Ep. 395: "Talismans and Memories"
Merlin: Hello.
Merlin: Hi, John.
Merlin: Hey, Mr. Guy.
John: Hey, there he is.
Merlin: BMOC.
John: Counselor.
John: Hey, happy anniversary.
John: Captain Marm wrote me this morning and said that nine years ago, on a night just like tonight, you and I recorded, I was a guest on Back to Work.
John: The pilot ep of our whole show nine years ago.
Merlin: Is that right?
Merlin: I thought we started.
Merlin: Wow.
Merlin: Wow.
Merlin: Happy anniversary.
Merlin: I didn't get you anything.
John: What is the ninth anniversary?
Merlin: Oh, ninth anniversary is tacos.
Oh.
Merlin: Hmm.
Merlin: Ninth anniversary traditional gifts according to The Nest.
John: Yes.
Merlin: Let's see.
Merlin: Water.
Merlin: A ceramic bowl.
Merlin: I can make you a ceramic bowl.
Merlin: You are a ceramicist.
Merlin: Dinnerware.
Merlin: Artisan pottery.
Merlin: Sure.
Merlin: I love that stuff.
Merlin: Yeah.
John: I went through a phase earlier this year where I was buying artisanal pottery.
Merlin: Really?
Merlin: For what purpose, if I could ask?
Yeah.
John: Well, it's depressing to talk about now because I was like, I'm moving into a new house and I want new plates and I want it to be artist anal.
John: Yeah.
John: And, you know, there are a lot of people in the Northwest that are throwing pots and making uneven plates that don't stack and bowls that can't nest.
John: And I was like, I'm there for it all.
Yeah.
Merlin: Yeah, I think the Japanese call it wabi-sabi.
Merlin: The idea is you want to – it's the errors that make it fun.
Merlin: We went around with this recently in my household because my lady friend has been desiring new bowls.
Merlin: Oh, yeah.
Merlin: And I'm, I think, more practical in this regard.
Merlin: I'm a karma suck about the bowls.
Merlin: You want the old bowls.
Merlin: Well, I said that I want the old bowls.
Merlin: I want the good old bowls.
Merlin: The good old – not all the old bowls.
Just the good old.
Merlin: I like consistency.
Merlin: And if there's any thread that runs through all of my issues with organization, I want to be able to just grab.
Merlin: I don't want to think.
Merlin: I don't want to unstack.
Merlin: I think everything should be ready.
Merlin: This might be my version of wanting a girl with combat boots or maybe keeping a small bag packed.
Merlin: I should never have to move anything to get to anything.
Merlin: As E.T.
John: would say, ready.
Merlin: Oh, that's sweet.
Merlin: But, you know, it depends.
Merlin: It depends.
Merlin: If it is the go-to, like the pans.
Merlin: I want the pans to be deployable.
Merlin: You know what I mean?
Merlin: Kiss the pan.
Merlin: Kiss the pan.
Merlin: The pan kisses you.
Merlin: Only English people can fly.
Merlin: I still think about Mr. Show quite a lot.
Merlin: I thought about Mr. Show just a few minutes ago.
John: Yes.
John: You just thought about Mr. Show just a few seconds ago.
Merlin: You know, because I don't have any self-control for these things.
Merlin: When the vice president announced that a familiar friend of mine might be stopping by today, I instantly thought of Hal Tinkerbell.
Merlin: the video appearing on stage of Hal Tinkerbell, and then he goes and he talks to the guy who has limber legs, and he just had this giant face appearing on stage.
Merlin: You can't unsee it, you know?
Merlin: They were so far ahead of their time.
Merlin: They were.
John: Let me ask you.
John: Yeah, ask me anything.
John: Why don't you, did you ever, and slash why don't you,
John: do the thing where you just have all your clothes like be Steve Jobs clothes where it's just a closet full of the same clothes.
Merlin: I'm pretty close to that.
Merlin: Really?
Merlin: I buy all the same underwear.
Merlin: I buy all the same socks.
Merlin: Um, the only thing that really changes, I wear the same pants every day.
Merlin: The only thing that really changes is my chosen undershirt tee.
Merlin: And then I usually wear a, um, like a long sleeve shirt over that, like a Mack Weldon shirt.
Merlin: So I'm pretty close in that regard, I think.
John: So now when you go, uh, what, you know, we, we've been sponsored, uh, for a long time by the wonderful, uh, Mack Weldon company.
Merlin: I forgot we talked about it just yesterday.
John: A couple of days ago.
John: Wow.
John: So when you get an order from Mack Weldon, because they have a delightful different palette or delightfully wide palette of colored underwear and socks.
John: And so when I have ordered from them, I always get a different color of underpants and a different pattern of socks so that now my underwear drawer is
John: looks like a bag of Skittles.
John: Everything, they're all bright yellow and red and orange.
John: It really, really pops.
John: Just really pops.
John: Like the dark ones, the gray ones, and the black ones and stuff, I'm sort of like, well, I mean, you know, I've lived in a mono-color underwear world, and I never want to go back.
John: I want to just live, I want my underwear to be all the colors of
Merlin: of the maracas of brazil you know like i want them that's so much more fun than what i'm doing well pow now are you buying underwear that are the same color every time yeah yeah every time it's just which color yeah yeah i mean there are so many aspects of my life where i really do thrive on a certain kind of
Merlin: existential or even just visual chaos, but it's kind of like, it's like the pan.
Merlin: I mean, I want to be able to stick my hand in the drawer and pull out a fork without having to think about it.
Merlin: And, you know, I see, I feel like I've heard people say that this is what the gap accomplished for a lot of people at one point, which was if you were just like some kind of trad dad, you could just march in there and get six pairs of these khakis and six of these polo shirts and stuff like that.
Merlin: And yeah,
Merlin: Yeah, I don't know.
Merlin: It's weird.
Merlin: Like I said, there's other parts of my life that are much more interesting, but I like yours.
Merlin: Yours is fun.
Merlin: You're a fun guy.
Merlin: You wear fun shoes.
Merlin: You got fun outfits.
Merlin: You'll wear a bow tie.
Merlin: You're a fun guy.
Merlin: Yeah, fun, super fun.
Merlin: I mean, you're painting with such a palette.
Merlin: You have so many options.
Merlin: Sometimes you wake up and you wait for the announcement.
Merlin: What is the uniform of the day?
Merlin: I feel like if I were truly...
John: Like if I were a chaotic evil person, my underwear drawer would have boxers and briefs and, uh, like, uh, G strings and, uh, tidy whities.
Merlin: Oh, so you'll, you'll rock a whale tail.
Merlin: Yeah.
John: Right.
John: But that, but that feels like that's, that's chaos at a different level.
John: That's, that's like, that's an underwear drawer where basically it's full of found underwear.
John: right like like for a while i had what would you say three four different kinds of underwear like traditional boxers that kind of you know that are like the flap in the wind yeah and then boxer briefs and then briefs and then i had a few pairs of german underwear which we've we've discussed yes your german underwear yes
John: And then as time went on, you know, the German underwear all got stolen by girlfriends.
John: And the boxers just sort of don't fit under skinny jeans.
Merlin: That's what I was going to say.
Merlin: I think you, at least historically, have a reason to require or desire different kinds of underpants.
Merlin: Because let's think of it this way.
Merlin: Let's say you're going to wear like an airy seersucker suit topped off with a straw boater.
Merlin: Now, that feels like a boxer situation to me.
Merlin: It does.
Merlin: It does.
John: You're absolutely right.
Merlin: Classic.
John: The appropriate underwear there would be some boxers, some all-cotton boxer shorts.
John: But remember your phase where you wore tight pants?
John: Tight pants, you can't wear boxer shorts.
Merlin: Tight pants, you're not going to pair with a boxer.
Merlin: You're going to want something a little more slim.
Merlin: Maybe some Spanx.
Merlin: But something that'll – I mean, these are different pairings.
Merlin: But as our late great friend Leslie Harpold used to say – what did she used to say?
Merlin: I don't like buying toys for my toys.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: And sometimes that's what it is.
Merlin: If you get a certain, you might need a different brassiere, whatever it is.
Merlin: You know if you're going to pair this with that.
Merlin: Now, bras, that's a whole other thing.
Merlin: Because are the straps going to show?
Merlin: Do you want the straps to show?
Merlin: Is it for effect?
Merlin: You know what I'm saying?
John: Is it like a poem or is it for comfort?
John: Are you going to run in it?
John: Are you going to sit around in it?
Merlin: Well, let me ask a follow-up.
Merlin: In these, amidst these difficult times, I think I know the answer or can guess the answer to this.
Merlin: Do you still listen for the announcement about the uniform of the day?
Merlin: And are there occasions where the uniform of the day is something that's not strictly utilitarian, sit around the house and teach math clothes?
Merlin: Are you still a fun dresser amidst these difficult times?
John: It's a good question.
John: Thank you.
John: And, you know, the problem was at the top of the hour, at the top of the quarantine, I was already working with a reduced pallet because all my stuff is in storage and I'm working out of a bag, right?
John: Of course.
John: Ugh.
John: And so over the fall, like –
John: I really just sort of moved in here with like two duffel bags full of everything.
John: That was my whole life was just a couple of suitcases.
John: And in the fall, I was prepping for the two things that I normally do in the winter that involve coffee.
John: different clothes.
John: Cause I, we go to sketch fest, but sketch fest is just whatever fun clothes that you're, that you're wearing normal stuff.
John: You don't, you know, I'm not Paul F. Tompkins.
John: I don't go to sketch fest in a three piece suit.
Merlin: Oh yeah.
Merlin: Well, I mean, that guy probably has to bring up a steamer trunk.
John: He does.
John: He does.
John: He's got a different hat for every hour, but, but what I do is I go to sketch fest.
John: I do a few things like that, but nothing that looked like it was going to require any, any crazy bunch of clothes.
John: And then Joko Cruz,
John: And we spend a couple of weeks in Hawaii every year at this, in the early year.
John: So I knew when I was packing in September to move in over here that I probably was going to need some stuff for both of those things.
John: And so I packed a bunch of Hawaiian shirts because I decided several years ago that old Hawaiian shirts were what I were going to, that's what I was going to wear on the Joko cruise.
John: And that's what I was going to wear when I'm in Hawaii.
Merlin: Okay.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Well, that makes a ton of sense.
Merlin: That's actually oddly efficient.
John: Efficient, right?
John: But fun.
John: But then I got back.
John: Efficient but fun.
John: And so I pulled all that off.
John: That was great.
John: And then got back here to Seattle in March and we went into quarantine.
John: And in March and April in Seattle, you just wear a sweater and a rain jacket.
John: And I had a sweater and I had a rain jacket.
John: And then when it started to get warm, because it's been a very nice spring and summer here,
John: threw on those Hawaiian shirts again.
John: And I'm like, I got, I got no worries.
John: I'm wearing Hawaiian shirts like nine months out of the year.
John: And then of course the boogaloos,
Merlin: I wasn't going to say anything.
Merlin: I think Hawaiian shirt is code for Boogaloo now.
John: So Boogaloo's come along.
John: Now, Boogaloo's are wearing, for the most part, Hawaiian shirts that they got at Walmart, right?
John: They're not vintage Hawaiian shirts.
John: They're not reverse prints.
Merlin: It's not any better than the you will not replace us guys, you know, with the tiki torches from Home Depot.
Merlin: Lazy, lazy stuff.
John: Right, or all the incels in the fedoras.
John: Like, they're not wearing the right – they're not the right hat.
Merlin: Walmart fedora.
John: You know, those fedoras, they're not good.
John: They don't look good.
John: They're not editorial, John.
John: But all of a sudden, I got self-conscious about going out into the town in a Hawaiian shirt because it's not – it's never about the connoisseurs –
John: that you see across a crowded dance floor and they go, oh, nice.
John: And I go, thank you.
John: And then we never want to speak to each other again because we've seen each other.
Merlin: But you don't want to unintentionally rep white nationalist hanky code.
Merlin: Exactly.
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John: I don't want to just be walking down the street, not only rep it in the sense that somebody gives me an OK symbol, but rep it just in the sense that somebody on a bus driving by looks out the window, sees a guy in a Hawaiian shirt, has been looking at Twitter too much.
Merlin: Oh, now you're normalizing it unintentionally.
John: Well, or, or just creating an environment where people are like, Oh, you know, it's a bummer, man.
John: There's white nationalists in Burien or whatever.
John: And it was just me walking around in a Hawaiian shirt.
John: Yeah.
John: And that's the problem, right?
John: There are a lot of people that, uh, because they're, they're, they're very online.
John: I mean, wearing Hawaiian shirts around my neighborhood, uh,
John: I realize I'm in the suburbs.
John: There's not a, there's not a living soul out here that has any awareness that of the Boogaloo even exists, except for like, there's probably a few dads that are like in their garage tinkering, but you know, like this is just, this is just a place where people are mowing their lawns.
John: There's no, nobody is, there's no subtext to anything in the suburbs, right?
John: It's just all text.
Yeah.
John: And so, you know, I would not wear a Hawaiian shirt to Capitol Hill and walk around in a fedora with a tiki torch and be like, these are just my normal things.
John: I don't know what you're all upset about.
John: But it made me feel every time I put one on, like even in the house, even if I wasn't, you know, going to go very far, I was like, oh, man.
John: Yeah.
John: I swear to you, Merlin, it's 85% of my shirts that I have not in storage.
John: What are you going to do?
Merlin: That's what you got.
John: I put them on.
John: I wear them around the house.
John: And I wear them over to my ravine.
John: And I put on my gloves and my boots.
John: And I go down in the ravine and I chop wood.
John: And in the ravine, nobody can see me.
John: That's one of the things.
John: Nobody can see me from any direction.
John: And so I could wear Hawaiian shirts.
John: I could wear Tiki Torch.
John: down there and nobody would know, you know, be irrelevant.
John: The only problem is sometimes I have to go to the store and then I'm like, Oh no, I'm in a, I'm in a Hawaiian shirt.
John: Oh man.
John: But then, you know, if you go to the hardware store, that's probably one of the places that you're getting most likely to get an okay sign.
John: So I don't know.
John: It's complicated.
John: I don't have enough clothes to not get
Merlin: have to fall back on hawaiian shirts and it feels um wasteful and um waste wasteful and dumb to go out and acquire a new wardrobe so that people who spend too much time on facebook won't think you're a gun toting yeah not yeti everybody that's a boogaloo that's wearing a hawaiian shirt is also wearing a flak jacket and oakley sunglasses i'm unlikely to be mistaken for
Merlin: Someone, but you never know.
Merlin: But you go out to the parking lot of that Home Depot or similar, there's going to be 60 men in their cars recording videos with yokes on the back of their head for some reason.
Merlin: Hi, I'm a human thumb.
John: Women hurt me.
John: For me, of course, I've been collecting these shirts now for a long time, over a decade.
Yeah.
John: And I think you, I think I told you the story about how, um, when millennium girlfriend left in the middle of the night and took my Filson bag, the other thing she did was I had a closet full of clothes at her house that she had somewhat insisted upon.
John: Like, why don't you have any clothes at my house?
John: You need to like, here's a drawer for you and here's a closet for you and you need to put your stuff at my house.
John: And I was like, okay, sure.
John: And so I moved a bunch of clothes down there, including, um,
John: Some of my best Hawaiian shirts because she's living in Venice, California.
John: I figured this is where I'm going to need them.
John: Pre-Boogaloo.
John: But then when she, when she, you know, when she left in the middle of the night, she got back down to California and took all of my clothes to the Goodwill in the first day.
John: Ain't that ironical?
John: She got home and she was like, these are going to the Goodwill and that'll show him.
John: And so, yeah, ironic, right?
Merlin: Well, I mean, like from ashes to ashes, dust to Goodwill.
Merlin: Like the events they came, you know?
John: To every season, turn, turn, turn.
Ugh.
John: And so they went back, but they went to a different Goodwill.
John: Those shirts, if those shirts could speak, how did I find them in the first place?
John: And where are they now?
John: Some guy is walking around looking like Nick Nolte in Down and Out in Beverly Hills.
John: Walking around Venice Beach in a bathrobe in one of my old shirts thinking like – Brandishing one of your sorts.
Merlin: Hey, I got it made.
Merlin: I hate skateboards.
John: But one of the things I did in recovering from the trauma of that relationship was I said, I'm going to build up that Hawaiian shirt catalog again.
John: I'm not going to let this –
John: keep me down, right?
John: I'm not going to let the fact that I just lost 15 of my favorite shirts.
Merlin: You're reclaiming the locus of control.
Merlin: I heard about this recently.
Merlin: It's the idea that you can empower yourself.
Merlin: You can have external locus of control or internal locus of control.
Merlin: External locus of control, which I have, is the feeling that things happen to you in the world.
Merlin: Internal says, I don't think so.
Merlin: I'm going to rewrite my story.
Merlin: And you're rewriting that, except instead of a pen, you're doing it with men's shirts.
John: Yeah, and I was concerned somewhat that I was doing shopping therapy or that it was some kind of retail.
John: Like, I don't want to just buy things to make myself feel better.
Merlin: You don't get long-term gains from that.
John: But I did feel like I just lost this thing that I'd been, you know, because collecting Hawaiian shirts is a fool's errand, first of all.
John: There are every thrift store you go into, there's 50 Hawaiian shirts, but 49 of them are garbage and the, and the 50th one doesn't fit.
John: So it became another thing.
John: It's just, we've talked about thrift stores so much.
John: It's just thrift stores used to be, I haven't been in one in six months, but they used to be just a place I went to.
John: Like, it was just kind of.
John: a place of meditation.
Merlin: I totally, and if you're going to do retail therapy, you know, why not have it be a flea market or a goodwill where your dollar goes a little further, but even in the heyday, my heyday anyway, of the vintage, which would be 84 to 90.
Merlin: I mean, I was forever going to the, and you know, the thing is you go to a thrift store,
Merlin: or a Goodwill, Salvation Army, whatever it is.
Merlin: You go to one of those where I used to live, and it's a lot of the results of donations from somebody who died.
Merlin: And also, a lot of those men, I think, were very small.
Merlin: So I've always, you know, I'm a pretty little guy.
Merlin: I'm pretty close to the, like, I think, the mean for America.
Merlin: Like, I'm 5'9 and change.
Merlin: But even on...
Merlin: I used to be a classic medium.
Merlin: Now I like a large because it's a little roomier.
Merlin: But also it was that even me being a slight fella.
Merlin: So then let's say back then I was 5'9 and maybe 140, 145.
Merlin: I had trouble finding stuff that fit.
Merlin: So the thing is what I'm trying to underscore here is your journey.
Merlin: The life that you have lived has been one of struggle and one of American stick-to-itiveness, where you had a program, you stuck with it.
Merlin: And so last time you went to a thrift store, give me some observations on what the Delta is.
John: Well, you know.
Merlin: Does it still have that one smell?
John: Oh, yeah.
John: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
John: And I've never been able to tell exactly whether that smell is just like –
John: insecticide or what?
Merlin: But it's still there.
Merlin: I think it's a combination of like all kinds of artifacts of time and existence.
Merlin: It's basically like a German philosophy book.
Merlin: There's a lot of Zeit und Heit und Blut
Merlin: blued and dung's ramen and velton shong and i think it's probably it's a little bit bo probably a little bit of death some mildew uh old spice uh yeah bay rum racism i mean there's a lot of things and then the yellow pit state one oh it's unisex they say
John: I think the big difference between when you and I were initially shopping in thrift stores in the 80s and now is that in the 80s,
John: All the stuff in thrift stores was from the 50s and 60s.
John: And local.
Merlin: And local.
Merlin: Before it became professionalized.
Merlin: It was old, like, there was a line of JCPenney's, I forget what it's called now, I've mentioned it before, but there was a line, I used to call them Paul Westerberg shirts, of these, like, great, a lot of, like, old Glen plaid shirts, you know, like, blue and green, but subtle grandpa shirts that you could pick up.
Merlin: Short-sleeved shirts, $2.
Merlin: Long-sleeved shirts, $3.
Merlin: Now put these in the bag and leave.
Merlin: But then, as you know, it became professionalized also.
Merlin: So now you're getting stuff that's sourced.
Merlin: It's the opposite of farm to table.
Merlin: That could be a death from the East Coast that you're living in.
Merlin: It's being trucked around.
John: Although in Seattle, I think most of the stuff that you're buying here is from here.
John: I think that's probably true in San Francisco.
John: I mean, it's professional, but also the thrift store corporations are regional entities.
John: Like Goodwill in Minneapolis is so disconnected from Goodwill in Seattle.
Merlin: That's fascinating.
Merlin: I had no idea.
Merlin: So they might have a whole different approach to what they're trying to accomplish.
Merlin: Yes.
John: What does get shipped is all the stuff that doesn't sell gets shipped overseas.
Right.
John: And that's why you see... Oh, that's why you see African kids in Dukakis shirts.
John: That's right.
John: Not just like that stuff, like Super Bowl XV, but I mean, even when I was in Romania... Daddy, what is corn?
John: Even when I was in Romania, I remember walking through a village and a little old lady was coming the other way in a rugby shirt that said...
John: like university of San Diego.
John: And I was like, Whoa.
John: And then I realized like everybody in the village was wearing American cast off stuff.
John: And someone had come recently and had a like, Hey everyone, you know, free clothes or we brought you clothes and everybody went and took some clothes from this pile.
John: And, and, you know, you could see like, Oh, these were, these are,
John: This isn't just the recent Super Bowl stuff.
John: These are clothes from the 80s and 90s.
Merlin: But it could be stuff where – like you remember we went to that one crazy night.
Merlin: I think you needed pants for something.
Merlin: Oh, yeah.
Merlin: And we had a hectic night where we went to the Goodwill and West Portal, and it was super upscale, and everything was like $14, $20, $30.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Do you remember that?
Merlin: But then, so the stuff that maybe won't even be made into a bath mat, that ends up on a barge going somewhere.
Merlin: I think that's what happens, yeah.
John: It's the cycle of life, right?
John: It comes from China and it goes to Romania or to Gabon or something.
John: But the big difference, I think, is that in the 80s, the stuff that we were buying, even stuff from J.C.
John: Penney in 1959...
John: was made in America out of fabric that was sturdy.
Merlin: These clothes could save your life.
Merlin: You're hanging by a thread.
Merlin: I'm telling you, you might see some wear on an elbow, but you're not going to see a cuff tear off.
Merlin: You're not going to see an errant collar that can't be repaired.
Merlin: It's back when they made clothes for people.
John: Well, and you still see clothes from that era where –
John: I mean, I buy them all the time where you can tell the history of the garment by just looking at the repairs that have been done to it over the, over the decades.
John: Like, Oh wow.
John: They put patches on this and then they wore the patches out and they sewed up the, and it's still, even after all of that, a garment that's,
John: not just kind of worth owning for its utility, but like now it's become worth owning because of its – It's a piece of history.
John: It's wabi-sabi.
Merlin: The thing I think about with regard to you describing Hawaiian shirts is –
Merlin: how understandably, but weirdly, stuff from different times gets coded in different ways.
Merlin: So the Hawaiian shirt that was a Fun Dad thing 18 months ago, now the exact same shirt, now it could be coded with a Boogaloo thing.
Merlin: And I was thinking about this just yesterday.
Merlin: I was thinking about this with my kid.
Merlin: You know, I love spreadsheets.
Merlin: One of my spreadsheets is my daughter's Halloween costumes.
Merlin: So I always write down who she was, et cetera, et cetera.
Merlin: She's been a tomato.
Merlin: She's been a ladybug girl.
Merlin: She's been with different Marvel characters.
Merlin: She was Taco from TV, from Adventure Time.
Merlin: Or excuse me, Adventure Zone.
Merlin: And then twice, in 2014 and 2015, she was contiguously...
Merlin: the Harry Potter character Hermione Granger, right?
Merlin: Yes.
Merlin: And back then, we didn't have as many problems with the author of those books.
Merlin: So when my kid, God forbid, wants to run for Senate, if we still have a Senate, we should abolish the Senate right alongside the Electoral College, but that's a different podcast.
Merlin: Is she going to get canceled because she was Hermione?
Merlin: Oh, boy, I don't think so.
Merlin: Could that become blackface?
John: No, I mean, without going too deep into it, I think that that whole process is a process we're going through.
John: It isn't a place where we're ending up.
John: I get it.
John: The process of going back— The pendulum has swung very hard without going into too much detail.
Merlin: A certain pendulum has swung very, very far to a side right now, but pendulums don't tend to stay on one side.
John: That's right.
John: And you cannot conduct a culture—
John: for an extended period of time where everyone is on blast for all infractions.
Merlin: I guess we'll find out.
Merlin: Jerry Falwell just likes to watch the pool boy donking his wife.
Merlin: Why do we have to kink shame?
John: Did you see?
Merlin: The pool boy spoke today.
Merlin: The pool boy.
John: The pool boy spoke.
John: You know, last night I was sitting around with my sister and she said, have you ever seen the map of the United States where each state is?
John: has its most searched kink.
John: Pornhub word.
John: And I was like, no.
Merlin: It's great.
Merlin: It's pretty great.
John: We call it up and we're learning all these new terms.
John: Like, what is sounding?
Merlin: Don't Google that.
Merlin: Do not Google that.
Merlin: It's so important that you don't Google that.
John: Sounding?
John: I didn't know that that was a thing.
John: And that doesn't sound fun at all.
John: But they're like, oh, no, it's amazing.
John: But yeah, pool boy cuckolding is like a major thing in the East Coast.
Merlin: But it's also – like I don't have it in front of me right now and I'm not going to Google it.
Merlin: But I feel like it's – there is a lot of like the kind of darker power exchange stuff.
Merlin: Not the fun, you know, let's get fuzzy handcuffs stuff.
Merlin: But some of that darker stuff really seems to flare up in the most conservative states.
Merlin: It does.
Merlin: The funniest thing we see.
John: we saw was really into poop and grinding it was montana was okay here i go i'm looking it up montana was something like bds and m uh wyoming was submission and masochism they chose to live there that's not my problem
John: South Dakota was cuckolding and North Dakota was like gagging or something.
John: It was just like, oh, you guys, you found each other.
John: We belong together.
Merlin: It's a regular gift of the matchup.
Merlin: I sold my ball gag to buy you this sounding rod.
Merlin: Sweetheart.
Merlin: I'll put it on my watch.
Merlin: Whoops.
Merlin: Pornhub state searches.
John: Oh, dear.
Merlin: I'm always a little skeptical of these things.
Merlin: Yeah, me too.
Merlin: You know, because it's stuff like because I'm not sure how they I don't know how sciencey this stuff is.
Merlin: You know, and sometimes it feels like, what they don't mention sometimes is like excluding all other things.
Merlin: This is the, some of those interesting ones are like, this is the unique, most weird thing in this state.
Merlin: You know, like there was a really good episode of, I want to say Planet Money, trying to figure out what is the average American or what is the most un-average American and trying to use data and statistics to identify the most common overlaps and things.
Merlin: And if you take away all the overlaps, now you're back with the narcissism of modern ball gags.
Merlin: You know what I'm saying?
Merlin: Yes, I do.
Merlin: Yes, I do.
Merlin: You're in numbers.
Merlin: Oh, this is full of infographics.
Merlin: I'm not your typical American.
Merlin: Most searched.
Merlin: This is the 2019 results for the Pornhub.
Merlin: Most searched for in 2019.
Merlin: Wow, this is very international.
John: It's always MILF, right?
John: Isn't MILF the number one search?
Merlin: There's a lot of MILF inflation.
Merlin: Let's be honest.
Merlin: Japanese, hentai, lesbian, MILF, Korean, Asian, stepmom, massage, anal, ebony, big-ass teen, threesome.
Merlin: Oh, yeah.
Merlin: There's those.
Merlin: Poor stars.
John: Lenny Bruce and Lester Banks' birthday party cheesecake.
Merlin: Rotary started the ball again.
Merlin: Okay.
Merlin: Countries by traffic.
Merlin: Oh, now where's the maps?
Merlin: Anyway, okay.
Merlin: I think we've made our point.
Merlin: Yes, I think so.
Merlin: Sounded.
John: Okay.
John: So I – but I –
John: I don't now, uh, I don't know now what I want at all in terms of Emma, what am I, do I even want to code anything?
John: Do I want to, have I moved to the suburbs and am I now all text, no subtext?
John: If I walk around with a hat on in this neighborhood, sometimes a hat is just a hat.
John: And it's like, hmm, all right, a hat.
John: If I wore a hat for most of my adult life, it would be like, what's with the hat like that?
John: Where are we supposed to go with this hat?
John: In a lot of places these days, you wear a hat and you're a hat guy.
John: You're a hat guy.
Merlin: You can't just be a person, right?
John: Depends on your hat, right?
Merlin: Depends on your hat.
John: And so out here, a Hawaiian shirt is just a Hawaiian shirt.
John: But that's not what I had in mind.
John: I did not move...
John: to the suburbs in order to just surrender.
John: It was quite the opposite.
John: I moved out here because I had a vision of how I was going to reconnect.
Merlin: That's right.
Merlin: You had made some very intentional decisions about, you know, your mid-century modern, you know, Bob's mom living in a bookcase, you know, type lifestyle, right?
John: That's exactly right.
John: And I was not – I did not move out here because I was giving up.
John: It was the opposite.
John: I felt that I had become stuck in a rut, that I was –
John: I didn't really have a clear sense of what my plan was going forward.
John: I've never been much of a plan for the future type of person, but you know, one of the, one of the things when I got sober, one of the things that was clear to me in the last six months that I was using was whenever I thought about it, I could not, I could not think of a path that
John: forward.
John: You know, I got into a place where when I, when I looked at, at my options and thought of all the things that I had dreamt of doing in life, I could not picture myself getting to any of those places.
John: And, you know, through,
Merlin: uh being drunken on drugs yeah right i was not i was no longer getting an education i was that's not a that's not a um but that's not a state in which one spends over much time thinking beyond at the furthest like will i make rent this month it's more like especially if you get into the drugs it's much more like am i going to score or something like that it does not incentivize long-term thinking in a variety of ways
John: It doesn't.
John: And, and you know, and it's either fortunate, I guess in this case, fortunate that my heart was always big enough to be hurt.
John: Right.
John: So I was never, I never got drugged to the point where my heart didn't hurt.
John: And so I was, I, I never just surrendered and said like, I'm a, I'm a loser.
John: I'm doomed.
John: I just want to get high.
John: I was always like desperate to get high, but,
John: but also, I don't know, like had a, had a deeper desperation and I could see, I could see every, every door closing.
John: You know, I was, I, and it wasn't just like options.
John: It was personally, I could feel doors shutting inside myself.
John: I was becoming, you know, unreliably angry.
John: I had sold my own values out several times and it looked like I was going to keep doing that.
John: I was, you know, I was just kind of becoming, for lack of a better term, like a whore.
Merlin: I was just, I was not.
Merlin: So it's internal and external.
Merlin: You've, I mean, because one of the themes, if I could say, it seems like one of your themes is like, you don't want to feel like you're disappointing people and you hate the fact that you feel like you're disappointing yourself.
Merlin: But there are times in life, I was joking about this, joking about this the other night, like what a horrible state,
Merlin: no pun intended, California is in right now.
Merlin: I think about when I first came here in 1997, it was like, the idea of me moving here in 1997, you might as well have said that I'm going to colonize Mars.
Merlin: It seems so far-fetched.
Merlin: And I think there are times in your life, especially when you're younger, but also if you are
Merlin: if you're feeling incapable, where you're like, why would I, I'm mad that I don't have the future I would want.
Merlin: I feel like the world of options that are there for me are not that great.
Merlin: And the ones that are there are not that positive.
Merlin: And so like, what are you going to do?
Merlin: I guess, you know, you get a drink or whatever.
Merlin: It sucks.
Merlin: It sucks.
John: It sucks.
John: And honestly, when I quit drinking and doing drugs and got up on a step, right, I took one step up.
John: Um, I didn't have any plan beyond that.
John: I wasn't like getting sober to go to college or getting sober to whatever, chase a dream.
Merlin: What was your, what was your big, one of your big, not to spoil the ending, but one of them was, it was, uh, owning a toothbrush and having something that required keys.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Key.
John: Like the first key I got, I was like, I have a key.
John: Someone put my chip on it.
John: I can put a key in a door and someone will let me in.
Um,
John: And then watching the keys show up on the ring like, two keys, two people trust me.
John: And for several years after that.
John: But what happened was I started playing music.
John: I started having friends.
John: I started doing theater.
John: And it wasn't because I had a plan.
John: It was just that I had stopped doing one of the things that was inhibiting me the most.
John: Um, but when I, you know, when I sold my house, when I, when I left the farm and when I, when I chose to move down here to be closer to my daughter and to pursue this kind of whimsical, uh, change in style, it was all with a, with a kind of version, a middle-aged version of that, which is like, am I going to live in the same house for 25 years and gradually suffocate under the weight of
John: all of my talismans and memories, or am I prepared to reinvent myself?
John: And am I going to reinvent myself by moving to Berlin and getting into burlesque?
John: Or am I going to reinvent myself more locally because I have a kid and she's, she's got 10, 12 more years of school.
John: And it was all like, this seems easy.
John: This seems doable.
John: I'm just going to come out here.
John: I'm going to, I'm going to put a certain kind of
John: vintage tile in this bathroom and I'm going to, uh, buy pottery.
John: And that's all going to be part of, um, you know, it's still going to be a happening.
John: It's still going to be artful and, and, um, and encoded and, and, you know, purposeful.
John: And I got here and walk around this neighborhood for a year and realized, Oh no, right, right, right, right, right, right.
John: This, these are the suburbs, like,
John: That's not what's happening behind closed doors out here.
John: Very few people are, are back behind these, um, Seahawks flags and, you know, and thinking about local potters.
John: That doesn't mean that there aren't people doing it here, but it's, you know, it's, it's not, I didn't move into that culture where it's, where it's nearby.
John: Right.
John: Or not nearby, but like where it predominates.
Merlin: But I mean, any decision to, well, this is really, really general, but people have their reasons for moving to the suburbs, and they always have.
Merlin: Some of them are more racist than others, but one of them is that you are choosing by design a certain kind of operational isolation.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Because, I mean, I really think about like where I lived or where my family, other family members live in Florida.
Merlin: You have to think about how you get out of and back into your enclave.
Merlin: It involves getting in a car and going somewhere.
Merlin: So, I mean, like one of the tradeoffs is apart from that 7-Eleven, that's a mile and a half away.
Merlin: You're not going to be able to like walk somewhere to meet somebody for coffee.
Merlin: But that's built into the price of moving to the suburbs.
Merlin: And it's what I think appeals to a lot of people.
Merlin: It's just a question of choosing the suburbs that give you the kind of isolation that you want, not the kind that makes you sad.
John: Right.
John: I mean, what you get is you can have a fire pit and invite people over if you want to have people over to your fire pit.
John: Love a fire pit.
John: Love it.
Right.
John: you don't get a nearby cafe.
John: And if you, if you move to the Castro and are interested in local pottery,
John: You may not have people all around you that are interested in local pottery, but you have people all around you that are interested in something, right?
Merlin: They're pottery adjacent, yeah.
John: They're pottery adjacent.
John: You have Jessie Char over there who's decided she's going to make 700 kinds of dumplings, and she's going to do every one of them in a vintage seersucker dress or whatever.
Merlin: And you're like, oh, my neighbor is fucking living her best life.
Merlin: Nobody in the suburbs is going to appreciate those eyebrows like people in San Francisco.
Merlin: No.
Merlin: She has amazing eyebrows.
John: She did a whole thing where she was like, oh, my mixer is broken.
John: I'm going to repair my mixer.
John: And I was like, this is the Instagram content I'm here for.
John: My own neighbors out here in the suburbs presumably are not doing that.
John: They're thinking – they wake up in the morning and they're like, should I use my leaf blower today?
John: I should.
John: I think I will.
John: The answer is always yes.
John: I think I'll fire that baby up and see if I can move some leaves around.
John: So, but that, you know, that was a trade I was making partly based on the idea that I was going to get on my shoes.
John: You know, I was already living in a world where I was schlepping my kid.
John: The kid changes everything, right?
John: You can repair your blender all day and then you have a kid and it's like, oh boy, that blender.
Merlin: There's a lot of overhead to having a kid, including, so there's a lot of the built-in overhead of everybody knows or should know that when you have a kid, it's pretty difficult at first for everybody.
Merlin: But like all along the way, there's the overhead of the schlepping, but there's also the overhead of the risk management process.
Merlin: If you take my meeting where you are turning down a lot of stuff, not because you have to do another thing, but because you might have to do another thing.
Merlin: And being in the suburbs makes that a little less stressful.
John: And honestly, I got priced out of Seattle.
John: If I had had a daughter in 1997, I could have bought a... If I had a daughter in 1997, but I had my current...
John: career.
John: Yeah.
John: If I'd had any career in 1997, you could have bought a house in Seattle for, for $300,000 and a house in, in, on Capitol Hill in my neighborhood.
Merlin: Yeah.
John: And, and then I would, I would still be living there probably live there forever.
John: But, but along the way,
John: a modest house on Capitol Hill became a million dollar affair and then more.
Merlin: And I couldn't live there anymore.
Merlin: So it was like- My wife occasionally tortures me the way she tortures herself by doing that thing that we all do.
Merlin: Well, I don't, but almost everybody else does, which she'll like hold up a picture and go, this house right here, four bedrooms, three baths.
Merlin: How much does it cost?
Merlin: I'm like, I don't know.
Merlin: She's like, well, it's in Montana, but it is $16,000 or whatever you're
John: Oh, I thought the worst game, I think by far the worst game, is to hold up a picture of your neighbor's house or your house and say, guess what this place sold for in living memory?
Merlin: Oh, absolutely.
Merlin: I mean, what stuff cost to buy – well, obviously to rent also.
Merlin: But to buy in San Francisco in the 70s is –
Merlin: It's pretty, pretty wild.
Merlin: We were watching Rent last night, the 2005 movie.
Merlin: And, of course, it's one of those classic, like, oh, come on.
Merlin: These people, they ain't going to pay rent.
Merlin: But, boy, do they ever have a very, very, very large place on which they're not going to pay rent.
Merlin: And, boy, that theater that Maureen has, wow.
Merlin: The DNC convention was in a smaller room.
John: Yeah.
John: Yeah, that's the thing that I don't think we –
John: I don't think anybody in the 1990s understood that one of the main resources we had, one of the things that made us the richest—
John: culturally was there was so much abandoned space.
Merlin: That was very much true here.
Merlin: When I very first moved here, that was when things were dying because of the dot-com boom on which I was writing.
Merlin: But there was a, I forget the name of the place, but there was a place in sort of like on southeast side of town by the highway.
Merlin: There was this giant, giant, giant warehouse that had been converted into practice spaces for bands.
Merlin: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Merlin: Dozens and dozens and dozens of bands.
Merlin: And I forget exactly what happened, but I do remember that it was a dot commie.
Merlin: Well, you know, we're going to turn this into a place for people that are, you know, going to deliver pet food by pneumatic tube.
Merlin: So get your PV and roll.
John: Well, just think about the survival research laboratories.
John: Like they had a huge compound.
John: Right when they shoot the light bulbs around and stuff.
John: Yeah, a huge compound in the center of San Francisco that was built around making robots out of vacuum cleaners that had flamethrowers on them.
John: Like where did that – and that was until the 2000s.
John: Those guys were still in there.
Merlin: You could not do that in Oakland now.
Merlin: I mean you would have to move to like practically to Nevada to do that.
John: I lived in a warehouse.
John: My practice space was one block away and it belonged to us.
John: We paid $300 a month and we had our own building to practice.
John: And every person I knew had either a practice space or a theater space or some other space that was in addition to their apartment.
Merlin: A community arts something.
John: Yeah.
John: And it was all just like –
John: it didn't feel like a luxury because they were, those buildings were cold and dirty and, and had no features and the bathrooms were full of rats, but it was, that was why it was cheap.
John: And you didn't think that cheap, shitty stuff was ever going to be hard to find.
John: And now you look around Seattle and it's like, Oh, my kingdom for just a cheap, shitty place to experiment.
John: Yes.
John: It's all gone.
John: So I had, I had to move.
John: Um, if I was going to basically having a kid meant that I was either going to live the rest of my life as kind of like a middle-aged dad with green hair who skateboarded down to his daughter's school, or I was going to have to get out of town a little bit.
John: And I'm now recognizing she's almost 10.
John: And I'm seeing very clearly like, whoa, I lived in, I lived at the farm for 12 years, 12 years for now, my daughter will be in college.
John: Oh God.
John: And so that 12 years is pretty compressed in my recent memory.
John: You know, it was basically my forties.
John: Um, but yeah.
John: My 50s will be spent here, presumably.
John: With your two bags?
John: With my two.
John: Well, yeah, right here in this house waiting for my other house to get done.
John: And then she's going to go to college.
John: And then what kind of, I don't have four kids, right?
John: I just have one.
John: As far as you know.
John: As far as I know, right.
John: I've never gotten that email that was like, guess what?
John: I never wanted you to meet your daughter because I hated your band.
John: But now that she's 16, she needs a car.
John: And I have a, you know, I have a friend that that happened to, uh, you know, like now that she's old enough to know, I want her to meet her father.
John: And unfortunately for you, it's you.
John: And my friend was thrilled, right?
John: Had he known about it before?
John: No, had no idea.
Merlin: So there was a relationship that happened much earlier.
John: She got pregnant and then she was like, I don't want this guy around.
John: I want to raise this kid by myself.
John: I don't think that happened.
John: I think that everybody, I mean, all of the women in my past.
John: Your mom was very organized.
John: I doubt that happened.
John: My mom was very organized, but also they're all, all the women in my life are still actively mad at me.
John: So they would know.
Merlin: I would have heard about it.
Merlin: Yeah, yeah.
Merlin: So that's the project.
Merlin: That's the project.
Merlin: How do you feel about the project at this point?
Merlin: I mean, it does, at least from a remove, your project for your 50s does feel very dependent upon what happens next with several things, but especially COVID.
Merlin: It does...
John: And the challenge, I think, is always, are you continuing to challenge yourself?
John: And I've never not felt if things get too easy, I start to get very uncomfortable.
John: I've never sought...
Merlin: ease or comfort or... You're not big on autopilot in the way that, say, I am.
Merlin: I love autopilot.
John: Yeah, no, and I don't... Autopilot is unfamiliar to me, but also...
John: I'm, I'm just, I'm motivated by disease, not disease, but yeah, disease.
John: Uh, and, and that has motivated me to do all the, everything that you could describe as, you know, the wonderful things that I've, that I've been lucky enough to do.
John: It's always like, ah, I've got to get out of this chair because if I don't,
Merlin: i don't know what the chair will engulf me or you know something and and it's disease but is it also a sense of some kind of um motion i guess it's all kind of wound up in each other but motion change and the idea that there's something that's forcing you to unpot yourself a little unpotting right that but but there are people like my mom changes her house
John: uh, every spring and fall, right?
John: New, a new rug.
John: I mean, she, it's not like she goes and buys all new stuff, but she has her summer house, her winter house.
John: She changes the color of her, uh, accent pillows.
John: You know, she's always in motion in that, in that way.
John: And I'm not, I, if you walked into my house in, uh, 2000,
John: eight and you walked into it in 2018, you would find the same couches and paintings on the walls.
John: There, there were just, there's just more stuff, but not, I'm not, I'm not changing just for the sake of change.
John: If I put a painting on the wall and it belongs there, it's like, there it is forever.
John: It's the, it's the thing of feeling, um,
John: motivated by, by like needing to cut trail somehow needing to leave something behind.
John: No, no, not that.
Merlin: I honestly don't know.
Merlin: I mean, I'm almost certainly way oversimplifying this, but I wonder if part of it is, because this is, I think, a very common, normal thing for people is, okay, let's put it in my terms.
Merlin: Oh boy, things are going really well right now.
Merlin: I bet something terrible is about to happen.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Maybe to put differently for you, is it that your nature is to be suspicious of the comfort that disguises something unaddressed that could be motivating you or pulling you down or whatever it is?
Merlin: It seems like you really want a certain amount of, as you say, friction, something that's going to mix it up and force you to live this life, whatever this life is,
Merlin: something that's going to, does that make any sense?
Merlin: Something that would like force you back into the mix at a time when you might want to disappear into the chair.
Merlin: Yes.
John: And it comes out, I think, when I consider wealth and what wealth affords one, what opportunities.
John: And when I think about being very wealthy, when I was young and you think about being very wealthy, you think, oh, I can do whatever I want.
John: When you get to be middle-aged and you think about being very wealthy, you consider it at a remove.
John: You realize getting to do whatever you want isn't really that big of a deal.
John: And the more money you have, I think the more you have to confront the fact that getting to do whatever you want is not...
John: interesting or fulfilling or even good.
John: And you, and I think what you see and a lot of the evil in the world is from very wealthy people who are bored and don't have imagination and are just like, they fill their house up with worthless shit.
John: They go on vacations.
John: They don't enjoy.
John: They, they,
John: You know, to own a $50 million yacht is to be in a way like completely devoid of anything that would make you an interesting person.
John: What is the, what do you need that for?
Merlin: You don't at all in any way.
Merlin: Yeah, there's a feeling like when I find myself getting impatient because something that I ordered didn't get delivered and it's something I don't really super need.
Merlin: But I was so amped for that thing to arrive.
Merlin: And then I'm very disappointed.
Merlin: And I continue to pretend as though a given Amazon delivery is going to make me happy for more than a few minutes.
Merlin: Because now really it's just more Kipple, a lot of it.
John: Yeah, right.
John: It's just extra toilet paper because it's not like you're low on toilet paper.
John: You're just low on reserves of toilet paper.
Merlin: Well, yeah, and I'm low on feeling like I deserve a treat.
John: Yeah, right, right.
John: And I think for me, I think after you make $50,000 a year, they say that you're past the line where any more money is going to make you happier than
John: And it's because getting to do whatever you, whatever you want is pretty easy.
John: Most people don't want to stand atop all the peaks of the world.
John: And if you do want to stand atop all the peaks of the world, you don't need millions of dollars to do it.
John: And, and honestly, most, most of what you can do is pretty achievable to most people.
John: Money is,
John: money is imaginary for the most part.
John: And so for me, it's like, what do I want?
John: What did I ever want?
John: If you, if you strip away the, all the, the fantasies of youth where you're like, I want to own a Scottish castle.
John: I want to, you know, I want to walk down the aisle with my, my beautiful bride, uh, Christie Brinkley and Christie Brinkley.
John: Right.
John: And drive off in a Ferrari.
Right.
John: if all of that stuff where you're just sort of imagining like one day everything will happen to me and you get, you get to be middle-aged, you strip it down to like, well, not everything's going to, I'm probably not going to live in a Scottish castle.
John: It turns out I don't care.
John: I didn't ever want to.
Merlin: It didn't turn out great for Nicolas Cage.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: So what do I, what do I want?
John: And it all ends up being either experiential, although not in the sense of like, I want to,
John: I want to see a baseball game in every stadium in the United States.
John: although seems like a fun thing to do one summer.
Merlin: Yeah, I mean, I think there would be a lot of cool stuff that would come along.
Merlin: It's not just about baseball if you did that.
John: That's what it would be.
John: It would be a really fun summer because you'd meet a lot of interesting people.
John: The friends you met along the way, if I could say.
John: But like that type of experiential, but more like it's all back to the same question I have been asking myself my whole life, which is like, why am I here?
John: What...
John: What can I possibly do to justify the food that I eat?
Merlin: So you keep pumping coal into the engine room without regard to the ultimate destination to which you hope it takes you.
John: Yeah.
John: And right now, because I'm lucky enough to have a garden to work in,
John: I have that short term, that short term, long term of feeling like I'm planting this and in two years and in 10 years, it's going to be this, it's going to be this, it's going to grow, it's going to be here after I'm gone.
John: But that's a, but that's a pretty short term.
John: There are people I think that spend 40 years tending a garden and that's their gift to the world.
John: For me, it's much more like I'm going to create this environment and I'm doing it as a thing to keep my hands busy and my imagination busy.
John: But I don't think like leaving a garden behind is going to be sufficient.
John: To justify all the hamburgers.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: No, there's also the thing of the internal, external sort of ideas, like the way you've had to realign your life.
Merlin: I mean, short of just bouncing and going to another country, even though your kid lives here, you do have to realign some of your ideas beautifully.
Merlin: because of the responsibilities or needs or however you want to put it.
Merlin: But it's also a question of in some ways that, and I have not by any imagination made this leap, but people who do get old and are not terribly unhappy seem to have found a way to make their life about other people, whether that's interacting with other people or whether that's helping other people.
Merlin: But in some ways, it's like you eventually realize –
Merlin: sometimes, that it was about figuring out what you could do for and with other people that made you happy.
Merlin: That's the boat.
Merlin: The boat ride is, you know, this is where we're all, you know, trying to go.
Merlin: But, you know, this is not the best time to try and exercise that.
Merlin: I mean, sure, you can donate money.
Merlin: You can work at a food bank or do whatever.
Merlin: But, like, you're not going to probably develop a vaccine in the suburbs.
Merlin: No.
Merlin: Um, and, but like what, you know, what do you do?
Merlin: I mean, I, but I don't know, that's just, just an observation.
Merlin: And some people are better at that than others.
Merlin: And some people like doing it for the parade, but that's something I do think about a lot is like, are there more things that I could do for people who aren't me?
John: Well, and that's why I think married people live longer and marriages are so important because there's, there's a built in, um,
John: reciprocity.
John: There's a built in sense of like what you're building every day is the, is this marriage, this house and this relationship and the work that you do for one another.
John: You know, it, it's, um, it feels very much like every day that you stay married is a, is another brick in the wall.
Um,
John: That sounds happy.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Well, it's, it's all a little bit like, you know, R2D2 getting that little restraining bolt, you know?
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: To take off.
John: It's just like the more your leash grows into your fur, the more that the more your collar is just like part of your skin.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: The more the paler, the, the skin underneath your wedding ring.
Yeah.
John: Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha.
Merlin: Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha.