Ep. 18: "Main Pastrami Incisor"
Merlin: Hello.
Merlin: Hi, John.
Merlin: How are you?
Merlin: Hi, Merlin.
Merlin: Merlin, man.
Merlin: I'll never get sick of it.
Merlin: You know what?
Merlin: I'm going to make a note, though.
Merlin: I've got to work on this song thing.
Merlin: This is getting out of hand.
John: Have I expressed this already?
John: The problem with that being your theme song is that the next line is, don't mean a thing.
John: All you Merlin mans don't mean a thing to me.
John: But that's not true.
John: You do mean something to me.
John: And so it's hard for me to sing that, even though it's stuck in my head.
John: Because the sentiment doesn't reflect my true feelings.
Merlin: Part of you says Jermaine, and another part says Tito.
Merlin: No, is that Nasty Boys?
Merlin: Is that what you're singing?
Merlin: Yeah, it's Janet.
Merlin: There's a lot of controversy about this, John.
Merlin: I think people have made the argument persuasively that you're actually singing something different.
Merlin: You're the musician.
Merlin: You're a professional musician.
Merlin: I'm not going to tell you what to do here.
John: People have ten ears.
John: All you have to do is hold up that...
John: that web app or that iPhone app up to the stereos to see how bad technology is at identifying songs.
Merlin: Tell you what, buddy, that has come a long way since that day you and I tried to find your songs.
Merlin: It's come a very long way.
John: It has come a long way, but my problem is that the songs that I want to identify, I'm usually listening to in a crowded supermarket at really low volume, and I hold my phone up in the air to try and get the
John: to try and get the audio, but they're clattering shopping carts and yelling kids and the thing can't, it can't sort the music out from them.
John: What, you know what it needs to do?
John: It needs to use hearing aid technology because I think they're perfecting hearing aids that can sort out the background noise.
John: And focus the attention of the device on the interesting part.
Merlin: I read an article about this.
Merlin: They call it blasting the high mids.
Merlin: And it's a huge move forward in the technology.
Merlin: Blasting the high mids.
Merlin: I can't hear anything anymore, John.
Merlin: Even my eyesight, my hearing, it's all going to hell.
Merlin: I'm going to need something like that iPhone app just to hold up so I can understand what kind of dressing they have at the restaurant.
John: I lay in bed at night and listen to the symphony of whistling and whining happening in my ears.
John: And I'm alone in my house.
John: It's not like it's some girl next to me whistling and whining.
John: No, it's the sound of my own ears slowly disintegrating.
John: Do you have the tinnitus?
John: I never had it before.
John: I went to rock shows for 25 years.
John: I never had a whistling in my ear.
John: And then I went to a bachelor party of a friend of mine where we were firing AK-47s.
Right.
John: As you do.
John: And, you know, we're in this bunker of a firing range, cement walls, cement floor, cement ceiling.
John: And everybody gets done shooting their guns and we all take our earphones off.
John: to sit and talk about how great the guns are.
John: And then everyone gets back into firing position and I have my earphone off on my right ear.
John: I just forgot to put it back and somebody shoots a bullet and the, the sound echoes around this concrete room and goes right into my ear.
John: And I knew right then like, Oh, I have done permanent damage to myself.
John: And sure enough,
John: still now two years later are you that was i remember you talking about that was two years ago yeah and i and i went i went to an ear doctor and he was like oh and he was one of these doctors with the bedside manner
John: of a person that had been unfrozen from a glacier.
John: Like he, like he had only just met modern humans today.
John: And, you know, and I'm asking him questions about like, this matters to me.
John: Like my ears are kind of my, are part of my job.
John: And are you whistling?
John: That's a siren.
John: I'm sorry.
Merlin: I dashed away desperately to try.
Merlin: I thought I could play it off legit.
Merlin: I thought John's still going to be talking about his hearing and run back.
Merlin: And I got totally clocked because there was a siren.
Merlin: And I don't like to edit this program.
Merlin: I'm extremely sorry that I did that.
Merlin: That was inappropriate.
Merlin: No, that's hilarious.
Merlin: No, it's not.
Merlin: I apologize.
Merlin: I'm very focused when I'm talking to you.
John: I thought you had gone to the other side of the room and whistled to try and test my hearing, which would have been a very clever move.
John: That's pretty good.
John: I could hear it.
John: I could hear it.
John: But in any case, this doctor was like, he was a bad doctor.
John: He was a bad doctor in putty-colored dockers.
Merlin: I'm sorry.
Merlin: I missed 30 seconds of this.
Merlin: What was your first indication that this was a bad doctor?
John: But he just had no bedside manner.
John: Every time I asked him a question, I don't know why I'm using the universal you, every time I asked him a question, he acted like he had never been asked a question before and like it was an imposition on him.
John: But in any case...
Merlin: Is he an audiologist you want to see?
John: Yeah, he's an ear, nose, and throat.
John: No, I guess he's not even a nose and throat.
John: He just does the ears.
John: And he said, oh, well, if you had come in to see me within three days of sustaining that injury, we could have done something about it.
Merlin: What a cock.
John: Yeah.
Merlin: And I was like, he has some fucking morning after pill for, for noise.
John: I think they do.
John: They have a morning after pill for hurt ears.
John: They call it plan E. But then the one hopeful thing, the one hopeful thing he said, he kind of like looked at me kind of confidentially after, because I was trying to warm him up, you know, with how you do with doctors when you meet him for the first time.
John: There's that thing of like, oh, you're a doctor.
John: And I used to be in awe of doctors before I had before a lot of my high school friends became doctors.
John: And I realized that any dingus can be a doctor.
John: But you try and, you know, you try to warm him up like this guy's going to have his finger in my butter.
John: I mean, obviously not the ear doctor.
John: But a doctor could put his finger in your butt.
John: He's a doctor.
Merlin: I mean, the thing is, well, he's calling the shots.
Merlin: I think a lot of doctors could make the case that they probably need to fill your butt a little bit.
John: He leans in kind of confidentially and he goes, but just between you and me, you know, in the next couple of years, I almost said in the next couple of years, in the next couple of years, we're going to have a thing to fix this tinnitus.
Merlin: I can't say any more about it.
John: That's right.
John: That's right.
John: And then he was like, say no more.
John: And I, you know, like don't reference it again.
John: And I was like, really?
John: Like new technology?
John: And he was like, mm-hmm.
John: Did you book an appointment?
John: We're very close.
John: We're very close to a major breakthrough.
John: You should book an appointment a couple of years from now.
John: Check back in.
John: Well, what was interesting to me was that this ear doctor at the poly clinic on Broadway in Seattle is somehow tapped into some like super, super like deep in a mountainside lab ear doctors that are very close to making this major breakthrough.
John: And I'm like, what, what did you just get back from a conference or something?
How?
John: Do you guys all text each other?
John: How do you know?
Merlin: I don't want to make this about World War II, John, but what if he's involved in some kind of... Schwartz Commandos?
John: Schwartz Commandos.
Merlin: Is that a Mel Brooks joke?
Merlin: No, I'm sorry.
Merlin: Does ocular mean eye?
Merlin: Ocular means eye.
Merlin: Okay, what's the one for ears?
Merlin: oral ear killer what if he's in an ear killer uh manhattan project have you thought about that he might be working with some of the great minds of germany that he's lulled over here um he somehow he somehow attracted the werner herzogs of uh of the of eardrums to work on this and he maybe he can't say anymore because it would you know obviously you can be trusted with a secret because you were at one point almost in the special forces i probably said too much
Merlin: I don't like that, though, John.
Merlin: I don't like that about doctors.
Merlin: I like the kind of doctors that are very down to earth and go, you know what?
Merlin: We don't fucking know about a lot of this stuff.
Merlin: There's not much we can do for you.
Merlin: You know what?
Merlin: An explosion went off by your ear.
Merlin: And from the dawn of time until now, there's very little we can do about that because part of your ear just got blown up a little bit.
John: This doctor that you're talking about is smoking Winston's while he's talking to you.
John: There's not much we can do.
John: I think a lot of the problem is in your T-zone.
John: I put this out there on the internet the other day.
John: I was like, look, I'm looking for a doctor, and I want an old-school doctor.
John: I don't want a doctor who's going to tell me about Eastern medicine.
John: I don't want a doctor who's going to tell me that I need to do aerobics.
John: I want a doctor...
John: who's just going to be like an old-school doctor who smokes cigarettes and who talks to me like a guy, right?
John: And so I put this out there, and on my Facebook page, I get 30 replies from people like, oh, you should use my doctor, Dr. Brianna McPherson.
John: She's amazing.
John: And I'm like, you're not listening to me.
John: I'm not going to a doctor named Brianna.
John: She's going to tell me that I need to aerobicize.
John: I want a doctor.
John: She's going to talk about your lifestyle.
John: Yeah.
John: I need a doctor named Herman.
Merlin: Who comes in.
Merlin: The stethoscope is fucking freezing.
Merlin: You're naked.
Merlin: You're naked.
Merlin: There's not even a gown.
Merlin: You're just standing there naked while he smokes.
Merlin: That's not the kind of doctor you want.
Merlin: You want somebody who goes, you know what, there's no surgery for that yet.
John: He's smoking.
John: He has a really cold stethoscope and he has a pair of pliers in his back pocket.
John: And we sit and we talk about, you know, we talk for 45 minutes before he says, so what's the matter?
Merlin: Yeah.
John: But anyway, so I made a doctor's appointment.
John: Or actually, I didn't make a doctor's appointment.
John: Someone made a doctor's appointment for me.
John: And I haven't been to the doctor in I don't know how long.
John: I don't believe in doctors.
John: I haven't gone to the doctor in a long time.
John: But I was bitching about this.
John: And a person close to me said, you know what?
John: I'm going to make you a doctor's appointment.
John: And now I have one.
John: So I have to go to the doctor.
John: Is it nearby?
John: Well, I mean, everything in Seattle is nearby.
John: But it's, I mean, it's not nearby because in my neighborhood, there are no facilities.
John: I live in a neighborhood with no facilities.
John: You don't even like a free clinic?
John: I guess they just built a free clinic down the street, which really angered me because it was on a lot that could have been a nice cafe.
Yeah.
John: And they built a medical facility for poor people.
John: And I have, as if there aren't enough of those.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: Is that the kind, is that really the kind of thing we want to encourage?
John: There should have been, there should be, there are no cafes down here and there are like, there are all kinds of medical clinics and veterinarians and stuff.
Merlin: Can I ask a question?
Merlin: You think, you think those people are actually getting, their health is actually improving?
Merlin: Cause I'm going to guess probably not.
Merlin: You could build as many clinics as you want.
Merlin: You know what you could do?
Merlin: Carbon offsets.
Merlin: You say for every one of these clinics, you've also got to build like a cafe, a nice cafe.
Merlin: Not like some kind of squirted together cafe.
Merlin: It was a Korean guy.
Merlin: Like, I want a nice cafe with real coffee.
Merlin: I want angry ladies with tattoos.
Merlin: Exactly.
John: Is that too much to ask?
John: I don't think that's too much to ask.
John: The thing is, all the tattoo coffee shops are all up in the neighborhood where there are no brown people, and I live down with the brown people, and nobody services them with good coffee.
Merlin: Do you miss the Capitol Hill experience?
John: No, it's irrelevant to me now.
John: I go up there and I walk around and I feel like I'm in a Lady Gaga video.
John: And I don't... That's just the men.
John: I cannot identify... All I can identify are... I mean, I look around at the kids and I see all of the ways in which the men have ripped off my fashion sense.
John: It's so galling.
John: And the girls have all ripped off the fashion senses of all the girls I was dating 10 years ago.
John: It's really annoying.
Merlin: With a little bit of editing, that could be a hit Willie Nelson song.
Merlin: You know, here's the problem with diversity, John.
Merlin: The problem with diversity is it always benefits.
Merlin: Oh, brother.
Merlin: There's so many problems with diversity.
Merlin: You know what?
Merlin: I don't want to go ping pong.
Merlin: I'm going to skip the whole cafe problem.
Merlin: That's a black box.
Merlin: We'll come back to that at another time.
Merlin: Well, I don't know.
John: I didn't say anything, did I?
Merlin: Oh, dear.
Merlin: That's a lady thing, too, isn't it?
Merlin: I just said something about... Now you're a misogynist.
Merlin: Oh, man.
Yeah.
Merlin: Diversity.
Merlin: Diversity.
Merlin: You know what?
Merlin: We shouldn't even open that box, if you know what I mean.
Merlin: When I was in fifth grade, yeah, don't open the black box.
Merlin: When I was in fifth grade.
Merlin: Not without a strong cup of coffee.
John: When I was in fifth grade, my reading book was called Serendipity.
Merlin: Whoa, whoa, whoa.
Merlin: This is different.
Merlin: Now, what were your two books?
Merlin: Is that right?
Merlin: Serendipity and Diversity.
Merlin: Okay, right.
Merlin: Serendipity and Diversity.
John: We've talked about this.
Mm-hmm.
John: Fifth and sixth grade, Serendipity and Diversity.
Merlin: Some listeners have told us that they had those same books.
Merlin: I've heard that.
John: I did not realize that diversity was going to be such a problem later.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: It's one of those things like auto insurance, like it seems like a good idea.
Merlin: To you, maybe.
John: But I feel like when I run for president, my platform will be no more nanny state mandatory auto insurance.
John: Hmm.
John: Hmm.
Merlin: Because there's a lot of forced insurance going on.
John: Because of Obamacare.
Merlin: Did you just say Obamacare?
John: But I know you don't want to talk about politics.
Merlin: I'm not going to talk about the Tea Party.
Merlin: I like, though, that you're talking about all these things that I assume people on Fox News talk about.
Merlin: They're coming up with these portmanteaus.
Merlin: And you know what?
Merlin: Those are very sticky.
Merlin: You can have a sticky portmanteau by just smashing a couple things together.
Merlin: Absolutely.
Merlin: Let's see.
Merlin: That's a couple good ones.
Merlin: Like a new business name.
Merlin: Misogyny Nazi.
Merlin: I've never heard that before.
Merlin: That was good.
Merlin: I just coined it.
Merlin: Yeah.
John: I'm sure we'll see that on Fox News in two months.
Merlin: What about a diverse asexual?
John: Diverse asexual?
John: I was thinking about that this morning, actually.
John: The diverse asexuality.
John: because it's this common trope that if you let the gays marry, if you let the gays out of the stables, then everybody's going to, all the young boys who are on the fence, the young men who are on the fence.
Merlin: That argument makes me so angry.
John: They're going to see that the gay lifestyle is so... They're going to recruit them.
John: They're going to recruit them.
Merlin: They're out there getting Hitler youth.
Merlin: They're playing a tube and banging on a drum, and suddenly everybody wants a uniform.
Merlin: I don't think that's how it works, John Roderick.
John: Well, let me tell you from personal experience.
John: When I was a young man in my early 20s and I moved to Seattle, it was during the big explosion of the gay rights time, the gay rights movement, right?
John: The we're out and we're proud.
John: And I think when I arrived in Seattle in 1990, it was just at the beginning.
John: You know, there was still a very vibrant underground gay culture.
John: And then gay culture went mainstream.
John: And it happened very fast.
John: And I was living right in the middle of it as a young person surrounded by other young people.
John: And being gay seemed very exciting.
John: The gays had a good sense of humor.
John: They were chic.
John: They seemed to be... They felt newly liberated.
Merlin: Lighthearted, intellectual, good shoes.
John: Yeah, I wanted to feel newly liberated.
John: I, too, had been living in a closet of a kind.
John: A closet of...
John: of unacceptability, unacceptableness.
John: I wanted to feel liberated.
John: Where's my parade?
John: That's right.
John: Where's my parade?
Merlin: Where's my float that I get to wear a dolphin shorts on?
John: Where's my World War I aficionado parade?
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Where's my throbbing, it's raining men loop?
John: So I went to a lot of parties with my gay friends, and I tried out the gay lifestyle.
Merlin: This was not the one-time shot with that big black buck of yours.
Merlin: This is an ongoing human experiment that you were participating in willfully, knowingly, you were trying something on.
John: Correct.
John: For a couple of years there, I would make out with boys when the opportunity presented itself, which it frequently did.
John: And I really said, you know, let's try that.
John: What about bisexual?
John: Let's try bisexual.
John: Let's see how that feels.
John: And I really feel like if it were possible for a person to change their sexual orientation by exerting their will...
John: If it were possible for a person to choose, let me simplify that by using the word choose.
John: If it were possible to choose your sexual orientation, I think I would have chosen to have a, in fact, I tried to choose to have a more open sexual orientation than it turns out I ended up with.
John: And in the final accounting, I realized that I was 10% bisexual.
John: Not enough to sustain a bisexual relationship.
Merlin: Is it reductive to say that makes you 5% gay, or how does that break down in a pie graph?
Merlin: I would say... You found the bisexual thing to be, you weren't on the bubble.
John: I'd say I was 10% gay.
Merlin: What?
Merlin: Huh.
John: I'd say 10% gay.
John: I mean, if you're going to say bisexual, yeah.
John: No, I was, let's say I was 20% bisexual, 10% gay.
John: But when I read this, all this, like, hyperbole about, oh, if we legalize gay marriage, then, oh, it's just the beginning of this slippery slope, or pretty soon it's just going to be frotage in elevators, and... Oh, it's like, I mean, the argument these people make is... Dogs and cats sleeping together.
Merlin: Dogs and cats living together.
Merlin: It's going to be, it's like we're one step away...
Merlin: It's not possible.
Merlin: John, I'm going to share a very fast, and I won't take you off your rail here, but I want a very fast anecdote.
Merlin: I'm visiting my mom a few years ago.
Merlin: My mom, you know, she's really serious.
Merlin: You know, she carries a gun and stuff, and not in a good way.
Merlin: She's from Florida.
Merlin: Yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep.
Merlin: And so a friend of hers who, you know, has been like almost a family member since childhood, she's from like the Bay Area originally.
Merlin: She's from like the East Bay.
Merlin: No, from like the East Bay.
Merlin: and uh but not like oakland but like you know the white people like way out in the east and she um and she's kind of county no no that's that's north uh but she's picking she's kind of picking a thing with me and i can already feel she's picking a thing with me like oh san francisco and i go yeah yeah it's pretty great there you know it's expensive and but it's nice there's lots to do and she's she's implying because you can feel it you know it's your lispy swishy ways
Merlin: I don't know if it's even me.
Merlin: It's just more like watching an old man try to punch somebody who's not even there.
Merlin: She's getting ready to swing, and there's nothing to really hit, and I'm not taking the bait.
Merlin: This is your mom's friend.
Merlin: She is my mom's friend, and I'm buttonholed.
Merlin: I'm stuck by her in a bar.
Merlin: I can't get out.
Merlin: I'm stuck.
John: You're buttonholed?
Merlin: You're stuck by her in a bar?
Merlin: You ever been buttonholed?
Merlin: You ever been buttonholed at a party?
Merlin: I tried.
Merlin: You ever been seated next to somebody where you wanted to literally kill yourself at dinner?
Merlin: You never had that?
Merlin: I tried to get buttonholed in my seat.
Merlin: That's in the early 90s, right?
Merlin: In any case, so what did you do?
Merlin: I want you to just think about one concept while I'm working on this.
Merlin: Voguing.
Merlin: I think voguing is what happened in Seattle.
Merlin: I'm going to continue.
Merlin: Voguing.
Merlin: It was huge.
Merlin: And so she's needling me now, and I'm not really taking the bait.
Merlin: And I go straight into the story that I believe in my heart is part of what makes San Francisco.
Merlin: San Francisco is such a stupid fucking town in so many ways.
Merlin: But I will tell you one thing I genuinely love about San Francisco.
Merlin: The homeless.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: it's like the island of misfit toys we never got to this in one of our previous world war ii discussions but you know what made one thing was there an island of misfit toys in world war ii i think you're thinking of rank and pass here's what happened okay if you got if you got this is you don't steal my job my job is to derail your job is to talk about the coldware where i i'm gonna be interrupting cow this episode that's right bikes i'm sorry i'm sorry
Merlin: And I believe this.
Merlin: Okay, so first of all, just to go a little bit back in the stack, I don't know if this is precisely accurate, but it's my understanding that in World War II, if you got thrown out of the armed forces in the Pacific theater for being gay, guess where they dropped you off?
Merlin: Bikini Atoll.
Merlin: Very close.
Merlin: Another place that's the bomb.
Merlin: The Port of San Francisco.
John: So if you were somebody who got kicked out... But you're saying the gay San Francisco started in World War II because they dumped all the gays there?
Merlin: See, this is one arc.
Merlin: There's another arc, which is, of course, the beats and stuff, but there's a synergy to all of this stuff happening.
Merlin: And one of them is there's a whole bunch of people... Think about that, though.
Merlin: Think about the self-selection of that.
Merlin: You were a gay dude...
Merlin: in the, in the fucking Navy army, whatever, who acted upon it.
Merlin: Like you were ready to like risk that.
Merlin: Sure.
Merlin: You get thrown out and you're like, Holy fucking shit.
Merlin: There's all these other dudes here who wanted the same thing.
Merlin: Yes.
Merlin: Hooray.
Merlin: Exactly.
John: And that's like, it's like your snake Plissken.
Merlin: but instead of being dropped into a new york city prison camp it's all it's all shiny guys you're dropped into a a hilltop city surrounded by water and donald pleasant wants to suck your dick oh my my point is you land and i think first of all that's part a i think that's glorious i think it's amazing if you're somebody who has trouble understanding how you fit into the world and who you are to land in an environment where suddenly you're not the only like quote unquote fucked up person and and
Merlin: And I'm trying to make this case to her and saying, hey, look, you know, Castro Street in 1976.
Merlin: It was just – you have no idea.
John: You engaged this woman in conversation about San Francisco?
Merlin: I'm trying to make a case to her that she's saying gay marriage should not happen.
Merlin: San Francisco – she's implying – I know she's saying gay marriage should never happen.
Merlin: And she's saying that basically San Francisco is like this petri dish for wrong.
Merlin: And anyway, I made the same case to her that I made –
Merlin: To my mom, like she would see two guys kissing and get super uncomfortable.
Merlin: And I was like, imagine you spent your entire life feeling like you were the only person in the world who was really screwed up about something.
Merlin: And then you found a million other people or, you know, whatever, a hundred thousand people who felt the same way.
Merlin: It becomes your family.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: And like, I was like, you know, you've got kids.
Merlin: Wouldn't you love it if your kids fell out of place their whole life and they finally found somebody that understood them?
John: No, not if your kids were kissing some other guy.
Merlin: other person of the same sex well close she said well she said the problem is if we allow gay marriage people will also be allowed to uh marry their dogs man on dog man on dog i was dumbstruck because i always thought that was one of those make-believe like hillbilly things people said this is an educated woman who is a successful professional who thinks that gay people fuck children and dogs
John: Well, if you read your history, you will... This is before World War II?
John: This is before World War II.
John: The once great nation of Slobovia, which legalized man-on-dog marriage, and it spelled the end of their civilization.
John: This is sort of like between the Etruscans and the Assyrians.
John: The Slobovians were a great seafaring people, and...
Merlin: They're all dogs and semen?
John: Well, there was considerable semen and they were great dog breeders.
John: And there was semen abroad.
John: And there were a lot of people who felt like their dogs were refined of character and noble of temperament and that they would make fine spouses.
Merlin: Partners.
John: Life partners.
John: And they would dispel the doom of their civilization.
Merlin: That sounds like a little bit of an outlier.
John: Your mom and a lot of the conservatives have a valid point if you believe that history speaks to our present condition.
Merlin: there's just there's so many things i don't like politics but this is not politics this is life and culture and it's important life and culture is the section of the newspaper that you turn to immediately well sure i'd like to see what carl lagerfeld's showing right right i'm just saying that like if you it's one thing it's one thing to be talking about policy and politics and it's another thing to talk about like somebody's ability to just live like a like a normal human being and the problem is she does not think that's a normal human being
Merlin: And as much as I didn't want to take the bait, I finally just got unbutton-holed and had to walk away.
John: You and I had an argument a couple of years ago where I said that I don't believe that Christians or religious people of any stripe should drink alcohol.
John: Was I drunk when we talked about this?
John: And you argued that I was being ridiculous.
John: You're going to have to get a lot more specific.
John: A court should be able to drink alcohol.
John: And I said, no, I don't think so.
John: Oh, I remember this because of the religious experience thing?
John: Yeah, I don't think that religious people should drink alcohol or take drugs or commit adultery or do any bad things because they have eternal reward in heaven to look forward to.
John: Whereas the rest of us who are going to spend eternity in torment, the only fun that we get is here on earth, you know, finger banging each other.
John: And if the Christians are in here also like sopping up all the gravy with their buns, it's all that much less gravy for me and the rest of the secular humanists who are doomed to eternity in the pit of fire.
John: So, personally, I feel like religious people should be... If they cannot handle the responsibility of living in cities while maintaining their sort of separatist identity, then I think that they should be corralled into camps.
John: Nice ones, nice camps.
John: Well, the camps can be made to be nice.
John: Separate but equal.
John: Let's just say all of Oklahoma...
John: We could put some fencing.
John: It can be attractive fencing.
John: I'm not saying it has to be cyclone wire.
Merlin: It's kind of like a Marcus Garvey type situation.
Merlin: They want to be together.
Merlin: Let's get them all together.
John: The thing is, I don't understand why religious people want to live in cities.
John: Cities are vibrant places where people stick things in each other and yell at each other.
John: There are all kinds of people smoke marijuana.
John: There are all kinds of things that happen in cities.
John: I don't understand why religious people even want to be here.
John: I feel like they probably don't and that they are here just because they were born here or their parents moved them here.
John: And where they really want to be is in a bucolic place, somewhere where they can't be injured by offensive speech or by seeing men kiss or whatever it is that's hurting their feelings.
John: And that place could be maybe the entirety of Kansas, Nebraska, Oklahoma.
Merlin: Let's not mince words.
Merlin: You want to put everyone in Utah.
Merlin: You want to take Utah and convert it to a full crazy, crazy religious state.
John: Is that the idea?
Merlin: Here's the problem.
Merlin: I would like to respond also.
Merlin: Please continue.
John: Alright, here's the problem with Utah.
John: Right in the middle of Utah, there's a range of mountains called the Rocky Mountains.
John: And unfortunately, if you look at Utah on a map, it seems plenty big enough to hold all the religious people.
John: But unfortunately, everything west of the Rocky Mountains is an uninhabitable wasteland.
John: So all the religious people would have to live up in the mountains and on this high kind of rocky plain.
John: And I understand completely that religious people would potentially want maybe some warm climate or some green pastures.
John: So I can't confine them to Utah.
John: It has to be geographically more diverse.
John: There's that word again, diversity.
John: But I feel like some geographical diversity is important for people.
John: Maybe a little beach.
John: We could have Galveston.
John: That could be their beach.
John: I don't know.
John: This is still pie in the sky stuff.
John: But I don't understand why a religious person would want to live in San Francisco.
John: I really don't.
Merlin: I can tell you didn't graduate from college, John.
Merlin: You are capable of so much of a better argument than that.
Merlin: That has got to be one of the 9 to 16 weakest arguments I've ever heard you make.
Merlin: What are you talking about?
Merlin: That doesn't make a lick.
Merlin: Do you understand how bananas close to a religious insanity that argument is?
Merlin: I know you're being exaggerating, but you don't really believe that about people of faith.
Merlin: People of faith.
Merlin: Well, you use this word religious.
Merlin: So you're tying in like, you know, what, you know, Coptic Christians with like, you know, UFO cults?
John: Yes.
Merlin: Anybody who has any faith in something.
John: No, no, no, no.
John: That's not what I'm saying.
Merlin: You're saying, see, I think you should, I think you need to separate the people who are nut jobs.
John: I believe that people in Narcotics Anonymous are entitled to have a power greater than themselves and still live in cities.
Hmm.
John: Hmm.
Merlin: We should avoid this.
Merlin: Can I ask you a question?
Merlin: You know what?
Merlin: I'm just going to put a stake in the ground here.
Merlin: This is going to have to be another episode.
Merlin: I can't even begin to take apart all the ways that you're so incredibly wrong about so much of that.
Merlin: Apart from wanting to put people in a bad state.
Merlin: There's a lot of people I would like to put in a bad state.
Merlin: We should talk about that.
Merlin: Are you calling Oklahoma a bad state?
Merlin: I don't know.
Merlin: The wind comes sweeping down the plain.
Merlin: Is that still the case?
John: There are plenty of nice things in Oklahoma.
John: Do you have a sense of how high the corn is?
Merlin: Although I would never eat sushi there.
Merlin: How high is the corn there?
Merlin: Do you have any sense of that?
Merlin: The corn is above your head.
Merlin: I'd say, you're not a musical guy, are you?
Merlin: You're trying to quote from the musical Oklahoma.
Merlin: Which brings me back to my question, which is, were you regarded by the legitimate homosexuals as something of a carpetbagger?
Merlin: Pardon my French.
Merlin: Were you seen as a carpetbagger?
Merlin: You come in, you hang out a little bit with your musky, masculine, and your vintage glasses collection, and you're in there making out with people.
Merlin: You're taking pieces off the table, so to speak.
Merlin: Were you seen as a carpetbagger, John Roderick?
John: I think that the legitimately well-adjusted young homosexuals of Seattle were not interested in pursuing a brief relationship with me.
John: But the number of young, emotionally well-adjusted gays in Seattle in 1992 was a fraction of the population of the homosexual community.
John: Most of the young homosexuals were also confused.
John: And, frankly, also, their sexuality was on a continuum of...
John: There were some who were more inclined to make out with straight boys.
John: There were some who were more inclined to sort of be right on the fence also.
Merlin: This is the problem with vegetarianism too.
Merlin: Now, if you were a vegetarian, let's go back.
Merlin: You look at something like The Boys in the Band, which now as a movie seems like something from another planet because it's so broad.
Merlin: Did you ever see that in the movie or the play?
Merlin: I did.
Merlin: I liked it a lot.
Merlin: My mother-in-law actually directed that as a play one time.
Merlin: There's a lot of mincing around in that.
Merlin: There's a lot of mincing, and it's almost like an allegory.
Merlin: It's almost like something Rod Serling was like.
Merlin: Here's the seven kinds of homosexuals arguing in an apartment.
John: As late as the early 90s, I think that was still more or less representative of how...
Merlin: Well, you've got to take it, like, for the time.
Merlin: You know, there's a lot of things that happened in the 60s where you would look back and go, oh, wow, that seems pretty casually racist in retrospect.
Merlin: But you go, wow, it's pretty amazing that, like, you know, you look at something like In the Heat of the Night.
Merlin: I mean, it's incredible that that movie got made in some ways.
Merlin: It's so good.
Merlin: And Sidney Poitier is so obviously the smartest person in the movie.
Merlin: And I think at the time, a lot of gay guys— Although that's a kind of racism, too.
No.
Merlin: Well, not at the time.
Merlin: Not compared to hanging somebody from a tree.
Merlin: I mean, that's a pretty long way to have Hollywood putting a good-looking guy as the lead.
Merlin: Bill Cosby on Man From U.N.C.L.E., what have you.
John: Again, imperfect, but steps.
John: Hollywood, to their credit, didn't really lynch a lot of people.
Merlin: How many did you find out about?
Merlin: Here's the problem.
Merlin: Here's the problem, though.
Merlin: So you take something like Boys in the Band, and I think if you were a...
Merlin: most probably most uh most people i'm guessing this other were closeted you know i mean it was not cool to be out of the closet unless you know except in very specific situations in very specific cities i bet you saw that cool that's right but i bet you saw that movie and for the first time you saw yourself on screen yeah maybe mincing but you weren't just like the clifton webb character or something when you say you you're talking about me if i were gay i don't know i don't know i could go either way oh really you and me both
Merlin: For a while.
Merlin: I've lost my point again.
Merlin: You know, the fact is... I don't understand this episode, John.
Merlin: I'm completely at odds.
Merlin: Have you been drinking a lot of coffee?
John: No, I quit caffeine.
John: Since all brother win.
John: I quit caffeine on New Year's Day.
John: Huh.
John: I haven't had any caffeine since New Year's Day.
John: And you're still not sleeping?
John: No, I sleep like a baby.
John: But the reason I want to go to the doctor is I'm walking around in a fog all the time.
John: I don't have any... I'm foggy.
John: I'm always foggy.
John: I've been feeling a little foggy.
John: I'm feeling foggy.
John: But here's the thing about being gay.
John: If the right young man approached me after a show, I have to say that really, if he smelled right, there's a lot of smell involved.
John: If he smelled right, I think I might still give it a go.
Merlin: Does he worry about your culpability in that working out because he might feel the same way?
Merlin: Maybe that particular way that you smell could be quote-unquote right to him?
Merlin: Are you saying that's a possibility?
John: Could be.
John: Could be.
John: I mean, I've smelled right to people before.
John: But here's the thing.
John: I'm no longer in the business of worrying about other people's culpability.
John: They've got to look out for themselves.
Merlin: I think that's terrific.
Merlin: They've got to look out for themselves.
John: When they come up against me, when they meet me in a dark alley, when they come up to me in the high corn, they'd better have their A game.
John: Because I'm not going to hold their hand.
Merlin: No.
Merlin: I only like four or five musicals a lot.
Merlin: But there aren't many.
Merlin: It's like poems.
Merlin: It's like poems.
Merlin: I thought I liked poetry.
Merlin: The range of poetry.
Merlin: And it's like folk music.
Merlin: Or reggae.
Merlin: Or musicals.
Merlin: Where it turns out I like... Well, no.
Merlin: I'll say there are five poets maybe that I like.
John: But in contrast, you celebrate the entire Jerry Lewis catalog.
Yeah.
Merlin: That's not accurate.
Merlin: But I'm not going to sit there and spend an evening reading Gary Snyder or something.
Merlin: No offense.
Merlin: No, no, no.
Merlin: Turtles are very nice.
Merlin: Right?
Merlin: And so that's the problem.
Merlin: This is part of the problem.
John: Tell me what of the Jerry Lewis stuff you don't like.
Merlin: Do you really want to get into this now?
No.
Merlin: I wish you wouldn't change the topic.
Merlin: I've limited myself to four cards.
Merlin: I want to talk more about the doctors.
John: I felt like from the very beginning that we had switched roles.
John: And I was kind of reveling in this.
John: This is not difficult.
Merlin: This is not difficult to understand.
Merlin: At a high level.
Merlin: Jerry Lewis is fascinating.
Merlin: Yes.
Merlin: Oh, my goodness.
Merlin: Because even if you're not being reductive, he is full of so many paradoxes and so many unresolvable, just warring sides to his personality.
Merlin: The Day the Clown Cried.
Merlin: The Day the Clown Cried is a terrific example.
Merlin: Have you seen it?
Merlin: I mean, I've seen the script.
Merlin: Patton Oswalt claims to have seen it.
Merlin: yeah i mean it's like a yeti a lot of people claim to have seen it i know harry shearer had a copy of the script i i've seen bits from the script and it's um staggering how many pages it's like 300 pages i mean it's a very very long movie for those for those in our audience in the minority who don't know what this is uh you're gonna explain you're gonna explain the day the clown clown cried it's i'll keep it short i mean the background is people could wikipedia it except that wikipedia is closed i'm begging you not to get me started on that
Merlin: Here's the thing.
Merlin: Jerry Lewis decided to do a movie where he plays a clown in, I believe, Poland, I want to say, named Helmut Dwork.
Merlin: Helmut Dwork is a clown.
Merlin: He makes fun.
Merlin: He makes fun of the Nazis.
Merlin: They put him in a death camp, and it becomes his job to do clown stuff to make children go into the gas chamber.
Merlin: So that's the Jerry Lewis movie, and he had trouble getting it made, apparently.
Merlin: He had to go to, I want to say, Sweden.
John: Inconceivable.
Merlin: I don't have the number in front of me, but it's one minute per page, generally, in a script.
Merlin: Hundreds of pages.
Merlin: It's a really fucking long movie.
Merlin: I don't think it was completed.
John: But he did draw attention to one of the little-known...
John: facets of the holocaust you know you know about the gypsies and you know about obviously the jews and homosexuals who speaks for the clowns who speaks for the clown that's right i didn't say anything i didn't say anything when they came to the clowns for the clowns because i wasn't a clown right and then when they came for me there was no one left to uh shoot them with seltzer that's right or to honk their red nose you know the nice thing though i mean you'd be amazed how many of those clowns you can actually fit into a gas chamber well
Merlin: So my point is, here's the thing about Jerry Lewis.
Merlin: If you go out, if you go out and search for this, if you go out and search for the Daily Clown Cry, you will find production skills, production stills.
Merlin: I've seen them.
Merlin: You will see pictures of, they're absolutely horrifying.
John: Yeah.
Merlin: Because it's Jerry Lewis in shitty clown makeup wearing the like Auschwitz striped outfits.
Mm-hmm.
John: Here's what happens when a person no longer has people around him who can tell him no.
Merlin: This is the George Lucas problem.
Merlin: And here's the thing about Jerry Lewis, and then I'd like to move on because this is not that interesting, is that he is full of these kinds of... Nobody can dispute the amount of great things that he did for the Muscular Dystrophy Association in the sense that he brought in a ton of money.
Merlin: And to use a phrase that is virtually meaningless today, he raised a huge amount of awareness about a disease that was very unknown in the early 50s.
John: Although I still don't know what muscular dystrophy is.
John: And I watched that telethon for 10 years probably.
Merlin: You know why?
Merlin: You know why?
Merlin: Because there were the parts where they'd make you cry and they'd talk about whatever, Duchesne, something, something.
Merlin: But mostly you remember him acting like he was retarded.
Merlin: And talking about his kids and bringing up grown men in wheelchairs and trying to make them cry on stage, thereby bringing all of these people into his twisted universe where he could at once.
Merlin: You might remember the one a few years ago where he joined in with the chorus and was doing the whole mouth-along thing.
John: Let me stop you right there.
John: I have not watched a Jerry Lewis telethon since 1978.
Merlin: And you call yourself bisexual.
John: I don't remember the one from a couple of years ago.
John: I wasn't even aware they still happened.
Merlin: He got drummed out this last year.
John: I remember sitting in a beach cabin on Maui.
Merlin: Were you with a man or by yourself?
John: I was with my father, if that's what you're implying, in 1978.
Merlin: At that point, I was just experimenting with my relatives who were politicians.
John: And it was beautiful out.
John: It was beautiful.
John: The waves were crashing on the beach.
John: It was a beautiful, sunny Hawaii day.
John: And we were inside watching the Jerry Lewis telethon because it was not something that you missed.
John: It was a cultural, it was like an after school special.
John: It was like a, it was like a Marlon Perkins.
Merlin: Oh, there was no question.
John: I mean, it happened once a year.
John: You watched it.
Merlin: That's right.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: And did your father enjoy that?
Merlin: Did you guys stay up late to watch The Stars come out?
John: Oh, my dad didn't watch it.
John: My dad was an old enough person to know that this was dumb.
Merlin: Did he have something against Sammy Davis Jr.?
John: I think my dad loved Sammy Davis Jr.
John: I mean, my dad was that same generation.
Merlin: He's a very talented man.
Merlin: You know, he has one eye.
John: Sammy, yeah.
Merlin: He's racing cars and he lost an eye.
John: One eye, yeah.
Merlin: One-eyed African American.
Merlin: That's right, that's right.
John: Married a Swedish girl who was much taller than he was.
Merlin: She was handsome.
Merlin: That was a good looking lady.
Merlin: She was an attractive lady.
Merlin: She was super cute.
John: Those guys really, boy, they must have had a time.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Well, if you read the biography, the Sean Levy biography, which I'm sure you will now, called King of Comedy, you will realize what a tortured individual he is.
Merlin: I'm not going to go on about this.
Merlin: I'm going to start a separate podcast with Goldie and we'll be able to talk about all of this.
Merlin: Okay.
Merlin: I look forward to not saying that.
Merlin: I don't get to talk to her as much as I like carpet bagging, tea bagging.
Merlin: You know what?
Merlin: Here's the thing.
Merlin: You know what?
Merlin: What do you want to talk about?
Merlin: Because I got a card.
Merlin: I got a card.
John: We can go back to Schwartz Commando.
Merlin: That means white?
Merlin: No.
Merlin: Black.
Merlin: What's white?
Merlin: Vice.
Merlin: Vice.
Merlin: Schwartz Commando.
Merlin: You never read Gravity's Rainbow.
Merlin: That's tension.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Hmm.
Merlin: I think I read The Crying of Area 51.
Huh.
John: That's a good place to start and end with.
John: I want to talk about James Joyce.
Merlin: We don't have to do it right now.
John: When I was a very young man, I walked into a bookstore, and there was a man behind the counter who looked like a bookstore employee.
John: He was a heavyset gentleman.
John: Did you blow it?
John: Did you blow him?
John: He had long red hair and a red beard, which he had kind of shaved down his cheeks.
John: And he was wearing a sweater under a tweed jacket.
John: And he probably had a pipe in the pocket of his Mackinac.
John: And I said, I walked in and walked up to the counter and said, look, I, uh, I got some time to kill.
John: What's your favorite book?
John: I want to know your favorite book.
John: And he lights up his formerly like pinched bookstore employee cynical face lit up and he went, oh, Gravity's Rainbow.
John: And he comes out from behind the counter and he walks me back into the, you know, to the peas and he pulls Gravity's Rainbow off the shelf and he goes, you have to read it.
John: It's the greatest book ever written.
John: And he sells it to me for half price because he really wants me to, you know, I only had a dollar or something.
John: He really wants me to read this book.
John: And over the course of the next two years, I tried to read Gravity's Rainbow.
John: At this point, I was reading the book in four different places.
John: I had bookmarks in four different places in the book, and I would sit down and pick up the book at a different bookmark.
Merlin: I couldn't finish it.
Merlin: I could not finish it.
John: And keep reading, and I read this book, and I read this book, and I never made it past about page 500.
John: And I just kept reading it, and I would pick it, and I'd put it down.
John: I'd read other stuff, obviously, and then it'd be sitting there on the bookshelf throbbing this dull red glow.
John: You haven't finished me.
John: You aren't smart.
John: You can't read.
John: And finally, one summer, I was like, you bastard.
John: I'm going to read the fuck out of you.
John: And I sat down, and it was like the time I read the Iliad all the way through.
John: I was like, you are going to sit here, and you're going to read this fucking book.
John: And I read the goddamn Gravity's Rainbow all the way through.
John: And when I was done, I was going to say I threw it out the window, but I didn't.
John: It's sitting on the bookshelf now.
John: I'm looking at it as I speak.
John: But it no longer throbs.
Merlin: How did you feel when it was done?
Merlin: Did you feel like a sense of accomplishment or were you winded?
John: Well, here's what happens in this book.
John: At page 750... It's that long?
John: It's longer.
Merlin: Oh, wait, you know what?
Merlin: I may be confusing with Crying a Lot 49.
Merlin: Sorry.
Merlin: Well, Crying a Lot 49 is a short book.
Merlin: Well, that's the J. Alfred Prufock to the Wasteland, right?
Merlin: It's much more, you know, Dubliner's kind of way in, right?
John: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
John: It's the way in.
John: But...
John: At about page 750 or whatever, I don't remember how many pages it has, but all the way back after it's like you've already read five books that don't make any sense at all, the story starts to come together.
John: And you're like, oh, wait, I know what he's talking about.
John: Now, finally, after 700 pages of reading gibberish, I know what he is referring to now, and now I am getting it.
John: And then the last little bit of the story is like a fun adventure story where you're like, hooray, I'm glad to have read it.
Merlin: Oh, you get a little dessert at the end.
John: It's like you have to basically read the Simmerillion, and then at the end... You get a little hobbit?
John: You get a little hobbit.
Merlin: I started a new car, and I can't decide if you're up for a lightning round.
Merlin: I thought we could do a lightning round.
Merlin: I want to talk a little bit about something.
Merlin: Not today, but in the future.
Merlin: I'd like to talk about whether people confuse Tom of Finland with Tom's of Maine.
Merlin: Oh, do you think that happens?
John: If you were like, I'm looking for some Toms of Maine tooth whitener, and you confuse it with Tom of Finland.
Merlin: Depends what store you're in, I'll bet.
Merlin: I bet some stores are used to either one of those going wrong.
Merlin: You could solve that if you've got a big gay sex store by just having some toothpaste in there, and you've got to make everybody happy.
Merlin: You ever use that toothpaste?
Merlin: It's pretty gross.
John: Tom of Finland?
John: I bet it is gross.
John: Well, it depends.
Merlin: It tastes like calamine lotion.
Merlin: I remember when I first switched to the baking soda toothpaste.
Merlin: Can I tell you some John Roderick?
Merlin: It was not until last year.
Merlin: I thought Crest and Colgate were essentially interchangeable.
Merlin: And now I cannot have Crest in my mouth.
Merlin: It is so disgusting to me.
Merlin: How could I go 44 years without knowing the difference between Crest and Colgate?
Merlin: I thought it was a meaningless brand difference.
John: Right.
John: Isn't that weird?
John: I take a cup of hydrogen peroxide and switch it around my mouth for a minute.
Merlin: Do you have to do special stuff with your teeth?
Merlin: Do you have to do any kind of special cleaning stuff with your make-believe teeth?
John: The number of pages I have somewhere in this house detailing all the special stuff I have to do with my teeth... For real?
John: It's like Gravity's Rainbow.
Merlin: It's a bridge.
Merlin: Do you have a bridge?
John: No, I don't have a bridge.
John: There's a tooth where my missing tooth is.
John: There is a tooth, and it's basically soldered in place...
John: It's held into place by a combination of braces, glue, wheat paste, sawdust, horse hair, guitar string, and it just hovers there.
Merlin: They call it a D'Addario bridge.
John: It just hovers there.
John: This is why I can't get a big pastrami sandwich anymore because my front tooth, my main pastrami incisor is not functional.
John: It's just a facade.
Merlin: I am writing this on one of my actual cars I'm going to keep nearby.
Merlin: If and when you're comfortable about it.
Merlin: We don't have time today.
Merlin: I would like to talk about the teeth and how they got there.
John: Oh, yeah.
Merlin: That's a long story.
Merlin: No, I know.
Merlin: I know.
Merlin: I know.
Merlin: Main Pustermy Incisor.
Merlin: Is that right?
Merlin: That's pretty good.
Merlin: Tom of Finland.
Merlin: Okay.
John: All right.
John: You know, the Tom of Finland stuff.
John: Here's the problem with Tom of Finland.
John: This is where I realized that wherever on the gay scale I was, it was very straight.
John: That's super gay.
John: Is that masculine men I don't find attractive at all.
John: What about bears?
John: No, no, no.
John: You don't like a bear?
John: They find me attractive at a distance.
Merlin: I love bears.
Merlin: The friends of mine, I have a couple friends that are bears or bear chasey guys.
Merlin: And I got to say, of the different self-identifying groups, easily one of my favorites.
Merlin: Those are some go-along, get-along guys who go to a drink of beer.
Merlin: I don't know thousands of gay people, but among my friends who are gay, I think the bears are pound for pound the most fun.
John: Well, pound for pound.
John: Here's the thing about the bears.
John: If I was having a really bad day, if I really needed to cry, which the last time it happened was 1984, but if I really needed to cry and I had a big bear friend that I could just go lay my head on his fuzzy chest and really have a good cry, that's the one type of person in the world that is big enough and furry enough and comforting enough that I could actually lean on them.
John: As opposed to always being the one that people lean on.
Merlin: You go with one of those shiny gym rats that's all veiny looking.
Merlin: See, I don't like those either.
Merlin: Exactly.
Merlin: You try to hug that guy, you're going to slide right off.
John: My homosexuality manifests itself exclusively in being attracted to twinks.
Merlin: That is not a word that I know.
Merlin: Oh, is it like a little Filipino kind of guy?
Merlin: Well...
Merlin: Like a cabana boy?
Merlin: Yeah, like a cabana boy.
Merlin: I get that.
Merlin: Like a Moroccan house boy.
Merlin: Is he kind of tidy and friendly?
John: He's tidy.
John: He's friendly.
John: He smells good.
John: Good cook?
John: Extremely good cook.
Merlin: T-W-I-N-K?
John: His hair kind of comes down playfully in front of his eyes.
John: Oh, like a Leonardo DiCaprio thing.
John: Like a young Leonardo DiCaprio who is not playing a retarded boy.
John: Pretty fat.
John: Okay.
John: And twink.
John: No, you know what?
John: Fat is okay.
John: Like a little chubby little twink.
John: Those are the ones I always found.
John: Is that ping pong?
Merlin: Is twink ping pong?
John: I don't think twink is ping pong.
John: I think that is in the great gay lexicon.
John: I think twink is an accepted reference point.
Merlin: Is this something where they're only allowed to call themselves that?
John: well like uh like mexicans this is one of those things where i feel like i live on capitol hill or have lived on capitol hill for many years oh your mom's house i want to talk about your mom's house and i am i'm entitled by by grandfathering and by uh you know by having my pinky and enough people's poopers that i can use the lexicon that's very gentle john very gentle how do you pick a pinky you know what actually you know what i don't want to know pick a pinky twinks uh crying in 1984 was that an olympic thing
John: The crying of Lot 49.
John: Okay, I got it.
John: You're saying when I cried in 1984?
John: I was a teenager.
John: I cried because some girl was mean.
John: You're saying that's the last time you cried?
John: I don't know.
John: I cried because my parents yelled at me.
John: The last time I cried, I don't know.
John: No, I cried when my dad died.
Merlin: Oh, I'm sorry about that.
John: Well, you start talking about crying.
John: I like that guy.
John: He's fun to be around.
John: He's good.
John: He's a pistol.
John: He was a pistol.
John: And in fact, that's a phrase he would have used.
John: He's a pistol.
Merlin: And now our listeners are going to think that you're making a silly dad voice, but he sounded like that, but 10 times more.
Merlin: i like that kid uh okay so um lightning round here okay so tristram shandy did you finish it no keats's endymion the long poem never read it infinite jest you ever go all the way through yeah i read it really okay i want to come back to that ulysses same problem but but but but more entertaining absolutely
Merlin: Absolutely.
Merlin: Now, have you been through Ulysses all the way?
Merlin: No.
Merlin: Okay.
Merlin: Andy Warhol's movie Empire?
Merlin: No.
Merlin: Okay.
Merlin: The closest I've gotten with any of these, I've started Ulysses.
Merlin: I did read Keats's Endymion all the way through, which was brutal.
Merlin: I get partway through Tristram Shandy, and I keep thinking each time how awesome this book is.
Merlin: And then again, somehow I dropped it and never come back.
John: I've started Ulysses.
Merlin: Beowulf.
Merlin: Now, is that a long one?
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Is that a translation, or is it all that goofy middle talk?
Merlin: Yeah, middle talk.
Merlin: Is it middle English?
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: I keep thinking I can finish Ulysses, and I can't.
Merlin: I can't.
Merlin: I feel like a dumbass.
Merlin: I'm like Johnny Liberal Arts, and I can't finish Ulysses.
Merlin: I keep trying.
Merlin: I keep reading things.
John: It's all right.
John: You're not supposed to.
Merlin: It's not important.
Merlin: Here's my thing about all these.
Merlin: Now, the Warhol thing, clearly, that's a test for douchebags.
John: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Merlin: Here's the thing about Ulysses.
John: When it was written, it presumed that people had an intimate familiarity with the Bible, Shakespeare, and the great, you know, and Wittgenstein and the great works of man up to that point, right?
John: So in order to properly read and understand that book, you have to have...
John: You have to have a complete liberal arts education as understood in 1912.
John: And none of us do.
John: I mean, I tried to accumulate that kind of education.
John: I tried to acquire it on my own through years of diligent study.
John: And I have an education that looks like, I mean, I have a completely checkerboard education.
John: so that none of the illusions, none of the connective tissue that makes that book a tremendous read for someone who is completely vested in literature, none of that is available to me.
John: I'm just glancing off of it.
John: I'm like a pachinko ball going down and sort of like, oh, I get that.
John: Oh, I think I got that.
John: Was that a reference?
John: Was that a...
John: I don't even know.
John: Was that a reference to Job or was that a reference to Napoleon?
John: I don't understand.
John: And you go through and you're just like, a lot of it is just...
John: A lot of it is just word game.
John: It's just game.
Merlin: I hate to admit this at this point in my life, but I've come to feel that way about The Wasteland.
Oh.
Merlin: And so, I mean, actually, there was a really good class that I did not take, one of my favorite teachers taught at school, which is called Literary Substrat of the Wasteland.
Merlin: And you do, you know, obviously you read The Wasteland and study and stuff, but you also read the bibliography.
Merlin: Like, you read...
Merlin: you know uh jesse weston uh the grail myth book you read you know you read every shakespeare thing that's referenced in that but the funny part is like the weird part is like i i like that better as a piece of musicality with with uh funny little bits of language and stuff in it and then he does little crazy voices and stuff when you hear him read it but the more i learned about exactly what it was that he was aping oh this little greek bit the more it just seemed kind of cobbled together
Merlin: I know that sounds awful because I used to love it so much.
Merlin: But now I'm like, you're just a guy with a fake English accent showing off sometimes.
John: I think a lot of that stuff, a lot of that literature as science was really important at the time.
John: And we live in a world now that is post that stuff.
John: So that stuff had to happen.
John: in order to free up the mind, free up the culture of literature so that it could produce Don DeLillo or whatever.
John: I'm not sure.
John: But we live in the aftermath of it.
John: And so it isn't strictly necessary that we go back and participate in the revolution again.
John: We can just be happy that it happened.
John: and go on reading detective novels or stories that are interesting or fun.
Merlin: I'm not saying I hate it or something.
Merlin: I'm still saying it's a remarkable thing, but isn't it kind of funny that you get this, and I'm pulling this out of my ass, but you go through this very structured, great books kind of education, and everybody gets this same sort of Western culture education that they could have something like Ulysses makes sense, or that Wasteland kind of makes sense.
Merlin: You at least get the references.
Merlin: You know what all that stuff means, I guess, but in a weird way, then it becomes sort of an indictment of the very education that you've had.
John: Well, the thing is that colleges append the words great books to all kinds of curricula.
John: But no one has the attention to truly have a great books education anymore.
John: Like, no one.
John: I challenge you to find me a PhD student in literature that has read one-fifth of the books that a high school graduate in 1870 had read.
John: You know?
John: Like, there just isn't the reason to.
John: We don't need to have read all that stuff.
John: And the only reason they did at the time was there wasn't anything else to do.
John: Yeah.
John: So we have this whole like, oh, we're giving you a great books education at these universities, and they're not.
John: You can take a film class, you know?
Merlin: You can take a... This Henry V is all well and good, but I wish we had cable.
John: You know?
John: And we just have to accept, even as educated people, that we cannot, just as we cannot go back to a time before, you know, when...
John: When women didn't have the vote, as much as we might want to, we also cannot go back to a time when the vast majority of people shared the same 20 books.
John: When everyone had read the same... Any educated person had read the same 20 books.
John: We can't go back to that.
John: You can't duplicate it.
John: And I feel sorry for those people who are 20 years old, as I was, who...
John: really think that is essential.
John: It is necessary for me to go back and read those 20 books and understand them in order to be a fully-fledged person.
John: Because you spend a lot of time sort of beating your head up against a culture that the important parts of, the good parts of, have been assimilated into our culture enough that...
John: Most people, you know, those references go by and most people don't even know what they are.
John: It's just part of the comic.
Merlin: Don't you think it's kind of a MacGuffin, though?
Merlin: I mean, to reference one of the great works of the last hundred years, The Karate Kid, I mean, he gets Daniel-san to understand...
Merlin: how to do these moves with the wax on and wax off he thinks this guy's just some dumb fuck who's a gardener right but what he's teaching him is this repetition um that ends up bending benefiting him in a way he didn't want i think some of the great book stuff i think people miss the point when they think it's about reading a bunch of white guys you know i i i mean i'm not saying that's good bad or indifferent i mean if you if you don't read a lot of lady authors you're really going to be missing out like if you don't read to kill a mockingbird or whatever like you're gonna you know
Merlin: These are books that you should read.
Merlin: But I think there's something to be said for like whether or not you like the gym equipment to just keep going to the gym.
Merlin: And I think getting somebody to a way where they could have a place where they could have an intelligent conversation based on having had to digest that much material is not a bad idea.
Merlin: You know, I don't know what could replace that.
Merlin: I think we get really way off track sometimes with this whole, like, we don't value books anymore.
Merlin: Or, you know, it used to be you'd have five books in the Bible and that's all you had.
Merlin: Or, for that matter, those douchebags in the early 90s who were about, you know...
Merlin: Who really were, like, kind of trying to come up with some cultural canon.
Merlin: And then, of course, there's the other side that says, no, there shouldn't be a cultural canon.
Merlin: It's like, I don't fucking care what you do, but just do a lot of it until you're smart.
Merlin: That's the hard part of that is not that you should sit there and learn your ciphers or what you're ciphering.
Merlin: But, like, you know, you get good at multiplication because you learn all of those through 100 and eventually do it long enough and you know how to multiply.
John: Well, this is the problem with the Karate Kid analogy is that, was he an orphan or something?
John: Daniel-san?
John: I never watched The Karate Kid.
Merlin: No, I think it's his mom.
Merlin: I think they divorced and his mom had to live in a cheap apartment.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: He was sad.
Merlin: There was something that he was sad.
Merlin: Was Leah Thompson in that?
Merlin: Who was the girl in that?
John: I have no idea.
John: God, she was cute.
John: Who was the girl in War Games?
John: Oh, Ally Sheedy.
John: Ally Sheedy.
Merlin: She has slightly messed up teeth, which I find intoxicating.
John: But in any case, the myth of The Karate Kid is that any teenage kid
John: I don't care if somebody's putting cigarettes out on your arm.
John: Any teenage kid is going to go do chores for some guy until he becomes a karate expert.
John: It's called being a twink.
John: The problem now is that I don't think there is any depth left.
John: I think everyone has a tremendous familiarity with an incredibly wide surface of information.
John: And to equate
John: I don't know, to expect young people to have the mental fitness to learn anything at depth when there's so much at breadth available, I think we just have to re-evaluate what being smart is.
John: We have to acknowledge that being smart now is maybe a different thing.
John: That sounds really depressing to me.
John: Well, except it's a form of evolution.
John: I mean, being smart 50 years ago was a completely different thing than it was in 1705.
Merlin: To be smart or literate.
Merlin: I would say the definition of being literate is changing.
John: Like literate in the sense of, you know, are you able to... I think being smart because what being smart was 50 years ago was having at ready hand in your mind a tremendous encyclopedic knowledge of either one thing or of several things.
John: But now that's completely unnecessary.
John: It's a waste of your brain because all of that knowledge is available on your phone.
John: I look at my phone 600 times a day.
John: Mm-hmm.
John: And what good does it do for me to know, you know, the place names and dates?
John: I mean, it's one thing for me to understand the course of the Thirty Years' War and what its significance is in history.
John: But for me to remember any of the dates or place names is ludicrous.
John: I can find it on my phone in a half a second.
John: And so what we used to call intelligence...
John: was in large part just memorization of things and now most of that has been made obsolete so what is intelligence now you know we have to we have to call it the ability to draw together disparate uh ideas and things across a wide spectrum of knowledge and make sense of them at the center you know we have to be able to draw on things and make make
John: and form hubs out in space and say, here's the hub where Tom of Finland and MacGuffin, here's where those things link up.
John: Here's a world in which those things coexist.
John: You have to be able to form those hubs, and that is a different kind of intelligence than being able to memorize or being able to pass your med school exam.
John: It's a systemic knowledge.
John: It's a much more biological knowledge.
Merlin: But I mean, having to read, if you have to read all of the ancient Greek stuff, if you have to read all the Roman history stuff, sure, that could be a total death march, but it gives you a real context for understanding things about history and relationships.
Merlin: And as I've said before on here, I think it's really helpful to understand the stories.
Merlin: My concern with some of this goes back to how fucked up the educational system seems to be.
Merlin: And, you know, it would be a whole other season of this show to talk about the way kids are tested now.
Merlin: We have to teach to the test.
John: Believe me, I think every person should read Plato.
John: And I think every person listening to this podcast, if they have not read Plato, they should go get Plato and they should read it because it's all there.
John: Like everything that you are wondering about right now is in Plato.
John: And if you have read it and understand... I mean, it's very easy to read.
John: That's the thing most people don't read.
Merlin: I don't remember.
Merlin: I read all the major dialogues, and I honestly don't remember that much.
Merlin: I couldn't tell you which ones are which.
Merlin: I could tell you some of the names, but I don't remember what happened to them.
John: I think if you went back and read it again, you would find that it was a breezy read.
John: It's not like reading Freud.
John: It's like reading... It's very conversational.
John: And really, a lot of...
John: A lot of the stuff that, you know, that every year an undergraduate goes, oh, my God, I just had a great I just had a tremendous realization.
John: And 99 percent of the time that realization was already in Plato.
John: And he could have he could have saved himself the Domino's pizza that it cost him to use his brain to figure it out because it's already it's already written down.
John: Somebody already was there.
John: So, I mean, I'm not against the great books, obviously.
Merlin: Well, let me try to give you an angle on what I'm actually trying to say here, which is that if you take something, imagine this unholy mixture.
Merlin: And near the center of this, I think you have to put the testing stuff.
Merlin: The testing stuff is if you talk to anybody who's teaching school right now, it's a completely different world than you and I were in.
Merlin: The No Child Left Behind and all that kind of nonsense.
Merlin: If you want funding, you know, there's teachers who are out there having to cheat.
Merlin: They're having to like basically tell their kids what's on the test in order to, you know, get in the past.
Merlin: So, I mean, that to me is an elephant in the room.
Merlin: But here's the other part.
John: But the onus has always been on smart kids to educate themselves.
Merlin: Okay, but here's what I'm trying to say.
Merlin: Again, there was a time when you could at least count on, at least when I was in public schools as a kid, it might have been the only thing in your life that was a real rock.
Merlin: You might have had a tough home life, you might have had not much to eat, but you could get on a fucking yellow bus and go to school and there was a meal there for you if you were a poor kid.
John: Some tomato soup and a grocery sandwich.
Merlin: Yeah, but it had a much bigger, like a free breakfast.
Merlin: I mean, that had a much bigger role than just trying to get you to, you know...
Merlin: Get George Bush reelected.
Merlin: out of what made each, he took out of each of them what made them special, right?
Merlin: So the great, you know, there's, if you took these ideas of like, well, we should all have a common education, or there should be some kind of a bar that we all agree represents this, or you say a teacher should be, you know, you know, like, like I said, pedagogical or not,
Merlin: didactic but you become this kind of character that is respected you take all that and pretty soon you've got like a some fuckhead at a community college who's sitting there and thinking that he's cicero or something you know i'm just worried that if there's no center to this other than how we get our budget for next year nobody's gonna have any idea what the real purpose of being in that room is and when that happens i think that's when you get a nation of dumb fucks because you're gonna get people gaming the system much like you and
Merlin: And you're going to get people who don't even understand why it's great to know the story – why it's great to know that Ernst Rome was gay.
Merlin: Why that's such an interesting story.
Merlin: Why, like we say, the founding fathers did not agree on that much of anything, right?
John: But we already live in a nation of dumb fucks.
John: And part of the problem – Do you take that point at all?
Merlin: Do you get what I'm saying?
Merlin: If you take all the bullshit of what education seems like without taking the hard, the difficult, and the interesting part that made it great over time, it's a shell.
Merlin: It's a fucking shell.
Yeah.
John: I think it has to be reinvented.
John: At no previous point in history were there 300 million Americans.
John: You cannot educate 300 million people the same way that you would educate 20 million people.
John: You can't expect that the definition of what is useful and reasonable for 300 million people to know is the same.
John: When the United States was founded, 10% of the population was actually literate.
John: And in some ways, it's the toaster problem.
John: After World War II...
John: there was this incredible influx into the American family of labor-saving devices.
John: Oh, we're going to give you the washing machine, we're going to give you the dryer, and all this labor is... You're going to have so much free time.
John: So much free time, and we are going to create a utopia where people sit around and write poems and knit sweaters for trees and make cufflinks out of old typewriter keys and sell them on Etsy.
John: Like, we're going to create this utopian world because we're going to have all this free time.
John: And we created all this free time.
John: And people, the vast majority of people, have now spent that time drinking 64-ounce Mountain Dews and watching television.
John: And that's not a eugenical argument.
John: It's an argument of just like, listen, that's always been the case.
John: Literacy is not...
John: Some kind of magic drug that creates that creates like like philosopher kings out of everyone.
John: Literacy is valuable and certain, you know, like a certain percent of the population exploits it.
John: And most people, it just makes it easier to get around town.
John: I don't want to devolve into a demographical... Well, two things.
Merlin: One thing is also, I mean, I don't know if this is just conventional wisdom that's been exploded, but the other side of the washer and dryer thing is it wasn't that mom suddenly got to sit around and eat bonbons and take dexedrine.
Merlin: It was that the standard went up.
Merlin: The standard went up for what were expected of people.
Merlin: That's what was not included in the vision of us living in the fucking Jetsons where Rosie takes care of everything.
Merlin: People thought that when the washer and dryer came along or, you know, now you weren't going to have to go get ice for your icebox.
John: The standard went up only if you measure it one way.
John: I mean, people still work 40 hours.
Merlin: Well, they wanted laundry.
Merlin: They wanted mom doing a little bit of laundry every day in some cases.
John: Mom used to do laundry... That was Monday.
John: Monday was all day.
John: Exactly.
John: And then Tuesday was ironing.
John: People still go to work for 40 hours a week, but the amount of time they're actually working is probably 15 hours.
John: And the rest of the time, they're fidgeting and playing with their balls.
John: Back in the old days, when people went out to work,