RL417 - Dr. Project, M.D.

This week, Merlin and John talk about:

The Problem: John has a bulldozer across the alley, referring to recording from his bed old-school because there was literally a bulldozer across the alley.

The show title refers to John needing all new doctors because he has recently moved and Merlin saying that he would need a doctor just to manage all the other doctors.

There is a bulldozer across the alley and John has been recording the last couple of weeks from Hawaii old-school from his bed. Now he has his little pre-amp, his microphone, two turn-tables, a paddle-ball game, and he is all in that mode anyway, and because there is a bulldozer across the alley he decided to record from bed even today. John used to record from bed all the time, and that picture of him in the bed with a microphone was not just a promo-shot, but he was actually talking to Merlin in that picture. John could put motorized wheels on this bed.

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 Please do not quote these texts directly without applying your own editing first!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 being offered to be a guest on a radio show (RL416)

John got an email this morning from somebody who said they used to be on the Opie & Agie show (called Opie and Anthony) and they like to have John on as a guest. He can imagine what they wanted to talk about because this show is some of those things you would expect, that they would be reaching out 2 months in, like: ”Hey, let’s get him on the show!” Imagine being the booker for a show like that, sending out those cold-call emails!

What if John and Merlin had to book a guest on their show every week and they had a producer. Merlin would be out there, getting people on the horn, doing the Better Call Saul thing where he acts like he is the receptionist. Right now the show is produced by Merlin talking to Wilberforce on the counter. They could pivot to one of these podcasts that ran out of gas and now are having guests on. The could get one of the many young people who offer them to intern for free and make them the producer and ask them to find some guests after they have already all of their friends, all the Jason Finns, the Chris Ballews and the Marco Arments.

Merlin has a lot of running lists of ideas for podcasts, let alone the podcasts on these lists, he has lists of all the people he eventually likes to have a show with, he doesn’t act on any of this, but he captures it when it occurs to him, and he has even done some test-recordings with people they both know, but it didn’t work out. The big mental block is that if you are reinventing the wheel in scheduling technology every week, every single thing you add adds half an order of magnitude of things that can go wrong. That is what keeps him from doing more shows. He doesn’t want to add difficult work to an unknown thing.

This show has won The Phoney Awards and they have been around for 10 years, so maybe it is time to spread their wings? Are they running out of gas? Would it be good to bring somebody on each week? John Siracusa could have a segment each week with mainly what Merlin did wrong or what John did wrong and Merlin should have told him that he did wrong because Merlin causes the problems that become John’s problems. They could add a segment called Venn diagram where they find out what surprising thing John has in common with a friend or an intern, like both John and Siracusa have all the boxes to all the computers he has ever owned in his attic.

Nostalgia TV shows (RL416)

John just pulled his 1981 IBM PC with 64K, 2 Floppy Disk drives and a cyan-colored screen out of his storage container and it probably fires up and he could run WordStar on it right now. He could hack the BIOS! Merlin just discovered the show Halt and Catch Fire on Netflix less than 48 hours ago and he is already on episode 6. The cast is fantastic and it has a lot of good nostalgia in it, and clothes that ladies would wear to work in the 1980s. John likes to nitpick that stuff! In Hot Tub Time Machine there is no way people skiing in 1986 would be listening to Safety Dance (by Men Without hats).

1980’s music, The Big Chill, The Getaway (RL416)

The worst sin is if they are listening to Doolittle (album by the Pixies) in 1986, unless they have time-machined a 1989 Pixies album. People who listen to Doolittle don’t ski! In those super-bright clothes they would have listened to INXS or Pyromania (album by Def Leppard). That period had a lot of weird pseudo-ballads, like Richard Marx, the big Aerosmith comeback with Permanent Vacation was 1986 and then it was Pump in 1989 that really put them into the spotlight. In Permanent Vacation they came back with some real riffs!

Merlin thinks of 1985 as being crazy interesting, it was his last year of High School because it was one of the worst mainstream music and one of the best underground music. In 1986/87 he was still super into R.E.M. and The Smiths and bands like that. Above ground you had Richard Marx, Peter Cetera, a lot of that ballad-y stuff. It is also peak Peter Gabriel and Phil Collins. In 1988 the charts switches over almost entirely to smooth R&B, Whitney Houston, but the new iteration of it pre Celin Dion, the big ballads. In 1986 there is Peter Gabriel’s album So, Phil Collins was on Top of the Pops, there was Brothers in Arms by the Dire Straits.

It was also the last year of the Boomer. There was this movie The Big Chill)// where Kevin Costner was dead, you have the guy from Jurassic Park (Jeff Goldblum), the guy from Vietnam with the scars on his face who had a Porsche (William Hurt as Nick, not Michael Cimino as Merlin said), but it also had the Motown soundtrack and the younger girl (Meg Tilly) who was the one with the Polka Dot Dress (no, that was Jennifer Tilly) who was married to a veterinarian (The Getaway) and along came the guy from Reservoir Dogs (Michael Madsen, not Harvey Keitel) and it ended up being Kim Basinger. It was a Boomer movie, that was from 1983.

There were movies with something like Griffin Dunne, or where the brat pack is growing up, St. Elmo’s Fire was a couple years earlier (it was 1985). In 1986 if you were in the Eagles you could still get a single to the Top of the Pops. 1987 is going to make 1988 look like 1986.

John needing all new doctors (RL416)

John needs all new doctors now. He moved to a new place, there was a pandemic, and John is out of all doctors, they are all gone now. He should have 3 doctors: A psychological doctor, an internist, and a dentist. Merlin would like a doctor who takes care of all the other doctors, a project doctor, Dr. Project! The first person to email John who is a doctor M.D. will be his new doctor, preferably with offices in Burien, Washington. John also needs a doctor who organizes the other doctors, just like Merlin. He needs somebody who is capable of understanding John Roderick and is able to wrangle all of the parts of this process including scheduling. His own fans are capable of diagnosing him with 85% accuracy, which is better than most doctors.

John trying to remember 5 good things from the year 2000 to the present (RL416)

1997 was the year that didn’t exist, although there are calendars that say 1997, but that is a bit of a Mandela effect. John has been looking back and has been thinking that he had a long fallow period in the 2010s and he becomes bad at remembering exactly when this happened vs when that happened. Sometimes he thinks that this happened way before that, but then it turns out they happened only two weeks apart.

If you are born in the year 2000 you are 21 years old now and you are finally able to listen to Roderick on the Line. John was going back to the year 2000 and was trying to name 5 good things from each year from 2000 to the present. It was where that photo came from. Merlin still had the Archers of Loaf shirt, which means they had not done their big purge, and he had the old dumb glasses from myglasses.com. John doesn’t have a beard. There were some other pictures from that series.

Some years it was easy, but some years it was hard because John didn’t think anything good happened. He was very depressed from the years 2008 to 2017 and it all smears together. He has the sense of himself that he wasn’t really doing much for a lot of that time. John started using other resources like his photos. For Merlin his photos and Gmail are the only things that let him know what year things happen. John’s Gmail stopps at a certain point although he knows he had Gmail before that. Receipts tell a story and if you can’t remember one of the times you flew to a certain city, there are probably receipts somewhere.

John started looking back at pictures, at his calendar, searching in emails, to put together a list of 5 good things that happened every year since the year 2000. There are some years where he hasn’t gotten all 5 good things yet, he only got 4 good things that happened in 2003, the year that When I Pretend To Fall was released. Merlin reminds John that he got a cool website. One of the things for 2002 was that he met Merlin Mann, it was before that album was released and Merlin heard it 30-second-snippets at a time months before it was released.

When he came to 2007 it was the year when he bought his first house, but it was also the year when his dad died. It was also the year Merlin’s daughter was born. It feels very weird to make a list of momentous things and not have his dad’s death on that list, so all of a sudden it switched from 5 good things to 5 momentous things, in a couple of cases it became 7 momentous things and pretty soon there were some years where nothing happened, but as he dug into it, it was: ”What? That happened that year?” He was so amazed that these things happened at the same time that he wanted to put these things on the list.

If you asked John what happened in 2012, he would have said: ”Nothing!”, a dead zone, like a reef that had been bleached. Roderick on the Line was early days, The Long Winters weren’t doing anything, John was puttering around the country doing little shows, he was trying his hand at his Charles Nelson Reilly future, he was popping up at things, and it felt like a desert, but in fact he was doing crazy stuff the whole time. It is a fun activity because now John has 15 things that happened that year and he is still adding stuff. Looking at pictures it often doesn’t add up because you remember two events from two consecutive days, but you remember them two years apart.

Merlin came to Seattle and stayed with John’s mom and couldn’t figure out her shower. He had a video iPod with the appropriate jacks and in the very nice guest room he was able to use the RCA jacks on her small CRT TV to watch episodes of either Psych or Monk that he had bought off the iTunes store and that he could watch on that TV from his video iPod.

John found some pictures where You Look Nice Today was on tour and he sat with Scott Simpson in a radio studio in Seattle when Luke Burbank was doing an interview with Merlin and John had really long hair and was missing a tooth. You can just gauge how John is doing by whether he has a tooth or not and how long his hair is. Missing a tooth is a characteristic of a reluctance to go to a doctor, which is a characteristic of a certain time in John’s life. The lady who helped him was an internal medicine doctor, not a shrink doctor.

During all the depression that John had between 1984 and 2015 he did a lot of things and he is trying to square it. You can look at pictures of him and you know that this is a guy who is going in and out of catatonia, and yet, looking at the calendar he somehow aroused himself out of a state of utter stupor where he knows for a fact that he laid on the couch for 3 days and stared at the ceiling and he didn’t talk to a soul, but somehow somebody he knew came to town and John got off the couch and met them and there are photographs documenting that they spent two days living in hotels, shooting guns, and throwing bath tubs off the roof.

John remembers the time as this desperate time, but he doesn’t remember how it was possible that he also did all those things. It is not that he suddenly cured, but it is a question like: ”If you are an introvert, how do you have so many friends?”, ”If you are super-depressed, how are you doing all those things?” Over the last five days John felt dangerously close to doing an Until the End of the World (1991 film) on it where he just puts on the headset and watches his dreams. He has been looking through his photos not by just scrolling for that one that you are looking for, but stopping and looking at those random interstitial photographs.

If John were to ask himself how many times he came to San Francisco and either stayed with Merlin and his lovely wife or the three of them went to a third location and had dinner, drinks, watched a show, rode their skateboards down the Embarcadero, had a Subway. Merlin thinks it is like 6 times, for a few years before Merlin’s daughter was born it was a pretty casual arrangement and John were always welcome on short notice. We smash those instances together.

Merlin doesn’t remember when he was in Portland and what he was there for, probably more than he thing. He went to hang out with his comic book friends to do project stuff, that was 4-5 years ago, there was the time when he was in the hotel with the too-small doors, where he met James Urbaniak, where he had that weird-ass room with no TV (see RL223, BT2016). That is where he met Hookers & Popcorn (Instagram-account).

Merlin has pictures at that same Thai restaurant where he was wearing the Archers of Loaf shirt, and then there is one that he thought was the same night, it is from 2004, but John is wearing something different. John thinks that the number of times John has visited Merlin was probably closer to 15.

There was a period when John went on tour with Aimee Mann and he thinks of it as a tour he did with Aimee Mann. Looking at his pictures he realized he didn’t just do a couple of tours with Aimee Mann, but there was a period of 2-3 years where he did every tour that Aimee Mann did and he was on tour with her all the time. He would fly out to Philadelphia, do 6 shows, come home, and then 3 months later fly out to Chicago and do 5 shows and fly home, which makes it all feel like one tour.

His calendar reveals that he was super busy and a lot of the times he was flying to Chicago not from his catatonia bed, but from some dinner that he was having with Merlin at a Thai food restaurant in San Francisco to Chicago the next day to start the next tour with no space in between. It makes it feel that John’s life had more shape and this project is making him feel good because there were 5 good things happening in every year, often there were 10.

The tendency in John’s head to shape his history to fit a narrative that he is a loser or that those years were wasted years, trying to red-con his own life according to a subconscious directive that he needs to find the version of his life that tells the story of him as someone who failed to thrive.

A couple of days ago John had a very helpful conversation with Hodgman. He is super unsettled right now because he is waiting for the third act, not just the other shoe, but things have happened, then other things happened, then further things happened, and now he is waiting for the lights to go out and the sound of a gun and lights come back up on the stage and Mr. Mustard is dead by the fireplace. He is not in an agitated state, but there is a tightness in his chest. Hodgman said: ”You are a story teller, we want everything to be a story, but it is not a story, there is no third act, things happen!”

The photo John sent to Merlin is from February 8th 2004, 10:12pm PST, and they were at that Thai restaurant around the corner. 2004 was a big year for them both, they did a lot of things together. John recorded Ultimatum in 2004, his EP with Tucker Martin, he spent 4 months playing a piano over Commander Thinks Aloud over and over, and Michael Shore was in The Long Winter, which was a very intense burst in the spring of 2004. They went on tour with the Pernice Brothers, then they went to Europe for a month and then came back and went on tour with The Decemberists for the first time. After that John was very depressed.

He stayed with Merlin for a little while and had a cold sore. Merlin has a picture from June 27th 2004 with John at Great American. Being on tour with The Decemberists put him into a funk, but then not being able to finish the Ultimatum album put him in a funk and by the end of that year he had a beard that was down to his chest, he had checked out completely. A couple of days afterwards on July 7th Merlin saw Rush on the tour with the washing machines and three hurdy-gurdies. Merlin has another picture from August 23rd 2004, but he thinks it has the wrong date on. John has the Chick Magnet hat on that John had when they first met in 2002, but John brought it out of retirement sometimes. There is Michale Shore and there is John petting Linus the white dog.

Was that the time when John sat on the front porch of Merlin’s house smoking cigarettes and talking to Robin Goldwasser on the phone about stopping smoking cigarettes? That could have been any time in a 6 year period on either side of that, it is one of John’s big memories. Was Ted Leo there?

In 2003 When I Pretend to Fall came out, John was on the road the entire year, and in one way it is one of the fullest years of his life, but he is struggling to find 5 good things that happened in that year. He met John Flansburgh and They Might Be Giants at the start of that year, then the record came out, then they went on their first European tour, and John met his girlfriend Nicole Grier towards the end, but he can’t think of a 5th good thing even though he was traveling all over, playing shows every night and meeting wonderful people, and doing wonderful things.

It is like a smear, like an impressionist painting being in motion, a tentpole memory, whereas 2012 was the year when they did Gamechangers and John almost immediately started recording his Christmas record with Coulton. John thought those two things happened two years apart. It was the same year that Flop played a house show for 85 people in North Seattle and John had forgotten that happening before he saw the pictures.

In the absence of having an actual mental health professional involved in his treatment John came up with this 5 good things project because he is trying to carve some new ruts. From this point forward his project is that he can’t keep living as he have been, looking back at his life as a failed project. Merlin wishes he could talk him out of the need for thinking that, but he knows he can’t. Like in the movie It’s a Wonderful Life, what would it take for John to feel like he led a good life? John always thought that it is some ghost appearing on a bridge in the fog who taps his jacket with his billy club and says: ”What’s with the heater?” and he has been actively trying to accomplish that thing by running for office to find that lightning bolt moment where he has found his duck, the reason he is here for.

Right now John is working on getting there by inches and say: ”There is no third act, it is not a story, but a thing happens, and then another thing happens and another thing happens!” The lights aren’t going to go off, there is a gunshot, and when the lights come back on he will have a big gold star on his jacket and everybody applauds. It sounds like a Wes Anderson fucking film. It is something else, it is the little thing where he looks back and says: ”It has always been a failure!”, but actually: ”No! This happened and this happened and this happened!”

John doesn’t know if that is going to be successful. Everybody always told him that he was afraid of love, so several years ago he did the opposite and went toward love and every time there is a choice he is going to choose love. The problem was that he chose love and it led him to a place where he didn’t want to be and he learned that this is why he doesn’t choose love because love is insane. It is not measurable and not reasonable, so choosing love every time if you are not a hippie is a fucking dangerous route. What you want to do is choose reason and logic sometimes.

Why did Kirstie Alley not have Vulcan eyebrows? (RL416)

This is the misconception about Mr. Spock: He has feelings, he just has to work extra hard to control them because it is the nature of one half of his lineage that is very logical and the other half is human. I Will Fight No More Forever! John’s daughter wants to know why Kirstie Alley doesn’t have Vulcan eyebrows. Merlin doesn’t know the answer to that, but that was her first big thing if you exclude her commercials, she could have retired right after it, Merlin would have been fine with learning less about her, but when you have a young person you can not only not pay them very much, but you can also put weird eyebrows and ears on them. John doesn’t know why they didn’t, but it was pretty good as it was. She could have walked off of that set and into John’s dreams. ”Out of my heart and into my dreams” (probably reference to Get Outta My Dreams, Get Into My Car by Billy Ocean).

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