Ep. 28: "The Sheriff of Twisp"
Merlin: Hello.
Merlin: Hi, John.
Merlin: How's it going?
Merlin: Hi, Merlin.
Merlin: Oh, God.
Merlin: This is a labor of love that you're even here.
John: That's going to be one of many coughs.
John: I think we should stop right there.
John: That's the whole show?
John: No, you're ill.
John: Yeah, I'm ill, but that is not an uncommon thing for me.
John: In fact, lately, I've been better than I've ever been in my life.
John: Sick-wise, not mental health-wise.
John: But I used to get sick all the time.
John: You get sick hard.
John: I do.
John: I get really sick.
John: I get super sick.
Merlin: Yeah, you're almost preternaturally.
Merlin: I don't know if it's a word, preternaturally.
Merlin: You're unbelievably strong, is it?
Merlin: Preternaturally is a word, yeah.
Merlin: Yeah, I think I'm using it wrong.
Merlin: You may be using it wrong, but it is a word.
Merlin: Okay, your point's taken.
Merlin: You are so supernaturally strong in so many ways, disturbingly strong, really irresponsibly strong in so many ways.
Merlin: But when it comes to getting sick, you're a total pussy.
John: Yeah, I have several Achilles heels.
John: Is that another collection you started?
John: Because I'm six-legged.
John: I have five Achilles heels and one heel that works.
John: Yeah, and a bad immune system is one of them.
John: I've always been quick to catch the bug.
Merlin: Me too.
Merlin: I'm the same way.
Merlin: I get cold sores.
Merlin: I get psoriasis.
Merlin: I got it all.
Merlin: I should be dead by now.
John: You know, up here in the Northwest, we call cold sores, stress bumps.
Merlin: That is really... Is that a Bellingham thing?
John: Because nobody wants to admit that they have herpes, so they say, oh, I have a stress bump.
Merlin: In Bellingham, they call them agreement helix.
Merlin: I'm going to not make you laugh because I... Oh, dear.
Merlin: Excuse me.
Merlin: No, no, it's fine.
John: Ah, yeah.
John: And I have... You know, I think my lungs are my...
John: That's the part that... Your Achilles lungs.
John: They're my Achilles lungs.
John: If you read the Iliad, there's a scene where Achilles is leaping over the wall, and he gets a wheeze, and he wheezes, and that's how they know where he is, and then...
John: And then they shoot him in the heel.
Merlin: I didn't study the classics.
Merlin: If memory serves, the reason for his weakness is that when Moses' mother dipped him into the mud basket, she held him by his lung.
John: Right.
John: Well, see, you've read the book.
John: You've seen the movie, at least.
John: Yeah, I saw Exodus.
John: Yeah, when Moses puts Achilles in the mud bath...
John: She holds him by his lung, and that's why his heel never grew.
Merlin: And then brings him some cucumber water and a lucky magazine.
John: It's all in the Bible.
Merlin: It's all in there.
Merlin: How much of the Bible have you read?
Merlin: You ever read any of the Bible?
John: Yeah, I read a lot of it.
John: Because I went to Jesuit school, and I showed up there with a real chip on my shoulder.
John: And I took an Old Testament class my first quarter.
John: I'm sitting in the class and the professor comes in.
John: And he's a priest and he's an overweight man.
John: And he's wearing his priestly garb.
John: But you can tell from the... It's all black.
John: It's black clothes, right?
John: But you can tell from the accumulated dander...
John: on the shirt.
John: It's like he comes in and somebody has been, like he had just left a wedding where they didn't have rice to throw, they just had salt.
John: So he's covered in dander, and I realized over the course of the quarter that he never changed his clothes.
John: But he was a brilliant guy, and he came in and he said to the class, you know, the first thing out of his mouth, he said, how much of the Bible should we take as truth, as fact?
Yeah.
John: And, you know, the room is quiet and nobody knows what to do.
John: And I'm sitting there already with my feet up on the desk, you know, smug and presumptuous.
John: And I was just such a turd.
John: And I raised my hand and all sardonically, I'm like, I don't know, all of it?
John: Mm-hmm, mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
John: And he goes, no, in fact, and proceeds to make me feel like the tool that I was.
John: He says, no, in fact, the Bible is a collection of stories told over generations by people wandering the desert.
John: And here's how we're going to take this class.
John: And he starts to talk.
John: And I sat up in my chair and leaned forward and was like, oh my goodness, this seems really smart.
John: And I dove into that class.
John: I was so thrilled to read the Old Testament with...
John: with a priest who was going to walk me through it like it was like a history lesson.
John: Oh, I still, I should go back there and find that priest and give him a dead dandruff brush as a gift, like an embossed.
John: He's got to be still alive.
John: He was a pretty young guy.
Merlin: They live pretty long, those guys.
John: They do because they, you know, free food.
John: Health care.
John: Free hand jobs.
John: Subsidized anyway.
John: You know, they all live together there in the priest house.
John: So, and they don't need money there.
Merlin: I think that's in Ruth.
Merlin: They talk about that.
Merlin: You know, the thing is, Old Testament, it's a bit of a slog.
Merlin: There's a lot of repetition.
Merlin: It could have really stood a second read through before it went to press.
Merlin: There's a lot of extraneous stuff.
John: That was what was great about this class, because, you know, as you walk through life, right, you meet people all the time that are like, well, I've read the Koran, and let me tell you this about that.
John: And every one of those people that says that is a lying sack of shit.
John: No one has read the Koran because it's like the Old Testament.
John: It's so boring.
John: If you start at the front and you start reading the first page, you're just like, oh, by four pages in, it took me a year.
John: to read four pages of the Koran.
John: But when somebody's walking you through it who knows all the good parts, like someone who has studied enough priestly stuff to be a Jesuit, this guy knew where all the good stuff was.
John: He knew where all the sex was.
John: He knew where all the turning points were.
John: And he skipped by the genealogies and all that stuff and just got right to the heart of the matter.
John: I wish I knew it well enough to do that for someone else.
John: You know, to like give somebody a syllabus about the Old Testament.
Merlin: I think you do that.
Merlin: You do that in different walks of life.
Merlin: I mean, I think you take people to the interesting part sometimes.
John: I try.
John: Yeah.
John: I take people to the interesting parts of the Seattle, you know, where the sewers connect to the power stations.
John: Is that an analogy?
John: You take people down there.
John: That's where I like to take people and kill them.
John: Take them to the sewers, meet the power stations, and...
Merlin: What's funny, I mean, like, if you're a student of literature, which you have been.
Merlin: A literature.
Merlin: A literature.
Merlin: That's what we call it in Florida.
Merlin: Literary-ature.
Merlin: We call it la literature.
Merlin: You know, you would never think, like, oh, I read through, I read this short story, I read where I'm calling from once, and now I'm a learned man.
Merlin: You have to read a lot more than that, and you probably have to read that several times.
Merlin: If you're going to consider yourself someone who really knows a lot about something or consider yourself, let's say for the sake of argument, you know enough about something to judge someone's life and afterlife, it would behoove you, and we're not going to talk about religion, but it would behoove you.
Merlin: Like, if you're any student, you would want to, like, you know, learn your times tables until you know it really well.
Merlin: But it's just funny.
Merlin: You can drop a reference to something like the Old Testament or the New Testament or, for that matter, Shakespeare or the Constitution.
Merlin: And just because you've heard of that thing, you suddenly sound like a learned person.
Merlin: And that's not even the beginning of the learned part.
John: But all those things that you mention, Shakespeare, Constitution, and the Bible, there are so many references to them.
John: throughout all other literature, that if you get just a grasp of what the original text says, then you start to pick it out.
John: You see it all the time.
John: It occurs everywhere else.
John: So you actually can get a pretty good
John: grip on the Iliad and the Old Testament by just, by kind of doing a Cliff's Notes reading of it, and then being aware when you see it appear in other books, you know, because people do refer to it.
John: Like, for instance, reading Where I'm Calling From,
John: although it is a great work, you won't see it.
John: You won't see allusions to it in all the other books you read.
John: But you're going to see the Iliad come up over and over.
John: You could hear the phrase Achilles heel your whole life and not realize it's from the Iliad.
Merlin: Yeah, or hear like what?
Merlin: Like Pound of Flesh or Blood on My Hands or, you know, the innumerable.
Merlin: But it's funny.
Merlin: I mean, like, have you ever read Hamlet all the way through?
Merlin: I've never read the whole Hamlet.
Merlin: The whole Hamlet is really, really... Almost every Hamlet that we read is a lot, a lot shorter.
John: It's the short Hamlet, right.
Merlin: Well, like when Kenneth Branagh did that version in the 90s or whatever... That was good.
Merlin: It was beautiful, but it was like four hours long.
John: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
John: And that was even a little bit abridged.
John: But Shakespeare is the same way.
John: It's in everything.
John: And I find that that's true the first time I went to Hollywood...
John: You go to Hollywood and you're driving around and you realize that... I mean, I had never been to Southern California, but I knew it.
John: Every street sign, every street corner, you get to Hollywood and Vine and you're like, Hollywood and Vine?
John: I've heard about this my whole life.
John: First time you go to New York City, every street corner you stand on, you realize you've seen it in a movie, you've read about it in a book.
John: And so that familiarity...
John: With not just the place names, but like, I know what happened here.
John: This is the place where the thing happened.
John: Right, right.
John: It makes New York and L.A.
John: and Paris, it makes these places seem, well, like we all own a little bit of them.
Merlin: Here's a photograph of me that is really, really blurry for reasons that will become apparent.
John: You have a mullet and a mustache, and you're wearing an army jacket.
John: I am.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: And you're absolutely right.
Merlin: You know the era.
Merlin: I don't think I told you this story.
John: This is the great era of Merlin Mann.
John: The mullet, the mustache, and the army jacket.
John: You seem to traverse the world.
Merlin: Now, yet again, the mullet, the mustache, and the army jacket.
Merlin: Again, Aesop.
Merlin: A lot of people don't know where that comes from.
Merlin: Slow and steady wins the kebab.
Merlin: In our limited number of days that we had in Manhattan, this is how you knew I shouldn't have lost this one.
Merlin: I said to my girlfriend, we're going to go to this place and you're going to take my picture.
Merlin: And so we got on a subway and it went north and north and north and north and north.
Merlin: And we got scared and scared and scared.
Merlin: You went to Lexington and 125?
Merlin: No.
Merlin: Sick and dirty, more dead than alive.
Merlin: Had her take my picture at Lexington and 125th.
Merlin: You did.
Merlin: I'm literally in motion.
Merlin: I stopped long enough to go, Sharon, take the picture.
Merlin: And then I started running back into the subway.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: This was what year?
Merlin: 1988.
Merlin: I got the photo somewhere in 1988.
John: That wasn't a good time.
Merlin: There's like two different like like, you know, like a professionally made sign like for a restaurant or a store with misspellings on it.
Merlin: There's like this is, you know, this is New York in the 80s.
Merlin: This is not this is pre Giuliani, you know.
Merlin: being redone there's giant pieces like the street you know like when they're like repairing the street they're like oh fuck it and they bring them bring in like a four four inch piece thick piece of steel sheet of steel to just say fuck it cover the street we're leaving it's it looks like lebanon so i can't believe you guessed it that fast have i told you that story before
Merlin: That's amazing you would guess that so fast.
John: But you're talking about, like, I'm going up, I'm going up, I'm going up, and I'm like, well, what's up there?
John: Merlin's not going to the Apollo, probably, to stand out front with your tap shoes and be like, I'm ready for my audition.
Merlin: Like the Violent Femmes.
Merlin: No, go up there and, yeah, go to the Cotton Club?
Merlin: Where else?
John: Columbia?
John: Many years later, I lived there at 118th and Lexington.
John: Yeah.
Merlin: Yes.
Merlin: This is around the time you were about to start writing your first record, right?
John: Yeah.
John: Well, the first record was done.
John: It was 2001, summer of 2001.
John: And I went up there and lived in Spanish Harlem, what they called El Barrio.
John: And it was the one time in my life where I actually had a gun pointed at me where it wasn't just some Alaskan guy pointing a gun at you like happens.
John: Something you could settle.
John: Yeah, it wasn't like, oh, yeah, all right, you got a gun, I got a gun, right.
John: It was an armed robbery.
John: And I was with two other people, and we were walking.
John: Obviously, we were stupid.
John: We were walking along the East River at...
John: 10 o'clock at night in Spanish Harlem, and we've been walking up the East River, so there's a certain point there.
John: Isn't that like gunplay primetime?
John: Yeah, it's sort of like, well, it's at 98th,
John: you're still on the Upper East Side, kind of, you know?
John: And we're just walking and talking and chatting, and we don't realize that we've walked into kind of a shooting gallery area where everyone is... All these junkies are lying sort of all in stacks like cordwood all around.
John: And we walk over this bridge, and this guy in a hooded sweatshirt is standing there, and he's real casual, you know?
John: He's kind of... He's leaning up against a pole, and he's got...
John: He's got his pistol out.
John: And I'm kind of in the lead of the three of us.
John: And I walk past him.
John: He says something to me.
John: I don't see the gun.
John: And I go, oh, hey, what's up?
John: And I walk past him.
John: I'm 10 feet past him.
John: Before the girl...
John: screams there's three of us to me a guy and his girlfriend and she sees the gun and she stops dead in her tracks and screams and i turn around and i see that he's got the gun on the girl and and i i i have the i'm so indignant that i have to walk back to get in front of this guy's gun you know what i mean like did you do that
John: Well, I was already past him.
John: If she had kept walking, if the other guy had kept walking, he's just sitting there.
Merlin: I thought you were talking about being a human shield.
Merlin: You're saying go back and finish the robbery transaction.
John: Well, no, that's what I had to do.
John: I was like, oh, my God, why didn't you just keep walking?
John: So I turn around.
John: I walk back.
John: And this guy never says a word.
John: I mean, he said something to me like, stick him up or whatever, but I didn't hear him.
John: Because when you're walking in the dark in Spanish Harlem, even if you are oblivious, I mean, being oblivious is your greatest strength, right?
John: I mean, some guy's standing there with a gun and goes, stick him up.
John: And you just go, yeah, great.
John: Nice to see you.
John: And keep walking.
John: He's not going to shoot you.
John: He's going to understand that it's a misunderstanding.
John: He's going to hold up the next person.
John: Or he's going to run around in front of you and force the issue.
Merlin: Yeah, but that looks sort of stupid if he does that.
John: Yeah, right.
John: He has his own dignity.
Merlin: In retrospect, he didn't fire a warning shot and say, no, turn around.
John: Yeah, and the thing is, he's not a guy who's jumping in front of you with his feet spread and the gun out in front of him going, freeze!
John: He's like this guy.
John: He's cool about it.
John: He's like, hey, man, you know...
Merlin: He's like the troll under the bridge.
John: Right.
John: He's like, let me hold your wallet.
John: So I have to drag my ass back there, and I'm all indignant about it.
John: And he's like, you know, throw your wallets on the ground or whatever, says to the girl.
John: And I pulled my wallet out, and I had stuff in the wallet I wanted to keep.
John: And so I take whatever $21 I had, and I threw it on the ground, and he wants the wallet.
John: And I'm like, no, you don't need the wallet.
John: And again, I kind of had to grab her by the arm and pull her down the road.
John: Like she was like a deer in the headlights.
John: And my God, just keep moving and get out of the way.
John: You know what I mean?
John: Like keep moving.
John: Don't stand there.
John: So yeah, we had to pull these two along.
John: And you know, all this guy wanted was that if I had had 11 cents, he would have dove for it.
John: So anyway, we get on past and then we had the great adventure of going to the El Barrio police station and trying to pick this hooded, this masked gunman out of a book of mugshots.
John: which was the ultimate example of mugshots are useless.
John: Eyewitness accounts are useless.
John: All three of us picked a different person out of the mug book.
John: The guy that I picked out, the cop turned the book around and was like, well, that's interesting.
John: I don't think it was him because he's been in jail for the last three years.
John: But nice try.
John: I was like, oh, God, could have sworn it was him.
John: And then they put me in a cop car and we drove around.
John: All the dark spots of the barrio with our spotlight looking for the guy who... I mean, the guy had ridden a white swan.
Merlin: That's a pretty high level of service for the El Barrio Police Department, I'm guessing.
John: You know, they were great.
John: The cops were great.
John: I have always felt that New York City police are some of the best in the world.
John: Having been accosted by many police in many cities, New York police are...
John: They're just regular Joes, you know?
John: L.A.
John: cops, San Francisco cops, Seattle cops, they all act like they're real special people who are charged with a special mission to keep the peace, and they are working on behalf of the mayor and the governor, and they really carry themselves with a lot of... You know, with the attitude that every single person on the street is a perpetrator.
John: And in New York City, they're like, hey...
John: Smoke a bowl.
Merlin: You're more like a legitimate civil servant.
John: Yeah, they're guys that are there to keep bears from running down the middle of the street.
John: But beyond that, let people do what they're going to do.
John: If you're going to stop and bust every infraction in New York City, then nothing could get done.
Merlin: That school I went to was really small, and there were four – rotating, but four full-time campus cops, you call them, right?
Merlin: The campus police.
Merlin: There's only four of them.
Merlin: It's all we needed for this campus.
John: We're talking about the University of South Florida.
Merlin: Well, yes, and it's smaller developmentally disabled daughter, new college.
Merlin: But yeah, the campus was small, and what's funny was –
Merlin: It might have been more than that, but the four main cops that were around, first of all, you know, they were by and large, like you say, they were there to keep bears away.
Merlin: But at least three of the cops were retired from being actual cops.
Merlin: I'm pretty sure two of the cops were former New York City cops, and one in particular, who was the friendliest, tubbiest, funniest, nicest guy there who could beat your head in if he had to, used to work on one of those boats that would drag the river for bodies.
Merlin: I mean, this is a guy who dealt with dead, bleached-out bodies.
Merlin: He saw a lot of shit.
John: This guy had been in the shit.
Merlin: He's been in the shit.
Merlin: Yeah, exactly.
Merlin: A thousand yard stare.
Merlin: And what's funny was, I mean, this sounds, I guess it sounds like a cliche, but you know, he was really nice.
Merlin: He, he had a very, he had the correct trigger for when to go ape shit about stuff and when not.
Merlin: and there's one guy we call him shorty was the one guy who seemed to be like a professional security guard who'd gotten like come to the big game and he was he was the barney fife guy he was like always waiting to pull his bullet out of the pocket you know kind of guy but i always thought that was so interesting like somebody who had actually had that kind of exposure to people kind of like you right i mean in that case i would have been that screaming lady just for what it's worth because i'm not used to dealing with situations like that for you that's something where you just keep your head about you and that's how that cop was and he was uh he was more effective
John: Well, that's why I always imagine that in life, what would end up happening to me is that I would end up being the sheriff of a small town in northern Washington, like Twisp, Washington or something.
John: I would end up up there, retired.
John: The sheriff of Twisp?
John: And I'd end up being the sheriff of Twisp.
John: And then if some kind of bad shit happened in Twisp, there was a multiple killing or maybe a drug deal gone bad where a bunch of people all shot each other and then a local hunter found a bag of money and went on the run.
John: I would be like the kind of hard-bitten sheriff that was like, man, what's gone wrong with the world today?
John: I've been in the shit.
John: I've seen it all.
John: But if this ain't a mess, it'll do till one gets here.
Merlin: Well, like a lot of those kinds of sheriffs, it seems to me you're somebody who's seen stuff you don't want to see.
Merlin: Maybe you're back from the Civil War.
Merlin: Maybe you're back from Vietnam.
Merlin: You're back from somewhere where a lot of, you know, there were a lot of body parts.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: The Indy Rock trenches.
Merlin: Oh, gosh.
Merlin: It's amazing what a man like you can see.
Merlin: The steely eyes and the twigs.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: So you went there looking for maybe not a simpler life, but sure you wanted to help people.
Merlin: But you're also, maybe you had it with the body parts, but now you're imperturbable.
Merlin: And the town of Twisp, as with Andy Griffith, can rest easy knowing that you're there and you're mostly talking people out of things.
Merlin: Now, do you carry a gun in Twisp?
John: No, you don't need a gun.
John: I mean, you have one in the truck.
John: But the thing is, I didn't move to Twisp to be the sheriff.
John: I moved up there to get away.
John: And then I realized, you know, the people of Twisp kind of called on me to be the sheriff.
Merlin: So you were maybe not precisely a psychotic loner, but you were definitely like in your own cabin, maybe working on your latest book.
Merlin: And then something happened.
Merlin: Did something happen to the old sheriff?
Merlin: But they needed you, I'm guessing.
John: Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Merlin: You were called upon.
John: Something happened to the old sheriff and there wasn't anybody to fill his shoes.
John: Mm-hmm.
John: And I was called upon to be the sheriff.
John: And it was a service I was providing my townspeople.
John: Did you resist a little bit at first?
John: Oh, sure, sure.
John: I'm not the guy.
John: You don't want me.
John: You know, I've been in this shit.
John: I just came out here to listen to the wind whistle through the pines.
John: And then they're like, but sheriff.
John: They started calling me sheriff.
John: And that's where it starts, you know.
John: Right.
John: They were calling me sheriff even before.
John: Just because I walk around, carry yourself like a sheriff.
Merlin: What kind of crime you get in Twisp, you think?
Merlin: I mean, you're saying, is it mostly a drug crime?
Merlin: Is it people growing weed?
Merlin: Somebody hitting somebody with a belt?
Merlin: Running off with a chicken?
Merlin: What kind of shit goes down in Twisp, do you think?
John: Well, you know, it's real close to the Canadian border, and so there's those Hells Angels motorcycle gangs who are bringing the BC Bud.
Merlin: John, that is exactly the kind of thing that would have Twisp calling upon you.
John: Yep, that's right.
Merlin: It's like Seven Samurai, but with just one John.
John: Yeah, here comes the motorcycle gang terrorizing the town.
John: The problem with Chuck Norris, of course, is that Chuck Norris, in that same situation, is going to karate chop all those guys.
John: I come from a different school.
John: I'm not going to be karate chopping anybody.
John: But I am going to be freezing guys in their shoes with my steely gaze.
John: And mine bullets, too.
John: I've got mine bullets.
Merlin: You've got mine bullets all the time.
Merlin: Yeah, I can use mine bullets.
Merlin: You could also take them down to where the sewers meet the power plant.
Merlin: What was the terminology?
Merlin: That's a long drive from Twisp.
Merlin: They probably have something like that.
Merlin: I bet they've got a ravine or a gully or a crick.
John: They definitely have a crick there.
Merlin: I think they probably found something in the creek.
Merlin: This is in Okanagan County.
Merlin: Okanagan County, that's right.
Merlin: Population 938.
Merlin: Oh, sorry, sorry.
Merlin: Let me take that back.
Merlin: Strike that.
Merlin: 938, that was in 2000.
Merlin: Oh my God, John.
Merlin: John, in 2000, the population was 9—when you're feeling better, you need to get the fuck up to Twisp.
John: What's happening?
John: What's going on?
Merlin: Tempographic changes?
Merlin: I'm only in the first paragraph, but 938 in the year 2000, it's already down to 919.
Merlin: I don't know if they're losing jobs or people are falling in the creek, but I think they might need Sheriff John.
John: The thing is, the young people in Twisp, they don't see the opportunity up there that their fathers and grandpappies used to find.
John: So they're probably moving to the big city.
John: They're moving to Seattle, and they're joining some kind of raver group.
Merlin: group of ravers they couldn't find jobs maybe let's see the twist is located on the metho river at its confluence with the twist river the titular twist river the whole town it's 1.2 square miles john i don't know man i you there's nothing as long as you could get like satellite service or something there's almost nothing you could take baths there i know you love your home i know you love your family i'm just saying there's a lot of things you could do in twist
John: I saw all this in a dream.
John: Twisp is a beautiful little town.
John: It's kind of like an old west town.
John: If you drive through it, it's got little clapboard houses.
John: It was a mining town back in the turn of the century.
John: It's exactly the place that I would end up being the sheriff if I was going to do that.
John: But I still haven't decided, which, you know, there are a few different turns my life could take.
John: I could also be a Tweedy professor sitting in his cramped office.
Merlin: Can I be honest?
Merlin: That's a lot of fucking meetings.
John: Yeah, that's true.
Merlin: Don't teachers have to go to a lot of meetings?
John: They do.
John: They have to deal with that university hierarchy, which I've never... It's just the same as getting a job at IBM.
John: It's just like working... I bet it's worse.
Merlin: I mean, at least at IBM you can go outside and you get outside and do a math problem and settle like men.
Merlin: But at a place like that, you just have to undermine them for five years because they got tenure.
Merlin: They're like fucking furniture.
John: Well, I think every person at a university is like an HR person at a company.
John: You know what I mean?
John: Like every person you're dealing with, including the other professors are talking to you like an HR person.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Conservative, nervous and easily replaced.
John: Yeah.
John: And, and, and also really concerned about what you're, you know, really concerned about you and what's going on in your mind and whether or not you did your TPS reports or whatever.
Merlin: It's just, it sounds like a horrible environment for you, John.
John: You know, I had a mentor at the University of Washington who wanted to... When I say a mentor, I mean the mentor, the one mentor of my life, this professor named Jim Klaus.
John: And he had this vision that he and a few of the other...
John: Like teachers and students from the Comparative History of Ideas program were going to start a new university called the University of the Cascades.
John: And we were going to go find a lodge, like an old Boy Scout camp somewhere up in the mountains.
John: And we were going to start a new university there.
John: And we would talk about this university over and over.
John: And it was really a beacon in... They're just a small group of us, but it was a beacon in our future.
John: And then we will start the University of the Cascades.
John: And then he changed it to the University of the Olympics because he liked those mountains.
John: Seattle is situated between the Olympic Mountains and the Cascade Mountains.
John: And he figured there were more Boy Scout camps out in the Olympics.
John: And so he switched his focus to those mountains.
John: And that seemed even better.
John: It's harder to get to the Olympics.
John: And then the University of the Olympics was like this idea that... And then he got the cancer.
John: Oh, God, that's no good.
John: No, it was terrible.
John: And he got the cancer really fast.
John: It was like... He and I used to meet weekly and go to this hot dog place called Schultz's.
John: on university avenue and we were supposed to meet at schultz's on tuesday and he called me and he was like oh i can't uh meet you at schultz's this week i was like oh why not and he said because i have pancreatic cancer oh my god john that's awful yeah and he died within a couple of months it was a it was it was a terrible thing for me he was the one guy in my whole life that ever like
John: that ever kind of showed me the way, you know, he was a real, he was a, a pedagogue in the, in every sense of the word.
Merlin: Isn't it miserable that we don't get that opportunity to realize that and then do something nice to thank them until it's way too late.
John: Yeah.
John: Yeah.
John: Although, I mean, I, I, I feel, I feel like I hadn't, I had a, you know, I had a chance to, to, to tell him what he meant to me.
John: And I, I, I went to his bedside, you know, when he's like the final days and I started, I started saying, you know, he said, he said, you need to just graduate from college.
John: Don't worry about
John: all these fantasies that you have about how you're going to graduate from college where someone's going to put a laurel crown on your head and they're going to pronounce you the king of all colleges.
John: Just graduate from college like a normal person.
John: And I was like, but I have to do this, that, and the other.
John: And he was like, just do this one thing.
John: Just graduate from college in the simplest possible way.
John: And I realized that even there as he lay dying, he was trying to help me
John: And I was being a pain in his ass.
John: Like, no, no, no.
John: Here's how I'm going to do it.
John: I'm going to graduate from college.
John: But when I do, they're going to realize that from that day forth, all college is meaningless.
John: And that people just need to listen to me from here on out.
John: And he was like...
John: Listen, with some of my last breath, I'm going to tell you, just don't do that.
John: Just be a normal person and graduate from college.
John: Just do this one simple thing.
John: I still haven't done that.
Merlin: Yeah, but you moved on from thinking, I assume, that you were going to change the way we think about colleges as a virtue of that.
Merlin: So you moved on in your way.
John: A little bit, a little bit, yeah.
John: It was very sad because with him, he was the motivating factor of this university we were going to start out in the trees.
John: And without him, no one else had the complete vision, you know.
John: He was the one that he was actually a PhD.
John: The rest of us were just satellites or whatever.
John: I mean, that's not to say there weren't a bunch of PhDs around him, but he was the one that had the... He burned like a hot sun, this guy.
Merlin: could tell i was wrong to be on the team for for your school program for a variety of reasons because i was i i sat erect in my chair through through every part of that and i was like yes yes and this will be out with the camps and the lodge and the wood and i was yes yes and then you told me you thought about calling it university olympics and i completely lost interest in
Merlin: That's what a pedagogy I am.
Merlin: And then I realized I mainly just thought that the University of the Cascades is one of the coolest names I've ever heard.
John: But as soon as it was the University of the Olympics, you were like, I don't want to wear that sweatshirt.
Merlin: Well, did that?
Merlin: See, you probably weren't like this.
Merlin: Did that ever factor into your thinking?
Merlin: Because Gonzaga is a pretty fruity name for a school.
John: Especially since a lot of people mistakenly call it Gonzaga.
Merlin: I called it Gonzaga until I heard your dad pronounce it in front of me once.
Merlin: And until then, I thought it was Gonzaga.
John: yeah i think a lot of people do yeah i mean it's just gonzaga it's named sorry it's all right that was pretty good pretty close you know gonzaga is named after a guy a lot of people are named a lot of universities are named after some old guy some dead guy as my sister would say some dead rich guy from the past why do i want to go to these castles and museums it's just a bunch of dead rich people oh susan that's my sister that's my sister walking through rome
John: Let's go in here.
John: Why do I want to go in there?
John: It's a bunch of stuff from dead rich people.
John: Susan, it's that we're in Rome.
Merlin: You and your sister traveling together sounds like an NBC sitcom that would not be picked up for a second season.
John: She's like, yeah, we're in Rome.
John: There are discotheques everywhere.
John: Why do we want to go to these old places full of musty dirt?
John: What are you talking about?
John: Discotheques.
John: Traveling with her was like
John: Traveling with an untamed she-wolf on a... Like, held back with a piece of dental floss.
Merlin: i'm holding on to this mint flavored floss and she's just like disco i'm like disco i'm not gonna go to a roman disco she's like you don't know how to live we were everybody's a dumb shit that's the problem and i and the problem is it's one thing to be a dumb shit and it's another thing to be a slightly above average intelligence dumb shit which makes you 10 times fucking dumber than the dumbest dumb shit
Merlin: Because I was so genetically incapable of seeing what a dumb fuck I was.
Merlin: And it makes me resistant to even try and help anybody because obviously I'm still kind of an idiot.
Merlin: But do you know what I mean?
Merlin: And the things that people would say to me that seem so sane about how to treat other people and how to behave and how to make decisions, I just thought they were just queerbaits, just dumbasses.
Merlin: I mean, you must have gone through this a little bit.
John: Oh, I was tortured by other people coming up because I really kept trying to do the right thing in my interactions with other people.
John: And that invariably sets you on the course for doom and destruction if you're trying to be normal.
John: You know what I mean?
John: Like a normal teen is not thinking about doing the right thing.
John: Normal teen...
John: is just trying to do something, anything, at any opportunity, right?
John: A normal teen is not flying up above the scenario trying to discern what the best course of action for everyone involved is.
John: And I spent my whole young life watching people
John: go about their living and wondering, you know, standing in the middle of it, like one of those, uh, stop motion scenes in a movie where everyone's moving really fast and the person in the center is, is moving super slow.
John: And he's like, but, but wait, you know, and people are just getting on with it.
John: And I'm, and I was in the, I was in this, like this constant cloud of thinking that, um,
John: that all the petty little problems that people were getting into, we could just figure out and figure out what the right thing to do is and then do that.
John: And I think that's why later on I dove into drugs and doing bad things.
John: Because later on I was like, well, you know what?
John: None of that trying to do good produced anything but sadness in me and everyone I touched.
John: So now I'm just going to be bad.
John: I'm going to do the bad stuff.
John: I'm going to do all the bad stuff.
John: And maybe that way I'll come out the other side and it'll all have evened out somehow.
John: And that didn't work either.
John: That was just, that was just bad.
John: That was just doing bad things for their own sake and, and, uh,
John: It still was a kind of overthinking it.
John: What are you doing?
John: You're doing bad things for the sake of doing bad things?
John: You're thinking too much.
John: Just go like you want to be with the girl.
John: Go try and be with the girl.
John: It doesn't have to be like a...
Merlin: like an epic poem just go try and be with the girl well this is it's the frustrating part on both sides of the equation it's uh think about like trying to my daughter's a little young for this but like try to think about how you teach a kid to ride a bike and the first time the kid gets on a bike they fall down and they don't want to ride the bike anymore because there's no way they're ever going to be able to ride a bike and then on the other hand and kick them and kick them and kick them until they get back on the well you hit them with the bike and you say you like this bike and you hit them with the bike you say you like this bike stand up
Merlin: But the thing is if you know how to ride a bike, how do you describe to somebody how to ride a bike?
Merlin: You might have a couple ideas, but basically you just go, well, you ride the bike, and it seems so obvious.
Merlin: I'm not saying you can't help somebody do that, but I think it's really frustrating as a former serial dumbfuck who's hopefully trying to get a little better at some of it.
Merlin: the really frustrating part, I think a lot of this comes down to like, I can't fix you and I can't prevent you from doing everything wrong, but you're doing, doing, I see you doing something that I can promise you is so fucking stupid and derailing.
Merlin: And I wish I could get you to see how stupid and derailing it is.
Merlin: And that's the thing that you're least likely to change in somebody.
Merlin: Like you say, just ask her out.
Merlin: She's scared too.
Merlin: And if she says, no, you know what?
Merlin: That's okay.
Merlin: You're not going to die.
John: Yeah, I kept thinking that there was... I mean, I'm not alone in this.
John: There's a world of people thinking this, but everybody thinks there's a secret to life.
John: I kept thinking that the secret to life was attainable and I was going to...
John: Once I figured it out, I was going to share it with everybody.
John: Oh, God.
Merlin: That's a tough formula.
John: Oh, boy.
John: Oh, kid.
John: But, you know, if I went back and talked to myself right now, if I stood in front of my 17-year-old self and grabbed myself by my stupid shirt that, you know, my stupid kind of like...
John: like a plaid patchwork shirt that I thought was hilarious and cool.
John: I grabbed myself by that shirt, lifted myself off the ground and said all this to myself.
John: I would just be like, whatever, man, whatever old man.
Merlin: Yeah, no, I'm, I'm the worst example of everything that I thought was wrong.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: In a lot of ways, because, because I think I, I think I can help, you know, Oh, this, this, this kid, I'm going to try and help not knowing that that kid already knows everything.
Merlin: And plus I'm obviously, I'm kind of a doofus.
Merlin: Um,
Merlin: You know, and I remember thinking like I was I was standing outside the library yesterday and I was watching this, you know, very old woman crossing the street and, you know, people being very impatient with their cars.
Merlin: And she's just an old lady trying to cross the street.
Merlin: She's all hunched over and shit.
Merlin: And I was thinking, like, I remember very scream at her.
Merlin: Keep moving and get out of the way.
Merlin: people have to go places madam did you throw your phone at her what i remember was uh i never overtly thought this but now i know i was actually i was thinking this so often that i didn't even need to meta think it i thought people who got old did something fucked up and wrong oh no that they were stupid that they were stupid or like just didn't realize that you could be eternally young and healthy forever and and obviously you're just a fucking idiot because you got old
John: Oh, my best version of that is I thought for a long time that street drunks and hobos had the wisdom of the sages.
Merlin: I call this my Tom Waits phase.
John: Oh, it's everybody's Tom Waits.
John: It's the Bukowski years, right?
Merlin: John, you go to those schools and they teach you nothing.
Merlin: It's just a bunch of blah, blah, blah.
Merlin: You know why?
Merlin: Because none of those teachers have lived.
John: That's right.
John: Really actually lived.
John: You need to go down to Skid Row and find the guys who literally have tire tracks on their face.
John: What?
John: and lay down next to them in the piss-filled gutter and say, tell me, man, what is the fucking secret?
John: And these guys are going to go, I'll let you finger me for a quarter.
John: I remember I was standing down in some soup kitchen line one time, and some guy with one arm walks over to me.
John: And he's got a pack of camel straights in his hand.
John: And he goes, hey, brother, can you help me out?
John: And he holds out the pack of cigarettes.
John: And I'm standing there, you know, trying to be real cool, real street.
John: And I don't know what he's asking.
John: Can I help him out?
John: And he's pointing his pack of cigarettes at me.
John: And I'm like, yeah, sure, man.
John: What...
John: what's going on?
John: You know, and I kind of hold my, like hold my hand up.
John: Like I'm going to kind of high five his cigarette pack or whatever.
John: And he's like, uh, it does help me out here, brother.
John: You know?
John: And I realized he's looking for a, looking for a fire wingman.
John: Let my cigarette.
John: No, he's only got one arm.
John: He can't open his pack of cigarettes.
John: Right.
John: And so, Oh, Oh, Oh, I get it.
John: I get it.
John: I get it.
John: Okay.
John: Oh, you want me to open your pack of cigarettes?
John: I got it.
John: You know, and all these guys stand around like, Oh,
John: So I grabbed this pack of cigarettes.
Merlin: Horrible sound.
Merlin: Horrible sound for a collective group of people to make.
John: Just like six guys.
John: It's raining.
John: We're standing out of the soup kitchen line.
John: And he comes over to me because I'm like the one guy.
John: He thinks I'm just not going to run off with his cigarettes or whatever.
John: But at this point in my life, I'm 17 years old.
John: I've never opened a pack of cigarettes in my life.
John: And I stick my finger in one end of the top of the pack of cigarettes and just pull across the top of the pack like I'm opening a bag of chips.
John: And this guy who's expecting me to open the pack of cigarettes like a guy, you know, you take the cellophane and then you rip the little one side of the foil.
John: You rip it two different ways and open it up and fold it back so that you can tap out one cigarette at a time.
John: You know, I ripped this thing open like a bag of Fritos.
John: And this one armed guy goes ballistic.
John: Yeah.
John: He's like, what the fuck are you doing, man?
John: Why'd you fuck up my cigarette pack?
John: God, you dumb kind of asshole.
John: Stupid bullshit.
John: He grabs the cigarettes out of my hand.
John: Now he's got this.
John: He's got basically like a paper cup full of cigarettes that he's got to figure out how to keep out of the rain and
John: He storms off.
John: He's screaming at me from across the Pioneer Square, you know, like, that asshole over there.
John: I'm standing looking around at these other guys for some support, and they're all... I was so humiliated and so, you know, just like, new...
Merlin: Yeah, you're the fish in the cell there.
Merlin: That just kills your hobo cred if you make a cigarette cup.
John: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
John: It was such a fox pass.
John: But, I mean, my hobo cred was already kind of in question because I had a peach fuzz beard.
John: And I think I was probably still wearing that same patchwork plaid shirt that I thought was so cool.
John: I might have even had a bandana tied around my neck.
John: I mean, I don't know.
Merlin: Whatever it was.
Merlin: Like an eight-year-old in his 50s who likes trains?
John: Yeah.
John: These guys were drinking Sterno.
John: And I was like, hey, fellas, can I help you with that?
John: Street life sure is tough.
John: So how'd you lose the arm?
John: Rah.
Rah.
John: I spent a couple years of my life like that down there like, hey, gee whiz, gee whilkers, fellas.
John: What was Vietnam like?
Merlin: Oh, it's brutal.
Merlin: It was exactly the same way.
Merlin: No, but then when you had your tough times there, you weren't too far off from that.
Merlin: I mean, you probably didn't make that noise, but you made a noise more like that.
John: I made that noise, sure enough.
John: I mean, that's the thing.
John: It doesn't take you long.
John: If that's what you're looking for, you can end up being somebody like that.
John: The thing is, when you see a street person, particularly, or an alcoholic, you know, a lot of street people have legitimate mental problems.
John: But if you want to get to be a street person just strictly as an alcoholic drug addict, you can get there surprisingly fast.
Merlin: Well, especially with the crack.
Merlin: It seems like you could be there inside of a month.
John: Well, the crack or, I mean, there are plenty of people who die of alcoholism in their early 30s, you know, who just drank themselves to death by the time they're 33.
John: So, I mean, it doesn't, you think when you're 22 or whatever that you're kind of playing a game where you have a thousand years to figure it out.
John: But you can make a couple of bad turns and it only takes a couple of like, oopsie.
John: And oh, shit, I lost my job in my apartment in the same week.
John: And now I don't have, you know, now I don't have anywhere to go.
John: And oh, shit.
John: And then I like got an infection on my toe and I don't have a place where I can get dry shoes.
John: Oh, shit.
John: You know, and it's just a couple of things.
John: And all of a sudden you're you're actually in real trouble.
John: Yeah.
John: Yeah, it was funny how fast I went from being a 17-year-old who didn't know how to open a pack of cigarettes to being somebody who, yeah, I could look a couple of different directions and be like, oh, there's no good way that this is going to turn out.
Merlin: But I mean, this is it's a provincial.
Merlin: No.
Merlin: And it's it's to me.
Merlin: It's like I've used that phrase for like provincialism, like is another version of like being this in my case, like a suburban kid where I could I could hold these two ideas in my mind.
Merlin: We're on the one hand.
Merlin: I wanted to be like somebody I perceived to be from a Tom Waits song or maybe like Mickey Rourke in Barfly or something like that wasted.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: But then I also wanted my mom to pick me up because I didn't feel like walking home from the mall.
John: yeah yeah there's and these these two completely two completely like you know uh irreconcilable things well and that is the thing if you if you spend much time with bukowski or uh or kerouac or any of the great drunks they all want their mom to pick them up you know that's the thing they they blow through a lot of moms
John: Well, yeah, that's right.
John: The ones that managed to write their dramatic, elegantly wasted story down, they had so many moms picking them up.
John: You remember Bukowski?
John: Bukowski was such a little crybaby little brat, you know?
Merlin: You think so?
Merlin: Do you really think that's true?
Merlin: You don't think that was a persona?
John: What, the crybaby brat or the tough guy alcoholic?
Merlin: Oh, I don't know.
Merlin: I mean, I think you could talk in the same way that you could probably talk yourself into being a hobo.
Merlin: I wonder sometimes, especially with Hunter S. Thompson and like Bukowski, I read a letter from him.
Merlin: I don't know.
Merlin: I've read a couple of things from him.
Merlin: He was a very, very good writer.
Merlin: I mean, he was not like a deranged man.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: You know what I mean?
Merlin: It's funny.
Merlin: It's the same old thing.
Merlin: It's like, oh, Hemingway drank a lot, so I'm going to drink a lot, and then I'll be able to write The Old Man and the Sea or whatever.
Merlin: I mean, I don't think that's that far off a lot of people who think, oh, you know, I read a little bit of Baudelaire, and now I want consumption or something or syphilis.
John: I think that's absolutely true of Bukowski.
John: I think he thought he would drink himself into being Hemingway, and he turned out to be pretty good at it.
John: The drinking to death part.
John: Yeah, and the being Hemingway.
John: I mean, I think his poetry is great.
John: I mean, his books are all the same, but I think his poetry is some of the best.
Merlin: Well, to me, I don't know.
Merlin: I should come up with a name for this, but like him, Hunter S. Thompson, Joni, Mitchell, Neil Young, Bob Dylan, there are these people who spawned so many horrible imitators that you almost wish they hadn't existed.
Merlin: Like, there's so many people.
Merlin: I like Hunter S. Thompson's writing so much, but I like Hunter S. Thompson's writing.
Merlin: The people who decide to try and ape what they perceive to be his persona and then kind of half-ass their way through this style of writing that didn't have the same editorial care that he did.
Merlin: He was a really good writer.
Merlin: He meant every word of that to sound that way.
Merlin: He wasn't just a deranged guy at the airport.
Merlin: He created that feeling and that tone.
Merlin: And who wrote – did Bukowski write Barfly?
Merlin: Did he write that?
Merlin: Oh, yeah.
Merlin: Yeah.
Yeah.
Merlin: But I mean, you have to have your senses.
Merlin: The problem, you know, it's like William Faulkner wrote, he drank when he wasn't drinking, or excuse me, he drank when he wasn't writing, like either because he was done with the project or because he was, you know what I'm saying?
Merlin: William Faulkner did not sit down and get drunk in order to write.
Merlin: It's like, it's such a, I don't know, it's such a cop out.
Merlin: And it's something that seems so romantic when you're younger, like me sitting there with a hat, I bought a Goodwill and a manual typewriter, like thinking that I was going to be, you know, anybody that has a manual typewriter and a hat.
Merlin: It was ridiculous.
Merlin: Yeah, kids are stupid.
Merlin: So fucking stupid.
Merlin: We can't put them in camps yet.
John: Oh, I think we're getting closer.
John: We're getting closer all the time.
Merlin: I think people are fed up.
Merlin: I've been talking to people about it.
Merlin: I am not the only one.
Merlin: I think the sympathy for teenagers in particular is plummeting.
Merlin: Really?
Merlin: Oh, I do.
Merlin: You know, the whole idea of teenagers, we invented that.
Merlin: That's an invention.
John: Yeah, that's true.
John: That's a technology.
Merlin: Well, you go back to any other century, before the 20th century, and there was no such thing as a teenager.
John: Well, it's not even the 20th century.
John: My mom talks about... The 50s.
Merlin: The 50s.
Merlin: The 50s.
Merlin: Yeah.
John: Being a teenager in the 50s, and she said that there was absolutely no interest among her peers in being anything other than adult...
John: As soon as you possibly could.
Merlin: Because you were a child until you became an adult.
John: That's right.
Merlin: It wasn't like there weren't R-rated movies or something.
John: So my mom, when I think about her life, she turned 21.
John: in 1955 which was the birth of rock and roll and she was living in ohio which was like the heart of where rock and roll really caught fire and she worked at a radio station you know she worked or she worked at a television station but she you know she was friends with djs and uh
John: Elvis and Jerry Lee Lewis and, and, uh, Fats Domino and all this stuff was happening right there.
John: And I've quizzed her a million times.
John: I was like, you know, was there, because when you think about a 21 year old right now, 21 and those are your prime.
John: Like if, if, if there, if there is a rock music scene happening, like, and you're 21 years old, you're in the heart of it, right?
John: That's, that's the beginning of your rock appreciation years.
John: Yeah.
Merlin: Well, put differently, you couldn't fathom a world in which somebody 21 with direct access to rock and roll would not be steeped in at 22 hours a day.
John: Yeah, and she said, that was music and culture for little children.
John: And I was 21.
John: And so I was wearing white gloves and a pillbox hat and was going to... Well, I guess this is right before the pillbox happened.
John: I was wearing adult clothes and I was listening to smooth jazz, which is what adults did.
John: I wasn't going to go sit in a crowd of little girls screaming at some greaser.
John: I was like, well...
John: I hear you.
John: And she's like, this whole business of being a teenager was invented right then and didn't exist before, really, before World War II.
John: And the idea that you could be a 27-year-old teenager, that's only 15 years old.
Yeah.
Merlin: I was so – you know, it's funny.
Merlin: As you get older and you make these connections, you figure out things like, oh, my God, my friend's parent's wedding date is fewer than nine months after – you know what I mean?
Merlin: Like you figure out these, oh, my God, all these things where you go, oh, my gosh, this is not what it appeared to be.
Merlin: Like they were pregnant.
Merlin: She was pregnant when they got married.
Merlin: Or in my mom's case, I suddenly realized, oh, my God, you used to be young.
Merlin: And like this Beatles album was out when you were – she was in her 20s.
Merlin: But I was like, oh, my gosh, did you –
Merlin: We can dad like really into like into the Beatles.
Merlin: And they're like, oh, I mean, and I don't know if this is not what your mom was saying.
Merlin: But in that case, it was like you understand where this is from Southern Ohio.
Merlin: So there's the Indiana influence, as you know.
John: Yeah.
John: Southern Ohio is might as well be Appalachia.
Merlin: Oh, yeah, you bet it might as well be.
John: That's still true.
John: Southern Ohio is Dixie.
Merlin: I've only ever heard secondhand, ever heard people use the phrase race music, but I think that might as well.
Merlin: And yet, ironically, no, you know what I mean?
Merlin: It was something that was déclassee.
Merlin: Or as your pal Colin Maloy would say, it was gauche.
Merlin: It wasn't the kind of thing that an adult would listen to.
Merlin: And so they were really into Nat King Cole.
Merlin: And that was the coolest thing they were into is Nat King Cole after the trio, like him singing.
Merlin: I'm talking about like they were into Montevani.
Merlin: They were into what was called beautiful music.
John: Right.
John: Because that's what you did.
Merlin: That's what you did.
Yeah.
John: Yeah, in fact, I think my mom said the first Beatles song that really connected with her... She said that when Yesterday came out, that was the song of the Beatles that converted...
John: that the whole generation of adults where they realized, oh, these teeny boppers actually are capable of writing beautiful music because Yesterday was a song that appealed across...
John: generation in class and and when that song came out the way my mom describes it you know even my dad who was who was by that time 45 years old even he appreciated that song frank sinatra appreciated that song like it was that was the moment that the beatles grew up and became something that you could that you could say that you could appreciate being something other than just for children you know
John: And that always stuck with me.
John: You think about yesterday as being just one of the many great Beatles songs, but to think of it as a watershed moment in their own career where they were a grown-up band.
Merlin: And that's like the most covered song of all time.
John: The most covered song of all time.
John: Because every single person in the world looks back at their past and wishes they had done it differently.
Merlin: Wow, this is really – this is a good one.
Merlin: This is going to really – it's just coughs and letdowns.
Merlin: Let me ask you this.
Merlin: How much do you worry about fogginess?
Merlin: I am finally accepting the extent to which I just could fucking care less about almost everything –
Merlin: I think it was Leonard Bernstein, I believe, is the one who said that you're not obligated to appreciate any music that was written during your lifetime, but something like that.
Merlin: But right now, I hear everything that comes out, and I sound like the kind of people I hated when I was 16.
Merlin: Even when I hear a really good indie rock band, I'm like, okay, that sounds like a not-as-good version of the Buzzcocks.
Merlin: Or whatever.
Merlin: Now you, this is your part of the industry.
Merlin: You have to know these things.
Merlin: You have to keep up to date, right?
Merlin: Do you fear the foginess?
Merlin: You've kind of always been an old fogey in some ways, right?
John: Well, that's exactly right.
John: I mean, I remember when I was 16 years old, a friend of mine and I were over at his house and he was one of those kids that called his parents by their first name.
John: And it's not because they were hippies.
John: It was because they were they were like, I don't know what I never understood their family family dynamic.
John: But this kid's name was Eric.
John: And his dad's name was Dean and his mom's name was Edie.
John: And he called him Dean and Edie.
John: And we were over at Dean and Edie's.
John: So, of course, we all did, you know.
John: We were over at Dean and Edie's Spurlock's.
John: And his mom...
John: said to us kind of, this is one of those things that I'm, I'm, I'm always careful not to say to kids.
John: I'm always careful not to talk to teenagers this way because every once in a while somebody would say this, some well-meaning adult would say this type of thing to me.
John: And it really, you know, your mind works on it for years afterwards.
John: But she said, she said to me and her son, she was like, um, listen boys, uh, I know your peers don't think you're handsome now, but
John: But you're both very handsome men and you just haven't grown into it yet.
John: But rest assured that from an adult perspective, you guys are both going to be very handsome men and you just relax.
John: Don't worry that you are awkward.
Merlin: Did she actually think that was going to be helpful at anything?
John: Don't worry that you are awkward, ugly, unappealing teenagers because you are clearly going to grow up and be handsome men.
John: And we were both like...
John: And kind of sat, you know, looked at each other.
John: And she said this to us as we're walking out the door, like on our way out.
John: Like, bye, see you later.
John: She was like, oh, by the way, boys, just one last thing before you go.
John: And so we go get in his car and we're both like, uh, and he's like, uh, you know, sorry, my mom sometimes.
John: And I was like, no, no, no, it's fine.
John: It's fine.
John: You know, we're both like churning it over in our minds.
John: We're handsome men.
John: Okay.
John: But we're unappealing teenagers.
John: All right.
John: You know, and at that moment, I knew that I was an old fogey.
John: You know, she planted in my mind the idea that my best years were always going to be in front of me.
John: I was always going to be chasing after the...
John: I'm going to be one of those people that becomes beautiful as he becomes gray.
John: So I've never been worried about being hip, but what I'm noticing now as I get older is that...
John: I have to resist the fatalism that comes with that.
John: With feeling like, ah, well, fuck it.
John: You know, old people get fat, so why not just let it happen?
John: Or like, ah, you kids go run and play.
John: I'll just sit here and sort rusty nails into different jars.
Yeah.
John: You know, like, I have to.
John: Don't worry about me.
John: I got my nail jars.
John: I got my nail jars.
John: I got some screws over here to get to when I can finish with the nails.
John: And I got all these cans.
Merlin: I worry about becoming calcified or inflexible.
Merlin: You know, the same kind of people who said, you know, who looked down their nose at, you know, well, whatever, Jerry Lee Lewis or rap music or whatever.
Merlin: They call it hip-hop now.
Merlin: But, you know, I wonder what I'm missing out on by being the way I am.
Merlin: But then I see teenagers and I get so fucking angry.
Merlin: I just don't want anything to do with that.
Merlin: Like, I want all of you to be put somewhere because everything you're doing is wrong.
John: Yeah, the secret to the fact that I don't understand, I really don't understand video games that require a tremendous investment of time and practice.
Merlin: That's actually, that's a perfect example.
John: You know what I mean?
John: Like, I don't understand them.
John: Yeah.
John: I played video games when I was a kid.
John: I was there at the birth of video games as a kid.
John: I was their target audience.
John: But I didn't make the transition to first-person shooter games.
John: I didn't make the transition.
Merlin: But, John, there were video games.
Merlin: It wasn't like you sat there with a headset playing chess for 16 hours a day.
John: But I fully understand.
John: I see in the culture...
John: I see that immersive video games are simply a thing that I do not understand.
John: I am not in a position to make a value judgment about them because they are simply a thing I do not understand.
John: And there was a while, I think, where I would have said,
John: that they were bullshit.
John: But that is coming from the same voice of somebody that says that Elvis is jungle music or whatever.
John: It's the same ignorance that the only way you can express your ignorance is as angry contempt or whatever.
John: And so I have to step out.
John: I have completely stepped away from the conversation about hip-hop in American culture because I was very invested in hip-hop up to a point.
John: And then it lost me
John: And then I then it went into a realm where now I don't relate to it.
John: There's very little hip hop now that I relate to at all.
John: But just to make any comment about it is just the only thing I can say with authority is I don't understand it.
John: Good luck.
John: God bless.
John: I cannot make a value judgment about modern hip-hop because I have not invested the time to understand it.
Merlin: That's where I am with video games.
Merlin: I at least have, hopefully, the presence of mind to go, there must be something here.
Merlin: I have lots of friends who are really smart.
Merlin: My concern with the video games is I think it's way bigger than I ever expected or ever will get.
Merlin: And I feel like there's this whole thing.
Merlin: It's like I refuse to believe in cars or something.
Merlin: You know what I mean?
John: I was watching a thing.
John: I don't know how I got here.
John: I was searching the internet as you do.
John: And I got to a thing and I got to another thing and I was, somebody was pranking somebody and I was watching a YouTube video of somebody get pranked.
John: And then, you know, over on the side, there's all these like, if you like that YouTube video, you should watch this.
John: And I'm following a chain and I get to this YouTube video where a guy has screen captured a
John: himself playing a video game.
John: And the point of the video is that he is a pirate and other people are playing this multiplayer game.
John: And it's a civilization game out in space where they have battleships and they're sailing from different planets and they're collecting resources and all this type of thing.
John: And he is, he's screen capturing himself stealing somebody else's battleship.
John: And them realizing it because they're all talking to each other.
John: You know what I mean?
John: And I'm watching this video and, and what's on the screen is just gibberish to me.
John: It's like a, okay, we're in outer space and I see little, there are little menus on either side of the screen.
John: And obviously somebody has a collection of battleships somewhere.
John: And, and this guy is kind of typing at the bottom, like now I'm going to steal their battleship.
John: Watch this.
John: And you hear people talking and they're like, wait a minute, where's Battleship X?
John: And you feel the dawning realization that someone has just ripped them off.
John: And as I'm watching this five minute long video, I realize these people have been playing this game for years.
John: And that in this alternate reality, they are completely invested in their identities there.
John: And it filled me with a sense of, it filled me with a deep sorrow in the sense that humankind is not actually exploring in outer space.
John: You cannot, no matter how hard you work, actually have a fleet of battleships by the Tannhauser Gate and watch the sea beams glitter.
John: You know, like there's no, we are not there yet.
John: But these people playing this game are living it.
John: in their imaginations, in this other world.
John: They're living in the future.
John: And when they log off their computer and have to go downstairs and eat their macaroni and cheese, or when they have to log off in the morning and go to work at their job, like reality cannot possibly compare to this, to the intrigue and the dynamism of this online world.
John: And I just was like, oh my God, I don't grasp...
John: I finally grasp the littlest bit of what being really a gamer is.
John: And it chilled me.
Merlin: That's a lot of investment.
John: Well, they're investing all the energy that they would be investing in
Merlin: I guess what made that... I have to guess what made that interesting was that somebody had put a lot of effort into getting that battleship.
Merlin: It was the equivalent of stealing somebody's house or something.
John: Yeah.
John: You were stealing something real from them, which was the time they had put into earning that in this game world.
John: We shouldn't talk about this.
John: That is so fucking depressing.
John: It was nuts.
John: And particularly when games like...
John: figure out ways to have these resources within the game be worth real money in the outside world.
John: You know, I don't know.
John: There are going to be people who are millionaires and what they have done is stolen other people's battleships in fake outer space.
John: And they become millionaires in the real world from that.
Merlin: You can buy some nicer macaroni and cheese.
John: That's already happening.
John: You know, there are already people...
Merlin: thing and this is the shows we're old that we're talking about any of this people are probably rolling their eyes but i know i know they're all our all our listeners that have green hair and nose piercings are like come on granddad understand that not only can you find an automobile and drive it you can hire somebody who for a living drives cars you tell him where you want to go you don't have to feed it not but gas and
Merlin: And he'll drive it anywhere.
Merlin: No, wait, it doesn't stop there.
Merlin: He's got a telephone in his pocket that he can use to make a map show.
John: Holy moly.
John: They're out there.
John: They're cashing their Bitcoins right now to hire somebody on the deep web on the Silk Road to come kill us both with some kind of poison and dart.
Merlin: Maybe they can sell that battleship and have Amazon ship them a hug.
Yeah.
Merlin: I'll sell you a hug for five bucks.
Merlin: How'd that work?
Merlin: What was your net on that?
Merlin: What's your net on hugs?
John: I was making bank on hugs.
Merlin: You could do two, three, four at once.
Merlin: You got economies of scale in those arms.
John: The problem is there's always somebody that comes up and goes, do I really have to pay five bucks for a hug?
John: And I feel like a jerk saying yes.
Merlin: And you say, do I really have to answer you?
Merlin: That'll be $2.
John: I'm like...
John: Here's what I'm going to say from here on out.
John: If you don't want to pay five bucks for a hug, then I give you the hug of my choice.
John: I give you the hug I want to give, not the hug you want.
John: And that's going to dissuade some people.
Merlin: Your problem is you're like a museum and you've got the suggested donation box.
Merlin: You need some way where maybe there's a portcullis or something where they can't even get near you.
Merlin: They can't even ask you questions about that shit.
John: Right.
John: I need a merch girl who's standing there taking five bucks and giving tickets.
Merlin: You need somebody big who says you don't even get to ask John a question unless I tell you across my palm.
John: Right.
John: Across my palm.
John: The thing is, if people want a hug for less than five bucks and I get to grope them inappropriately for my own amusement, then I feel like I'm getting five bucks worth.
John: If they knowingly come in under the new rules that I get to do whatever I want...
John: That's worth five bucks.
John: Are you kidding me?
Merlin: They've opened it to negotiation, not you.
John: That's right.
John: So if part of my hug is that I grab the back of their underpants and pull real hard... Yeah, you get a real good grip on their saddlebags.
John: Yeah.
John: I wouldn't have done that if they had paid me five bucks, but that's the...
John: They were like, let's wrangle.
Merlin: I got my haircut yesterday.
Merlin: And when I was getting my haircut, there's a lady cutting my hair and there's somebody else down.
Merlin: She's watching a little tiny TV with the volume turned up really, really loud.
Merlin: I couldn't see what was on the screen.
Merlin: But, you know, in the 20 minutes it took for this haircut at a deafening volume, they were watching a TV program that is plastic surgeries.
Merlin: And so there's live, like they're showing you plastic surgeries.
Merlin: And as I sat there, and I don't know, I'm like, I'm not super creeped out by stuff, but, you know, I'm getting a procedure here.
Merlin: There's somebody with scissors cutting part of my body.
Merlin: And it was like, every time they come back from the commercial, it'd be like, what you want to see was made disturbing to some, not recommended for children.
Merlin: And then they go, now we're good.
Merlin: You can see as we get in here and we make the incision, we're removing the fat pads.
Merlin: And now we're going to show you by demonstrating on this avocado what we can do with the laser.
Merlin: And if she stays out of the sun, that skin should say, how does that feel?
Merlin: Oh, it feels better than it's ever.
Merlin: fucking blew my mind.
Merlin: There's a TV show where they show you plastic surgery.
John: Have you seen this before?
John: I haven't, but I know that plastic surgery is one of the, you know, everybody has the fantasy that with a little nip and tuck, they will go from being hideous to beautiful.
John: So I understand why that's popular.
Merlin: I guess so.
Merlin: Now I keep thinking about fat pads.
John: What I don't understand is why I spend so much time on the internet looking at like fail blogs about shitty tattoos.
Ha!
Merlin: I let my friends curate that for me, but I do enjoy them when I find them.
John: Yeah, I'm never going to get a tattoo.
John: I know my ship has sailed on that.
John: But why I take so much pleasure looking at other people's curations, like Tumblr pages of people's ill-advised tattoos, I don't know.
John: I don't know why.
Merlin: I like a misspelling.
John: A misspelling in a tattoo or like somewhere where the tattoo started and you could tell that the person didn't have a complete grasp of perspective.
John: Like I saw one the other day where... Like where Tweety Bird's got a goiter?
John: Yeah, or it was an American flag that was flapping in the wind.
John: But the folds in the flag, any fool could tell that if you straightened out that flag, it would be like 15 feet long.
John: And the person who had curated this blog took the time to count the stripes on the flag.
John: And in the first curve...
John: It had 11 stripes, and then it had 14 stripes, and then it had 12 stripes.
John: So it's a 15-foot-long flag, which has different numbers of stripes throughout its length, and it only had nine stars.
John: It was just like, that's wonderful.
Merlin: And for the sake of argument, though, it's a pro-America patriotic kind of flag.
Merlin: It's not about the complex nature of statehood.
John: No, no, not at all.
John: And I think it expressed perfectly that the tattoo artist began the tattoo...
John: with no forethought and said, I know an American flag and I know how this is going to turn out.
John: It's going to turn out awesome.
John: And just drew it like freehand and just was like, I know how this works.
John: That is, that says a lot.
Merlin: That may be why I hate tattoos is I really, I'm always happy to know that I can undo something stupid that I did.
Merlin: And for me, just for myself, like always having that there for almost everything is a great consolation for me.
Merlin: And it's probably the reason I don't have a Thompson Twins album on my back.
Merlin: Do you have a lot of scars?
Merlin: I have two scars that I know of.
John: What are the two scars?
Merlin: I have a very small, tiny, tiny, tiny scar under my nose where my mom accidentally nicked me with her fingernail when she was a kid that she still feels about.
Merlin: And then I have a really cool scar on my leg from where I jumped a ramp and got like a one foot cut on my, no, like a foot and a half cut on my leg.
John: Jumped a ramp on a skateboard?
John: On a bike.
John: Oh, on a bike.
Merlin: Went over the handlebars, yeah.
Merlin: Oh, yeah.
Merlin: What about you?
Merlin: What do you got?
John: I am covered with scars from head to toe.
Merlin: You're like Wolverine.
John: And some of them are gruesome.
John: And those are like tattoos.
John: Those are the thing about me that are like tattoos.
John: Some of them are things that I cannot take back.
John: and that i that i wish i had i wish i could do it over again so that i did not have it's not that the scar itself is unsightly it is that the scar represents now a a point of weakness a physical disability in the making you know like the scar the scar is the last outward sign of of some internal damage that are you talking analogy or in terms of bodily integrity
John: No, bodily integrity.
Merlin: It's weakened the fiber of your largest organ.
John: Yeah, when I was a young person, I put my physical self through the paces.
John: And now that I'm in my 40s, I feel those things now.
John: I feel, and it isn't just like, oh, the barometer's changing.
John: I got a little bit of a thing in my knee.
John: Yeah.
John: It's that there are parts of me that will fail before other parts.
John: Oh, it's miserable.
John: Because they have been compromised.
Merlin: But you think you've got a few good years in you, right?
John: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
John: But, I mean, I watched... Because my dad also wore out his body in the pursuit of physical thrill.
John: And, you know, as he got older, he started to...
John: Did I ever tell you about the time he was 80 years old and we had gone to a University of Washington football game?
John: Have I told you this?
Merlin: No, I never heard it.
John: And we're leaving the stadium and the UW football stadium is there kind of perched on a grassy hill overlooking Lake Washington.
John: And after the game, and our tickets were always way up in the nosebleed seats.
John: You know, my dad, I don't know why the hell he didn't
John: pull some strings or whatever but he felt like being way up in the bleachers with all the undergrads was the only way to watch University of Washington football and so I'd walk up there with him five flights of stairs to watch these football games in the November wind but we were walking across the grassy field after the game and you know it's a grassy hill and it's got trees and the cars are kind of parked on the grass we're walking out to our car
John: And all of a sudden, he trips on a route or something.
John: He's 80, and he goes face first.
John: Down this hill and I'm like, it happens in super slow motion.
John: I'm like, oh, dad.
John: And he's just too far from me that I can get under him or get in front of him and take the brunt of the fall or whatever.
John: And he heads down this hill face first in a swan dive and somehow tucks a shoulder and
John: rolls, like does a full on barrel roll and comes out on his feet.
John: He's 80.
John: He's 80.
John: And I'm standing there like, and he just keeps, keeps walking.