Ep. 495: "Hauling Balls"
Merlin: Hmm?
Merlin: Hmm?
Merlin: Hello?
Merlin: Hi, John.
John: Hi, Merlin.
John: Hey, how's it going?
John: Good.
John: I wasn't sure what was going on there for a second.
Merlin: John, you rarely need to explain yourself to me.
Merlin: Oh, thank you.
Merlin: I almost said never, but... No, every once in a while, sure.
John: I've got to keep a car in the hole.
Merlin: What the fuck are you doing?
Merlin: What are you... Oh, man.
Merlin: Jesus Christ.
John: Woo!
Merlin: Woof.
John: A friend signed me up or sent me an invitation to a group on Facebook because we're that age.
John: Hey, there's a face on Facebook.
John: You know, an acquaintance of mine faced me.
John: It's a site that focuses on old school ski industry projects.
John: uh stuff like oh yeah i used to work on the riblets back in the 70s but like like the kind of like you know but like you might one might get into like vintage guitar gear or stuff like that right it's uh yeah yeah it's like a uh it's a specialist group if you ever you know if you ever free dogged for instance
John: I don't see anything weird about that.
John: No, it's fun.
John: That's what Facebook is for.
John: So I posted a picture of myself when I was like 10 years old skiing.
John: And I was in a race.
John: It was a spring ski race season.
John: And halfway down the race course, just hauling balls, my goggles.
John: I didn't wear a hat because it was a spring day.
John: And my goggles just gradually started slipping down my face until they were in front of my eyes and I couldn't see.
John: And then they fell down and right at the moment that they fell below my eyes, but hadn't yet fallen off my face, uh, a,
John: Like a race course side photographer commemorated the moment.
John: Like you were on Big Thunder Mountain.
John: And this was a person that had been hired by the ski team, like, get a great action shot right here at this cool gate.
John: And so, of course, my dad bought the picture and had it framed.
Yeah.
John: And for years I was very embarrassed by it.
John: But then, of course, later on you think, oh, that's actually kind of funny and kind of great.
John: Anyway, I posted it.
John: Why is my phone ringing?
John: I posted it and it turns out there are all these old –
John: People from my ski team on this crazy website.
Merlin: Now, see?
Merlin: That's nice.
John: Yeah.
John: So then all of these people that back then would have teased me mercilessly are teasing me mercilessly now.
John: Circle of life.
John: Yeah.
John: They're all in their mid-50s, and they're like, ha, ha, ha.
John: You could never ski.
John: Blark, blark, blark.
Pfft.
Merlin: So that's fun, right?
Merlin: Isn't that fun?
Merlin: I think stuff like that is really nice.
Merlin: It's nice to, you know, I mean, I like vintage things.
Merlin: Line readings.
Merlin: I like line readings.
Merlin: That just came out, what did they say, 25 years ago?
Merlin: Big Lebowski just came out 25 years ago.
Merlin: Wow.
Merlin: Yeah, yeah.
Merlin: People love anniversaries.
Merlin: It's kind of unseemly.
Merlin: I think that's wonderful, but I also am always intrigued by the changing nature of... I don't mean to sound fake philosophical here, but like, you know...
Merlin: Think about the photographs of your childhood and the generations before where, I mean, we're not just talking about like Deadwood shit.
Merlin: I mean, like you might have one photo, two photos, three photos of a person ever.
Merlin: And I mean, maybe more saliently back in the days when we'd all line up dutifully in three rows and take exactly one photo of a group.
Merlin: Like that was, that was Derek air.
Merlin: You always took a group photo and they were almost always bad because somebody only took one photo cause photos cost money.
Merlin: But you know, the, the, the scarcity of that kind of stuff, which also goes for things like yearbook photos.
Merlin: We're like, there are not that, that many, not that anybody needs them, but there's not that many extant photos of me in second grade.
Merlin: I mean, there's some, but like every family, I guess we went through some phases of morals.
Merlin: I'm just saying it's, you got to take what you get and not get upset because
John: Yes, yes, yes.
Merlin: I had a habit that is only interesting or salient because of this topic that I just made up, which is that I don't know.
Merlin: Kids are weird.
Merlin: You chew on things.
Merlin: You chew on your pencil.
Merlin: I used to chew on the collar of my shirt for probably a year or so.
Merlin: Oh, sure.
Merlin: I remember kids chewing on their collar.
Merlin: And so like you wear a shirt and I'm from a family.
John: We have long collars.
John: That's one of the things.
Merlin: Oh, yeah.
Merlin: You can get it into your mouth.
Merlin: Like Ray Liotta in Goodfellas.
Merlin: Cut myself a few times.
Merlin: No, but I don't know why I did it.
Merlin: It's something weird I did.
Merlin: And the problem is, though, my mom was not aware that I wore my most chewed upon collared shirt for a yearbook photo.
John: Oh, see.
Merlin: And so you can clearly see the tips of my little collared shirt are mangled in the photo.
Merlin: And I think, you know, understandably, she was really embarrassed, I guess.
Merlin: That was the picture of you.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: It is.
Merlin: And you buy a bunch and you send them to people.
Merlin: And like, if you're like my family, you, I don't know, you might make a Shrinky Dinks frame for it and give it as an ornament at Christmas or something.
John: Shrinky Dinks frame.
Merlin: Right, but that's the canonical photo.
Merlin: But the thing is, you get what you get and don't get upset, right?
Merlin: That's the photo we had.
Merlin: And I don't know.
John: You go to war with the photo you have.
Merlin: That's what Rumsfeld said.
Merlin: And here's one more thing I want to say about this.
Merlin: I'm throwing it back to you.
Merlin: I understand.
Merlin: I understand.
Merlin: And I sympathize with people who have a sex man in their family.
Merlin: Or there's an ugly divorce.
Merlin: A sex man.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Well, we had a sex man in part of our family once, and then people just took all the photos out of their photo library.
Merlin: Can I just be clear?
Merlin: For a fifth time, I understand that.
Merlin: Oh, I see.
Merlin: I understand.
Merlin: You get divorced from somebody, and you do that weird, I don't know, John Hughes movie thing of cutting the person out of photos.
Merlin: I've scribbled on people's photos.
Merlin: But I think that's unwholesome.
Merlin: I think you oughtn't take the sex man out of your photos, unless you can't handle it, which is your decision.
Merlin: But I keep the sex man.
Merlin: I keep all the bad photos.
Merlin: Because your life doesn't change retroactively because you've decided that you don't want somebody to have ever been in your life.
John: What do you do with your old not cool tweets?
John: Oh, that was... Your hilarious tweets from 2009.
Merlin: That's a good question.
Merlin: I had three distinct phases that I really felt really good about the first two, and I'm ambivalent about the third.
Merlin: The first was every tweet I ever did.
Merlin: I'm not really much of a deleter, but I'm a deleter if it had a typo, and I...
Merlin: If you don't delete tweets with a typo, what the hell's wrong with you?
Merlin: It's a publishing platform.
Merlin: But no, but then a while back, I set up a thing that would delete my tweets automatically after a week, which has worked great for a year or two.
Merlin: And then since some changes at Twitter, that doesn't work anymore.
Merlin: So that third phase now is everything's deleted up to a point.
Merlin: Now everything else is there.
Merlin: I'd just rather it all disappeared.
John: Yeah.
John: Yeah, you embrace the new technology, which is that this is not a lasting platform.
John: This is not a photo album.
Merlin: That is very much part of it.
Merlin: I'm not particularly I would not be joining Twitter today if it was a new thing.
Merlin: But in that particular example, the thing that was difficult for me to accept and operationalize was I'm proud of things that I've written.
Merlin: And I think things that I've written are funny.
Merlin: And I'd like them to remain up.
Merlin: And if somebody did a joke about it two years ago, it sucks that it went away and disappeared.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: But at the same time, Twitter is a tremendous application for being misunderstood at scale.
Merlin: Deliberately misunderstood at scale.
Merlin: And without context, your tweets mean nothing.
Merlin: So it's better to just delete them.
John: Yep, yep.
John: Shoulda, coulda, woulda.
John: I published them in a book, of course.
Merlin: I do remember that.
Merlin: I think you sold that at shows at one point.
John: Yeah, I did.
John: Big moneymaker for me.
John: That's why I live in a house now.
John: Yeah, my perfect bound Twitter book published by Matthew Stadler.
Merlin: Did you know that there is not... I remember being fairly modest, not in terms of length or girth or any of those things.
Merlin: I just remember it seeming a little bit like it was slightly nicer done than the thesis I printed on a laser writer.
John: Yeah, it was for sure printed at Kinko's, but it was...
Merlin: It's technically book.
Merlin: But it was done in such a way.
Merlin: The Mendocino County, make sure you see the sites of Mendocino County booklet that we picked up in the lobby of our hotel was way nicer than your thesis, my thesis, or your book.
Yeah.
John: Yeah, well, and the thing was the book had... Full-color bleeds.
John: The covers are like a file folder.
John: I mean, there's definitely... Yeah, it was made... It's the words that matter, man.
John: Handcrafted.
John: There's not a single picture of me...
John: age 18 meaning that for something like a year if a photograph was ever taken of you you don't you can't put your hands to it yeah there there were i remember you were probably photographed but you don't have those i remember in duluth minnesota standing uh for a for a photograph
John: Some people were like can can we take your picture?
John: And I said yes, I might you know, and I hear the representative at Dillon State For songwriters and I had my I had my backpack slung over my shoulder But it was really more of a duffel bag and I and so they took a picture I know it's out there now Maybe they threw it away when they were getting rid of all the sex men out of their files
John: But like there's a picture of me that was taken that I would pay any amount of money for.
Merlin: Do you remember, were you doing something funny in it or were you handsome?
John: No.
John: Well, I was 18.
John: Yeah.
John: Like I said, I don't.
John: And I went to jail then and there was a mugshot taken of me, which I would pay any amount of money to see.
John: But a listener to this program many years ago,
John: who lived in Colorado undertook a search to find using public records to find the mugshot and came back with the craziest, like, uh, Johnny Cash story that
John: apparently the courthouse in Boulder County burned down between 1986 and now, and all of their files were lost, which sounds to me.
John: Sounds a little suspicious.
John: Really sus, as we say, as we kids say.
John: Yes.
John: But he said, and somehow he got the arrest report, but the picture was lost.
John: Yeah.
John: So anyway, can you imagine an entire year of your life?
John: And then there was another year.
John: I think the age 22 was,
John: there's one picture of me, maybe like whole years would go by and there wouldn't be a single photograph for me of me or of anybody I knew.
John: Like I didn't, I just never owned a photograph from that time.
Merlin: I mean, I feel like I understand that well.
Merlin: And in a way that's, that sounds strange to explain, nobody's asking me to explain it, but like, as I am, I am as a, as a contrast, um,
Merlin: My wife's father loved photography and had pretty good cameras and took a lot of photos of the kids in the family, and those exist.
Merlin: And some of them are really, really, really good photos.
Merlin: Well, we didn't have that.
Merlin: We had a Kodak Instamatic camera, and we bought the 11020 exposure film for it from time to time.
Merlin: That's the good stuff.
Merlin: Well, there's so many little like patterns of that that are completely not relevant today.
Merlin: There's the obvious ones.
Merlin: Like you had to buy film with money and then you had to have film developed with money.
Merlin: You didn't take a photo of everything.
Merlin: I mean, what I'm not even getting into here is every single person in my family was a terrible photographer.
Merlin: Like so many poor decisions, whole rolls of film of what they imagine how like a fireworks show would look in 1976.
Merlin: Like or like pictures of fish and tanks and all this stuff that like we're today.
Merlin: I mean, there's so much stuff today where I would go like, oh, God, as beautiful as that photo is in my head, I wouldn't take it because the sun is shining at me and you wouldn't.
Merlin: All this stuff everybody knows today.
Merlin: We didn't know.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: But it was just also the part that makes this especially difficult is that we would have little runs where like maybe we took more photos for a while.
Merlin: Maybe we had a little more money that quarter and we bought two rolls of film.
Merlin: But then how does that developed film end up in...
Merlin: The album that we would make eventually.
Merlin: So there's all the pie that you start with is getting smaller and smaller and smaller.
Merlin: And so by the time you're done, there's like five photos of my birthday around my birthday when I was 10 with the same terrible haircut playing with my Action Jackson and my Evel Knievel and my guy from Star Trek, my Miko character.
Merlin: And like, you know, but you know what I'm saying though?
Merlin: Like it's, but now today, I mean, the ha ha, the opposite problem is I have so many pictures of signs.
Merlin: I just posted a picture on the internet just this morning.
Merlin: I took a photo of a tree that in my estimation looked like it had a butt.
Merlin: I have so many photos of misspellings.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Misspellings of signs, all that kind of stuff.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: You know, and when I take a photo of my kid, my kid's wearing a mask.
Merlin: So we have a completely different kind of problem today, you know?
John: Yeah.
John: How many pictures do you think are in your entire
John: Like picturography.
Merlin: Of the digital stuff in Apple Photos, which is my prime one off the dome, I don't know, somewhere between, I don't know, 60 and 100,000?
Merlin: I don't know.
Merlin: I mean, that would be very hard to look at.
Merlin: I'm going to look, though, because now I need to know.
John: That would be hard to look all the way.
Merlin: I have 59,091 photos.
Merlin: This is the weird one.
Merlin: 2,057 videos.
Merlin: And, you know, obviously that doesn't count duplicates or, you know, whatever.
Merlin: But yeah, yeah, that's completely bananas.
Merlin: We had three photo albums that my mom and I made in about 1977 or 8.
Merlin: And then, as I've mentioned before here in other places, most of my photos that I had personally were destroyed by water damage a few years ago.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: You know what I mean?
Merlin: So, like, yeah, it's all pretty weird.
Merlin: Was your family – wasn't your dad a famously pretty bad photographer?
John: Oh, yeah.
John: He was terrible.
John: He loved buying cameras and things to go with his cameras.
John: He's a gear man.
John: Yeah, but he could not for the life of him compose a photograph and and execute on that composition.
John: Yeah.
John: Yeah.
John: And one of the things I realized, you know, I took an art history class in college.
Merlin: and was really affected by it you know it was one of those most significant class i had in college was 20th century painting is that right oh yeah the the one that most of all or at least very very much on its most unexpectedly changed my view of things yeah that that was i didn't mean to interrupt you but yeah it's crazy because that was so out of nowhere the bar was so low for that i wasn't taking it because it was easy i was taking it partly because it was hard because i would say difficult but yeah
Merlin: But, yeah, that's what led me to really get interested in learning just a little more about – no, tell me more about that.
Merlin: Did you look at daguerreotypes and stuff like that?
John: Well, it was – you know, this is kind of the thing about a liberal arts education, right?
John: An art history class is one of the ones that I think a lot of people, maybe the majority of people listening to this show –
John: As they are scrolling, running their finger down the syllabus or running the finger down the class lists going, what should I take this quarter?
John: It just seems so lightweight, like art history.
John: People, I'm sure, skip over art history all the time on their way to something they think is more interesting or edifying.
Yeah.
John: And art history was exactly the kind of class I would take.
Merlin: Or just more practical.
Merlin: Practical, exactly.
Merlin: If you try to put it, I mean, like, and this, I am from Florida.
Merlin: I went to college in Florida.
Merlin: My decisions reflect being raised in Ohio and Florida.
Merlin: But honestly, I mean, the pressure to go to college was mainly just so you don't, like,
Merlin: I don't know, end up on a chain gang.
Merlin: It starts in seventh grade with something called vocational wheel.
Merlin: You are instructed in all of your fallbacks that you could have in life if you don't end up going to college, which let's be honest, you probably won't.
Merlin: And it was all very practical.
Merlin: It was about getting a job.
Merlin: Yes, it was about like making your parents happy, but ultimately it was about vocation in some ways.
John: For me, of course, college was all about reinforcing misapprehensions we had about our own class.
Merlin: Oh, doctor, that is good.
Merlin: Holy crap, you're right.
Merlin: Oh, my goodness.
Merlin: For me to take art history was absolutely good.
Merlin: It doesn't give me an invitation to the Met Gantelab, but it gets me a nice photograph.
John: Yeah, I expected all those years I was like, well, when I have to confront William F. Buckley on firing line—
Merlin: I'm going to know more, you know, if you call him a fascist one more time, he's going to punch you in the face so hard you'll stay plastered.
John: So but but of all the like ways of seeing like intellectual classes I took that were trying to break my mind and get me to understand the, you know, the real meaning behind language or the real meaning behind language.
Merlin: Or like a connection you never likely would have made on your own that requires just – like, you know, I mean, when you say, like, oh, why study the pre-Socratics?
Merlin: Dumb question.
Merlin: But, like, once you do that and you go, oh, there's a lot of stuff here that became the basis for a lot of other stuff, and it's going to be difficult for me to –
Merlin: in the future draw my own conclusions about these things because you kind of need a basis.
Merlin: I'm not talking about the great books.
Merlin: I'm not talking about great men.
Merlin: But I am saying, like, you do need to understand a little bit about how we got here to jump straight into Derrida before you looked at, you know, Descartes, let alone Kant.
John: Well, as we've talked, before you even read the Bible and think you can understand it.
John: But sitting in this art history class, you know, it was a darkened lecture hall and the teacher would get up and do a slideshow every, what, twice a week.
John: He had a really hot deck.
John: And he did have a hot deck.
John: And just walk you through the history of painting, but also walk you through, or the history of art.
John: Then do the great thing about art history, walk you through each individual artwork and go, do you see this?
John: Look at this.
John: This came, remember that thing we saw last week?
John: This is what happened as a result of that.
John: That's exactly what I got out of it.
John: These people went sideways from what we were looking at yesterday, and this is what they took from that.
Merlin: And Cezanne made these little simple geometric houses, had a huge influence on Van Gogh.
Merlin: Van Gogh's impasto style, where some of his impastos are like an eighth or a quarter of an inch thick, had an influence on later action painters.
Merlin: Like you can say that all out loud, but when you actually look at it and you go, no, no, no, I want you to really look at this.
Merlin: You can see shadows that are cast by the paint on one of Van Gogh's paintings.
Merlin: And when you see it in person, you get chills.
John: Yeah.
John: Yeah, and there was something about the – my art history teacher had – these slides had really great definition.
John: Like he really showed tremendous – they weren't fuzzy out-of-focus pictures.
John: It was just like you could really, really, really get –
John: what was happening and then i did you know when i went to rome or when i went to athens and saw some of these artworks i knew them already i knew them and i knew their little i need knew the little codes in them and the little stories about them and like no no do you see like this over here this person like this thing is so much like okay this painting is so much bigger than i expected or the salvador dolly painting it's so much smaller than i expected but he's painting with a one hair brush in 1934 to get these lines before he got all cute
Merlin: Like when he was really just a very, very gifted painter.
Merlin: You know what I mean?
Merlin: All of those kinds of things.
Merlin: But I think it's different from wine.
Merlin: I hope it's different from wine.
Merlin: It's different from wine.
Merlin: I hope so, because that seems a lot about showing off.
Merlin: And this is more about a warmth of connection that is so human.
Merlin: It feels like such a dumb, unnecessary white middle class flex.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: But it's actually really special.
Merlin: Oh, really special.
Merlin: When you understand things about visual art, you understand things about plays.
Merlin: Fuck, man.
Merlin: I didn't understand anything about dance.
Merlin: I thought dancing was stupid.
Merlin: And now I watch people dance.
Merlin: And as I'm sitting here with what I have come to call sleep injuries, and I watch people who are – I watch Molly Shannon on SNL able to kick as high as her head.
Merlin: And I'm like, holy shit.
Merlin: I mean, this is all revealing something very special about what makes us human.
John: Well, the thing about art history class was that then the next time I looked through the viewfinder of a camera, I understood.
Merlin: That's such a good point.
John: 10,000 times more about the fact that, wait, this is a frame.
John: I'm looking at a painting.
John: I'm looking at a picture and I know that there are vectors happening and I know that if you – that sometimes if you cut something off in the middle, it looks really terrible or sometimes you cut something off in the middle, it looks really intentional.
John: Like all of the things that I didn't learn –
John: Because I didn't take a photography class.
John: So no one taught me cropping.
John: No one taught me exposure.
John: But I did understand it.
Merlin: Especially on film, where there's like... Yeah, I mean, we were watching a Law and Order.
Merlin: Sometimes we watch Law and Order.
Merlin: And there's an old Law and Order that involves a guy taking...
Merlin: That guy taking lots of food.
Merlin: Wait, wait, wait.
Merlin: Do we loop?
Merlin: Am I lost?
John: I don't know.
John: Yeah, you're all warbling.
John: I'm here and I'm talking.
Merlin: I'm talking.
Merlin: Can you hear me now?
Merlin: I am talking.
John: Now I can hear you.
Merlin: Oh, good.
Merlin: That used to be costly.
Merlin: Even if you did black and white on your own, then you smelled like eggs.
Merlin: Like, you know, it was not without cost.
Merlin: But continue.
Merlin: Continue.
Merlin: But you know what you're learning?
Merlin: This is design skills.
Merlin: You're learning, unintentionally learning design skills.
Merlin: You're learning things about composition and texture and contrast.
Merlin: And like, you know, being able to draw is not just about like, oh, no, that looks, that looks like a, you know, Grecian urn.
Merlin: It's like, no, but like, it's got texture to it.
Merlin: It's got depth.
Merlin: It's got, there's more to it than just lines.
Merlin: And like, same thing happens with photography and the art history stuff where you're like,
Merlin: There's a lot more to this.
Merlin: This is not just some fun optical illusion or some tribute to, you know, the deeply inbred King Philip of Spain.
Merlin: There's something more going on here.
Merlin: As Bob Dylan says, or excuse me, his friend Bob Seger, what's to leave in, what to leave out.
Merlin: What's in the frame, what's out of the frame.
Merlin: All the way down to color field shit.
Merlin: Like you see like, you know what I mean?
Merlin: Like a Frankenthaler or whatever.
Merlin: And you're like, oh, it's just a red painting.
Merlin: That Rothko is just like two boxes.
Merlin: And you're like, okay, fine.
Merlin: It's just two boxes.
Merlin: Why don't you go wait in the car?
John: Yeah, all of that.
John: I think it changed the way I look at architecture.
John: And it's simple.
John: It's not like I took 17 classes in that field.
John: It was just the scales falling from your eyes.
John: And I think immediately I became...
John: like innocently a 10,000 times better photographer than my dad ever was because he didn't look through the camera that way.
John: You know, he would look through the camera.
Merlin: I mean, if he's like my family, I can't speak for your dad, but we would look through the camera and see what we hoped to see, to see what we wanted to see.
Merlin: If you take a picture of fireworks with a Kodak Instamatic camera in 1976, your results are not going to be terrific.
Merlin: If you take pictures inside the Pirates of the Caribbean ride where you're not supposed to be using those flash cubes,
Merlin: You're going to, you know, it's going to look terrible.
Merlin: That's not what it's for.
Merlin: And you don't, you don't have any context for that.
Merlin: You learned, you learned, you got all the basic tools that you needed to like start thinking in a slightly more sophisticated way about the visual presentation of things.
John: Yeah.
John: The challenge was then to look at my dad's photos and,
John: Of which there were many.
John: Figure out what they were of.
John: Well, yeah, a lot of them were in slide trays, you know, circular trays for a slide projector that were stacked to the ceiling.
John: And you put them on and you really – Dad is looking through the camera like he's looking through a submarine periscope.
John: And he had something he was trying to capture.
John: And often looking at his pictures now, he captured –
John: a lot of things he didn't intend to capture because he wasn't paying attention to how it was framed or waiting for someone to turn around so you could see their face or you know like that's the thing taking a picture of someone where you can't see their face because in the present moment with them
Merlin: You can see that, you know, you like you're saying you can what you think what you think is in the frame and then what you think will appear on Be exposed on the film and then what you think will turn into a negative and what you imagine the negative will turn into as a finished print He's drawing the whole world that he's looking at through his magic machine, right?
John: I can see an owl really far away so you can see an owl, right?
John: Yeah, right exactly or or here is my child
John: In a, you know, in some crucial moment of their life and I'm taking a picture of them in mid stride with their face turned away from the camera and I'm using the wrong shutter speed.
John: So it's also blurry and also it's dark.
John: But this is the moment that they, you know, this was the moment that they won the science fair project.
Merlin: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Merlin: Or this is the moment.
Merlin: How many families, like mine, have a photo of the TV screen when we landed on the moon?
Merlin: Oh.
Merlin: A terrible, terrible.
Merlin: I used to record with a cassette tape and a little Zenith cassette player.
Merlin: That's how I first got a recording of Daydream Believer, was recording it with a microphone held up to the TV at four in the afternoon.
Merlin: Shit.
John: Sure, sure.
John: That's the world we lived in.
John: Well, and 45 years went by where that was not worth anything, right?
John: Like 45 years went by where a Kodachrome photograph of your television on the moon landing is not worth anything.
John: Of course you have a flash.
John: Because the moon's dark.
John: But then at some point in 2015, that suddenly started to become an artifact of
John: And depending on how you think about things now, like I have right here, right here, right here.
John: In your hands.
John: I have this affidavit.
John: It says right here that Michael Corleone...
John: No, I have a newspaper.
Merlin: I just want to say a lot of my constituents are Italian-Americans, and they are some of the finest people.
Merlin: And just because they saved me from a situation where they framed it to look like I had killed a sex worker, I do have another committee meeting I need to get to.
John: Senator.
John: Senator.
John: Senator.
John: Senator.
John: I'll allow it.
Senator.
John: my wife i feel i have a i have a i have the the entire not the front page the entire seattle times from the day the man a man walked on the moon times from when john lennon died oh man and i've looked into what what do i do what do i do with this i i have this copy of the newspaper
Merlin: We both have yellow garbage in a hefty bag.
John: Yeah, it's yellow, and it's sitting here on the freaking coffee table.
John: It's as old as me.
John: It's 54 years old.
John: Who knows the life that this thing led in order to find its way to me, and then I don't know what to do with it, so I just put it on the coffee table.
John: Well, if you look at how to preserve a newspaper in a frame...
John: Everything you read about – and I'm sure there is a librarian right now that has jumped up off of her chair and is running right now to send me a letter on archival paper.
John: But almost everything you read says – An acid-free complaint.
John: Acid-free.
John: It says, yes, you can put a newspaper in a frame, but it will decay.
John: It doesn't matter what you do.
John: Newspapers were not meant to live.
John: And it will – you can put it in all the archival, whatever you want, but it's just – the sun is just going to turn it into ashes.
John: And so – and I've heard – I read this over and over.
John: Like, make a really beautiful copy of it on really beautiful paper and then put that in a frame.
John: But then it's not the thing.
John: It's not the thing.
Merlin: And so – It's a replica.
Merlin: You've got a replica, perhaps an antique –
Merlin: Well, and you could buy that.
Merlin: Absolutely.
Merlin: I mean, yeah, like, because we're not really getting at the point of what it's for, how you imprinted.
Merlin: I'm not criticizing here because I have so much shit like that where, like, I thought this was the special thing and that's what I imprinted on.
Merlin: And, like, was that really the special thing, though?
Merlin: Or was it, like, how it felt in the room that day?
John: Well, and for me, this newspaper realizing, because I did the thing where I went down a rabbit hole, like, how do I preserve this incredible piece of American history?
John: And everywhere I looked,
John: online, somebody was telling me, you can't.
John: Now, I'm sure you can.
John: I'm sure if I put it in something other than folded on my coffee table sitting here waiting for me to put my coffee cup on it, there's a way, you know, like one of these days I'm going to accident, I'm going to be looking somewhere else, I'm going to put my coffee cup down right on this 55-year-old copy of the newspaper.
John: But what I did was I got bamboozled or baffled by
John: all the people telling me it wasn't possible who are probably talking to each other in archival communities and they,
John: You know, they're just like small differences with each other.
John: But what I've decided is, oh, the best use for this is just to have it on the coffee table and pick it up every once in a while.
Merlin: It's what Alice Walker talks about in that wonderful short story, Everyday Use.
Merlin: This quilt that your grandmother has had since the 1800s as a student of African-American studies in the 70s, you look at it and say this should be in a museum.
Merlin: And your grandmother says, no, it's not for a museum, it's for using.
Right.
Merlin: Food is for eating.
Merlin: Blankets are for warming.
Merlin: This is what we use.
Merlin: This has become so instrumental.
Merlin: Stickers are for sticking.
Merlin: Stop acting like your life is a museum.
Merlin: You have just made my food collection look really weird.
John: Well, we refrigerate our garbage for two weeks before we throw it out.
John: Stickers are for sticking.
John: Now, this is a thing I never learned in my entire life.
John: Right, of course, because they're nice stickers.
John: Why would you use them?
John: They're too nice.
John: No, I'm going to put this sticker in my sticker drawer, and one day I'm going to find the thing that all these stickers go on.
John: But until that day, I'm not just going to stick it on.
John: And then, you know, then you have a daughter and she's just, you know, you hand her a sticker and she pulls the backing off and sticks it on something.
Merlin: And I bet it's not even like even or centered and it might have like a bubble or a line.
John: What are you doing?
John: You just stuck that on your thing.
John: We were about to throw that away.
John: We were taking that to the dump.
John: And she's like, well, I liked the way the sticker looked on it for the three minutes before we threw it in the fireplace.
John: Oh, my God.
John: That's so wholesome.
John: Your child might be a Buddha.
John: I guess, right?
John: I mean, and that's the thing I could never do.
John: I still have stickers.
John: I still have sub pop stickers from the first time they made a sub pop sticker.
John: And I have sub pop stickers from two weeks ago when I went to the sub pop store.
John: And they're indistinguishable from one another, except one of them I've been carrying for 30 years.
John: This one, see how yellow it is?
John: This one's from 1992.
John: And that one is from today.
John: And they're the same.
John: They're the same.
John: Exactly the same.
John: And she would take the back off of either one of them
John: Even knowing the story, I would go, but this one's 40 years old.
John: She's like, zip, stick it on a Coke can.
John: Right now.
John: And now it's a sub pop Coke can.
John: I was going to retire on that sticker.
John: Are you kidding me?
John: That was your heirloom.
John: You know, that was your that was your estate.
John: You just burned.
Merlin: I think sometimes we... I. I'll just use I statements.
Merlin: I mean, but for it to be useful, I hope it can be abstracted beyond just me.
Merlin: Well, then say we.
Merlin: I think we, as a people, sometimes have confused relations about...
Merlin: You know, something I've talked about a lot here that's become a big deal for me is, like, thinking about your relationship with the stuff in your life.
Merlin: And is the stuff really just stuff?
Merlin: Or is it a talisman?
Merlin: Is it a relic?
Merlin: Is it, like, a piece of the true cross?
Merlin: Like, all these things where you're like, well, let's go.
Merlin: And when you're talking about librarians, et cetera, for some reason I started immediately thinking of...
Merlin: like antiques roadshow, like not to do a bit here, but like those times where a guy, there's one I remember in particular where a guy comes up and goes, Hey, this is an original, you know, what a civil war gun in a, in a belt.
Merlin: And it's one of those classic, like, well, no, you can see here where it says copyright 1972.
Merlin: This is a toy gun.
Merlin: The, the, the, the holster is made out of cotton candy.
Merlin: It clearly says cotton candy holster on the side.
Merlin: It is that kind of thing.
Merlin: And you're like, and they always end up saying to try and be nice about it.
Merlin: They'll go like, well, I hope you continue to enjoy having this,
Merlin: 1976 Betty Boop statue in your house but like when you thought that that was valuable you cared about it a lot you cared about it more than you probably should have and then when you found out that it was not valuable and by not valuable I mean empirically to people like librarians who and I didn't mean to interrupt you I think we got drift but like you know when it would have mattered to take care of that newspaper July of 1969
John: Well, somebody did, because it's here.
John: You know what I'm saying, though?
Merlin: They didn't throw it in the fire.
Merlin: Well, I know, but I mean, for me to try and rehabilitate the John Lennon paper from December of 1980, like, well, you know, to get into another one of my, if we're going to talk about things like food and stickers, well, the best time to not waste food is by not buying it.
Merlin: If you bought the food and then decide not to waste it.
Merlin: That's not as useful.
Merlin: If you've bought it, what are you going to do?
Merlin: Well, eat it or don't eat it, but stop acting like it belongs in a cold museum.
Merlin: It's just that you have to figure out.
Merlin: And the thing I'm putting so poorly is that we have to be, I feel like it's useful to try and interrogate what it is about your relationship with the thing that has made it special for you.
Merlin: And, you know, if you want to have an unwholesome relationship, live it up.
Merlin: But like, it's also valuable to go like, well, it's not these people are being mean by saying you have to go scan this and put it on acid free paper.
Merlin: That's the color of their crystal.
Merlin: It's their job to take care of that.
Merlin: They're not there to take care of how you feel about this.
Merlin: Kapok garden plastic orange drinking cup.
Merlin: You know what I mean?
Merlin: They're looking at it from that point of view.
John: In that specific example, no, I don't know what a Kapok orange.
Merlin: Kapok tree was this, but you ever go somewhere and get like a souvenir, like an orange drink and like an orange, it looks like an orange.
Merlin: I mean, my whole house is full of that kind of crap.
Oh, yeah.
Merlin: Rusty Brown.
Merlin: Rusty Brown from the Chris Ware comic, I think.
John: Except I have some that are actually made out of pottery because they are from 1850.
Merlin: Hey, come get them.
Merlin: It looks like an orange.
Merlin: Actually, sir, it does say 1987 on the bottom.
Merlin: Oh, but I thought that was their joke.
John: It was them making a future joke.
Merlin: No, that's the very rare Rookwood, you know, print.
Merlin: They strike that on the bottom of all their pottery.
John: My favorite Antiques Roadshow people are the ones where, you know, the person says, this is an original Stickley.
John: It's worth $27,000.
John: And they're like, well, it's been in the closet and that's where it's going because it doesn't match my drapes.
Merlin: Or, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Merlin: I do love those too.
Merlin: But like, you know, I'm not watching this to like bag on people, but it's something we all do.
Merlin: And the reason I think it's interesting, the same reason I like a good villain, even if they're problematic, or especially if they're problematic, is I learned something from that.
Merlin: When I watch the people on Antiques Roadshow who are like, oh, they're walking in there and they're like, oh, man, I'm going to blow this woman's mind with this, you know, whatever, writing desk.
Merlin: And it could be something like, okay, there's water damage here, that kind of thing.
Merlin: It could be that, like, this leg has been replaced.
Merlin: But here's the thing, and the reason I keep coming back to this, I think this is important, is like, if you love this desk as a part of your life, however, why ever you have come to love this desk, I am not here to take anything away from that.
Merlin: Problem is, you brought it in here in the way that you would bring it into a pawn shop
Merlin: in reno and so i need to i need to say to you that like this is not a thing that i would buy and it's not in a condition that i would sell that doesn't mean i hate you and your family it just means that you ask me about that and i told you that and then the person's understandably a little miffed because it might be some big piece of family lore that this is general hat a general grant's hat or something
John: general grants had he was he was less well-dressed than lee you know oh you know they're both they're both very handsome men very very uh you know you gotta like lee a little bit you know he's a really when i was in he's such a good when i was in charleston i went into an antique store and it was truly an antique store that's the wait a minute you mean actual antiques which used to mean it was 70 years old
John: Yeah, it wasn't a couch with a bunch of big flowers on it that said Brady Bunch on it.
John: It was like a thing from 1750.
Merlin: This is an original ColecoVision.
John: And walking around the store, an enormous store, I realized there wasn't a single thing in this store that I even liked because it was all...
John: colonial era and Antebellum But it could be like a butter a butter churn you could afford what one could afford.
Merlin: Oh, yeah There was all kinds of stuff you could buy and this is old and I know it I've got the provenance papers.
John: I've got the certificate of authenticity This is a real churn that now I'm gonna put umbrellas in it You see this in car collectors to like there was a time when The the really cool cars were
John: from the thirties and cars from the seventies were still being taken to the dump and car, the whole car collecting hobby was about cars from the, the twenties and thirties.
John: And then for most of my life, but not most of my life, most of the last 15 years.
Merlin: I think from the time I was aware of it, the reason I like Mustangs is because I think they're cool.
Merlin: But also because I had a friend who was into Mustangs whose actual other dear friend had Mustangs when he was 16.
Merlin: He had a 64 and a half Mustang Pony interior hexagon grill.
John: The parking lot of my high school in 1986 was like GTO, 1971 split bumper Camaro.
John: Oh my God.
John: You just walk down the line and it's like every one of these cars is an incredible collector.
John: They're all SS.
John: It's all the Novas, everything.
John: And so then I watched those become really expensive.
John: Well, now you look at the car collecting hobby and people are buying cars.
John: all these uh you know like honda accords and they're like this this are you kidding this accord has the 16 valve overhead cam you guys really need we've i don't want to talk out of school but it's so important i hear you got you two talk about a honda accord
Merlin: Because he really, it's so hard, it's getting harder and harder for him to get a manual Honda Accord with the trim package he wants, and it's undoing him.
Merlin: Oh, yeah, he's just like, well, I need the RS package.
Merlin: Because you can't, right, because you can't get, if you, I'm not going to get involved in this.
Merlin: I'm going to let you two fight it out.
Merlin: Jesus Christ.
John: Well, but this is the thing about what things are worth, right?
John: Like, I think you can get colonial furniture.
John: affordably again because there's nobody that wants it, right?
John: And 15 years ago, you'd watch Antiques Roadshow.
John: Oh, because everyone's like mid-century, right?
John: Yeah, you'd watch Antiques Roadshow 15 years ago and they're like, this chair was made by Abraham Lincoln or Ben Franklin.
Merlin: Which I'm really interested in, especially like,
Merlin: like shaker stuff and like, you know, kind of like plain folk, like beautiful benches or like this, this is, you know, this was part of a probably rotten now, but a broom or like, this is one of those chairs that hang on a wall.
Merlin: I feel like in the eighties and nineties, that was really the shit.
John: It was, it was.
John: And, and, and I think there are people that invested a lot of money in,
John: in that kind of folk art stuff, thinking it was only ever going to be worth more.
John: Exactly.
John: And the wine can only go up.
John: This is old.
John: Yeah, the bottom falls out of the market.
Merlin: They're not making this anymore, right?
John: Because nobody's like, I'm decorating my house like an old, like an Amish farmhouse anymore.
John: That's not the style.
John: It looks like the barn and women talking.
John: But I think millennials forget this when they think about there not being any affordable houses.
John: Right now, the boomers are clogging up all the houses and houses cost a ton of money and nobody can afford one because there's all these old boomers that are just about to either die or move into a home.
John: And that's all going to happen in the space of like, boom, like a huge wave of boomers leaving.
John: I mean, my entire neighborhood is old boomers who are
John: starting to look at brochures about a place in loretto mexico that if they just sold this you know this nine bedroom house where they raised their families they're gonna get a duplex down in flagstaff farms and they're gonna go down right and then the house is gonna come for sale and none of their kids want it because their kids are all living in double wide somewhere and all of a sudden like this whole neighborhood is gonna in is gonna flip and
John: It's going to go – I'm going to go from being the youngest guy in this neighborhood to the oldest guy in this neighborhood.
Merlin: Do you think they'll turn into like Airbnbs or something?
John: No, no.
John: I just think – I think that they're all – because every house that sells in this neighborhood, I – when I meet the people, I'm like, oh, they're 40 and they have –
John: two kids under the age of four yeah yeah and they're very you know they're nicely appointed people they have you know two two incomes except she's decided to quit her job and stay home it's like she makes jewelry now yeah it's the it's the most it's the craziest kind of like this still exists but yeah it's like it's everybody's dream right to like
John: Oh, we're going to move out and have a yard.
Merlin: But it's a problem that used to be, I don't want to say unique to San Francisco and places like San Francisco, but it was something that was, I don't know, I don't know if this is exactly true, but a way that it was explained to me why San Francisco in particular, the seven by seven-ish city and county of San Francisco that's unique is it's economically...
Merlin: um anomalous in the sense that it is a place where the demand is so high and you can charge almost anything you want it's the kind of thing you usually would see more in like a an old resort community like long island or cape cod or something you know what i mean older colorado i i i guess i i guess that's a joke for our boulder listeners
Merlin: That's where CU is?
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: And the idea was like, okay, well, this is, it's not going to be everywhere, but now it is kind of everywhere.
Merlin: But because of, because of, or related to what you're describing, which is people who bought these houses, I mean, all the way, if we're talking about boomers, you go all the way back to, that means they were born in the post-war period when there was a fair amount of housing stock coming up, lots of financing for it, especially for veterans, et cetera, and on and on.
Merlin: And
Merlin: through all those generations and you could buy.
Merlin: So those folks who are a little, what, 10 years older than us, are they, is this mostly?
John: 20 years older than us.
Merlin: Wow.
Merlin: God damn it.
Merlin: That makes you feel better, sure.
John: God damn it.
Merlin: Look at me.
Merlin: I can retire.
Merlin: Ooh.
Merlin: And I said, are we talking about like Boeing, retired Boeing engineers or what?
John: Oh yeah.
John: Yeah.
John: Yeah.
John: Boeing, you know, the guy across the street from me was a veterinarian.
John: The guy on the other corner was a, was a doctor.
John: Like this was a nice neighborhood, but the people.
Merlin: Those houses are probably really appreciated in value over the last 20, 30 years.
John: Well, they have, but I, you know, just in the last two years, this, no, the last year, this time last year, uh, my house had a valuation that was, so it was bonkers to anybody.
John: And then the interest rates changed.
John: And all of a sudden, you know, it took like this huge amount of apparently what this house is worth.
John: It just took it off the books because the interest rate went from 3% to 7%.
John: Okay.
John: And you only have to go through a few of those in life to go like, oh, right, I remember.
John: All of this is fake.
John: It's all just pretend.
John: It's real.
Merlin: I always remember in the early 80s.
Merlin: And I remember this specifically because I'll tell you why.
Merlin: I tell you why I remember this specifically.
Merlin: When rates were 17% and our parents were trying to buy homes?
Merlin: Yeah, because check this out.
Merlin: My stepfather threw us out of the house in 1982.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: And my mom had to get back.
Merlin: He's awesome.
Merlin: Big fan of Serbia.
Merlin: He threw us out.
Merlin: Actually, technically his son threw us out.
Merlin: We came on one day and there was an eviction order from his son who technically owned the house.
Merlin: But that's a different story.
Merlin: That's all fine.
Merlin: So mom and I moved into this house, a two-bedroom with cat pee smells.
Merlin: And she got right back into real estate, which is what she had done while... She'd already kind of just been getting back into it.
Merlin: But then she really plunged herself into that because...
Merlin: you know, that we needed money.
Merlin: So check this out.
Merlin: We have my, my, the old crappy car that my stepfather had used for fishing and smelled like bait.
Merlin: And, um, but she was going to have to like go out and show people how.
Merlin: So guess what?
Merlin: Ready for a double whammy, 1983.
Merlin: You've got gas at one point was like a dollar.
Merlin: Remember when gas was like a dollar 40 a gallon.
Merlin: Uh, yeah.
Merlin: Oh, so you youngsters.
Merlin: Oh, so $7 now.
Merlin: Okay.
Merlin: Here's a thing called inflation.
Merlin: I'd like to tell you about the thing is a year or two before that gas was about 40, 50, maybe 55 cents a gallon.
Merlin: And then suddenly it was a dollar 40 a gallon.
John: I, I, you know, my Vespa, I could fill it up for, I think like, I don't know, 50 cents.
John: And drive around for a week or two?
John: Well, you didn't have to actually mix it.
John: It did have a two-cycle motor, but it had a separate place where you put the oil.
John: So it was self-mixing.
John: It mixed itself.
John: So it's like a sexy lawnmower.
John: My car mixed itself.
Merlin: I drive cars that mix themselves.
Merlin: And then you get what you described.
Merlin: I don't know if it got to 17, but I do remember interest rates for houses were bananas over like 15% if memory serves.
Merlin: Circa like mid 80s, right?
John: My mom had a 15% mortgage.
John: Yeah.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: I mean, this is not a particularly new problem, but that was a real double whamly, double whamly, a double whamly, a triple whamly.
John: It was a doubly whamly.
Merlin: It was a big whamly.
Merlin: It was a timey whammy.
Merlin: It's hard to explain.
Merlin: That was a rough time.
Merlin: But, you know, we sometimes, like so many things in the world today, John, it's difficult to even have a decent argument with somebody because we –
Merlin: Don't take the time to realize whether we're even arguing about something that's even vaguely related to what we think we're arguing about.
Merlin: We don't know for ourselves.
Merlin: We don't understand the other people.
Merlin: And I'm not saying we're dumb.
Merlin: People are dumb.
John: But I mean – Well, people are dumb.
Merlin: People are dumb.
Merlin: And if you can look at somebody who's working really, really hard in their 30s and go, well, it's because they ate too many avocados that they can't afford a house.
Merlin: Like you're being very unkind and simple.
Merlin: And you're not really understanding the benefits that you had in a way that they don't have.
Merlin: The generational wealth has really, really changed.
John: The converse of that is also true.
John: If you're 35 and can't afford a house, that's also not necessarily going to be true the rest of your life, right?
John: Of course things change.
John: Yeah.
John: We all at age 25 thought that the world was completely rigged against us, that everybody that had come before us was a cheater that was stealing all the oxygen, and that no one in the world was ready to hear my incredible ideas.
Right?
John: We all felt like that at 25 and 35.
John: Why the hell doesn't anybody want to hear my incredible ideas?
Merlin: I keep raising my hand.
Merlin: I think I have solutions that can help a lot of people.
John: Yeah, but nobody wants to hear it because all of the people ahead of me are like stealing all the avocados.
John: It's like, all right, all right.
John: You know, like that's the problem, right?
John: That's the problem.
Merlin: No wonder I can't afford them.
Merlin: This guy over here keeps buying all the avocados.
Merlin: Yeah, why the fuck does he get all the avocados?
Merlin: It's artificial scarcity and I hate it.
What?
Merlin: Hello, my name is Robert Haas.
John: I went to an Easter service.
John: Oh, you did?
John: I went to an Easter service.
John: And, you know, this is the trigger alert for our religious listeners.
John: I went and I came in late.
John: And, of course, I was dressed to the nines because it's Easter.
John: And so, you know, if you're going to have, if you're going to dress up for church, you want to do it on Easter, right?
John: You know, there's only four times you're really going to put on a pastel suit.
John: It's like John Mulaney says, you go in here, you're wearing hats.
John: It's like you're going to church in Atlanta.
Merlin: They make a day of it.
Merlin: Exactly.
John: And so I walk in and there's, you know, of course, the church is packed.
John: There's nowhere to sit.
John: There's nowhere to be.
John: And so, and I'm with my little girl and she grabs my hand and marches us right to the front.
John: Do you remember the denomination of the church?
John: I do.
John: I do remember the domination and it was the Episcopalian domination.
John: Oh, yeah.
John: And this is a church in Bellingham.
John: So they wear the suits, they wear the outfits and everything.
John: Oh, yeah, yeah.
John: Well, the people that are running the show.
John: I dated a daughter of an Episcopal minister.
John: Yeah, the people in the, because this is in Bellingham, Washington, this is the big Episcopal church in Bellingham.
John: You know, in Bellingham, people on Easter will put on their second or third nicest flannel shirt.
John: Because they save the nice ones for weddings.
Merlin: Oh, the special Patagonia bonnet.
John: Yeah, or they want to be buried in their nice ones so they never wear it.
John: Yeah, yeah.
John: You know, what's funny is that back when Bellingham was a town full of fishermen and lumberjacks and people that worked at the mill, they all wore suits to church.
Yeah.
John: Now, it's a bunch of people.
John: God knows what they do.
John: Teach at the college or they work online.
John: And they all dress like fishermen, lumberjacks, and people that work in the mill.
John: Isn't that ironical?
John: Isn't that something?
John: Huh.
John: Anyway, so I'm at this thing.
John: We end up sitting in the front row.
John: Because my little dingbat's like, well, there's open seats in the front row.
John: And I'm like, aren't these reserved for somebody?
John: And all the people are like, nope.
John: Just nobody ever wants to sit up here.
John: These seats are for the worthy.
John: So we sit in the front.
John: And, um, and I watched the whole Easter, the whole Easter show.
John: And of course I'm, uh, you know, I go into a reverie as one does in any kind of thing like this, you know, um, it's, it is people practicing their religion.
John: And it's a liturgy that I know very well because I've grown up in America in the 20th century.
John: And so I know what's happening.
John: I know all the stories.
Merlin: Easter, I gotta say Easter is usually, that's a pretty good service.
Merlin: It's good service.
Merlin: It's fun.
Merlin: It's like Easter is like, it's pretty, it's celebratory.
Merlin: Christmas, Christmas Eve, you're like, ah, we got to get home.
Merlin: But Easter is kind of fun.
Merlin: It's like, hey, he's risen, guys.
John: Look, he's not even on the cross.
John: Easter is the story that turns the story from, oh, yeah, there was this Jewish guy that had a lot of good ideas.
John: It's Easter that turns it into like, oh, no, no, no, no, no.
John: It's not just a guy with a lot of good ideas.
John: It also.
Merlin: Nailed to a tree for saying people should be nice to each other.
John: And then they put him in a cave, and then he rolled the stone away, and then his blood cleanses you of sin.
John: No, no, no, no, wait, there's more.
John: And then Thomas rolls up, and he's like, let me fill your sword hole.
John: And so they're really leaning hard on the Gospel of John, because that's a pretty darn good Easter story.
John: Oh, yeah, it's the best.
John: It's the hipster gospel for sure.
John: I keep leaning over and I'm like, well, John says that it was only Mary that was there.
John: But, you know, there are other accounts.
John: And she's like, shut up, Dad.
John: And I'm like, no, no, no.
John: Matthew's kind of just making a lot of shit up.
Merlin: It's kind of the manga version of it.
Merlin: Yeah.
John: Maybe there were a bunch of people there.
John: Maybe it was like, maybe, you know, maybe he was crucified in the morning.
John: Maybe he was crucified afternoon.
Merlin: There's a lot of different.
Merlin: And she's like, why do they have two characters named Joseph?
Merlin: I think that's confusing.
John: Why are there two Marys or maybe 15 Marys?
Merlin: Oh, I know.
Merlin: You can't just strap on a Magdalene and call that a new character.
Merlin: So she's a sex worker.
Merlin: She has a name.
John: yeah although i don't know maybe read her gospel oh you can't why because oh shit dog now wait so i'm watching it and i'm you know and i'm in that thing i went to catholic school i've been to i everywhere i go i go to religious services so i'm in my i'm in my space i'm listening to the homily i'm thinking about the early church i can't i can't help but always go back to think about the early church
John: I'm thinking about the church.
John: I'm thinking, what a nice building this is.
John: The early Christian church?
John: The early Christian church.
John: I'm looking at the 600 people that are here for the Easter service and what brought them here.
John: And then they start baptizing babies.
John: And so I'm watching these young families that are so excited to have their little babies baptized.
John: And it's the whole thing.
John: It's the whole bit.
John: And I'm watching it and I'm just like,
John: How is this – this is both like the newspaper on my coffee table about the moon landing.
John: This is in one way exactly the same as shaker furniture that should no longer be popular, but it keeps going.
John: Christianity has been up and down with the Rolling Stones 2,000 times over the last 2,000 years.
John: And here we are.
John: Here we are.
John: I'm sitting in this.
John: I'm sitting in this building.
John: I'm sitting with the band.
Merlin: The band, yeah.
Merlin: You're saying like you like a single from this, then they put out some girls, you have this feeling they come up with like hot, not hot space, you know, but they keep, they do the steel wheels.
Merlin: Yeah, you got undercover of the night.
John: Undercover.
John: Wow, wow, wow, wow.
Merlin: With the Harlem shuffle.
Merlin: It's a lot like Jesus.
John: You're right.
John: Like Jesus, right?
John: And so I'm like, there are so many things in that service that
John: So much of it is artifacts, right?
John: They're mental versions of little, of like oranges that were drinking glasses that came with your hamburger, right?
John: So much stuff.
Merlin: At least our tabernacle, the little table says, you know, this do in remembrance of me.
Merlin: You've got the cross.
Merlin: You've got the like, there's something very, very formal.
Merlin: And like, it does feel very important.
Merlin: Like something very important is happening.
John: Well, the stories, too.
John: I mean, you know, all the stories, we all know them.
John: And it's just like, wow.
John: And then we're telling this story.
John: And the whole point of a priest or a minister is to tell those stories and make them relevant to you today.
John: And so how many times have you heard the good news presented to you by somebody who
John: who is doing their own intellectual work, trying to make that relevant to them first and to you, right?
Merlin: I mean, it's arguably the most basic role of a minister, but in some cases, especially a youth minister, of being able to not stand off all of this, but make it something that you could teach in a—you know what I mean?
Merlin: In junior church, which for us is—
Merlin: Yeah, between five or six years, probably about seven-year-olds up to like 12 or 13-year-olds.
Merlin: That's a tough group.
Merlin: That's a little one-room schoolhouse of people where you're talking about some very complicated, deep issues.
John: That's a hell of a job.
John: But I think that's true.
John: Trying to get those teenagers to go through confirmation is super hard.
John: Send your kid to Hebrew school and it's like, no, no, no.
John: At the end of this, there's a big party.
John: You just have to memorize a lot of stuff between now and then.
John: But then you're going to get a watch.
John: Granddad's going to get you a watch.
John: There's a payoff.
John: But sitting in this room with all these fully grown people,
John: And their babies and all of the hymns and all of the things where everybody's participating.
John: And like any church, the up, the down, the up, the down.
John: And just feeling like, for whatever reason, I was just really feeling not the antiquity of it, but the antiqueness of it.
John: And normally I'm really tuned into the antiquity of it.
John: And that's where I come from on it, right?
John: Or that's how I sit through a church service and enjoy myself.
Merlin: Antiquity is how long it's been around, and antique is how it's regarded for being old?
John: Well, or antique is how it's just old.
John: It's not, you know, like there are better blenders, right?
John: There are some of us, like me, who uses a blender from 1930 because it's hilarious.
I see.
John: I get it, yeah, yeah.
John: But it's not a good blender.
John: Well, and like – but also like because I'm not trying to be – In some ways it's a better blender because it's not going to break.
Merlin: But like opening day is like that for some people in baseball.
Merlin: It's like this is a spring, family, all these things.
Merlin: It's like, you know –
Merlin: you don't, you generally don't kind of cut it into slices in that particular way, but it's similar in that way.
Merlin: And like the whole, the whole feeling of like, you know, peeing in a trough and getting a beer and like all the stuff that involves that and that you did with your father and your father did with his father, et cetera, et cetera.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: Like that's, that there's something to that that is a great source of, of consolation and confidence in a world that's generally full of things that are confusing.
Merlin: Yeah.
John: Well, and I think the, I think the story, the point, you know, like if, because I know that there are a couple of priests that listen to this show and I,
John: And that job is to tell those stories in a way that has the impact of our art history classes.
John: Oh, I see.
John: Good one.
John: Every day, somebody's going to hear that story for the first time and go, whoa, I see.
John: If you get all the corners in the frame, then all of a sudden it looks like, I get why things are beautiful now.
Merlin: If Jesus was selfish like me, he could have just said, no, I just want to go straight up there and sit next to you.
Merlin: And instead, like the whole point is like, whether you, however you feel about this, I don't have a dog in this fight, but it's a very, it's a very big and moving story to go that the coolest guy ever decided to take one for me.
Merlin: And the least I can do is, you know, help him out.
John: That's right on the cover page of, of the extreme teen Bible.
John: The coolest guy ever decided to take one for me.
John: Hang on.
John: Let me turn my chair around.
John: Turn my baseball cap.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Turn my pointy poe pad around.
Merlin: Hey, guys, let's wrap.
Merlin: Hey, guys, let's wrap.
Merlin: There's so much I miss about church.
Merlin: I miss the potluck.
John: And afterwards, there was a giant potluck.
John: Oh, yeah?
John: And all the cakes and all the coffee.
John: What did you guys bring?
John: Oh, well, it was a potluck of people that are in the church.
John: Oh, I see.
John: I was just stopping by.
John: I didn't know about the potluck.
Merlin: Mm-hmm.
Merlin: I guess take a penny, leave a penny, unless you're busy.
Merlin: It was Stone Soup, and I brought the stone.
Merlin: Oh, you brought the stone.
Merlin: Okay, that's good.
Merlin: I brought the Stonewater.
Merlin: Stonewater would be a good name for a division for boomers.
John: Why is that not a band, Stonewater?
Merlin: Wait, that sounds like a band.
Merlin: It does sound like a band.
Merlin: Stonewater.
Merlin: It sounds like somebody who would eventually be in a band with Eddie Vedder.
Merlin: Stone Gossard.
Merlin: Oh, Stonewater.
Merlin: We got Bongwater.
Merlin: I think that's Anne Magnusson was in Bongwater, if memory serves.
Merlin: Yes, she was.
Merlin: Yes, she was.
John: I don't remember who the guy was.
Merlin: I mean, I had a big crush on Anne Magnusson.
Merlin: That's Bongwater.
Merlin: Stonewater could also be the band in, I want to say, what's that fucking Cameron Crowe movie?
John: Yeah, they were called- John's song.
John: They were called Sweetwater.
John: Sweetwater.
John: I think that's where you buy music equipment now.
John: You do.
John: You can get it there.
John: What I found out later was that there always was a Seattle band named Sweetwater.
John: But there was actually, I guess, a 70s band called Sweetwater, too.
John: It really sounds like it.
John: Yeah, but Stonewater.
Merlin: Stonewater.
Merlin: I think that's better.
Merlin: We might need to copyright that or trademark that or something.
John: Yeah, Stonewater.
John: Stonewater.
Merlin: Have you guys heard the new Stonewater?
John: Did you look it up to see if...
Merlin: No.
Merlin: If there is a stone water?
Merlin: I can't have my heart broken again.
John: I'm not going to look.
Merlin: I'm not going to look.
Merlin: You can look, but don't tell me.
John: No, don't look.
John: I'm not going to look.
Merlin: Don't look.