Ep. 437: "The First Betrayal of Kevin"
John: Hello.
John: Hi, John.
John: Oh, hi, Merlin.
Merlin: Happy Labor Day.
John: Oh, wow.
John: It is Labor Day.
Merlin: To all who celebrate.
Merlin: Whew.
John: Labor Day.
John: Boy, I've been waiting for it.
John: You good?
John: You good?
John: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
John: I mean, I've been coughing a lot this morning, but I think it might have something to do with the fact that I had a breakfast of M&M's.
John: And my body recoils when I do a thing like that.
Merlin: Were they paired with anything besides coffee or was it just raw M&Ms?
John: No, they were paired with coffee.
John: But what I did, I was at the grocery store.
John: It was late at night.
John: And they had one of those point of purchase enticements.
John: It wasn't right there with the gum and the pulp magazines.
John: It was across from the...
John: It was where you would wait if you were waiting.
John: And they were these large.
Merlin: Oh, like that pre-area end cap.
Merlin: Sometimes it's Dasani water.
Merlin: Sometimes it's Lay's family chip products.
John: Yeah, yeah.
John: It'll be DiGiorno's pizza up here.
John: Sometimes it'll be Tillamook ice cream.
John: And in this case, it was two large size bags.
John: Oh, like you're talking about a sharing size.
John: Yeah, sharing size, family size.
John: I bought some sharing size gummy bears this weekend.
John: Yeah, that's what it was, sharing size.
John: And they had peanut M&Ms.
Merlin: Don't worry.
Merlin: You're not an unlovable hog.
Merlin: No.
Merlin: You have friends and you love to share.
John: You bought these to share.
John: You bought these to share.
John: Even if you're just sharing it with yourself, it is a sharing.
John: Well, I mean, you know, help begins at home.
John: Well, so they had the peanut M&Ms, the best of the M&Ms, the best of the M&M family.
Merlin: I'll allow it.
John: And then they had the new peanut butter kind.
John: And I thought, you know, I like to mix things.
Merlin: It's a little bit like a Reesey-Piecey, but it's got to crunch you out outside?
Merlin: That's exactly right.
John: It's got a little bit of peanut butter flavoring inside.
John: Peanut butter, what would it be called?
John: Paste.
John: Slurry.
John: A Nutella of peanut butter.
John: But not hosel noose.
Merlin: Hosel noose.
John: Okay.
John: So I thought, you know, I like to mix stuff.
John: I got a turkey dinner at the diner last night.
John: I had stuffing.
John: My sister got the hot turkey sandwich.
John: The only difference between the two...
John: was $3 and stuffing.
John: And I felt like it was worth it because stuffing to me is worth $3 in this case.
Merlin: I mean, that's got, that almost fits into, I know it's not meat, but it really almost falls into extra meat for a dollar, which also technically kind of falls into always make all the bacon.
John: That's right.
Merlin: That's right.
Merlin: It's meat.
Merlin: Don't deny, don't deny plenty, especially if it's inside your budget.
John: They could have put a little more gravy on it for my taste.
John: But yeah, the stuffing is meaty, beady, big and bouncy.
John: It's what you want.
John: It's what you want.
Merlin: It's what I love stuffing.
Merlin: You know, it's great to make it home, too.
Merlin: If you make a stovetop, that's like a 30 second delicious dish.
John: I'm not as good at that, or at least I've never tried it.
John: So, you know, that's an example right there.
John: I said I'm not good at it.
John: In fact, it just means I haven't tried it.
John: I've never made stovetop stuff.
John: Even though I love stuffing.
John: And I don't want sage in the stuffing.
John: I don't want the stuffing to taste like you picked it up off the dirt.
John: I want it to taste like celery.
Merlin: Sage is the cilantro of meat.
Merlin: You must use it very advisably, and you should take care to make sure that everyone in the party shares a feeling about oregano or sage.
Merlin: Sage, and even I'm going to say, you know what, I'll throw one more on there.
Merlin: I don't hate dill, but I think you need to be advisable with your dill.
John: No, I don't want to use dill, and I don't want rosemary.
John: I don't want any dill.
Merlin: Do you put dill on a salmon?
John: I will put dill on a salmon.
John: Yeah, not a monster.
John: Right.
John: No.
John: But, you know, this whole this whole world that we entered into at some point where rosemary was the thing that went on chicken.
John: It's like people made chicken for thousands of years without rosemary.
John: When did it become the thing that goes on chicken?
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: When did that happen?
John: Yeah.
John: I don't like it.
John: And that's the thing.
John: There are so many things in today's world.
Merlin: Stop making assumptions about what kinds of herbs.
Merlin: Stop making herbal assumptions is what I'm asking.
John: Well, it's just, it's part of this whole pickle everything school.
John: Okay.
John: Well, you can't just have chicken.
John: You can't just have a crispy chicken.
John: You can't just bake it in its own butter.
Merlin: You know, I got a word for this, John.
Merlin: I got a word for this.
Merlin: And there's two words.
Merlin: There's always two things with me.
Merlin: There's two words I started using a lot when we were on our quote-unquote vacation.
Merlin: And one of them was the word hostile, which is a word I found myself constantly using to describe the entire travel industry.
Merlin: The other word I started using a lot is cute.
Merlin: And I've used that word before.
Merlin: You can use cute in lots of ways.
Merlin: But cute has become an important guiding principle for me.
Merlin: You know what?
Merlin: Don't get cute.
Merlin: Don't get cute about it.
Merlin: Just make a fucking chicken and don't get cute about it.
Merlin: Do you know what I'm saying?
Merlin: I think America got a little cute.
Merlin: Do you know what I'm saying?
Merlin: Well, we didn't have anything else to do, and so all that was left was cute.
Merlin: Since like the 70s, you think.
Merlin: When did it start?
Merlin: When did this herbal strap-on flavor madness, when did that begin for you?
Merlin: When's the first time you found yourself saying, all this oregano makes my Mexican food taste like soap?
John: I gotta say, you know, here, it's like everything, Merlin.
John: It was so exciting when it first happened.
John: It was so exciting.
John: Almost everything's exciting when it first happens.
John: Oh, it was so exciting.
John: And you're like, look at it, it's the young chef.
John: The young chef comes out of the kitchen.
John: He's like, oh, I just made this, you know, I'm a young guy.
John: I'm from around here.
John: Everybody knows me already because I worked in this other restaurant.
Merlin: Oh, he's a local boy made good.
John: Yeah, he was a sous chef or something.
John: Because there used to be only a couple of chefs.
John: First person in his family to go to chef school, yeah.
John: There wasn't even a chef school.
John: It was like when my great-grandfather became a justice of the peace.
John: He didn't go to law school.
John: He just sat at a—he was Bartleby the Scrivener until somebody was like, we need another judge out here.
John: And what'd he say?
John: He was like, huh!
John: Okay.
Merlin: That's not actually the famous Nelvno line, but—
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John: I remember the first time some guy younger than me.
John: This is it.
John: I remember when there was a guy younger than me that started a restaurant.
Merlin: Okay.
John: Oh.
John: And, you know, because this is going to happen, right?
John: When you're 22, there's very few people younger than you that have started a restaurant.
John: But you get to be 27.
John: All of a sudden, there's a 26-year-old.
John: He started his own restaurant.
Merlin: Yeah.
John: And we all went.
John: We went all the time.
John: My girlfriend got a job there as a waitress because she was, or I guess a server.
Merlin: Was that the place we went to with the benches that one time?
Merlin: no no no it was before that before that it was a it was a place and it had some name like the sea and cake or whatever it was and um right and it was it's one of those names it's a portland style name they got an x on the sign with a fork no this is way before that portland this is more when you would name it like the kind of place speaking of melville it's the kind of place where you might uh lay down with queequeg like the name of an inn
John: This is at the time when Portland was – if you went into a restaurant in Portland, you got a chicken with crispy skin and a side of vegetables, right?
John: And a pole dance, if memory serves.
John: Yes.
John: You could go to a restaurant in Portland and you get normal food.
John: Okay.
John: And I would sit in this restaurant.
John: Here was the first sign.
John: You walk into the restaurant.
John: There's no menu.
Okay.
John: There's a blackboard and some things written on it.
Merlin: Oh, and they don't – so it's also one of those places maybe – again, this could be later on.
Merlin: If something costs $12, just write the number 12.
John: Or if you need to ask, you can't afford it.
John: AQ, yeah.
John: But you couldn't read – the menu was written on a blackboard in someone's hand.
John: They couldn't read.
John: So the server had to explain it.
Merlin: The server, you look at it and you go, well, obviously you love your friends, but what kind of dishes would the server be explaining to you?
John: Oh, a lot of seafood.
John: You know, it's one of those, like, you get the meat, you get the best meat, and then you devise the menu, not the other way around.
Merlin: Locally sourced, we get whatever's fresh.
John: Somebody comes up, backs up the money truck.
Merlin: At this point, are they leaving off the article and just referring to your friend as chef?
Merlin: Chef is chosen.
Merlin: No, no, no.
John: It's all before that.
John: That came much later.
John: This is neolithic, John.
John: You're going way back.
John: This would have been, I don't know, it just would have said the guy, the cook.
John: The cook.
John: What happened to me?
Merlin: What had happened was, it's also horrible, John.
Merlin: Why does everything have to be horrible?
John: Well, what wasn't horrible about this, about the inciting incident of this story, is that this was at 11.59.
John: They closed this particular grocery store at midnight.
John: I don't think that that should be how they run grocery stores because there's somebody in a grocery store all night.
John: They're stocking the shelves, right?
John: They're in there all night.
John: They're stocking the shelves.
John: Most grocery stores, at least around here, used to
John: stay open.
John: They only had one register open.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: They did this in Florida.
Merlin: They did this in Florida.
Merlin: And I could tell the first time I walked in to not a jewel, but like, you know, one of the big, one of the big stores, first time I ever walked in, it was obvious that they had realized something that you realized here, which is we got people here putting stuff on shelves anyway.
Merlin: Why don't we continue stocking like we normally would?
Merlin: And the only difference is now customers can come in and utilize this one lane.
Right.
John: You want to – it's 2 o'clock in the morning.
John: I want a loaf of bread, a quart of milk, and a stick of butter.
John: Stick of butter, yeah.
Merlin: Vipers, right?
John: Something like that, yeah.
John: I go to the place.
John: I wave a hearty hello to all the people who are stocking the Cheerios.
John: Ahoy!
John: I get my things.
John: Ahoy, right.
John: And I go up and I stand at the register, and I wait patiently until the assistant manager –
John: who's stocking the produce, wipes their hands on their apron, and comes over and rings me up for these things.
John: It takes 30 seconds to them, and then they're back.
John: What is it?
John: The electricity's already on.
John: All it requires is you keep the door unlocked.
Merlin: Somebody had the great idea to continue accepting money for more hours.
Merlin: Yeah, right, right.
John: For those who don't wake up until the late afternoon.
Merlin: Come on.
Merlin: Help us out.
Merlin: How hard is this?
John: Yeah, we have a 15-hour day just like everybody else.
John: But it doesn't end until three.
Merlin: I told my neighbor today, I said, happy Labor Day.
Merlin: I said, you know, when you're self-employed, you don't have a Labor Day.
Merlin: Because who would care?
Merlin: Who would care?
John: There's no sympathy for the man.
John: Every day is Labor Day.
Merlin: Sleepy podcaster gets no slack.
John: Sleepy podcaster gets no slack.
John: That's one of my favorite kung fu moves.
John: It's $11.59.
Merlin: You and Susan are there, and you've got a sandwich with stuffing and not enough gravy.
John: No, this is the diner.
John: No, I'm talking about the grocery store.
John: And I buy not one, but two sharing size M&M bags.
John: One peanut M&M's, one peanut butter M&M's.
Merlin: Peanut butter slurry, okay.
John: And then I bring them home, and I get out a big glass cookie jar.
John: of the kind that you might steal a cookie from.
John: That would be on top of the refrigerator or where someone put a cookie jar.
John: And we always had clear cookie jars so you could see the cookies.
John: I know some people have opaque cookie jars.
Merlin: That's like marking daddy's bourbon bottle.
Merlin: That way mom can see.
Merlin: You say, who stole the cookie from the cookie jar?
Merlin: And then the child answers, not me.
Merlin: And the mom says, not you.
Merlin: And the child says, not me.
Merlin: And the mom says, then who?
John: And you have to name someone else.
John: The little ghost that has not me on his t-shirt runs through the roof.
Merlin: He goes and scrubs up Jeffrey's footprints.
Merlin: Ah!
Merlin: What kind of cookie jar did you have?
Merlin: Did it say cookies on it?
Merlin: I don't think we had a canonical cookie jar.
Merlin: We had lots of things like that.
Merlin: We had, for example, oh, John, you're going to know this from your innumerable trips to thrift stores over the last 80 years.
Merlin: The sets.
Merlin: We've got a set of canisters.
Merlin: One that says sugar, one that says flour, diet pills.
Merlin: Yeah, exactly.
Merlin: You'd have those, and they're usually like an aluminum thing that had been in the family forever.
Merlin: We might have things like that.
Merlin: I feel like we did not buy a ton of cookies, and when we did have cookies, they were like a Nutter Butter or something I enjoyed.
John: These were made cookies.
John: It was a special thing.
John: My mom would make cookies, and then you have cookies.
Merlin: No, I honor it.
Merlin: I don't think we have one of those.
John: Let me just throw this out there.
John: My mom wants everybody to know this.
John: And we're going to get to that in a second because I'm going to start doing a podcast with my mom.
John: That's a very good idea.
John: She's always wanted people to know that the way to get a cookie to stay soft in the cookie jar is not to put more butter in it.
John: It's counterintuitively you put less butter in.
Merlin: That is a huge life hack, and it's a turns out all-in-one.
Merlin: I had no idea.
John: That's right.
Merlin: I would have thought butter affords moisture.
John: And that's what happens.
John: You're like, oh, more butter.
John: I'm going to make them salt.
John: It's like drinking salt water.
John: I get it.
John: No, the butter is what makes them crispier.
John: Like a chicken.
John: You get a good sear.
John: I get it.
John: You put more butter in to make it crispier.
John: You put less in to make it chewer.
John: Less than the recipe, I'm saying.
John: Anyway, I combined the peanut butter M&Ms and the peanut peanut M&Ms in the cookie jar and mixed them up so that every handful, you got some of each kind.
John: Get a mix, yeah.
John: Because that's what I like.
John: I like a little stuffing.
John: I like a little gravy.
John: I like a little mashed potatoes.
Merlin: Mm-hmm.
John: I don't want any rosemary, and there aren't any in these M&Ms.
Merlin: And what I didn't do is get the regular— Rosemary M&Ms are something that never should have been uttered.
Merlin: It might be, according to the book The Secret, that might now be evidence because we brought that into the world.
Merlin: What about a cilantro cookie?
John: You're saying that no one—maybe, it's possible, no one ever said rosemary M&Ms until right now.
Merlin: John, if we get through this Delta thing, I give it six months before there is at least two competing restaurants in Portland that have herbal cookies.
Merlin: And not that kind of herb.
John: Oh, you know they already have herbal cookies.
John: I've gone into places and they're like, oh, would you like to try some of our licorice fudge or whatever?
Merlin: Also, stop doing things with flowers.
Merlin: Don't put flowers in food.
Merlin: Just stop all of this.
Merlin: You know, just everybody's being too cute.
Merlin: And they're too close to it, John.
Merlin: They're too close to the flame.
Merlin: They don't see how cute they're being.
Merlin: It's not helping.
John: Maybe they do.
John: You know, that ice cream parlor in Venice Beach, all they serve is ice cream made out of flowers and laurel leaves and ketchup.
Merlin: Yeah, but that's like Berkeley.
Merlin: I'm glad Berkeley exists, but I don't want everywhere to be Berkeley.
Merlin: Are you glad Berkeley exists?
Merlin: I think it's important.
Merlin: This is what I say to people who are in from Berkeley are going to Berkeley.
Merlin: As I say, I'm glad Berkeley exists because I think we need Berkeley to tell us when we've gone too far.
Merlin: Like, you know, like if there's not a law that says all all dogs can only be served fair trade coffee.
Merlin: You know what I'm saying?
Merlin: The kinds of things where you're like, I don't even know where to begin with you, Berkeley, but I'm so glad you're here.
Merlin: I'm glad you're around.
Merlin: I used to think this was about Texas.
Merlin: Bad on me.
Merlin: I used to think with Texas, it's, well, because do you remember when we were kids, I'm sorry, I'm getting off your story, but do you remember, I say this to people all the time when I talk about how I'm from Florida, mostly, and how like when I was a kid, Texas, it was Texas and Southern California were the two places where all the crazies were.
Merlin: Texas always seems so big.
Merlin: Texas seems so big, and I think it's probably what they call the law of large numbers.
Merlin: That's partly why you get so many crazies in Texas, right?
Merlin: And then even in Southern California, in the Manson family, who you got there?
Merlin: Tex Watson, right?
Merlin: So Texas.
Merlin: But the thing is, I think Florida has stolen their crown, and now Florida is the home of crazy.
Merlin: But I like Berkeley, and it's a lot of fun, but they are awfully cute.
John: You know, in Washington, it used to be Olympia because, you know, Bellingham was always Bellingham.
John: Everything was always everything.
John: You know, Tacoma had a very unique character and there wasn't anything cute about it.
John: Tacoma had zero cute.
John: If you had cute and were driving through Tacoma, you put it in your glove box until you're on the other side.
John: But Olympian... I get it.
Merlin: I get it.
Merlin: It's like how you can... In New Orleans, bless their heart, if you have a drink and it's in a cup, as long as you're using a straw, it's not considered an open container.
Merlin: That's extremely cute.
Merlin: But that's part of the tee-hee fun of New Orleans.
Merlin: In this case, you're saying, as long as I can't see you're cute, I'm not going to search your glove box.
John: It's interesting.
John: Open container, in that sense, it's open to the air.
John: But when you put your lips on the straw, the drink never touches the air between the bottom of the drink and your lips.
Merlin: These kinds of laws can be very strange.
Merlin: I don't know if this is true.
Merlin: I'm not a lawyer.
Merlin: But I remember being told in Florida that when you go out and you buy your 12-pack of Bush, that you need to put it in your trunk.
Merlin: Because if it's in the passenger compartment, yes, even in the back seat –
Merlin: That is in violation of some open container adjacent law.
John: Sure.
John: Put it in the trunk.
John: But don't put it in the trunk and leave it in there on a hot day.
Merlin: No.
Merlin: Especially Bush.
Merlin: Yeah.
John: You know, I didn't go to Texas for the first time until I was in the long winters.
John: And I remember we had a show.
John: It was our first show booked in Texas.
John: We were driving there to meet the band Centromatic in Denton, Texas.
John: We were going to meet them for the first time.
John: We were going to play a show together at the Rubber Gloves in Denton.
John: And we were driving – that was the name of the cool bar in Denton.
John: We were driving there, and we were coming at it from a weird –
John: direction i think we were coming to texas from memphis maybe and and if i remember from the mountain goat song that's got to be in west texas right well it's in north texas it's north still that's a long ass drive with probably not many venues in between everything in america is a long drive if you have nothing to think about
John: I heard that's true in Canada even more.
John: Oh, even.
John: There's a whole Canada in between the two Canadas.
Merlin: No, there's a bunch of Canada we don't even know the name of.
Merlin: But in that instance, you drive from Tennessee.
Merlin: You're going to drive.
Merlin: I don't have a map in front of me, but that's going to be a pretty long drive.
John: Yeah, you go through all these Arcalooses and stuff down there.
John: oh yeah tampolini the whole way yeah kansas i'm driving along and i'm thinking back to sixth grade sixth seventh grade right about seventh grade when uh when who shot jr
John: was on everybody's lips.
John: Who shot J.R.?
John: 1980, 81.
Merlin: Who shot J.R.?
Merlin: Who shot J.R.?
Merlin: Who shot J.R.?
Merlin: A lot of people thought it was that one guy, the lawyer-looking guy who's not in the family.
Merlin: I think a lot of people... Did it turn out to be Kristen?
Merlin: I don't remember.
Merlin: Well, see, I didn't... All summer long, this is post-Devil Went Down to Georgia.
Merlin: This would be 1980.
John: Oh, yeah.
John: It was post...
John: the uh smokey and the bandit this was the this was the we might still get to watch bj and the bear bj culture on the skids this is really i love that band okay and so uh dallas was on tv every week and people were really into watching dallas i think i just sang i think i just sang the lost ark thinking i was doing dallas wait dun dun dun dun that's right how does dallas go
John: Don't remember because I didn't watch it because I was a Ginnett.
John: I was a Ginnett.
John: What about Falcon Crest?
John: Did you watch Falcon Crest?
John: No.
John: No, because I was a Ginnett.
John: I was a Ginnett.
John: You were a Ginnett.
Merlin: You watched Dukes of Hazzard.
Merlin: I watched Dukes of Hazzard, right?
John: No, I didn't watch.
John: Well, I watched a little bit of the Dukes.
John: I think you might be anti-Southern.
John: Well, because my mom was so anti-Southern that I just couldn't.
John: She was against it.
John: The South and Bonaparte, two things.
John: She didn't break country music.
John: She thought it was hillbilly yodeling.
John: She was just against it, the whole bit of it.
John: Got it.
John: And, you know, what I didn't realize, I thought that she was against it because her great-grandfather fought in the Civil War for Ohio.
John: But no, partly what she was a gimmick for was that her father and her brother and a large portion of her mother's family all moved to the South.
Merlin: Denton forms a triangle with Fort Worth and Dallas.
Merlin: You've got Fort Worth and Dallas, which are Cheek to Jowl, Minneapolis-St.
Merlin: Paul style.
Merlin: And then up north of there, okay, I thought this is where the best ever death metal band is from.
Merlin: They are, well...
John: I'm going to take issue with it, actually.
Merlin: Well, when you punish a man for, you know.
John: I feel like the best ever death metal band is from Finland.
Merlin: Oh, well, this would be the best ever death metal band out of Denton, which is a smaller pond, death metal-wise.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: Right, right, right, right.
Merlin: And then you could get into the levels of death metal.
Merlin: You get into Swedish death metal.
Merlin: Then you drill down into my favorite, which is melodic Swedish death metal.
Merlin: That's where you're getting... We're not talking about church burners here.
Merlin: That's a whole totally different head.
Merlin: Are we not, though?
Merlin: Well, I think... I think... You know what?
Merlin: I don't know enough about it to say.
Merlin: There you go.
Merlin: Denton is...
Merlin: So north, northwest of Dallas, northeast of Fort Worth.
Merlin: And I would say, I'm not an expert here, that is very central Texas, it seems to me.
Merlin: Yeah, central north, though, because north of there, north of Denton, what is there?
Merlin: What the hell is there?
Merlin: There's a Denton Chickasaw Nation, Choctaw Nation.
Merlin: It's up in Oklahoma, Wichita Falls.
John: You got Waco up there.
John: Nobody wants to be up there.
John: no that's you might as well you're in Oklahoma yeah I think you're probably right the thing about I mean Denton used to be like Boulder used to be to Denver and the thing is we say Dallas Fort Worth but Fort Worth is way the hay over there you can see Fort Worth from Dallas is that also how Athens is to Atlanta
Merlin: Yeah, there you go.
Merlin: You're talking about college-ish town, different disposition than its neighbor, maybe to some extent Gainesville in Florida, a little bit.
Merlin: Like when you drive, you drive out of Gainesville, man?
John: No, no, no.
John: See, Gainesville is different because Gainesville does not have a corresponding metropolitan area.
John: True.
John: Okay.
John: What would it be?
John: Orlando?
Merlin: No, no, you're totally right.
Merlin: I just meant like Tallahassee for sure and Gainesville 10 times more.
Merlin: Like you drive out, here's the area where you can play at the covered dish and buy a futon and then you drive a few miles and it's like, you're in pickup country, buddy.
John: What happened with Denton vis-a-vis Dallas-Fort Worth is what happened to
John: boulder visa v denver which is what happened to athens visa v atlanta which is that at one point and not that long ago they were completely separate communities way out you know you you got out nobody considered them adjacent huh no because they weren't they were they were they were they were that away
John: But little by little, the creeping suburbs coming out of Decatur and coming out of whatever.
John: Eisenhower made all those highways.
John: Now everything is everything.
John: You drive north from Denver now, and you're just in bedroom communities all the way to the border.
Merlin: of boulder my i think my friend chris who i've mentioned here i think my friend chris went to boulder and it does don't they have a funny university name it's called cu but it's the university of colorado is that right that's what it is because it's also where mork and mindy was located if memory serves there are too many ucs out there so boulder's flipped it around cu but it's not colorado university here okay all right all right all right all right we need more letters
John: So, uh, the thing is Boulder did a thing a long time ago where the, where they nimby themselves and they said within the city limits of Boulder, you can't do certain things.
John: You can't have a taco bell.
John: You can't, you know, you have to.
Merlin: Oh, they did like that whole like sign ordinance type thing.
John: And what happened, what had happened was Boulder resisted becoming a bedroom community of Denver.
John: And what it became is a rich hippie enclave.
John: You have to be rich to buy a house in Boulder.
John: Okay.
John: It's a hippie enclave now.
John: I bet that happened a lot in Washington.
John: None of those hippie enclaves, none of those people, they're all 75 now and they don't want to sell.
John: And they got these bungalows that are worth a million and a half.
John: And Boulder, even in 1990, you could buy a house in Boulder for eight a week.
Merlin: It wasn't incorporated until 1866, John.
John: Well, and if you look at Denton's got a town square.
Merlin: I'm looking at it now.
Merlin: This building is gorgeous.
Merlin: This is the courthouse.
Merlin: Yeah, the courthouse right in the middle.
Merlin: It's like 1.21 gigawatts right there.
Merlin: No kidding.
Merlin: You could hang a wire off that.
Merlin: Oh, you're right.
Merlin: I'd expect a kid to go hoverboard right by this.
Merlin: This is a beautiful building.
John: The clock tower ended up getting hit by lightning.
Merlin: But that's not the one in Austin.
Merlin: That's a different clock tower.
Merlin: That's a different clock tower.
John: As we were driving toward Texas, I was having this identity crisis.
Hmm.
John: Because here I am, I'm 32 years old, I've never been to Texas, and it felt like I'd done it intentionally in order to honor a pact that I'd made as a young man, as a 12-year-old.
John: A pact that I made when everybody wanted to know who shot JR, I swore, I put my hand on the Dungeon Master's Guide, and I swore, I'm never going to go to Texas.
John: I made one of those punk rock oaths.
John: I'm never going to go to Texas.
John: No, I get it.
John: But that's big talk.
John: The thing is, I didn't know.
John: And in Alaska at the time, there were so many oil people from Oklahoma and Texas and all these people, Louisiana.
John: They were all up there because of the pipeline.
John: They had just completed the pipeline just a couple of years before.
John: And they were all their Southern accents up there conflicting with our
John: with our native Minnesota accent, as evidenced by our vice presidential candidate, Sarah Palin.
Merlin: Wait, so that's, this is like one of those, like the language guy on Wired.
Merlin: This is one of those kinds of things, like why some people in New Orleans sound like they're from Brooklyn.
Merlin: Now, was that an accident, or is that owing to Minnesotans coming here?
John: No, it's not Minnesotans at all.
John: What it is is that,
John: Norwegians.
Merlin: Okay.
John: Who also have death metal and church burning.
John: They emigrated both to Minnesota and Alaska directly from Norwegia.
Merlin: Okay.
Merlin: So you could get a little house on, no offense to the long winter, but you could get some Laura Ingalls-ass people showing up there to work on the rigs or the pumps or the pipes.
John: Oh, no, no.
John: Long time before that, back when it was farmers and fishermen.
Merlin: Farmers and fishermen.
John: The Norwegians came all the way, long time before the Texans.
John: And they were up there in Palmer and Wasilla speaking that like, oh, you sure you betcha up there.
Merlin: And it's before Fargo, the movie Fargo.
John: So people just sound like they're from Wisconsin or whatever.
John: Oh, that's why those that's why Sarah Palin talks like that.
Merlin: It's before.
Merlin: Before everything was everything.
Merlin: Let's be honest.
Merlin: This is back when something could, might be something.
Merlin: But it wasn't that you would not be exposed.
Merlin: People talk about this all the time.
Merlin: That American accents used to be much more pronounced before the age of radio and television.
Merlin: Because you would not be exposed to people from those different places.
John: The Norwegians weren't up there as like some kind of prominent people.
John: They came because they were getting kicked out of Norwegia for, I don't know, some potato famine or whatever.
John: They were just farming people everywhere.
John: The people that actually ran downtown Anchorage, they all spoke like they were from New Haven because they were.
John: Okay.
John: It's the, it's just the, it's just, it was the Hicks and the Hillbillies that spoke like that.
John: And then real Hicks and Hillbillies showed up from down South.
John: So I was again, I was again, you're again, you're again, JR and again, Texas.
John: I was again at all.
John: And I swore in 1980, 81, whatever that summer was, I said, I'm not going to Texas.
John: Take that, Texas.
John: Take that, America.
Merlin: You would say this to people.
Merlin: When they'd be talking about J.R.
Merlin: and wondering who shot him.
Merlin: Who shot him?
John: I'd be like, don't care.
Merlin: I don't care so much that I will never go to Texas.
Merlin: Not going to go.
John: And at the time...
John: The new vice president, George Herbert Walker Bush, was quote unquote from Texas, although he was clearly from up.
John: Nobody that runs the CIA has ever been from Texas.
John: That's right.
John: And there was all this Texas talk, Texas, Texas, Texas.
John: It had moved.
John: The fascination had moved from Alabama, where where the bandit was was.
John: peeling out and it had moved all the way or, you know, whatever, Atlanta, right?
John: He was there.
John: They were thirsty in Atlanta.
John: They weren't thirsty in Alabama.
John: He had to get across Alabama.
John: That's where he was spinning his tires, Texas.
John: So I'm, so here we are long winters.
John: We're driving there.
John: We're, we're going to meet Centromatic in Denton.
John: And I'm saying to the guys out loud in the van, I swore I would never go to Texas.
John: That was an oath I made.
Merlin: Did you feel like you were being disloyal to your young self?
Merlin: Well, you know, it's an oath.
Merlin: I mean, I don't make oaths.
Merlin: Oaths don't expire unless that's a specific codicil of the oath.
Merlin: That's right.
Merlin: The point of the oath is that you say, you know, it's like Jerry Seinfeld betting Kramer about making levels in his apartment.
Merlin: And then when Kramer doesn't make levels, he says, well, the bet's off.
Merlin: I'm not doing it.
Merlin: And Jerry says, that's the bet.
Merlin: Like in this case, that's the oath.
Merlin: The oath is I'm not going, and if I'm 30 and meet in Centromatic, well, bad luck for everybody.
John: And nobody, there's not a living soul that even remembers that oath.
John: Like, all of those people are dead.
John: Or the ones that are living, they don't remember it.
John: I made it, you know, it was the type of oath that you make standing in the center of a Halloween party.
Merlin: I'm never going to Texas.
Merlin: I totally understand.
John: Because actually, and here's the, this is the ugly part of this story.
John: I started seventh grade.
John: at Wendler Junior High School.
John: And I'd gone to North Star Elementary.
John: Now, what had happened was, my mom, during that time, moved to Alaska, and she moved across Northern Lights Boulevard
John: on the other side of firewood.
John: Changing where you go to school?
Merlin: So you got fucked over for junior high and high school?
Merlin: You didn't get to go to the Ozzy Osbourne High School?
John: Well, so that was different.
John: But I mean, I had moved to Alaska, and I'd left my fourth grade friends, my kindergarten through fourth grade friends, back in Shoreline.
John: I'd moved to Alaska to live with my dad.
John: I went to North Star Elementary, because my dad lived on the west side of Northern Lights.
John: just south of Firewood.
John: Or I'm sorry, just north of Firewood.
John: My mom moved to the east side of... Wait a minute.
John: I'm not making any sense.
John: Not Northern Lights.
John: The Seward Highway.
John: My mom was to... That's okay.
Merlin: I wasn't going to say anything, but now that makes a lot more sense.
John: Tell me about the Seward Highway.
John: My mom moved to the east side of the Seward Highway.
John: You follow Fireweed across the Seward Highway.
John: She lived right over there on Ingra.
John: My dad lived over on...
John: East 24th, which was just to the north of Fireweed on the west side of the Seward Highway.
John: Northern lights.
John: What am I talking about?
John: Anyway, so now my mom's here, right?
John: So everything defaults to your mom.
John: I was going to North Star, but that would have meant that I went to Romig Junior High, which was associated with West High.
John: But my mom, bless her heart, she moves less than a mile from my dad, but now I'm going to
John: to Wendler Junior High, which is associated with East High.
Merlin: Okay.
John: Because I'm on the east side of the sewer.
John: All right.
John: Oh, that's to keep track of.
Merlin: They have a lot there for being such an obscure state.
Merlin: They got a lot of stuff.
John: Well, yeah, they got two.
John: They got, at the time, at least two high schools.
John: Is it geographically bigger than Texas, John?
John: No.
John: Oh, Alaska?
John: Yeah.
John: Well, Texas seems so big, but Alaska's the largest state of the union.
John: That's because we've all been punked out by Mercator projections.
John: No, we're still the large state of the union.
John: Mercator got it all wrong, but we're two-thirds the size of the world, Alaska.
Merlin: Two-thirds the size.
Merlin: That is really big.
Merlin: It was big for a country, which makes it extra big as an acquired state.
John: You could put the whole world inside of Alaska.
John: There would just be one-third of Alaska.
Merlin: You put the whole world inside of Alaska and you still have room for a second Disneyland and two parking lots and a stadium for the Disneyland.
John: Like a third, but it's over the edge.
John: It's like putting a pancake on top.
Merlin: They have not found all of Alaska.
Merlin: There are ideas.
Merlin: It's a lot like Canada in that sense.
Merlin: You think Canada is big?
Merlin: Woof.
Merlin: Alaska, they're still looking for the rest of Alaska.
John: You could put all of Canada in Alaska and there'd be the size of Alaska left over.
Merlin: That's amazing.
Merlin: That's big.
Merlin: It's difficult to argue with how big that is.
Merlin: You're going to need strong rules about which side of the highway John lives on vis-a-vis where he ends up being educated.
Merlin: It makes sense, but that's what an oath is.
Merlin: An oath is a rule.
Merlin: An oath is a rule that we give to ourselves.
John: Well, all of my friends, what I was saying was all of my elementary school friends are now going to Roamig.
John: I'm going to Wendler, but you know, those are still my old friends, or at least I, you know, I kind of thought those were still like, my kid's been through a similar thing with going to a different, uh, middle school than the rest of her friends.
Merlin: And you end up having different groups.
Merlin: It's a whole different culture.
John: You start trying to have play dates with your old friends.
John: It doesn't work out.
John: Cause all of a sudden you look, you look at them and you don't recognize them.
John: And so somebody from my, from North star now going to roaming invited me to a Halloween party.
John: It was, uh, it was a Halloween party.
John: Over, I'd never been to their house before.
John: You know, this was like somebody that I knew from elementary school.
John: I didn't know them well enough to have been to their house previously, but now I was getting invited to this party.
John: And I'd made a new friend at Wendler.
John: I'd been there, well, school starts on Labor Day, or the day after.
John: Like, this would have been 1980, so...
John: 41 years ago.
John: 31 years ago.
John: Today, I started at Wendler.
John: 41, John.
John: No.
John: 40.
John: Whoa.
Merlin: You dropped a decade.
Merlin: That's called dropping a decade.
John: 41 years ago today or tomorrow, I started at Wendler Junior High School.
John: I met Kevin Horning.
Merlin: Oh, Kevin Horning.
John: He looms large.
Merlin: He does.
John: He just moved to Alaska from Seattle.
Merlin: He did not want to be in Alaska.
John: He didn't want to be there.
John: He didn't like it.
John: He wanted to go back to Seattle because that's where his friends were.
John: And his dad had lived in England.
John: He'd lived in England with his parents.
John: And so he knew all this stuff.
John: He'd heard of the police by this point.
John: He'd heard of new wave music.
John: Like he, he had all this shit that the rest of us did not have.
John: Right.
John: He did not want to be in Alaska.
John: He'd gone to, what would it, what would you call it?
John: Second base.
John: He'd, he'd, he'd like second base.
Merlin: Second base is the top part above.
Merlin: I think we need to standardize.
Merlin: First of all, we need to talk about MILF inflation at some point.
Merlin: We also need to talk about standardizing the bases.
Merlin: Because maybe toward the end of this episode, I also want to talk about they might be giants at some point.
Merlin: But can we talk about the bases at the end?
Merlin: But he had had a knowledge that was carnal.
John: He had gone to second base.
John: The bases had never occurred to me.
John: I still didn't know what going with meant.
Merlin: Is that boob touching?
John: Yeah, what he said was he and his girlfriend had been in a park.
John: It was autumn.
John: The leaves were falling, and he took some leaves.
Merlin: Oh, and because it was fall, he was bracing himself that he didn't tumble down, and he accidentally grabbed lefty.
John: No, there wasn't anything accidental about it.
John: He took some leaves.
John: He stuffed them down the front of her sweater.
John: Okay.
John: And then she said, get those leaves out of there.
John: You're a bad boy.
Merlin: It was an elaborate pas de deux.
Merlin: Oh, I see.
Merlin: She's waving him in.
Merlin: She's the second base coach saying, get these leaves out of here.
Merlin: Get these leaves out of here.
John: Tee hee.
Merlin: Oof.
John: Anyway, so I say to Kevin, my brand new friend, who doesn't know anybody in Alaska, he and I met the first day of seventh grade, and somehow we became friends.
John: He was almost a year older than me.
John: Which is a big deal at the time.
John: It was a big deal at the time.
John: We were in Ms.
John: Dexter's science class.
John: where we all sat at big tables that had that black surface, that lab table surface.
John: You know we have one of those in our hallway.
John: You have one.
Merlin: Oh, yeah.
Merlin: I bought a science table in Tallahassee.
Merlin: I've got one of those.
Merlin: They're super heavy.
Merlin: They're wooden tables with the black top and the boogers underneath.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: All original.
Merlin: Yeah.
John: So I said to Kevin, want to come to this Halloween party with me?
John: It's a bunch of my old friends.
John: And he was like, I guess so.
John: Sure.
John: And I said, why don't we go as commandos?
John: And he was like, okay.
Merlin: Like a SEAL Team 6 type situation?
John: Yeah, but this was before we even knew there was a SEAL Team 6.
John: Oh, so really more like a G.I.
John: Joe.
John: Well, yeah, exactly like a G.I.
John: Joe, right?
John: We're going against Cobra Commander here.
John: Yes.
John: And so I'm like, we'll put camouflage paint on our faces.
John: We'll wear all black or camouflage and we'll be commandos together.
John: And he was like, okay, that's fine.
John: And I got Kevin in trouble a lot being commandos.
John: I think I've told the story where we got...
John: We were running around on the roof of the Alaska Railroad building with toy guns.
Merlin: Oh, yeah.
Merlin: For you, it was almost more of a lifestyle thing.
Merlin: My culture is not your costume.
John: That's right.
John: Well, that's exactly right.
John: And that whole thing on top of the Alaska Railroad building, that happened within weeks of this event, this Halloween party event.
John: And this was the first time I betrayed Kevin.
John: And it wouldn't be the last time.
John: But this was my first betrayal.
John: Kevin we showed up at no and the thing was I had on all black but the only way that I could get all black because I've never been a black wearer I Had some black pants.
John: I had a black shirt of some kind but the only jacket and this is Halloween in Alaska.
John: It's cold The only jacket I had was like this suit jacket this black suit jacket a blazer a blazer a black blazer and I had black leather gloves and
John: And then here's the here's the kicker.
John: I had a black cowboy hat that somebody.
Merlin: And so that is a lot of look.
John: It's a lot of look.
John: And so my commando outfit was all black, a black blazer, black leather gloves, a black cowboy hat, and then shoe polish on the face in a in a camo style pattern.
John: Right.
John: And so Kevin shows up and he's wearing what would be a better version of this costume.
John: He somehow had a camouflage hunting suit.
John: Head to toe, you know, like a classic green and brown camo?
John: Yeah, like an insulated brown hunting suit.
Merlin: We didn't used to have all those different kinds of camo in the digital camo.
Merlin: You had just camo.
John: This was oak tree camo that you would use to hunt deer in the Midwest.
John: And then he had some kind of green Radar O'Reilly hat that had ear flaps.
John: Helmet liner.
Mm-hmm.
John: And then he had, you know, also the camouflage, you know, the blackface paint.
John: And so we show up.
Merlin: Listen, let's be clear.
Merlin: It's a functional blackface.
Merlin: Yeah, yeah.
Merlin: No, this was commando.
Merlin: With these young people today, if you describe yourself wearing a blazer, black gloves, and a cowboy hat with blackface, I want to give some subtlety to the fact that you just didn't want to be seen, obviously.
Merlin: Yeah, no, no.
Merlin: This wasn't an Amos and Andy.
Merlin: That's the full point of camo is to not be noticed.
John: That's why you wear the cowboy hat.
John: So we go into this party, and it's a bunch of kids that I knew from elementary school, but also a bunch of kids from Rome and Junior High I never saw before.
John: And so that's weird.
John: And then I'm bringing my friend from Wendler Junior High that nobody's ever met before.
John: This was the first time I ever saw dry ice in a punch bowl.
Merlin: Oh, wow.
John: So that was very exciting.
John: That's a pretty big deal.
John: Yeah, the punch was like fucking bubbling and smoking and it was rad.
John: But we're standing there in the kind of the alcove and it's cold outside.
John: And so everybody, you know, you have to take off your coat and your boots when you, when you come in, we're standing there and we're just like, Oh, and I'm thinking to myself, this was a terrible mistake because if it had been just my six best friends from elementary school, it would have been really weird to bring Kevin.
John: But in fact, it's,
John: Six to 10 people I knew from elementary school and 10 other kids I've never seen.
Merlin: So did it make you feel bad for Kevin that he was kind of stuck in this odd place or you felt awkward for you too?
John: It gets worse.
John: Oh no.
John: Because one of the kids that I knew from elementary school, a guy I didn't like, a guy that
John: Oh, he was the kid.
John: So the smartest kid, and by smartest, I mean the one that aced every test in our school, was Diminidor Gobeleza.
Merlin: That is a terrific name.
John: Diminidor got... Diminidor Gobeleza.
John: Diminidor Gobeleza set the curve.
John: And then right behind Diminidor was Lori Basler.
John: The Lori Basler?
John: The Lori Basler.
John: Lori Basler was the second most...
John: smartest kid in the class.
John: And she had, she was, you know, she was always chasing Diminidor and it was a fraction of a percentage point, but Diminidor just never got a question wrong.
John: Lori Baszler, you know, I don't know, every once in a while, maybe she was distracted by the fact that I was sending so many love hearts at her from across the room that it just, and not that she would ever notice or look at me, but that just, you know, they bounced off of her and they caused her to miss one question.
Merlin: She might have noticed something or felt something, something probably, let's be honest, uncomfortable, but she might not have associated with you.
John: No, she felt a disturbance in the force.
Merlin: Okay.
Okay.
John: But then, so they were the two smartest kids in the class, and then came me, widely regarded as the most gifted kid in the class.
Merlin: Subtle, but important.
John: Whatever that meant, but it was something that the teachers... It means you're not living up to your potential, I think.
John: That's what it was.
John: The teachers would say these types of things out loud to us.
Merlin: Gifted is just only a little bit better than being called special.
John: It was something.
John: It meant something.
John: It meant that I was, in a way, outside of the problem, outside of the question of who was the smartest kid in the class, who clearly it was Diminidor.
John: But then I was outside of it somehow, over here, the most gifted one.
John: And then there was this kid, Matt, who was running a distant fourth.
John: And Matt could not, he could handle Diminidor being the smartest kid.
John: Because how are you going to touch Diminidore?
Merlin: He never gets anything wrong.
Merlin: Was he okay with Laurie being number two?
Merlin: Oh, yeah.
John: Well, that's the thing.
John: You can't argue with Laurie Basler because she's incredible.
John: Laurie Basler, anything she touches turns to gold.
John: Diminidore's just flying.
John: Diminidore's like an SR-71.
John: And the thing is, Diminidore, the sweetest kid, too.
Merlin: See, that makes it harder.
Merlin: But what about that white ribbon gifted kid?
Yeah.
John: Well, that's the problem and I was when I showed up in fifth grade.
John: I was the new kid I'd come from Seattle And so also Matt had always been number three and he was comfortable position You came at the king you didn't even know it well And so I'm in the room right and Diminidors got no he's got no beef with me because Diminidors a golden child He's also very he's also very beautiful.
John: He has nothing to worry about No, I'm fine.
John: He's like and the thing is he's like, oh, you're the most gifted one great.
Oh
John: Cool.
John: Whatever that means.
John: You can draw or you can cut stuff out or you remember things like that's fine.
John: And Lori, she had no problem with me because, you know, here I was.
John: What was I?
John: I was I was over here.
Merlin: Your mind bullets were bouncing off.
John: I'm just and the thing is, if Lori had told me to go put my head in the toilet, I would have done it.
Merlin: Well, I mean, it's Lori.
John: But no.
John: Yeah, that's right.
John: But no, this kid, Matt, all of a sudden he's he's aced out.
John: Right.
John: What is he?
John: He's a white ribbon now.
Merlin: He's not a blue.
Merlin: He's not a red.
Merlin: I would go further.
Merlin: I think, I think at this point he's the, he's the, he's the runner up.
Merlin: And I think he's at, he's at very much, he's descended to participation award level.
Merlin: And so he's always, he knows it.
Merlin: He probably knows he's smart enough to, he's not smart enough to be in the top three or top two plus one, but he's smart enough to probably realize that he's been a step by John Roderick.
John: Oh, he, no, he's, it's not a question of smart.
John: He feels it.
John: Because it's like the teacher goes, okay, well, let's get, how about Diminidor, Laurie, and John over here, and then whatever, you, you, you, and you.
John: And he's just like, what?
Merlin: You?
John: He's Fredo.
Merlin: He's totally Fredo.
Merlin: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Merlin: Poor guy.
John: But he is one of these guys, he deserved it, right?
John: Because he's treacly, he tries to make alliances, he's always trying to undermine.
John: Basically, we turned him into Fredo, or maybe I turned him into Fredo.
John: but I don't care because I'm new at the school.
John: I'm just like, I don't know.
Merlin: It sounds to me like you're more like Tom Hagen in a lot of ways where you're very highly respected, but you're not really, you can never, you're not only, well, you're in the family, like honorarily, but you're not a wartime consulary.
John: Well, but that's the problem.
John: I wasn't, I'm not, you know, Tom Hagen takes orders.
John: I didn't take orders.
John: Dutch Irish.
John: I'm just out here.
John: You know, I was like, I'm floating by, right?
John: I'm like, his father and I were in the olive oil business.
John: I'm somebody else.
Merlin: German Irish, not Dutch Irish.
Merlin: What kind of craziness am I talking here?
John: Dutch Irish.
John: Yeah.
Merlin: Dutch Irish.
Merlin: Oh, can you imagine that?
John: The Dutch over here, the Irish over there.
John: They never meet in them.
Merlin: The super tall and the super small?
John: No, no, no.
John: Always after me lucky charms.
John: The Dutch and the Scots, sure.
John: Dutch Scots.
John: And the Scots and the Irish, it's the Scots.
John: They're the place where the Dutch and the Irish meet.
John: Okay.
John: I'm standing in the doorway of this party with Kevin.
John: We're kicking the snow off of our boots.
John: And Matt comes over in a way.
John: I already hate Matt.
John: And the thing is, he's going to Roemig now.
John: I'm no longer a threat to him.
Merlin: Yes.
John: I'm over.
John: It's time to mend our fences, Matt.
John: What's going on?
John: What are we doing here?
John: And he tries to mend fences.
John: He looks at me.
John: He looks me up and down.
John: And he goes, oh, oh, are you JR?
Merlin: Oh, shit, dog.
Merlin: He said, wait, wait, wait.
Merlin: So you guys walk in.
Merlin: You're kicking the snow off your boots, the boots off your feet.
Merlin: You're coming in.
Merlin: And Matt goes out of his way.
Merlin: Matt, who has no reason at this point to cause any kind of dust up with you.
Merlin: He comes up and he says, are you JR?
John: Now, he's not...
John: He doesn't know.
John: He doesn't know what's going on.
John: I've got a cowboy hat on and it's 1990 or it's 1980.
John: I've got a cowboy hat on.
John: Of course I'm JR.
John: I got black leather gloves.
John: I got a blazer on.
Merlin: Hmm.
Merlin: Do you think of pivoting to commando JR?
John: I'm a seventh grade JR.
John: Okay.
John: And I look around the room and everybody, this is a seventh grade Halloween party.
John: This is the year that people stopped wearing costumes and
John: And started wearing costumes.
John: It got cute.
John: Everybody now, there are no princesses here.
John: There are no Tony the Tigers.
John: Nobody's dressed like Yogi Bear.
Merlin: Irony had not been popularized yet, but it's where you might start getting a little bit ironic.
John: Well, or you're wearing something where there's no freaking shoe polish on your face.
Merlin: I see.
John: That's a big difference.
John: You're trying to look cute with each other.
John: Sure.
John: Right.
John: And the costumes are like trying to be cool.
John: Like I'm sure there was a Luke Skywalker or there was some, but you know, you're not wearing a helmet.
John: Because it's a party, and there's punch, and maybe the lights are going to go down, and people are going to kiss, and it's just like, it's changed.
John: Things have changed.
Merlin: Nobody wants to kiss a man in blackface, except maybe another person in blackface.
John: Well, so here's the betrayal.
Merlin: This is the first betrayal of Kevin.
John: The first time I ever betrayed Kevin, and not the last.
John: Oh, shit.
John: I went into the bathroom.
John: I washed off the face paint.
John: Oh, no.
John: And came out, and I was J.R.,
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Merlin: Are you, John?
Merlin: I know.
Merlin: This took a turn I could never have anticipated.
John: This is absolutely against.
Merlin: You became the thing you hate right in front of Kevin.
John: It is against my character in every respect.
John: But I was, I don't know what was happening.
John: It's not like I was going to kiss anybody.
John: Were you panicking, panicking a little bit?
John: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
John: I don't know what happened.
Merlin: Sure.
John: I went in because I looked down and I realized, oh, shit, I got a great costume on.
John: How did I not know this?
John: I went and I washed the paint off.
John: And I came out, and for the rest of the night, everybody was like, oh, great costume, man.
John: You're JR.
John: Who shot JR?
Merlin: And I was like, ah.
Merlin: And your friend, the outside of the Lonely Commando, he doesn't have a cowboy friend anymore.
John: Kevin, nobody knows him.
John: He's leaning against the wall, dressed in a very hot hunting outfit, with a hat on and his face painted.
John: And everybody's like, who's the...
John: Who's the stiff?
John: Who's the hunter?
John: You basically removed his context.
John: Yeah, there was no context to him.
John: I mean, my cowboy hat was already like not, it was not.
John: operable, right, as a commando outfit.
Merlin: I don't know.
Merlin: Maybe you're more like, speaking of Robert Duvall, maybe you're more of like the apocalypse leader guy in this commando unit, and he's your, what do you call it, esprit de corps, your attaché de toilette.
Merlin: What do you call that?
Merlin: Your chief of staff.
Merlin: Yeah, chief of staff.
John: Well, if not that, no, probably not chief of staff.
John: He's some kind of sergeant, but if you look at the... Charger de ferre?
John: Uh, no, he would be, he's just a guy in, in a commando outfit.
John: He doesn't, he has zero epaulets on him.
John: If you look at the original, I feel for Kevin so hard.
John: I'm not talking about the GI Joes that are, that are three feet tall.
John: I'm talking about the little ones that had the, that fought Cobra commander.
John: The later ones.
John: There was one of them that had a cowboy hat on.
John: He had a blonde mustache and sunglasses.
Merlin: That sounds like Big Jim, which was like gay G.I.
Merlin: Joe, which is what I had.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: Well, let's be honest.
Merlin: G.I.
Merlin: Joe got pretty gay in some ways.
Merlin: Oh, the whole thing, right?
Merlin: It was all the way for mentally.
Merlin: No man in 1981 to wear a rubber scuba suit that much.
John: Unless you were scuba-ing, but this was not, that would have been weirder at this part.
Merlin: In the same way that you were cover for his commando, I think G.I.
Merlin: Joe's, if I could say, and I'm not yucking on a yum or kink-shaming, but I think he found the career that suited his lifestyle.
Merlin: And good for him.
John: In Kevin's sense, he was a very good sport about it, but there wasn't anything he could do.
John: We got dropped off at this party, right?
Merlin: I understand.
John: The grown-ups were coming back.
John: This was before you could just go to the phone and call your mom.
John: Or that would have been the least cool thing he could have done.
John: So he just sat and took it.
John: He just took it.
Merlin: He was truly a commando in some ways at this point.
Merlin: I bet he was closer to what his costume was, the shape that it was throwing, that he was closer to that than a lot of people.
Merlin: Let's be honest, John, and I don't mean this in an unkind way.
Merlin: You know I love you.
Merlin: But you were not very close to J.R., but he was very close to being a stealth guy who might need to defend his life.
John: Oh, that's where you're wrong.
John: Because, of course, I was very close to J.R., just as I am to this day.
John: You're close to this rich man.
John: Well, yeah, the kind of, like, dangerous, maybe not that good.
John: Oh, you're a cad.
John: Yeah, a little bit, right?
John: The one that everybody knows him, everybody kind of likes him, but they also kind of don't.
John: He's sort of like, what's he?
John: I mean, in fact, by taking the paint off and arriving back at the party and being like, I'm J.R., what more J.R.
John: move is there than that?
Merlin: John, John, disappointing, disappointing sign of a much better respected man.
Merlin: Such a J.R.
John: move.
John: You're such a J.R., John.
John: So Kevin's leaning against the wall.
John: He is the commando.
John: I am the J.R.
John: Oh, God.
John: I've betrayed my friend.
John: And I was kind of the hit of the party, like, ha ha, you know, because it's something everybody could interact with.
Merlin: You went to that party thinking you were one thing, but just based on the unkind words of your competitor, Matt, now you're suddenly weirdly relevant in a way you probably weren't most of the time.
John: Matt was trying to cutsel up to me.
John: He gave me the greatest gift of the night.
John: He was cutseling?
John: He was truly trying to mend a fence?
John: He's cutseling because he's like, oh, you know, I still, if I am friends with you, then I get some of your reflected glory.
Merlin: I see.
Merlin: Number four wants to claw his way back up.
Merlin: I get it.
John: And the thing is, he's in junior high.
John: He's not even number four anymore.
John: As soon as you go to junior high, right, you always thought you were number one, two, three, or four, and now you're number five.
Merlin: No, that's like thinking you're the cutest M&M.
Merlin: Well, you're an M&M.
Merlin: Get in the jar.
Merlin: You're an Eminem getting the jar.
Merlin: I walk out of that party.
John: And what what was the what I learned, what was the most J.R.
John: about me was I had betrayed my friend.
Merlin: Oh, shit.
Merlin: And he said might have been you might have been needing some shooting at that point.
John: He said it to me.
John: He was like, you abandoned me.
Oh, no.
John: Did he say it at the party?
John: No, he said it to me as we were driving home, and I was like, you're right.
John: I did, and I have no excuse.
John: And this was the beginning.
John: Kevin and I are still friends.
John: We talk on the phone, and I still have never repaid him for that.
John: And you implied, John, that this was the first but probably not the last betrayal of Kevin.
John: That's right.
John: And the thing is, if somebody gave me $100 million right now, if somebody listens to the program that ended up
John: They're about to go public with their billion-dollar company, and they give you $100,000 and me $100,000 shares.
Merlin: No, I think for your project, it's important that we get this fixed.
Merlin: I will want to hear about future betrayals of Kevin.
John: If I get that money, the first thing I'm going to do is set a little bit of a side, enough to really change his life, and just send it to Kevin, because I owe him so much, all the way back to this 1980 Who Shot You?
Merlin: Oh, you're going to apologetically publish his clearinghouse, him.
Merlin: Like, you show up with some balloons and a novelty-sized check, and you say, Kevin, I know I need to make good on a lot of betrayals, but let's go back to October of 1980, and the first time I JR'd you super hard.
Merlin: And there are—oh, oh, this is the other thing.
John: My initials are JR.
John: My initials are JR.
Merlin: Your initials are JR.
Merlin: You're JR.
Merlin: You are JR.
Merlin: You're literally JR.
John: I'm freaking JR.
John: I was already JR.
John: It had all, everything just happened, right?
Merlin: I'm JR.
John: I was JR.
John: So I've done this before over the years.
John: I have sent Kevin gifts, surprise gifts that were a little bit too, maybe a little too much because I'm still, because they're so, I've betrayed him so many times over the years.
John: They're just all these little things that I, and little gifts aren't going to do it.
John: I'm going to have to give Kevin $5 million one day and I don't, and he's not, he doesn't want it.
John: It's not, he's not asking for it.
Merlin: Yeah, but it's not, it may not be for him.
Merlin: It's kind of for you.
Merlin: Well, that's,
Merlin: exactly in the sense that like you're not going to get that money you go to patreon.com slash john roderick the point is that you're going to set up some kind of uh some kind of a trust where they call them not non-cancellable trust you set up some kind of a thing that says kevin this is here there's going to be more things in the future that neither of us know about but let's let's begin paying down the first betrayal of kevin with with this amount of money and it's really it's going to be for his kids right i'm gonna i'll put a trust this is
John: Have you betrayed them, John?
John: No, I never have, and this is the thing.
John: I'm never going to be able to make it up to him for abandoning him at that party, but I will be able to put a trust together for his kids.
John: This all requires, of course, that somebody write us into their business plan.
Merlin: Yeah, you go to patreon.com.
Merlin: I think it's very important.
Merlin: Now, J.R.
Merlin: Ewing, he's John Ross, J.R.
Merlin: Ewing Jr.
Merlin: And yeah, this whole Wikipedia article makes him sound pretty unappealing.
Merlin: But you weren't thinking about that.
Merlin: You weren't thinking about... And so, John, can I ask a follow-up?
Merlin: I don't think we have time for which basis boobs.
Merlin: But my question to you is at what point...
Merlin: in this timeline, did you find yourself saying, I don't care who shot J.R., I'm never going to Texas?
John: Was that this party?
John: No, I was saying this the whole time, even before... You were saying this in the cafetorium.
John: This is how it was also a betrayal of myself, because I had... You would say, J.R.
Merlin: Schmayer, I'm never going to Texas.
John: Never going.
John: I was never going to go to Texas, even by this point.
John: But I'm at the party, and it was like a situation on the ground.
John: Now, let me just say that Kevin...
John: He betrayed me many times, right?
John: Kevin, Kevin.
Merlin: Who shot first?
Merlin: Who shot JR first?
John: The thing is, Kevin was a bigger boy than me at this time because he was a year older than me, and he used to hold my face down in the snow.
John: Kevin was the one.
John: Kevin made out with Christy Cata.
John: Kevin ended up, you know, Kevin had a girlfriend before me.
John: Kevin was kissing Mary Bald off on the side, and when I called him out for it, he punched me.
John: He punched me, and then I kicked the side of his truck, and then he told his dad that I kicked the side of his truck, and his dad called.
John: Oh, Dr. Horning.
John: You don't want to screw around, Dr. Horning.
Merlin: You know, one thing is you also, I don't want to, I think we could probably unintentionally belabor this, but you showed up at that party in blackface, and then you washed it off.
Merlin: The blackface was John Roderick, and when you washed it off, you became J.R.
Merlin: The black, the camo on my face.
Merlin: Well, potato, potato.
John: Well, the thing is that this was... I mean, that's what I'm saying.
Merlin: It's functional.
John: It's functional blackface.
John: I had just turned... Don't say blackface, all right?
Merlin: Oh, sorry.
John: Sorry, my bad.
John: Functional camo.
John: Kevin was almost 13.
John: Wearing camo to the party was... I walked into that party 11-year-old me, and I walked out of that party 12-year-old me.
John: Kevin was almost 13 walking into that.
John: He was already late 12, and he walked out of that party probably 15.
John: Oh, no.
John: You want to make it up to him, though?
John: What had happened was, as we're driving into Texas, I've been thinking about all of this.
John: I've been thinking about it.
John: The Longwinners are excited to meet Centromatic.
John: We're about to go on tour with them.
John: We're going to leave Denton with them on tour with Varnaline.
John: And the three of us are going to go over to the West Coast and back up to Seattle.
John: This was a tour that made...
John: The Longwinners and Centromatic, like, tight bros all the way.
Merlin: This is around, this is Pretend to Fall, right?
John: No, no, no.
John: Before, this is one of our first tours.
John: Oh, wait, this is before The Worst You Can Do Is Harm?
John: No, Worst You Can Do Is Harm.
John: Okay.
John: But before Pretend to Fall was even a twinkle in my eye.
John: Okay.
John: But Centromatic was who got us our...
John: our first European record label, Munich Records.
John: Then we got Centromatic, their Spanish label, Houston Party Records.
John: Like we toured Europe, we did everything.
John: We're driving in.
Merlin: Is it run by Daniel Lorca out of curiosity?
John: No, he was never involved.
John: I was desperate to find a solution to this problem because there was a part of me in my heart that felt like I needed to cancel the show.
John: and not go to texas i'd made this oath and as i'm driving there we're talking about it in the van and
John: And nobody in the long winters understood an oath like this.
John: Very few people do.
John: Very few people understand how an oath can be binding what would have at the time been.
Merlin: Beyond how long ago it was, beyond whether it was a good idea.
Merlin: Once again, that's the point.
Merlin: The point is you made the oath and you could either keep it or you can break it, but you cannot alter it.
John: At the time, it was only a 20-year-ago oath.
John: Now it's 40 years.
John: That was 20 years ago.
John: that I'm driving into Texas with this problem.
Merlin: Holy shit, you're right.
John: Oof.
John: Oof.
John: That's half a JR ago.
John: So we're driving in, and I say, all right, look, if we're going into Texas, there's nothing I can do about it.
John: I'm breaking this oath, what at the time feels like an ancient oath.
John: It's longer ago than half my life ago, and that remains true to this day.
John: And so the only way I can break this curse, the only way I can honestly break this oath is to go all the way.
John: And what that means is as soon as we cross into Texas, the first place we see that sells cowboy boots, we're pulling in and we're all buying cowboy boots.
Merlin: I remember this and Eric, I remember something about Eric buying, that's when this happened.
Merlin: Yeah.
John: And so we're driving down the highway in Texas.
Merlin: Did you frame it that way?
Merlin: So they knew about the oath.
Merlin: They didn't understand the oath.
Merlin: But did you present this to your band as, was it just one of those, hey, let's go pee and get some food?
Merlin: Or had you said this is important for the journey?
John: No, I said the only way we are going to trump the spell that I cast is by casting a higher spell, is by throwing...
John: We're, you know, we're throwing the 20-sided die here.
John: And we're, the four of us together, or it might have even been five of us at the time, we're going to, our combined Wonder Twin powers.
Merlin: What are the... Like a form of an ice monkey, shape of a ladder face.
John: What's the manga thing where five of them combine and they become one spaceship?
Merlin: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Merlin: Like a, you could be like a Battle of the Planet story.
Merlin: What's it called?
Merlin: Voltron?
Merlin: Like a Voltron?
Merlin: Yeah, become a Voltron.
John: And so we went into the, and it was a giant boot warehouse.
John: But you all need to roll a 17 at least.
John: It said boots on the sign.
John: We pulled off.
John: We went in.
John: I'm like shaking with nervousness.
John: Is this going to work?
John: I could see you flop sweating as you enter into the JR store.
John: Oh, yeah.
John: I'm not comfortable at all.
John: We walk in.
John: There's a kid that's 5'2".
John: He's got real tight Wranglers on.
John: He's got a big hat on inside because you're allowed to do that in Texas.
John: He's got pointy boots on and he says, how can I help you fellers?
John: And we're like, we got to get cowboy boots.
John: And he's like, you came to the right place.
John: And we, and that's right.
John: Rolling, rolling, rolling.
John: And we all go out, we fan out and everybody comes back with cowboy boots and we show up in Denton.
John: Meeting Centromatic for the first time.
John: And they are not wearing cowboy boots.
John: Nobody at the rubber gloves is wearing cowboy boots because that's not what's happening there.
Merlin: No, but you're like when Spinal Tap bought cowboy hats.
Merlin: I bet you'd pull it off about as well.
John: And we all walked in kind of teetering on our brand new cowboy boots.
Merlin: Those heels are harder to master than they look.
John: Howdy, howdy.
John: You're slipping everywhere.
John: Howdy.
John: We're like the Far Side cartoon where the vultures got a hat on.
John: Howdy, howdy, howdy.
Howdy.
Merlin: But it did.
Merlin: It broke the... How?
Merlin: Whoa, whoa, whoa.
Merlin: Okay, hang on.
Merlin: That's a big leap.
Merlin: How did you know the spell had been broken?
Merlin: How did you know that the oath had been successfully breached?
Merlin: How did you know it worked?
Merlin: Is it because you made yourself go into the store and get the things and be the thing you didn't want to be?
Merlin: You had to accept it to reject it?
John: This wasn't a Vichy France thing.
John: Right.
John: This was this was not a situation where I was like, no, no, no, it's still France.
John: It's just, you know, it's just petite France.
John: It's this was the real France.
John: It's the France at Avignon.
John: Yeah.
John: When I'm when I'm fucked up, it's the real France.
John: Yeah.
John: This was this was France.
John: This was this was not France.
Yeah.
John: this was this was more of a thing where uh you know portugal is competing with spain for uh you know for the new world and they're having a real spain's real freaked out because portugal is doing such a portugal takes brazil portugal you know portugal's doing all this business around the world portugal doesn't care about whatever the treaty it signed oh it starts because they share a border but there are proxy wars that are being played out all over the world possibly even in alaska as far as that's
John: They're fighting a global war.
John: Over a border, basically.
John: But the thing is that there's no conflict at the border.
John: They're just doing all this in Hispaniola, right?
John: They're fighting this thing in Suriname.
John: And then Spain realizes, you know, Portugal out at sea is going to kick our ass.
John: And then Spain annexes Portugal.
John: So Portugal's out kicking their ass in Cuba, but then Spain comes across the border, and they're like, guess who's part of Spain now?
Merlin: Oh, not so fast, Portugal.
Merlin: That's right.
Merlin: Obrigado.
John: Obrigado.
John: Obrigado.
John: So that's a thing where the Portuguese didn't see the real story.
John: The Portuguese are out here.
John: They're thinking, ha, ha, ha, look at us.
John: We're in the Dutch.
Merlin: Oh, the JR was right under their nose.
John: Yeah, that's right.
John: And Spain comes in the back door, and they're like, actually...
John: Hey, guys.
John: The story goes like this.
John: So it was it was on my oath, on my honor to, you know, to help other people and obey the law of the pack.
John: I came in the back door of the oath and said, yeah.
John: Nobody would have expected that.
John: Nobody expected it.
John: Right.
John: Even the oath didn't expect it.
John: I basically took off the paint and became JR again.
Merlin: Oh, shit!