Ep. 162: "April's Cream"
Merlin: Hi Merlin.
Merlin: Hi John.
Merlin: How are you?
Merlin: I'm doing great man.
Merlin: How's it going?
Merlin: Pretty good.
Merlin: Tell me something John.
John: Let's see.
John: Something John.
Merlin: Tell me that you like it.
John: I made some coffee.
John: And then this will give you some sense of where I'm at.
John: I looked in the refrigerator and there was some cream in there.
John: And I grabbed it and I knew that there was a variety of sort of suspect creams in the refrigerator.
John: Yeah.
John: But it was also possible there had been a few people in and out of the house.
John: It was also possible that somebody had bought a new cream, a new container of cream.
John: Heisenberg Uncertainty Cream.
John: Yep.
John: And so I grabbed the cream.
John: I looked at it.
John: I read the date.
John: And I said, oh, June 1.
John: It's almost June.
John: Mm-hmm.
Merlin: Yep.
John: Right around the corner.
John: And I put the cream in the coffee.
John: And then I was walking around sipping it.
John: And there were some floaters.
John: But come on.
John: I'm not a guy that's going to throw a cup of coffee away just for a couple of floaters.
Mm-hmm.
John: And then after about 10 minutes, I had one of those sort of, you know, the slow, delayed, time release, the OxyContin of thought, where I was like, June 1?
John: It's almost August.
John: Oh, God.
John: And then I went and I looked at the...
John: I looked at it again to confirm that it was June.
John: And I opened it up and I smelled the cream.
John: And it did not smell like spoiled milk.
John: It smelled kind of like pie.
John: It had moved into some other realm where it was... Or maybe it's that strange phenomenon where...
John: Where half and half doesn't spoil because it's... It seems like it can only get so spoiled.
John: Yeah, right.
John: It just becomes... I mean, it's refrigerated.
John: But it becomes something else.
John: It turns into like... It has like a state change.
John: Mm-hmm.
John: A state change.
John: That's right.
John: It becomes a particulate.
Yeah.
John: And so you know what?
John: I made the executive decision.
John: It was an executive level decision to just go with it.
John: And so I still have – because I drink my coffee out of half liter beer steins.
John: I'm sitting here with about a quarter of a liter of coffee and what I can only describe as April's cream.
John: And that's how I'm starting today.
John: And you're just going to power through it.
John: You know, it's a little saltier.
John: It's got a little pow.
Merlin: Pie coffee.
Merlin: Yeah, I shouldn't say this.
Merlin: My coffee apparatus at work, at some point, I guess in the last year or so, stopped working.
Merlin: And I was drinking less coffee at work.
Merlin: I would have it at home.
Merlin: I'd bring it in.
Merlin: Long story short, I have a half and half in my refrigerator that expired in April of 2014.
Merlin: Oh, here's my thought.
Merlin: It got to be April's cream 2015.
Merlin: You know what?
Merlin: Maybe this is back to like affections for your shirt.
Merlin: I didn't want to throw the guy out.
Merlin: I kind of wanted to see how long he could stick around.
John: Sure.
John: He's April's cream.
John: He's like he's been April's cream twice now.
Merlin: I mean, I don't know.
Merlin: It's sort of like putting a relative in a home or something like, well, you know, they're they're kind of stinky and not very useful.
Merlin: But, you know, you got affection.
John: Let me ask you this.
John: Have you considered the cow or cows that produced April Scream where they are now?
Merlin: Yeah, that makes me so sad when I watch a movie and I know the dog's dead.
Merlin: You know Ubu from Sit Ubu.
Merlin: He died in 1984.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Really?
Merlin: Yeah, but his legacy continues on.
Merlin: Sit, Ubu, sit.
Merlin: Good boy.
Merlin: Good dog.
Merlin: Oh, man, that is rough.
Merlin: We got some new coffee technology at the house, and I have mixed feelings about it.
Merlin: How so?
Merlin: Well, you know our house.
Merlin: We have like two plugs in the house.
John: Because it was built in 1904 when electricity was powered by gas.
Merlin: It was in 1928 when it was powered by horses.
Merlin: And so we don't have a lot of counter space.
Merlin: But my wife, in her new job, has become so taken with the Keurig K-Cup system.
John: Oh, it is a system, isn't it?
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: And I was kind of always just against it because it seemed a little fancy to have a single, like, you know, a piece of electronics that's that big for doing one thing that takes up that much space.
Merlin: But we went ahead and got one.
Merlin: And it takes up a lot of space, but it's really good.
Merlin: It feels wrong, though.
Merlin: It makes a lot of waste.
Merlin: I just don't feel good about it.
Merlin: But man, it's a great cup of coffee in less than a minute.
John: It produces a ton of little used cups.
Merlin: Yeah.
John: But one of my main coffee problems is that I was made aware several years ago that coffee mold is not just...
John: the major mold system that arrives on your coffee filter if you don't change it for two weeks.
John: Coffee mold is something that's present in... It can be present in your coffee without you knowing about it.
Merlin: Like if it's old beans or ground a long time ago?
John: Yeah, right.
John: Old beans or grind that's been sitting around.
John: Coffee mold becomes a presence...
John: And you're just sort of not – you're not conscious of it, but coffee mold is potentially bad for you.
John: It could be toxic.
John: Who knows?
John: But I'm always fighting a losing battle over coffee mold because –
John: I don't have a regular or predictable routine.
Merlin: Well, obviously, this is reflected in April's cream.
John: Exactly.
Merlin: I mean, it seems like you would have gone through that.
Merlin: Is it like a half gallon or a quart?
Merlin: What is it?
John: Well, see, so here's what happens with the cream, right?
John: April's cream sometime in June was determined by someone else who was cycling through my home to be too old because different people have different ideas about how old cream should be.
John: And if it says expiration date June 1 and it's June 15th, well, a certain slice of the population will go ahead and get another one.
Merlin: See, this is how they get you, John.
Merlin: They used to put expiration dates on things.
Merlin: And it was an expiration date, and you would say, you got to eat this salami by December.
Merlin: And that was something we could all understand.
Merlin: I think the sell-by date is all about the people who are selling it.
Merlin: It's their convenience to have that on there.
John: Sell it by, right.
John: But I am somebody who sees a sell-by date of June 1 on June 15th, and I feel like, right, we're right in...
John: Right in the strike zone here.
John: Yeah.
John: But I'm not in 100% control of my environment anymore.
John: So another cream appeared in my refrigerator.
John: And frankly, it was a bigger cream and a newer cream.
John: And it coincided with the time that I was out of town.
John: So when I arrived back in town, here's this big new cream.
John: you know, April's cream is, is back in there somewhere with the, you know, the half empty container of Greek yogurt and three or four different mustards and, and a box of Arm and Hammer baking soda that's been in there since 2007.
John: And honestly, you know, I just reached for the front cream in that case, you know, like I'm not, I'm not so, I'm not so like managing my,
John: my refrigerator contents that I'm like, listen, I'm going to work my way through April's cream before I move into this June cream.
John: Oh, so I'm just, I'm just reaching in, grabbing the top cream first cream.
John: And April's Cream just got pushed back.
John: I think there's probably, you know, probably a mustard like migrated in front and then it was back there.
John: But the thing was, I do manage my refrigerator well enough to know it was in there.
John: I knew it was there.
John: I just wasn't, you know, like kind of like you.
John: I wasn't at any point along the way was I ready to say like, you know, it's time to go in and do the humane thing and have April's Cream go live on a farm.
Mm-hmm.
John: And so here's what happened, right?
John: You know, the main creams, of which there have been four probably since then, four front creams, all got cycled through.
John: And then one day April's cream just popped up.
John: I don't know how she did it.
John: She just, you know, there was some kind of refrigerator machination.
John: The mustard let their guard down for a second.
John: April's cream came to the fore and masqueraded as a new cream.
Mm-hmm.
John: And now here I am.
John: And I don't know what's going to happen if I drink this cream today.
John: I don't know.
John: This is also the beginning of blackberry season here.
John: And so as you probably know, blackberries grow in abundance precisely in all those areas where the pollution is the highest.
Merlin: I didn't know that.
John: Well, it just seems like the places where people let BlackBerrys run riot are right next to the freeway, right next to the train switching yard, right next to where they dump the unusable avgas.
John: And so...
John: You know, you're always kind of out there on the... You pull over to the side of the road and you're gathering blackberries and you're having a wonderful time.
John: But you're conscious that they are covered with a... They're all covered with a film.
Merlin: Mm-hmm.
Merlin: A kind of environmental dander.
John: Mm-hmm.
John: So, you know, I've been scarfing blackberries, too.
John: By this afternoon...
John: I could be in the hospital.
Merlin: I wasn't going to say anything, but the tale that you're weaving here involves April's cream.
Merlin: You've got coffee dander.
Merlin: You've got the coffee mold that has performance characteristics.
Merlin: I don't think we've even begun to identify yet.
John: That's right.
John: That's right.
John: I could see through time if I have enough coffee mold.
Merlin: I see now, as soon as I hear about a new kind of dander, the first thing I think about is the toxoplasmosis.
Merlin: Tell me more.
Merlin: Well, it's the cat poop thing.
Merlin: It's the thing that makes people crazy.
John: Sure, sure, sure.
Merlin: You might remember when there was a child on the way, you start reading lots of things that say, be careful with the cats because you get the toxoplasmosis.
Merlin: That's really bad for babies that are in their mommy's tummy.
John: Yeah, we sent the cats to live with Aunt Martha when the baby was coming.
Merlin: So you're not above making a hard decision if you know that there's a risk.
John: My daughter's mother's cats were the two most awful people I had ever met in my life.
John: One of them at some point as a young cat –
John: had some cognitive disconnect where the cat did not understand what hissing, the role that hissing performed in a normal sort of social milieu.
Merlin: Oh, interesting.
Merlin: It's a domestic cat.
Merlin: It doesn't know all the signals either of being a wild cat or of being a domesticated cat.
Merlin: It might have crossed wires.
John: Yeah, right.
John: So the cat, I feel like, personally enjoyed hissing.
John: but hissed at inappropriate times, hissed at people that it knew well, hissed, you know, like came to you to be petted, you pat it, you petted it, and then it hissed at you, and then it remained there to be petted more.
John: That sounds like half the women I dated in college.
Mm-hmm.
John: um but uh but uh not only that but the cat had a you know when it's hissing it is it is propelling a whisker's breath at you you know so it's just it's hissing right in your face and it's just like the word the inside of it this is like
John: inside of a cat smell yeah that thing's not flossing yeah so that cat was really bad and then the other cat i think suffered from kitty malaise oh it had a kind of uh feline on we it did it had feline on we that's so sad john and so that cat didn't really care for itself it didn't have a very high self-esteem it didn't keep itself up
John: And so the combination of these two cats, you know, I was just like, listen, these cats, I mean, talk about go live on a farm.
John: These cats should go live in the sea.
John: Was she attached to them?
John: Well, you know, people get attached.
Merlin: That's probably the toxoplasmosis.
Merlin: It gets into your brain.
John: Well, I feel like that's absolutely true because there was, you know, there was just cat garbage in the air and
John: Uh, but also, you know, there's a little bit of Stockholm syndrome happening there where you are held captive by, uh, these monsters and then you start to feel sympathetic to them.
Merlin: Oh yeah.
Merlin: Uh, he's so nice to me.
John: Yeah.
John: Oh no, he doesn't mean that he just blah.
John: And I'm like the only, only reason to keep a pet is that that pet is a, is a companion and a friend to keep a pet who clearly wants to die.
Yeah.
John: is to do no one a favor.
John: But it turned out that Aunt Martha is a cat lover and was able to take these two cats and give them a happy life where the depressed cat started grooming itself again and the hissing cat, I think, lived on top of the refrigerator.
Yeah.
John: And was showered with love.
John: And actually it was a story where it had a happy ending.
John: We had a baby that did not suffer from toxoplasmosis.
John: And I never had to see those cats again.
Merlin: There are numerous, according to Wikipedia, notable cases of celebrities who have contracted toxoplasmosis.
John: Tell me more.
John: Gwyneth Paltrow, please.
John: Let me check.
Merlin: I don't see it here.
Merlin: She's right in the sweet spot, I would say.
Merlin: Wouldn't you think?
Merlin: I mean, it would seem like.
Merlin: I'm just glancing at this quickly.
Merlin: I don't want to get email about this.
Merlin: I have heard it said.
Merlin: It is said by some people.
Merlin: Turns out that this is what causes the cat lady thing.
Merlin: Because, you know, like there's a certain kinds of like super interesting animals that can take over another animal and make it do crazy stuff.
Merlin: You know how you can get like a zombie ant or something like that.
Merlin: Supposedly the story goes, I don't know if this is exactly toxoplasmosis, but part of the reason you become like somebody who has a lot of attractive cat dander in the house is that the toxoplasmosis is attacking some part of your brain.
Merlin: It says, hey, it's OK for all this poop to make more toxoplasmosis.
Merlin: And you don't know it.
Merlin: Wow, that's heavy.
Merlin: It's coming from inside the cat.
John: See, now I want to know how often, when you say, I don't want to get emails about this, how often does that work?
Merlin: I couldn't say.
Merlin: I guess I won't email him.
Merlin: I think people with toxoplasmosis will send a lot of emails.
Merlin: I think that's a side effect of it.
Merlin: This is super interesting.
Merlin: There's three prominent athletes that have had it.
Merlin: Arthur Ashe, the late great Arthur Ashe.
John: Had toxoplasmosis.
Merlin: Mm-hmm.
Merlin: He later, you know, he had the AIDS.
Merlin: But he developed neurological problems from toxoplasmosis.
Merlin: Oh, dear.
Merlin: Martina Navratilova.
Merlin: So it's a tennis player, I think.
Merlin: It's a tennis problem.
Merlin: Or it might be Sebastian Coe.
Merlin: Remember the guy who had the Union Jack on his shorts?
Merlin: The runner?
Merlin: Right, right, right.
Merlin: He had it.
Merlin: And some of these other people.
Merlin: Prince Francois, the Count of Claremont.
Merlin: Sure.
Merlin: Pretender to the throne of France.
Merlin: Well, sure.
Merlin: I was just exchanging letters with him the other day.
Merlin: His disability caused him to be overlooked in the line of succession.
Merlin: Isn't that a shame?
John: Wow.
John: Really?
John: Are you sure it wasn't syphilis?
John: It sounds like it could have been something more severe.
John: Enjoy your cats.
John: Meow.
Meow.
John: I feel like that... We had cats growing up.
Merlin: Really?
John: Your mom allowed cats?
John: Well, here's the thing.
John: We loved cats.
John: but we were both allergic to cats and we didn't know because allergy detection technologies and allergy and the you know and the cult of allergy had not yet entered into the american consciousness and so the fact that i had a chronic cough and fatigue my whole childhood um
John: was never attributed to anything other than sickliness or I don't know what.
Merlin: There were plenty of other cultural reasons to think that children were broken inside.
Merlin: You didn't need science there to pop its head up.
John: Yeah, and so it turned out later that I was sleeping with a cat on my chest my entire young life, and I was allergic to them.
John: So we don't keep them anymore.
John: But, you know, we were cats.
John: We enjoyed cats for some reason.
John: I don't know.
John: My dad liked them.
John: My mom liked them.
John: Cats were sort of always present.
John: And I have to say, I had a couple of great cats.
Merlin: Well, you pretty recently had a secret cat.
Merlin: You had a secret cat.
Merlin: You didn't talk about it, but you had a cat that you loved.
John: Yeah, I did.
John: And it broke your heart.
John: Yeah, he did.
John: He did.
John: He got hit by a car.
John: And that was Lewis.
John: And then in the pantheon of great cats, I have to say Guido was a great cat.
John: There were some poor quality cats in there too.
John: My dad thought puppy was a good cat.
John: I never really bonded with Puppy.
John: And then Puppy died and Dad got Puppy 2.
John: And Puppy 2 was a pretty good mouser.
John: Oh, nice.
John: But not a real good dude.
John: Not a very personable guy.
John: He felt like he had a job to do.
John: Tippy was a good cat.
John: Flaky was a flaky cat.
John: I'm learning so much.
John: All the way back to Mel.
John: Mel, one of the original great cats.
John: My mom and dad talked about Simba Jacoby and Tiffany Michelle.
John: They're two cats from the 60s.
John: They talked about those cats until my dad passed away.
Merlin: Oh, my goodness.
John: They'd still sit around and talk about Simba Jacobi and Tiffany Michelle.
Merlin: Those are great names.
John: Who would ride on the back.
John: They would jump up on the back of my folks, Borzoi, Manushka, and ride around.
Merlin: They would ride the dog.
John: They would follow Manushka around the neighborhood like a little pack of elephants.
John: But listen, enough about my family's cat history.
John: No cats now.
John: We are presently catless.
Merlin: I just sent you a link in the robot.
Merlin: We met a cat weekend before last, and I don't think of myself as a cat person.
Merlin: I'm not anti-cat as much as it might sound like I am, but I understand that as a not active pet person, it's a big step to get an animal and bring it in the house.
John: Yeah, yeah.
John: Look at that cat.
John: That's midget.
John: That is really an extraordinary face.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: It's got a little derpy tongue.
Merlin: And that is a Persian cat that had just been shaved except for its head.
Merlin: And basically I was at these people's house and I was kind of avoiding my family.
Merlin: And I looked out the front window and I saw something that looked like a teacup lion out front.
Merlin: It was so tiny and so cute and so weird and so looking like it was near death.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: And I instantly bonded with Midget, who, as you see in the caption I'm referring to here, is the world's most interesting cat.
Merlin: Midget lets you hold her, and she licks you.
Merlin: Because she can't put her tongue back in her mouth.
Merlin: I think she's got neurological problems.
Merlin: But I didn't want to say this in front of my family, but I was like, I want this cat.
Merlin: Because these people had two dogs and three cats.
Merlin: And I was like, if you ever want to unload this cat, let's talk.
Merlin: Yes.
Merlin: So there are some potential high-level talks going on about maybe bringing Midget into our life.
Merlin: Wow.
Merlin: Midget is pretty old, but look at that face.
John: That's a great face.
Merlin: Yeah.
John: It's a great face.
John: It's overused to describe a creature like that as Muppet-like, but it is very Muppet-like.
John: Oh, 100%.
John: It looks like it's a Jim Henson project.
John: Yep, yep, yep.
John: It is something that they modeled Muppets after.
John: But I know that feeling of seeing a little creature and – I want your cat.
John: And saying like, oh, this creature belongs with me.
Merlin: Because it's pretty cool.
Merlin: First of all, John, everything you're describing, you kind of want an animal.
Merlin: And this is exactly the kind of thing somebody who doesn't own pets would say, or excuse me, companion pets would say, is that it's pre-qualified.
Merlin: Like, I know, right?
Merlin: I know this is a cool cat.
Merlin: Yeah, right.
Merlin: Right?
Merlin: If you're just driving to Trader Joe's and somebody goes, hey, free Siamese, you don't know what you're in for.
Merlin: That's right.
Merlin: You got a pretty good idea what you're in for, but, you know.
Merlin: But in this case, this is a pre-qualified cool cat that likes to lick you.
Merlin: How cute is that?
John: Well, and the problem with cats for me is that, you know,
John: The kitten does not denote the cat.
Merlin: Oh.
Merlin: Oh, my goodness.
Merlin: If you know what I'm saying.
Merlin: Oh, I think that's true.
Merlin: I think that's true.
Merlin: It's beyond that species.
Merlin: I think that's a thing.
Merlin: The kitten does not denote the cat.
Merlin: Yeah.
John: And so I have seen a lot of cute kittens that became pretty uncute cats.
John: And I would like, if I'm going to look at a little face all the time,
John: and have that little face look up at me pleadingly, uh,
John: wanting its whiskers and that little face greet me every morning.
John: I would like to like that face.
John: I do not want a face that, that, that I would not choose.
John: And when you choose a kitten, you're like, Oh, and then it turns into this sort of grotesquerie.
John: And it's like, well, you know what I mean?
John: Like you, you can, there's nature and there's nurture.
John: Let's be honest.
John: There's only so much you can do.
John: to make a cat that is destined to be a jerk into a good pal.
Merlin: You know, when you get a kid, there's a lot of biological stuff going on where you feel compelled to try and move things around your schedule to make sure it doesn't die.
Merlin: Yeah, sure.
Merlin: But with a cat, I think for some people, I know I would have to manufacture a lot.
Merlin: There are points when I would have to manufacture a lot of care.
Merlin: Not that I – I don't want to sound uncaring.
Merlin: I'm trying to be realistic.
Merlin: It's like those idiots that go out and buy an Easter bunny or a turtle or something.
Merlin: They have no idea what they're getting into.
Merlin: You know what I mean?
Merlin: That's the trouble.
Merlin: Turtles have – what do they have?
Merlin: They've got the – what's the stuff you get from bad meat?
John: Oh, trichinosis?
Merlin: No, that's pork, I think.
Merlin: But, you know, the one they got salmonella.
Merlin: You get salmonella from a turtle.
Merlin: Oh, I thought that was from chickens and eggs.
Merlin: I could have a pet chicken.
Merlin: I would enjoy it.
Merlin: These people also had chickens.
Merlin: They had four chickens at their house, too.
John: I bet they did.
John: They sound like chicken owners.
John: I do not... You know, I had a cat...
John: After Lewis, I tried to replace Lewis with another cat.
John: And all of these cats, you know, they come to me, you know, by hook or by crook.
John: It's not like I go to the pound and choose cats, but like cats show up.
John: And a second cat arrived, and I think it was that somebody was trying to make my pain over Lewis go away.
Merlin: Oh, okay.
John: And so this second cat arrived, and the second cat was okay, but I think had been weaned.
John: too early or incorrectly you know you can be weaned incorrectly i meet people like that all the time they just got torn away a little too soon just like hey hey i was using that wait a minute um and so this cat just didn't you know and and over time um
John: My good friend Eric Corson, bass player of The Long Winters, would come around and Eric and the cat had a good rapport.
John: And then I was going out of town.
John: I was like, hey, Eric, you want to watch the cat?
John: And he was like, yeah.
John: And then I just never went back and got the cat.
Merlin: That sounds like a nice way for that to end up.
John: Yeah, and I think Eric and the cat still have a good relationship and are close, and I never have to see the cat, and everybody wins.
John: But, I mean, I lived with that cat for a year, maybe.
John: Wow.
John: With no, never really feel, I mean, we were sharing a space together, but we were not sharing a place together.
Mm-mm.
Yeah.
Yeah.
John: The rotten milk in my coffee is really making me sentimental.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Who knows what's causing that?
Merlin: I remember a job I had one time hearing Monday morning, I hear a man scream down the hallway, and we all gathered around because he was the least intelligent of people working there.
Merlin: And he got himself a fresh cup of coffee, put some cream in it, but he erroneously grabbed the coffee from Friday that was on his desk.
Merlin: Oh, Friday's coffee.
Merlin: He had Friday's coffee, took a big slug of it, and it had Friday's cream in it.
John: and he was a sad little man oh it's been sitting on the counter the whole time yeah that's not even in the fridge that's that's bad did i ever tell you about the time i left a cup of coffee in the um in the garden no yeah i left a cup of coffee in the garden uh and i came back a couple of days later and a bird had fallen into it
John: And I don't know how or why.
John: I don't know why she swallowed a fly.
John: But she died in my coffee cup.
John: Was it a cup that you liked?
John: Well, I mean, I still use the cup.
John: Good.
John: I think you honor the bird.
John: But I had to, you know, honor the bird, honor the bird story.
John: Like what I did was I washed out the cup and that was no easy thing.
John: I dumped the coffee.
John: I dumped the moldy
John: coffee bird in the yard waste?
John: Maybe the compost?
John: I'm not sure which bin, which of Seattle's many bins got the moldy coffee bird.
John: But then I went in and I gave the cup a good scrub and then I put it back in rotation and now I swear to you I could not tell you which one it was.
John: I could be drinking out of it now.
Merlin: Yeah, that's the dream.
John: But trying to picture what was happening in a bird's life
John: Where I was like, huh, look at that.
John: I wonder what that is.
John: I'm going to go perch on the edge of that mug.
John: And then birds don't really lose their footing.
John: How did the bird end up in the... Got a little bit curious.
John: Right.
John: Dropped down and then couldn't get out.
John: It was like a little bird.
John: Well, I mean, little enough to fall into a beer style.
Merlin: Well, you wouldn't want, I'm just saying, I don't want to state the obvious, but you would not want that to be a crow.
Merlin: No, it wasn't an eagle.
John: You drink out of pretty big cups.
John: But no, it was a bird that would fit in a cup.
John: But there are a few private tragedies that I've had involving things, creatures, over the years, over almost 50 years in American life for me.
John: And a few of them have just always remained private, right?
John: There are just those few times when you come upon a...
John: When you come upon a noble stag in the forest and you fell him with a handmade bow and arrow, you never talk about those things with anyone else.
Merlin: No, he never got a chance to put his head in your lap.
John: No.
John: But it's just a thing that doesn't come up in conversation.
John: And if you're sitting at a party and somebody says, have you ever felled a stag?
John: You just kind of don't answer.
John: You look out the window and just sort of – it's not a story that you want to tell.
Yeah.
Merlin: We've had to recently deal with the state of little things lately, and it's hard.
Merlin: It's hard.
Merlin: My daughter found a robin's egg and put it back in the nest about a month ago, and she's really excited because it still hasn't hatched.
Merlin: and i was just saying you know no she's like she's pretty sure it takes at least a month for an egg to hatch and i was like hey you know what do you say i mean you know right you know she's if it was just any any egg in a nest i would say well you know that thing's probably fucking dead but like she has some ownership some investment in that it's a project for her she rescued it yeah
Merlin: And then the other day we went in the garage to check the mail and there was a mouse in a glue trap struggling.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: And I mean, I don't mind seeing mice like I did when I was a kid, but an animal struggling in a glue trap to where it has flipped it a foot from where the trap had been.
Merlin: And it was really tiny.
Merlin: It was like maybe an inch and a half long.
John: Yeah, that's no good.
Merlin: No, now she's probably scarred.
Merlin: But it's like, what am I going to say?
Merlin: It's either that or have a garage full of mice.
Merlin: You pick.
John: Yeah, right.
John: Well, and things, you know, things do die.
John: I mean, the thing with the egg, I don't know where you guys are on the Santa Claus continuum.
John: But I think you just go out there in the night, you grab that egg, and you get rid of it.
John: Put a fake bird in there.
John: Well, when she looks for it, you say like, oh, the bird hatched and flew away.
Merlin: I used to be really good at that.
Merlin: I used to be good at like really basic sleight of hand to make her think that things were magic.
Merlin: The Santa Claus continuum is tough right now.
Merlin: because i i don't know i can feel i think we're at that age we're at that age where she's probably got some pretty specific concerns there's probably been some dickhead at school that's already spoiled it for her there's always one um but uh where do you stand on santa if you mean if you're comfortable saying um you know my i do not have a i don't have any political feelings about santa um
John: And I don't have – I don't have a stand on Santa.
Merlin: You don't have like a moralistic stake in the ground about the consequences of Santa.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: Some people have very strong feelings about Santa.
John: They do.
John: They do.
John: And I don't – I'm not here saying like I will never lie to my child.
John: I used to think that.
John: And if you say Santa is real, then you're just setting them up for a lifetime of not trusting people.
John: Like, I understand that logic.
John: I think causing a child to be born does that even better.
John: Exactly.
John: But like, I don't have that stand.
John: But nor am I sitting on my like like my my gilded tortoise or my magic footstool and saying the magic of Santa and Christmas is something that I wouldn't deny my child.
John: And I didn't, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
John: Like, yeah, I guess the magic of Christmas.
John: Sure.
John: Thus far.
John: Santa to her is just one in a, one of a panoply of bearded men who wear all red because her father is one of those too.
John: You know, like, like jolly bearded guys in, in, uh, funny hats who I'm not even sure she made, she has made entirely made the connection that Santa brings presents.
John: She, she doesn't talk about Christmas gifts.
John: I mean, honestly, the other day she was walking around the house with a little Christmas present in her hand.
John: And by little, I mean the size of a matchbox.
John: And I said, where did you find that?
John: And she said, it was over there on the dining room table with the Christmas decorations.
John: And I looked, and on my dining room table, there is still an advent calendar, a creche, and a stuffed Santa Claus that apparently had a couple of small presents at his feet that's been there since Christmas.
John: Has it been there the whole time?
John: And I just stopped seeing it with my eyes.
John: Whoa.
John: Because I had other things going on.
John: Uh-huh.
John: And I was like, hmm, I'm not sure what – I mean, I'm pretty sure that that doesn't say amazing things about me as like a –
John: As like a tidier or a person who's living a particularly organized life.
John: And then I went over to the fireplace to make sure that the stockings weren't still hanging.
John: And they weren't.
John: But she found a present, a Christmas present, and was carrying it around.
John: And then she attached it to a fork somehow and was calling it a piece of cake.
John: So she was off on her own thing.
John: But I had a real moment of pause realizing that I'd been looking at an advent calendar for six months and it had just turned into another sort of little piece of flotsam.
Merlin: I mean, it's not a small thing.
Merlin: It's a big thing.
Merlin: No, no.
Merlin: But like, oh, you get me thinking.
Merlin: I just, it would be so convenient if we could choose and fully understand our own forms of madness.
Merlin: But then I guess that wouldn't be madness.
Merlin: Part of what makes it madness is we either don't know about it or don't understand it.
Merlin: There's the madness that we think we know about and are comfortable with, and that's crazy enough.
Merlin: But then there's the other stuff where you're like, hmm, I wonder if I'm out of my mind.
Merlin: And I think that sometimes.
Merlin: And for some reason, I don't know if you've ever seen a movie called Synecdoche, New York, which I find a very affecting movie.
Merlin: But I talked about this recently on another show, but that movie had a huge impact on me because I realized how much of what Caden goes through in that movie is...
Merlin: it felt feels like something that I thought was peculiar to me of like suddenly going like, Oh no, no, that actually happened 10 years ago.
Merlin: And you're like, you're not exactly crazy.
Merlin: You don't exactly think that it's whatever 1996 now or something, but you could easily go like I, in my case, like we are a little diner down the street that you've been to.
Merlin: They give out a little, uh, stick on calendar, you know, one of those little calendars or a little tear off calendar.
Merlin: And I have one of those over my, my clothing dressing area from 2012 and,
Merlin: And it didn't occur to me that, like, not only had I not taken this down since July of 2012, but I hadn't bothered to rip it off since something like August of 2012.
Merlin: And it just kept sitting there.
Merlin: And then that started dogging me.
Merlin: Like, why is this here?
Merlin: Why am I not changing this?
Merlin: Why is this still here?
Merlin: And why has it not bothered me until three years later?
Hmm.
John: why did you notice it three years later i mean if i i have to say like if that little christmas present hadn't gotten repurposed as a piece of cake yeah i'm not sure whether i would have noticed these christmas decorations until it was time to decorate for christmas and i was like oh look look we already have a little still life here that's been here the entire time and you got a little nativity just sitting there huh yeah kind of crash my wife calls it a crash
John: Yeah, I mean, it's not – I mean, what Christmas decorations are to me, I guess, is like another –
John: It's another couple of bins of sentimental jetsam, stuff that I've looked at my whole life that I go, like, I remember when that advent calendar really mattered to me.
John: And every day I couldn't wait to open another little door in the, like, endless...
John: march to christmas that was like the longest month ever just like oh it is the 14th are you kidding me come on and you open the little door and there's a little you know and it's an advent calendar from germany that was made in 1954 and so there's a little boy in lederhosen behind the door and he's you know and he's holding a sugar plum and you go i don't know what any of these i don't know what any of this imagery means and i don't know why germany in the 50s
John: So completely colonized my childhood Christmas, right?
John: Like I knew the lyrics to Oh, Tannenbaum and never understood, never made the connection that it was the same song as Oh, Christmas Tree.
John: Oh, right, right, right.
John: Why did the Germans have such a lock on Christmas, particularly post-war Germany?
John: You know, made in West Germany.
John: That says Christmas to me, made in West Germany.
John: It feels more authentic.
John: It very much does, right?
John: It's got the feel of the old country.
John: So I don't know.
John: So, but, but in terms of like Santa and the tree and the, and the business and whether or not, whether or not we say like Santa's coming down the chimney, so get in your room.
John: Like I, I honestly have not picked a side and I feel like, I feel like not picking a side.
John: Um, my daughter is,
John: already knows that i am pretty half-hearted about most uh american traditions or most you know like just most sort of yeah like holidays like are you a big celebrator of holidays not at all yeah i feel bad about it i'm the same way
John: So it's like, here comes Easter.
John: Oh, boy.
John: We're going to hide some eggs.
Merlin: You don't feel compelled.
Merlin: Like we just had – what do we have?
Merlin: We had the 4th of July.
Merlin: Before that, we had – excuse me, Independence Day.
Merlin: A couple months ago, we had Memorial Day.
Merlin: November, you get Veterans Day.
Merlin: And it's like I don't feel compelled to explain those distinctions and why they're special.
Merlin: It's really mostly a day off, and I feel bad about that.
John: Well, yeah, and I mean it's a good way to mark your progress through a year.
John: Like, oh, it's already the 4th of July?
John: Wow.
Merlin: That's great.
John: Hey, but, you know, when we were – before the baby was born,
John: All the conversations that we had with pediatricians and with all the books that we read about how to raise a baby.
John: You know there's a baby on the way and so everybody runs to the library and gets all the how to raise a baby books.
John: And you study them and they're all contradictory and none of them make sense really.
John: And some of them make it seem like this is a matter of desperate importance and some of them make it seem like
John: Oh, it'll be fine.
John: But they all kind of agreed and people lectured me a lot about routine.
John: Children love routine.
John: They want routine.
John: They want the same things at the same time and that gives them a feeling of safety and it makes them feel secure and that is kind of the nurturing life that they need to grow up to be productive and healthy members of the banking community.
John: And I remember reading those books and talking to those pediatricians and saying, I do not have any kind of routine or any capability of maintaining a routine.
John: So I have two choices.
John: I can either accept your framing, in which case I already fear for my unborn child's future.
Merlin: It almost seems, not to put too fine a point on it, it almost seems doomed.
Yeah.
Merlin: It's doomed, right?
Merlin: If it's something that you've got to learn from scratch, that's going to be pretty tough to do on a day-to-day basis.
John: Yeah, right.
John: I have never – I mean some weeks I make coffee every morning.
John: Some weeks the coffee mold takes over the entire like northeast corner of the house.
John: And I don't have – it's inexplicable to me.
John: Why that's true.
John: And, you know, I have tried to take vitamins and I have made it 10 days before I just stopped taking vitamins.
John: I just stopped remembering them.
John: I did the seven minute workout for...
John: I would go as far as to say 14 days I did the seven-minute workout before one day I didn't.
John: And that was it.
John: And that was the end.
John: You didn't just bounce back the next day?
John: I was just like, oh, oh, I missed a day.
John: Let's get back on the train.
John: Like I have never successfully gotten back on the train.
John: I get off the train, often in the woods,
John: And then I'm bushwhacking again.
John: And that's my natural state.
John: So what I chose to do was refuse to accept the idea that a child without a child will refuse to accept the idea that a child needs routine and instead like found maybe like a different a different layer of
John: Of routine?
Merlin: Yeah, I mean, like that's... Like I see her every day.
Merlin: Like that is our routine.
Merlin: It's, you know, I'm sorry, I don't mean to be going off here.
Merlin: But like, first of all, there's a lot of great stuff in books.
Merlin: There's a lot of great advice that exists in the world.
Merlin: The trouble is that the advice that you get from people who aren't professionals and people who are professionals, I think is mostly advice that is tendered to make you think better of them.
Merlin: and to make them feel good about the decisions they've made, whether or not they're particularly great.
Merlin: But whatever version they tell you of their life, which is usually put down in the most strict possible way.
Merlin: Like, it's always got to be this way, and that's how I've had such success.
Merlin: Like, that's... And then you get books, and the thing is, for a book to be a book, it has to have a big point, and then drive it home all the time, and say that there's going to be a catastrophe if you don't do it this way all the time.
Merlin: Which is very unrealistic, and causes you to just want to go out and read more books.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: If you're susceptible to that kind of thing.
Merlin: So, I mean, I don't have a super strong position on like how that shakes out to success or not.
Merlin: But I do know I feel that pressure of like, you know, any of these dumb books that have, you know, as a branding or marketing point have this.
Merlin: Here's the one big thing that you need to know in your case.
Merlin: It's like toxo cat plasmosis.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: But in self-help books.
John: How's that?
John: Well, they plant the little seed.
John: They plant the little seed where suddenly you need more books.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: And like I don't know.
Merlin: Maybe I'm just as dumb as I seem.
Merlin: But like I think there's a distinction to be made between – what was the phrase you used?
Merlin: Banana hammock?
Merlin: Mm-hmm.
Merlin: That was –
Merlin: There's a difference between, like, what was the word you used, though, to describe what you're never going to have?
Merlin: Routine?
Merlin: Oh, routine.
Merlin: Like, I think there can be important differences between a routine and between consistency.
John: Okay.
Okay.
Merlin: I think, because here's the problem.
Merlin: And I think this gets to something that people don't like talking about, which is that people like to think that if they buy into a system and then do it doggedly, everything will probably turn out fine.
Merlin: And even if it doesn't, there's probably a reason that can be fixed because all I have to do is go back to the book and read it.
Merlin: And I think what they're avoiding is the fact that you're kind of a little fucked all the time when you're a parent.
Merlin: You're always behind.
Merlin: You're always not doing as much as you could.
Merlin: And there is a very natural inclination to feel like, wow, I'm really not well suited for this.
Merlin: And so, you know, do you believe that or not?
Merlin: But like, I think the angle to add to that that's important is that when you think about routine versus consistency, like, okay, if you've got a routine that you're constantly stressing over,
Merlin: And that you're making your child feel like everything is a constant potential catastrophe because you're not at the bus at 9.05 a.m.
Merlin: My concern there is that if you can do that routine and be consistent and everybody's pretty content with that routine, that's a good thing.
Merlin: I think the problem is if you try to instill something in your kid that you don't basically have in yourself, you're setting up a lot of potential disasters.
Merlin: Whereas if you're consistent, like here's what you can consistently expect out of me in terms of attitude and comportment and how things, importantly, how I am when things don't go well.
Merlin: That's what I want to get good at.
Merlin: What I want to get good at is being like the person who handles that stuff in stride.
John: Well, right before she was born, we decided that we needed a wagon, a car, an automotive wagon.
Merlin: Yeah.
John: Because you got to carry the inner tubes and stuff or whatever it is that you do when you're a parent.
Yeah.
John: And so we drove over to Mercer Island, which is the kind of upscale neighborhood because somebody was selling a Passat wagon.
John: And we arrived at the house, which was a nice sort of house out in the woods of Mercer Island.
John: And there was a family there, a mom and a dad, you know, our age.
John: And they had two toddler age kids, one, four, one, two, I think, and a brand new baby that was like one day old.
John: And they were selling their Passat because with the arrival of the third kid, they now had... Oh, they're going to upgrade.
John: Yeah, they now were at suburban level of car need.
John: And so they were getting rid of the little car, which was going to be the big car for our little family of one baby on the way.
John: And so we were sitting around and we liked the mother very much.
John: We were chatting and liked the dad and the kids were running around.
John: And we were fascinated by this one day old baby.
John: Like, wow, look at this.
John: Because we were buying this car just a couple of days before our daughter was due.
John: So I was like, that's a brand new baby.
John: Like our babies are about the same age.
John: They're going to be the same age when our baby is born.
John: And wow, look at it.
John: It's right there.
John: And the baby was crying and fussing.
John: And we were like, so, you know, is it up all night or what's the story?
John: And the mother very confidently said, well, you know, this weekend and, you know, I took next week off from work.
John: So for the next week or so, yeah, we're going to be like up in the middle of the night and stuff.
John: But then the baby's going to have to get on our schedule.
Yeah.
John: and we were both like whoa and she just said it like so like yep and then the baby's gonna have to you know baby's gonna have to figure it out and it absolutely blew our minds we do you think it was realistic oh i mean she had two kids yeah she must know something and and she had people over buying a car the day after she had a kid yeah right that's the part that's really telling and she was running the show and i was just like
John: This idea that a one-week-old baby is going to get on your schedule and you're not going to be slave to it, it's not going to wake you up in the middle of the night.
John: You're going to wake it up in the middle of the night.
John: It was like profound, you know?
John: And in contrast, like the only thing my daughter knows for sure is that the first day of seventh grade, we are driving to Mexico in a stolen Jeep.
Yeah.
John: Like that's the only thing on her horizon that she can count on.
John: And so far she seems fine with it.
John: I'm not sure if she'll ever believe in Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny or even know if those things are important because she still hasn't seen a movie.
John: We watched a couple – at your recommendation and at Hodgman's recommendation, we sat down and watched a couple of Adventure Times.
Merlin: She's a little young for Adventure Time.
John: She is, yeah.
John: But I'm not.
John: I was enthralled by Adventure Time.
John: Really?
John: I was like, what?
John: Oh, my God, I'm so happy.
John: What is going on in this mushroom trip of a cartoon?
John: It's kind of not what you expect, right?
John: No, I really enjoyed it, and I looked forward to the time when she's eight years old.
John: and wants to delve back into Adventure Time and go through that world or whatever.
Merlin: Were you watching it, if I'm understanding?
Merlin: You were watching it to kind of like check it out to see if it might be something that you'd want to show her.
John: Yeah, I mean, almost everything that she has ever seen on a screen has sort of come about as a result of either going over to a friend's house where the friend is watching Frozen for the 40th time, and Marlo will kind of sit...
John: next to her friend for a while and watch some portion of Frozen, but her attention can't stay on it.
John: It'll come to a song and then Marlo, she'll want to get up and sing or whatever.
John: Or I will say, I am depriving my child of
John: rich culture, our rich encyclopedia of video culture, and I'll start to feel bad, and I'll say, I need to show her some things on TV because there's so much wonderful stuff on TV.
John: And so...
John: That's how I introduced her to Mr. Rogers and she likes Mr. Rogers.
John: We watch some British children's television programs from the 70s just because we like hearing them talk.
John: Usually they involve like the main character is a man made out of a button.
John: And a soup can because those were hard times in England and production values were very low.
John: So Button Moon is one which is really like – it's an amazing show.
John: I highly recommend it.
John: There's a narrator who's like, here comes Mr. Spoon.
John: he's wearing a hat and it's a spoon with a, with a, like a, a plate on its head.
Merlin: Well, it's right there on the tin.
John: And you're like, wow.
John: I like that.
John: Wow.
John: This show really, I mean, yes, they don't even bother concealing the fact that they are controlling all the characters with like popsicle sticks.
John: But then I'll say, like, let's try Adventure Time.
John: Let's try Powerpuff Girls.
John: Let's try – we watched Mary Poppins.
John: And in general, she just – you know, I told you we watched Dumbo and it traumatized us both.
John: Yeah.
John: But in general, it's not a – because I don't –
John: I don't have a lot of time watching stuff.
John: It's not part of her culture either.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: That feeds into the consistency thing.
John: Yeah, right.
John: We have decided that watching tap dancing videos is one of the things that we both enjoy.
John: And the other day we were watching tap dancing videos and we came upon one where some tap guys and some river dance guys were having a tap off.
John: And boy, I think I could watch it again right now.
Merlin: Oh, I love me a Riverdance video.
John: It was tap guys and Riverdance guys.
John: And the tap guys had a man with a fedora and a saxophone.
John: And the Riverdance guys had a red-haired girl with a violin.
John: And so they were like trading licks and trading tap licks.
John: And I think everybody agreed that one of the American-style tap dance guys was like...
John: Pretty tough to beat.
John: But the head Riverdance guy, I don't know.
John: He had some bad skills, too.
Merlin: The original Riverdance guy?
John: I don't think so.
John: I think these were younger Riverdance guys.
John: It was young guys giving each other a little bit of the old razzmatazz, if you know what I'm saying.
John: YouTube can be good for things like that.
John: Oh, I mean, you just tap dance videos.
John: You can watch them for a thousand years.
John: You get a little bit of Shirley Temple.
John: You get a little bit of the cast from Fame.
John: You get a real slice of American history.
Merlin: It sounds like she doesn't feel like she's missing anything.
John: Oh, no.
John: I mean, I was always worried that she was going to come to me one day and just be like, videos.
John: What have you been doing?
John: Why have you been depriving me of these magical things?
John: And so the first few times I showed her videos, I was watching very carefully, looking at her eyes to see if there was some.
John: And I mean, obviously, she was delighted by the moving pictures.
John: But there wasn't any moment where some switch was flipped where this incredible world of –
John: of video production was you know did she never wanted to dive in it was always another thing in the course of a day like oh and then we'll watch that for 15 minutes and then we'll go um you know and then we'll go pull uh petals off a flower or whatever so so yeah but it still may happen you know she may be uh
John: She may be seven years old before she decides, you know what, it's probably going to be virtual reality.
Merlin: Oh, that's an interesting point.
John: She's going to put her VR headset on and she's going to be like, wait a minute.
John: I don't have to stand around this stupid world anymore.
John: I can go into this other world.
Merlin: Our friend John Siracusa on the show we do has said in the past some stuff that makes me think that he's more in the nature versus nurture camp, which I would never have thought myself to be in the camp of.
Merlin: But the more I think about it, the more I see evidence that that can tend to be true once you start looking for it.
Merlin: Put differently, it's not so surprising that something that both of the parents are really into becomes something the kids are really into.
Merlin: Conversely, and not just because they're forcing Star Wars down their throat, but conversely, something that the parents just are not into for any variety of reasons could easily be something the kid is not that into.
John: So you're suggesting, based on my daughter's mother's proclivities, that my daughter will spend many hours a day looking at Bed Bath & Beyond catalogs for the rest of her life?
Merlin: I look over at my wife sometimes at night and see her on the iPad.
Merlin: She's like looking at catalog sites.
John: And my daughter loves catalogs.
John: Yeah, catalogs.
John: Catalogs and like, I mean, you peer over someone's shoulder and you think like, oh boy, I'm going to catch them.
John: I'm going to catch them looking at something on the internet.
John: Who's Tom?
John: And it is, it's just like discount purse sites.
John: Yeah.
John: It's like, wow.
John: I mean, you know, I have a luggage fetish myself.
Merlin: Yep, yep.
John: And if you look over my shoulder, you will catch me on some discount purse sites.
John: So I'm not casting aspersions on anybody.
Merlin: Well, in that case, I mean...
Merlin: I think the point there's the thing that I feel like I think my wife would agree that we both struggle with this a little bit is when we talk about things like the screen time thing is that we both really like looking at iPads.
Merlin: We both really like, you know, watching Top Chef at night or something like that.
Merlin: And so and so, you know, like in the case of like last night, we had a marathon Gilmore Girls night.
Merlin: We all really like the Gilmore Girls, which is a great show.
Merlin: And we finished off season one.
Merlin: We started season two.
Merlin: My wife and I have seen all of them, at least the first six seasons, three times.
Merlin: So, and my daughter loves it now.
Merlin: She sings along on the song.
Merlin: So, I mean, is it surprising that like, it's something we all enjoy doing and you do it, but then there's a long winter song on a couple of Gilmore Girls episodes.
Merlin: Oh, do you remember which, which song?
John: No, it might be on the internet.
Merlin: You're on the OC, too, right?
Merlin: Yeah, a couple of times.
Merlin: That's super cool.
Merlin: It's nice.
Merlin: Matthew Kauz responded to one of my toots the other day.
Merlin: That was kind of weird.
John: He's a nice man.
Merlin: He seems like a very nice man.
Merlin: Yeah, he is.
Merlin: The times that you've introduced me to him, he seems like a basically nice fellow.
Merlin: He is.
Merlin: So that's not surprising.
Merlin: But then now you're up against it because now, yes, we can have exactly one more Gilmore Girls.
Merlin: And then we've already had bath.
Merlin: We've had dinner.
Merlin: So it's definitely bedtime after that.
Merlin: We'll do reading to you.
Merlin: 20 minutes of reading.
Merlin: We read to you.
Merlin: You read for 20 minutes.
Merlin: That's a thing we do.
Merlin: And then that's it.
Merlin: But there's never been a time when the credits came up on anything that she was happy.
Merlin: Mm-hmm.
Merlin: Guess who else was exactly like that?
Merlin: Mm-hmm.
Merlin: Mm-hmm.
Merlin: Oh.
Merlin: Come on.
Merlin: I want one more.
Merlin: Just one more.
Merlin: Just one more cartoon.
Merlin: One more music video.
Merlin: One more.
Merlin: But, like, who's to blame?
Merlin: Because we like that, too.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: You know, I'm just being straight up.
Merlin: I mean, but, like, that's the thing.
Merlin: So, you know, you might not have such a hard time getting her into the stolen Jeep in seventh grade.
Merlin: We'll find out.
Wee.
John: You know, not to say that some version of this on every podcast, but I was thinking about it the other day in the context of the campaign that I'm running that, you know, I was asking around like, did we have iPhones four years ago?
John: We did.
John: What did they say?
John: I think a lot of people said yes that they did.
John: I think I had one four years ago.
John: Yeah, I think you did too.
Merlin: But definitely not eight years ago.
Merlin: The iPhone came out, I think it was eight years ago, came out eight years ago in June was when it hit the streets, I think.
Merlin: But it was a pretty weird thing that the True Believers bought.
Merlin: But I think it got big like a year or two after that.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: The 3G is the one where everybody went, whoa, I need one of these.
John: And I think my first one was a 3GS.
John: That's a nice phone.
John: That was a good phone.
Merlin: I mean, that was a strong phone.
John: It was a strong phone, and if I had never upgraded the operating system, I would still be using it today.
John: Sing it, sister.
John: But I realized that I already had screen time problems in the sense that I continue to be astonished at how much I...
John: How big a part of my life Twitter still is.
John: I don't understand it.
Merlin: That never stops surprising you.
John: We predicted four years ago that that was over and it's not.
John: I still look at it all the time.
John: I look at my phone all the time.
John: But I'm running a political campaign and these are some of the first political campaigns that people have ever run where they were campaigning 24 hours a day because their phone is right there.
John: There's no time at which somebody can't
John: either toot something political at me or that I'd be asked to respond to an email or an issue.
John: It's with me all the time.
John: And I think back to what it must have been like to run a campaign even 10 years ago when you had to go sit down at your desk and turn on your computer to read your emails, let alone
John: 20 years ago when you picked up the newspaper in the morning and read the headlines and then sat down at a phone and dialed people or, you know, waited for the phone to ring.
John: And what that would have been like...
John: was that if the phone wasn't ringing and your name wasn't in the newspaper and you weren't out actively campaigning, then you were off, you know, or you were sitting at a typewriter or something.
John: You had some mental freedom from the process.
John: And what what has been characterizing my last three months is is total involvement, 24 hour a day involvement in this thing that I'm doing, which is which has taken every last shred of always on call.
Merlin: Like you're almost like it just there's never a time that you're probably comfortable not picking up the phone to see what that was.
John: Right.
John: Well, and, you know, last night in the middle of the night, somebody from some Washington state bicycle advocacy group found a video of me very early on in the campaign when somebody at a forum asked a question, where do you stand on bicycle license plates?
John: And I said, and I honestly pictured myself on my Schwinn Stingray with a little license plate that said, John Washington.
John: That was held onto the back of my bicycle with two twist ties.
John: This is the depth of your analysis for this ad hoc remark.
John: I'm just thinking this in my head.
John: And I was like, I support bicycle licenses.
John: And I look around and every other candidate on the forum is holding up a sign that says no.
John: And I'm like, why not?
John: Why wouldn't you put license plates on bicycles?
John: And the room is like, boo!
John: And I realized very quickly, I look out in the room and a couple of my supporters are like shaking their heads vigorously back and forth.
John: I realized that it is some kind of test that people that hate bikes...
John: And I can't even believe that there are people that hate bikes, but they feel like bikes are a problem.
John: Oh, so it's a dog whistle for both sides.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Where you come out on this is, I get it.
Merlin: So that's a pretty simple question to answer.
Merlin: You don't feel yourself, you know, it's a trap.
Merlin: Like you're walking into this thing where like how you answer that is going to have a big impact on how two groups look at you.
John: Yeah, right.
John: Like, oh, if he wants bicycle license plates, then he hates bicycles.
John: And it's like, really?
John: It was a new idea to me that anybody hated bicycles.
John: But so somebody, some like Washington Bicycle Club advocate in the middle of the night last night finds the video somewhere.
John: And, you know, caps it and starts tweeting at me.
John: Really, John Roderick?
John: Do you really think that bicycles are, you know, and I was just like, whoa, I was just on Twitter just reading some Eugene Merman tweets.
Yeah.
John: And now I'm like in a fistfight with somebody who is mad at me about something that I, you know, and I wrote him immediately.
John: I was like, I got that totally wrong.
John: I didn't know what that meant.
Merlin: Right, right.
Merlin: It's to quote John Lennon, and now it's all this.
John: I didn't, yeah, I didn't understand the question.
Merlin: I made this dumb remark about Jesus that was not really meant to say that we are better than Jesus.
Merlin: I made this remark, and now it's all this.
John: Yeah, yeah.
John: And now it's all this.
John: And so then, you know, when somebody says, like, I was wrong when I said that, there's nothing you can do except, like, go, oh, okay, I get it.
John: And now I'm going to send you 15 lecturing tweets about what you, you know, about what you should have known.
John: Right.
John: And it's like, I understand.
John: I have educated myself since then.
John: I mean, that has happened a lot.
John: I have said a lot of things on this podcast where I got a lot of pushback from our listeners and fans and then went and educated myself on things.
Merlin: Holy God.
Merlin: I mean, I can't even tell you how many times that's happened.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: But the thing is, here's the part that people misapprehend, understandably, is I didn't say something dumb because I was trying to be offensive.
Merlin: I said something dumb because I was being dumb.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: And, like, I can grow.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: But now you have to grow in public where, like, if you don't respond to that person, it seems dismissive.
Merlin: And if you do respond to that person, you're kind of arguing on the Internet.
Merlin: And you're just – you're leaving this huge trail of toots where everybody's going to go, wow, John Fisher seems sensitive about this.
John: Yeah, yeah.
John: And that – I mean I'm very comfortable with the amount I have learned.
John: And the amount I've had to grow and the role that pushed back from our listeners and super fans has contributed to that.
John: But there's always going to be something that you can pull out.
John: I mean, there's always going to be something somebody can pull out from this podcast and say, can you really believe these guys?
Yeah.
John: And, you know, what can we do?
John: We do what we do.
John: Now it's all that.
Merlin: Now it's all this.
Merlin: And it's like, you know, just as, I mean, you kind of can't have one without the other.
Merlin: Well, you can't have one without the other.
Merlin: But one of the rare ways in which I am becoming slightly more healthy as a person, I think, is that I...
Merlin: it may not always show but i find myself much more forgiving of stuff the stupid stuff i see happen out of remove yep because i know like like stupid shit happens people do stupid stuff i mean you know whatever i get why people pile on donald trump because he is a farcical character who clearly takes a certain amount of relish and i'm going to use a word i almost never use because people use it wrong people say trolling all the time when they mean teasing or baiting he's trolling people
Merlin: He's deliberately trying to say something extremely controversial because the more people talk about him, the more real he seems.
Merlin: So, I mean, setting that aside, I mean, it's just the – I guess I feel like I – I don't know.
Merlin: It's too late to say this.
Merlin: It's too late.
Merlin: But, like, I feel –
Merlin: I feel pretty bad about a lot of dumb stuff I've said, but, you know, I also realized that those were words and they came out and I changed.
Merlin: And like, I want to believe that other people are the same way too.
John: Yeah.
John: Yeah, I agree.
Merlin: Not just because of political correctness, but because of growing as a person.
Merlin: There's all kinds of stuff, whether that's 40 years ago or a month ago, there's all kinds of stuff that I don't just, it's not just that I'm not saying it because I don't want to be offensive.
Merlin: I'm not saying that because I think it's not true.
Merlin: And I realized that there's more to it than just those words.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: And I wish everybody got that same break.
John: Well, I think, you know, hopefully they will.
John: I mean, there are a lot of us that have grown a lot in the last few years and there's a lot of people, you know, I mean, you can only punish people so far before you have to sort of live with them again.
Merlin: But you know what?
Merlin: I do want to hear more about the campaign if you have time.
Merlin: But like here's another part of that is that, you know, you must get this because I know I get this.
Merlin: I actually I get a surprisingly small amount of genuinely obnoxious stuff thrown at me.
Merlin: I feel very fortunate.
Merlin: But sometimes there will be, you know, what happens is like I'll say something or somebody heard I said something.
Merlin: Somebody else mentions that third hand.
Merlin: They didn't hear the context.
Merlin: And so, of course, now I'm Hitler.
Merlin: Like that, that happens, whatever that, you know, I think that happens.
Merlin: But I think part of it is the environment where like you described like the last week or the week before you described being in a situation where like all the insiders in politics are interested in what you say, but they're super interested in like who you hang out with because that's, that's how we can really tell.
Merlin: But, but basically I don't want to overstate this, but basically implying that, Hey, we're all just a bunch of liars on one level or another.
Merlin: And so I wonder if part of it is people are so – people understand how – what's the word I'm looking for?
Merlin: How many demagogues are out there?
Merlin: People who are artfully putting together certain kinds of polemical and hurtful things by design because they know they're trying to reach a certain group.
Merlin: There are other people who speak in a code that pretty much everybody knows.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: I mean, is, is the Confederate battle flag really about heritage?
Merlin: Maybe to you, but it's not really, it's kind of not really about heritage.
Merlin: The heritage is used to own black people.
Merlin: Like, well, can we, you know, get past that?
Merlin: Like, but like that is, that's something you can say that a coded statement when you talk about, you know, urban, urban people, when you talk about all these things.
Merlin: So I guess, I wonder, I guess I'm wondering your opinion on this because you're living it now.
Merlin: Is it like, how much of that is just the rhetoric of,
Merlin: of being in public as a public person where maybe people are so accustomed to everybody out there, uh, having some brand that they're trying to portray and deliberately choosing the awful things that they say.
Merlin: Do you think you're getting tarred with that?
Merlin: Pardon my use of the word tar?
John: The, uh, it's, it's two things.
John: And I think one of them, politics is always a rhetorical place where, where, um,
John: You're trying to catch the other guy with their pants down.
John: You're trying to turn their words against them.
John: You think about politics all the way back.
John: It's one of the number one ways you run against somebody is to try and portray...
John: someone who is ultimately another person of goodwill who is trying to help other people by serving in the democratic process.
John: And you turn that person into a repository of everyone's fears and hatreds.
Merlin: Like a hate sink.
Merlin: You become like, you know, for your Orwellian moment of hate.
John: Yeah, the idea that you could swift boat John Kerry, who...
John: who went to Vietnam and fought nobly and that you could turn that against him and that his opponent would be a guy, would be a rich kid who dodged service in Vietnam by joining the National Guard and not even fulfilling his commitment,
John: But that he could be perceived as the better candidate because John Kerry, you know, on some river in Vietnam, you know, misreported what his role in a battle was.
John: I mean, that's just the political process, and it's insane, and it doesn't bear any relationship to reality, and it's unfortunate, but it's real.
John: Right.
John: And so there's that, which I can't do anything about, and none of us can.
John: So you just have to accept the things you cannot change and have the courage to change the things you can't.
John: The...
John: what makes it different now is that that rhetorical, that rhetorical, uh, culture has expanded out into the world at large and normal people are sitting on the internet and using those same techniques to turn other normal people into the opposition or the enemy, you know, and, and, and like you say, it is a, um,
John: We've spent a lot of time removing words from our lexicon, but removing those words hasn't successfully removed the underlying thoughts and prejudices.
Merlin: Yeah, it's almost like thinking that taking the book out of the dictionary means people won't understand what it means anymore.
John: Yeah, so now we have to decode what people are saying.
John: It's the what it means part that's the biggest problem.
John: Yeah, because David Duke can speak without using racial slurs
John: but you know what he means.
John: And evangelicals are always speaking to one another in kind of coded language so that you know who you're dealing with.
John: Family values.
John: Yeah, there are all these language codes now.
John: And so we're forced to decode one another, but that we're also applying this kind of political approach
John: matrix to just what our normal conversation somebody goes online and says like i had a you know i met a i met somebody today she was so basic and then it's like wait a minute you know using that is classist and all that you know and and and then that political attack comes and and it takes the it takes the form of like i'm gonna i'm i'm
John: I'm both going to try and educate this person but also discredit them and silence them.
John: It's all that which comes from our political culture and now has just infiltrated our daily lives.
John: And so there's a lot of that coming from just daily life people back into politics, right?
John: I mean, I'm running and it's not just a super PAC that is going to swift boat me.
John: It's somebody that disagreed with something I said on the podcast and –
John: chose to interpret it a certain way and then decides that independently they are going to be a a flaming sword that alerts the world to the fact that i am a i'm a bad candidate and a bad man um and then you know and so so yeah i i do feel i do feel that there's there's a lot more of that to come in my campaign and
John: There will be people that come out of the woodwork and say like –
John: I used to be a fan, but then one time John Roderick didn't reply to my email fast enough.
John: And then I realized that he was a narcissist and he's covered in white privilege.
John: And so I've made it my personal mission to destroy him.
John: And everybody's got the same resources now.
John: Everybody's got access to the same communication channels.
John: You just keep lobbing dirt clods at somebody until one of them sticks.
Merlin: And you don't get any extra credit for not doing that.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: Or do you?
Merlin: Me, personally?
Merlin: One that does not participate in that particular form of mudslinging.
Merlin: You don't get credit for not doing that, do you?
John: No, I don't think so.
John: I don't think so.
John: I mean, I've said that I want to run a clean campaign, and I get a lot of pressure from my own team to challenge my opponent on his record.
John: And when I do...
John: When I do, people that are fans of mine say, I thought you were going to run a clean campaign.
John: So there's a lot of...
John: There's a lot of – I'm caught between a rock and a hard place.
John: I've got people who think that me running a clean campaign means that I never say anything about my opponent except that I think he's a nice guy.
John: And I spend all my time ideating up in the clouds.
John: And then my own staff is screaming at me to –
John: to get in the press and make it and differentiate myself from my opponent.
John: Uh, and you know, you gotta do, you gotta do both and I try not to be personal, but ultimately, ultimately the, the, the attacks against me probably aren't going to come from my opponent.
John: They're probably going to come from somebody on the internet.
John: Somebody that is angry at me for the way I talk and the way I am and the way I've lived and has decided that it's their mission.
John: People have...
John: crusades that will get them a lot less attention than going after me in public.
John: I mean, that's a real opportunity for somebody if they want to.
Merlin: So you get about, what, three more weeks?
John: Three more weeks before the primary, yeah.
Merlin: That's going to be a long three weeks, huh?
Merlin: Boy, I'll say!
John: That was weird.
John: I know.