Ep. 434: "John and the Girls"
John: Hello.
John: Hi, John.
John: Oh, hi, Marilyn.
John: How are you?
John: I'm doing good.
John: How are you?
John: Oh, I'm good.
John: Thank you.
John: It's been a long time since we talked.
Merlin: Oh, it's been such a long time.
Merlin: I don't mean to come in hot.
Merlin: But, you know, there's a thing that happens sometimes and then another thing that happens with me.
Merlin: yes we're like a case like what happened here this morning which is that my entire macintosh computer setup there's something that's not working it hasn't been working something like got disconnected and i couldn't tell what and you know the problem with connections you know as james burke told us is things get connected to other things and then you can't tell where the failing connection is and then you and i things fall apart
Merlin: Well, you know, you and I had agreed to push a little like we do.
Merlin: Sure, sure.
Merlin: And then I found myself singing aloud a line from a song from They Might Be Giants, which is a thing that I do sometimes.
Merlin: Yes, I know.
Merlin: When this happens.
Merlin: And here's what I just said.
Merlin: Everything is catching on fire.
Merlin: Yes.
Merlin: Because Jerry Lewis covered that.
Merlin: I don't know if you remember.
John: You even texted it to me.
John: I put it in quotes so you wouldn't think I was literally on fire.
John: It was a Macintosh computer thing, what you're describing.
John: There was something in the Macintosh system.
Merlin: Well, yeah, yeah.
Merlin: I mean, think about this.
Merlin: Think about, I don't know, this is not even a good example, but because like when you play live and you got a... You mean me or the... The royal you.
John: Or you, yeah.
Merlin: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Merlin: When one plays live, let's even say you've got like a Charles Bissell style what is happening with those pedals set up.
Merlin: Even then, it's pretty, even though you might have little junctions and X's and Y's and, you know, that kind of thing.
Merlin: There's generally like a signal that goes from your guitar to an amp and it passes through things.
Merlin: So you try to find out like, okay.
Merlin: It's called a chain, a signal chain.
Merlin: Signal chain, never break the chain.
Merlin: You know what I'm saying?
Merlin: If you don't love me now.
John: The chains that bind you.
Merlin: I was listening to Lindsey Buckingham this weekend.
Merlin: But then what happened?
Merlin: So in that case, you go, okay, did my boss distortion lose its, did the battery die?
Merlin: At what point did this stop working?
Merlin: I got something much more, if I may say, quantum going on.
Merlin: which is I've got some things that are powering other things, some things that are signal moving other things.
Merlin: So it could be, you know, that this knob on this pedal didn't work.
Merlin: And that affects this pedal over like in a different venue.
John: And that's what I was getting set of problems.
Merlin: Well, and you know what?
Merlin: It is city of Rome, John.
Merlin: I got so many things accumulated here and plugged in.
Merlin: Try not to touch anything.
Merlin: It's very ugly.
Merlin: It looks very, from a health and safety standpoint, like I could probably use a cable audit.
John: You know what I'm saying?
Merlin: I do.
Merlin: But that's what I, after we push twice, thank you very much.
John: Thanks.
Merlin: Because I missed you and I've been dying to chat with you.
John: Do you ever go and take everything apart and then put it all back together better?
Merlin: John, I am so close to doing that with the setup in our, you would call it like the TV area, but it's really the technology center at home and it has completely spilled.
Merlin: It looks, it looks like what?
Merlin: It looks like the goop,
Merlin: coming out of the dude's head in Alien, you know, when he's just ahead.
John: Yeah, just ahead.
John: No spoilers.
Merlin: It's all just wires, cables, blinking lights.
Merlin: Everything's just pouring out of the credenza.
John: Have you ever used a cable ordering system of some kind, something where they all go into a tube or into a smaller tube?
Merlin: Yeah, if you're curious, yeah, for sure.
Merlin: I've got that right here.
Merlin: One thing I do...
Merlin: that i need i just need to i need to start this you know there's a point we just gotta you just gotta start over yeah but i get these little cool things these little tabs that imagine something like a piece of velcro or as you say hook and loop and it almost looks like a little set of headphones and you put that put one of these little guys and they have colors you put them on one end of this cable and the other end of that of this cable and that way you can say oh this is light gray and light gray means this without having to undo it all but
Merlin: But you know what I do?
Merlin: I used to do this even more often, and I so do.
Merlin: Exactly what you're describing.
Merlin: Shut everything down.
Merlin: Turn everything all the way off.
Merlin: And then unplug.
Merlin: I start with devices.
Merlin: Remove all devices from their cabling and put them in a pile over here.
Merlin: Then remove all of the rat kings, the rat's king of the cables.
John: And then you start back from zero.
John: Now, when you do that, do you go all the way?
John: Because when I do that, I will go all the way to coiling the cables,
John: And putting them together as though it's all... You essentially put them away before you try to reconstruct.
John: And then rebuild it out of what feels like brand new parts.
Merlin: Totally.
Merlin: And you know what?
Merlin: I thought you were going to go even further.
Merlin: Because if you don't go all the way down to unplugging from power sources, guess what?
Merlin: If you don't do that, you're not going to discover how many of those wall warts and power bricks are attached to nothing and haven't been for years.
Merlin: Sure, the ghost remains in the machine.
Merlin: The ghost remains in the machine.
Merlin: Every little thing she does is magic.
Merlin: So all that stuff, then that's part of your rat king.
Merlin: And you go like this.
Merlin: If you're like me, you go, ha, ha.
Merlin: A third of this has not been connected to anything for at least months.
Merlin: It's such a good feeling if you eventually do it.
John: I'm glad that you feel like maybe you're on the cusp of this because it feels like a...
John: We don't do spring cleaning.
John: We don't take the rugs out and hit them with a tennis racket.
John: No, we don't, John.
John: What's happened?
John: What's happened?
John: We don't restring the racket.
John: What's happening?
John: This is spring cleaning because once you pull all those wall warts out, you realize, oh, lint has collected on the carpet under here.
John: You know, you can really get in and you can scrub stuff.
John: You can get some of that grime off.
Merlin: Yeah, and I like the idea of what you might call channels.
Merlin: Like if you think about like a data center, I know you think about data centers.
Merlin: It makes sense to have a big tray in the sky through which all your Ethernet cables pass.
Merlin: That makes a lot of sense.
Merlin: It gets it out of the way.
Merlin: It's just that it's- Remote charging, Merlin.
John: That's going to do away with a lot of that.
Merlin: Do you think that's going to, is our future wireless?
John: Is that what you're telling me?
John: I think I'm making an investment in wireless technology.
John: Oh, really?
John: Yeah.
John: You shouldn't talk too much about it probably.
John: Okay, all right.
Merlin: No, no, no, no.
Merlin: I'd love to hear about it.
Merlin: I just don't want the FEC to be up in your grill.
John: Yeah, my passwords are all 1, 2, 3, 4, password.
John: Okay, 1, 2, 3, 4, okay.
John: All right, that's smart.
Merlin: I mean, consistency in all of this stuff is really naming cable.
John: Well, it's capital P, capital P, because they always want you to have a capital P. Oh, that's good.
John: 1, 2, 3, 4, capital P, ass word.
Merlin: P, ass word.
Merlin: Okay, and maybe one of the S's is a five.
John: But if you make two of them a five, then it looks like you're a Nazi.
John: Hmm.
John: Is that right?
John: Yeah.
John: Nausie.
Merlin: The Churchill pronunciation.
John: I haven't talked to you in a long time.
John: It's been several weeks.
John: You were traveling.
John: Is that right?
John: Yeah, yeah.
John: You were traveling?
John: I was traveling.
John: Boy, it's a hell of a time to be traveling, John.
John: Woof.
John: So I'm sitting here right now with a cough.
John: With a cough.
John: A cough that we were coughing?
John: It's been two years since I've had a cough.
John: It's been more than two years since I've had a cough.
John: How long was the COVID thing?
John: It was more than a year, wasn't it?
Merlin: Weren't we all in quarantine for a long time?
Merlin: I feel like it's been a pretty long time.
Merlin: You know what?
Merlin: You figure in this, as you can guess.
Merlin: We've talked before about how, you know, I feel like between February and March, a lot changed.
Merlin: But even that first week of March, there were two big, it's always two things with me.
Merlin: One of the big things was, oh, oh, there it is.
Merlin: We're still going to do our Disney trip for spring break at the end of March, right?
Merlin: Yeah, sure.
Merlin: And John, John just went off on a cruise.
Merlin: Is that advisable?
Merlin: Well, as soon as John went off on the cruise, they closed the door and they said, no more cruise.
Merlin: No more cruise.
Merlin: That's I think the first week of March, I feel like.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: So that was March to March is a year.
Merlin: Let's see.
Merlin: Alexa, how many days since March 1st, 2020?
Merlin: 532 days.
Merlin: 532 days.
Merlin: 532 days.
Merlin: And are you one of those people who saw fewer colds and whatnot?
John: I had zero colds.
John: I had zero colds.
John: And you know, I mark my passage through time.
John: based on quarterly colds.
Merlin: You seem to have an upper respiratory, if I could say, and I'm not casting an aspersion, you seem to have a little bit of an upper respiratory vulnerability.
John: Always did.
John: I had a lot of allergies as a kid and a lot of allergies that were unrecognized.
John: So I spent a lot of time with people like putting cats in my face and all my bedding was feathers.
Merlin: They would take like a medical cat at a facility and wave it at you to see what happened?
John: This was a thing in the Northwest.
John: When a kid was feeling down, they'd put a cat on you.
John: They'd make you wear a cat.
John: They'd make you eat cat.
John: There was cats.
Merlin: It could be a punishment or a reward depending on what happened in which cat.
John: And I was allergic to them.
John: I was allergic to a lot of things, grass and other things.
John: But not Lewis.
John: Lewis you weren't allergic to?
John: No, I was allergic to Lewis.
John: That's why I kicked him out.
John: um in the morning and then he ran out in traffic and got hit by a car if i hadn't if i hadn't been allergic to him i probably wouldn't have kicked his ass out of the house every time he tried to sit just like my usb cables it's all connected john it is it's all connected but i haven't had a cold in a year and a half and it's one of the best things about the the whole experience the whole experience all of the you know all of the cat catastrophe global catastrophe
John: One bright side from a personal standpoint is that I have not had a single sniffle.
John: In a couple of days, I had some kind of seasonal meh.
John: But I was just on a road trip.
John: This is something we talked about a long time ago, but I didn't really talk about it as we were leading up to it or during it for reasons I'll get to in a second.
John: But I just drove 16 days across America.
Merlin: Oh, my God.
John: With all of the women in my family.
John: And we drove across 21 American states.
Merlin: Brace yourself for Netflix's next limited series, John and the Girls.
Merlin: 8,500 miles of driving.
Merlin: Uh-huh.
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Merlin: As we record this, it's summertime.
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Merlin: And, you know, when I was... Oh, that's so many.
Merlin: I'm sorry.
John: That's so many miles.
John: It's a lot.
John: It's a lot.
John: 16 days, a lot of eight-hour driving days.
John: And, you know, my mom turned 87 on the trip.
John: And my daughter's 10 and a half.
John: And my sister is alternately 10 and a half and 87.
John: And so, yeah, it was a lot.
John: And, and, and what was, what was interesting or good is that, you know, there were various heat waves and fires and tornadoes and crazy storms all across the country.
John: And we just stayed out of like everywhere there was some major weather event.
John: We were in
John: the part of the country where the opposite was true and it was unseasonably cool.
John: Oh my God.
Merlin: You're like a rolling bubble.
John: Yeah.
John: Oh, isn't that nice?
John: Look at these spring rains.
John: You know, it was, um, we had a wonderful experience except coming back into the Northwest, we hit the wall of fires.
John: Yeah.
John: The new, the new normal, uh,
Merlin: So at this point, let's see, so that's a huge Northern California thing, and I guess...
John: B.C., Idaho.
Merlin: And so what direction were you coming from when you were moving toward that?
John: As I moved into the fire scape... Oh, the other thing was, this story will unfold over the course of many months, but one of the things was I endeavored to never drive on an interstate road.
John: So I had the five ladies.
John: I had 16 days.
John: 16 days, five ladies, no interstates.
John: I had 8,500 miles of no interstates.
John: A lot of little roads.
John: As Billy Idol would say, the blue highways.
John: Some of the blue highways, the maps have changed now.
John: The blue highways are red now, right?
John: Because of some blue state, red state thing that happened on Fox News.
John: Oh, no, John.
John: And what's crazy is, you know, America is a wonderful country.
John: I'm really looking forward to the Biden administration rolling out their infrastructure package.
John: In particular, there are a couple of roads in the great state of Illinois that I have personally earmarked.
John: for some work that needs to get done.
Merlin: Oh, you put a post-it note on there like, don't miss this, where the painter missed something.
Merlin: You put up a little piece of blue masking tape and say, right over here, this needs a little work.
John: Yeah, it's really... I don't often miss being on social media.
John: I don't often say like, oh man, this is something I really wish I could Instagram right now.
John: It's been really great to not have to do that and to feel somewhat liberated from just that whole...
John: Just that whole dirty impulse.
John: But every once in a while, in particular, US Highway 24 as it crosses Illinois, I really wished that I still could harness the power of social media to say, Illinois Department of Transportation, what can I do?
John: as a traveler, to encourage you to improve the road conditions on Highway 24.
John: Like, I'm driving across... Did I mention 8,500 miles over the course of 16 days with five women?
John: Were you the sole driver most of the time?
Merlin: But, like, did you get a little help sometimes?
John: Here's how it broke down.
John: As we were gearing up to leave, my sister recognized...
John: in her heart that all of us in my truck with me as the captain was not going to be possible for her.
John: And so she said, I'm going to drive my car, my 1997 Prius, nicknamed soggy doggy.
John: because it has had so many wet dogs in it.
Merlin: I didn't know they had pre-I back then.
John: I'm making up the number, because 1997, as you know... It didn't exist.
Merlin: Oh, you got me.
Merlin: You hoisted on my... Yeah.
John: There it is.
John: Okay, sorry, sorry.
Merlin: But so there's everybody's in the truck.
Merlin: There's the ladies and John in the truck, and then there's Susan in the strap-on vehicle.
John: Well, so this was the late proposal, and I was like, this is ridiculous.
John: I don't want you driving along behind me like the little red...
Merlin: ufo in close encounters that's just like always trailing along it's like oh i love that i love that it's got like the i always think of it like like wingman in the actual sense of the word you got the big one coming you know yeah big one coming uh-huh uh you lose some economies of scale with two vehicles or i guess you gain certain others but like that you you add a lot of inefficiencies it seems like
John: Yeah, and it just feels, for me, and this is kind of one of the things that we'll explore in our many conversations about this road trip over time.
John: Oh, this is exciting.
John: This is great.
John: I love content.
John: You know, the desire to have all problems find a solution and that that solution be a greater understanding of what is true and real.
John: rather than a Band-Aid-style solution where you decide not to talk about a thing?
Merlin: Solving a problem versus creating the conditions where you notice its downsides less.
John: There's got to be a very... This has to be a well-known...
John: a universe within the, the, within the dog boy, my head, my head, I have long COVID now, so I can't really think.
Merlin: But in academia, there's some kind of a thought technology.
John: Yeah.
Merlin: It's gotta be a thought technology where maybe has a good, cool name.
John: If a good, cool name is what I'm looking for.
John: But, but in an interpersonal relationship where your relationship with somebody where you're like,
John: Oh, this is unsolvable.
John: And you know I don't like to agree to disagree.
John: You agree to nothing if memory serves.
John: This is the heart of the problem, right?
John: I don't agree to disagree.
John: If we're going to disagree, we don't even really need to agree about that.
John: See, if I have a problem with somebody, from my standpoint, it's always like, well, there is a truth and somehow neither of us are, we have not found the place where we both are standing.
Merlin: And just because you haven't found it doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
John: Thank you.
John: And the idea, and I think it's increasingly a contemporary idea where it's like, well, you have your truth and I have my truth and they can coexist side by side.
John: I don't subscribe to that.
John: I believe that you either have a reality or you have a problem.
Merlin: Either you find the truth and you show your work best you can with the closest you can to the idea of the truth Plato-like, or you keep the journey going.
John: Yeah, you keep searching, right.
John: And so with my sister over the decades and over the decades, realizing that there is never – we cannot arrive at a truth –
John: And this was a, this was an issue I had with Millennium Girlfriend.
John: This is, this is, you know, it happens with a certain small segment of the people in my life that are my lives that I have lived where, oh, there is no, I can sit here all day and all year and for decades and say, now what, explain to me again and let me see how I can
John: work with what you're saying and, and make it square with what I'm saying.
John: And it just never does because, because it's a shifting target or because of whatever.
John: And with my sister in the last year, I've increasingly come to a place where I go, you know,
John: I get it now.
John: What everyone is saying is it's easier just not to fight.
John: Right.
Merlin: And that is that is conceptually that is a I totally agree.
Merlin: And but that is a practical coping mechanism or but it's not it's not the same thing as saying, well, you know, if we did talk about this, we would still disagree.
Right.
John: Or it's impossible to agree or disagree because there isn't even an agreement on what it is that we're trying to agree or disagree.
John: Or if agreement is even... It's so far back up the tree trunk to the point where you're having conversations where you say, well, I think that in this one instance, I really can just point to science.
John: And then the other person says, well, science is...
John: a um a social construct and you go okay well i got nothing then we're not we can't even agree on what science is but in the case of in the case of susan in particular long-standing uh issue between us that is that has a it's a multi-headed hydra and she says i'm going to drive behind you
John: For 8,500 miles in my Prius where all of the check engine lights are on.
John: And I've always been on.
Merlin: And she's just okay with that.
John: They came on.
John: They came from the factory that way.
John: All of them on.
John: Oh, I see.
John: And she's like, oh, yeah, I talked to a guy and he said that that's fine.
John: That's just a, you know, that's just something that needs tightening.
Merlin: That's one that she's not going to be able to resolve.
Merlin: So she just puts the masking tape over it.
John: And so so when that was first proposed, I was like, well, no, this I cannot be I cannot be red leader in this formation of two.
John: She's a red five.
John: Because what the fuck?
John: But then over the weeks, I was like, wait, it's not, I just, this isn't, I cannot be the manager.
John: All I can do is get my craft from hither to thither and
John: And if Soggy Doggy ends up in the Mississippi, you know, all I can do is be here.
John: I'm just here to help, you know.
Merlin: Boy, it takes years to get to where you can even live with that feeling.
Merlin: Remember being younger and just being like, no, this will not stand.
Merlin: As you get older, you have to find these kinds of uneasy accommodations to just get by.
John: And at a level I recognize like, oh, somehow my pride gets involved.
John: Somehow my dignity gets involved.
John: How can I possibly let this be this way?
John: It's not that I have to solve it or control it.
John: How can I live in a world where this is the situation?
John: Anyway, at the 11th hour, and I'm talking about the day before we leave,
John: My mom calls me and says, I found a car.
John: I want you to come look at it with me.
John: And I said, Mom, I am not going to go with you to a used car lot 12 hours before we leave.
John: To drive across America.
John: We're not in that mode, Mom.
John: That's a different mode.
John: I'm not going to go and – because neither of us are hagglers.
John: And where you're coming at, where you – and she's like, oh, I've been looking at Corollas for a dozen years.
John: And I'm like, no, you haven't.
John: This is the first I've ever heard of it.
John: What are you talking about?
John: And so she's like, and I said, you know who would be great to go to the car lot with you?
John: Susan, why don't you two ding-dongs go to the car lot?
Merlin: She's Action Line, right?
Merlin: She's your local reporter going out there and confronting the scoundrels at the car wash who steal your pennies or whatever.
Merlin: She's Action Line, right?
Merlin: So bring Action Line with you to look at, I guess they still make Corollas?
Merlin: To go look at Corollas.
John: You guys are in a universe apart.
John: I'm actually packing the truck right now with all of the supplies that we're going to need.
John: Everybody gets their own.
John: Every second is precious.
John: In this run-up, you're not going to get any of that time back.
John: It's all precious.
John: Yeah.
John: 8,500 miles, 21 states.
John: What are you talking about?
John: You're going to go to a car lot today?
John: So they come.
John: to the house four hours later in an 2016 pink Toyota Corolla
John: that's got 30,000 miles on it or whatever.
John: They're like, look at this incredible car that we just bought.
Merlin: And I'm like, wow.
John: Flaunting it.
Merlin: Flaunting it.
Merlin: You're trying to figure out, you're playing three-dimensional Tetris with all of your goods.
Merlin: You're loading up the Conestoga wagon, and they want to come roll up with a different wagon now?
John: Different wagon.
John: New wagon.
John: Brand new wagon.
John: Untested wagon.
John: I mean, at least the check engine lights aren't on.
John: It's a nice car.
John: They're beautiful cars.
John: My mom's very excited about it.
John: And she makes it sound like this is a thing she's been working on.
John: Like, oh, I finally found the one.
John: And I'm like the one that – Secret project, yeah.
John: Like you thought of this six hours ago.
John: But then there they are and they're just – and the thing is they are not doing this at me or about me or –
John: None of it.
John: They are doing this in their own universe that's not related to me and the road trip and the truck and all the bags and all of the special food everyone needs that I'm in the process of putting into my spacecraft.
Merlin: John, just stuff like the order you put stuff in.
Merlin: Something I've talked about recently with Syracuse is my bag-in-a-bag approach.
Merlin: And my whole Weltanschauung, if you'll allow, of like, how do you load this?
Merlin: Where does this go?
Merlin: Because the Tetris is not just about the bounding sides of the boxes and shapes.
Merlin: It's about something much more fundamentally philosophical and Weltanschauung-y, which is like, you know, we've got to think this through.
Merlin: We've got to get this right because we don't get a second chance at this.
Merlin: We're not really into the new Corolla mode right now.
John: Yeah, well, and as somebody who has spent
John: Years and years and years with everything I owned in one little bag.
John: And every night I moved the bag from this place to that place.
John: Every morning I moved it.
John: A lot of the time I put it on my back.
John: And you always had – and especially like the long treks, the long COVIDs of the past where you had a sleeping bag in your backpack –
John: And every night you had to pull the sleeping bag out and every morning you had to put it in.
John: But there were all the other things in the bag that also you needed to get to in the course of the day.
John: You can't just cram the sleeping bag on top of them.
John: Correct.
John: Yeah.
John: But if they are on top of the sleeping bag, you're going to pull them all out at the end of the day when you put.
Merlin: So when you need something, you're tearing up a bunch of stuff that otherwise was was well, well organized and bagged in a bag.
John: So, six hours before we leave across the United States.
Merlin: This will all be covered, I'm guessing, in the first episode of John and the Girls.
Merlin: Yeah, let's hope.
Merlin: This would be the setup, right?
Merlin: Let's hope.
John: Let's hope.
John: And the thing is, it's not a trip that has no framework because my other sister, Susan, in Ohio, said, you need to be here at 9 o'clock in the morning on Friday.
Right.
John: And so there's a hard tent pole.
John: There's a midpoint.
John: And it has time brackets.
Merlin: It's like a rally.
Merlin: I still don't fully understand what a rally is.
Merlin: But the idea of a rally versus a race, you're trying to officially reach a certain point.
Merlin: And this is one of those things where I'm guessing this is some kind of an event, certain, a booked event.
Merlin: And if you're not there, you've disappointed the family.
John: Right.
John: It's exactly like a rally.
John: You have to get to this point at this time.
John: And it's not about getting there early.
John: Oh, so that is how a rally works.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Oh, I love that concept.
John: Yeah, and it's great.
John: You have little watches and you're like, I go past this checkpoint and then I have to get to the next checkpoint within a very small window of time, not as fast as I can, not as slow as I can.
John: I have to maintain speed over this course.
John: Yes, it's like that.
John: And then I have to bring them back
John: And when I say I have to bring them back, it's because, yes, this is – I am – I have a role in this universe, which is that they – they're coming to me with their bags and they're like, I need to bring this bag because it has – like my sister brought –
John: an air filter, like a standalone plug into the wall.
John: An appliance.
John: Appliance that's four feet tall that's like an air filter that she needs.
John: That's a lot of cubic inches, John.
John: And she's like, here's my air filter bag, and here's the bag that I have that's, you know, like...
John: And everybody had a bag like this.
John: You know, my daughter was like, here, where do I put my sword?
John: And I'm like, okay.
John: But so we set out on this trip.
John: You put it on the halberd rack.
John: Yeah, put it up here on the sword rack that I have for this special thing.
John: And they're behind me.
John: And we are now a convoy, a convoy of two.
John: At one of the cars is, you know, my truck isn't that old and, uh, you know, it's a new purchase for me.
John: And then we have this brand new unknown unknown.
John: There are no, there are knowns.
John: And so off we go.
John: And, um, immediately it's apparent that my mom and sister are in, uh, locked in a battle of wills and they're in a car and, um,
John: They're fighting about, you know, whatever, something as old as the gods.
Merlin: You probably said this, but just to clarify.
Merlin: So your mom, this is, they're in Susan's car.
Merlin: No.
Merlin: Okay.
John: So Susan is driving alone.
John: This is my mom's car.
John: This is my mom's new car.
Merlin: Oh, I see.
John: Okay, I apologize.
John: It's your truck and her new car.
John: Mom's car, but Susan is driving.
John: Okay.
John: And Susan is driving and my mom is, you know, even though she's 80 at this point in the story, 86 and 356 days old at this point, she also is like very proprietary about her new car.
John: She wants to drive it.
John: It's her car.
John: She wants to drive the car.
John: She doesn't want my sister to act like it's her new car.
Yeah.
John: And so, but they're back there.
John: Like I'm in, I'm up here and I'm dry and I'm avoiding the interstates and they're back there and who, and let go and let God.
John: Right.
John: I'm not trying to, all I need to do, what I needed them to know is if they fall apart, if they're part of this convoy falls apart, I cannot put the Corolla on my roof rack.
Right.
John: Like the Corolla, you have brought the Corolla.
John: There are a limited number of qualified drivers in this group.
John: Like my daughter cannot take a shift.
John: And so you have brought this car and now you cannot abandon the car.
John: We're not going to park the car in an airport parking garage and come back for it in a year.
John: So you guys have to work it out.
John: You have to work it out.
John: You guys have to work it out.
John: I don't even have to work it out.
Merlin: And you feel like this has been, this is one of those things where, and I know you've had some success, sometimes limited success, where you want to just stipulate, almost like, not stipulate, but to establish what we're talking about here.
Merlin: What are we talking about?
Merlin: What are we talking about here?
Merlin: This is not a Monty Python sketch.
Merlin: We can't afford to have lots of jokes about not understanding each other.
Merlin: This is something where, just so we're clear here, what you may choose to sign up for is being in the truck
Merlin: Or if you choose to do something other than what that plan is, don't count on me.
Merlin: You cannot count on me.
Merlin: If we're at the furthest point in this trip, if you're at, let's say, for example, Ohio, I do not have a plan.
Merlin: I want you to be happy in life, but I do not have the plans, the means, or the time to stop what we're doing to deal with new car.
John: Unfortunately, no, I cannot say that because in the event that anything like that happened, it would have absolutely fall to me and they would all look at me and go, of course it would.
John: I'm just saying it's, it's, yeah.
John: And, and the years and years that I have spent, you know, there was the, um, in my early twenties, I had a good friend that really tried to lay the groundwork in all of his relationships.
John: For the, I told you so moment.
John: All right.
John: Because he was, he was, he really believed that if he came to a point in the relationship where he could point to some earlier thing where he had said X is X is so and so, and then they arrived at that moment in their relationship and he was like, I told you so that that was going to protect him from demons or it was going to, it was going to usher him into the kingdom of heaven.
John: Right.
Merlin: No one's ever made a friend or improved a friendship that way.
John: By saying I told you.
John: Or it certainly doesn't help in relationships because, you know, you say that to your lover.
Merlin: Oh, no, absolutely.
Merlin: Especially if it's at the moment where the failure just happened.
Merlin: You're like, well, I told you so.
Merlin: It's like, oh, man, I thought you were going to be a helper for this.
John: Except my errors, you know.
John: Especially if it's like I documented that I said this to you.
John: So, so years and years ago, I realized that there was no, there is no preparing anybody for the future.
John: I cannot, I'm not saying, Hey, Hey, let's look at this situation in order to one day be right.
John: Because that, that serves me not at all.
John: I'm not, I'm just saying off we go, but I can't drive two cars at once.
John: And if the, if your relationship breaks down,
John: You cannot both retreat to my truck as a safe space from one another because someone still has to be over there piloting the car.
John: If it comes to that, I will find a solution.
John: And so anyway, halfway across the country.
Merlin: I think I mentioned this before, but just in passing, this is really quick.
Merlin: I learned about this through a friend, Marco, and I don't know the origin of this phrase, but it's a phrase that he uses sometimes because, you know, he makes software that's reliant on services and platforms.
Merlin: And there's a phrase that he uses that has become very meaningful to me, which is, it's not my fault, but it is my problem.
Yeah.
Merlin: Isn't that a great phrase?
Merlin: Like if his users are mad, well, I mean, like say for example, like for example, there's so many things in America and the world that run on AWS, like backend, you know, storage stuff, like whether that's Twitter icons or music downloads or whatever.
Merlin: If that goes out, your website breaks, for example, and everybody, what their experience of that is your website broke.
Merlin: And so like, what do you say to your customers?
Merlin: You say like, well,
Merlin: We're working to get it fixed.
Merlin: Yeah, it's not my fault, but you can't really say that.
Merlin: But that is a mantra for adulthood.
Merlin: It's not fun.
Merlin: You wouldn't have it printed up at Shirt Shack.
Merlin: But understanding that frequently in adult life, it may not be your fault, but it's still your problem, is really good to know.
John: Yeah, and I think emotionally the story in my family is that it was...
John: it was often described as also being my fault.
John: And I'm someone who... You just didn't know it yet.
John: I'm someone who is looking for it to be my fault even when it's not, right?
John: That's one of my disabilities is that
John: That, you know, car crashes out on the highway and I'm like, what did I, what did I do to, he takes it personal and makes it personal.
John: But in this case, so, so we were only three days into the trip.
John: The first time that one of them came over to me in a parking lot, you know, out, out in the, with the, you know, while I'm pumping gas.
John: And said, I can't ride in that car with her anymore.
Merlin: Oh my God, John.
John: And I was like, okay, well, so what, what do you need?
John: And, and so for a while I was able to say like, well, why doesn't, you know, why don't we have the little one ride over there and then you can ride here and then, and also, you know, and I'm, Oh, you're, you're doing the fox and the chicken and the grain.
John: Fox and the chicken.
Merlin: You've got to cross the river, but you've got to be careful who you leave with what, otherwise that grain is going to disappear.
Merlin: You don't want that baby.
Merlin: I see.
Merlin: Oh, John.
John: Here's another thing that we're just realizing in the family dynamic is that my daughter has no fear about speaking truth to power.
John: And we always kind of knew it.
John: But she's now making that transition to teenage life where she's kind of a person, like an authentic person.
John: And when two people are having a conversation and one of them says something that doesn't track –
John: All of a sudden, she takes her headphones off and goes, that's not what you said.
John: Oh, man.
Merlin: She's like Uatu the Watcher.
Merlin: She's there.
Merlin: She's a giant baby in the sky, like ready to like, she's got receipts, as they say.
John: Yeah.
John: And in this family, that is treacherous ground.
John: To really the one that says that's not what that's not.
John: Oh, who hired you to be the referee?
John: Well, but the problem is, you know, of course, she's the she is the star, right?
John: She's the she is the center because she's the only child and she's the she's everyone's center.
John: And so for the center to suddenly to not just be the one that's like more, more chocolate, but for the center to turn and say,
John: Actually, what you said was this.
John: Oh, boy.
John: And for her not to be wrong.
Merlin: It must really change the – I can imagine that really changing the barometric pressure in the cabin.
Merlin: For sure.
Merlin: Because now we're having a different – this has just turned into a slightly different kind of thing.
John: Well, because for me to say, that's not what you said, is –
John: Back to this like, well, your reality is different from mine universe of like perpetual fight.
John: But for her to say, actually, that's not what you said.
John: She does not have a side, right?
John: She doesn't have a – she doesn't have a perspective.
Merlin: she has what she she's just sitting in the middle of the room going well that's not what you said yeah she's like a stenographer yeah and so but like if you're in court there is a stenographer typing everything down for the record and getting it exactly right but the stenographer is normally not allowed during a say a cross-examination to to pop up and say excuse me but that's not not what you said that's not not unless they're consulted yeah because now now you've gone from being a stenographer to an attorney
John: Well, and she also has her own agency in the sense that she then will also say, you said there was going to be a swimming pool at this hotel and there isn't one.
John: And so it's not that she's just a stenographer.
John: She's got real strong feelings about how things are going.
Merlin: She's got so many aspects of members of your family and her in the most probably inconvenient way.
John: Yeah.
John: At one point she said, dad, today, no missions.
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Merlin: I know exactly.
John: I know exactly what she means.
John: She was like, you go from one mission to another.
John: Everything is a mission.
Merlin: And that's, I would call it a project, but yes, exactly.
Merlin: Exactly.
Merlin: The thing where you're like, no, no.
Merlin: And, and, and, uh, oh boy.
Merlin: So she just declares that kind of by fiat, huh?
John: By, uh, well, it was, it was at some point, it was at some point where she said some point in her, in the day where she was like, I'm done with missions.
John: And, uh,
John: Everyone else is too.
John: They just won't, they just won't tell you.
John: And so one more freaking graveyard.
John: No.
John: And I'm like, well, well, well, but, but, and she's like, no more missions.
John: Not today.
John: I was like, all right, no more missions.
John: I snuck in another mission, but she, and she was giving me the, all the eye rolls.
John: They just, they sound like trucks locking up their brakes on the interstate.
Merlin: One of those audible.
John: Anyway, by day four or five, um,
John: You know, my sister came over to me and was like, I'm flying home.
Merlin: So just to be clear here, because I get confused.
Merlin: This is day four or five out of, did you say 16?
Merlin: 16.
Merlin: The Uber mission was a 16-day... Yeah.
John: Okay.
John: All around the kitchen.
John: I'm flying home, she said.
John: Okay.
Merlin: And what happens with the car?
John: There you go.
John: Okay.
John: And so...
John: For the first time in my life and this is what this is what was so profound about all of this For me, and I'm still reckoning with it.
John: It's why this is gonna end up being a spinoff show.
John: Okay, I No longer was I no longer had any personal investment in being right about anything and
John: or about um being vindicated or my pride was no longer involved in any of this i had no there was no dignity to maintain all that all that needed to happen was that i cared for everyone and showed them care and got them from here to there in a
John: feeling heard and cared for.
Merlin: And you know, that's never, there's no, there's no room for gloating in that, uh, in that portfolio.
John: No, because what, and, and realizing like, Oh, um, no one, this isn't, she's not trying to hurt anybody.
John: My mom's not trying to hurt anybody.
John: Nobody's trying to hurt anybody.
Um,
John: Everybody's just got their own hurts and their hurts Clyde with other people's hurts and then that's good There's her sad, but it's good.
John: That's just you just then and the thing is if you're stuck in a car with somebody for for nine hours and
Merlin: um it's just you know your little fish bowl of hurts and they clang up against each other and pretty soon somebody says what do you mean by that and then like my kid was kind of today was first day of school of eighth grade and uh you know as you would you know you're kind of dreading it and for all the reasons that you could imagine and everybody's got their own mind and i said you know i'd really i've gotten better at this is just listening and not going into advice mode but then a day later
Merlin: I said, you know, look, don't count this as advice, but I said, one thing to keep in mind, just, it's been useful to me, is to be careful about rehearsing failure unintentionally, or, you know what I mean?
Merlin: So if you rehearse failure for something, which can mean lots of things in my Weltanschauung, but one of those things means you have already told yourself this is only gonna turn out one way and it's bad.
Merlin: That's going to predispose you from now till that event and beyond to only mostly looking for bad things to happen to confirm the prediction that you've been rehearsing.
Merlin: And that goes for hurts too, I think.
Merlin: I feel like the hurts are like you have this vulnerability, this bruise, and then you're sort of pre-anticipating.
Merlin: Your filter has already been prepared to mostly notice the things that reach that hurt, whether it was intentional or not.
John: Yeah, absolutely.
John: I mean, and so all of a sudden we're standing at, we're standing out in the middle of nowhere.
John: And my mom and sister are, you know, my sister, my sister says to my mom.
Merlin: Day four or five.
Merlin: You're, you're, you're like just a little over a quarter of the way through the sojourn.
Merlin: And so, and that she says, I'm flying home.
John: And, and, you know, and, and Susan, well,
John: So Susan says to my mom, like, at the top of her lungs, this is all happening at the top of everybody's lungs.
John: Here you go again, abandoning me again at a truck stop in the middle of nowhere.
John: And she's not wrong.
John: She's been abandoned at truck stops before.
John: I mean, who hasn't?
John: Does she have a comment?
John: You know, did I ever tell you the story about the time that John Vanderslice...
John: He pulled over in the middle of a night at a bus station and kicked a guy out of his band.
Merlin: Yeah, I think he did.
Merlin: Nevada or whatever.
Merlin: It was not like anticipated, right?
John: No, no.
John: It was just like, I've heard one word.
Merlin: I've seen it in your presence.
Merlin: John Vanderslice can be very candid.
John: Yeah.
Merlin: I mean, he's the nicest guy in rock, but he was also – He's a hugger, but he has a lot of candor in those hugs.
John: He said, you know, this bus station – from the sign on the door, it appears that it opens at 9.
John: So, you know, it's 3 o'clock in the morning right now.
John: You've got six hours to think about.
Merlin: You throw up one bottle of water, one bottle of Dasani and half a sandwich.
John: Kuna Matata.
John: You've got six hours to think about how you're going to pay for the bus ticket.
John: Oh, boy.
John: Yeah.
John: And then my mom was like, who's abandoning who?
John: You're the one that's leaving me out.
John: Oh, so it's hurt versus hurt.
John: Yeah, all the hurts, all the abandonment hurt.
John: And so I was in this posture where I had no – there was no – I told you so's played no role.
John: There was nothing –
John: It wasn't just that there was nothing to be gained.
John: I had no feeling of like, well, could have told you this was coming.
John: It was, there was none of that.
John: It was like, I have a situation.
John: I have the ladies.
John: I have these vehicles.
John: I have a target.
John: I have X, I have resources and what, and, and, and I'm, and no one is attacking me.
John: Like my hurts are off the table.
John: I have, for the purposes of this, I have no hurts and everybody, and they need me right now.
John: Well, you're the captain.
John: And so I, I went over to my, and you know, and normally they, what they do is then they all, they, they look at me and go, who's right.
John: And you know, now they have the little one who's like, well, I can tell you what you said.
John: Which is like, oh boy, this is exciting to have another person who's like, oh, would you like to know what, I can't tell you who's right or not, but would you like to know what you said?
John: Oh boy.
John: But in this case.
Merlin: You have a well-stocked toolbox full of things nobody needs for this situation.
John: Oh yeah, the whole back of the truck is just AK-47s.
John: And so what I said was like, you just, you know, I went over to my sister and said, you drive in the car by yourself.
John: I'll take mom in the truck.
John: You follow me.
John: You just follow me.
John: And you don't have to make any decisions.
John: You know, and she's crying.
John: I'm like, you don't have to make any decisions.
John: You don't have to, when we get to the next graveyard, you don't have to get out of the car.
John: You can listen to your music and just follow.
John: And she was like, okay.
John: And so we spent a day driving across the Midwest where she was, and she's, oh, my sister is the best follower in terms of two cars on a highway.
John: I don't know if you've ever done long distance drive with two cars on a highway.
Merlin: Oh, you got to have walkie talkies.
Merlin: Like otherwise, I mean, you know, I mean, like there's so many ways that it can go wrong.
Merlin: And I don't just mean this as like a Seinfeld bit, but it's really true.
Merlin: And if things go real wrong, it can be not catastrophic, but she's good at that.
Merlin: That's one of her.
Merlin: That's what she has such interesting skills, John.
Merlin: And that's what I feel like.
John: This is one of the skills that it's like after spending after spending two weeks with her in my rearview mirror, I feel like she should be.
John: I feel like she should work for the central intelligence agency.
John: This is a set of skills that no one else has.
John: You cannot shake.
John: Like if I'm in the far left lane going 85 miles an hour on the interstate and I suddenly realize, oh my God, that's the last exit.
John: We have to get to it.
John: And there's no, if we don't, we're on the wrong side of the Mississippi and it's,
John: And it's rush hour and I put on my blinker and swing across six lanes of traffic and over the rumble strip and barely make it off the exit.
John: I look in my rear view mirror and she's with me.
John: Like white on rice.
John: And I don't know like how – I don't know how I made that.
John: That's a gift.
John: That is a gift.
John: I don't even know if you can learn that.
John: But she also does the other thing where she's looking and she sees the truckers.
John: You know –
John: We have lost a lot in American trucker culture.
John: This is a different show when you and I talk about American trucker culture.
John: But we have lost a lot.
John: There's a lot of cultural memory of interstate trucking that's gone.
John: And I don't think we'll ever be.
Merlin: Just go try and find you a copy of like season one of BJ and the Bear.
John: It's not there, right?
John: There are a lot of people driving trucks that don't know what the rules are.
John: And so Susan and I have for years.
Merlin: They've probably never encountered 11 long-haired Friends of Jesus in a chartreuse microbus.
John: They have not.
John: They absolutely have not.
John: You know, they're not hauling dynamite, and the air is intense up here.
John: Come on back, truckers, and talk to teddy bear.
John: So she and I have a longstanding feeling that a trucker has to prove by their behavior that
John: that they deserve respect.
John: You don't give a trucker respect until they earn that respect on the highway by their behavior.
Merlin: Oh, yeah.
Merlin: It's miles, right?
Merlin: You can't just buy a hat and a billy club and a hustler and call yourself a trucker.
John: You can see the truckers that know what they're doing.
John: You can see them a mile away.
John: You can see the way that they pass.
John: You can see the way that they look at.
John: Well, they're looking ahead is what they're doing.
John: That's what everybody on the road should be doing.
John: And Susan's looking ahead.
John: And she is so good to work in tandem to thwart bad truckers and to make the world safe for good truckers.
John: Okay.
John: She and I do a lot of – we do a lot and also bad drivers and also people that don't know how cruise control works.
John: Anyway, it's great to have her in the rearview mirror because it makes me feel –
John: not insane in the way that driving on the, on the freeway.
John: And the thing is we don't, we don't, we're not on the freeways, right?
John: We're on the, we're on these two lane roads.
John: So you're dealing with a different class of trucker, entirely different class of trucker.
John: What the hell is a trucker doing on highway 24?
Merlin: Oh, I see what you're saying.
Merlin: They're not, because normally they would very much want to be on the interstates.
John: Sure.
Merlin: Unless they know a secret shortcut or something.
John: They're not, you know, being on I-80, you might as well be, well, it's like a, it's,
John: It's a zombie apocalypse out there.
John: I-80 used to have rules.
John: There were rules.
John: It's all gone.
John: It's all gone.
John: There are no rules.
John: So much lost culture, John.
John: But down on 24, there are still rules.
John: There are still rules.
John: Anyway, the long and the short of it is I got this crew all the way around 21 states.
John: and got them all home.
Merlin: So she didn't fly home.
John: And relationships intact, mostly.
Merlin: But just to rewind real quick, so you, I think you deployed, I feel like you deployed a tactic similar to a tactic I do, which is the like, you know, nobody makes their best decisions when they're very emotionally hot.
Merlin: That's not a great time to make a big decision, so let's get to the next, you know, we'll skip the graveyard, we'll get to the next exit, we'll make the stop, let's talk about this when we get there, right?
Merlin: So she's, the heat is off a little bit,
Merlin: And then how did that turn into, okay, I'll continue with this?
John: Well, what's interesting is that I didn't do any problem solving in the sense that Susan and my mom were going to come to a place and I think traditionally in the family, they would turn to me to mediate and
John: Or I would try to mediate.
John: And in this case, I didn't.
John: I, I did the, this, this thing that's very alien to me.
John: The all agree to disagree thing is what it feels like.
John: What I did was I'm just trying to get us to the next graveyard where apparently, um, you know, like this is, this next graveyard is where, uh, grandpa Harold and Auntie M are buried and
John: And the reason we're going to see them is that, you know, Auntie M was the one that burned down the farm.
John: And that's why we ended up in the windmill business.
Merlin: I see.
Merlin: So we pay our respects.
John: Yeah.
John: And so I'm just doing that.
John: And my sister pulls in behind us at the graveyard and my mom is, you know, is trying to avoid her and, and marching off looking for the, the headstone.
John: And she,
John: Susan is, um, you know, is listening to Madonna's music album or, you know, is kind of gets out of the car and is kind of skulking.
John: And I made no effort to insinuate myself in between their hurts.
John: and it wasn't and i wasn't pretending i wasn't like okay everybody well great let's go you know i was just like all right so here's auntie m's thing and then this so she's the one i'm asking my mom right so this is the mission in a lot of ways i focused on the mission but i didn't ignore my sister i always would go over and say like
John: And I didn't do the – I wasn't solicitous.
John: I didn't go over and say, are you okay?
John: Are you okay, baby?
John: I would go over and I would have something to talk to her about.
John: Like, oh, so this gravestone.
John: Now, I know that you're not as interested in this as some, but let me explain who Auntie M was.
John: And she's in a state of kind of –
John: she's an emotionally heightened state, but in just the way that she could kind of listen to the little story about some great, great aunt.
John: And, and it gave her, it was, it was like a bomb, right?
John: It was just something calming, some calming talk.
John: And then back in the car and off we go.
John: Cause now we're going to go see the, you know, now we're going to go see the other place all the way across the country.
John: And by the end of that day,
John: The two of them are standing on either side of some old library that we went in.
John: And they start to kind of talk to each other.
John: Wow.
John: Wow.
John: They were, she was about to fly home.
John: This is, this is a thing that wasn't where my mom was like, well, I'll never speak to her again.
Merlin: That's a huge save.
Merlin: And you, uh, I don't want to say you have transitively accomplished that, but in some ways you accomplished that by staying out of the way and not being solicitous.
John: It happened four more times.
John: Oh my God.
John: Really?
John: In the course of 16 days.
John: Oh, John.
John: And all four times.
John: And what was amazing was each time,
John: I gained more trust.
John: Like they each trust, they both trusted me more.
Merlin: You earned more trust.
John: I earned more trust.
John: The longer I, um, just demonstrated that I wasn't, that I was just.
Merlin: You're a trucker of the human heart, Sean.
John: I was going to care for them both.
John: That was all I was doing.
John: I was going to care for them both and I was going to get us to the next.
John: Hotel that hopefully fucking had a swimming pool.
John: Because I was going to hear from the real captain.
Merlin: You could anticipate that you were going to get a note on that.
John: I was going to get a note.
John: Too many missions, not enough swimming pools.
John: Too many missions.
John: Yep.
John: But, you know, we did it all.
John: We went to Zion.
John: What is that?
John: Oh, it's all the beautiful parks in southern Utah.
Merlin: Oh, terrific.
Merlin: I hear nice things about Utah.
John: We went to Tulsa, which has now been rebranded by my daughter, Tusla.
John: She was like, when do we get to Tusla?
John: And I was like, I'm never calling it anything else.
John: And she was like, no, tell me the real name.
John: And I was like, Tusla is the real name of the town.
John: And on Tusla time.
John: We spent the night in Paducah.
Merlin: Oh, wow.
Merlin: Did you see all the Bugs Bunny places?
John: We did.
John: We went to Peoria.
John: We went to Paducah.
John: Whoa.
John: And I mean, if you can put a trip together where on the way out you go to Peoria and the way back you go to Paducah, you're doing it.
John: You're doing it right.
John: You just won the rally.
Merlin: You won the rally.
Merlin: There was no race.
Merlin: It was a rally all along.
Merlin: And you did it.
Merlin: But it sounds like there's more to this.
Merlin: Like, if I'm hearing you right, you've introduced chapter one of what will become the new Netflix series, John and the Girls.
Merlin: But it sounds like there's even more to this that you might want to share at some point.
John: Well, I don't know because it's all – this feels very unprecedented for me emotionally because this is exactly the rain –
John: exactly the the realm in which my sister and i are always at odds this is the and by the transitive property this is the realm where i have lived my whole life without access to a light heart yeah yeah somebody somebody asked me there's some victories there's some victories here john for everybody in this it sure feels like it i don't know it feels like it somebody you might have turned some kind of corner here
John: Somebody said, what would you, if you could, if you, what was, what was the question?
John: It was some cosmopolitan magazine question about like how the 10 ways to know that your husband is cheating on you.
John: But it was some question like, do you, what would you, if you could wake up tomorrow and one thing would be different about yourself, you know, that type of thing.
John: And I said, without any, without putting any thought into it, I said, I would just like to wake up with a light heart to have, to have, to have a light heart.
John: That is the one thing if I could change anything.
John: And, you know, and the conversation bounced on along, but then I kind of sat there hearing that echo around and thinking, what an interesting, of all the things you could ask for, like a light heart.
John: How telling and also... Feelings are real, John.
Merlin: And if you had a way to get to, I'm not going to say flip a switch because that misses the point of why this is so difficult.
Merlin: But if you've got yourself into a one, I agree, if I got to a place in life where I knew to a relative certainty that most days I'd wake up with a light heart, I would really look forward to life more.
John: Well, yeah.
John: And that was the thing.
John: Isn't that doable?
Merlin: a light heart i'm not asking for millions i'm not asking for we got to figure out where the cable disconnected or where it got too connected somewhere in there though you could you can do that and i i still i practice this i try to practice this every day which is like do i have to feel the way that i feel is there some kind of a cosmic curse on me to have this idea about how i am or who i am
Merlin: And like, do I really need that?
Merlin: Like, what if I, is that, is it one of those things that I'm going to someday realize was impossibly easy to just stop doing?
John: Right.
John: It's exactly it.
John: You know, I'm out there and for 16 days, it was not about, none of the emotional struggle was, was about me or coming from me.
John: I was just solving problems.
John: I was just trying to find a cheesesteak restaurant.
John: Yeah.
John: And, and,
John: was in a place where I had, for the most part, a light heart the entire time because I had a mission.
John: I had missions and I could see that there was emotional trouble all around and I stayed out of it and I was useful and a valuable member of the team and just realizing, like, it's all I want.
John: I don't want anything.
John: I do not want for anything but a light heart.
Merlin: I love the way you put that.
Merlin: I love that.
John: And it can't be impossible to find.
John: And so...
John: So that's what feels like.
Merlin: Does that feel like a new mission?
John: Well, that's why this feels like a watershed.
John: Because I only drove into my driveway last night at 10 o'clock at night.
John: Really?
John: I woke up this morning and you were like, can you give me five more minutes?
John: And I was like, yes, I can.
John: Because I've got six hours of sleep.
John: Let's go.
John: Let's talk.
John: So I'm in the very earliest stage of – because I wasn't processing it while it was happening because I was driving.
John: I had nine hours of driving to do.
John: And I had all these graveyards to find and all these ghost towns and stuff.
John: Well, it's a mission of missions.
John: It was a mission of missions.
Merlin: Yes.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Boy, I really want to explore this more.
Merlin: I want to talk about this more, but I want to do this more.
Merlin: I mean, just this very morning, I was thinking the same thing.
Merlin: And, you know, and again, just to repeat myself, because I really think this is important.
Merlin: I mean, it's almost like somebody I've heard people describe meditation, which I am not great at, describe meditation as standing on a bridge, watching traffic go by and trying not to get into any of the cars.
Yeah.
Merlin: And I think that's somewhat similar to what we're talking about here.
Merlin: Like what if it were as – let's just distinguish.
Merlin: It may be simple, but it's not easy.
Merlin: But what if it were as simple as I'm just going to stop getting into every car that goes by?
Merlin: Would that lighten my heart?
John: But what's interesting is I wasn't just sitting in a bus station listening to a couple argue.
John: These are my people.
John: My mother and sister and daughter and their struggle.
Merlin: Your character in that play.
John: I mean, this is the family.
John: This is my universe.
John: These aren't randoms.
John: And I've always been able to sit and listen to other people fight.
John: But these fights are orbiting around the sun of all of my own struggles.
John: And I'm often cast in the role of...
John: of the sun in, in these situations, you know, like this is it.
John: You are the, if you, if you are the, the main character, then all of this is yours.
John: Like it all belongs to you.
John: This is, this is all a product of your gravity or it's a, it's, um, you, you cannot divorce yourself from this.
John: And I wasn't divorcing myself from it.
John: I just was not, um, well, uh,
John: I had a, I had a mission and the end result, this is the thing.
John: The end result is that everyone's better than before.
John: I didn't just skate along and kick the can down the road and agree to disagree.
John: We actually grew as a unit.
John: Everybody knows more.
John: So, so, so the, this is the, I buried the lead the last day.
John: My sister came into my hotel and said, you know, and I was like, we did it.
John: We made it.
John: We drove across the country two plus weeks.
John: This isn't a thing that anybody would have done.
John: This isn't what normal people do.
John: You don't put your whole family in two cars and drive through 21 states.
Mm-hmm.
John: 16 days it's not a thing that we should have done when you tell people about it they're gonna go what were you thinking but we did it we pulled it off and everybody's fine I don't believe that she's turned some corner where all of a sudden we have a shared reality because tomorrow it'll be a different it'll be a different thing and we'll be back to
Merlin: Um, our patterns, but in those points, if they exist, expire overnight.
John: Yeah.
John: But in this instance, she wasn't, no one was yelling that at her.
John: She wasn't yelling it at me.
John: It was just, uh, and partly it was because I think my, in the cold light of my daughter's eyes, um,
John: In a situation where it's like, who's the problem right now?
John: And if you look at, at, um, at my kid, she's going to make the, like, roll the tape back and play it for you.
John: Well, she's just going to make the silent finger.
John: She's going to point the silent finger at like, who's the problem?
John: Well, you are, because you're the one that is the problem.
John: And she's so – and it's not always my sister.
John: You know, the problem moves around.
John: And the problem is often that daddy has too many missions.
John: And can we get to the freaking hotel?
John: Because I hear there's a swimming pool there.
John: The finger moves, you know.
John: And the thing is, it's the judgment of the finger feels very –
John: It feels nonjudgmental in a way.
John: It just feels like the, the, the truth of a child in a world of adults who has, who can see, you know, a child, the child that is listening into grownups and has the ability to say like, right now you're the problem.
John: And there's no walking away from it.
John: There's no feeling like, well, you're just saying that because blank.
John: It's like, no, she's not.
John: All she wants is to get to the hotel.
Merlin: And there's a pool, like you said.
John: And she would also like a Kit Kat.
John: I love a Kit Kat in a hotel room.
John: If she could get a Kit Kat and know there's a pool at the end of the day, my daughter has no problems.
Merlin: That's not a lot to ask when you're somebody who's basically like the watcher.
Merlin: You know what I'm saying?
Merlin: That's pretty – you get a lot of value out of that.
Merlin: But could you have anticipated going into this – maybe you could.
Merlin: Could you have anticipated that there would be these sorts of thought-provoking thought technologies waiting for you after 16 days?
John: I did not – maybe this is another thing.
John: Going into it, I did not say –
John: Very much to myself about what my expectations were.
John: What I said was, I know that you cannot go to Yosemite the first week of August.
John: You can't go to Yellowstone the first week of August.
John: Forget it.
John: Like, I know that everybody wants to go visit those things, but not the first week of August.
John: Because it's crowded?
John: Yeah, because it's a four-hour wait to get over to Old Faithful.
John: You know, you can't do that.
John: But you can go to Devil's Towers.
John: Also, we're going to be going through Rapid City the week before Sturgis.
John: So you can go to Sturgis and watch the carnies setting up their Harley windmills or whatever.
John: There are things we can do.
John: We can go here.
Merlin: It seems to me you kind of ran between the raindrops, especially with stuff like the weather and motorcycles.
John: We did.
John: And the wonderful thing about being around Sturgis the week before is that you get all the Sturgis without the Sturgis.
John: I heard it's beautiful there.
John: Well, it's wonderful.
John: And it's lovely to see a bunch of boomers on full dresser motorcycles riding in groups of 30.
John: on, uh, you know, like around the sitting bowl monument.
John: Like that's a beautiful, it's actually a beautiful choreographed man.
John: Yeah.
John: None of them have laid their bikes down recently.
John: Everybody's just rolling.
John: It's nice.
John: Um, it's another thing to be in Sturgis for Sturgis and realize that it's the ultimate super spreader event.
John: And it was even before COVID existed.
John: It's a super spreader event of bad.
Merlin: There's probably a lot of crabs.
Merlin: Oh, it's just, it's just the worst.
Merlin: I don't think clean those seats as often as they should.
John: Every biker I saw on the road outside of the envelope of Sturgis, like, you know, down in Kentucky or whatever, pull into a gas station.
John: There's a guy filling up his bike and I'd walk over and you know, enough not to say like going to Sturgis, but it's on everybody's mind.
John: every motorcyclist in the country knows it's happening.
Merlin: And so, you know, it's like, it's like bloggers at South by Southwest.
Merlin: I mean, you can, it's safe to assume they at least would like to be there.
John: Yeah.
John: If you see somebody, if you see somebody in like a sexy wolf costume and it's during Comic-Con and you're like, so what are you doing?
John: You going to just hanging out?
John: No, it's a lifestyle thing for me.
John: I sell insurance and I have a motorcycle.
John: So you say that, you know, kicking tires with anybody at some rural gas station, it's like, so it's great, great day for a ride, you know, headed anywhere, especially the ones that have like a bedroll on like tight above their headlight.
John: And the thing is, Merlin, let them tell you they're not going to Sturgis.
John: Oh, absolutely.
John: Let them say, yeah, I'm headed south.
Merlin: I've been to Sturgis once.
Merlin: We're running a little long here, but I learned a lot of things on this latest family traveling visit.
Merlin: And one of the things that was sort of a breakthrough for me, sometimes the biggest breakthroughs for me are the most obvious things.
Merlin: But I was thinking, and this was kind of in the context of like, geez, do I really want to be around all these people without masks, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
Merlin: And I had this thought that is, again, very germane to experiences you and I have had, which is like, you have to ask yourself whose event it is.
Merlin: So by that I mean if there's going to be a clam bake that somebody's putting on, even if you're throwing money in the kitty for the clam bake, it's somebody's clam bake.
Merlin: It's at their house.
Merlin: If you're going out on the boat, you're with the person whose boat that is.
Merlin: That's a very explicit example of that.
Merlin: And I think in life it's helpful to realize just in general whose trip it is.
Merlin: And to realize if you have a role in that, evaluate what your role is according to whose trip it is.
Merlin: And I'll tell you the example that came to mind for me was like, if you don't like going to strip clubs, don't go to the strip club.
Merlin: But don't go to the strip club and be a dick because that's not your trip.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: Do you know what I mean?
Merlin: Like, you're not allowed to go and protest about the things that are exactly the way everybody else wants it to be.
Merlin: So like me going on vacation and being really hung up because there's no schedule for when we're doing things.
Merlin: Well, that's a huge appeal for other people.
Merlin: And it's not cool for me to go and just be the scold who's going to be telling people that they're doing their event wrong.
Merlin: And there are times where you are better off to just not go than to be somebody who's going to be a drag.
Merlin: But also that, like, now you've also become somebody who's always making everything about yourself, which is very unpleasant to be around.
John: Well, this was another kind of thing on this trip, which is that my daughter's mother wants to know where we're going to stay.
John: And in all of my travels, I have never really put any premium on knowing where I was going to stay.
John: When it's time to lay your head down, find a place to lay your head down.
Merlin: To know where you stay, you have to know where that day's mission ends.
Merlin: Right, exactly.
Merlin: And part of the mission is we don't know when the mission's over until the mission's over.
Merlin: Once the mission's over, I'm guessing here, but I'm putting words in your mouth, but isn't that kind of part of it?
Merlin: It's like, well, the mission is not to get to the hotel on time.
Merlin: The mission is to complete the mission.
John: And so in trying to manage the show, I realized the amount of stress and anxiety that will be in the space if we don't know where we're going to stay tonight,
John: is not worth the trade-off of...
John: missing some tiny corner of a potential mission because we were trying to get to the hotel on time.
John: So I said, absolutely.
John: Let's make sure we know where we're going to, you know, where the hotel is every day.
John: And so my daughter's mother was, you know, your daughter's mother will certainly be able.
Merlin: She's less likely to not enjoy the day.
Merlin: I mean, it's no guarantee she will enjoy the day, but like to have that top of mind and feeling unaddressed.
Merlin: Well, guess what?
Merlin: Now you got a new area of hurt.
Yeah.
John: There were a couple of days, one in particular, uh, you know, like on the way to this spa, she booked on the Navajo reservation that I felt a little bit like, Hey, we should be looking at what we're seeing and not looking at where we're go, not looking at the clock because we're not where we're supposed to be.
John: Uh, but for the most part for the 16 days, uh,
John: We knew where we were going to stay, and it brought a lot of comfort and relaxation.
John: And it was not my method, but I completely surrendered all –
John: All I said at the beginning of every day was like tell me where you tell me where you want me to go and You know and what was funny was she she felt that pole like do I find a cool hotel do I find a hotel that's built in a windmill do I find a hotel that has like you know all the rooms are a different color or they all look like a Madonna in type situation or do I just find a regular
John: you know, uh, like a systemic edge of town hotel with a pool and a, and a free breakfast.
John: And again, like it wasn't that I was delegating it because it wasn't my position to delegate.
John: I just said, you tell me where to point the, the craft.
John: And in between here and there, I will find enough, um, you know, enough like archeological sites to,
John: and enough places of interest.
Merlin: There's graveyards everywhere, John.
Merlin: I mean, except San Francisco.
John: And my family has enough sordid history across this country that if you point me to any county between Boyle County, Kentucky, and King County, Washington, I can find you some uncle that did something terrible.
John: It did a hate crime there.
John: Some uncle that did something terrible and is buried on the edge of town.
Yeah.
John: Oh, you gotta take care of that, John.
John: That's no good.
Merlin: Oh, jeez.