Ep. 396: "Yreka Bakery"
Merlin: Hello.
Merlin: Hello.
Merlin: Hello.
John: How's it going?
John: It's going okay.
Merlin: Did you have a good morning so far?
Merlin: I was having a great morning.
Merlin: You know what?
Merlin: No one cares.
Merlin: I was having a very, very good morning.
Merlin: I've been sharpening the saw.
Merlin: I'm doing things.
Merlin: I've been learning things.
Merlin: And then when I got a beep from my friend John Roderick, Skype says, call recorder uninstalled again.
Merlin: So I've been dealing with that.
Merlin: And nobody cares, John.
Merlin: Are you sure they don't?
Merlin: You know, I feel like I ask so little.
Merlin: You know what I'm saying?
Merlin: You do.
Merlin: You don't ask for a lot, Merlin.
Merlin: I don't ask for that that much.
Merlin: But things are doing fine.
Merlin: It's Labor Day.
Merlin: It's been very, very hot here.
Merlin: Is it hot where you are?
John: It is uncharacteristically hot, but that means that by other standards, it's just what you would call like
John: nice warm day.
John: It's like 85 today or something.
John: And so looking at people's reports of their own situations in different parts of the country, I feel like Seattle, this is one where Seattle kind of has to take a knee and not do the thing that we love to do, which is
Merlin: Hey, it's great weather in Seattle.
Merlin: Yeah, you don't want to do that.
Merlin: No, that's like bragging about a vacation.
Merlin: Yeah.
John: Because people, it seems like, in Los Angeles are burning up, burning up for your love.
John: And you in San Francisco can't breathe.
John: Is that right?
John: Is that your current status?
Merlin: No breathing?
Merlin: Well, John, I got to tell you, the phrase that comes to mind is, I'd complain, but who'd listen?
Merlin: Do you know what I'm saying?
Yeah.
Merlin: Yes, right.
John: There's a lot of people there.
Merlin: Yeah, this whole godforsaken state is just crazy on fire right now.
Merlin: So it's weirdly smoky outside.
Merlin: You know my part of town.
Merlin: Notoriously great fresh air.
Merlin: Nice fresh air there.
Merlin: Yeah, because, you know, the ocean washes it.
Merlin: That's the climate.
Merlin: Sure.
Merlin: So, like, if it's 91 for us, woof.
Merlin: It is rough for people up in Marin.
Merlin: 91 here is – San Francisco broke its record yesterday.
Merlin: Wow.
John: 91 there is like 1,000.
John: It's like 1,000 in other places.
Merlin: Yeah, if you adjust for inflation, yeah.
John: 91 will make 105 look like 87.
John: Uh-huh.
Merlin: All right, you get a little one for that.
John: Thanks, thanks, thanks.
Merlin: It took me a second.
Merlin: That's why.
Merlin: No, it's terrible.
Merlin: It's really terrible.
Merlin: I mean, Los Angeles has got a lot going on right now.
Merlin: It's really rough.
Merlin: But, you know, the other thing is, John, I complain, but who'd listen?
Merlin: We don't have the air conditioning here.
John: That's right.
John: You don't need it most of the time because of the clean, washed air.
Merlin: It's freshly washed.
Merlin: It sweeps out the salad bowl, as they call it.
Merlin: The hot air blows to the west and pushes all the air out over the Pacific, and it gets kind of scientifically washed.
Merlin: And then it comes back in.
Merlin: But no, it's crazy, man.
John: Nobody has a AC in Seattle or at least never did.
John: Uh, and lately, you know, when I was a kid, of course, now we're going to talk about when we were kids because when I was a kid, I would really, I would really enjoy that.
John: Uh, it never got hot here.
John: Uh, it rained all the time.
John: It rained in the summer.
John: It, um, sometimes, uh, you know, there was every once in a while you'd get a dusting of snow and then sometime in the
John: What I think of as very recent memory, and I'm talking about in the last 10 years, just 10 years, all of a sudden it's 95 degrees several times during the summer.
John: And it's like, where did that come from?
John: That was never...
John: My mom had a rule.
John: We had a little one of those little swimming pools in the back.
John: Not a kiddie pool, mind you, but one that had to be set up.
John: One that could hold an adult.
John: And her rule was it had to be 80 degrees to go in the swimming pool.
John: I don't know why that was her rule.
Merlin: You developed a pretty good sense of how often you could go in the pool.
Merlin: Well, which is say, you know how often it hit 80 because of how often you could go to the pool.
John: Well, and we would sit, we would sit in the kitchen staring at the thermometer.
Merlin: Mercury watching, they call it.
John: Yeah, that was, and we would say, you know, it's 78 degrees.
John: And she would say, nope, it's got to be 80 to go in the pool.
John: Now, my mom, you know, obviously didn't like kids.
John: But it was a struggle in the 70s to go into the pool as much as you wanted.
John: Let's just say that.
John: And now sometimes it's 80 degrees for weeks at a time.
John: But 80 degrees does not compare to 118 degrees.
John: Also, we've been lucky with the fires this year.
John: No fires.
John: But I heard on the weather that the California fires are so bad that we're going to start seeing smoke from them up here this week.
John: And our air quality is going to go to shit because the fires dropped.
John: The fires sent so much smoke that it blanketed Oregon and didn't get enough.
John: And had to come all the way up to the furthest corner of the state.
John: It just kept on going.
John: That's like a fire in South Carolina.
John: That's like a fire in Georgia depositing smoke in Maine.
Merlin: We're all just one big country, but I don't know if you're a federalist, but I don't love that.
Merlin: I feel like it should stop at the border.
Merlin: You come in based on merit.
Merlin: That's what we're doing.
John: It should stop at the California border.
John: Mount Shasta is not doing its work.
Merlin: It should hang over Eureka.
Merlin: Hang over Eureka.
Merlin: That's what I say.
Merlin: Yeah, or Wairika.
Merlin: Ooh.
Merlin: Tell me about Wairika.
Merlin: Is that a place you would go in the RV?
John: Wairika is a place that you can't avoid.
John: And you don't think that you're going to end up in Wairika as often as you do, is my experience.
John: Okay.
John: You think, oh, Wairika.
John: Ha, ha, ha.
John: What a nutty place.
John: Funny, funny kind of place.
John: Wairika.
John: And then you're in Wairika again.
John: And you're like, huh.
John: Isn't that funny?
John: Look at that.
John: Wairika.
John: And then you're in Wairika again.
John: And then again.
John: And, uh, and eventually you're like, I feel like I know why Rika.
John: I feel like I, I feel like I, like I ran away from my next wife and lived in why Rika for a while.
Merlin: I feel like why Rika would be an alternate timeline.
John: Yeah.
John: I feel like why Rika would be a good place maybe to think about being sheriff if, if twist won't accept me.
Merlin: Okay.
Merlin: Okay.
Merlin: And in that timeline, would you still have your underpants?
Yeah.
Merlin: I mean, at what point do the timelines – I don't want to take you off your story of childhood and beloved pool times, but at what point does the timeline break?
Merlin: Is Wairika potentially some kind of a – one doesn't want to call a town a vortex, but the kind of place where –
Merlin: It's like me when I first moved here.
Merlin: Like, hey, I'm in San Francisco.
Merlin: I got a rental car.
Merlin: I'm going down Market Street, which is a bad idea.
Merlin: You don't want to drive on Market Street.
Merlin: And you can only turn right.
Merlin: And then you turn right.
Merlin: And then two rides later, you're back on Market Street.
Merlin: That feels very Wairika to me.
Merlin: It's not avoidable.
Merlin: You will return to here.
Merlin: You're going to get there.
John: And the thing about Wairika, I –
John: There's a town in North Ontario.
John: Mm-hmm.
John: But there's a town in North... Helpless, helpless, helpless.
John: There's a town in Northern California.
John: It's called Wairica.
John: Wairica.
John: And it's in the... Once you pass through weed, you're in the shit, as we say.
John: Oh.
John: And you're really in the shit all the way to Cottage Grove.
John: And people don't realize... They think that...
John: The mountains of Southern Oregon, the Umpqua National Forest, they think of that as being some little thing that you go through.
John: You go bleep, bleep, bleep, and you're through.
John: But that's not the case.
John: You get through there.
John: You get to Medford.
John: You think, I'm in Medford.
John: It's a town.
John: But it's like, oh, no, no, no, no, no.
John: There's much worse to come.
John: grants pass you think i'm in the top of the pass it's the pass i'm going through the pass no no no no it's terrible this is i'm talking about interstate five okay america's most um no i'm not gonna say most but but the west coast's gnarliest freeway yeah it goes places yeah it goes places but but wyreka is the place that
John: that the tow truck takes you back to when your truck catches on fire is the place where you if you ran out of gas the first place you're gonna see is why rica why rica is the place that you have to stop when you just have to stop there because the road is bad doesn't matter whether you're going north or south
John: Wyreka sometimes is where you stop if the pass is too gnarly and California Highway Patrol is like, nope, hold there, hold there.
Merlin: Wyreka is also where the smoke should stop.
Merlin: It should.
Merlin: I'm on the internet science page for Wyreka, California.
Merlin: And there's not a lot interesting here.
Merlin: I always like to jump down to the notable people section.
Merlin: And I'm pleased that these people are notable, but I don't think I straight off the dome know any of these.
Merlin: Oh, oh, oh, the Robert Black Bart, which is a problematic name.
Merlin: Black Bart.
Merlin: He's from there.
John: What about late period Nick Nolte?
John: Is he from Wyoming?
Merlin: I'm scanning Ross McLeod, Patrick McMahon.
Merlin: No, I don't see.
Merlin: It jumps right from Richie Myers to John Otto.
Merlin: John Otto was the first park custodian at Colorado National Monument.
Merlin: Well, I think there's a different kind of use of custodian.
Merlin: What gets me, though, is you jump down to, I wish that every internet science page had this section, which is palindromes.
Merlin: What?
Merlin: And Wairika Bakery.
Merlin: Yes.
Merlin: It's just out there in the wild.
Merlin: It's just, it's out there right now.
Merlin: Wairika Bakery.
Merlin: Wairika Bakery.
Merlin: That's wonderful.
Merlin: You know, you don't see a lot of really good palindromes in the wild.
Merlin: You know, you get a man, a planet canal, Panama, that kind of thing where you got to really monkey it up.
Merlin: But that would be a good section.
Merlin: John, as you sit here today,
Merlin: In these times, amidst these challenging times, are there specific places you kind of wish you could go to again, maybe soon?
Merlin: Could be here, could be in Europe, could be wherever.
Merlin: Do you find yourself yearning?
Merlin: You know, I've tried to bring this up with my other hosts and they're always karma sucks about it.
Merlin: Like my family has a wish list of things we're going to do when, if this ends.
Merlin: When if, when slash if.
Merlin: When slash if, like the great, I think that was Kierkegaard.
Merlin: Um, but yeah, I mean, do you have places you think about like right now you got a kid, you got a kid at home, you got you at home, like other places where you'd like to, like you talked at one point about, I think jumping into a Jeep that you repair yourself and driving to the end of South America.
Merlin: Is there a, is there a place that looms large in your mind right now as a locale that you would find a wholesome and rejuvenating?
John: Hmm.
Hmm.
John: I have started now after months of feeling like this, uh, quarantine and, uh, and all such, uh, that it was like a thing that I was managing and that it was fine.
John: And we just started school, which is its own fresh hell.
John: But like we got through the, the initial bumps it's we're managing, but I've started to feel that feeling where, um, travel, um,
John: was really the thing I didn't realize that, that, that travel was such a part of the structure of my, my, not just a year, but my life.
John: That's what I, I didn't realize it.
John: My friends are,
John: All over.
John: You are in San Francisco.
John: And I have friends in New York.
John: I have friends in LA.
Merlin: You toured as a musician.
Merlin: And then in your afterlife as America's new Charles Nelson Riley, you would be called upon to go places and do things.
Merlin: You'd have to get on a plane.
Merlin: And you'd try to keep your miles up.
Merlin: And that feels like another world now.
Merlin: But in its absence, it's like a missing tooth.
John: I just didn't quite get that when the thing all shuts down and then stays shut down, that I do have a missing tooth.
John: And it is that I don't see any foreseeable.
John: I haven't been to Seattle in weeks because it's fully nine miles from here.
John: and it would require that I have a reason to go there.
John: But I miss New York way more than I miss Seattle.
Merlin: That's at the top of my list.
John: Right.
John: New York's just there, and it's just being New York this whole time.
Merlin: It doesn't need us, but we really need it.
John: Yeah.
John: I was thinking about the people that have been in New York this whole time thinking, oh my God, get me out of New York.
John: But for us who come to New York sometimes, you know, usually if I'm somewhere and I feel like New York has been busy being New York for long enough and I'm starting to get like –
John: And I want to see what it's doing.
John: I want to see what's going on over there.
John: I'll just go there.
John: There's nothing keeping me from going there.
Merlin: You don't need a reason.
John: I don't need a reason.
John: I go there.
John: It's New York.
John: It's like a pretty girl who smokes too much.
John: Like, who wouldn't want to go?
John: Who wouldn't want to go?
John: I go all the time.
John: And now I can't go.
John: And I can't go to Los Angeles.
John: This week, that's fine.
John: But, like, I can't go to some other – just all the places.
John: All the places, all the friends, all the things.
John: I've canceled –
John: I mean, when the pandemic hit, Delta Airlines was a little bit cagey for a couple of days.
John: And then after the first few weeks, they were like, well, we're going to refund these first few tickets and then we'll see what happens.
John: And then as my plane tickets and travel arrangements kept coming due, they were like, well, we're going to cancel that too.
John: So right now I have six major plane tickets, a couple of them international tickets.
John: that are just sitting in a Delta bank somewhere, somewhere in Atlanta, which is Delta bank.
John: And, and Delta is pretending.
John: And I am presuming that one day soon the Delta bank will open and, and I will not only will those tickets all be there without penalty, but that I will want to go do those things and,
John: be re-invited to go do those things you know like i was supposed to go to japan right i got asked to go to that the u.s army war college which i was so excited about and the war college was wonderful they sent an email to everybody and they were like well we're we can't do it this year but you're all just automatically re-invited to next year oh that's cool so they did that's a that's a cool way to treat that yeah right because there were because the you know that other thing i did that thing in alaska where they were like well we
John: We're not going to fly you up here and treat you nicely, but we still have to do it.
John: So we're going to do it over Zoom.
Merlin: Oh, right, right.
Merlin: Is that where you have to listen to the music of youths?
John: Yeah.
John: And the thing is, the whole experience was very positive.
John: And I really loved the organization and the people that work there.
John: All were wonderful.
John: It was part of what made it hard was that I really was going to meet them and wanted to be up there and go to dinner with them and hang out and stuff.
John: And so the Zoom experience was bad, but only in relation to what I imagined was possible, you know?
John: Mm-hmm.
John: Anyway, what's going to happen?
John: There's one day going to be a day when the Delta Bank is going to open and I'm going to go like, wow, I got all these saved up trips.
John: I get to go.
John: I don't see that.
John: I'm talking to people in the music business where it's like, hey, 2021, am I right?
John: And they're like, no, no, I don't think so.
John: I don't see, you know, like until –
John: I mean, this is the question we keep asking each other.
John: What would it take to get you to go to a Creeper Lagoon show?
John: Let's say Creeper Lagoon got back together and they're playing on the hill.
John: Merlin, when would you go?
John: Oh, man.
Merlin: December?
Merlin: That place is pretty tight.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Um, I have to tell you, man, I, uh, I think about this so much and I feel like, I feel like my imagination at this point is so impoverished.
Merlin: It's something that Dan and I, uh, kind of talk about like pretty much every week, which is one or another sort of
Merlin: uneducated gander about not like what happens next, but what happens next after next after next.
Merlin: After next after next is right.
Merlin: Yeah, because there's these things that one can imagine.
Merlin: I mean, let's take a really straightforward one.
Merlin: So a bunch of tech companies in the past few weeks and months have announced that you can work
Merlin: from home.
Merlin: I believe Google and Facebook have both said you can work from home until at least June of 2021.
Merlin: Last week, my wife was informed.
Merlin: Same deal.
Merlin: Like, you don't have to come back to work unless you need to for something.
Merlin: Like, pick up your calendar that still says March on it.
Merlin: You don't need to come back to the office until next year.
Merlin: Now, just off the dome, that means so many things.
Merlin: Some of the trivia, well, not trivial to them, but like the kebab place.
Merlin: on the first floor of her building that we really like.
Merlin: We would go for lunch sometimes.
Merlin: How's that place going to do?
Merlin: The giant Warriors arena, the basketball arena across the street.
Merlin: What are you going to do there?
Merlin: I hope they open it for voting.
Merlin: But it doesn't take that much before you find yourself swimming in assumptions about things you don't and can't know, apart from guessing what stuff will just go away.
Merlin: The whole idea of business travel that's been the tentpole process
Merlin: between business travel and tourism, right?
Merlin: That's been the temple of like holding up so many pieces of that industry.
Merlin: And I'm with you.
Merlin: I don't see myself even going to see Cooper Lagoon for a good long while.
Merlin: Not least because I'm not going to say this publicly, but
Merlin: My family and people like us, we are the sin eaters for the maskless youths right now.
Merlin: I've read a couple things about this, why this is so stressful.
Merlin: It is this kind of like you do feel like a sin eater where like, God, we're trying so freaking hard to do all the right things.
Merlin: And then you just see people running around.
Merlin: You know, and just half-assing it at best.
Merlin: You know what I mean?
Merlin: And it's like, with that, it's like, like I said to Dan, if I see you, and you and I talked about this with your neighbors across the street, like, if I see you, other person, like, making poor decisions that clearly will have an impact on other people...
Merlin: that flips the bozo bit, man.
Merlin: Like, I'm not going to want to hang out with you.
Merlin: Your decisions are poor.
Merlin: This is going to be a virus that tears through people who make poor decisions and the people they used to love.
Merlin: So I don't know.
Merlin: I don't see it.
Merlin: When you think about that stuff, what do you think about in terms of stuff that's going to change a lot or go away?
John: Well, you touched on it, and
John: All the, I mean, all the things in a downtown, all of the restaurants, but also all of the catering, all of the, not just the bars and clubs, but the, I mean, the reason that we congregate in a downtown, all those reasons are going to, we're going to all take a hard look at them.
John: Some of those businesses are not going to be able to wait this out.
John: Or transition.
John: But the whole premise that we want to live on top of each other and work on top of each other because it's good for efficiency and business.
John: And it's where we want to be because we're a social creature and we want to squirm around in our hive and rub up against each other.
John: Yeah.
John: I've always felt...
John: Like that was kind of like the way that museums are open from 7 a.m.
John: to 3 p.m.
John: because they are catering to what they perceive to be the mean audience, which is people between 75 and 79 that apparently are who go to museums because who's at a museum at 7 in the morning and why aren't they open at 8 o'clock at night?
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: That would be nice.
Merlin: I would really like that.
John: If museums were open at 8 o'clock at night, wouldn't you go to museums and art galleries?
Merlin: Yeah, not even that novelty thing of you get to sleep here overnight or something like that, but just something like maybe you have food and drinks at night and you can hang out.
Merlin: Where's that place we always – is it the Academy of Sciences where we always do – Yeah, Academy of Sciences.
Merlin: With the albino alligator.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: But places like that, I mean, they realized a while back that, like a lot of places, that there is a limited amount of money to be made with admissions, although they do charge a lot.
Merlin: They have really good food there.
Merlin: And then they have another place with really good food there.
Merlin: But what you're describing, you're seeing it right now.
Merlin: You take the most stereotypical example from the last 20 years of some, what you might ungenerously call a tech bro.
Merlin: Gets a job at a big company, maybe starting at high five, but really probably more like six figures.
Merlin: Hey, this is great.
Merlin: I work in Palo Alto, but I live in Potrero Hill.
Merlin: And there's this bus, a bus with Wi-Fi that's comfortable.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: There's a bathroom you can use and it drives, it picks me up here and I get in, I play on my laptop for an hour and a half and eventually I'm in Palo Alto ruining democracy with Facebook.
Merlin: But why am I in San Francisco and not in a bedroom community of Palo Alto?
Merlin: Well, it's,
Merlin: Fucking San Francisco.
Merlin: There's all this great stuff to do there.
Merlin: I'm far from the first person to point this out.
Merlin: A lot of that great stuff has been gone for months now.
Merlin: And in some cases, it's gone, daddy, gone.
Merlin: Gone.
Merlin: So what are you going to do?
Merlin: If you could make, let's just say arbitrarily, if you could make six figures working from home, why would you do it somewhere where you're stuck in a single room that's for a one-bedroom apartment that's $5,000 a month
Merlin: When you could live in, in this case, Tahoe.
Merlin: Lake Tahoe is getting super overwhelmed right now with people wanting to buy houses.
Merlin: The houses on sale in San Francisco, I think, are over 100% year-over-year number on the market.
Merlin: You could move to one of those places where you look up things on Zillow and see what you could get.
Merlin: I'm sure you do this.
Merlin: I know my wife does.
Merlin: You could have this house for this much money.
Merlin: This is like two years of rent, and we could own a house.
Yeah.
Merlin: Why would you stay in a place like this when it's – if you don't have loyalties here or roots here with schools and stuff like that, communities, churches, why the fuck would you stay here?
John: It's crazy.
John: Well, I bought a house a year ago, and during that process, right next to Seattle, a very short ferry ride away, is Vashon Island, which is –
John: An island, it's a long, thin island in Puget Sound that stretches kind of from, like the north end is right there at West Seattle.
John: And the south end is, I mean, you can see Tacoma from there.
John: And there are ferries at both ends.
John: And then there's a ferry on the west side that takes you over to Kitsap County.
John: And it's a very developed island in the sense that all the islands in Puget Sound used to be farming communities, like everything here.
John: And gradually the waterfront property turned from little humble two-bedroom cabins to, in a lot of cases, like big handsome mansions and then big ugly mansions.
John: But the centers of those islands are still very bucolic, like trip to a past that you kind of vaguely remember.
John: There's still a store at the crossroads that
John: And the porch of the store is wood.
John: So when you park and get up on the porch, it's like clump, clump, clump.
John: And then you walk into the store and there's a jar of candy.
Merlin: Oh, I miss sounds.
John: Yeah.
John: Vashon is wonderful.
John: And then after a while, the main street started to get...
John: fancy restaurants where they served you pickled ferns and everybody was like they're amazing have you had the pickled ferns at at at uh barren bread and it's like ah but is this uh is this your first time uh dining with us i should tell you we do things a little bit different here it's
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John: And everybody's excited about those restaurants, and luckily they're terrible, but the ice cream store and the pizza parlor are still there.
John: So I was looking at places on Vashon, and it was like, if I move to Vashon, it's not like super cheap, but it's 10%, 15% cheaper.
John: And every year, it was always a joke in the...
John: the old days that the Vashon real estate agents made a lot of money because every year people would move over there and buy a really cool big house and they would live there for a year and realize that the, that the ferry boats, although they run every hour on the hour, they're actually a very tenuous connection.
John: And when people say like, Hey, come to my show.
John: And you think,
John: I got to drive up the island.
John: It's a half hour to the ferry boat.
John: Then I got to wait for the ferry, take the ferry over.
Merlin: That's a lot of resistance.
John: It's just a lot.
John: And so you end up saying, well, you know, I'll try and be there.
John: And then you never leave the island.
John: People go crazy because there's just the one place with the pickled ferns, one ice cream parlor and a pizza parlor.
John: And you're like, I got to get out of here.
John: And then they sell the house.
John: But
John: Now, in the pandemic, I was thinking about it last night.
John: If I hadn't bought a house a year ago, if I were shopping now...
John: I would have considered Vashon much more seriously because I don't go to Seattle anyway.
Merlin: So many factors are different.
Merlin: I mean, it's not even fair to compare.
Merlin: It's so different.
Merlin: And we're not even getting into, like we say, the global warming stuff.
Merlin: Going somewhere that's on the edge in terms of a climate you can tolerate, and in 20 years it's like 10 degrees warmer, that's a big deal.
Merlin: That's a lot of changes.
Merlin: So the night you and I met –
Merlin: You know, we went to Oakland to see a rock and roll concert.
Merlin: And like, but you know how rare that is, even for us as big rock and roll people?
Merlin: People are like, oh, we got a Christmas party in Oakland.
Merlin: I'm like, that's pretty far away.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: But another one that you, well, you know what?
Merlin: Have you noticed you haven't heard the streetcar in a while?
Merlin: Well, guess what?
Merlin: Streetcar stopped being the streetcar.
Merlin: No.
Merlin: Quite a while back replaced with buses.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: No, what?
Merlin: No.
Merlin: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Merlin: Why?
Merlin: What happened?
Merlin: And then they monkey well.
Merlin: Here's the thing.
Merlin: I'm sorry, I interrupted you, but this is the slow dissolution of a really huge benefit of where I live, which is that when I moved here in 1990,
Merlin: 1999, like one of the great joys to me was being so close to a streetcar.
Merlin: Everybody knows this story.
Merlin: You get on, it's an above ground streetcar.
Merlin: Then it turns into a subway tunnel streetcar and you end up downtown.
Merlin: You know, it's my version of riding on that Google bus, I guess.
Merlin: It was always amazing.
Merlin: My kid and I, without having to do in the time before lifts and stuff like that, you know, it's just great to be able to get on the train, go downtown, have some Korean barbecue and go see a Marvel movie at the mall downtown.
Merlin: Go to the art supply store.
Merlin: Oh, my God.
Merlin: The Japanese stationery, I miss it so much.
Merlin: But here's the thing.
Merlin: So here's the very fast version of slow dissolution, which is that pretty early on, they're like, well, this is not going to work out.
Merlin: You can't pack people into these subway cars.
Merlin: And for a variety of reasons, months ago, the streetcar line was replaced with buses.
Merlin: At the same time, they started monkeying
Merlin: With the way the routes work, without getting into too much detail, it used to be each route was its own route.
Merlin: You could get on at Embarcadero and go all the way out to the zoo.
Merlin: But now it's like, oh, now this is no longer a train.
Merlin: It's a bus, and the bus stops at sunset, and then it's a different bus because this thing has to turn around and go back.
Merlin: Well, finally, mid-August, late-August, guess what?
Merlin: This is so exciting.
Merlin: They're going to bring back the streetcars on the same or similar crazy schedule.
Merlin: You've got to basically go from my house to West Portal and then transfer to something that goes into the tunnel.
Merlin: It's already not fun.
Merlin: It's not cool.
Merlin: It's not easy.
Merlin: Anytime you add a transfer to public transit, you triple the chances that it's going to go tits up.
Merlin: They were, I believe, they opened on a Saturday.
Merlin: They reopened the streetcars, brought them back out on, I believe, a Saturday.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: And by the second business day, that Tuesday, they had to shut it down again because a driver had gotten sick.
Merlin: And now, I mean, now they're shut down, I think, somewhat indefinitely.
Merlin: I think the latest I heard was there was going to be no street cars until...
Merlin: at least the end of this calendar year.
Merlin: So is that a big deal?
Merlin: I mean, it's a big deal to a lot of people.
Merlin: It sure takes a little bit of the bloom off the rose for me in terms of like even I love where we live.
Merlin: But that's just another one of those little benefits that's gone away now.
Merlin: The train that I used to use to go to things is no longer a train and there's also no things.
John: Why is a bus better?
Merlin: I think – I don't know this to a certainty.
Merlin: I think part of it was also that – I'm guessing a little bit here because I haven't really followed this super closely.
Merlin: There's a lot to follow closely.
Merlin: But I think part of it was that it is more costly to run the trains.
Merlin: It takes more expertise in different kinds of drivers.
Merlin: I see.
Merlin: It did have something to do with social distancing, but it was also that I think it gives them more flexibility when you're doing buses versus streetcars because those things can only really go on the tracks.
Merlin: But that's just one of those examples where as soon as you start prodding at that just a little bit, you see so many different effects.
Merlin: What about the cafe that's by the streetcar stop?
Merlin: Like that place where people go and get coffee before they commute in.
Merlin: Not doing so great.
Merlin: Now they have a table and you can walk up with a mask and order something.
Merlin: But you see where I'm going with this.
Merlin: So many factors are changing.
Merlin: It's difficult to explore any one of them without opening up a thousand timelines.
John: Well, what happened in post-war America...
John: was as the suburbs were built for the first time.
John: I mean, one of the reasons that you see all the mid-century houses out in that first ring of suburbs is that those weren't suburbs.
John: They didn't exist.
John: There was no suburbs prior to 1945.
John: And that produced a massive flight from the cities, what they described as white flight because it was mostly white people.
John: And one of the reasons that the cities in America became such impoverished and falling apart, cities burning, broken windows theory, Times Square.
Merlin: Yeah, a lot of cities still had a lot going for them, had huge areas that were blight.
John: Yeah, and that was all a product of not an escape from the cities because –
John: because they, because of a virus, but an escape from the, from cities just because people discovered that with their automobile, they could live in a place with a lawn.
John: Right.
John: Now we're going to see a different version of that, which is, and best case scenario, the virus resolves itself, uh, and future viruses.
John: We, we manage better.
John: Um,
John: But if it's finally true that a certain kind of commerce, initially like high-level white-collar commerce, but eventually any kind of what you would call, I guess, intellectual commerce, where you can have a set of skills that you can translate through a computer –
John: if you can do that anywhere, then all of these questions that we used to have about when you were driving through Banff and you're like, why doesn't everybody live here?
John: This seems amazing.
John: Uh, you know, why doesn't everybody live in grand junction, Colorado?
John: All of a sudden I think people are going to, uh, and that's going to tax infrastructure in a way that like we had this, the guy come out to the septic system the other day because being home, uh,
John: what the timeline where a septic system needs to be maintained suddenly was quadrupled because there's three people and they never leave.
John: They never leave the house.
John: And so it's not, you know, all the people that go poop downtown aren't pooping downtown.
John: They're pooping in their houses.
Merlin: They got to reallocate the resources to where the poop goes.
John: Yeah, there were all these poop pipes that were devoted to people pooping between the hours of 8 and 5 p.m.
John: Between 8 a.m.
John: and 5 p.m.
John: in a certain extremely concentrated set of poop towers.
John: And now those are...
John: gone and all, but that poop didn't go away.
John: It all just moved out to the home poop pipes.
Merlin: There's a different poop pipe where that's true, and that's the poop pipe called the internet.
Merlin: In the early days of this, internet service providers had to reallocate resources to make it so that a lot of the bandwidth that had been focused on those poop towers downtown was now going to go to bedroom communities like mine so that people could keep up.
Merlin: Yet another thing where
Merlin: That's just the thing that's going to happen.
Merlin: It's a different tower, same poop.
John: And what's scary, and this only, what was it, five years ago,
John: During the peak of the – because in the last 15 years, the urbanist movement has been driving this whole millennials move back downtown.
Merlin: It's why San Francisco is so – Oh, is this the people who get chickens, John?
John: It's the people who get – well, no.
John: It's the urbanists who don't even want chickens because they want to live in a – they wanted to live in the center of downtown.
John: These are the mustache waxers.
Merlin: I see.
Merlin: I see.
John: I see.
John: they they they what what their idea was the whole urbanist movement was about much better public transit get on your bicycles um it's this constellation of incredible restaurants that all of a sudden appeared in downtowns where there weren't any restaurants or no good ones um it's just people that believed that the future and a kind of environmentalist mentality a um
John: It was a cultural movement to move downtown.
John: And during the peak of that, I talked to a lot of people who speculated that the McMansions and suburban, like McMansions were going to start to be the new inner city, the new ghetto, if you will.
Merlin: Like housing stock that nobody wants?
John: Yeah, a 6,000 square foot house.
John: that's a half hour from downtown is suddenly going to be occupied by three families.
John: It's going to be Dr. Zhivago, except different and for different reasons.
John: But it's going to be the flip side of white flight, that white flight is going to be directed to the inner city.
John: All those houses, like my mom's house that she bought for $180,000 and was suddenly worth 10 times that.
John: Um, you're going to have just, uh, a complete flipperoo, but, but we're going to have these, these incredibly weird visuals of mansions in the suburbs, either, either decaying like the housing bubble in Florida where you're driving through these streets and it's like, well, every one of these was worth $900,000, uh, nine months ago.
John: And now you, now they're all on fire.
John: Or they're going to be the habitations of people that – the old luxury was that you had to drive into work and the new luxury is that you walk to work.
John: And now the new poverty is that you have to get to work from your burned out suburbs.
Merlin: If you live in the suburbs or somewhere outside of Atlanta, you're going to have a real big commute in front of you.
Merlin: And then at the end of the day, whereas somebody who's
Merlin: I don't know, could this be somewhere like maybe like St.
Merlin: Paul, like somewhere that's like just a cool place to live with cool stuff.
Merlin: And like you get all the things, I guess Portland would be another one, good transit, like a place where you can just like disappear into this area, but you still have the access to the resources of like a good airport that will like with cool carpeting where you can go places.
Merlin: That's always been part of the appeal is you don't want to be stuck somewhere where that's all you get now is like Applebee's and sadness.
John: And the sketchy thing is that when that happens, you suddenly realize that the, that one of the byproducts of urbanism was as they were building this transit transit was no longer 1960s transit, which was designed to bring people in from far away.
John: New transit is, is, you know, concentrated local transit.
John: That's going to move you from one kind of like your neighborhood, which is close to town, you know,
John: And so if the poor neighborhoods are suddenly relocated to the outskirts, and that's the only place that people can live, people that actually work service industry jobs, you know, maintenance stuff, hotels, that –
John: There's no transit to those places.
Merlin: You know, there's no trolley.
Merlin: You can't just, I mean, just there's another one of those things or obviously the example that comes to mind is, you know, online education.
Merlin: Like just because you put the word online in front of it doesn't mean it's easy.
Merlin: And in that case, just because you say, well, it's just a different kind of public transit.
Merlin: Well, it could be a very different kind of public transit that requires a very different infrastructure.
Merlin: And you might be building out something for 10 to 20 years in the future, reflecting what you know or think about something 10 years in the past.
Merlin: So at the airport, our airport was in the midst of getting all of these big upgrades and doing stuff at the terminals.
Merlin: And then pretty soon it was like, yeah, we've got two windows open in the whole place.
Merlin: We just don't need it.
Merlin: Again, another one of those 90% numbers.
Merlin: I think the number of people flying per day went down something like 90% over this time.
John: And in a way, that's great because we were ruining the world by imagining that the future was that we were going to fly in these extremely polluting jets all around.
John: I have an app that's called Flight Tracker 24, which I highly recommend to everyone.
John: It's a free app, and it's a crowdsourced plane spotter app that allows you to look at any plane in the sky, pull up your app, and immediately know
John: what it is, where it's going to, where it's coming from.
John: You can track its flight path, um, both directions.
John: There's a photo of it, uh, with the, I mean, with the, um, if you upgrade to the paid version of this app, I think you can know the pilot and you can zoom out on this app and see every plane in the air in the world.
John: Like I, I sit sometimes and just look at Schiphol airport in Holland and
John: and water the netherlands and watch the planes come and go but you can also look at every plane in the sky and what i've noticed in sitting and staring at this hat for many hours is that what else are you gonna do is that so many of the planes in and out of seattle in the course of a day are cargo
John: Amazon is running planes.
John: There's cargo planes, 747s flying back and forth from Seattle to Taipei every night, like four planes a night.
John: Giant 747s flying back and forth to Taipei.
John: Now, what we're shipping to Taipei and they're shipping to us that needs to come via airplane, I really don't know.
John: I'm not sure what they're manufacturing.
Merlin: I wonder if it's similar to what was happening here, which is – and again, I don't remember this carefully.
Merlin: A lot happened very quickly.
Merlin: But sometime around February, March, April, there was a huge thing in cutting down the number of trips internationally that obviously was happening everywhere.
Merlin: But one was that –
Merlin: Airlines were cutting back, especially on flights to China in the early days, which is a huge deal for a certain company in Cupertino, where they've got people going back and forth all the time to go supervise or do whatever it takes to make the next iPhone come out, which is a lot of quality control, a lot of software stuff.
Merlin: So you know what I mean?
Merlin: But just Apple alone was accounting for a lot of flights to China and back.
Merlin: And they put it on the board.
Merlin: That's another thing that's going to change a lot.
John: Well, but somehow, even when no one was allowed to go back and forth from anywhere, somehow four flights a night were going back and forth to Taipei.
John: Costco chickens probably.
John: Four flights a night were going back and forth to all kinds of locations and
John: And they were all cargo jets.
John: And I don't know whether those cargo pilots just stay in their cockpits.
John: I don't think so.
John: I think they have to get out and go to hotels.
John: So there were allowances being made.
John: But I think what our dream was, what the urbanist dream of a world where you could work from home was was
John: was that all those downtown office towers would get converted to apartments for cool people.
John: Yeah, high density.
John: Yeah, who could live down there, and they wouldn't use pollution, and they would eat pickled ferns, and it would be freaking amazing, and...
John: We wouldn't worry that much about whether or not the old neighborhoods of McMansions that we used to think were good were now like five families to a house and they couldn't – and they had to commute for an hour and a half to get to work.
John: That was a thing we were going to solve later as is true of all problems.
John: Solve them later.
John: But now –
John: Can you imagine a world where the WeWork Tower in San Francisco just sits there empty like freaking Detroit?
John: Where all of downtown San Francisco is just...
John: like just wind whistling through the broken windows.
John: I know.
Merlin: I know.
John: The Pan America tower.
Merlin: There's, there's, I mean, like there's just been story after story about all of the, again, like the small businesses that service the financial district.
Merlin: And we've known for a long time.
Merlin: Anybody can tell you, like you come out of a comedy club, you know, you come see Roderick on the line at that, with that one club we do, you know, what's it called?
Merlin: The one on Jackson or whatever.
John: Under the, under the bridge.
Merlin: Under the bridge.
John: You go to the end of the bridge club.
John: Top has sprung a week.
Merlin: And then you go outside at 11 p.m.
Merlin: and there's tumbleweeds.
Merlin: In the best of instances, the McDonald's downtown in the financial district close at five or six, which would be unheard of where I'm from.
Merlin: Everything's 24-7 in Florida.
Merlin: You can get gas and pork rinds anytime.
Merlin: But even back in the normal times, that was true.
Merlin: But now, it is a little bit like a ghost town.
Merlin: On top of which now...
Merlin: Again, everything's connected.
Merlin: For example, I talked about going to the zoo.
Merlin: We go to the zoo with my kid.
Merlin: We have a membership.
Merlin: We go all the time.
Merlin: And over the years, we've watched the very, very, very slow development of these condos being built.
Merlin: And one of them had that feel of like, hmm, they seem like they ran out of money.
Merlin: There's a bunch of plywood and plastic flapping around.
Merlin: You're like, when are you going to finish this?
Merlin: Two days ago, I was looking out the back window through the dense smoke.
Merlin: And I said to my lady, hey, what's that giant building?
Merlin: over there that looks like a sandcastle.
Merlin: And she's like, that's, that's those condos that like now nobody wants the condos that were built by the zoo that took years and years and years.
Merlin: They're just, they're just sitting there.
Merlin: There's been all these crackdowns on like, for example, like if you're on a retail corridor, you have to be zoned the right way.
Merlin: Otherwise there's fines.
Merlin: It's like, there's all this stuff where you're like, that's not going to be sustainable.
Merlin: But businesses are just tearing ass to get out of this town.
Merlin: People.
Merlin: I mean, again, as has been widely meta-reported, turns out, a lot of that has been greatly overstated.
Merlin: That basically cities are emptying out.
Merlin: I don't think that's entirely true.
Merlin: But in an economy that was more marginal than anybody wanted to realize, it doesn't take that much damage to be like a nearly fatal blow to several ecosystems.
John: What I don't know...
John: I was talking to – I was about to say friend of the show, but he's never listened to a podcast.
John: Friend of ours.
John: He's a friend of mine.
John: He's a friend of ours.
John: He's a friend.
John: Josh Rosenfeld.
John: Oh, hi, Josh.
John: Owner of Barsouk Record.
Merlin: Big fan.
Merlin: He gave me some shirts.
Merlin: He's a good man.
John: Yeah, he's a good man.
John: He and I were talking last night because we had a socially distanced family event where our kids –
John: joined us around a campfire, and we roasted some weenies, and we made s'mores, and everybody wore masks, and it was very cute.
Merlin: Oh, that's so cool.
Merlin: And USA America.
John: Oh, so it wasn't done over Zoom.
John: It actually wasn't a virtual fire.
John: That's right.
John: We were together in real person.
John: And we were talking about the fact that in the course of our lives, and our lives just in the middle of those lives right now,
John: In the course of our lives, we've had several different careers.
John: And I know you have had this same experience where it's like, okay, well, my career, I guess, is this.
John: And then it turns out, oh, wow.
John: Eight years later, that wasn't my career.
John: I ended up doing a different thing, a wholly different thing.
Merlin: And then... I was so driven by my idea.
Merlin: I think everybody's like this.
Merlin: What did I study in school?
Merlin: What was my major?
Merlin: What was my last job?
Merlin: And you're always using Pastis Prologue to try and figure out what's happening now and in the future.
Merlin: And it isn't until time passes that you go, well, I guess I have a different career than I thought.
John: Time passages.
John: Time passages.
John: I mean...
John: There's no way I could have predicted what I'm doing now.
John: Not when I was 22 and I thought I would never have a job and I would never have a house and nothing would ever work out.
John: But not when I was 32 and I still felt like I would never have a house or a job, nothing would work out.
John: But not when I was 42 either.
John: And so there's no way to know what's going to happen in 10 years.
John: And
John: But the one thing I do know is it's very doubtful I'm going to still be doing what I'm doing now.
John: Whatever that is.
John: And honestly, right now, I don't want, I'm no longer feeling like, when is something good going to happen?
John: Like right now, things are good for me.
John: I've got a nine year old who has just started a nine and a half year old who has just started to be a teenager preteen.
John: And I don't know what like four years from now is going to bring.
John: I'm not sure I'm, but you know, I'm not sure I'm ready, but I'm also like, my job is fine.
John: My, my, uh, my situation is fine.
John: But 10 years from now, when my daughter is 20 and when, uh,
John: I'm in my early 60s, and the cities are whatever they are, and I am whatever I am.
John: I've never before looked at it the way I'm looking at it right now.
John: I was thinking – I know that we hate this game, but we can't stop playing it.
John: Do you remember Madonna's spectacular 2000 record, Music?
Merlin: Oh, yeah.
Merlin: Is that the one with – you were tweeting about that?
Merlin: Is that the one with Ray of Light?
Merlin: Yeah.
John: Music makes the people come together.
John: That was – I think a lot of Madonna fans feel like that might have been her last truly great record.
John: But it certainly was the last Madonna record that swept the nation.
John: Yeah.
John: uh, that everybody had and was listening to.
John: Uh, and at the time there was all this talk, like Madonna's 40 now, like, like this is crazy.
John: She's still sexy and seeing satisfaction at 75.
John: She's still like, you know, she's still doing it and she's 40.
John: Can you, can you believe it?
John: But I was thinking, you know, it's a terrible game, but we are further from... Oh, I love this game.
Merlin: Don't say that.
Merlin: See, I thought you were going to say the what if Obama said that game.
John: No, no, no.
John: We are further from Madonna's music album than Madonna was at music to the beginning of her career.
John: Like Madonna, when she made that... The equivalent amount of time would have been Video Killed the Radio Star.
John: Yeah.
John: And the idea that
John: Because I think of that music record as being fairly, it's still like Madonna, the last Madonna record I really engaged with.
John: And still I'm thinking of that record as a time when Madonna was like, it was kind of amazing that she was still, and now that I look back at it, it's like, that's, I mean, Madonna was incredibly appealing to me at the time and appealing to me now.
John: And I,
John: the the the concept i mean i madonna she's probably still making music i made this offhand comment to ben the other day where i was like well who heard a radiohead in the last five years and ben's like radiohead continues to make amazing music and every you know and every six months they put out something that redefines the brakes nerdlinger redefines music and i'm like all right all right all right all right all right i didn't want to get into the whole thing about radiohead jesus but but uh
John: So you and I are in our mid 60s or early 60s in 10 years.
John: Yeah.
John: And we don't have, it's not like we have retirement or savings.
Merlin: Okay.
Merlin: Okay.
Merlin: Okay.
Merlin: Okay.
Merlin: Let's keep it.
Merlin: Let's keep it.
John: You know, you started with the aging daughters, but now you've crossed the line.
John: But you have to be excited about it, right?
John: Because we're the cockroaches that have survived every apocalypse.
John: But what are the, you know, like if cities go away and they're not going to, but they're absolutely going to be re-envisioned because no one I know has any real interest in ever doing it like we did it.
John: And so those restaurants downtown are not going to be what they were.
John: And the sewers are all going to be really stressed.
Merlin: You started out this week sounding like a Richard Hugo poem.
Merlin: And I think you're about to end it sounding like a Godspeed, you Black Emperor song.
Merlin: I opened my wallet and it's full of blood.