This week, Merlin and John talk about:
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Table of Contents
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The Problem: Their people use every part of the lighter, referring to Gutter Punks using the metal top of lighters as metal studs on their clothes.
The show title refers to John being the chosen Anchorman for the UFOs when they finally want to start communicating with the humans.
Merlin’s sinuses are a wreck! He was traveling, he was on a fart tube twice, and he was spending two nights in a hotel with air conditioning and he is thanking his lucky stars that he is not sick.
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 Please do not quote these texts directly without applying your own editing first!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 experiencing a jam-up day on the way to his office (RL202)
For John today is a jam-up day, everything on the way in was a jam-up, not terrible, but it had that vibe. He has an idea about how this should go, but like a great U-Haul truck existence has put a governor on his life and he is not allowed to go quite at the propulsive velocity that he needs to make this thing go. There are jam-up days days where John is the jam-up, where he can’t find his keys or glasses, where he stubs his toe or gets a spider in his mouth, but that is not the problem today.
Today John was on a 4-lane road with 2 lanes in each directions and 2 cars driving side-by-side at 40 mph (65 km/h) on a 45 mph (72 km/h) road and everybody behind is trying to pick which one of those people is the oblivious dope who never looks in their rear-view mirror and will just go 40 mph the rest of the day, no matter what, and which one is the inconsiderate but knowledgable person who is driving 40 mph because they are looking at their phone and at some point they are going to become aware and potentially speed up or get out of the way.
John had no dog in this race and he had time, and he was hanging back and was scoping the 5-6 cars piling up behind this 2-person clusterfuck. The right-hand car was a peach-lipstick colored 2001 Toyota Tercel and on the left lane there was a Minivan Taxi and the entire back window was covered with stickers of various Taxi authorization to the point that you could not even see who was in it. They were going 3 miles with those two side-by-side. Merlin thinks this is a triple-turns-out and guesses that the Taxi-person was the dingeling, the blight on society who was just oblivious, but every other driver on the road thought otherwise and lined up behind the cab.
Sometimes the mere pressure of 6 people piling up behind you will have the effect of pushing the obstruction and the cabs started to move and everyone behind it started to rejoice because they made the right call and it is opening up and they can be on 55 mph soon (90 km/h) and they are setting the bezel on their GMT watches and in 30 seconds it is coming and when they pass the lipstick-colored car they are all going to look down into that car and whatever their suspicion is will be confirmed.
The cab pulled ahead, a brown Ford Probe was first in line to slot into the space, the lipstick car was holding a very constant speed and the cab finally cleared the line so that the Probe could pop over and as he does he immediately stops accelerating and was going the same speed as the cab, going neck-and-neck with the cab with the lipstick car now behind the probe. John was super-glad to be just hanging back as a passive observer and the entire rest of the way in to town the other cars were passing a baton of stupid back and forth and as John got into the office he was happy to be there. The problem with a baton of stupid is that dropping it doesn’t mean you have lost or won, but it just means you are still stupid. The driver of the lipstick car turned out to be a 45 year old Asian woman.
Merlin is not proud of himself, but he would do the revenge thing and drive down I-75 and somebody was not driving to his satisfaction and he would drive past them, get in front of them and go 1 mph slower than they were going. It is the worst! What was he even attempting to solve with that?
The other day somebody in the left lane in front of John decided to put on their turn signal just as they slam on their brakes to make a left turn. John was already in the right lane and not affected by this person, but behind them was a jacked-up Dodge Ram 2600 with giant coal-burning pipes and the guy in the truck was bald with sunglasses on the back of his head and a goatee. If he is not a member of the NRA then his dad was, he got short pants on for sure, and a ”Don’t tread on me!” flag somewhere and he thinks he is not going to change his forward momentum at all, except to weave over into the right lane, even though his truck is 45 feet long. John was in that space already, not doing anything wrong, just traveling at a constant speed.
Now the guy had to slam on his brakes and somehow it was John’s fault and you could see his tantrum when he passed John, although John was not looking at him. That guy’s whole life is a fucking jam-up and all the Metamucil in the world is not going to clean this guy out. John was driving along, minding his own business, but a minute later the guy was hauling ass by him, pulled over in front of him and slammed on his brakes and John didn’t even have the option of not being affected by him and had to brake. If he had anticipated it he could have dodged and weaved him, but John was just driving along, looking at the birds, and got punished.
Keep moving and get out of the way (RL202)
The original Roderick on the Line discussion is Keep moving and get out of the way, which is not a bit, but it is literally a way of life. It has become America’s favorite catch phrase, but what people forget is that the ”and” is the key and that by keeping moving and getting out of the way they are helping people. If we all found a way to do both of those things all the time everything would get better. Every Libertarian nominally agrees with this statement, but if they actually adopted it they would get more credibility.
They talk a lot about how they are helping people on this program, but what they really do is empower people to help people. They are helping people help people and the prime way is #Supertrain, but another prime way is teaching people to teach people to keep moving and get out of the way. It is almost the world’s least financially successful pyramid scheme, but that is Alcoholics Anonymous.
The problem with keep moving and get out of the way as a teaching strategy is that you want other people to learn by example how you can be out of their way while still be moving, but people refuse to learn and if they are already in the way they are presumable not watching to see a better way. It should be part of the driver’s exam.
Hillary Clinton wanting to open the Area 51 files if elected (RL202)
Hillary Clinton has promised that if elected she is going to bottom of Area 51 (John remarks that she didn’t say ”when elected”, but ”if elected”). She used some inside language of the UFO community and she even started talking about it without being asked and prompted the discussion. She was not mollifying some kook by using their inside language, but she was outing herself as an UFO truther.
It cause John to reflect that her husband was president for 8 years and you would think that if she cared about it this much she would have had the opportunity. Has he seen Gleep Glorb? No! But if he wanted to know the answers about them…
John’s sense of what Hillary was saying is that her husband wasn’t that interested, he was more interested at that point in time in juicing the economy with his vaguely neoliberal policies and he was not interested in getting to the bottom of the One World Government that lives beneath the polar ice caps and is controlled by UFOs, but his wife was and she was just biding her time to get into that hot-seat.
John being the Anchorman for the UFOs (RL202)
(John already told this story in RL10 and RL331)
John is very excited about this as a UFO truther because chances have improved about somebody reopening Project Blue Book and saying that this could all have been swamp gas, but let’s get to the bottom of this again. When this all goes down and when the UFOs say: ”Okay, the gig is up! We have been designing Frozen dolls for a long time, we have been making a lot of movies about UFOs!” and all of this was laying the groundwork for the big reveal in the style of: ”We never knew about them before, but here they finally are!” and all the kids are going to welcome them because they look like Frozen dolls.
The way it has to happen is the same way as it often happens in movies because those movies are all produced by the UFOs, walking around in They Live style face masks (John Carpenter movie), interacting with Roddy Piper (who was in that movie), where one morning everybody wakes up and there is a giant spaceship hovering over every major city. You don’t want just one over St. Louis Missouri. It being a giant flying saucer in those films is Hollywood overselling it a little bit because if it was just a 4-passenger one it would still have the same effect.
During a certain part of his life John believed that if the UFOs wanted to camouflage themselves they would do it by turning their spaceships into 727s. There are no 727s anymore today and a certain number of plane spotters would be confused where those 727s came from, but if they were 737s, those are everywhere! Imagine there was a 737 on approach to every major airport in the world and it would just stop moving a forward and go into a hover, that would send a powerful message to everybody!
The Air Force will send up their jets, but they are not very useful because the 737s are immobile and flying around them in F-16s won’t do anything. Then they send up some Apache or some Cobra helicopters, but an immobile 737 is no thread to anybody, there are no weapons on it, and maybe it is full of people! You can’t just shoot it down because it is an airliner. Conspiracy theorists are online, saying what they think it is, like a cross-temporary reality theme, but they will let them stew for a day until they will come on the airwaves.
They will be broadcasting on the Internet and on televisions all around the world and show their alien spokesperson which is John. His voice is simultaneously translated into all the languages of the world, but he is just an American and he was the obvious choice to put a human face on the UFOs. He is as curious as anybody, but he is here to moderate the experience, to be the Anchorman, which will be the name under which he will be remembered by generations in the future.
John will be walking everybody through it and he will be throwing in some Keep moving and get out of the way science on people, it will be the moment where John could interject some life science into the whole experience with people. They will be dealing with a whole new reality with planes hovering in the air and cats and dogs sleeping together and one great way to do that would be to learn this simple tool. This will be a better way to get the word out than to just populate podcasts with it. This podcast would have to be about a murder if they wanted to reach such a broad audience.
They are already communicating with John, they have already chosen him, and they are already here, so they just need to do the next step, which is the big reveal, and when Hillary Clinton is president she is going to down into the elevator, meet Gleep Glorb, and she will be pretty impressed. When all this is happening and they look back they will wonder where the Anchorman came from, but John’s story will be in the public record and people will know that the Anchorman was talking about it a long time before it happened on his Phoney Award winning podcast.
Merlin explains that the First Lady of the White House usually has a mission, like Lady Bird (Johnson, wife of LBJ) wanted to clean up litter and beautify the Highways, Michelle Obama wanted kids to move more and get in shape, Laura Bush was a former teacher and was all about literacy, but Hillary Clinton did not have a thing and maybe she had a pet project that wasn’t quite so public. We might be in the second or third chapter of a much bigger story and she might have been working on this since 1993.
Because we live in an electoral democracy, when Clinton left office they took the key to Area 51 back from him and she has been on the outside. She has been the Secretary of State, but the key-master in this situation is Obama. George Bush had no idea that Zoul, the third UFO behind Gleep Glorp and Gleep Glob, was even there. Cheney would go down there and they would be sharing cows in their amorphous form. He is ultimately a dumdum, he is no Hillary Clinton, and he thinks that eating cows with Gleep Glorp is the end of the road, but he is just dealing with the gaseous guy at the front desk.
Cheney’s body language and the way he talks almost perfectly resembles Vincent D’onofrio’s character in Men in Black. He is a cockroach inside a human skin. Ever since Eisenhower somebody in the government has been interacting with the UFOs, but they are just handing you the little chewed-on bones of their technologies with gets the Air Force to claim that they have developed the F-22 Raptor using alien technology, but really it is all the plans on the Jolly Rancher labels.
All you had to do was watch the movie Masters of the Universe with the raccoon and the tree and with the guy Hodor and the guy from Parks and Rec, to realize that every other planet that isn’t Earth is already populated by every kind of race of alien, most of the bipedal, but that is just the best way to get around. Maybe Lowly Worm is the height of evolution for us, he definitely seems like the happiest person in a very happy story, and he has an Austrian yodelehihoo-hat. In a Richard Scarry universe every character knows their place and if you have been to a little German town in the Thüringer Wald you will found that this is exactly how little German towns operate, like a Rotary Club where they have one of each occupation.
There is the United Nations idea of UFOs and Earth people are just being cultivated that one day we will be ready to join the United Nations of universe inhabitants. All of our movies depict the United Nations of the universe as mostly human beings with some blue people walking around, but in future UFO movies we are going to find that the humans are the weird ones and most everybody else looks like a rhinoceros.
John is not claiming that the UFOs are giving him any privileged information. They are just picking him to sit in the chair and experiencing the UFOs for the first time with everybody as a proxy, except he is on TV, saying: ”Look, this is what we are seeing!” John is able to inspire trust because in order for people to truly trust the messenger he has to be able to criticize the message, and if the UFOs do something weird John will be able to tell them that what they are doing is a bit inexplicable and he will be calling them on their shit.
What qualifies John for the job is that we already spend all day every day thinking we are being duped 1000 different ways, but we don’t know how. He accepts refined sugar, he accepts the fact that they are playing Wheezer in the grocery store now, he accepts the fact that he cannot drive a car without putting a seatbelt on because the car will lecture him through a series of bongs, he accepts all these things, knowing he is being mind-controlled, but he is also looking for the next layer of mind-control and the one after that is the job.
The UFOs want somebody up there who is saying what everybody is thinking because that is how people learn to trust the spokesperson. The game for John would be that he knows as well that this is what they are doing, he is even saying it out loud. Is Zoul the last layer? Or is he the guy behind the desk at the US Embassy in Niger.
They are going to put John through an airport scanner and fix his health, repair the ligaments in his ACL, they are going to clean him out, his head is not going to be allergic to itself anymore, his little broken finger is going to be able to straighten itself out all the way, they ware going to fix his teeth, they are going to take all the cancerous cells that haven’t started to metastasize yet. John is going to be like washed rice after they have combed out all the impurities. At a certain point John’s brain will not be able to handle being the anchorman anymore and they are going to retire him to a Veld somewhere after a Methusalean 700 years. Also, being the Anchorman is a job and they are going to fill his space account with bitcoins because what are bitcoins if not space dollars?
Meeting a group of Gutter Punks playing Hillbilly music who might be UFOs (RL202)
The other day John was walking through a park and saw a group of people. Gutter Punks are a very specific brand of My Own Private Idahos. They have a clear aesthetic and for all of their outsiderness, if you see two Gutter Punks coming through the rye you are going to recognize them as a member of the same tribe which John finds even less punk, but it is closer to classic hardcore tribal 9-inch Nails style with tribal scarification and tattooing and elongated ear lobes, stuff that within the hardcore community would not be what everybody was rocking. They mend their own clothes and each one has their one outfit that they mend over and over.
John has a long history with Gutter Punks. He had a good friend named Grant who at the age of 21 decided that he wanted to be known as Grant Funk Rayroe, something that probably came up when he was wasted and then it stuck. He was a beautiful guy. John was never a confirmed street kid because at a certain point of education you cannot take that education back, like you cannot choose to join the proletariat, but for a while he traded in the same market place as the Gutter Punks and Grant was a very close friend, they crashed together often.
Grant was prepared to go further down the drain than John would. One time John was at a party with him and he stuck a fork into a burner on a gas stove because they were using the burner to hot-knife hash and he stuck a fork into it and everybody said: ”It is not called hot-forking, it is called hot-knifing!” and when the fork was red hot he just took the fork and pressed it into his arm. He was legit, it was a pretty good party trick because he was going to have a burned fork on his arm for the rest of his life just for their benefit. But there are people who have put less thought than that into tattoos.
John was walking through a park and came upon a very large group of 20+ Gutter Punks or all sizes and shapes and genders and races. Generally you only see about 4 of them at a time, one of them with a German Shepherd puppy on a chain, and one of their aesthetics is to take the little metal cap of a big lighter and crunch it into the brim of their baseball hats or onto their Levi’s jacket with the effect of making little studs. Their people use every part of the lighter.
They were playing Hillbilly Mountain Music, one had a tiny little piccolo banjo, one was playing a tub bass with a broomstick, a washtub, and one string, one played a jaw harp which we once upon a time called a Jew Harp, there was a harmonica, two guitars, and a full-size banjo, a violin and a flute, and all the instruments were Gutter Punk, too, either handmade or found and patched, they looked exactly like Dexys Midnight Runners from 1982. The music they were making was great because Mountain Hillbillies are not that far away from Gutter Punks anyway.
John stopped and listened to them and the ones who weren’t playing music were sneering at John like: ”Do you like this? Oh, is that something that you like?”, which is a classic Punk Rock move. You pull your shirt down and show your boob and when somebody looks at you, you say: ”Oh, do you like that?” and John was super-ashamed by their friends for liking it, like: ”Are we entertaining you? Are we like a clown to you?” What was most entertaining was that this band required something that is most antithetical to Gutter Punkism, which is that they have coordinated with one another, they got organized, they learned a bunch of songs together, and yet they are clearly true Gutter Punks, you could see that they were no posers, and yet they were making banjo music that is actually good.
John thought that they were fucking UFOs, which is genius because nobody would think given the choice between different groups of people that the Gutter Punk was the UFO because it is too obvious. It was a glimpse behind the matrix because how many people know enough about the Gutter Punk subculture to walk up on a thing like that and say: ”Wait a minute! This is weird!” A fake Gutter Punk in that situation would not have cut it, the core of that group was definitely down. It seemed to be a sign that stuff was going to come unravelled, like when a parking meter gives you a free ticket, which never happens because these computers are programed to be pure evil.
Little things go wrong all the time, but when little things start going right, like when the check engine light goes off or when the closet door that was always stuck stops sticking, you are wondering: ”Who is laying the groundwork for what here?” When the Gutter Punks start organizing and contributing to society in the form of music they are violating their credo, but in a way it is still consistent with their credo. How is that even possible? It is like bending light! There might be some Gutter Punk - Juggalo overlap, but probably not that much. Merlin was asking because John had to revise his opinion about Juggalos after moderating that panel (see RL197).
John is still waiting for the Juggalo-rising and he knows that they most definitely feel chosen by the UFOs, but that seems like Dick Cheney eating cows with Gleep Glorb because the UFOs are not going to walk up on people who have a green glow-in-the-dark alien smoking a bong on a really long baggy T-shirt. A Juggalo is going to get some information about UFOs from a guy that came into the elevator when they were on their way up to their dentist and it will indicate that they have been tapped, and they are going to go back to their gathering and say: ”Dudes, I had an experience!” and that is going to galvanize a certain little quadrant of Juggalos. But when the Anchorman comes they are primed to know their job in the system, they are ready!
John’s mom having a great weekend reading (RL202)
The other day John was talking to his mom. It has been very hot up in the Northwest, he was gone for the weekend and he came back and asked her what she did this weekend and she said that she mostly read, which was a great weekend, but it was interesting that he immediately identified this as a great weekend, while a lot of people would not think that this was a great weekend, some would even think it was a horrible weekend or they wouldn’t even be able to process those words.