Ep. 91: "Roller Derby Boyfriend"
John: Hello.
John: Hi, John.
John: Hi, Merlin.
Merlin: How's it going?
John: Things are going good.
John: I'm sitting here dressed in my Hawkeye Pierce outfit, which is to say a wet kimono, a baseball hat from Merrill Field Airport.
John: hmm um some slip ugg slippers are you are you recently bathed yeah i just got out of the bathtub i got out of the bathtub specifically to do this podcast my god the things that you give up for this john i know do you want some time to find some kind of thirstier apparel no no i'm fine i'm just you know i'm i'm off gassing a little bit and uh just uh just getting in the zone is it like silky
John: My skin?
Merlin: Your kimono.
John: Oh, no.
John: It's a cotton kimono.
John: It's just various shades of blue flowers, large blue flowers.
John: I, uh, I'm not, I'm not, um, I really, here's what I want.
John: I want to live in a world where I dress in kimonos, but I do not live in that world.
John: It's another world I want to live in that I don't live in.
Merlin: What?
Merlin: You mean like where people wouldn't look askance?
Merlin: Like if you go to the bank to cash a check and you're wearing a wet kimono, nobody's going to say anything.
John: Well, you know, I wouldn't wear a wet kimono to the bank.
John: Not at first, but like a big, like a big kimono and some like wooden sandals.
Yeah.
John: And just sort of, you know, but not, I wouldn't have a top knot or anything.
John: I'd be wearing a baseball hat like a normal guy, but just like in a, in a serious warrior kimono.
John: But why, you know, people would, people would give me the hairy eyeball and I get that enough.
Merlin: and now is that is that your typical bet i'm sorry i don't mean to i'm interested in robes yeah me oh me too yeah because i don't know i feel i feel kind of guilty when i'm wearing a robe for too long really no guilty is the wrong word i feel self-conscious yeah right sure indulgent i guess yeah and so is this the usual is this the robe if you can say is this the robe that you would use to prowl your perimeter carrying a sword
John: No, no.
John: Let me walk you through the robes.
John: The longest standing robe, if not the longest in length, is a Pendleton robe that belonged to my dad that is made out of the scratchiest wool.
John: You would not make a blanket for a horse out of this wool.
John: It is so scratchy.
John: But for some reason, Pendleton made it into a robe probably in the 40s.
John: My dad had this his whole life.
John: And then I stole it from him.
John: And it was an expression of like...
John: literally a hair shirt i would put on this robe and then you're you're like a wet horse at that point it's the opposite of getting comfortable yeah you would be in a scratchy robe and you would walk around and kind of feel like yes yes if you've had some corporeal sins through the day but you'd like to relax and play some video games you put on your uh your horse hair shirt your horse robe yeah i i it's like the bath soothes you and then like jumping into a cold pond
John: You jump into a harsh robe.
John: Totally harsh robe.
John: So then I... Then sometime...
John: After I grew to adulthood, I was like, I don't have to wear this robe all the time.
John: This is a robe to wear over silk pajamas where the scratchiness of it isn't a factor.
John: Oh.
John: So then I got a white terrycloth robe like you would steal from a hotel.
John: That's what I have.
John: Yeah.
John: And I wore that for a long time except the sleeves were too short.
John: Okay.
John: So then I bought a blue terrycloth robe and I made the classic mistake.
John: I do this all the time.
John: I bought a double XL.
John: thinking that the sleeves were too short in the old robe i'm gonna get a double xl and um and that's gonna you know that's gonna fit me properly but in fact uh in fact i look like rasputin in this thing the sleeves are four feet too long it's made for a 500 pound man
Merlin: That's comfort country.
Merlin: But that is the robe.
Merlin: That's the category area, though.
Merlin: You think it's going to be more comfortable because it's really big, but that's a little too big.
Merlin: Yeah, exactly.
Merlin: You got like wizard sleeves.
John: Wizard sleeves.
John: I mean, Peter the Great would lop off my beard if he caught me in this robe.
John: But this is the robe I wear out into the yard.
John: This is the yard robe.
John: Okay.
John: Because it wraps around you like a Snuggie.
John: It's like going out into the yard like in a terrycloth house.
Ha ha ha!
John: And it's also midnight blue.
John: It's like a cotton yurt.
John: Yeah, exactly.
John: I could pull it up over my head and build a cooking fire.
Merlin: But it's midnight blue also.
Merlin: That sounds like something like Hammock or Schlemmer would come up with for Christmas time.
John: I forget what the brand of this thing is, but it's something like that.
John: It's basically designed for you and a friend.
John: But I have tested it and raccoons cannot see it.
John: It's like a certain color and it has a kind of shark skin quality that raccoons just think it's like leaves blowing in the wind.
Merlin: That's handy.
John: And they'll walk right up on you.
Merlin: Because sometimes you want to be seen, but then other times you want to be able to move with some stealth if you want to do some reconnaissance.
John: Exactly.
John: The kimonos are a recent.
John: I've just been, I've started collecting.
John: That's just for John time.
John: That's just, exactly.
John: That's for me.
Merlin: I've got a – well, this is not very interesting.
Merlin: But, yeah, we went to – on our honeymoon.
Merlin: We went on our honeymoon with our moms.
Merlin: And we liked the robes so much that our moms on the sly bought us the fancy robes.
John: That was at some Victorian gasthouse.
John: It was like a gasthouse.
John: Up in Sonoma County or something.
Merlin: You're good.
Merlin: Yeah, it was like a – it was – God, that place is amazing.
Merlin: But, yeah, I feel real girly in it.
Merlin: I feel feeble.
Merlin: Oh, I've not.
Merlin: Well, I mean, I get by, but yeah, it's very big, very thirsty, very comfortable.
Merlin: It's nice for coming out of the shower.
Merlin: But would you let me let me ask you this.
John: Your office is within a block of your house.
John: Would you walk to your office from your house in this robe?
Merlin: Oh, my gosh.
Merlin: That is such a good question.
Merlin: Right?
Merlin: Because I wasn't going to say anything, but I'm – I should cut this out.
Merlin: I have noticed – it was occurring to me today when I came to the office, and I don't like to – you know how triangulation works.
Merlin: You don't like to say too much.
John: Sure, sure, sure.
Merlin: But I measured the time that it took when I got this office, and I could easily listen to –
Merlin: Basically, the first two verses of Thunder Road is the amount of time it takes me to go between the two places.
Merlin: I know you're a fan.
Merlin: And it's very, very close.
Merlin: And it occurred to me that I've been at resorts and large hotels where it would take me far more time to walk to the lobby of the hotel than it takes me.
Merlin: Sometimes I've got to go and I've got to do an internet thing.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: Like a TV related thing.
Merlin: That's all I'm going to say.
Merlin: I got to go do something at the office.
Merlin: And I have to tell you, this has only really happened in the last two to three weeks.
Merlin: And I'm saying way too much.
Merlin: My sartorial decisions for ambling toward the office are getting more and more informal.
Merlin: I don't know why.
Merlin: This is funny timing because for the last, whatever, four years I've had this office, I would always get dressed like a gentleman to go to the office.
Merlin: I would put on my holy pants or whatever.
Merlin: But yeah, I have to tell you, I've been sliding into sweatpants territory to go to the office.
John: Well, everybody on that block has seen you go by a million times.
John: They know you belong there.
John: That's so freaky when that happens.
John: So why not start just wearing a garbage bag with armholes?
Merlin: It doesn't breathe.
Merlin: To make that trip.
Merlin: Well, you know, that's funny you should say that, too, because I've also noticed more often people saying things like, oh, I saw you the other day.
Uh-huh.
Merlin: Like my lady at the KFC.
Merlin: She'll say, I see you walking by.
Merlin: And it never occurs to me that people can see me walking by.
Merlin: So I don't even know who sees me.
Merlin: And I've been here long enough now that people have probably seen me.
Merlin: People have seen you.
Merlin: But I think I turned a corner in the last week or so.
Merlin: I was really, really... I think, yeah, obviously I mentioned to you last week.
Merlin: I was really, really sick a week ago today.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: And I think my standards slipped even further.
Merlin: I did something I never, ever, ever do.
Merlin: And now I'm definitely saying too much.
Merlin: I started going to the office...
Merlin: Oh, sure.
Merlin: Why would you need it?
Merlin: I've got my phone.
Merlin: I'm listening because I'm usually listening to music or a podcast.
Merlin: And that's in a jacket sleeve or jacket pocket because I'm wearing sweatpants.
Merlin: But then I don't even bother.
Merlin: My question, John, is where will I be in, say, two and a half months?
John: Right.
John: Well, that's what I'm, you know, it's just going to be you in rollerblades with a dish towel wrapped around your waist.
John: That's a smart look.
John: But the thing is, going to the office without your wallet, that puts you in a problematic situation.
John: What if you suddenly need two chili dogs?
Merlin: That's a really good point.
John: You can go back to the house.
John: Do you keep a bucket of change there at the desk?
Merlin: It's not – the money thing is – that's a very good question.
Merlin: It's not even the money thing.
Merlin: It's that – and I berate my beloved wife about this because she just like sometimes goes out of the house without all of the kit.
Merlin: And I'm a big believer.
Merlin: I carry a backpack, a giant backpack everywhere I go.
Merlin: I've always got everything with me.
Merlin: I've got several forms of identification.
Merlin: I've got cash.
Merlin: I've got cards.
Merlin: I've always got – I have several – if you want to talk about it, I have several heuristics for making sure I don't lose things that are extremely interesting.
Merlin: Do you have mnemomics?
Merlin: Yeah, I've got mnemonics, mnemomics, mnemomics.
Merlin: I do.
Merlin: Actually, I have several mnemonics involving keys if you'd like to learn them.
Merlin: And because my biggest fear, but luckily, and boy, I'm really saying too much now.
Merlin: The door of my office requires a key to get in.
Merlin: Sure.
Merlin: And then when I get in, I lock the door with the same key.
Merlin: So that's a mnemonic right there.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: They call it a life hack.
Merlin: It's called a life hack.
John: It's the one key life hack.
Merlin: Yeah, the uno yave.
Merlin: But no, I guess I think about it, and you know how it is with life and substances, where something starts out really simple and then you find yourself challenging yourself.
Merlin: That idea of like, can I throw the beanbag a little bit further this time?
Merlin: And I'm just wondering, I wonder if I will get to a point, we should probably capture this for later and circle back.
John: Barefoot, barefoot.
John: I think you're going to make that walk barefoot.
Merlin: I did barefoot for a while in college.
Merlin: I've done barefoot.
Merlin: But are you going to make that particular walk barefoot?
Merlin: Knowing what you know about your neighborhood.
Merlin: Let's cut to the chase.
Merlin: How long will it be before I put on a comfortable warm jacket and walk to the office in my underwear is the question.
Merlin: Long t-shirt, nothing else.
Merlin: Yeah, a guy can do that.
Merlin: Now, if a lady walked to her office, I don't want to be normative, but if a lady walked to her office in underwear, that would seem like a penthouse forum thing.
John: listen my favorite thing in the world is a lady in a trench coat with nothing else have you ever gotten that i mean i don't want to have to cut this all out okay but uh you know i have a lyric in a song that used to be a special thing which song if you can say oh it's in uh well it's in an unreleased song but it's in not moving to portland oh that's a good song yeah um
Merlin: I don't know.
Merlin: You know what?
Merlin: We'll probably do what we call an offline follow-up about this because I'm not sure I want to triangulate any more than I have.
Merlin: At this point, I'm probably hexagonalating.
Merlin: Sure.
Merlin: But I have a feeling knowing how I am and knowing – you know how I am.
Merlin: You know how I'm scared of everything?
Merlin: Well.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Remember the shirt you suggested for me?
John: Uh-huh.
Merlin: Was it Driven by Fear?
Merlin: Was that the shirt you thought I should get in very, very tiny letters?
Merlin: Like I don't want people to be able to read it.
John: Driven by Fear, but in those dripping paint letters, really small dripping paint letters.
Merlin: What do you mean?
Merlin: Like 80s roller skating letters?
John: Yeah, iron-on dripping paint letters from them all.
Merlin: A little kitty cat on a branch.
Merlin: Friday's coming.
Merlin: But I could see myself pushing myself to that and saying – because you know how it is.
Merlin: It's like procrastination.
Merlin: It's like any kind of substance abuse or anything where you get away with something for a while.
Merlin: You eventually – you got to see how far you can – I may tonight just walk home with my wang out just to see if I can do it.
John: I mean at a certain hour, there is nothing – I mean I have –
John: I've made a practice of wandering around sort of my local neighborhood and
John: In nothing but a bathrobe and a sword.
Merlin: Yeah.
John: And I find it incredibly liberating.
John: But would I get into the car in a bathrobe and a sword?
John: No.
John: First of all, no.
Merlin: I know why.
Merlin: See, I think this is something we have in common.
Merlin: And I would like to think that this drives your mates as crazy as it drives my mates.
Merlin: But I really like to walk through.
Merlin: I like to think through.
Merlin: Like if we're driving somewhere, okay, well, we better bring a blanket because what if something happens with the car?
Merlin: What if we're stuck out there?
Merlin: We should have some energy bars and some gallons of water, extra oil.
John: What if somebody T-bones the car and you're the only one and everyone else is knocked unconscious and you have to escape through a side window?
John: Yes.
John: Are you going to get your fucking bathrobe tangled in the rearview mirror?
Merlin: It seems so simple.
Merlin: You could drive naked for years and never have a problem.
Merlin: And then one day you realize you forgot your driver's license and now you're entering a world of pain.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: You want to bring Yahtzee and water and be ready.
John: This is why I don't get a belly button piercing.
John: I've said it before.
John: I don't want anything that could possibly get snagged if I have to go over a chain link fence.
Right.
John: And I think you should make all of your life decisions based on...
John: Is there a chance I'm going to have to go over a chain link fence at some point today?
John: And when I go walk around my perimeter in my bathrobe, I make sure there's never a fence between me and the front door behind which is my small bag and my arsenal of medieval weapons.
Merlin: I think that's smart.
Merlin: Even if you don't use it, you know it's there.
Merlin: The thing is you're mentally prepared.
Merlin: You know you – even if it doesn't come up, it may not come up for years, and then it may come up like three times in a couple days because like Mossad is after you or something.
Merlin: I'm just saying.
John: I get into this all the time with people and their stupid shoes.
John: It's like, make your shoes as fancy as you want.
John: Make them 10 feet tall.
John: Have a fishbowl in the soles.
John: But if you cannot either get the heck out of those shoes in a hurry...
John: And, and, and make the pace or like make the pace in the shoes.
John: But any, any time I'm like walking around and all of a sudden I'm, I'm like holding hands with, with, with an Insta gimp, right?
John: Like we looked great at the party.
John: And then it's like, Hey, we, it's like, it's only two and a half blocks up and a block and a half over to get to the, uh,
John: get to the next party and they're like oh and all of a sudden insta-gimp and they're just limping and their feet are bleeding i broke my kitten heel how the fuck do you live in the world like your feet your feet would have you would have been fine and pretty much i mean the they're the the great pantheon of women's shoes includes plenty of cute little shoes that can also be used to scale a fence
Merlin: Let's be honest.
Merlin: There's a lot of very handsome boots that a lady can wear that are attractive, and they're comfortable, and they're ready for evading massage if it comes up, when it comes up.
John: This is what I'm asking you, Merlin.
John: High fashion.
John: For many, many, many years, high fashion.
John: I'm talking about the real high stuff.
John: The Italian and French stuff.
John: Super, you know, like custom made fashion.
John: Those crazies have been marching their runway models up and down the street in logger boots for like 30 years now.
John: There's nothing new to it, right?
John: Giant like Gene Simmons Kiss boots and motorcycle boots.
John: Why don't all women just take the cue that that is the best shoe?
John: If you just have a knee-high motorcycle boot, it goes with everything, right?
John: It's black.
John: I don't understand.
John: We have crossed this bridge and crossed it and crossed it and crossed it, and yet I keep seeing pumps.
John: I keep seeing people choosing pumps.
Merlin: Well, you understand why that is.
John: Because it makes a girl's foot look like a cloven hoof.
John: Okay.
Merlin: Yeah, I guess that's the way... Doesn't it make them look like... Well, it makes your butt stick out.
Merlin: You walk cute.
Merlin: You look tall.
Merlin: There's a lot of things to recommend them, but...
Merlin: The problem is it's one thing to be like in the court of Louis XIV.
Merlin: It's one thing to be in a Louis court where the whole idea is you are deliberately wearing completely impractical clothes to show how powerful you are.
John: Right, to express your wealth and the fact that no one will require you to lift a thing except your petticoats to go to the bathroom behind the curtain.
Merlin: Or to hide a page or horseman.
Merlin: Hello.
Merlin: Could you hide under a petticoat?
Merlin: I saw Doctor Who where he hid under a dress.
John: I would happily hide under a petticoat.
John: How long could you stay under there?
Merlin: Would you bring water?
John: Depends on whose petticoat.
John: I was thinking about this the other day.
John: I'm often bemoaning the fact that people dress so shabbily when there are so many wonderful ways to dress that are just as comfortable as shabby dressing.
John: And I was talking to my mom.
John: I was reflecting on like, oh, you know, when you were a kid or back in the 40s, like everybody dressed great.
John: And it was such a much better way of so much more, more, more beautiful world.
John: When all men are in suits and all women are in dresses and it's just, you know, everybody's wearing a hat.
John: It's like I long for it even though I only saw the tail end of it.
Merlin: And it was real.
Merlin: I mean, if you look at newsreels up until Kennedy, every guy always wore a hat.
John: Yeah.
John: But what my mom said is what the photographs cannot convey is that everybody smelled to high heaven then.
John: Like, it was before deodorant had been invented.
John: You're like the opposite of Malcolm Gladwell.
John: So people doused themselves with perfumes and powders.
John: So rich people smelled like Victoria's Secret dressing rooms.
John: And poor people just smelled like toilets.
John: And so everywhere you went, every public transportation, just walking down the sidewalk, you were just assaulted, constantly assaulted by poop and powder.
John: And, you know, now you could, when you're in a public space and there's somebody that smells strongly, either strongly of perfume or strongly of body odor, it stands out.
John: You're like, oh my God, you, person, come on, get a grip.
John: But my mom said back in, you know, back in the 30s and 40s, like everybody,
Merlin: just reeked i bet part of that was you got first of all just let's step zero you got wool right you had probably had a lot of stuff that had to be dry cleaned you're wearing wool suits all year round i think people owned fewer clothes than probably yeah and you took care of them and you mended them couple of suits three or four suits if you were a normal person
Merlin: I ordered 12 pairs of socks today from Amazon because it really is that simple.
John: And what kind?
Merlin: Well, it's a pretty pedestrian, so to speak.
Merlin: White gold toes.
Merlin: Is that the brand?
Merlin: Oh, white gold toes.
Merlin: Yeah, I was going on the pad thing.
John: Your good friend Jesse Thorne gave me a real lecture one time because I was wearing white gold toes with a suit.
Merlin: Well, he's got a lot of lectures in him.
Merlin: I checked, though, and the last time that I bought, one of my mass orders was August.
Merlin: Like, that's how recently.
Merlin: So my thing is, like, now today, this is how crazy we are today.
Merlin: Like, today, you know, you would buy, I was going to say a VCR, but you buy these electronic devices, you don't get them fixed.
Merlin: But it used to be, like, now I discovered I had a pair of socks on the other day.
Merlin: I had a hole in my sock, which I get about twice a year.
Merlin: Uh-huh.
Merlin: Cause I throw them out when they get too gross.
Merlin: I think back then you would have clothes.
Merlin: You might have five, 10 year old underwear, like as just a matter of course, like I say, I think you got wool, you got to dress for work.
Merlin: So if you had to wear a suit to work, not everybody's Jesse Thorne.
Merlin: Not everybody has a lot of fancy suits in the forties.
Merlin: You wear the same suit you wore yesterday and the suit that you wore the day before.
Merlin: Also, John, foundation wear.
Merlin: I think for ladies, I mean, I think a lot – if you watch, go back and look at those old – like the shapes that women have are not natural.
John: No, 10 layers of underwear.
John: Yeah.
John: So now this is – That's a lot to wash.
John: We're talking about 1940 now, the modern era.
John: Now imagine how people smelled in 1840.
Merlin: I've heard, I don't want to sound like I'm looking down my nose at the French, because I know that's a thing I do, so to speak.
Merlin: But I've heard people were pretty stinky back then.
John: A lot of cologne.
John: People are still pretty stinky in France.
John: But I mean, people everywhere.
John: I think this is one of the things that we never talk about.
John: When we talk about time travel, I think the most extraordinary aspect of traveling back in time would be that you would land and immediately your senses that cannot be conveyed on film, like your smell senses, would be assaulted immediately.
Merlin: Can you imagine what the Lower East Side must have smelled like in, like, the 19-teens?
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: The amazing... But, like, you know, when there's a lot of people there, you know, probably not super fancy.
Merlin: You got all those different kinds of ethnic foods going on.
Merlin: It must have been overwhelming.
John: People are butchering animals, like, in the streets...
John: Right.
John: I mean, you're not Lower East Side.
John: You're not going to the local Whole Foods, like Whole Foods, the organic chicken place.
John: You are like grabbing a chicken off the roof or whatever and and cutting its throat.
John: And then, I mean, you would be the streets would be running with blood and awful and and poop, poop and pee.
Mm hmm.
John: And, uh, and yeah, we look at those pictures and we're like, oh, wow.
John: Simple times.
John: Jeez.
John: So simple.
John: Look at the families.
John: I mean, my, my, the, the history or my whole, uh, my whole story of travel, like the first time I left, cause in Alaska, right.
John: Or Seattle or, I mean, Seattle was built sort of largely constructed in the last hundred years.
John: San Francisco is older, but Alaska is,
John: In 1940, Anchorage was like four pup tents and a windmill.
John: So the entire city has been built since the advent of all mod cons, right?
John: So growing up in Anchorage, there was no opportunity to ever smell an open sewer.
John: It just would never happen.
John: And my first experience of going to, I mean, and it really happened the first time I went to New York City, to be in a city full of people and to smell something come up out of a hole in the ground that suggested the amazing warren of pipes, of dookie pipes.
John: I was, you know, like I had to control my retching because the smell was unfamiliar and also I knew what it represented.
John: and then the first time i went to europe and you know the streets of paris are just strewn with feces really well because they don't curb their dogs there first of all so it's considered part of being a parisian that you take your shitty little dog out and walk down the street and just let it shit anywhere like that's a it's it's actually like a cultural problem why do we keep helping them
Merlin: They are really adamant about it.
Merlin: Don't they go to the table at a cafe?
Merlin: Your dog can sit there?
John: Absolutely.
John: It's part of the Gallic culture.
John: I don't understand it.
John: I can't judge.
John: That's got to be just... They're being deliberately annoying.
John: They are being deliberately annoying.
John: So there's poop everywhere.
John: And then also Paris was built...
John: by the Romans.
John: And I'm sure that the, I'm sure that the, the underlying fundamental foundational sewer system is still Roman.
John: It's still just like terracotta, uh, like poop tumblers, right?
John: You just, it's like gravity fed, tumble the poop down and,
Merlin: It was, let's be honest, it was pretty advanced for its time.
John: It was incredible 2,000 years ago.
John: But I'm sure whatever, you know, anytime you go into a European bathroom, the first thing that you're struck by is like, that's your toilet?
John: And that's your bathtub?
John: Like, interesting.
John: Like, so much of, so much, we share so much with Europe.
John: But the kitchen appliances and the bathroom facilities are always just a little bit off.
John: Like somebody was doing a film design and it's kind of like the cars in sleeper.
John: the Woody Allen film, you know, the, the cars and sleeper are from the future, but you can tell that it's just, it's just like a paper mache car over the top of a, I feel like there were VWs in that.
John: Yeah.
John: Maybe under, under some crazy, um, some crazy body, fake body work.
John: And that's what I always feel like when I'm looking at, at a, at a European dishwasher or, or a bathtub, it's just like, really?
Yeah.
Merlin: Yeah, everything's kind of little.
Merlin: I haven't been to Europe, but I've been to England, and everything seems very compact.
Merlin: The thing that strikes me about New York, I haven't been to Manhattan in a while.
John: We should change that.
John: You and I should go to Manhattan and do a show.
Merlin: We've got to talk about a lot of things.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: I heard you were writing a book.
Merlin: We can cut all this out.
Merlin: Okay.
Merlin: We got a lot to talk about.
Merlin: But whenever I go to New York, last time I was there, I was staying in the garment district.
Merlin: And I remember, you know, how like you'll realize something for a long time and then you finally like realize the name for what it is.
Merlin: It was like – and it was like – I was in a pretty –
Merlin: God, I was lucky enough to be in a pretty quiet hotel, all things considered.
Merlin: But still, you could look out the window and just all night long, there's something going on all the time in New York City.
Merlin: And that's so different from almost anywhere I've ever lived, including San Francisco.
Merlin: As you know, San Francisco, everything closes up pretty early by really any normal.
Merlin: Super annoying.
Merlin: Yeah, metropolitan city standards.
Merlin: But New York really feels like an organism.
Merlin: It feels like a big, breathing, eating, pissing, shitting organism.
Merlin: And there's just trucks delivering stuff in crazy places at crazy times, and they're hosing down the street.
Merlin: And it really feels like a brood.
Merlin: You know what I mean?
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: I guess there's probably cities like that in Europe, but New York, Manhattan really feels like that to me.
Merlin: It really feels like a giant, complex animal that we just happen to be living on for a little while.
John: Yeah, well, the great thing about Manhattan is there are no alleys.
John: Right.
John: Most cities that were built in America were built with alleys for delivery and trash.
John: Right.
John: And all the facilities.
John: Right.
Merlin: You ever see the UPS person in Manhattan?
Merlin: You're like, oh, my God, you're you're a fucking wizard.
Merlin: What are you doing?
Merlin: They all are wizards.
Merlin: Everybody.
Merlin: They've got the same UPS.
Merlin: UPS trucks here.
Merlin: They just park wherever they want for as long as they want.
Merlin: And there they just they have to go to the most improbable places in the craziest traffic.
Merlin: I don't know how anyone survives it.
John: Yeah, the people there learn to park on top of phone poles because you are... Like, everywhere you are... Talk about keep moving and get out of the way.
John: Like, as soon as you stop moving there, you are in 500 people's way.
John: And so everybody just keeps... And like I say, no alleys, no back doors to anything.
John: So all deliveries, all garbage, it all has to come in and out through the same front door that...
John: Business is being conducted through and everybody's coming in and out at all times.
John: You know, there's no, the city can't afford to rest because there's no such thing as like, I'll just put that out back.
John: We'll, we'll figure it out.
Merlin: Oh, there's, there's no, there's no place like, like here you might say, Oh, you know, drop off my delivery, you know, in this, you know, go through this access door and go leave it here in this space.
Merlin: Everything's public in some ways.
John: It's all happening.
John: And if you put something out on the sidewalk, you know,
John: and go back inside.
John: Someone will move into it.
John: It will go away, yeah.
John: People are like, hey, look at this.
John: And so the city just... But I think it's the most amazing place.
John: At any hour of the day, four o'clock in the morning, you can go...
John: Only a couple of blocks from where you are, wherever that is, and walk into a place and say, I would like a four-course meal.
John: Yeah.
John: I would like chicken parmesan and apple pie and decaf coffee and, let's say, for instance, calamari, fried calamari.
John: And there will be people there that think that's the most reasonable thing in the world.
John: And they will bring it to you with no comment and there will be people all around you having similar meals.
John: And you're just like, yeah, that's right.
Merlin: That's right, world.
Merlin: Here's what's crazy about that.
Merlin: So like in San Francisco, there's just – I don't know.
Merlin: It's a really weird place.
Merlin: Like there's not that many fast food places.
Merlin: There's not that many gas stations.
Merlin: There's all kinds of stuff where like we've let other places take care of that.
Merlin: There's not nearly as much of that kind of stuff.
Merlin: There's a small version of a gas station here and so forth.
Merlin: But like in Florida – so that's pretty weird for a theoretically metropolitan place.
Merlin: Like in Florida, when I lived in Florida, there were all kinds of places that were open 24 hours.
Merlin: There were like giant, like enormous, like 24-pump gas stations with a blimpies inside that were open fucking 24 hours a day.
Merlin: Walmart.
Merlin: The Walmart is open 24 – you can go in and buy a lawnmower in the middle of the night.
Merlin: But here's the difference.
Merlin: So we don't have that here.
Merlin: In Florida, you go there, but you know who's there in the middle of the night?
Merlin: Loonies.
Merlin: Like the only people at these places at 2 in the morning are there for something lurid generally.
Merlin: But what you're describing about Manhattan, the part I never could get my head around –
Merlin: This is exactly what you described.
Merlin: You walk in and like you go in and you go like, hey, I'm drunk guy ordering calamari.
Merlin: No, like it's everybody in there.
Merlin: It's totally normal.
Merlin: It's a 24-hour town.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: And I have no context for a place where you would just go in and go, you know what?
Merlin: I want to go get some pretty above average Greek food at 420 in the morning.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: I've never experienced that.
Merlin: Because it would all be crazy people.
John: There's a guy in there working on his novel.
John: There are two sweethearts canoodling in the corner.
Merlin: Or it's just like two senior citizens, and you're like, what are you doing in here in the middle of the night?
Merlin: That's so suspicious.
Merlin: Everywhere I've ever lived, to be out after dark, it's like the Middle Ages.
Merlin: It's like, why would you be at this place now for more than, why would you be anywhere in the middle of the night for an hour, unless it was for something really sketchy?
John: Well, and as I drive around my own town in the middle of the night reflecting on why the fuck everybody is not out hanging out with each other,
John: I can't but come back to that we are all at home watching television.
John: It's not that everybody is asleep.
John: It is that everybody is watching workout commercials and weight loss commercials alone in their own little sanctums.
John: And not making that small extra effort to go to the one place that is open and just sit and read a paperback or whatever.
John: If you're up at that hour, at least that is the one time of day I do like to be in a place where there's a little hustle bustle and people are around.
Merlin: You mean like a waffle house kind of scene?
Merlin: Well, we don't have waffle houses, but... You know what I mean?
Merlin: Some place where you could go in just like a Denny's type place.
Merlin: Yeah, a little diner.
John: You get a piece of pie with a cup of coffee and you write in your journal or you read a paperback.
John: I mean, I feel like that experience...
John: is one that we all take for granted we we all think of as kind of like oh that's kind of lonely like you're in the middle of the night you're having a piece of pie reading a book but in fact i think those are the greatest experiences and that we should all seek out that kind of thing because what what we're
John: The thing that that replaces is not sitting around carving a turkey with your family and friends.
John: It replaces sitting in front of a TV watching garbage in the middle of the night.
John: To replace solitary television watching with any other thing is a net improvement.
John: to replace solitary television watching with a walk around the block, to replace solitary television watching with a cigarette out on the back porch shivering in your nightgown, is ultimately, I think, better for our spirits than just that passive TV.
John: And particularly...
John: sitting in a restaurant in the middle of the night and writing in your journal and having a piece of pie and a cup of coffee.
John: I mean, those are the, those are moments I really cherish.
John: And, and, and, uh, and that, that whole, like I'm dining by myself.
John: Yes.
John: It is a table for one.
John: Yes.
John: Like that's a thing I'm,
John: I'm always very proud in those moments.
John: It is a table for one, sir.
John: Bring me a pie and coffee.
John: And people are embarrassed to dine by themselves, I guess.
John: But I think dining by yourself is the ultimate power move, especially if you have a book.
Merlin: Oh, it's, you know, when someone, you go in somewhere and you just want to get a meal and they say, uh, just one.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: I say yes.
Merlin: One.
Merlin: Uno.
Merlin: I like, I like eating by myself.
Merlin: I like going to the movies by myself.
Merlin: Going to the movies by yourself is the best.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: But I think you're right.
Merlin: I think people that reads as lonely.
Yeah.
John: Well, and I really feel like those moments, I mean, not to be too late 80s, early 90s, like cherish yourself culture.
John: But I really do... I think I missed that.
John: I really do feel like... Cherish yourself.
John: The cherish yourself era of like... You remember when the baby boomers really, really first started to realize that they were...
John: They still didn't believe they were going to die, but they did start to... Their hair started to fall out.
Merlin: Oh, they were the worst.
John: Do you remember that before they realized they were going to die?
John: Before they realized they were going to die.
Merlin: All that Smokey Robinson?
John: Ugh.
John: And that's the thing.
John: And that's when they went through their big, like, we need to cherish ourselves.
John: Every moment is precious.
John: Like, all of that.
John: And, of course, you and I were 20, 25 years younger than they were.
John: And being given this information, like, cherish ourselves?
John: I hate myself.
John: Yeah.
John: I hate myself as God intended.
John: What do you mean cherish myself?
John: It's efficient.
John: Yeah.
John: But now I'm starting to see like, you know what?
John: You don't have to buy something expensive.
John: Cherishing yourself is just taking yourself to the fucking movies.
Merlin: Well, I don't want to sound defensive as somebody who enjoys watching extremely good TV and movies at night.
John: Oh, I know.
John: No, no, no.
Merlin: You are curating your... Well, you know, my taste is outstanding.
John: It's incredible.
John: You should have... There should be an Amazon that is just...
Merlin: things that merlin likes that's a pretty good idea and it used to be one i could do that uh i i think um i think people are just a lot of people uh i don't say that they're scared of being alone i will say i think people are uncomfortable being seen being alone and i think that we kind of are meant to feel badly about ourselves if we're in public by ourselves like unless you're going to get like a pap smear
Merlin: Or an abortion.
John: Listen, I always offer my services to take women to their pap smears.
John: You'll be like a smear buddy?
John: Yeah, you don't want to go do that by yourself.
John: I'll go with you to your smear.
Merlin: You know what?
Merlin: That's a nice thing to do.
Merlin: That's a super nice thing.
Merlin: Somebody who's just there, you could sit there and you could read a fishing magazine in the lobby while it's happening.
John: I've gone with some friends to their abortions and sat in the armored lobby with every other woman in the place really, really glaring.
John: Humming a Ben Fold song to yourself.
John: Really glaring at me while I read Women's Wear Daily.
John: And because that is a thing where you need a – you really do need a friend and often the culprit is not a friend.
Merlin: Well, I wasn't saying ladies who get abortions are lonely.
Merlin: Just that I think that we're supposed to feel like – again, this is just –
Merlin: Well, there's another part of this, which is the suburban culture, which is like when I was a kid, if you wanted to go to Denny's, you would get in a car and drive to Denny's.
Merlin: Why is there a 19-year-old kid who has driven to Denny's in the middle of the night?
Merlin: Now, if you want to go out and get a kebab at 4 in the morning, there's a pretty good chance you could walk there.
Merlin: In 10 or 15 minutes.
Merlin: Huge difference.
Merlin: It's one reason I put up with so much horseshit in the stupid town I live in is because it is pretty walkable and pretty, you know, public transitable.
Merlin: And given that I'm advancing in years and don't need to go out in the middle of the night, it would actually make school drop off the next morning kind of hard.
Merlin: Still, I like that that's...
Merlin: I like that I can walk places.
Merlin: I don't like having to get in a car.
Merlin: I despise having to get in a car to go somewhere and do a thing and then drive back.
Merlin: I did that for so many years and it just became in Florida.
Merlin: That's what we did.
Merlin: You know, I've told you this when we want to go buy records, we had to drive to Tampa, Florida to buy records.
Merlin: We had to drive 40 minutes to buy records.
Merlin: And, and now like, like today that seems, I understand why that's the way it is, but it's kind of a bummer.
John: Yeah.
John: Well, and you're talking about my life now because, as I've said before, the one thing that I failed to take into consideration when I bought my house was that I would have to drive and that I did not like... I love to drive for sport.
John: I hate to drive out of necessity.
Merlin: Same, same here.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: And you really, there's, uh, I don't want to provide triangulation.
John: Oh, it's all right.
John: They all know where I live because they're putting super train stickers on all my stop signs now.
Merlin: Creepy.
Merlin: Uh, there's that, there's that one weird little shop near you.
Uh,
Merlin: Which is useless.
Merlin: Totally useless.
Merlin: They don't have half and half.
Merlin: They don't have half and half.
Merlin: All they sell is Faygo and Kools.
Merlin: Lottery tickets?
Merlin: Do I remember correctly they didn't know what half and half was?
Merlin: Never heard of it.
John: Wasn't interested in learning about it.
Merlin: I was like, it comes out of a cow, but you're a good driver.
Merlin: You like to drive and you're not drinking and stuff.
John: So you can like, I love to drive.
John: But the problem is, the problem is everybody wants to have a fucking meeting and they all want to have fucking meetings on the other side of town.
John: So I'm always, that's half a day.
Merlin: That is half a day.
John: Just like you, you have to have a meeting.
John: I don't want to have a meeting.
John: I just send me the, just send me the, the liner notes.
John: Give me the PowerPoint.
John: Yeah.
John: Like, what are we talking about?
John: Is there something I can say yes or no to?
John: But no, it's a freaking meeting.
John: You got to be there.
John: And so I'm in the car and the traffic is so capricious.
John: Like...
John: 1130 on a Wednesday, it takes me five minutes to get to town.
John: 1130 the next day on absolutely same conditions and it's stop and go traffic for an hour.
John: Oh, that makes me insane.
John: It's just crazy making.
John: And so I look at my house and I'm like, I want to live here.
John: I want to fix this house up.
John: I can see myself living here for 20 years.
John: My mortgage payment is inexpensive.
John: I have a lot of property.
John: You got room to grow.
John: I got plenty of room here.
John: I can have a room just to practice the viola.
John: As John Hodgman describes his childhood home, he said there was a room in my house where the whole purpose of the room was for me to practice the viola.
John: And I like that.
John: I admire that.
John: A viola practice room.
John: But I am consigning myself to this drive, this drive, or to being like a weird hermit.
John: The internet does not provide me.
John: I cannot be a person who just sits and lives on the internet.
John: I just can't do it.
Merlin: You sure about that?
Merlin: Does that include your phone?
Merlin: Well, my fucking phone.
Merlin: See, you act like you're some cat lady sitting there with your PC.
Merlin: But you toot a lot.
John: I've been having some very strong feelings lately, Merlin, that the internet, in particular, the internet that I live in, which is the Twitter net,
John: And that expanded kind of into the Instagram net with like a Hail Mary pass once a week to the Facebook net.
John: that this world is now greatly diminished from what it was a year ago.
John: And I know that you being an early adopter of all these technologies have already felt sympathetic, have already felt the great sorrow of how much worse it is than it was.
John: But you know, I am, I am one of those people who actually has a career that he is like, I'm trying to provide, as you know, top shelf free content.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: I would never do that.
John: But, but I'm also trying to like the Twitter is the only way I have to tell people that I'm playing a show and playing a show is the only way I have to connect with people outside of Twitter.
John: And I've noticed just recently, like I'm trying to promote things and Facebook has put up all those firewalls where your posts no longer go to your friends and
John: Yeah, I've heard about this.
John: It sounds really weird.
John: It's the worst.
John: It's just like, oh, you have 5,000 friends.
Merlin: So five people could look at a page and see different things?
John: Well, what happens is their timeline is going by, and Facebook used to put my little tweets in the timeline of everybody that follows me.
John: Or everybody that friends me or whatever.
John: But then Facebook realized that people like me were promoting their shows by sending out Facebook.
John: I mean, not like private messages or anything, but just tweeting about it or just Facebooking about it.
John: And now Facebook takes...
John: Like 70% of your friends, it just doesn't show them all your posts.
Merlin: What?
John: Yeah.
Merlin: How does it decide?
John: It just randomly decides.
John: And it says, if you want all your posts to go to all your friends, it costs you $99.
John: Are you kidding me?
John: I am not kidding you.
Merlin: Is that real?
John: This is how they're trying to make money.
Merlin: Oh, boy.
John: Sorry I'm missing out on that.
John: I know.
John: So I hear from people all the time.
John: Somebody came up to me the other day, and they were like, I used to love your Facebook posts.
John: Why did you stop?
John: And I said, I didn't stop.
John: Facebook just stopped showing them to you.
John: My pictures got small.
John: And they were like, really?
John: That's the thing.
John: Nobody knows about it.
John: But I'm noticing, like, I send out a thing that used to generate a lot of interest.
John: And I used to feel like, oh, the internet is a comfortable place for me now.
John: I have transitioned away from needing magazines to write about my band.
John: I can just write about my own band and promote myself.
John: But in the intervening four or five years since I've been on Twitter, everybody in the world is trying to promote their cat videos and
John: And no one has any attention span for it.
John: Nobody goes and reads their Twitter feed anymore.
John: Your Facebook feed is all gamed.
John: And I no longer feel like I am effectively communicating with people that want to find me.
John: People that are listening to our podcast are doing it because they have drank the Kool-Aid.
John: They are ruined forever forever.
John: And, like, they just sit pulling on their fingers and waiting for more information.
John: But the majority of the people... I never thought of it that way.
John: The majority of people out there that I'm trying to reach that are just, like, normal ticket buyers and people that have not yet... People that have, like, tasted, smelled the Kool-Aid but haven't had a taste of it yet...
John: Like those people, it's just getting lost in the... I mean, just the people I follow...
John: I mean, just Paul and Storm's Kickstarters are taking up three quarters of my Twitter feed.
John: Everybody wants your attention.
John: Everybody is asking for money.
John: Everybody is making a new thing that they're very excited about.
John: And there is no distinction between me who makes things professionally and the guy next door who makes things
John: to keep the demon dogs from filling his head with screaming and howling.
John: And his promoted... If he pays $99 to Facebook, everybody sees his post.
John: So anyway, I'm feeling like, oh, the internet, it has legitimately moved on from... I mean, I remember when I joined Twitter, you and your old cadres were already like, Twitter's dead.
John: Twitter's dead.
John: It used to be so great.
John: But now I really do feel like there is no...
John: What seemed like you could run an economy, you could run a business this way, it's all gone or it's ebbing.
John: And I don't know what the next thing is.
John: Do we go back to blogging?
John: Yeah.
John: Do I design an app?
Yeah.
John: Do I design an app that every time I fart in a glass, it goes onto your phone?
John: That's pretty good.
John: That's a lot of farting in glasses.
Merlin: You should get somebody to prototype that.
Merlin: Fart glass.
Merlin: It's F-R-T-G-L-S.
Merlin: Fartglass.co.
John: I'll get Lonely Sandwich to do a promotional video for you.
John: Good luck.
John: That guy's busy.
Merlin: Well, I have a lot of thoughts on this.
Merlin: Yes.
Merlin: None of them are interesting, but I'll give you a couple quickies.
Merlin: Well, first of all, it's funny that like you would like look at a cat video guy and now like, you know, you go like, well, hey, like I'm John Roderick and like I actually make stuff.
Merlin: Well, it's funny because like five or eight years ago, you know, you were the underdog.
Merlin: Whereas, you know, there's the big companies out there that are like buying the ads in Rolling Stone and there was these all these bands doing this skunk works thing.
Merlin: And they were the underdogs.
Merlin: It's funny to me that today a relatively successful independent artist could look at the cat video people and see like, hey, you're eating off my plate.
Merlin: What's going on with this?
Merlin: You're not not releasing records.
John: What are you doing?
John: How dare you?
John: Hey, listen, if I'm going to sustain this not releasing records career, I need all the bandwidth I can get.
Merlin: Also, I would just like to say it is completely insane to use a service that doesn't do what you expected.
Merlin: Like Facebook, I don't want to get into Facebook because who cares?
Merlin: But, you know, eventually you will all not care as much as I...
Merlin: don't care and you'll be so much happier.
Merlin: But you know, it just seems so weird to me.
Merlin: Like it seems like Facebook is predicated on this weird shell game about expectations.
Merlin: It seems so strange to me that you would like, regardless of whatever their model is, that you would post stuff that wouldn't appear somewhere.
Merlin: Like you don't know which or when that's, that sounds like the definition of madness to me.
John: This is what's confusing.
John: I guess what's confusing is that I had a brief moment there where being pithy with no expectations was
John: generated interest created an art there was an audience for it and i was like that's all you you and i and all of our friends have ever wanted is like can we get paid to just hang out and have hang out in a chinese restaurant and and uh and and just talk funny about uh about rock and roll
John: Isn't that, isn't that the dream job though?
John: Well, it's all we ever wanted.
John: And there was a brief moment there where like, we were basically all hanging out at a Chinese restaurant and talking about rock and roll and it generated an audience.
John: And for a, for a, for, and I was stupid enough to think like, this is, this'll last.
John: Uh, and so now I'm, yeah, I'm back into the like, Oh shit, I gotta make something.
John: I gotta make something that like, that I gotta make something that's big, that, that rises up above the din.
Uh,
Merlin: Well, I mean I'm sympathetic though because I hate to admit it but I feel the same way.
Merlin: I don't check in on my Twitter timeline like I used to.
Merlin: Now I will kind of – I am like beyond okay to just let the whole thing go by and I'll pop in a couple times a week and go, oh, that's funny and favored that.
Merlin: And like, oh, that's funny or retweet or whatever.
John: But I no longer – if I'm going to San Francisco, all I do is I tweet.
John: I'm going to San Francisco.
John: See you guys there.
John: With the assumption that all my friends are watching my Twitter to see what I'm doing.
John: And then when I get to San Francisco and I'm like, where is everybody?
John: Uh, and then I realized, Oh, nobody is watching Twitter anymore.
John: Nobody is nobody.
John: And, and I don't, I have not either gone back to actually texting and emailing my actual friends or figured out a new way to, I mean, that was what Twitter was originally designed to do, right?
Merlin: Absolutely.
Merlin: Yes.
John: I'm, I'm, I'm anything that Twitter was for.
John: That was kind of it.
John: I'm at this bar tonight, you know, and all your friends would see it.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: And that gets me to the second point.
Merlin: Which is going to be frustrating because it's more of just a restatement of the problem.
Merlin: But when – my mom bought a house when I was 10 and she did something that was really, really strange.
Merlin: Burned it down immediately?
Yeah.
Merlin: It's all the dirty thoughts were inside.
Merlin: She, but she did something that was very strange by my mom's standards.
Merlin: We, you know, we had a very, we didn't have a lot of dough, but she did one of those weird single mom things, uh, that's, that still seems really strange, but, and yet very interesting, which was that like, we didn't even have, we didn't have a touchtone phone, but we had an office phone, like a business phone in our kitchen.
Merlin: So on the wall in our kitchen, we had a phone and,
Merlin: And it had a hold button and it had, you know, like you think about those, remember those old phones where you get the, on the left, you get the hold button and then you got the first line, second line and so on and number of lines.
John: Hold line is, or the hold button is red.
John: Yeah, exactly.
Merlin: And then those are white.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: In, uh, in 1976, uh,
Merlin: We had a home line and a business line in our house, which is like – like you could see somebody like fancy having that.
Merlin: But this is our $28,000 house in Cincinnati.
Merlin: My mom had this.
Merlin: She had a personal line and a business line.
Merlin: And it was such an interesting idea because for her real estate business, if anybody needed to call her – this was, of course, years and years before mobile phones – was they could call her.
Merlin: She had her work number and she had this like home business number.
Merlin: And there were very different rules.
Merlin: I was never, ever to use the business line for stuff because that's not what it was for.
Merlin: And you're kind of like – that seems so exotic to me.
Merlin: Think about being – think about how you were when you were 10 years old and the idea of having the phone in your kitchen have a hold button.
Merlin: Nobody had that when we were kids.
Merlin: Absolutely unheard of.
Merlin: And the problem is like your Twitter is like – first of all, it doesn't have a hold button.
Merlin: But it does have like – it should have numerous white buttons, but it's really just one big white button.
Merlin: So you're using it to talk to your friends.
Merlin: You're using it to be funny to strangers.
Merlin: You're using it to promote your business.
Merlin: You are using it to talk about politics.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: And sometimes you're using it to bitch about how the door on the plane just closed.
Merlin: And, you know, all of the people who follow you are seeing theoretically all of those.
Merlin: And so, you know, part of what made that so great was it is so simple.
Merlin: I mean, the rules of Twitter are just wonderfully simple, but I think you're running up against what a lot of people run up against.
Merlin: It's like, how do you, how can you be a real person on there with just that one big white button?
John: But that integration of all those different realms was the primary revolution for me.
John: Because before that, you know, the challenge I always felt was my songs are a place where I'm very passionate and I write about my feelings and I write about girls and I write about being disappointed.
John: And I write about being...
John: you know lonely and scared they are not especially funny songs they aren't especially they're not political songs they aren't um you know the and and i always felt like when my songs were my only ambassador to the world that i had all this other pent-up
John: energy and desire to be understood and unlike a lot of my peers i mean a lot of the guys i know are just like i don't like doing interviews i let the songs speak for me you know the songs will speak for themselves and i was absolutely opposite i was like please give me an interview so i can contextualize this music in a in the larger picture of like how i see the world
John: And Twitter was the first time I had, I had access to people who were interested in my songs and wanted to know more where I could just speak directly across, you know, and, and yes, get into fights with Hilton hotels and yes, talk about things late at night and make jokes, you know, and, and that integration, that one button that,
John: was like, I felt like, Oh, finally, I didn't want, I didn't want my songs to be this separate realm.
John: Um, because every time, every time I would read a review about my music where they were like, well, this guy obviously doesn't know how words work.
John: He's, his music is just, you know, he's just throwing random words at a dartboard.
John: I was like, you fucking idiot.
John: How can you, I mean, how could you listen to my music and think that?
Um,
John: And ever since Twitter, I have felt very confident that even a cursory search, if you are interested in the long winters, a cursory search will deliver a person to a place where the whole spectrum is at least available to see.
John: And the idea that that I would have to start cutting that up again and say, like, because, you know, I own at the long winters and at long winters.
John: I have those Twitter accounts and I've never used either one of them.
John: I wanted them so nobody else would take them.
John: But I didn't want to have a banned account that was just like, come into your town.
Merlin: Well, let's be honest.
Merlin: There's a strategic reason for not doing that.
Merlin: Raz, your good friend, Mr. Hodgman, about wanting to convert his Twitter following into a Tumblr following.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: But when you razz, that's what you're talking about here.
Merlin: I have probably 15 different Twitter handles for different things, but there's not that much point to it because for whatever inexplicable reason... Are you fake hot dogs, ladies?
Merlin: Oh, I'm a lot of them.
Merlin: I'm fake Merlin.
Merlin: I'm nice Merlin.
Merlin: I don't think I'm fake hot dogs ladies.
Merlin: If it's not funny, it's not me.
Okay.
Merlin: All of mine are funny and not updated, as you do.
Merlin: But I could do that.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: You know, the percentage of people who would go and follow that particular thing would be far less than 1% of the following that I get with this one that's already been sort of established or whatever.
Merlin: So, I mean, there's a business reason for not doing that.
Merlin: But also, everything you described right there, that would work, not to get all Malcolm Gladwell, that would work up to 150 or 200 people.
Mm-hmm.
Merlin: maybe 500 people, depending on how active they were.
Merlin: But after that point, I mean, I know you know this, but you have to remember that everything you say on there, regardless of which mask you're wearing at the time or which persona you're speaking in or which business you're speaking in service of, the person who follows you, like the extremely small number of people who follow you because of your politics, I'm assuming, sorry, for now, for now,
Merlin: But I mean all the people who would follow along because of some squirrely political belief you have could care less about whether – You can't be helped.
Merlin: Could care less who you're playing with tonight.
Merlin: I mean like why aren't you talking more about this thing that I like?
Merlin: That's the problem is that like – but we all act so surprised when that happens.
Merlin: Well, it's like we deliberately created this one place where you could find out all of these things.
Merlin: But then we seem really confused that people want different things.
Merlin: out of it.
Merlin: And it's, it's, I agree with you.
Merlin: It's just that it got big and like we had the curse of this thing becoming bigger than we expected.
Merlin: And then it didn't.
Merlin: So, I mean, like I personally, I've made my peace with that.
Merlin: Like to me, it's just a funny joke platform.
Merlin: It's not gonna be a place where like I talk about too many intricate details of my life because that doesn't scale.
John: Right.
John: But you are developing a new platform somewhere where you can talk about comic books.
John: I hear the rumbling.
Merlin: Am I?
John: I hear the rumblings in the streets.
John: I know that you cannot continue to not have a place to talk about comic books.
John: I wouldn't call it a platform.
John: I call it a bus stop.
John: And so, I mean, you're absolutely right.
John: I would not.
John: The only reason the only there are only five people in the world that really want to hear every single thing I say.
John: two of them are you what two of them are me one of them is my mom and then two other you know and then two stalkers but uh but and and i know that because like i follow a lot of my friends and and uh there and every one of them has a place in their in their core interests where i go oh my god not this again
John: But at the same time, that desire to be an integrated person and to take your party to the world, I guess the reason that television or radio or books or any media is such a narrow aperture is that, for the love of God, nobody wants to
John: have everything from from any one person i mean if the i guess a novel or a or a like journal writing would be the closest would be the most um the closest you could get but you know but you might love love name norman mailer's books but you don't want to like be with him i like hitler's paintings
Merlin: But I don't want his recipes.
John: Hitler's paintings.
John: Did I tell you that I went through a phase where I thought maybe I was going to buy a Hitler painting?
Merlin: I would love to hear about that.
John: I realized that you can go online.
John: It's a dark, dark corner of the internet.
John: But there is a dealer that specializes in Hitler watercolors.
John: And they're not his best work.
John: All of Hitler's great, you know, like big full-size canvases.
John: Oh, probably destroyed, huh?
John: No, no, no, no, no.
John: They are held in private collections.
John: Really?
Merlin: I'm surprised the Allies would let those live.
John: Well, this is the thing.
John: They are... I mean, there is this world of people that collect fucked up shit.
John: And Hitler paintings is one of those things where you don't publicize it.
John: It's not a thing that you can really be above ground about.
John: But there are people that have big Hitler paintings on the wall.
John: And their value is...
John: At least right now, their value is still very purient.
John: You know what I mean?
John: Like, it's still not okay to have a Hitler painting.
Merlin: Now, maybe a hundred years from now... It's like owning Jane Mansfield's scarf or something.
Merlin: It's something, or, you know, Ed Gein's car.
John: Yeah, or worse, like owning Jane Mansfield's tooth.
John: You know, where it's like...
John: What?
John: How did you get that?
John: Oh, well, I kind of can't talk about it, but it's, you know, like, here's Jane Mansfield's tooth because during her autopsy, like, some unscrupulous doctor pulled it and sold it to a guy.
John: Like, a Hitler painting.
John: And I believe that there will come a time when those are... I mean, because, like...
John: a painting by, uh, Napoleon or even a painting by, um, who, who's like a, who is a dastardly person from history.
John: That's been dead long.
John: John Wayne Gacy.
John: Well, but even Gacy paintings like that.
John: He realized that was an industry.
John: He did.
John: And the people that own Gacy paintings are a particular type of roller derby boyfriend.
Yeah.
Merlin: I don't know what that means.
John: But that's like... Those people have all the research...
John: You know modern primitive books on their shelves and they think that they're edgy but like a Hitler painting first of all is a is a more expensive proposition and also you know a pretty ugly thing in the sense that even if it's a watercolor of a stream.
John: running through a forest every time you look at it you have to say why do i have that oh that's right it was he wasn't he wasn't that good right hitler i mean he's he's he is he's a better painter than half the paintings that are on the wall of my house that i bought at thrift stores for five dollars would jason finn buy a hitler
John: No, Jason Finn likes modern art.
John: And Hitler is, you know, it's like pretty art school watercolors.
John: Like pastoral.
John: Yeah, right.
John: Or, you know, he was really good at architecture.
John: He was really bad at figure drawing.
John: So he painted a lot of buildings.
John: Boy, that's ironic.
John: It really is.
John: Think about that.
Merlin: It really is.
Merlin: And I would love, I would love a catalog.
Merlin: He got, he, he got the idea of a good looking Berlin, but he just couldn't get people.
Merlin: I would love, I would.
John: Oh my God.
John: Hang on just a second.
John: Long bell.
John: I would love a catalog of all the buildings in Munich and Vienna that Hitler painted that were destroyed in the war.
John: Wow.
John: He's much better than I thought.
John: Well, see.
John: Wow.
Merlin: I mean, his perspective's pretty good.
John: And the problem – what they say is if Hitler – if you could go back in time, all you would do is go tell Hitler what a good painter he was and avert the war.
John: Tell Hitler's father what a good painter he is.
John: He was – Hitler was criticized by his harsh art school teachers who said –
John: You will never be a good painter.
John: This is no good.
John: This is terrible.
John: But in fact, he should have just set up an easel in like the... Like the German version of Fisherman's Wharf.
John: Yeah, exactly.
John: Das Fisherman's Wharf.
John: and uh and sat and painted painted buildings and watercolors all day he was fine but in any case i i there was a period there where i had you know a little extra money lying around and i was like you know what i'm gonna do i'm gonna buy a painting by hitler and then thank god for your moments of repose then i put a i put a little square on the wall and i was like okay that's your hitler painting
John: Now, every time you walk past there and you look at that and you think that's a Hitler painting, how do you feel?
John: And I walked by and I looked at this square on the wall for a couple of weeks.
John: And every time I looked at it, I was like, what the fuck is that square?
John: Oh, that's my Hitler painting.
John: Oh...
John: Hitler painting.
John: That's my Hitler painting.
John: That's not cool.
John: That's not cool, dude, to have a Hitler painting.
John: Ladies.
John: People are going to be creeped out.
John: Yeah, there's going to be a girl that comes over and she's like, and the problem with the Hitler painting is you don't have it and then keep it a secret.
Merlin: No, that's the whole point.
John: A girl comes over and she's like, oh, what's this painting?
John: And you go,
John: That's my Hitler painting.
John: Well, actually, that's by Adolf Hitler.
John: And then she's going to get her coat and she's going to walk out of the house without another word because that's fucked up.
John: Yeah.
John: And so I did not get a Hitler painting, but I really thought about it for a while.
John: Because they're so fraught.
John: Like, it's all in the painting.
John: There he was, and he was like, this is what I'm going to do.
John: I am going to be a great one of these painters.
John: And then he was not.
John: And then he...
John: And he killed millions of people.
John: Yeah.
John: And destroyed all of Europe.
John: And so, I don't know.
John: It's like, would I get a... I think I would be more likely to have a Stalin painting.
John: Because even though Stalin killed more people... Mm-hmm.
John: There's just a, you know, you get the sense of Stalin.
Merlin: You don't get the Hitler stigma.
John: He's not quite so Hitler-y, Stalin.
John: And I mean, we don't live in a world where Stalin's crimes really touched us as much.
John: But, you know, Stalin just seemed like he was doing the best he could and was a paranoid sociopath.
Yeah.
Merlin: I'd like to see what that guy in Turkmenistan, I'd like to see what he could come up with.
Merlin: Remember him?
Merlin: The guy who named all the months after his family and stuff like that?
Merlin: Sure, he's still around.
Merlin: He's not gone.
John: Oh, is he still in power?
John: Yeah, and he's building his own Brasilia.
John: You know the story of Brasilia where they were like, we're going to build a modern capital and we're going to put it out in the middle of the jungle in a place where no one should ever build a city.
John: And it's going to be this amazing campus.
Merlin: Like a Fitzgerald kind of thing?
John: Yeah.
John: Have you ever seen pictures of the city of Brasilia?
John: No.
John: No, I don't know it.
John: Well, Brasilia is the capital of Brazil.
John: And it was built out of whole cloth to be like a representative of Brazil into the future.
John: And it looks like Epcot Center.
John: No, it looks like the World's Fair of 1939.
John: Yeah.
John: But it's an actual city where government work is supposed to get done.
John: And the guy in Turkmenistan is building, like his capital looks like, it really looks like the strip in Las Vegas.
John: There's a pyramid.
John: There's an Eiffel Tower.
John: You know, like the library, the official library of Turkmenistan is like a one-quarter size moon.
John: It looks like a Shakey's Pizza.
John: One-quarter size crystal moon.
LAUGHTER
Merlin: uh it's just it's it's an it's just insane and it's like it's like i didn't know he was still around he was real hot for a while do you remember you would hear about i know it's not the thing is i know it's not jokey i know he's actually also like a horrible person it's not just that he's silly but he's really really silly am i right yeah yeah like didn't he do like the like like beyond mao like didn't he do incredibly capricious things with naming things and
John: Yeah, he's bad and he makes everybody in his country wear a hat on Tuesdays shaped like a flower.
John: I mean, he's fully bonkers.
John: But the thing about a guy like that and his insanity and probably the brutality that's just under the surface is that we give such a pass to Dubai and the emirs of the Persian Gulf.
John: I don't think they get the pass that they used to.
John: But yeah, you're right.
John: But, you know, like we are allowing that we are we are globally allowing that.
John: Oh, that is a valid banking center.
John: Oh, NYU is opening a campus there.
John: Apparently, the Louvre is opening a branch Louvre.
John: In Dubai, we are, as a people, as a global people, rewarding the insanity of Dubai, which is slightly more, obviously, liberal than Turkmenistan, but just as bonkers.
John: I mean, the capital programs, and I can only imagine what the immigrant workers are being treated like there.
Right.
John: So it's a, it's another, it's another like, uh, kind of now we, now we love Saddam Hussein.
John: Now we hate him.
John: Now we love, uh, Bin Laden.
John: Now we hate him.
John: It's like right now, these, these guys are our friends.
John: These, these crazy despots.
Merlin: It would have been so nice to be an anti-communist lunatic in the sixties and seventies.
Merlin: Can you imagine how much like awesome free shit you could have gotten, uh,
Merlin: Think about how many lunatics we supported just because they were against communism.
John: Right.
John: Yeah, sure.
John: Like Ferdinand Marcos.
Merlin: If you were just vetting, sitting around one afternoon vetting the Shah, Marcos, any number of people in Central America.
Merlin: Pinochet, yeah.
Merlin: Oh, my God.
Merlin: Unbelievable.
Merlin: That could have really been in your wheelhouse back then, John.
John: That happened in America, too.
John: I know a guy who was a Soviet scholar.
Merlin: in the 60s 70s and 80s he was a is this the guy who told you the truth about uh that the the truth you did want to hear about uh believing the soviets were a threat oh there's a guy you mentioned a few few months ago who you talked to who told you that they people actually were convinced that the soviets were uh capable of more than
John: Yeah, I'm not sure of that guy.
John: The guy I'm talking about was an academic who had a career that took him to the State Department even.
John: And he was a guy who I can, I mean, I'm not embarrassed to say, should never have...
John: been given any portfolio of any kind.
John: Okay, that's a different person.
John: Because this guy was a, you know, he was a Soviet scholar and his entire scholarship was based on his conviction that the Soviets were godless heathens.
John: And yet he had teaching positions in major universities and was sent around the world, including to the Soviet Union, for years.
John: And learned to speak Russian and was a person who was like...
John: Like living and studying the Soviets and yet never was shaken for a moment from his complete conviction that it was a completely bankrupt system and culture and people.
John: And, you know, he was just a bigot or he was a paranoid person.
John: bigot but because his because in academia there was a there was a need you know there there were there were all these people from from air america or whatever wandering around berkeley campus in 1968 trying to find one person that felt like that felt like communism was bad and when that person you know when some some uh
John: But he showed up in a three-piece suit with a pocket protector and said, communism is godless.
John: They were like given an immediate chairmanship.
John: And this guy had an entire career.
John: And I mean, you know, he's a nice enough guy, but he should not have ever.
John: He should have been on the lunatic fringe.
John: but he, but because he chose academia and there was, and I'm absolutely sure.
John: And he, he is blind to it.
John: He is oblivious to the fact that his entire career was a CIA officer.
John: He was not actually working for the CIA, but they had to have been the reason that he ever got a job or was ever promoted.
Merlin: The timing favored him.
John: Yeah, exactly.
John: He was the Ferdinand Marcos of the University of Maryland.
Merlin: Oh, I get it.
Merlin: He probably doesn't phrase it that way on his resume.
John: Yeah.
John: No, and the thing is he's unaware of it.
John: He was a bad academic, and yet he continued to work, and I'm sure he was marginalized by his colleagues.
John: But he continued to work because a guy in a blue suit showed up at the president of the university's office and said, this guy has a lot of interesting ideas.
John: And I really think that you would benefit from giving him this chaired position as he slides a brown envelope across the desk.
John: And that had to be going on everywhere.
John: And it goes on still.
John: It's basically the same idea as all these museums devoted to intelligent design.
John: We're teaching the controversy slide in a brown envelope across the desk.
Merlin: Can I ask you a question?
Merlin: Of course.
Merlin: So in the fullness of time, well, you tell me, uh, you had that rectangle on your wall and you realized I don't want this to be my Hitler painting.
Merlin: What did you do with the space?
Merlin: Did you fill it with something else?
Merlin: Did you just leave it blank in memory or what did you do?
John: Well, here's the, here is my current problem, which is that I have a lot of visual art that does not quite rise up to the level of actual art.
John: Jason Finn's house, as I've spoken about many times, and Chris Ballou's house too, both of my main bros in the presence of the USA have houses full of really cool art.
John: Jason's house is mostly art paintings.
John: Chris Ballou's house is really a wonderfully curated collection of raw art and handicrafts and so forth that are fantastic.
John: And my house is really much more of a junk pile of garbage that, you know, that I would see.
John: But honestly, like, sitting in my room right now, I'm looking at a giant fabric, a giant flag that says Bota Comunista that I tore down off of a balcony in Barcelona in 1989 and got chased through the streets by the police.
John: And it is four foot square.
John: And then I have a painting, an oil painting that an ex-girlfriend did of herself on paper and gave me.
John: At gunpoint.
John: That I could never throw away because I think it's wonderful.
John: I have a poster of a 1970s playmate taking her shirt off in a wheat field.
John: And that poster has been lacquered to a board.
John: And then the edges of the board are burned.
John: i know that look um i have a rope where i have clothes pinned a bunch of baseball hats to the rope that's my baseball hat storage hack is it is it hanging a rope and then clothes pinning baseball hats that's a good hack i have a melvin's nirvana dwarves derelicts poster
John: I've got a wonderful single of Adriano Celentano's Prison Colon.
Merlin: Oh, I love that song.
Merlin: You turned me on to that.
John: That was sent to me by a girl who listens to our podcast.
Merlin: No way.
Merlin: You get stuff?
John: A girl who lives in Italy who found it, or maybe she ordered it from Italy.
John: Oh, my God.
Merlin: I love that video.
John: Yeah.
John: I have a wind, one of those, like wind, what the fuck is it called?
John: It goes up on top of a barn.
Merlin: A wind vane?
Merlin: No.
John: A weather vane.
John: I have a weather vane.
John: I have a rack of Varnay sunglasses in every different color.
John: Like, so...
John: None of this is garbage to me.
John: I could sit and talk about every one of these items, but they all taken together do not, A, form a collection of any kind.
John: B, none of them, no single one of them has any intrinsic value at all.
John: It's all just crap.
Right.
John: God.
Merlin: This is just hard to listen to, John.
Merlin: There's not enough space.
Merlin: Are your Playboys over on a big speaker?
John: No, Playboys are on a speaker.
John: There wouldn't be enough space in a Boeing aircraft hangar to put all of it on the wall at once.
John: um and and honestly like i none of it actually broadcasts any kind of aesthetic other than this person has 24 different voices in his head at all times talking to him and talking to him in various accents and telling him to do things hello
John: Oh, hello, my friend.
John: Why are you not putting this on the wall?
Merlin: I thought you were going to put on the record.
John: I'm looking now across the room.
John: I have two different picture frames.
John: One of them has all of the coins in circulation in 1941.
John: in a picture frame each one with a little hand typed label underneath them saying 1941 liberty walking dollar 1941 mercury dime that's in a picture frame and then i have another picture frame
John: But not a matching picture frame.
John: The first one is like brushed aluminum.
John: The second one is totally Baroque brass frame that has all of the coins that my great uncle brought back from the Merchant Marines when he went on his world tour in 1937.
John: Wow.
John: Now, the coinage value of those things is a thing that has value.
John: You could take them out of the frames and take them and sell them individually for the value of their coins.
John: But as displays, they just say, these are on the wall of the house of a crazy person.
Merlin: They say, not desessant so much as lessessant.
John: so so i don't know i'm trying to i'm really trying to get a handle out there's a there's the old alaska license plate from my vespa so are you looking for something that pulls it all together like do you need a focal piece you need like a sunday in the park kind of like i think i need a hitler painting i should have bought a hitler painting if i had a hitler painting it would be it would be the crazy at the center it would make everything a little more edgy too yeah yeah then people would be like
John: Oh, that Merchant Marine coin collection takes on a new, strange vibration.
John: The Hitler painting would have been over there by the playmate.
Merlin: It would be a little bit of an art hack, but if you did it, I think you could really pull the room together.
Whew.
John: I think the other problem was that once I saw the Hitler paintings that were not available, because they were in private collections, and then the paltry offerings that you could still buy, I was like, I don't want a substandard Hitler painting.
Merlin: What if you had somebody do a reproduction for you?
Merlin: What if it was a bad person?
Merlin: What if a bad person did it?
Merlin: No, like a really bad person.
Merlin: What if you found an extremely gifted artist who was an extremely bad person and had them do it for you?
John: I don't mind that.
John: Like Donald Rumsfeld did an imitation Hitler painting.
John: I would fucking hang the shit out of that on my wall.
John: Right.
John: We go with the Hitler painting we've got, not the Hitler painting we've got.
John: You know what?
John: In fact, now, I never would have thought of this, but now I want some Donald Rumsfeld art.