Ep. 444: "Blue Link Girlfriend"
Hello?
Hi, John.
Hi, Merlin.
Oh, we have fun, don't we?
Wee!
Nice to hear from you.
Ooh, it's nice to be heard.
Yeah, you sound good.
You're full of beans.
Beans.
Yeah.
Yeah.
God, you've become quite a performer.
Well, thank you.
Yes.
Thank you.
That's a compliment.
It is a compliment.
I can say you're quite a character.
Quite a character.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Quite a performer.
A lot of balls in the air.
Uh-huh.
Uh-huh.
How's your balls?
Not as many balls in the air, actually, as in times past, right?
I got quite a few balls in the air, more than most.
I think that's thoughtable.
I think it's a lot of, I think people got too many balls, too much air.
Oh, you know, people aren't meant to communicate with each other.
No, no.
You know, you and I talk once a week and that's, that's nice, but that's about it.
You know, this is the thing with, this is the thing with the internet.
I don't know if you've heard, but the internet's in crisis.
Oh no, what happened?
Well, people aren't meant to communicate with each other.
We thought it was a great idea.
Remember?
Didn't it seem like a great idea?
I feel like I do.
I feel like I do.
It was a while back.
But I feel like a lot of the notion that we should be communicating with each other, a lot of that came along before we actually started communicating with each other.
And I think we kind of saw how that turned out.
Yeah, it used to be hard.
And so we thought, wow, we should make it easy.
And then we did make it easy.
And, oh, the things we used to say sitting around the cafe.
Wow.
Once there's an internet and we can all talk to each other.
Yes.
Oh, the things we'll do.
Yeah.
And now.
Subtle arguments.
Mm-hmm.
You know, look up the names of actresses and who they used to be married to.
We can still do that.
Yeah.
It's nice, but I mean, that is a form of communication in some way, but we talk to each other too much, I think, about too many things too often.
And too many of us.
Too many of us talk too much.
Yes, yes, yes.
Right.
It's interesting that you mentioned looking up actresses.
I look up actresses.
It's basically all I do.
At night when I watch TV with my family, I'm watching TV, but mostly I'm just trying to remember what somebody was in.
Well, I was thinking that I do that all the time where I'm like, ha, ha.
I think that's the woman who's in this one sketch.
And I think, and I think you should leave.
And then I go look that person up and I see what else they've done.
And then that leads me down a kind of a, if you like a rabbit, rabbit trail.
Well, you and I use, use media differently as we've discussed.
And, and, and I don't generally, now this is going to, this may shock you to your core.
Oh no.
I generally don't care what they were in before.
Oh, you should live with my family.
I generally don't.
If I see somebody that I've seen in a different thing.
They super duper don't care.
And then it's so gallant to me because I go, hey, you see that guy?
The guy, Ronan the Accuser?
Ronan the Accuser is also the guy in Halt and Catch Fire.
Right.
And then my daughter says, I don't know what you're talking about.
I haven't watched Hulk and Catch a Fire.
I said, yes, you have.
You've seen this guy.
I said, he's also an elf in Lord of the Rings.
And I showed her a photo.
She said, oh, that guy.
And that's all I get from that.
Yeah.
So you should live with my daughter's mother.
We've seen, there's a lot of reasons.
Never sent me those photos, but does she continue to dress like Donald Tricks Lestrange?
We should do a little wife swap, but she...
She loves to do exactly, she would love this conversation with you.
Maybe we should get on the internet and communicate.
Yeah, it's like, oh, that's the person that was the one thing.
I'm sorry, John, just to be clear.
It's not a wife swap, it's a family swap.
And its connotations are extremely different.
You're right.
You're absolutely right.
Family Swap.
And that should be a TV show.
Family Swap.
Oh, it kind of was, wasn't it?
I think it was.
See, there's too much communication.
Family Swap.
I'm going to capture that.
Oh, and the guy from Family Swap was the guy that was in Happy Days.
Oh, you know.
He was in the thing.
He was Ralph Melf's little brother.
I remember that, Donnie Most Jr.
Jr.
Yeah.
Yeah, I remember that.
He goes by Don now.
I don't do that.
When I see a TV show that I like, or when I see a celebrity, or when I listen to a music, or when I hear a news,
I will often, of course, do a dive on the person and follow the trail, follow the internet trail.
What's the story with this person?
How did they do this?
Where are they coming from?
This is just a flashbulb.
It's a moment in time.
What else is going on with this person?
What else is going on with the person?
I go look them up.
But what I was thinking about the other day,
And this is, you know, this is, I don't think this is going to shock you to your core, but I was realizing a lot of the people that I look up, you look them up and then it says, you know, they were married three times or they were married five times.
A lot of people in show business.
Wikipedia likes to put that in a little side rail.
Yeah.
Married five times or whatever.
A lot of people got divorced in the 70s, from what I can tell.
They did.
They did.
And there are people who were married for two years, and then two years, and then two years, and then the fourth time they were married for 25 years.
Like, they got it right.
They finally figured it out.
But I always, of course...
then want to look at all their spouses.
Who were these people?
Where did they come from?
What were they all about?
Especially if a spouse has her own or his own Wikipedia.
Is it no link?
Is it red link?
Is it blue link?
Because blue link means they might be kind of famous too.
Sure.
And then you go and then you, and then sometimes you realize, oh, well, wow.
You know, the, the, the celebrity, the person I was first looking up, they married up.
Like it turns out John Taylor of Duran Duran, his second wife, his first wife was a, was a beautiful Danish model.
They, that relationship didn't work out.
His second wife was the woman that started juicy couture.
You mean put on people's bottoms, said juicy?
The word juicy on people's bottoms.
I had no idea.
Is that in England?
No, I don't think so at all.
I think it's American.
And not only that, but she's like 10 years his senior.
So at some point when he was in his late 30s and she was in her 40s, he was like, you juicy lady are the one for me.
And she's got to be richer than Croacius.
Yeah.
Are they still together?
Yeah, they're still together.
Oh, I love that.
And they cut a very striking couple.
It turns out Nick Rhodes... He was the keyboard player, right?
He was the keyboard player.
He married a girl.
He was only 20 years old and they were already the biggest band in the world.
He met an American...
on a boat, a cruise ship or some kind of party on a yacht.
Her name is Rio.
And she, no, her name was something like Shoshana.
She was the daughter.
Yeah.
She was the daughter of the, uh, of some kind of like Iowa, uh,
department store magnate and they met on a yacht.
She's just like a, like a Jewish American princess who from a, from a department store family in Iowa.
And he's like, you're the one for me.
And she was, and she was a foot taller than he was or whatever.
Maybe not a full foot.
Anyway.
So I'm really, you know, I, this is something that I enjoy.
I'm reading about people.
I'm reading about their, their spouses.
And then I realized.
Yeah.
I've never been married.
And as a consequence, if you look at my Wikipedia, I don't have any list of spouses.
And if you were somebody who was like, well, I'm going to look up John Roderick and see what he's done, what he's been doing, that whole side of my story is
is just gone it's not there it didn't um wikipedia there's a lot as i understand it anyway is a lot about like reaching a certain bar and if you go and read the talk page behind anything that's that's where all the real fun is happening is on the talk page um and so but for the bar in this instance is well you have to be famous enough i don't know what the current rule is but like i think you have to have been on tv at some point mostly but anyway and there's another bar that you're telling me about now i think which is
Spouse.
Spouse.
So what about like long?
Okay.
If I look up Lee Marvin, am I going to see that Michelle Triola Marvin was a longtime companion?
If not, John, does a common law spouse count as a spouse on Wikipedia?
So somewhere, I think somewhere at the level where your level of fame access is high.
Yeah.
And the level of, uh, fame of your, of your partner is high or that the relationship is well enough known and prominent enough in the world.
Okay.
Yes.
That it would, that it would warrant an asterisk long time.
Uh huh.
But in my case, right.
Like, like there's never going to be on my Wikipedia page millennium girlfriend.
Yeah.
Well, not on the official week.
That could be a Wakia thing.
But if we'd been married... I get it.
Lee Marvin, I think I picked probably too extreme of an example.
According to the Lee Marvin Internet Science page, it says here that he was married to a woman and divorced, that he was married to a woman in 1970.
But Michelle Triola, who does have a blue link, it says partner, like partners...
partners michelle triola 1965 to 1970 now there's another bar which is like you'll sometimes see some jazz like let's say let's say you're an lgbtq um person like you'll see some jazz where like you might see in the personal section that the guy who plays guillermo on what we do in the shadows is out as is out as queer i don't think it mentions people that he's been partners with in the text
Because if it gets mentioned in the text, that's a low bar.
I think the higher bar is then you got to have a spouse if you want to have it show up in the right rail, unless you're a Lee Marvin type with a blue link girlfriend.
So is it possible this is part of the process?
Is the Wikipedia is deciding which relationships are significant?
Well, that's the thing.
But also, I think there is...
You know, spouse is a heavy word.
It's a, it's a, it's a heavy word.
Right.
And so like Shel Silverstein, who incidentally, in addition to writing where the sidewalk ends, wrote a boy named Sue.
Shel Silverstein, apparently throughout the sixties and seventies and eighties, just spent a bunch of time hanging out at, at a playboy mansion and
It says in his Wikipedia that Shel Silverstein has slept with hundreds, if not thousands of women.
Ooh.
And that's got a citation?
It's right there in the Wikipedia.
Hundreds, if not thousands.
Once a year, we have to have a read the internet episode, and it might as well be this week.
Oh, wow.
That's a very distinctive look.
Oh, he's got a heck of a look.
He's bald.
He's bald before bald was bald.
Bald before bald was a thing.
And also, I just don't understand how they come up with these photos.
This is from circa 1964, and he's got two children, dark comedy.
There's his signature.
That seems like bad OPSEC.
Now, I'm going to go down to look for his intercourse.
Is that impersonal, probably?
Well, I don't remember.
It was a long time ago.
But it made me wonder.
I think we've talked about this before.
I know almost certainly we have.
Okay.
My dad, as we've discussed.
And his receipts and his canceled checks.
And his canceled checks and all of the letters from the IRS.
Where they're like, dear Mr. Roderick.
This is our last attempt.
Dear Mr. Roderick.
The tiny, tiny heirloom hidden in a box of garbage paper.
Yeah.
Isn't he famous for putting an heirloom in garbage paper?
I still have it all.
I'll open a file and I'll be like, garbage, garbage, garbage.
Oh, isn't that nice?
Garbage, garbage, garbage, garbage.
There are the papers for you getting discharged from the Navy.
And you were looking for those for the second half of your life.
And now I've found them 15 years after you died.
But no, you know, my dad was a legendarily bad photographer.
And I say that just in my own opinion, no one else feels that way because no one else looks at things.
Could you tell what he was photographing?
No.
Oh, yeah, well... You can tell it's humanoid, but blurry, that kind of thing?
It was not just that, but, you know, when you point a camera at something, you look through the lens, and you are, hopefully, framing a photograph in your mind.
Mm-hmm.
Where you are... You're like, oh... What to leave in, what to leave out.
Yeah, this should be in the picture.
That shouldn't, you know, why don't we put...
in the upper corner here, why don't we get a little lens flare?
And in the bottom corner, why don't we get the fact that there's a suitcase on the ground?
You know, and my dad believed that if you pointed a lens at something, it would take in all the... It would take in the... Classic rookie problem we all grew up with is somebody with the Kodak, in my case, like a Kodak Instamatic, like trying to think that you could shoot a landscape.
And I know...
Just the tiniest bit enough about lenses and optics to understand why that is, but it happens to this day.
I go outside, the moon looks beautiful.
I shoot it with my information telephone and it doesn't really capture the grandeur because there's no, there's not, you don't have the context for it.
It's not going to look cool the way you hope it looks cool.
It's a lot, there's a lot more to it.
A lot more to it.
And my dad was aware of that because he, because my dad liked gizmos and he went to the, to the, um, the camera store all the time.
And he had a collection of seven expensive lenses and two Canon AE one programs.
And he didn't know how any of it worked and he didn't figure out how it worked.
He just pointed the lens at things and believed it was a vacuum cleaner that would suck up all of the, the, all of what he could see.
And then when he would get his photographs back 10 days later, he would, I don't know what he saw when he looked at the photos, honestly.
I don't know when he looked, when I looked at the photos, I was like, that's the photo?
Of all the things that happened that day, this is the moment you captured or this is the way you framed that moment?
Yeah.
But so I inherited all these pictures.
I still don't know what to do with 80% of them because what they really, they just, they belong in the shredder, except in a lot of cases, they're 50 year old photographs now.
And, and that.
You never know what future technology is going to bring.
You know, I often think to myself, there's things like that where,
You know, and I admit this is a little bit of my Borges prejudice of like thinking about is some kind of crazy thing going to happen in the future that enables something that seems impossible right now.
For example, in the 70s, it might have seemed nuts to think you'd have a phone where you communicate with anybody in the world and you kind of wish you could.
And then once you got it, you wish it never happened.
Could there be something where those photos, Google comes up with some service that they run for up to six weeks, where you run it through a dingus, and it goes, here's the photo he wanted to get.
You mean you could sit there and go, enhance.
So you enhance, don't put me a hard copy.
Yeah, you drink out of a square glass.
See, maybe so.
And so I don't want to, the thing about photographs is- I love that sound so much.
I don't know what's causing it.
Chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck.
I'm still not entirely certain what's happening in the bathroom.
It's a very confusing photo.
It's a machine because it's the future, but still it's an actual machine.
Oh, it's like cyberpunk.
I get it.
Yeah, it's very cyber.
And she's in the bathroom, she's in the bathtub, and she's got her snake.
Yeah, snake.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Anyway.
No, but it's hard, John.
When we had, we get so much water damage.
It's just, it's not when or how, it's just...
Water damage just happens in my life.
I deal with a lot of humidity.
And I discovered, I don't like to talk about it too much because it makes me very sad.
And by the way, if we could come back to it this week or another week, I'm going through this right now with things.
I have just...
opened mini sarcophagi in my office of things that have just been sitting there that I'm paying cubic inches of rent every month for shit like thermal fax paper from the late 90s.
Right?
So we'll come back to that.
But in this case, it's that...
Oh, we had some water damage.
And I have, as I learned from my sarcophagi, I have a bad habit of just grabbing a bunch of stuff and sticking it in a box and putting tape on it.
Very Dave Roderick kind of move in a lot of ways.
Artifacts, garbage garbage.
Right under a bathtub.
Apparently, it just rained bathwater on this box of photographs and it turned into a single block of photographs.
Mainly my 90s, my 90s photos, my college through 90s photos basically became like a sad cinder block.
Oh, that's awesome.
But isn't there a part of you that thinks, well, maybe it'll be a life hack and I can bake these and then put it into my Google dingus and get it fixed.
I'm just saying that the existence, photos are precious.
Yes.
And God and the Bible.
And the Bible.
I just want to say to that man, I think photos can be precious even if they're stupid and fucked up because you never know.
That might be the only photo you ever have of that thing.
Yeah.
Well, and that's the thing.
Maybe as you're taking that block apart, you're going to find a water damaged photo that the water damage adds an element to the composition.
Uh-huh.
And then put that sucker in a frame and people will look at it and it's like, what a brilliant artwork.
And now you've got a thing to show people and say this is the only surviving photo of the 90s.
That's right.
That's right.
And it could have been, and if it was just in its normal state, people would have been like, why'd you frame that something?
But you're like, now it's a thing.
It's from 1997.
I now have proof that it existed.
Well, or you could say, it's a famous artist.
And what they do is they take old photographs and they treat them with a mysterious process.
But you just don't like parting with stuff so much in general.
It seems to me you do a lot of perusing and organizing and re-enjoying.
I'm just sitting here in a room full of sarcophagi, but that's kind of a part of your whole process, I feel like.
I just decided to do a thing I had been putting off for a long time, over a decade, which was sit down and look at all of the archives of rock show posters.
I mean, you know, I have rock show posters that when they're all stacked are the size of an armchair.
You know, the whole pile of rock show posters, the size of an armchair.
You could make an armchair out.
Are they rolled, folded, various?
A lot of them were rolled.
A lot of them were flat filed.
A lot of them were, you know, they're just, they're contained in it.
They were, they were flat in boxes.
Took them all out, looked at them and confirmed a thing, you know, kind of a broken heartedness.
for me about my rock posters because i have i have great ones that are that are like took down from phone polls like i have the nirvana motorsports garage poster from then this is i have a poster sign by you and other ersatz members of your band i just haven't found the place that i want to put it yet yeah that's beautiful when i pretend to fall for poster sign by you
But the problem is, and I knew this then, you know, I was a real and am a real fan of the poster arcs, the poster artist, the, um, you know, the offset printed or the screen printed, uh, rock show poster.
I came up in that era, right?
The rock show poster.
And, and for many years in the nineties, I was making my own rock show posters and, uh,
And then the level, the next level up was when the venue itself thought you were a big enough deal that they made a poster for you.
Yes.
And then put it up around the town.
There's that trend in the nineties where they come back to that retro, a look I grew up with thinking of as like state fair or county fair posters.
Remember where it was just like the most generic, like sort of, but it was like done with just regular block letters really inexpensively, but it was, it was super hip and it would say John Spencer blues explosion or something like that.
But, but like the, the having, well, I think about in the sixties, I mentioned having like a, like a pink Floyd poster from like 1967.
It'd be amazing.
I used to sit at Kinko's all night long.
I would take a typewriter.
I would write out the information for the show.
Then I would take that typewritten piece of paper and I would enlarge the type and
by you know doing a copying machine i would i would copy it and i would enlarge it 200 percent 200 percent many generations you break it down and it looks a little bit uh i won't say grunge but it looks a little bit dirty it's a little dirty then then i would cut it up and i would paste it i would paste the the like big type and i was doing this not because i was an art genius but because i couldn't think of another way to do it because i didn't understand computers
Yeah.
And so then I would lay out the poster.
You understand typewriter.
With the typewriter font that was all broken at this point.
And then I would put a photo on there and then I had large and then I would, you know, minimize.
And I would, and then finally I would have created a poster four o'clock in the morning, everybody at Kinko's just standing around.
And then I would say, I want to meet some interesting people at Kinko's at four in the morning.
Those were the days I used to love going to Kinko's in the middle of the night.
My friend Tony did work at a Kinko's in the middle of the night in San Francisco.
And boy, did he ever have some stories.
So many stories.
It's a crazy place.
It's such a, well, it was.
And a lot of people come in, but like, the main thing was, a lot of people, there's a lot of urgency, which I guess makes sense.
Everybody's in.
People are coming in.
If you're up at four in the morning and going to Kinko's,
I mean, maybe it's coffee, but there's something that's really driving you and you've got like, you got to get the update to your manifesto out or something like that.
And those folks generally need a fair amount of help with the computers.
And, but they're apparently, I can't get to four in the morning.
It's my understanding can be a very animated place.
Super animated.
I mean, I was over in the corner, just minding my own business.
Leave me alone.
I know how to work the copiers.
And it was just a steady stream of people that would come in with some, you know, whatever, seven inch floppy desk.
Like I need to get something off of this desk.
And, you know, the people behind the counter be like, okay, bring it over here.
Let me see.
I used to love it there.
And there were always people that were, you know, there was somebody always over at the architectural drawing copier doing God knows what.
Those were expensive copies to me.
Anyway, when I graduated to the next level, which was not just that the venue was
making posters but that the venue contracted an actual artist to make show posters and then the further level beyond that which was that your band was considered big enough that artists would uh would make a poster for your show as a thing to sell and they would give you some copies but then they'd be at the venue selling these gorgeous posters and
And it was kind of a, you know, it was an artist economy where what you got was some free, super cool posters.
And then it was, you know.
Do we have a poster for, I feel like I remember assigning a poster for Game Changers at a table.
So we do have a bunch of Game Changers posters that were made for us by a late Harvey Danger bass player, Aaron Huffman.
Oh, right.
I pointed him out in a video the other day and told my daughter how much I like Heron.
Yeah, he did the Game Changers.
And that is a great poster.
I'm trying to remember.
Is it very Silhouette-y?
I feel like.
What he did was he took...
He took pictures of us from the internet and he superimposed us over a bunch of tuxedo people.
And then he arranged us as though we were walking down the hall like you two.
It's great.
And I still have a bunch of them because what always happened at those shows, unless you were really a major deal, was that they would make 200 posters, but they'd only sell 100.
And then...
In advance of the show, they're like, look, you can only have 15 posters because the rest are for sale.
Because at that point, they're still precious.
But then at the end of the show, they'll want these posters.
Like they say about a daily newspaper, like a daily newspaper has an extreme amount of value at five in the morning and a lot less value at five the next morning.
Right.
And like the posters, while you still got the scarcity and excitement of the event, that however many you've got seems much more precious before the show's over.
And then it's like, well, what are you going to do with these?
But what I noticed then, and it absolutely is true, because now I look at it after a decade or more going through the archives, is that there was another step up.
in having posters made of your shows.
Oh, wow.
Which was... It's probably a big marquee.
This is going to be like a big name.
This is a big poster.
The artist felt that the poster was worth... That the band was worth...
Doing a unique font for the words.
Oh, wow.
Okay.
A unique drew the type or drew the words rather than cut and paste some words in over a drawing they did for something.
You know, a poster artist made a drawing of a bird and somebody says, hey, the Long Winters are playing.
And the poster artist was like, oh, cool.
They took their drawing of a bird and then they put the Long Winters over the top.
But, but if, but you can tell when they took the words from, you know, Times New Roman and blew it up and moved it over into the corner and then sent it off to the printer.
As opposed to ones where they were like, I'm going to hand draw the words.
Yeah.
And if you look, if you go on and look at, and that just burns me to say, but if you go on and look at Decembrist posters.
I'm looking at this one with the person in a top hat.
Yeah.
You're on there somewhere.
Yeah.
Very, very far down at the bottom.
It says here Decemberist.
It's got a lady with a parasol.
That looks like a very expensive to make poster.
Very expensive to make.
I remember when the artist brought those over to me at the merch table.
And I said, I actually said to them, because I was so fed up by this point.
I was like, you know, you took the time to do this beautiful, beautiful piece of artwork, and you put the name of my band down in the corner so small that it's smaller than your signature.
But you bring the posters to me as though it's a thing I'm going to be happy to sell for you on my own merch table.
Like, hey, come over and buy this poster.
Yeah.
Uh, and my band is like, how, how hard would it have been to, to artistically integrate the name of my band into the poster?
Obviously much smaller and lesser than the Decembrists, but still interesting.
There's one here, I see one here with a fella, a funny looking fella with weird teeth flying a kite.
And you are top build with December's Below You score with the places and the capillaries.
That's a very responsible poster.
I totally enjoy that.
It's probably not personal letters, but you can see that the long winners are playing, which is kind of cool.
The long winners are playing on the show, right?
But the problem is that even some of the best posters, big shows, things that I'm really proud of,
I'm proud of the show.
I'm proud of the moment, but the type is cut.
The type is cookie cutter.
It's, it's clip art.
And the art of the poster is great.
Somebody really did a, did a professional art job, but they didn't take that extra effort.
care to make the words beautiful like it now um your your fella your design guy uh god i can't believe is it sean yeah sean nelson but oh god remind me the guy who does the amazing like sean the weird device thing and yes sean wolf oh my god that guy he's he's remover installer that's it that's it which is different from lift or puller yes but uh boy that guy
Holy shit.
And he did more than the album cover and the poster.
Like he's done lots of things for you, right?
He's done a lot of things and he always does, or most of the time does wonderful words.
He draws them himself.
I'm so proud to have his work.
It really stands.
And there are a few things, you know, there's a Mike King poster.
There are a few, but there are others that are just like, Oh, I would put that right up on my wall, except the words.
Except the font just makes it look like somebody did it at a Kinko's in the middle of the night.
Yeah, I get it.
I get it.
And there are some that are old enough that they were actually done at a Kinko's that I will put on the wall because it's like, that was done at Kinko's.
That's cool.
But like that middle ground where it's like, I'm a professional artist.
I'm going to try and sell these at the shows.
But look, I got a lot on my plate right now.
And so the Long Witchers are not, let's just be honest, they're not the Decembrists.
So I'm just going to kind of put...
I'm going to make this poster.
It's going to be cool.
Sometimes the Decembrists are no Decembrists.
But if you look at the Decembrists posters on eBay, every one of them is just gorgeous.
And it's because the Decembrists had an aesthetic, right?
They inspired artists to do a big ornate thing because they were such an ornate band.
Yeah.
Yeah.
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And all the great shows.
So the thing about my dad's photos is that, and I absolutely remember us talking about this once before, but as Captain Marm has showed me, when you and I talk about something
And then we talk about it again many years later.
The first thing that she showed me is that we actually have talked about it four or five times.
And you and I never remember.
So helpful to be reminded of.
And she's really good at just like stacking them up.
Like, here's when you said that.
And then you said it again.
And I'm always proud because we, you know, it's not like the, it's not like the story changes.
It's always almost exactly the same.
It's just that we forget.
Including how we forgot about it.
Yeah, we forgot about it again and again.
It's very pure, as they say.
It's very pure.
It's very pure because we're because I in my opinion, it means either that we're great liars or that we're not lying because it'd be very hard to remember the exact lie unless you were really bad.
Well, yeah, but also, like, I'm sorry, this is not only talking about the show on the show, but, you know, we're this would be.
Almost everything that one considers amusing would become much less amusing if we had to be self-conscious about what it is that we're doing.
That's not fun.
I mean, it's not a skills challenge for college sophomores.
We're shucking and jiving here.
We're having fun.
Don't crush the bunny.
My dad's photos, as I go through the boxes.
Your dad took a lot of photos.
He wasn't a very good photographer.
Not a very good photographer.
He and my mom divorced in 1971-ish.
Big decade.
Big decade for divorces.
And they got in really early.
And there are these photos.
In 1971, I was three, four years.
I was four years old when they got divorced.
Let's say that.
Yeah.
From the time I was four until the time I was 12.
Um, during that eight year period, my father lived many lives.
He was in his fifties.
It was basically the decade of his fifties and he had friends and he had girlfriends and he had adventures in the great state of Alaska and
He was, he was divorced and his ex-wife and two children moved back to Seattle and he was up there with sort of, he was maybe free for the first time in his life.
And he loved to take photos of,
And so he's got all these photos of people I don't know.
And in one way, they're wonderful because they're the, the fashions and the styles of the early 1970s and the look of Kodachrome.
Yeah.
Uh, Kodachrome is, I mean, I can clock that immediately.
Yeah.
You'll see a photo.
I follow this account.
I think it's called Sharpie and it's a Twitter account that just posts wonderful old photos.
There is, there's a reason Paul Simon wrote a song about it.
Like Kodachrome.
Oh man.
It's really special.
Yeah.
Well, for that time.
Wow.
And also capturing that transition of where guys' hair is getting longer and women's hair remains tall and there's people who wear shirts with collars.
That's it.
You're, you, you nailed it.
Right.
Because, because there are, the collars got big, but they were still collars and you'd wear a necktie like a gentleman.
Well, and there are long sideburns, but there are still beehive hairdos of a kind.
A hundred percent.
Right.
Big, big backcombed hair.
And, um,
And then you add Alaska, which is like, there are a lot of puffy jackets and weird sunglasses and people out.
She, you know, she'll have a beehive hairdo, but she's standing on a glacier.
And it's just another whole other dimension of like, whoa, what am I looking at?
You know, they were building the pipeline at the time and my dad was there for all of that.
But I wasn't a witness to it because I was a little child.
Right.
I don't remember any of those people.
I don't know who they were.
And there are clearly photographs of women that work closely.
Clearly my dad's girlfriend, you can just tell by the way he pointed the lens at them and hoped that the lens would, would take in all the information.
It's a woman with a beehive hairdo standing with her hands, you know, holding a pocketbook in front of her puffy jackets, standing on a glacier.
And it's like, how did this photo get taken?
Who are these people?
I'll never know.
Yeah.
Unless Google says,
Unless I put a photo like that into Google, Google facial recognizes the person, says this was Maisie Glotz, and here are Maisie Glotz's children, and one of Mary Glotz's children looks like they could be your younger brother or whatever.
You know, there's no chance.
Uh-huh.
And so looking at the Wikipedia entry for John Taylor, you go, all right.
I know when John Taylor was in Duran Duran and he was 22 years old, he was probably having a lot of relationships, short-term relationships with people.
Then he married a model and she had a baby.
By the way, I think you might have reversed your celebrities.
I think it might be Shel Silverstein that had a Shoshana.
Oh, Shel Silverstein probably did.
But the point stands.
Big department store is still in evidence.
Nick Rhodes' wife was definitely a Shoshanna.
That maybe isn't her name.
Oh, I see.
I see.
Okay, sorry.
But, you know, she's a department store heiress.
But the technology that would make that possible would be terrifying.
Well, yeah.
You don't want to throw them out because you never know.
The thing is, you don't want to throw them out.
I don't want to know.
But in the sense of anyone... How do I put this?
On the show, on this show, which is kind of the show of record for the last decade...
You know, I'm very coy about talking about my relationships because, you know, you and I are... That's a need-to-know situation.
Yeah, and it's okay to be coy about it.
I refer to things that have happened as a result of relationships.
You know, I tell stories where it feels like if you were listening very carefully to the show, you might think, now, wait a minute.
Is that the girl or is that the other girl?
I feel like...
We have, perhaps we've discussed this a tiny bit, but I think we've gotten a little better.
It's one thing for us to mention our kid's name.
We're trying not to be too weird about that.
But also, like, for example, you don't want to put various red-haired girlfriends from the 80s on blast.
No, but if I had...
married anybody right they would they would be in the they would be in the wikipedia yes and if they were in the wikipedia then i could say megan and it would be right there you know i was married to megan from 1999 to 2006
And then I would be able to talk about Meekin because it would be... There it is.
She was my wife.
Of course.
But in not having married her, she wasn't my wife.
And so...
Although she was as significant to me, maybe more significant than any one of Shel Silverstein's first three wives, who he was only married to for 16 months.
There are all these people back in the day who were married five times, and some of those marriages lasted a year or two.
I just got, I, the reason I think about this is I just got a text message from a friend I hadn't heard from in a couple of years.
And her text message was, well, what was it?
It was, uh, well, land cruiser guy has moved on.
If you want to hang out.
Oh, wow.
And I was like, Land Cruiser guy?
Huh.
I wonder who Land Cruiser is.
And then I realized, oh, she had a baby.
She had a baby.
I knew she had.
I knew she'd had a baby since I saw her last.
And I knew that she was making a go.
She was making a go.
She'd met a guy.
She, she was right at them, you know, mid thirties age.
She was met a guy.
She was like, I'm going to have a baby.
I'm going to, and here's my guy and we're going to buy a sailboat and live in the San Juans.
And so, you know, and there, she didn't send me an email that was like,
I, you know, I met a guy and I'm getting married.
If I'm going to live in the San Juans, I just stopped hearing from her.
And then I, then I saw tangentially back when I was still on social media.
Oh, she's holding a baby on, on a, on a Facebook post.
Well, congratulations, like Godspeed.
Yeah.
And, and maybe even there were some photos with a land cruiser in the background.
And I was like, there it is.
She, you know, that's perfect.
She met a guy, a land cruiser guy.
She's got a baby now.
Godspeed.
Two years later, she's got a two-year-old and Land Cruiser guy moved on.
Land Cruiser guy has moved on and she's writing, if you want to hang out.
And I think what she means, I think, I don't think it's entirely possible that she's like, want to take it back up again.
But I think more than that, she's just like, I got absorbed in this relationship and I lost all my friends.
Oh, okay.
Yeah.
And now I have a two-year-old or a one-and-a-half-year-old.
Do you want to go get coffee?
I think is the implication, although maybe our female listeners are listening and rolling their eyes at me.
I think, I mean, I don't know if that is a call to like re-hook up.
I would guess probably not because I think it's much more likely that she's starting to, and I'm just repeating you here.
She's starting to like try to rebuild everything.
a life that is her own yes and she's starting with some pretty sensibly maybe with some older parts and saying like you know i boy a lot of this stuff just went away i might as well at least go look at this sarcophagus and see if anybody's still inside yeah it's hard to it's like with a kid it's hard to put all that adult shit back together from next to nothing it's very difficult
It's impossible, right?
And you're so wounded.
You're so vulnerable.
No matter how strong you are as a person, you're going to have very strong emotions probably.
You might be angry.
You might be very sad.
You might just feel very lonesome.
And it's hard.
It's really hard.
And this is exactly my mom's situation in 1971.
She had two little kids.
She was divorced, living on her own all of a sudden, and didn't have that many friends to begin with.
You know, and this is true of my correspondent this morning, you know, kind of a social introvert.
But, you know, so here she, you know, she's got a baby.
And I'm thinking on her Wikipedia page, which she doesn't have one, but if she were to have one.
Okay, yay.
You know, he's a spouse now.
He, it only lasted, it only lasted 18 months or something.
And I don't understand how you can have a baby.
Am I getting one thing, one part of what you're saying?
Cause I'm probably being a little dim and I'm also trying to Photoshop this, this picture of the game changers.
But, but, um, is you're saying like, Hey, the Lee Marvin's are whomevers of the world.
They're in relationships for five, four, three, two, one year, and they get a spouse slot.
I still, and you, as we all know, John, you try to keep things going friend wise with people long after the romance is gone.
You've got 20 year relationships with people and you're sitting there with your, with your dick in your hand.
I got 20-year relationships with people, and I also have a decade-long relationship with our listeners.
That's true.
I have a two-decade-long relationship with my fans of my band, and yet none of them, in the middle of the night, when they are saying, like, I wonder, you know, I haven't looked at John and Myrtle's Wikipedia pages.
Oh, boy.
No, no, don't do that.
Look at John's, but like, oh, was John ever on Game of Thrones?
Oh, don't look at that.
You go and you look stuff up and you're just curious.
Exactly.
Is he the guy in that December's video?
And it's like, yes.
He was.
Was he ever on Portlandia?
No.
Is there a reason for that?
No.
Amy Mayer was on Portlandia.
She sure was.
I don't know if Michael Penn was.
He was.
I was standing around with Portlandia going on all around me.
You know, and I, he was, he was emailing me at one point.
Why am I not on the show?
Doesn't matter.
Doesn't matter.
I got no bad feelings.
You know, Colin Malloy was probably on there.
Oh, he was also on Parks and Recreation.
The whole band was.
Yeah.
What's her name?
Jenny?
Who's that girl I like?
Jenny, yeah, Jenny.
Jenny was on it, and Colin was on it, and who's that nice guy I met at the merch table?
Chris?
Chris, Chris.
I like that guy.
I really like that guy.
Smart guy, yeah.
Anyway, they were all on an NBC show, but you're not even on whatever, IFC, I guess, probably?
No, no, no, no.
That's weird.
Chloe Sevigny was on there.
Yeah.
Oh, I sat behind her in a movie theater in New York City one time.
I bet she's tall.
Oh, Kumail Nanjiani was on there.
He was the guy at the phone store.
Portland has had a lot of good people.
It's strange that they just kind of overlooked you.
Yeah.
Especially as, well, as a denizen of the PNW.
It just seems like a courtesy.
Yeah, that's right.
At the time, at the time, especially, it would have been like, oh, sure, of course, here, you know, at that time, 2012 or whatever, I had 7,000 Twitter followers.
That was a big deal.
You put a bird on it.
You've done it.
Anyway, I feel bad.
Not bad, but like, I want there to be a way because you can't write a kiss and tell, right?
You can't say like, Hey, I want to tell you about my last 10 girlfriends or whatever.
You can't say like, Hey, here are the people that matter to me in my life.
And I want to tell you their story or rank them or, or not rank them, but like,
Chronologically, chronologically, not rank.
Oh, no, I know what you mean.
Rank them.
This is the best girl.
It's not a draft.
No, like, run them, you know, like, say, like, here's where I've been in my life.
Here are the people that matter to me.
And if I had married them, they'd be, I'd be able to talk about them because I'd be able to say, ah, that was my second ex-wife.
Yeah.
But you can't talk that way about somebody, even if you had a decade long relationship with them, even if they shaped you, they made you it.
As soon as they're gone, my daughter's going to look at my photographs one day.
She'll be 35 years old and she'll be going through my boxes.
And, you know, and it'll just be like, are you fucking kidding me?
You kept the ticket stub from Ace Ventura, Pet Detective?
Yeah.
And I'd be lying in my bed and I'd go, I didn't even see the movie.
I found the ticket stub on a... I found it and I thought it was... I didn't want it to be lonely.
I didn't see that stupid-ass movie.
If you turn it over, someone wrote their phone number on it.
And she's going to see all these photos and she's going to go, who's this girl?
Who's this girl?
Who's this girl?
And if, if she's not interested or if I'm not there, uh, then all of it's tears and tears and rain.
Yeah.
A hundred percent.
Yeah.
And I just feel like if I could, if I could Mormonize this situation, if I could, if I could church of Latter-day Saints it back and retroactively marry everybody.
Yeah.
Okay.
Because the thing is... Oh, it's the opposite.
John, you just invented the opposite of an annulment.
Exactly.
Exactly.
Annulment is when... So the difference between an annulment and, say, a divorce... A divorce is you say, hey, y'all are married and now you shouldn't be... Everybody agrees.
You shouldn't be together.
If I understand correctly, an annulment is that this marriage never happened.
Never happened in the eyes of God.
And you're operating, you're conjuring marriages of days past...
Yeah.
The reverse, reverse annulment, which needs a better name, but that's a great idea.
Do you know where you'd start with Megan?
Where do you start with something like that?
Well, that's the thing.
I mean, I have a doctor.
No, I never would have married Kelly.
Although, you know, maybe if it was 1860, I would have, but no, I would have married.
I mean, I think my first wife would have been Ellen.
That relationship, you know, if I had been, if I was Lee Marvin, it would say my first wife was Ellen.
I, we married in 93 and we did 95.
No, no, no.
Dance is on TV.
Oh, Lorna's married to Portia De... No, never mind.
It's not Ellen DeGeneres is what you're saying.
Not that Ellen.
She's even done a lot in comedy in the past, so... Ellen had eyes like a wolf, like bright, like crazy clear blue eyes.
She was very tall.
She wore her hair very short and dyed it black.
And she had an elegance that was unusual in Seattle at the time.
She had a... Well, no shade, no lemonade, but...
These other fucking monsters.
She walked very erect and very slowly.
Ellen had this ability.
Oh, she's dignified.
Oh, she walked so slowly.
She was from Boston.
She was from Boston and she grew up in a warehouse loft.
Her parents were already warehouse lofting early enough that in the 70s, she grew up in a Boston warehouse loft.
She was the girl that once said to me, you know, oh, I was courting her.
I was trying to get her to be my girlfriend.
And she was like, she said, first of all, one time she said, you are the last person I will ever date.
And I was like, okay.
Well, depending on how you say that exactly, that can have lots of different meanings.
It was pretty heavy.
There's a difference between you're the last man in the world I would ever be near versus you will be my last.
So I'm implying basically that you'll be together forever, forever.
Oh, I don't think she meant that.
No, I don't either.
Yeah.
And she said like her last boyfriend before me was some guy that wore leather pants and rode his motorcycle up the stairs of her apartment building.
And yeah, I know.
Oh, she lived in San Francisco at the time.
And she said to me, there was the fateful day we were sitting there and she said, listen, you're my best friend and I'm never going to date you.
So you need to stop trying to court me or we can't be friends anymore.
Wow.
And I said, you know what?
I will stop trying to court you.
I'm, you know, I've been playful about it.
It was like, I thought it was a running joke, a fun thing where we were best friends, but I was like, it came across to her as like, ha ha ha ha.
Wouldn't it be funny if we guess right now?
That kind of thing.
No, no.
It was just gradually like over time.
It was always funny because it was because she was so sarcastic.
I was like, you know what?
I don't even, I don't even think we should, I'm not like in love with you.
I just think we should go out because it's so perfect.
Look at us.
We're together all the time.
We should just date one another.
And she was like, no, thanks.
And I was like, yeah, all right.
But I mean, seriously though.
And at a certain point she was like, you gotta stop.
You gotta stop with that.
And I was like, cool that she wanted to save whatever it was you had though.
That's kind of nice.
We're best friends.
And I said, okay, we're, you'll never hear another word.
Was that difficult?
Yeah.
No, because I didn't, you know, and she said, okay, good.
And I was like, okay, good.
Let's shake on it.
And we shook on it.
And she was like, okay, I got to go home.
Will you walk me home?
And I was like, yeah, I'll walk you home.
I walked her home.
She was like, come in for a second.
I came in and she was like working in the kitchen and I was in her, you know, her office putting books on a shelf or something like that.
And she came out and she was like, I want you to look at this.
And I looked at something and then we looked at each other and we started kissing and then we dated for two years.
But that's not on Wikipedia.
That's not on Wikipedia.
There's not a name that fully... There's not a name for what you had or, if I'm being honest, what you did there that does not have probably a Wikipedia-friendly name.
I was drunk then...
And so it was a drinking time.
And in 1962, we would have gotten married.
We would have been married three months later, right?
And then now I would be able to talk about Ellen and it would just be easy.
Everybody that listens to the show would know all about it.
It's Ellen that John used to be married to for a while.
Yeah, Ellen, you know, John's first wife.
And then, of course, my second wife would have been Laurel.
We've talked about Laurel a lot.
I just don't know if I've ever even, you know, I would have married Laurel in 94.
I haven't been married to her since until 99.
You know, these are significant relationships and they're not, no one will ever know.
But my daughter will look at a photograph of Laurel and she'll be like, who's this girl?
And it's like, well, dad, one of daddy's old girlfriends and she'll throw it in the, in the crusher.
But if it was my first wife,
Maybe the, so I do, I want to, I want to Latter-day Saints this, I want to reverse a null.
Yeah.
I want to go back and have married them all.
And I don't know why I swallowed a fly.
Yeah.
I don't know why.
I couldn't do it then.
I couldn't do it then, but now I wish I had.
It's the lack of, it's just not the, well, I can't speak for you, but it seems to me the most galling part of this is thinking about your legacy is that it's going to be hard for your kid to find out who you donked in the 90s.
It's not dong.
No, no.
It's the stories.
I want to tell the stories.
I'm sorry.
Yes.
But you know, but it's, but I can't, I, you can't tell the stories because you can't make it when we get married in retrospect.
Right.
I guess, I mean, I guess I would need their consent to marry.
I mean, that's a very Catholic church kind of thing.
I was talking to my friend the other day about, uh, I was always in 10th grade when I first learned about, um, indulgences.
And I was so fascinated by the idea that to help build churches, uh,
you know, Rome decided to like, Hey, it's a cool, if you want to go make it a sin, we'll forgive you ahead of time.
You know, if you want to go, if you want to go donk the milkmaid, um, and you can pay us a hundred dollars in advance or lira or whatever, Bitcoin and, uh, uh, Pope coin.
And then you're allowed, remember this indulgences and it allows you to sin.
This is such a bad idea.
Even if you're not a very doctrinal sort of person, that's very upsetting that sin has a very special meaning.
And so in retrospect, to ask to be forgiven of a sin is this very important idea to say, can you just, is it cool if I just sin and give you some money?
Like, I'll bet that's a very Catholic church thing.
You could probably get reverse annulled at a certain point in the Holy Roman Empire.
I wonder if I converge to Catholicism.
No, I think it's a, I think, I think, I think the Mormons already do this, right?
They baptize people who are already dead.
In order, in order that, because if, if my ancestor wasn't baptized, then I'm not going to meet them in heaven, but I can go do it in, in reverse.
Now I'm, I don't know that much about this, but I'm pretty sure this is one of the perks.
But I do feel like I would have to send some emails that were like, hey, Land Cruiser guy moved on, and do you want to hang out?
Just to say like, oh, by the way, heads up, we're married now.
Yeah, or do you want to have been married in the 90s?
Okay.
And I think there are going to be a couple of those people that are like, ha, ha, ha, sure, why not?
And there are going to be a couple that are like, go fuck yourself.
Go fuck.
Oh, if you want to know who Ellen is...
In the liner notes of the first Long Winter's record, she's the one that wrote the letter that has the bullshit artist one.
No.
Yeah.
The little hand cut out.
Go fuck yourself ticket.
That's.
Oh, wow.
Pinned to the letter.
That's Ellen.
Wow.
That's that's a letter that only an ex-wife could write.
Yeah.
She just doesn't know it yet.
She just doesn't, she didn't know that.
But I, but I think if I, if I wrote her now and said.
She might be relieved, John.
If she finds out she's reverse annulled to you, she might be relieved.
Reverse married and then annulled.
It's possible.
Well, I'm just saying like if an annulment, I'm trying to follow my own tortured metaphor, but if an annulment is a way of saying this marriage doesn't exist because it never existed.
What if you're saying is this marriage exists because it's always existed?
What if this marriage exists?
We've always lived in the castle.
You know what I'm saying?
It's always existed.
But what that means is that there's also a phantom divorce that happened.
A phantom divorce.
Right?
Because there also would have existed a divorce.
Oh, you're saying you, okay, okay, okay, okay.
This is going to be one of those.
There's the thing, I'm always searching for a phrase, and I'm always using this phrase I do know incorrectly.
Performative statement.
So what I want is a phrase that says, you just said something to me that has much more of an implication that I do something, right?
You want me to perform something.
A true performative statement in English language is that there are some kinds of things that become real because someone said it.
I now pronounce you man and wife, for example, a little on the nose here, is a performative statement.
I sentence you to, you know, this much community service is a performative statement.
So if I understand correctly, you don't want to just have, you're not trying to pile up wives, Latter-day Saints style.
We do want a way to retroactively have been married to somebody for the period of time when you were together.
Yes, because we were effectively married.
Okay.
Okay.
It's like a GRE for the human heart.
Yeah, like if Shel Silverstein can call those marriages, if Lee Marvin can call them marriages.
Well, he didn't want to do that, but yeah.
No, no, no, but Chris, he's more like me.
Lee and I have a lot in common.
Lee and me.
I think there was a, yeah, 2020 Lee and Me.
Oh, that's pretty...
He was in the Dirty Dozen, if memory serves.
I feel like one of those websites told me I was related to Lee Marvin.
And when I heard that... Okay, now you're just torturing it.
23andLee, full comedy points for 23andLee.
It is the service where we take a very small, like Elizabeth Holmes-sized capsule of blood, and then we send you a letter to let you know whether or not you're related to Lee Marvin.
Wow.
That's all.
That's all it does.
It's a one-note app.
It's just, yeah, exactly.
I mean, they can put it on a postcard.
Yes, you're related to Lee Marvin.
Are you or are you not related to Lee Marvin?
It's a one-time app.
But if you want to find out more, like how related, where related, why related, am I to Lee Marvin?
You know what I mean?
Second cousin wants removed.
Well, that's, you know what?
That's an in-app purchase.
That's a $2.99 in-app purchase.
Well, you could also go to Triolivago.
When you find out if you're related to the show, that's not even a joke.
I see.
You should do that.
You can start your own religion or, you know, get a good lawyer.
No, I think the ship has sailed, and I don't know what to... So I was having lunch with a rock musician friend the other day, and I said, you know, the problem is I want to write the book.
I want to write the book.
It's not one of those rock books.
The Europe book.
No, no, not that one.
Oh.
I'm actually working on that one, by the way.
I know, I know.
You get the captain comes helping you.
You told us.
But no, the book about... You know, there's up and down with the Rolling Stones or whatever.
There are a lot of books about...
There's Bob Dylan's Chronicles, where you read the book because you're like, Bob Dylan wrote a book.
I want to read the story.
But then there are the other books, the rock books, where you don't necessarily know the writer that well.
It's not like, oh, I'm a huge fan of this artist, but I'm going to read this because a rock biography is interesting enough.
in and of itself the genre is interesting it's like a detective would you include stuff like our band could be your life like sort of like are you talking in particular about like Albert Goldman's Elvis biography no I'm talking about like okay I was in the rock music business and the you know I was like a fly on the wall type situation fly on the wall for a lot of things right and then when I pivoted to whatever that was that I did for the last 10 years I was a fly on the wall for a lot of stuff
And so writing it all down, plus all of my own personal experiences, you know what?
It becomes the story of, in some ways, the end of the music business, but also the rise of the DIY business.
You were there when people started communicating too much.
I was.
The Western State Hurricanes were the last band to make a demo tape.
everybody else with the guy from built to spill it was all it was all demo cd i know this i know this it's uh i can do this i can do this because at the end of nothing wrong with love they make a jokey trailer and they talk about hit you in the head hit you in the head hit you in the head i know this god damn it what's his name i'm not gonna say it oh fuck me gently because he's mad at me he's he's mad at me about something he still has your tapes
I'm not going to... No, I got the tapes back.
No, but he's mad at me about something else.
He's mad at me about something else.
All right, well, placeholder here.
Something about band of horses.
I don't... Oh, no, again with the horses.
Yeah, band of horses, they keep coming up.
Ugh, okay.
But my point is, I said to my friend, I was like, I want to write this book.
But the thing is, I don't know if everybody wants me to tell the story because it's not one of these, like, is this my story to tell in some ways?
Like, like the relationship between you're the fly.
I'm the fly.
Right.
So nobody's ever going to write the story of death cap for cutie.
If I don't, because they're not going to.
Okay.
And anything, and any other story would be a fan story where it was like, here's the greatest band ever.
But there was nobody else that was standing right in the middle of that band that wasn't in the band.
And yet I have to go and say, I'm going to write this story and you might not like everything in it.
Maybe you'll get one book done if you work on two.
Hey.
I mean, there's no reason to stop there.
Do you remember when I read that interview with the guy from Moneyball and he was like, yeah, I've got so many projects.
I just work on one for a week.
Oh, that guy's a monster.
He's incredible.
He's always working on something.
He's working on something.
Maybe that's me.
Maybe I'm writing a book that's going to piss off all my rock friends.
I'm going to write a book over here.
You know, this one says no soup.
There's a reason people swap flies, John.
He's got a fly on the wall.
Well, maybe, maybe I should take him out because he's going to have things to say about the dissolution of my band.
And I just want to say also in passing, it's just a name you mentioned a little bit ago, a name with a name in it.
That's another instance of where there's maybe a little bit of a disparity in the power structure, right?
So you marry somebody and then they turn into, let's say a TV star and then maybe things get a little bit complicated.
Right, right.
You follow?
Now, I don't know if you'd cover that.
You're Fly on the Wall book.
But that's the thing.
But you never know.
Fly's got a lot of eyes.
Fly's eyes.
The Wikipedia for that book is going to have a lot of blue names.
Oh, and it might cover your reverse annulment sister wives.
Well, so, but, you know, but those are going to be red names.
Maybe you should just print out a PDF.
Those are going to all be red names.
Because I never married a TV star.
They're all going to be names where you click on it.
It's like more information needed.
Okay, but let's take this into the Charles Famidorian style.
Maybe you just haven't married a TV actress yet, either in the future, quote-unquote future, or quote-unquote past.
Thank you.
But that could change.
I think you could make some serious... Well, obviously, you're going to be a huge author.
I've always said you're going to be the Charles Nelson Reilly of our time.
And what I'm here to say today, not to Bruce Vlant, stop saying that.
But what's going to happen
No, but you, you could do punch up, right?
But, but also, but, but I mean, think about the bank you buy.
I don't want to make this, you know, mercantile, but think of the bank you could make if you invented the reverse annulment.
I, partly I want to do the favor to all the people out there who are like, I really want to Google millennium girlfriend, but I don't want to be a creep.
Merlin tells me all the time not to be a creep.
Yeah.
Don't do that.
Just stay off the internet.
Stay off Google.
And I, but I want to know, but, but if I had married her, then it would be in the record.
They wouldn't have to feel like a creep.
There'd probably be a link and it would just be ex-wife.
I see.
Instead of Martin McFly disappearing from the photo, new children would start appearing in old photos.
Boom.
There you go.
Boom.
Right?
You used to be a sports almanac and a reason to live.
I would have had a baby with every one of them, and those babies are out there.
Babies making babies.
Those potential babies have already been making babies, and that's a whole ghost family I don't have.
You've got just overlooked zygotes out there just doing nothing right now.
Think about that.
I have.
Think about that.
You can go back in time and bring a great-great-grandparent into heaven with you by reverse baptizing them.
Yes.
What about all the babies that, what about my huge extended family that is just in the potentiality?
It's just out there.
It's alternate universe extra family.
They're out there.
I miss them.
Yes.
I never even met him and I miss them.
Think about the Kodachrome of them.
Yeah.
So, but think about all the possibilities that I'm not going to say won't happen, but aren't happening.
What is it going to take to activate these babies?
Yeah.
That's the thing.
My kid with Ellen would have been 28 years old right now.
They would have their own face.
They'd be a lawyer.
What a terrible age for a child.
Hey, man.
Turns out I'm totally your son.
Nice to meet you, Tyler.
Hey, Tyler.
No, I would never have named a child Tyler in 1993.
It's not up to you.
It's not up to you.
You found out about the baby later.
Baby's been Tyler for 27 years.
I see what you're saying.
I don't know.
I don't know how it gets your...
revolution ellen would not have named a child tyler she would have named a baby would have been named ezekiel or something or or or you know like herman a bible name like jason yeah she okay no she would have had some some boston name she would have had some motorcycle up the stairs oh like colin oh have to be colin
Now, is this going to apply for him, too?
Is he going to have retroactive babies, too?
No, no, no, no.
Colin's done what he's done.
Yeah.
He knows what he did.
He basically married his high school sweetheart.
Does she know that?
She knows that, right?
I think so.
Yeah, they've got two lovely children.
Colin Malloy.
Huh, whom I introduced myself to in a bar, and that did not go well.
No.
I was full on.
This sounds like a guy to my voice's record.
Full on Barney Gumbel that night.
I was in a bar in Portland and calling the lawyers there.
I actually said, Hey, I was having babies.