Ep. 185: "I Reject Potatoes."
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Merlin: Hello?
Merlin: Hi, John.
Merlin: Hi, Merlin.
Merlin: How's it going?
Merlin: Good.
Merlin: Good.
Merlin: Happy Monday.
John: I feel like Bez this morning.
John: Is that the dancer in that band?
John: Yeah, that's right.
John: The Happy Mondays.
John: Wow.
John: He's the dancer.
John: The professional, the accompanying dancer.
Merlin: Did he start out professional or they must have just invited him on stage to do a little dance?
John: I think he probably invited himself on stage.
John: Yeah.
John: There was another band here in the Northwest that had their own dancer.
Merlin: I'd love to hear why you feel like Bez, but also I am a fan of bands who have a superfluous dancer on stage.
Merlin: I like that.
John: How many do you know?
Merlin: It depends on how you define it.
Merlin: I think Bob from Pavement kind of started out as a guy doing a dance on stage.
John: I think you're right.
John: I think you're right.
John: And then they gave him a stick, right?
Merlin: They might give him a stick.
Merlin: He used to be the old drummer supposedly used to like hand out food at the door.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Shake everybody's hand.
Merlin: Gary.
Merlin: Is that his name?
Merlin: Gary.
John: Gary.
John: Gary.
John: So many Gary's and they're all wonderful.
Merlin: And then there was a time, of course, like in the 60s, you just have people dancing on stage.
Merlin: I think it was just part of the people really used to put on a show.
John: That's right.
John: There was a Portland band called Hazel, which was the Pete Krebs band.
John: And they had a dancer named Fred.
John: Fred was a little bit older than everybody else in the band.
John: And the thing about them is that they were just an indie rock band.
John: They were an excellent indie rock band.
John: I remember the name very much.
John: Yeah, but they had a middle-aged guy with a long beard dancing on stage with them, which at the time was quite a spectacle.
John: Not what you expected.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Well, I'd like to circle back to this.
Merlin: Can I ask why you feel like Bez today?
Hmm.
Merlin: Are you a little winded?
Merlin: No, no, no.
John: Let me tell you.
John: So in my office now, I have a Keurig.
John: A Keurig.
John: You got a Keurig.
John: A Keurig.
John: And so I spent, I was a little bit late to the program, 15 minutes late, because that was the 15 minutes it took me to figure out my Keurig.
John: Was this your first poll?
Yeah.
John: The first one.
John: So I'm sitting here, I'm drinking it.
John: I'm drinking it out of a mug that has my own picture on it.
John: Because that was the only mug that I had here.
John: And it's delicious.
John: It's delicious.
John: It's nutritious.
John: It's my own coffee.
John: My own coffee and my own strange little packet-y coffee maker.
John: I'm into it, though.
John: Here I go.
Merlin: Was it a gift?
John: Oh, nice.
John: Oh, the coffee.
John: It was.
John: It was a Christmas present.
John: Oh, Merlin, it just simplifies the process of making coffee so much.
John: All you have to do is just push like 14 buttons.
John: Wait 11 minutes.
Merlin: Yeah, I don't want to rain on your parade.
Merlin: There's a few things I really, really like about the Keurig and then like a very large number of things I don't like about it.
John: Tell me, as a new Keurig owner, I'm very, very curious about it.
Merlin: Well, you know, maybe I should hold back.
Merlin: I don't want to sour your experience of it.
Merlin: My lady works at a job at a fancy office, and it's got lots of nice perks.
Merlin: She can, like, walk to the gym.
Merlin: You know, she's got a standing desk.
Merlin: They got huddle rooms.
John: A lot of perquisites, they call it.
John: That's why you get a job.
John: For the perks.
Merlin: I think when you get a job in, you know, in her case, medicine and education, there's a lot of perks.
Merlin: Free medicine.
Merlin: But she's got a Keurig machine.
Merlin: The reason we ended up getting a Keurig machine is she has one in her workplace where she can walk a few steps, go to the little kitchen.
Merlin: And the thing about her Keurig machine is it's got like a dedicated water line.
Merlin: Whoa, it's a plugged in Keurig.
Merlin: So can you imagine how that changes everything?
Merlin: It fucking changes everything.
Merlin: So you walk up.
Merlin: You get one of these little buckets.
Merlin: It's kind of like a giant-sized Cisco creamer.
Merlin: You drop it in, an incredibly sharp needle goes into it, and then it squirts out some coffee for you.
Merlin: And the thing I will say about the Keurig, when it works, is it is insanely consistent.
John: And convenient.
John: Consistent and convenient.
John: Those are two things that I want.
John: Yeah.
John: Because I'm here at the office, and sometimes I want another cup of coffee, but it's a long way to get a cup of coffee here.
Merlin: Well, can I ask you about your – I don't want to ask you too much about your office for a variety of reasons, but what is the basic setup in terms of amenities?
Merlin: I assume that you have a desk with your Mac on it.
Merlin: You've got probably a lot of empty Amazon boxes.
John: That's true.
Merlin: And so what is the setup for things like?
Merlin: You know I'm always interested in bathrooms.
Merlin: What's the bathroom setup?
Merlin: What's the kitchen and food setup?
Merlin: Is there refrigeration?
Merlin: Could you give a rough idea of what a day is like for you in terms of the amenities and perks?
John: Absolutely.
John: So my office is, as you know, constructed in a former immigration prison.
John: What?
John: I didn't know that.
John: Oh, really?
John: Oh, my goodness.
John: foreigners that we determined we did not want to just roam around.
John: So this was pre-World War II when the biggest sort of problem, the biggest immigration problem here in Seattle I think were Chinese and other
John: sort of Asian, you know, Filipinos that were coming in, working on ships, and then they were trying to immigrate, and we had some issue with that.
John: So this was the new prison at the time.
John: I think before that, they were just, you know, people whose immigration status was unclear were just held in warehouses or wharfs.
John: And in addition to being the new immigration prison, it was also the assayer's office.
John: So if you wanted your poke of gold assayed, you would also bring it here if you wanted your ore.
Merlin: So if you went out and reconnoitered the rim, you could bring in what you find, and that'll let you know if it's a good claim.
John: Uh, well, they will actually, yeah, they will tell you, they'll tell you what your gold is going for.
John: Like it's, um, they'll put it on the scale.
John: In other words.
John: Wow.
John: Wow.
John: Wow.
John: Uh, and so it continued in that role and then the war came.
John: So there were, this was not, I mean, they, they decided that they were going to deport all of the Japanese Americans to camps.
John: And this was sort of the headquarters of that process.
Yeah.
Merlin: Oh, so it started out more like Vita Corleone in a room and became more like a halfway house to getting people to those camps.
John: During the war.
John: Oh, man.
John: And then after the war, successive waves of people immigrating to Washington created a sort of like, oh, your immigration status is...
John: You don't have a passport or you are applying for asylum here.
John: And it was a kind of place that the goal was to process people through it.
John: But a lot of times you find people who just need to be deported to their original country.
John: Sometimes you find people where their original country doesn't want them back.
John: And that's where you get people in a limbo state.
John: America wants to send them away and then no country wants them.
John: Oh my God.
John: And so then they live in a limbo state where they are locked in this prison.
John: until their status is resolved.
John: And as you can imagine, the people whose job it is to resolve that status are underpaid and overworked and harried and so forth.
Merlin: Talk about being stuck in the system.
John: Yeah, and so there were, for many years, people that just lived in a prison
John: And there was no, they continued to have no status.
John: Do you remember that guy that lived in the airport?
John: He lived in, he landed in New York City, landed at JFK.
John: Right, right.
Merlin: They made a movie about him because he was in an international airport and he couldn't get out, he couldn't go anyplace else.
Merlin: Yeah, right.
John: He just was stuck in this, like, in-between state.
John: So this prison, you know, developed a reputation as being a pretty bad place just because there were people stuck here for years and they had no recourse to any law.
John: So as time went on, you know, then there were then there were a lot of Latin American people here and a lot of Muslim people here.
John: And at a certain point after 9-11.
John: it was determined that this prison wasn't big enough.
John: We needed to build a new prison, a super big state-of-the-art prison to house all of the new people that we were going to hold.
Merlin: Is that the Tacoma Northwest Detention Center?
John: That's the one.
John: And so this was the Bush era when we were, A, building a lot of prisons, and B, holding a lot of people.
John: And so here was this enormous terracotta prison right in the center of Seattle's International District that no one knew what to do with.
John: So they just surplused it.
John: They just sold it to some dudes.
John: And the dudes thought, oh, man, because it's a very cool building.
John: They were like, oh, we'll set it up with T1 lines and it'll be a super rad tech office.
John: Wow.
John: And then the tech crashed.
John: Oh, sure.
John: And they said, you know what?
John: Rather than do that, we're just going to throw up some drywall.
John: And rent it to a bunch of artists.
John: Because right at that time.
John: Seattle's Pioneer Square neighborhood.
John: Which had formerly been the artist loft place.
John: Was being swept with a wave of gentrification.
John: And all the artists were getting pushed out.
John: There was a place called the Washington Shoe Building.
John: which was an old shoe factory, and it was that kind of artist hive where you'd walk in and the walls were all wackadoodle and people were having crazy parties, like wonderful, wonderful art parties and people living in there illegally and making art.
John: So a lot of the old respectable artists that had come up in the Washington Shoe Building just moved over to this place, which was formerly the...
John: what did they call it?
John: The INS building and the new owners changed that to in scape.
John: So INS scape in scape.
John: Hmm.
John: Uh, so no T one lines, no, uh,
John: amenities really of any kind and my office is a corner office in what was formerly the men's dormitory where people lived in bunk beds in a giant you know holding place where I think they lived for a long long time there were bars on the windows and
John: Uh, I'm up on the top, top floor.
John: So, uh, and, and, you know, there are stories of guys that like climbed out on the, on the ledge and jumped to their deaths because it was so, so abysmal here.
John: Oh my God.
John: Um, and now some artists have turned the, uh, inscape building into a living museum.
Um,
John: where they commemorate all of the eras of its prison-dom.
John: And there are all kinds of art parties here now, and on my floor, like painters and photographers, and there's a woman that does...
John: A wonderful thing, which I'm sure you know about, which is she goes into business meetings and she diagrams the meeting.
John: What?
John: Maybe you don't know about this.
John: No, I love it though.
John: It's a kind of art, but also a business strategy where they're having a meeting and she is kind of simultaneously like turning the meeting into a big...
John: flow charty wall art thing which then allows you to look at the meeting in like a whole piece of data data art wow and let's see there's a woman next door who is I mean there are a lot of like
John: And caustic sculptor type people who are melting wax and burning things, potters.
John: But what that means is an industrial sink halfway down the hall, a dormitory bathroom at the far end of the hall from me.
John: And no kitchen.
John: No.
John: I mean, you just have to build your own little kitchen in your own place.
Merlin: So if you want running water, you got to go to the sink.
John: You got to go to the sink to get.
Merlin: OK.
John: All right.
John: You got to go down the hall to go to the bathroom, which is like shared.
John: Yeah, I know.
John: And I mean, but it's kept it's kept reasonably clean.
John: There is a there's a manager here that sort of it does a pretty darn good job of running herd on everybody.
John: The free pile is pretty amazing down in the basement.
John: Right now, I would say the free pile has gone to shit.
John: People are just dumping trash there.
John: But over the years, like, you know, you find a dentist chair there.
John: I mean, I've outfitted my whole place with stuff I found in the building.
John: There's a couch.
John: There's a table with four chairs.
John: There's a desk.
Merlin: It's living history.
John: It's living history.
John: That's right.
John: And I like the space.
John: I like the weird people.
Merlin: So the Keurig is a good fit for you in that sense.
John: Yep, that's right.
Merlin: You got to fetch some water.
John: And I've got a pitcher so I can go get the water without taking the Keurig apart.
John: Right.
John: And yeah, I've got a little space heater.
John: You got a fridge?
John: No fridge.
John: You should get a fridge.
John: Well, so what I did was I bought a box of those little creamers.
Merlin: Oh, the aseptic Don't Go Bad creamers?
John: Yeah, the Don't Go Bad creamers.
John: And I figure they won't go bad for six months or something like that.
John: What else would I want in the fridge?
John: Greek yogurt?
John: Greek yogurt?
John: You could have seltzers?
John: Yeah, I don't mind a warm seltzer.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: I don't know.
Merlin: One of my favorite things.
Merlin: You've been here.
Merlin: I've got a Costco dorm fridge.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: I've got our old microwave.
Merlin: And I've got a Cuisinart hot pot water boiler for making hot beverages.
John: Well, what's nice about your office is, you know, you've got the private bathroom.
John: Oh, boy, it's just steps away.
John: Steps away.
John: And that's great.
John: And, you know, you could actually...
John: You know, if you and the wife had a disagreement, you could go down and live in your office for a couple of days.
Merlin: Don't think I haven't thought about it.
John: And here, I mean, I sleep.
John: I take naps here, of course, but I do it just stretched out on the floor because the couch is too small to sleep on.
Merlin: Yeah, I got a sleeping bag and a pillow I pull out a couple times a month.
Merlin: And I'm worried that when on the very rare occasion, my landlord, who's really great, when he comes here, I worry that he thinks there's something kind of weird going on here.
John: That it's a lived workspace.
Merlin: Yeah, you know, I feel guilty and worried about everything.
Merlin: But like, yeah, exactly.
Merlin: That maybe I'm like stretching the coat a little bit.
John: So you've got a big shelf unit that has a bunch of dolls on it, Supergirl and Superboy and Girlboy and Dynamite Twins.
John: Oh, the great DC villain Girlboy.
John: And whatever, like Bat Person and Green Person.
John: Person Bat.
John: Big Boob Girl.
John: Big Boob Girl with the black eyes.
John: Bigger Boob Girl.
John: On my shelf, let's see what I have.
John: I have a piano.
John: I have a second piano.
John: What?
John: Well, I mean, electric pianos.
John: Like a Rhodes?
John: Yeah, I have a Wurlitzer and a Rhodes, and then I have a Juno 106.
John: And then I've got a very big crate of kazoos.
Merlin: Oh, those old Long Winters kazoos?
John: The Long Winters kazoos.
John: We bought 10,000 of those, and we sold a lot of them, but we still have a lot of them.
John: And I've got some – oh, I don't want to say kind of what I've got because people are going to start hassling me, but I've got some Long Winters vinyl, some –
John: John Roderick books, some old T-shirts, vintage Long Winters T-shirts, including a couple of girl baseball sleeve snowblower T-shirts.
Merlin: Wow.
Merlin: This is all classics.
Merlin: And I'm just imagining – do you have any of your –
Merlin: you know, Roderick campaign materials there.
John: I've got some Roderick campaign materials if anybody's interested in those.
John: That's quite a living museum you've got there.
John: It is, including a giant banner, a huge, huge Vote Roderick banner.
Merlin: Is it unfurled?
John: It's not unfurled.
John: No, I could put it on the wall, but still a little soon.
John: A little soon.
John: Too soon.
John: And then I've got various and sundry things that I found in the free pile.
Merlin: uh that i was like hmm uh yeah what the hell that that's a cool box i do that sometimes i find things on the street now this is another thing i worry about with the landlord sometimes i'll find things on the street and i'll just pick it up for no reason to bring it in like i've got a i've got a pallet you know i don't know why i have a pallet but i thought maybe someday i could use that for something well sure after the apocalypse you break it up and it'll make a campfire you can make a campfire or a very very tiny house oh you can make a tiny house that's right for for uh for a girl boy to live in girl boy and green green boy to live in
John: And Wilberforce and... Wilberforce and Blank-Eyed Lady.
John: Yeah, Dr. Bald.
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Merlin: I hate you so much.
Merlin: I'm such a poor housekeeper that even now, all of your stuff, including the coffee cup that you used, it's all still in exactly the same place.
Merlin: I haven't moved it.
Merlin: Oh, really?
Merlin: Oh, yeah.
Merlin: Yeah, yeah.
Merlin: There's a giant pile of Marvel dolls on the floor that you've examined and described.
John: Well, yeah, I could tell that it wasn't, you hadn't recently swept through there with a big cleaning.
Merlin: Well, this is the problem.
Merlin: And one of my questions, we should give out the Keurig, I guess.
Merlin: But it seems like you have a very particular feeling about your space at home, and you have your collections, and you've got things set up a certain way.
Merlin: So does that same philosophy apply at your office?
Merlin: Because I mostly just clean up occasionally and move stuff around and fill more bankers' boxes.
Merlin: It's pretty utilitarian.
John: Well, let me say that the state of my house currently is embarrassing.
Merlin: No.
Merlin: Don't you say that, John Roderick.
Merlin: Why would you say such a thing?
John: Well, because somewhere along the line in October...
John: I just started to let it all go to hell.
John: And I put it back together, I think, once in late October.
John: Did a big clean, put everything back together.
John: But it wasn't that the house itself was teetering, but it was that I was teetering.
John: And then in November, I let it go again.
Merlin: Also, at this point, you're still dealing with the election.
John: Well, you know, I'm...
John: I have processed it, but I'm looking into the future.
John: I'm like, what's going to happen?
Merlin: In October, when did your part in the race end?
John: Beginning of August.
Merlin: It's been that long?
Merlin: Yeah.
Oh, my gosh.
John: I know.
John: That's insane.
John: The city council, the Seattle city council has been seated.
John: The city council.
John: Election is completely over and they've all taken their jobs.
John: And it won't be the same without you.
John: Well, it's true.
John: It's true.
John: But, you know, Seattle just didn't share my vision.
John: Yet.
John: Yet.
John: That's right.
John: Anyway, I let it go in November and then I went away for a month and a half on tour.
John: Tourish kind of things.
John: And now, walking into my house, you'll be greeted by...
John: Just utter chaos.
John: Chaos in every direction, including I took apart my bed in order to replace it with my Casper bed.
John: And that whole process, because I'm sleeping now on the Casper bed that I put in the guest room.
John: Right.
John: So I emigrated to the guest room.
John: And in the whole time I've lived in the house, I never lived in the guest room.
John: It's the guest room.
Merlin: That's it.
Merlin: It says it right on it.
Merlin: That's the one kind of in the back by the stairs.
John: That's right.
John: Now I'm living in the guest room, and my bedroom, like the sleigh bed is all dismantled but hasn't been removed.
John: There's an extra couch upstairs that doesn't belong there that never should have gone there.
John: It was hard to get there, and now it has to get out of there.
John: Oh, you're singing my song.
John: Yeah, and there's a desk up there that doesn't belong there.
John: There's a new Casper reality just waiting to be implemented.
John: And then downstairs, oh, there's another desk that doesn't belong there.
John: There's some furniture that I just, there's some furniture I found in the barn that needs to go.
John: I'm wearing my couch out.
John: And on top of it all is a thousand unread New Yorker magazines.
John: All that stuff I got back from the burglary that I decided I needed to sort again.
John: Oh, sure.
John: It's got to find a new place in your new reality.
John: Right.
John: But that's all half sorted.
John: And then there's a layer of books and novels and stuff that's all on top of that.
John: And then there's a layer of just wool over everything.
John: Sure.
John: And so every time I walk into my house now, I'm overwhelmed by the
John: the daunting scale of just what needs to be done.
John: And so I'm becoming someone who's just walking through the clearing on the way.
John: And there are a lot of like – so I started doing my hobbies and projects in the kitchen because there wasn't any space anywhere.
John: And now the kitchen counters are all covered with boxes and robots.
Merlin: This is so similar to what we're dealing with at home right now where there's been this –
Merlin: Perfect storm is an overused phrase, but there's been a confluence of several things that have happened, including that my wife works full time now.
Merlin: I'm, you know, not super busy, but I'm doing more than I was like six months ago.
Merlin: Christmas.
Merlin: comes along so all kinds of new things come in the house because of christmas uh and also my daughter i am on the one hand very proud to say has gotten really into we'll just say arts and crafts she's very but stuff like drawing you know painting that kind of stuff that's bad enough but she's also does things with beads and just all of these little projects there's lego everywhere and my problem is like i hear you because i feel like i come in the house and it's a little depressing
Merlin: Partly because it's like a tile puzzle.
Merlin: If half of this stuff was just gone, I would be able to clean the place up.
Merlin: But you can't really properly, if you've got two desks you don't need in your house, you've got a bigger problem.
Merlin: Yes.
Merlin: You need a hauler.
Merlin: You need somebody to come in with a big claw and actually take some giant things out to make more room in the tile puzzle.
John: That's exactly right.
John: And then on top of it, one of the big, big problems, and I'm embarrassed to say this,
John: But one of the big problems, honestly, is that I have too many blazers in the last.
Merlin: That seems like something you could collect and organize.
John: But there's only so much closet space in any one place.
John: And I just really found a lot of good blazers in the last couple of years.
John: And I didn't say no to any of them, the good ones, because they were only $8 and they were lovely.
John: But now I have...
John: So many blazers that I just don't, I don't have the closet space for them, but I take them out and I arrange them, you know, I spread them out and look at them and say, which of these blazers can I get rid of?
John: And I'm like, well, I need the orange linen one and I need the green felt one and I need the
John: blue tweed winner I need that other tweed one and then pretty soon I'm like in that headspace where it's like well what if I get asked to a to an orange tweed party yeah right you can find that twice yeah right so then and that's part of part of like the looming eBay store that I'm gonna launch is gonna be a play I like a pipeline for all this stuff to go out into the world and I'm just hoping
John: The problem is when we did our show, our live show the other day, I was looking at the audience and I was saying, how many of these people are 44 and 46 longs?
John: Right?
John: Because that's the...
John: That's the market for pretty much everything I own.
John: I'm going to put a bunch of blazers up online, but if you're not a 44 long or a 46 long or a 42 long.
Merlin: Because there aren't going to be that many people who buy it just to have a creepy piece of John's past.
John: Yeah, people aren't going to put it on the wall like a kimono.
John: Oh, man.
John: Can you imagine?
John: It's a tweed jacket up on the wall in a big giant frame.
John: In the John room?
John: Yeah.
John: So, no, I expect that these will be practical items for people, but it's going to be a limited number of people.
John: If you're 5'6", these things are going to be – there's not really going to be anything.
Merlin: I don't know.
Merlin: It would be pretty cute.
Merlin: Like a girl 5'6 with a pixie cut and wearing a 46 long.
Merlin: That's pretty cute.
Merlin: With a belt.
Merlin: I love you.
John: Like a ribbon belt.
John: Exactly.
John: And rolled up sleeves.
John: I mean I can see it.
John: I can too.
John: Actually, that's pretty cute.
John: Yeah, super cute.
John: But, yeah, just move the buttons, right?
John: Just move the buttons over and make it into a double-breasted jacket with giant sleeves.
Merlin: It would look like a kimono.
Merlin: I think I've talked about this before, but there's something I do every – depending on where it is, what it is every year, two or three, which is calling the hauling guy.
Merlin: And the thing is, this is the final part of the problem, but getting to that part is difficult.
Merlin: So basically, there's these places you can call, and I don't like doing this.
Merlin: I feel weird about it.
Merlin: I don't think it's super environmentally sound, but my environment needs to be made more sound by doing this, which is I will just get a, and I don't know if this is for you, but it's just something to think about.
Merlin: You get some contractor bags, like a bunch of contractor bags, and just start filling, filling, filling, filling, filling them up.
Merlin: And the amazing part is like, I go through so much anxiety with that where it's like, I don't want to throw this out.
Merlin: I don't want to deal with this.
Merlin: I don't want this stuff going to the dump.
Merlin: I feel terrible about all of this.
Merlin: But the amazing part is in my case, a few months ago, I did this for my office and this like five guys and a big pickup truck show up.
Merlin: And honestly, it was about 18 minutes from my life is virtually unlivable in this office to like a new start.
Merlin: And it is one of those, like, talk about a weight off your shoulders.
Merlin: Again, I'm not saying it's the greatest thing environmentally, but, like, what are you going to do?
Merlin: Are you going to be your own personal garbage dump for the rest of your life?
John: Own personal garbage dump.
Merlin: But just if you could just get the desks out, that would be a start.
Merlin: You have some kids come and carry your desks out.
Merlin: That would be a huge start.
Merlin: You can also do something like a task rabbit.
Merlin: You can have somebody come and make a bed for you.
Merlin: That's probably beneath you.
Merlin: But I'm just saying, you might need to outsource some of this.
Merlin: Hey, kids, get these desks out of here.
Merlin: You could probably find some urchins in the neighborhood.
John: Well, and so the thing is, I'm starting to look at my candlestick collection with a different eye, with a little bit of a jaundiced eye.
John: Yeah.
John: I'm saying, I got too many candlesticks.
John: I really don't need these.
John: And that's something I could put on my eBay store and someone of any size could buy.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: You need, in some ways, your barn is probably not up to it.
Merlin: You wouldn't want it to be your office.
Merlin: I don't think anybody else in your life would allow it.
Merlin: You need a third place.
Merlin: A storage shed, not great, because nobody ever opens a storage shed after they buy it.
Merlin: No, it just becomes a place where spiders live.
Merlin: That's right.
Merlin: It becomes a place where spiders move into your stuff.
Merlin: Yeah, right.
Merlin: But you kind of need – you almost could get one of those storage.
Merlin: You can have those – you know, like people do that thing where they move now where you can have like a big storage container.
Merlin: You put your stuff in and they ship that out to a place.
Merlin: You almost could use a storage container somewhere on your property for a month is a thing.
John: What I really want and need is a basement.
John: Like I am a basement dweller.
John: I truly am.
John: I learned that about myself.
John: There are people that like to live in an upstairs environment.
John: I am – late at night, I want to be in a basement.
Yeah.
John: And if I'm in a basement, then it feels appropriate that I be surrounded by crazy projects and it's all down in daddy's basement and you close the door and just the insanity happens down there.
John: You can play the guitar, you can build a train set, you can do whatever lunatic thing that you want to do.
John: But my house doesn't have a basement.
John: It's just one of those houses that was built on the ground for all intents and purposes.
John: And it's the one thing that I rue.
John: is that I don't have a basement.
John: And, you know, I could dig out under the house and build a basement, but what a project.
Merlin: Oh, come on.
Merlin: No.
Merlin: Oh, no, no, no.
Merlin: That would be too much.
Merlin: The last place that I lived in Tallahassee, and Tallahassee's not so much of a basement kind of place.
Merlin: Is Seattle a basement place?
Merlin: Are there a lot of basements there?
Merlin: No.
John: uh depends but no i mean yes but no it's not it's not a massive there are basements but it's not like you know the you know mid-atlantic or the midwest where like you just get a basement the size of your house with your house no it's i mean there there plenty of houses here have basements plenty don't i mean in anchorage
John: A lot of houses don't have basements.
John: They just throw some boards on the ground and start building a house.
John: In Tallahassee, I would imagine that you'd have alligators down there, right?
Merlin: Well, yeah, because of the sea level situation.
Merlin: It's not as bad as Miami, but the last house I lived in, which seemed improbably expensive at $750 a month, it wasn't part of the house that we were renting, so we weren't supposed to use it.
Merlin: But except to do like laundry.
Merlin: But oh, my God, it had an entire, you know, I'm talking about where you've got a basement that's almost the size of your house.
Merlin: It's in it's the footprint of your house.
Merlin: And it was it was finished so that it could be like a nice in law.
John: Oh, yeah.
Merlin: And it had like a full bathroom and it had a whole separate area, like utility area for storage and and laundry.
John: Oh, you're giving me a chubby.
John: I know.
Merlin: If you live in Seattle, San Francisco, Manhattan, you know, oh my God, what a dream that that would be to have your own dedicated area for stuff that wasn't the living right now stuff that you could go down to and play guitar.
Merlin: Oh my God, what a dream.
John: Do you remember the split level house?
John: Did you ever live in a split level house?
Merlin: I think I know what that means.
Merlin: We're talking about like a sunken living room in a ranch style house.
Merlin: Nope.
Merlin: No, no, no.
Merlin: Split level where the parents have their own area.
John: Well, you walk in the front door.
John: Split plan.
John: Split plan.
John: Split plan.
John: Split plan.
Merlin: Split plan is a very popular kind of design.
Merlin: Split plan.
Merlin: Split plan.
Merlin: So you've got a middle area of the house where you've got all the common rooms.
Merlin: Way over in this other side of the house, you've got two or three bedrooms for your dumb kids.
Merlin: And then there's this wing over here where you go down a hallway and you enter into this zone with a separate door for your entire grown-up master living area.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: Oh, I like a separate zone.
Merlin: Right?
Merlin: So you go into a door and you've got your giant, giant closet, maybe two closets.
Merlin: You've got a big bathroom and you've got your big master bedroom, maybe with a sliding door and a wet bar.
John: That's a fantastic sounding thing.
John: But a split level house is one where you walk in the front door and you are immediately greeted by a choice.
John: Upstairs or downstairs?
John: Like the stairs.
John: Oh, sure.
John: The entryway is basically you're on a landing between going up and going down.
John: I totally know what you mean.
Merlin: It's not exactly a townhouse.
Merlin: It's kind of a classic, like big city, Philadelphia-ish kind of place where you get this area, the zone, a common zone you come into where you're like, okay, will you go down to the sleeping and hang out or like up to the kitchen and...
Merlin: Family area.
John: Yes, but no.
John: No.
John: This is a suburban house, which is wider than it is deep.
John: So it's wide.
John: It's built on the width.
John: When you look at it from the front, there's always kind of a two-car garage.
John: And then the front door is set not in the very middle of the face, but sort of skewed over two-thirds.
John: Front door is two-thirds in a classic proportion.
John: Yeah, sure.
John: You walk in, and you either go upstairs to a big open-plan living room, and then there's a little dining room in the back, and then a kind of long kitchen, and
John: And then down the hall from the living room, back over the two-car garage, are like three to four bedrooms.
John: Let's say three bedrooms.
Merlin: I see.
Merlin: Not Brady Bunch, but like a kind of classic.
Merlin: It's got a little pop-up.
John: Yep, now you're getting it.
John: Now you're getting it.
John: Brady Bunch was a very cool, modern, architecturally cool one example of this, but it would have been in a neighborhood of these.
John: And then if you go downstairs...
John: There's a big rec room and probably another bathroom, the laundry room, and another bedroom.
John: And that bottom bedroom is the one I think that you put your teenager in or your mother, right?
John: It's the one that's like...
John: It's not part of – you can have the whole top floor be your house where everybody's living and hanging out.
John: And that bottom big rec room can be your TV room.
John: But then there's a back bedroom.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: For some reason, we kind of mutually agree we want that person to have some space.
John: Yeah, yeah.
John: You go there.
John: There's your own bathroom, bottom floor of the split-level house.
John: Pow.
John: And I lived in a split-level house right as I was transitioning into being a teenager.
John: And I couldn't have been happier.
John: That was circa Ozzy Osbourne's Blizzard of Oz.
John: And I worked out a situation.
John: I designed a system where I could sit in bed and I had a string that I could pull that went up to an eye bolt and
John: above my bed and then the string went across the ceiling to an eye bolt on the far side of the room and then down to the not for to the pullout knob that turned on my tv oh my goodness and my tv was you know like a little red it was red uh plastic
John: tv that was seriously about the size of one of these amazon boxes like a portable tv a portable tv that's right and so i could pull this i could pull out this the on button and of course we only had three channels plus pbs yep and uh i would pull i would uh pull the tv on and watch mel's diner
John: And then I had another rope, another piece of string that went up and turned on the light.
John: I had this whole system.
John: And in my bathroom, I had a jar of Lipton's Instant Iced Tea.
John: which I drank like five tall glasses of a day.
John: Oh my God, me too.
John: Not realizing that it was full of caffeine.
John: I would drink a pitch.
Merlin: I would watch Carol Burnett and drink an entire pitcher of that by myself.
Merlin: Wasn't that incredible stuff, that Lipton's tea?
Merlin: We would get the Nest tea.
Merlin: Yeah, Nest tea.
Merlin: All you do is add water and a pitcher with ice cubes, and then you're just drinking sugary tea for an hour.
John: Drinking sugar tea.
John: I loved it.
John: I still have a jar of it.
John: in my pantry which I never touch I just have it there I have it in the pantry just to look at it and go like yep because I drank so much of that me too and
John: I was so happy.
John: You could make it there right in your room.
John: You could make it in the room.
John: So I had my own corner of the house and I had it rigged up exactly how I wanted it.
John: There was a little desk where I could build my model of the USS Enterprise.
John: Then I do not mean the fucking spaceship.
John: I mean...
John: The aircraft carrier.
John: Oh, okay.
John: And... We wouldn't want people to think you're a nerd.
John: No, no.
John: I was building the aircraft carrier, which is cool, and not the Starship Enterprise, which was also... If you meant Starship Enterprise, you wouldn't have said USS Enterprise.
Merlin: I would have said Starship.
Merlin: That's right.
John: I remember in 19... What would this have been?
John: You know, 80, 81...
John: I remember building a model of a B-52 bomber because in 1981 during the Reagan administration, the B-52 bomber was slated to be retired.
John: And I was working hard on this model because I wanted to finish it before the B-52 was taken out of service.
Yeah.
John: And for those of you listening at home, you know that the B-52 is still in service.
John: Wow.
John: So I was in a big hurry in 81 to get this thing done because it was going to be replaced with the new B-1 bomber.
John: Brand new B-1 bomber.
John: Reagan administration was going to build a thousand of these.
Merlin: Oh, of course.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: That was a big deal.
John: Yeah.
John: And then it got, it wasn't a good bomber and it didn't, it got canceled.
John: Not canceled.
John: They built, like, you know, however many of them.
John: And then they decided, well, we'll keep these B-52s around.
John: I think the B-1 bombers are still flying, too.
John: The ones that we built are still flying.
John: Anyway, that's a little bit of an aside.
John: And not that this show ever has an aside.
John: God forbid.
John: But, yeah, the split-level house, it wasn't actually a basement.
John: You wouldn't call it a basement.
John: You would call it, even though it was slightly subterranean, right?
John: It was three feet of it was underground.
John: But I miss that.
John: I miss that separate area.
John: I don't have that in my house.
John: I need a separate area, Merlin.
Merlin: Oh, my God.
Merlin: Be so nice.
Merlin: And it's like, you know, grown up dads get a den.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Again, like the great Mike Brady, the architect, you know, he had his den and he went in there and he did his work at his table.
Merlin: And you weren't supposed to bug him.
Merlin: You know, that was dad's area.
Merlin: No, you don't bug dad when he's in his den.
Merlin: I think it's something, it's so funny you're pinpointing this to exactly a time in my life when I was very much the same way, where I was always trying to find a new enclave.
Merlin: And for some kids, maybe that was a tree house.
Merlin: But for me, that would be like, I decided to one day set up a second room for myself in our third bedroom.
Merlin: We had a very small house, but it was three bedrooms in this very small house.
Merlin: And there was this one kind of junk room that had an old single bed in it.
Merlin: But that's where I would hang up the pictures of Charlie's Angels that I'd cut out of magazines.
Merlin: And I had a separate radio in there.
Merlin: Wait a minute.
John: You were allowed or you felt empowered enough to just publicly hang up your Charlie's Angels posters?
John: Yeah, my mom worked a lot.
Merlin: I was a latchkey kid, so I could inhabit this room.
Merlin: That's where I kept my copy of Emily Post's etiquette, all of my almanacs.
Merlin: I used Miss Manners myself.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: We had Amy Vanderbilt and Emily Post.
Merlin: I would read that a couple times a week.
John: You didn't read the Miss Manners book?
John: That first Miss Manners book had so many manners in it.
John: And she was a very funny writer.
John: She's underrated.
John: She's a very funny writer.
John: She's a funny writer and she gave great advice.
John: And so my two books were Miss Manners Guide to... What was it?
Merlin: Miss Manners Guide to... Something Exquisitely Correct Behavior or something like that.
John: That's right.
John: The first one.
John: And then The Preppy Handbook.
John: I love that.
John: Lisa Birnbaum.
John: Yeah.
John: And I would pour over those two books.
John: I love the preppy handbook.
John: Trying to figure out exactly what the behavior was, exactly what balance I was going to strike between this behavior, the polite and accepted behavior, and the completely inappropriate behavior that was going to balance it out.
Merlin: But The Preppy Handbook was not precisely like an on-the-nose parody, but I think it was fairly tongue-in-cheek.
Merlin: But I didn't really treat it that way.
John: No, I didn't even understand that it was meant as a joke until later.
Merlin: Right.
John: When I first learned that The Preppy Handbook was ironic—
John: I was a little bit taken aback and I played it off, right?
John: The person was like, oh, that book's hilarious.
John: And I said, huh?
John: And they were like, oh, that's like it's like it's like it's some it's mocking preps.
John: And I was like, oh, yeah.
John: Yeah, of course.
John: Yeah, right.
John: Mocking.
John: And then I kind of like walked away and I was like mocking preps.
Merlin: I think you're describing something that a lot of people do.
Merlin: So I had that room.
Merlin: I had at one point when we moved into a different place, when I moved to Florida, we had an attic with pull-down stairs.
Merlin: We had pulled downstairs installed.
Merlin: Oh, really?
Merlin: Oh.
Merlin: Yeah, so all of our Christmas stuff, all of our old stuff was up there.
Merlin: But at a certain point, really at that same time, I was a little older than you, but about 1981, I started spending a lot of my time in the attic.
Merlin: So I would pull down the stairs.
Merlin: You pulled down this door.
Merlin: You know what I'm talking about, right?
John: Oh, yeah, for sure.
Merlin: Sears would come out to your house and install this.
Merlin: And so it was amazing.
Merlin: And so this creaky door would come down.
Merlin: You pull down these steps.
Merlin: And then you could go up into the attic.
Merlin: And I had made a space where I'd covered up some of the insulation and the beams.
Merlin: Again, now I move my books up there.
Merlin: I have a radio up there.
Merlin: I have some drinks up there.
Merlin: Probably not the most hygienic thing, but like the same pattern.
Merlin: I would go up there and like inhabit the life that I wanted to have up there.
Merlin: I would be a gentleman up there.
Merlin: I would have my own one-man Teenage Gentleman's Club.
John: Now, you've heard Hodgman describe his house, haven't you?
John: Probably.
John: His parents lived in a gigantic East Coast...
John: Central Boston, like one of those.
John: It's like a brownstone, but it was enormous.
John: I do remember this.
John: They gave him accommodations, didn't they?
John: And he had his own apartment.
John: He had two rooms, a bathroom.
John: And he was his only child and very autonomous.
John: And he set it up even with like ferns and stuff.
John: He had a TV area, like couches.
John: I mean, it was basically his own grown-up, what he imagined to be his own grown-up living space.
John: Like what Dick Cavett's house would look like.
John: Like Dick Cavett's, yeah, exactly.
John: And then this house had room for boarders who had their own apartments.
John: so oh my god what a dream i know can you imagine all right merlin i'm i'm gonna make a second cup of coffee here oh okay uh so pardon me if i just uh this will give me a minute to tell you about casper mattresses oh yeah let's do
Merlin: This episode of Roderick on the Line is brought to you in part by Casper.
Merlin: To learn more right now, please visit casper.com slash super train.
Merlin: Oh, this is so very easy to understand.
Merlin: You heard us talking about Casper just a minute ago.
Merlin: Just see right over there.
Merlin: Casper is a company that offers an obsessively engineered mattress at a shockingly fair price.
Merlin: And their mattresses are so good, you might just leave it in the guest room and sleep on it, just like internet celebrity John Roderick.
Merlin: Casper's mattress is a one-of-a-kind mattress.
Merlin: It's a new kind of hybrid mattress.
Merlin: That combines premium latex foam with memory foam.
Merlin: It's got just the right sink and just the right bounce.
Merlin: The best of two technologies coming together for better nights and brighter days.
Merlin: I have been sleeping on this Casper, I swear to God, for over a year.
Merlin: And I love it.
Merlin: My lady friends and I sleep on it.
Merlin: Don't be creepy.
Merlin: I love this thing so much.
Merlin: I love the quality of the product.
Merlin: I love the sleep that I get from it.
Merlin: Thank you.
Merlin: But you know what?
Merlin: Even over a year after getting this thing, I am still just stunned at how easy this company is to deal with.
Merlin: And that matters.
Merlin: This entire process is so painless.
Merlin: If you've ever tried to go into one of those junky stores where you go and lay on a mattress for five seconds and decide if that's how you want to spend a third of your life, stop it.
Merlin: It's nonsense.
Merlin: Ponderous.
Merlin: With Casper, a surprisingly small box, maybe a little bigger than like a small file cabinet, appears at your door.
Merlin: You carry that up to your room by yourself, and you just slide open this little bag with this little mattress in it.
Merlin: It suddenly becomes a very big mattress, and the mattress exhales, inhales.
Merlin: It takes a breath.
Merlin: It draws a breath.
Merlin: It goes, and now within minutes, you have everything you need for a good night's sleep.
Merlin: It's that easy.
Merlin: It's that simple.
Merlin: Here's the part that's nuts.
Merlin: Casper has an equally simple risk-free trial and return policy, so you can try sleeping on your Casper mattress for 100 nights.
Merlin: And if for some reason it's not to your liking, you can send it back.
Merlin: That's free delivery, painless returns, made in America, and sleep glorious sleep.
Merlin: The prices for these things are so crazy.
Merlin: $500 for a twin size, all the way up to $950 for a king.
Merlin: And on top of it all, Casper has a limited special offer to listeners of Roderick on the Line.
Merlin: You get $50 toward any mattress purchase by visiting casper.com slash supertrain and using that offer code supertrain at checkout.
Merlin: Terms and conditions do apply.
Merlin: Our thanks to Casper for many a great night's sleep and for supporting Roderick on the lawn.
John: I'm kind of an expert on them, but I want to hear about them more.
John: All right, here we go.
John: I'm going to make this thing.
John: I'm going to do it.
John: You go ahead with the Caspers.
John: No, no, I'll do it after.
John: Oh, I see.
John: I'm making a lot.
John: It's a long pull.
John: I'm going to do a long pull this time.
Merlin: These are the dreams of the other day.
John: How are you?
John: Fine.
John: Fine.
John: I'm fine.
John: I'm fine.
John: I'm fine.
Merlin: Save it for the show.
Merlin: Should we just leave all this in?
Merlin: I got to put Casper here somewhere.
John: Well, I mean, yeah.
John: This feels a little bit adjunct.
John: Neither fish nor fowl.
John: Is this the show?
John: I mean, I was going to give you a play-by-play on the curing.
John: Wait a minute.
Merlin: Can you talk while you're making coffee?
John: Oh, my God.
John: Do you hear that?
Merlin: Do you hear the sound of the coffee?
Merlin: Yeah, no, that sounds amazing.
Merlin: I want one now.
John: I don't want to pee.
John: I know.
John: That's my coffee being made in my own mug.
John: Now, how many people can say that?
John: I mean, I guess anybody that works in an auto supply place.
John: Yeah.
John: I mean, I guess a lot of people have mugs with their own business on them, but not with their face on them.
John: No.
John: Ugh.
John: So disgusting.
John: What flavor are you doing?
John: Well, so with the Keurig came like a sample pack, right?
John: Sample pack of all the different flavors that you might want.
John: coffee yeah it's kind of a what we got was kind of a strange collection you get the fake Dunkin Donuts you get like Donut Shop Donut Shop Donut Shop here's what I got English breakfast tea which I don't want chai latte I don't want that hazelnut flavored something I do not want that 8 o'clock the original medium roast coffee I'll probably use that Swiss Miss hot cocoa unlikely but maybe my kid will be here sometime
John: And then these various things, breakfast blend, caribou blend, Starbucks.
John: Starbucks dark Sumatra is all you need.
John: Yeah.
John: That's pretty good.
John: So I didn't know what to do.
John: And so my mom went on the internet, which is, I mean, she is the 81-year-old lady that loves the internet.
John: And she bought me like 80 of these from Costco.
John: Or no, I'm sorry, from Office Depot.
John: And they're all Starbucks brand.
John: So I have coffee for days.
John: Yeah.
John: And maybe one day I'll want a chai latte.
John: Yeah, it's worth a try.
John: Okay, so now I've got this cup of coffee.
John: It's very full because I got the long pole.
John: Sitting back down, I've got my two creamers that don't spoil.
John: And do you make it dark?
Merlin: Do you use the option to make it dark?
Merlin: I prefer dark.
Merlin: You know, there's a dingus to make it dark.
John: What's the dingus?
Merlin: Well, I'm trying to remember.
Merlin: We haven't used ours in months because it's broken.
Merlin: But when you're on the screen, God, the interface on this thing sucks.
Merlin: But I remember there's a section like once you drop the thing, it's like, are you ready to make coffee now?
John: Oh, no, mine doesn't have a screen.
John: No screen.
John: No, mine is just a simple one that just is like...
John: It just has buttons.
John: It has like three buttons.
John: Do you want this?
John: Go.
Merlin: Oh, man.
Merlin: That's attractive.
Merlin: Ours is really – as you know, we have a pretty small kitchen.
Merlin: It's a big footprint.
Merlin: Like if you commit to this thing, you're not going to have other things around.
John: Oh, no.
John: This thing is just the size of a normal coffee maker.
John: Is that right?
John: Yeah.
John: It's just a little – it's just big.
John: It's the size of a rugby ball if a rugby ball was shaped like – A coffee maker.
John: Like a coffee maker or like the Matador for Porto Porte.
John: Okay.
John: Right?
John: Okay.
John: It's a rugby ball-sized matador.
John: Oh, right.
John: Mm-hmm.
John: Okay.
John: Oh, this coffee looks good.
John: Is it an office pro?
John: Might be an office pro.
John: This is a professional office.
John: That's a much smaller footprint.
John: Yeah.
John: And I think and I hope that it breaks less easily.
Merlin: Ours gets clogged.
Merlin: It gets clogged.
Merlin: It doesn't work.
Merlin: You end up wasting those very expensive little buckets because it didn't run right.
Merlin: And so there's been lots of advice for people on how to clean it.
Merlin: We've cleaned it.
Merlin: I think ours is defective, and it's super disappointing because it was pretty expensive.
Merlin: Yeah, that sucks.
John: Now, you used to be an advocate of the fizzy water maker.
Merlin: Yeah, I still like the fizzy water maker.
Merlin: My problem is this is how my brain works.
Merlin: Like I'll be up to date and buying lots of those canisters.
Merlin: The canisters are not inexpensive.
Merlin: No, and they go through them.
Merlin: You do, but it is in the end way less expensive than cans, way less expensive and less wasteful.
Merlin: But it's a lot of effort.
Merlin: I drink a lot of seltzer water.
Merlin: Yes, you do.
Merlin: I do.
Merlin: I mean I drink at least over a 12-pack of seltzer a day.
Merlin: Now, you used to drink Coke, right, or something?
Merlin: When I was a youngster, I drank in the days of my attic days.
Merlin: I would drink a lot of Coke.
Merlin: Did you see the photo I sent you?
Merlin: I found and sent you a photo of the Ness tea that I remember from childhood with that green label.
Merlin: Oh, that's exactly the Ness tea with the green stripy cap.
Merlin: Carol Burnett.
Merlin: And so, yeah, I used to drink, like, way too much Coke.
Merlin: It's really weird.
Merlin: I just can't even drink it today.
Merlin: Like, I'll get a Mexican Coke twice a year, and I'm like, ugh, this is just too much.
Merlin: I bet the Nest Tea had even more sugar in it.
Merlin: I'll bet you.
John: Oh, for sure.
John: That Nest Tea was... I can't even believe how much... You know, it was the early 80s and they still were feeding kids garbage.
John: Yes.
John: Like Tang and Nest Tea in a jar.
John: That was just terrible, terrible stuff, but it seemed like...
John: Nobody thought for a second about providing me a 12-year-old or 13-year-old with as much tea, as much sugar tea as I could consume.
Merlin: Oh, no, no, no, no, no.
Merlin: I mean, there was way more background sugar.
Merlin: So like today, my daughter loves candy.
Merlin: She loves chocolate, all things chocolate, and she will eat all of the chocolate.
Merlin: That's not good.
Merlin: I wish that were a habit we had not started.
Merlin: But I still think, in my gut, I still feel like it's nothing like what we had as kids.
Merlin: Between things like breakfast cereals, things like powdered drinks, I'll really put it this way.
Merlin: Until I was in probably college, I actively disliked drinking a glass of water.
Merlin: Me too!
Merlin: Nobody I knew drank water.
John: I drank so much water.
Merlin: It seemed like something you were being cheated.
Merlin: Yeah, it's weird.
Merlin: It would be like having a machine to dispense mana or something.
Merlin: You'd be like, why would you have that?
Merlin: Why don't you have something real?
Merlin: Why would you drink water?
Merlin: Like you have it on the side and a little glass at dinner, maybe.
Merlin: But like I drink I water is my primary thing that I drink now.
Merlin: And yeah, she never did.
Merlin: Never did.
Merlin: But but the background sugar in everything.
Merlin: I mean, when we went shopping and my mom was a good mom, she but like we would just buy stuff like hostess cakes.
Merlin: We just had these things in the house.
Merlin: You would take to lunch.
Merlin: You would just have a Twinkie.
Merlin: That's a thing.
John: Now, this is going to sound weird to you, right?
John: This was along the lines of the fact that I don't eat potatoes.
Merlin: You don't eat potatoes at all.
John: You know this about me.
John: Do I?
John: I do not, nor have I ever eaten potatoes in any form.
Merlin: This is like finding out you're gay or not gay.
Merlin: This is huge.
John: You reject them.
John: I reject potatoes.
John: Now, I will eat mashed potatoes on Thanksgiving that have gravy on them.
Merlin: Oh, sure.
John: And if I'm sitting at a table and someone is lauding some fries, which is something people do, right?
John: They're like, these are great fries or these are awful fries.
John: People talk about their fries.
John: They do talk about their fries.
John: And if I'm sitting at a table and somebody's like, oh, these fries are amazing.
John: These are the best fries.
John: I'll reach over and try a fry.
John: But otherwise, I have never ordered a French fry.
John: I do not like potato chips of any kind.
John: I don't like hash browns.
John: I don't like any kind of potato.
John: You don't eat home fries.
John: Yeah.
John: Look, I will put little russet potatoes in a stew that I'm making.
John: Or maybe like a corned beef hash?
John: No, I don't eat a corned beef hash.
John: Wow.
John: I will eat corned beef all day, but a corned beef hash, I have never had a corned beef hash.
John: Oh, my God.
John: I feel like I'm tripping.
John: I don't want any kind of one of those breakfasts where it's all jumbled together with potatoes.
John: Oh, served in a sewer lid?
John: I don't want one covered with white sauce.
John: I do not want potatoes, Sam.
John: I do not want them, Sam.
John: I am.
John: No potatoes.
John: I never wanted them, even when I was a little kid.
John: You go to a kid's party, and they throw potato chips at you through a cannon.
John: Wow.
John: And you're like, no, thank you.
John: I do not want them.
Merlin: It's one of those things that's not candy.
Merlin: It's like noodles or rice.
Merlin: It's one of those things that you can mostly depend on most kids to want to eat.
John: Yeah, right.
John: And the thing is, in the world, they will shove potatoes at you.
John: I mean, you may not even notice it.
John: But when you're someone who doesn't eat potatoes, which I have to say, I'm the only one I've ever met.
Wow.
John: But potatoes are given to you as maybe your primary starch option about 60% of the time.
John: Oh, yeah.
John: And I don't like them.
Merlin: I don't want to take care of your game, but can you trace back to as long as you can remember, you've rejected potatoes as long as you can remember.
John: The first potato I ever had I didn't like, and I never liked a subsequent potato.
John: Never looked back.
John: And what they seemed like to me was a kind of grainy,
John: Grease holder.
John: Right.
John: It was like it's actually it's actually a grease delivery device and salt grease and salt delivery device where the underlying substance is a sort of grainy muck.
John: That tastes like muck or tastes like dirt.
John: It's a, it tastes like dirt.
John: It has the consistency of dirt and it's slathered with grease and salt.
John: This is super interesting to me.
John: And so, and even if you're, even if they're fried to a crisp, you can still taste that grainy dirt.
John: And then the, and no matter how much salt and fat you put on them, I still taste mud.
John: So, I mean, I was four years old and I was like, I don't want potatoes.
John: Don't give me those.
John: And the thing is that most people, if you don't want potatoes, they just take your potatoes.
John: Or I think what it is is everybody recognizes that potatoes are garbage food.
John: So if they put potatoes on your plate and you don't eat them, they just throw them away.
John: Like nobody ever says, why didn't you eat your potatoes?
John: Because everybody realizes it's just garbage.
John: It's pre-garbage.
Yeah.
Merlin: Now, okay, I was with you for a while, but now you're just talking crazy words now.
John: It's like pre-compost.
John: So this is all in prelude to what I was about to say, which is that I don't like Twinkies.
John: I like Ding Dongs.
Merlin: The Ding Dong is more like, is that the cupcake one?
John: No, no, no.
John: The Ding Dong is wrapped in foil.
John: It's the size and shape of a hockey puck.
Merlin: Oh, the Ding Dong.
John: Yes.
John: It's chocolate on the outside and whatever that lardy sugar fat cream.
Merlin: The thing is, though, yes, I'm remembering.
Merlin: But it's just barely any of its constituent parts.
Merlin: It's just barely chocolate.
Merlin: It's just barely cake.
Merlin: And it's just barely a filling thing.
John: The chocolate is largely wax.
John: It's very waxy.
John: The cake is also wax, and the filling is just oleo with sugar.
John: And I loved them.
John: I loved a ding-dong.
John: Here's the thing, though.
John: Those Hostess cakes on the East Coast have different names than on the West Coast.
John: Yeah, exactly.
John: Go ahead.
John: Well, Twinkies are the same, but then they have different names for all the other stuff.
Merlin: Yeah, I think it's one of those Best Foods Hellman's type situations, right?
Merlin: Where you give a different name on the East and West Coast.
Merlin: Right.
John: But my experience was that the Twinkie was the potato chips of lard cake.
John: So if you were going to have one kind of kids' sugar lard cake, it was going to be a Twinkie.
John: Oh, you had Zingers.
Merlin: Forgot about Zingers.
John: Yeah, Zingers.
Merlin: Zingers, you always see this advertised during Charlie Brown specials.
Merlin: And they were like a little cake with a funny kind of like – it's a vanilla cake with a creamy topping on them.
Mm-hmm.
Merlin: Kind of like a frosting.
Merlin: You got Twinkies.
Merlin: You got cupcakes.
Merlin: You got donuts.
Merlin: I do remember the tiny donuts.
Merlin: I enjoyed a tiny donut.
John: Now, what was the one that looked like a Yule log?
Merlin: Oh, yeah.
Merlin: I know what you mean.
Merlin: Is that a ho-ho?
John: Is that a ho-ho?
John: Is that a hostess ho-ho?
John: We didn't.
John: I mean, I don't in my culture.
Merlin: Yeah, you got a ho-ho.
Merlin: It's a rolled up thing.
John: Yeah, we didn't used to get ho-hos very often.
John: That was more of a that seemed like something special.
John: Get a ho-ho.
Merlin: This is horrible.
John: But a ding-dong.
Merlin: So when my mom would get her hair done, I'd go to the pony keg next door and get a chocolate milk and a couple ho-hos.
Merlin: And I just thought I did it like it was a normal thing.
John: Oh, chocolate milk and a couple ho-hos.
John: I want that now.
John: I'm sorry, a couple of... But this was the problem.
John: As I got older, the amount of wax went up, and the size and moistness of the ding-dong went down.
John: Oh.
John: Host of snowballs.
John: I forgot about snowballs.
John: No, I would never eat a snowball.
John: No, snowballs, that's totally not in my wheelhouse.
John: No, no, no.
John: A snowball seemed like an old lady food.
John: Yeah.
John: So, let me just say, my childhood was kind of bookended
John: and characterized by the fact that on one end I would not eat potatoes and on the other end I didn't like Twinkies.
John: I was just like, what kind of kid is this?
John: People would say that to me.
John: What kind of kid are you?
John: You don't like the two great kid foods.
Merlin: It's like saying you don't want to watch TV.
Merlin: It's one of those things that doesn't even register as having something sensible to it.
Merlin: You'd be like, oh, no, I'd rather just read quietly.
Merlin: What?
Merlin: You don't want to watch TV?
John: Like, that's weird.
John: Kids would come to my house and knock on the door and say, Mrs. Roderick, can John come out and play?
John: And my mom would come into my room and say, hey, Todd and Tony are here, and they want you to go out and play.
John: And I would say, no, thanks.
John: So mom would go back and say, John's busy and maybe he'll come out and play later.
John: And they'd be like, oh, okay.
John: And then they'd go play and I would just be in my room.
John: And eventually they stopped knocking.
John: Yeah, right.
John: I'd be in there just doing what I was doing.
Merlin: I'm looking at these ho-hos.
Merlin: Now I'm remembering, as I look at these horrible things, I would always unroll mine.
Merlin: That was part of my ritual.
Merlin: You know, for any kind of food, you like to have a ritual.
John: Well, yeah, but I've never heard of that.
John: Unroll your ho-ho?
Merlin: Unroll your ho-ho.
Merlin: And the character for the ho-ho was Happy Ho-ho, who is a cylindrical Robin Hood character who's quivering.
Merlin: He's bouncing a little bit.
Merlin: I think that's East Coast only.
Merlin: Happy Ho-ho.
Merlin: You got this captain guy who is a cupcake.
Merlin: You got Twinkie.
Merlin: Of course you remember Twinkie the Kid.
Merlin: Of course.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: The cowboy Twinkie.
Merlin: Cowboy Twinkie.
John: But will you send me some pictures of these ho-hos in their native environment?
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Yeah, you just do a Google search on Hostess Ho-Ho.
John: Oh, I see.
John: So you're not going to send me them.
John: Oh, sorry.
John: I sure can.
John: Let me search for them.
Merlin: When I send you things in the robot, you don't respond.
Merlin: I don't know if you got it.
Merlin: Sometimes I hear you pausing because I think you're confused.
Merlin: You heard a bleep noise.
John: Yeah, that happens.
John: Oh, look at all these.
John: There's dig them.
John: Oh, see, some of these are either later packaging or they are not, that's not canonical.
Merlin: Oh, now I'm remembering King Dawn.
Merlin: Was King Dawn the mascot of the Ding Dong?
Merlin: He kind of looks like you a little bit.
Merlin: He's got a crown and a scepter and a big white mustache.
Merlin: Maybe that's what I liked about it.
Merlin: He's King Ding Don.
John: King Ding Don.
John: No, although I did just watch that movie, The Big Short, and the fact that Brad Pitt looked like angry me through the whole thing.
John: I was like, he just looks like me when I'm depressed and angry.
John: I thought of you.
John: I saw Bruce Valanche on Shark Tank not long ago.
John: Stop saying Bruce Valanche.
Merlin: I haven't said that in three years.
John: God damn it.
John: You know what that does?
John: That just sets a bunch of people off, and they all start sending me pictures of Bruce Valanche.
Merlin: So mad.
Merlin: So mad.
Merlin: So I'm not against the idea of the Keurig.
Merlin: Now at work, I do.
Merlin: So I've got this Cuisinart pot that I like because it's got six buttons on it for different temperatures.
Merlin: And it goes from...
Merlin: 160, 175, 185, all the way up to boiling.
Merlin: So if you want to have a green tea, you're not going to singe it.
Merlin: It's nice.
John: Well, why doesn't it just have a gradiated knob?
Merlin: Oh, I don't know.
Merlin: That's like from another generation.
John: A knob?
Yeah.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: You're telling me that they've done away with the knob?
Merlin: I guess they have.
Merlin: Well, the bespoke buttons work pretty great, and it's super fast.
John: I haven't seen a knob in a long time on a thing.
Merlin: You should talk to John Syracuse about this, because this is what drives him crazy about the way the toasters work.
Merlin: He's got a lot to say about toasters.
John: He wants a knob?
John: He wants a graviated thing?
Merlin: You know what?
Merlin: I'm not even going to get into it.
Merlin: He wants a lot of things about toaster ovens.
Merlin: We had a toaster oven.
Merlin: We had a – there was probably a Black & Decker.
Merlin: We had a Black & Decker toaster.
Merlin: Now, as long as I'm talking about being 10, we had a Black & Decker toaster oven when I was a kid that was probably the greatest oven ever made.
Merlin: You could make great toast in it.
Merlin: You could make Stouffer's French bread pizza in it.
John: Those were good.
Merlin: You know?
John: Boy, those were good.
John: Well, let me tell you another thing that you may not know about me.
John: Yeah.
John: Never had a toaster oven.
Merlin: This is just, this is too much for one day.
Merlin: Wait a minute.
Merlin: So no, no potatoes, no toaster oven.
John: No toaster oven.
John: We didn't have one in the house.
Merlin: There's another thing.
Merlin: There's another thing you're very famous about.
Merlin: What was the one where your mom was going to make you eat them and you wouldn't eat it?
Merlin: It was, you have another food that you're dead set against.
Merlin: Well, olives.
Merlin: Olives.
Merlin: You don't need olives.
Merlin: You won't have a muffaletta?
Merlin: Ew.
Merlin: Think about a muffaletta.
Merlin: Okay.
Merlin: Working on it.
Merlin: Got it?
Merlin: Yeah, that's gross.
Merlin: You're right.
Merlin: Yeah.
John: Yeah.
John: No, but my mom made me sit in front of some bowls of peas a couple of times where I didn't eat the peas and she was like, that's what you're going to have for breakfast then.
John: And I called her bluff and then I had peas for breakfast, cold peas.
John: And then I called her bluff on that and I had cold peas for lunch.
John: And then I started to cry.
John: Oh, you're lucky you didn't get pee boarded.
John: And then at dinner, cold peas.
John: And then I really was crying.
John: Oh, she stuck with that?
John: Yeah, she fucking did.
Merlin: Oh, I would have crumbled after 10 minutes.
Merlin: She stayed with it that long?
John: No, cold peas.
Merlin: She moved her day around to make sure you got peas.
John: That's right.
John: Cold peas in front of me until I choked those cold peas down, gagging, like theatrically gagging with every spoon of cold peas.
John: With her just sitting there, you know, just placid-faced, like, eat the peas.
Merlin: Oh, my gosh.
John: Eat the peas or you get no food.
John: So that's it.
Merlin: There's no other food you're going to get until these peas are done.
Merlin: This is a dependency.
Merlin: These need to get done.
John: Yeah, yeah.
John: What I was finding was same peas, right?
John: It's not she's putting out new cold peas.
John: It is that these peas were once hot and they cooled down and they're not going to get hot again.
Yeah.
John: You're going to see this bowl of peas until they grow a skin on them.
Merlin: Do you feel like what, well, do you have a sense of what she wanted to accomplish and do you think she accomplished it?
Merlin: My question with those things is, is like I was just in passing, I find myself sometimes doing that and I realize I'm doing it more out of anger than parenting.
Merlin: And when I do things more out of anger, tired, whatever, frustration, than I am out of actually trying to make a point, that's when I'm like, what the fuck am I doing?
Merlin: Because mainly what she's going to remember is I was really super mean and irrational about food.
John: That's my concern.
John: So the irrational and mean about food, like that was my dad, right?
John: Oh, the eggs.
Merlin: That's it, the eggs.
John: You didn't like the way he made the eggs.
John: He made the eggs wrong.
John: And I crossed my arms and said, no way.
John: Because I like my eggs sunny side up.
John: You don't say that to David Roderick.
John: And he made scrambled eggs.
John: And I was like, no way am I eating those weird eggs.
John: And he was like, oh, you're going to eat these eggs.
John: And we had a battle royale that involved everybody in the family and everybody in the neighborhood.
John: about the freaking scrambled eggs.
John: So he and I would have showdowns like that over chow mein.
John: We would have showdowns like that over just a lot of things.
Merlin: Was it probably because he made it his certain way and you didn't like the way he made it?
John: Oh, here's the crazy thing.
John: He made macaroni and cheese according to the directions on the box.
Merlin: Eight quarts of water.
Merlin: Who needs eight quarts of water to make macaroni and cheese?
Merlin: Four quarts.
Merlin: Four quarts of water.
Merlin: That's it.
John: Four quarts of water and like half a stick of butter.
John: So the macaroni and cheese sauce would be this like just butter sauce.
John: And so I remember when I was living with my dad and he and oh, here's the other great thing.
John: I may have talked about this before.
John: Captain Marm will know.
John: But he would make the macaroni and cheese.
John: So I get this.
John: He would make the macaroni and cheese sauce for Kraft dinner now in a separate pot.
John: He would prepare the sauce and then pour the sauce on the noodles when they were done.
Merlin: Did that harm the performance characteristics of the Kraft dinner?
John: Oh, absolutely.
John: Absolutely.
John: But he didn't know any better because he was following the instructions on the box.
John: And the first thing about Kraft Dinner is you don't follow the instructions on the box.
John: That's the first rule of Kraft Dinner Club.
John: First rule is you just put a little bit of butter in there, a little bit of milk, a little bit of sauce, and then you get that nice, like, sticky Kraft Dinner.
John: I think it feels fancier to make it separately.
John: Well, yeah, that's right.
John: He was like, I'm going to make your craft dinner.
John: And it's like opening a can of Chef Boyardee spaghetti and meatballs and like putting a salad on the plate.
Merlin: I was going to say, it's a little bit like making somebody boiling bag Stouffer's, like, you know, a piece stroganoff and pouring a bunch of fucking truffle oil on top.
Merlin: Don't do that.
Merlin: Don't do that.
Merlin: I don't want that.
John: Don't mess around.
John: And so I actually called my mom in Seattle long distance.
John: and said mom how do you make macaroni and cheese because dad is doing it wrong and she said oh here's the secret you think is my mom will make craft macaroni and cheese with water not even put milk in it yeah and with a with just a little bit of butter and a little bit of salt and i was like oh my god thank you and you know my mom was doing that because she was a frugal and b
John: Like crazy or not crazy, but just like.
Merlin: Your mom has reason.
Merlin: It strikes me that your mom has reasons why she does most things, even if we don't know what that is.
Merlin: I think your mom seems to me like she has a reason for almost everything.
John: Yeah.
John: I think what she understood was that the powder, the powdered cheese, what had once been cheese and all that had been taken out of it was the water.
John: Okay.
John: And so all you needed to do was reconstitute it with water.
John: Okay.
John: And it would have all the characteristics of cheese, which she presumed it had once been.
John: She didn't realize that it was orange food coloring and dust and iced tea mix.
John: It was, she understood it to be cheese and all it needed was, and if you put a little milk in it, that was sort of a luxury.
John: Like, sure, go ahead, help yourself.
John: So that was a big contention between me and my dad.
John: I think what my mom was trying to do at a certain point was to say, you know what, enough.
John: And as a parent, I don't know...
John: I don't know where that line is yet.
Merlin: It was kind of about the food, but it was more about like, no, she just needs to make a stand here.
Merlin: The pea thing is the MacGuffin, but it's really more about like, no, no, you're not going to do that.
Merlin: You're not going to dictate what food gets served.
John: Yeah, we are done with you just arbitrarily deciding that you're going to throw a wrench into the spokes of my road bike as I pass you
John: Trying to be friendly.
John: Yes.
John: Trying to be friendly to your Italian bike team, and you put your bike pump in the spokes of my wheel.
John: Talking about the cutters?
John: Talking about the cutters, that's right.
John: She said, enough.
John: I am making my stand now, and it is over a cold bowl of peas.
John: And here is the bad part.
John: Are you ready?
John: Yes.
John: This happened on Easter.
Merlin: Oh, gosh.
John: This bowl of peas happened on Easter.
John: And we had just graduated to a thing where the Easter bunny was not hiding the eggs anymore because we knew that there was no Easter bunny.
John: And what we were able to do is the kids could hide eggs for each other.
John: And then find the eggs.
John: And then the next kid got an opportunity to hide the eggs for each other.
John: And my mom's boyfriend had five kids.
John: So it was like there were eight kids at this party.
John: Everyone hiding eggs for each other.
John: And then it was hide and go seek with eggs.
John: And I was sitting at the dining room table in front of a cold bowl of peas.
John: And so the kids were actually hiding eggs around me.
John: They would come into the dining room and they would hide eggs around me, hide eggs on my chair.
John: This is complicated.
John: They were hiding eggs for each other right around me while I'm sitting there crying over a cold bowl of peas.
John: It was truly like a – it is singed in my memory.
John: And this is one of those things that if my mom listens to this podcast periodically and then she comes to me and she says, that's not how it happened.
John: And I say, you have a selective memory about things, about instances where you were standing in my closet stomping on my toys because I hadn't put in them.
Merlin: Now, has she had equal time for that?
John: She said she didn't do it?
John: No, she denies it completely.
John: And she says, that's not how it happened.
John: Here's how it happened.
John: And then she tells some story that...
John: is not at all a true story.
John: She says some bananas stuff about how I was a bad kid or something.
John: She was a great mom.
John: She never laid a finger on me.
Merlin: I struggle to try and make the right point because in all honesty, trying to make the right point gets so clouded by all the different layers of being inside my own head combined with trying to do the right thing.
Merlin: But I find it very difficult to know
Merlin: You know, here's the thing.
Merlin: It's like this is it's like Buddhism.
Merlin: Like if everything's going well in life.
Merlin: Which program is this?
Merlin: You want to open some mail?
Merlin: You don't think about how things are going until they're not going well.
Merlin: So we can have the most perfect day in the world.
Merlin: But then like if it gets toward, you know, it's bath time and it's time to stop doing whatever the fun thing is now, whether that's watching TV or video games or drawing or reading or whatever.
Merlin: Now it's time to do the next thing.
Merlin: Those transition times are, you know, that's where things are tough.
Merlin: And like I find myself, this is not interesting.
Merlin: and no one cares.
Merlin: But, like, I find myself really struggling with, like, okay, what's the point that I want to make here?
Merlin: Is the point that I want to make that you're not going to push me around?
Merlin: Wow, that's a really weird point to make.
Merlin: You're supposed to be the adult here.
Merlin: Is the point that, like, sometimes we have to do things we don't want to do?
Merlin: Is the point here that, you know, there's... I...
Merlin: And I just have to be very careful that I not get emotional before I understand what the point is.
Merlin: Because it's very easy, especially if you take something personally, and especially if you don't realize you're taking it personally, it gets ugly and stupid fast, and I end up apologizing and saying, that was really silly of me.
Merlin: I'm not sure why I was so short with you, but that was wrong.
Merlin: And that's when the tears really come, because now I'm apologizing.
John: Oh.
John: Do you ever do that?
John: Well, the other day, she stomped her foot at me.
John: We were out in public and I said, here's what we're going to do next.
John: And she said, that's not what I want to do.
John: I want to do this.
John: And I said, well, we can't do that because we have to do this.
John: We have to do this other thing.
John: We have to go in this direction because of reasons.
John: And she turned, put her hands on her hips, like little fists on her hips and stomped her feet at me and said, no, daddy.
John: What about you, dad?
John: And I said with a big smile on my face, don't you stomp your feet at me.
John: You don't stomp your feet at me.
John: I am daddy and I don't get feet stomped at me.
John: And she's just at the age, she's rather still at the age where I can say that and she puts that into her function machine and she goes, oh.
John: I didn't realize that you don't stomp your feet at daddy.
Merlin: Like, yeah, that doesn't work for that, that long.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: And that's what I could see that already.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: You've, you've now you've made some kind of little, uh, encoding trail in her brain that you may never be able to take back.
John: Well, and so I don't know what I'm doing here, right?
John: Like, you don't stomp your feet at daddy.
John: And so what that means is... How will she use that when she's 35?
John: Well, and she... So I could see it going in her head like, well, what that means is, A, you do stomp your feet at other people.
John: And daddy is a special case.
John: And B, daddy thinks you don't stomp your feet at him, which I will accept now because it's unclear what the results will be if I do.
John: She's still unsure exactly what daddy is capable of.
John: And so, but there will come a day when she goes, oh yeah, let's see.
John: Let's see what happens if you stomp your feet at daddy.
John: And then I don't know what I'm going to do.
John: What do you do?
John: It's already, I've already laid down a law that you don't stomp your feet at daddy.
John: And I did it with a big smile on my face because I thought it was cute as hell when she was stomping her feet at me.
John: Of course.
John: With her little fists on her hips.
John: But now what do I do?
John: When she stomps her feet at daddy and I say, you don't stomp your feet at daddy, and then she does it again.
Merlin: I don't know what I'm going to do.
Merlin: I totally agree.
Merlin: Here's the other one.
Merlin: For example, if your kid's real little, I mean, this is like, so we've never hit our kid.
Merlin: We're not a hitting family.
Merlin: But like the one way that I can understand like a smack on the butt, for example, is like don't run into traffic.
Merlin: Like I need to make an impression on you about something that just happened.
Merlin: So I don't think you have to do that with hitting.
Merlin: But like there are times when a kid is when you are not able to communicate the complexity of why we don't run into the street where you just need to make an impression.
Merlin: I do think that that probably – I could be wrong.
Merlin: I'm sure you'll get email about this.
Merlin: I don't get email.
Merlin: But there will be people who tell us how we're doing this wrong, especially if they don't have kids.
Merlin: But sometimes you need to make that impression.
Merlin: The trouble is, first of all, that only works for so long.
Merlin: And then it becomes – what I worry about is then it becomes that like –
Merlin: Something like, what I don't want to have that turn into is, if things don't go his way, Dad gets mad.
Merlin: Mm-hmm.
Merlin: But, like, so what is the point that I want to make there?
Merlin: Is the point there that, like, you're being unkind right now?
Merlin: Or you're not listening to how your feelings are making you, you know, be right now?
Merlin: Like, what is my sage piece of advice that amounts to, you don't stomp your feet at Daddy?
Merlin: Mm-hmm.
Merlin: And I don't know.
Merlin: So where do you think she learned the stomp?
God.
John: oh i you know i imagine that the stomp is partly innate in her uh and partly she's going through a phase right now where she's she is real i mean she's always bossed everybody but she's really doubling down on like uh no right she's just no to everything and yeah
John: My goal at this point is really not – I don't believe that she has the capacity to understand, well, even her feelings.
John: And so I'm not going through the process yet of being too complicated –
John: in explaining or in reasoning with her so that she understands – so that she comes out the other side in better touch with her reality.
John: I am at the stage of like you don't stomp your feet at daddy, which is just – Because it's new to you too.
John: Yeah.
John: It's just what it is.
John: It is just a rule.
John: It's just a way of saying –
John: enough right you're you are not the boss and there are a lot of ways that you are trying to assert that you are the boss and there are some realms in which you are the boss like i give you lots and lots of things where lots of situations where you are absolutely the boss you decide but there are things that you don't decide right and what where we're going to eat dinner is not a thing that you decide we'll take your input and
John: But in the end, that's going to be something that mama decides.
John: You do not decide about crossing the street, and you don't decide what we're going to do next if daddy says, we can't do this, we have to go do that.
John: Like, because reasons.
John: You don't decide.
John: And your input in these matters is, you know, there will come a day.
John: In a purely advisory role.
John: Right.
John: And the thing is, my feeling about it, even before she was born, I talked about this at length within my family, was that every birthday, and now that we've established that there are such things as half birthdays, and fucking quarter birthdays, which I don't know.
John: I don't think that's a thing, John.
John: That didn't come from me.
John: I established the precedent of half birthdays and I immediately regretted it.
John: But then she learned that in addition to halves, their half of a half was a quarter.
John: And she was like, it's my quarter birthday.
John: And I was like, my quarter birthday is coming up.
John: And I was like, oh my God.
John: I've never heard of that.
John: Your quarter birthday.
John: And she was like, yeah, don't I get a cupcake on my quarter birthday?
John: and i was like okay i just was i you know she's young quarter birthdays i don't know i established it as a precedent and now i'm sure she's at 16 years old she's gonna be like it's my quarter birthday
John: But I did say in advance of her even being born that she should be accorded new rights and privileges as a birthday present.
John: So now you are seven and you get to pick the following.
John: You are now empowered within the family to have these new rights and responsibilities.
Right.
John: So that she thinks of every birthday, not just as a time when she gets presents, but as another Masonic level in her path to being a 33rd degree Mason.
John: But mainly wanting more rights and responsibilities.
John: Well, right.
John: But trying to impart to her that here are your new rights and here are your new responsibilities.
John: So that the two things go hand in hand.
John: So now you can dress yourself without arguing with your mama.
John: You can wear whatever you want.
John: But that means that you put your clothes in the laundry when you get undressed at night.
John: Good luck.
John: Well, but this is the thing.
John: And if you do not perform the responsibility, then the right is retracted.
John: I understand.
John: I understand.
John: Believe me, I understand.
John: Yeah.
John: Oh, I know.
John: I know.
John: But we'll see.
John: And this is the thing about don't stop your feet at daddy.
John: And it may just be that...
John: What I don't understand is what the consequences are.
John: I know.
John: I know.
John: And if she's like, oh, I'm going to keep dressing myself, but I am not going to put my clothes in the laundry, then I don't know whether she sits in front of a cold bowl of peas or all of her clothes disappear in the night and all that's left is the white boiler suits from the earliest incarnation of the police.
John: Well, that's good.
John: You're going to gaslight her.
John: Right.
John: You know, where she just wakes up in the morning?
John: I had nothing to do with that.
John: That's just life that did that to you.
John: Yeah, there's just six boiler suits and it's like, hey, baby, there it is.
John: You know, mirror in the bathroom.
John: And so I don't know.
John: I mean, daddy does have significant power.
John: Significant power to change actual reality where she comes home.
John: I did this once to my dad.
John: He went away for two days on vacation with his girlfriend and while he was gone, I painted the walls of his house yellow.