Ep. 401: "How is Pond?"
John: Hello.
John: Hi, John.
John: Oh, hello, Merlin man.
John: Hi, how's it going?
John: It was good.
John: I mean, it was going really good until just a second or two ago.
John: Oh, no.
John: Yeah, I realized that I have an injury, and I don't – it's a new injury, and it's one I don't recognize because I was not conscious of having an injury.
John: Until I started to walk down the stairs, at which point my right knee, which is not my bad knee... Yet.
John: ...started to... Do you have a bad knee and a worse knee?
John: Well, I have a bad knee and a knee that's been doing the heavy lifting, if you know what I mean.
John: I have a bad knee and then a knee that keeps bailing it out of jail.
Merlin: Mm-hmm.
John: It's an egg on me.
Mm-hmm.
John: It's an enabler knee.
John: That's right.
John: It should have been tough on the bad knee a long time ago.
John: But now it, uh, I was walking down the stairs and about three steps down, I was like, I was, it was, uh, it hurt so badly.
John: I was, I struggled to get down the stairs and not spill my coffee.
John: And it didn't, it didn't hurt laying in bed.
John: It didn't hurt walking around on flat surfaces.
Um,
John: It's just a walk down the stairs injury.
Merlin: Part way, as you were a nude descending a staircase, part way.
Merlin: So you took a few, you were on flat ground, you take a few steps on the steps down, and that's when something clicks.
Merlin: Is it the front of your knee, like the kneecap, that kind of like beneath there?
Merlin: No, it's the back.
John: And the thing is, I didn't injure it on the stairs because...
John: Yesterday, last night, I think a couple of times, it was a thing where I crouched down to pick something up or pet the kitty or something.
John: And as I was standing back up, I felt a crick in the knee.
John: So I knew there was something going on, but I got a crick.
John: If I wrote every crick that I feel down in my diary, it would just be a list of cricks.
Merlin: This is probably one of those topics that's not particularly interesting to others, but it's important to me.
Merlin: How can I put this?
Merlin: What it takes to injure me
Merlin: That bar has been lowered greatly.
Merlin: And I, like you, I discover injuries or I discover discomfort.
Merlin: And I can think of a couple right off the top of my head from just even the last couple days.
Merlin: One was I was assembling...
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: I minimize the amount of time I spend on the floor.
Merlin: And this reminds me why.
Merlin: Because no matter how I sat, no matter how I bent my lower joints, it caused excruciating pain.
Merlin: And then I had to use the leg of the newly assembled desk to help daddy up.
Merlin: So that one, I had a knee injury.
Merlin: It just made me realize, wow, this is worse than I thought.
Merlin: All of my joints hurt.
Merlin: What was the other one?
Merlin: Oh, yeah, I just cut my lip shaving.
Merlin: I want to talk about shaving.
Merlin: Oh, wow.
Merlin: Yeah, I'm very upset about shaving today.
Merlin: But here's the other one.
Merlin: You ever injure yourself sleeping?
John: I have injured myself sleeping.
Merlin: I've injured myself in so many different ways sleeping.
Merlin: I've done the classics.
Merlin: I've done the neck.
Merlin: The neck is the bad one for me.
Merlin: And I'm a cover kicker.
Merlin: I like them to be loose.
Merlin: Me too.
Merlin: But sometimes I'll wake up the next morning.
Merlin: I feel like I've got a sprained ankle from sleeping.
John: That's not right.
John: That's no way to live.
John: No, that's never happened to me.
John: That's really, that's truly bad.
Merlin: You're a little behind me, if I could say.
Merlin: Just you wait.
John: It's true.
John: It's true.
John: It's true.
John: That has become one of my favorite things to say to people in their 40s.
John: It's all coming.
John: It's coming like a wave.
John: Just you wait.
Merlin: You got your hand problems.
Merlin: I don't know when this happened.
Merlin: I'm wondering now if I have arthritis because, which is, you know, normal for somebody that's getting older.
Merlin: But for example, like I cannot grip something tightly with my left hand anymore because I get excruciating pain in my thumb.
Merlin: Yesterday, as part of this omnibus effort to improve the office slash bedroom area, that is my wife's domain now, we had to move a rug.
Merlin: Pretty good-sized rug.
Merlin: Now, what a lot of people won't tell you, a rug is heavier than it looks.
John: Oh, it sure is, yeah.
Merlin: Especially when you've got the grippy, rubbery stuff under it and it's hard to drag.
John: A nice rug.
John: Nice rug.
John: A nice Telecaster, they want to tell you how light it is.
John: A nice rug, they want to tell you how heavy it is.
Merlin: A rug's more like a Les Paul, let's be honest.
Merlin: So we had to drag this rug, and it became a three-person effort.
Merlin: Long story short, it became necessary because of the new position of the new desk.
Merlin: And boy, that room is looking great.
Merlin: She's done a dynamite job with her bedroom office.
John: She's a hell of a gal.
Merlin: Oh, boy, she's now got two different stations.
Merlin: She's got a standing desk, and she's got her new desk.
Merlin: It's double monitors.
Merlin: She's helping medicine a lot right now.
John: I was doing a show the other day, and I had to go pee, and I didn't want to say, oh, hey, can you guys hang on?
John: And so I stood up at my desk because my microphone's on a boom stand, and I was like, hey, I've got a standing desk.
John: I could do all these podcasts standing up.
John: That was the last time I tried it, though.
Merlin: Anyway, you were saying... No, I feel like I sound different when I'm standing, and maybe I just need to adjust.
Merlin: Maybe it's like the razor, where I think I can just buy a nice electric shaver and it'll actually work.
Merlin: Maybe it's my face that's wrong.
Merlin: Maybe I don't have a voice for standing.
Merlin: I need to explore that.
Merlin: So it became necessary to move the rug, which is a pretty... You know the size of the front room.
Merlin: Yep.
Merlin: So it's a pretty big rug.
Merlin: Not a small room.
Merlin: And it required...
Merlin: This is fairly quick.
Merlin: It required getting a bunch of the rug underneath the bed so that we could create a space at the other end of the room by the fireplace where the desk could go.
Merlin: And I said to her, hey, look, you're not going to want any rug under you.
Merlin: You want to be rolling, you know, like your homies.
Merlin: You want the desk to be flat and not be, you know, cattywampus on an inch and a half of rug.
Sure.
Merlin: Three-person effort.
Merlin: My wife, my daughter, and myself.
Merlin: And we employed all kinds of ancient Egyptian tricks of physics, like putting a yoga bolster under the bed to hold it up and dragging.
Merlin: Why am I telling you this?
Merlin: My back hurts this morning.
Merlin: And you know what?
Merlin: I'm the least strong of the three of us.
Merlin: My kid is stronger than me.
John: You were doing the thing where you moved the rug four times.
Yeah.
John: You move to the rug to move the thing and then you move to the rug to move the other thing.
John: You move the rug under the thing.
John: You put the rug several places that the rug was not going to be.
Merlin: Wow, you're a good visual thinker because that's all I brought to this entire event was moaning.
Merlin: And having some idea about how to use a little bit of planning.
Merlin: So, yes, we roll the rug back.
Merlin: We pick it.
Merlin: We don't drag it.
Merlin: You can't drag it on the rubber thingy.
Merlin: We size it out different ways.
Merlin: Yeah, that's really all I brought to it.
John: You got to roll the rubber thingy up with the rug.
John: Otherwise, the rubber thingy gets...
John: a kink in it or a crinkle in it.
John: And then you're never going to get that out.
Merlin: What we ended up doing was rolling the rug proper away, then rolling up the rubber thing and then kind of dragging that because it's light.
Merlin: It's grippy but light like a crock.
Merlin: And so that we were able to pull under the bed.
Merlin: By the way, bed, heavy, right?
Merlin: We've got a mattress and another mattress.
Merlin: We've got an old Casper and a new Casper on top of that.
Merlin: That constitutes the bed.
Merlin: But that's heavy.
Merlin: So yeah, we used a lot of science.
John: You've got to lift the bed up even higher to get the rolled rug underneath it.
Merlin: Well, at that point, we're just – all we're doing at that point is we're dragging the rubber thingy and then we're kind of lifting and dragging the rug.
Merlin: But again, the rug is very heavy.
Merlin: This is the gating factor in this three-person office bedroom project.
Merlin: But my point is, it takes very little to injure me.
Merlin: And then the injury does not go away quickly.
Merlin: I spend a lot of my adult life just knowing that I'll be fine by tomorrow, almost no matter what happens.
Merlin: And that is simply not the case anymore.
John: I feel like I've localized the injury now that I've been sitting here for... Well, please tell me about it.
John: Well, I feel like it's not actually the knee.
John: It is...
John: a muscle in the back of the leg.
Merlin: Like a sub-hamstring?
John: Yeah, not central.
John: There's a knot in it sort of just above the knee on the right-hand side of the...
John: of the upper, of the thigh, the rear thigh, whatever that is.
John: Yeah, yeah.
John: I call it your hinders.
John: Yeah, it's on the right-hand side of the rear thigh, very, very far away from being a butt muscle.
John: This is down close to the knee.
John: And it is decidedly pulled...
John: And I think I know why, but it's funny that it, oh, wait, I remember.
John: I remember when it happened.
John: Oh, my gosh.
John: And I said, oh, that's going to hurt.
John: Oh, boy.
John: But then I put it out of my mind, and sure enough, I was right.
John: It does hurt later.
John: It stayed out of your mind.
John: Ow.
John: Ow.
John: Now I know what that is.
John: Ow.
John: See, yesterday I was doing work where the entire time I was thinking, this is going to hurt your hands.
John: Tomorrow, you, Mr. Hurt Hands now, Mr. Guy, apparently, who can't do a day's honest work without having his hands get all screwed up.
Merlin: Were you down in your trench doing your stonework?
Merlin: I was.
Merlin: Raking and shoveling.
Merlin: It's kind of like you put yourself on hard labor.
Merlin: You sentence yourself to go into a trench and be like a federal prisoner in the 1930s.
John: I am doing work that you literally could not hire someone to do.
John: Because if you brought them down there and said, so here's a job.
John: And I was thinking you would just have your lowest ranked employees come do this.
John: If you went to a Boy Scout troop and said, it's a merit badge in it for you.
John: to clean up this creek, they would pass.
John: They would say, what?
John: No.
John: And it's not that there's any garbage in it.
John: It's that Mr. Oman, the old man, the father who built the house, and he raised his family there, he wanted a pond.
John: And I think part of it is that his wife wanted the creek to stop eroding in the spring floods.
John: Right.
John: And so they did a lot of work to keep the creek from eroding.
John: And I think Dad, at a certain point, got committed to the idea of a pond.
John: But he was using – he worked for Boeing as an electrical engineer.
John: So pond building isn't in – it's not part of the electrical engineering field.
John: Hmm.
John: And he was using surplus materials, as far as I can tell.
John: Some of it surplused probably from Boeing.
John: But also... So in the space...
John: That used to be Oman pool.
John: Oman pond.
John: On Oman pond.
John: Pond would be better for you.
John: There were a lot of very big steel pipes pounded, pounded deep, deep into the ground.
John: Steel pipes that are six feet tall, but only three feet of them were out of the ground.
John: That I think things were attached to the pipes that made...
John: older dams now long gone um there were giant beams beams that would have been sawn out of a ancient warehouse you know like beams that if they hadn't been you've become some kind of landscaping cormac mccarthy i'm really it's nuts i'm enjoying it these beams these beams they'll go on when i close my thighs
John: These beams would have, if they had not spent the last 50 years in a pond, would have been now in the like old beam market, would have been very expensive beam.
Merlin: Oh, I see.
Merlin: You get like a lumber liquidator.
Merlin: You get somebody comes along.
Merlin: It's called reclaiming.
Merlin: We're going to reclaim that.
Merlin: Is that right?
John: That's right.
John: These would show up in a tech company headquarters common room.
John: But unfortunately, they've been in a pond for 50 years.
Merlin: I don't want to interrupt you, but can I ask a question?
Merlin: Sure.
Merlin: I realize I'm going to out myself here as somebody who doesn't know how to build a pond, but I'll speak for the listener who perhaps also does not know how to build a pond.
Merlin: Just real quick, how do you build a pond, and how do the things you've described –
Merlin: have an impact on the building of that pond.
Merlin: Because I'm imagining you lay down a tarp, you put some water in it, Bob's your uncle, drop some koi, you know?
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: But you're telling me about pipes, you're telling me about ancient beams.
Merlin: Yes.
Merlin: How is pond?
John: Well, there are a lot of schools of pond building.
John: If you say, like, I want to build a pond, the first question I think people are going to ask is, is it in your backyard or is it in a ravine that's close to your house?
John: The next thing they're going to say is, is there live water, active water?
John: Or are you pumping water up to the top of a little waterfall and then it trickles down into your pond?
John: And in every case, you're going to make a different decision.
Merlin: Is one of the responses to that more dignified in the pond community than the other?
Merlin: Or is it simply a lifestyle choice?
John: Well, it's completely different.
John: Most people do not have a crick running through their backyard.
John: Yeah.
John: And so most people have to manufacture a little pond, a little... They have to bring water in themselves.
Merlin: They're importing the water, and then is the water refreshed through some mechanism, or is it... Okay, because you won't be stagnant, because then you've got a green pond, right?
John: Yes.
John: So you get pumps, you're moving water around, there's a little fountain probably, or maybe a little waterfall, cascade.
John: But as you're saying, a lot of...
John: Almost all pump.
John: I'm sorry.
John: Almost all pond and stream Culture that you'll that you'll find that first blush is
John: says, you know, you carve out the channel, you build the, you dig out where you want the pond to be, you line the bottom with a pond liner.
John: Pond liner.
John: Yeah, you cover that with, well, a tarp.
John: Well, no, I understand.
Merlin: It's a term of art.
Merlin: Okay.
John: Yeah, then you cover that with sand, then you cover that with pea gravel, then you put your decorative rots around the edge, etc., etc.
Merlin: Wow, I had no, there's so much more to pond than I realized.
John: It's a lot to pond, because if you don't do that stuff, then the water just either...
John: seeps through the ground into the groundwater or it's just it's just a hole well it's just a hole that will not you know uh it's not a residence for water it's just just a means for losing it it's a means for losing it okay it's that's right you just it's just a hole in the ground but instead of throwing money into it you throw water into it so it's yeah it's like a boat if a boat were were a pond or a pond okay
John: But the problem also, I think, is if the water is touching the organic earth that isn't an organic earth that you have invented that's sitting on top of a plastic liner, if it's just sitting in the mud, then all the creatures of the earth will come.
John: And that's how you not only get a green pond, but you just get a mud bag.
Merlin: bucket you know you you just you turn into a it's just a place for a mud duck at that point because that is not going to score you in my opinion that would not score you a slot in say sunset magazine no exactly thank you unless you're in the they're famous um pond fails page pond fails
John: And I did not want to be – I didn't want to be on Vice's like pond do's and don'ts.
Merlin: It would suck so much to be put on blast by Sunset Magazine.
John: And the new Sunset.
John: Have you read Sunset lately?
Merlin: No, not in forever.
Merlin: We got their books because their stuff is real good for the West Coast climate stuff.
Merlin: But I haven't looked at the magazine in years.
John: So the magazine – Sunset –
John: Well, Sunset Magazine now is being edited and all the articles are written by and for people our age and maybe people a little bit younger than us even.
John: And the editor is, you know, like a very active West Coast woman who's fashionable and who really wants to know what the –
John: what the best five spa towns in Arizona are.
John: Oh, sure.
John: Okay.
John: You know, like where the Airstream campgrounds where you can look out at the Pacific and also be glamping with seven different kinds of cracker, you know?
Merlin: Yeah, yeah.
Merlin: It's basically, we've moved from home and garden stuff to basically charcuterie.
John: Yeah, well, but also home and garden stuff, but it's all like, how do you convert your backyard into a fire pit and a sex swing?
John: But, you know, the sex swing is implied.
John: The thing about pond design is it's changed a lot in the last 40, 50 years.
Merlin: Interesting.
Merlin: Pond seems ancient, and yet it's still seeing innovations from the people who would have them in their ravine or yard.
John: A lot of what you see in pond thinking now is actually to go back to the ancient practice, Merlin.
John: Whoa.
John: And what we saw in mid-century...
John: was probably, well, we're talking about a hundred years or more of interventionist pawns.
Merlin: I see.
Merlin: And we're looking for pawned originalists.
John: Yeah, that's right.
John: Pawned originalists is kind of, that's who I've been studying.
John: I mean, I'm not like tied to the pawned documents, but, you know, you need to interpret them because modern conditions.
Merlin: Well, it's like they say, you know, you want to learn the rules before you break them.
Merlin: And I think that also goes for pawned.
John: So, uh, uh, Mr. Oman in, in the years.
John: So he did lay down some plastic and some tarp and then, and some beams and some pipes.
John: And then one gets the impression.
Merlin: that over the years the oman family broke up a few driveways if you know what i mean there were some patios that we've got we've got that in our yard we still find inexplicable broken up cement that implies there used to be like a whole paved like i don't know like a cul-de-sac in our backyard there's no reason that you would have that much broken up concrete in a yard unless you were trying to conceal something right same here like the the amount of broken concrete and i'm talking about
John: chunks of concrete
John: that if I get down into a proper lifting position and get both my hands under this thing, I can stand with it, but I'm like... It would take two Boy Scouts in a Frogman suit and some serious OSHA violations to move those cracklings out of there.
John: Yeah, I'm like waddle-walking.
Merlin: Yeah, that's no good, John.
Merlin: That makes my back hurt.
Merlin: I'm sorry.
Merlin: I don't want to add this to your list of cricks, but...
John: Well, that's what I did to the back of my leg.
John: But the thing is that for whatever reason, these chunks of concrete at some point clearly were envisioned to line the bottom of the pond.
John: But the pond was too big.
John: It didn't have liner all the way under it.
John: At least I haven't dug down far enough to find it.
John: But this is a natural pond in a lot of senses.
John: And one of the major senses is that every autumn, and we're entering into that time right now, the 25 mature big-leaf maples...
John: That ring the pond.
John: That are 180 feet high.
John: Really?
John: That sounds amazing.
John: It's great.
John: But they all lose their leaves all at once.
John: And big leaf maple.
John: The leaf is bigger than my splayed hand.
John: And all those leaves fall down into the pond.
John: And then they sink to the bottom of the pond.
John: Creating every year.
John: A layer of leaf muck.
John: That grows and grows and grows until it becomes like a muck hole.
John: And the bottom of the muck hole is in hell.
John: Like there's no bottom.
John: It just goes – it's just muck all the way down.
John: Except –
John: It's muck all the way down until you get to this layer of broken driveway.
John: Yeah.
John: Yeah.
John: And I am taking the broken driveway parts out of the mucky pond.
John: And I'm doing it.
John: I'm not sure why.
John: I'm doing it because there's something that happens in me where if a thing isn't right and no one else would notice, and maybe it's even structurally important, but it's wrong, it doesn't belong,
John: I will not rest until it's gone.
John: And there have been so many things in my life where I've undermined the foundation of a thing, where I have destroyed a piece of art or a relationship or...
John: a carburetor or uh you know like a like a uh a 10 page essay because there was some thread definitely this happens with clothes some thread sticking out and i can't leave it and i pick at it and i pick at it and so realizing that this pond had all this stuff in it
John: You know, this is a pond.
John: I mean, the first thing I had to do was drain the pond.
Merlin: Yeah, but like it seems like that feels like a cop-out.
Merlin: I'm saying you're doing the opposite of this, but it feels like a cop-out to go, oh, it's just a pond.
Merlin: Because I share this with you on certain kinds of things.
Merlin: Like, I got to get the rod out.
Merlin: Like, if there's something here, it doesn't matter if people can see it or not.
Merlin: I know it's there.
Merlin: And sometimes one has an intuition about when a thing needs to not be where it is.
John: Exactly.
John: And in...
John: In this case, there are quite a few things that need to be not where they presently are.
John: And once I started pulling the concrete out, I just got up to go get... There was this little bike helmet that belongs to, I think, an American Girl doll.
John: So it's big.
John: It's the size of...
John: How big is an American Girl doll head?
Merlin: About yay big.
Merlin: I mean, so you could put it on somewhere between a baseball and a softball, except it's Rebecca.
John: Right.
John: And I think this hat, this helmet, you could put a baseball in it, but not a softball in it.
John: And I saw it sitting over there, and I said, I wonder if I put that under my leg and could use it as a, like,
Merlin: uh like a a little hard point to massage my hurt muscle and so i went and got it now it's under my leg and i'm massaging my american girl helmet behind your your it's on your knee hurt or are you gonna do is it like a classical guitarist where they did a fruity thing where they put their foot on a block
Merlin: No, it's not my foot.
John: It's actually on the muscle and I'm using it because it's a round little helmet.
John: I'm using it as a kind of pressure.
Merlin: Oh, I see.
John: You're doing some kind of ad hoc kinesiology.
John: That's right.
John: That's exactly right.
John: I'm rolfing myself.
John: So I had to dig with a shovel to get to the layer of broken concrete, at which point I had to use a crowbar to pry them out of the muck and
John: and then carry them up to the shore.
John: And then yesterday, what I did, I had amassed this pile of broken concrete on the shore, and I needed to move it up the hill.
John: And it's one thing to pull it out of the muck and put it on the shore, but I had to pick each one up and carry it up the hill.
John: And halfway through that, I was... Oh, and also I have to step over a log...
John: With them in my hand, so they're in my hand and I have to step over a log, back and forth over this log, that I should just take the chainsaw and cut.
John: But I haven't... I've been studying it for months.
John: I haven't exactly picked the spot I want to cut the log.
John: I look at it every time I walk over it.
Merlin: I'm like, if I just cut it right there... Something inside you says, we're not ready for that yet.
John: We're not ready.
John: I actually picked up the chainsaw yesterday and turned...
John: To go down and cut the log.
John: And then I put the chainsaw back down and I said, not yet.
John: Not yet.
John: Wait.
John: Don't rush it.
John: Just wait.
John: The moment will come to cut the log.
John: But I think I was stepping over the log with a block of concrete in my hand and I felt my leg go boing.
Merlin: Boy, who would have guessed that would happen?
John: Later on, I'm going to have an American Girl doll helmet under this leg is what I said.
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Merlin: Yeah, I'm looking at a picture here.
Merlin: This one's got – it's pink and it's got butterflies and flowers on it.
Merlin: I wonder if it's similar to that.
Merlin: This is so interesting to me.
Merlin: So I have to say every week or so when we talk about this, we get back to the project here.
Merlin: And you mentioned things like – phrases like carrying boulders.
Merlin: That – I mean, you're a very, very young and capable man.
Merlin: But –
Merlin: Did you have concerns going into this?
Merlin: Did you know what you were in for?
Merlin: Or did you know there was going to be like a lot of, as they say, heavy lifting?
John: Well, so when I went to look at the house, you know, I've been looking at houses for a long time.
John: I've gotten very depressed.
John: And when I saw the listing for this house, before I even saw it, just based on the real estate listing, I was like, oh, I'm going to definitely buy that house.
John: And I think that most of the people helping me and following along my house search were surprised and a little confused about why I chose this particular house.
John: Because, you know, my search criteria had been for a long time that I wanted a house that had a lot of
Merlin: architectural drama and this house is to be yeah this was an ongoing thing for you certainly for quite a long while you wanted things like memory serves you wanted a place where somebody hadn't uh you didn't want a mid-century house that had been mucked up by a lot of uh a doctor and mrs dentist making a lot of dumb changes that harm the the integrity uh that would make it a lovely time capsule
John: Right, but I also was at least talking to my real estate agent and saying, there are a lot of modest mid-century houses, and I want one that is full of drama, and I'm willing to sacrifice other things in order to have this drama.
John: But the house that I chose is not that dramatic.
John: It is a fairly modest home in style.
John: It's stylistically...
Merlin: modest it doesn't have i mean there's there's some drama to it but it's not like it's it doesn't look like what you mean it's not the kind of thing where like there's a sweeping you're gonna see a sweeping uh oh god whose house did i see recently um um i forget doesn't matter but somebody famous has this amazing house with these super high ceilings and the giant windows it's not the kind of thing where people are going to come in and go oh this is an exemplar of something from a lost age
John: Yeah, no, they're not going to do that.
John: They may walk in and go, ooh, because of the way it sits on the site, and it has vaulted ceilings in every room, even the bathrooms.
John: Wow.
John: That's right.
John: See, that's an ooh right there.
John: I caught an ooh.
John: That's an ooh I love.
John: I love a vaulted ceiling.
Mm-hmm.
John: But the humility of it, it just appealed to me at a glance.
John: And then when I went and saw it, I realized that I'd seen this house a lot because it's sort of central in the neighborhood.
John: In fact, it's at a crossroads of one, two, three, you know, arguably like a four street crossroads.
John: One of the streets, I mean, there's like
John: Multiple stop signs, like just to – there's basically three stop signs at one corner because the streets all converge at a weird angle.
John: But it's a house that's sitting on a lot that was part of the original plat of the neighborhood.
John: So not only is it a lot A house, Merlin, but it's also in the Riviera section.
John: Is that right?
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: It's an OG.
Merlin: There's something.
Merlin: The house has good bones historically from a plat standpoint.
John: From the plat standpoint.
John: The house wasn't built until the 50s, but the land was platted in the 20s.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Well, you can't have grandkids without having kids, you know what I mean?
Merlin: Thank you.
Merlin: Normally.
Merlin: I mean, you could adopt, but in that case, you don't really adopt a house until you've bought it.
Merlin: You have to buy it and then adopt it.
John: Mm-hmm.
John: Lot A status...
John: there's only a fraction of the houses in this neighborhood are lot A. And that means if you're part of the original plat and in a section, you know, if you're part of some original plat, but that doesn't mean that your lot was platted, but that the land that your lot is on was part of the original vision, then you're lot A, which means that you have a fractional ownership of
John: In a private beach and clubhouse.
John: Whoa.
John: That is only for the neighborhood.
John: Huh.
John: I'm talking now about the town of Normandy Park, Washington.
John: Okay.
Okay.
Merlin: But within lot A. That's written into the code?
Merlin: It's like you're grandfathered in.
Merlin: If you get into an A, you're guaranteed a slot where, as I say, membership has its privileges.
Merlin: Is that the idea?
John: When they originally platted this, they had two private beaches.
John: Because the neighborhood was designed originally.
John: It's called Normandy Park.
John: They were going to build a neighborhood of French provincial homes.
John: Big homes.
John: And it has a beach?
Yeah.
John: Yeah.
John: It was going to be a bedroom community of the city of Seattle full of very expensive homes.
John: And then right after they started, right after they had their grand opening ribbon cutting, there was a country club and a golf course.
John: Then it was 1929 and the stock market crashed.
Merlin: Hang on.
Merlin: You got a Normandy and a Normandy beach and this is 15, 20 years before WW2?
John: That's right.
Merlin: This is the Normandy of old.
John: The old Normandy.
John: I get it.
John: Okay.
John: So the lots, most of them remained fallow all the way through the war, the Depression and the war.
John: And then after the war, there was this plucky young generation of architects that were popularizing the
John: mid-century style of Eames chairs and lava lamps and whatever.
John: We can talk about mid-century all day.
Merlin: I always think of, I don't want to say blonde woods, but I think of lighter woods than the sort of heavier Victorian woods.
John: Teak woods and a lot, you know, it's a whole school of thought, an architectural school of thought.
John: And all these young architects, as you know, architects have to study
John: to be architects.
John: And then in a lot of situations, young architects don't get to design and have their
Merlin: buildings built they have to spend many years carrying water i see they got to be a padawan right then you grow the architect braid and then you you uh you serve uh you have a senpai and like you work for them for a long time and uh and maybe or an altar boy perhaps that kind of thing and then eventually maybe you get a shot to help out a little bit but it but it's a long it's a long road it's all part of bushido
Merlin: Yeah, it's Cobra Kai.
Merlin: Cobra Kai.
Merlin: Okay.
John: Makes sense.
John: But after the war, there were all these young people that wanted to buy their first house in Levittown, and there were pink Cadillacs, and there were baby boomers getting boomed.
John: And so young architects discovered Normandy Park.
John: It was already platted.
John: It already had sewers in.
John: The roads were laid out.
John: There were no houses on it.
John: And so they came down here and all these architects... That's really prime.
Merlin: It's all ready to go.
Merlin: It's so odd that it would be like that for so long, but of course you'd pluck that up.
John: So what they did is they'd come down, they'd buy a lot, they'd design and build a house, and then they'd go and do it over here, and all the houses were on half-acre lots.
John: And they realized they had these beaches and...
John: Ownership in the beaches was written into the original founding documents of the neighborhood.
John: Wow.
John: And so the county, King County here in Washington, at some point said, hey, you can't have a private beach.
John: All the beaches are public and your beach can't just sit here and be private.
John: Yeah.
John: And the people of Normandy Park, I think maybe the county sued them.
John: The people of Normandy Park went to court.
John: They waived the original papers in the air.
John: And through some wrinkle of zoning, the judge said, oh, because this was written into this before this date, it's a grandfathered situation and they can have their beach.
John: And the county really didn't like it.
John: And the county came back and said, because there are creeks running into the beach.
John: The county said, we need this beach to build a sewage treatment plant for the region.
John: And so we're going to eminent domain this beach to build a giant sewage treatment plant.
John: Boo.
John: And it felt very vindictive.
John: When you read the news articles from the 50s, it really felt like they were just like, oh, you have a private beach?
John: How do you like this?
John: How about if we put one million gallons of poop water in?
John: And the residents of this neighborhood...
John: They were so not in my backyard that they incorporated themselves as a town.
John: They seceded from their status as unincorporated county.
John: Created the town of Normandy Park where there's now a mayor, a city council, a police department.
John: They built an entire town infrastructure and sued again.
John: And they went to court, I think, two more times.
John: And each time, it went all the way to the state Supreme Court, at which point they were like, King County, I know that this is always going to be a thorn in your side, but this little town of Normandy Park has a private beach, and you can't do anything about it.
Merlin: But just to be clear here, we're covering a lot of ground.
Merlin: It's not so much that the city was against the idea of a private beach, but more that they wanted to domain that shit for sewage treatment.
Merlin: Or are they standing on principle about the exclusionary nature?
John: The way the water works around Washington, there is private ownership of certain beaches because that private ownership was established before the principle of...
John: commonly held water was enacted so at a certain point the state of Washington said all the beaches are open to everyone and the people that already had the beach written into their deed because there are some places where the deeds had private ownership all the way to the low tide line and the state couldn't
John: Couldn't blanket repeal that because they would have had to have rewritten 10,000 deeds.
Merlin: Really just the analogy that comes to mind is if they want to change all these laws, they're going to need to move a lot of metaphorical boulders.
Merlin: This is not something with one sweep of the quill and now all beaches are created equal.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: A lot of one Tuesday lawsuit stuff.
Merlin: And the litigious nature of the community before you arrived was like, no, no, no, I don't think so.
Merlin: We're going to, we're going to, we're going to fight you in the land, the sea, the air, blood, toil, sweat, and tears, Omaha beach, right?
Merlin: On, on the beaches in the air.
John: That's right.
John: And that's what Normandy park.
John: But I think the private beaches that you see in Washington are all on a, on a, like a,
John: per house basis there's not like a community that says this beach is is ours it's the problem they have down in malibu they got the most expensive houses in the world and they just got guys with um metal detectors walking around out in in front they don't want it you know they try to stop it but but the count so the county didn't like it on principle there's no place in seattle that has a private beach
John: um and and so the residents of normandy park all got together like a bunch of amish and built a giant clubhouse in the mid-century style and they put in you know uh fire pits and picnic tables and the playground and a little meandering stream with ducks in it and you know they like they did it all up and then the county went upstream
John: up miller creek and built their sewage treatment plant up on county land in the forest and so it's there nobody can see it and they had to work it out with normandy park that rather than send any of the water into the creek because it couldn't do that
John: They had to build like a pipeline deep under that went all the way out into the ocean, way below the low tide line.
John: Normandy Park basically pants the city, it sounds like.
Merlin: Well, the county.
Merlin: County, sorry.
Merlin: Normandy Park is the city now.
Merlin: Boy, there's a lot to follow.
Merlin: This is a municipal education for me.
John: It's crazy.
John: And it occurred to me, wait a minute, I could be the mayor of Normandy Park.
Merlin: You could be the mayor of Normandy Park.
Merlin: You definitely have residents there.
John: I think that's step one.
John: The problem is that the city council and – so the mayor is elected from the city council by the city council.
John: Just one of the council members ascends to the mayor.
John: Yes.
John: Okay.
John: But the problem is that Normandy Park long ago voted that their city council would be a pro bono position.
Merlin: Oh, I see.
Merlin: They only listen to you two.
Merlin: So you don't make any money from that?
Merlin: You don't make any money at all.
Merlin: It's just a thing.
Merlin: Is it an honor?
Merlin: Do you have actual work to do?
Merlin: I think there's work.
John: They have meetings.
John: I think at the 4th of July parade, you stand around and
John: Like old guys come up and yell at you about how they wanted to put in a taller fence.
Merlin: Oh, yeah, but maybe this is a chance for you to reprise your work as King Neptune also.
Merlin: You could ride in an open automobile.
John: See, that's the part of being a mayor I would love.
John: I just don't want to hear guys come yell at me.
John: Would you have the banner across your chest like Mayor McCheese?
John: Of course I would.
John: Of course you would.
John: I would convert it so that all council members wore sashes.
John: Right now, there's not a sash in Normandy Park, as far as I can tell, except there are probably some beauty queens, retired beauty queens.
Merlin: It's like getting an STD without ever boning down.
Merlin: The whole point is the sash.
Merlin: I mean, yes, serve your community, fight the powers that be, put it to those nuts over at the county.
Merlin: But my gosh.
John: I feel seen.
John: Thank you.
John: But so within the Lot A community, because there's a lot of Normandy Park, a lot of big fancy houses here where they're not Lot A. And if you're not Lot A, you can't go to the beach, right?
John: And in the summer, there's a guard that sits in a car at the entrance to the beach.
Merlin: Did you have an anecdote?
Merlin: I'm struggling to remember.
Merlin: I feel like you had an anecdote about you and your kid going to the beach and you were going to see something, animals, eminels in a cage or something.
Merlin: Was there an anecdote about that?
John: Something animals, aminals, maybe around Christmas.
John: Oh, sure, sure, sure.
John: The turkeys, the turkeys.
Merlin: And then now is that was that was that Normandy Park Beach?
John: That was Normandy Park, not the beach and not reserved to lot A. OK, but there was a security guard there.
John: uh there was there was the woman that there was no security that was what was so crazy about those turkeys they just sat out there you could just you but then one night there was a woman who told me all about it okay right okay but but the um it would be infuriating i think to live in the city of normandy park to pay normandy park taxes for normandy park cops and to
John: Wear a sweatshirt and a hat that says, I live in Normandy Park.
John: And not be lot A and not be able to go to the beach and the clubhouse.
Merlin: Yeah, I'm just learning about all this right now.
Merlin: So what you got, now that you've announced all these things about where you live, 3.32 square miles.
Merlin: That includes 2.5 square miles of land and 0.82 square miles of water.
Merlin: which I don't normally think of as being measured in square miles.
Merlin: By 1929, the entire area had been platted.
Merlin: Good gravel roads were built and a water system installed that was fed from deep wells in the area.
Merlin: An elegant clubhouse was built on what is now known as Lot A, and promotional efforts such as free refreshments and band concerts were offered there to promote Normandy Park.
Merlin: It's all right here.
John: So that's the old clubhouse, which I think got converted into a home.
John: In the 50s, the new clubhouse was built.
Merlin: Rediscovered.
Merlin: Within a few years, many fine homes were built.
Merlin: Yes.
Merlin: Yes.
Merlin: Okay.
Merlin: Okay.
Merlin: Story checks out.
John: But then within lot A, which is a small subset of the residents of the city of Normandy Park, there is a smaller group called the Riviera section.
John: And as far as I can tell, the Riviera section...
John: is the original, original plat where the actual borders of each house lot were drawn.
John: And so it's not just like, this is the land where we will build Normandy Park.
John: It was, these are the lots that we will sell individually to people.
John: And my house is in the Riviera section as well.
Merlin: Wow, creme de la creme.
Merlin: John, I'm sorry, I can't live another second without saying this.
Merlin: In the section for the Internet Science page on Normandy Park, Washington, there's a section at the bottom called Notable Residents.
Merlin: And as of this date, there is only one notable resident.
Merlin: Who is it?
Merlin: As of October 2019, John Roderick of the Seattle indie rock band The Long Winters is a resident of Normandy Park.
Merlin: No, it doesn't say that.
Merlin: Citation.
Merlin: In the Wikipedia?
Merlin: Citation.
Merlin: Episode 362, Ghost of a Hobo, Roderick on the line.
Merlin: Wow.
John: Oh, my God.
John: But, you know, I've been doing, I thought, a good job of not telling people I lived in Normandy Park.
John: Right.
John: Because you've convinced me not to let anybody know online about what you're doing.
John: But I just realized recently.
Merlin: I've been keeping it a secret, but I don't want it to be a secret because I want – You know, it's like if you cut up your credit card and the little bits, like people still know it's a credit card.
John: Yeah.
John: You know what I'm saying?
John: In this case, I want people to move to Normandy Park.
John: Now that it's work from home, a lot of people that live in the city and live in the environs don't have to live downtown.
John: And they're looking far afield.
John: And what I'm trying – I was talking to Nick Harmer, bass player of Devcat for Cutie.
John: And that there was this crazy house for sale in my neighborhood.
John: And I was like, you need to move down here, move into this house.
John: And he was like, Normandy, where?
John: And I was like, exactly.
Merlin: Nobody knows it's here.
Merlin: This is how I feel about my neighborhood.
Merlin: Like, except I don't want people to know anything about it.
Merlin: Your neighborhood's great.
Merlin: Well, I mean, just that idea of like, if you're going to move to San Francisco, as my friend Michael used to say, the place I was looking at, my future home, he said, you're not near the beer.
Merlin: He's like, that's too far away from what everybody in San Francisco does, which, you know, is true.
John: But, you know, Normandy Park is 20 minutes to downtown.
John: It's 20 minutes to downtown.
John: And it's on, in my estimation, the correct side of the ship canal, which is the south side of the ship canal.
John: And West Seattle, the West Seattle Bridge has been closed for seven months and they're talking about not opening it.
John: So all the people that thought they were smart.
John: Oh, that seems like that must change a lot.
John: Well, it does because there's some, you know, they built this bridge, frankly, not that long ago.
John: And seismically, it didn't pass muster.
John: And then the engineers got up on it and they were like, we got to take a look at the bridge because we saw some cracks.
John: And they got up on it, and this is not that – this is six months ago, eight months ago.
John: They got up on it, and they were like, holy shit.
John: Let's get off of here.
John: Everybody off the bridge.
John: Like, seriously, get off.
John: And the guys in hard hats were standing there next to their trucks, and whoever these engineers were that were hanging by ropes looking at the bridge, they were like, get the fuck off this bridge now.
John: And so they shut it down.
John: This is a major thoroughfare.
John: Hundreds of thousands of people depend on this bridge, and it's the only way in and out of West Seattle, which is a huge neighborhood.
Merlin: What?
John: Isn't that like a ferry?
John: They said with no announcement, no advance notice, they were like, bridge is closed, not going to reopen, so figure it out.
John: People must be pissed.
John: Well, it's not even a question of piss.
John: It's insane.
John: There isn't a way out of West Seattle unless you drive—
John: Unless you drive south.
John: Well, you go around the Cape?
John: Like, what the fuck?
John: No, and then you drive.
John: Yeah, you have to get down off a cliff and over a river.
Merlin: But can't the Army Corps of Engineers come in and put something together?
Merlin: So even one of those janky Yosemite-style bridges where you wait five minutes or ten minutes and then this direction goes that direction.
Merlin: Couldn't they come up with something?
Merlin: That seems very hazardous.
Merlin: So there are – let me count.
John: One, two, three, four.
John: There are four bridges over the Duwamish River.
John: And one of them, the West Seattle Bridge, is a giant freeway bridge that's very tall because it's an active river.
John: Ships go in and out.
John: And so rather than make it a drawbridge, they wanted it to be a freeway.
John: And so they built this huge bridge that goes way up and over.
John: And then there are three drawbridges along the river.
John: There's the old West Seattle Bridge.
John: There's the First Avenue Bridge.
John: And there's the South Park Bridge.
John: Okay.
John: Now, 10 years ago, 15 years ago, the South Park Bridge, which is the bridge closest to the old Boeing factory, they shut that down and said, South Park Bridge, impassable.
John: Nobody can drive across it.
John: We don't have any money to fix it.
Merlin: Oh, so the West Seattle Bridge is going to take care of a lot of that.
John: They ended up finding the money, and they fixed the South Park Bridge.
John: They didn't fix it.
John: They built a new South Park Bridge, and it's a lovely bridge, except they made some public art choices that I disapprove of, but that's a different problem altogether.
John: But now the West Seattle Bridge, the freeway bridge closing, you've got the old West Seattle Bridge, the Canal Bridge, which is
John: As far as I know, just one lane each direction on a metal grate drawbridge.
John: You've got the First Avenue Bridge, which is an improved drawbridge that can carry a lot of traffic.
John: The First Avenue Bridge is not a bridge designed to serve West Seattle.
John: It's a bridge that was designed to move traffic a different way.
John: And then the South Park Bridge.
John: There's no reason for that bridge at all except for the town of South Park.
John: Depends on it.
John: Like they blew all their money fixing the South Park Bridge.
John: And now, anyway, if I lived in West Seattle, I don't know what I would do.
John: The thing is the virus happened.
John: The quarantine happened right after they shut the bridge down.
John: So it was kind of great because the 500,000 people a day that needed to use the bridge now all had to stay home.
John: But they won't have to stay home forever.
Merlin: Well, I mean, I'm not super familiar with the area.
Merlin: I mean, like, can you get groceries and medical care in West Seattle?
Merlin: Oh, West Seattle's an entire town.
John: It's a real city.
John: It's a city of its own.
John: I mean, it's a town.
John: It's still got a hardware store and a record store.
Merlin: Well, according to what I read here, John –
Merlin: Two facts for you.
Merlin: First of all, the city council serve unsalaried by choice.
Merlin: So that's something you need to think about.
Merlin: It seems to me if you get into city council, maybe you change that choice.
Merlin: Second, Normandy Park is classified in the revised code of Washington as a, quote, second class city, just so you know.
Merlin: Oh, it is.
Merlin: I agree with that.
Merlin: How does West Seattle compare?
Merlin: I'm not going to look it up, but what class city do you think?
John: West Seattle is a town, and it's got a vibe, and it's big.
John: The thing about West Seattle is people don't appreciate how big it is.
John: It sounds like, oh, it's like the West Edition.
John: It's like, no, no, no, no.
John: West Seattle could be its own town if they had just come up with a clever name for it.
Merlin: Calling it West Seattle wasn't very clever, frankly.
Merlin: That's like calling it Seattle Junior.
John: Yeah, they could have called it the town of Luna Park.
John: If they'd called it Luna Park, they could have divided it into five towns, frankly.
John: That'd be beautiful, yeah.
John: As far as I know, the Riviera section...
John: does not come with any additional benefits except for being a snob about it.
John: But is it part of the A area?
John: It's a smaller subset.
Merlin: You cannot be in Riviera if you're not already in A. So I get it.
Merlin: So the Venn diagram is, yes, you will benefit from the A things, but apart from the fancy name, there's no benefits there in two.
John: The benefits of being in the Riviera section are, as far as I can tell, that there is a Riviera...
John: section committee and as i haven't interacted with them yet although i'm i'm watching them from afar but they seem to be like a group of people that can make comments on your hedges oh it's like a um what do they call that like a homeowners association yeah that they can come around and say like as a as a riviera home i
John: I'm afraid that your palm tree is drooping.
Merlin: They run a celebration on you.
Merlin: They say that's the wrong mailbox.
Merlin: You can't hang out your laundry.
Merlin: That's not the 10-penny nail.
John: Exactly.
John: So when I found this house, and I remember throwing on my coat, because I saw this house and I was like, that's the house I'm going to buy.
John: I better go look at it right now.
John: It's the kind of excitement that you get.
John: I threw on my coat.
John: It's only a mile from the house where my daughter lives with her mother and where I live and where I've been living for the last year.
John: So it's only a mile.
John: Where my children play with their toys.
John: Which is kind of was the whole idea of me moving down here to be closer to my kid, to make us a family.
John: If not a nuclear family, then one with covalent bonds.
John: You know, like a family where it's a molecule.
John: It's not an atom, but it is a molecule.
John: And to live very close by, it seemed like that was – because I looked at houses that were many miles away that I would have to drive.
John: But to be one mile away, that's wonderful.
John: You ride your bike, you know.
John: But I walked over to the home.
John: And I realized that I'd seen it many times before.
John: It sits very central.
John: And I'd seen it in winter and in summer.
John: And I knew that it sat next to what appeared to be a giant forested, either like public, like undeveloped
John: public space like a like a abandoned lot is what it seemed to sit next to but in in washington unlike california or many places if you have a lot that you abandoned
John: A lot of places in America you drive by, you're like, there's an abandoned lot.
John: And what it is is somebody's built a fence around a piece of dirt.
John: And then some weeds grow.
Merlin: I always assume it's an environmental thing.
Merlin: I always assume like it used to be a dry cleaning plant and nobody wants to clean up the perchloroethylene or whatever.
Merlin: Yeah.
John: There are a lot of places in America where somebody owns the thing and the only improvement they do to it is build a fence around it.
John: Yep, yep, yep.
John: For no apparent reason.
Merlin: I wouldn't even know how to – I don't know how to buy a lot, but I definitely – I wouldn't know how to abandon a lot.
Merlin: I mean, is that a formal process?
Merlin: I think abandon just means that you quit mowing it.
Merlin: Quit mowing it, okay.
Merlin: It becomes like an English lot and not a French lot.
John: It grows wild.
John: Okay.
John: If you do that in Washington –
John: the lot will i mean nature is only allowing us to live here human beings only have a very tenuous grasp on the land here and if we if we if the electricity went down and we stopped having we we stopped being able to power our lawnmowers we would be covered in ferns so fast it would be like you'd be gasping for air you'd be like where did these ferns come from and then you would be gone
John: And there would be – and then the ferns – and like three minutes later, the ferns would burp.
John: A big loud burp.
John: And everyone would – Because you'd be – And this lot that was next to this house had that – had a feeling like no one had done anything to it for 50 years.
John: All these giant maple trees.
John: But then there was underbrush –
John: 15 feet high that was so thick you couldn't put a hockey stick into it.
John: Wow.
John: You know, it was like you would, if you tried to, if you tried to enter the lot, the lot would throb and say, no, you, you got to wonder what's inside of there.
Merlin: Cause you can't see in.
Merlin: And if your hockey stick won't fit in, I doubt your body will.
Merlin: I mean, you're not a roach, but what, what is happening inside of there in the middle?
Merlin: That could be anything.
Merlin: That could be a discount for all you know.
John: And can, and very enticing to me.
John: was you could hear a stream.
John: You could hear a waterfall coming from within, but could not see it.
John: Oh, creaks and cricks.
John: You could not get to it.
John: And I, and I had identified the, I'd identified this place as a place that was, you know, that there was, but I didn't, I never associated this abandoned lot with the home because the,
John: You wouldn't necessarily think they went together.
John: I mean, they're next to each other, but they don't look like they are the same.
John: They don't look contiguous because the lot— Well, they've been maintained so differently, I imagine, right?
John: Yes, that's right.
John: That's right.
John: The house has a mowed lawn.
John: The house has a driveway and some steps.
John: The house has a lighthouse and a windmill.
John: The property does not, you know, it's just, it was insane.
John: So I went and I got a machete.
John: This is before I made an offer on the house.
John: I was like, I got to get, I got to see what's in here.
Merlin: I'm not going to kick the tires, kick the tires with a machete.
John: Yeah.
John: So I put on my, you know, I went, I went to my closet where, where the sign on the closet says endorsed by the Filson company.
John: And I put on my stuff from head to toe.
John: And I got my machete and I waded in and started – I just started chopping.
John: And I got in there and the first time I went to visit the property, there was a moment where I said –
John: I've gotten in here, and I don't know if I can get out.
Merlin: Oh, boy.
Merlin: And this would be... You might have been consumed by the foliage.
John: It was going to be hilarious if I had to call someone and say...
John: Hi, I'd like to make an offer on the house, but could you send a team?
John: Because I'm down.
John: I'm lost and hungry.
John: I'm down in the creek and I can't get back out.
John: And I've injured myself and I need to get airlifted.
John: I lost my machete.
John: Also, I would like to buy your house, please.
John: And I broke my ankle, but I would like to buy.
Merlin: I broke my ankle, but I'm very responsible.
Merlin: Can I have your house, please?
John: And it was amazing.
John: What I found down in the creek was amazing.
John: I couldn't believe that it was there.
John: And it's right in the center of this very manicured neighborhood of expensive homes.
John: A neighborhood that has, I think, changed a lot.
John: And it's...
John: Changed a lot from its original sort of scrappy beginnings and – well, its original like super hoity-toity beginnings, its scrappy middle period.
John: And now it's been through a long period where it's like –
John: Elegant homes.
John: And I'm hoping that now that I'm outing it.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: John, you're the best spokesman for this area.
John: Yeah, because you can come down.
John: For the price of a one-bedroom apartment in Seattle, you can buy an architect-designed home on a half-acre lot.
John: Wow.
Wow.
John: And it's 20 minutes from town.
John: And besides, nobody wants to go to town anymore anyway.
Merlin: Well, could you get some of those poor bastards in West Seattle to move out?
Merlin: People like Eddie Vedder, people like Jeff Ament, Diane Cannon.
Merlin: Oh, Stephen Hill.
Merlin: He plays the depressed district attorney on Law & Order.
Merlin: The Flying Karamazov Brothers, Chris Cornell.
Merlin: But, you know, Meg Tilly, Francis Farmer, like from that song.
John: Right.
John: Right.
John: I'm I'm hoping that that's what happened.
John: I talked to a real estate agent one time and he said the only people that because the thing is nobody knows about Normandy Park in Seattle.
John: And I talked to a real estate and he said the only people that know about Normandy Park are people your age who are tired of living in West Seattle.
John: Hmm.
John: Because Normandy Park is numbers on that.
John: He's like, this is where people in their 50s go to retire from West Seattle.
Merlin: Okay.
Merlin: Wow.
Merlin: Okay.
Merlin: I don't hate that idea.
Merlin: So would you airlift them out?
Merlin: Would you get Boeing to help out?
Merlin: How would you get an Eddie Vedder out of West Seattle and into Normandy?
John: Eddie Vedder lives in a compound above the Fauntleroy ferry terminal that you can only see from the air.
John: And it's not, I can see his land.
John: I know where it is.
John: I can see trees that I know are in his yard.
John: But I don't know if I could tell you how to drive to his gate.
Merlin: So it would be hard to even contact him.
Merlin: As an emissary, as the anchorman for Normandy Park, you're going to have to find ways to reach out to people like the hidden Eddie Vedder or the deceased Francis Farmer or the depressed Stephen Hill.
Merlin: You're going to need to really close ranks, have a super team of the opposite of D-Day.
Merlin: You're going to leave Normandy Beach and try to bring other people there.
John: Eddie Vedder and I had the same car mechanic.
John: Not to out Eddie Vedder, but Eddie Vedder drives a two-wheel drive Toyota King Cab pickup that he has had professionally painted flat black.
John: And when I saw his truck at my mechanics, I said, seriously?
John: That's...
Merlin: He rattle-canned a Toyota pickup, and my mechanic was like— I was going to say, in your head, when you hear Matt Black, you think it's going to be like some kind of radar impervious plane, but really, it's more of— Yeah, okay.
Merlin: That's what I was thinking.
Merlin: But my mechanic leaned in, and he was like— You sure you want to do this?
Merlin: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
John: He said, it looks rattle canned, but it's actually professionally done.
John: Like, it's in a very expensive rattle canned paint job.
John: On a two-wheel drive Toyota King Cab pickup.
John: And not a recent one.
John: You know, like in 1992.
John: I was like, all right, man.
John: You know, whatever it takes, right?
John: But my mechanic...
John: right before the coronavirus said, I'm quitting car mechanicing and I'm going to open a bar, a rock and roll bar.
John: Whoa.
John: And I wrote him the other day and I was like, Hey man, um, I know you opened a bar like two months before the coronavirus pandemic happened.
John: Um, so I need some car mechanicing.
John: If you're doing a little shade tree stuff on the side, um,
John: I could throw you some work if you're having trouble keeping the bar going.
John: And he wrote back and he was like, thanks, man, but I'm never touching a wrench again.
John: And the bar is going to make it because we're selling beer out the back door or something.
John: I don't know how the bar is making it.
John: That's some unfortunate timing, isn't it?
John: For him, yeah.
John: So anyway, he was my only connection to Eddie Vedder.
John: The point is, Merlin, that this pond...
John: is going to, when I'm done, I'm restoring it according to the new old principles of pond.
John: I'm going to make this pond, this pond is going to make the 50s ponds look like the 80s ponds.
John: That's it.
John: That's it.