Ep. 81: "It Tastes Like the Forest"
John: I know an 11-year-old girl who's already on the pill.
Merlin: Don't ever say that word again.
Merlin: Hello.
Merlin: Hey, John.
Merlin: Hi, Merlin.
Merlin: How's it going?
Good.
John: It's going good.
John: Me too.
John: My breath is bad because of the
John: Because of the Atkins diet.
Merlin: The change.
Merlin: And so... How can you tell?
Merlin: How can you tell?
John: Because it's reflecting back off of my microphone.
Merlin: Oh, no.
John: I'm talking into the microphone and then my breath is shooting back at me.
John: And it's not your typical, like...
John: bad breath of someone who doesn't brush his teeth it's this other worldly bad breath I shouldn't ask but can you give me is it a sourness or a bitterness no it tastes like the forest it tastes like juniper and regret it tastes like if you took a spade and dug into the dirt of a forest floor
John: Not too deep.
John: It's a little soily.
John: Loamy.
John: It's a little loamy.
John: Yeah.
John: It tastes like I've been eating raccoon.
John: And you respect a raccoon.
John: You're not going to eat it.
John: I'm not going to eat a raccoon unless I absolutely have to.
John: But you know, this is the thing about grass-fed beef.
John: that a lot of people don't realize i'm making i'm transitioning now to all um i'm going on the portlandia diet i'm transitioning uh over to only eating animals whose name i know oh that's so wise and um the thing about animals that eat grass and natural foods and not you know corn and and other animals ground into corn aka poison
John: The thing about those animals is that they taste very gamey.
John: They taste like moose.
Merlin: I started to wonder if I just got a bad load, but I got some grass-fed beef one time, and it tasted like salmon to me.
John: Right?
John: Right?
John: It tasted wrong or off.
John: Yeah, off.
John: But it isn't off.
John: That is the taste of cow that has been eating dandelions.
John: Which is what they want.
John: And so I'm having to recalibrate my whole taste scenario because I'm like, mmm, beef.
John: Now I'm going to eat this healthy beef.
John: And it's like, yes, healthy beef tastes like a Moroccan leather factory smells.
Okay.
John: I don't know if you've ever smelled at a Moroccan leather factory.
John: Well, I had the cologne.
John: But it will put you off your food for a long time.
Merlin: Oh, so it doesn't smell like a Lexus.
Merlin: It smells like cow.
John: It smells like cow that has been stripped with a bone tool and then hung, covered in flies outside of a Moroccan butcher shop.
Merlin: You're reading that off a Whole Foods thing, aren't you?
John: In the hot sun.
John: This is what they're aspiring for.
Merlin: this meat to taste like i have a metric in life it's not a metric i live up to every day but it's uh you can call it laziness if you like but i think one good metric in life is like success can be money success can be fame success can be i think success as you get older is reducing the amount of complexity in your life
Merlin: So think about being young and like having to have a whole bunch of jobs you don't like, making almost no money.
Merlin: Like one nice bit of getting a little older is you reduce the complexity by having one job that lets you pay your bills.
Merlin: Like that's – that may sound kind of simplistic, but the problem is like everything I look at – I mean obviously getting off meth.
Merlin: is good because that reduces the complexity.
Merlin: If you're traveling, it can be hard to find good meth, right?
Merlin: It's true.
John: It depends on where you're traveling, but yes.
Merlin: But see, some people, as they get older, they go, oh, like, it's not enough for me to have the ABC Wellbrand scotch.
Merlin: Now I've got to have the Klenlivet, which is great, and they're tasty.
Merlin: But then pretty soon, you can't have a Wellbrand anything again.
Merlin: You become beer guy, and I'm worried that if I improve my health,
Merlin: And I mean I don't eat as much junk food as I used to because it doesn't – it makes me feel bad to eat a lot of junk food as you're learning I guess.
Merlin: But I worry that like if I get on that whole grass-fed thing, I'm going to be paying like $40 a pound for something that tastes like Morocco.
Merlin: And then eventually I'll get used to that.
Merlin: Do you know what I mean?
Merlin: Have you had anything like – I could only drink Klon Macleod.
Merlin: I imagine –
Merlin: For you, maybe this is something like with your ears, like you're very – not sensitive to sound, but you can't listen to bad-sounding music.
Merlin: You would probably not want to listen to like a low-quality MP3 for example, right?
Merlin: Is it similar?
Merlin: Because I mean like I don't mind that.
Merlin: Like I'm fine to rip it 320 or lossless now and I do actually hear the difference even though I'm deaf.
Merlin: But to me, that's the damn side away from having to go to Whole Foods to get a burger.
Yeah.
John: You just hold up your phone on the Muni.
John: Just click the volume button all the way up and like, check it out.
John: Blurred lines.
Merlin: John Roderick, if I hear that goddamn Macklemore song one more time.
Merlin: You know what he says in that song?
Merlin: I'm almost done with this.
Merlin: You know what he says in that song?
Merlin: His mom reminds him that he was into girls since before pre-K.
John: I know.
Merlin: Now, I was into girls before pre-K.
John: Before pre-K.
John: I feel bad about Macklemore because I... They're hometown boys, right?
Merlin: That's your home team.
John: Well, yeah.
John: And I like him personally.
John: I think he's a very nice guy.
John: And he is a super cool guy.
John: And it's the classic thing, Seattle thing.
John: As he's coming up, everybody's like, oh, my God, local guy.
John: Check him out.
John: He's, like, making it.
John: He's so cool.
John: And then as soon as he gets popular, then all the hipsters are hating him.
John: Right, right.
John: So I go to his video shoot the other day and I'm at the video shoot.
John: I like Macklemore.
John: I like him as a person.
John: I am there to support him.
John: And I am doing my thing, which is standing in a crowd full of young people.
John: And I am commenting on their appearance and their behavior.
John: And I'm like, look at these young people.
John: They are almost human beings.
John: Uh, not quite, but, but they're edging toward it and I'm reporting some of the things that, that they are, you know, that they're saying in the crowd and I'm, I'm just, you know, I'm having my usual lighthearted fun at other people's expense.
John: These young people are dumb.
John: This is a completely anonymous thing that I'm not, you know, it's not like I'm naming them.
John: Except naming them in the general, like young people.
Merlin: Were you doing this on the Internet?
John: I was doing it on the Internet.
John: Oh, brother.
John: And then out of nowhere, a booking agent from a local club, a friend of mine, a guy who is now in his mid 30s and I think has always identified himself as a young person.
John: And now he's going through a little bit of an identity crisis.
John: He is he is realizing he's no longer a young person.
John: But he's not an old person yet either.
John: He's 35 or something.
John: He's somewhere in this middle ground.
Merlin: He's still clinging at the reeds.
John: And he sends a tweet at me where he says, oh, well, at least you went to a thing that you hate to talk about it on the internet.
John: Or he sent me some kind of shitty tweet that was like,
John: That was trying to call me out for like being at this event and hating, in quotes, hating.
Merlin: Oh, you were being a player hater.
John: I was hating.
John: Hating on the player.
John: And why did I go to the event if I was just there to hate?
Oh.
John: was the implication of his kind of snarky tweet.
John: And I wrote him back and I was like, what the fuck are you talking about?
John: Like, first of all, all any of us do, all any of us have ever done is go to shows and snark.
John: Like, what the fuck?
John: If you want to take that from me, you are depriving me of 85% of my culture and life.
John: stand in the back of the room of a band that you adore where you're friends with everybody in the band and in the show and what is there to do except snark about what people are wearing and what dummies they are like this is fundamental to my to my culture so i write it back and i'm like what's your problem like get off my phone
John: And he keeps at it.
John: Like, you know, like he won't get off of this idea.
John: And it felt very foreign.
John: It felt very, like, it felt very, like, what the fuck is behind this?
John: You know what I mean?
John: And we took it offline.
John: We were texting back and forth.
John: He wouldn't get off.
John: He kind of wouldn't get off this righteous stance.
John: And it turned into a small, very small, but public feud between me and this guy.
John: Where, of course, other people in the town who...
John: It's because Seattle is small and everybody's got a fucking opinion.
John: All these people get involved.
John: And anyway, the long and the short of it is the other day I go to Macklemore's Twitter page.
John: And Macklemore isn't following me anymore.
John: He used to follow me.
John: And now Macklemore unfollowed me.
John: He got on Macklemore.
John: I can only guess that he unfollowed me because of something because because I was being accused of being a hater.
John: at his video shoot, and now there are some quadrants of Seattle in which I am a Macklemore hater, which I'm absolutely not.
Merlin: Wow, that's acrobatic.
John: You know what I mean?
John: I'm a Macklemore lover, but now I'm in the position of, you know, you can't prove a negative.
John: I can't go out in the world and say, hey, Macklemore lover here, coming through, because it's just going to be like, see, he's just hating more.
John: so anyway maybe he's just taking a break he's a busy guy yeah it's true he's got he's he's you know he's he's got a lot going on but still i feel like very you know sometimes when somebody unfollows you it's fairly conspicuous he didn't make a point of it but it's like i wish you'd let me tweak tweak your apps yeah i'd love to go in and just affect some very small changes
Merlin: That'd be nice.
Merlin: Like to hide all the numbers.
John: Back to your earlier point.
Merlin: Yeah, grass.
John: There was a time, Merlin, where I did not have any keys.
Merlin: The guy... This is when you were living in the van?
Merlin: When I was living... Did you have a generator or something?
John: No, I was living in a Ford Aerostar in a carport.
John: And the Aerostar was plugged in by an extension cord to a battery charger.
John: to the house so that I could open the, the back deck, the lid of the, uh, the trunk lid.
John: And that would cause the light to go on.
John: And I could read Stephen King novels while I was trying to go to sleep.
John: I was trying to sleep in this Aerostar.
John: And at a certain point, the owner of the house that was featuring the Aerostar said, uh,
John: As your friend, you've been living in my minivan, my non-running minivan for too long, and I'm going to have to ask you for my keys to my minivan.
John: But, you know, like my house keys, basically.
John: And then I entered that realm where I had no keys left.
John: And I remember when I rejoined the world, I quit doing drugs.
John: I got a job.
John: And I got my first set of keys.
John: I got my own apartment again, you know, after sort of a long period of no place.
John: I got my own place.
John: and i got some keys and then i got i got a job and they gave me keys to my work and then i had keys on this ring and i was like i am that was the point at which i was adding stuff to my life and every new key i got made me feel like more apart every i mean i totally agree and to me like
Merlin: Every key is a new obligation, a new debt, like a new thing to take care of.
Merlin: It's not bad.
Merlin: Responsibility can be good.
Merlin: Like if you want to be like a captain of industry, in your case, you eventually managed – did you manage the bar?
Merlin: You were like a manager at a bar, right?
John: Yeah, and I did the books and stuff and eventually – That's a lot of keys, John.
John: I was one of those guys, those mid-90s guys where I had a big chain and it had 35 keys on it.
John: And I was like, what happened to me?
John: A few years ago, I had zero keys.
John: Then I had like four keys.
John: I felt great.
John: Now I have 40 keys and I feel like shit.
Merlin: Isn't that weird?
John: And as you were saying, right now, Merlin, you know what I did today?
John: I'm going through my closets.
John: I have too many tuxedos.
Merlin: That's self-awareness, John, on so many levels.
John: I'm going through my closet.
John: I'm like, wait a minute.
John: I have multiple tuxedos, and that's crazy.
Merlin: And you were the only one.
Merlin: I think you were the only one who didn't bitch about having to then rent a brown tuxedo.
Merlin: You will be a tuxedoed man.
Merlin: How many you got?
Merlin: How many, roughly?
John: Right.
John: I mean, counting.
Merlin: You have more than two?
John: I have more than two tuxedos.
John: I have a midnight blue tuxedo.
John: I have a standard black tuxedo.
John: Then I have a comedy black tuxedo.
Merlin: It's got tubing to go to the flower so you can squirt people with your flower.
John: No, but it's like a tuxedo that Charles Nelson Reilly would wear on, you know, Celebrity Match Game or something.
John: Match Game After Dark.
John: It's a laugh tuxedo because it's got big white lapels.
John: But in its day, it was a beautiful tuxedo.
John: It still is a nice tuxedo.
John: It's just...
Merlin: Just that its day was 1972.
John: Yeah, it's just unfashionably cut.
John: Okay.
John: And then I have a couple of white dinner jackets, as one does, with some matching black tuxedo pants.
Merlin: Oh, that would be such a handsome look on you.
John: It's very nice.
Merlin: I think that, boy, if you can go with it.
Merlin: Now, what's a, I'm sorry, I'm going to interrupt you, but what's a white, so black at dinner, they call it a dinner jacket.
Merlin: Like if you wear like a tuxedo at night, you wear the black.
Merlin: You don't wear the tails unless you're fucking Jiminy Cricket.
Merlin: But a white, would that be like an afternoon or evening?
Merlin: When do you wear a white tuxedo jacket?
John: Well, there's some contention among the male fashion people about the appropriateness of a white dinner jacket.
John: Some people say that it is only for the tropics.
John: Like a James Bond kind of.
John: Exactly.
John: You're wearing the white dinner jacket if you are at a casino in Bimini or in Curacao.
John: Seattle is not in the tropics.
John: And so one could argue, and I think people do argue, that there's no time at which it's appropriate to wear a white dinner jacket in Seattle.
John: Not even if you are in the Navy.
John: But, you know, as part of my job, I am often on cruise ships now.
John: And cruise ships go into the tropics.
Merlin: And so I feel like... You're not there as a mixologist.
Merlin: You're there as an entertainer.
Merlin: And bon vivant.
John: Yeah, I mean, the JoCo cruise was the first of these cruises.
John: The Jonathan Colton cruise.
John: And now I'm going on another cruise this fall.
John: The Jesse Thorne cruise.
John: The Maximum Fun cruise.
John: So cruising now is a part of my lifestyle.
John: And I already had a white dinner jacket.
John: And now I have a second white dinner jacket.
John: So anyway, exactly as you're saying, I have gone from living in a minivan to having too many tuxedos.
John: And I'm afraid that if I don't do something, if I don't arrest this trajectory, I'm going to drown in tuxedos.
John: The last thing you'll see is my hand sticking up out of a pile of ever-growing tuxedos, and then I'll be gone.
Merlin: Just a small notice in the local paper.
Merlin: Local musician found dead under a pile of ironic tuxedos.
John: Holding, as I go down, holding a bottle of 12-year-old single malt scotch that I can't even drink.
Leave it!
Merlin: Yeah, I don't want to sound like too much of a...
Merlin: Um, hipster faker.
Merlin: If I were a wealthy man, I might have a different feeling about this, but you know, my, my key ring, you see my key ring.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: I have two keys.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: I have a key to my house and I have a key to my office.
John: Smart.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: And, uh, and a, uh, you know, if I need the car key, I grab the car key, but I don't want to carry that around.
Merlin: It's like, it puts, puts holes in your pockets.
Merlin: It's too long.
Merlin: And you see these, you see these people walking around now.
Merlin: You probably have like, do you have like, do you have at least one modern car?
Merlin: Have you seen modern car keys?
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: I mean, they're the size of like a like a like a like a box of like fireplace matches.
John: Oh, sure.
John: Yeah, I've rented one.
John: And increasingly now you just put the key in the proximity of the car and and the car just knows it's you.
Merlin: Yeah, that Musk guy invented that.
Merlin: All I have to do is get somewhere near it and it just turns on.
Merlin: Elon Musk, right?
Merlin: Elon Musk.
John: He put biometrics in it.
Merlin: That's right.
Merlin: That's right.
Merlin: That was his addition.
Merlin: I don't know.
Merlin: I could have more.
Merlin: I could have more stuff.
Merlin: But, you know, it sounds like such a stupid, like, punk rock thing to say.
Merlin: But, like, you know...
Merlin: Whenever I think we said this before, but like I feel like when I see somebody who not only has a lot of keys, but like has a lot of keys that they want everybody to see, like I just see like a security guard.
John: Yeah, I see.
Merlin: I see somebody who's like got to go.
Merlin: I mean, that sounds silly, but I mean, like, I wonder how many of those keys actually go to anything.
Merlin: Do you really need all of them all the time?
John: Yeah, they're trying to be they're trying to be Schneider from one day at a time.
Merlin: Oh, no, that was a good look.
Merlin: You should cosplay Schneider.
John: You know, he was a slim guy.
Merlin: But increasingly... I saw a bad girl today that was Zoftig and it was a great effect.
John: Oh, I know.
John: I like a Zoftig girl.
Merlin: Zoftig black...
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: See, but here's the thing.
Merlin: This is where it all ties together though.
Merlin: We should get back to the tuxedos probably.
Merlin: But with all of those things, I think you have to ask yourself – so something I say to my kids sometimes when you're thinking about – Did you just say kids?
Merlin: I call them my kids.
Merlin: But when you're thinking about your work, you get to those crossroads with your work, with your life.
Merlin: And I think one rhetorical question to quietly ask your mind is what do I want ten times more of?
Merlin: Like if you're being treated a certain way by an employer, imagine yourself staying there for a while.
Merlin: Would you want 10 times more of that?
Merlin: What would you like to have 10 times more of?
Merlin: Whatever.
Merlin: Use your own multiplier.
Merlin: But I think like, OK, what complexity do I want to add?
Merlin: Like I was just listening to an interview.
Merlin: Alec Baldwin was interviewing this guy from PETA and talking about like – he brought up this very basic thing of like, well, when you travel, you got to get your wheat bread and you got to get your avocado.
Merlin: The guy is like, it's not really all that hard.
Merlin: I'm like, well –
Merlin: You maybe don't travel as much as I do.
Merlin: It's hard enough not to get something that didn't fall out of a machine.
Merlin: You know what I mean?
Merlin: And I guess I just think about like what do I want to make – I keep coming back to meth, John.
John: Yes, you do.
Merlin: It seems like one of the hard parts about being addicted to drugs in general, like if you're addicted to cigarettes –
Merlin: like worst case scenario, you know, you can buy cigarettes a lot of places.
John: Yes.
Merlin: You can buy alcohol a lot of places.
Merlin: Like if it's Sunday, you might be out of luck, but like, you know, if you've got to score heroin, like that's, you're going to have to trust some people and it might take a few minutes.
John: Yeah.
John: That's true.
John: But,
John: But also, if you are in the heroin-buying subculture, you are... It seems to us that it is easy to get cigarettes because we're living in the culture of... We're living in a culture where however much, $8 for a pack of cigarettes is not too much, and we are welcome in stores.
John: But there are people...
John: You know, a surprising number of people for whom getting a pack of cigarettes is a challenge.
John: And if you are living in a heroin world...
John: you would be surprised that you could travel from town to town.
John: And you're right.
John: You still are going to have to like put in some legwork.
Merlin: But if you planned ahead, you could make some calls.
John: Oh, sure.
Merlin: Whereas with cigarettes, you might just be out of luck.
Merlin: I'm just saying like the more stuff that you need, think about this.
Merlin: Like I think everybody could ask themselves like what are they worried they won't be able to do or get once the wheels hit the ground?
Merlin: And that could be a drink, that could be weed, that could be a handjob.
John: I'm afraid that people live in a, and this is a thing that I've started to worry about a little bit, that I think in terms of other people too much.
John: Not that I'm thinking about other people, but that I think in terms of other people.
Merlin: It sounds like based on some previous conversations, you're doing a little bit more sort of pre-filtering.
Merlin: It seems like there's more stuff where you kind of filter it through a notional point of view.
John: Yeah, right.
John: And so I feel typically that other people more or less cannot live without their crutches.
John: Yeah.
John: And their crutches are ridiculous or that a lot of their crutches that people like go into full on like like clawing the earth panic mode because they can't get.
John: I mean, you know, you've we've we've all been through it.
John: I've been I've been traveling with people where they didn't have their they they forgot their pillow.
John: You know, they brought their pillow with them on the trip.
Merlin: It's like a kid with their stuffy.
John: Yeah.
Merlin: And then it's like, oh, my God, if you left that on the plane, like it's game over.
John: It's game over.
John: But we're talking about a 30 year old person.
John: It could be menthol cigarettes, let alone menthol cigarettes.
John: Right.
John: Or let alone, you know, food and drink.
Merlin: People get attached to pillows.
Merlin: It's true.
John: But I'm trying to stop thinking in terms of other people in that way or like as a prism to try and break out all the different colors of my own thought and just start kind of trying to stay more...
John: Stay more focused on what am I thinking?
John: Like I think your thing is – your idea is brilliant.
John: Like what do I want ten times more of?
Merlin: Well, I was going to say this before you started publicly agreeing with me.
Merlin: But I think that's a good way to be.
Merlin: Honestly, I have it on a card here.
Merlin: But I think, boy, anybody – I mean like when you start becoming dependent on what anybody else thinks, you're a little bit fucked.
Yeah.
John: Well, so the weird thing about this Atkins, because I've never gone on a diet before.
Merlin: The only reason I think this is... It's not a traditional diet.
John: Well, sure.
Merlin: I mean, it's a non-traditional diet.
Merlin: I think in the aggregate, if you took some graph paper and an HB pencil, you've been on some extremely interesting and consistent diets.
John: It's true.
John: It's true.
John: And one could argue that walking six months in one direction is a kind of diet.
John: Yeah.
Merlin: Yeah.
John: Um, but, uh, but this is the first time that I have in my entire life at 44 years old, mindfully, like consciously said, I'm going to make this kind of a change in my intake.
John: Right.
John: Right.
John: Because up until now, I have always preferred to feel like I am as God made me and, and throw what you have at me and I will, and I will consume it.
Merlin: And I will digest salad.
John: I will make poo out of anything.
John: And now I'm, you know, I'm concentrating on this and I, you know, I did not weigh myself.
John: I have not weighed myself because the point, the point of this exercise for me is to, is really to go through a door, make a transition into a new way of, of thinking and,
Merlin: Which is why calling it a diet is a little bit of a misnomer, right?
Merlin: A diet is this thing that crazy people do for bikini season.
Merlin: But it sounds like you're trying to do something more different.
Merlin: It's a thought technology.
Merlin: Right.
John: It is a pursuit of mindfulness that I am constantly on, and now I am extending that Truman Show bubble to include also the things that I eat.
John: And what is astonishing is that I actually...
John: feel that I have stepped off a rollercoaster.
John: Like, I do not enjoy eating this way.
John: There is no fun in it.
John: The second time I went into a restaurant and ordered a double cheeseburger with no bun and sat and ate it out of a styrofoam container with a plastic knife and fork.
John: Grim resolution.
John: I felt like somebody had taken my shoelaces because they were worried I was going to hang myself in my prison cell.
John: Like, it was...
John: i was like what what has become of me like i ordered and the person by the cash register was like there's another one you know like they knew how they knew how to throw up two two burger patties but i don't i don't necessarily enjoy it but this this fog that i've felt like has been on me for years this like
John: This up and down, up and down kind of crazy energy fluctuations is gone in two weeks.
John: No kidding.
John: I just have this steady amount of energy all day long.
John: I have not taken a nap in the last two weeks or in the last 10 days.
John: And no nap.
John: I mean, a nap is like...
John: that's the whole reason I get up in the morning is to start looking forward to the nap in the afternoon.
John: Right.
Merlin: And now it's just like, I just, it sounds like your sugar has stabilized.
John: Yeah.
John: I'm not peaking.
John: I'm not, I'm not, I don't feel like I'm drowning anymore under exhaustion and I'm just puttering along.
John: And it's like, uh, and this is just, I'm not even really taking care of myself.
John: I'm just eating, uh,
Merlin: Well, you know, one step at a time.
John: One step at a time, right.
Merlin: That's, you know, that's part of that.
Merlin: I don't think you're, you've probably been guilty of this.
Merlin: I know I have been, is that kind of black and white thinking of, again, thinking of the PETA thing.
Merlin: Well, you know, if I can't get rid of every conceivable animal product in my life, I should probably keep torturing animals.
Merlin: Like that's the kind of bizarro internet thinking that people go through, like the fear of hypocrisy that makes people just be permanently stuck in like in silly mediocrity.
Merlin: But, you know, I mean, take stones.
Merlin: it takes stones from being like, I could give a fuck about this.
Merlin: It's like, I'm going to give a little bit of a fuck about this.
John: Yeah.
John: A little.
John: Right.
John: And, and, and not, and not get all, I'm not getting all crazy on myself.
John: I'm not, I didn't like go into my freezer and, and, uh, start, uh, like throwing out all the leather, throwing, yeah, throwing all the popsicles on a bonfire in the backyard under a giant golden Eagle.
John: Are you evangelizing?
John: No, I mean, only in so much as you and I have now talked about it a couple of times.
John: And even then I feel awkward, except that I feel like somehow you and I are past the point of even trying not to, you know, bore the shit out of people.
John: We're just, we are devoted to this cause of talking about our poo, our food, our Hitler, a little bit of Hitler.
John: Belgium comes up some now and again.
John: I got to learn more about Belgium.
John: It's a fascinating country.
Merlin: I'm very happy to hear this.
Merlin: I fell off the wagon with the eating better in the last few weeks because we did some vacation stuff and my daughter started kindergarten today.
Merlin: So things have been a little bit crazy.
Merlin: But I'm going to get back into it because I remember that feeling.
Merlin: And there's this one very – I'm sorry to be doing my other podcast here.
Merlin: But there's something I've said a lot that I really believe, which is like once you lose 30 pounds, like potato chips don't look as good.
Merlin: And the only reason I can say that with such authority – I mean honestly to me it was French fries.
Merlin: Like the only reason I can say that with authority is because I went from 36 to 33 and I really felt the difference.
Merlin: I mean the thing is I – when I walk up the hill and I have to carry my daughter –
Merlin: I sometimes think when she was younger, I would think, wow, this was me every day.
Merlin: I used to have to carry a small person when I walked up a 20-degree hill or whatever it was.
John: A small person that was clutching at your intestines from inside.
Merlin: Well, at least if she was awake, she could grab on.
Merlin: But that extra little person was a little bit of me.
Merlin: And boy, I just – Let's rewind for just a second.
John: Did you say today was her first day of kindergarten?
Merlin: Yeah, yeah.
Merlin: oh my god it's a pretty big deal wow yeah it was uh it was you yeah anyway hey you know what we're talking about food was there was there coloring and stuff was it was it fine was she okay to go to school i i love her school um but you know don't get me started on institutions you know i just this is what i'm worried about because we're we are investigating we have joined a co-op
Merlin: That's what we did.
Merlin: We did a co-op for three years.
Merlin: My daughter did a postdoc at her preschool.
Merlin: She did an extra year.
John: They sent out an email and they were like, we need sunshine helpers.
John: We need... What did they want?
Merlin: Oh, John, just brace yourself because if you think you've been experiencing it – I'm sorry to use that verb I hate.
Merlin: If you've been living in that kind of weird parenting bubble, get ready because there's going to be so much of your personality you're just going to have to let go of when you're around a lot of people in these places.
Merlin: I mean you're going to have to sit through so many discussions that are very poorly organized.
Merlin: There's going to be a lot of forms that could have been laid out a lot better.
Merlin: There's a lot of signs with bad punctuation and typography.
Merlin: Comic Sans.
Merlin: Comic Sans or like there's – the one that my daughter's teacher uses is just – it's not Helvetica.
Merlin: It's not Ariel.
Merlin: It's kind of a stylized like Futura meets like a stork.
Merlin: It's just – but no, I suffered under that and also I think there's a lot of hazing.
Merlin: I think there are people who are very comfortable being like a suburban mom or dad and they take it out on people like you and me.
Merlin: We're not totally like hipster tattoo doofuses with barbells in their nose, but we're also not like wearing tasseled loafers.
Merlin: Like we are the forgotten men.
John: I want to be on the board of directors just because that's where I belong.
Merlin: You should have a coup.
John: And then very shortly after that become the, you know, just like either eliminate the board of directors or make it a
John: Make their, you know, put it up to a vote that there should be, that all board of directors are equal, except some are more equal than others.
Merlin: Maybe you should stage like arson of the art room.
John: It's like your own personal Reichstag.
John: Ice pick the assistant teacher.
John: What I'm afraid of is everything.
John: I am absolutely 100% afraid of being in a position of, well, basically having to subjugate myself to the Borg.
Merlin: It's so – I found it – I have no one to talk to about this.
Merlin: I found it so difficult.
Merlin: It made me realize – I'm not saying this is you but me.
Merlin: Like it made me realize how much of a man-child I am in some ways.
Merlin: Like I'm so used to like –
Merlin: I don't like having to like – it took me fucking 40-some years to get to where I don't hate my personality.
Merlin: And so I feel like I'm almost like out of this Merlin closet where like I just – I'm very reluctant to go gently into someone else's goodnight.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: You are Merlin.
Merlin: Here you roar.
Merlin: Well, and I don't have to be like – I don't have to be a cock.
Merlin: I don't have to always be the center of attention.
Merlin: But at the same time, there's like – there's just – there's a lot of times when I've had to go like, OK, I've worked on my own for a lot of years.
Merlin: I've gotten to be like whatever it is that I am for a lot of years.
Merlin: And there's times when you're – the first meeting at my daughter's co-op school, which was – I mean like I will – I can't imagine my daughter ever going to another school as great as her co-op school.
Merlin: My wife mostly worked there.
Merlin: I worked there.
Merlin: It's a great gig.
Merlin: It's so much less expensive than like a regular like penitentiary style preschool because you're there and you're – it's a great way to watch your kid get better at being a kid.
John: Right, and you learn to watercolor again.
Merlin: But it's also – it's cool because like the people there who aren't dicks have a stake in it.
Merlin: Like there are people who still want to like just drop their kids off and drive away.
Merlin: But there are a lot of people there who are there because they believe in the school.
Merlin: They believe in what's going on.
Merlin: You can take that too far and like have – some of these schools, they make you read a book before you can go there.
Merlin: Like they have like a – was it Tom Wolfe says a persuasive theory.
Merlin: Like each place has a different like philosophy.
Merlin: But the –
John: I don't want to have my commitment to sparkle motion doubted.
Merlin: No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
Merlin: But, you know, but here's the thing.
Merlin: The first thing that, well, two things just quickly in this case.
Merlin: First of all, that like how much I showed up feeling like, of course, I always feel like the worst father in the world, no matter where I go.
Merlin: I'm always like, oh my gosh, there's so many things I could be doing so much better.
John: But I got there.
John: Are you kidding me?
John: Do you honestly feel that way?
Merlin: And I got there and within like two minutes, I felt like I was at a student council meeting because it was like – and at the greatest school in the world.
Merlin: But it was like the people who like were the – as you say, like the board of directors or whatever, like the people who were like the head of the three-year-olds group, the four-year-olds group.
Merlin: It was just like student council.
Merlin: And it was like this weird – not a popularity contest, but there were some people who cared so intensely about governing like whether you had to wear shoes in the bike area or whatever.
Merlin: And second –
Merlin: The first meeting I ever went to at this school, the greatest of all schools, they talked about the problem of chicken poop for 25 minutes because there's four chickens who run around.
Merlin: Oh, I see.
Merlin: And apparently one of the moms was pretty upset because some of the chicken matter had gotten on to her child's shoe and that came into the house and that led to a larger discussion of just sanitation in general and like should we even have chickens at all?
Merlin: If we have chickens, should there be somebody who's monitoring the chicken area more closely?
John: Right.
John: Right.
Merlin: All good questions.
Merlin: I think it's attributed to Kissinger.
Merlin: It starts to go through your head.
Merlin: The stakes are so low.
Merlin: But – I'm sorry.
Merlin: I'm going on.
Merlin: But the big pattern here is like for me, it's one thing to sit around and poison my daughter's mind with comics.
Merlin: But like then I have to go up and be around other people and even like the coolest people in the world, I feel like I'm always like –
Merlin: It's pushing me forward because now like all of my failures are exposed to all these people.
Merlin: But I would not trade that experience for the world.
Merlin: I mean it was – you know what it is?
Merlin: Last thing on this.
Merlin: It's like hiring a doula.
Merlin: Or it is like finding a psychiatrist.
Merlin: It is like finding a mate.
Merlin: Don't start with the role.
Merlin: Start with finding somebody that you like.
Merlin: You've got to find a school that you like before you find a school.
John: Here's the problem with that, Merlin, is that I rejected the idea of a doula.
Merlin: Can we please talk about doulas at some point?
John: And I reject the idea of a psychiatrist.
John: And formal education.
John: I really have not fully embraced the idea of finding a mate.
John: What about chickens?
John: Got a thought?
John: And I don't have chickens.
John: You don't have heritage chickens?
John: Everybody that comes over to my house says, you have a barn.
John: Everybody in the city is buying chickens.
John: You're the only guy that actually has a barn.
John: Why don't you have chickens?
John: And I'm like, because chickens.
Merlin: Because why do you need fucking chickens?
John: Right.
Merlin: Exactly.
Merlin: You show up and within a month, you get your tattoo, you get your fixie, and you get two chickens.
John: That's so fucking weird.
Merlin: What I feel about the chickens... Are chickens a thing there?
Merlin: Chickens are a huge thing here.
John: Chickens are a thing everywhere.
John: But what I feel about the chickens and the organic farming...
John: both of which things I am encouraged by every person who comes here to embark upon.
John: Like, why aren't you?
Merlin: Oh, it's like a little suggestion box for John's house.
Merlin: Things I can't believe John is not doing with this house.
John: Why don't you build a big organic garden?
John: And what I realize about those things is that those are mating rituals that once you and your partner
John: have exhausted all of the episodic television and you are staring across the breakfast table at one another and contemplating being together for decades.
John: And you realize like, I don't want to be like my parents.
John: I don't want to be like my grandparents.
John: What are we going to do?
John: You embark upon a mutual project, like starting a garden where you are now going to eat out of this garden and it's a merry old time and
John: But it's really a way of stitching your relationship together with a kind of mutual, you know, like here are our values in bright red tape and we're walking our talk and we're living our life together.
John: Yeah.
John: And for me as a bachelor, the idea of going out and tilling a little organic garden for myself, again, feels like a prison activity.
John: Like they take your shoelaces away.
John: They give you two hamburger patties with cheese in a styrofoam bucket.
John: And then you've got like your six by eight plot.
John: You're out there.
John: You're out there trying to keep the rabbits out of your lettuce.
John: And that's what keeps you.
Merlin: You remember, though, like in college, like I would meet I would meet a lady and like we would just sit and go into like, you know, like you leave the party.
Merlin: You'd be X-ing.
Merlin: You'd go to like an abandoned classroom and you could talk for 18 hours.
John: Just talk.
Merlin: Just talk about whatever.
Merlin: Talk about the Flintstones, whatever.
John: She'd lie her head on your shoes.
John: It'd be in the dark.
John: You'd be lying down.
Merlin: It wasn't quite a thing yet.
Merlin: It was just a kind of a thing.
Merlin: Just talking about whatever, man.
Merlin: Just talking about whatever, man.
Merlin: Whatever.
Merlin: It's just, oh my God, you too?
Merlin: Oh my God.
Merlin: And then you need projects when you get older.
Merlin: And let's be honest, the biggest project is a kid.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: You know, somebody said this is probably like a very old cliche.
Merlin: It's probably like, you know, like a Mort Sahl joke or something.
Merlin: But like, you know, when you run out of things to talk to somebody like that's when the words will you marry me?
John: Right.
John: Well, and all you have to do is go to an Ikea on a Saturday afternoon and you're seeing all the people that are that are either right before that or right in the heart of it.
John: Right.
Merlin: Projects, projects, projects.
John: She's pushing the cart and he is kind of walking along beside and they are just picking out storage solutions.
Merlin: He's wondering what's Swedish for ricin.
John: And for me, I did not escape it, but I went through a lot of those sort of...
John: As solo, like, I built a nest for myself here, unconscious that that's really what I was doing.
John: And I did it all by myself so that my house looks like a hunting lodge where someone set off a grandma bomb.
Yeah.
Merlin: But there's also – there's no one there to go, what are you thinking?
Merlin: Of course we're not going to put that there.
Merlin: What are you doing?
John: Right.
John: There's no one – by the time anyone could have said seven different mismatched paisley patterns is not a style.
John: It is a mind riot.
John: By the time anybody could have said that to me, it was too late.
John: And all they could do was stand there with their hands on their hips and go, wow.
Wow.
John: And I'm like, I know, right?
John: Kind of like tripping you out, isn't it?
John: Go ahead.
John: Sit on the couch if you can find the couch part.
John: So I'm kind of now going through this.
Merlin: I'm interested in this idea.
Merlin: I had not thought of it this way.
Merlin: I really had not.
John: There was nobody to keep me from buying...
John: Ten copies of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn because I was afraid that it was going to get banned and I was going to have the last stash of them to hand out to people on the street.
John: There was no one to stop me from decorating my house with amplifiers.
John: And I have built a nest.
Merlin: I'm so glad you're there, John.
Merlin: I really am.
Merlin: You're like Berkeley.
Merlin: I don't love everything you do, but I'm so glad you're there.
John: But the problem is that now, having built a nest, and now I have a child, and the child's mother and I are very close, and we live in a very kind of communal atmosphere, in a way, is everything that I...
John: If you had asked me 10 years ago how I imagined it, it is that.
John: It has happened.
John: But I've maintained so much of my own... Like I kept my...
John: I kept up my castle and now I'm, now I'm in the, in this castle and I feel a little ridiculous.
John: Like the, the castle grounds are all being gardened by other people.
John: That's the pre-filter, John.
Merlin: You should not feel ridiculous.
John: I'm standing up here with my flag.
John: You know, I have a collection of flags.
John: Yeah.
John: And, uh, and I realized today because our, uh, our good friend, Captain Merriam.
Merlin: Yeah.
Yeah.
John: So I put a friend of the show, friend of the show.
Merlin: I think she, I haven't, I haven't run this through, but I think she might be our, uh, amongst other things, our official statistician.
John: Well, I, and I, and I'm beginning to feel like a chief archivist, but, but, uh, but so I post a picture of a jacket that I have that I thought was like a vintage, uh, you know, Nate Navy officers coat.
John: Like it's clearly a captain's jacket, uh,
John: I thought maybe like French Coast Guard auxiliary.
John: I wasn't sure.
John: But I posted a picture of this.
John: I was trying to crowdsource where this jacket was from.
John: And I got your usual snarky answers from everybody.
John: I hate that.
Merlin: Just answer the fucking question.
John: Some legit tries.
John: People were like, I don't believe that's an American.
John: And I was like, well, right.
John: But what is it?
John: And it was like, not U.S.
John: military.
John: There were some people taking some stabs at it.
John: And then she comes in out of the blue with a link to this exact jacket.
John: And I didn't even post a whole picture of it.
John: I just posted a picture of the sleeve.
John: She's good.
John: She has the entire jacket, and it is a Yacht Club Commodore retired dress blues jacket.
John: So close and yet so far.
John: How did this fire?
John: I mean, it's like wherever I got this jacket, it must have crawled out of a trunk and situated itself on top of a rafter.
John: And as I was walking by, it leapt.
Merlin: Wait a minute.
Merlin: Yacht Club Commodore, comma.
Merlin: Retired.
Merlin: R-E-T.
John: Yeah, right.
John: Okay.
John: Former Commodores.
Merlin: So there's a current Commodore of the Yacht Club.
Merlin: He wears a different coat.
John: Okay.
John: This is the former Commodore.
John: Once a Commodore, always a Commodore.
John: Yeah, it's like a Marine.
John: So once you have been the Commodore of your Yacht Club, you graduate, you are always able to wear this jacket.
Merlin: The Commodore Emeritus.
John: Emeritus, which is a fantastic coat.
John: And...
John: And so then I'm online.
John: I am researching Yacht Club.
Merlin: I'm literally typing this right now.
Merlin: Retired Yacht Club Commodore?
John: Yacht Club Commodore former.
John: Right.
John: So now I'm in this Yacht Club world.
John: I had no idea that members of Yacht Clubs had ranks.
John: There's an entire ranking system as elaborate and bizarre as the...
John: Like Congolese Navy or whatever.
John: It's got, you know, you can, you can, you can be a bosun's mate in the yacht club.
John: But anyway, I'm, I'm flipping through this and all of a sudden I see these flags, which I've had.
John: I have a flag with a giant acorn on it and a flag with crossed feathers on it.
John: And I've had them for a long time.
John: I, they're part of my collection of flags and,
John: And I learned on this website that the acorn is the flag that you fly from your yacht if you are the treasurer of the yacht club.
Merlin: Oh, come on.
John: Because the treasurer is collecting acorns.
John: And this is international.
John: I mean, if you are a yacht club in... But this is in a book somewhere.
John: This is codified.
John: Yeah, right.
John: And the crossed feathers, of course, is the secretary of the yacht club.
John: So I'm flying all these weird Yacht Club flags here around the good ship Roderick Pop.
John: And I had no idea what they meant.
Merlin: It's like you and the hanky.
Merlin: So the hanky code, right?
John: Yeah, hanky code, right.
John: I was flying a green hanky in my back left pocket.
John: I didn't know that it meant I was into boogers.
John: And Captain Miriam.
John: Solves all these problems in one fell swoop and also somehow completely like completely by happenstance.
John: I already own a retired Commodore's jacket.
John: I didn't have to go through any of the like where is I may already have a retired director of the CIA jacket and I just don't realize it.
John: You just need to send her some some photos.
John: I need to send her photos of everything.
Merlin: She could be your personal archivist.
Merlin: That's all I'm saying.
Merlin: I think she's, you may have finally found it.
Merlin: You, you, you lament this every, every few months about what are you going to do?
Merlin: Like with the history of all the items in your home, like how, how will that be passed on to the future generations?
Merlin: She's very scientific, John.
Merlin: I don't want to go into too much personal detail, but Captain Miriam is very scientific.
John: All I'm saying is that, that, that, that, uh,
John: that that mystery at least is solved and why it is that i that you know because i ask people to salute me when they come into the house and at a certain point i change to a kind of open-handed salute rather than your closed-handed salute what i'm not sure i'm not sure no not like himler open-handed like uh you know like a classic sort of i think it's called a wave
John: Not a wave.
John: You're still touching the tip of your glasses with the hand.
John: Okay.
John: It's just your palm out.
Merlin: Oh, I know what you mean.
Merlin: Like a lieutenant.
John: Like you're the governor general in the Raj.
Right.
John: Let me ask you a question.
John: It's because I was feeling like a Commodore.
Merlin: Isn't it fair to say you probably know more about military and fake military clothing than most people in Seattle?
Merlin: I'll be honest.
Merlin: I'd be in the top 5%.
Merlin: Top 5%.
Merlin: Okay.
Merlin: If you go to the co-op meeting, like the second meeting, dressed as a former Commodore of a yacht club, people are going to think it's pretty fucking weird.
Merlin: But if you're consistent...
Merlin: If you always show up in some kind of military garb, no one is going to fuck with you.
John: Right.
John: But one day I'm a colonel in the Air Force.
John: One day I'm wearing desert fatigues.
Merlin: There are a lot of people with honorary degrees who call themselves doctor.
Merlin: There's no reason you can't be – there's no fucking reason you can't be an honorary commodore.
Merlin: All I'm saying is if you show up at this place and you want to have this certain will to power, you may be able to go in there, dress for the job you want.
Merlin: Am I right?
John: Well, but this is the thing.
John: Commodore of the co-op.
John: I've already begun compiling the uniform of a member of the board of directors of your child's co-op.
Merlin: It would be like a Patagonia fleece.
Merlin: Well, see, now that's where you would think.
Merlin: An aluminum water bottle.
John: I have not been to this meeting yet, so I'm guessing that that's what you're going to find.
Merlin: Oh, so that's going to be the enlisted men.
John: At least that's right.
Merlin: Okay, got it.
Merlin: Sorry.
John: So, obviously, tweed jacket, patches on the elbows.
John: knit, squared bottom tie.
John: He's selling Michael Keaton.
John: In like a gray knit.
John: That's right.
John: No, you're absolutely right.
John: Michael Keaton in 83.
John: Yeah.
John: Plaid, buttoned down, sort of Norse sport shirt.
John: Ah, it's a smart look.
Mm-hmm.
Merlin: I don't know, though.
John: I think the military thing – But then crew neck sweater on top of the shirt.
Merlin: I just saw Ocean's Eleven for the first time.
Merlin: I think you should bring back the giant turtleneck, almost cowl neck, ridiculously large turtleneck shirt.
Merlin: That, like a sweater, like a big, big – you know what I'm talking about?
Merlin: You ever seen the movie?
Merlin: Like for some reason, like three different guys in the movie, especially Matt Damon, are wearing these cool like fisherman kind of sweaters like –
Merlin: You know, vertical ribbing, but with these giant, giant turtles.
John: You're talking about the Captain Haddock sweater.
Merlin: Am I?
John: The Captain Haddock sweater from Tintin.
Merlin: I might be thinking of the former Captain, the retired Captain Haddock.
Merlin: Is that what it's called?
Merlin: I'm going to look that up.
Merlin: It's a smart look.
Merlin: I could not pull that off.
Merlin: You would look awesome in that.
John: You know, the thing about Captain Haddock is that his, first of all, his sweater has a giant anchor on it.
Merlin: Oh, apparently this is a cartoon character.
John: Are you not a Tintin reader?
Merlin: Yes.
John: Outed as a non-Tintin reader.
John: He's got a pipe.
John: He's got a Thurston Howell hat.
Merlin: He looks a little like Bluto.
John: That's right.
John: And guess what else?
John: He's from Belgium.
Merlin: Belgium.
Merlin: Belgium.
Merlin: He's got no pupils.
Merlin: I don't know.
Merlin: I have mixed feelings because to me there's two ways you can go with this.
Merlin: You can either go with the perhaps inadvisable, this guy is obviously bananas.
Merlin: which is you might go in in a slicker one day, like the Gortons fishermen, you know, like one day you might go in as like the, I don't know, whatever the Seattle Mariner big head mascot is, you know, Mariner moose, Mariner moose.
Merlin: Oh, they had a big head, big head mascot at my kid's school today.
Merlin: Made a bunch of kids cry.
Merlin: It's a big lion.
John: Was the person inside of it autistic?
John: Just bringing it around.
Yeah.
Merlin: i i'm pretty sure that or you could just consistently wear the same uniform that's all i'm pretty sure that my my sword cane is going to be the thing that just that that really gets their attention but that's not going to be till meeting five well a lot of people are going to see it and go that guy doesn't look like he needs a cane and he definitely looks like the kind of guy who would like to carry a sword so i'm gonna guess that's probably a sword cane
John: You would think, but the people up here, the, the, the, you know, the fleece dulls there.
John: Like, I think that the fleece creates a kind of, um, it like off gases and it, you know, dulls your wits for combat.
John: A lot of leeching.
John: Yeah.
John: Yeah.
John: So no, no, I, I, the whole idea, the whole premise that one day I would be jockeying for power in a pre-K co-op.
John: is like, I feel a little bit like I'm sitting in one of those little tiny desks at a parent teacher conference already.
John: Yeah.
John: And I don't know how this, I don't know how this happened.
John: You know, you know, Merlin, that, that Michael Anthony Hall and, um, uh, what the hell?
John: Molly Ringwald.
Yeah.
John: They're the same age as me.
Merlin: And... Just that in itself, that's plenty.
John: Yeah, I just don't... I was thinking about that today.
John: I don't think I knew that at the time.
Merlin: I think about that a lot.
Merlin: I was watching Moneyball today, that movie, and Billy Beane's like 51.
Merlin: He was a guy who played baseball when I was a kid.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: But he's only like a few years older than me.
Merlin: I mean, Michael Stipe is not that much older than me.
Merlin: That's right.
Merlin: He seems like a generation older than me, but he's actually not.
John: Right.
Merlin: And that is disturbing to me.
John: And with Michael Stipe, I can handle it because whatever, when I was 15, he was already 22 or something.
John: And that did seem like a generational difference.
John: But I don't think I knew...
John: that anthony michael hall and molly ringwald were just six months older than me or something i think if i had known younger to you no no no no they seemed again like they were in the movies i was i thought that they were older people playing teenagers i thought it was the classic 90210 problem right 20 the girl with the glasses 60 yeah right
John: And, you know, 27-year-olds that are playing 17-year-olds.
John: But the, you know, the knowledge that those kids playing teenage kids were actually teenage kids is, I don't know why... It's retroactively depressing.
John: Yeah, I don't know why to learn that at 44 years old is causing me to kind of be agog today.
John: But...
John: But I spent all afternoon kind of like thinking about Anthony Michael Hall.
John: I don't know.
Merlin: He got real meaty for a while.
Merlin: Wasn't he like really like beefy?
Merlin: Didn't he get all like ripped?
John: Yeah, he was beefy.
John: I think somebody was advising him as a young person, don't be the nerd.
John: Don't be typecast as the nerd.
Yeah.
John: So you got to get into the gym and be a serious actor and get... It was not flattering.
John: Take some intense roles.
John: I don't think you'd recognize him now.
John: If you Google Anthony Michael Hall right now and look at his face, you're going to be like, he looks like a guy at my child's pre-K.
John: He looks like just somebody's dad.
John: He doesn't look like Anthony Michael Hall anymore.
Merlin: But now you look at a Jackie Earl Haley.
Merlin: You probably have not had a chance to look at the materials I sent you.
Merlin: But in the movie version of Watchmen, Rorschach is played by Jackie Earl Haley, who you'll remember from Bad News Bears and Breaking Away.
John: Oh, sure, sure.
John: The bad kid.
Merlin: And he's great.
Merlin: Yes, he's played Freddy Krueger in one of the Nightmare movies.
Merlin: He's in Shutter Island.
Merlin: He has a great small but great role in Shutter Island.
Merlin: With all due respect, Mr. Earl Haley, he's all fucked up looking.
Merlin: He's always been super weird looking.
Merlin: But I so treasure that.
Merlin: You know what?
Merlin: Now I've got to find out how old he is.
Merlin: I do this.
Merlin: You know what else I do, John?
Merlin: I look for how tall people are.
Merlin: Isn't that strange?
John: I don't think he's very tall.
Merlin: I search for how tall people are.
Merlin: Isn't that odd?
Merlin: That's an old person thing to do, isn't it?
John: I like your new boyfriend.
John: He's tall.
Merlin: Scarlett Johansson seems like she's a little gal.
Merlin: She seems... Let me just look here.
Merlin: She's... Oh, look at that.
Merlin: The gal who plays Agent Hill is a little more statuesque.
John: Did the bad news bears have the effect on you that it had on me?
John: Probably.
John: Which is to say that there were things happening in that movie that were just a little bit
John: Out of my grasp.
John: And they made me.
John: Afraid.
John: That movie made me afraid.
John: And also yearn.
John: For things I didn't.
John: I didn't know what I was yearning for.
Merlin: You know what?
Merlin: It's ineffable.
Merlin: And yes.
Merlin: It's the hallmark of like the late 70s.
Merlin: Oh, my God, John, you're going to send me down a fucking rabbit hole here.
Merlin: It's a hallmark of the late 70s young person's movie, whether that's breaking away or whatever.
Merlin: For me, the first movie I ever saw Diane Lane in, A Little Romance with Mr. Laurence Olivier, I had the hugest crush because it was about these kids who meet in Paris and fall in love.
Merlin: And they're like 12 or 13.
Merlin: And I saw it when I was like 10 or 11.
Merlin: So I was like, you ever have that though?
Merlin: You're just filled with like – you see kids at camp.
Merlin: Like you watch Meatballs.
Merlin: I'm like, oh, man, I would love to meet a girl in shorts.
John: Yeah, well, yes, absolutely.
Merlin: Dangerous, but so seductive.
John: Tatum O'Neill was that she... I'm just realizing now that there was a remake of Bad News Bears.
John: With some other people?
John: Yeah.
John: That's not what we're talking about.
Merlin: No, no, no.
Merlin: We're talking about the one with Walter Matthau.
Merlin: He's fucking drinking beer.
John: He's drinking beer in the movie with kids.
John: But Tato O'Neill had this worldliness that I knew already...
John: In 19... Whatever.
John: 70... Like, what the hell year was that?
Merlin: I want to say 77.
Merlin: Because Paper Moon was like 73.
Merlin: She smokes in that, and she's like 10.
Merlin: Okay, 76.
Merlin: So, Tatum O'Neill... By the way, I sent you a link to some Jackie Earl Haley materials.
John: I'll check it out.
John: But, like, I knew in 1976... So, I was 8 in 76.
John: And I knew that Tatum O'Neill in the Bad News Bears was not...
John: A virgin?
John: Or maybe was still one but had been to third base.
Merlin: Did you have a mental model for virginity when you were eight?
John: I was so worried.
John: You knew that she had crossed some kind of... She had crossed the line.
John: And people... She was like... Maybe somebody had touched her boobs and she was okay with it.
John: she wanted it to happen even.
Merlin: And this is back when we both still worried about people being damaged goods, right?
Merlin: You worry about them a little bit.
John: Well, and also, like, I had engaged in a little bit of, like, you show me yours, I'll show you mine.
John: And at one point, out on the compost pile, was in the process of
John: Doing a little you show me yours, I'll show you mine with a couple of neighborhood girls.
John: When my mom came around the corner with a wheelbarrow full of compost.
John: Of all the places.
John: And she said, what are you kids doing?
John: Get out of there.
Merlin: This is why you hate farming at home.
John: And everybody scattered.
Merlin: Oh, God.
John: And my mom wasn't mean about it.
John: It wouldn't take a lot, John.
Merlin: I mean, just her being there.
Merlin: Those two worlds should not collide like that.
John: Oh, I was covered in shame.
John: I was covered in shame and I did not know how, you know, and the thing about Tatum O'Neill and the kid with the dirt bike, what's his name?
Merlin: Jackie Earl Haley.
John: Jackie Earl Haley.
John: The thing about them is that they had, they clearly had no parental supervision.
Right.
John: Or very little.
John: And I was worried that in order, I think what it was, was I was worried that in order to learn about sex and cross the Rubicon to be on the other side where people were touching each other, I was going to have to sacrifice my relationship with my mom.
John: You know what I mean?
John: Like in the movies, all the, all the kids that were fast, when you went to their house, when the movie went to their house, their mom was smoking cigarettes and was drunk in front of the TV or like, you know, uh, working mom, single mom, who's like always out selling real estate or whatever.
John: Yeah.
John: But, but, but, but always like the, the message in the movie was always that that mom was self-involved or, I mean, it was very seldom that she was a working mom who was harried, uh,
John: And her kids were bad.
John: She was always a working mom who was like, who was having an affair with her boss or like, you know, she was a, she was a bad mom.
John: And so that's how these kids who had, who had hearts of gold, but they were smoking cigarettes behind the school and they were, they were feeling each other up.
John: And I didn't want to...
John: Because my mom already worked a lot and I didn't want to have to lose the good relationship that we had with the little time that we had together in order to learn to be like a fast kid who...
John: who had put his hand up a girl's shirt.
John: And so I think in my mind somewhere, I drew this line, like, I needed to be good, and in order to be... It was a little bit black and white.
John: In order to be good, I needed to not... Or it wasn't that I needed to, but that I was never going to be the kid with the motorbike.
John: And that's a...
John: If I could sit my eight-year-old self down and talk to him about this, I would be arrested immediately for talking about sex with an eight-year-old because apparently that's illegal now.
Merlin: Let's not talk about time travel.
Merlin: Back then it wasn't illegal.
Merlin: Back then you could have a kid go get a beer for you.
Merlin: You kidding me?
Merlin: It was the style at the time.
Merlin: No, it's – oh, boy, that's a real minefield.
Merlin: I was going to say Freudian and I stopped.
Merlin: But it is.
Merlin: I mean like I felt the same way.
Merlin: My mom was real protective of me.
Merlin: I think she's – she had a lot of loss in her life and did not want to have me be lost too.
Merlin: But like that made me more reluctant to –
Merlin: To like until, you know, my mid-teen years to become a hellion.
Merlin: You know what I mean?
Merlin: There's a part of me that thinks like it's a good idea to like burn it out of your system when you're Tatum or Jackie aged.
Merlin: Like not – but like in an environment that's safe.
Merlin: Like there should be some kind of like, you know, mall petri dish way to fill people up.
Merlin: Like you shouldn't have to like sneak out of the house when you're 17 and like, you know, go somewhere super foreign.
Merlin: You know what I mean?
Merlin: It's like the Italians having wine at dinner.
Merlin: Like it makes it – it takes away the stigma.
John: Although the tragedy now is that whatever that was that I was seeing in Tatum O'Neill's eyes, I mean, what we know now about her relationship with her father, Ryan O'Neill, the alcoholic, like... Farrah beater.
John: Yeah, terrible, terrible, terrible.
Merlin: Wasn't he a Farrah beater?
Merlin: What is a Farrah beater?
Merlin: Oh, wasn't he unkind to Farrah Fawcett?
John: Oh, I think he was unkind to everybody.
John: I think he... You're saying he was legitimately abusive.
John: Well, she says here in her... Now I'm reading from Wikipedia.
John: In her autobiography, O'Neal alleged that she was molested by her father's drug dealer when she was 12.
John: She also alleges physical and emotional abuse from her father, much of which she attributed to drug use.
John: She detailed her own heroin addiction...
John: Et cetera, et cetera.
John: So whatever that worldliness that was being captured on film when she was 12 was in fact actual horror.
Merlin: Can I just say Mackenzie Phillips?
John: Mackenzie Phillips, another one.
Merlin: And another young lady I was very attracted to for her apparent worldliness who like, you know, had some problems.
John: Yeah.
John: And maybe I was right as a kid to see that, to see her allure and also recognize that it was, that it was a, uh, that it was a tragedy or that there was forbidden, uh,
John: Forbidden knowledge.
John: And that it's really the exploitative adults in 1976 who used that brokenness in her eyes to captivate a generation of us young boys.
Merlin: Wow.
John: Boy.
Merlin: Wow.
John: Must be gotten youth.
Merlin: Might be done with the whole program now.
Merlin: That was good.
Merlin: Brokenness in her eyes.
Merlin: Shit.
Merlin: Now, what about Jodie Foster?
John: Loved her.
Merlin: Yeah.
John: Remember the movie where she was, remember that whole series of movies with David Niven?
John: Hang on a minute.
John: Didn't she?
John: There was one where she lived in it.
Merlin: Wait a minute.
Merlin: Wait a minute.
Merlin: Was Tatum O'Neill?
Merlin: Was it Tatum O'Neill or Jodie Foster in Bad News Bears?
Merlin: It was Tatum O'Neill in Bad News Bears.
Merlin: Was Jodie Foster in the TV version?
Merlin: Is that what I'm thinking of?
John: I don't know.
John: Was there a TV version?
John: Jodie Foster was in a movie with David Niven where she was an American girl who it turned out... This is the great... Oh, my God.
John: This plot line... The very existence of this plot line ruined me as a child.
John: The knowledge that this type of thing was possible.
John: She was a...
John: Uh, like a ruffian, an American street ruffian little girl who it turns out is the heiress to some British, you know, her last surviving relative is the, the Duchess of Cornwall or whatever.
John: And she flies over to England and is living in a castle and,
John: uh with david niven and it's one of those culture clash things where she's like what you don't know how to play baseball smacking her gum and uh his monocle shatters yeah but uh but i you know i saw that movie at at the exact wrong age the the totally impressionable age where i was like
John: Wait a minute.
John: Are you telling me that all I have to do is just be... All that's going to happen is somebody's going to come knock on the door and be like, hello, we've come for the boy.
John: He's the last surviving son of the Duke of...
John: Cornwall.
John: The Duke of Worcestershire sauce.
Merlin: Can you imagine how your life would be different if you'd had David Niven for a mentor?
John: Oh, I'd be such an asshole.