Ep. 533: "Busty Trainfails"
John: Why am I muted?
Merlin: You got me waiting in the lobby!
John: I didn't mute myself.
John: Yeah, you did.
John: No, why would it start off re-muted?
Merlin: That's the dumbest thing I ever... Are you talking about prior restraint?
Merlin: Are you saying that I muted you?
Merlin: I'm talking about institutional capture.
John: Uh-huh.
Merlin: That's what I'm talking about.
John: Yes.
John: I sign on to this dumb thing.
John: You're there with your blue man.
Merlin: Hey, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.
Merlin: Let's keep it between the lines, Johnny.
Merlin: Institutional capture and institutional kill.
Merlin: Yeah, I didn't.
Merlin: Well, maybe.
Merlin: I didn't mute.
Merlin: I'm not a muter.
Merlin: Please.
Merlin: You're a muter.
Merlin: You're a muter.
Merlin: Your father was a muter.
Merlin: Your mother was a muter.
Merlin: That's not true.
Merlin: You're coming from a lot of muters.
Merlin: That's not true.
Merlin: We came to this clean country.
Merlin: You came to me.
Merlin: I'm in my slick suit?
Merlin: You're telling me you're not a muter?
John: We didn't mute anything.
John: Are you serious?
John: You think I would mute myself?
John: Let me tell you.
Merlin: Well, I do.
Merlin: Now I see the irony.
Merlin: I do see the irony.
Merlin: Okay.
Merlin: All right.
Merlin: All right.
Merlin: Let's keep the bit going for another 20 seconds.
Merlin: Anyway, you came here to this clean country.
Merlin: You know?
Merlin: You know what?
Merlin: You know what?
Merlin: You know what?
Merlin: We're both part of the same mutation.
Merlin: Yeah, that's true.
Merlin: But never say anything about my family.
John: Sometimes computers are great.
John: I just was sitting here.
John: You bleeped me.
John: I put it on.
John: I didn't bleep you.
John: Wait, now you're saying I censored you?
John: No, you bleeped.
Merlin: You booped.
Merlin: You booped me.
Merlin: Oh, my.
Merlin: I don't know if you've learned.
Merlin: You ponged me.
Merlin: God damn it, John.
Merlin: I don't know if you've learned the new system.
Merlin: I don't know if you've learned the new system, and I- I have-
Merlin: I bookmarked it.
Merlin: Now, Dan makes a new bookmark, or Dan makes a new link for every episode, so I have to wait for Dan to send me a link every time.
John: I know he doesn't.
Merlin: You know, this morning, I'm fighting.
Merlin: I told him six weeks ago, Dan, you know you can go, like I've done with John, you know you can go and make that permit.
Merlin: He says, yeah, I'll do that.
Merlin: You know, admittedly, I'm not trying to mute Dan, and I'm not trying to come in and despoil this clean country.
Merlin: No, no, no, no, no.
John: I woke up this morning with a little bit of a... You woke up with a ZZ Top song?
John: No, that was you.
John: For the last few days, I've been fighting.
John: I don't know whether it's an allergy or what, and as I was sitting here right before you booped me,
John: oh boy i was thinking you know more than more than a handful of times dan canceled our show as it was as it was happening for less reason yeah than that you know like get lunch get a prescription lunch i'm sick and i can't do the show people won't like it because they won't like to hear my voice less than perfect
Merlin: He has to pick up his prescription lunch from lunch school.
Merlin: It's 12.
Merlin: What are you supposed to do at 12?
Merlin: What time do you eat?
Merlin: You can't just cancel lunch.
John: You can't have lunch at 11.45 and you can't have it at 12.15.
Merlin: And you can't go swimming with a water buffalo.
Merlin: You can't go skating in a watermelon patch.
Merlin: How does it go?
Merlin: You can't take the mask.
Merlin: Old Lone Ranger.
Merlin: Oh, yeah.
Merlin: You don't met a dust spitting into the wind.
Merlin: Yes.
Merlin: There were a lot of songs about admonitions in the 60s and 70s.
Merlin: I was thinking of the great Roger Miller.
Merlin: whom my father really enjoyed.
Merlin: We had an eight track of Roger Miller's greatest hits that I grew up with.
John: You know, I have that picture of your dad and I can imagine him sitting there listening to Roger Miller.
Merlin: It's a, it's a perfect little rent.
Merlin: He ain't got no cigarettes.
Merlin: You understand?
John: I was watching, uh, I was watching some Jimmy Reed the other day and thinking, mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
Merlin: That's what I was thinking.
Merlin: I'm really, I, I'm spacing out.
Merlin: Cause what?
Merlin: And he's not the breakman.
Merlin: He's not the yodeler.
Merlin: Who's Jimmy Reed?
Merlin: Oh, he's the Brakeman yodeler.
Merlin: Oh, see, I knew it was either that or the guy from the Just Like Honey song.
Merlin: The Scottish band.
Merlin: Which is different from the Scottish play.
Merlin: No, isn't there a reed?
Merlin: Aren't there two reeds?
Merlin: Imagine Wagons.
Merlin: Imagine Wagons.
Merlin: Exactly.
Merlin: Dance of Wagons.
Merlin: I know what you're talking about.
Merlin: Yeah, for sure.
Merlin: You got Jim Reed and then you got Joe Reed.
Merlin: And the two of them, they're in that song, the Jesus and Mary chain, right?
John: Well, see, now you've exceeded my depth.
John: You're at where the swimming pool says five feet and then six feet and then nine feet or whatever.
John: You're always out in nine feet.
John: John Roderick, what's your depth?
John: Standing back at five feet.
John: That's the nice thing about a pool.
John: You can pick your depth.
John: You pick your depth.
John: I go lean on the wall.
John: I put my elbows up.
John: I don't put myself on mute.
John: I just sit there, sunglasses on.
John: A little bowl of spaghetti floating by.
John: It's summertime, so I'm getting ready.
Merlin: Oh, I see.
Merlin: You're getting your swimsuit bod ready.
Merlin: That's the nice thing about a pool is you can do whatever you want in a pool up to a point.
Merlin: You know, they call it a swimming pool, but that's more of a serving suggestion.
Merlin: Who just gets in a pool and swims?
Merlin: Like, what are you, 60?
Merlin: Some people, yeah, that's right.
Merlin: 60-year-olds.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: I don't know.
Merlin: I'm just picking out numbers.
Merlin: They're meaningless at this point.
John: Whenever I pack a suitcase, I always put a swimsuit in there.
John: And then when I get back from the trip, I always take the completely dry, still folded, unused swimsuit out and put it back in the drawer.
John: That is very interesting to me.
John: My swimsuits go with me all around the world, but I try as hard as I can not to use them.
Merlin: A breaking case of emergency type situation?
Merlin: I bought a brand new swimsuit for our recent trip across the pond, the other pond.
Merlin: I bought a brand new swimsuit.
Merlin: Oh, wait, that's from a show.
Merlin: It's Imagine Wagon.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: oh wow you're you know what you're on today i like this i like this john uh you either slept or didn't sleep is my guess yes it's still so not only is it still in the away suitcase from from the trip from a week and a half two weeks ago uh it still has the tags on it oh you didn't wait a minute you were in a beachy beach and you didn't use your new swimsuit at all this surprises you i
John: It doesn't surprise me, but I'm very impressed.
Merlin: It's okay if it surprises you, because it should surprise anybody who doesn't know me, but people who are... Oh, no, no, no.
Merlin: Now I see that you are based, my friend.
Merlin: I am stick man.
Merlin: I watched an entire season of Taskmaster in one day in Airbnb.
Merlin: Boom.
Merlin: That's my idea of a vacation.
Merlin: Kaboom.
Merlin: Ever told you my definition of a vacation?
John: Just being in your room and nobody knocks on the door?
Merlin: That's perilously close.
Merlin: I mean, if I had to do it as like one line, it would be that.
Merlin: For me, anything can be a vacation.
Merlin: Simplest, but the oversimplified way to put it is that nobody has any expectations of me.
John: Yes, that's nice.
Merlin: And I understand that other people differ, but...
Merlin: You know, a lot of people differ about a lot of things, and it's something that took me a while.
Merlin: I've told you a couple things about this, because there's always two things with me.
Merlin: One is that I'm telling you today, as I think, that you come into this clean country.
Merlin: I don't...
Merlin: I don't – I really – it's difficult for me to think of something as, quote-unquote, a vacation if it is just as saddled with expectations of me or this is really important and this is what makes it complicated or my feeling that there are expectations of me.
Merlin: Because I don't know if you draw a distinction there, but I sure do.
Merlin: Because my brain will be scanning the horizon.
Merlin: Time was if I went anywhere for –
Merlin: I've evolved a lot as a traveler, for better or for worse.
Merlin: But one thing is, I used to be like, oh my God, for weeks, I would be like, okay, and just a final reminder that I won't be here on this Tuesday and that Tuesday, but I will be, you know what I mean?
Merlin: That kind of stuff.
Merlin: Like, just so you know, you're going to get an auto response because I'm not here.
Merlin: And still, I would be like, I just know there's a grenade rolling around somewhere.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: And on top of it, there's a general plan to do something today and I don't know what and what to wear and what kind of sunscreen and will there be shade and water there?
Merlin: That's not a vacation to me.
Merlin: That's...
Merlin: I don't know.
Merlin: What's the old phrase Tim Goodman used to use about TV, you know, big TV events?
Merlin: He called it a death march with cocktails.
Merlin: That's kind of what other people call a vacation to me is a death march with cocktails.
Merlin: And by the way, that is what you get on a cruise ship.
Merlin: Oh, it is.
Merlin: Well, with gravy.
Merlin: And gravy.
Merlin: And, you know, you do get soft serve.
Merlin: See, it's complicated.
John: We just did this trip where we spent four days in London and then we went to Berlin for four days.
John: And the four days in London, it was obvious what we were going to do every day because we had all these things to do.
John: We had to go to Westminster Abbey.
John: We had to go to the Harry Potter thing.
John: We had to go to the British Museum and see the Rosetta Stone.
John: Wait, the play?
John: We went to see six...
John: The West End musical.
John: Wait, The Wives of Henry VIII?
John: My kid loves that musical.
John: That's right.
Merlin: Was it good?
John: We went to see it in London.
John: It was good.
John: It was really good.
John: And my kid, I did not know this going in, my kid knew all the words.
Merlin: Oh my God, my kid has so much secret music.
Merlin: Yeah, what are you doing over here?
Merlin: Okay, I'm writing that down because I want to talk about secret music.
Merlin: I am actively very frustrated with my kid right now about this.
Merlin: About secret music?
Merlin: So wait, so you saw six?
John: So we did all these things.
John: We went to Tower of London.
John: And so every morning when we woke up, I knew what my job was.
John: My job was to make all this happen.
John: And it was obvious that we were going to have to do these things in a certain order.
Merlin: Oh, John, is it possible at this point you're a facilitator and full-time project manager for your quote vacation?
John: Well, so the managing falls to my daughter's mother by...
John: by affinity right she wants to be managing it she has it all she's good at it and she cares about the outcome why would she not be the one organizing it right so i'm the implementation agent where it's just like okay now you get us all there sounds that sounds like a terrible euphemism for something it depends on the decade when you're using that term implementation agent
John: it's pretty dangerous right but so it's just like you get us to here and uh and then once we're there get us through it and then get us out of there and then on to the next thing and you know and we're we're fighting jet lag which i also have a real system about like and that system is death march on the first day quit your complaining because tomorrow you're gonna thank me
Merlin: Do you know whether you like it or not I might be projecting here, but you know whether you like it or not that the first day Whatever from the time you arrive at least 24 hours are going to be kind of useless, but that's you accept that and then power on or like What is the rule of law inside the implementation agents room when you land in Europe from the west coast of America Whatever time of day you land
John: You cannot go.
John: You can go to the hotel or whatever and drop your bags off, but you cannot sit in a comfortable chair until 9 o'clock at night.
Merlin: So do you immediately start acting like your body is on the current time?
Merlin: Is that the idea?
Merlin: You have to, but you can't.
Merlin: Really?
Merlin: So you're saying, again, to speak of pools, you're throwing your body, and there's a lot of actual science about this, about what happens to your body with jet lag.
Merlin: It's really interesting and very complicated.
Merlin: Short version, your different organs think they're in completely different time zones, right?
Merlin: And it takes a while for your body.
Merlin: No, seriously, like different systems in your body, sleep being one, is that it's not a system technically, but you know what I mean.
Merlin: But you're saying you splash a little cold water on your face and you go straight up to the Towers of London.
John: That's right.
John: And you cannot, whatever you do, you cannot...
John: think that it's a good idea to take a five minute nap because it's not it's just you have to and so you're one of those folks who feels like you do you take that five minute nap a it might be longer than five minutes and b you're going to wake up worse on the other side yeah it's all over it's all it's like salt water at three o'clock in the afternoon you've never been more tired and then and then it's five o'clock and you've never been more tired but you can see you can see in the distance like but if at five o'clock you're as far away from your hotel as you can be
John: then you know that you know that very much in my yellow zone just so you know you have to get close to my red zone just fyi i know it's terrible but but then so so so london was was a great success because i was given a list of things that we had to do and i was told to keep uh the dragons away or whatever while we were doing them and i was successful at that
John: But then we got to Berlin, and Berlin is, in this little group, Berlin is my town, right?
John: I've been to Berlin a lot.
John: I mean, I've been to London a lot, but I've been to Berlin a lot.
John: And I have feelings about what we should do in Berlin.
John: Mm-hmm.
John: And in London, I don't really have feelings, because how do you have feelings about what to do in London?
John: You do the things in London you're supposed to do.
Merlin: As somebody who's been to London, I think once, very briefly, I mean, but I know, I think, a fair amount about London as a thing.
Merlin: Which London?
Merlin: You have so many, I mean, are we talking about the Roman times?
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: Are we talking about Conaby Street in it?
Merlin: There's a lot of different Londons.
Merlin: A lot has happened in London, John.
John: But this is the London where you have four days and you're traveling with a 13-year-old.
John: And one of those days is devoted to going up to BFE to go through this Harry Potter hellscape.
John: It's basically like Toy Story 3 except Harry Potter.
John: And you are the you're one of the toys.
John: Wait a minute.
John: Are you talking about the live experience?
John: We went.
John: No, we went to the studio where they made Harry Potter, which they have decked out as a as like a fun.
Merlin: Oh, it's like I know they do this with Doctor Who.
Merlin: There's a thing called the Doctor Who experience, which is like a whole thing.
Merlin: It's kind of like a museum.
Merlin: Is it sort of like that?
Merlin: They've got like a whole thing you can go visit, like a Universal Studios kind of thing.
John: Yeah, they have all the original sets.
John: Oh my gosh, really?
John: So you're in the sets.
John: You could be in Potions class?
John: That's so cool.
John: All that stuff.
John: But it's set up to funnel 15,000 people a day through there.
John: And they do it really well.
John: It's genius.
John: Designed by Temple Grandin.
John: But it's very much like, whoa.
John: And if you want to be somebody who stops and reads every caption like I do, you could be in there for six weeks.
John: Sure.
John: That's why you need a time turner.
John: Or if you want to be like my kid who does the Griswold at everything, like, uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh, boom.
John: Right, right, right.
John: But anyway, in Berlin, there are, again, many Berlin.
John: Just as you say, do you want to go to Ye Olde Berlin?
John: Do you want to go to Weimar Berlin?
John: Everybody wants to go to Hitler Berlin.
John: Do you want to go to Russian Berlin?
John: Do you want to go to what Berlin do you want?
John: Do you want to go to U2's Berlin?
John: And I have a feeling like, oh, well, and the thing was, I was there in 89.
John: So I have these weird memories of like, wait a minute.
Merlin: Before or after?
Merlin: Before or after the wall?
John: Well, so both.
John: Jesus.
John: And I couldn't put it together.
John: this was really weird to me and i was driving yesterday thinking i don't i don't mind getting old but i cannot start to have you remember a year ago or whatever when i wasn't getting any sleep and i started to not be able to finish my stories i do remember that yeah yeah where i was just like what was i saying something was taking away your instrument i was not you know i hadn't slept for weeks
John: Anyway, I'm there and I'm, you know, the big radio tower in East Berlin, the big spiky one with a ball on the top, it's like iconic East European 60s architecture.
John: It towers over Berlin to this day.
John: And we went up into it.
John: You know, there's a rotating restaurant in it.
John: Oh, wow.
John: We went up there and I was walking around going, I came to this tower
John: When it was in East Berlin, and I had dinner here, and I remembered distinctly, the whole restaurant was full of East German...
John: Apparatics, you know, like like high ranking members of the party all in gray suits with brown ties like Stasi adjacent people.
Merlin: Well, just like like everybody was Stasi adjacent by a certain point But this was the ruling class.
John: This was the most expensive place in East Berlin in a time when there was, you know, it was Arguably a communist economy.
John: So what does expensive even mean all pigs are equal?
Mm-hmm
John: And I had this very clear memory.
John: I was here in this restaurant with long hair, shit-faced, absolutely blotto, and eating and ordering every steak on the menu.
John: And everyone in the restaurant was glaring like the ugliest Eastern European glares.
Merlin: I bet you were like the Anjinsama.
Merlin: I don't know what an unjunso is.
Merlin: Oh, sorry, sorry, sorry.
Merlin: You know, like the pilot in Shogun?
Merlin: Oh, the barbarian.
Merlin: Well, yeah, and by the later episodes, he's walking around, and I was saying to Matt, like, he really does kind of look like a barbarian.
Merlin: I bet that was you.
Merlin: You were like a Yeti with steaks.
John: And I was clearly from the West, and how did I get in here?
John: And I'm sitting there going.
Merlin: Laughing too loud, that kind of thing.
John: And I'm thinking to myself, how did I get in here?
John: What am I?
John: Am I making this up?
John: This sounds like one of those things.
John: that you know to put it in the words of my daughter this sounds like one of those things that daddy says that how is it a possible and b how could you possibly confirm this confirm or deny you know like yeah oh i was here in 1989 months before the wall came down you were you were you were kind of a little drunk a lot then
Merlin: Oh, so drunk all the time.
Merlin: But also we know the curse of John Roderick is, at least in the story, I don't have no way to prove this, but you say you, part of your curse as a heavy drinking man was you could and would drink a lot, but you also tended to remember things that a lot of people would forget.
John: Never passed out, never blacked out, just always just flodding along like a Clydesdale.
Merlin: Do you know roughly the dates and stuff?
John: Not that it would matter, but... Well, so I have all my journals...
John: From that trip in 1989 except When I got my bag stolen in Avion The one journal that was in the bag When it when the bag was stolen was and I and I lamented it at the time when the bag was stolen I said in the next journal that I started that day The one thing I wanted out of that bag was my journal.
John: They could have everything else.
John: They could take everything I own I just want that journal back
John: And I searched the garbage cans of Avignon for four days looking for the book because it was like, at the time, the thing I was the most proud of I'd ever done.
John: I'd been keeping this journal and it was, you know, this book just sort of meant everything.
Merlin: And the book, for that reason, the entries in it ended there, but I'm guessing started and covered quite a lot of other distance that represent an important time in your life.
John: Well, and I, so I had already completed two journals on this trip around Europe, and then this was journal three, where I really hit my stride as a writer and as a... You said 89?
Merlin: 89.
Merlin: This is 10 years before the walk, right?
Merlin: And so also 10 years before you, like, we were robbed in what, Czechoslovakia?
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Okay.
Merlin: All right.
Merlin: So that's the problem in my head.
Merlin: I think I'm, because those both end in a nine, I don't know if the listener will have the same struggle.
Merlin: But just to clarify, this is not the time John took his long walk from Milan to Minsk.
Merlin: And it's, this is 10 years earlier when you were drinking, as opposed to 10 years later when you weren't drinking, when you took a long walk and your shoes fell apart and you got German underwear and saw a lady in a Dutch window.
Merlin: This is 10 years before and you're an Anjan Samayeti eating mini steaks in a tower.
John: Yeah, I'd gotten kicked out of Gonzaga.
John: For those of you following along.
Merlin: Yeah, bring us up to speed, John.
Merlin: Previously on John Roderick.
John: I'd gotten kicked out of Gonzaga, and I couldn't, you know, and they had said, don't come back.
Merlin: Yeah.
John: Right?
Merlin: They called the Jesuit goodbye.
John: Yeah.
John: We're not going to put all these black marks on your transcript if you agree just not to come back.
John: And I was like, I agree.
Merlin: Is that the second time that's happened in an educational institution?
Merlin: Is that kind of what happened in high school, too, a little bit?
John: It happens a lot.
John: It was what happened in high school.
John: Yeah, they were like, look.
John: I wrote it down here.
John: As long as I don't lose it, I've got it written down here.
John: We're going to agree that you go, and then that'll be fine.
John: Okay, here's what we've decided and you've agreed to.
John: We're not going to cheat.
John: It's not called cheating if everybody agrees, right?
John: And so I had some money because of the Alaska Permanent Fund dividend that they paid you every year to be an Alaskan.
John: And so I said, look, I'm not going back to college, obviously, so I'm going to go to Europe instead.
John: And I went over.
John: Like on Bastille Day, the 200th anniversary of Bastille Day.
John: And I spent nine months over there.
John: July 14th?
John: Hitchhiking around and dicking around and went all over.
Merlin: July 14th?
John: July 14th.
John: Okay.
John: And at one point, a couple of friends and I...
John: We met a guy in Amsterdam who said, you guys want some Eurail passes?
John: Eurail passes being these month-long passes that allow you to take any train in Europe.
Merlin: I've heard about these since I was a kid.
Merlin: You buy one ticket and you can get on for practical purposes, any train, anywhere.
Merlin: Any train, that's right.
Merlin: You can just decide, okay, today we're going to Belgium.
John: You get regular class.
John: You could get first class URL passes.
John: You could get a three month URL pass, all this kind of stuff.
John: And this guy, you know, I was just like sleeping in youth hustles and squats and whatnot.
John: And this guy was just some, you know, street weirdo.
John: But we were like, yeah, URL passes.
John: And he actually came through with these three forged URL passes for me and my two friends.
Jesus.
John: And they both got like student class one month URL passes.
John: And he hands me a three month first class URL pass.
John: For the same, we paid him 50 bucks or 50 Gilda or whatever.
John: Anyway, I'm here with my family in this East German tower.
John: And I can see the brown-suited people with their weird Eric Honecker haircuts.
Merlin: Do they have those rectangular eyeglasses like Germans?
John: Yeah, the rectangular, exactly.
John: Those are so German.
John: And I'm sitting there just like lotto drunk, hair in my eyes.
John: going how the hell am i remembering this and i can't i'm i'm now in a world where there's i mean i have to start calling people and so i called my friend peter in new york i'm sorry in alaska and i said look
John: I got to know, did we go to East Germany together in July of 1989?
John: And he wrote back and said, we didn't go to Germany together at all.
John: And I said, I'm pretty sure.
Merlin: Peter is, if I remember correctly, pretty durable.
Merlin: Who's the guy you went to see Lola with at the strip club?
Merlin: That's Peter.
Merlin: So Peter's like a long... As Alaska friends go, you've got a long history with Peter, right?
Merlin: I do.
Merlin: I do.
Merlin: And Peter says...
John: Well, look, it's not very clear to me because we were really drunk then.
John: You need to ask Dolph because Dolph remembers everything.
John: Well, Adolf was Peter's roommate at Cornell, Adolphus Bush Orthwine III.
John: Related to?
John: The Anheuser-Busch van.
John: You've heard of Dolph before.
Merlin: Yeah, I feel like these are some names we haven't talked about in a while, which I have to say is exactly sort of concomitant with what you're talking about, which is, and I won't bring it up now, but like this is something I think about a lot too, which is a weird thing that happens where a memory, I feel like the easiest way to put it is a memory gets unlocked and you're suddenly like, wait a minute, there's this whole room in here that I haven't looked at in a long time.
Merlin: And there's some of it that feels so absolutely true.
Merlin: I know what order it happened in.
Merlin: You know what I'm saying?
Merlin: Those kinds of memories where you're like, and I have a recent instance last week of this happening to me, where it's like, things that happen, I know, I'm talking to, in this case, five people about something that happened in 1989.
Merlin: And we can, none of us have thought about it in years.
Merlin: And we suddenly all see it crystal clear.
Merlin: We all remember it happening mostly in the same order.
Merlin: And then we collaborate on the sort of like, what happened in this instance.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: And so you need to go, because of the nature of you unlocking this, if I could say, you're bringing up some names from back in our history.
Merlin: If it seems like I'm dwelling on it, I just want to make sure our listeners are caught up on the fact that this is actually a kind of John multiverse event we're talking about here.
Merlin: We're talking about many times, many peoples, and then we have the extra element of time on top of time because now it's been 30 plus years since then?
Merlin: And you got to go talk to a Bush heir.
John: Yeah, 35 years.
John: Chimney.
John: So Pete gives me Dolph's number and I text Dolph.
John: Hey, Dolph, I haven't talked to you in 30 years.
John: How's it going?
John: Did we ever go to East Berlin together in July of 89?
John: And Dolph writes back and says, hey, man, I can confirm that we did not go to Berlin.
John: Peter and I were in Berlin and we sent you, we sent a postcard to your mom telling her to tell you that we were going to Berlin and you should meet us there, but you didn't show up.
John: And so I was like,
John: Right.
John: That's how things were done then.
John: And I must have called home and my mom said, Peter Nosek says to meet him in Berlin in July.
John: And, and I was like, oh, I can't, I was somewhere else.
John: Although I had very real memory of it, of being there.
John: But it must have been some memory of thinking about doing it.
John: So then I'm... So at this point, you know, my family's like, can we leave, Dad?
Merlin: Like, can we go?
Merlin: But in troubleshooting that, how do you... So you're... Partly it's you're competing with multiple memories, which you're... Your memory's pretty good about this kind of stuff.
Merlin: I mean, do you feel like it was a memory that got misfiled?
Merlin: Or is it something that... It's not something that you, like, hallucinated happening, but were you able to reach some level of confidence about what, quote, actually happened?
John: Well, so this is the problem, right?
John: Because we were the whole... That whole era of my life, I was just...
John: drunk and high all the time and also doing a ton of stuff i wasn't just sitting drunk playing video games like i'm drunk and high but i'm hitchhiking from portugal to to belgium right so i have a ton of memories that are just like in this thicket but the glue that's holding it together after 35 years is starting to get yellow the glue that it was all like
John: You know the events are just starting to come kind of not apart, but I Couldn't I couldn't figure out how I would Is it possible they no longer make sense on their own because you one loses list for myself I lose some of the cues that used to exist
Merlin: just naturally, of like, of course this happened and that happened.
Merlin: And of course, it wouldn't have been that time because I wasn't into dinosaur yet.
Merlin: Or, you know, you have those weird memories where you're like, or I had this car at that time, or how did I get to Tampa that day?
Merlin: Right?
Merlin: Where you know there's things, but the glue you're talking about, the sort of temporal spackle that gives you confidence that this is actually an integrated story with continuity starts to get a little frustrating.
Merlin: And you need cues to like...
John: say to yourself now wait a minute something about this doesn't quite add up right so after i get back to the states i'm i'm still i'm still chewing on this because here's the problem i was also traveling with pat and joe two other guys pat being a friend from gonzaga joe being his high school his high school best friend
John: And we did go to Berlin in November of that year.
John: And we were there for the wall coming down.
John: And we did go through the border
John: you know, this was the time they had, it was, we were there, the wall came down on November 9th and we were there on the evening of November 10th, right?
John: So there were still kids on top of the wall.
John: They had only pulled one little section out.
John: People, you know, the Trabants were lined up at Checkpoint Charlie and it was a, it was a madhouse and like a great, one of the great events, right?
John: And we did at that point then go through a legit checkpoint and
John: Because you couldn't just go, you know, there were guards all in those.
Merlin: The way I heard it is it all happened very, very fast and might have even, quote unquote, kind of started because of an accident.
Merlin: Hadn't some kind of an announcement been made?
Merlin: Maybe I'm thinking of Glassnest.
Merlin: But I know this was a weird time where people were like, where it kind of happened fast and they got over their skis a little bit.
Merlin: And then pretty soon it was like, oh yeah, yeah, this is all just ending now.
Merlin: Now we're all just, this is something we all just have to accept.
Merlin: Now this is ending.
John: Yeah, Hungary, the nation of Hungary had said, okay, we're going to loosen restrictions and we're going to let people cross.
John: And then the people in Berlin were like, us too?
John: And the German government was like, no, no, no, but.
John: And as soon as they said, but.
John: Yeah, right.
John: It was just like, woohoo.
John: We're going to Disney World.
John: Yeah, once the first person had climbed on top of the thing and hadn't been shot, then there were 4,500 people sitting on the top of the Brandenburg Gate.
John: Right.
Merlin: But when normal order kind of clears up the next day, one does not simply walk into East Germany.
Merlin: You still had to get checked out.
John: as an american i wasn't gonna just like hey excuse me coming through you know it was like it was a madhouse but there were still east german guards everywhere and we had gone through the wall officially at that point and were on the other side to witness the chaos from that side but even then i knew i had been here before i'd been to east berlin before so i'm
John: I'm here at home and I think, I haven't talked to Pat, Patrick McComb, my college roommate.
John: I haven't had to talk to him in 35 years either.
John: Pat had become Pat had gone on to live up a respectable life.
John: He'd become a Banker and lived in San Francisco and eventually like didn't want to talk to anybody from college anymore because he was he had Left all that behind something like that and I'm you know, I'd always missed Pat.
John: He was a good.
John: He was a good friend But I knew that his buddy Joe
John: had reached out to me in 2005 about something I don't know what.
John: And so I went through my old emails and found an email from Joe Benjamin, who at the time was living in Boulder, and just shot in the dark.
John: He had given me his phone number in this email.
John: Shot in the dark, I texted the phone number.
John: Hey, Joe, it's John Roderick.
John: If you can, if this is you, like, write me back.
John: Didn't hear from him all day.
John: And then at, like, 7 o'clock at night, the phone rings.
John: Rings.
John: Rings.
John: So you know it's a phone call.
John: Rings from a 303 area code.
John: And it's Joe Benjamin.
John: Well, I haven't talked to him, like, heard his voice since 1989.
John: He's the same guy.
John: And I say, look, I'm sorry to just out of the blue view here, but did we go to East Berlin in July of 1989?
John: And he said, yes.
John: He said, we were in Zurich with our URL passes and we're standing in the train station and we don't know what we're going to do because this was what, you know, with the URL pass, you just go to the train station.
John: You look up at the big board.
John: Look at the big board right?
Merlin: And the board will tell you where everything's going but Did you remember that was that surprising to you to go like was that for example?
Merlin: Just that one fact which is like okay John I can give you a clue We were there a and then B. It was preceded by being in Zurich.
Merlin: Does that help right?
John: Right and it's one of those like you were talking about how did I get to Tampa that day?
John: Yeah, right right right just hearing him and just talking to him it starts to click and
John: into place.
John: And some of these are stories that I've actually told over the years that, that I had, that the Legos had come unstuck.
John: And he said, a train pulled in and the, and the, and the, the placard on it that tells you where it's going said Warsaw.
John: And you said, let's get on this train to Warsaw.
John: And maybe they won't, maybe no one will notice that.
John: You know, there was no sign the wall was coming down at this point.
John: This was an Iron Curtain phase.
John: And he said, you said, let's just get on this train to Warsaw and see what happens.
Merlin: Oh, so he's saying you're the one who wanted to take some kind of a big adventure.
Merlin: But am I gleaning that part of the adventure is, if let's see what happens is like, yeah, there's a pretty good chance we're not going to actually end up there for a variety of reasons.
Merlin: But let's see what happens.
Merlin: We got a Eurail Pass.
Merlin: And is Poland covered by Eurail Pass?
John: It is not.
John: Uh-huh.
John: right poland would be on the other side of the of the iron curtain there's no url pass over there but i was like you know that those brilliant flashes of being 20 years old where you're like well it says warsaw right on it and if i have an idea how we could build a tree house overnight and make money let's get started wait a minute did that happen i think that happened
Merlin: I mean, not everybody getting those projects when you're when you're young and maybe a little intoxicated and you're like 35 years later, you need a little help puzzling it back together.
John: Yeah, like this is not a thing that that That I could have put myself back in standing in this tower.
John: I could not have gone.
John: Oh, right We were in there was a train that said Warsaw like I had I had just lost that connective string
John: And so as he's telling me, I'm like, oh, right.
John: And we rode the train across Germany.
John: We went to sleep on the train and we woke up the next morning with guards in our cabin, army in our cabin saying, what the hell do you think you're doing?
John: And we were in, we were in the Alexander plots train station in East Berlin.
John: And they were like, show us any information, show us any sign of a ticket or a, or a visa, any reason that you would be on this train still.
Merlin: Is this a case of you sort of sleeping past your stop?
John: Yeah, yeah.
John: We slept past whatever the stop was that said, if you're not a communist, get off this train now.
John: Right, right.
John: And so they pulled us off the train in East Berlin.
John: And said, you need to go down these stairs.
John: And it was a train.
John: It was the train station.
John: It had a catwalk with guards walking on it.
John: Everybody in the train station was dressed in gray.
Merlin: Like a catwalk at a prison?
Merlin: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
John: They were all looking at us, you know, out of the sides of their eyes.
John: They were like, get off the train.
John: Go down these stairs.
Merlin: Over the years, I've got, I mean, I keep saying Stasi.
Merlin: I just want to point out that over the years, through a variety of exposures to a variety of TV and movie things, in some ways, the Stasi are up there now with Mossad.
Merlin: Oh, I didn't realize how much you don't want to mess with these guys.
John: Yeah, they're under your bed right now.
John: What was that great movie where it was about East Germany and the Stasi?
Merlin: Oh, I know what you mean.
Merlin: The one where the guy listens to calls.
Merlin: Yeah, not Eastern Promises, but I know exactly the one you mean.
Merlin: That's a really good movie.
Merlin: Eastern Promises is the one where they have that fight.
Merlin: I think that's where Viggo Mortensen fights in his altogether.
John: That's a great film.
John: So we went back, but then we were in Berlin, and we were there...
John: In July of 1989, because we, we'd lives of others.
John: We'd taken this train, the lives of others.
John: So then the lives of others, right?
John: Great movie.
John: Yep.
John: So then I say to Joe, Joe, did we then get visas, go back across the wall and go to the top of the giant radio tower and have a steak dinner.
John: And Joe said, Whoa, I have no recollection of that.
John: But as I'm talking to him, I'm remembering, wait a minute, we did do this because we went across and they forced us to change West German Deutschmarks for East German Deutschmarks.
John: And in the process of changing, and there was a mandatory amount, some 100 Deutschmarks you had to change.
Mm-hmm.
Merlin: And sorry to get in to like show you had money to spend.
John: Yeah.
John: You're just like, you have to change this over.
John: It's just a way of collecting Western money.
John: It's like Stalinist Disney dollars.
John: But then once we got out, once we got through the wall and it was a whole elaborate, you know, like go through these corridors and stand and talk to very fierce looking 24 year old blonde square jawed, angry soldiers and
John: We got through and right on the other side, somebody in a cloth hat sidled up to us and said, you want to change some Deutschmarks on the down low?
John: Because you guys just got ripped off in there.
John: That's the mandatory amount.
John: Oh, they're going to give you a better rate.
John: Yeah, so we gave him 50 Deutschmarks and got like 600 East German Deutschmarks on the black market.
John: So all of a sudden we had 700 Deutschmarks.
John: And we're wandering around.
Merlin: You've also already broken the law.
Merlin: Six times, right?
Merlin: But we're on.
Merlin: I mean, at this point, it's just a question of, apart from all the things they could choose to make up about you, there's like six different things they could charge at this point.
John: And I have to imagine that the Stasi and the cops and everybody are watching us the whole time we're over there.
Merlin: But this is the thing about Stasi, and at least this comes through in a lot of, again, this is media, things I've read, but mostly media I've seen, is that you've heard about this with the...
Merlin: what was it in the Cultural Revolution, the Red Guard, the young people who were taking over with their radicalism, or to an extent the Hitler Youth, but where you've gotten so much of a population to actively report on other people to the point where there's a benefit in even just a hunch being reported that gets blown into whatever, because it serves a purpose, right?
Merlin: It's...
Merlin: There's eyes and ears everywhere.
Merlin: That was my impression anyway of East Berlin.
Merlin: Even further toward the end, it got worse and worse and worse in terms of people reporting on each other.
Merlin: That there were eyes everywhere is what I've heard.
John: Well, and I have a friend.
John: My sister's old high school buddy is like a charge d'affaires in the U.S.
John: Embassy in St.
John: Petersburg.
Yeah.
John: and she they were out walking in the street and susan was saying in saint petersburg susan was saying like well so what's the deal with this and she said look we can't talk about this not in the apartment not on the street because there are people watching us now and listening to us so anything we say while you are in russia you have to assume
John: They're listening and I'm in a position where I can't talk about it.
Merlin: And it's not stuff where you go like, oh, I understand why I'd get in trouble for that.
Merlin: Because again, like in a system, when a system gets like that in my understanding of it, like it all just becomes not compromise, but it all just becomes stuff that could be used for a purpose.
Merlin: If they've got you on tape somewhere saying or report of you saying a thing and they need to round up 10 people tonight, you might be on that list.
Merlin: Just because, isn't that kind of how it worked?
Merlin: It was very, you don't like to say Kafka-esque too much, but it's as bad as you think in terms of the capriciousness of people, of citizens being used to make a point tonight.
John: That's why it's so great that there are thousands of hours of you and me talking without any breaks.
John: Yeah.
John: Online.
John: About everything because what can they do Merlin?
John: We've already said it all we've already said every single thing you so Steve Bannon calls flooding the zone before the zone before they even knew there was a zone Okay, so I remember walking around East Berlin looking in the windows of scare quotes shops
John: And seeing that there was literally nothing to buy.
John: We had 800 Deutschmarks or whatever it was, and there was not a single thing you could buy.
John: Not even a kitschy, funny lunchbox that had a dancing bear on it or something.
John: Not even a can of creamed corn that said East Germany.
John: Is this just because there wasn't stuff?
John: There was supply problems?
John: Yeah, there was no economy, right?
John: It was all just... I mean, I think if I were there now, I would see kitschy things that my 20-year-old... My pal Michael lives in Berlin now, and it sounds pretty astonishing.
Merlin: Every photo he sends me, I'm incredibly envious.
Merlin: He's like, oh yeah, here's the thing from Wings of Desire.
Merlin: And I'm like, you piece of shit.
Merlin: You know that library?
Merlin: You know that library?
Merlin: I'm like, yeah, I do really well.
Merlin: So yeah, I just go there when I feel like it.
Merlin: That's the thing.
Merlin: It's an incredible city.
Merlin: Everything I've heard is like, again, pick your Berlin.
Merlin: Yeah, it's so fantastic.
Merlin: Okay, so tell me more about this story and how you clawed back your sanity.
John: Well, so now, so Joe is on the phone and he's like, I don't remember, you know, I barely remember
John: Except for that was a story that really stuck in my head that whole like oh we're getting on a train to Warsaw and see what happens Did you remember when had you remembered that before and just miss filed it?
John: Yes as soon as he said it I was like oh Right because getting pulled off the train in that train station like that was an indelible memory
John: Them saying like not only are you not allowed to go, but you've already gone across you should have gotten off at the last train station You're on the other side now and you're not allowed to be here and you don't have any paper Can we just say in passing which makes is gonna make a somebody look really bad
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: The fact that you made it pass without, you slept through a border check or numerous border checks, or please, can we see, can I show me your papers?
Merlin: Somebody's going to get in trouble for sleeping at the switch on that one.
John: Probably, right?
John: Or maybe this is, I can't imagine it happens.
John: I can't, because I think everybody else involved, all the people that would have normally been on that train, know it's so ingrained.
John: that no one would have ever failed to get off at the at the station before right trying to stay on pasconia island and you're like yeah and if you were a spy if you were a spy like this would be the last thing you would do you know you're not gonna right if you if you had any if you had any evil plan um this wouldn't have worked
John: But so I remember that then all of a sudden in my, like plowing through all the rooms in my head, I'm like, we had all this money.
John: We couldn't spend it.
John: We went into a pub.
Merlin: Oh my God.
John: You had to find a place to spend money.
John: Yes.
John: We were buying beers for everybody in the pub and they were all...
John: like 50 finning a piece and nobody in the pub wanted our beers they didn't want us to buy them beers they were like no thank you like why are you here just being in this pub is putting us all in an uncomfortable position because now you this is like how stalin killed the people returning from the western or the their western front which is you know right it's like you you had exposure to an american who broke the law so we have a lot of questions for you yeah
John: Yeah, right.
John: I mean, what are you in there drinking with that American about?
John: You know, I don't know.
John: They just were not, again, it was so ingrained in them that they, that they were like, we have our own beer.
John: Thank you.
John: And we were like, fuck, what are we going to do?
John: Like what?
John: Because they, because we couldn't stay overnight.
John: The, the visa said, you have to be back here at whatever time.
John: And somehow I said, let's go to the big tower and
John: and see if we can blow some cash.
John: And we went, and they let us in, which seems, again, like the only reason they did is... Is it the Frenzertrm?
Merlin: Frenzertrm?
Merlin: Frenzertrm.
Merlin: How do you pronounce it?
Merlin: Berliner Frenzertrm?
Merlin: But it looks, it's not, I don't want to say it's like exactly like the Seattle tower, but it's a, it's got a spire at the top and a radio tower, but it's, it's really, it's really cool looking.
Merlin: And I have to say that's a little bit.
Merlin: Okay.
Merlin: All right.
Merlin: Let's call it that.
John: I don't, I don't remember yet.
John: I was just there.
John: Oh, and it's near Alexander plots.
John: Look at that.
John: Yeah.
John: It's right there.
John: And so somehow, I mean, again, like, how did I get to Tampa?
John: I have no idea how I even knew there was a restaurant in there.
John: I know.
John: And how I convinced these two other guys, we were just, you know, we were sleeping in on the street the night before.
John: And now we're at the top of this tower, like Gargoyle, more wine.
John: And none of it- Gargoyle is German for Garcon.
John: And Joe could not confirm it, could not remember this.
John: And I'm like, look, I know this happened because I couldn't, there are too many details in my head to have made this up.
John: And also I've spent two weeks trying to track this memory down and I'm at a dead end.
John: And then Joe says, we need to call Pat.
John: And I said, I haven't talked to Pat in 30 years.
John: Pat stopped replying to everybody.
John: And I'm talking about everybody that I went to college with.
John: They're like, yeah, Pat.
John: Is he from Gonzaga?
John: He went to Gonzaga.
John: And Joe says, I'm still in touch with Pat.
John: He's the one guy in the whole world that's still in touch with Pat.
John: And I said, first of all, if I knew you could get me on a text thread with Pat, I would have called you a long time ago.
John: Not even about this story, about the Ferngen term.
John: But this is going to be fun, to get Pat spun up on this.
John: Like, I'm going to get to the bottom of this.
John: I'm going to hear the story.
John: Someone else is going to tell me this story that only I have held for 35 years.
John: Because this is not a story I've ever... We never talked about it again, right?
John: This is not some fun back and forth where you go to parties with your college friends and you're like, ha, ha, ha, remember that time?
John: Like, this has just been living in some increasingly small cave in my head.
John: Let's get Pat on the phone.
John: And Joe says...
John: I'm going to get Pat on this, but right now I'm going on a three-day ayahuasca retreat.
John: Okay.
Merlin: Sort of aboriginal buildings, Ramon.
Merlin: And I said, really?
Merlin: Like, you know, you're...
John: You're scraping your soul, huh?
John: And he's like, yeah, I mean, you gotta, you gotta do it.
John: You gotta reset.
John: And I think he said this time it's not actually ayahuasca.
John: We're doing some other route that's called Moomoo Chan or something.
John: You know, it's called some kind of Chan.
Merlin: One of the chants.
John: And enlightened ayahuasca.
John: Yeah.
John: And, uh, and so here we are Monday.
John: Joe is, Joe's had a soul scraping.
John: He's back, presumably at work in Boulder.
John: And I'm not sure what he does.
John: He might be... I didn't think to ask him.
John: I was too busy asking about East Berlin.
Merlin: Did things end acrimoniously?
Merlin: Not at all.
Merlin: I guess you could almost certainly say the same thing about me, which is I don't go out of my way to stay in touch with pretty much anybody.
Merlin: But it wasn't seen as he's mad at you or something.
John: What happened was... What had happened?
John: In Berlin...
John: In November of 1989, the wall came down.
John: Joe and Pat and I sat up on top of the wall.
John: We got a hammer and chisel.
John: We chiseled pieces of the wall, which was very hard to actually chisel.
John: Surprisingly hard.
John: It's a wall.
John: We were sleeping in, you know, we were partying and drinking with all these... The Germans were losing their heads.
John: Absolutely losing their heads.
John: It was like...
John: It was like a once-in-a-lifetime for everybody there.
John: We were just watching, basically, as the Germans had this moment with themselves.
John: And we were there for, I don't know, 10 days of just steady... It was not a bacchanalia, exactly, because it was winter, first of all, but also...
Merlin: It was like I don't know I'd never seen any I'd never seen anything like it from this like again again things are just I've seen from videos and What not is like people did seem like I don't manic like really like the people there was a lot going on Was there just an atmosphere like a crackling electric atmosphere of change excitement?
John: Yeah, you know we I went and saw the line of Trabant's coming across and
John: And the Trabant's had.
John: Tell me what that is.
John: It's the little East German car, the little like putt, putt, putt, putt East German car.
John: It's very signature little car of the Eastern Europe.
John: Okay.
John: It looks like a little Fiat 124.
John: And the car can hold four people, but they had eight people in them.
John: And they're lined up.
John: And because it was the car of East Germany, the line was just all Trabant.
John: So it's kind of a crazy image because it's like 40 versions of the same car, all lined up, crammed full of people.
John: And people on the Western side, as soon as they crossed over, they were like throwing money in the windows.
Wow.
John: Opening champagne bottles and just handing them into the cars like they were just throwing Western treasures Into the cars like welcome to the West here are like would you all like watches, you know just just the idea that separated them West and East the Western response
John: Standing there was just like this explosion of look Well, like now you can have well now you here are here are things you don't have anything to buy on your side of the wall Yeah on our side of the wall.
John: All we have is things to buy It was insane
John: But Joe and Pat and I were starting to splinter at that point.
John: Pat wanted to go home.
John: And I had met some German guy who lived in the Alps.
John: Some, some kid who had, who had spent some time in America.
John: He spoke English.
John: He'd done a foreign exchange and he lived in Garmisch Partenkirchen.
Merlin: And I'd been talking to him and he was like, I haven't had a really good John story with lots of foreign words in a while.
Merlin: And this is really taking me back to the early days.
John: And he said, I can get you a job as a ski instructor in Garmish.
John: Uh-huh because there's a big American military base papers They all want they all want to learn how to ski and Joe God bless him Joe said I'm not done.
John: I'm going To Greece I'm headed out.
John: I'm not headed in I'm not going I'm not trying to find a job like in some German ski resort.
John: I'm not going home I'm going farther Wow
John: and i remember at that moment feeling like i want to go with joe i want that to be my future that i keep going that way but this guy this friend who was like come to my german village
John: He had a lot of weed.
John: And he was like, we're going to party and we're going to be ski bums.
John: And I split up with Joe.
John: And I went to Garmish.
John: And I got there and spent three nights with this guy in the house he lived in with his mom.
John: And his mom was like, who is this guy?
John: Get him out of here.
John: He's been here three nights and I was already tired of him after night one.
John: And so he was like, I'm really sorry.
John: You know, you can't stay here anymore, but don't worry.
John: We're going to get you a job at the, uh, it wasn't, it was the ski resort thing petered out.
John: And then it was like, Oh, the marker bindings factory, maybe it will hire you.
Merlin: And I went, I think at this point you're about to get to human trafficked.
John: It was all very like meh.
John: And I went and actually had an interview with somebody at a company there.
John: And the guy said, you know, a month ago I would have hired you.
John: But I don't know if you've noticed.
John: There's suddenly a lot of people from East Germany here.
John: Also looking for work and they all speak German.
John: So I think the job market's going to be really... And their eyes aren't rolling freely in two different circuits.
John: And they're not hippies, right?
John: And I was like, right, right, right.
John: And then I had kind of dead-ended myself because now it was December.
John: I'm in a German mountain town freezing to death.
John: I got nowhere to go.
John: And it's an expensive town.
John: I can't afford to be there on my own.
John: And I had lost Joe.
John: Joe had, because, you know, there's no, how do you get in touch with somebody?
Merlin: But you still have your pass at this point?
John: I still have the URL pass, right.
John: But Joe and Pat have split up.
John: And what am I going to do?
John: Send a postcard to Pat's mom to tell Joe's mom to tell Joe that I'm going to come find him in Greece?
Yeah.
John: and i hit a wall of despair and it was christmas time oh is this when you called your mom it was when i called my i'd been there for nine months at this point and i was like mom yeah help or whatever and she was like you know come home for christmas well when i talked to joe later sometime in 1990 he had gone to greece had gotten a job in a bar on the beach in santorini
John: had worked at like a beach bar all through the winter and then continued on his journey, I think, to Turkey and had done what I wished I had done.
John: Right.
John: That's a pretty good trajectory.
John: It was great.
John: And I let myself get sidetracked.
John: And when I think back to it, I honestly think I made that decision because this guy had a bag of weed.
John: I was gonna ask.
Merlin: Like, is that how it feels in your head?
Merlin: Like, cause I know how you are.
Merlin: And if I could say, and how you will, as you say, chew on things, there must be a part of you to state the obvious that goes, I could have gone with my pal and ended up being one of the fathers in mama Mia or, but no, I did this because there was a guy who said there'd be weed in Switzerland.
John: Yeah.
John: I really, I, I think that's what happened.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: And it's, it's understandable.
Yeah.
Merlin: It is, but... But I mean, no, honestly, it's not un-understandable.
Merlin: I mean, when you look back with the bright light of time on your side, as much as you can remember what happened, you still got to remember, like, you know, if we always decide on the day, in the moment, we don't always decide.
Merlin: There's no way to know if we decided the best thing.
Merlin: And if you didn't have your pals but wanted a little more adventure, and there's a guy that said, here's a warm place to shit, and I've got weed.
Merlin: I don't think it's insane for you to do that at age whatever that was, 19?
Merlin: What was it?
John: 20.
John: Well, no, we had turned 21.
John: We had all turned 21 at that point.
John: We turned 21 in Europe that year.
John: But what's interesting in talking to Joe about- I've made a new thing for you to regret.
John: You need that.
John: You need more of those.
John: But no, I'm thinking, so this has been very interesting because for 35 years, I have said, you followed a bag of weed to Garmisch-Partenkirchen when you could have followed Joe to Santorini and that was the road less traveled by and it made all the difference or whatever.
John: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
John: Regular Kokomo.
John: But getting back in touch with Joe, who's living in Boulder and going on an ayahuasca journey this weekend, and when he gets back, he's going to call Pat and we're going to try and figure out if we went to the top of the first in Durham in Berlin.
John: It's wonderful in a way to know that
John: Wait a minute.
John: Joe did that.
John: I did that.
John: But here we are.
John: Here we are back together.
John: It's the same old thing we learn a thousand times, which is Joe did not go on to become the deputy undersecretary of state for the nation of Greece.
John: Joe's living in America, doing a thing.
John: He's a middle-aged guy.
John: He's got a teenage daughter.
John: And I am too.
John: and that decision that for that there's definitely 10 years of my life where it felt like a catastrophic misstep to have followed a bag of weed rather than than to find the sun
John: um it wasn't it's just fine it was just what i did and he did what he did you know like it like part of being 55 is this marvelous feeling of like wait we all here we all are still right like none of the guys that i knew in 1995 who had record deals
Merlin: are markedly different from the people in 1995 who didn't have record deals but they at the time we seem somebody tried to tell you in 1993 what the not the fate i don't want to put it that way but like all the everybody who was getting signed in an era where like the posies could get signed like it but like you're like well you're going to be surprised to find out how a lot of this turned out because it didn't all turn out great and that really that was not a brass ring
Merlin: Like, right, like, and in that same way, but like, and all we have, all we have is our memories and our regrets and our hopes.
Merlin: And it's not, I think it's not unusual to cobble those things together.
Merlin: And, and again, like, even now, like, not to, you know, rain on your parade, but it's like, even today with the four of you or however many having this nice conversation, it's still like, well, and that's still for now.
Merlin: Like, that's just a snapshot of where we caught up to.
Merlin: Now, I just realized that Bick and Ray had a, we did that reunion show where we opened for the Wrens in Tallahassee in 2005.
Merlin: And it seemed like a million years between Bick and Ray ending in 1999 and us doing that show in 2005.
Merlin: We were all really different, had really different lives.
Merlin: But that was six years.
Merlin: And now that was 19 years ago.
Merlin: Yeah, almost 20 years ago.
Yeah.
Merlin: It's one of those, I call them chron analogies, where you try to take a period of time from the past, and you know what I mean?
Merlin: Where you go, like, it's been as long since X's, from X to Y. One of the best games.
Merlin: But it's a really, I find that a very calm, what you're going through right now, it's, yeah, it's a fun story, but, like, it's also a very complicated affair.
Yeah.
Merlin: where you find yourself wanting or really needing to relitigate things you thought you understood from the past with the new context.
Merlin: Don't you think?
Merlin: I think that's one of the most, for me, that's one of the most difficult parts.
Merlin: It can be one of the most, it can be so fun.
Merlin: I'm avoiding telling you a very long anecdote from last week.
Merlin: All you really need to know, I'll send you a photo, but I did a podcast with five friends of mine from New College, and they do a podcast about New College, and because they're people from, like, it includes my friend Grant, who I think you know.
Merlin: I do know Grant.
Merlin: Who's exactly from my class, and then some people from, like, anyway, but I described it as, like, opening a bag of hair that you only let yourself sniff every few years, because you don't want it to stop smelling like hair.
Merlin: And, but then you also, then in that case, we're collaborating the five of us.
Merlin: Well, what happened at the protest?
Merlin: What order did those things happen in?
Merlin: What was it really like when we were in the jail?
Merlin: Like what was, and so everybody brings this, you know, kind of like temporal stone soup where everybody brings their pieces to it.
Merlin: And there's some things that everybody remembers pretty well.
Merlin: There's some things hardly anybody remembers, but then the best part is when two people will be able to like finish a sentence about something that happened.
Merlin: But that's, I don't know.
Merlin: I mean, look at it.
Merlin: Look, there's a lot of, uh,
Merlin: A lot of culture about that phenomenon, going back to the Greeks and all the way through Kurosawa, about the different ways that we put together the past.
Merlin: But sometimes it's really fun and it's enjoyable and it's nice to have a snapshot in 2024 of, well, we're all still alive and it hasn't gone horrible yet, but...
Merlin: I find that very complicated because as soon as you start, it's almost like this incredibly complex series of gears to get you the machine that explains your past as of today.
Merlin: You can't just go in and move some gears around because that's not how gears work.
Merlin: Do you know what I mean?
Merlin: Another way to think of it, if you like in a more James Burke way is like as a network of connections, you can't just go and change one of those connections without having an influence on all the other connections.
Merlin: And even in my own mind, such small things as like, was that a Perkins or
Merlin: Or a Denny's we used to go to where there's a waiter named Ken who would be the only guy working.
Merlin: And like people remember different things about, you know what I mean?
Merlin: And you like collaborate on that.
Merlin: But I think it's a very complex and honestly a very emotional thing to do.
John: It is, and I've been really surprised at how emotional it's been trying to untangle it.
Merlin: I'm on a podcast talking about getting arrested at a protest, and I cried twice.
Merlin: It was like a two-hour recording.
Merlin: It was so emotional to me to talk to these people who are still 19 years old in my head.
John: well and i think another thing that's crazy because the other day i was looking at instagram of course again and i hit a wall because something again just subtly has changed it's maybe not even that subtle but something has changed where instagram now is just feeding me this stuff like like the little the little video clips that it's like do you want to watch this video of a train hitting a a deer
John: Every one of those video clips now has a young girl with a big bosom jumping up and down about something and a little caption that says, like, you won't believe it.
John: Yeah.
John: Busty train fails.
John: And I don't like the things that I click on to look at on Instagram are people trimming cow hooves.
John: And yeah, like, uh, like I bet you didn't know how many smokestacks have fallen on buildings in the last 20 years.
John: Here's a site devoted to it.
John: I have never clicked on a thing that had a young girl bouncing, but Instagram is like, I bet you'd like this young girls bouncing.
John: They're trying to tell you something about yourself.
Merlin: I hit a wall.
Merlin: I was like, this has become... You have that feeling where you're like, I've run out of internet.
Merlin: I've seen all the good internet.
Merlin: I've run out of internet.
Merlin: I've run through this with things that I'd like to read.
Merlin: I don't really feel like reading a book.
Merlin: I don't even feel like reading a short story.
Merlin: But I would like to read what we used to call a long read.
Merlin: If I could find a good piece that's like a profile of somebody interesting, I would really enjoy that.
Merlin: And there'll be days where I'm like, I've run, I'm pulling down the thing.
Merlin: I feel like I've run out of internet or I've at least run out of good internet.
John: I'm at the end of good internet is exactly what it feels like.
John: And I'm scrolling and it's just like, everybody's trying to sell me.
John: Hey guys, I'm Busty Train Fails.
John: They're not trying to sell me anything in particular.
John: They're trying to sell me themselves.
Merlin: They don't even know what they're trying to sell anymore.
Merlin: It's all so confusing and complicated, and it keeps coming back to because ads.
Merlin: And you're like, well, but what are the ads for?
Merlin: Well, the ads lead you to other ads.
Merlin: And you're like, I don't understand.
Merlin: It's like we're like Wile E. Coyote running in midair, and we just haven't really looked down yet.
Merlin: I don't understand what is supporting in any way what all of this nominally is.
John: Yeah.
John: There's seven, seven things that throw up in my feed every day that are like, Hey, it's a cute girl with a British accent pronouncing the names of trees.
John: And it's like, the first time I saw that, I guess I thought it was charming.
John: I guess I looked at it too long.
John: And now the internet thinks that I love girls naming trees.
John: And then there's seven different of those accounts and I'm seeing them all anyway.
John: I hit the end of the internet, like you say, where I was just like, I'm so exhausted.
John: And honestly, I'm also in the business of, what, trying to get people to watch me and listen to me?
John: Like, oh my God, I don't even pronounce trees, interestingly.
Merlin: Yeah, maybe you should do it on a trampoline.
John: or something and then i and then i and then i welcome to bouncing john i compared that to this which is this is an incredible if i had a picture of me and joe and pat at the top of the french term
John: In 1989 with a plate covered with steaks with tons of people in the background in brown Maybe holding up the day's newspaper holding up, you know It would just be the the light bleed in the camera would show you how old it was, right?
John: If I had that one photograph, it would be a Taylor Dane It would just Jane child
Merlin: Let's be 1989.
John: There's not a 21-year-old in the world right now that's having an experience that they aren't documenting with 100 pictures.
John: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
John: And so to sit here and be like... Sometimes with people, but rarely.
John: But to sit here and think, did that actually happen?
John: And can I find one of the five people...
John: that could even validate it to remember it too and to right now have talked to four of them and there's only one remaining and I haven't talked to him in 35 years and he might also say, I was too drunk, I don't remember.
John: Because there were seven other things that happened that day that crowded that memory.
Merlin: Aren't you also kind of dreading what if somebody mentions, oh, and also there was a treasure map and you weren't interested?
Merlin: Is there some part of you that's like, I can't take any information that makes me feel worse about myself?
John: Well, all of this in a weird way is making me feel better about myself for the reasons that you were saying.
John: Continuity, man.
Merlin: Like, you've always been the same person.
Merlin: And to quote the great Elaine Stritch, I made it through all of last year and I'm here.
Merlin: Like, that's who you are.
Merlin: You are, in some ways, the Samor...
Merlin: multiplicatively the product of those experiences.
Merlin: And whether you remember or not, like, you know, I mean, there's a lot of ways to look at it that are really wholesome, but you're also getting at something that I won't change the topic, but like Instagram and things like it,
Merlin: I don't want to say anything about other people.
Merlin: I will say this about myself.
Merlin: But things like Instagram and other things, they don't have an appeal to me because I feel a very sick and venal performance going on.
Merlin: And if you're for myself, and again, I'm old.
Merlin: Fine.
Merlin: Write this off, everybody.
Merlin: Don't worry.
Merlin: Act like this is not true because I'm old.
Merlin: But if I found myself in a position, as I have from time to time, wanting to conduct my life in ways that would make for good internet photos...
Merlin: Or to, like, show that I was rich but not stuck up.
Merlin: Or that I had good feet but, like, I didn't put them up too much.
Merlin: You know, you have to, like, there's so many lines you have to walk.
Merlin: You can never please everybody.
Merlin: The more popular you get, the more people will hate you.
Merlin: And all that stuff, I can't imagine...
Merlin: I would go from being a beautiful glass to a pile of sand very quickly.
Merlin: That stuff is absolutely excruciating to me.
Merlin: And I've learned to not even talk about it because it makes me sound like one of the hill people.
Merlin: But I don't understand how I would be able to straighten out that swing into a home run in such a way that I would find myself constantly thinking about...
Merlin: I don't know.
Merlin: I mean, maybe I just – again, I probably just don't understand, and that's my role.
Merlin: My role is to reach a certain point where I just don't understand.
Merlin: That's what we all do.
Merlin: Hopefully, you can do it with class.
Merlin: But it does not change the fact that, like –
Merlin: that call with my friends, including one of my dearest friends, Grant, like included stuff like, and you know, I said like stone soup, which is an overused phrase, but like, for example, we found ourselves talking about four of us had been in different bands together.
Merlin: And by which I mean different bands.
Merlin: Grant and I had been in a bunch of them.
Merlin: I'd been in the Fove's.
Merlin: Grant and I had done solo stuff together, like a duo thing where we played at a coffee house on Fridays.
Merlin: But then Grant and Christian and I, Christian, who, by the way, was at a gig in Madrid that night.
Merlin: So that guy in the picture in the lower left, he started two years after me, my friend Christian, and he's a professional bass player.
Merlin: So he was playing stand-up bass at a gig in Madrid.
Merlin: That's his wife...
Merlin: That's his wife, Megan.
Merlin: They have a 22-year-old son who's a physicist.
Merlin: They're beautiful.
Merlin: A kid who started school two years after me, and I didn't know Megan super well at the time, but yeah, one of my good pals has a 22-year-old son who's a physicist.
Merlin: Wow.
Merlin: Just that one fact alone is... I gotta also say, I really like your beard.
Merlin: I don't know where I'm going with this, but thank you.
Merlin: No, leave it.
Merlin: It really exaggerates my jaw.
Merlin: It's...
John: You look like somebody on a space station that's been living there a long time and the new astronauts show up and they're like, hello, hello.
Merlin: Is this my future?
Merlin: But like a very specific example, I got a wonderful email yesterday from Megan.
Merlin: And because we talked about like the different band stuff and everybody has like a little piece of the stone soup.
Merlin: And they just don't know it until somebody says, we're having stone soup tonight.
Merlin: So I was able to pull up the Facebook from 1986.
Merlin: Did you have Facebooks at your school?
Merlin: Like when you went to college where they would take a photo of everybody with their name and like, it's kind of like, like, for example, it's ironically enough, it's kind of what led Mark Zuckerberg to create Facebook was that he could go and get all the photos of freshmen.
Merlin: Like, although, you know, all the first year students.
Merlin: It was a yearbook.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: I'll send you a photo.
Merlin: It came out at the end of the year, right?
Merlin: Well, no, this is the Facebook, which was, just so you can keep track of who all the new students are, here's a bunch of silly photos of them.
Merlin: So I had that to contribute.
Merlin: I had a PDF of that to contribute.
Merlin: Several people had photos that some of us were in.
Merlin: I forgot that I was at, so Christian had organized a visit to campus by, I don't know if you know the name, Ivan Stang, the guy from the Church of the Subgenius.
Merlin: And I forgot that I was temporarily overnight married to everybody else at New College by Ivan Stang.
Merlin: And there's a picture of me and the woman who would become my first wife, as well as a bunch of these idiots.
Merlin: I forgot that event even happened.
Merlin: But somebody mentioned it, and Megan's like, yeah, I got a photo of that.
Merlin: Another one is like a flyer for this thing where a bunch of bands play.
Merlin: My band was the quote headliner.
Merlin: Another one of like our fake ska band, Dog School, the Christian in Granton.
Merlin: But what I'm saying is each person is like, oh yeah, I've got something from that.
Merlin: I've got something from that.
Merlin: Here's a clipping from when our friend took his life.
Merlin: Here is a photo of the arrest, the day of the protest that I was arrested at.
Merlin: But it's just, there's no way...
Merlin: I'm sorry, this is so obvious, but it really, I felt it very deeply that there is this shared, partly shared partial past that we all have that we can all contribute to.
Merlin: We've all had lives before and after that, but there's something special about getting together with people and being able to like pull your potatoes and your carrots.
Merlin: Yeah, that's the thing.
Merlin: You've known them for 40 years or 35 years.
Merlin: But, like, Grant's the only one I keep anything, like, touch with.
Merlin: I mean, Grant and Michael and Dennis are, like, my three best friends from that time in numerous ways.
Merlin: Grant's at least the longest lived, like, kept-in-touch friend.
Merlin: But, like...
Merlin: Grant pulls my ass from the fire all the time, by the way.
John: In what sense?
John: He's really smart, you know?
John: He's really smart, and there are so many things I don't understand that I don't want to talk to John Searcuso about.
Merlin: He taught me about Sid Barrett and Gnosticism, and he did his thesis on hermeneutics, and he's a really interesting guy.
Merlin: Hermeneutics?
Merlin: Yeah, it's a great word.
Merlin: Isn't that a good word?
Merlin: But like, I don't know.
Merlin: It's just, I'm not sure what my point is, except that like, you know, like the San Equus moments snap together like magnets.
Merlin: You never know when this, we all have these weird little shared, like these little pools of memory that we share with other people and sometimes we refine them and sometimes they can be painful, but it's...
Merlin: Okay, can I just do one quick one that's kind of funny?
Merlin: I wasn't going to mention this because who cares, but like, toward the end of the call, which was very long, and this is for a podcast they do about New College, and toward the end, Grant was like, you know, when you texted me today, because I hadn't texted him in a while, I texted him at two phone numbers that had the same area code.
Merlin: I don't think I'm blowing up his spot at all here.
Merlin: You know about what Grant used to do for a living, right?
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: So...
Merlin: Grant goes, yeah, you texted me at the phone number I've had forever on my phone, but there's a pretty good chance your other text... We should start a new channel.
Merlin: There's a pretty good chance your other text just went to somebody who works for David Pecker.
Merlin: And I said, of course I did, because Grant used to be...
Merlin: I know he was an editor for the Weekly World News for a long time, but I think he was like a major domo editor at the Weekly World News.
Merlin: If you're listening, Grant, hi.
Merlin: You know I love you.
Merlin: And I was like, wait a minute.
Merlin: And by the way, that was the first witness in Trump's trial today in New York.
Merlin: The first person on the stand today was David Pecker from AMI.
Merlin: AMI is the company that owned the National Enquirer.
Merlin: They did.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: So he's like, let's start a new thread because you might be texting a phone owned by David Pecker.
John: Yeah.
Merlin: And it's like, that's just, it's just, you know, I make that crack a lot about that movie and play Equus moments snap together like magnets, but that is inextricably how it feels to me sometimes.
Merlin: It's, it's the kind of thing like, you know, I don't know if anybody's gone back and watched Amelie lately, but because Amelie became a little bit of a punchline as a movie, but a couple of things to remember about Amelie.
Merlin: First of all, it's better than you even remember.
Merlin: It's a very good movie.
Merlin: It's also not as sickly sugar sweet as you remember.
Merlin: Like Amelie's got, it's got edges to it.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: But do you remember that like, and this is such a hallmark of like European art house cinema, you know, into the 2000s, whether this is like Run Lola Run or whether it's like Wings of Desire, whatever.
Merlin: There's a line that runs through a lot of great European art house stuff, which is like, look at this insane film.
Merlin: sequence of events that nobody had any idea had anything to do with each other at the time.
Merlin: And this happened, and then this happened.
Merlin: And of course, I'm also watching James Burke's Connection series right now.
Merlin: So I've been learning about how pasta led to the creation of gunpowder or whatever.
Merlin: This is on my mind.
Merlin: And it's made me intellectually and emotionally vulnerable in the sense of we gloss our way through a lot of our day-to-day chunking.
Merlin: you know, like the sand psychology, the phenomenon of chunking information and like heuristics and biases, not the bad kind of biases, but just the kind of biases we all have of like, well, I don't go to that neighborhood because I heard it's dangerous.
Merlin: We have all these things and that's how we have a quiet life, right?
Merlin: But like there are times when something kind of like punches through and you're forced to like have the sort of a second order thinking where you go like slow, think your way through this thing that happened with other people and
Merlin: John, it was really overwhelming, and I wasn't the only one who got at least a little emotional talking about it, because I'm talking to people that went to the same squirrely school as I did, all have just, they're so smart and have such extreme intellectual curiosity, and something I really miss, John, I'm not going to talk a lot about it, but, like, they get subtlety and context.
Merlin: And having a conversation about the past with people who are not willing to just accept, you know, the party line on something, but to go like, yeah, and you know what, and I can remember at that time, I was really sad because I'd broken up with someone and had a really bad trip.
Merlin: And they're like, oh, I do remember that.
Merlin: And then I come out of that and I'm back into the world.
Merlin: And it's just everything, I don't want to use the word plastic exactly, but after an experience like that in the same way as like, I don't know, I don't want to make it weird, but like watching somebody who's ill die or like reconnecting with somebody from your past, those kinds of things, you get dropped back into the world as it is.
Merlin: And it's a very complicated feeling.
Merlin: I wonder if you get this.
Merlin: Like after your experiences with this group of guys, doesn't it feel kind of odd to then be expected to go watch Busty, what's her name?
Merlin: Busty Train Fail?
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: You're like, oh no, that's right, we're still doing this.
Merlin: I'm back here with these folks who are like, you know, intricately, subtly interrogating what it meant when you took this class rather than that class and like, oh yeah, that's right, that breakup did end kind of badly.
Merlin: You know what I mean?
Merlin: And I admit someone that could just be the...
Merlin: misty water colored memories of the way we were sure but I don't think I'm just pining for the fjords I think I think this is something very real where you're like oh I've just reconnected with a time that was very important in my life well you know if you ever want to cheer yourself up listen to a band you love when you're 15 end of story it's gonna blow your mind
Merlin: Most of the time, if you go and listen to a band you love when you were 14 to 18, it'll make you happy.
Merlin: Because that was maybe a happy time in your life, or it was at least an emotional time.
Merlin: I was thinking the other day, yesterday, literally last night, how Mexican wine, or really Fountains of Wayne in general, welcome interstate managers.
Merlin: I associate that album so closely with two extremely difficult moments in my life.
Merlin: And in both cases, hearing Mexican wine, hearing that wine begin and that guitar,
Merlin: Calms me centers me because it takes me straight back to two times that that fucking album helped me through two very difficult times That's what we're right.
Merlin: Isn't that what we're really talking about?
Merlin: This is like the real stuff of life This is not this is not like like getting a photo of your feet on your friend's boat This is like this is real shit and like we forget the importance the impact of this at our pair We can't do it all day long or when you'd be a nut you'd be like the three-eyed raven losing your goddamn mind and
Merlin: No, but when you get reattached to something that is valuable and you can have an experience today with people, I don't know.
Merlin: I don't know what I'm saying.
Merlin: Get my back.
Merlin: Well, that's the thing.
Merlin: Isn't this a big deal, though, when you do this?
Merlin: You get a kind of reverse culture shock coming back to where we are today in some ways.
John: i when i was talking to joe you know he called me freaking called me on a phone like a person what the called me and i and i realized i'm so glad he called me if i had been doing this over text with him like i did with dolf it would i can i had a side-by-side comparison i texted back and forth with dolf
John: I don't know what Dolph sounds like now.
John: I didn't have a moment with him.
John: He reminded me that he'd actually come to see the Long Winters play when we played in Atlanta.
John: And I'd talked to him and we'd had a great time after the show.
John: But, you know, we were on tour and I'd forgotten, right?
John: Forgotten that I'd had that moment with him.
John: I wished I'd called him.
John: You know, I wish I'd called him.
John: But I'm on the phone with Joe, but it's 7 o'clock at night.
John: I'm standing out in front of an Italian restaurant.
John: I told everybody else, like, go on in.
John: I'll be right there.
Merlin: Get your scabetti.
Merlin: I'll be in in a minute.
John: I'm standing.
John: I'm talking on the phone to Joe.
John: And I finally say, hey, you're on your ayahuasca journey.
John: I've got to go in and get some pizza for the table.
John: But I just want to say, like, Joe, you still sound like yourself.
I know.
John: You sound like Joe.
John: Yeah.
John: Do I sound like me?
John: And he said, you absolutely sound like John.
John: And it was such a... How'd you feel about that?
John: It was such a gift, you know?
John: It just felt so... It just felt so reassuring because... Doesn't it make you feel just a tiny bit sturdier as a being?
John: It was very emotional because that person...
John: And me?
John: How are they?
John: How can they possibly be connected?
John: I've been through a thousand psychic wars.
John: And Joe has too.
John: He scraped his soul an uncountable number of times on his way back to... He might be selling articulated hoes.
John: I don't know.
John: Next time I talk to him, I'm going to ask him what the hell he does for a living.
John: Yes, but... But the fact was, I needed to hear that I was the same person.
John: Oh, shit.
John: Yeah.
John: You didn't go into it thinking about it.
John: No, no, no.
John: He was like, you sound like you.
John: Yeah.
Merlin: And I was like, I'll talk to you later.
Merlin: See, okay.
Merlin: I got to grab that one, though, because I have this thought that I am not proud of.
Merlin: And if I wanted to perform as a different kind of more palatable person to you... Okay, so I'm about to say something untrue.
Merlin: That's what I would say if I wanted you guys to like me, which is this.
Merlin: And the amazing part was, it was just like no time had passed at all.
Merlin: And we talked to each other, and it was incredible.
Merlin: And we agreed that from now on, every five and a half weeks, we're going to have a group call, and we'll start a text.
Merlin: And none of us have changed, and it's really... Okay, that's what I would say if I wanted you to like me.
Merlin: But because I hope...
Merlin: I hope you understand me more than like me.
Merlin: What I'm going to say is this.
Merlin: I have no intention of doing any of that with anybody ever.
Merlin: Because the times that I have, as a rookie old person, at the age of like 30, done that in the past.
Merlin: Reconnecting with my second best friend from childhood, who was the son of our minister, who I sang with, like he...
Merlin: discovered or he learned that I was out there from stuff I did in my, you know, productivity guy job.
Merlin: Sure.
Merlin: You were Merlin Mann on the internet.
Merlin: He contacted me.
Merlin: It's like, it's Eric.
Merlin: I'm like, Eric?
Merlin: He's like, yeah.
Merlin: Last time I saw Eric was when he and his mom were visiting Florida in like 1981.
Merlin: But I had four very intense years of him being my second best friend.
Merlin: Like we went to school together.
Merlin: We sang, like I said, all this stuff.
Merlin: And I think at the time, I said to Eric, there's some usual jazz about, maybe I can get my company to bring you here.
Merlin: And I was like, oh, it's just nice to catch up.
Merlin: But we should really stay in touch.
Merlin: Here's the thing.
Merlin: Yeah, maybe we should really stay in touch.
Merlin: Maybe what you really would like to say is we really should have stayed in touch.
Merlin: I don't agree personally.
Merlin: I don't agree with that either.
Merlin: I differ from you, I think, here.
Merlin: I have stopped saying that to people.
Merlin: And it keeps these experiences much more real.
Merlin: and fresh to me, because we don't end it all by going, yeah, so anyway, let's get lunch.
Merlin: I'm not saying I don't want to talk to you again, but it gets to be more special if we all walk into this chamber for a minute and see that we're all still here and we talk about this, then we walk out of that chamber and have whatever life we were going to have anyway.
Merlin: If the life we were going to have anyway is to keep talking to each other like we have for 40 years, you two, that's fine.
Merlin: Can you not see that for your group of friends?
Merlin: Like, I feel like there's something so sour that so sours the beauty, the sublime nature of an experience like this.
Merlin: Like going, okay, so anyway, friend me on Facebook.
Merlin: Or let's make sure, let's make a plan that none of us has any intention of keeping, of always making sure that we look at the moon.
Merlin: No, it's just, and I'm not saying I don't like these people.
Merlin: If anything, I'm saying, Jesus Christ, I love these people so much, but they're a bag of hair.
Merlin: I don't want to smell the bag of hair so much that it no longer smells like what it used to be.
Merlin: I know that's a gross example, but you know what I mean.
Merlin: If you talk about a dream too much, it stops being the same dream.
Merlin: If you start telling the story too much, anybody can tell you, friends of John can tell you, that story is really different than it used to be because you've gotten reactions over time and changed it.
Merlin: I don't want to diminish this thing and what it was.
Merlin: And if I am going to interrogate this with a friend or talk about it or discuss old times, I'd like it to be just as fresh as this felt right now.
Merlin: And you're not going to have that.
Merlin: Happily ever after is not always happily ever after.
Merlin: And boy, you know what I don't need is another fucking text group of people I don't actually know that well anymore.
John: Can you believe what's going on in the White House?
John: Can I believe what's going on in the White House with the Bidenomics?
John: Well, I went to dinner last night.
John: The admissions director at my daughter's school
John: after we'd been going there a little while, sidled up to me at some event and said, I actually went to Gonzaga.
John: I was a few years behind you.
John: But my husband is Matt.
John: Did that instantly mean something?
John: And I was like, Matt.
John: Matt, Eric.
John: I know.
John: I mean, you know, she has a last name too, but.
Merlin: Yeah.
John: And I was like, no way.
John: And she was like, yes.
John: And he and John Barnhart are best friends.
John: Well, John Barnhart and I were very close.
John: And I knew Matt and I knew that he and John were friends.
John: But, you know, like this was one of those things where I was a member.
John: You're not reading the trades.
John: You don't keep up with this.
John: I was a member of 10 groups and I went on and whoever can tolerate me this week.
John: Yeah, right.
John: I'm like, oh, I've got to go to another party.
John: I'll be back soon.
John: And so the other day she invited us to dinner.
John: Hey, come over to the house.
John: We have a little wood-fired pizza oven.
John: We're going to make pizzas.
John: We all have teenage kids.
John: And you haven't seen John in a long time.
John: Although, you know, he and I are in more regular contact, but we haven't seen each other in several years.
John: No, that's not true.
John: He came to one of the long winter shows recently.
John: but I hadn't seen Matt in forever.
John: And so we had one of these that you're talking about a dinner where I knew these guys from, from 35 plus years ago.
John: And we all have friends or we all have family and we're all living in the same town.
Merlin: It's so interesting.
Merlin: Cause you've all got like, you've got loose connections with a lot of specific things.
Merlin: And when you press it, that a little bit, you find more connections and that, that can be so fun.
Merlin: So entertaining.
John: Yeah.
John: it's really fun and you know and john and i briefly went into one of those things where he was like remember that class that we took where the guy kept saying for also neither must and i was like i wrote it down in my notebook and he's like yeah remember and then we took this other thing and he and i got into a very brief little like and then we looked around and no one else like this was we were just talking about something from freshman year that really bonded us
John: but that we were doing that thing.
John: Like, no, no, no, don't, don't, don't you guys go off into your, like, remember that, you know, like get, get back in the room.
John: But, but what, what's crazy is I've been to enough funerals lately and,
John: Where I realize that there's not an unlimited amount of time.
John: Like that bag of hair.
John: Yeah.
John: On the one hand, I don't want to smell the bag of hair until it doesn't smell anymore.
John: But on the other hand, I don't want to save the bag of hair.
Merlin: That's actually a really good point.
Merlin: This is adjacent to my advice that stickers are for sticking.
Merlin: You do not win awards for dying with good stickers.
Merlin: You simply use the stickers when you feel like it.
Merlin: Eat the big piece of chicken.
Merlin: Have dessert first.
Merlin: I know I sound like Warren Zevon or something.
Merlin: You sound like an Instagram account.
Merlin: Oh, my God.
Merlin: Hey, guys.
Merlin: Ten secrets to smelling the hair.
Merlin: Seven takeaways to steal my look.
Merlin: Smell this hair.
Merlin: Eat the dessert first.
Merlin: Oh, Jesus.
Merlin: I'm sorry.
John: Don't talk to me before my Instagram pillow.
John: I just hope you say something nice at my funeral.
Merlin: I'm not going up there for that.
Merlin: Fuck that.
Merlin: Even if you had it in the sunset, I'd go.
Merlin: Well, it depends.
Merlin: What if some cool bands played, huh?
Merlin: Do you have an idea when it would be?
John: I bet you there'd be cool bands.
John: I mean, maybe not like... I don't know.
Merlin: I'm not that... Yeah.
Merlin: Oh, yeah, that would be... Yeah.
Merlin: We were talking about...
Merlin: The lines in your head, the ridiculous things.
Merlin: I mean, this is even beyond the purview of the Merlin Podcast universe, probably, but lines that are just indelible.
Merlin: As far as I'm concerned, all you new waivers are in purgatory.
Merlin: Like these lines that somebody said and you never forget.
Merlin: And there's one where I was like, so I was kind of testing people.
Merlin: For each person, I had like items where I was like –
Merlin: Christian, do you remember when you wanted us to call you Lando and you said that you wanted to get ground effects and paint the bottom of your car to say Lando's ride?
Merlin: And he's like, and Megan, who was very serious and still is very, Megan goes, he still wants people to call him Lando.
Merlin: Wow.
Merlin: And, and it's like, that's the same person.
Merlin: You know what I mean?
John: People to call him Lando.
Merlin: But like this one made me so happy.
Merlin: We were so, you know, the campus cops on our campus were really cool.
Merlin: And except for one guy who was a real pain in the ass, the four other cops on campus had all uniformly had like serious jobs in serious police work and then retired to Florida and became campus cops.
Merlin: And they really, they protected us.
Merlin: They were pretty cool.
Merlin: They were nice guys.
Merlin: They did their job.
Merlin: They scared away weirdos on campus.
Merlin: But they were retired guys.
Merlin: But one of the guys who had actually worked on a boat in New York
Merlin: dragging the East River.
Merlin: He'd had a career.
Merlin: And there's one time we were getting ready, some called PCPs, palm court parties, four times a year.
Merlin: We were getting ready for like a big event and like getting everything ready.
Merlin: And I think my friend Dan had stolen some lumber and was trying to make a tiki bar.
Merlin: And there was all this stuff going on.
Merlin: And one of these cops walks by and said something.
Merlin: And I said, I said, Grant, do you remember what he said?
Merlin: And he said, I think I remember.
Merlin: I said, it starts out, big party.
Merlin: And Grant goes, big party, gonna break all the windows.
Merlin: And we both said it exactly like that because it was so fucking funny in 1988 that a cop, he didn't even break his gate, didn't look at it, just walked by and just goes, big party, gonna break all the windows.
Merlin: That's lived in my head since 87, 88, 89.
Merlin: And then you get to reconnect and somebody else remembers that too.
Merlin: Or, you know, the waiter that we thought had a hair weave.
Merlin: Or like all this insane stuff and what Grant calls the kenning.
Merlin: We're going like, oh, which Amy?
Merlin: Is it Snake Amy or is it Goth Amy?
Merlin: We're like, it's a small enough campus that, oh yeah, we all remember the time that Snake Amy warmed up a dead gerbil for her snake in the second court lounge and it came back to life and its eyes bulged out.
Merlin: Yeah, of course everybody remembers that.
Merlin: second court lounge was really gross.
John: It's, it's really moving, but, but you know, there are some friendships.
John: A lot of people's friendships are based only in that, right?
John: Where they get together and they talk about, as in like, do you remember that time that, Oh, remember that time that we were all, and every gathering is like that.
John: And I've, I've, I have dropped out of so many friend groups, um,
John: You know, like potential friend groups because it was always like our presence was always talking about that crazy thing we did.
John: Almost like just talking about like high school sports victories or something.
John: Yeah, right.
John: And what you're describing is absolutely kind of, you can only do this one more time in your life.
John: The most mundane thing that happened one day and you still remember it.
John: When you're 75 and you all get together to break open that bottle of cognac that you bought in 1915, you can do it one more time, right?
John: But please do not remind me of that ski trip between now and then.
John: Because because I can't live.
John: I can't live in a place that's that's defined by those.
John: It's wonderful to get back together and have everybody repeat that same like phrase that somebody misspoke, you know, but to have it be to have it be still like defining.
John: Like our friendship, this is what we have.
John: We don't – it's not like we're building anything, right?
Merlin: And pretty soon it feels like you're just kind of like almost like – remember that terrible – I'm sorry, this is going to sound extremely weird, but do you remember when there was that painting of Jesus that someone had single-handedly tried to like –
Merlin: Yeah, the lady in Spain.
Merlin: Isn't that kind of what it feels like sometimes?
Merlin: Where you're like, I'd rather have this busted-ass crack painting that barely looks like the painting anymore than spend my precious hours today with y'all trying to renovate it to a way that we want it to look.
Merlin: That bums my head.
Merlin: Yeah.
John: Yeah.
John: Well, and, you know, in rock and roll, it's really easy.
John: It's so fun to, to sit around and be like, what was that band that Larry Steiner would put the bass in the toilet?
John: But, you know, right now.
Merlin: I kind of want to hear that one.
Merlin: Capo was real.
John: Right now, Mike Squires is playing in Ugly Kid Joe.
John: He's the bass player of Ugly Kid Joe.
Merlin: They had a hit, right?
John: Yeah, they did.
John: But they're still massive in Europe.
Merlin: Is that she don't like meat, but she sure likes the bone?
Merlin: Was that them?
Merlin: Something like that.
John: I don't know.
Merlin: It was something that I did not.
Merlin: Don't like meat.
John: Which I don't know.
John: It was grunge era.
John: But they do tours of Europe where they sell out, you know, they're selling 2,000 tickets a night.
John: People in Europe still love Ugly Kid Joe and they bought all the records.
John: That's work, man.
John: That's, you know.
John: They bought nine Ugly Kid Joe records and it's still a big thing.
John: But right now,
John: Ugly Kid Joe is opening for the Scorpions in Vegas.
John: Oh, how many?
John: Is Klaus Minus hit still?
John: It's Klaus Minus.
John: It's all the guys from the Scorps.
John: And they're playing.
John: And all the Scorps.
John: Speaking of Germany.
John: It's a residency, a Scorps residency in Vegas.
John: Well, they don't want to walk a lot, probably.
John: Yeah.
John: You know, that's right.
John: And it's at the Planet Hollywood.
John: They walk down from their suite upstairs.
John: They go right.
John: There's an elevator takes them right to the stage, probably.
John: And Squires says, well, you're going to come down, right?
John: You're going to come down to Vegas and watch me open for the Scorps, right?
John: I can't wait for the nights with you.
John: I was just in East Berlin.
John: I know.
John: And I was trying to show my daughter, like, well, here's what that looked like.
John: And everything on the Internet was about a guy named Udo Dirk Schneider.
John: You want to see the wall come down?
John: Get the balls to the wall.
John: You want to watch the Scorpions video.
John: Whatever that was.
John: Some massive hit that they wrote about the wall coming down that I don't remember because I was on drugs at that point.
John: Yeah.
John: And so I showed her this Scorpions video.
John: I had so bounced on the Scorpions by 1989.
John: And there they were.
John: And it was the wall coming down.
John: So I have Scorps on the brain.
Yeah.
John: And then Squires is like, what the, you know, WTF, I'm in Vegas opening for the Scorps and you're not going to buy.
Merlin: Oh, what a nightmare that sounds like.
Merlin: Oh, sure.
Merlin: Well, I'll just come on down to Las Vegas, which is an awesome place to be for more than five minutes.
Merlin: Amazing place.
John: But I said to myself, yes, you absolutely have to fly down to Vegas, spend the night at the Excalibur and watch ugly kid Joe open for the Scorpions.
John: Every one of those things is a thing you don't want to do.
Merlin: Oh, I get it.
Merlin: This is his own thing.
John: Yeah, stacked together.
John: Yeah.
John: Every one of those things you don't want to do.
Merlin: It's a reverse gestalt.
John: Every one of those things you really don't want to do.
John: You really don't want to fly to Vegas.
John: You really don't want to stay at the Excalibur.
Merlin: By the way, Dead Eye Dick does the song New Age Girl, which includes the line, she don't like meat, but she sure likes the bone.
Merlin: Ugly Kid Joe is opening for the Scorps in a residency.
John: That's right.
John: and you know i know one of the guys so i got a good seat that doesn't mean i'm gonna meet klaus minor no but i'm but i might pass him in the elevator or something you know but yeah but even so i gotta go do it i have to because i don't wanna i don't i don't care about the time larry steiner put the base in the in the toilet at the off ramp i care about
John: I care about tomorrow, Merlin.
John: I care about tomorrow.
John: Oh, my gosh.
John: Do I still sound the same?
Merlin: Yes, absolutely.
Merlin: You still sound like Merlin.
Merlin: The bitch is hungry.
Merlin: She needs to chill.
Merlin: Give her inches.
Merlin: Feed her well.
Merlin: Feed her well.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: That's right.
Merlin: What do you mean?
Merlin: What's wrong with being sexy?
Merlin: There's nothing wrong with being... There's nothing wrong with being sexy.
Merlin: They all had cold sores.
Merlin: John, Jesus Christ.
Merlin: Sir eating hog.
Merlin: Sir Dennis eating hog.
Merlin: And so let's tap into America.
Merlin: We'll keep doing that.
Merlin: We can do that for a while.
John: We could.
John: I'm just as God made me, sir.