Ep. 224: "Family Lasagna"
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Merlin: Hello.
Merlin: Hi, John.
Merlin: Hi, Merlin.
Merlin: How's it going?
Merlin: Good.
Merlin: How are you?
Merlin: I'm doing pretty good.
Merlin: That's good.
Merlin: Having a coffee.
Merlin: Yeah, you know, that seems like something to do.
Merlin: We have our teacher conference today, and I always get nervous on teacher conference day.
Merlin: What do you think is – what's there to be nervous about?
Merlin: Well, you know how it is in life.
Merlin: You always kind of hope that things will go as well as you could dream, and you fear that it's as bad as you imagine.
Merlin: And they almost always go really well, but still.
Merlin: You worry about the one where you go in there like, well...
Merlin: We all have some concerns about your child.
Merlin: Oh, no.
Merlin: No, we haven't gotten that one yet.
Merlin: But, you know, sometimes you eavesdrop a little bit and you hear the other ones.
Merlin: And, yeah, I just am always waiting, you know, because she's been, she's a good kid.
Merlin: But, yeah, I'm always nervous because I feel like I'm on trial.
Merlin: I feel defensive is the wrong word, but I feel a little defensive.
Merlin: I'm like, yeah, well, you give dumb homework.
Merlin: Uh-huh.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: So, no, but, you know, I think it'll probably go fine.
Merlin: Have you had any of those experiences yet?
John: Let's see.
John: Yeah, teacher conference.
John: Went to a teacher conference.
John: Skipped the PTA meeting so far.
John: Teacher conference.
Merlin: You should really treat yourself to at least a few of those.
John: Oh, yeah.
John: I know they're in my future.
John: There was just one that was like, oh, a great one.
John: Hey, come to the PTA meeting tonight if you want to order –
John: bottles of wine with your child's picture on them.
Merlin: Oh, that's right in your wheelhouse.
John: Because they make lovely gifts.
John: This is your last chance.
John: This is what makes me drink.
John: We're not going to send you another email.
John: This is only the eighth.
John: Here comes the big nine.
John: So many limited opportunities every week.
John: And so I said, this is a PTA organization.
John: I'll get involved.
John: Not quite yet.
John: I made that mistake when we were in pre-K and I went in and said, sure, I'll join the executive board.
John: I told you this, I'm sure.
John: I went in and sat down at the first meeting and they were running the meeting.
John: like full-on Robert's Rules of Order.
John: Oh, wow.
Merlin: Just real quickly, without revealing too much, was your pre-K of any particular stripe, methodology, philosophy, was it sort of allied with any big ideas?
John: The big idea, it was a cooperative preschool.
John: Yeah, me too.
John: Which means that everybody was all hands on deck.
John: Gotta work.
John: But I was in this executive board meeting, the first one, and they started running down the minutes and the
John: and uh i could not i felt i felt that feeling that you that maybe it was like a bad dream where you were in fifth grade and you had been mistakenly put in 15th grade oh yeah where i was like what do we wait i drifted off there what what are we talking about and uh and you know then my eyes were were like
John: I was falling asleep in my chair.
John: My eyes were like uncontrollably drooping.
John: And like 45 minutes into an hour-long meeting, I said, I can never be here again.
John: This has been a horrible mistake.
John: But it turned out that my daughter's mother goes to those things all the time.
John: And she happily, not happily, but she took my place and no one even noticed.
Yeah.
Merlin: One thing we have in common, we both have young daughters and we both have baby mamas who are, how shall I say?
Merlin: And I mean this as the extreme compliment that it is, I hope.
Merlin: They're capable.
Merlin: They go places.
Merlin: And they do stuff.
Merlin: And they don't piss and moan about minor inconveniences.
Merlin: Whereas we've made a career out of that.
Merlin: Wouldn't that be something?
Merlin: My wife, she goes to some meetings.
Merlin: And she goes to a lot of meetings.
Merlin: You know, there's one kind of meeting where you go and you're the guest speaker.
Merlin: And that's a fun kind of meeting.
Merlin: Oh, I like those meetings.
Merlin: Yeah, right.
Merlin: Exactly.
Merlin: That's a podcaster's type of meeting.
John: Yeah, guest speaker.
Merlin: Hello.
Merlin: Hello.
Merlin: But a lot of those kinds of meetings, they have a certain valence to them that are not well suited to people like you and me.
Merlin: Nobody there is necessarily happy to be there, but they're more grown up about it.
Merlin: They handle it better.
Merlin: And on occasion, I'm sure I've told you this story.
Merlin: But on occasion, I would, you know, with the preschool, it was a co-op like yours.
Merlin: And you've got to help out.
Merlin: I mean, stuff does not get done unless everybody does more than they need to.
Merlin: Because there are a lot of people who are supposed to be doing what they need to.
Merlin: And you end up doing more than you need to do than you need to do.
Merlin: So that's just a... Do-do-do.
John: Do-do-do.
John: I was at a dinner party not very long ago in a cabin.
John: Which, wait for it, didn't have a dishwasher.
John: Now, it's been a long time since I've been someplace that didn't have a dishwasher.
John: It's a different state of mind.
John: Yeah.
John: I'm a downtown person.
John: And we live in the rarefied air of the ivory tower of Seattle.
John: It's one of the two towers.
John: Mm-hmm.
John: And so I'm at this party, and we're making dishes faster than we're making any other thing.
John: Was this your meat-centric wedding party?
John: Well, same cabin, different event.
John: We were making plates at the boy party.
John: And yeah, there was a certain amount of like, all right, we got to do the dishes.
John: One of the guys at the boy party was a nag, right, about the dishes and stuff.
John: Meh.
John: But then we were at a party at the same place a few weeks later.
John: It was a mixed gender party.
John: And we were just making balls.
John: We were making dirty dishes like you're going out of style because it was one of those dinner parties where we're making the food all communally, making the food, making some pasta, making some sauce, making some cake.
John: That's a lot of dishes.
John: Making, making, making, making.
John: And these dishes needed to get done.
John: And I jump over and I start doing dishes.
John: And, you know, it's like riding a bike, right?
John: I haven't.
John: sat in us in a sudsy sink and done dishes in a long time but you don't forget how to do it and it and it's like back in the you know i was back in the dishes it felt real it kind of felt real good i was always i was always too meticulous about doing the dishes interesting and i never understood when people would say you're being too meticulous
John: I would say, how can you be too meticulous in cleaning dirty dishes?
John: I mean, I just want to make sure that they're very clean.
John: And they're like, yeah, I've been watching.
John: You've washed that one dish.
John: For three minutes.
John: And I'm like, yeah, that's what it takes.
John: Three minutes a dish.
John: This is how you get on the moon.
Merlin: Right?
Merlin: I mean, you don't get on the moon by just sloshing some water around.
John: No, that's right.
John: You make sure every inch of that dish is clean at a molecular level.
John: You've got the right stuff.
John: So, I'm doing the dishes.
John: I'm making my way through it.
John: The problem with spending three minutes per dish is that three quarters of the way through a big pile of dishes, your hands are...
John: fully saturated like my hands were like um but you know on on on i go right semper fi yep do or die and uh and it was it was uh it was it was super gratifying but it it was um
John: There's a methodology and there's like a every house has a different style.
John: Oh, so different.
John: And I'm stacking them up over here, but that's not where they go.
Merlin: Well, you start with something as simple as bottoms up, bottoms down.
Merlin: that's that or you know you get into stuff like what what silver silverware makes sense to you to go to this place like why would you keep your knives there but i think bottoms up bottoms down i used to be a i used to be a bottoms up person and now i think those people are monsters if you wash a cup why would you put the lip of the cup on the filthy like when you put it away like would you put it in the cupboard like lip down that's that's so gross you know i'm talking about
John: Well, I know it all too well because I am a bottoms-up person.
Merlin: Interesting.
Merlin: It's time for this country to come together.
John: Why would you put a coffee mug in the cupboard where all of the detritus that falls from the sky?
Merlin: Oh, I see.
Merlin: You worry about gravity.
John: Plus the flies and the geckos.
John: Yeah.
John: Anything that wants to get in that cup.
John: The night geckos.
John: Well, shit, the woofers and the tweeters come out of your speakers in the middle of the night, and they're going around licking all the rims.
John: That's what they do.
John: They lick the rims.
John: They climb into your cups and pots.
John: Dander.
John: Back into the speakers in the morning before you get down?
Merlin: Yeah, yeah.
John: So, no, you put the lips down.
John: Yeah.
John: And then all that stuff, they're just, you know, they're like, oh, you see them all.
John: The geckos, the tweeters, they're all like clawing at the cup.
John: Let me in, let me in.
John: I want to get in the cup.
John: And it's like, sorry, buddy.
John: Butt up.
Merlin: Now, at that particular event, was there a sense that somebody will take care of this?
Merlin: No.
Merlin: Because sometimes that's what happens when you get in an event like that.
Merlin: Actually, there's a thread that runs through all of this, which is being around people who have just as strong a feeling about how to do this as you do, and it's very, very different.
Merlin: Like a different feeling about how this should go.
Merlin: Do you know what I mean?
Merlin: I do like if there's somebody there who's like never washed a dish in their life They're like they're gonna think that's an affront.
Merlin: That's an attack.
Merlin: That's a punishment.
Merlin: Oh, I see doing dishes just any of it just any or whether it's going to the meeting where they talk for literally 45 minutes about how to deal with the fact that the chickens are pooping in the yard and it gets on the children's shoes I did feel like that was a punishment See the first party I went to the nag guy the naggy guy
John: Was the one that was like, well, your mom doesn't live here.
John: Where I was like, all right, pal.
John: But the second one, it's like, we're at a dinner party and it's fancy.
John: Fancy enough.
John: We're making our own pasta.
John: Wow.
John: I'm not going to be the one that's sitting in the chair.
John: uh pretending pretending to nap when the dishes need to get washed you know i'm not going to be the ones like huh what doesn't that just take care of itself you know like you're trying not to get called on in class like not like you noticed yeah you don't want to be that you want to be the one that's like way that's a step ahead of the game like here let me get in there let me get let me take care of this then there's there's the guy that i've been which is uh seems only slightly better but it's actually much worse which is um
Merlin: Do you guys want me to do the dishes?
Merlin: It's like, no, no, no, you relax.
Merlin: Somebody else do the dishes.
Merlin: Never ask.
Merlin: Does somebody want me to get more beer?
Merlin: No, no, no.
Merlin: You just sit here and play DJ.
John: Oh, that's right.
John: That is a job, though.
John: Never occurs to me to be DJ.
John: Really?
John: No, I leave that to people that have stronger feelings about being DJ.
John: But when I'm appointed DJ, then look out.
John: The roof is coming off this party.
John: I mean, I love being DJ.
John: I'm just not going to stand in line to be DJ.
John: And I'm not going to sit there and, you know, like, I'm not going to unzip my pants to be DJ.
Merlin: Okay.
Merlin: I was a little bit of a hero at my niece's wedding a couple years ago because I was the only person who had such great heights on their phone.
John: Oh.
Merlin: That's the age we live in now.
Merlin: There's a call out.
Merlin: The bride has had a couple drinks and she really wants to hear such great heights.
Merlin: And oddly enough, the DJ didn't have it.
John: This is a call to all.
John: She was a little, she got a little tipsy.
John: And she was like, hey, it's her day.
John: You know what I'm saying?
John: And you're like, step aside.
John: Indy man is here.
Merlin: Actually, can I also play you District Sleeps Alone?
Merlin: It's really good.
John: That's me.
John: You know what?
John: That's kind of the lesser known track, but I think it's got a lot of... Can I play some of these REM demos?
John: Have you ever heard Guided by Voices?
Merlin: Oh, Gather Round.
Merlin: I'm going to show you guys how to kick at a party.
Merlin: Set aside your chicken dance.
John: If I were DJing a wedding, I would just play God Only Knows on permanent loop.
John: That's a great choice.
John: You know, you don't know where that song ends, so you could just loop if you loop it properly.
Merlin: Just keep going.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: You totally could.
Merlin: And maybe people wouldn't notice.
Merlin: But, you know, I have a this is, I guess, kind of a bit.
Merlin: But I I have a problem with wedding DJs.
Merlin: It's like every part of the getting married industry.
Merlin: It has a great gaping maw.
Merlin: and giant teeth.
Merlin: And you think it's going to be a friendly dragon.
Merlin: You think like they say, Oh, you know, we can make these petty fours just the way you want.
Merlin: And the buttercream is going to be exactly like your dreams.
Merlin: And, you know, it's like, no, no.
Merlin: And I'll never forget this.
Merlin: My, um, my, my primary high school, uh, girlfriend got married and I went to her wedding.
John: Did you have a secondary high school girlfriend?
Merlin: I had secondary and tertiary high school girlfriends, but my primary high school girlfriend, uh, was kind enough.
Merlin: I don't know why she invited me, but I went to her wedding.
Merlin: and uh and she had been like super clear with the dj about a few things and like she you know you know how everybody is whether you're giving birth or you're getting married or you're making a website you got certain things you have like not that much of a feeling about a couple things where you're like i really want to have this one thing like i want a dancing panda in the header of the page and then you might have some things where you go like i really it's so important to me above all else that these things not happen
Merlin: right and she was like no rhinoceroses no one she she said she's like looked into his eyes and said i i am the bride uh hey and here's here's here's uh i memory serves it was two things she's like i want you to play at one point i'm gonna want you to play melt with you by modern english
John: Oh, the original or the radio?
Merlin: No, given what I know about my primary high school girlfriend, it was definitely going to be the original.
John: But you remember they came out with it again like two years later.
Merlin: They did a Bring It On The Heartbreak.
John: That's right.
John: That's right.
John: That's right.
John: When they came out with the next record, they kind of remixed it.
Merlin: I think a lot of people would listen to the original Bringing On The Heartbreak and be kind of maybe even confused because it doesn't have the keyboards and stuff on it.
John: Right.
John: Of the second.
Merlin: It's much more about the John, John, John, John.
Merlin: You know what I mean?
Merlin: It's a different song.
Merlin: And I think her other request, I see, I remember her enjoying the chicken dance, but I feel like she said something.
Merlin: There was some kind of one of those things that every DJ does.
Merlin: And let's for the sake of this argument, let's say it's the chicken dance.
Merlin: What is the chicken dance?
Yeah.
Merlin: And there's a dance that goes with that where you flap your arms.
Merlin: You've never done a chicken dance.
Merlin: What?
Merlin: You've been to weddings and you've never done a chicken dance.
John: This feels like a very regional idea of how to marry another person.
Merlin: It's kind of like suburban Morris dance.
Merlin: We really got to get back to Morris dance at some point.
Merlin: Is this a Macarena thing?
Merlin: It's like a Macarena thing.
John: You know how Macarena is like a wedding thing now.
John: See, the only reason I said Macarena thing is that somehow I knew that it was a wedding thing.
John: But I don't know about chicken dance.
John: Okay.
Merlin: I don't know from chicken dances.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: But, you know, but you know how the DJ at a wedding.
Merlin: I mean no disrespect to the industry of wedding DJs.
Merlin: I'm sure they're hardworking people.
Merlin: But they do have a way they like to do things, and they got a bit.
Merlin: And somebody hands them a microphone, and they start running things.
Merlin: And they become the over-the-top, like, drive-time DJ person.
Merlin: person who emcees your wedding and tells everybody when it's time to do what?
Merlin: Some people really like that.
Merlin: I'm sorry to interrupt.
Merlin: No, please.
Merlin: I'm not really going anywhere with this, except I just want to talk about sadness.
Merlin: It made the bride very sad, because he did the fucking chicken dance, and he did not even have a copy of Modern English's Melt With You, which seems unconscionable to me.
John: Well, if you ask for it specifically, it does seem unconscionable.
John: But I...
John: I guess have not been to a lot of weddings.
John: And that may seem strange, right?
Merlin: I have to tell you that seems very strange because you are an event man.
Merlin: You get invited to a lot of things.
Merlin: You go to a lot of things.
Merlin: It seems like you would have been to 40 weddings.
John: Yes.
John: I can see where it might seem like that.
John: But I have performed as the officiant
John: at, let's say, a dozen weddings.
John: No kidding.
John: I have officiated a dozen weddings, including a couple of weddings of people very close to me.
John: The drummer of The Long Winters, I officiated his wedding.
John: I officiated... Nabeel or Michael?
John: Nabeel.
John: Oh, that's so nice.
John: I officiated Nick Harmer's wedding, the bass player of Death Cab for Cutin.
John: Wow.
John: I officiated...
John: A lot of weddings.
John: But I have not been...
Merlin: Many weddings where I wasn't officiating aha kind of like going to PTA meetings if I may say Mmm, right you so you're experiencing this in a very different way than most people yeah, right?
John: I mean and so so I've always felt a little bit of responsibility for the wedding going going well absolutely, but that responsibility ends when they say I do and
John: like I don't have any sense of what the wedding DJ is doing past that point, but all of the weddings I've really, all of the weddings I've ever been to have been indie rock weddings where, um, like,
John: Sam Beam was the music.
John: So it's sort of unconventional.
John: Well, yeah, there's not if there's a DJ, it's someone that we all know.
John: Right.
John: Like it's it's like Chris Waller or something.
John: Right.
John: And he'd be a great wedding DJ.
John: Right.
John: Yeah.
Merlin: No chicken dance, though.
Merlin: It's going to be just all tracks from David Bowie's Berlin period.
Merlin: Right down, waiting for the sound and vision.
John: Everybody dance.
John: It's just music for airports.
John: And then when side one is over, he lets the needle run for a minute.
Merlin: Here comes this part.
Merlin: Here's my favorite.
Merlin: Bum, bum, bum, bum.
John: That's what it really gets rocking.
John: I have no idea at all what a conventional wedding is like.
Merlin: No kidding.
Merlin: That's so interesting to me.
John: I hear people talk about them and I hear about bridezillas and I hear...
John: That drunk grooms and I look at pictures sometimes online of wedding parties and I think, why are they dressed like that?
John: And I hear that weddings are very expensive and that they're very stressful for people.
John: Like I know about weddings.
John: Okay.
John: But either I don't get invited to them.
John: Conventional weddings.
John: Or maybe I have been invited to them and I didn't open the Evite because I don't open Evites.
Merlin: No, that's a good policy.
Merlin: If they really want you to go, they'll hitch up on Facebook.
John: The thing is, if you send me an Evite and you don't have my phone number to text me and say, why haven't you opened my Evite?
John: There should be a name for this.
John: You don't know me.
Merlin: There should be a name for this phenomenon.
Merlin: No.
Merlin: Right?
Merlin: Don't you think?
Merlin: I mean, I don't want to take you off weddings, but there should be a name for this phenomenon.
Merlin: You almost got me there.
Merlin: If you really knew me, you would never have sent this.
Merlin: It's like a canary trap.
John: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
John: When an evite arrives in my inbox, I scan who it's from.
John: I make a mental note.
John: That person wants something.
John: I attend something or want something from me.
John: And then I await a second communication.
John: I see.
John: It's like a warning shot.
John: Yeah, that's right.
John: Like, all right.
John: All right, Teddy.
John: I saw that you sent me an invite.
John: Let's see how serious you are about this.
John: I got a very terse email from a bride not very long ago saying, reply to my email.
John: And I said –
John: I can't find it.
John: And she said, you bastard.
John: It is hard enough to put on a wedding.
John: This is hard enough without 40% of the people I know not sending the card back in.
John: The self-addressed stamped card.
John: Right.
John: And then I send emails to that 40% and fully 20% don't reply to the email.
John: Oh my goodness.
John: And then I text that 20%.
John: And here you and I are standing, standing on two, like, uh, two tiny little, uh, road runner plateaus in a, but the sky has turned red.
John: And the ground isn't in flames.
Merlin: In more quotidian terms, though, it's more like she has to go door to door and stand there while you're obviously she can see your shadow on the screen.
Merlin: You're like, you're obviously standing there.
Merlin: You're like, open the fucking door.
Merlin: What?
Merlin: What?
John: And I felt so bad for I felt badly because
John: I understand in a lot of cases that I'm meant to know better.
John: Wow.
John: But I don't.
John: I don't know better.
John: All by way of saying that I have never been to a wedding in an event space where the bride didn't know the DJ before.
John: already as a friend.
John: So I don't know.
John: I don't know from even from Macarena.
John: I don't know from, I don't know from, I always know the parents of the, of the people already.
John: Like, uh, uh, so I can't believe that at, at my advanced age, I'm sitting here thinking about it.
John: I can't think of a wedding I've been to in 25 years that didn't have some, um,
John: Where I didn't either know every single person there or where it wasn't like being held in a rowboat or something, you know?
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John: So I'm so divorced from...
John: From what the from this whole not just the wedding culture, but like the like what everyone must have gone.
John: Everyone I know that's married that I don't know well enough to have been there.
John: What they must have gone through.
Merlin: Well, it's it's utterly fraught because everything you're saying is true.
Merlin: And as per usual.
Merlin: Yeah, sure.
Merlin: And so one thing about this, yes, everything you're describing is true.
Merlin: And ever thus it's been, I assume.
Merlin: Like, it is costly.
Merlin: It is complicated.
Merlin: It's emotionally difficult because there's a certain kind of, like...
Merlin: Class sorting.
Merlin: You have to be the sorting hat for all of these different people and decide all kinds of things.
Merlin: And you see this, for example, with table arrangements, where you decide who's at what table and how you're going to mix that up.
Merlin: And there's this constant tight... But I guess what I think in general is there's this constant tightrope walk, where on the one hand, the thing is, what you think those weddings are like is probably not far off what they're like, because a lot of our sense of what we get about what a wedding should be is from TVs and movies and
Merlin: And from other weddings we've been to.
Merlin: So on the one hand, there's this pressure to put on this thing for your family and to an extent your friends.
Merlin: Because really, in a lot of ways, weddings are about everybody but you.
Merlin: Just like funerals.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: They're not for the living.
Merlin: That's a very, very good point.
Merlin: But it is in some ways really about throwing a party that's going to be this satisfying ritual thing.
Merlin: For all of the important people in your life, you have to, whether you want to or not, you kind of have to think about stepping on toes.
Merlin: Like, think about like, okay, is divorced dad going to be here and divorced mom going to be there?
Merlin: And is she going to bring her boyfriend?
Merlin: All that kind.
Merlin: Who drinks.
Merlin: He drinks, right?
Merlin: Who drinks and then who's going to walk her down the aisle.
Merlin: And like she wants that to be her decision.
Merlin: She might want her English professor to walk her down the aisle, but she can't because divorced dad will get mad and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
Merlin: But I think there's this line you try to walk of like making it the big event for the couple, making it the portentous thing.
Merlin: maybe even vaguely mumbo-jumbo religious event probably for some of your family, but you're also, the tightrope is you're also weighing that against like, oh, but I don't want this to be a cliche.
Merlin: I want mine to be different.
Merlin: So we're going to write our own vows.
Merlin: And these days, almost everybody writes their own vows.
Merlin: Or, you know what I mean?
Merlin: There's something about it.
Merlin: You're going to do the flowers in this different way.
Merlin: And it all costs money.
Merlin: It all takes time.
Merlin: It all takes resources.
Merlin: So, I mean, it is... I mean, like, for example, my niece, for whom I was the officiant and the only wedding, she could not have been more mellow about the whole thing.
Merlin: To where it was like, I was the one emailing her, like, so is this okay?
Merlin: Is this alright?
Merlin: She's like, no, that'll be fine.
Merlin: Like, make it a little bit, like, spiritual or something.
Merlin: And I was like, okay.
Merlin: You know, a little bit of Book of Common Prayer, funny anecdote, wear some nice shoes.
Merlin: That's how the Bible was written.
Merlin: Is that right?
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Just chill.
Merlin: Just throw in a little more religious stuff.
Merlin: They got animal stories.
Merlin: They got fire.
Merlin: That's right.
Merlin: That's right.
Merlin: There's a lot of adventure, high adventure.
Merlin: They got magic, John.
Merlin: There's a lot of magic in the Bible.
Merlin: They got gladiators.
Merlin: Gladiators.
Merlin: You got wizards.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: You got healings.
Merlin: You got fish.
Merlin: Just throw a little bit more religious stuff in there and we're good.
Merlin: You think that passes through like a second draft?
Merlin: You think it gets passed around the writer's room and they're like, hmm.
Merlin: I like the loaves and fishes, but I'm not really seeing the connection with God.
John: Well, yeah, I think it does.
John: I think each one of the writers had a little bit of leeway.
Merlin: Also, the Sadducees are coming across a little Jew-y to me.
Merlin: Can we tone that down a little bit?
John: But the thing is then...
John: Then it goes to committee, right?
John: The Council of Nicaea takes it apart, and then Augustine's got other things to say about it.
John: You've got the Diet of Worms.
John: It takes a long time to get a script into production.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Oh, my gosh.
Merlin: And then you get stuck in turnaround, whatever that is.
John: It's an epic picture.
John: You're going to have to get a lot of extras.
John: I heard they had to build the set of Cleopatra twice.
John: Because the first one was they used a metric instead of imperial.
Merlin: I learned about it in a four minute YouTube video, so I'm not really sure.
Merlin: But I think something happened with Elizabeth Taylor got sick and then they had to like use it for something else and then rebuild the set.
Merlin: And even though it was the top movie of that year, it still didn't earn back.
John: Didn't earn back.
Merlin: That's some inside talk.
Merlin: That's some Hollywood lingo.
Merlin: We have not even gotten into the whole gift conundrum.
John: Of the wedding.
Merlin: Yeah, so a lot of people at a wedding, they want to say, hey, don't give us gifts.
Merlin: Well, you know what?
Merlin: Turns out, that's not actually that cool of a thing to say.
Merlin: Because the thing is, your aunt, who loves you, really wants to not just give you something, but wants to give you something memorable.
Merlin: I don't want to be unkind, but you're kind of denying them the chance to do something that's important to them.
Merlin: It's one of the many bullets you have to take when you're getting married.
Merlin: you have to accept a gift you well you have to register you don't have to but your entire family is going to be like no like I really want to get you something yeah and then you got to figure out a range of prices you got to put a big banger on there so if you do something like say oh we just want money toward our mortgage like that might not go over all that well some people say like just pay for our honeymoon that some people are doing things like that you could pay off my student debt well yeah I want to yeah I could do that but like can I get you some spoons or something yeah spoons yeah
John: I do.
John: I think somewhere a long time ago, I went to one of the early weddings, you know, by which I mean one of the first weddings ever.
John: It was Abraham and Sarah?
John: Uh-huh.
John: Uh-huh.
John: And it was Abraham and Mary.
John: Oh, Abraham and Mary.
John: Right.
John: Sorry.
John: Mary Todd.
Yeah.
John: And they said we don't.
John: That's funny.
John: Okay.
John: Get a little one for that.
John: They said we don't want gifts.
John: This wedding is so depressing.
John: They said we don't want gifts.
John: And so I took that to be how weddings are and that I just have always extended that to every wedding.
Merlin: Okay.
John: All right.
John: So because the first wedding I went to didn't want gifts, why would any subsequent wedding want gifts?
John: It's a little learning pattern and you internalize that.
Merlin: You see, that's my new pattern now.
Merlin: The other thing is supposedly you got a year to give a gift.
Merlin: That's the conventional wisdom.
Merlin: Oh.
Merlin: So you're not off the hook.
John: One wedding I went to, I did give the bride and groom very fancy matching gift because I felt like
John: I felt like the groom had done many great, uh, he, he, he had been a, a good friend over the years and that this was a group, this was a, a, a gift, uh, commensurate with the amount of.
John: love that i felt and uh and the bride and groom received the gift very you know like graciously like oh thanks kind of like the way you receive a men's wallet sort of like the way you if i had handed them a casserole and when they looked at the casserole it had pasta but also like m&m on the top
John: I want it to be special.
John: They were like, oh, thanks.
John: Yeah, like this is my family lasagna.
John: But I added Skittles.
John: I added Skittles because I love Skittles.
John: And then those gifts, which were, you know, which were pretty nice.
John: Like it was basically like here is a taxidermied ram's head.
John: There's only one place it can go over the mantel.
John: Right?
John: You don't take a taxidermy ram's head and put it in the downstairs bathroom.
John: Yeah, it's like one ram's head in ten assumptions.
John: Yeah.
Merlin: Well, sure.
Merlin: Well, first of all, that you want a ram's head.
Merlin: And second, that you're going to put it up.
Merlin: If you're going to put it up, there's this whole chain of dependencies.
Merlin: If I give you a ram's head, you're going to be moving some shit around.
John: Yeah.
John: Like Jason Finn of the Presidency of the United States of America has a great number of platinum albums.
John: Because the Presidency of the United States of America went platinum on
John: Their first album went platinum in like 50 countries or something.
John: Are you kidding me?
John: No, they have platinum records from Uzbekistan.
John: Huh.
John: They were multiple platinum records.
John: Good for them.
John: In Australia and New Zealand, Canada and Europe and America.
John: And the new style of that is instead of one big vinyl album.
John: platinum record in a frame it's like a frame with five cds i think today you just have to re-authenticate with the itunes store and you download your record you download your your award e-record but so jason would jason you know he's not somebody that's going to put a big platinum record on in his living he's got paintings yeah he's got a lot of fantastic art a great art collection he's not gonna he's not gonna even just have one of them
John: right like the best one i don't know what the best one was if you had a platinum record from uzbekistan if i had one forget it front and center no question uh there and there'd be spotlights on it but if you wanted to see any of the like jason kept him in the downstairs bathroom right because he's like what am i going to do with all these platinum records and and they weren't all on display right it was just like sort of oh we'll put this here and then a couple of them in a box and then there's you know we use one as a
John: We put one on the, on the coffee table that's in the garage that, you know, the coffee table that's like stacked in the garage.
John: Anyway, that's not what you're going to do.
John: If somebody gives you a taxidermied Ram's head, it's not going to fit in the downstairs bathroom.
John: There's one spot for it.
John: And so I gave them the, I gave the bride and groom this lovely gift and it just went away.
John: I never heard about it again.
John: Still haven't heard about it.
John: Don't know where it is.
John: It's in the world somewhere.
John: I'm assuming it's not, it didn't go immediately into the fire.
John: It has intrinsic value.
John: Not just like friend value.
John: It's like a thing you could pawn.
Merlin: And it feels like the kind of gift that lots of families – actually, one of my favorite holiday traditions in some families is like the weird gift that gets re-gifted every year.
John: Have you ever run into this?
John: Cheesecake or the fruitcake.
Merlin: Yeah, we had an inflatable hammer in my wife's family that went around every year.
Merlin: But my friend Richard – Is that a quasi-religious gift?
Merlin: That's a euphemism.
Merlin: Did you hide it under a bushel?
No.
Merlin: My friend Richard, I don't know how this thing started, but there's some kind of an ugly gift.
Merlin: And basically, when you're given that gift, then you have to add something to it, like hot glue something to it, and then give it to somebody else the next year.
Merlin: And so the weirdness accumulates every year, and it gets weirder and stupider every year.
Merlin: And apparently it's a real joy of the Buckerite family Christmas.
John: That seems fun.
Merlin: Isn't that a great idea?
Merlin: Now you're going to see that.
Merlin: I bet that's, you know what, that might be in Martha Stewart or real simple at this point, but I think that's, I think that's a good idea as a, as a, as a gift idea.
Merlin: What makes me think that the Ram's head could be something that you, uh, you then maybe it's a wedding gift that you keep passing on to other people.
Merlin: It was like a kind of ad hoc monkey's paw.
John: That would have been fine and fun if they had done that.
Merlin: Yeah.
John: Did you email them about it?
John: Well, that's the problem.
John: I don't know enough about weddings that,
John: But I get a sense that – I get a sense from my other – from all the many faux pas I have committed in so many other areas of human life.
John: Yeah.
John: That once you give someone a gift, you do not – it does not come with a guarantee –
John: like a reverse guarantee where I can call and find out what they did with it.
Merlin: Oh, it's not like saving a child.
Merlin: It's not like you get a letter with a picture of the kid that you gave fresh water to.
John: Yeah, well, I mean, you could, right?
John: They could every year say, look, here it is.
John: Here's your gift.
John: We take it every year ice fishing with us.
John: It's like the mascot of our ice fishing trip every year.
John: Thank you so much.
John: If they don't do that, if it's just like,
John: We'll never mention this gift again.
John: You can't call them five years later and say, hey, I was just wondering.
John: Remember that super thoughtful gift I gave you guys?
John: Did you ever – have you seen that recently?
John: I mean if you're not –
John: using it.
John: Yeah.
John: I mean... Shit dog, give it back.
John: I'll put it up.
John: I'll take it back.
John: You know, I don't think you can do that.
John: I don't think that's kosher.
Merlin: Right.
John: So it's been a great lesson to me in letting go and letting God.
Merlin: Oh, God, you used it as a chance for self-discovery.
John: Yeah, yeah.
John: Where I'm like, I still, I mean, I'm talking about it right now.
John: I still sit and go, hmm, I wonder what
John: I wonder if that's just in a box somewhere or did that get, is that, did that get water damaged in the flood and, and they just had to toss it?
John: I don't want to say anything.
John: I, I left a, I left some stuff at a guy's house one time in, uh, in the great city of Minneapolis.
John: And it was, it was stuff that was important to me, including some journals, some journals that I had,
John: accidentally left when i decamped rather quickly and uh for a while we were in touch with one another and i was like god hey gotta get those journals from you hey buddy how's it going gotta get those journals from you and he's like yeah uh yeah i got them right here you know i'm gonna uh i'm gonna send them on just gotta get the um
John: Just got to figure out how the post office works.
Merlin: Yep.
John: Great.
John: Well, I can, anything I can do.
John: Just let me know.
John: Just should want to get those back.
John: Yep.
John: No problem.
John: And then one day he said, uh, and it wasn't like he wrote me.
John: It was that I wrote him and said, so what about the journals?
John: Let's revisit the journals.
John: And he said, oh man,
John: There was a flood and the journals, uh, got wet and they weren't really saveable.
John: Hmm.
John: So I tossed them and I was like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.
John: Like I get the flood part.
Merlin: Yeah.
John: Floods happen, but journals dry out too.
John: Like you can dry a journal.
John: and potentially like there are a lot of there's a lot of
John: when you're talking about a journal yeah but you know as somebody who's made a lot of lame excuses in life i can smell that that's that is a lame excuse he thought that was going to be his ticket to ride like oh they're damaged in a flood and so anyway well like yeah they're damaged in a flood end of conversation yeah and i was like i could if you had sent them wet i could i could you know like baked them in the oven like it's not the
John: It's not the paper I want.
John: It's the words.
John: The words.
John: My words.
John: Gone.
John: Gone forever.
John: Do you know how many journals I've lost over the years?
John: Too many.
Merlin: Oh, I bet you've... You've also had a lot of things stolen.
Merlin: You lost a journal with a stealing one time when you were in Europe.
John: I've lost a few journals from stealing.
John: I had a roommate one time.
John: A young woman.
John: Who...
John: I had a different idea of our roommate ship than I did.
John: And when she moved out, she moved out mad.
John: And took my journals.
John: What?
John: Like didn't take the didn't take my art or whatever.
John: Didn't take my guitar, which would have been a great country song.
John: You know, if she'd taken my guitar, that could be, I'd still be dining out on that story.
Merlin: She didn't take my art.
Merlin: She didn't take my guitar.
Merlin: She took the words that mean the world to me, not the pages, but the words on the page.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Took the journals.
Merlin: Support our troops.
Merlin: How weird.
Merlin: Does she still have them?
Merlin: Well, that self-same primary high school girlfriend, whenever I was a shitheel and I was often a shitheel, she would destroy one of my cassettes.
Merlin: One of your mixtapes.
Merlin: No, no, no.
Merlin: Usually one of my Columbia House or self-purchased cassettes.
Merlin: But that's how I lost English Settlement, for example.
Merlin: That was a double LP.
Merlin: How did she destroy it?
John: Like pull the tape out or did she break it?
John: I totally had it coming.
John: Oh, but that's – I mean that's like – each pull must be even more gratifying to her.
John: That's not just like I'm throwing this in the garbage.
John: I'm not sure I really learned my lesson as well as I should have.
John: It's just like every one of these polls is just, fuck you, Merlin.
Merlin: Fuck you.
Merlin: All the world is football shaped just for me to kick in space.
Merlin: I can hear, I can see, hear, smell, touch, taste.
Mm-hmm.
Merlin: Hi, hi.
Merlin: Tell you a funny story.
Merlin: You leave something at my house, I start using it.
Merlin: This has happened to me on numerous occasions.
Merlin: Again, back to my friend Richard Butcherite, who has an excellent name.
Merlin: Richard left a bunch of his Burning Man stuff at the place.
John: What is Burning Man stuff, exactly?
Merlin: It's the stuff of... Don't call it sand.
Merlin: It's dust.
Merlin: It's got the playa dust all over it.
Merlin: I used one of his chairs from the Burning Man for a long time until that disappeared.
Merlin: I'm still using his sleeping bag.
John: Wait, wait, wait, wait.
John: You used it until it disappeared?
Merlin: Is that a Hogwarts thing?
Merlin: It's kind of a long, strange story, but I had a chair.
Merlin: I left it.
Merlin: This is not a Donovan song, but I had a chair.
Merlin: I left it somewhere.
Merlin: It disappeared, and I was sad.
John: I grew my hair.
Merlin: And then I came back another time, and the chair was back.
Merlin: But then I lost it again.
Merlin: Are there other agents that might be moving the chairs?
Merlin: There's so many things I try not to think about too much, but I'm going to tell you a funny story about this thing right here.
Merlin: My friend Lance walked over to my house.
Merlin: I don't know if we'd been drinking together the night before, but we were both really hungover.
Merlin: This is probably late 1990, early 1991.
Merlin: He walked over to my house to hang out, and we both had some ibuprofen and laid on the floor, and he had a big cup of coffee.
Merlin: Big cup of coffee.
Merlin: And he left his coffee cup at my house and I am using it right this second.
John: Whoa.
Merlin: I'm using the coffee cup that Lance left at my house 25 years ago.
Merlin: Wow.
Merlin: Now I, you know, I nurse this.
Merlin: I use this every day.
Merlin: This is my office coffee cup at this point.
Merlin: It's also sending a photo.
Merlin: It's a nice big cup.
Merlin: It's like, it's almost like a stein and it's got lots of beautiful trees on it and it's survived all of those years.
Merlin: It's one of the few things in my life that hasn't broken.
John: I love that story.
John: Thank you.
John: But that's just like you maintain that relationship.
John: by keeping that stuff in play.
Merlin: Yeah, I haven't talked to him in years, but I still enjoy his cup.
John: It's not a thing where you put it in a box and you say, oh, I've got to get this.
John: No, it's not a collectible.
John: Or no, I've got to get this back to him.
Merlin: Oh, no, no, he's never getting this back.
Merlin: It would be kind of cool, especially like, God forbid, he's on his deathbed.
Merlin: I'd give him his coffee cup back.
John: Yeah, yeah, sure.
Merlin: That's a little on the nose.
Merlin: If he gets married, maybe I'll bring it to him.
John: It's not like you've ever left anything at my house unintentionally because it's a very small number of times that you've ever left your house.
John: That's true.
John: But there have been a couple of times where you loaned me something.
Merlin: I've lent or gifted you a strange array of things, some of which we've covered before.
Merlin: But I really appreciate the fact that you're so gracious at receiving things.
Merlin: Thank you.
Merlin: No, you really are.
Merlin: I mean, like where I go like, oh, here's this bag that was really expensive that I don't like.
Merlin: And I lost the strap.
Merlin: Do you want it?
Merlin: And you were like, you're like the kid in the cafeteria.
Merlin: I'll have it.
Merlin: And then I found the strap and I gave you the strap.
John: You did.
John: And that bag is a great bag.
John: That red bag?
John: Did I tell you?
John: Did I tell you that I found the matching bag?
Merlin: No way.
Merlin: Was it Red Ox?
Merlin: Red Ox.
Merlin: That was the bag on those learn-how-to-pack-one-bag websites.
Merlin: That was the one that was recommended, and I hated it.
Merlin: You had to carry it on your shoulder, and it was like loom.
Merlin: It was too big.
Merlin: Yeah, too big for not having wheels or something.
Merlin: Yeah, if you're going to pack a small bag, have the bag be small.
John: You know what?
John: That's a great tip.
John: You know what I'm saying?
John: I do.
John: So I was at a thrift store months later, and I found the identical Red Ox bag except blue.
John: Wow!
John: That's so cool.
John: Yeah, and it was only a dollar.
John: That's a costly bag.
John: Yeah, and I said, Merlin told me this was a costly bag.
John: It's obviously a costly bag by the amount of expense...
John: That's evident in it in the quality of its manufacture.
John: It seems like something that was made in America.
John: It's very hardy.
John: It's a hardy bag.
Merlin: It's got really nice zippers on it.
Merlin: It's like the beef stew of bags.
Merlin: Oh, my God.
John: This is more expensive than I remember.
Merlin: Did you get the one that's kind of like a thick satchel?
John: Let's call it a thick satchel.
John: There's one called the mini boss.
John: Oh, my God.
John: Anyway, I bought the second one and now I have a matching set.
John: Basically, they're like – I could turn them into motorcycle panniers if I allowed myself to consider riding a motorcycle.
John: Oh, don't do that.
John: I've taken – just recently I've taken riding motorcycles out of the can't wait to do it any day now.
John: file and put it into i wonder if i'm ever going to be able to revisit that idea oh really interesting yeah and i don't like having done it but i gotta tell you i mean i don't i kind of don't want to talk about it because i worry about you i worry about your safety but i could i could really see you getting a motorcycle i could see you getting three motorcycles oh i know oh i know uh and i you know i could see me getting three motorcycles too but i would need to live somewhere where it didn't rain all the time
John: atop the nation's steepest, most difficult hills to
John: traverse like it's a this is a stupid town to own a motorcycle in unless you have one of those motorcycles that's um like die die die motorcycle like if i lived in san diego oh no it's flat and it's dry yeah it's flat and it's dry you just get on your motorcycle put put put put put put put you go from place to place if you were like a navy seal you're at the navy seal base you ride out to the beach on your on your crotch rocket there you go that's exactly right
John: But I have a friend who was a Los Angelino motorcyclist.
John: who just died.
John: Just died when a car, he's been riding motorcycles his whole life.
John: He's obviously very good at riding motorcycles.
John: He's not, he's not like, didn't just hop on a motorcycle.
John: Been riding it in LA for 25 years and just a car, just a car.
John: I'm so sorry.
John: Not a thing that he could have done anything about.
John: That's the thing.
Merlin: If you're a motorcycle, you just have to assume that nobody sees you.
Merlin: You have to, yeah, at all times.
Merlin: I used to say it was my daughter.
Merlin: Like I said, whenever we were across the street, I would say to her, you are a motorcycle.
Merlin: The thing is, nobody sees motorcycles because they're not.
Merlin: The pattern matching for driving a car does not account for bicycles, motorcycles, anything that's not another car.
John: People just don't see you.
John: They don't see you.
John: And the thing is, they don't even see other cars.
John: People are crashing into things all the time.
John: And if he had been in a car, this person still might have crashed into him.
John: It's just that he wouldn't have been dismembered.
Merlin: You must have to become very – you know that old phrase defensive driving.
Merlin: You must have to become so aware of your surroundings.
Merlin: When you've got such few square inches of tire on the road at a given time –
Merlin: And you've got so much potential power under you.
Merlin: I mean, you could, I mean, it's just, you know, almost any motorcycle you could get on and go really fast, really quickly.
Merlin: It must take a lot.
Merlin: And, you know, I'm not criticizing.
Merlin: We have a friend out there who enjoys the show.
Merlin: It's a motorcycle guy.
Merlin: And so, you know, I'm not ragging on motorcycles, but it must take a lot of self-restraint and a lot of self-awareness to be safe on a motorcycle.
John: Well, this is my problem on a motorcycle because when I get on a motorcycle, I'm like a super...
John: cautious, respectful driver.
John: Do you know how to do one?
John: Can you do a motorcycle?
John: Oh, I've driven a motorcycle across America.
John: Halfway across America until I crashed it.
John: But let's not focus on the crashing.
John: That's probably an outlier.
John: Let's focus on all the safe driving I did right up until I crashed.
John: That feels like an important metaphor for something.
John: And spent a considerable amount of time in the hospital and then went to jail.
John: Let's not go through that whole chain of events.
John: Every story requires careful editing.
John: Let's think about the good, safe time I spent on the motorcycle.
John: But I'm a Vespa rider.
John: Oh, of course.
John: Until very recently.
John: But the problem is when I get on a hypo motorcycle, one that has this power that you're talking about where you can – with a flick of a wrist, you can go from zero to 1,000.
John: very, very quickly, surprisingly quickly, like shocking to myself, how quickly it happens.
John: I turn into that person where someone's in the left turn lane, uh, and they're not there.
John: Then they're waiting for the traffic to come the other direction to make their turn.
John: Someone's in the right lane with their blinker on waiting to turn right, do a, do a right at the light.
John: But there's someone in the crosswalk walking and I thread
John: The like three and a half feet between the bumpers of the two cars at 45 miles an hour.
John: And with the full knowledge that there's someone coming the opposite direction with their blinker on about to turn right in front of me.
Merlin: But you see that opportunity and it just feels like that's a giant size hole to fill.
John: Here we go.
John: Because I see that the people walking across the crosswalk that are blocking the guy that's about to turn in front of me are still blocking him enough that if everybody behaves perfectly rationally, there's a slot here for me.
John: And then I do it and my blood goes cold.
John: And I'm like, you idiot.
John: That is the classic situation.
John: If one of those people...
John: is even slightly distracted, if one of them behaves even slightly abnormally, which everyone does all the time, then you are a casualty.
Merlin: If they stop moving in the same trajectory that you're expecting or they make a little micro change in what they're doing.
John: It's all it takes.
John: Because a lot of those are that slot isn't three feet yet.
John: The slot has not opened yet because everybody's still slightly in motion.
John: You're skating where the puck is going to be.
John: That's right.
John: You see the opportunity, right?
John: You're leading.
John: You're in a sop with camel.
John: You are leading the Fokker tribe wing.
John: And that was brand new technology then.
John: And in a way, I feel like it still is a brand new technology now.
John: But that is the thing that gets me back off the motorcycle.
John: I park the motorcycle and I say, daddy's not old enough yet to drive a motorcycle.
John: Even though he's 47 years old, he does not have the good sense that God gave a chicken to not stand in a field and look up at the rain until he drowns.
John: Just checking the weather.
John: So I stop.
John: So I stop and then I spent.
John: But the thing is, it doesn't stop me from sitting online and saying, wow, look at that motorcycle.
John: Boy, if I had that motorcycle.
John: then all of my problems would be solved.
Merlin: I see the appeal, because it's not so different from the appeal of a bicycle, which is just this little thing that you can get lots of, or even a skateboard.
Merlin: There's this little thing that can get me lots of places.
Merlin: But in that case, man, that's part of the American dream, too.
Merlin: A motorcycle?
John: Well, yeah.
John: I see what you're saying about the bicycle, but in another way, it's utterly unlike a bicycle.
John: Because if you are invited to a wedding, let's say, and I don't know much about weddings.
John: You haven't been to that many.
John: Previously stipulated, but I'm guessing...
John: If you're invited to a wedding and you ride up to the wedding on a bicycle, like in your gear, right with your little, your little flippy hat and your, and your cloppy shoes and your, your, uh, like, uh, wet pants or whatever.
John: Like that's not how you roll.
John: Or maybe like one of those rear view mirrors that's clipped to your glasses.
John: Right.
John: That's not how you roll up to a wedding.
John: But if you roll up to a wedding on a, like on a super boss, uh,
John: 70s style like chopped hardtail pan head.
John: I like those words.
John: You roll up to a wedding on one of those in a tuxedo with some like some Bausch and Lomb like commando sunglasses with your date on the back.
John: With your date riding on the back fender because you don't even have a passenger seat.
John: You paint quite a picture, my friend.
John: You're not riding up to that wedding on a bicycle.
John: No, I'm sorry.
John: You're right.
John: You're absolutely right.
John: You are riding up to that wedding on a carpet of dreams.
John: Oh, my goodness.
John: On a fucking – on a loud rainbow is what you're saying.
John: You know?
John: Like a rainbow with a bumper sticker that says loud pipes save lives.
Yeah.
John: And then the wedding belongs to you, right?
John: That's right.
John: The bride, everything belongs to you.
John: You could leave that wedding with whatever.
Merlin: You're like Paul Williams on the love boat.
Merlin: It's something that's true about Paul Williams.
Merlin: In this case, you show up on your gas molly with your Hemi brakes and your Bausch and Loam costume.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: And then all of a sudden you're like, Bogsy, my law.
Merlin: And the bride's thinking, man, I'd sit on that tailpipe.
John: Hell yes.
John: Well, the tailpipe is wrapped in like fabric tape.
John: That's your gift to her.
John: Because boom.
John: Yeah, right.
John: Your gift to that wedding is that you came.
John: You know?
John: So I just feel like, but I had to step back from that.
John: And then, of course, the other motorcycle is the tsunami motorcycle, the apocalypse motorcycle.
Merlin: What do you mean by that?
John: Well, let's say you're living in Long Beach, California, or Gearheart, Oregon, or Long Beach, Washington.
John: Every state has a Long Beach.
John: Oh, is that right?
John: It's like a Springfield.
John: It's like a Springfield, right.
John: Or at least every beach on the West Coast, or every state on the West Coast, when there are only three, they each have a Long Beach, I'm guessing.
John: But it seems like there should be more.
John: It seems like there should be five.
John: All of Oregon is a Long Beach.
John: It's just one big Long Beach.
Okay.
John: But I want to live – I want to have a house in Gearheart, Oregon or down by Cannon Beach.
John: I want to have a house right there.
John: Because it's nice.
John: And I don't want to talk about it too much on this podcast because I don't want other people to go there.
John: No, the looky-loos are going to be saying, oh, well, maybe I should get into that vertical.
John: Yeah, like let's go down to the Oregon coast and get ourselves a house.
John: Yeah, before all the middle-class white people come in and ruin it.
John: Well, that's already happened.
John: But Portland is a small town relative to other cities.
John: And the number of people that the number of people that Portland can the number of like spore people that Portland can actually put out into the world to ruin everything.
John: It's like a lot fewer people.
John: Like Boston every day is just sending out spores that are just ruining things for other people.
Merlin: They start with a larger number of people, right?
John: That's part of it, right?
John: That's right.
John: They're in the process right now of ruining Western Massachusetts, which was ruined by a previous generation in a different direction, right?
John: Like the generation in Western Massachusetts that ruined it by focusing on manufacturing and doing bad business and
John: Turning all those into abandoned factory towns.
John: They were bad.
John: Did John Hodgman have any role in this?
John: Well, he's certainly a pioneer.
John: That's true.
John: Of the next generation of ruiners who were the early middle aged, you know, like affluent middle class people who are now going out to Western Massachusetts and buying old manor houses.
Yeah.
John: And turning them into sex dens or something.
John: All the people that used to be in Dinosaur Junior who are now living on 50 acres.
John: Shame Murph.
John: But I do not want any more people my age who currently live in Portland or Seattle to go out to –
John: Uh, cannon beach and make it any harder to live there.
John: Okay.
John: But if you do live there, particularly if you live in, in gear hard or seaside or something like that, and you hear those tsunami sirens, which are indicating one of two things, either there was a giant, giant, giant earthquake in Japan and you have like, I don't know how many hours, but like a significant number of hours.
John: While that wave goes all the way across the ocean.
John: Or there was just a earthquake.
Merlin: on the pacific plate right there poor new zealand new zealand just can't catch a break man new zealand oh there's a big one there's like an eight point something in new zealand oh right because new zealand is a young young country it's just made out there was a terrible earthquake uh not to mix about me but like right like within a day or two after we'd flown out of there there's this terrible uh earthquake there it's so awful god what a wonderful country they don't deserve earthquakes
John: So some of our New Zealand listeners who are among our best listeners.
John: I love that country so much.
John: They're right now dealing with dealing with earthquake aftermath.
John: Yeah.
John: But the nice thing about New Zealand, of course, is that if you leave the water, if you leave the coast and head inland, you go uphill pretty fast.
John: Right?
John: Like New Zealand's not a swampy country.
John: Mm-mm.
John: Right.
John: You get – the secret to getting away from an ocean wave is to go up.
John: Ocean wave.
John: Right.
John: Okay.
Merlin: Yeah.
John: Right?
John: Here comes ocean wave.
John: Head up.
John: Find the most up place you can be and go there.
John: Okay.
John: If you're – if the nearest up place is like a tower made out of toothpicks that somebody made for a science fair, that's not enough.
John: Okay.
Okay.
John: Go, if you can find up land, go up land.
John: But if you're on the Oregon coast, the up land is just far enough away.
John: You can see it, but you can't run to it.
Merlin: So how do you decide how to proceed in the event you wanted to get some kind of Oregon beachfront property?
Merlin: What's your thought process for deciding what to do about that?
Merlin: Here's what I'm assuming.
John: You're buying your Oregon coast property.
John: You already have a vintage 4x4.
John: Because that's one of the first things you should get, right?
John: Vintage four by four.
John: That's like, that's like long time before you're thinking about a beach house.
John: But when you get the beach house, you realize my vintage four by four is just exactly like everybody else's vintage four by four out here.
John: There's only one road out of town and it's going to be, it's going to be completely jammed with vintage four by fours.
John: And you're done.
John: You know, if you like pile everybody in the 4x4 and say, we're headed to the hills.
John: No, you die in a traffic jam.
John: So what you need is two – Oh, so it's the greater 4x4 theory.
John: That's right.
John: That's exactly right.
John: What you need is two high-powered enduro motorcycles that are gassed up and ready to go with side – with like hard case side bags.
John: And so you're hacking the system a little bit.
John: That's right.
John: And you and whoever you're with, whether it be your spouse or significant other, you have both practiced this.
John: Where you run out to your covered secret garage, hop on the motorcycles, and then you're off and you are using the roads only as much as needed, but you have a route.
John: that you can do if the roads are all jammed full of saps.
John: You've rehearsed this.
Merlin: It's a bug out.
Merlin: It's a bug out.
Merlin: It's a bug out.
Merlin: We've rehearsed this.
Merlin: Right.
John: Battle stations.
John: We don't have to have enough gear to survive for 40 days.
Merlin: We've just got to survive further than you.
John: That's right.
John: Outriding the tiger.
John: All we have to do is close the distance between us and five miles from here as fast as we can.
John: On the assumption that everybody else is going to be trying to do that at the same time, but they're not going to have these high powered motorcycles.
John: And then once you get there, you watch the wave come in.
John: You feel, yeah, I mean, obviously you're not gloating.
John: You feel bad for everybody.
John: Sure.
John: And then the wave goes out.
John: You don't go back immediately because there's going to be that next wave, second wave, like wave 2.0.
John: Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
John: But then when the waves calm down and everything goes back to just being like a big, huge burning garbage heap, like you've got your motorcycles.
John: In the saddlebags, you had presumably a key to your normal house and some rain jackets or whatever.
John: And you're like, you've survived.
John: Oh, also you have to teach your kids to grab onto the back like little baby monkeys.
John: Grab onto the back of your jacket and hold on for dear life.
John: Like everybody's got to know what to do.
Merlin: And these are not the kinds of decisions you want to be thinking about for the first time on bug out day.
John: Sure.
John: When you hear the tsunami sirens, that is not the time to go to the motorcycle store and start shopping for a motorcycle.
John: But these motorcycles are expensive.
John: And so it would be pretty weird to buy them and just keep them as tsunami motorcycles.
John: Right.
John: You'd also want to ride them.
Merlin: You're not Batman.
John: Right, right.
Merlin: And you don't have somebody to maintain it.
Merlin: You don't have like specific motorcycles for specific occasions.
Merlin: It's not like a cummerbund.
Merlin: Right, right.
Merlin: Although all you need is one cummerbund.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Is that right?
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: You just get a black satin cummerbund?
Merlin: That's right.
Merlin: So you got to avoid the jokey, like you don't want a plaid or something.
Merlin: Don't do it.
John: Okay.
John: If you are in a wedding party and you have ties and cummerbunds that match one another.
John: Oh, dear.
Yeah.
John: You're already in the wrong wedding party.
John: You should not be friends with those people.
Merlin: I wish people could bring us in to help with those kinds of things.
Merlin: We could help you.
Merlin: See, now, in my case, I've been to a lot of weddings.
Merlin: John's officiated a bunch of weddings but hasn't been to many.
Merlin: I think we could bring a really fresh eye to somebody's wedding.
Merlin: And we could probably save you some money.
John: Well, yeah, absolutely.
John: I mean, that's the craziest thing about weddings that I hear about.
John: which is we tried to do this a different way.
John: We tried to have fun with our wedding.
John: And the further we got into having a wedding, we realized that there's an industry of people who are trying to tell you, you can't have fun.
John: You just have to do it a certain way.
John: And that way costs.
John: It's like, it's like my mom used to say about going to the hardware store down by the yacht club.
John: She said all the stuff at the hardware store that's in town costs one quarter of the price of the same exact thing at the hardware store by the yacht.
Merlin: Buy your sunscreen before you get to the resort.
Merlin: Because if you buy it in that little tumble-down fish shack, oh, brother.
John: So if you say, hey, we'd like to rent your event space because we want to have a big paintball expo,
John: we want to fill this place with smoke machines and play laser tag, they're going to quote you a price.
John: Oh, it's $1,500 to rent our place for your smoke machine laser tag part.
John: Do not mention you want a paintball wedding because that word, order of magnitude.
John: That's right.
John: If you're like, we're going to fill this place with smoke machines and have a laser tag wedding.
John: Whoa, hello.
John: Ding, ding, ding, seven grand.
John: But the problem is you can't fake them out because people smell weddings.
John: So you're like, hey, we're just having a big laser tag party here.
Merlin: It's like trying to convince your plumber the problem is not a big deal before they come out and thinking you're going to pay less because of that.
Merlin: They do this every day.
Merlin: They dealt with these paintball pikers.
John: Yeah, this isn't their first rodeo.
John: So, and in every case, they're like, oh, we're going to, it's not, is this your first day?
John: Like, I would think that at your wedding, knowing you, that you would have tried to have it catered by Subway.
Merlin: I had Popeyes at my thesis defense.
Merlin: Really?
Merlin: My baccalaureate, yeah.
Merlin: We brought in like 40 pieces of Popeyes.
Merlin: I'm going to be honest with you.
Merlin: Some people were not there just to hear about cultural criticism in TV.
Merlin: I think some people were there for a spicy breast.
John: So you made your thesis defense an event that people came and like cocktail party?
Merlin: At my school, every baccalaureate defense is a public event.
Merlin: Anybody can come.
Merlin: I see.
Merlin: I see.
John: I see.
Merlin: Boy, there's some tough ones.
Merlin: Mine was easy.
John: The first Thanksgiving I ever spent away from home, I got a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken and went to a pro wrestling match.
John: Oh, wow.
John: You made that America?
John: That was my thesis defense.
John: And that, again, Minneapolis.
John: I don't know why I keep coming back to Minneapolis.
John: You want to talk about the election?
Yeah.
Merlin: You and me?
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Sure.
Merlin: I don't know.
Merlin: People have been fast forwarding through like an hour and nine minutes to get to this.
Merlin: Listening to it on 4X time.
John: Election.
Merlin: Yeah, you know, I just want to say to everybody out there, I'm grateful you listen to the show, but when you send your plaudits for how much you enjoy the whole show, when a third of the time that the show takes to listen to has passed, it gives me the fear.
Merlin: People are listening to the show very quickly.
Yeah.
Merlin: You and me?
Merlin: Not us.
Merlin: I don't listen to anything.
Merlin: Well, you don't listen to podcasts, but I always listen at a reasonable speed.
Merlin: But some people, they listen to the show very quickly.
Merlin: That's how they get through the backlog.
Merlin: That's how they get through so many shows.
John: Really, I couldn't imagine listening to this program on fast speed because of
John: How important some of the pregnant pauses are.
John: Right?
John: Like there are a lot of times when you let a beat go by.
John: And the beat is as eloquent as anything.
John: It's anything you say.
John: The beat.
John: The beat tells a story.
John: The beat.
John: Yeah.
John: And those beats I think are lost if you change the tempo at all.
Merlin: I was thinking of that interview that Ira Glass did with Mike Daisy.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: after it was revealed that Mike Daisy's expose of the Apple factories in China was not 100% copacetic, fact-wise.
Merlin: And there's one point in that interview when he asks Mike Daisy something, and there's a pause.
Merlin: You know how it is with these kinds of things.
Merlin: It felt like it was two minutes long.
Merlin: It was probably like eight seconds.
Merlin: But if you didn't hear that pause, you didn't really hear that interview.
John: Sure, you missed the whole thing.
Merlin: It's like Sean always says.
Merlin: Sometimes the rest are as important as the notes.
Merlin: The rest, right.
Merlin: Too many notes for the year to hear.
John: I don't know if Sean says that, but I feel like we should give him some credit.
John: Sean says too many notes for the year to hear.
John: That's what Sean says.
Merlin: Too many notes for the year to hear.
Merlin: Was it Leopold?
Merlin: What's his name?
Merlin: Jeffrey Jones played him.
Merlin: Played Sean Nelson?
Merlin: Yeah, he played Sean Nelson in that movie with Salieri.
Merlin: Yeah, too many notes.
John: Too many notes for the year to hear.
Merlin: I don't know.
John: Don't listen to this program on anything other than the speed that we record it.
John: Because that's one of the tenants of it.
John: Otherwise, you're banned.
Merlin: As David Reese would say, you're banned from the show.
Merlin: That's right.
Merlin: I feel like I don't, at this moment, have a lot to say.
Merlin: But I feel like our listeners probably are looking forward to what you have to say.
Merlin: And I don't know if you talked about this with Dan.
Merlin: I don't think you did.
Mm-mm.
John: Did you?
John: Dan also, I mean, Dan started the podcast and it was like, what, the day after the election, two days later?
John: And he was like, boy, you know, I sure did have a lot of oatmeal this morning or whatever.
John: He was like, let's talk about dinosaurs.
John: And we got about this far into the show, an hour or so.
John: And I was like, Dan, are you sincerely going to try and not talk about the election?
John: You know, like 24 hours after the election?
John: And he was like, basically like, what election?
John: I mean, it went and it was and it seemed like that.
John: That's a good summary of almost every conversation with Dan.
John: That's it.
John: It was it was pretty brilliant, though.
John: I like I sat on the toadstool of it smoking my hookah and said, wow, like Namaste Sensei.
Merlin: Yeah.
John: And we just kept talking about our pillboxes and and like finger like like finger chimes.
John: Serenity now.
John: And, and so what that did was it kind of put me in a, it put me in a place where I was like, huh, do I have a hot take that is worth a good goddamn and, oh, and that can't wait.
John: Do I have a hot take that can't wait?
John: Yeah.
John: Because I, uh, for the last week I have logged onto the internet every day.
John: I have read, uh,
John: up just through a few things and have just not like slammed my computer shut just very slowly shut my computer and said this is not there this is not helping listening to people yell at each other is not helping listening to people blame each other is not helping
John: And listening to people tell me and other people what reality is or what our obligation is.
John: And how you should feel.
John: How you should feel.
John: How you shouldn't feel is a big thing.
John: How you're not entitled to feel.
John: How you're not entitled to feel is a thing.
John: How you need to be quiet.
John: Or how you don't need to be quiet.
Merlin: How you are absolutely admonished to never be quiet again.
John: Or that your voice isn't needed right now because you are part of the problem and so you absolutely should shut up.
John: Like every single thing has not helped.
John: And so I've been doing chores.
John: I've been eating cereal.
John: I've been taking care of my kid and...
John: and doing the things that are right in front of me with the kind of like, uh, with the quietude of knowing that I am not like my online participation is not needed.
John: Right.
John: And, um, and nothing's going to change as a result of it right now.
John: I will rejoin this conversation in a little bit.
John: I've, it's not that I haven't been thinking about it,
John: But like, I didn't, and immediately afterwards, I had so many hot takes.
John: I had hot takes.
John: It was hot takes all the way down.
John: And I had lectures I was going to give about it, and I had, you know, like I was making PowerPoints in my mind, even though I don't know how to make a PowerPoint.
John: Yeah.
John: You don't need to know in your mind.
John: You can always do a tutorial later.
John: Right.
John: I could just go on YouTube and learn to play the harmonica.
John: Slide.
John: But I, but, you know, maybe it was the, maybe it was like the Buddha, like it was Dan Budajemen.
John: who who made me realize that i wish i could unhear that to say what election what was there an election was like yeah right right yeah i i so just um i did a
Merlin: We were talking about whether we should do a show late last week, and I had asked if you wanted to, and then in that interregnum, I had scheduled a show with my friend John Gruber.
Merlin: So I've already talked for two hours about how I feel about what happened with feelings.
Merlin: And people liked it, right?
John: People were grateful.
Merlin: Yes, I got teary from what some people said.
Merlin: Because, like, you know, yeah, whatever.
Merlin: Like, yeah, I'm another white guy, but, like, this has hurt my heart a lot.
Merlin: So anyway, I just want to say, like, that's a place where I have discussed that.
Merlin: It's not so much to encourage you to listen, but to, like, that gave me a little bit of, like, getting through the first part, which is just the feelings.
Merlin: And I would like to say I'm further along than that, six days later.
Merlin: Um, and I have so many conflicting things going on right now.
Merlin: One of those conflicting things is I still haven't gotten past the feelings part.
Merlin: And I, and so I'm not, I don't, I'm not really, I'm not trying to criticize, um, anybody's strong feelings that aren't mine, but like, there's this part of me that says I need to sit with this for a little while.
Merlin: And I understand the, I, I feel like I absolutely understand the like, no, it's time to get to work.
Merlin: Um,
Merlin: I do understand that, and I respect that.
Merlin: And I subscribed to the New York Times finally yesterday.
Merlin: I know that's not a lot, but what I'm trying to say is, for myself, maybe this is something we should take a little bit more time with, because I don't think we need more hot takes right now.
Merlin: And...
Merlin: I hope people will take this in the spirits it's intended, but there is this impulse in me that I can locate as feeling very similar to an impulse that I would feel at a time when, say, I was in college and got very upset about something happening in the community or in politics.
Merlin: And I'm trying to...
Merlin: I'm trying to set that feeling aside.
Merlin: Leave it, right?
Merlin: I'm trying to put that aside for just a little while until I figure out a little bit more about the feelings part, which I know is a very privileged place to be.
Merlin: But I don't know what I could say right now that would make a huge difference.
Merlin: I'm not ready to try and say anything intelligent yet.
Merlin: And I'm not saying you shouldn't, but for myself, it's just I'm not ready for the fray yet.
Merlin: And that probably makes me less of a citizen.
Merlin: I might look back at this week and say, wow, I wonder how much opportunity I lost by not jumping on to something.
John: I'm just not ready to do that yet.
John: I feel like the answer is none.
John: Like, none.
John: And partly for myself, it is that
John: Like I have very strong feelings, obviously, like as it was unfolding, I was, I had no idea that I would feel that strongly.
John: Um, but I was wrong.
John: I was, I was profoundly wrong about a lot of things.
John: My take leading up to it was wrong.
John: Um, and, and a lot of people were wrong.
John: Most people were wrong.
Merlin: It's one of those rare occasions where when we say everybody was wrong, we don't mean everybody was wrong on one quote-unquote side.
Merlin: There's almost nobody that was right.
Merlin: Nobody was right.
Merlin: For example, people are really hard on 538 right now, but one thing that I think is interesting about what 538 says is they're trying to show you... First of all, these are not our polls.
Merlin: These are other people's polls.
Merlin: But I'm really interested in that idea of here's the polls and here's how...
Merlin: confident we are in the polls it's not just that we saw and so stepping away from that for a minute it's that we saw the world in this certain way and to for myself to a like fairly high 80 plus level of certainty that i was seeing something that was true or feeling something that was true right isn't that part of it right right there was not well i was not i was not actually fraught with self-doubt until somewhere around 5 30 or 6 on tuesday
Merlin: Yeah.
John: I mean, I was doing a show that night and we were backstage.
Merlin: You went through with the show?
John: Yeah.
John: We were backstage like eating the little petty fours and tuning our guitars and imagining that we were about to do a show that was full of triumph and like our first female president.
John: And immediately before we walked on stage, we all like looked at our phones to see what was going on.
John: And 538 right in front of our eyes went from 85% to
John: Uh, certainty that, uh, that Ms.
John: Clinton would be elected, uh, secretary Clinton, uh, to 65% to 51%.
John: And we were like, say what?
John: And then we took the stage and on stage, all of us were like stunned deer in the headlights level of stunned.
John: And I was hosting the show.
John: we're three of us sitting on stage with guitars.
John: And then there was a poet and then a woman painting while we were doing the show.
John: It was, it was this kind of show.
John: And I said to the audience, look, uh, things are not, uh, things are changing very rapidly.
John: I would like to say everyone turn their phone off and let's just be in the room together for two and a half hours listening to music and, and being part of art.
John: And I, everybody agreed.
John: And we just sat and like,
John: It didn't banish the feelings, but I had the I and my and the audience and my fellow musicians had two more hours of just listening to one another play and enjoying like friendship in and guitar You got to stand there next to the band playing near my god to thee as the But but then when we rejoined the world it like fait accompli right it had happened and
John: And we didn't have to sit there for that two and a half hours like watching everything crumble.
John: We just were like playing our guitars.
John: And then we came back.
John: We landed on the earth again.
John: And we're like, well, guess what?
John: Like everything's different.
John: But here's my feeling, right, is that I was wrong.
John: Everybody was wrong.
John: And not just wrong about what, you know, not just wrong by 10 degrees, but like wrong about what is going on.
John: And immediately what I saw was all these people that were wrong thinking that their wrongness was an anomaly and now they were right again about everything.
John: They could begin immediately to say what needed to be done, to say what other people needed to do.
John: to start talking about what needed to be done immediately that, and if we didn't do it, we were on the wrong side of history talking about who was, who, how, how, whether you should wear a safety pin or shouldn't, whether you should organize or not, whether you should be in the streets or not, whether everybody was right again, instantly.
John: And for me, I said, oh,
John: my reaction was I was fucking wrong and I do not presume to be immediately right about maybe, maybe we need to just be wrong for a little while.
John: Like sit on your fucking wrong and think about how wrong you were and how that wrongness reverberates through your other certain certitudes.
John: And that isn't, I mean, that is healthy.
John: And that will affect what you do next, which hopefully is different.
John: You don't just come back into a thing and say, well, I was right about everything.
John: And this election, which it turns out I was completely wrong about, just confirms how right I was.
John: Which is a fallacy I've seen repeated a thousand times.
John: Like right up until this election, I was saying all these things that I was confident I was right in this happened.
John: Negating everything and it proves how right I was the whole and if it turned out differently in the other side did that same thing you tear them apart for not being realistic at well and everything how could you not accept these results and the end this business about like you have you you cannot have any sympathy or Consider the other side because that empowers them or that normalizes them and you know the fact is it just got normalized like I'm not normalizing them by
John: saying, huh, whoa.
John: Um, by not immediately, you know, uh, by not going at them with the same language we were going at them before that produced the results that we didn't anticipate.
John: Right.
John: I mean, we did not by, by virtue of our fury at the, at the racism, sexism, and in like just, I mean, racism and sexism, even, uh,
John: even those things are like subsumed beneath just the pure insanity of electing someone who has never for a minute, uh, done any government work.
John: That's that, you know, that's just like, whoa.
John: And, you know, for, for my part, my first thought was we have on both sides of the aisle become a country of,
John: that is convinced that our problem is elites.
John: Both the, both the people on the conservative side and on the liberal side are convinced that it is elites who are the problem and the solution is a populism, a populist movement where we put outsiders in.
John: And the further left you go, the more that conviction is true.
John: And the further right you go, the more that conviction is true.
John: That we are in combat culturally with these elites who are keeping us out.
John: And on the left, we think it is elites that are promulgating a white supremacy and a patriarchy.
John: And we need to oust those elites and put...
John: Neophytes in those positions because people with no experience but with conviction are better in those jobs than people who have dedicated their lives to administration, to government, to thoughtful action, to moderate behavior.
John: We need them out.
Merlin: To people who've done the job but have also had to deal with the harsh realities of having to deal with people who don't agree with you, that maybe have more power than you but have to find a way to get something happening.
John: Compromise and negotiate and facilitate a best practice even if it isn't the most beautiful or the most radical.
John: And on the right of this equation –
John: There are people who feel like the elites are perpetuating a snobby, East Coast dominated, prissy, pretentious lecturing, hectoring form of social engineering.
John: And they need to eliminate the elites.
John: in order that real people who have real concerns, who are real and authentic, who have, who haven't like, uh, in Donald Trump's case, even read a book that they are better suited to this, like to this job, which is a job.
John: When I ran for office, I ran thinking this very thing that the people in, uh, that were running downtown Seattle, the city council,
John: was full of insiders who, you know, who couldn't see beyond the end of their nose, who were compromised by their affiliations, who were in bed with business and what they needed in there was some fresh blood in the form of me, a, uh, like a freewheeling fun loving smart guy who, who saw the problems in the city clear eyed and was going to roll in there and
John: and just shake everything up and be somebody that sat on the city council with a little bit of an ironic smirk.
John: And when problems came across the desk, I would just know what to do.
John: And I wouldn't ha I wouldn't be in bed with anybody.
John: And as I started to run and said, well, the first thing we need to do is build a unified transit system.
John: And the first person I met, you know, who was a 21 year old intern for somebody said,
John: Well, I mean you'd never be able to pay for that because the state legislature passed a law 15 years ago that limited the amount – limited the ability of the city of Seattle to raise money via taxation.
John: And so the state government would never pay for this transit program and the city of Seattle cannot – does not have the taxing authority to pay for it either.
John: So what's your next plan?
John: And I was like, what?
John: Because I didn't know that the state legislature had passed this law.
John: And having passed it, the city of Seattle was bound by it.
John: And the legislature was not going to overturn it because six-tenths of the legislature is from Moses Lake and Spokane and Enumclaw and places where they don't share Seattle's values.
John: So as I went through the process of running for office, every step along the way, I realized this is people's profession and they've spent their whole careers.
John: Isn't it – I mean it's a craft.
John: It's absolutely a craft.
John: And when somebody comes to the city council and they say, I want to raise the height limits –
John: in this zip code so that I can build an 80 story apartment tower that, uh, where the, you know, the cheapest apartment is a million five.
John: There are 40 other groups that feel like they're stakeholders in that choice.
John: And each one of them has a whole camp train of history and of history with the city, their own constituency, their own like logical worldview.
John: They're all, they're all, all those worldviews are logical from within.
John: And all 40 of those groups, I'm not talking about 40 people who have stakes, but 40 groups of people that have stakes in that decision who want to talk to the city council and tell them and explain their, patiently explain and angrily explain their consistent worldview that from within consumes them.
John: They absolutely know they're right.
John: that that apartment building is going to create more homelessness or that apartment building is going to raise the tax base, which will enable us to help the homeless or that apartment building is going to, you know, the fact that it needs to be union or the fact that it doesn't need to be union on ad infinitum.
John: And so to sit on that bench and do that work well is a lifetime, uh,
John: Or a job that you do need preparation to do.
John: You do need to have a certain personality.
John: And it isn't just a matter of kicking your feet up on the desk and saying, you know what sounds good to me?
John: Do it.
Merlin: Or don't do it.
Merlin: It seems like you could look to somebody like, let's say, a veteran journalist who has been walking through the corridors of power for years, and that person might roll their eyes at somebody who says, oh, I'm going to come in and be an outsider, and the fact that I don't know very much and don't have a plan helps me to not cloud my ideological vision for what needs to happen because reasons.
Merlin: So somebody who's in that position as, again, somebody who's a very...
Merlin: Very good journalist or a scholar knows all of that stuff, but even they have never done the job.
Merlin: And when you get in and do the job, you not only know or not only exposed to and know all of that complexity, but then you have all the extra added complexity.
Merlin: Mm-hmm.
Merlin: I'm kind of just repeating what you're saying, but that's the part that I always think about.
Merlin: I could have the best idea in the world for how the plumbing in my house should work, but being an outsider when it comes to plumbing does not make me better at it than somebody who's done it for 20 years.
Merlin: But for somebody who understands the actual... You think about somebody who's really an expert at somebody.
Merlin: It's not just somebody who knows how to do it.
Merlin: It's not just somebody who's done it repeatedly.
Merlin: It's not just somebody who's done it enough to be good at it, but it's somebody who sees things you...
Merlin: can't see and that can't even really be explained to you and that comes across as a certain kind of cynicism or hollowness that you know you're just a pure politician now but it's also that they understand how many people in a position of power are going to be making calls when you decide to change the height limit that you haven't you haven't thought about that because you have this pure vision of how that should be but somebody who's done that job that that seemingly callow person who has that job has done nothing but deal with that the entire time they have that job
Merlin: until it becomes almost a primary part, is learning how to deal with what everybody wants.
Merlin: And that looks like callowness.
Merlin: Yes, exactly.
John: But, so, you know, if there is a, if I did have a hot take, personally, internally, it was that watching, you know, watching the people that I follow, the people that I agree with,
John: immediately frame what happened in a way, in a self-serving way so that what they could maintain was their conviction that what we needed to do was get the elites out.
John: And now there was a new set of elites, a new set of people that were, that were supporting and confirming their belief that this elite structure
John: was what was in our way.
John: And what we needed to do was get the people in there.
John: Even though the person that just was elected was elected precisely because his argument was we needed to get the elites out.
John: And so I, you know, I watched my whole world and continue to watch it on Twitter.
John: Um,
John: And the thing is we are fighting against racism.
John: We are fighting against sexism and these are noble goals and this is a lifetime fight for all of us and will be a lifetime fight for our children.
John: Like this is our side of the mission of creating the world we want to see.
John: But that doesn't – the nobility of that project does not –
John: necessarily validate all of our processes it doesn't reflect back and say and then give us the the the right to say that our methods are correct because our goals are noble and I am increasingly inclined to say people who have devoted their lives to government are not the enemy people who have people who work
John: on behalf of others, even if we don't agree with them or we in our conspiratorial sense that the world is pitted against us, even if all evidence points to the fact that that person has actually is full of self-sacrifice and has devoted their lives to helping others, which in my opinion, Hillary Clinton has done, right?
John: Like she has not,
John: enriched herself.
John: She's not poor.
John: Her husband has made a lot of money.
John: She gets paid for speeches.
John: I wish to fucking God I got paid for speeches.
John: Uh, the way that she, she does.
John: That's not, I mean, there are people right now, my age who are worth hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars for doing nothing for sitting and transferring money from one bank to another.
John: their whole careers to say that Hillary Clinton is corrupt is just like, you don't understand what a lifetime of service looks like.
John: But there are, there are so many people out there whose business is government and whose work is in the world of, of, uh, like the, the social sciences who work at the state department their whole lives, who work in the diplomatic core and who,
John: Anyone on either side of the aisle is going to point to these people and say they are elites that are keeping, that are, that, that are keeping this system that we disagree with in, in, in power.
John: And I look at them now and I say, thank God for you.
John: And I do not want the people.
John: I do not want, I do not believe that the people marching in the street know better necessarily because
John: I don't think that they are the people I want to hold elective office.
John: I don't want a revolution.
John: I want a slow, methodical march in the hands of people who have made the study of this their life's work.
John: And I believe that that will result in justice because I think justice is inevitable.
John: Like I think equality and this is the slow march of history argument that makes people really mad who think that they can yell and make history march faster.
John: And we, and there's plenty of, plenty of examples of like move, things do move faster, but things have just moved back.
John: You know, this has been a, this has been a big correction, a bad back corrections.
John: And all it does is confirm to me that like you make a big stab, things change.
John: And then, you know, and then the people that wanted a different way push back.
John: And, but the March of history is what I'm, what I count on.
John: And I hope that this era where this Jacksonian sense that, that like,
John: people throw down their hoe and March on Washington with their, you know, with their bag of corn meal over their shoulder and say, I can do government better.
John: You know, they can't, we can't, we, I believe in like,
John: I don't believe in the electoral college anymore.
John: But I believe in elected representatives.
John: And we've just elected a big pile of garbage to that role.
John: And that is giving me pause.
John: And that's making me feel like I don't –
John: I don't know.
John: I do know that equality is, that we have more equality today than we've ever had and that the current administration can't take that away.
John: And things are ugly on the street right now.
John: But I'm not redoubling my effort to do what I was doing a month ago.
John: I'm...
John: Eating cereal.
John: Doing chores.