RL443 - The Fifty-Cent Candy Bar

This week, Merlin and John talk about:

The Problem: John has contributed to the energy of the machine, referring to the music business where it is expected that going to see shows is part of the pay and you part of contributing energy to the machine.

The show title refers to the malfunction of the criminal justice system where people who shoplift a $0.50 candy bar end up in jail for two years because they also rack up a felony for not showing up for their bench warrant.

Merlin asked John if he is okay, which makes John think there is something in his one that makes Merlin think that something is not okay, and of course there is. Asking that sort of question shows that Merlin has transitioned to becoming a professional fretful grandmother.

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 Please do not quote these texts directly without applying your own editing first!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 recording from the couch (RL443)

Several weeks ago John transitioned to doing the shows from his couch, which gives it a little more ruffle as he gets situated because he is supine, lying lengthwise on the couch with a Pendleton blanket over his legs and 4 pillows propping him up, exactly like FDR, he has his coffee on the coffee table, the computer in his lap, and he is holding he microphone in his hand, looking out the window, the creek is high, producing a little bit of static in the mic.

My Bloody Valentine took Merlin’s hearing and he doesn’t even hear rustling anymore, but he just hears tremolo everywhere he goes. Merlin had no idea that John was doing this. He has seen photos of him recording in his bed. John uses the SM7B that has a built-in mic adapter stand holder thing. In the old days back in 2012 John had a desktop mic stand that this screwed into and he would pick this mic stand up from his desk and rest it on his chest. Never once did he just lean into the mic without using his hands. When he professionalized his rig and had Adam and Ken over to the house he bought radio station big springy boom mic things with shock mounts and those are fine, but he is constantly fuzzing with it.

John wants to hold the mic in his hand like Bob Barker or Gene Rayburn with that long slender mic. Dumb Donald (a character from Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids) is so dumb! There was a certain kind of joke that was very popular when Merlin was young about supposedly not very smart people of a certain country, and they had a lot of problems like screen doors on submarines, they lost the recipe for ice (jokes by Jeff Foxworthy about the rednecks and hillbillies), and Dumb Donald and Dumb Dora were a way to slip in a bit of Warsaw humor.

Merlin thinks about standing while recording and there are people who do that, but for some reason he doesn’t.

Gifts that come with a message (RL443)

IKEA makes a play kitchen that takes a battery that makes your heater look lit up. You could make lot of things out of it, it could be whatever you wanted it to be, and after his daughter outgrew her interest in it, it was a great gift to her 3rd birthday, the first time she remembers him ever saying the f-word when he was trying to get Buzz Lightyear out of his box (see RL208) it made their way into their bedroom by the window and Merlin used it as a standing desk. He likes to move around, and back when his family would be out of the house sometimes, which they are not anymore now, he thought he could look out this window into the park where the confederate ghosts live (see RL2) and use the IKEA kitchen as a standing desk.

He received a Christmas present a few years ago a very sweet passive-aggressive gift that came with a free unstated message. For Christmas a few years ago Merlin received a gift with a message from his lady friend, he got sanding desk with the built-in robot so it can go up and down, and the message was that they needed to get rid of the IKEA play kitchen in their bedroom, either because she wanted to professionalize him, or she didn’t want all the neighbors to think dad is making make-believe breakdast.

He also got really nice and tactical sweat pants from her, but the real message there was that they are not his ship wreck pants, which are pants that no adult man should wear because it looks like you were just in a ship wreck in an inexpensive TV production, which they always show by your pants being tattered. Merlin will wear his 501’s until the crotch or the knees blow out, but he has a couple of sweat pants from a long time ago when we still liked American Apparel and the mustache men that he really likes, and they look like he has been in a ship wreck.

John thinks that Merlin’s wife is probably thinking that Merlin wants new sweat pants, but he just didn’t have the combination of factors it takes for a man to just get his own new sweatpants, which is more complicated than it sounds. He bought some a few days ago and the rise is still too long, he has a very short rise. John still has some groovy sweat pants from Mack Weldon. Merlin is a big fan of Mack Weldon and wears their shirt right now.

John not wanting to wear technical fabric (RL443)

John tends to shy away from anything that describes itself as a technical fabric because there is tech and there is fabric and on John’s plate he wants to keep them both from touching each other. Like he doesn’t want the noodles to touch the cranberry sauce, but he is fine with the noodles touching the gravy. He will wear pants cover with wax, but he doesn’t want a high-tech thing that wicks. John loved the Mack Weldon underwear with silver threads because i seemed like something the Egyptians would have done, but if a fabric has too many capital X in the word, he doesn’t want anything to do with it.

Merlin is an REI affiliate member, but they have too many technical fabrics. There is that one brand Arc’teryx that cost double of an already costly REI item and it is extremely technical. It is too expensive to justify.

The decline of comics pages in newspapers (RL443)

The Apteryx is a wingless bird with hairy feathers from the comic strip B.C. before it turned into a preachy weird super-religious strip. How did it even get into the funny pages? Save it for The Wizard of Id! By its very definition, B.C. stood for Before Christ, and we got cavemen kneeling in front of the North Star on Christmas eve and shadows of crosses, but Christ wasn’t even born yet!

Merlin talks about the movie Santa Claus is Comin’ to Town when Mickey Rooney gets all horny for Jesus and talks about the holiest of nights and there is the hot singing woman by the fountain: ”My world is beginning!” (Merlin calls it ”love” is beginning, see video here) She looks like a hot tardid (?) at Modigliani painting, and that is right in his wheelhouse. Or when Linus is on stage and is reading the thing from Matthew, some basic-bitch gospel.

A little bit of Christianity is nice, but B.C.? It started in 1958 in the Peanuts Christian envelope, but Johnny Hart, not Gary Hart who had intercourse on a boat, died at his drawing board, but he did not come back 3 days later. John feels very strongly about the comics pages which were already in decline when Merlin was a young person and he doesn’t want to get started on what happens to comics now. They used to be a treat!

In the Sunday edition of the Cincinnati Enquirer there was a Heart of Darkness (Novella by Joseph Conrad) sized tome of full-color comics. Even into Junior High it was really good, but then the papers got smaller, like Gloria Swanson said, and then the comics got weirder. They made them how they were, and how they were made them how they are. For many years John was reading B.C. wishing that Johnny Hart would die at his drawing table. When he was young he had books with the collected work of Johny Hart and he loved it, he can still almost recall wingless bird with hairy feathers! At a certain point it wasn’t funny anymore because he was throwing the Jeez all over the daily comics page in the middle of August!

Months not having all 30 days, Merlin’s shape of the week (RL443)

John’s daughter asked not very long ago why there is nothing in August? There are no holidays in August and nothing religious about it. August has almost become like 1997, the year that didn’t exist, and Merlin thinks that August could easily be removed if we had to cut cost and go with an 11-month year. John thinks we should go back to a 10-month year where every month has 30 days and then we have a 65-day Rumspringa. They discuss for a while how they could structure a 10-month year. In Seattle there is Seafair in August, but that takes several weeks.

August is always tainted because school is about to start, it is the Sunday night of months. Yesterday Merlin was a bit melancholy thinking about how he needed to get back to whatever the fuck this is what he is doing right now. You either get back on the horse or get run over by the horse. Merlin never liked the last week of the year.

John is always bothered by the fact that the months aren’t all 30 days long, and there is a way to do a 12-months calendar where the months all are 30 days long and you just have to keep some balls in the air. We already do that, we just changed our clocks because someone told us to. They said time changed, but time doesn’t change, your clock changes. Time takes a cigarette and puts it in your mouth!

John still believes that years have a shape (see RL168). Merlin thinks that weeks have a shape and they go from right to left, which is unusual in his pantheon of things. Sundays are yellow and one to the left is Monday. Since the 1990s he believes that Thursday night and Friday should be part of the weekend. When he lived in Tallahassee in a town full of college students, in the papers Thursday was practically the weekend.

People just want to get high and get laid (RL443)

When John was in High School, most of the people he knew in school just wanted to get high and get laid. As John has gone through life that was true for an awful lot of people. What they get high on changes and what getting laid looks like changes, but it looked like life was pretty simple and it was easy and you needed to figure out just a couple of components. You needed to find a way to get high so that it didn’t screw you up. People know they need to get a job and a spouse, but you also can’t get a job that wouldn’t allow you to get high to be able to continue to get high and get laid with the minimum amount of issues.

Also, if your spouse also likes getting high, then you can get super-duper high and it is not a problem within your relationship. But if your job requires hat you get up at 5am and have your periodic table memorized, then you can’t get that high and want to not get that job and end up getting a manager job at a dealership or you get a business degree and work in a business, but you are not going to start an app or do a start-up or be a billionaire, you just want to do business, which a lot of people do high or you go out in the afternoon with a client and you are both high.

When you are in college you want to find the perfect spot where you find a nice job, which means that you make enough money that you can be comfortable and also get laid and also stay high, which is a huge balancing act. John went to a Catholic school and those people really have it dialed in, they are trying to hit that nail directly on the head because irrespective of gender everybody at Catholic school is trying to get high and a lot of then definitely are trying to get laid. At other colleges, like a research university, people are trying to do science, but that is not happening at a Catholic school.

Crucially, they are trying to get high and get laid in the now, not just one day! John’s problem was that he was super-good at getting high, but he was never really focused on getting laid, and he was embarrassed that he was getting high because he wanted to do more and wanted to accomplish something, but didn’t know what, and at 53 years old he still has that problem. He doesn’t get high, what even is getting laid, and what is he doing? Why do we do it? If he had gotten a job at a Pontiac dealership, that would have been a bad career course, but maybe they would have given him a good retirement. He could have switched over to Oldsmobile.

Lee Rea was a Pontiac Dealer and he sold the dealership and ended up buying The Off-Ramp and turned it into a sex dungeon. Pontiac dealerships can lead to other things (article here). You don’t want to die at your drawing table like Johnny Hart, but you want to die having a drink with your dingus in somebody.

There was a time when John understood Thursday to be part of the weekend and the work week was Monday through Wednesday, but the question has always been more about the why than the how: Why did he want a longer weekend? For most people it would be to have more time to get high and get laid, which you only do on the weekend, unless you have it really worked out at Gonzaga and you are getting high at the golf course or at your desk selling Pontiacs. But now there is no Monday and no Sunday and everybody works all he time.

Balancing admin vs billable hours, embrace admin work (RL443)

Merlin’s lady is a manager of things and sometimes she has to check in on some email on a Sunday. Yesterday she cleaned the bedroom, which she loves because cleaning is about control and Merlin totally supports that. Sometimes you need to control a small space. Back at Merlin’s job in ca 1992 it was billable hours vs admin and he had a lot of admin time because he was also the Mac guy, but you don’t want too much admin time. One of the ways he has grown as a person is that he learned to accept, enjoy, and embrace the idea that a lot of the stuff that he does that seems like total bullshit actually contributes to his work and to his home life. A huge victory for him was that he fixed their smart home stuff.

Merlin’s friend Jason Snell does this in a way that Merlin admires: Jason writes about technology and has a podcast about it, but he is not afraid of doing some writing or podcasting about how he did his job, and Merlin gets to do that too, which is why he gets mad at his lady when she rents a car that doesn’t have Apple Carplay in it. For 3 days he could have been creating content on his technology shows because he could have talked about Carplay.

For the last two months Merlin’s Philips Hue Hub has not been able to work with Homekit, and he did fix it by blowing the whole thing up and terraformed it, like what they do on the Star Trek. He started over and fixed it and now it is fucking great and their tap-switches work. He fixed it and now it is content on the Roderick on the Line program, too. Here is everything you need to know about Star Trek 3: They search for Spock and they found Spock, now let’s go into Star Trek 4.

John going to his first Rock show since February of 2020, Band of Horses, going to free shows as a musician (RL443)

Band of Horses formed in Seattle, they were on Sub Pop, and they were all part of a music community. Ben (Bridwell) was in Carissa’s Weird for a while and John tried to convince him to go to Barsuk, but it didn’t work out. John played a show with Ben the first time he ever called himself Horses, and they were all part of the same milieu. After Band of Horses really hit, and they got big fast, he moved back to his native South Carolina and just papered over his decade in Seattle and in the music scene there, he claimed being a Southern guy and that Band of Horses was a Southern band. You can rewrite your story, but he still has a lot of connections up there and they are playing in Seattle tonight.

John has not been to a Rock show since February of 2020. Once the thing started opening up and bands would ask him to come to the show, he would propose to come to their sound check instead. There was some big show he was afraid he was invited to (at The Showbox, see RL423). Going to the sound check means he can go there at 5pm, hang out with his friend, watch the band, they usually play for an hour, and it is interesting stuff when they stop the song halfway through, or as Nabil used to say: He hit his toms more in the sound check than he will in the entire set or the entire week. It is fun!

Band of Horses is coming tonight and John’s daughter’s mother has started to put the elbows on him a week ago. She wants to go to the show and part of the perk of having John as her daughter’s father is that he can get her into shows. She likes to be backstage or at the side of the stage, and that is one of the reasons you would put up with John. John doesn’t want to go, but at a certain point it is not enough to just give somebody a special ticket because she wants him to go and draft off of him.

This morning he did what he has not done in two years: Send the email to his friend who is running the concert and say: ”Hey, I haven’t talked to you in a while! Anyway, Band of Horses is playing tonight. See you at the show, maybe?” At a certain point in music everybody realizes that going to shows is part of the compensation package that they all have. When you are young and starting out in bands you will ask if you could get on the guest list, you are afraid of being told: ”No!” or that the guest list is full, and you would ask the band directly because they also have 10 slots and they have their family and so forth.

But past a certain point in the music business when you have contributed enough into the energy of the machine you never have to ask the band. You are going to talk to Chad or to the boss who is the boss of the thing. At the very top level like The Rolling Stones or Coldplay, they have the insane ability to say that there are no comps and if you want to go to the show it is $180 to sit in the nose bleeds. Of course that is a lie because the vice president of Sony has 25 seats in the front row for his daughter and her friends.

Five years ago John saw Adele (see RL323, RW36, it was in July 2016) because Chad had a bunch of seats for her and asked John if he wanted to go. But on the tour that she is doing now he doesn’t know if he would get such an opportunity again because Beyoncé might want those tickets.

For the most part you don’t get any flack and you don’t have to beg borrow and plead because everybody in the business knows that going to shows is part of how they get paid. To the people who put on the shows those tickets mean everything in a way, but in one hand they are incredibly scares, which gives them value, and on the other side of the desk they are free and everybody knows they are free because they are meaningless. The email isn’t about: ”Can I get in?”, but there is a certain amount of performance you have to do.

What shows are the ones where the value of the ticket has gone so high past the threshold where it is no longer easy to give them to John? At one level your tour manager goes out into the room and counts the chairs by hand because he has the feeling that the booking agent tries to sell 20 extra tickets, but at another level that booking agent probably already gave 50 tickets away to their friends. There is a threshold when John is priced out of a seat but (Showbox) Chad could still get in. he is probably always able to get in, he might just have to kiss some ass.

John was trying to get his sister into a Coldplay concert a few years ago and went to his booking agent Matt Hickey, but Matt said he was asking the possible question because they intentionally make this hard on them, especially when you are dealing with a Live Nation thing. It is such a strange move to not be in control of your venue anymore. Live Nation doesn’t want to do any favors for Chad, although at one level they also want to lord it over him and they become a faceless nation.

John’s friend wrote back immediately and told him: ”Oh, absolutely man! You and your posse are on the list!” Now John is going to see the Band of Horses, which he at one level wants to do, but that is about 4%, and 96% of him doesn’t want to do it, but that is like getting Carplay in your rental car or setting up your Homekit, it is part of his job. He has to do it because he put the energy into the machine and has to take some energy back out of it. Who knows what happens, maybe John runs into Ben on the way to the bathroom and invites him to be the bass player in his new band The Florida Crackers.

Election in Seattle, the failure of the criminal justice system, new Republican City Attorney (RL443)

The other day they had an election in Seattle. Their City Council has become very progressive and that has led to a feeling among certain people in the city that it has gone too far and they are not taking care of the city anymore. When John ran for the council was the beginning of this period and one of the things that shocked him was that he thought he was only going to be running against the old conservative dude, but there was a guy in the race who was positioning himself to John’s left, making John the centrist and he has never been a centrist in his life.

He believed that Capitalism is bad and property developers were the greatest evil because people who were building buildings were trying to profit and the reason there was no housing for middle- or low-income people was that big developers were tearing down all the low incoming housing and building new housing, which is the most simplistic way to describe the whole symbiosis of a city becoming too expensive for poor people to live in it, it is not the developers who are doing that.

They did some wonderful things, like the $15 minimum wage thing, but the whole engine of progressivism right now… at one point during the CHAP last year (see RW188, then called CHAZ) John definitely was super-offended by the way the Seattle Police Department worked and he was very interested in rethinking police and defunding them from having their tanks, but that developed into an energy where there were now candidates in the race who were advocating for the elimination of the police and replacing them with a mysterious potpourri of community action.

If filters down to a level where we see statistically that a lot of people who are shoplifting candy bars end up in the police system and end up in jail for shoplifting a $0.50 candy bar and they can’t pay their bail or they don’t show up for their bench warrant and now suddenly they have a felony warrant for a failure to appear and then they go to jail for 2 years, not because they shoplifted a candy bar, but because they were indigent and didn’t have resources. The criminal justice system feeds disproportionately poor people into the system.

A lot of the evidence is in how you interpret statistics. I would be weird for a system to target poor people because poor people don’t bring any money in except in the form of allowing police budgets to increase. It is a daisy-chain. How do you reform the system in regards to the $0.50 candy bar? There was a candidate running for city attorney in Seattle and her platform was to decriminalize petty crime because the statistics showed that those candy bar shoplifters were clogging up and becoming career patrons of the criminal justice system.

You can see how the residents of the city would ask as a follow-up question what keeps people from just stealing if there is no penalty for stealing candy bars. What do shop-owners do then? Unfortunately the candidate had to resort to some hand waving, like if there was enough mental health counseling then the person wouldn’t need a candy bar, but that is not an answer to what you do when they do steal a candy bar, but it is the magical thinking that if we take away the police we will eventually take away the need for the police, don’t worry about it.

Downtown Seattle feels scary right now and there is a pushback against this type of thinking. The other candidate in this race was Ann Davison who changed her party affiliation to Republican last year and Seattle has not elected a Republican to public office in decades, although Washington State does. All the tough-on-crime people in the city attorney’s office over he last 40 years were all Democrats, but she is now a Republican who is running on the platform of: ”Don’t defund the police! People who steal candy bars should still face consequences!” and she won.

For the other candidate Nicole Thomas-Kennedy they found some tweets from last year when he tweeted the chief of police and said: ”I hope you suck on a COVID dick and die, asshole!” and the city attorney should maybe not talk to the chief of police, but she didn’t know she was going to run for office at the time.

The Republican woman is probably not super-qualified according to her CV. She is an attorney, but she have very little trial time and hasn’t done her time in the trenches, but she got all the establishment endorsements and the new mayor is also the more conservative of the two candidates, although still a Liberal. In Seattle they are always interested in burning down the institution, but they want to hear somebody who has got a play for what to replace it with, but lately there have been a lot of candidates in the politics who want to burn it down and think that is the means to the end.

John is not living in Seattle and can’t vote in some of those elections like the mayor or the city council, because has moved to the suburbs and is in a different jurisdiction, but he was following he election just out of old-school love and because he knows some of the characters, he knows the new mayor a little bit, he knows his opponent who was by no means a radical and would have been a great mayor, but she was running to the left of him. John was reading a couple of articles and was wondering what kind of election this was: ”Wow, what is going on in Seattle right now?”

New Seattle City Attorney Ann Davison being a Long Winters fan, John influencing people with his music (RL443)

John decided to do a deep-dive on Ann Davison and in the first long article of her there was a picture of her and John scrolled past it first, but then he thought: ”Wait a minute!” and he scrolled back and it was like a brick wall fell on him because she was a super Long Winters fan and went to a lot of shows back in the day, was right up on the barricades, hanging out at the T-shirt stand after the show, and John knew her. At the time she was a newly minted lawyer, she is a tall red-headed lady and was really excited about the law and they used to talk about the law.

John lost touch with her and a year ago she sent him a picture of herself at the Western State Hurricanes show, but it had gotten lost in his inbox during COVID and he just found it now when he put her name into his email. She is above the fold in all the news stories about the recent election because hers is the campaign that was the most: ”a Republican?” and John has this picture of her standing at the merch table going: ”I already have all the CDs and T-Shirts, but can I have a sticker?”

Almost certainly John had an influence in radicalizing her back in the days and he is afraid that we are getting to the age where all Long Winters fans are going to start tipping over and becoming Centrist and gradually Conservatives. As John gets older and finds himself cast more and more as the Conservative in all these online dialogs where he goes: ”There need to be some police!” - ”Okay, Boomer!” Merlin talks in length about COVID vaccine mandate protests and that some of those people when asked say that they are not against the vaccine per se, but they are against the erosion of union power. Part of the resituation of people that consider themselves Liberals becoming Conservative is in part because if everything else but you changes in a direction, it is going to change what you are.

We can never know if there is anything else John is influencing with his past Rock music, but think about all the people that they have influenced with this podcast! Maybe the Texas tower sniper is listening to New Girl by The Long Winters? It never occurred to John that New Girl is a sniper song, but it is possible. Merlin also thinks that John could turn Scent of Lime into a really creepy song, or Everything is Talking, which is a lesser-known track. John is fairly certain that Ann Davison, new City Attorney of the City of Seattle has Everything is Talking memorized. Maybe you come through the side door and ask Charles Whitman (the Texas tower sniper from 1966): ”What is your favorite Long Winters song?” - ”It is a Shibboleth!”

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