RW166 - The El Dopa House

This week, Dan and John talk about:

The show title refers to the house John lived in behind Ernie Steel’s on Broadway together with the band El Dopa.

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 Please do not quote these texts directly without applying your own editing first!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 on his phone too much (RW166)

John is just sitting here, getting up to speed on the Internet. The less he knows, the better, he really feels that way today. A couple of days ago his phone announced to him that he had been looking at it for eight hours in the course of the day and that he had been averaging over seven hours a day of looking at his phone. He realized that it was true that his phone was telling him and he has been feeling his brain turning to mush for a long time. He tried this before, but he was like: ”Basta! No more!” and for the last three days he left his phone at home and didn’t look at it from the morning to the night. He has the Apple Watch and gets texts and phone calls right, but the phone is also keeping track of the texts and he sends on the watch because it adds up to the total at the end of the day.

Then John looks at his phone at night, he comes home and lays in bed and plays his little card games and look at Safari and Google. Before he would look at his phone all day long. He has become one of these people that pulls up to a red light, glances down on his phone, checks some things, until the light turns green. He is not a monster that sits there at a green light looking at his phone, but he keeps an eye on the light. Anytime he is in a waiting room, anytime he got three seconds he will look at his phone. It has been nice and the last three days he averaged about two hours a day looking at his phone, but that is also counting the amount of time he has been replying to texts on his watch. That is John’s current project: ”Not have my phone.” He bought an expensive thing, he is paying for it on a monthly basis, and now he is not going to use it.

John looked at his phone when he woke up this morning, but he was still in bed. He doesn't want to get into this cheat day situation where it's like: ”Well, technically I'm still in bed. I can take it as far as the front hall!”, but he wants to be strict and say: ”Is this a phone looking opportunity? No, it is not! Leave it!”

They have talked in the past about John’s highly addictive personality, but it will not be a big challenge for John to steer clear of it because he also has a highly restrictive personality or a highly developed capacity to refuse himself that which he most desires. He is going to have no trouble at all making himself not having his phone, it is just the slippery slope that the Watch is only 82% functional and if it is a day where he is expecting to get a lot of e-mails or something he might say: ”Well, I've got to have my phone with me today!” and then it becomes two days and pretty soon he is looking at it for eight hours a day again and he just can't do that! There are only so many hours in a day, there are three chunks of eight. That is one third of your day looking at that damn thing!

El Dopa, a band by John’s peers (RW166)

John likes to be stimulated, he likes to have the little drop of El Dopa. We don't talk about El Dopa anymore, at one time everyone talked about El Dopa all the time, it was on everyone's lips, but now it has been two years since somebody said El Dopa at him. He had some friends that had a band named El Dopa, ripped from the headlines. The band El Dopa was made up of a bunch of John’s close friends and former bandmates. Before the Western State Hurricanes when John was a band in The Bun Family Players, the most Seattle period for him, he had quit drinking and doing drugs, he had a band, he had a girlfriend, he had an apartment, his band had a practice space, which were all things that at 23 years old he did not have: a band, a girlfriend, an apartment or a practice space.

Now John was 26 and had all those things, this wealth of everything he had imagined one needed to be happy in the world. He had a group of friends that lived together in a group house, the house immediately behind the bar Ernie Steel’s that got turned into a different bar called Ileen's later (see this building), the house directly behind it when they would come out at night and throw all their bottles in the garbage can, it was right underneath the living room window of this house, which is still there. Some people in the house had this band El Dopa and the drummer of El Dopa was the drummer of John’s first band Chautauqua, meaning he was really mobbed up with them.

El Dopa played a show, back when they were playing shows for 80 people and they all went to each other's shows, they all went to shows constantly. El Dopa had attracted the attention of the guy in Atlanta who was the producer of the band TLC maybe, which was a super big name from Atlanta, and they were on LaFace records, Jermaine Dupri maybe, somebody from down in Atlanta who was working within a Hip Hop context who decided they were going to branch out. It wasn't Jermaine Dupri, was it Salt’n’Peppa? Are they from Atlanta? Plateau Records wasn't it either, Salt’n’Peppa are not from Atlanta, they are from New York (TLC are from Atlanta, though)

This guy’s name was something like Marcus Marcus and he discovered El Dopa. He had an interesting name that really stuck out. He was doing Hip Hop and R&B, but he was one of these these people that had made a name for himself because he had come up with three or four different bands and now he was looking for a Seattle band, he thought this was the way the music industry was going, maybe he would find a Grunge band. Somehow the El Dopa demo got into his hands and they suddenly had a relationship with this label in Atlanta. They got flown down there, this was the closest thing of this kind that had ever happened to any of John’s peers, it was during the time when you still felt, at 26, you had a cool band, they weren't popular in Seattle, but they were popular with their friends and it still seemed like a world where you would just bump into somebody at an airport and they would sign your band and then you would be huge. That stuff seemed real still.

El Dopa was flying down to Atlanta to make a record with the guy who discovered Bell Biv DeVoe or whatever. It felt like: ”Wow! It is happening! It is happening to our friends!” The bass player of El Dopa was Chris Carniglia who ended up being the keyboard player in the first version of The Long Winters, it was all super-connected, they were super mobbed-up with of them! They watched them go down there and they made a record, or at least they spent a couple of weeks down there, recording, they made this major label record and they said they were at this big really fancy studio down there and every time they came out of the room some major star would be out there, just hanging out, all Hip Hop stars, L.L. Cool J or somebody, but big names.

They were really fish-out-of-water and everybody was super friendly‚ but like: ”Oka, you guys! Grunge band, I guess! Wow, Marcus Marcus is really thinking outside the box here!” - ”Yeah, label mates! What's up Lisa Left Eye Lopez!” Then they flew home and John’s peers greeted them with open arms. This was the era where Built to Spill was the band they all emulated, but they weren't that big and were pretty much Northwest Regional. Nobody had heard of them outside of the Northwest yet.

El Dopa was not good, they were as good as John’s band, but that wasn't good either. They had weird meandering songs and they did a cover of Fight for Your Right To Party, but they weren't a fun party Grunge band, but way too serious, super duper serious, stare at the floor, scream out your inner hurts, and a few months went by, they were talking to their their new label in Atlanta, and then all of sudden: radio silence. They couldn't get anybody on the phone, nobody would answer when they called, and eventually they got a message from the guy's intern, saying he was taking the label in a different direction and thought maybe Grunge was it, but what he did was listen to this album that this band had made and went: ”Hmm, I don’t see anything. I don't know what I saw before, but I don't see it now!”, but they wouldn't give the band the record. It was the classic big time music business stuff: ”You guys made a record for us that we paid for, but it belongs to us. We don't want to release it. We don't want anything to do with it, frankly, we are not going to shit-can it immediately, but you can't have it!”

Those guys from El Dopa had no money, they had no shot of making a record on their own, they didn't even have $1500 to go in and make a record in three days type of thing. They had made this big thing they were super proud of, this big sparkling alt-rock record, that if they had been given the tapes and had come home and duplicated it… This was before a time when any band John knew had ever made a CD themselves. The first Seattle bands who came out with an independent CD, when the first independent CD pressing plants opened, and it couldn't have been before 1998, because you couldn't go buy a CD pressing plant, and by 1998 you could have your own in some little warehouse somewhere.

What they would have done is bring that back and make tapes and sell cassette tapes at shows, and they would have been the biggest band on the scene if they had this professionally made record. The reason they didn't get it from their Atlanta label is they could have taken that tape and shopped it around and they surely would have gotten a record contract with somebody on the strength of this really great sounding album that Marcus Marcus had paid for. El Dopa went back to playing shows for 50 people on a Wednesday night, just like the rest of them, which was super depressing, but it wasn't depressing for John.

John always had that quality that one admires so much in a friend, that quality where he is like: ”Hmm, you flopped, ay? Well, too bad!” John is not the one that you come to cry on his shoulder because he doesn't ask to cry on anyone else's shoulder. He sits on these podcasts and talks about his travails, but he doesn't want sympathy, he doesn't deserve sympathy, and he doesn’t ask for it. He talks about his stuff in the realest language he can, but he does not want you to say ”Sorry for your loss!” Take that stuff and save it. If you lose a child or if somebody dies, John is very capable of offering sympathy for those things, but if your band doesn't make it? John will give you a little chuck on the shoulder, but them's the breaks.

John’s band doesn’t deserve anything more than a chuck on the shoulder, but it doesn't mean that when he runs into Carl Newman of the New Pornographers that he doesn't glare at him, even though he loves him dearly, but he doesn't go: ”You fucker!” and he says that mostly because his songs are better than John’s. In the case of El Dopa he felt: ”Yeah, you guys did not become big rock stars because your songs are garbage! I can't be sad about it, I can't even be sad that you didn't get to be big stars because I don’t want you to be big stars! How am I going to feel?”, but it was sad because El Dopa limped along for a while, but that experience demoralized them.

They went from nobodies that were fine being nobodies… because if you played a show and you had 80 people and then the next time you played a show you had 85 people you felt like something was happening! They had a scene, it was a shit scene, nobody would have cared, but then they did that thing like: ”Bye everybody, we are going to the big time!” and then to come back…

The worst instance of that was a band called Man Ray. They had come ready to be big stars and even in Seattle, before anything had happened, they already had a lot of swagger. That was the feather boa era of alternative rock, before everybody had tattoos, but they had tattoos, they had gel in their hair, they wear sunglasses onstage and they had feather boas and they played glam rock.

Their following was not the same people that liked John’s bands at all. The people that came to see the Bun Family Players were wearing wool jackets that were wet from the rain and did not put product in their hair and were mopey. Man Ray attracted the people that did put stuff in their hair and their jackets weren't wool, they were made of other materials. John played with them several times because they had enough of a draw to be an opener for Man Ray. John liked them personally, although they were from a completely different culture.

They got a big record contract during the real heyday of that stuff and they went out and bought all new gear, big shiny super-1990s versions of it. They didn't buy vintage instruments, but they showed up with electric-blue Les Pauls, bright crazy 1990s instruments that now when they show up in music stores you are like: ”Oh, weird choice, Gibson, to put hearts and spades and jacks and queens on a Les Paul!” That is not 1980s or cool or vintage, that is just weird. They had all that stuff, brand new triple rectifier amplifiers and Galleon Krueger stuff, all this like tech stuff, and they actually said, maybe not from the stage, but: ”Thanks a lot Seattle! Look for us on MTV! We will see you on the streets of Los Angeles!”

They like took off, they all moved, they were going to the big time and then they did the same thing is El Dopa and they made a big big record for Universal and the label decided they were going in a different direction or whoever that A&R guy was got fired and the Man Ray record got put on a shelf and six months later they showed up back in Seattle, booking shows, playing their big guitars. It was actually at a Man Ray concert that John met Death Cab for Cutie. That was the bill: Death Cab opened, the Western State Hurricanes in the second slot as main support and Man Ray at the top. That was a very fateful show meeting Death Cab that night, which had profound reverberations through the whole rest of John’s music career.

Most of the time when somebody says: ”Tonight is the big night! This is the big show! Everybody put on your game face because this show really matters!” it never does. You go play South by Southwest, you go play the big show at Irving Plaza or whatever, and that is not ever the thing, or hardly ever the one where somebody walks up and hands you their business card and thus begins your career. It is always some main opening subplot for Man Ray at the Sit and Spin and you watch the opener who are 8 years younger than you and you go: ”What are those guys doing?” and pretty they are your best friends and your best friend band for the rest of your career.

What the hell is El Dope? It is some kind of medicine that we took to cure depression back in the days when nobody knew how to cure depression, it may be short for dopamine, the thing that makes you feel good. Was this a beta blocker or was this a a reuptake inhibitor? No, it wasn't! It was good for people with Parkinson's disease. It crosses the blood brain barrier and that is important, you want that. John remembers it being really front page newspaper business during a period when he would not take any kind of medicine, even when doctors would recommend that he take medicine.

John cannot speak with authority over what it is at all, just that… the band El Dope didn’t name themselves that because it was like naming the band Aspirin, but El Dopa meant something to them. It had something to do with whatever illnesses they all thought they were suffering from.

Finding new friends after getting sober and returning to Seattle (RW166)

John was in a scene that was the same scene that he had always been in when it comes to drug use, drinking, smoking, yet at least at this stage of his life this was how he made his money performing and playing gigs as a musician, as a performer in general… No, John made his money working at the magazine store. This was the era when bands would get $50 or $100 dollars for a show and when they would get $100 for a show they would high five each other, that was $25 each. John was still in this community, though with easy access to drugs, and how did he navigate that without getting back into it?

When John decided that he was done with drugs and alcohol he was in Alaska, that is where he got clean. It took him a couple of months to shake it off and then he said: ”I have to go back to Seattle!” and the consensus up there from the people he knew and his family and the community he had there, they were like: ”Don't go back to Seattle! Seattle is a den of iniquity! You are going to go back down there and immediately fall back into your old patterns with your old people and be in big trouble!” - ”Look, I can't stay in Anchorage! I can't be an Alaskan right now because Alaska doesn't have a vibrant arts culture!”

Alaskan arts culture tends toward kitsch. Most Alaskan art is about Alaska. If you are an Alaskan painter you paint Alaskan scenes and if you are an Alaskan playwright your plays are about Alaska because the identity of the place is so strong. The people up there want to consume and build an Alaskan mythology, so what you see in the art up there are a lot of bears and moose and the Northern Lights and gold nuggets and that type of stuff.

Whatever the music scene was up there was just imitating the Seattle scene and a lot of the things that created the sound of Seattle were also true in Anchorage. All the 21 year olds up there were also the product of divorced homes and even worse teenage street culture, it just didn't seem worse because Seattle was a lot punkier. John said: ”Look, I can't stay here!” I have to go back and make my way, as much as being sober now is important to me, I can't turn into somebody where that is the only thing I am doing. There is no point in being sober if I'm just sitting around in Anchorage working at a sporting goods store being sober. I have to still try to be part of the world!”

Staying at Nona’s (RW166)

Against all odds, and his parents threatened him with whatever they had to threaten him, which wasn't much, at this point he was 50 days sober, had no money and no prospects, no job, no place to go back to, but he bought this one way ticket, flew back to Seattle, took the bus in from the airport with his little shoulder bag, and he went right over to this girls house Nona whom he was dating in the last days, the worst days of his drug period, and knocked on her door.

Nona had always been responsible. There is that class of people that are capable of maintaining responsibility in the world and as their after work life they really go into the seedy underbelly, the punk preppy thing. You will meet them in work life! There is one girl in the office that is wearing just slightly out tray (?) clothes as part of her work outfit or she has got a piercing or she has some secret and every once in a while you catch a glimpse of a tattoo that you can see under her sleeve and you realize: ”Oh, she has an alternative life of some kind. She doesn't just get off work and go home and watch episodic television with her boyfriend and her cat. She is doing something after work!” Sometimes they are those people that will really surprise you and it turns out that they are into S&M or they are really tight with outsider art. Nona wasn't working a straight job, but if she worked at a restaurant or in a café she was the manager.

John showed up at her house which had always been a nice house, and for whatever reason she had indulged him when he was a homeless, jobless, slouch and he was like: ”Hi, I really need a place to crash!” - ”Welcome back!” and for the first few months when John landed back in Seattle he was living with her and she had been his girlfriend when he was at his worst, ”girlfriend” in quotes. She was very gentle with John, he was sick a lot, getting all of that stuff out of his system, he hadn't been eating very well for a long time before that, just from lack of money but also lack of interest.

That was during a period when John would go to meetings all the time, he had a hard very hard time finding a job. He would get a job at a place and work there two days and just be like: ”No!” Like a lot of people at that time suffering from those same maladies John believed that he was too good for just menial work or he was too good to be a regular American, but he knew he had to stay straight. He didn't have anywhere else to go besides bars and cafes, so he would go sit in the cafe all afternoon with a little spiral notebook, just writing, mostly essays, just trying to get his thoughts out on paper.

A lot of it is unreadable because he was flipping in and out of not just different ideas, the essay had different ideas, but trying to have different ideas about what good writing is. He would try different tones, never different personas, but sometimes he would be more emphatic, more aggressive, sometimes he would be more contemplative, but he would just scribble, just write and write and write and write and write, filling up these spiral-bound notebooks.

Meeting Peter and other friends after getting sober (RW166)

Then at night he didn't know anybody, any people that weren’t in bars, and he would go to the bar and sit there at the bar and smoke cigarettes and talk to his friends. As the night wore on they became less and less interesting, which was his first glimpse of being around drunk people when you are not drunk, it is not very fun. After about 9:30pm he just went out, just wandered the streets, and his first real friend was this guy named Peter Cars, he still knows him, and he was a very depressed, moody, artistic, handsome outsider character, glamorous by virtue of being completely unreachable by anyone, and he lived in that house behind Ernie Steel's and John knew people in that house because he had played in the band Chautauqua when he first moved to Seattle with the drummer Brian. This house was right in the center of Broadway and John would go by there and Peter lived there.

They just immediately glommed on to each other, one of those situations where it's just like: ”Wow, I have a new best friend!”, but Peter didn't really drink or smoke or do drugs. He drank like he had a beer. Most of the people in that house also would have a glass of wine or a beer, but were not drug abusers and they weren't alcoholics, one of them was. It was John’s first experience as an adult, as someone above the age of about 17, of people that he liked, that he admired, that he felt a kinship with, that just didn't have drug abuse and alcohol abuse as a part of their culture. They were artists, they were making art and were living in that early 1990s generation-X super-creative impassioned time, just not getting high.

It blew John’s mind: ”What? Who are these people?” and he threw himself in with them and was able to interact with people that weren't just sitting at the bar talking about the play they were going to write or they were writing the play. He watched people write a play, perform it for five nights in a small black box theater for 15 people a show, and then the play was done and they threw it away or they put it in a box and they started working on their next play, which was very different from the alcoholic crowd and the way that they talked about art, which was: ”I'm going to write the play that changes the world and I’m starting it tomorrow!”

The idea in the alcoholic culture is that when you finally make something it is going to be incredible, and that is part of the reason that you can't start it: You don't quite have the thing that is going to change the world yet and as soon as you get it, then: ”Watch out, world!” Watching working artists who made a thing and they did it and now they are starting the next thing, was transformative for John.

It did not transform him because he still even now suffers from the idea that he can't start working on a thing until it becomes an amazing thing that is going to change the world and he never was able to be one of those people that just went from creative thing to creative thing. Playwrights and actors just just blow John’s mind because they work just as hard on a play as you would on a record album, but it really leaves no record behind, except in the memories of the people that were lucky enough to see it. That is crazy for a musician to think about, even though every show they play is equivalent to putting on a play‚ at least you have an album and people who will never see the show listen to the record. Peter and John would go out and walk all night, rain pouring down, John would be smoking, and they would talk about art and life and the end times. They were both very dark, but finding a shared spirit in somebody else was a great comfort to John and to Peter, they just sought each other out.

Sleeping behind the curtain (RW166)

At some point along the way someone bought John a beeper, some of his friend who was tired of not being able to get in touch with him. You could call the Espresso Roma and leave a message for him and it was almost certain he would get it because he went there every day and then later you could call the Café Septieme or you could leave a message there at the counter and he would get it, but some friend was like: ”I'll pay for your beeper!” and it might have been Peter or Laural.

John carried it around for a while and it would beep and then you would go to a phone and call the number and there would be a message for you. That lasted close to a year before John had his own apartment. He crashed at Nona’s for a while and then the house behind Ernie Steel’s. John started sleeping on the couch there in the living room until eventually the people that lived there were like: ”You can't sleep on the couch!”, but there was an alcove at the top of the stairs, just a place with bedrooms on both sides, you came up to the top of the stairs, you turned around the railing and at the back end there was a dormer with a window that let light into the stairs.

It was about four feet deep and somebody hung a curtain, maybe a shower curtain, across that four foot alcove and if John went in there with a sleeping bag he could sleep and all you would see was his feet sticking out into the hallway. Somehow for some reason the people that lived in that house, which at that point was called the El Dopa House tolerated him. Even though Julie lived there and later Laural lived there and Derek Chamberlain lived there. None of those people were in El Dopa at all, but enough members of the band and the band practiced in the basement.

John slept in that alcove for a long time before the people at the El Dopa house, Nona had kicked him out and he was probably dating Laurel at that point, and they were: ”You can't stay here anymore! You have just been at the top of the stairs for too long! You are the man at the top of the stairs and you are really not bringing as much of the community as you are taking!” - ”I totally understand!” At that point he had been sober for six months and a lot of the people in his life said: ”You got to get a job one day and also an apartment one day!” John was doing work, he worked in a warehouse, he got these little odd jobs, he went to a temp agency and said: ”Put me in anything!” and he could type pretty well. They gave him these little jobs, three days here, two days there. John worked for that temp agency for a while and he liked it because you could go in and say: ”I don't want to do anything for the next few days!” - ”Whatever, we will put you in a thing when one thing comes up!”

Kevin and David Brest (RW166)

Then John had to go over to Kevin's house who was living with David Brest at that point. Both guys he had gone to high school with, David Brest ended up being the boyfriend of Kelly Kiefer, John’s high school girlfriend. When she and John broke up she started going out with David Brest just to infuriate John. He was extremely handsome. He was one year younger than them in grade, he was an 11th grader and John and Kelly were seniors, but he and John had the exact same birthday, not a year apart, but the same age. His parents had held him back before going into kindergarten and John’s hadn't and John wished that they had.

It was an indignity that he was an 11th grader, it was an indignity even though they were all the same age, it was an indignity that he was handsome as he was, he was also very GQ, which meant he wore a Guess Watch on the outside of his shirt, he put it on his cuff instead of on his wrist, he rolled his cuffs back, he wore penny loafers, he was the wrong kind of preppy, he was the gaudy kind of preppy.

David ended up living with Kevin and David was growing weed in the basement, which was extremely complicated for John because John was living in the house with his two high school buddies and one of them had a pot growing operation in the basement, a full-on one. He never went to jail for smoking pot, it was alcohol that was the problem, but he didn't succumb to any kind of temptation. He took a real interest in the grow operation, more than a polite interest, he took a proprietary interest in it.

David was not really from Seattle so John actually made some connections for him. He went out to the people he knew in the community that were on the buying side and David was on the selling side and John put them together. John always had a prohibition on dealing drugs, that was never a thing that he was willing to do, even when he was doing them a lot and it would have made sense, although you are not supposed to do both things: ”Don't get high on your own supply!” because you are not going to make money if you use your own product. You are going to sell it to people and then whatever you would have used to make yourself rich or even to buy more just goes into you and then you are just a drug addict.

That wasn't John’s issue, but his issue was that morally he had a compunction against sinking so low. There were a lot of people he knew that were high class drug dealers that only sold Mushrooms and LSD for instance, they felt confident that they weren't selling narcotics, so they maintained a moral code where they said: ”Look man, I don't sell drugs, I sell these spiritual facilitators!” It is all just a big shit show because of course then MDMA or MDA came along and now what do you do? Is Ecstasy a narcotic or is it a spiritual mind opener? If you call it a mind opener then you are selling MDA and it is very much a narcotic.

The difference between MDMA and MDA: The first one John heard of was MDMA and that was Ecstasy and Attention Deficit Disorder turned into Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder and MDA inexplicably turned into MDMA, maybe they just added an M because they forgot before, or maybe it was a different chemical. It performed the same function culturally. Then somewhere when John wasn't paying attention in fairly recent times it started being called Molly. Ecstasy was a perfectly great name that was much more evocative of what the drug did than Molly. For a long time people were talking about Molly and John wondered if this was a new thing like squeak, like somebody invented a new drug? Later on somebody explained it was Ecstasy.

No one ever named LSD anything but LSD. You could have called it anything you wanted, but it was Lysergic Acid Diethylamide and that was always what it was and still is. John was living at Kevin's and David's on the couch and by this point they had a band. Kevin and John had a band, the Bun Family Players, and they practiced in the basement of Kevin's house, which was the problem: They were practicing down there and at this age your band practiced five nights a week, it was all they had to do, and then John would just hang out after after practice and they would sit and smoke cigarettes and watch TV and everybody else would leave and the other guys would be like ”Okay, we are going to bed!” - ”Okay, good night!” and John would sleep on the couch.

Eating other people’s food, getting beer from pitchers in bars (RW166)

This was a period where they would go to bed and John would go into the cupboard wherever the cans of canned food were, he would go to the very back of the cupboard and pull out the can that had been in there the longest because in everybody's pantry there is always a can that gets lost back there, a can of ravioli that just is behind the green beans because it has been in there a year. John started to eat the canned stuff that he thought they wouldn't miss. He had been doing this for years on the drug side.

If you left him alone with your bong he would get into it and scrape the resin out of the stem and smoke the resin. In that way he was able to get high every day without ever having any money to buy pot because he was effectively stealing the resin out of people's pipes. Most dedicated pot smokers are aware that they are storing up resin in their devices and they are saving it for a rainy day and probably a week later when somebody was out of dope and was like: ”Oh, I'll just scrape my pipe!” they would go in there and: Huh, seems like there should be a lot more in here than there is now!”, but it was an extremely low-level crime. John had been living that way for a long time.

John used to pull a scam where he would go into a bar and wait until the bartender wasn't looking and grab a clean pint glass off of his stack and then he would just walk around the bar with this empty pint glass and strike up conversations with people. The presumption it was he had just finished his drink, he had bought a beer and then he just finished it and he hadn't gone back and gotten another one because he was so interested in this conversation they were having. The culture of being in a bar, particularly one where beer is sold in pitchers, is when everybody's glass is empty you pick up the pitcher and you fill up everybody's glass. It is just the assumption an particularly back then in Happy Hour pitchers were $5, you threw $5 down and you fill up everybody's glass and when it is time for a new pitcher the next person goes and gets it.

When it was getting to be John’s turn to get the next pitcher he would see somebody across the room and be like: ”Excuse me you guys, I'll be right back!” and he would walk over there and talk to his other friend, he was a very social person, and he would hang out over there until they filled up his glass. It was not completely usurious like it sounds, he was actually having a great time, and they were having great conversations and these were all friends who all knew what he was doing, everybody at The Comet knew John didn't have any money, but the consensus was that every once in a while it costs you a beer when John came around.

Nobody ever really pulled the curtain down and confronted him and said: ”No beer for you, moocher!” because he brought a lot to the event, is the way John justified it, he made it fun in there, but he did feel like he was trading on his personality in a way, selling it, one beer at a time, and that started to feel like he was a stripper in a way: He had a thing, he had a gift, the gift of conversation, and he was funny and he was friendly and in exchange for that you just had to give him a beer every once in a while, but that didn't start feeling very good to John, it felt like he was exploiting a talent for really low wages.

Sleeping at Kevin’s and eventually in the Ford Aerostar (RW166)

Eventually Kevin, who had been John’s best friend in high school and who played in the Bun Family Players said: ”You cannot sleep on my couch anymore! You have been sober almost a year! You need to join the world! Get a job! Get your own place!” and that was the transition John had the hardest time doing. He hadn't touched drugs or alcohol in nine months at that point, he had a band, he was a member of an arts culture, he had a girlfriend who was a great girlfriend, he just couldn't get his head around having his own place and having a job and having a key ring that and places to be, but his friends had run out of patience.

When somebody is clearly drunk all the time and a drug addict, a lot of people don't know what to do, so they end up being somewhat sympathetic, even though they want you out. They don't know how to say so without impoverishing you, nobody wants to kick you out in the rain in the middle of the night. Kevin had a Ford Aerostar, the first mini van. He had driven it around the country, he had used it up, the thing was busted. They hardly ever used it, he walked to work. It was parked in his carport and he said: ”I'll run an extension cord out to the battery so you will have lights, you just have to move out of the house! You have to move into the Aerostar! You can't be on my couch every morning and every night because it is my couch, it is where I want to sit: On my own couch!”

It was a tiny two bedroom house, it was not like John was on the couch in the basement, he was right in the center of the house. Also John slept to 11am. He was on the couch, they woke up in the morning to get ready to go to work and John was on their couch, hiding under the blanket when they turned the lights on. The key element was: You move out to the Aerostar, but you can't use the house while we are gone. They started locking the house and John couldn't go in in the morning, use the bathroom, use the kitchen, hang out there.

The exile into the Aerostar was in a way genius! Kevin was genius: ”I'm not kicking you out. I'm providing you with a roof over your head. It is just a mini van in the carport and that's it!” John had his sleeping bag and a pillow in there and he made the mistake of deciding at that point that he was going to read… he had always been a voracious consumer of books, but the books were always other people's cast-offs. Somebody would finish a book and they would save it for John and when he came around they'd be: ”Here is a book!”

That way John kept in books all the time. Somebody had given him Interview With a Vampire and he read that in the mini van and went into reading vampire books, horror books, and Steven King books, while basically living outside. The only way he could get the light to stay on in the minivan was by keeping the back door slightly ajar, so he would lay back there, breathe in the night air and when it was time to go to sleep he would close the door and the lights would go off and John was laying in his little carport with the rain coming down, thinking about vampires.

Being the house sitter for Jose’s apartment (RW166)

What ended up happening was Bethany bumped into John on the street and she said: I have a friend who is looking for a house sitter. John’s ears perked up because this had always been a dream. ”Tell me more!” - ”It is this gets this guy Jose from Argentina and he is moving to Heidelberg to go to the University of Heidelberg for six months and he needs somebody to look after his place!” - ”Introduce me!” and Bethany introduced John to Jose, a diminutive Latin man and John recognized him because at some point along the way, back when he was drinking and doing drugs, he had posted outside of a gay bar on Capital Hill that was also a Chinese restaurant, on the north end of Broadway. It was your classic Chinese restaurant, but it was also a gay bar.

John used to sit out front of it, on the sidewalk, because it was a fun sidewalk scene, and he would sit there and bum cigarettes and had a lot of friends in that community, people would sneak drinks out to him. Not that he couldn't have gone in, but he had gotten his ID taken at some point, some situation where he had to put his ID somewhere and then at the end of the night they were like: ”Okay, well you owe us $700 dollars because you did this that and the other!” - ”Oh, I didn't think you had to pay for that!” - ”Are you serious?” - ”I can't pay you!” - ”We are keeping your ID!” - ”I hope you choke on it!” During that whole last period, maybe even the last year of his drinking John didn't have a state ID, so he couldn't just go in anywhere, he could only go into bars where they knew him, even whoever it was that was checking IDs knew him and that is a job that rotates.

John had to really know the bar. There were enough of them, clubs and bars, three of the rock clubs and probably five bars in the city that John could go into and have that like: ”Norm!” kind of thing, but there were lots of other ones, including the cooler ones like the Cloud Room and places like that, The Frontier room even, where they just didn't know him. The frontier room was a legendary rundown Grunge bar and John only ever drank in there a couple of times. Not having ID didn't mean that he wouldn't go try and sometimes you get in, sometimes there is nobody at the door or sometimes they just wave you through. John was confined to a small world by not having ID and he couldn't get in to this bar, but it was a fun scene, it was fun out front and people would sneak him drinks under their coat.

John knew Jose from the sidewalk scene out in front of this bar and he had come onto John several times in one of those reverse situations where he was a little bit older, even though he was 5’1”, came onto John with a daddy vibe, like: ”Come with me, little boy!”, but John was like: ”Well, I'm more just into being a sloppy pile of dirty clothes out in front of this bar. But it is very generous of you!” - ”Oh, you don't know what you are missing!” This was the same Jose, but by this point John looked completely different, he was all cleaned up, he was Mr. Mister Post Grunge and he didn't recognize John! He was going to Heidelberg because he was getting his PhD in Romance Languages or something. He had this wonderful one bedroom apartment right off of Broadway on 10th Avenue E on the ground floor of this very genteel building that was full of rich white girls, and John rented it from him for an affordable price. John was still temping, but all of a sudden he had this furnished apartment, he had a life, and he had a place!

John went to the thrift store and bought a lamp and now people could come visit him and his friends just rejoiced. John was 27 because he was 26 when he quit drinking, he just turned 26, and he was full-on 27 by the time he put all this together, or if not then it was within weeks of his birthday on either side. Pretty soon he got the job at the magazine store. What was wonderful was how Jose kept writing him letters every couple of months: ”Things are going well, I'm going to stay in Heidelberg a little longer!” and he ended up subletting John that apartment for a year and a half because he kept getting extensions on his visa to continue his studies in Heidelberg. It was devastating when he finally got that letter where he said: ”I'm coming back and I want my apartment back!”

John’s friend Peter (RW166)

John was still friends with Peter. Peter and John had a relationship where John left a window unlocked in his apartment and Peter would come in through the window at any hour of the day or night if he needed a place because at that point maybe he no longer lived in the El Dopa house, and it was really success that drove Peter and John apart. Peter had a band called Bugger the King and the Bun Family Players were starting to sell 150 tickets and they were sharing a practice space with Peter that Peter had built and then Peter decided he was going to live in the practice space. They were like: ”What are you talking about? You can't live in the practice space! We are all using it!” - ”I built it and now it is my apartment!” - ”It is a garage behind a funeral parlor. How in the hell are you going to live here?”, but he kitted it out and put windows in it.

Then he started to get weird about them practicing there: ”You can't get weird about that, a practice space is worth its weight in gold! You can't kick us out of our practice space! This is the whole center of our universe!” and he got weirder and weirder and weirder. ”No, you can't be here during these hours because this is my dinner time and I want to cook my top ramen on a hot plate here!” - ”You are kicking us out from 7 to 9? You are just trying to get us out!” until they found their own practice space. In that conflict Peter and John never came back from it, the friendship was never the same.

They continued to call each other, run into each other, he used to do work from John’s mom, and they love each other, Peter and John, there is a deep emotional love that prevents them from just being high five and friends that used to be closer. Everything is always fraught. It is like being with an ex-girlfriend where neither of you are really over it. You can't just hang out. It is the same with John and Peter. Whenever they are with each other, it is that kind of: ”How are you doing?” and that was more than 20 years ago and it is weirdly still an open wound.

BONUS CONTENT

+ Patreon-only content

New T-Shirt, how to reward Patreon supporters (RW166)

Dan did a mock up for their T-shirts. He sends it to John who starts laughing out loud. John is going send those to everybody in the Going Places Guess because he is still in touch with them all. It is the greatest font, too! It looks like an iron-on with the ringer sleeves. Dan wonders if the Patreon supporters should get them first or how to do it, but John doesn’t know either because he went into Patreon just tumbling down a hill and they jokingly yelled at people to join the thing and because in the world today no-one understands tone there was a handful of people that got offended. On omnibus they are taking Patreon donations, but some of the people expected that meant that they no longer took ads, which was never really their intention.

In all these shows they are trying to figure out a way to make a living from them. Everyone is trying to figure this stuff out and there are no rules to it, no guides to follow. It is weird, John is uncomfortable, he doesn’t 100% like it, but also it has made a real difference, the Patreon money from this show and from Omnibus. A year ago John was so full of stress and anxiety, he was just saying the word Aloha over and over. It is hard for him to acknowledge that he has succeeded or accomplished the tasks. Last June he didn't know how he was going to manage to sell his house, last March / April he wasn't making any money for many shows except for the ones that he did with Dan and Merlin, he was eking along.

Now John has resolved some issues where Omnibus and Friendly Fire weren't earning money, he sold his house, he now bought a new one, John and Dan have a Patreon, and it has just been amazing! It is not hard for John to thank people, it is just hard for him to acknowledge it inside, not just that the burden is relieved somewhat, but that he worked to do it and succeeded. That is the thing he should be able to congratulate himself for and say: ”Hey, good job!”, but he is immune to being told that he did a good job, especially by himself, so he is trying right now to sit where he is say: ”You did a good job! You did a good job!" John is working on it, he is chipping away at it.

But as far as how to reward Patreon people? When John asked that question most people write in and say: ”I'm giving to the show because I like the show, I don't care about your challenge coin!” and John is grateful for that, especially because that seems like what it is: It is not like you are buying something, you are giving to a thing that you like! You recognize it doesn't cost that much for you to support a thing, but there is a difference between the people that are giving and the people that aren't, for sure! Is letting them have the T-shirt first enough of a difference? John would love to see that shirt go out to the wider world, but he honestly doesn't know what to do. Probably at a certain level of Patreon you should just get one, if you are giving $20 a month, to give that person a $20 shirt feels like: They are already giving them a couple hundred bucks a year!

But then you could also get them to pay for it and that is also another way of making money, which is absolutely true. Roderick on the Line does a T-shirt every year and it is a real money earner because people that listen to that show have no other way to show their appreciation. Also, that shirt is full of memes and John doesn't do memes very much. That was a toss-off story that John was extremely embarrassed to tell and John loved that Dan turned it into a shirt, he would wear that shirt! It is just great! John leaves that to Dan, all the patriotic tiers.

People being easily offended (RW166)

There is a thing where somebody is like: ”I give a dollar a month, but then it turned out that I changed that to $5 a month or whatever because I felt good about a thing!” and what John is embarrassed by is that they harangued people that one episode and there were people that were like: ”I used to $5 a month, but you hurt my feelings and now blah blah blah blah!” These days if you say that Batman is dumb you get 100 angry e-mails from people that are like: ”Batman is an American hero!”

Everybody is offended all the time basically, but John hates to say that because that feels like that could offend someone and he doesn’t want to be on the side of people who are like: ”The offense culture is offensive!” That world has been co-opted by… you can almost not make any cultural criticism right now without being artificially put on one or the other side of some incredibly bold dividing line that people want to put between sides of our contemporary culture. Nobody wants there to be a middle because people on the fringe of either side always love to accuse the middle of being allies of their enemies.

If you are a moderate then you are the ally of the right or the left. If you even speak about a thing in terms of the right and the left you are part of the problem because there is no right and left, there is only right or left. That alone is antithetical to the way John was taught and raised and the way he thinks. Little catch phrases like that, like ”Everyone is offended now!” John has to retreat from those things because just to save them is to feel like you are tossing your hat in with people who are using that as a way to dismiss a whole swath of the world. John doesn't give that much of a care about it, if you want to be offended, then by all means. John does not have a ton of sympathy for offense at all, frankly. Being offended by things he is not very interested in because it is not a very interesting reaction to anything.

If somebody puts their feet on you on an airplane, John’s sense is that your reaction would be to be appalled, which is very different than offended. Disgusted perhaps or furious, and also that you would immediately raise a protest! The thing that is most insensible to John is people who have suddenly a set of feet appear on their armrest and they take a picture of it and put it on the internet but don't do anything about it. John would stab those feet with the sharpest thing he could find and he wouldn't care if they belong to a child. The best way to learn not to do that is to suffer an injury, frankly. If they take him off an airplane for stabbing a kid's foot with a pen, he will make his case to the magistrate.

Receiving less emails (RW166)

They have gotten less letters as of late… fewer letters…. Dan is offended that John would correct him in that way! … than they used to. Downloads are up, not down, people are probably just entertained. A while back when they were asking for comments and thoughts from people about how they should do the Patreon and what they should charge for it, Dan has a huge stack of e-mails and letters about that, but they are past that now and reading those letters now? Dan has 40 e-mails here all about how they should or shouldn't charge for the show.

Follow-up of bing excluded by friends (RW166)

This one came in as a comment on Patreon itself, not an actual separate e-mail:

I really appreciate your advice to the first letter because I had a friend end their friendship with me last year and they never said why. I apologized for whatever I did, still not sure, and they just never replied back. I asked a third party who was with the last time I saw her and they also had no idea why this happened. When John said that the not knowing is part of the punishment inflicted by the other party it made total sense. My former friend won't tell me why she stopped speaking to me because that is part of the punishment. I am hoping to find some closure now within myself. I even asked my therapist about this. That is how much it has been bothering me. So thank you John and Dan for giving me the better advice than my therapist did! :-) I included the dash for you, Dan!

Dan thought a lot about that, too and there is really something to that. They want to get back at you what for whatever reason, they want to get revenge on you, and they are not going to tell you why, they want to watch you squirm, they want to make you wonder, they want to make you feel uncomfortable. Where did John get the insight for that? Dan thought about that a lot since he said that and it is spot on.

John was having a conversation with a friend the other day about cultural appropriation, which is another thing that John doesn’t believe in. We all appropriate one another's cultures, we all have, there is no culture that is not a product of past cultural appropriation, nothing is pure, no-one has a pure thing, and to say that there can not be cultural appropriation effectively means that we are now siloing our cultures.

A friend told the story the other day that their elementary school wanted to do a production of Aladdin and the principal came in and said: ”We can't do Aladdin because most of the kids in this school are white and it is cultural appropriation.” The response to that was: ”Are you saying now that the only shows we can do are white culture shows? Because that seems like the opposite of what we were intending, that now majority white elementary schools are only doing white productions of white media? That is a weird conclusion to come to, that somehow we are protecting something by not allowing kids to do Aladdin, a Disney cartoon, written by white Disney writers?”

That whole universe John just has no more patience for. You want to tell him that African-American culture isn't 100% percent the product of assimilation? Let's call it that: Assimilation of 100 different cultures. And now we arrive at a thing where it is some pure belonging that only some people have access to? John can't support the whole idea, it is antithetical to the United States, it is antithetical to the human experience, it is 100% balderdash.

They were talking about it and John’s friend was making the general case that… she was asking the question, which is at the heart of that debate, which is: How can you know another person's experience? How can I as a 50 year old white man know what a 22 year old Latinex who is has gender dysmorphia? The point John was making is that human beings are not that different from one another, they really aren't! In the spread of human ability and in the spread of human consciousness, when we are down in it we think of it as being incredibly diverse and people's experiences being so different from one another because we are down in the soup of it.

You think: ”Oh, this guy is a banker who went to Yale, who lives on Park Avenue, and this person lives in Burma and their culture is one where the women put rings around their necks until their necks are stretched. How can they possibly have anything in common?” and the fact is that in each and every instance of human beings, including those who are insane, we have 99% overlapping similarity, not genetically, but culturally. In all of the billions of people on Earth no one can fly, no one can do actual magic, no one can breathe underwater, no one can live past about 120, no one can do any kind of spooky action at a distance according to their will, there is no one that has managed to reproduce in any way other than putting a sperm into an egg.

Every single aspect of life, from birth to death, is shared. When you lay in bed at night and imagine falling in love or imagine what the arc of your life is going to be, it is only the circumstances that are different, and the person on the Upper East Side and the person in Burma are setting their emotional adventures in different stage sets, and they are imagining different food, and they are imagining different curtains, but the emotional experience of it, the emotional life of going to the big dance, if your big dances at the Waldorf Astoria or your big dances at the hut at the end of the dirt path, the big dance is the same, and what it feels like to go to the big dance is the same.

John has been to big dances all around, and it is the same for the people there. When the music starts it is the same, emotionally. Our experiences are the same, and it doesn't matter what your identity is. If you have an outsider identity and you go to the dance and you feel excluded and you think it is because it is a component of your identity, your difference from others, you are you are putting yourself in a position of privilege over everyone else because everybody there feels excluded, with the exception of a very few sociopaths every person walks into that dance feeling terrified that they are going to get rejected by others.

If your identity puts you in bold relief from others, so you feel tense or pre-rejected by everyone, honestly that is a shared feeling! It is very hard for people who have identities that put them on the outside and they imagine that that really is different from the chads who they perceive to be insiders. Emotionally the vast majority of those chads are terrified walking into that dance the same way. John knows that because it is 100% true. All you have to do is read any book ever or listen to any song ever by anyone. There is never a song or a book written from the perspective of: ”I walked into the dance and I belonged there and everything was great and my life has been amazing and easy!” because if a character in a book does profess those things, that character in the book is meant to be a sociopath and a villain. There is no sympathy for that person in any culture and they are the outsiders, they are the fringe, the people who internally believe they belong.

When John thinks about that person who just cuts you off from their life and gives you no explanation and never returns your phone call, it doesn't matter what the window-dressing of that situation is. John doesn't need to know your race or gender, where you grew up or what your story is, because that is a universal experience, and that desire to put a person in a box, either to exclude them from your box or to put them in their own box and put that box on a shelf and set that box on fire, is a universal human experience.

John watches 5 year olds do it and 50 year olds do it. Punishment for unknown crimes is a major part of civilization-building. Tribalism is not a thing that is based on war, it is not a thing that is based on culture. Little girls at an extremely young age start excluding one another from games. It is part of the game. The game is to exclude one girl, like: ”Oh, we are playing. We are all kitty cats and you can't be one!” or ”I'm the dog, she is the mom, and there is no cat in this game, so you are out!” - ”I don't have to be a cat, I will be whatever you want!” - ”Nope! Sorry, game is closed!” and honestly: That is the thing little girls do that little boys don't. Little boys hit each other right. Little girls make those rules. That is at a foundational level of civilization: ”You are out!” Little boys pick up on it as they grow up. They learn to do it by being victims of it, but you couldn't build a town, you couldn't build a church, you couldn't build a family, really, without that human dynamic of: ”Here is where we draw the line on who is in the cabin and who is outside the cabin!” It is why any human being ever built a second cabin.

It feels like an insight only if you are living in a world where you take other people's difference at the level that they project it and want to be thought of as exclusive. We are living now in a culture where it is the exclusivity of pain that has more of an effect on people than the exclusivity of pleasure. Part of identity politics is to say not like: ”You can't come into this club because you are not rich enough!”, it is not: ”You can't come into this club because we don't accept Jews or blacks", but it is: ”You can't come into my club because you don't understand my suffering!” and that is as old as time, but in leftist culture at least there is no longer a premium put on exclusivity based around money or access to pleasure. That is a thing we are all contemptuous of.

If you were to say like: ”Welcome to my liberal paradise! Only people who have X amount of money can get in!” that still exists everywhere, but it is not a thing we profess. What we profess now is: ”My experience is inaccessible to you!” and in order to find that inaccessibility people are putting themselves further and further out: ”Unless you have an eagle tattooed on your forehead you can't possibly know what it is like to be me!” - ”You know what? I can! I know exactly frankly what it would be like to walk around with an eagle tattooed on my forehead because I have a freaking imagination and I have read 1000 books!” and it is why John doesn't have one.

He didn't not get any eagle tattoo on his forehead because he wasn't brave, or because he didn't have internal pain that projected itself as an eagle onto his forehead that he had a compulsion to get. He can imagine all of those serious situations, he has compulsions. He can absolutely put himself in the shoes of someone who is like: ”There is a freaking eagle on my head and I need to draw it there, because if I don't I will be committing a sin against the eagle or against myself or against the world!” John is close enough to being insane that he knows that feeling, but he also feels not that he has to do that, and he is grateful that he doesn't feel pushed there, but he is not going to say that the things that he does suffer from keep you from him.

John doesn't think that just because you don't understand bipolar you don't understand him as part of why he does all this talking. He wants everyone to understand him and that he is not that different from anybody and that you are not that different from anybody. If you can hear what John goes through and sympathizes with that at all, even as a voyeur, even as somebody who's like: ”Well, thank God I don't have that!”, or: ”Boy, I don't have any idea what that is about!” John has gotten so many letters from people who say: ”I do not have your problems‚ but someone I love does, and listening to you talk has allowed me to understand them!” and for that John is grateful and those are some of the best letters he has ever gotten. For some bipolar person to write him and go: ”I’m like you!”, they both high five and then it's like: ”What can we do for each other?” They can't really do anything because they both know that you can't really do anything beyond just say: ”Hey!”

If somebody is like: ”I have been trying to get my significant other or my younger brother to see the lights and listening to you talk I realize that they have what you have and that they are never going to see the light, but I love them still and now I know what to say at least, and how to be around them!” That is all John wants for anybody and it is what he feels for everybody. He does not ever meet a person where he is like: ”I don't get you!” Even people who are suffering from full-blown schizophrenia: ”I get it! I feel that!” and if you feel like you can exclude him from that, it is you that is making the mistake of empathy because humans are not that different and empathy is a major factor in that.

If John moved to Burma right now and moved into that village he would always be an outsider in the sense that he would be identifiably not born there, but he would join that community, he would start to perform a role there. He doesn’t know what it would be. Probably initially it would be teaching English, but he would start playing music and pretty soon he would be there, he would be a member, and if he can be a member of that community, then there is not that much of a difference between us. All of our hopes and dreams are shared, and if John was living in that village in Burma, the first time they invited him to the dance he would be nervous.

John’s connection to France (RW166)

Hi Dan and John,

You can call me Dan! I'm Canadian, but for the last five years I've lived in Strasbourg, France where I work at the University. My question is mainly for John, but I'm eager to hear Dan's thoughts too: I'm a longtime listener to Roderick on the Line as well as Road Work and throughout All the great shows you have shared stories about your travels around Europe.

You have talked a lot about your time in the low countries: Germany, the Czech Republic, and Romania, and even mentioned the U.K. and Spain occasionally. However, it seems to me you rarely mentioned France. I'm not complaining per se, despite being quite happy here overall. I certainly have an ambivalent feeling toward the country, but living in Alsace I think a lot about how the story of Europe or at least the Western part has for centuries been about how the ”Germans” and the ”French” interacted with one another.

I have heard you talk a lot about the German side of that interaction, but rarely about the French. Is this something I have just imagined or are you less interested or have you spent less time in France in particular? From what I have seen, French musical tastes are among the worst in Europe, and the Indie Rock scene is pretty small, so maybe that meant you spent less time touring here than elsewhere. Anyways, I would love to hear more about your time in France or your thoughts about the country and its place in Europe. I live not too far from the EU Parliament, so I think about that a lot too.

I'm also curious about what thoughts Dan has on the subject if he has any. I just listened to an after show where he expressed disdain for the UK, but a love for Scotland. So maybe the subject of France and Europe will simply return ’NULL.’ Thanks a lot for making the show and allowing us listeners the opportunity to directly support it with our €$; both parts of that equation mean a lot to me.
Cheers, Dan

Dan’s answer about France is very very brief: Dan’s uncle is French, he is French from France, grew up in France and moved to the United States when he was around college age and met Dan’s aunt in college and he continued on to become an electrical engineer and has worked at a lot of very very cool places. He used to build submarines and one of the submarines was in one of the James Bond movies where there was a sub chase he built that bad guy submarine, the company that he worked for at the time was called Perry.

He has done a lot of cool things, he showed Dan how to build a computer when he was 10 or 11 years old, super-cool dude, very French, had to drive a Peugeot, the only car that he would drive, that type of French, very fun and interesting guy. The only thing Dan knows about France according to him and his aunt who have been many many times is that Paris is all tourists and dirty now. That's it! That's all Dan got! Poop on the sidewalks.

John’s reply

Listener Dan lives in a very interesting part of France, which he alluded to when he says he lives in Alsace. The area is called Alsace Lorraine to those of us who learned in American. It is a region in the Northeast of France that makes up the little sharp point on the Northeast corner of France, and it is an area that has been in contention between the French and Germans for many many many many many many many years. If you think about it, he lives in Strasbourg. What kind of name does Strasbourg sound like? It is a German name, and you can spell it in a French way, but it doesn't change the fact that it is really Strasbourg, the word with two s's that are spelled with a capital B in the German language. It is a German name!

The problem up there is that the French somewhat reasonably believe that the borders of France should be the Rhine river, but the Germans, dating back to the Holy Roman Empire and before, just have filled that area with German-speakers to the west of the Rhine. You have this area between France and Germany where in the period before Napoleon Germans and French people intermingled. Every country in Europe has this. Belgium and the Netherlands and over on the other side Germany and Poland, and this is why the Nazis went into the Czech Republic and took that Sudetenland because it was mostly Germans that lived there.

The French and the Germans, there has always been a conflict there. They are two different kinds of people. We think of the Slavs and the Germans being there is a line there, but the French are heirs of the Roman Empire and they are Latins and they speak a Latin language and they are Gaellish people, not Germanic people and not related and intermingled with Celts and Norse people, who are also Germanic. The Rhine river has always been a line between the two universes, and one that did a lot of cross-pollination. It has also been culturally a hard line.

The Germans were just tribes, there was no Germany, there was Prussia, there was Austria, the Holy Roman Empire encompassed it all, but there was no Germany, no united Germany until a period pretty late in the 19th century. But there has always been a France, for a long long long time there has been a France. The Germans didn’t have a very clear sense of identity nationally as German people, as opposed to little duchies and mark graves and whatnot, until Napoleon swept through there and just beat everybody's ass.

The Germans said: ”Wait a minute! No! The French don't get to do this to us, our longtime neighbors and adversaries! If we had been united, if the Germans had all been together, rather than working across purposes from one another, we could have stopped Napoleon!” It was Napoleon in the aftermath that caused the Germans to start thinking of themselves as a people with not just a shared language, but a shared German culture.

It took them a while to become a nation and a people, but if you think about the Germans even really calling themselves the Germans, it has only been in the last 150 years, more or less. You would have said you were a Hessian or a Saxon or a Bavarian. Bavaria had their own king! All these little nations, all these areas were ruled by different rulers. After the Reformation they all started changing religions on one another. You would have one set of Germans that were Lutherans and one that were Catholics across a little border.

Personally, the thing that Listener Dan said that resonates the most is that French people have terrible taste in music. Partly it is that France is extremely insular. They don't want to culturally cross-pollinate with others because there is some chauvinism to the French. There is chauvinism to all these people, but the English language is a complete amalgam of Latin vocabulary, Germanic grammar. If you come in and speak some other language in the United States for 15 minutes, we will steal 10 words from you. We have words from almost every language of the world that we use now. Potluck and goulash and we will take it and make it ours. Renaissance!

French are not like that. They want to be somewhat pure in themselves and politically they have always said: ”You can come from all around the world and come to France, we welcome you, but as soon as you settle in here you are French, you are no longer Algerian or Vietnamese, you are a French person now and that means adopting French culture. Don't come here and live outside of us!” That is why France has so much nationalism now and that is why that idea is under such pressure, because people are coming in and they're like: ”No, we are going to maintain our religion and our culture!”

The French don't like The Long Winters. The Germans and the Spanish and the Belgians and the Dutch loved The Long Winters. They had a prominent article in German Rolling Stone. They could go to Germany and play 10 shows all around the country, not like they were selling 10.000 tickets, but from a standpoint of an Indie Rock touring band they were welcomed on German radio and Spanish radio. In France they played one show in their entire career, and that was opening for Keane.

When they played they were greeted with a lot of enthusiasm, there was a big crowd of people waiting after the show just to get them to sign their bras and interact with them, enthusiastic music fans. But for whatever reason they were not given their music and when they talked to their labels and booking agents in Europe they were like: ”Ah, the French, you can't connect with them and so we don't even try!” John’s friends Nada Surf are huge in France and it helps that two of the guys in the band are fluent in French, but also there is a kind of music to them that is popular.

When John has been in France and turned the radio on, which is a lot because when he was initially hitchhiking around Europe he spent a lot of time in France and was fascinated by it. If you listen to the radio in France you hear American bands, but they are not American bands you have ever heard of, or will ever hear of again. ”Hey, we are the Bozios and here is our song, get up and be happy!” and the song comes on, it is an American band, and it is big here, but it makes no sense to John, it is just like some weird Pop music. Why there would be a whole set of American bands that…

John’s friend Jesse Sykes and her band The Hereafter would go to Europe and wouldn't play any German shows or Spanish shows, but they could would sell out French shows. She did a very dark Americana. In the French speaking part of Belgium The Long Winters were popular, but it was because the college radio stations in Belgium were largely controlled by the Flemish, culturally.

John was in Paris for the 200th anniversary of Bastille Day. It was a phenomenal event, astonishing. Also one of the worst things that ever happened to John was that he got robbed in a park in the middle of the night happened to John in Avignon in the South. He had wonderful experiences there, he loves it! But in the last 20 years, as part of his cultural exchange with Europe, he thinks of France as a monolith and that was true in his education, too.

We used to learn about French history in history class in a way that we don't learn about the history of Central Europe. In history class when John was growing up you learned British history to a certain extent, you didn't get all the way into the Tudors and whatever else, but you learned British history up to a point, but you really learned French history because it was continuous, you could draw a direct line from king to king to king to king all the way pretty far back, and you had these wonderful events that you could leapfrog through French history, and it was thought of as important.

John didn’t learn that Italy wasn't united into a single country until the mid 19th century until he was in college or maybe even later, which is confusing: Why didn't they teach that? It is an interesting story, but it is too complicated to teach. You learn about Spain, you learn about the Spanish Inquisition, you learn stories, but no school ever taught Central Europe or what was happening in Germany until those things became very interesting to John, whereas France is just Louis all the way back. At the end of that stack of Louise you got a Charlemagne and before that a Barbarossa or whatever, but those are Germans.

In John’s Indie Rock years they went to France all the time to drive across it, to go from from Brussels to Barcelona, and they would spend that two days feeling like they were in a weird time portal, not because the French are in a different place in time, but they were touring Europe and playing all the nations of Europe except for the biggest one right in the center, where they would cross over and just be like on a on a Disney ride, like: ”Hello French people! We would love to play for you, but apparently that is not possible, so…”

John even speaks French a little. Then they would get to Spain and it was like: ”Yeah, right on! Let's get rocking!” How can you help but feel like: ”Well… you know what? What do I say about that?” People there in Alsace Lorraine could come see them in Karlsruhe, they could come see them in Bonn or Cologne, they could make a little train trip and come see them, they played in Switzerland and had wonderful times in Switzerland, although more shows in the German part than the French part, but unlike other things in Europe, unlike other questions John had that he really wanted the answers to, he didn't pursue an answer to that question very hard, and partly it was he doesn't want to know why a certain group of people don't like them.

It would happen to them in the UK. They played a lot of times in the UK, but they never caught fire because the UK is similarly and the music scene especially is super snobby. It is just that the French have bad taste in music and the UK has great taste in music. To not be liked by the French felt like: ”Well, I guess they just don't get how great we are!”, but to not be liked by the British was a huge blow, like a desperate insult, because all you want is to play an English tour and have it be successful and to go up to Scotland and go down to Wales and to go to Ireland. They were more successful in Ireland than they were anywhere else in the UK, because Ireland is a different country.

Their listener is not even living in France, really. Alsace Lorraine has has traded hands. It has been part of Germany and part of France multiple multiple times over the years, it was a cause of the Franco Prussian war. It was annexed in World War I, it was the first thing Hitler wanted in World War II and it is now part of France, but who knows what the future holds for Alsace Lorraine?

Bicyclist’s hand signals, bicycles in traffic (RW166)

Dan was driving the other day, the same exact place where he saw the dude get hit by the car, same exact place, he was driving there and he had done the turn and a guy was riding a bike, a 10 speed, that style bike, and he got his gear on, the tight little pants on, that kind of stuff. He pointed at the ground on the left side of him, like if Dan was walking with his son or daughter, if he pointed down that way, what he would be saying is: ”There is a pile of dog crap! Avoid it! Watch out!” He did this and Dan assumed he was trying to point out that there was some road hazard, that he was concerned for Dan’s welfare. But in fact that was his way of signaling that he was going into this left lane. There were two lanes going in the direction they were going in. That was his way of saying to Dan: ”I'm going to be going where I am pointing, which is in the left lane, I'm changing lanes in other words!”

Dan asked a friend and demonstrated it and asked what that would mean to them, and they said: ”Oh, that means that he is getting into that lane!” Dan looked it up and apparently there are all kinds of hand signals that you use, not just the left turn, right turn, stop, which are the three that he has seen guys on motorcycles doing: the left turn your left arm out straight, the right turn your left arm out bent at the elbow, stop your left arm out bend at the elbow hand facing down. Those are the only three that Dan was aware of, were official legit road signals, but apparently motorcyclists and apparently cyclists also have a whole crap ton more.

Does John know them as a frequent guy on a motorcycle or scooter? Are these things that he uses when he is driving around? Has he ever seen anyone using them? If Dan were to quiz John on them, would he know them all?

No. The reason is: The only ones that other people recognize are left turn, right turn, stop, On a motorcycle first of all you have to assume that no-one even sees you and no-one recognizes anything that you are doing, and that they are all trying to murder you at all times and behave accordingly. Also: left turn, right turn, stop are the only ones that are useful. If you did any other thing it is basically like hobo signs: Only other hobos will get it and that is not who you are trying to communicate with.

Dan has another example: Forearm extended, fist clenched, with short up and down motion. That is called a comfort stop. Dan has no idea what that is. There is another one, this is almost the exact thing that the guy was doing, he was just pointing down a little lower, which is: Hazard in roadway! That is what Dan thought it was, but apparently that means: I'm getting in that lane! If John were about to change lanes he would do what the guy did, he would point to the center line of the next lane. All that is, is just to say like: ”Hey asshole, pay attention to what I'm doing here for a second!” and most people who are driving, who are paying attention would say: "What is this guy doing?” and as soon as you start to move, they go: "Oh, I guess he is changing lanes!”

Putting your little turn signal on on your motorcycle is no guarantee anybody is going to see that or know what it is, so you add the little hand signal, even lifting your left hand up as a right angle with the palm out to indicate a right hand turn half the people in the world would look at that and go: ”Who is he waving at?” The comfort stop and all those other signals are a language that you probably would make to other motorcyclists who were part of your motorcycle gang. You are out in the lead and you give the little up and down jack-off move and what that saying is: ”Everybody follow me to this diner!” as opposed to: ”I'm pulling off because I have a flat tire or because I need to go to the bathroom and you guys keep on and I'll catch up!”

There are probably a lot of hand signals that are only meant for you and your friends, that are special forces hand signals and that is all wonderful, it is one of those dying languages that is hard to know how you would preserve it other than by living it.

Dan is very nervous around people on bicycles. He heard from a lot of people over the years that among cyclists there is a tremendous amount of anger that they feel that they should be treated just like a real motor vehicle when they are on the road, the same consideration that we provide a car, that we are obligated to provide to a bicycle. If they are on the road, they should be treated just like a regular car. We shouldn't go around them, we shouldn't swerve around them, we shouldn't pass them without great a great deal of care, the same as if they were another vehicle. That makes sense, but at the same time these are the people who will ride slow in the turn lane because they wanted to get out of the main lane and they are not turning. Dan has seen that happen dozens of times, where they are just cruising. They will pull into the into the lane, they will start coasting, they will pull out their drink, they will take their drink, they will put it back in, all in the long turn lane, but they are not turning, and now they got a line of four or five cars behind them and then they will just move back into the main lane and keep driving.

Dan sees that all the time, people on the bikes not using turn signals, not indicating anything, not even doing what the guy did, pointing at the ground, which was helpful. Riding on the side of the road instead of in the middle of the road in a way that confuses Dan. Dan just tries to stay away from people on bikes at all times because he doesn't know how to not do the wrong thing.

John says that this is kind of what they are trying to accomplish. There are a couple of things going on, and one is: They are always on the defense because they are on the roads, in a lot of jurisdictions they are prohibited from riding on the sidewalk, they are forced into the roads, but there is no accommodation for them. Other drivers are either oblivious to them or openly aggressive, and so bicyclists are trying everything they can to carve out space in the public right of way for themselves. Cities like Seattle have gone to great lengths and tremendous expense to create a separate world for bikes, which has created a lot of resentment on the part of drivers because they have taken multiple lanes away from cars.

In places like the Netherlands where bicyclists are an essential part of civic life, which is true in China and Vietnam, too, the bicycles rule the day! There is such an infrastructure for bicycles in the Netherlands that is purpose-built for them. You can travel from town to town on a bike trail that is far away from a road, it is its own road. In Seattle what they should have done, definitely in neighborhoods, just taken a street away from cars, and said: ”Republican is now a bike-only street and cars can cross it after they wait at a signal, and it becomes a bike thoroughfare!” but to take a lane off of Broadway and make it into a bike lane and then another lane off Broadway and make it into a light rail lane is crazy. You may as well at that point just take Broadway away and make it a pedestrian mass transit and bicycle street only.

What they could have done is do that on 12th Avenue or on 11th Avenue and just purpose-build a street. Bicyclists on Broadway are just a little bit more comfortable having their own lane, it is only slightly less hazardous because delivery vehicles pull into the bike lane, cars pull over, you are never safe! If they had made 11th Avenue just a bike thoroughfare!

The other problem that Dan identifies is that bicyclists and bicycle culture have adopted a mentality of moral superiority and in a way they do believe that about themselves because in our culture they can claim to be carbon-free, but also they are athletes, they are getting exercise, which is another virtue in American culture. They are not contributing to traffic, they don't think, which is another virtue. They begin to think of themselves as virtuous people and that if everyone joined their religion the world would have no problems. If everyone rode their bike to work in January, which the diehards do, there would be no problem.

You can't have everyone ride a bicycle, especially not in a city like Seattle. Seattle is a steep, hilly, cold, dark town. So that virtue and the fact that they have had to carve space out for themselves from the public rideaway has created a kind of militants in them where they expect to be treated like a car but they are only going 8 mph, so they are offended or perturbed if you try and go around them. If all cars were going 8 mph the city would come to a crashing halt. Then you have to figure out a way to get around them where you give them plenty of space, but of course from their perspective that is still nerve-wracking.

What we are doing right now is living in this weird period where cities are trying to solve for bicycles and bicyclists are asserting their rights. At least in Seattle the town has done a terrible job. They had a mayor two mayors ago Mike McGinn who is a friend of John, who is a bicycle commuter. He biked to City Hall, he biked from City Hall to events, he is a proud bicyclist, and he put in all of this bike infrastructure for bicyclists, but rather than think about it in terms of: ”How do we make the bicyclists in this city a functional part of the city and rethink it entirely?” he did the thing that was the fashion at the time, which is: ”Cars and bikes are the same. Bikes have the same status as cars and bikes are going to have their own traffic signals, bikes are going to have their own universe, but within the same space. Every street will have a bike lane, and every street will have bike turn-only lanes!” and all this stuff.

It just wasn't enough of a rethink and it just clusterfucked everything. There are plenty of bicycle commuters in Seattle, but not enough to justify a lane of traffic on every major thoroughfare. There just aren't. You can sit on a street corner and watch any downtown intersection! If this is their way of encouraging people to stop riding in cars and start biking, then that is the moral superiority argument and it was Mike McGinn’s argument: ”If we build it they will come! If we take away parking spots and build bike lanes, more people will bicycle!” - ”Well, no!” The people who want to bicycle are bicycling and there are some people in there who are on the fence who are like: ”Oh, I'll take my bike today!”

What it would take to get John to bicycle to town is an incredible investment in a good bike, and good clothes, and all the time that you need to budget into your day to get from here to there. It is another moral stance: ”Well, you should get up earlier! Well, all you have to do is budget it an hour into your day each way!” A certain type of person will counter every argument against bike commuting, this moral turpitude, this attitude, that if you don't do it you are part of the problem. They refer to people in cars as being in cages, it is a separate universe.

John used to drink with bike messengers at a time when bicycle commuters were not even a thing that people were aware of, but bike messengers were. They were a complete separate class of anti-authoritarian punk bike centric people. The thing about bike messengers, and this is the other aspect of the subculture is: If the light is red, an awful lot of bicyclists will look both ways and keep going. Bicyclists will jump up on the sidewalk even if it works for them. Laws that keep bikes off of sidewalks are dumb. What there needs to be is a code of ethics and of traffic to bikes, too. Bikes should be able to hop up on the sidewalk and then go down into the street.

They should have a separate set of rules because they are a separate kind of vehicle. They should be able to go between cars and do all that kind of stuff, but it requires of them that they be hyper-aware of cars and of pedestrians and of one another and have a code because it can't be enshrined in law. You can't say: Bikes are allowed to run red lights. Bicyclists should be prosecuted for running into civilians or for riding their bike on a sidewalk down a busy shopping day, a cop should pull them over. But on a rainy night when a bunch of car are sitting at a red light and the bicyclist pulls up, looks both ways and there is no cross traffic, they should go, for Christ’s sake they should go, but they should also be prepared for cars to pass them on the left. They are fucking slow and in the way and assholes.