Ep. 75: "Mean Baby"
John: Nothing a cat likes more than being in a hammock.
Merlin: That sounds like some old southern wisdom.
John: That is a little bit of Southern wisdom.
John: I feel like a corn pone inside of a fritter.
Merlin: I'm as existentially conflicted as a cat in a hammock.
Merlin: I kind of like it, but I feel a little off kilter.
John: A little bit like a cat on the edge of a bathtub.
Merlin: I miss the color of the South.
Merlin: I shouldn't say that's a little bit ping pong, but it's, uh, well, I feel, I just told you in the tutor, I feel like a real idiot.
John: Oh, because you set a time signature that could possibly be a time signature in our last episode.
Merlin: John, as you know, I'm not a music theoretician.
Merlin: Theoreticist?
Merlin: Theoreverter.
John: Theoreverter.
Merlin: Theoreverter.
John: Theoreverter.
John: Rorschach.
Merlin: Theoreverter.
Merlin: Yeah, you know, but still, I know there's no such thing as a sixth note that I'm aware of.
John: But you know what?
John: Here's what I did not know.
John: There is such a thing as two-thirds for time.
Merlin: You mean there's an extra slash?
John: Two-thirds four time.
John: Yeah.
John: Yeah.
John: Two-thirds four.
John: And you can also play in four-thirds four.
John: You can play in three-fifths four.
Merlin: Four-thirds four.
Merlin: I need to look at Wolfram Alpha.
Merlin: But wouldn't that be something like 1.3 time?
Yeah.
Merlin: What is that resolved to?
John: Well, that's the good question.
Merlin: Is this like the time signature version of like, like 12 tone or something?
John: Apparently, the third movement of Oh, you're talking about the Boulay song.
John: Yeah, Boulay.
John: It has a portion of the third bar, the third movement.
Merlin: You know what that reminds me of, to be honest?
Merlin: I'm trying to remember the name of it.
Merlin: I think it's Mershton Totenidler by Bo Nielsen.
Merlin: Do you know that part in bar 102?
John: Yeah, right.
John: Well, that's more like in three-fifths over four times.
Merlin: I think it's actually in two-thirds over two, and then bar 123 is in two-thirds over four.
John: Well, you know, there's a lot of room for music theoreticians to disagree about these measures.
John: Because it's all about counting, and you can count things a lot of different ways.
Merlin: Yes, yes.
John: Our song Cinnamon, for instance, is in... I still don't understand that song.
John: It's in 4-4 time.
John: But what are the drums doing?
John: The drums are doing an Oopaw thing, right?
John: No, the drums are in 4-4, the rest of the song is in 3-4.
John: Is it a triplet?
John: And it lines up every 470 miles.
Merlin: Oh, I see.
Merlin: It's what Stuart Copeland calls synchronicity.
John: It's a little bit of synchronicity.
John: Synchronicity.
Merlin: Well, let me synchronicity.
Merlin: Synchronicity.
John: So, you know... Want to hear something corny?
Merlin: Boy, this Bo Nielsen's got a lot of entries on the unusual time signature page.
John: Yeah, I get the feeling that he is one of those sport composers.
Merlin: Oh, it's like math classical rock?
John: Yeah, who's just out there trying to write music because it's possible.
Merlin: Because he wants to be on a Wikipedia page.
John: Yeah, he's doing math because it's possible, not because it's true.
John: Or because it's real.
John: I mean, I guess if it's possible, it's real, but... What were you going to say?
Merlin: Were you going to sing something?
John: I was going to sing, there's a house on my street and it looks real neat.
John: I'm the cat who lives in it.
John: There's a tree by the sidewalk.
John: There's a car by the door.
John: I'll go for a drive in it.
Merlin: And when the wombat comes.
Merlin: Yes.
Merlin: Now that's one of the Stuart Copeland songs, right?
John: That is a Stuart Copeland song and Stuart Copeland sings it.
John: And it is a, I remember being, what would I have been, 13?
Merlin: I think that's on one of the three good records.
John: It is on one of the three good records.
John: And it's one of those songs that, to a 13-year-old aesthetic, a 13-year-old mind, it's just like so awesome, so great.
John: It's the type of song that you play if you are the type of kid that
John: who takes the half rack box from a 12-pack of Schmidt beer and writes dork on it and then makes whoever is drinking, whoever is shotgunning the next beer has to wear the dork helmet.
John: That is the kind of song that you want playing while you are shotgunning a beer wearing a dork helmet.
John: I'm just saying, I'm just theorizing what it would be like.
Merlin: Huh.
Merlin: It just, yeah, as a hypothetical.
John: To be that kid or to be that kind of kid.
Merlin: Well, if it's real, it's rational and true.
Merlin: I think Sting said that on one of his jazz records.
Merlin: I remember I had a... But that song was about his father.
Merlin: And the Russians.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: And yoga.
Merlin: Oof.
Merlin: I had a strange experience a couple months ago.
Merlin: I might have mentioned this, but I saw somebody wearing a cowboy hat that they had made.
Merlin: You call it a half rack?
Merlin: Is that a 12-pack?
John: Half rack, 12-pack, same thing.
Merlin: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
John: Unless you're talking about Stroh's.
John: Oh.
John: And then Stroh's, of course, has the 15-pack.
Merlin: Mmm, Viennese Waltz.
John: Three extra beers and the Stroh's go for the gold 15-pack.
Merlin: Does that have cold-activated bottles and cold-activated cans?
John: No, that's your thing of Coors.
John: You're thinking about the silver bullet for which there is no slowing down.
Merlin: Oh, that's no slowing down.
Merlin: And that's right.
Merlin: And so if they put that in the New Yorker, it would have a diuresis over the second O. Right, exactly.
John: Exactly.
John: Mr. Coor.
John: Mr. Coors.
John: Coors.
John: Didn't you recently call them out for putting an umlaut over cooperation or something?
Merlin: No, it was, yes, but it wasn't even cooperation I made my piece with.
Merlin: Like, they're going to do that.
Merlin: I think it was re-enter.
John: Oh, the second E. Yeah, yeah.
John: If there's two vowels in a row... They're going to diaclick the second one.
Merlin: Man, I'd like to do a code red on whoever is their grammar Nazi there.
John: The problem is that the Chicago Manual style caved, I think, or at least they waffled on the Oxford comma.
John: There was all that waffling over the Oxford comma, and as a result of it, no one knew what to believe anymore.
Merlin: Well, I mean, you know, if you're not going to have the Oxford comma, I mean, well, first of all, oh, God.
Merlin: Can I tell you about the chorus hat?
Merlin: I don't want to talk about it.
John: Oh, no, let's hear about the course.
John: Have you talked about the Oxford comma on one of your other podcasts and you feel like it's not a topic?
Merlin: If it's true, it's rational and provable.
Merlin: So I have to imagine, you know, it's like monkeys in Shakespeare.
Merlin: I have to imagine at some point I've discussed the Oxford comma.
John: Put an unlimited number of Merlins in a room with an unlimited number of grammar books.
Merlin: Well...
John: Eventually he will talk about everything.
Merlin: I'm not going to get to the course.
Merlin: No, no, I want to hear about the course.
Merlin: My daughter started a new activity and we got an informative multi-page sheet.
Merlin: As you know, you get informative multi-page sheets about everything as a parent.
Merlin: You expect to digest it all like it's all equally important.
John: I only know this from the pediatrician who gives you... The baby doctor.
John: Yeah, that's right.
John: It gives you the multi-page sheets that say your child at this age should begin to...
John: vomit in solid chunks instead of just the slurry.
John: Your child at this age should begin to resist when you try and choke it.
John: Your child at this age should have opinions about French cinema.
John: And I read this sheet and it's just like, these are the same people that told me that the contractions were going to come in an even and regular way.
Mm-hmm.
John: And that they were going to start at this rotation, at this intensity.
John: And then over the course of several hours, they were going to mature until they were coming faster and harder.
John: And I went to all those parents' classes.
Merlin: For just a second, I lost track.
Merlin: I was writing down Kors hat.
Merlin: And I lost track for a second.
Merlin: I thought you were talking about contractions like don't and can't.
John: Oh, yeah.
John: Well, that too.
Merlin: It's called Braxton Hicks contractions.
John: I'm talking about Braxton Hicks contractions.
John: Yeah, it feels like a belt.
John: And they trained me for months.
John: Pavlovian trained me to feel like when the baby was coming, it was going to be a predictable and rational experience.
John: That's how they get you.
John: Yeah.
John: The Braxton Hicks contractions started and they were like something that Tesla had devised.
John: It was just like a, it was like a, a lightning ball and they were coming.
John: They weren't anything like they had said in all these many, many classes and all these five page stapled handouts.
John: And I called the doctor, I called the pediatrician and actually had the pediatrician come out of surgery to talk to me and
John: and i said what the hell who took over do you think i must have they just they just put the suction in there and put some saran wrap and just put put some ice in there and just everybody cool it i'll be back in three and he comes out and he's like yeah okay hello what is going on and i said you guys said that it was going to go like this and it isn't going like that and he said oh it's fine every pregnancy is different
John: And I said, that's baloney.
John: You gave me, I went to 40 classes and every, every class told me it was going to be exactly the same.
John: And he's like, Oh, I know, but that's every one of them is different.
John: You're for you guys.
John: It's everything's happening.
Merlin: Maybe that's just to keep you from not freaking out or keep you from freaking out.
John: You know what I mean?
John: Now when they hand me a three page printout that says your baby at this age should start resisting when you choke her.
John: I'm like, I don't believe it.
John: I'm not going to read this.
John: It's just more of this.
John: It's more of this, like the mean, if your baby is the mean baby, I'm
Merlin: and my baby is a mean baby but if she is the if she's the mean baby yeah she will behave predictably otherwise but i mean it boils down to a certain kind of just speculation of like you could expect like you're saying with if you got a curve and you got a mean and a median it's like you know a bunch of the time it kind of sometimes works out this way right two white parents normally white baby yeah do you have do you have concerns every once in a while you're gonna have to you're gonna have to have a you're gonna have to have a conversation you got some white chocolate
John: So anyway, Coors hat.
Merlin: We got this handout.
Merlin: And the handout, my wife and I both noticed completely independently that they'd missed a comma.
Merlin: And so one of the things that you're not allowed to bring is animals, electronic devices.
Merlin: So either there's a missing comma.
John: Electronic devices that belong to the animals.
Yeah.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: And I mean, and then again, once again, do you put the S, you know, after the, anyway, I think the comma would go after the S I'm still, I got to get back to Phil Collins.
Merlin: So I, I, I was walking down the street.
Merlin: This is one of those, uh, I think it's what, uh, Stuart Copeland calls synchronicity.
Merlin: I'm walking down the street or somewhere.
Merlin: I might've dreamed it.
Merlin: And I saw somebody, I believe this doesn't make sense given Florida, but I think it was the first time in my life.
Merlin: I saw somebody wearing an air sats cowboy hat made out of a, a 12 pack.
Merlin: of Coors bottles.
John: So no, no, let me get, let me, let me see if I can zero in.
Merlin: Have you seen one of these?
John: Is this, is this, is this where they have cut aluminum cans and macro made them together into a, no, I'm sorry.
Merlin: I should have been clear.
Merlin: It's like, no, it's not like a pop top vest.
Merlin: No, no.
Merlin: It's where you take, you take the box, the, the emptied Coors, Coors, uh, cold activated box and fashion it somehow into a cowboy hat.
Merlin: Now this on its own is pretty strange because
John: Can you do it with one or do you need multiple Coors boxes to make the hat look right?
Merlin: Because it depends on how lonely you are.
Merlin: I mean, because you're going to want the logo.
Merlin: Oh, you're saying like you want a 10-gallon.
Merlin: I don't know what that would be.
Merlin: So that's going to Wolfram Alpha.
Merlin: But anyway, and then that very same day, maybe a day later, I saw that you could buy one on the Amazon Marketplace.
Merlin: I'm not sure how I arrived at that.
Merlin: It might've been one of those.
John: A beer, a half rack cardboard.
Merlin: And it was Coors.
John: Cowboy hat.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Pretty weird.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Anyway, there's no such thing as 13 six time.
Merlin: I feel dumb that I said it.
Merlin: And I just, I regret the error.
Merlin: I've been doing that a lot lately, John.
Merlin: I, you know, my, and my daughter leaps on it every time I say something stupid.
Merlin: I confuse some Avengers.
Merlin: I'm sure I do it on the show all the time.
Merlin: And I say something stupid.
Merlin: God, 59, 48 time.
Merlin: I got to close this page.
Merlin: I do it more and more.
Merlin: I'm hoping that you do it too.
Merlin: I mean in a selfish way.
Merlin: I just find myself sometimes saying something.
Merlin: I think I might be a little like slow motion strokey.
Merlin: Like I find myself saying things that after I've said them and it's been pointed out to me, I realized make almost no sense.
Merlin: And I'm not talking about my usual not making sense.
Merlin: You know what I mean?
Merlin: Do you ever take that at all?
John: Well, the thing about you, Merlin, that is so extraordinary is that you are capable of such a torrent of ideas that for the most part do make sense.
John: That is what's astonishing.
Merlin: Yeah.
John: Thank you.
John: I don't have that problem because it takes me a long time to say everything that I am trying to say because I take all this time in between.
Merlin: You choose your words carefully and not just because you're pedantic.
John: Yeah.
Merlin: We'll set that aside for a minute.
John: That is one reason.
Merlin: You're here to help people, John.
Merlin: But I slow it down.
Merlin: Yeah.
Yeah.
John: And what, what, you know, I've said multiple times because lately Merlin, I have been reading a couple of transcripts of our show.
Merlin: Um, because I have you, you're so quotable.
Merlin: You're, you, you really speak in like written paragraphs.
John: Well, part of that is the slowness.
John: But reading some of the transcripts of the show, there are things that you say.
John: I'm sure that the person who transcribed the episode had to slow the tape down.
John: You know, it took him a half an hour to transcribe one exchange between us because you say so many things and so many of them are on point and they are referencing back and referencing forward and you are moving through time like a worm through a cheese.
John: And...
John: Is that really a thing?
John: Yeah, you should see worms move through cheese.
John: They're like time travelers.
John: That's just science.
John: But I'm reading the transcripts and I'm thinking...
John: You know, I was I was a part of this conversation and there were there are whole stretches of it where I was really I was like the jet ski rider.
John: And and I'm throwing cans of course.
John: And you know, and you and you were the lake.
John: And I was just I was just I was just going on the wavetops.
Merlin: John, I'm the sidekick, and I'm so okay with that.
Merlin: I come in.
Merlin: I don't know if you know this, but I edit the program.
Merlin: I select the show art.
John: I thought you didn't edit the program.
Merlin: Oh, I put it in GarageBand and hit a button.
Merlin: I think that counts as editing.
John: Half the people that have a production credit on Wikipedia, that's all they did.
Merlin: I mean, you think Andy Warhol sat there with the Starnberg essay or whatever it's called, that big film editing machine?
Merlin: I doubt it.
Merlin: He just points it at the Empire State Building and gets a haircut.
John: If you look at the production credits just from the Long Winters records, there are a lot of people on there that did less.
John: Also, maybe I'm your Ken Stringfell.
Merlin: I'm always punching in.
John: Yeah, although Ken...
John: god rest his soul you can't mourn the undead that's not classy i'm so i i'm so i i you know i'd just like to say a nice word about ken who's been dead all these centuries
Merlin: Sleeps on an air mattress of dirt.
John: I don't like to speak ill of the undead.
John: But no, Ken is a great producer.
John: Part of it is that he doesn't need sleep and feeds on teens.
John: But he gets great guitar sounds.
John: Okay.
John: Did you know that the lyrics of Synchronicity, the song, actually foreshadow Sting's solo career?
Merlin: I thought they were a palindrome.
John: I'm not talking about synchronicity 2.
Merlin: Oh, you're talking about with one breath, with one hope, you will know synchronicity?
John: Yeah.
John: A starfall, a phone call, it joins all synchronicity.
John: It's so deep, it's so wide, you're inside synchronicity.
Merlin: That's a foreshadowing.
Merlin: The shadow came first.
John: Yes, this is Dream of the Blue Turtles, but in advance that we could have ever conceived of it.
John: When Synchronicity came out, you had no foresight of Dream of the Blue Turtles or beyond.
John: That's the only thing that kept me hanging on, yeah.
John: But if you had really studied these lyrics...
John: You know, almost imperceptible.
John: Something inexpressible.
John: Science.
John: Insusceptible.
Merlin: We should have seen it coming.
John: Logic so inflexible.
John: Causally connectable.
Merlin: Oh, come on.
Merlin: It sounds like a Burger King commercial.
John: This is, and it's really, I mean, I've heard this song a billion times.
John: I don't think I ever took the time to see what Sting was talking about.
John: And what he was talking about was, yeah, tantric fucking.
John: Oh, right.
John: Riding around in the back of a jaguar.
John: Yes.
Merlin: yes and you know like get the little uh the indian cum vice right you just clap it down that's right and none of this is good now none of this there is no political solution i'm gonna have troubled evolution have no faith in constitution there is no bloody revolution but see i can forgive that that could be i mean that fits the song in it men lyric or whatever but oh here we go but
John: But but I'm going to have to go back and see what the first sign or maybe some of our listeners.
Merlin: No, I can I can help with that.
John: What is the first indication that you had that sting would eventually be become the sting that we know?
John: Where is the evidence in the in the police?
Merlin: Well, for example, he did not write the lyric ton of white boy guilt.
Merlin: That's my problem.
Merlin: Obstacle to joy.
Merlin: One reason to use some drugs.
Merlin: if he'd written like that no no chance you probably don't recognize that you know it's it's bullshit i realized that when i saw him as a bellhop carrying people's bags oh wait into the fancy hotel is this that uh brimstone in marmalade is this that movie where he's the creepy guy no dune what are you talking about
John: No, no, it's his star turn.
Merlin: Oh, Ace Face, Ace Face.
John: Yeah, Ace Face, his star turn in Quadrophenia.
Merlin: Is that a good movie?
Merlin: I feel like I've started it and it seems weird.
John: No, it's not.
John: Did I ever tell you about the first time I saw Tommy?
Yeah.
John: Did you get that M. Margaret picture I sent?
John: Did you have a 3x5 card there that's like a hot one that's burning a hole in your hand?
Merlin: No, I'm just going to write all this down.
Merlin: I want to come back to when I taught my daughter to curse.
Merlin: And the first interview I read with Sting, I'm writing this down.
John: The first time I ever saw Tommy, there was a double feature at the University of Alaska Anchorage in the student center.
John: And some kid from my junior high school
John: was like, hey, you want to go to this movie with me?
John: And I had never... I mean, it was like a student activity at the university, and we were going to sneak in.
John: We were in eighth grade, I guess?
Mm-hmm.
John: And we go in, and the student center's all full of kids, and you can smell pot smoke in the air.
John: And it felt very dangerous.
John: We were clearly too young to be there.
John: And it was a double feature of Tommy and Heavy Metal, which had just come out.
John: Wow.
John: And Tommy was first, and Heavy Metal was the headliner.
John: And we were there to see Heavy Metal.
John: Did you know what was on the soundtrack?
John: Did you know the soundtrack?
John: Well, yeah, I guess we already owned the soundtrack because we were... It's a weird soundtrack.
John: We were Devo fans.
John: Oh, okay.
John: So we got the soundtrack because of Devo.
John: And then, you know, that Sammy Hagar track's pretty killer.
Merlin: And isn't Cheap Tricks on there, too?
John: Cheap Tricks on there.
John: There's some good jams.
John: That's a great movie.
John: But so we had to sit through Tommy, and I had never seen a musical.
John: Certainly, I'd never seen a rock musical.
John: And it chilled me to the bone.
John: It scared the living daylights out of me.
John: Tommy did.
John: I kept waiting for it to make sense.
John: I kept waiting for a sympathetic character.
John: Uh, it, it really, it, I can't say that I was too young.
John: I just was, I didn't, I didn't get it.
John: I didn't like it.
John: It took me, it took me multiple viewings of Tommy to, to, uh, to dig.
Merlin: It's a really weird movie.
Merlin: It's, it's, it looks, I don't know how to describe this.
Merlin: And off the top of my head – I mean because the thing is when I saw it, I was already such a huge Who fan.
Merlin: And I mean I had just – and Tommy for me was like, wow.
Merlin: I mean I had just – I had listened to it so many times and I learned as well as I could play along with the songs.
Merlin: The movie just – it looked weird and it was too concrete in some ways.
Merlin: I think probably Elton John in giant shoes playing pinball like didn't help.
Merlin: Although Tina Turner in The Iron Maiden was –
Merlin: That helped me.
Merlin: That'll serve me well at sea.
Merlin: But yeah, I remember looking in retrospect kind of like the Blues Brothers.
Merlin: You know, Blues Brothers has that weird like almost like TV movie kind of look to it.
Merlin: And in retrospect, I think about like – speaking of ace-face and gangs, I watched this movie the other night called The Firm about soccer hooligans.
Merlin: It was pretty good.
Merlin: And I've been thinking more about like gang movies actually lately and –
Merlin: I don't know why I mentioned this, but sometimes movies – it seems like The Firm, for example, was based on this BBC show, like a one-hour or two-hour TV show with Gary Oldman?
Merlin: Newman?
Merlin: Gary Newman, right.
Merlin: It was a two-boy army show from – and I thought this is a good movie, but it was probably a lot better as a TV show because of the dramatic compression of it.
Merlin: You kind of need to stretch it out into a movie.
Merlin: And with Tommy, what makes Tommy so great – I mean I love the little – like what that guy can do with a sus four as a callback.
Merlin: You know what I mean?
Merlin: It becomes almost symphonic.
Merlin: And when you put it in a movie with like Eric Clapton walking down a church aisle, it's weird.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: So you found it disturbing.
Yeah.
John: I'm still disturbed by the first impression of Tommy.
John: And even the cartoon boobs in heavy metal could not erase the trauma of watching Tommy all the way through.
John: And, you know, like a drunk, pilled-out Ann-Margaret rolling around in a bed full of beans.
John: I mean, phew.
John: But I still watch the Blues Brothers probably three times a month.
Merlin: I really, really, I like that movie.
Merlin: And I, until I think about it, I don't realize like how often I still constantly quote the blues brothers.
John: Yeah, you can't, you can't not.
John: And yet I introduced Jonathan Colton, our oft referenced friend on this podcast.
John: I introduced him to the Blues Brothers.
John: As an adult, he had never seen it.
John: 40 years old, he'd never seen the Blues Brothers.
John: And it's just like, come on, really?
John: You didn't see the Blues Brothers?
John: Because why?
John: Because you were too cool when you were 10?
John: I wanted to beat him.
John: I wanted to beat him down with a boat paddle.
John: He deserved to go to Yale.
John: Yeah, that's exactly right.
John: And you know what?
John: Yale is full of people like that.
Merlin: I am not surprised at all, John.
Merlin: You encounter an extraordinary amount of people from Yale, and I just think it's a shame on every level.
John: If you stood in the center of Yale on their quad, they probably don't even know a quad.
John: It's probably a quint.
John: It is a quint, yeah, or a sext.
John: uh and you stand there with it so you can play dnd on it you stand there with a clipboard and you ask every person walking by with the with a knotted pink scarf or knotted pink sweater around you say excuse me have you ever seen the blues brothers i bet 80 of them would say no
John: And they would say, you know, they'd say, no, like, no, that's a movie the servants watch.
John: But anyway, I introduced Jonathan Colton to the Blues Brothers, or rather, I insisted that he watch it, which is the way I introduce people to things.
John: And he wrote me, and here's what he said.
John: Are you ready?
John: Meh.
John: He said, meh.
John: Yeah, this is a movie with Cab Callaway.
John: Ray Charles.
John: Ray Charles.
John: Yeah, I mean... Chaka Khan is in that movie.
Merlin: Aretha Franklin?
Merlin: Steve Cropper.
Merlin: Pee Wee Herman?
Merlin: That must have been infuriating.
Merlin: I can't imagine you... First of all, anybody who says meh to you... What can you do?
Merlin: He was across the country.
John: And that's why he did it.
Merlin: He really relies on that.
John: I would have put a carton of milk down the front of his pants.
Merlin: Meh.
Merlin: I'm sorry.
John: Anyway, you taught your daughter to swear.
Merlin: A lot of chicken for dinner.
Merlin: Oh, yeah.
Merlin: I don't – you know what?
Merlin: Who cares?
John: No, I want to know because I intend – I'm already teaching my daughter how to swear by swearing around all the time.
Merlin: See, I thought it was going to be okay to say crap, but today she said crap on the swing set and I felt kind of bad and I realized what a hypocrite.
John: Said crap to another child?
Merlin: No, I read it to her in comics.
Merlin: It's my substitution for another word.
Merlin: And I do say crappy a lot.
Merlin: And in my head, that's like, what?
Merlin: Crappy.
Merlin: Ah, boy, what a crappy comic this was or something like that.
Merlin: And I don't realize that she can hear what I'm saying.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: And they emulate that.
Merlin: Now, we said this ritual, we have rituals.
Merlin: I imagine you have rituals.
Merlin: One of our, you know what, this is really boring.
Merlin: But one of our rituals, we go to the walk-in beer cooler ever since she was an infant.
Merlin: We would go to the walk-in beer cooler at the lucky.
John: You have one of those at your house?
Merlin: Not that I'd show you.
Merlin: I've been to your house.
John: I never saw a walk-in beer cooler.
Merlin: And ever since way before she could talk, we'd walk in there and it was even one of our rituals.
Merlin: We'd visit the lobsters.
Merlin: We'd walk into the beer cooler and we'd walk into the Coors.
Merlin: What's that?
John: You put her inside the beer cooler and pretend you're going to leave her there.
Merlin: There's not that much I have to teach her, but what I have.
Merlin: And we walk up to the Coors and I would say, I'd say, look, cold activated bottles, cold, you know, along the lines of, you know, real tomato ketchup, cold activated bottles, cold activated can.
Merlin: I say, Ellie, who buys this?
Merlin: And of course she couldn't talk yet.
Merlin: So I go, dumb asses.
Merlin: And then eventually now she picks it up and I always tell her before we leave the beer cooler.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: This is just our special word that we only use in the beer cooler.
Merlin: I saw – I read an interview with Sting and I want to say – so to answer your question, I'm not sure where it started because there needs to be a name for this phenomenon, which is like, oh my gosh, you are such an important part of my life, artist, that like you could roll in the strength for a pretty long time.
Merlin: You know, Weezer being a great example, made two of my all-time favorite records and then a lot of stuff that made me go, huh?
John: Yeah.
John: Well, not just that, but they have committed full-on crimes against humanity that you are blind to or continue to forgive them for.
John: I'm going to write that down.
John: So you think there should be a Twitter Nuremberg?
John: There really should.
Merlin: We should have a tribunal.
Merlin: Put them online.
Merlin: Yeah, put headphones on them.
Merlin: And let everybody on Twitter try them.
John: Try them for crimes against humanity.
Merlin: According to their fucking peers.
Merlin: Also, I watched Downfall the other night.
Merlin: Have you watched that?
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: OK, we should return to that.
Merlin: And it was an interview and I want to say Musician Magazine.
Merlin: And it was right around the time it was publicity for Blue Turtles.
Merlin: And it was one of those – another one of those Bruce Willis moments where in the – I think I want to say – I'm probably going to get this wrong.
Merlin: But my memory of it is that in the introductory paragraph where the overwriter wants to establish the scene, I think he was in Bare Feet.
Merlin: And he had a yellow legal pad.
Merlin: There's a copy of Lolita sitting around, of course.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: He's read a book.
Merlin: And a rhyming dictionary.
Merlin: And in retrospect, that seems kind of important.
Merlin: Think about that.
Merlin: Think about the political solution, the troubled evolution, the faith and constitution, the bloody revolution.
John: Hello.
John: You're absolutely right.
John: He's rhyming shun, shun, shun, shun.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: And what was your example?
Merlin: Yeah.
John: Oh, whatever it was from Synchronicity.
John: Oh, Synchronicity 1.
John: Synchronicity 1, right.
John: Well, I mean, imperceptible, inexpressible, insusceptible.
Merlin: See, I think he tries too hard.
Merlin: I think, you know, we talked about the Sarises, the Sarai, not too long ago.
Merlin: Like, I think he tries way too hard.
Merlin: I think he's trying to jam a lot of fake smart into a rock song.
Merlin: And then he realized that he was above that.
John: Yeah, well, this was the problem with me in my early career when I was up against some other indie rockers who were using big words.
John: And I was coming up short.
John: People were saying, like, oh, the Long Winters are, you know, it's smart indie rock.
John: Kind of in the family of these other really smart indie rockers like...
John: X, Y, and Z. All of whom I knew to be stings.
John: They were all stings.
John: They were all saying inexpressible, imperceptible, insusceptible.
John: Barrel boy.
John: And I was mad all the time.
John: During that part of my life.
John: I am not mad anymore.
John: You don't write about Dickens at all.
John: Pirates.
John: Pirate music, right?
John: Now, now, now.
John: Okay.
John: I'm not saying anybody specifically.
John: I'm just saying that is, you know, that is a kind of, it's a genre that music writers like to put, musicians that write lyrics that are complete sentences, they like to put them all together and say, these are the ones, these are the musicians who write complete sentences.
John: They are a type.
John: They're a genre.
John: And I was so mad because, you know, there are a lot, I can use a lot of 11 cent words, but I, but they don't belong to song lyrics.
John: I don't think, come on, insusceptible.
Merlin: Yeah.
Yeah.
Merlin: um that's just you know what i'm thinking now i mean i'm trying to keep up with the conversation even as my brain churns on on police lyrics but you know the final one i'm talking about you you must have had this with certain bands where in the case of the police like i lost my virginity listening to the police i'd feel that way about uh fresh prince dj jazzy jeff as in parents just don't understand
John: That first DJ Jazzy Jeff and Fresh Prince record, which, I mean, I think the entire career of Will Smith is, in a way, indefensible.
Merlin: The entire thing?
John: Well, musically.
John: I don't think you could go take his whole catalog and make a playlist out of it and be proud of yourself.
John: I don't mean to bust your bubble.
Merlin: Girls of the world ain't nothing but trouble.
John: that's a pretty tight jam out of 12 inch of that but I can go I can do the entire parents just don't understand start to finish and every time you know somewhere about three quarters of the way down I start to feel like I'm about to lose my virginity again
John: you start having flashbacks it's uh so the the fresh prince is like your trigger word yeah that's right i feel i all of a sudden i'm i'm at a sex on the beach party and there are a bunch of girls that have their their bangs spray painted into these giants like rocks of gibraltar you're still listening to that at 30 that's interesting ding where's my i can't even reach my bell
John: Yeah.
John: Thanks.
John: But yeah, you know, big, big bangs.
John: And then there's this one girl across the room whose bangs are unadulterated.
John: And I was like, who is that girl?
John: Every other girl in this place has teased her hair.
Merlin: She had natural bangs.
John: And she just was letting her hair just be like she washed it, and then she probably put some conditioner in it, and it was black hair, and it was just sort of hanging down, curly.
John: I was like, what's going on with this girl?
John: No hair product.
John: And at the time, that seemed like...
John: Almost the highest endorsement you could give a person.
Merlin: That is punk rock in its way.
Merlin: And our listeners who are certainly younger than us will not remember this.
Merlin: But in the time I think you're talking about – I used to – I think this is in parlance – hair muffins.
Merlin: Like you would have these things that involved usually mousse and then in girls' cases usually like a curling iron.
Merlin: And they would produce this puffy pastry of hair.
John: Correct.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: I mean, to quote Josiah Bear, I mean, most of the women at the time had three different haircuts.
Merlin: And the men did, too.
Merlin: But the women, you know, you'd get like a perm.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: A perm.
Merlin: You get a perm.
Merlin: Step one.
Merlin: Step one.
Merlin: Step one.
Merlin: Get a perm.
John: And then step two is you iron flat your front hair.
John: Right.
John: And then you curling iron it into a muffin.
Merlin: Yeah, yeah.
Merlin: I mean, it looks almost like half a fountain, but they're real delicate and have to be maintained.
John: Right.
Merlin: Like humidity, you know?
John: And then you couple that with high-waisted jeans.
Merlin: Like an Esprit striped top with no sleeves.
John: That says Esprit across the top.
John: Sleeveless sweatshirt.
John: High-waisted jeans that maybe have a proto finish.
John: They got flaps.
John: Acid wash.
John: I've taken those off.
John: New style color finish.
John: And then shoes.
John: I'm going to say pink pumps.
Merlin: Or candies.
Merlin: Usually the pants are a little short.
Merlin: You get a little extra ankle.
John: It could also have been stirrup pants.
John: Oh, yes.
John: Like, this was what we had to deal with, you and me, Merlin.
John: It is, yeah.
John: Our primary, like, our sexual burgeoning, our blooming.
John: And women were dressed almost universally.
John: Young women were dressed like they were climbing out of a clown car in that James Bond movie where he goes to the circus in France.
Merlin: Where Roger Moore is a clown?
John: Yeah, where Roger Moore dresses up like a clown.
Merlin: I hate that scene.
Merlin: What an undignified scene.
John: It was such a terrible movie and all of the, and that's how, that's how young girls dressed when we were teens.
John: Like Roger Moore.
John: Like Roger Moore with giant, giant polka dot bow ties.
John: And then there was this moment, this moment I remember we're looking around one day and all of the girls were wearing tight clothes and everybody looked great and
Merlin: And I was like, what the fuck?
Merlin: You got Roman.
Merlin: That got taken away from you.
Merlin: You did not have that.
Merlin: You missed that window.
Merlin: Your window opened into a spree.
John: I could never be 16 again.
John: And when I was 16, I was being shown...
John: Through the outfits of my peers, this completely ambiguous sexuality, this version of femininity that you couldn't possibly be attracted to.
John: You know underneath all of the gel and the acid wash and the ill-fitting clothes that are young girls and you are a young boy.
John: You know you're attracted through the haze.
John: But they were like, they were, it was like a, it was like their fathers had all banded together and devised the, the, like from head to toe, the best possible way to make them sexually unappealing.
Merlin: I've been sitting here while, while you're finishing that excellent sentence, I've been sitting here trying to come up with a funny example of like, well, you might as well have dressed him up like Dennis the menace.
Merlin: I was like, you know what?
Merlin: That would be totally fucking hot compared to the ways Mr. Wilson.
Merlin: I mean, next door.
Merlin: That would have been hotter.
John: If a girl was dressed like Mr. Wilson, that would be hot.
John: There's nothing less hot than acid-washed waist-tied jeans and overthought hair.
Merlin: My girlfriend had earrings that looked like lightning bolts, not the brand.
Merlin: I'm not talking about Nina Cherry.
Merlin: I'm talking about five years before that.
Merlin: The geometry.
Merlin: There's a lot of geometry.
Merlin: There's a lot of angles.
Merlin: A lot of angles.
John: A lot of big, big, big, big, big, big shoulders.
Merlin: Oh, God.
John: Why are you saying this?
John: Big shoulders?
John: I do.
John: Who thought that a good look on a 16-year-old girl would be a jacket with giant shoulders?
John: It's like, and I was training my penis during this time to know what it liked to be able to function in the world.
John: And I'm looking around and I'm like, big shoulders, geometric earrings, like ill-fitting pants, stirrups, sweatshirts.
Merlin: That does not add up, John.
Yeah.
John: and i and i was just like what am i and then then across the room i see a girl who has not put any product in her hair and i'm like it's she's from another dimension she's from another time she's wearing she's wearing army pants and you know and i was and my course was set but what if everybody had just been dressing like normal people back in the 80s maybe maybe my life would be totally different
John: I remember my friends saying, I came to school one time in just some clothes, just some clothes, some normal clothes.
John: And my friends staged an intervention, like a mini intervention in the hall.
John: And they were like, dude, are you immune to embarrassment?
Merlin: What?
Merlin: I'm sorry.
Merlin: So what counts as your usual kind of preppy Stan Smith look?
John: No, I mean, I'm wearing, I was wearing some army pants that I got at the army Navy surplus store and I was wearing a shirt.
John: I don't know.
John: It might've had that.
John: I went through a phase where I found a whole roll of stickers that were little rainy beers with legs and
John: Remember the Rainier beers?
Merlin: No, no.
Merlin: I think that's exclusively like Washington State thing, isn't it?
John: Rainier beers, they did a commercial where there were a bunch of giant Rainier beers that had legs and they were running through the forest.
John: And your goal as the consumer was to chase these wild Rainiers.
John: Yeah.
John: It sounds like you got the DTs.
John: And you're like, the Rainiers!
John: And somebody would see them and then they'd be all the way across a meadow.
John: And then they would run into the woods and you'd be like, get them!
John: The Rainiers!
John: Was it animated?
John: No, no, they were live.
John: Oh, that's chilling.
John: Live action, full-size Rainier beers.
John: Dumbasses.
John: And so they made, somebody made a bunch of stickers that were like actually fabric, little fabric Rainier beers with legs.
Merlin: I think I know the kind.
Merlin: You mean they look almost like patches, but you kind of slap them on?
John: Yeah, they look like patches, but they're stickers.
John: Right.
John: And so all my friends had alligators on their shirts.
John: And so this shirt might have had a Rainier beer in place of the alligators.
Merlin: This is when you meet the free banged lady?
John: This is just this day in high school where I was wearing army pants and maybe a polo shirt that might have had a Rainier beer instead of an alligator.
John: And these guys were like, you are humiliating us.
Merlin: They did like a Rainier intervention.
John: It was a little bit like a scene from Pretty in Pink.
John: Like, um, John, really?
John: Are you going to be a loser or are you going to get with the program?
John: And the phrase they used was immune to embarrassment.
John: Are you immune to embarrassment?
Merlin: If you send out signals that you don't want to fit in.
John: And yet, you know, there it was across the room.
John: This girl with her hair down.
John: She probably was just wearing some normal tennis shoes.
John: I mean, we would we look we look like you say that like that's a small thing.
John: Me and this girl probably looked like the only two by today's standards.
John: We would be the only two normal people.
John: If you looked at if they made a movie about it.
John: Right.
John: You would look at me and this girl and you'd be like, oh, there's two people that they forgot to put in costume.
Merlin: I was watching the great American classic Hot Tub Time Machine last night.
Merlin: And of course they – oh god.
Merlin: There's two kinds of people in the world.
Merlin: Well, probably five.
Merlin: But there's hangover people and there's Hot Tub Time Machine people and I am definitely in the better group.
Merlin: Hot Tub Time Machine people.
Merlin: Oh, it's a far superior movie.
Merlin: But they play super fast and loose with the references.
Merlin: Like you wouldn't have Safety Dance –
Merlin: And like those in excess songs in the same period, whatever it's supposed to be in 1986 or seven.
Merlin: But I think they kind of nailed in the production design.
Merlin: They kind of nailed a lot of the look because it really was that stupid.
Merlin: I mean, you know, by the time it was in the early to mid 90s, the 80s seemed much more dated than the 70s.
John: Oh my God.
Merlin: And now looking back, whatever, you know, 25, 30 years later, it's, it's, it's, it's ridiculous.
Merlin: But even tennis shoes, like you had to have a certain girls had to have a certain kind of Keds, but they didn't even wear Keds.
Merlin: If you were going to wear Keds, if you're going to wear tennis shoes, you had to wear Keds unless you were like running track, but otherwise you'd wear like these weird flats, like those, those weird, like white shoes.
Merlin: Everybody look like Daisy duck.
John: Yeah.
Merlin: Okay.
Merlin: So anyway, I had red boat shoes, but like a, like a Sperry top sider.
John: Yeah, but they were red.
John: I had topsiders.
John: But were they red?
Merlin: No.
Merlin: They were brownish.
John: Right.
Merlin: And so was Fresh Prince playing when you saw her?
Merlin: It wasn't If You Leave.
Merlin: It wasn't playing.
John: No.
John: Here's the thing you may not know about me.
John: I lost my virginity a little bit late.
John: I was not a 16-year-old.
John: I was not a 15-year-old.
John: I remember I dated a girl one time who told me her big loser virginity story.
John: About how she and her longtime boyfriend who had long black hair to his belt were running in a field of flowers or something.
John: I mean, this girl, half the time I thought she was hallucinating when she talked.
John: But she had this identity, this idea of herself that she had lost her virginity in a field of flowers with her 15-year-old one true love.
Merlin: Later on, she was like... Who looked like the singer from Soundgarden.
John: Yeah, exactly.
John: He looked like Chris Cornell.
John: Later on, she told me the boy she was dating right before me was a heroin addict who rode his motorcycle up the stairs of their house in San Francisco.
John: Their Knob Hill Victorian that they were squatting in.
John: Rode his motorcycle up the stairs, and then she and he and some other girl...
John: made passionate love all night together and it was the freest any of them had ever been this is before live journal yeah and then and then she and i are going out and i'm like well i work in a pizza parlor and uh i understand i understand physics i understand that motorcycles don't go up narrow steps we both work in a pizza parlor and i'm having a hard time squaring that away with all of these amazing stories you're telling me think that at the time
John: Well, no, at the time, every time I read an interview with Kurt Cobain in the newspaper where he said that he just wrote all the lyrics to Nevermind on the bus on the way to the studio, I took him at face value.
John: And I took this girl at face value.
John: I was like, wow, your last boyfriend was a heroin addict who rode his motorcycle up the stairs of your Nob Hill mansion.
John: And during that, and I had enough sense that I could think back what Shirley, that was only six months ago.
John: Before she left San Francisco and six months ago in my own personal timeline, I was sleeping in a Ford Aerostar parked in a carport and I was scraping people's bongs for a living.
John: And I'm like, well, then why are you going out with me?
John: And she would, you know, she'd kind of look out the window and say, I'm not even sure.
John: And I'd be like, man, I feel like the pressure's on here to be the worst boyfriend you ever had.
John: I really feel like... Oh, she's almost daring you.
John: Yeah, I feel like you want to see a guy ride his motorcycle up the stairs of your house?
John: I'm going to do you one better.
John: I'm going to ride my motorcycle up the stairs of your heart.
John: laughter
Merlin: Oh man.
Merlin: But you know, you're, I mean like I, I was so susceptible to stuff like that.
Merlin: Maybe just, maybe just because I was insecure, but it was so easy for me to be drawn in to something like that where I go, Whoa, Whoa, Whoa, Whoa.
Merlin: You know, like you could tell me anything, the craziest stories.
Merlin: And because I was so provincial, I would sit there wrapped.
Merlin: You know what I mean?
John: Yeah, for sure.
Merlin: You know, like when you meet people who work in the service industry and talk about their boat or whatever, and you're like, wow, that sounds like an awesome boat.
John: Yeah.
Merlin: When you leave 7-Eleven at the end of your shift, it must be great to go yachting around the Pitlagescote River.
John: Yeah, that whole, the braggadocio is one thing that at a certain point you realize, like all the guys that you were sitting around with in high school who were telling you about the remote control helicopter that they built that could fire real missiles, you realize that they were bullshitting the whole time.
John: And yet when you when you're getting that kind of when you're getting that kind of flim flam from a girl that you're interested in.
John: Right.
John: And she's flim flamming you about the time she lost her virginity when she was 15 in a field of flowers with Chris Cornell.
John: You're like this.
John: That is the female equivalent of I built a remote control helicopter over the summer that fired real missiles and I killed a cat with it or something like it's the same level of bullshit.
Right.
John: But I was not prepared for it.
Merlin: But on a practical level, even today, like if you had a liquidity event in mind, you would still play along today.
Merlin: I mean maybe you as the mature John Roderick wouldn't need that liquidity event enough and you would go home to your Braille Playboys.
Merlin: But I think back then you would go, whoa, this is dangerous.
Merlin: And like even if it's BS, it's pretty great BS.
John: yeah yeah it's a there's a little bit of like whatever you say miss but in my own case my own peculiar route through life i uh i was busy trying to reform girls for most of my teenage years huh when they would when they would come to me and say like um have you ever kissed a girl behind the gym and i would look around and we would happen to be standing behind the gym
John: And it would register what she was doing.
John: Instinctively, what I would say is, oh, you don't really want to kiss me.
John: I think what you want is...
John: To be friends, maybe?
John: Or to have the respect of gender equality?
Merlin: Still in that phase we're talking about.
Merlin: You were helping people in a different way then.
Merlin: I was helping people and I was... You were like a kind of gender-inormative Pygmalion.
John: I was killing them softly with my lack of song.
Merlin: First of all, I'm guessing most girls at that age, that took some guts to say something like that to a guy behind a gym.
John: Unless they were fast.
John: They weren't.
John: Then they would look mortified and they would try and play it off like they had been kidding.
John: Or whatever.
John: And then it would be awkward between us forever after.
John: So anyway, I did not lose my virginity until I was almost 20 years old.
John: 19 and three quarters.
John: And even then, it was just because I happened to be at this party...
John: I had no intention of losing my virginity.
John: I didn't realize that that was a thing that I was going to have to choose to do.
John: I was out there saving girls.
Merlin: That night when you were preparing and putting on deodorant and choosing a shirt, you didn't have that in mind.
John: Well, in fact, that day, I had gone four-wheeling in a national park with a friend of mine and had gotten arrested.
Yeah.
John: and uh i'd gotten arrested and then when the and i was arrested by a uh by a national parks employee oh how humiliating and by well no i mean those national parks guys i mean he's a gun carrying oh national parks cop he's a steward that's right he is a he is literally a ranger
John: a ranger in the, in the Lord of the Rings sense.
John: Got a good.
John: And he arrested me, uh, partly because I was so baked that I got out of my truck and I turned the locking, uh, hubs on my four wheel drive truck.
John: But I had been, I had been so drunk the night before that I had, I'd turned the hubs.
John: And so I turned them off.
John: I, I unhooked the hubs thinking I was hooking them.
Oh,
John: And then I was four-wheeling, but I wasn't in four-wheel drive, and so I got my truck stuck.
John: And then the National Park Ranger came and arrested me for four-wheeling in a national park.
John: And then he searched me, and he found that I was covered in drugs.
John: And he pulled out.
John: And so anyway, my friend, my good friend, Peter, who sometimes listens to this podcast, he was, Peter was videotaping the entire arrest.
John: Oh no.
John: And at a certain point, the park ranger pulls a pipe out of my pocket that I had made out of a ski pole and
John: So it was like a beast pipe.
John: It was like a foot and a half long made out of a ski pole.
Merlin: Did you have it on your person?
John: I had it in my large jacket.
John: My large Gore-Tex jacket that had a multitude of pockets.
John: And he was frisking me and he found this thing.
John: He pulled it out.
John: And on the videotape, you can see him hold it up and look at it and look at me and look back at the pipe just like, what the?
John: And then he goes to break it over his knee.
John: But the pipe is made of aluminum and it's just... Is that on the video?
John: It's on the video.
John: It's just short enough that he goes to break it across his knee and it didn't even bend.
John: He just creamed his knee with this thing.
John: And it made him so mad that he handcuffed me and he put me in the back of his blazer and drove me down off of this mountain.
John: Drove me down to Wasilla, actually, where Sarah Palin is from, with my friend Peter following behind in my truck videotaping the whole truck.
Merlin: He videotaped it and got out of the whole thing unscathed?
John: The thing about Peter is he was my Teflon friend.
John: Peter and I could be standing next to a burning building, and Peter would have the gas can in his hand, and a cop would walk up and arrest me.
John: And Peter would be like, okay, Johnny boy, I'll bail you out when I get the, you know.
John: Oh, so anyway, I gave Peter my ATM card.
John: Oh, right.
John: Peter took the ATM card and went and bought himself dinner.
John: before he got the money out to bail me do you feel like in retrospect were you unclear with him about what the card was for no he videotaped himself having dinner and he and then the you know he's like hey i'm loving this sandwich thanks a lot johnny boy and he's like he's doing it as a as like a you know that was the kind of that was the kind of sport we played on one another
John: So I'm like, nobody knows, wasting away in this jail.
Merlin: You got super drunk one night.
Merlin: You were high and four wheeling in a national park that day.
Merlin: You got arrested.
John: Yeah.
John: And then so Peter finally comes.
John: He bails me out of jail.
John: Now it's like, I don't know what time it is.
John: 10, 11 o'clock at night.
John: And we're all the way out in Wasilla.
John: And we know about this party that is literally called a sex on the beach party.
Merlin: You mean as in the mixed drink?
John: The mixed drink.
John: Because the girls that are throwing the party are like, he's sex on the beach.
John: We're making these drinks.
John: And so Peter and I drive to the sex on the beach party.
John: Me just freshly sprung from jail and relieved of all my pot and other drugs by the ranger.
John: And we roll up into this party and it's all these girls with the stirrup pants and the high hair.
John: And then there's this girl across the room with black curly hair and no product in it.
John: And I was like, hmm, what do you know?
John: There's a girl here like me.
John: And little by little, everybody else, you know, it's four o'clock in the morning and everybody else is passed out or, you know, vomiting in the driveway or whatever.
John: And she and I are like kind of the last men standing.
John: And Fresh Prince is playing.
John: And she says something to me.
John: I don't remember.
John: You know, we're sitting on the couch.
John: And I turned, you know, how old am I?
John: I'm 19 years old.
John: I mean, come on, right?
John: I turned to her and I rap some fresh prints at her.
John: And like a rap along with the record, which I happen to know.
John: And that is I mean, and she was not 19.
John: I think she was 17.
John: And she got a look on her face that was not impressed.
John: But that this is and this is most of the girls that I've slept with in my life.
John: They get a look on their face that is not impressed, but that thinks that's pretty cute.
John: you you you made an impression yeah and then and then uh then i lost my virginity to her and it was very definitely a case where i don't i don't think she was a virgin at all and i think that she didn't think i was either so i was you know i was under a little bit of pressure to pretend that i was not pretend that this was not like a singular moment did she know that you've been in jail that day
Merlin: I mean, at that point.
John: I'm pretty sure it was the first thing Peter said when we walked in the door of the party.
Merlin: But he doesn't have a tape of you guys having intercourse, right?
John: Well, he does have a tape of himself barging into the room the following morning and waking us up, tangled up in her bed, videotaping us and saying like, wake up, Johnny boy.
John: And he may jump on the bed.
John: I'm not sure.
John: This is what kids have been doing for thousands of years.
Merlin: Are you pretty sure Peter's real?
John: This is one of those fight club things, is it?
John: I know for a fact that he's real.
John: Yeah.
John: The number of, you know, Peter and I met, he went to a different high school than I did.
John: He went to West Anchorage high school.
Merlin: Oh, the good Ozzy Osbourne one.
John: That's right.
John: I went to East Anchorage high school, which was the low rent of the two original high schools.
John: West, West was the first high school in Anchorage.
John: And the people that went there thought that they were going to the Yale of public high schools of Anchorage.
John: Like they really did.
John: They acted like they were, they were somebody special.
Yeah.
John: and peter peter and i went to different high schools we barely knew each other we knew each other from like some student congress uh event or something but hardly like a boy's state kind of thing yeah boy's state right that type of thing we met we met there but we didn't didn't know each other and then uh i was hitchhiking across the country and after high school and i was up at middlebury college visiting a guy another guy i didn't know
John: And those guys kicked me out and he said, you should go down to Rutgers.
John: My friend Peter is going there.
John: And I hitchhiked down to Rutgers and just barged in on him and ended up staying in his dorm room for like three weeks.
John: And then we were, we were, we've been friends ever since.
Merlin: Have you kept in touch that whole time?
John: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
John: The number of events, the number of adventures that he and I went on in a very brief four-year period where neither of us were really living in the same place most of the time.
John: But every time we were together, we would go on some kind of singular.
John: We went to Europe together.
John: We went...
John: uh, we lived in Washington DC together.
John: Like we did a lot of, we did a lot of things because Peter is a, he's a, an adventurous guy and a good friend.
John: Although the type of guy, A, that will take your credit card and buy himself dinner while you are languishing in jail.
Merlin: I think, you know, can I just say, if he's finished bailing you out and he's edited the tape down, you know what?
Merlin: Go enjoy a sandwich.
Merlin: But, you know, put John first.
Merlin: I mean, it is your card.
John: That's not how he, that's not how he rolls.
John: He was, he let, you know, and I'm sitting in there like, and the sheriff is kind of like running his, running his keys up and down the bars.
John: Like, so it looks like your friend split on you.
Merlin: So it was bail though.
Merlin: You had to still – you know what?
Merlin: That's a derail.
Merlin: No, I had to go back and deal – I had to deal with the crime.
Merlin: But now you had a little experience.
Merlin: I got two thoughts on this.
Merlin: First of all, like isn't it – in retrospect, if what you're saying is even 40 percent accurate and I'm sure it is.
Merlin: You have a great memory.
Merlin: But doesn't it seem pretty bananas?
Merlin: Like after – like in my case, I'll speak for myself.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Speaking for you too.
Merlin: But like months can go by and kind of not that much really happens.
Merlin: Like there's not that many things where you go, I've got a pretty crazy story about the day I looked at YouTube or whatever.
Merlin: But like it doesn't seem so strange in retrospect.
Merlin: Maybe it's the intensity of the memory that like you could have so much happen in 48 hours.
Merlin: Doesn't that seem crazy in retrospect?
John: Well, and particularly, I mean, when I was 20 years old, I could tell you the top 10 times I was closest to death.
John: And every one of those stories would have been like, what?
John: No way.
John: Seriously?
John: I had 10 good stories about hanging by my fingernails.
John: And now, 24 years later, like eight of my top 10 best stories about being closest to death are the same as they were when I was 20.
John: Well, that seems good.
Merlin: Kind of.
Merlin: I mean, isn't that kind of a good thing?
John: It does.
John: You know, I put most of those stories together between the time I was 15 and 20.
John: I mean, five years.
John: And it's been five years.
John: I mean, in the last five years...
John: I've been working on this macaroni art here, and it's still not done.
John: It's all spread over the floor of my office here, making kind of a macaroni George Washington.
John: You know, good things take time.
John: Well, I'll tell you.
John: But I'm not going to tell that story five years from now.
John: Live fast, die young.
John: What's crazy is there are a lot of people who die...
John: of those adventures when they're 22 or 23 or 17, you know, who die.
John: And then they don't.
Merlin: It doesn't kind of seem like the odds.
Merlin: That's, that's, that's the thing.
Merlin: It's like, when you're saying all of this, it, that's, it kind of blows my mind.
Merlin: Uh,
Merlin: So like you were just saying, eight of your ten best stories are from before you were 20.
Merlin: Doesn't it seem not to be morose?
Merlin: Well, yeah.
Merlin: My best sex stories are all from later.
Merlin: I'm not a librarian.
Merlin: But yeah, doesn't it seem kind of crazy that given the curve, the trajectory that you were on, I don't know.
Merlin: It must just seem pretty weird that you would make it out of that.
John: Well, it is...
John: It's one of the reasons that a lot of the hand-wringing that goes into talking about teens and the culture that we are raising teens in and how morally bankrupt it is and how video games cause violence and how we're not teaching our kids the right sexual politics and all this stuff.
John: And that consumes a big part of our national dialogue.
John: And the reality is that, I mean, 17-year-olds have a kind of death wish.
John: You can tell your kid every day not to hang his head out of the sunroof and try and drive his car with his feet at 110 miles an hour.
John: But right now, somewhere in America...
John: That's happening a half a dozen times.
John: There's some kid right now driving his car with his feet 100 miles an hour with the headlights off on a dirt road.
John: And you can talk about it being part of the culture or his parents didn't raise him right or any one of a million things in it.
John: And it's really none of those things.
John: It's just, I mean, I've told you, right?
John: When they instituted the three strikes law.
John: up here in washington i would open the newspaper and i would read these articles about like oh this kid 24 years old just got sentenced to life in prison because he had his third strike and i would read the description of the three strikes and i'm just like man i have done every one of those things i did all three of those strikes and
John: Worse than that kid.
John: And I just didn't get caught.
John: And it's not that I didn't get caught because I was smart or fast or I just didn't get caught.
John: There just didn't happen to be a sheriff driving by or there didn't happen to be, you know, I missed the phone pole by a hair's breadth.
John: Really?
Merlin: I mean, like you would even look at that and you would see yourself but realize it was just kind of dumb luck.
John: Absolutely.
John: I mean, you read those three strikes.
John: I mean, they don't they don't prosecute people that same way anymore, but you'd read these three strikes laws and it's like the first strike was he was 17 and he stole his grandmother's car.
John: And joyriding it, he wrecked it.
John: And to teach him a lesson, his grandmother pressed charges.
John: And they tried him as an adult because he had already gotten into some trouble smoking pot in school.
Merlin: And every person in that chain didn't do it out of meanness.
Merlin: They did it out of thinking that it was going to set this kid straight.
John: Yeah, and then his second... I mean, don't you think?
John: Yeah, absolutely.
John: His second strike...
John: was breaking and entering because he and some friends were drunk and they were out in the woods and they broke into a cabin and
John: and uh stole some liquor out of the liquor cabinet but the neighbor down the road saw a light on in the cabin and called the troopers and the troopers came and they were too drunk to run and so that's his second strike but they prosecuted it as a breaking and entering because his dad wasn't a lawyer and he you know and he got nine months in jail which he served and
John: And then he got out, and then his third strike was that he was selling ecstasy, and he's 21 years old.
John: He was selling ecstasy at a rave, and he sold ecstasy to some 16-year-olds, and he was 21, and it was a felony charge, and that's his third strike, and it gets life in prison.
Hmm.
John: And I and I read and there's so many articles like that or there were where you just run down the list and you're like, dude, there was no he never even fired a gun in the air.
John: Like there was no he never burned anything down.
John: He never led police on a chase.
John: I mean, all three times it was just like pretty much falls in the category of.
John: To me, at least, at the time, it seemed like innocent hijinks.
John: Like, oh, yeah, you broke into a mountain cabin?
John: Come on, who hasn't done that a thousand times?
Merlin: It wasn't like three hostage situations or three bombings or something.
John: Yeah, no one ever got hurt, and it was some low-level minor league drug shit, some minor league breaking and entering.
John: I mean, come on.
John: I broke and entered.
John: into a lot of places and never took anything other than like a bowl of ice cream.
John: And half of the time I left a note, but like I needed a place to sleep for a minute.
John: It was a mountain cabin.
John: I was out.
John: I was between, I was between beds or whatever.
John: There's a million reasons why you might find yourself living in a shotgun shack and
John: you might find yourself in another part of the world.
John: And, um, and every one of those, you know, the number of cars that I borrowed and maybe got high centered on a stump outside of golden Colorado, um,
John: hypothetically or or maybe you know ran into some wetlands and and in a lot of cases like either either kind of got away with it or didn't or didn't get prosecuted for it and all that stuff it's just crazy let alone the kids that were doing that and zigged instead of zagged and died
John: You know, I've told you about the friend of mine who was who left a party and like cutting through backyards, hopped a fence and got his pants caught on the on the fence and couldn't get his pants dislodged and and passed out and froze to death.
John: What?
John: And it's like, he's a friend of mine.
John: And they found him in the morning, like frozen solid, hanging on this fence by his belt loop.
Merlin: And you must be thinking, like, you've done so much stupider, willfully stupider stuff than that.
John: Come on!
John: I mean, like, you know.
John: We used to climb up, and that's another thing, my buddy Peter and I used to climb up on the second story of this cabin that was surrounded by logged area, and we would jump off the second story of this cabin and just free fall face first and land in the snow.
Merlin: What?
Merlin: From like 15, 20 feet up?
John: I mean, yeah, the peak of a two-story cabin.
Merlin: Oh, my God.
John: And, you know, we would, like, swan dive.
John: But there were, which is like, okay, sure, there's five feet of snow, and none of us ever got hurt.
John: But all around this cabin, there were stumps, just like tree stumps, and we never landed on one.
John: But you wouldn't know.
John: I mean, the snow was just deep enough that you wouldn't know where the tree stumps were.
John: So you'd jump off the roof of the cabin.
John: And what about the time that you just land...
John: a chest first on a three inch tree stump or something but again it's another kind of dumb luck stupid just stupid luck and the so so i mean the number of the the top 10 times that i uh could have died all those good stories involve actual motorcycle crashes or like freight train hijinks or gun play like bad scenes where hilariously i avoided dying but
John: But the shit where you're just hopping over a fence in the middle of the winter or we were snowshoeing across a frozen lake one time and the lake started to break.
John: Lake started to go and we were running and the ice was heaving and water was kind of chasing us across this lake and because we were on snowshoes we weren't
John: We were staying up.
Merlin: Did you know it was a lake when you were crossing it?
John: Oh yeah, we knew it was a lake.
Merlin: It feels different when you're walking on it.
John: Well, there are no trees.
John: You're walking through the forest and then you come to an area that is a frozen lake.
John: It looks like a lake except it's frozen
John: So why would you do that?
John: Because it's a big lake and you're trying to get to the other side of it.
John: Okay.
Merlin: You don't want to go around.
John: You don't want to go around.
John: And you can walk across a frozen lake on snowshoes and it's not a problem except these are these situations like I was describing where we would land on a float plane or land the ski plane on the swamp.
John: Because the swamp is generating all this methane and the springs are keeping the lake never completely freezes and you can't tell one from the other.
John: And we're halfway across this thing.
John: You know, when you're walking on frozen lakes, they crack.
John: You hear the cracking.
John: But it doesn't mean that you're going to fall through.
John: But in this case, like, it cracked and then big, big panels started to move.
John: Like, we were on a piece of ice that was, you know, 50 feet across and it started to go.
John: And we're running for the edge.
John: And it starts to, you know...
John: It starts to tilt and slide, and we jump and hit the next section, which starts to crack and break and tilt and slide.
John: And the snowshoes are keeping us on top of the snow, so we're not...
John: You know, if we had just been in boots, we would have gone into this lake, which is, I'm not describing it very well because this lake was in the middle of nowhere.
John: It's, you know, it's 100 miles from anywhere.
John: And if either of us or if any, if we had gone in, it would have been, that would have been the end.
John: There was nobody there to rescue us and there was no, they would never have found us.
John: You know what I mean?
John: You would have just gone in under the ice and gone forever.
Yeah.
John: and so all that kind of stuff where you're like that doesn't even that's not even on the list of stories that's just like one that's just a day in the life but there are people who go out and never come back and and they're on a list of they're on a list of mysteries and
John: And it does give one pause, particularly on the 400th consecutive day that I'm sitting in my computer looking at bringatrailer.com and trying to imagine if I can fit into an Alfa Romeo, that I have earned this leisure...
John: by somehow surviving all these... Like you're a dumbass emeritus.
John: Yeah, that's right.
John: I am the retired director of the dumbasses of America, and I'm sitting in my dotage here, just kind of squandering my...
John: my life squandering my adult life that all these amazing adventurous crazy kids are deprived of because they either died or are in jail for shit that you know shit that was just they just zigged when they should have zagged
John: And I don't have any sense that I was saved for a reason or that I was... That's the problem.
John: That I survived because I was smart.
Merlin: Well, it wasn't like there was one time, you know, where you led some kind of like a clean and godly life and then one time you prayed and it turned out better than you'd hoped.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: I mean, there's no fucking reason you're alive.
Merlin: It's completely bananas.
John: Well, I mean, I swear to you, open up the Sunday paper and there will be some article about a 17-year-old girl in a...
John: Volkswagen Cabriolet that her father bought her as a graduation present who, along with three friends, went off the road and they were thrown from the car and they're dead.
John: And you're just like, how do you prevent that?
John: You don't.
John: I mean, you cannot buy her a Cabriolet.
John: So she does it in a used Honda Civic or whatever.
John: It's just like some people don't make it.
Merlin: The guy who ran sound at the place where all of our bands played, you know, typical kind of local sound man and friend of the owners.
Merlin: And he was at a party one night and he jumped off a diving board when there wasn't like water.
Merlin: And then he got – he was just – from then on, he was like in the Stephen Hawking situation with like the little chair with the battery and stuff.
Merlin: And, you know, not to be morose, but I mean, God, I – in retrospect, I've done such –
Merlin: I'm a piker compared to you.
Merlin: I have not played on the same level you're playing at.
Merlin: But I think everybody who's under 25 does shit that will harrow them.
Merlin: Is that a verb?
Merlin: They'll blow you away.
Merlin: They'll make your scrote suck up into your body when you think about how close you were.
Merlin: Here's the other thing.
Merlin: These are just the ones you know about.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: Setting aside the like you step off the curb and some idiot hits you.
Merlin: But I mean like all the times where you like made some step that a even 30-year-old person would go, what the fuck were you thinking?
John: Yeah.
Merlin: I mean we all have these.
Merlin: And I saw this article.
Merlin: I don't know.
Merlin: I mishmash all these turns out articles.
Merlin: But two things I remember reading the last year or so.
Merlin: One of them is – I think it might be my shrink actually that said this – is there's like this kind of –
Merlin: important middle part of your brain that doesn't really finish forming until you're like in your mid twenties.
Merlin: Um, where campus could be, that's, that's the, uh, the little seahorse.
John: That's where the hippos live.
John: It's where the hippos get a college.
Merlin: I'm giving you a bell in my head, in my corpus callusum.
Merlin: But you hear these turns out stories.
Merlin: There was one a few months ago about the fact that teenagers are like – not only are they kind of not done baking brain-wise, but there's a certain – you have to Google this.
Merlin: But there's a certain kind of chemistry that people in their teens have that kind of makes them take risks.
Merlin: Like you're kind of hardwired to be a dumbass at a certain point.
Merlin: It's kind of astonishing that anybody makes it long enough to lose their virginity, let alone get arrested.
John: Yeah.
Merlin: I mean it's kind of – you know what I mean?
Merlin: It's like if we didn't have all this great healthcare and airbags, it's –
Merlin: it seems like there would be a lot more of them.
Merlin: And it's the same kind of thing that makes you, maybe it's the thing that makes you want to join the army.
Merlin: Maybe it's the kind of thing that makes you want to base jump.
John: Like right now, I guess it varies a lot, but I mean, it's the, it's the, it's the, it's the fundamental, like it's, it's what's so dichotomous about us is that we are so hard to kill and yet so easy to kill.
John: And it's, it's one of the things that I, that's profound about having a child is just like,
John: You see how resilient a human being is.
John: They're very hard to injure, and yet at the same time, you can turn around and just one false move.
Merlin: Oh, right.
Merlin: I mean, my kid got away from me for 30 seconds at a Target last week, and I almost lost my mind.
Merlin: I mean, I felt like such a weird helicopter dad.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: But I mean like – and I really don't want to sound glib about this.
Merlin: But you think about, God, the horrible loss.
Merlin: Like we talked about dry drowning.
Merlin: I don't know if you actually Googled that.
Merlin: But the kind of horrible like, oh, God, you can never see it coming kind of thing that will take a child's life.
Merlin: But then you also think about like one guy who's like 22 or 23, like being kind of a funny high jerk at a party.
Merlin: And now like –
Merlin: The guardian part of it is he's going to live, but he's got to have a little straw and a chair with a battery.
John: Yeah.
Merlin: Like for the next like 60 years.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: And it's like that's the part where like, you know, when I was getting like, like, God, you know, I don't have many stories like yours, not by a long shot.
Merlin: But in retrospect, a lot of things that given my background were extremely close calls.
Merlin: You know, we're like getting busted and busted or almost busted for drinking or drugs.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: And, like, I think about, like, how they could have been a little bit different.
Merlin: You know, just – if that had gone just the slightest bit different, you know, let alone that, like, you know, I was not a drinker and driver.
Merlin: I never have been.
Merlin: But, you know, like that kind of thing, like, you know, you just hear these stories, these chilling – God, this is entertaining.
Merlin: Those horribly chilling stories about somebody –
Merlin: Who's just a fucking kid and they're, and they're being like us and they're being silly and they run through a stop sign and like, you know, uh, kill a sophomore with a promising future and like, and like the rest of their life, they're just going, what the fuck?
John: Like, well, just to take this, just to really shift gears on this conversation.
Yeah.
John: and really put the pedal to the metal really cold activate it i'm gonna i'm gonna pop the tab on my can of guinness and it's gonna fill it's gonna that's gonna make the guinness little thing came out of the tap uh the warm tap of a english um is this whole business of like you turn around and your kid is gone
John: You're at the playground, you turn around and your kid is gone.
John: And you didn't do anything wrong.
John: You were just there and they were there and then they're gone and you never see them again.
John: How do you contextualize that?
Merlin: I'm so good at generally not thinking about that.
Merlin: Like I have to say for as insecure as I am and as weird and helicopter-y as I am, I don't obsess about that.
Merlin: And I have – because I am so anxious a lot of the time, I actually do pretty well sometimes unless my friend is yelling at me to call 911.
Merlin: I generally do pretty well in a slightly stressful situation because I tend to go straight into like, OK, finally.
Merlin: I have something for this – all this focus that I have.
Merlin: This will be useful.
Merlin: And so I'm at Target and I said, listen, we got to go.
Merlin: I'm going to start walking this way.
Merlin: And she wasn't there and – in this case.
Merlin: But I stopped for a second.
Merlin: I said, wait a minute.
Merlin: Like I do know as I have counseled my kid, the main thing to remember is not to freak out.
Merlin: Like there's nothing that's ever been made better by panicking.
Merlin: And so I stopped for a second.
Merlin: I got a little logical and I realized how far even out of –
Merlin: I sound like Tommy Lee Jones.
Merlin: Like even at like a sprint, how far she would go.
Merlin: And I thought, well, I'm going to risk my dignity and I yelled her name really loud but not crazily like three times.
Merlin: And then I walked toward where I thought she would be.
Merlin: And you know the deal on being lost, right?
Merlin: When you're lost like –
Merlin: Like stay in one place, right?
Merlin: So I didn't go too far beyond the perimeter and I found her in 30 seconds.
Merlin: And then I was suddenly relieved and then all the stress of my regular life came back.
Merlin: But in that case – but I haven't had too many of those.
Merlin: But like now she goes places and takes field trips on buses and you go like, oh, you just –
John: Yeah, you put her in the hands of some other person who's got their own list of times.
Merlin: But now here's – this is our crazy unformed brain.
Merlin: It's like you can – you certainly know this.
Merlin: You can sit around and like process that and overthink that all day long and does exactly jack shit about reality.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: Uh, the equivalent of a drone could come along at any time, like just stupid shit just happens.
Merlin: And, and, and, you know, and there's like, it could be both of us killed in a crosswalk, you know, I mean, not to be morose, but the thing is, um, I don't know.
Merlin: I think you can't obsess about that stuff too much or you get, you get really weird.
Merlin: And I think you generate a level of anxiety in your kid.
Merlin: It's not useful for anybody.
Yeah.
Merlin: Yeah, it's like I say as though I'm great at it.
John: Are you familiar with the great man theory of history?
Merlin: You know, you talk about it a lot, but I don't think I've ever gotten a an according to Hoyle exegesis of that.
John: So I would take the great man theory of history is just that this was very out of fashion.
Merlin: John's is very out of fashion when you were in college.
John: That's right.
John: Very out of fashion.
John: And it turns on the idea that Charlemagne and Napoleon, that these kind of singular people, Joan of Arc.
Merlin: Fucking French.
Merlin: Fucking three fucking French people.
John: That's right.
John: Because all history went through France.
John: It all went through Aachen when Aachen was part of France.
John: But in any case, all of history turns on these giant pivot people.
John: And it was very unfashionable for a long time in the university.
John: But in my own personal history, I look back and I think, if I had not met person X...
John: And instead of having met person X, had met person Y, would my whole life be different?
John: Because as you're searching for meaning, as you're searching for a narrative in your own life...
John: these tentpole people like oh yeah right i only lost my virginity to one girl and and in my case in my case i got lucky if you're lucky you just lose it to one i didn't i didn't ride my motorcycle up the stairs and lose my virginity to two girls i just had the one and i got lucky in that case but you know i feel like
John: I feel like my high school girlfriend, who was a wonderful, productive member of society— The mulatto Irish girl.
John: Yeah, and I'm sure that she votes in all the elections, and she probably pays her taxes with a minimum of complaint.
John: But, you know, if I had gone a different way, if I had met a different person or if my high school girlfriend had been a different person, I think my life would have been a lot different.
John: And it's the same kind of idea.
John: And now that I'm looking at my kid, you know, I want her first boyfriend to be somebody nice.
John: And I know I can't do anything about it.
John: Certainly, I can't do anything about it now.
John: And all you can do is try and make her a good person and hope that she gets lucky.
John: You know, it's not that I chose wrong.
John: It's just that I didn't get lucky in the high school girlfriend sweepstakes.
John: Like, that's the trick.
John: Like, I didn't choose wrong.
John: I chose correctly, and luck wasn't on my side.
John: And that's the...
John: in in my own life i can i just shrug i for the most part shrug but when you have a when you have a kid and you look at her future and you think like oh my god luck luck is gonna play into this somehow i'm trying to do everything right that just won't do and you're gonna roll into some school and there's gonna be some guy and he's gonna seem awesome
John: Right.
Merlin: And it's just... Boy, he really seems to love kids.
John: It turns out he doesn't.
John: It turns out he's not awesome.
Merlin: I thought, you know, you will handle this so much better than me.
Merlin: I know.
Merlin: But, I mean, I've actually thought about that a lot.
Merlin: And I'm reluctant to say anything because I don't want to sound careless.
Merlin: But I really don't want to sound careless.
Merlin: But, you know, I mean, the one thing I try to keep in mind is...
Merlin: I don't know.
Merlin: Just that, I mean, I don't know if you've ever noticed this about me, but sometimes I can be a somewhat anxious person.
Merlin: Wait.
Merlin: Hang on.
Merlin: Which one am I?
Merlin: Wait a minute.
Merlin: You're the one who designed my T-shirt, Driven by Fear.
Merlin: Turned on my VCR.
Merlin: Same one I've had for years.
John: Driven by fear.
John: Driven by fear.
Merlin: Driven by fear.
Merlin: I think that's what Stuart Copeland calls.
Merlin: Anyway, I – but I mean like you could probably – if a cynical person could see this as playing the odds.
Merlin: But in the – with the prospect of what I could potentially pass on to her with my ridiculous amount of anxiety, like I – and there's no way I can't.
Merlin: I used to think that I could – I used to think that I could successfully not pass on not simply my own anxieties but the anxieties that were visited upon me and became mine.
Merlin: from other people I have to imagine on some level this is super personal and I should shut up but I mean like I think about like you and your dad like there must be things about your life you wish were different you love your wonderful late father but there must be certain things where you go like I wish I could go in and kind of scrub through this video a little bit and change a couple things about it
Merlin: Because certainly it had an impact for the positive in some ways, but there's probably things you'd like to do differently.
John: I think I would have been a bass player.
Merlin: Really?
John: Yeah.
Merlin: I think if you're a bass player... You would have lost your virginity a lot earlier.
John: I think if you're a bass player, singer, songwriter, you can control a band from the puppet master chair.
Merlin: My name is Mud.
John: Whereas a singer-guitar player, you're just like...
John: you're like the honda civic of people yeah you're really you're relying on all these mechanics to tell you like what you know to run a diagnostic on your car and tell you what the chip says and you're just sitting there with your fucking guitar and your c chord and your g chord and you don't know you don't know what they mean you know you're just like you're like uh okay i'll pay whatever i'll pay whatever it costs just please just play my song and
Merlin: I just want to drive out of the garage with my dignity intact.
John: Yeah, but if you're the bass player singer, then I don't know.
John: I just feel like I could have.
Merlin: I can't think of a great example that comports with what you're describing.
Merlin: You got Les Claypool.
John: That's the thing.
John: The guy from Winger, Kip Winger.
John: Oh, you got Lemmy.
John: Lemmy.
John: But the thing is, McCartney, right?
John: Yeah.
John: It's a good example.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: I mean, I think he is like Lou Barlow.
Merlin: I think he is at heart a guitar player.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: I know he's famous for bass.
Merlin: Did you notice his bass got louder and louder over the years?
John: Well, that was the whole thing.
Merlin: By the time of Silly Love Songs, it was literally all you could hear.
John: Yeah.
Merlin: Okay, I'm going to get past this one thing, and then we can chuck and jive.
Merlin: Just the one thing, all I'm going to say is that I'm trying to let go of this meta-anxiety, which is this idea that I have any kind of control over these things I don't really have control over.
John: How do you let go of it, though?
Merlin: Well, I'm not saying I'm good at it, but I do think that...
Merlin: You know that old thing they say where dogs can smell fear.
Merlin: I'm not sure if that's strictly biologically, anatomically, animally true.
John: Animatronic.
Merlin: I think what dogs can sense is flop sweat.
Merlin: And I think one reason dogs react – They also can smell when a woman is ovulating.
Merlin: Oh, sure.
Merlin: They call it the menses.
Merlin: And so I think that kids are extremely sensitive to what their parents are freaked out about.
Merlin: And they're probably equally sensitive to when they're trying to cover it up.
John: Well, yeah, I can appreciate why you would want to move beyond anxiety.
John: But how do you?
Merlin: Well, I mean, I don't have like a bullet list, but all I'll say is it's an ongoing struggle.
Merlin: And again, I'm not trying to say that I'm any good at it.
Merlin: And I feel like I'm – I'm not a superstitious person, but I feel like I'm courting fate just by saying this and this will probably be in the thing they play on NPR for my segment.
Merlin: Hi, Nina.
Merlin: Wait, I'm not on the Supreme Court.
Merlin: What am I saying?
John: I thought you were talking to Nina Hagen.
Yeah.
Merlin: No, I think you're thinking of Klaus Nomi.
John: Or Nina Blackwood.
Merlin: I'm not saying I'm good at it.
Merlin: I'm just saying that once you accept that there are some drones in life that you don't have that much control over, it doesn't make you any happier or less anxious.
Merlin: But it does make you appreciate that you can keep your powder dry for the times when –
Merlin: There is something you can prevent, right?
Merlin: So this – actually a productivity guru that I like a lot, this guy David Allen says in your life and your productivity, it's a lot like having a kid.
Merlin: Have as few rules as possible but be really dogged about enforcing what those rules are.
Merlin: And to me, that application becomes like, OK, here are some patterns.
Merlin: I don't want you to have to feel like you've got to read a fucking PDF to decide how to cross the street.
Merlin: I want you to get to where you can develop some combination of confidence and self-possession that I don't have, that I hope you will have, that lets you make the right decision at the right time in the right context.
Merlin: And you don't get that by going –
Merlin: right right right and if i constantly go you know some yeah i and i i'm guessing you're better at this than me sometimes she's just gonna fucking hit her head on the swing set and that's gonna have to be okay the the rules that i the only rules i have uh for my daughter are uh no loud talking anytime don't touch daddy's cigarettes
Merlin: There is no outside voice.
Merlin: Okay, I'm sorry, just quickly.
Merlin: So number one, no loud talking ever.
Merlin: No loud talking.
Merlin: Not just when you're concentrating on your Pete Townsend research, but just any time.
John: No loud talking.
John: It's unnecessary.
Okay.
John: Don't touch daddy's cigarettes.
John: Daddy doesn't smoke, but he keeps cigarettes around.
John: In the same way that he keeps loaded guns around.
John: Oh, don't touch daddy's loaded guns.
John: 2A.
Merlin: How does she know if they're loaded?
Merlin: I thought every time you pick up any kind of a gun, you're supposed to personally check to see if it's loaded.
John: Yeah, they're all... Is that true?
Merlin: Is that good?
Merlin: Never pointed at anything you don't want to kill.
Merlin: Well, first of all, step zero.
Merlin: Don't take it out.
Merlin: Is this correct?
Merlin: This is the Rifleman's Creed.
Merlin: There are many like it, but if you're going to take it out, you've got to plan to kill somebody, right?
John: Oh, you're saying if you're carrying a gun and you're going to pull it and point it at somebody?
Merlin: Well, I'm just saying if your daughter wants to get that cigarette, she's going to take out her sidearm.
John: Yeah, if you take out a gun and point it at somebody, you had better be prepared to shoot and kill them.
Merlin: And really, really work at it.
John: Yeah, because, and what that is... Assume every gun is loaded, yes.
John: What that means, though, is that never pull your gun out and point it at somebody.
John: I mean, you never are going to... 99% of the people that pull their gun out and point it at somebody have no intention of shooting it or killing them.
John: They just want to scare the other person.
Merlin: Fucking teenagers.
John: into twirling it around on their finger right well but no 99 of adults that pull their gun out they expect that the other person is going to cower and what they're looking for is is that what they're looking for is that power they want to make somebody cower
Merlin: oh it's like that little man kind of thing yeah yeah and so they pull their guns out and they're like what did you say or they're like now how now how you feel and you hold it sideways like somebody in a gangster video sideways or you or you you know or you do some kind of baloney with it i don't know if you know john that's a super effective way to point a gun i don't know if you know that sideways yeah oh yeah over your head sideways yeah especially by the third shot you're gonna be in great shape
John: And the reason people get shot is that a lot of times they pull the gun out and they point it at somebody who is legitimately crazy or doesn't give a fuck or also has a gun or moves faster than them or whatever.
John: But I don't think – I mean most of the time if you are prepared to shoot somebody, you pull the gun out and shoot them.
John: There's no big speech that you have to give.
Right.
John: so all those like gun comes out and you're like giving a speech but i'm guessing i don't put words in your mouth but you'll wait till she's three or four to like really express this perhaps with some kind of a powerpoint but but no loud talking don't touch daddy's cigarettes don't touch daddy's guns i think what'll happen with her is that she'll see this in action somebody will pull a gun out at me and i will take it and i will i'll make them eat it and then she'll be like oh i get it don't do that don't pull a gun out at
John: Don't pull a gun on daddy will be the first thing she knows.
Merlin: You know what?
Merlin: There's a lot to learn from pistol whipping.