody puts some kind of cooked cabbage in front of him he always enjoys it. Cabbage shows up in things now and it doesn't look appealing, it always looks like the skin of a cadaver that washed up on the shore, that the police boat is pulling over with a hook, but it is actually really good. People cook cabbages, it is not that hard, even the Irish cook cabbages, and John decided to make cabbage soup.
He got his pot, put some chicken stock in there, threw some onions in, he started cooking them, he threw some leaks in there, he doesn't even know what a leak is, but he threw it in there and he started cooking it, some garlic and a bunch of kale just because, and then he started throwing a couple of cabbages in and a red cabbage. Then he thought: ”You know what this needs? A pound of hamburger!” so he made some hamburger and threw a pound of hamburger in there. ”You know what else I got in the freezer? A pound of ground turkey. I don't even know why I bought that!”, so he cooked up the ground turkey and threw it in, and then he was looking at the ten spices that he knows what they do and a little Hungarian paprika can't hurt.
The only serving size that a grocery store has of celery is an acre of celery, a forest stand of celery, you need a stalk and you have to buy a forest, you buy 50 stalks, this thing is as big as a rugby ball, and because John had a big pot he took this whole celery thing, this whole scrum of celery, and he chopped it into whatever pieces that are the size of a pocket watch, and he threw this whole thing in there. He also cooked some mushrooms and threw them in. He also had a pound of Sauerkraut and threw that in there and he thought: ”Fuck you, pot. You figure it out!"
This stuff cooked on the stove for forever and every once in a while he walked by and looked at it and cursed at it in a friendly way, just being encouraging. It turned into an incredible consistency that you could build an Adobe house out of, and eating it, if you close your eyes it is like eating spaghetti, it is so al dente and crunchy and it has too much flavor. It is great flavor. John got this pot in there that could feed Napoleon's army marching into Russia. It is this fantastic stuff that probably won’t ever go bad, it would just start tasting more and more like itself until it became Kimchi.
It is like a retired woman: It becomes more and more like itself every day! Wild women don't get the blues and neither does John’s cabbage soup.
John’s first impression was that this is Adobe-quality spaghetti soup, it is substantial, heavy, and got too much flavor in a good way. John was tripping because he had committed so much materiel, he was Yossarian, Bob Newhart in Catch-22, committing materiel to this pot and if it went bad Seattle sewers couldn't handle it, he would have to take it out of town, put it in the trunk, drive it out of town, and put it in the forest somewhere and a year from now somebody would be flying overhead and be like: ”What is going on down there? Send in the troops!”
It was this fantastic concoction that is really 8 pounds of vegetables and a couple of pounds of animals, and it feels like John’s latest triumph! Every person who has been in his house in the last week he has basically forced to eat a cup of this soup, but the more soup he takes out of this pot the fuller the pot is, like some miraculous Grim Brother deal, he has unlocked some metaphysical door and has created the ultimate endless soup. Everybody was like: ”Roderick made cabbage soup? I don't know!”, but he wouldn’t take ”No!” for an answer. There is not a lot of color to it, it looks like something you would use to fill a hole in your driveway, but everybody tries it and everyone agrees that it is a revolution in their mind.
Merlin feels ashamed because he is cleaving to the convenience, he is being pulled in the direction of just wanting the ease, and yet John’s story of adventure in cooking is inspiring and humiliating to him.
There is a difference between being a bachelor and being a house husband in the sense that if John made a catastrophe he could slink out into the night and leave it by an abandoned couch somewhere, put it over by Gary and Skeeter who would probably try to use it for gas, and there would be no consequences. Nobody is going to open the refrigerator and say: ”Where did all the food go?” John is dancing like no one is watching. And sometimes the race goes to the bold.
Every time John does this he feels like he is the Napoleon and he is invading the Russia of the unknown and every time he could lose 700.000 troops to frostbite and sometimes he does, but sometimes he is the Napoleon that conquers Russia and he comes back wondering why he ever thought to do that because it was a bad idea even if you conquer Russia because then you got to run it and that is what John is doing right now: He conquered Russia, he has it in a pot in his refrigerator, and everybody that comes by gets a little taste of the Ukraine. Na Zdorovie! Merlin would be shitting non-stop if he were John.