Ep. 346: "Every Sunday is Different"
John: Hello.
Merlin: Hi, John.
John: Who's there?
Merlin: I was muted.
Merlin: I used my mute switch.
Merlin: Off to a great start.
Merlin: I got a mute switch.
John: Was it something someone sent to you or was it a thing that you had made or is it a thing you bought at the Guitar Center?
Merlin: I've had it for a while.
Merlin: I tried it.
Merlin: It did not completely erase the signal.
Merlin: And so I regarded it as a failure.
Merlin: And then I thought, you know what?
Merlin: It's like Stalin says, you know, the enemy of the good is paved with Mike's switches.
John: Yeah, the silver bars.
Merlin: Pairs in the trees.
Merlin: And so I hooked it up, and now I got a switch.
Merlin: So if I have to pee in a jug or similar, you know, I'm good.
John: You know, someone sent me, back in the old days when I had the office, someone sent me a cough button.
Mm-hmm.
John: But they were like clearly a rock and roll person and the cough button was like a foot switch, like a distortion box.
Merlin: A stomp box, yeah.
John: A stomp box.
John: And, you know, so to stomp on it.
John: It would be like, you know, like, except it would, except it would mute me.
John: And I think it was back in the day when Roderick on the line fans were concerned that I had a lot of mouth noises and coughs and smorks and snicks and squirks.
Mm-hmm.
John: Before they realized that what was in the show was in the show.
Merlin: Yeah, before we had fully accepted that.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: Yes.
Merlin: No, and it's nice to see that those people have either stopped talking about it or stopped listening to the show.
Merlin: I'm grateful in either case.
Merlin: Now, here's the thing.
John: Go ahead.
John: Well, I was going to say you would think so, but somebody just the other day posted something that said that they couldn't listen to our program because my mic sounded not as good because we record through...
John: QuickTime player or whatever it is that we do.
John: So they're still out there.
John: They're still mad about the tone.
Merlin: Alas, open letter to John and Merlin.
John: Alas, I have enjoyed your program for many years, but alas.
John: It was a response to someone else, but of course they kindly...
John: Love that.
John: Love seeing that.
Merlin: But here's the funny part.
Merlin: As you say, in the oregano, I had purchased a second one of these because apparently I can't buy one of anything.
Merlin: Of course you can't.
Merlin: Yeah, and so I got one.
Merlin: I'm not going to Google it.
Merlin: So I bought a second one of these and went, ha-ha.
Merlin: Now this one, everybody said this is the baller one.
John: Ha-ha.
Merlin: I'd had the Rolls MS-111 mic switch.
Merlin: And then somebody suggested I get this other one, which escapes me.
Merlin: And it really, really looked like a stomp box.
Merlin: And it actually had a chunk chunk.
Merlin: And I said, wow, this is a lot like a rap pedal.
Merlin: You know what?
Merlin: Turns out it's made by the people who make rap pedals.
Merlin: Oh, Proko.
Merlin: Proko.
Merlin: But you don't want to chunk chunk on it because you're going to at least hear the chunk, if not the full chunk chunk.
John: Right.
John: It's true.
John: But, you know, I think the idea is that we sit at our podcasting stations.
John: Mm-hmm.
John: uh, you know, like maybe it's that we all have standing desks or maybe it's that underneath our desks, we have a full array of pedals, like,
John: Like Geddy Lee's bass pedals?
John: Like a Taurus pedals right here.
John: I don't use them, but anytime.
Merlin: It's just in case I need to play the Moog, but I want a hot bass lick.
John: Just like Yngwie.
John: We used those in the long winters, you know.
Merlin: The Taurus pedals?
John: Eric Corson had us.
John: Not a set of Moogs, but the...
John: They weren't exactly knockoffs, but they were, you know, knockoffs.
Merlin: You're talking about bass pedals.
John: Yeah.
Merlin: Those are heavy.
John: You know, they weren't light, but this was during a phase when Eric was like going through a mad gear.
John: And he would play them during, um, during commander thinks aloud because then he could play the on his little keyboard.
John: And then we did a couple of shows.
John: I, in some ways they were the best long winter shows where it was just the two of us.
John: And he had a setup that was keyboard bass guitar on a stand next to him and
John: Um, a bass pedals.
John: And then I had, and then, oh, and then there was a drum kit and the drum kit had maybe the bass pedals by the drum kit.
John: And then I had a keyboard and a guitar and we could, we could do a pretty full set.
John: Of just the two of us kind of switching around.
John: I actually played the drums on one or two songs.
John: Oh my God.
John: And we just switched around and it was amazing.
John: It was really stripped down and fun.
John: Did you travel and perform shows like that?
John: We did a couple of shows.
John: We did one at the Crocodile and did one at the Triple Door.
John: But no, we never went anywhere with it.
John: It was right before we kind of stopped playing together.
John: But it was...
John: It was like our peak achievement when he and I had... We kind of became a duo right there at the end.
John: And we had a lot of possibility that we didn't explore.
John: There was a lot of potential futures that... Believe me, I understand.
John: Yeah.
John: If there's anything to the show, you know, really.
John: Delicious coffee, delicious.
Merlin: Oh, you got some coffee.
John: I did.
John: You know, I have to say, I have to point out, a lot of people don't know this, but for a long time, over a year...
John: You have been texting me on Sunday night saying, we good for tomorrow?
John: I've been doing an experiment trying not doing that.
John: And it's been lovely.
Merlin: It's been lovely.
Merlin: We doing it tomorrow?
Merlin: I never know how that's received.
Merlin: I've been doing that for, well, it's more than a year, buddy.
Merlin: But that's because I don't think you use a calendar, let me say with some confidence, I'm pretty sure you don't use a calendar in the same way that I do.
John: No, I don't.
Merlin: And so ordinarily I'd send somebody the calendar invite, as the youths say.
Merlin: But I don't know if that gets into your system, you know.
John: Or even if it did.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: And so actually I had a, because I'm me, I actually had a reminder to myself every Sunday night to text you to say, are we good to record tomorrow at 10 as we do literally every Monday.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: And every time you sent me the text, I was like, right, right.
Merlin: yes see now i was worried i see now this is the problem am i being helpful or am i being a pill well because i'm treating you i'm treating you like a teen yes or a tween a tween who has to remember to get the water bottle and the watch and all the things yeah right right right but you haven't done it in like what three weeks two three weeks yeah and i've just been like
John: what is going on okay i don't know what day it is every time i every time when i wake up on monday mornings 15 minutes before the show starts i'm like is it monday you texted me last week i thought i thought we we kind of like uh gone over the like gone over the peak because you texted me last week and said are we recording today i said yes sir
John: Yes.
Merlin: Literally, unless we say otherwise, literally every Monday at 10 a.m.
Merlin: Pacific time.
John: Right.
Merlin: For nine years.
Merlin: This is 2011.
John: But anyway.
John: Yes.
John: In any case.
John: It's a little bit, it's been disorienting.
John: Okay.
John: All right.
Merlin: So I don't know if you could start doing that again.
Merlin: How can I...
Merlin: Make me useful.
Merlin: What would be a good way?
Merlin: What's a new integration?
Merlin: Should we return to an old technology?
Merlin: What is a good way for me to make this easier on you?
John: Oh, well, you had it when you were texting me every Sunday night at like 10 p.m.
John: going, are we recording tomorrow?
John: That was it.
John: See, I tell people all the time, and I think I've told you, go ahead and lie to me.
John: Don't give me all the information.
John: Don't let me know when the actual deadline is.
John: Don't tell me what time it is now.
John: Tell me what time you want me to think it is.
John: And I will accept that because I'm frankly desperate to be managed.
John: You talked about this on your road work program a while back.
John: But if you tell me...
John: If you send me a text every Monday at 8 a.m.
John: and you told me it was 9 a.m., I would go, oh, yes.
John: It would not occur to me to look at the phone.
Merlin: So you're receiving the text, and I'm telling you that it is a time that it is not, and you would not feel inclined to look in the upper right-hand corner of your phone to see what time it is.
John: No.
No.
John: Not really.
John: I mean, oh, well, because every clock that I have that it's possible to set independent of the Borg, I set to a different time than every other clock.
Merlin: Oh, my God, John.
John: So every clock in the house, with the exception of the two clocks, my oven has two clocks on it.
Hmm.
John: there's a there and they're right next to each other there's a because it's a it's a microwave and oven built in together like a combo and the controls are right next to each other sure and so you need two sets of controls because your oven could have a timer and your and your microwave could be going but in their neutral state they both just have a clock so right next to each other it's just like
John: There it is.
John: 10, 14, 10, 14.
John: So those two have to be super in sync.
John: And I start one.
John: It's 10, 18, but that's fine.
John: 10, 18.
Merlin: Whatever.
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John: I stand there and I push one and then I stand there for a whole minute with my finger poised over the start button of the other so they change at the same moment.
John: Now maybe I'm a few minutes off.
Merlin: Oh, yes.
Merlin: They don't stay that way, do they?
John: Well, yeah, there's a little variation, but I change it up.
John: Uh, but then I, when I realized that the watch, the Apple watch would allow you to make it wrong, the app, you can go into the Apple watch and change it.
John: So the time is, um,
John: 10 minutes fast five to 15 minutes fast you can but it's not a good idea well that's what i do oh you do oh geez okay okay oh okay and the clock in my car is set differently so anyway if you if somebody says like it's 10 18 like you just did how would i i mean i could look down at my computer where there's a clock ticking away and confirm oh it says mine says 10 19.
Merlin: Okay, all right.
John: But I guess you said that a minute ago.
Merlin: Well, it's confusing because, yeah, okay, there's a lot here.
Merlin: You know, just for what it's worth, I think what you're doing is madness.
Merlin: You know, that's how you can tell we're different.
Merlin: But it seems to me that you need to empower someone in your life with a set of instructions to keep this system truly entropic.
Merlin: So you need to find somebody who thinks what you're doing is a good idea, I feel like,
Merlin: And you should say to them, listen, this often, I want you to go and change my clocks within this range of variability.
Merlin: So you could do something as simple as, you don't want to get too crazy with this, but you could go in and say, irrespective of what the time is right now on that clock, I want you to change it up or down three minutes.
Merlin: And if you did that for all of your clocks, now you're getting some entropy.
John: The thing is that I... The entropy exists in my...
John: inability or unwillingness to remember what I did last with any given clock.
John: So as soon as I set it, like two days later, for instance.
Merlin: You don't adjust?
Merlin: See, my problem is I would adjust.
Merlin: Like my stupid goddamn cheap microwave here at my office says it is, so right, my computer, which is connected to the Borg, says it's 1020 a.m.
Merlin: My microwave, which I had set correctly, now says 1028.
Merlin: So it's got, it's really, it's greasy.
Merlin: It's sliding on the rails time-wise.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: The fact that they're all wrong.
John: If you came into the house right now, okay, that's not true because it's been weirdly cleaned by like nine other people.
John: But before I started to move, if you came into the house and you said, where is the belt buckle that says STP on it for the old oil, the performance oil?
John: Yeah.
John: I would be able to walk over to whatever sleigh stack there was in the corner.
John: And find this fucking thing.
John: I knew where everything was.
Merlin: Oh, that's so interesting.
John: In all the sleigh stacks.
John: It didn't matter if I had not laid hands on it in two and a half years.
John: If you said, can you find me a protractor?
John: I would have gone, oh yeah, it's right over here.
John: And I walk up.
Merlin: As long as nobody has disturbed your sleigh stacks, you're able to put your hand to almost anything.
John: That's right.
John: But I do not remember whether the microwave...
Merlin: Stove clock is closer to the truth than the car clock or the watch clock and It causes me that perpetually perpetually you're there's not one where you like secretly know in your mind setting aside your phone and your Borg devices There is not one clock that you know secretly is almost the truth.
John: Well, this is the thing I thought that the clock in the car was 18 minutes fast But then
John: I was kind of six minutes late to everything.
John: And I realized that the clock in the car was 12 minutes fast.
John: Oh, I'm sorry.
John: Well, it was six minutes slower.
John: Oh.
Merlin: I'm going to need a primer-style diagram for this conversation.
John: Anyway, it was screwing me up.
Merlin: Back in the box at 3 p.m.
Merlin: That takes you back to 5 a.m.
Merlin: Now that John number three gets out, hides the box.
John: I mean, it's not the ideal situation.
John: It's just time, man.
John: It's just time.
John: The guys in Friendly Fire have figured out a couple of things.
John: One, they don't tell me, because we've recorded a few episodes in advance, but they haven't told me how many in advance.
John: Could be two, could be 20.
John: You don't know?
John: No, no idea.
John: No idea what's coming out this week or when we recorded it.
John: Okay.
John: All right.
John: But then they also send me a text like a few days before the show telling me what movie it is that we agreed to watch, which is something that... That's important.
John: There are other places I could find it, but I don't remember how to find those places.
John: And that's been very helpful because when I get that text, I'm like, oh, right, I do a podcast where I watch a movie.
John: Yeah.
John: And I go...
John: Anytime somebody says, hey, can you do this?
John: I say, send me a text 48 hours or 24 hours before it.
John: That puts it into the current stack mentally, sort of.
Merlin: But once it's in the stack, because that was why I accidentally discovered that texting you sometime between 7 p.m.
Merlin: and 10 p.m.,
Merlin: Sunday nights before we record, literally every Monday at 10, that something about that was a good place in your stack.
Merlin: I don't know how the system works, but you're like an AI.
Merlin: We're like, I just want to see if the results happened the way that we expected, regardless of how we got there, kind of.
Merlin: You're like a machine learning machine.
John: It's hard to just feed Nazi input into me and turn me into a Nazi.
John: You can't do that like all the Microsoft AIs.
John: But in terms of manipulating me with hand-picked inputs, you really can't go wrong.
John: By just shaving the truth off of everything to keep me from making the mistake of getting ahead of what I'm meant to do.
John: If you need me to be somewhere at 10 every Monday...
John: And you trust because here's the here's the problem.
John: No Sunday night is the same for me.
John: Oh, really?
John: Yeah.
John: Why is that?
John: There's just never been a Sunday night that's been the same as the one before or the one after because I don't have a schedule.
John: I don't have a plan.
Merlin: You don't have the sense of Sunday that one has.
Merlin: I used to find Sunday nights.
Merlin: I still find Sunday nights a little depressing even though I don't have a real job.
Merlin: But as a kid, I found it genuinely depressing.
Merlin: I did not like Sundays as a kid.
Merlin: I didn't either.
Merlin: I think there's a name for that now.
Merlin: I didn't even like Sunday mornings.
Merlin: Yeah, I think this is a phenomenon.
Merlin: I think there's been BuzzFeed articles about this.
Merlin: I think it's actually a thing.
Merlin: The sense of dread people have on Sundays.
John: It's not called I Hate Mondays.
John: It's not called the Garfield disease.
Merlin: Yeah, the silicon chip inside Garfield's head got switched to overload.
John: But no, I don't have, you know, my daughter goes to school on Mondays, but sometimes she's with me on Sunday nights.
John: Dr. Who, we call that a fixed moment in time, right?
John: That's a thing you got to do, right?
John: But not every Monday.
John: But not every Monday.
John: Because sometimes she stays with me, sometimes she's with her mother.
John: Every Sunday is different.
John: Every Sunday is different.
John: Oh, jeez.
John: And a lot of Sundays, I don't know that it's Sunday.
John: All Sunday long, I don't know that it's Sunday.
John: So at the end of Sunday, I don't know that it's going to be Monday.
John: You're kidding?
John: You spend an entire day not knowing what day of the week it is?
John: I spend a whole week not knowing what week of the month it is.
Merlin: Okay.
Merlin: That one I'm okay with, but like I have such a sense of such a valence for certain days.
Merlin: That's one reason I get so screwy during summertime is that like I go, God, today really feels like a Saturday, but it's a Thursday and it's really messing with my head.
Merlin: Oh, I have that.
Merlin: The motions and movements of the day, the valence feels much more Saturday than Thursday, which screws me up for today and screws me up for my sense of tomorrow because that day has a valence too.
John: Well, that happens to me all the time because I honestly don't know whether it's Thursday or Saturday.
John: Okay.
John: And so it's like Saturday.
John: You're like an Oliver Sacks chapter.
John: This is super interesting to me.
John: Yeah.
John: Yeah, right.
John: I don't know whether my hat is my wife.
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Merlin: You go over and pet the fireplug, you know?
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: He's fascinated by the gunnel fish.
John: Purr, purr, purr, purr.
John: But it does cause problems, but it makes it, I feel like, it makes it easier and it makes it... For you?
John: No, no, no.
John: It makes it gentle if somebody says to me...
John: We need to get this done by tomorrow.
John: You know that this needs to be done by tomorrow.
John: Oh, you do have a sense of tomorrow.
John: I have a big sense of tomorrow.
John: But if there are people, if there's a group of people, let's say three people who are like, oh, fuck, we need Roderick to do this.
John: Yeah.
John: Okay.
John: Tell him that it needs to be done tomorrow.
John: And then one of them writes me and says, this needs to get done tomorrow.
John: and i go oh shit shit okay okay okay okay um uh fuck all right i'll keep down hang on i'll get it done and then i'm scrambling and i'm knocking stuff over and i'm like okay and i'm like at the ticket ticket or i'm like or whatever and the three of them are somewhere laughing and they're like lol it doesn't need to be done tomorrow we just need it done so that we can get on to the
John: And I'm like, fuck, fuck, fuck.
John: And then I like get it in under the wire.
John: I got it done.
John: I don't care that they're laughing at me.
John: I don't care.
John: The next day if they're like, haha, we didn't need that done.
John: We just, we just wanted it done or whatever it is.
John: Or like we did need it done, but it actually didn't need to be done until a week from now or whatever, whatever.
John: Yeah.
John: I am not mad that I was misled.
John: Hmm.
John: Because, honestly, I would rather just, I want to get the thing done, and if they trusted me to get it to them on time, they have learned, probably, because this has started to happen now, they've learned that it's just better to mislead me and manipulate me than it is to count on me.
Merlin: You've, intentionally or otherwise, you've trained each other.
Merlin: You've trained them.
Merlin: This is something I used to talk about with email.
Merlin: Like if you constantly hover over your email and respond to everything the second it comes in, you're creating an expectation with people that that's what you'll do.
Merlin: And then they'll be disappointed if you don't do that in the future and think you're bad.
Merlin: So you've trained them in terms of expectations and results, like machine learning.
Merlin: But in some ways, they've gone back and trained you to some extent.
John: Yeah, right.
John: Right.
John: Like you had trained me and then you are trying an experiment or something where you're not doing it.
John: And and I'm unmoored.
John: And you're like, but, you know, the whole thing was like, I don't know whether it was, I don't know, you've been doing it for a long time.
John: It just felt like a friendly thing that you would every Sunday say.
Merlin: Okay, I'm going to put this, I'm going to click right here.
Merlin: I'm going to click.
Merlin: I want to hear the rest of this, but I'm going to click.
Merlin: I'm saying, let's see here.
Merlin: Text Roderick about show...
Merlin: Tomorrow.
Merlin: Now I'm going to, can I do that?
Merlin: Can I do that as, uh, I'll say I'll make that, uh, the 11th at a, that's a Sunday, the 11th and I'll make that at a 1900 hours.
John: Okay.
John: Yeah.
John: That's it.
John: That's perfect.
Merlin: Because I'm interested in the stack idea.
Merlin: You know what I mean.
Merlin: And also, I do want to get back to your STP belt buckle, because I'm very intrigued in that ability that you have, because I have something similar that feels to my family a little strange sometimes.
Merlin: So text Roderick about show tomorrow.
Merlin: Now, the stack is interesting to me because...
Merlin: Everybody can stand a certain amount.
Merlin: Let's say a messy desk.
Merlin: That's a classic, right?
Merlin: Some people don't want to have a clean desk.
Merlin: Some people can't stand not having a clean desk.
Merlin: A clean desk is a sign of a sick mind.
Merlin: That's right.
Merlin: You don't have to be crazy to work here.
Merlin: But it helps.
Merlin: And I think everybody's different in terms of their stack.
Merlin: Now, I'm so on the other end of the forgive my saying spectrum, which is I'm a set it and forget it guy.
Merlin: Like if it's not on the calendar where I can see it, it doesn't exist.
John: Right.
Merlin: Because like I need to like I've reached a place in life where I need to know that the calendar is truth.
Merlin: The calendar is truth.
Merlin: The calendar is a set of commitments for things that will die if they're not done on that day.
Merlin: Or nearly die.
Merlin: They might be in bad shape.
Merlin: So with you, it's more like you have a handful of...
Merlin: what, probably five-ish things, that once they're inserted into your memory module, now that stack has become your truth.
Merlin: And now you'll remember the next morning, you won't need a reminder that Monday morning as well, because it's in the stack.
Merlin: Correct?
Merlin: So, for example, I'm putting a piece of paper in your stack Sunday nights at 7 p.m., 1900 hours, I like to say.
Merlin: And you're going to remember I told you that, and then you don't need two or three more reminders.
Merlin: There's something about that range and that amount of stuff.
Merlin: What I'm trying to get at is if I tell you about something two years from Wednesday, you're probably not going to remember that.
Merlin: And if I send you 60 things to do tomorrow, you're not going to remember that.
Merlin: There's a certain distance out and amount in the stack that's optimal for you.
John: Right.
John: Like I do have a calendar and I put things in it.
John: The problem is I don't look at it.
John: Oh.
John: So my calendar is full of things.
John: And if somebody says, can you do something October 2nd?
John: I will go to October 2nd.
John: And if there's nothing there, I'll say, yes, absolutely.
John: Yeah.
John: I can do that thing.
John: The problem is I don't then put that thing in the calendar.
John: So then when somebody else comes to me and says, can you do something October 2nd?
John: I get a queasy feeling like, um, I hang on, let me look.
John: And I look at the calendar and I'm like, well, there's nothing there that
John: But I don't know.
John: And then they go, well, what do you mean you don't know?
John: Can you do the thing?
John: And I'm like... You got a tickle.
John: I think so.
John: There's a tickle.
John: There's a tickle.
John: About October 2nd somewhere.
John: Somewhere.
John: And that's when I get into those situations where people, as they're getting closer to an event, they send you a follow-up email like, all right, we're on for the second, which I'm grateful for.
John: But sometimes I'll get a jam up where somebody – where I've agreed to do two things because I didn't put the – when I found that the second was clear, I said yes, but I didn't – because I populate my calendar with things that people send me.
John: I just don't often put new things in it myself, which is terrible.
John: It's bad.
Merlin: Well, it's a thing.
Merlin: Is it a bother or do you think you don't need it?
Merlin: I mean, is it strange that I'm even asking you why you don't do that?
Merlin: Personally, I don't like it when people ask me why I don't do things.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: I am in this instance curious about why you don't write things on the calendar.
Merlin: You don't need it.
Merlin: It's frustrating.
Merlin: It's annoying.
Merlin: You don't want to be bugged about it.
Merlin: Some people just psychically don't want to see a bunch of stuff on their calendar.
John: You know what I mean?
John: It's not that I don't want to see stuff on the calendar, but I didn't used to have that many things to do when I could remember everything that I had to do.
John: Oh, yeah.
John: That sure goes away.
John: I have a lot more things to do.
John: And also, I don't remember...
John: Because I have those things where my daughter's mother will, as she's walking past, she'll say, the 18th, I'm going to be in Vegas, and that's the same day that... Forget it.
Merlin: You might as well be talking about the fucking Wizard of Oz.
Merlin: No.
Merlin: We have to have the calendars in front of us when you mention a date.
John: And I just go, oh, no.
John: Because I figure, because A, I'm my dad, I go, and then also I figure that there's... It's not even an acknowledgement.
John: I figured that there's going to... It's not a yes, it's an ack.
John: It's just a, that's right, ack.
John: It's halfway between a Kathy and a Build-A-Cat.
John: Swimsuit season, all right?
John: Oh, Irving.
John: I figure that there's a reminder coming before I have to do anything that somewhere closer to the event, someone will, again, walk past me in a kitchen and say, remember, I said I was going to be in Vegas and that that's the day that grandma needs her dentures polished or whatever.
John: Yes.
John: And I go, oh, right, right, right, right, right.
John: Oh, right, right, right.
John: Whatever.
John: So there's a lot of that kind of stuff going on.
John: Because also all my podcast co-hosts, they all have different systems.
John: But there's all, you know, like each one of the people that, you know, it's strange, but I do podcasts.
John: I don't know if you know this.
John: I don't know if you have this experience yourself.
John: But I do podcasts with different groups of dudes, all of whom have different anxiety profiles.
Merlin: Oh, interesting.
Yeah.
John: Right?
John: Like, there's you.
John: We've discussed that quite a bit.
John: Different anxiety profiles.
John: I'm super intrigued by that.
John: Well, think about Dan, someone you and I both know.
John: And think about Dan's anxiety profile.
John: It doesn't really overlap yours very much at all.
John: No.
John: It's a whole separate set of requirements.
John: Right?
John: Like, Dan needs to go to the doctor sometimes.
John: Dan's got to eat lunch.
John: Dan has to eat lunch.
John: Sometimes at the last minute...
John: he needs emergency surgery.
John: I can never tell if it's real or not.
John: And it often happens in a very short time frame, but also Dan is very busy.
John: He's extremely busy.
John: I don't know if you know this about him, but he's very busy.
John: And so if you try to schedule something far out, if you're like, hey, I'm leaving in a month, I just want you to know I'm going to be on for two weeks.
John: Maybe we could do a makeup episode.
John: That's impossible.
John: You cannot do that.
John: Dan's busy then.
John: So
John: When he sends me stuff where he's like, we have to do this and we have to do that, I'm like, okay, that goes into my function machine attached to...
John: a packet that represents an anxiety profile.
Merlin: I get what you're saying.
Merlin: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Merlin: I love that phrase.
Merlin: But yeah, everybody's got another way to put it was everybody's got their own hangups and preferences that you need to account for in how you solve problems.
John: Exactly.
John: Like Ken Jennings is somebody who he manages himself very well.
John: But Ken, of everybody that I know, has...
John: He is the most sanguine about the possibility that everything will burn down at any given moment.
John: Oh, what a great attitude.
John: Yeah, he's just like, I have to be on Good Morning America tomorrow, and so I'm going to do that.
John: But if it means that I become the host of Good Morning America...
John: then I'll be dealing with that, and our show will have to take a backseat to my new host job of Good Morning America.
John: Yes.
John: Or I could talk about our show on Good Morning America, and it could become the most popular show in America, and then we'll... But he never... He is not...
John: invested in any one thing to the degree that if it burned down, it would wobble him.
Merlin: Or, yes, I see what you're saying.
Merlin: But I mean, I'm looking at it from my point of view, being like, with my anxiety profile, it's that constant, I don't know, fear of loss or something, I guess, or a sense of like,
Merlin: And I mean, I don't want to overstate it, but loss aversion is a big thing with people.
Merlin: There's lots of science about that.
Merlin: And it sounds like in his case, he's like the free solo guy with his crazy amygdala.
Merlin: It's just that in Ken's case, he does not have as much bioavailable automatic concern about change.
Yeah.
Merlin: He sees it could be an opportunity for a good thing.
Merlin: It could just not be a thing at all.
Merlin: Whereas me, I heavily invest all kinds of portent into anything that could be a change.
John: Right.
John: I think you have it.
John: Am I getting close?
John: I think you've nailed it.
John: Yes, I think you are.
John: I think you are.
John: But that must be crazy making.
John: That must drive you nuts.
John: Well, because of everybody that I deal with, Ken introduces insecurity into my life because I say...
John: Well, you know, the show that we're doing, you know, this could happen or that happens.
John: And Ken will say something to the effect of, well, if that happens, it means we don't do the show anymore.
John: Shrug.
John: I guess we better not let that happen.
John: He's a shrugger.
John: And I go, what?
John: Well, that's crazy talk.
John: And the thing is, Ken totally fights for the show all the time.
John: Like, he's not blasé about it, but he does have this, like, shrug...
John: And so it's the one instance where I feel myself kind of go down like a cat and go like, no, wait a minute.
John: Give me some reassuring language.
John: And Ken's like, yeah, I don't really do that.
John: I don't give reassuring language.
John: Oof.
John: Because that just seems like extra oxygen I would have to process.
John: And it's like, yes, it is extra oxygen, which I'd like you to process on my behalf as a favor to me.
John: He says, I don't know what you want me to tell you.
John: Oh, my goodness.
Merlin: Can you imagine having him for a dad?
Merlin: I can't say there's not a monster under your bed.
Merlin: That wouldn't be rational.
Merlin: The way to be a learned person, I forget where I heard this quote, but something like, it's good to have strong opinions, weakly held, you know, the idea that like, it's okay to have a strong opinion, be willing to change.
Merlin: It sounds like he has hardly, hardly any opinion, hardly held at all.
Merlin: And he could just walk away.
Merlin: It was the flames.
Merlin: Yeah.
John: He's walking down the middle of the street with a shotgun in one hand and the world is blowing up behind him.
John: But so Aloha has been very good.
John: I'm practicing Aloha with Ken because I practice Aloha with all my co-hosts in various ways.
John: And with Ken, it's just like he is not going to give me any reassurance.
John: And yet his behavior is consistent and consistently indicates that he is doing what he wants to do and that this is like he is dedicated to this.
John: And so I just am aloha.
John: I just have to aloha everything and every day could be my last, right?
John: Yeah.
John: Now with the friendly fire guys, they both have different and in some ways oppositional anxiety profiles.
John: So that's complicated.
John: There's three of us there.
John: Yeah.
John: Adam Pranica is a very smart guy and a very sweet guy, but he agrees with whoever was talking last, which is very...
John: difficult to plan around because if if if you're talking and someone else is talking adam and is in the middle he'll be like yeah yeah you made a lot of good points and then the other person will say the opposite and be like yeah i agree with that so he's like um eventually his vote just gets canceled out which is not a good way to run a three-person democracy
John: And then Ben is absolutely consumed with anxiety to the point that he is maybe going to explode.
Merlin: So in that case, he's the one looking for assurance.
John: Well...
John: But he also has strong opinions strongly held.
John: Oh, boy.
John: That's quite a pickle of a barrel.
John: It is.
John: That's a lot to deal with.
John: It is a lot.
John: But anyway, all of these things are on my calendar.
John: I know that you cannot understand this, but I have four different shows.
John: I do one a day.
John: And every night before I go to sleep,
John: I have to remember that I do a podcast, first of all.
John: And then I have to remember which one.
John: And sometimes I don't.
John: Sometimes I forget.
John: I wake up in the morning and I go, what do I have to do today?
John: Same thing I've been doing on this day for two years.
John: And it's just not there.
John: But I can tell you...
John: So many things that you'd be surprised I remember.
John: That's the whole premise of the issue.
John: That's the STP belt buckle right there.
John: Well, it is.
John: And all these stories and everything that we talk about and all the little things and the little things, I remember them all.
John: I just don't have a – I don't have a –
John: I definitely have a calendar in my head of the Napoleonic Wars.
John: I just don't have a calendar.
Merlin: Well, you're good at remembering things and sequences that things happened in.
Merlin: And it's tough for me to say because my memory for things like conversations is pretty terrible.
Merlin: But you do seem to remember like fairly specific.
Merlin: I've not tested you.
Merlin: I've quizzed you in the past and you have amazing recollection for conversations.
Merlin: When things happened, you know it was this tour.
Merlin: You were in town at that place.
Merlin: I go and I look at a picture and I'm like, wait, so Nabil was the drummer at that point.
Merlin: It's in a record store.
Merlin: And I do have to go look at the metadata to have any idea when that photograph was taken.
Merlin: You know what I mean?
Merlin: Whereas you seem to...
Merlin: I don't know, maybe you have a kind of bespoke dementia.
Merlin: You know, you've got that kind of specificity.
Merlin: I do a thing, so here's what I was going to say.
Merlin: So you and your belt buckle.
Merlin: And again, I have been friends with John Sedgwick long enough to know to question everything about myself in a way that makes me even more anxious.
Merlin: But there's that phrase, photographic memory.
Merlin: And I don't know what the science on that is, but I can tell you that when I do have a very strange mind,
Merlin: for remembering certain kinds of things.
Merlin: Like a lot of people, maybe a lot of people my age, I have a very specific location memory for a lot of songs and audio.
Merlin: Like, I can remember what...
Merlin: intersection i was at when a certain part of a podcast played i'm able to tell you how far i need to fast forward based on where i was listening to this before and where i paused the audio that kind of thing but also weird and i don't want to say photographic memory but like when i was a kid i could remember stuff from books and i could remember where on the page that thing was
Merlin: Not flawlessly, but in a kind of impressionistic way.
Merlin: And that still happens today.
Merlin: But of course, with my failing memory, it has gotten weird.
Merlin: So my daughter will say, where's the brush?
Merlin: Where's the pink brush?
Merlin: Or where is my hat?
Merlin: And I'll say, your hat is on something.
Merlin: Your hat is on something, and I've seen it several times in the last few days.
Merlin: It might be something wooden, but that kind of thing.
Merlin: Or I'll remember, or I could just go, your pink brush is behind the bench by the Lego fishing store.
Merlin: I don't know how I know, but I know.
Merlin: And that's where it was.
Merlin: And I guess maybe everybody has that, but given how terrible the rest of my memory is, it is sometimes kind of crazy that I know which list back the STP buckle is near.
John: You and I have a different spatial, like a different geography, because I can remember...
John: I can sense the location of things.
John: And I'm constantly amazed by it in a similar way that you do.
John: You surprise yourself.
John: Yeah, I don't say like, oh, that's in the top drawer.
John: I say, I kind of, it's like I almost have a divining rod.
Merlin: Oh, yeah, like you're looking at a crystal ball and you're like, oh, I can tell that it's nighttime and there's trees.
Merlin: Like that kind of thing where you're like, like I say, impressionistic sometimes.
John: Yeah, I just go like – I kind of put my hand up and I go, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
John: And it's just kind of like, follow me.
John: And I go – I walk up and I kind of have my hand out like the lady from Poltergeist.
John: The little lady?
John: The little lady.
John: And I just kind of go, meow.
John: And then I reach my hand under a stack of papers.
John: Yes.
John: And I pull it out.
Merlin: I've said to my family as though I were the small woman.
Merlin: I will say something like, come with me.
Merlin: I don't know where it is, but I know that I know where it is.
Merlin: It's almost like tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon.
Merlin: And then it's sort of like your passport calling out to you.
Merlin: I might put my hands up, and I force myself to stop looking at the room in that sort of Daniel Kahneman first-order way.
Merlin: I'm going to go into slow thinking, second-order thinking, and browsing, and it will find me.
Merlin: Like you say, like a divining rod.
Merlin: It's the rod, not in the water.
Merlin: I just need to get near the rod, and it'll find me.
Right.
Merlin: And they don't understand that sometimes.
John: I do not have the thing where you have some kind of synesthesia where you can remember where it was that you were listening to where you were when you were listening to a thing.
John: I do remember where on the page...
John: certain things were like, I can open a book and kind of go to where the thing was and put my finger on the, on the paragraph.
John: Yeah.
John: Um, so there is a, we do have a similarity there.
John: There's part, part of remembering conversations with people is remembering you were standing there.
John: I was standing here.
John: You reached over and picked up a pack of cigarettes and you said,
John: Blank.
John: Because you recall the scene.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: I remember sitting waiting for a table with you and your Millennium girlfriend, and she was testing out my pen in my notebook.
Merlin: I have these sort of like flashbulb memories of these.
Merlin: I remember sitting at the table and you being annoyed as I kept fast-forwarding through all of your new songs.
Merlin: Like I said to Dan the other day, I have such a specific recollection of you taking me to the basement for those glasses that you picked out for me.
Merlin: There are these things.
Merlin: Max Temkin calls them flashbulb memories, those kinds of things.
Merlin: I don't have it for everything by a long shot, but for some kinds of things, there's something really indelible about it.
John: Yeah, that's nice.
John: I like a flashbulb memory.
Mm-hmm.
Merlin: You also have a means... Okay, so you had an umbrella stand that had umbrellas and swords.
Merlin: You've talked a lot about things like cigar boxes for ticket stops.
Merlin: So you have...
Merlin: um, a way of, uh, I guess organizing, but like gathering, taxonomizing, finding meaningful distinctions.
Merlin: To me, it's a step beyond organizing.
Merlin: Cause for some people organizing is just putting shit in a box.
Merlin: But in your case, like there's something, there are meaningful distinctions that the objects in your life clue you to.
Merlin: And then you, you're the, you're the, the vessel for putting those things where they need to be.
John: Well, like I have a, I have a ticket, I have a cigar box that's full of concert tickets.
John: I have a cigar box that's full of plane tickets.
John: I have a cigar box that's full of backstage passes.
John: Now, I have a cigar box that's full of tickets to plays, musicals, monster truck rallies, baseball games, things that I don't... Non-musical events.
John: Right.
John: But if I go to a play, which is...
John: not side by side by Sondheim, but if I go to a play that's set to the music of Elton John, what box does the ticket go in?
John: Right.
John: The music, the concert box?
John: It's a jukebox musical.
John: And it has to go, that would have to go in the miscellaneous box of theater and sports.
John: That's where I'd put it, yeah.
John: But then the boxes themselves don't pick up much space.
John: Mm-hmm.
John: the danger is if you said to me at any point, are those tickets arranged in any kind of order within the box, that would be, that would set me on a path of ruin because if I, if I needed, because what I, what the box full of plane tickets is to me is a potential resource for,
John: It's not a resource yet because it's not organized by date.
Merlin: Well, also it's not like a collection in the sense of being like baseball cards or Pokemon cards or something.
Merlin: You don't need the taxonomy.
Merlin: If it's a set of playing cards, a 52-card deck plus two jokers and instructions, like that, by the nature of that, is supposed to be a little bit chaotic.
Merlin: Those don't need to be organized.
Merlin: They just need to be together together.
Merlin: And with the plane tickets, that's something where you might need to go back at some point, and for whatever reason, you want to find what your gate was for that.
Merlin: Is that the idea?
John: Well, but also... So, for instance, it isn't that I would ever need to go back and say, what date...
John: did I fly on, you know, what date did I fly Western Airlines to Denver that one time in 1986?
John: I would never, I don't think need, but I might.
John: But they form a collective organization.
John: knowledge base that you can cross-reference.
John: How many times have I ever flown to Colorado?
John: Of all the times I've flown to Colorado, how many of them were in the spring and how many of them were in the fall?
John: How many times did I fly United Airlines before I decided I would never fly United Airlines again?
John: Right.
Merlin: And if you do have stuff from the 80s, wow.
Merlin: I mean, I would do a lot of that with Gmail because Gmail has such good search in it for finding stuff.
Merlin: But there's also something about the physicality of that, right?
Merlin: Isn't that part of the fun?
John: yes because it's nice to see things that are yellowed um it's nice to see things that are written in you know that were printed out by a printer rather than you know old tickets that are made that are on cards airline tickets used to be great they're real thick real thick and like then they went to that thermal paper like fax paper or receipt paper and got all smudgy and not as fun you know yeah and now forget about it
John: So I have a friend that I was introduced to by John Flansburg and Robin Goldwasser, listeners to the program, at least John is.
John: Her name is Susie Matthews, and she is the daughter of Mike Matthews, who is the crazy guy that founded Electro Harmonics.
John: Really?
John: Electro Harmonics being the makers of the Big Muff distortion pedal, among a thousand other incredible pedals.
Yeah.
Wow.
John: micro synth and the I had a phaser that was like it was like a bread box it was huge yep they're massive and it went tonk tonk it didn't have a button the whole thing was a button yeah the whole thing was a button those are those are worth money now but um uh Mike Matthews is like one of those New York guys from the 60s who's just like wow you know he just uh he just invented this fuzz box thing and I think he had a lot of girlfriends and he wore his hair in a big
John: I've met Mike Matthews.
John: I've been to... Oh, he looks colorful.
John: He's a colorful guy.
John: Oh, my goodness.
John: And his daughter, Susie, is also a... She's her own free spirit.
John: And at some point, we were... We haven't talked in a while, but we were friends and talked frequently.
John: And at one point, and she's an artist, and she said, why don't you send me
John: All of your ticket stubs and I'll make an artwork out of them.
John: And although I was polite, it felt like she was saying, why don't you send me all of your children and I will cut them up and...
John: And like shellac them to a canvas.
John: I was like, you're going to.
Merlin: I'll make them critically probative.
Merlin: You're going to take.
John: I'll give them a persuasive theory.
John: And the thing is that she was, it was a great idea because what she was saying, it was, she was attempting at the time to help me deal with clutter.
Merlin: I've had three different lady friends in my life say, how about I turn all your rock and roll shirts into a quilt?
Merlin: And I'm like, well, that just breaks all the shirts, and then I have a shitty quilt.
John: You know, Ben Gibbard's mother made keyboard covers and amp covers for him out of the 5,000 rock shirts that he had.
John: Oh, that's practical, yeah.
John: And Adam Pranica has a bedspread made out of rock shirts, and it's got like two or three long winter shirts on there.
John: Wow.
John: And I look at it and I go, oh, those shirts are worth a lot of money now.
John: But I don't think they are.
Merlin: But it's just a way of saying... He must not have yellow pit stains like I do.
Merlin: I wouldn't want to be sleeping anywhere near those.
John: Well, you just take the middle out.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: But you're right.
Merlin: They still smell.
Merlin: So she very aggressively wanted to art your things into a different thing.
John: Because she thought that it would be better if I had like a three foot by three foot square...
John: painting, incorporating all of my, you know, multimedia artwork, incorporating all of my tickets that she had scissored into.
John: Cause she did a lot of, uh, she did a lot of work.
John: A lot of her, she had big, big artworks and they, they had a lot of numbers in them.
John: You know, that was numerological.
John: She would find, uh, she'd find a thousand
John: uh, numbers from a old movie marquee.
John: Oh, interesting.
John: Okay.
John: And make, make things out of, uh, out of, uh, out of numbers.
John: So she was going to do this out of my tickets.
John: And I was like, um, that's super nice of you, but like, no.
John: And also like, stop even thinking about my shoe box full of tickets because, or cigar box full of tickets.
John: Cause I don't want them.
John: I don't want you like starting to covet it.
John: Because, and there are tickets missing, right?
John: Like, I don't think I have the, I don't think I have a ticket stub from Dio and Dokken because I don't know it.
John: Like, it went through the wash or something.
John: It stayed in my jeans and,
John: And it's not in the box.
John: There are things that aren't in the box is what I'm saying.
John: And that affects how I look at the whole box.
John: I look at the box and I go, that's the box.
John: It's got a lot of stuff in it, but it doesn't have everything.
John: And so I can only love it up to here.
John: You know, it's only useful up to here.
Merlin: Interesting.
Okay.
John: Like nobody saved the ticket stubs for all the flights that I took as a kid.
John: But I have saved every single one of my daughter's ticket stubs.
John: Really?
John: Yes.
John: If she wants a shoebox.
John: Well, she won't.
John: I know.
John: But if she did.
John: Let's save these comics for you.
John: Why?
John: This was daddy's shirt.
Merlin: This was daddy's shirt.
Merlin: The painful question is to always, now you're probably the wrong person to ask this to, is to ask yourself, like, when's the last time somebody in your family said, I saved this for you?
Merlin: And you're like, hmm, all right.
Merlin: But in your case, you're probably very happy to have somebody save for you.
Merlin: It's more information for the system.
John: Like my mom burns everything.
John: Yeah.
John: So I go, where's the thing?
John: And she goes, oh, I burned that.
John: You know, like, oh, that's gone.
John: And it's gone, right?
John: Don't bother looking for it.
John: Yeah, don't bother looking for it.
John: It's gone.
John: And I am just like always, oh, mom, that was exactly the thing that we need right now.
John: And she's like, yeah, well, six months ago I burned it.
John: My dad didn't intentionally ever hand me something and say, I saved this for you.
John: But my dad's complete jumble of an archive preserved things for me, even though he didn't do it on purpose.
John: Yeah, you said he had tons of letters and check stubs and stuff like that.
John: My uncle, every once in a while, will send me an envelope, a manila envelope full of things.
John: But at a certain point, my dad, my uncle, and their sister started to do that thing where...
John: Every photograph or letter they would make not just three copies of, but 13 copies of.
John: Oh, no.
John: That creates a lot of noise.
John: It does.
John: And so I'll get this manila envelope and it'll be my Uncle Jack saying, like, I've sent you all these things.
John: And then I'll open it up and it's like I have all of these things because these are all photocopies of the original thing and no one knows where that is.
John: But I have these because you guys made 13 copies.
John: Dad had four of them.
John: You have four of them clearly.
John: You're sending me two.
John: And that's a little staticky.
John: And part of that is because what increases the static is that those came from my uncle.
John: So I was talking about this the other day.
John: The piece of paper now has sentimentality attached to it.
John: Separate from its information, it has the sentimentality of this came from my uncle who thought it was important and sent it to me.
John: And so it should go into the shredder.
John: Yeah.
John: Now I have to... Now it stays on the countertop next to my upside down... If you keep anything long enough, it gets sentimental value.
Merlin: Yeah, right, right.
Merlin: That's the odd thing, yeah.
John: Well, so here's... So let me run this by you.
John: Yeah.
John: The people that bought my house said a very interesting thing.
John: They said, we don't have that much stuff.
John: We're like a couple that's been living in an apartment.
John: So anything you want to leave...
John: in the house when you go, go ahead and leave it.
John: And I said, what do you mean?
Merlin: Like furniture and stuff?
Merlin: Is it like when you're at a campsite and you leave extra firewood and paper towels?
Merlin: You know, I always do that.
Merlin: Like when we leave, if there's firewood, we're going to leave the firewood.
Merlin: I figure it's a nice thing.
Merlin: Now, somebody else might think that's a nuisance.
John: No, no, no.
John: You cut up more firewood for the next people so when they first arrive at the campsite, they can get a fire going.
John: Yeah.
John: Pay it forward.
John: But they were like...
John: We have no... You know, if you leave nothing, that's fine.
John: But if there's stuff that you don't want, if there's a chair or an old, you know, bureau or something, leave it.
John: If we don't want it, we'll deal with it.
John: Okay.
John: They're very, you know, they're very, like, take care of business type of people.
John: And they figure...
John: Um, maybe you, are we going to leave something that is useful to us?
John: Sure.
John: It's not a trap.
John: It doesn't sound like a trap.
John: All right.
John: And so I said, well, actually I'm thinking about leaving the dining room table and chairs because where I'm going, I'm not going to need it.
John: It's in a, it's in a classic style.
John: We don't need dining rooms.
John: That's right.
John: Where I'm going.
John: And they were like, yeah, that's fine.
John: Whatever.
Whatever.
John: Yeah.
John: It's all great.
John: It's all stuff that is super cool and kind of belongs here.
John: The kind of thing that anyone would want.
John: Anyone would want.
John: Of course you want a dining room table, even if you're going to get a new one when you move into your new house.
John: Absolutely.
John: And there's a nice dining room table and seven chairs.
John: You're going to be like, great.
John: Well, we can have a party tomorrow.
John: You put your boxes on there.
John: Yeah, put your boxes on the dining room table, just like I do.
John: Or seven chairs.
John: But then... Just like you do.
John: And seven chairs.
John: You can put a jacket on each chair and then another jacket on top of that jacket.
John: Mm-hmm.
Merlin: And your regular Algonquin round table.
Merlin: All the boxes could talk to each other.
John: But so here's the thing.
John: Mm-hmm.
John: This is even hard for me to say.
John: Mm-hmm.
John: But...
John: There's a baby grand piano here.
John: And it's a baby grand piano that my mother bought out of the little nickel in, or the penny saver, or whatever it is called in your neighborhood, in 1974.
John: It's a Wheelock brand piano.
John: It dates from 1915 or something.
John: she bought it for who knows how much nothing probably it was in the little nickel it's the piano that i sat at when i was seven years old and tried to learn scales it's the piano that i sat at when i was 10 years old and played the theme from close encounters it's the piano i taught myself how to play piano on it's the piano that i wrote the commander thinks aloud on
John: It's the piano that moved into this house with me and that I play every couple of days and have played sometimes every morning when I woke up and every night before I went to bed.
John: It's my piano.
John: And from the time it was my mother's piano until that day in high school when I sat down at it and said, how does this work exactly?
John: I sit at this all the time, but how does this work?
John: And I sat and started to...
John: This is the piano that I learned Harvey Danger's music on.
John: I've taught myself music at this piano.
John: If there was a way for an item to be imbued with sentimental significance, this piano fits all the criteria.
John: It has it all.
John: It's been with me almost my whole life.
John: It was in my...
John: childhood home.
John: It's a big part of my musical life.
John: And this is the piano that my cousin Sela said, something's wrong with your piano.
John: It sounds sick.
John: And I said, get out of my house.
John: But where I'm going, I don't need a baby grand piano.
John: I don't even know where I'm going, Merlin.
John: But I know when I get there, I'm not going to need a baby grand piano.
John: So I go to my mom and I say, what about the piano?
John: And she without, she didn't even let me get that far into the sentence.
John: She's like, get rid of the piano.
John: I'm like, yeah, I know.
John: But mom, it's got all these.
John: And it's just like, I'm, it's like I'm speaking Chinese to her because, and this has been my whole life.
John: I'm like, but it has all this significance.
John: And she just doesn't hear it.
John: She's like, burn it.
John: But for the first time, this combination of packing up my house and
John: Trying to be swimming with the turds every day.
John: Trying to reduce, reuse, recycle.
John: And with the idea that this young couple is like, whatever you don't want, leave it.
John: And I'm like, do you leave a piano?
John: Is that cutting firewood for somebody to arrive at the campsite?
John: Or is that leaving the car that you don't want anymore and pulling off the VIN tags?
Merlin: Yeah, I've told you about a friend of mine back in Florida who did this thing all the time where he would have this very earnest conversation with you.
Merlin: Another guy in the band scene.
Merlin: He'd have this very earnest conversation with you.
Merlin: He's like, listen, I have something I really like for you to have.
Merlin: I was like, oh, what, what, what?
Merlin: He's like, this is the radio that my dad and me used to listen to when I was a kid.
Merlin: And you'd be like, whoa, really?
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Like, yeah, yeah.
Merlin: He would do this all the time.
Merlin: He'd have these things that were invested with so much sentimentality and portent and like these parts of his life.
Merlin: And it was always broken.
Merlin: So basically it became a way of saying like, now you throw this away from me.
Merlin: But now you're going to throw away Tony's dad's radio.
Merlin: This is your problem now.
Merlin: Firewood is not a problem.
Merlin: A piano is a lot to deal with.
John: I don't want it to be a problem.
John: And the thing is, I think there are a lot of people who... I mean, there are people listening to the program right now who are like, I would take that piano.
John: But there are plenty of people who would move into a house and go, there's a baby grand piano here.
John: That's amazing.
John: Right?
John: It's like decorative.
John: It's a great piano.
Merlin: Let me just clarify one thing.
Merlin: Just to clarify.
Merlin: You, for whatever reason, you don't even need to give me reasons why or why not, but you are not only okay with not having that piano, but you'd prefer not to have to deal with it.
Merlin: Whether that means moving, storage, like whatever it is, you'd just as soon not...
John: Have the piano, correct?
John: No.
John: I am saying this to you now because I am deeply, profoundly wrestling with what to do with the piano.
John: Would you prefer to have it if you had somewhere to put it?
John: Not necessarily.
John: Okay.
John: Because if I am serious, if I am in earnest about...
John: I mean, the whole game, this whole game for the entire last year about selling this house has not just been, I've lived in this house for 10 years and now I need to move somewhere else or I'll live here for 20 years and I'll be somebody that lived in the same house for 20 years.
John: It's been, maybe this is totally flawed thinking, but I realized that modernism,
John: my mom and i always had this aesthetic argument she was a modernist and i was a uh eclectic and she would say the great thing about modernism when it arrived she said you know because she was there when it arrived she was like people used to live in houses that had freaking doilies on the back of everything
John: And grandma got up and started dusting at six o'clock on Saturday morning and she was still dusting at nine o'clock at night.
John: But modernism came in and all of a sudden you just opened the sliding glass doors and the wind of change blew through and every shelf had one thing on it.
John: And it was liberating.
John: And I was always like, I wish that you'd kept those doilies because I would give them to Susie Matthews.
Merlin: You're almost more Victorian.
Merlin: We're like, when you're taking that dust analogy or dust fact, like you got to go dust some very complicated chair legs.
Merlin: then readjust the doilies and there's like this whole like um i don't know almost like um existential debt physical debt of dealing with all the stuff that you have and and the more stuff you have that's nice the more stuff you have to keep nice more you know what i mean more sources of anxiety of like you know just the weight of physicality in life and she's happy to leave that behind she's happy to leave it behind but but i was attracted to more you know like she told me at one point
John: Your grandmother kept stacks of money under the corners of all of her oriental carpets because she didn't believe in banks.
John: Okay.
John: And so if you lifted up a corner of the carpet, there would be a stack of money under there.
John: And it wasn't so big that it made it hard to walk on the carpet, but it made it very difficult to deal with your grandmother's house after she died because you couldn't just say to some movers –
John: take everything out because she had put stacks of money under things.
John: And I was like, I resemble that.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: But... You know what?
Merlin: We'll tell you one thing about an oriental rug.
Merlin: No service charges.
Merlin: No overdraft fees.
Merlin: You know what I'm saying?
John: That's right.
Merlin: No fraud detection phone calls.
John: But the piano... So if I'm moving, I am moving into modernism.
John: And by...
John: By embracing modernism, which is a thing I don't understand and up until now have been fairly hostile to as a global aesthetic.
John: By embracing it, I have found a path, what I think is a path, to orderliness that I could not accomplish if I weren't adopting an entire movement of
John: simultaneous you you're going all in that's the attempt right to say like so it's not something where you're like saying oh i'm leaving behind my music life from my childhood and setting aside these things it's it's more that and for and for a penny and for a pound and then for the new modernism yes if i am going to have like i have a i have several little artworks
John: That are made out of baleen and like walrus ivy.
John: And there's one little statue of two polar bears fucking that's carved out of an ucic.
John: And an ucic is a walrus penis bone.
Merlin: Oh, wow.
Merlin: That's a lot going on.
John: Yeah.
John: So if you take a walrus penis bone, which is a very porous bone, and then you carve it into a statue of two animals having sex, it becomes a fertility device.
John: And this is of a polar bear humping another polar bear.
John: And it's a treasure.
John: I don't need to say what a treasure it is.
John: I challenge you to find one.
John: I definitely don't have one here.
John: But if I'm going to display this two polar bears humping carved out of an Usyk, it cannot be on a shelf with a bunch of baleen and ivory boats.
John: It has to just sit by itself.
John: I have to choose it.
John: Not only do I have to choose it, I have to take some light and shine it on the thing.
John: And it will just be there all by itself.
John: And people will come in and they won't look at the shelf and their eyes will just glaze over and just see junk.
John: They'll be forced to confront the two polar bears humping carved out of an ucic.
John: And I have to choose that.
John: And all of that is fascinating to me.
John: as opposed to just like, oh, well, this is made out of some part of a whale.
John: Yeah, these are all my maritime artifacts.
John: Right, right.
John: This is all the stuff that's made out of whale and walrus, and they all go on a shelf together.
John: These are all of the belt buckles that have to do with interstate trucking in the 1970s, and they all go on a shelf together.
John: No, you pick one.
John: You pick the one that says STP, or you pick the one that says...
John: You know, like, if this van's rocking, keep on walking.
Merlin: This is so philosophically different from your old approach.
Merlin: Yes.
Merlin: Really, really fundamentally different.
Merlin: Where you're saying, like, oh, I don't have my ticket to a Dio concert from the 80s, Dio and Dokken.
Merlin: It's very different from, like, this is just going to be one walrus boner.
John: Right.
John: And if I do want to... If I were able to find my Dio ticket...
John: I could put that Dio ticket in a frame and find a place where it was the only thing on that wall.
John: Right.
John: And that would be a thing.
John: But don't have – I could even give all my tickets to Susie Matthews and have her make a single artwork out of them.
John: But don't just have a stack of cigar boxes in the living room that have every ticket you ever touched.
John: Right.
John: So this is like it's going to be a massive challenge for me.
John: It's going to break me psychologically in what I hope is a good way.
John: It's going to shatter the glacier.
John: And is there room in that for a grand piano?
John: And part of the problem of the grand piano is that it is so imbued with significance.
John: Part of the power of leaving it go is
John: is that it's like a major anchor, an anchor in a past life.
John: But to take that grand piano and roll it out
John: onto the street and roll it down, you know, just push it down the hill, I couldn't do.
John: I couldn't give it to a thrift store.
Merlin: I mean, have you considered donating it?
Merlin: It seems like there would be somebody in the community.
Merlin: There's got to be a church, a community center, a veterans group.
Merlin: There's got to be somebody that would like to have that.
John: Here's a little... This will be a little Easter egg hunt for you.
John: Have you ever gone on...
John: your local craigslist and put free piano no i haven't it's a fun adventure because uh in san francisco right now i'm going to guess there are 40 free pianos really and a handful probably like spin it like stand up classroom pianos you would think but there will be a handful of
John: Not just baby grand pianos, but full grand pianos, as well as player pianos.
John: What?
John: How is that possible?
John: Parlor pianos that are gorgeous.
John: Why doesn't John Vanderslice have all of them?
John: He bought as many as he could fit.
John: The thing is, it used to be that everyone had a piano, and now no one has a piano.
John: It used to be everyone had an accordion.
Merlin: It used to be a thing where I've known more than one person where mom got to a certain age and said, look, I'm due.
Merlin: You all owe me.
Merlin: I want a nice piano.
Merlin: Right?
Merlin: Like I've gotten you guys off to school every day.
Merlin: You know, I've been the mom and now I would like us to have a nice piano and I'm going to play it and none of you are going to protest.
Merlin: That used to be a thing.
Merlin: That was a thing like in the 70s, 80s.
Merlin: Not always mom, but often mom.
Merlin: It's like, I want a piano in this house, damn it.
Merlin: We had a piano in my house when I was a kid.
Merlin: We have the means, we have the room, we have the sunken living room.
Merlin: I want a goddamn piano.
Merlin: And that was like, and it wasn't just like a status thing.
Merlin: It was like, just this is, this will feel more like the home I've always wanted to have if it has a piano in it.
Merlin: So you will get me a piano.
John: And I think what that represents, I don't know why I just said represents.
John: I think what that represents is that my mom, your mom grew up in a house that had a piano.
John: And at some point that piano got lost at some point.
John: It was, um,
John: grandma's piano didn't make it to the future.
John: Like my dad grew up in a house with an enormous Steinway.
John: You know, my aunt Julia Lee had a beautiful baby Steinway.
John: And when, when my uncle Cal died, my cousin page said, do you want Julia Lee's Steinway?
John: And I had this wheel lock and,
John: Well, the Steinway was 10 times the piano that this Wheelock is.
John: And I was sentimental about the freaking Wheelock.
John: And I was like, I can't get rid of this piano.
John: And briefly, and I know this sounds like...
John: I know that sometimes I say things that sound so me that they can't possibly be true, but there was a brief week where I thought that I considered having two baby grand pianos.
Merlin: Your house is big, but it's not that big.
Merlin: It's not that big.
Merlin: One would have to become a barn piano.
Merlin: A barn piano, which is a bad thing.
Merlin: That's a bad piano life.
John: And then... It's fine for a scooter, maybe not for a piano.
John: Two scooters, one piano.
John: That's what they say.
John: But then it occurred to me, hey, wait, my brother Bart is a professional piano player and music teacher.
John: And so I wrote Bart and said, do you want Julia Lee's piano?
John: And he said, why are you in a position to give me Julia Lee's piano?
John: And I was like, it's a long story.
John: It was about to land here, but I have this trash wheelock that I'm tied to.
John: And so the Steinway went to Bart, and of course Bart makes it sing, and he didn't have one.
John: I mean, he's had 40 electric pianos, but he never had a beautiful piano.
Merlin: It's a redistribution of wealth except with pianos.
John: There's a lot of pianos in my family and they move around.
John: But this, I think, is maybe one of the last.
John: Because, again, nobody plays piano.
John: I'm the only, you know, I'm the only person that I know.
Merlin: Not many people, not only that, I mean, it's a, as I say, a perfect storm.
Merlin: Fewer people are probably like, people who have keyboard abilities have ways of doing that.
Merlin: And I'm guessing fewer and fewer people have the kind of footprint where you could have a baby grand piano in your house.
John: Yeah, that's right.
John: And, you know, if this baby grand piano hadn't been in the center of my living room the last 11 years, it would have been a lot easier to get around this house.
John: But also that space would have just been taken up with fucking cardboard boxes full of ticket stubs.
John: So at least with the piano, I had someplace to put my keys.
John: And your candelabra.
John: And my candelabras.
John: Or I guess, wait a minute.
John: I think candelabra is already plural.
John: Candelabra is plural, isn't it?
Merlin: You get one candelabrum.
Merlin: A candelabrum?
Merlin: If it's female, it's candelabra-y.
Merlin: A candelabra-y.
John: So what are you going to do?
John: I feel like I owe them a text...
John: Where I walk around the house and I go... The new owners, the new tenants.
John: Where I say, okay, I know that you said leave some stuff, but what about this?
John: And I'm sure they'll be like, the dining room table is great.
John: What about this hutch?
John: The hutch, leave it.
John: And then I'll be like, what about this grand piano?
John: And if they're like, wow...
John: then I know I'll have a winner.
John: I'll know I have a winner.
Merlin: Oh yeah, it was meant to happen.
John: Yeah, and if they're like, whoa.
John: Do they have kids?
John: not yet, is the way that all my neighbors are talking about them.
John: They have never said that, of course, but this is the way neighbors are, right?
John: I've overheard a couple of neighbors talking about them.
Merlin: I think one way or another, you're going to get a strong opinion that will tell you what to do.
Merlin: I don't think there's going to be a tepid opinion.
John: No.
John: And then, and I think based on that, I have to then, I have to, at a certain point in my life, I'm going to have to say to this piano, go with God.
John: Use your wheels.
John: Now what's complicating it is up until now, I've been trying to move myself like 10 bags and four boxes and three guitars into the back of my Suburban and I drive it to the storage space and I get the cart out and I wheel it up there and I put the stuff in the storage space.
John: That's what I've been doing.
John: Yeah.
John: But I just got an email the last day or two from a guy who said,
John: I love all the great shows.
John: I also work at the head office of some moving company.
John: Can we help you move?
John: And he's doing it as a... He's doing this as an all the great shows.
John: That's a very kind offer.
John: It is.
John: But it makes the piano question...
John: That much crazier because all I have to do now is say, yeah, and the piano.
John: And then they'll pack it up and it will go somewhere and it will be a kick the can down the road.
John: Well, and I don't want to do that.
John: I don't want to kick this can down the road.
John: I'm here.
John: I'm here at the moment of decision about the piano.
Merlin: So this is, this is not about the piano really.
Merlin: It's kind of about the piano, but it's really about the philosophy and the, and the buy-in for the new program.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: Kind of.
Merlin: Yes.
Merlin: Cause you don't, it sounds, I mean, if I could say, it sounds like you do not have that surpassingly strong of an opinion about saying, hell yeah, I'll do whatever it takes to keep this fucking piano.
Right.
Merlin: It's more like you're almost looking for an out, it seems to me.
John: I feel like the piano is the thing.
John: If I embrace modernism, I cannot have the piano.
John: I want the piano.
John: My heart is in the piano.
John: But if I embrace modernism, I cannot have the piano.
John: And if I keep the piano, I am betraying the plan to embrace modernism.
John: So the whole thing hinges on it.
John: This is the decision.
John: And if I bring the piano, then I bring with it my eclecticism.
John: And the candelabra.
Merlin: I get it.
Merlin: I get it.
Merlin: I get it.
Merlin: I get it.
Merlin: You've probably already considered this, but I just discovered that there is a website called pianoadoption.com.
Merlin: Well, you can go to pianoadoption.com and you could say, I have a piano if you would like to have it.
Merlin: I don't know.
Merlin: I'm just saying, personally, I never look at Craigslist.
Merlin: I think it's a morass.
Merlin: This is a bespoke site.
Merlin: Now, there are a lot of Washington pianos in here.
Merlin: But I'm just saying you might, for fun, it wouldn't cost you much.
Merlin: It might probably cost you nothing.
Merlin: I'm just in terms of like effort.
Merlin: You might want to just put it up here and see what happens.
Yeah.
John: And this is the thing about, you know, the wonderful thing about pianos is it'll be like free piano, free piano, free piano, piano, $14,000.
Merlin: Like John Roderick wrote the commander things allowed on.
Merlin: I got a feeling somebody is going to want the fucking piano.
Merlin: I think after this episode, you're going to be deluged with people who would love to have your piano.
Merlin: Deluged.
Merlin: Deluged.
John: Well, I don't know.
Merlin: But I take your point.
Merlin: I feel what you're saying.
Merlin: It's a symbolic piano.
Merlin: It's not just a bunch of keys and a case.
Merlin: It's bigger than that.
Merlin: You need to get thee behind me, Satan.
Merlin: Like, I love your piano, but it's time for you to go.
Merlin: And you just wheel it out.
Merlin: And it's like Harry and the Hendersons.
Merlin: You have to punch the piano to make it go away.
John: Punch the piano to make it go.
John: Oh, because you love it.
Merlin: They love Harry so much, but Harry has to go back.
Merlin: He's got to go back into the woods.
Merlin: So John Lithgow has to physically assault Harry to show his love for him.
Merlin: You're honoring the piano and your future, is what I'm saying.
Merlin: I see.
Merlin: Harry and the Hendersons.
John: Uh-huh.
John: Okay.
John: So the piano is my Harry.
Merlin: It might be your Harry.
Merlin: It's got wheels, right?
Yeah.
John: It does have wheels.
John: You don't want to just leave it out front.
John: It's a piano.
Merlin: It's a piano.
John: No, you can't.
Merlin: I mean... Dumbass.
Merlin: Of course it has wheels.
Merlin: Fucking idiot.
Merlin: It's a piano.
John: It's a piano.
Merlin: I don't know.
Merlin: I know.
Merlin: I have a Yamaha keyboard.
Merlin: See?
John: You don't have to... You're not... I'm not going to YamahaAdoption.com.
John: If you ever move, that thing just goes right in your backpack.
Yeah.