Ep. 389: "The New March"
John: Hello.
John: Hi, John.
John: Hi, Merlin.
John: How's it going?
John: Oh, good.
John: Good, good, good, good.
John: Here we are again.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: What are the chances?
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: You know.
Merlin: What else am I going to do?
Merlin: What else am I going to do?
Merlin: Yeah, it's Monday.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: It's fun day.
Merlin: It's Monday fun day.
Merlin: What am I going to do?
Merlin: I'm going to watch Star Trek.
Merlin: I'm going to clean my bathroom.
Merlin: What am I going to do?
Merlin: I might as well make a podcast.
Merlin: You know what I'm saying?
You might as well.
Merlin: You might as well.
Merlin: We've got to do the work.
John: You do the work.
John: You put in the hours.
John: I just turned my levels down.
John: I noticed I was peaking a little bit.
John: My little machine here lets me know when I'm peaking, and it told me I was peaking.
John: I told you you were peaking.
Merlin: You don't want to peak too early.
Merlin: No, that's right.
John: That's right.
John: I'm only 51.
Merlin: I don't want to peak too early.
Merlin: Oh, God, really?
Merlin: You need to really, really stretch out the energies.
John: Pacing it.
John: Pacing it out.
Merlin: Pacing it is so important.
John: You need to drink water.
John: There's a long way to go before we sleep, you know what I mean?
John: If I'm lucky, am I right?
John: In this economy?
Merlin: I wrote down topics, but I'll talk about whatever you want.
John: Oh, you wrote down topics.
John: I love it when we started a show and you wrote down topics.
Merlin: I'm going to tell you something.
Merlin: I'm going to tell you a secret.
Merlin: You don't need to know this.
Merlin: This all happens well below your pay grade.
Merlin: Okay.
Merlin: I try to always have something in my pocket in case we have nothing to talk about or our clinical depression makes it difficult to go on.
John: Has this happened very many times?
John: No.
John: Have you employed in the, what does it seem like, a dozen years we've been doing the show?
John: Have you ever resorted to that list very often?
John: So many times.
Merlin: Well, what's the deal with religion?
Merlin: Hey, pavement sure is good.
Merlin: I have a whole bunch of these.
Merlin: It'll just be really good conversation starters.
Merlin: What's the deal with religion?
Merlin: Hitler had some good ideas.
John: Well, so what notes have you got?
John: I'm curious about this because, you know, I come in as a complete tabula rasa every time.
John: Do you?
John: Oh, that's so nice of you.
John: A man of your age?
John: Brain completely blank.
John: You just wipe that tablet clean every time, huh?
John: Synapses barely firing.
John: I've been up.
John: I set my alarm.
John: You know, it's 1115 now.
John: I set my alarm this morning for 1055.
Oh.
John: And that's that five minutes was enough time to pour a cup of coffee and come sit down.
John: And then you, and then I sat here waiting for you to call.
John: Yes.
John: I was like, he's, he's texting me.
John: Why isn't he calling me?
John: And finally you were like, so you want to,
John: Are we going to do this?
Merlin: And I was like, oh, I was sitting here.
Merlin: Let me take people inside, a little bit of behind the scenes is when John's ready.
Merlin: You send me a text or a Skype message and you say the word beep or sometimes beep.
John: I say beep or beep or boop or bloop.
John: And that means it's go time.
John: It's go time.
John: But I didn't do it this morning because at the time I'd only been awake five minutes.
John: Now I've been awake 20 minutes.
John: Are you feeling more awake now?
John: Than I was 10 minutes ago?
John: Yeah.
John: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
John: It's a, you know, like I've said before, if we did this show at 4 o'clock in the afternoon or if we did this show at 11 o'clock at night, what a different show it would be.
Merlin: I suppose.
John: I worry.
John: Yeah.
John: I mean, I don't want to.
John: I'm saying this is the show.
John: I don't want to do anything.
Merlin: Increasingly, I just more and more just literally don't want to do.
Merlin: I would prefer not to do anything.
John: Have you noticed this?
John: Remember back when the quarantine first started?
John: Oh, yeah, I do.
John: It was fun.
Merlin: It was all about wash your hands.
Merlin: Wash your hands.
John: It was nice, right?
John: And it was back when all of the things that I didn't want to do, I didn't have to do anymore.
John: Yeah.
John: And it felt so good.
John: And now I'm noticing that all the things I don't want to do, someone's come up with a way to do it on Zoom.
Yeah.
John: And also, the things that I didn't want to do that I used to get paid to do and still didn't want to do, now people want me to do it on Zoom and not pay me at all.
John: It's been really a bad transition.
John: Zoom is very good exposure.
John: It's good exposure, but it's also, you know, it's time to give back.
John: That's what people are saying.
John: It's time to give back.
John: And when people tell you it's time to give back, they usually are – the next thing they're going to say is,
John: We want you to do this thing for free.
John: I'm getting paid, they say, because I'm organizing it, and that's hard work.
John: Yeah, organization is work.
John: Yeah, that's a job.
John: Anyway, so now I'm finding that I have to say no to people again.
Merlin: uh which the which the original uh the original like quarantine meant that you didn't have to say no you just had to say oh you know what i mean we we certainly have talked about this a lot and i'm glad we talked about it a lot because i think we're contributing to the discourse in a useful way i hope amongst our 75 listeners um but i would say and i do i want to talk about how we're basically going to live through march again
Merlin: But when this all really kicked off, and I'm going to say early March, when we suddenly went from zero to something, I don't want to sound mawkish, but it almost felt like if you knew that somebody had just had a death in the family –
Merlin: and you knew that to a certainty, you might reach out to them to say, hey, no reply necessary, but I'm so sorry for what you're going through.
Merlin: I'm so sorry for your loss.
Merlin: This must be a terrible time.
Merlin: Let me know if I can do anything, right?
Merlin: The last thing you would do is say, oh, can you go do this benefit for Paul Allen's rock and roll collection or whatever?
Merlin: I get paid as the organizer of Paul Allen, but you, of course, will just be honored to get to talk about the presidents of the USA's coffee can or whatever.
Merlin: Mm-hmm.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: It would be, you know what I mean?
Merlin: It would be so gross to say, and that's all notional, but it would be so gross at that time to go like, well, and we talked about this.
Merlin: We talked about how there was very much a feeling of, well, we're all in it together and we can do this and et cetera, et cetera.
Merlin: Yes.
Merlin: I'm not going to shit on the cat here.
Merlin: I don't need to give you all these topics.
Merlin: Would you like to hear the topics?
Merlin: And then can we talk about my topic if we're going to talk?
Merlin: I'm very curious about...
Merlin: about the turn of phrase, shit on the cat.
Merlin: I just literally made that up.
Merlin: The ample time that I have doing my not work, I have plenty of time to think of colorful new things.
John: Yeah, I don't want to shit on the cat either.
John: I really don't want to shit on the cat.
John: The prospect of anyone wanting to shit on the cat, you know what that is, Merlin?
John: What?
John: You've just coined a thing.
John: You've coined a description of...
John: What of how I feel about other people's projects.
John: It feels so often like the person is suggesting to me that I shit on a cat.
John: And I'm like, why, why, why this whole plan?
Merlin: Why would you, why would you want that?
John: Why would you want that?
John: Your whole idea about like coming back from the quarantine, your new, your new plan, the new thing that's getting built, the way that you're talking to people, the way that people are talking to one another, it all feels like shitting on the cat and that, and it's what you've done is you've coined exactly, uh, you, you have described my confusion.
Yeah.
John: I'll tell you what, thank you very much.
John: They don't think they're shitting on the cat.
John: They don't think that.
Merlin: They think that they're, I don't know what they think they're doing.
Merlin: They think that's part of their job description is causing people to shit on cats, maybe.
John: Yeah, and I'm just like, why?
John: That's not a thing that we need.
John: That's a, I love yours.
Merlin: What I intend with mine, here's what I'm going to say.
Merlin: I'm going to give this, I'm going to put this out there.
Merlin: I don't need to make a nickel off of this.
John: Oh, sure.
Merlin: Consider this something that I am committing to the public domain.
Merlin: All the great shows.
Merlin: Yeah, absolutely.
Merlin: I mean, there's no getting that back in the barn.
Merlin: But when I think of shitting on the cat, one thing I think of is for sure, like, gosh, why would you want that?
Merlin: But also, if I shat on my cat, now I got two problems.
Merlin: Because I got this fucking monstrosity of a cat.
Merlin: She's so repulsive right now.
Merlin: We're doing everything we can to deal with it.
Merlin: She's hating it.
Merlin: We're hating it.
Merlin: This is a bad time to own a Persian.
John: She was always a bad creature.
John: From the first time you sent me a photograph, I said, that's not a creature that should... That creature... Let it die.
John: Just let it die.
John: It wants to die.
John: Any other time in history, it would already be died.
Merlin: It was born wishing death upon itself.
Merlin: It had a rough life.
Merlin: It didn't help that it had a rough life and got bullied by the other cats.
Merlin: And that it was basically living in a garage under a heat lamp and was getting traumatized.
Merlin: That all its teeth fell out.
Merlin: All of its teeth fell out.
Merlin: Watching it eat is so horrifying.
Merlin: Watching her just look me dead in the eye while she pees on the floor.
Merlin: The horrific arching that she does right before she pees on the floor.
Merlin: Because she looks like a very, very matted Star Wars creature.
Merlin: She looks like she lives on Tatooine.
Merlin: No, sorry.
Merlin: She looks like she lives on Hoth.
Merlin: She looks like a Hoth cat.
Merlin: Right.
John: But also, it's a Persian, so it shouldn't have ever grown that way in the first place.
John: No!
John: It's a little smashy face.
John: It's a horrible genetic experiment gone awry.
John: Anyway, so you're talking about not shitting on her.
Merlin: But if you had shat on her.
Merlin: If I shat on my cat, I shat on my cat.
Merlin: Now I got two problems, which is I still have this horrible cat, but also now I have to clean my own shit off of it.
John: Right.
John: What you don't have, though, is you don't need to take a shit anymore.
John: So you did solve that problem.
John: For a while.
John: For a while.
John: And you didn't have to think about where.
John: You were like, I gotta take shit.
Merlin: And also, I mean, if the cat's in motion, the cat has so much PTSD that if you just walk into a room with the cat, and the cat is so fucking stupid, I spend all of my time trying not to step on the cat.
Merlin: But the cat is so antsy and her impulses are so poor that she tends to step exactly where I'm about to try and get out of the way.
Merlin: And when I have less control over my gait at that point.
John: When the house is quiet, do you ever hear her just...
Merlin: just saying she meows 13 times in a row all night long i'll give you i'll give you i'll give you i'll give you one quick demo so this is about let's just let's just cut to say 4 25 this morning so you can tell it starts with a very soft one because she's just kind of clearing her throat she goes so the first one is usually in here
Merlin: And then sometimes she works in my name.
Merlin: She goes, usually about 13 times.
Merlin: And she does that kind of all night.
Merlin: She's such an angel.
Merlin: I love her so much.
John: I know.
John: I know.
Merlin: I think we know what this topic should be, but I don't want to shit on the cat.
Merlin: I have social distancing at the bar.
John: Okay.
John: Social distancing at the bar.
John: Yeah.
Merlin: Let's see.
Merlin: Ways to channel energy.
Right.
Merlin: The topic of knives.
John: Oh.
Merlin: And Nora Ephron's famous quote, you should take notes because everything is copy.
John: Oh, everything is copy.
John: I was thinking about that this morning.
John: I think about it a lot.
John: I think about it a lot.
John: There was some, you know, I had a thought a couple of days ago and I was like, oh, I can't forget that thought.
John: That's one of those thoughts that I'll never forget.
Merlin: Right, right.
Merlin: And, and I feel like, well, actually I'm screwing up my own list here because now I got knives between channeling energy and copy.
Merlin: Channeling energy and everything is copy are related.
Merlin: That's a little bit of a heady, brainy topic.
Merlin: Could we talk about the new March?
Yeah.
John: Well, let me just describe to you my current situation.
Merlin: Oh, please.
Merlin: Please do.
Merlin: Again, these are all serving suggestions.
Merlin: None of this is included with the macaroni and cheese.
Merlin: You've got to get your own plate and your own fucking chives.
Merlin: But the plate, whatever you put it on, it's your show.
John: No, I 100% normally am not aware that you come in with any preloaded cards.
John: Don't need them.
John: Don't need them.
John: Don't need them.
John: I know you.
John: I know you.
John: And so I know that you do.
John: But I also pretend that I don't know.
John: Or I'm not pretend.
John: I forget.
John: I forget every day that you are Merlin, man.
John: Oh, thank you.
John: I forget that there are three by five cards there.
Merlin: Well, you should never notice.
Merlin: You should see the puppet, not the strings, okay?
Merlin: That's exactly right.
Merlin: And here's another thing.
Merlin: This is what General Eisenhower said.
Merlin: He said something along the lines of, this has been a very important thought technology in my life, John, which is that planning is everything and the plan is nothing.
John: Isn't that good?
Merlin: A lot of people can hear that and go, huh, that's cool.
Merlin: I should get that on a pillow, like live, laugh, love.
Merlin: But the truth is, if you really think about it, it's true.
Merlin: If you plan well enough and you get to a plan, you're always in a position to throw out the plan because of planning.
John: Sure, the plan is nothing.
John: I was watching a movie last night with David Niven and, uh, and, uh, Roger, Roger Moore.
John: And, um, and at one point there's a bunch of British guys sitting in a bar in Calcutta in 1943 or something.
John: And someone, so your shit jar, someone mentions general Eisenhower and everybody, it's just a brief, it's just a half a second in the film, just one beat.
John: Someone in the, you know, on the radio says something about general general Eisenhower and all these, these, uh, like colonial British Raj, uh,
John: like old men kind of all roll their eyes.
John: And it was just a, it was just a, like a beat, just a, like a, a diss of general Eisenhower in a movie made in 1980.
John: And I was like, wow.
John: Yeah.
Merlin: Yeah.
John: Like a little bit of a, that guy, that kind of thing.
John: Yeah.
John: A little bit of like, Oh, Eisenhower should have been Montgomery.
John: Uh, what's my current situation is that, uh, at the beginning in March, as you know, I, I returned from the Joker cruise on March 10th.
John: Wow.
John: It was at that point that, I mean, it was the day that our cruise ship docked.
John: It was the, it was the last cruise ship at sea and they, and they docked and they turned off the lights and everybody was fired.
John: I went through the Fort Lauderdale Airport, which was like a refugee camp.
John: You know, it was all the people that had –
John: It was like a refugee camp but for people from Ohio that could afford to go on a cruise.
Merlin: The Ohio refugees.
Merlin: I love that.
Merlin: That's AAA baseball, right?
John: They were all down there like ready to go on a cruise and all the cruises got canceled and so they were all stuck in the Fort Lauderdale.
John: People sleeping on the floor and as we walked through –
John: Uh, we cruisers, like our flights weren't canceled for some reason.
John: We just got on the planes and flew home.
John: But I remember I, I asked Amy, man, do you think there's anyone in this airport that has coronavirus?
John: And she said, absolutely.
John: Yeah.
John: And so I got on the plane, I came home, immediately went into quarantine.
John: My family was already in quarantine here.
John: About two weeks later, I felt a very heavy feeling in my chest.
John: Very heavy.
John: An unusual, unprecedented kind of feeling that my chest had a giant...
John: Not on it, but within it.
John: There was a weight within my chest.
John: Like a heavy balloon?
John: Something Dick Cheney might feel.
John: Something very ominous.
John: I mean, my chest wasn't congested.
Merlin: One of the things where you go like, oh, this is not good.
Merlin: This is not good.
John: And I had a dry cough.
John: And for two days I walked around, nothing ever happened.
John: I didn't have a fever.
John: I didn't lose my sense of smell or taste, but for two days I had this extremely ominous feeling.
John: And I was asking myself, is this, are you having an anxiety, uh, feeling because you're right at the end of the 14 days since you were in the Fort Lauderdale airport and
John: And you're reading about coronavirus every day.
John: Are you having some kind of – have you created a feeling?
John: But I was trying desperately not to read anything into it.
John: I was really just monitoring what was happening to me.
John: Cough, cough, cough.
John: Oh, and dry cough but like big cough like –
Merlin: But but it wasn't the kind of cough like it's like sort of like, you know, when you realize that you're going to vomit and you start to vomit and then you're like, well, I better just go all the way fucking in on this and make it clear.
Merlin: I need to be done with this.
Merlin: That kind of cough.
Merlin: We're like, OK, I need to get this out.
Merlin: Oh, that's serious, John.
Merlin: That's a big cough.
Merlin: But not wet.
John: No.
Merlin: Well, dry is what we're looking for, not looking for.
Merlin: We don't want dry.
Merlin: That's bad.
Merlin: We don't want dry.
Merlin: Not productive, as they say.
John: Normally, my coughs are productive because, as you can tell, I'm phlegmatic, right?
Merlin: You don't listen to the program, but we feature your cough in every episode of the show.
John: It's got to be there.
Merlin: It's so distinctive, it might as well get a service mark.
John: But, you know, I'm also – I'm just made out of – you know, just generally I'm constructed out of wet parts.
John: You know, I'm not one of these people that's made out of dry parts.
John: I'm not some Ichabod crane.
Merlin: I'm like made out of – I've got all the – You have like a sort of, as George Harrison would say, an inner moisture.
Yeah.
John: Yeah, well, sure.
John: Right.
John: I mean, you know, it's nice, actually.
John: And I'm just, if you made, if you went to Farrell's and you got the pig's trough and you had every scoop of ice cream.
Merlin: I made a pig of myself at Farrell's.
Merlin: That's what the ribbon on my toy box said.
John: That's right.
John: That's exactly right.
John: If you made a man out of scoops of different kinds of ice cream, that's me.
John: It's great, man.
John: Stop me when I'm passing by.
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John: On Sunday, coming up!
John: So what I did after day two, I laid, I went down to, I went, I laid in bed and I slept for 18 hours and, uh, I woke up, you know, kind of like groggy, still felt terrible.
John: Went back to bed, slept through the night, woke up the next day and I was fine and I've been fine ever since.
John: And the people here that I'm quarantining with, including my daughter, each had about a day where they stayed in bed all day.
John: Oh, interesting.
John: And it felt like a day that – I mean you're in the middle of – quarantine is boring, everybody.
John: But it was like there was a day where each one of them kind of just like took a bye day.
John: Well, ever since then, we've wondered –
John: Now, was that a thing?
John: Is that one of those?
Merlin: John, I had a cough thing in February, and it was so bad.
Merlin: We opened an episode, as soon as I'm back to work, we'll do a cold open of like some dumb thing I said or something.
Merlin: And there's one where I do this horrible cough.
Merlin: And it wasn't until a few weeks later that I basically said to the internet, hey, people diagnose me.
Merlin: Is there a chance that I, it might have been January.
Merlin: Is there a chance I had the thing, which at the time sounded crazy because we suppose, supposedly nothing happened until February.
Merlin: Turns out it was around longer than we thought.
Merlin: I had the same thought.
Merlin: I have wondered, did I have it and just not know it?
John: Well, and San Francisco was an early hotbed, it turns out.
John: Yes, correct.
Merlin: Like yours, like where you live.
John: Yeah, except like ours made it into the newspaper, but San Francisco had early outbreak even harder, but it didn't turn into one of these like the Seattle, you know, Seattle virus or whatever it was.
Merlin: It has so many names, many are calling it the Seattle flu.
Merlin: What does the 19 even mean?
John: Yeah.
John: But since then, since the time I got back, we went straight up three months without interacting with anybody.
John: Yeah.
John: Stayed home.
John: But the one problem, the weak link in our chain mail, the one piece of our chain mail that wasn't mithril, that was just made out of regular, I don't know what, silver aluminide.
John: Mm-hmm.
John: Was the little girl across the street.
John: We've talked about this little girl across the street and, and she has been a lifesaver because she and my little girl are, are, are besties.
John: And when the, when it seems like the steam has built up so much, one of them or the other will go out into the street and they'll ride bikes and they'll be little girls and they have one another.
John: And they can roam and play.
John: And I don't 100% trust the family across the street.
Merlin: Is this also the kid that sets off your devices?
Merlin: I mean, that family?
John: The kid that sets off the devices, that's the family.
John: And also, the older daughter is a furry.
Merlin: That's right.
Merlin: Okay, okay, okay.
Merlin: Can you give them a redacted fictional name, this family, just for my own purposes?
John: Let's call them... The furries?
Merlin: The moors.
Merlin: The moors.
Merlin: Oh, like the Spanish people.
Yeah.
Merlin: Oh, no, you mean Moore's as in M-O-O-R-E.
Merlin: Right, right.
Merlin: Okay.
Merlin: All right.
John: Okay.
John: That's nothing like their real name.
John: So stay on the street, stay out of the Moore's.
John: Okay, got it.
John: And tomorrow when you mention it, I will forget that I said it.
Merlin: We'll workshop it, yeah.
John: And then the little kids up the street who are like four years old started to come out and play
John: And they would make like a little gang of kids like you dream about having in a neighborhood.
John: And I talked to the parents up there quite a bit.
John: He's an Alaska Airlines pilot.
John: At first, I found him a little off-putting.
John: But then as time went on, I grew to really like him.
John: He's a nice guy.
John: And he would do the thing where he would bring a plastic chair out to the street.
John: He would sit the chair down.
John: And he would sit there all day watching the kids play, making sure that he's one of these guys that every time a car comes, he's like, that car's going too fast.
John: They need to slow down.
John: And then he eyeballs them.
John: And then he put out a sign that was like slow.
John: And then he's just like, he's really, really monitoring the speed of the cars that are driving through this.
John: Like a one man next door.
John: Yeah.
John: And the cars are all going between 15 and 20 miles an hour.
John: But he's like really, really serious about it.
John: But he's out there all day, so he became kind of the neighborhood babysitter.
John: He's like, I'm out here watching my kids.
John: Oh, he's got eyes on everybody.
John: Yeah.
John: Not formally, but he's going to notice if there's some serious dangerous shenanigans going on.
John: That's right.
John: And he's an airline pilot, so you know he had to pass some tests.
John: So we had a little period, a few months, where it was like, okay, I'm not meeting anybody.
John: Nobody I know is meeting anybody.
John: We're staying away from my mom.
John: And the little kids are playing, and the environment feels small and all connected, and it's safe.
John: Well, when the quote-unquote return to normal began,
John: We here in the house agreed and within the Roderick larger enterprise, uh, agreed with one another that there was no end.
John: We were not lifting any kind of quarantine on ourselves.
John: We weren't going to go to restaurants or movies.
John: We had no at all faith in the story that things were getting better and
John: All you had to do was read the newspaper.
John: Things aren't getting better.
John: There's no return to anything.
John: It's just waiting for you.
John: It's just waiting in the bushes.
John: It put on a funny hat, crouched down in the bushes.
John: That's not when you go out in your underwear to get the newspaper.
John: No.
John: So we were like, good, we're fine.
John: We're just staying where we are.
John: This is fine.
John: It's hard.
John: It's not, it's not, not hard.
Merlin: It sucks, but it's the only thing to do.
Merlin: No fucking way.
Merlin: Are we going to do any of that shit?
Merlin: Just because there's two different narratives about reality right now should not buoy people to believe I'll, I'll wait for my term, but like, it does drive me crazy that the facts and evidence are,
Merlin: are so horrible and unrelenting even as we see so many instances of people saying well i don't know you know in for a penny in for a death cult i guess i guess we all just need to fucking die you know um well and the thing is like there are two different realities in the world today and i live firmly in one of them
John: I do not believe that there was a basement to that.
John: It's not tempting.
Merlin: The other reality is, it's tempting nominally in the sense of like, sure, I wish my kid could go to school, but no fucking way am I tempted to that reality.
John: No way.
John: Well, and the thing is, I don't believe that 9-11 was an inside job either.
John: I don't believe that chemtrails are, I don't really, you know, like the other reality is very identifiably bonkers at every level.
Merlin: And just because there's two of them does not mean it comprises a debatable topic.
John: That's exactly right.
John: Anyway, so at the beginning of last week, one week ago, I look over at my daughter at some point and I'm like, well, when's your little friend coming over?
John: When's the little moor coming?
John: And she says, oh, she's at camp.
John: And I said, what?
John: What do you mean?
John: And she said, oh, she's going to YMCA camp.
John: now this summer and i'm like ymca camp that's open and she was like yeah they opened ymca camp and that's where they are both kids jesus christ and so i so i texted the the dad mr moore and i was like why i was like ymca camp
John: And he said, oh, yeah, well, you know, it's only eight kids per class.
John: And they take their temperature every morning.
John: And they don't let them go out on the playground.
John: And I'm sure that it's fine and safe.
John: And I was like, well, what it is is eight different kids per class.
John: So that's 16 kids because you have two kids.
John: 16 kids whose parents also, for whatever reason, are sending their kids to Y camp.
John: And so now I have 16 families that I'm quarantined with.
John: Now you've kissed every one of them.
John: Right.
John: Because they're kids.
John: They're licking each other.
John: And they come home.
John: They lick each other.
John: It's what kids do.
Merlin: It's just a bunch of little fucking vectors of all.
Merlin: Listen, no shade, no lemonade.
Merlin: I don't want to be a dick about this.
Merlin: But it does really feel to me...
Merlin: And that one of the one of the problems is that our arithmetic on how this stuff works is so poor.
Merlin: And when you say things like, oh, it's only this many people or it's only this.
Merlin: Well, like, what do we know?
Merlin: We know the factor is setting aside the mask thing.
Merlin: But we know that, well, masks are better than no mask.
Merlin: We know outside is better than inside.
Merlin: And we know that short is better than long.
Merlin: We know there's all kinds of things like that.
Merlin: And there are some of these things where, like, you know, if you've got two of those things, if you've got none of those things, there's still no guarantee that you're safe.
Merlin: But even one of those things is all that it takes.
Merlin: And it's so frustrating and ignorant when people overlook how this actually spreads.
Merlin: It's like Donald Rumsfeld said, we need to be right every time and they only need to be right once.
Merlin: And when you put eight people in a room together or whatever and you have this social distancing sauce, you're slathering all over everything like that fucking means anything –
Merlin: and you do that over and over, you're bringing whatever their exposure was into that room and potentially passing it to others.
Merlin: And then guess what?
Merlin: They go redistribute to somewhere else.
Merlin: They go to a second location.
Merlin: And we know, well, you shouldn't be doing that.
Merlin: And so you're taking it home.
Merlin: Same thing with Tulsa, with the Tulsa rally, right?
Merlin: People from 40 different, I believe it was 40 different counties
Merlin: Obviously, including and outside of Tulsa, but 40 different counties had come to that rally, that massive 6,200-person rally.
Merlin: But then you saw rises in, I believe, 30 out of those 40 counties.
Merlin: Now, maybe that's a coincidence.
Merlin: Maybe it's – but every time you get close to another person for any period of time –
Merlin: So here's the part.
Merlin: Here's the Darwin part.
Merlin: I fucking hate this.
Merlin: I hate that I'm saying this out loud.
Merlin: But if you had a sexual partner, let's leave the gender out of it.
Merlin: Let's say you had a sexual partner and they're a pretty fun, wild person.
Merlin: And you're very attracted to them, partly out of their wildness.
Merlin: And you say, well, should we use a condom?
Merlin: And they go, oh, man, I never use a condom.
Merlin: Don't worry.
Merlin: We don't need to use a condom.
Merlin: That is such a red flag to me.
Merlin: Like in the same way that, yeah, I want you all wearing masks, whether or not it's 100% effective.
Merlin: Yeah, play along with me.
Merlin: Do the theater of wearing a face covering because it shows that you're trying.
Merlin: If your first sexual encounter with a stranger, you say, don't worry, no condom here, never needed it, never had one.
Merlin: That's a huge red, is that not a huge red flag?
Merlin: And so all the people who are so enthusiastic about throwing themselves upon the gears of this disease by going out and getting a cocktail with 12 of their friends are not making the best decisions.
Merlin: They're all not making the best decisions.
Merlin: What does that make them?
Merlin: Red flags.
Merlin: Every one of those people is now somebody who is unnecessarily exposed and just going, okay, whatever.
John: Right, right, right.
Merlin: Do you know what I mean?
Merlin: That sounds so mean to say, and I hope that's not horribly classist or something because I know different people need to do different things.
Merlin: But the people making the poorest decisions are the people who are now most likely to give it to other people who are making poor decisions.
Merlin: And guess what?
Merlin: What do we know about them?
Merlin: They make poor decisions.
Merlin: So now they're going to go out and do likewise.
Mm-hmm.
Merlin: The arithmetic is so simple, and yet we keep looking at it as if we don't want to do this cafeteria Catholicism about what we're going to do to break this thing.
Merlin: And we have all these asterisks and ifs, ands, or buts, and it's fucking mental.
Merlin: So the Moors.
Right.
John: Well, so... Did you put the kibosh?
John: Did you put the kibosh on the moors?
John: Well, so I had to say, you guys can't play together because I don't want to get coronavirus and I don't want it in our house and I don't anymore feel that I have any ability to... I don't even want to worry that I'm going to get coronavirus because they're not following the protocol.
John: Well, and we're in quarantine.
John: And so we're either in it or we're not.
John: We're not half in it.
John: And if you guys are playing together, we're not in it.
John: And I didn't decide that.
John: And so I don't want that decision made by old Mr. Moore across the street on our behalf because he thinks that it's fine.
John: And so now we had to introduce this situation where the one thing that was making quarantine tolerable for anybody, which was that these little girls could go ride their bikes is now off the tape.
John: Now they're both, they're both denied that now.
John: And they're both absolutely like ruined by it.
John: The little girl across the street, little more girl says, I don't even want to go to camp, but that's not, at some point I said to him like, like there's gotta be another way.
John: And he was like, well, they can come over to your house all day.
John: Now here's the thing about Mr. Moore.
John: He doesn't have to go to work.
John: He is a flight instructor and nobody is taking,
John: Using his services right now.
John: Okay, so he just wants the kids out of the house so that he can play I don't know what he does honestly it'd be funny if it turned out he's just really good at Microsoft Flight Simulator I think he probably is because he's a gamer.
Merlin: He plays games.
John: Okay, yeah, but I said to him at one point like and he and then he said I
John: Well, I'll pay you the $120 a week or whatever I'm paying the Y. And I'm like, are you kidding me?
John: Your solution to this is that your daughter comes in and lives at my house all week?
Merlin: Your judgment is seeming worse and worse with every turn.
John: Think it through.
John: So now the kids are – because what happens is
John: The little girl comes home from camp, gets on her bike, and rides back and forth in front of our house looking at the front door.
John: And we can see her from inside.
John: She rides up the street and looks at our house.
John: She turns around somewhere.
John: She rides back and looks at our house.
John: Because her friend is inside.
John: Her friend, my little daughter, who also is in the house looking out the window wanting to play with her.
John: But additionally, now, the little girl, little Moore girl rides up to the end of the street where the other little kids are playing.
John: And dad up there who sits in the plastic chair is selling his house and he's lost his eyes off the ball.
John: So he's not sitting in the plastic chair anymore.
John: Uh, now the little girl's mom is out there.
John: She doesn't bring the chair.
John: She just kind of comes and, and paces around, but the mom is not holding the, she's not holding the moors accountable.
John: So all the kids are playing together except my daughter.
John: So all of a sudden it's a punishment.
John: I'm the bad guy.
John: It's a punishment on my kids.
John: So I look at this situation and I, and I start talking to the adults in my family and I go, I don't want to get Corona virus.
Uh,
John: But what that means is that I have to keep my daughter inside for the whole summer?
Merlin: Yeah.
John: And they have started, the other adults, have started to say things like, well, that's just not doable.
Oh, God.
John: And I'm like, well, I know it's not doable, but at every stage of this, you have to come back to, you're either in quarantine or you're not.
John: You can't be half in quarantine.
John: And if you're out of it a little, you're out of it.
John: And all of your mask wearing- You start over.
Merlin: You start over.
Merlin: Start over.
Merlin: You lose all your accumulated game points.
Merlin: There are no saves in this particular game.
Merlin: You have to go, like I say, it's chutes and ladders.
Merlin: You got to go all the way back to the fucking beginning and start over.
John: But so all the ladies in my family, they're super good when they go out.
John: They have their masks on.
John: They do their social distancing.
John: They are extremely careful.
John: My mom hasn't been into a store in four months now.
John: But all of it is meaningless because our daughter goes out down to the end of the block.
John: Those kids all sneeze on each other.
John: And then she comes home and jumps on my lap and goes, let me show you what I learned today.
John: Achoo!
John: And it's not even in a chew kind of cold.
John: It doesn't need that.
John: So that's where I'm at, Merlin.
John: I'm sitting here.
John: That's where you are now.
John: I'm testifying to you on this day in June 2020 that...
John: And the thing is, you and I, at the middle age that we are, assuming a person lives to be 110.
Merlin: I'm definitely older than middle age.
Merlin: There's no way I'm going to live that long, but I'll take it.
Merlin: Thank you.
John: You and I are right in the middle.
John: I'm looking forward to my early death.
John: Of 110, your lifespan.
John: And we're what I like to think of as cusp people because the virus affects old people more than young people.
Merlin: In terms of like the lethality.
John: The lethality of it, right?
John: A lot of the people that die are still over 65.
John: But we're on the cusp, you and I. I could get the disease.
John: I could have had it.
John: Back in March and it was a two-day thing and I slept for 18 hours and I was over it or I could get it and spend three weeks in ICU and die.
John: And because there's no testing in this country without getting like a concealed carry permit –
John: I don't have the ability to just run down and figure out whether I had it or not.
John: And even if I knew that I did have it, it wouldn't be a guarantee that I didn't get it again.
John: I don't know.
John: I know.
John: None of us know.
John: So here I am.
John: So here you are.
John: Here I am.
John: I don't know what to do.
John: I don't know what to do right now.
John: I don't know what to go up and tell my daughter right now.
John: I know.
John: I know.
Merlin: So to this point, okay, so this is a new idea, but something I was talking to Dan about is how, partly because I'm a cusper and an old man, I have really come to believe, this is unrelated but related, I've really come to believe in setting timers.
Merlin: And given that we have any number of devices where I can set a timer with my voice,
Merlin: And I've often said, hey, you know, you young people, God love you, start getting in the habit of writing things down, of setting timers, of doing these things, because even if you think you're good at it now, you're going to get less good at it over time.
Merlin: And I don't mean to be shaking my finger or, you know, waving my fist at a cloud, but it's just a way to say that, like...
Merlin: Once you realize how easy it is, for example, to set a timer, there's no need to ever forget and overcook the pasta again.
Merlin: There is literally no excuse.
Merlin: All you have to do is say, hey, Dongus, set an eight-minute pasta timer or whatever, and it'll remind you.
Merlin: And I get kind of fired up about this because people are always like...
Merlin: I don't need any help with my life.
Merlin: And so the challenge that I pose to our listeners, and I don't think anybody did this, but I would challenge any of our listeners to try this for fun.
Merlin: Here's the game.
Merlin: The game is this.
Merlin: It's called the 8-Minute Game.
Merlin: And what's going to happen is that you're so good at remembering how long eight minutes is.
Merlin: What I would like you to do right now is set a timer that you can't see and you're not allowed to look at a clock.
Merlin: And you have to go do what you would normally do for exactly eight minutes, right?
Merlin: And if you look at the timer or a clock before eight minutes has passed, you have to start over.
Merlin: Make sense so far?
Merlin: And I want you to do this and see how close you get without cheating to knowing exactly how long eight minutes is.
Merlin: Understanding that each time you get it wrong, it has to start over until you get it.
Merlin: Let's even say within five, five, 10 seconds.
Merlin: What is eight minutes?
Merlin: Because here's what's going to happen.
Merlin: First of all, you're going to be wrong.
Merlin: But maybe more importantly, you're going to forget that you were ever tracking eight minutes.
Merlin: And you keep starting this over until your life is basically gone.
Merlin: So that's kind of how I feel with quarantine, which is is not done until it is really, really done.
Merlin: If you just peek out a little bit, you start over.
Merlin: That's that's how this works.
Merlin: The same way that I think you should have to wear a T-shirt with your tattoo idea on it for one solid year before you're allowed to get it.
Merlin: If you like it that much, why not wear a shirt for a year?
Merlin: Well, in this case, you know, start over, start over, start over.
Merlin: So that's been my thought on this is that like we used to say in the say no to drugs days, you know, not even once.
Merlin: Like if you've got to do stuff that gives you some exposure, you've got to do what you've got to do, whether it's for your job or for your shopping, for groceries or whatever it is.
Merlin: That's fine.
Merlin: But like you need a practically wartime comportment or approach that you're going to say, like, this is all I'm going to be taking care of until it's done for everybody.
Right.
Merlin: And we're such a big country and we have such sort of tribal ideas about our groups and our communities.
Merlin: And if it's nice and sunny outside, it must be okay to go outside.
Merlin: No, this thing travels.
Merlin: Just because it's not in where you are right this second doesn't mean you can let up.
Merlin: You could be saving one person's life.
Merlin: You may not even know how many people's lives you've saved just because of what you and your family are doing.
Merlin: It's so important to do that.
Merlin: That's the preamble.
Merlin: The reason I say this feels like the new March, I can speak a little bit more openly about this.
Merlin: I don't like to talk about my plans, but we've had for a long time, we had plans to do something we love to do, which is my favorite vacation is an in-state vacation where you drive somewhere.
Merlin: It's just so much easier.
Merlin: You don't have to fly.
Merlin: But you can also make it fun.
Merlin: So for months, we had a plan for spring break, late March 2020, is that we're going to get a cool rental car.
Merlin: We're going to drive down south.
John: We'll stop at the... Now, what's a cool rental car?
Merlin: Oh, often like in like a small SUV, but something that's got car play that's fun to be in.
Merlin: That's like real roomy.
Merlin: Like we've got a Jetta wagon.
Merlin: It's a little cramped for something like that.
Merlin: And we don't really want to put miles on the tires.
Merlin: So you rent a car.
Merlin: You drive down.
Merlin: Guess what?
Merlin: First night you stop at the Madonna Inn on the way there.
John: Oh, yeah.
John: That's a good time up there in San Luis Obispo.
Merlin: Oh, shit dog.
Merlin: And we've been there once before.
Merlin: I love the restaurant there.
Merlin: I love the food.
Merlin: The whole place is so bananas.
Merlin: Go look up Madonna Inn, everybody.
Merlin: It's a delight.
Merlin: It's a delight.
Merlin: And guess what?
Merlin: We were able to get the room we've always wanted.
Merlin: The one with the cupola where you can climb up into a tower and it's got its own balcony.
Merlin: Just for the fucking Madonna Inn alone, I was so pumped for Madonna Inn.
Merlin: And then guess what?
Merlin: You drive down.
Merlin: This is our blowout.
Merlin: Big vacation this year.
Merlin: We're going to spend two nights at Disneyland on property.
Merlin: Had it all planned.
John: We bought the passes.
Merlin: We bought the super passes.
Merlin: The car was reserved.
Merlin: We had already reserved go and make your own lightsaber.
Merlin: We had done everything was everything was set up.
Merlin: And I was for once in my fucking life really looking forward to this trip because I hate traveling.
Merlin: But this is I mean, this is a four quadrant big titted hit of a vacation for me.
Merlin: We don't take a lot of vacations.
Merlin: It's very difficult between school and especially my wife's work.
Merlin: But anyway, you get the idea.
John: Yeah.
Merlin: So that's February.
Merlin: Everything's squared away.
Merlin: We turn the corner into March.
Merlin: My friend John Roderick is, I'm sure, at this point, dying on a ship somewhere at sea.
Merlin: But there was that few days where we went from everything will probably be fine to, like, I want to say within a week, it went to holy shit.
Yeah.
Merlin: Some of us are realizing we need to take this very seriously.
Merlin: So why is it like early March?
Merlin: Because I actually had this grave conversation with my wife where I was like, you know, on the one hand, I think we need to start thinking about whether this can happen as a trip.
Merlin: And really, we need to start thinking about whether it should happen as a trip.
Merlin: But it was early enough that I also could footnote that with, ha, wouldn't it be funny if we did go and there was nobody there and we had the whole park to ourselves?
Merlin: And my God, if we were the only people in Disneyland, how great would that be?
Merlin: And I mean, that was our early March conversation.
Merlin: As late as early March, we were like, maybe we will still go to Disneyland?
Yeah.
Merlin: Wow.
Merlin: Okay.
Merlin: So then what happened?
Merlin: Another week or two passes by.
Merlin: And at this point, we are well and truly into the school.
Merlin: School is closed.
Merlin: My wife is working from home.
Merlin: Everything is locked down.
Merlin: It's when we finally, thank God, our governor and our mayor were ahead of this and it helped a lot in places where it could be helped.
Merlin: But then it was not a question.
Merlin: And of course, a lot of the policies at that time, companies were cool enough to say like, hey, look, you know, no harm, no foul.
Merlin: You can cancel or delay in most cases.
Merlin: You can reschedule, et cetera.
Merlin: And so we did that and we stayed really locked down.
Merlin: That was three months ago.
Merlin: So then in our area, things have been looking up.
Merlin: And, you know, it's almost like the thing we said, I can't believe I haven't gotten sick in so long.
Merlin: And then you get sick the next day.
Merlin: You jinx yourself.
Merlin: So there's a place near our home in my office that is a bar that's been open for a little while, but not too long before the lockdown, not more than six months.
Merlin: And like everybody else, they got closed down.
Merlin: So what happened then was... What had happened.
Merlin: What had happened was, in the last couple weeks, more places have been opening.
Merlin: I mean, obviously, for a while now, we've had things where you can, like, go pick something up at a counter and things like that.
Merlin: We've had that.
Merlin: But, like, you know, you're like...
Merlin: hopeful that these places can stay alive.
Merlin: And that place did pick up a cocktail or pick up a meal.
Merlin: They had bar food and stuff like that.
Merlin: But in the last two weeks, a lot of places in San Francisco, they were getting ready to reopen.
Merlin: And this place is very near our house.
Merlin: You've been past it many times.
Merlin: They put out some tables and they put out some heating lamps and they put out a whole bunch of stuff and basically colonized the sidewalk.
Merlin: I guess that's legal now.
Merlin: Um, and cause usually in San Francisco, if you want to take a shit, you need a permit, but.
John: Oh yeah.
John: But this is a thing.
John: It's a thing of trying to.
Merlin: We're going to relax, relax the rules as you'll see in a second, as you saw.
Merlin: And so basically they said, Hey, cool.
Merlin: Everybody come out.
Merlin: You know, it's going to be very safe and socially distanced.
Merlin: And like, it's all outside.
Merlin: They, they also made like this little, I don't know if you have these there where like, you can make like a park sort of in part of the street.
Um,
Merlin: Oh, yeah.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Parklet.
Merlin: Yeah, right.
Merlin: And so this all happened very quickly.
Merlin: On the one hand, I was like, wow, that's cool.
Merlin: Good for them.
Merlin: I hope they can stay alive.
Merlin: So why does it feel like early March?
Merlin: Because Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Sunday last week, there was a day last week.
Merlin: And this is something my household watches so closely.
Merlin: It's when shit really blew up, especially with Arizona and Florida.
Merlin: And things were really going up, up, up.
Merlin: And now even in California, Riverside, Los Angeles, even Contra Costa, Sacramento, you're seeing more and more of this growth.
John: Yeah, what's going on with that?
John: I thought that the governor was good there and that you guys shut it all down.
Merlin: Where's that growth coming from?
Merlin: I need to track this down, but it's my understanding that two of the biggest spikes – well, there's a ton of spikes still in the L.A., general Southern California area –
Merlin: I don't know exactly why that happened.
Merlin: It has been explained to me that there were huge outbreaks at some prisons and some meatpacking places and that that contributed a lot to that number.
Merlin: San Francisco is like knock on everything pretty good, not least because we've got the finances.
Merlin: Most people in San Francisco have a job that they can do from home.
Merlin: You know what I mean?
Merlin: It's total privilege that we're able to do that.
Merlin: But anyhow, so what happened?
Merlin: I said, hey, check it out, that place.
Merlin: I said, when we're feeling ready for it, wouldn't it be kind of fun to go there early, maybe even in the early afternoon, and go sit outside in the sun before it gets super cold here in the summertime?
Merlin: Wouldn't it be nice to just go?
Yeah.
Merlin: Yeah, but they have good, like, they have pretty good, like, chicken wings and stuff, and we could also go and get an old-fashioned, and it'd be fun, and we'd be outside, and it would be safe, and I had put it on the calendar that we're going to have early dinner at that place this past Friday night.
Merlin: And then those numbers went way up, and it was March all over again, because I said to Madeline, it all happened in the space of, like, 15 minutes on this morning, I think Thursday morning, where I was like, um...
Merlin: I don't know about going there for dinner.
Merlin: I also should mention that we have reserved a small RV to take a trip to, um, it doesn't matter where, somewhere close.
Merlin: But we would be getting in a little RV and basically going somewhere, and we thought, okay, one night we'll sleep in the crappy RV, one night we'll stay at a hotel or a cabin, etc.
Merlin: That's been our first thing we do, leaving the house, we go somewhere safe.
Merlin: And why is it early March?
Merlin: Because all of those plans in the space of like 20 minutes suddenly seemed farcical again.
Merlin: I'm not saying they ever weren't necessarily farcical.
Merlin: Bad on us for even probably thinking we could do this.
Merlin: But I was like, no, Portcullis is coming way the fuck down.
Merlin: We're going all the way back in.
Merlin: Shame on me for thinking we're even anywhere near done with this.
Merlin: What the fuck was I thinking?
Merlin: So that was last week.
Merlin: It was at the – it doesn't matter.
Merlin: But let's just say I noticed that that particular restaurant and bar was generating quite a lot of noise.
Merlin: There was a lot of people there kind of yelling and screaming.
John: And I did a thing.
Merlin: Oh, yeah, no, no.
Merlin: And so I would like you in a moment to describe what I sent you.
Merlin: So I did that thing.
Merlin: I'm not going to post this publicly, and don't be creepy.
Merlin: But I did take a photo, and I sent it to a couple people, including you.
Merlin: So can you describe Sunday afternoon at that place in the photo I sent you?
John: What we see here, I'm seeing... It's outside.
John: It's outside.
John: One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine people, seven men and two women, as far as I can tell.
John: They are all sitting around beer barrels, right?
John: that have been turned into tables there are two of those heat uh those outdoor heat like heater mushrooms are they are they six feet apart and wearing uh masks john they are all wearing black interestingly uh most of them in black jeans black black shirts they are all just oh the great thing about it is that a handful of them are wearing masks on their body they all have the masks they're hooked to their ears and they're all pulled down under their chins
John: How close are they, John?
John: There's like five of them wearing masks and they're just right on top of each other.
Merlin: They're so on top of each other.
John: They're just sitting with each other like it would be like they were just having a party or they just got off work having some drinks.
John: And then what do we know?
Merlin: What did I hear for an hour?
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: Like you get sick from the singing in the choir, the yelling.
Merlin: You're basically spitting, potentially spitting virus into the air for multiple people.
Merlin: They're all around this tiny fucking table.
Merlin: And I thought to myself, I've never felt stupider that I thought this was a thing that I wanted to do as of last week.
John: Well, I love that they're wearing masks.
Merlin: They're wearing masks on their body, but not on their face.
Merlin: Under their chins.
John: I mean, that's not very comfortable.
John: It's like taping a vitamin to your head.
John: Yeah, that's really strange.
John: That's not the pathway.
John: Now, I've been thinking about – because I like a road trip.
John: And so I've been asking a lot of people –
John: That question that I guess I always ask people, which is like, how many states have you been to?
John: Like, have you ever driven across the United States?
John: I've been everywhere, man.
John: Yeah, what's your favorite place?
John: You've been to Alabama, Tuscaloosa?
John: Oklahoma City looks mighty pretty.
John: Amarillo, Gallup, New Mexico.
John: Blackstaff, Arizona, don't forget.
John: You get kind of surprising answers from people because sometimes you think of people that are pretty well-traveled and it turns out that they've only been to a handful of states on the coasts, right?
John: They've never been to the – they've never been to – Never seen like the world's largest ball of string or something.
John: Never seen any of that but also never been to –
John: Minnesota, you know, like big states that have shit going on, right?
Merlin: Minneapolis, St.
Merlin: Paul can be very, very lovely.
John: It's a nice place.
John: It's very Seattle-like.
John: Who do I know lives there?
John: I want to say Kevin Murphy.
John: Kevin Murphy and Bill Corbett both live there.
Merlin: Oh, yeah, right.
Merlin: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Merlin: It's just beautiful.
Merlin: I'm not going to pick a favorite.
Merlin: They're both beautiful cities.
Merlin: Oh, between Minneapolis and St.
John: Paul.
John: Well, you don't want to get involved in that.
John: Woof.
John: My cousin Paige lives in St.
John: Paul.
John: everybody says that's the better one you know that's well you know you can't it's hard it's not you know nice neighborhoods yes st paul has nice neighborhoods good good little hotel that's where public radio comes from yes that is where public radio comes from anyway so uh in uh you know i asked my sister who's been she's been everywhere man but she's only been to what like
John: 29 states.
John: She's been to a lot of countries, different countries though, right?
John: A lot of countries, but also she's driven from Colorado to Alaska and back probably 30 times.
John: A thing that still boggles me.
John: She's been up and down through Canada like so much that she knows from gas station to gas station.
John: Like, oh, the next gas station is only 40 minutes from here.
John: Type of thing in a place that, you know, where you can't you can look to the horizon in every direction.
John: But she's only been to, you know, less than 30 states.
John: And so I've been thinking.
John: Well, this is a great opportunity to do a road trip where the point is the road trip, not that you're going anyplace.
John: The trip, not the destination, the journey.
John: We're all going to get in the family truckster.
John: We're going to drive out to Wally World.
John: But the park's closed.
John: Sorry, folks.
John: I love him so much.
John: And then he rides the roller coaster with him.
John: You turn around and you go back or you go back by a different route.
John: And you do all those wonderful American truckster things.
John: Like you look out the window at things.
John: You're like, oh, look at that.
John: Look at that, kids.
John: You almost have sex with Christy Brinkley?
John: It depends.
John: She's living in an uptown world.
John: Pass me in a Ferrari 308 or whatever that is.
Yeah.
John: And so I've been.
John: Audrey, can I help you with that, please?
John: I've been thinking about this.
John: Like, is this a doable thing?
John: Can I do a thing where the goal because there's a goal and the goal is to get more states.
John: For my sister and for my daughter's mother to rack up states.
John: Because listen, I don't count if you land in Atlanta airport and take a tram to the other gate.
John: No, that does not count.
John: That doesn't count, right?
John: You can't say you've been to Georgia.
John: So get in those states and there's no better way to get a state than to drive into it, drive across it, drive out of it.
John: And spend the night in a hotel.
John: And let's be clear here.
Merlin: You are, by and large, in your own little bubble.
Merlin: In your bubble.
Merlin: You can pay for gas, like, right at the thing.
Merlin: You keep washing your hands, deodorizing, all of it.
Merlin: Deodorizing.
Merlin: What's the word I'm looking for?
Merlin: Why am I having a brain fart?
Merlin: Antiperspirant.
Merlin: Antiperspirant.
Merlin: Antiperspirant.
Merlin: Yes.
Merlin: But you're in a bubble.
Merlin: John's bubble.
Merlin: Sanitizing.
Merlin: Sanitizing.
John: And, you know, you get your hotels in advance via some sort of online platform.
John: I'm sure you arrive, you put on a mask, you walk in, you're like, I got a room.
John: You stand 10 feet from the desk.
John: They give it to you.
John: You go upstairs.
John: If you're Merlin or Dan, you immediately put the remote control in a plastic bag.
John: Yeah.
Merlin: uh if you're me you throw the the weird hairy accent pillow on the oh god john corner get that pillow off of there do you know how many people have come in that coffee maker i don't want so many germans have have finished in your beverage maker
John: No, thank you.
John: It all gets unplugged and put in the corner.
John: Also, then immediately I call down to the front desk and say, I forgot to ask that all the bedding be de-feathered.
John: And so I always forget to do this.
John: And now I hope you have foam pillows.
Merlin: But again, like we're learning.
Merlin: I mean, like, it's fun.
Merlin: But like we're learning also that, yeah, there is a risk from it's the being inside.
Merlin: I believe that's the bigger risk.
Merlin: than the surface stuff but you should not be touching the surfaces with what with sex it's the problem with sex being inside is a lot more dangerous being inside is more dangerous you said but you should still wear a mask
Merlin: uh well it depends if they're into it are you a furry well it depends but like it depends maybe you're the covet bottom and you you you like want them to use the hole in the sheet i think if you're having sex with somebody and you're both wearing masks it's still not enough still not enough your your noses are too close together it's not anonymous but it's it's less anonymous
John: Yeah.
Merlin: Okay.
Merlin: So the idea is you're going through, you're going state to state, station to station.
John: I think you could.
John: I think you could do it.
John: I think you could too.
John: I think it's doable and you might not die.
John: If you pull into the parking lot at the Mount Rushmore and you look around, there are too many people walking around.
John: You can say, well, everybody, we can't get out because of all these people walking around.
John: But there it is.
John: And then my daughter is going to say, that's Mount Rushmore.
John: Where's Martin Luther King?
John: I'm going to say, well, that's on the other Mount Rushmore.
John: And she's going to go, hmm, all right.
John: She'll accept that.
John: A segregated Mount Rushmore.
John: That's the other Mount Rushmore.
John: That's going to be down by the Sitting Bull statue when they get that thing done in 2500.
Merlin: What's that really big one?
Merlin: Crazy Horse?
Merlin: Is it Crazy Horse?
John: Oh, it's Crazy Horse.
John: That's what I meant.
Merlin: That's a really big one, right?
John: It's so big.
John: I've been to it a couple of times.
John: Did they ever finish it?
John: No.
John: It's so far from being finished.
Merlin: We had a Polish-American friend of my grandparents who was very proud of the fact that that guy was a Polish man that made that.
John: Yeah.
John: Yeah.
John: Well, and he worked on it.
John: It's one of these like crazy things, kind of like Mount Rushmore.
John: He worked on until he died and then a consortium of other weirdos took over.
John: I was there a couple of times when they were – well, I've been there twice and two times.
John: So I guess both times I've been there, they were blasting and you can sit down in the visitor center and they sound a siren and everybody goes over to the window and looks up and then –
John: And they blow a big bunch of rocks in the air and you're like, oh, exciting.
John: But it's far away from where you are.
John: So it's like, well, there it is.
John: It's going to be something when it's done.
John: As described, John, this sounds doable.
John: It does.
Merlin: But it sounds it sounds doable.
John: What it requires is an awful lot of buy in from everybody.
John: Right.
John: And and then the like the primary buy in is here we are in a day driving and somebody says, I want to get out.
John: I'm so bored.
John: I can't be in this car for another second.
John: And I go, let's turn on the radio.
John: Let's play a game.
John: Like, look over there.
John: Do you see that?
John: That's the world's ballest.
John: That's the world's ballest.
John: Ballest yarn of mine.
John: And they go, can we go look at it?
John: And I'm like, nope, can't look at it.
John: Too many people in the parking lot.
John: There it is.
John: He's having another neurological event.
John: There it is.
John: Oh, look, it's the... I probably shouldn't try.
John: It's the fetropied poorest.
John: Oh, look at that.
John: And people are like, can I get out?
John: And it's like, no.
Merlin: It's the most Cracker Barrel Bob Evans that ever did shopping mall.
John: And for me, as somebody who has routinely driven 10 hours a day, staring out the window with one hand on the wheel and one hand on my imagination tiller.
John: Oh, that's so nice.
John: Just floating through the stars.
John: Till it.
John: One hand on the tiller.
John: Yeah.
John: I don't mind being in a car for eight hours a day and just looking out.
John: But I know other people.
John: Not for everybody.
John: There's one thing I know.
John: It's other people.
Merlin: Every kid gets pretty fidgety after a while, even if they got a little thing to play with.
Merlin: You don't want to be playing.
Merlin: It's like me with this.
Merlin: Can you just put down TikTok for one goddamn minute and watch a 15-minute movie called Meshes of the Afternoon that's very upsetting?
Merlin: Put down the TikTok and watch the TV like a person.
John: Yeah, watch a TV like a person.
John: Or in my case, look out the window and do what I used to do when I was a kid, which was imagine that I was being chased by spies on motorcycles.
John: For me, it was Dracula's.
John: How were Draculas chasing you?
John: Any way they wanted.
John: They can drive.
John: Oh.
John: Blah, blah.
John: Get out of the passing lane.
John: Blah.
John: For me, it was motorcycles on either side of the car.
John: And they would, like, one guy would excel.
John: And they all, the guys had masks on like they were members of Spectre.
John: Okay.
John: And a guy would come up alongside the car.
John: And the guy that was holding on to him around the waist would put out his pistol and point it at me.
John: And then they would hit a culvert.
Merlin: This is a little bit of like a – I want to say like a skyfall.
Merlin: This is a little bit like a James Bond pursued by people on motorcycles type situation.
John: Yes.
John: And the way that it happens in movies where you're being pursued by a seeming impossible number, 10 different people on motorcycles, and they get picked off one by one.
John: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
John: You know, it's like any kind of air battle where the plane goes into a canyon and flies over.
John: It's like the Firefox where he flies over here and one of the jets chasing him hits a tree.
Merlin: Oh, you're saying you do like a Han Solo and you turn your pancake sideways to go between the mountains.
Merlin: Exactly.
Merlin: Yeah.
John: Boom.
John: Ka-chow.
Merlin: Or it could be an alleyway and still it knocks the wings off your bird for sure.
John: And when you're driving fast, even if you're on flat ground and on either side, it's just like plenty of room for a motorcycle assassin to get up next to you.
John: There's always going to be something, a street sign, like an access road.
John: You could use it to your advantage.
John: Well, a lot of times the motorcycle would...
John: The motorcycles would use those culverts or whatever to jump and get big air.
John: And I would be imagining them in the air, like getting big air.
Merlin: You do have to prepare for that.
John: But then they have to land, you know, and a lot of times the guy on the back will get bounced off.
John: I would sit and imagine this motorcycle chase.
John: And for, I don't know, hours, just staring out the window, motorcycles on both sides, and I'm in the back.
John: And I'm not shooting at them.
John: No, but you're ready.
John: You're ready.
John: I'm ready.
Merlin: They're counting on you not being ready.
Merlin: They're counting on you not having gone through this scenario in your head for years, thousands of times.
Merlin: Right.
John: You've been preparing for this for your entire adult life.
John: Often in my life, there are these problems where people are complaining about something.
John: And I go, well, just imagine that you're being chased by motorcycles.
John: And they go, huh?
John: And then I realize not everybody's doing that.
John: When people ask me, they're like, oh, I can't go to sleep at night.
John: And I go, well, what do you think about as you're going to sleep?
John: And the last time I had this conversation, they were like, images.
John: And I'm like, what kind of images?
John: Oh, you know, just images, weird images.
John: Images like a giraffe with wings and stuff.
John: And I'm like, no, a giraffe with wings.
John: You know, what I do is I imagine an adventure.
John: And it's an adventure where intrinsic to the adventure is that you go more and more into the depths of the adventure.
John: And the depths actually are sleep.
John: I mean, you're like you're putting Dick Cheney in a in a shipping container and it involves a certain amount of like you got to work out the detail.
Merlin: This is this is a common tenant in self-hypnosis and sleep trying to work on your sleep, which is it involves levels.
Merlin: Like if you're doing self-hypnosis, you say like whatever works for you that's not scary for you.
Merlin: But it could be something like imagine yourself slowly walking down more and more flights of steps.
Merlin: And every step that you take is getting you deeper, you know, that kind of thing.
Merlin: So in this case, though, it's adventures all the way down for you.
John: Well, and that's where the whole Dick Cheney shipping container came from.
John: Really?
John: Which was like, I've got all this Dick Cheney stuff in my head all the time.
John: What I need to do is take it underground into a labyrinth that I've created out of shipping containers where all of these people are going to be in...
Merlin: Just to be clear, it's my understanding.
Merlin: He's just the marquee character that folks might know.
Merlin: He is by no means going to be alone, except in as much as he will be very alone.
Merlin: But he won't know how close he is to so many other war criminals.
Merlin: Like you get a Kissinger, for example.
John: Lawrence Eagleburger is in the shipping container right next to him.
John: But they can't know.
John: There's dirt in between them.
John: So when they're pounding on the walls going, let me out of here, the other guy can't even hear.
John: He doesn't even know he's there.
John: As the television just shows a constantly repeating but slightly edited version of all of his speeches back to him for hours at a time.
John: He sounds like Jerry Lewis.
John: All of those things, all of those images, all were a product of me trying to work out a maze that I would go down into.
John: And I had lots of little things I had to take care of.
John: Like, how was I going to make this bed slightly trapezoidal?
Merlin: It's one of those things where you really do want to plan ahead because the more options that you have for, let's be honest, like systematic years-long gaslighting, your planning of that is going to be so critical.
Merlin: How will the food be delivered?
Merlin: How will it be slightly poisoned with LSD?
Merlin: How will the walls move?
Merlin: If these walls move, is that going to move Kissinger's wall?
Merlin: These are all things you need to think through, right?
John: And the thing is the bed has to be designed to change shape.
John: But not in a way that's obvious.
John: Right.
John: Not in a way that's obvious.
John: And that means all of the sheets and bedding also has to be cut slightly.
John: I'm talking about just like micrometers off of square so that it's square relative to the bed.
John: And by the time I'm thinking about all this stuff and I've got all these checklists, I'm asleep already.
John: Oh, see?
John: That's good.
John: Basically, you just bore yourself to sleep but also bore yourself with a super exciting project.
John: And I explained this to my daughter and she's like, what are you talking about?
John: And I'm like, don't count sheep.
John: Count all the sheep that are going to be necessary to torture Dick Cheney into insanity.
John: And she's like, that's not true.
John: how I, my brain works.
John: And I'm like, look, if you're being chased by motorcycle, she has not even tried it.
John: She's not even trying.
John: She's tried it.
John: But if you're being chased by motorcycles, you can drive for eight hours and you don't even notice the passage of time.
John: Except when you come back to consciousness briefly in order to see the world's ball is large of twine.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: The only Stuckys.
Merlin: It has another Stuckys inside of it.
John: It's the truck stop where you can get like a satin jacket.
John: And CBD oil.
John: Made with a picture of your truck on the back.
John: On sight?
John: On-site.
Merlin: On-site?
Merlin: While you wait, you go and get yourself a porterhouse while they make you a satin jacket with you and your truck on it?
John: Like a state fair?
John: There's a giant embroidery machine in a truck stop in Indiana somewhere.
John: Whoa.
John: I've seen it.
John: Put that on the list.
Merlin: Put that on the list, John.
Merlin: Next to the twinest string of ball, you should definitely go to that.
John: I was like – it was 3 o'clock in the morning and I said to the man –
John: I said to the man, are you trying to tempt me?
John: Because I come from the land of plenty.
John: And he was like, oh, so.
John: And I said, this giant embroidery machine over here with these satin jackets, like in silver and green and gold.
Merlin: I can finally get that jacket that Ryan What's-His-Name has in Drive with the cool scorpion on it.
John: That's it.
John: That's it.
John: And I said to the man, when does this open?
John: And he's like, doesn't open until eight in the morning.
John: And it's a huge, it's a huge station.
John: It took up, it took up a giant space.
Merlin: The truck stops.
Merlin: It's got showers and stuff like that.
Merlin: Probably.
John: Yeah.
Merlin: The whole, like the whole suite, the facility, you can sleep here.
Merlin: You can eat here.
Merlin: You can get a handy here and you can get a scorpion jacket with your, with your, with your truck on it.
John: There's that thing where there's a sign that says truckers only past this point.
John: And you look up the hall and you're like, what's going on in there?
John: And all the trucks have stickers that say no lot lizards.
John: And so then this embroidery machine.
John: No lot lizards.
John: They have example jackets hanging all around it.
John: And you can go in with a picture of your truck or your Camaro or your daughter's face.
John: And they will embroider it while you wait.
John: on the back of a satin jacket get your old lady on there you could get your old lady you could get your dead uh younger brother with the like you could you get the jacket in memorial of of your brother you absolutely could but they also most of the ones that i saw had a tractor trailer that was like
John: This is my, this is my Peterbilt and it, and this is how it's customized.
John: There are many like it, but this one is mine.
John: That's right.
John: It's the Peterbilt creed.
John: And so after, and I made a, I made a, I made a, I planted a flag in my head.
John: I planted a flag in the mental Google maps right here at this place in Indiana.
John: Of course.
John: It's like, it's like, uh, it's like everything is content or everything is copy.
John: Yeah.
John: I said to myself,
John: I don't need to write down these coordinates because I will be back here and I will know when I am within 100 miles of this place, I'll know.
John: And I didn't.
John: Oh, that's your eight minute test.
John: It'll speak to you like a passport.
John: That's right.
John: But it's never happened in all the years since then.
John: In 20 years of searching for this embroidery machine in this one truck stop in Indiana, I never saw it again.
John: It's time.
John: Well, this is it, maybe?
John: You're saying get chased by motorcycles all the way across the country until I get to Indy?
Merlin: It's not my circus, not my motorcycles.
Merlin: But it sounds like what you were moving toward here is to say it's still not time yet?
Merlin: For the trip?
Merlin: What's your feeling like, given our previous last hour and eight minutes of talking about these precautions?
Merlin: As you sit here today, how do you feel about getting in a car and doing some punch buggy on the road with motorcycles chasing you?
Merlin: How do you feel about that today?
John: It's June 29th, which I cannot believe.
John: Fucking unbelievable.
John: If you had asked me at the start of this program, I would have said it was June 10th.
John: Yeah.
John: Somehow it's June 29th.
John: I don't know how that's possible.
John: And yet it's always 3 p.m.
Merlin: I don't know why it's always 3 p.m.
Merlin: now.
John: It does seem like 3 p.m.
John: all the time.
John: What is that about?
John: I never thought about it.
Merlin: I joked about this with some friends and every single person I mentioned it to says the same thing to where.
Merlin: Well, there are two things that I say to my family every day.
Merlin: I text them every day and I say, how is it already three o'clock?
Merlin: And the other one is, oh, my God, it's 630.
Merlin: It feels like 915.
John: For me, the 3 p.m.ness about it is like it's too late to start something new.
John: But so you dropped three hours.
John: I feel like I've dropped three to four hours every day and I don't know where it fell.
John: It's too late to start something new, but it's not dinner time yet.
John: And you don't do edibles, so that sucks.
John: So it's June 29th.
John: In order to drive across the country, in order to find this embroidery truck stop, in order to...
John: See the World's Tallest Ball of Wine.
John: I need to, what, have a plan?
John: I mean, if it were up to me, I would just go off of this show right now, out into the garage, turn the car on and start driving.
Merlin: I'm the wrong person to ask about this because you know me and you know, what is the first t-shirt you ever designed for me in your head?
Merlin: Guided by fear, driven by fear.
Merlin: Well, you noted very early on how fearful I am.
Merlin: I am fearful.
Merlin: I have loss aversion.
Merlin: Driven by fear.
Merlin: Boom.
John: Boom.
John: Driven by fear.
Merlin: But the problem here for me is like, for example, you know, it comes straight to mind for me.
Merlin: This is the thing that I've heard called chain worrying, where one worry turns into another worry and goes off like a spider web.
Merlin: For example, a recent time that my usually we go as a group to visit our relatives in gold country.
Merlin: But in this last visit, my wife and daughter went there.
Merlin: So they drive out 80.
Merlin: You know, you go is way, way, way east of here.
Merlin: And I forgot what was it that happened.
Merlin: It might have been the check engine light.
Merlin: Something happened where the car died like just basically within view of the Bay Bridge.
Merlin: But like well before like Vallejo even like you could see San Francisco and Oakland.
Merlin: So like and they're on the side of the road on fucking 80s.
Merlin: Where, I mean, I don't even like being on 80, but it's just and they're on a shoulder on the side of the road.
Merlin: My kid is terrified.
Merlin: The car has died.
Merlin: We got to call AAA.
Merlin: Thank God for AAA Super or whatever.
Merlin: But they did have to sit on the side of the road and deal with that for a while.
Merlin: What does that have to do with this?
Merlin: Hmm.
Merlin: Or like, for example, you in the RV, right?
Merlin: That one time.
Merlin: Like, you know what I really super don't want right now is to be stuck three counties from home in a vehicle that doesn't move and need to deal with that.
Merlin: There's so many interactions with people I do not want to have that would be required by a vehicle in a very normal, wholesome American way, just dying.
Merlin: Because that's what vehicles do sometimes.
Merlin: You get a flat or whatever it is.
Merlin: You know what I'm saying?
Merlin: Like, that's one of my first things that comes to mind.
Merlin: It's like, what if I'm like John?
Merlin: What if I'm like my wife?
Merlin: Like, what if I, what if we're stuck somewhere?
Merlin: And like, I just, now my mind is really cascading with the possibilities.
Merlin: It would just be no fun for you to be, you know, it's like that song that 500 miles away from home.
Merlin: It's a very sad song.
Merlin: What if you were closer than you could have realized to the embroidery truck stop, but, but then your, your, your vehicle gave out and now you're stuck there.
Merlin: You can't get the jacket.
Merlin: You can't get home.
Merlin: You got a kid who wants to ride a bike with that more kid.
John: See, we talked about this a long time ago, I think.
John: And it was one time on tour many years ago driving in the night.
John: The band was in one of those things where it's just us in this space capsule hurtling through space.
Merlin: Planet Earth is blue.
Merlin: There's nothing I can do.
John: That's right.
John: And it's just us.
John: It's just this tight little group of dudes and we're sharing our intimate secrets.
John: And I was like, I don't know what happened, but we were talking about our greatest fears and what are the things that are the scariest things in the world to us.
John: And the drummer of the band at the time, Michael Schilling, said, my greatest fear is running out of gas on a dark country road.
John: And I was ready to say, what?
John: And then Sean said,
John: Me too.
John: That's my greatest fear.
John: Running out of gas at night on a dark country road where you can't see a light.
Merlin: Oh, so you're like, you're in pitch black.
John: And you're just out on a country road and you're out of gas.
John: What do you do?
John: And you run the car until the battery dies.
John: And as I was listening to them, I was like thinking, just trying to compile a short list of
John: of the number of times I had run out of gas in the middle of the night on a dark road where you couldn't see a light because I just, because I'm a bipolar person and I drive until the car runs out of gas because of some reason.
John: I don't, I don't even remember why.
John: And I couldn't, I mean, I was at, I was, I was at 10 counting the number of times that that had happened to me and I hadn't even gotten to the nineties.
John: You know, it was just a thing where I was like,
John: run out of gas on a country road you're more of a buried alive kind of guy right yeah sort of i don't like being buried alive at all you'd prefer not to that is one of the i don't like having my breath denied me under any see this is why i don't wear a mask if you're just like