Ep. 13: "Then There Was Pump Chili"
hello hey john how are you hey merlin how's it going okay you ready i'm ready you ready this is based on uh uh feedback from i'm not really keeping track but i think it's our fifth listener are you ready
Well, we have five listeners.
Well, it's hard to tell.
I think some of them might be somebody downloading twice.
Oh.
Like from their room and from their mom's room.
But you're getting feedback from them?
Hey, you ready for this?
Yeah.
You ready for this?
Yeah, I'm ready.
I'm not going to pay ASCAP for this, so don't ask.
What are you, ASCAP or BMI?
I'm BMI.
Okay.
I don't want to get a letter.
You ready?
Yeah.
I haven't rehearsed this, so this is going to be from memory.
Okay.
Roderick on the line.
Oh, that's nice.
That's borrowing a melody from The Long Winters.
Wow.
The way you put that so flatly really took a lot of the charm out of it.
Have I ever explained to you?
I think I have.
I have the times that you don't drink and I do.
I think I've told you which of your songs I think should be in which commercials.
Yeah, that's one of the things that... Do you remember the one I told you as a no-brainer?
No.
I probably wasn't listening because of the you drink and I don't problem.
You're just watching a Mr. Show video in your underwear in my living room?
Yeah, I was just like, oh, uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh.
Can I go ahead?
Yeah, what was the song that was going to be in a commercial?
I haven't worked out the exact instrumentation.
Obviously, it wouldn't be you.
They would just be paying, I guess, BMI or Josh or whoever owns.
Who owns your music?
I don't know.
Is your mom owning your music?
No, it's an offshore company.
It's an Indian company.
Oh, the kind that gets intoxicated or the kind that answers phones?
Oh, dear.
Sorry, no ping pong.
Are you ready?
The dot, not the woo-woo.
Completely redesigned for a new generation.
Integrated MP3 players and air conditioning.
Jetta 2012.
More than shapes.
And the pause is important.
And there should be maybe in the middle, like a lindrum, like... Yeah.
And then what about... There's another one I... Anyway, first, can I please get your feedback on?
I have literally two index cards left, so this is going to be a very difficult call for me.
You could go into the archives.
You could start over on the bottom.
I would be more than happy.
I have... The problem is I have another program that I do occasionally, and I have, as we say in the computer biz, oh, you know...
Wait a minute.
That was pretty good.
What key is that in?
I'm here at Jonathan Colton's home studio.
No, that's not even funny.
What key is that?
A C or a G or what is that?
I picked up this harmonica and it seriously is a Bass Pro Shops branded harmonica.
Is this a fisherman's monica?
It's a fish monica.
I had a fisherman's stereo back in the day.
It's in the key of C. Yeah.
But sadly, as I put it to my mouth for the first time, I realized that it tastes like baby powder.
Oh, yeah, and it'll cut your lip, too.
I don't know why you would put baby powder on your harmonicas, but maybe it came... Oh, see, I think it was Blind Melon Jefferson that used to do that.
Blind Lemon Melon?
I only know how to play that riff in E, so could you ask Jonathan for an E harmonica, please?
Well...
Yeah, that C isn't going to work.
Do you have a capo?
You can capo it.
No, I haven't had a capo in years.
I left it with my erection.
And my three year of college.
Never had a need to play up the neck.
There's not a single good note on this instrument.
I know how to play the marine from the halls of Montezuma.
This could be our special musical episode because I got a lot of music.
Did you get the thing I sent?
The Marine Corps theme is a really, that's a very useful piece of music to know.
Okay, try this, John.
Start around the third hole.
That's what she said.
Don't start with the ping pong.
Okay, no easy ping pong.
Because then you want to do it an hour later.
Now here's the thing.
I want you to blow in.
Imagine going up one note at a time.
Blow suck, blow suck.
Try that.
One hole at a time.
Start with the third hole.
I can't play along.
There's too much innuendo.
All right, here we go.
Oh, you know what?
I took it back.
Do this.
That's not the Marine Corps theme.
To be stuck inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues again.
All right.
You ready to start?
Okay, so, but the part I really like about that is, and it's probably a lady singing, or it's a lady chorus, and it goes... With the Marine Corps theme?
I don't think there are any women singing on it.
That'd be really nice, like the Ronettes.
I've been listening to that Ramones.
I always want to say Phil Ramone, but that's the Billy Joel guy.
I've been listening to... Who's the hair guy who's a killer?
Oh, Jerry Lee Lewis.
No, I've been listening to Phil, the other one, Specter's.
Probably the greatest Christmas album of all time.
Are you familiar with that Christmas gift to you or whatever it's called?
Pretty sure the greatest Christmas album of all time is Manheim Steamrollers.
Oh.
First Christmas record.
I learned about Manheim Steamrollers background and I was very surprised.
Can I tell you?
First of all.
They're not from Manheim.
No.
And there's no Manheim, no Steamroller.
That's a service market.
She got called BMI.
You know what?
I'm going to write small.
Okay.
Oh, you only have two cards left is what you're saying.
No, no.
Let me just really quickly because I only got these two cards.
I ate a pear tart and I'm a little goofy.
Was it a fermented pear tart?
No, I don't drink.
Gardening at night.
Marine Corps.
For short, I'm going to write USMC.
I don't understand the way that you use 3x5 cards entirely.
I don't understand the way you use anything, fat face.
I'm guessing that writing a whole bunch of stuff really small on a 3x5 card is kind of exactly the opposite.
Would it help you at all if I sent you a photograph of my desk?
I've seen your desk.
Have you ever been to my actual office office?
No, no, you got that since the last time I was in San Francisco, but I can guess what it's like.
There's like chew spit cups all around.
I haven't done that since 1999.
You want to talk about that?
I'm going to capture that.
I'm going to capture Redman.
I'm writing down Redman.
There's a poster on the wall of a white Lamborghini with a bikini girl leaning on it.
uh or like that poster with like 10 garages yeah and a different kind of supercar in front of each one i've drawn a vagina on it um i am like it's like a what early december cp it's just like a fucking dickens in here it's all it's it's um red man a little coal stove shapes do you have an assistant wearing a scarf and a top hat warming his hands over a coal stove i don't know why i always think of barrows does he have a song with a barrowsmith in it or something
Pretty sure he does.
I used to tease him a lot about all his songs being about pirates.
And at one point he said, you know, we don't have a single song about pirates.
Listen to me.
I went to college.
I said, every one of your songs is about pirates.
Don't kid me.
His songs are about like secret pirates with master's degrees.
It's like pirates that have written a thesis and haven't lost a fucking limb.
I've written down, this is just between you, me, and the harmonica.
I've written down the word toilet paper.
And I don't know if you want to discuss that.
I would like at some point to discuss the toilet paper issue.
I have a lot of strong feelings about toilet paper, as you can imagine.
You have an anecdote that had me, I believe, in the parlance, literally laughing out loud.
Oh, right.
Yes.
Right.
Well, that actually, you know, that anecdote actually has now borne further fruit.
He was down the line.
Okay, well, I'm going to come back to that.
Did he make fun of you in the book about that?
Not make fun of me in the book.
There's actually a character in Wildwood...
uh named after me and um and and his name is derived from that toilet paper incident okay i think we should okay i've written that very small here so remind me also i like your bell i'm usually talking too loud and i talk over your bell when you get home i want you to use the bell more and there are other songs there's one song of yours i thought would be really good for a miller beer commercial i can't remember what but you know a lot of they all are okay
Every one of them.
If anyone from Miller is listening right now, I know I'm not supposed to break down the fourth wall and talk directly to people.
Please don't address our audience, John.
But let's say, hypothetically, if someone from Miller hypothetically was receiving this communication, any one of my songs... You're talking about the Miller Brewing Company.
...would be great to license for a nationwide beer campaign.
That would be awesome.
Even though I don't drink here.
Huh.
There's some songs that really get used a lot in those commercials and in movies.
I don't know if you've ever noticed that.
Dude, I was at my in-laws last night for my mother-in-law's birthday and the TV was on like it always is.
Did you know there's a show called On the Red Carpet that's just about people literally being photographed on the red carpet?
That's a television show.
I was talking to the Coltons this morning about how I stopped.
I don't know who that is.
I don't know what you're talking about.
Yeah, I know.
They're New York people.
Isn't she nice?
She's really smart.
All these people are smart.
Yeah.
That's the problem.
He lives in Westchester County.
Is that right?
No, no, they live in Brooklyn.
I'm going to tell you about the time I accidentally went to Amityville.
Don't go back.
Go ahead.
Amityville, New York.
Mrs. Colton has her own name, I think.
Her name is Christine.
Here is the funny thing.
In college, I lived in Spokane, Washington for a couple of years, and one of those years I lived in a house that we called Amityville because it was barn-shaped like the Amityville Horror House.
It had a red room, and you woke up at 3.15 every night.
And we tried in that way that you do when you're a sophomore in college.
We popularized around campus that our house was a party house and that you should just refer to it as Amityville.
Oh, dude, big party in Amityville this weekend.
Come on out.
It's like Graceland.
It just sounds awesome to have a name for your house.
Yeah, and I think for a couple of years, even after I stopped living there, they still kept calling that house Amityville.
I think it's like all colleges where in the 80s you could have 10 guys living in a big Victorian house and everybody's paying $25 a month rent.
Those days are gone now, and I'm sure there's a family of yuppies living in that house, and they have no idea the terrible things that happened there.
Let's be honest, it's a lot like the Amityville Horror.
Right.
And a lot of it was made up.
As far as I know, the blood that was on the walls at Amityville in Spokane was all blood that... None of it seeped out of the walls.
It was all like splatter blood.
From your youth.
Yeah, from youthful hijinks.
We're pretty deep here.
Bell, Amityville, A7sus4, Writing Small.
Oh, yeah.
Anyway, other ones.
So Miller Beer.
So you know a lot of these.
You get some of these songs.
You know, for me, it's that...
one of my least favorite things Eric Clapton has ever done, and I have a lot.
Oh boy, where do you start that list?
Well, you know, he's one of those ones, and I have to be honest, Jeff Beck, I'm going to write down Jeff Beck, because I think Jeff Beck is important because he helped us get Eddie Van Halen, but I think he's a little overrated.
Jeff Beck.
Happy midnight.
I'm not going to sit here and defend Jeff Beck.
Don't defend what?
I mean, there's some... It's got its moments, but... He's a good guitar player.
Let's just leave it at that.
But Eric Clapton is indefensible.
I grew up thinking I should really be into Beckola, and I was just... I've listened to it, and I'm like... And blow by blow, like with the young hammer, and I was like, I just... Maybe I'm just this... You know what it is?
It skipped a generation.
I just could not... Now, I like the Yardbirds, but I couldn't get into that.
All that music that you're supposed to like, none of it's likable.
The Yardbirds did not age well.
it's no let's up on three um and so you can make a lot of dough and he was at a budweiser commercial or was it michelobe i don't remember do you remember the time for a while when budweiser i think was was hiring actually hiring the actual talent behind a lot of famous songs and getting them to do them like to the tune of that one budweiser song oh i think ronnie james dio did one to the tune of rainbow in the dark
Speaking of Ronnie James Dio.
Love that guy.
I was walking through JFK yesterday, airport, and they're playing Christmas carols.
How will he die?
And I'm walking through the airport and it's like rocking Christmas carols, like rocking Santa Claus, New Year, whatever.
I'm walking through and the music's turned up a little bit louder than you normally get music in public spaces.
Mm-hmm.
Anyway, and I hear this voice singing a Christmas carol, and I'm like, I know that voice.
Whose voice is that?
I'm walking, I've got my bags, I'm listening with one ear, and I'm like...
Dr. Rainbow in the dark.
Oh, no.
You weren't in a lounge?
This was over the general?
No, no, no.
Just over the general PA.
And I'm thinking, Rainbow in the dark?
That's Ronnie James Dio.
And that's... Ronnie James Dio singing a Christmas girl?
It can't be.
I haven't had a chance to Google whether or not he did it, but his voice is unmistakable.
But it was supposed to be a Christmas version?
It was not Rainbow in the Dark.
Here comes Santa.
It was Ronnie singing in his Rainbow in the Dark voice.
It was from that era.
The production cues were from that era.
But was it like a traditional, like, Richie Blackmore kind of old-timey folky song?
No, no, it was like Rudolph's Rockin' Christmas or something.
I want to look this up.
That's terrifying.
There were like three things about it that were terrible, and it made me think at first, before I could quite place his voice, I was like, is that David Coverdale?
It has to be David Coverdale.
He's the only metal vocalist with so little taste.
Him and John Whitten could do a hell of a duet.
But it turned out, I mean, I swear to you, it was a deal.
That is so funny.
There's nobody else's voice.
I think he's pretty.
First of all, in interviews, he seems really cool.
Well, he's dead now.
So he passed.
He did.
Huh.
Just recently.
My friend Matt did something, and I think it was 2004, that I helped out with.
You remember, everybody was crazy about the Howard Dean.
Oh yeah.
So we started a site called, uh, when it was big cause it was the first big internet, you know, driven thing.
Like it was the famous first like giant internet president.
So we started Dio for America and we had a whole fake website about Ronnie James Dio running for president and like everything going horribly awry.
He threw a priest in a river.
There was a woman to look out for.
Look out.
You have to be born in America to be, uh, to run for president.
Yeah.
See, I thought he was from New York.
He has a very New York accent when he talks.
Oh, Ronnie James Dio is in English?
I'm almost... I know exactly.
I'm almost positive that he's from New York.
I will check this out and find out.
Well, this is going to be awkward for me if he is an American.
He should be English.
Somebody's listening to this right now and going, you guys are jerks.
What about Vivian Campbell?
What about Vivian Campbell?
Vivian Campbell is... Oh, my God.
Dio is American.
He's from New Hampshire.
Yeah.
Oh, that is really awkward for me.
That's the Granite State.
That's awkward for me.
I guess I just never...
There are certain people who wear a lot of chain mail that you just assume are from England because that's where people who wear chain mail are from.
You go to a Goodwill in England, you're going to literally find chain mail with short sleeves.
Chain mail and leather gauntlets and stuff, and Dio wore a lot of gauntlets.
Yeah, gauntlets.
He was a small man.
You know he's in a band called Elf because he was a little guy.
Very, very small guy, and I just assumed he was English.
Oh, I'm so embarrassed.
My metal credibility just went through the floor.
John, let me talk you off the ledge, my friend.
I think that I thought the same thing for a long time, because all I'd ever heard was, well, mainly Rainbow, Black Sabbath, and Dio.
I mean, I don't know Elf, but I mean, I think it's very easy.
Just look at who he's running with, right?
Black Sabbath, I mean, come on, Birmingham's finest.
Did you ever listen to Heaven and Hell?
what do you think of course i think that is one of the most underrated records of forever and it's certainly i will just go down and just say it is easily one of the best black sabbath albums ever but you did well that's quite a statement but you didn't you didn't smoke a ton of pot and sit around like dark dingy places with metal heads and and get all dark did you i don't i never think of you as being like you mean like melvin's dark stoner
no i'm not a melvin stoner i never was yeah melvin stone never never did it because i was i was a melvin stone or for quite a while there and you'd like to be seated seated and and like and like like not chatting just sitting and everybody's staring at a at a at a wet spot on the floor you know not not like happy not drugs for happy drugs for sad you weren't you didn't get all giddy and let's live in a treehouse together
I mean, when I first smoked pot, but later on, no, it was all like, oh, the world's coming to an end and we're the... The apocalypse is happening and it's just going to be us sitting in here watching some guy play World of Warcraft.
I'm trying to think.
I did have different bands for different drugs.
I think I did smoke a lot of pot at one point, but I didn't have one specific kind of band.
For Hash, it was Joy Division.
For Whippets, it was Suzie and the Banshees.
And the story I've told you before, I will always associate, they call it amyl nitrates rush locker room with A.K.
Malmsteen and ACDC, as I've told you.
You went through an amyl nitrate phase?
That's like a gay sex drug.
Yeah, I know.
I didn't know that until it was too late.
Oh.
Yeah.
No, no, it's a cheap high you buy at the sex store when you're, you know, a kid and you can go in there, you know.
When you're a kid at the sex store.
I don't think you understand.
This is the story you're trying to tell me right now.
You know, what can I just say for somebody who used to do different kinds of inhalants?
I do not need a lot of attitude from you about this.
Oh, all right.
All right.
I'm stepping off.
You know, you've got able nitrates.
But the sex store.
More than shapes.
That's where it was sold.
You go in there and they called it Rush.
Yeah.
Or was, I mean, did you like walk past all, walk past like eyes front, eyes front.
Don't look at the dildos.
Just going here for the, I should have not been wearing an extremely tight sailor suit.
I'm not going to lie to you.
You know?
And the thing was, I've been working out a lot.
Yo, ho, ho.
Yeah.
Yeah.
yep yep yep i also had a you know what's weird i paid for it uh with a roll of silver dollars that i happen to have you pulled out of a yeah my zipper it's terrible yeah anyway uh i told you that story where i was snorting uh snorting rush at an acdc concert and uh i i thought i was in an obtrusive place i thought i was you know nice and high up in the stands turns out i was just a few feet from the cannons
oh hello but that was about to rock and i don't know if you've got the kind of wanging headache you get with this stuff just to like we were there to see yngwie because acdc this is more like their whatever maximum overdrive past the prime period i was there to see yngwie but um yeah yngwie who never really had a prime
Oh man, his videos on YouTube are so worth watching.
See, this is the thing about people who lived in the United States.
Like Dio.
That you cannot, like Dio, you cannot understand what it was like to be a kid in Alaska in the 70s and 80s.
Because everyone in Alaska loved heavy metal, but no heavy metal band.
Oh, sure.
With the exception of the Scorpions.
Yeah.
No heavy metal band deemed Alaska worth a stop on their tour.
So we were sitting up there starved for ACDC to come through or Van Halen to come through.
And all we got were the third tier metal bands.
We would get, you know, like Dokken would come through or Rat would come through.
You don't like breaking the chains?
Oh, I mean, those were great at the time.
They scratched the itch.
But I talk to people now my age who are like, oh, yeah, I saw ACDC seven times.
It was like you'd get in a car and drive for 20 minutes and see Van Halen 81 Invasion.
Didn't happen.
Right.
Impossible.
No chance.
And the one exception to that was Ozzy did come in 1980 with Randy Rhodes and played a concert at West High School Auditorium in Anchorage.
And it was the biggest event.
I mean, it's an event people still talk about.
Ozzy at West High.
Can you imagine seeing Randy Rhodes live?
At a high school auditorium.
And I could not go because I was in seventh grade and my mom said, oh, you can't go to a heavy metal concert.
And what was amazing is that they simulcast, or I'm sorry, they didn't broadcast the concert, but on the local heavy metal rock station, not heavy metal, but the local album-oriented rock station, the DJs went to the concert and just live broadcast from the parking lot.
We're here at the Aussie show.
Dude, everybody's going in.
It's going to be amazing.
Now we're going to play some more Aussie.
And so I sat at home in my Air Force flight suit, my orange Air Force jumpsuit that I wore at that era all the time.
Anytime I wasn't in school clothes, I was in this orange flight suit.
And I sat at home and listened to the Aussie concert.
It's like broadcasting from a strip club.
It's like, oh my God, you should see the bosoms on these ladies.
These girls are totally naked.
And then reading like jokes from Playboy.
Like that's appropriate.
That was even brutal.
And a lot of my friends went and saw the show.
And still, I'm sure still, if we sat and talked for an hour, they'd be like, oh dude, you totally missed it.
So anyway, so we never saw any of the great rock shows.
None of those bands ever came to Alaska, except the Scorpions, who came through Alaska every single time.
You're kidding.
Because those guys are the working men of heavy metal rock.
Was it to get to Asia?
Yeah, they were on their way to Japan or something.
But they stopped and played a sold-out show at our big arena, the Sullivan Arena.
And actually, I think there's some Alaska...
There's some Alaska recordings on World Wide Live, the Scorpion's famous 80s live album.
With the Kiss-style screaming audience added in.
Right.
It's a really, really, the audience is hilarious.
Are you ready to rock?
Klaus Mina, is that correct?
Klaus Mina, yeah.
I couldn't finish reading the Canterbury Tales, but I can't tell you how much time I spent with the guitar for the Practicing Musician article on No One Like You.
That and Bohemian Rhapsody, that was the only, well, I massacred both of them, but I spent so much time just on No One Like You.
Remember how great that was?
Quack, quack, quack, quack, quack, quack, quack, quack, quack, quack, quack, quack, quack, quack, quack, quack, quack, quack, quack, quack, quack, quack, quack, quack, quack, quack, quack, quack, quack, quack, quack, quack, quack, quack, quack, quack, quack, quack, quack, quack, quack, quack, quack, quack, quack, quack, quack, quack, quack, quack, quack, quack, quack, quack, quack, quack, quack, quack, quack, quack, quack, quack, quack, quack, quack, quack, quack, quack, quack, quack, quack, quack, quack
I saw them in Spokane a few years later, and I used to get right up on the wall because I was a big kid.
I could force my way right to the front, even when I was 17, 18 years old, right up there with all the tough guys.
And I was at a Scorpion show, and he looked at me.
Oh, my God.
He came right over and looked right at me and was like, yeah, rock, dude, you, you, dude, rock.
And I was like, me, rock.
Do best rockin'.
And now I don't even remember his name.
Oh, you're talking about the guitar player?
The guy with the white explorer with the black stripes.
There were two.
I'm going to break my rules.
If any of our five listeners were women, we've just lost...
Matthias Jabs, right?
Ah, Matthias Jabs.
I'm sorry.
I think I overpronounced that a little bit.
Matthias Jabs.
That may be how he pronounces it, but we called him Matthias Jabs.
Anyway, so yeah.
By the way, there's a detailed color timeline for this on the Wikipedia page.
Oh, the different guitar players of... Oh, everybody.
Rudolf Schenker.
You got the Madius Jobs or Matthias Jobs.
Francis Buckles.
Rudolf Schenker, I think, was... They tried to make him the guitar player and... No, no, I'm sorry.
Michael Schenker.
They kept trying to get Michael Schenker to be the lead guitar player and he kept screwing up.
He couldn't...
He couldn't stay off the drugs or something.
And so they got Matthias Jabs in there and he's a workhorse.
I was a big Scorpions fan.
How could you not be?
They were the greatest at the time.
Oh, they were.
But they were also a little weird.
Oh, yeah.
Did I ever tell you about the time I played in the church basement with one hour practice?
Did I ever tell you about that?
That was the name of the band, One Hour of Practice.
We didn't even have a name.
We had to play at somebody's, you know, it's a dumb story.
But you know me and you know how I can't sing.
Now imagine me singing Still Loving You.
We tried it.
We rehearsed it once.
I'm sorry those tapes don't survive.
Wasn't that an awesome song?
at the end it goes herman rare bell what a great name so good so i think i'm thinking of udo dirkschneider that was the guy from except he's from except i
I think he looked a little bit like Lars Ulrich's dad.
You got your balls to the wall, man.
The thing is, you know, the reason that that music was so resonant, I think, at the time was, and this is something that we forget, or at least I find other people forget, I don't forget, I remember, is that those were real heavy Cold War years.
And the fact that these bands were German...
gave their heavy metal a kind of deeper import.
You know, there was more frisian to their apocalyptic scenarios and their big power ballads because they were facing annihilation at the hands of the Red Army at a moment's notice, right?
I mean, that was 99 Luftballons.
I mean, that was a great pop song.
I think that really came through in the music of Falco.
Exactly.
I believe he put it well when he said, Amadeus, Amadeus, Amadeus, Amadeus, Amadeus, Amadeus.
He's also dead.
Yes, I heard Falco passed.
Well, let me just take that and add a little bit of Mrs. Dash to it.
I had a Maxell XL2.
On one side of it was Falco 3 by Falco, and on the other side was Robert Palmer's The One with Addicted to Love.
Right.
That's a great mixtape or a great double side.
That was an outlier for me in 1985 or whenever that was.
That was a little of an outlier.
I have so much to follow up on here, John.
The way that you refer to people when you say when someone has died, you say they passed.
They passed.
That's what you say in the South.
Only Jesus dies, I think.
You know, this has come up a lot recently because my mom was going through a phase talking about the baby where she would refer to the baby having BMs.
And I was like, stop saying that.
You know, it's okay to say poo.
She's like, the baby had three BMs today.
I'm like, that makes me very uncomfortable.
I feel like I'm in some kind of hospital situation.
Again, like not a hospital, like a medical hospital, but like an insane asylum where you would talk about people's BMs.
Right.
Like something you would talk about an adult who was pooing.
It's like saying one of those things like menses.
It's one of those things where it's just like, ew.
It's a word that's just a little too technical.
You know, I love bolus.
I like bolus.
I love that word.
Bolus?
Bolus.
I think it's a kind of poo.
Oh.
But anyway, when you say he passed, it always sounds to me like, it's just a little too, it's like you would say, it's like a doctor talking to somebody, talking to you about your aunt.
Oh, she passed.
Yeah.
Passed or passed away.
I think that's, what do you say?
You say somebody died.
Died.
She died.
I think it must be a Southern thing I picked up.
Yeah.
Well, the South is very euphemistic.
In the South, almost everything is communicated by what is not said.
That sounds ridiculous, but I really, really believe that.
And as somebody who literally never stops talking, I always had trouble communicating with people.
Because everything spoke, there's a certain kind of code.
It isn't just about race and class, but that has a lot to do with it.
But there's so much that's based on what you never say.
Yeah.
Right.
And you kept talking past – you kept talking right through that.
You know, yeah.
Yeah.
But I mean, you know, it's not even just like the super easy passive-aggressive suburban stuff.
Like there's just certain kinds of stuff that nobody needs to say.
And the fact that nobody says it is what makes it powerful.
Right.
Right.
It's being said –
No.
Alaska culturally is much more like the things that don't need to be said are that you're a fucking faggot.
You know, like shut up and get out of my way type of
You know what I mean?
There is no cultural milieu in Alaska that needs to be navigated.
It's just like, are you going to bulldoze that acre of land or should I?
Are we going to use your bulldozer or are we going to use my bulldozer?
How's that distinct from Manhattan?
Oh, well, in Manhattan... Or, you know, like in the New York City area.
Because, I mean, there's a certain kind of famous... Not candidness, but certainty.
Like, I get the fuck out of my way, kind of... But in New York, you're dealing... The reason for it is that there are 10 million people here all trying to use the same public restroom at the same time.
Right?
So you're... So you have to say what's on your mind because you have other people to navigate.
In Alaska, you have the opposite problem.
Everyone has one square mile of land
that could be theirs alone.
And so the question is much more like, why are you here?
Why, why are you, why are you sharing?
Why are you breathing my air?
If you don't have a reason, then why don't you move on?
You know, it isn't the same as here where it's like,
We both have to stand on this same corner of the sidewalk right now.
And so there'd better not be any mistaking like, who's BO you're smelling?
Both of them seem very stressful.
Both of those kinds of ways of living.
It depends on what your threshold is for other people.
None.
I mean, it's just that I'm constantly anxious about things like that.
Well, see, then in Alaska, you would get along fine because you never have to see another person if you don't want to.
You have to see the person at the general store.
Okay, that's a good example because going to like a 7-Eleven in Florida, I've felt so much more sense of danger and menace at a suburban 7-Eleven than I felt like walking through really sketchy parts of San Francisco.
It feels much more random.
Are you getting that menace like from the chili dogs themselves or from just dealing with other people?
You know, even I don't get hot food from 7-Eleven anymore.
Even I have stopped that.
I used to be really into the, it's called the Biggin.
There's an implied apostrophe before the U. The Biggin is the hot dog wrapped in a burrito?
No, John.
It's a microwavable cheeseburger with chili on it, if memory serves.
Oh, right.
This was at a time when my friend Sam and I would hang out and talk to the guy at 7-Eleven.
That's what we would do.
We would hang out and talk to the guy at 7-Eleven because he was from New York and he had stories.
He had stories, right?
Uh-huh.
Yeah.
Well, we used to get two chili dogs for 99 cents at 7-Eleven and you could put as much chili, like pump chili, chili out of a pump and cheese out of a pump.
Oh, God.
So you put the two chili dogs on one of those paper trays.
Pump chili sounds like a German porn movie.
Pump chili?
Wasn't that an Aerosmith record?
Pump chili?
But you put these two hot dogs inside this paper boat and then you could fill the boat up so the chili dogs were not just covered in chili but floating in chili.
It was like a New Yorker cartoon of a desert island except there was a hot dog in the middle and chili.
Except there was a little mound of hot dog under there.
And then you could put a melted nacho cheese over the whole topic.
I don't think you're supposed to.
I don't think that cheese was ever intended to go on your island dog.
But I'm telling you, for 99 cents, you could avail yourself of any of the condiments.
And if you didn't float those hot dogs in a chilly sea and then cover it with nacho cheese, you were not exploiting the opportunity.
You're leaving money on the table.
That's right.
That's right.
Wow.
This is your big change.
You could basically get 6,000 calories of cheap...
of cheap ground something right that pump chili is far enough away from a cow right i mean once upon a time a cow lived in a field and ate grass and then there was pump chili and whatever happened between that cow and there was between that cow and that pump
On the counter of an Anchorage 7-Eleven.
Whatever distance that cow had to travel to become Pump Chili, there were a few steps in there I don't want to think about.
This goes back to your simple butcher, right?
That's right.
That's right.
The butcher that knew the cow.
Yeah.
By the way, that's my favorite Tony Morrison book.
Then there was Pump Chili.
No, no.
I mean the simple butcher.
I think that's...
A simple butcher was a hell of a... I mean, I'm getting to know my butcher now.
Right, but you told us in one of our early visits, you wanted to make sure you understood how this became pump chili, and you wanted to know the things about the relationship of the steer.
You wanted to know in detail, right?
At a certain point, in machine masticating this cow down into a form where it could be pumped out with a pump...
There are too many opportunities for rats to fall into the grinder.
John, have you ever felt a cow?
There are not many edible animals that are more solid than – well, not a cow.
It's a steer.
A steer is hard to move, right?
To get a steer to the point where it could be pumped in a suburb is a lot of abstraction.
I'm telling you.
I'm telling you.
It has to be... You don't do that with a couple swipes.
I mean, that's a lot of work.
It has to be chewed and then chewed again and then chewed again and then buried in the ground for a year and then reconstituted and then chewed again.
Like kimchi?
Like kimchi.
It's basically pump chili is the kimchi of cow.
I don't.
Please stop saying.
It makes me want to go there just to see what it looks like.
I know.
You want to go there right now and try it, right?
You want to float a couple of hot dogs in it.
This might be one of those Oprah memories, but isn't it like just scaldingly hot?
Isn't it like ridiculously hot?
I mean, in terms of temperature, it's like 180 degrees when it comes out of the pump.
When it comes out of there, but I mean, you have to stand there and put the cheese on it and stuff.
You're carrying that in a paper doily kind of thing?
You're carrying it in a paper doily, and then you're trying to eat it while your friend drives.
Think about a 7-Eleven.
There's no place to sit there and eat it.
I usually do.
When I get a hot dog, I get a hot dog there occasionally for 99 cents.
The quarter pounder, or half pounder, I guess.
I'm not sure.
Anyway, it's a very, very large hot dog.
Half pounder.
The size of a rugby ball.
I should mention that I was wearing an extremely tight sailor suit and snorting amyl nitrates in front of the 7-Eleven while I shoved a half-pound wiener in my mouth.
That's the Castro.
You were wearing a really tight sailor suit and a dog collar.
Yeah, connected to a boombox that was playing Giorgio Moroder.
Oh, my God, John.
Now, was this in Alaska?
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
I mean, my willingness to eat things that were pumped to me really dropped off after I left Alaska.
Like I knew somebody that worked at an Arby's that said if you take the roast beef, you take the big roast beef out of the freezer at an Arby's, like plastic encased roast beef that they micro slice and then fry on a little hot fryer thing.
He said, if you take that roast beef out of the freezer and leave it on the counter to thaw overnight, in the morning, it's just a bag of liquid.
It's just a bag of like... I've heard that the quote-unquote roast beef of Arby's... And by the way, Arby's is an acronym.
Did you know that?
I think it might be a backronym.
What does it stand for?
America's Roast Beef.
This country's best yogurt?
Yes.
America's Roast Beef.
Yes, sir.
Yes.
Oh, yes, sir.
I think that's a backronym.
I had my girlfriend and we talked about – did we talk about Murmur last time?
My friend I mentioned who wasn't out of the closet yet, who screeched about it being a country western album.
I think we've talked about this.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
We did talk about this.
That might have been offline.
But he was the manager, like an assistant manager there, and my girlfriend worked there.
And there's like three stinks that – food stinks.
There's the food stink of like a seafood-based Italian restaurant.
There's the dumpster at a KFC.
And then there's anybody who's ever worked in an Arby's.
and there's the smell of that arby's i have been told that that quote unquote roast beef is not even like steak um quality it's it's like uh compressed awful and variety meats i love the word awful awful do you pronounce that differently from awful i say awful i'm gonna say awful awful and variety meats that's what i heard and it's like from australia it's like australian to get to get from a cow in a field like eating dandelions you're
It had to go through a pump, and I'm thinking that the pump they use at Arby's is like some kind of pool pump, like the same pump that you would use to drain a swimming pool.
To remove frogs and leaves?
Yeah, you just have to get the cow into the hopper, first of all.
Get the cow through the aperture into the hopper, and then it's got to go through three or four pumps.
The first time you hear a story, like when you're a little kid, you hear the stories about, oh, hot dogs have fingers in them.
Like they don't stop the line like when somebody's nose goes in or whatever.
And whether or not that's true, there is certainly a lot going on with the processing of food at every level that is just horrifying.
But what freaks me out is the number –
The number of people between that cow and the pump and the number of parts of that process.
Like it'd be one thing if there were a way – like some kind of a Chuck Jones, like Wile E. Coyote machine that would have a funnel at the top and a 7-Eleven chili pump at the bottom.
And somebody drops in a steer and a little bit of cayenne cinnamon in my case.
Yeah.
And then some tail gets in there, some eyelash gets in there, but it's fine because you saw it all happen.
It's chili.
Like, you know, your standards should not be super high with chili to begin with.
And then if you're getting that out of a pump, but there are too many people who have too many people in the process of the production who have lost the relationship between what they're doing and the fact that at a certain point, somebody is going to eat it.
Like I see this even happening when I'm making a salad at my house, stuff falls on the floor and
And the distance between the counter where I'm making it and the table where I'm going to serve it to other people is far enough, which is six and a half feet, that I go, ah, that's fine.
I mean, there's a little dirt on it, whatever.
It's my dirt.
It came off of me.
So it's my dander, whatever.
And I don't want to discourage you from eating at my house because this is just part of the process.
We all do this.
A certain amount of...
a certain amount of dander makes it into all food.
But the more people between the cow-eating dandelions and the pump chili, the more dander, the more different kinds of dander.
It introduces a lot of unnecessary, extraneous dander.
Yeah.
And this is why I, although instinctively I hate people who are precious about their food, particularly urban people who want to talk about...
where their food comes from.
Talk about the locavores.
Oh my God.
I'm so, I want to get into a fist fight with every locavore I meet.
And that makes me a real Northwestern.
Yeah, that happened in Portland.
Yeah.
Somewhere in Oregon.
You sent me that, the fist fight between the two locavore chefs where one guy was like, that pig wasn't from Portland.
It was from a different area code.
It had to be hospitalized.
Yeah.
But even in spite of that,
But the question of – because I think dander in food is a kind of – it follows an exponential process.
The second guy's dander – It's like the way you put down some mail on the counter and then you put a magazine on top of that and pretty soon the counter is completely covered.
You're saying dander, it's an attractive kind of dander.
Well, the second guy's dander doesn't double the first guy's dander.
Geometric.
It's a times 10 factor.
The second guy's dander exponentially increases the amount of dander until probably that pump chili.
It's just dander and cayenne pepper.
How many people... Dander is the binding agent.
How many... How about this?
Instead of people, in your reckoning, as somebody who has enjoyed a lot of pump chili, if you were to go from a steer in a field to a 7-Eleven where you're abusing the pump chili, how many, let's just say, entities do you think are between?
I mean, you can say people that actually influence the food.
Well, I'm just thinking you got that.
You got the whoever whoever owns.
You got the people who are like putting down the dandelion seed.
You've got the you got whoever shoved it into the sluice.
Right.
At least a couple of guys.
That's it.
They're really there are very solid.
Right.
And you know, and you got it.
You got to assume knowing what I know about people and I get into arguments with people all the time because although I although on one level,
I am a Lockean thinker in the sense that I believe that man is basically good.
I was thinking more in the sense of that your philosophy involves looking things up on Wikipedia and half understanding it.
There's that too.
I guess that would make me a Hobbesian.
Thomas Locke didn't have Wikipedia.
It was John Locke.
It was just John Locke for what it's worth.
Thomas Locke.
I'm talking about his younger brother Thomas.
Oh, I'm sorry.
I thought you were thinking of John Hobbes.
No, no, no.
John Hobbs was the character in that comic strip.
I think you're thinking of Lost.
But here's the problem.
Ultimately, I am Hobbsian in the sense that I know that people have sex with dead things.
I know that this is true.
I've seen enough programs where it was about somebody.
You don't mean that as a metaphor.
Often having sex with a dead thing.
You don't mean that as a metaphor.
You mean literally... Literally people have sex with dead things.
It's a thing that bad people do.
I'm sure there are people on the internet right now who are thinking about it.
Germans.
Germans have sex with dead things.
Not all those guys are Klaus Minor or Armanius Jobs.
Here's the problem.
The Pacific Northwest was home to a lot of serial killers.
We had the Bundy.
Green River.
Green River Killer.
And these guys, every one of them, they would sneak off and have sex with these people after they were dead.
And so I have to think that somewhere in between that cow eating dandelions and the pump chili, somebody's having sex with the dead cow or some part of the dead cow.
And even at every point in that business, we call it a value chain.
In every part of the value chain or CRM or SLA, I'm not sure which it is, but at every point in SLA, like the Symbionese Liberation, they lock the cow in a closet and call its grandfather for money.
That's not funny.
That was pretty bad.
Too soon.
Did you know that I lived down the street from the bank she robbed?
Now or at the time?
You lived in Florida at the time.
Now.
Then it was a video store and now it's just a place that used to be a video store.
Really?
Now it's just a place that used to be a video store.
It was a place she robbed then it was a Hollywood video.
And so my point is... Why have you never taken me there?
You mean like locked in a closet?
You're a big guy.
No, no.
The bank that... It's an ex-Hollywood video.
It's like next to like a pho place now.
I don't care what it is now, but he could have stood out there and looked at it and talked about it.
I photographed it.
Yes, I photographed it.
So here's the thing.
I do not want to make this classist.
I do not want to make this stearist or pumpist.
But in my reckoning of this, and I've been listening to reckoning a lot, so I keep using that word.
I want to talk about the A7sus4 because I think it might be a variant.
It's like synchronicity, the word.
When I was in fifth grade, my reading book was called Synchronicity.
This was before the police song.
Yeah, so is being good and police being good.
It all came before synchronicity, sorry.
And I remember my two reading books in fifth and sixth grade were synchronicity and diversity.
And both of those words were alien to us in grade school, right?
The first time they handed you the book and they were like, here's your new reading book, synchronicity.
None of us knew what it meant.
And it seemed like it was a very advanced book.
Like, wow, synchronicity.
This is going to cover some advanced topics.
Like when we asked what synchronicity meant, the adults struggled to explain.
And that was the beginning of when school started to talk about things that weren't just like cat and dog.
And was this a reading book, social studies?
What was it?
A reading book.
I think this was... You remember when you're in fifth grade and you're... They always had a name.
A single name was like a plural noun, always, right?
But if you were reading above the level of other fifth graders, they would give you these books that were like, this is at the seventh grade reading.
Right.
You'd move on to the yellow or the green SRAs.
yeah and so you're like diversity is at the ninth grade reading level really ninth grade reading level I don't even know what that means ninth graders reading reading on a ninth grade level reading at a ninth grade level that sounds bad no matter what that's about that sounds bad if you're in fifth grade and you're reading at a ninth grade level that's not bad but right now if somebody said I think Merlin Mann reads at about a ninth grade level right penthouse forum that would be problematic we had in Florida you know you have to take a civics class and our book was called uppity
What?
Orange flight suit, pump chili.
The point is that there's a lot in the value chain, in the SLA and the CRM and the ERB of the getting to the pump.
I'm just saying there's a lot of people.
There's a lot of dander.
And at some point along the way, I just want to be clear, John, I don't want to be classist or steerist, but I think at some point along the way, there will be at least one person in there.
who's probably having sex with the dead cow, not averse.
It's goes through their mind.
I'm just saying, in the same way that you would go like, you know what?
I could totally get some of the Tom's chips out of that machine.
Or, or you would go like, you know, I bet, I bet when she leaves, I could get her panties out of the dryer.
You could say that steer is not moving.
Right.
Right.
I got a break in 10 minutes.
Right.
And although I'm not gay, no, it is an, it's an opportunity.
It's a crime of opportunity.
Right.
If it's dead, does that still count?
If you have sex with a dead thing of your same gender, I think you're still gay.
Is that correct?
A steer versus a cow?
Steers are boys.
Steers are castrated boys.
So I guess if it's castrated, then I don't know.
This is ambiguous now.
A chicken is a class of bird.
A rooster is a potent male like a stallion.
Or is a chicken always a lady?
I think a chicken's always a lady.
Okay.
I think it's a capon, right?
What's a pullet?
Is it a pullet or pullet?
A pullet.
Maybe that's an elongated chicken.
A pullet is a long chicken, right.
It's very confusing, all these names.
Long chickens.
That's one of the things that they're serving in the really fancy restaurants now.
Long chickens.
The long chickens.
But the thing is, this is why I always wipe a can of pop before I open it.
Oh, yeah.
I always wipe it on my shirt tail because the story, and I don't remember when this was planted in my brain by what sadistic adult, but some adult said, oh, yeah, you know those truck drivers, they go back in their trucks and pee all over the pop cans.
Oh.
And at the time, that's a long drive to Alaska.
Well, it is.
But here's the thing.
When you're a kid, you're like, oh, right.
That makes perfect sense.
Of course, these guys would go back and pee on the pop cans.
But speaking as someone who has driven many, many long miles.
You're not going to open that door.
You're not going to go back there and climb up in the thing and pee.
You're going to pee on the road where you stopped.
Exactly right.
There are so many opportunities to pee.
And so and there's so much work involved in getting opening the doors and getting back up into that truck.
Right.
I mean, there's no chance that a guy would go back there just to pee.
He might, however, go back there to pee if he's actually trying to get his pee in a lot of people's mouths or fuck a steer.
Well, we're talking about guys delivering pop now.
There's not going to be any steer.
You don't think they're ganging loads?
No.
Like, you know, when they move, when you get a moving van, a lot of times you've got to wait a while because they can charge you less if they can gang the load.
Well, I'm wondering, when a truck pulls up outside of an Arby's, I bet you it has both... Furniture, pop.
The bags of liquid beef and the syrup for the different kinds of pop.
So one resourceful pee fetish truck driver could get his pee on probably the salad greens, like the whole thing.
He could stand back there and really just... He could hit the potato cakes.
He could hit the turnovers.
Yeah.
Horsey sauce?
That horsey sauce is probably 15% pee.
It looks like the other thing that comes out of that hole.
Horsey sauce is so freaky looking.
Horsey sauce, really?
I can't even call it horsey sauce because I just think of Sarah Jessica Parker.
I think of it as sounding like something that you would use to inseminate a lady horse.
Is that a foal?
No, a foal is a baby horse, right?
Foal is a baby horse.
Hey, Herman, could you come in?
Could you take some of that horsey sauce?
Did you ever do that term in Alaska?
Take and get that horsey sauce.
You know, there's another phrase I heard last night for the first time where two people are throwing a ball back and forth.
What are they doing?
Tossing a ball around.
Well, what's another phrase for it?
Oh, like, oh, playing catch?
Well, thank you.
So the phrase is playing catch.
What are you doing?
You're playing catch, throwing this ball back and forth.
But I'm here in New York with this group of New Yorkers.
We're watching TV, and people on TV are throwing the ball back and forth.
And somebody in the room says, oh, they're having a catch.
That sounds English.
That sounds very affected.
I said, what?
Having a catch?
If Colin Molloy brought his carriage and his Barrow Smith to the arena to see the baseball play, I think he would call that... Having a catch?
Yeah.
Well, in any case, as I'm sitting there berating this room full of people, because everybody in the room agreed that that's what they were doing, having a catch, because they're all from Connecticut and whatever.
Ugh.
And I was like, having a catch?
Who are you people?
What are you talking about?
And then the character on TV says, we're having a catch.
And I felt like I was in an alternate universe, like the whole time.
It was like the Truman Show.
I've been being toyed with my whole life.
And...
everybody else is actually speaking a completely different language this is this is this is not funny but you called it pop and you know about the whole soda coke pop you know bag sack poke you know those kinds of uh sack poke we we drink pop right and we we have bags do you think there's regional and like for example like where you are right now you'll say standing online which is something you hear almost almost nowhere what do you think uh what do you think steer fucking has any regional flavors to it
I think steer-fucking probably emanated out from a central steer-fucking place.
You mean it was like the calculus?
You think maybe it had an inventor independently in different places?
No, I think it was independently invented many, many times.
But I think that the term steer-fucking, you have to have fucking already, right?
And steers...
I think that that trail from Texas to Montana where they ran the cows up and down.
I think steer fucking comes from there.
The trail of chili pump tears.
You could call it steer piercing.
The trail of steers.
Yeah, you could call it RB penetration.
Steer piercing.
I don't know.
I kind of like that.
That's way more Castro, though.
Did you ever fuck anything dead?
Me?
Yeah.
Well, let's see.
I mean... No, not metaphorically.
I don't think I could do that.
I've had sex with some things that were spiritually dead.
What about J. Edgar Hoover?
Do you think he skull-fucked JFK?
Do you think there's any truth to that?
That's a terrible thing to say.
Do you know the story, right?
Do you know this conspiracy theory, though, right?
The exit wound thing?
No, but I can't.
We should get into that.
I've been going through, as I've indicated to you, I've been going through an extraterrestrial encounter phase, as you do.
Oh, so this is a touchy topic for you.
Well, no, I don't believe in the probing, but where my interest in conspiracy theories lies is purely in the giant government cover-up about the extraterrestrial secret overlord government.
not really interested in the conspiracy theories about the Kennedy assassination.
Yeah.
But, you know, that could switch.
Six months from now, I could be all about the Kennedy.
Do you think our government is capable of a conspiracy at this point?
No.
I don't think it ever was.
I don't think there's anyone smart enough.
Here's the basis.
Or can keep a secret well enough.
Well, two people can't keep a secret, right?
Only one person can keep a secret, really.
But when you're out walking around in the course of a day, in the course of a day of interacting with other people, do you ever meet anybody that you think, how often do you meet somebody where you're like, that person's smarter than me?
Like, how often does that happen?
That person's smarter than me.
Honestly?
Yeah.
I don't know.
Not very often, I'm guessing.
You mean in general?
Like, as in one or as in myself?
Yeah, you just have an exchange with somebody and encounter.
You can tell if somebody's smarter than you.
Right.
How often does it happen?
I mean, I feel arrogant.
I feel like... Don't feel arrogant.
It's all right.
Nobody's judging you.
It doesn't happen that often.
Not a lot, a lot.
Not like I feel like that person has better social skills or shoes than me.
I feel that a lot.
That's right.
Now, how easy do you find it to keep a secret?
A real like juicy one that a juicy secret that you secretly feel other people should know.
Oh, like something like an important secret.
Right, right.
I'm not talking about like, oh, I have to keep a secret.
You know, one of my good friends is sleeping with somebody on the side and I don't really like his wife.
So I'm not going to tell her because I don't care about her.
I don't feel very good about my friend doing this, but I don't have a dog in the race of telling the wife.
I'm talking about the kind of secret where it's like, oh shit, Arby's beef is 75% dander.
I know how the chili gets pumped.
I don't care about the people at Arby's.
I'm not trying to protect them.
People should know about this, but whoever the last guy in the dander chain asked me not to tell, and so technically it's a secret.
Well, I should let you make your point, but if it was that kind of thing, I think I would probably feel like I probably had to tell people.
I don't know if that's the right answer, but I would feel it would be hard for me.
Like if you and I were hanging out and like I saw you about to make a chili island with pump, I would probably say, you know what?
Hey, guess what, John?
Try the nachos.
That's a lot of dander in that.
Well, here's the thing.
Now, and my exposure to the corridors of power is perhaps a little bit more intimate than your average person.
Is this about you being arrested?
Yeah.
Well, no, it's not that.
It's that my father was a politician.
And so I have known U.S.
senators.
I have known more than two U.S.
senators.
And they have known me.
I know these people...
as you know someone, not like, oh, that's my U.S.
senator and we met one time, but these are people that we know that are family, right?
People that we know.
And those U.S.
senators, one of whom in particular was a very powerful U.S.
senator,
with a lot, who wielded a lot of influence, these people are not any different than you or I. They are not any more capable of keeping juicy secrets.
They are not any more, certainly not any smarter.
And so it raises the question, like...
Yes, they are charged by their duty to keep more secrets than you or I in a typical week.
But really, there's no way that they... All the conspiracies in the world, like...
I'm afraid from firsthand experience I can say no.
No one in the quarters of power is any more capable of keeping things hidden than you or I. So I just – I feel like – Do you think they would even tell the senators though?
Well, again, one of these senators that I knew well was chairman of the committee that minds this business.
Like the black...
I don't want to make a software, John, but you know there's a way to look up everyone that's been a senator in every state you've been in.
And I can tell roughly from what age you are.
No, I'm just saying.
If I sat down with Microsoft Excel, I'm guessing, based on what you've said very slowly, I could get it down to four or five people.
Let me guess it's a man.
It's a man, isn't it?
It is a man.
I'm just going to come right out and say.
Daniel Inouye.
Senator Ted Steve, who was chairman of the Armed Services Committee...
You met him and he knew your name.
Ted Stevens knew your name?
Senator Ted Stevens was my Uncle Jack's law partner in the 60s before he was appointed to the Senate.
So the Alaska Senator at the time... Elected to the Senate?
No, our Senator died in a plane crash, which happens.
I'm sorry, he passed?
I'm sorry.
This is in the 60s.
Oh my God.
And Ted Stevens was appointed to the seat to fill out the remainder of his term and then was elected in the next election and then elected every year or every election since.
Because he brought home the bacon, right?
He really did.
I went to a party.
Now, this is terrible that I'm gossiping.
But I went to a party celebrating.
You know what I hate about John Roderick?
He's always gossiping about dead senators.
I went to his 40 years in the Senate.
He died in a plane crash, which is how Alaskan senators, how they want to go.
That's like setting a Viking on fire, right?
No better way for him to go out than crashing his plane into a mountain.
Or not his plane, but he was in a plane, a small plane.
Anyway, I went to the party.
Sorry, the mountain had been paid for with taxpayers' dollars.
I went to his 40 years in the Senate party.
And I'm sitting at a table with my dad.
And there's no curtain, but there's a stage.
And out on the stage come four different four-star generals.
An Air Force general, a Marine Corps general, an Army general, and a Navy admiral.
And they all have four stars.
Wow.
And they walk up to the stage and the band starts.
And these four generals put their arms around each other and start doing a can and singing.
Are they in uniform?
They are in full dress fucking gold.
You know?
You are blinded by the light coming off of their medals.
And they are doing a can-can and singing a bawdy...
song about Ted Stevens and how they will get down on their knees and do whatever he asks because he controls the purse strings for the armed forces.
Do you know how much you have to do to become a four-star general?
Oh, yeah.
Oh, I do.
Yeah, that's like 40 years in the army or something, right?
And I'm looking around this room and every other person in the room at this party in Anchorage, they're all shit-faced drunk.
And they're also either at the sea level at an oil company or...
part of the military industrial complex or somebody who's, you know, who's wearing like $180,000 worth of raw gold, you know, like this, this party, I mean, these people are literally cannibals, right?
I mean, the appetizer course at this party was like, they would saw off the top of somebody's head and everybody would take a spoonful of their brains.
Like this was, this was, this is right at the center of, of the real, real business.
the real monsters.
And I'm there because in a certain way, these are my people.
And I'm 19 years old or something like that.
And most of these guys, they're not wearing ties.
They're wearing bolo ties.
They're wearing bolo ties that are made out of... That's the tie that says fuck you.
That is the fuck you tie.
That is the oil company.
If you see a guy working for an oil company or sitting in any kind of government corridor of power and he's wearing a bolo tie... And a gold suit...
You know.
Made out of gold.
Well, it's their watches.
You look at their watches and you realize like, oh shit, that's a $200,000 watch band.
It's solid gold.
These guys, they're terrifying.
And it's terrifying to be in a room.
I'm not scared of a lot of bands.
They're drunk.
Are they laughing?
Oh, they're laughing.
And the humor is the kind of humor of like, yeah, suck it, suck it.
You know, like everybody in there knows who's in charge.
They might as well have set a pregnant mother on fire.
These generals are making...
taking light of the fact that they have to basically suck off this U.S.
senator to get their new submarine, their new $80 billion submarine platform.
And they're here making a joke out of it because at this party, the only people that are invited are people that are there.
There's no outsiders.
They don't see me.
I'm a kid.
I'm there with my dad.
And so I'm like, I'm the only person there that's under the age of 60.
And I'm just... My eyes are as big as saucers.
I'm like, whatever conspiracy theory you think is happening, this is what's really happening.
I mean, these guys are... They think it's hilarious.
And they're talking about...
They're talking about billions of dollars and it's just like we're here at Ted Stevens' birthday party and this is – just yuck it up, fuzzball.
So we're sitting around doing Rush and eating chili dogs and thinking about like who's covering up the aliens and saying like, oh, who's being tight-lipped?
And what you're saying here is like this is one of the most appalling things you've ever seen in your life and they don't consider it a secret.
Well, and one of the greatest things I ever saw in my life.
Like, you want to know how it's done?
That's how it's done.
I mean, it sounds like a Hunter S. Thompson made up thing.
I mean, that sounds completely made up.
It's absolutely true, except Hunter S. Thompson wasn't making it up either.
Hunter was talking about that scene, except like a convention of state troopers.
And I've seen it where it is a convention of four-star generals.
And their humor, their sense of humor is at the same level as a gathering of... Right, people at the Kentucky Derby.
It's just like, hey, boy, come over here and freshen up my drink.
And, you know, he's holding the drink right in front of his unzipped fly.
A little terrine of bourbon.
Yeah.
So, anyway.
Well, here's the thing, John.
yes nobody's gonna if there were there's no conspiracy there's no theory these these guys these guys are literally dancing a can-can they're dancing a can-can and about about blowing about blowing a senator yeah and they know you know they know like which side their bread is buttered on like i'm sure each one of those guys flew up to alaska in his own c-141 right like every one of those guys budgeted somehow of a half a million dollar flight in an air force transport
This is where the pump chili comes in.
To come to this party.
This is the part I can't stop thinking about.
I mean obviously the visual of this is amazing and the guy in the gold suit.
But the part that blows me away is like four of probably – wouldn't you say they're in like the top two or three percent of the most powerful and busy people in America probably?
Yeah.
Somebody had to like coordinate their calendars.
They probably had to cancel something.
They had to fly there.
John, they had to rehearse.
You don't just get up and do a can-can.
If you're a 50-year-old man who's literally— Somebody wrote it, yeah.
You know how many four-star generals there are?
There are not a lot of four-star generals.
Well, this is the thing.
What I can't convey is how many three-star generals there were in the room—
Who weren't invited onto the stage?
Someday me.
Right?
I mean, I was just walking around this thing, and I have to say, did I mention already that I was wearing a bolo tie?
Because I knew that that's what... I knew the drag.
I knew what drag to wear at a thing like that.
So I was wearing a bolo tie.
Did you borrow that from your dad?
I have a small collection of bolo ties.
I grew up in Alaska.
You have to know, there are certain times when you show up wearing a real tie, and you're on the outside.
You're going to ask if you're a homosexual.
They're going to ask you to go back to the kitchen and get them another tray of canapes.
But in any case, the number of other brass that was at this event, like full bird colonels, one and two star generals, who are just milling around trying to look busy, trying to not get in front of the four star general who has a one star general as his aide to camp.
There was a real scene.
Oh, like a Malden to the Patton.
Exactly.
Like other generals whose only job it is to stand there with a spit bucket when the guy wants to hawk a big wad of chew on the floor.
It was insane.
And then also the CEO of BP.
Wasn't your dad just... Have you said he was very liberal and very...
Like sort of activist, liberal?
My dad was a red, and in these corridors of power was the token – like at a certain level in the 50s and 60s, there was actual red baiting and actual communism was a real – that was a thing that people –
were really afraid of but but behind the real curtain nobody gave a fuck everybody knew you know who were the you know like what threat oh you're saying it was for shell i mean we know mccarthy was you know ruining ring lardner for just for fun mostly yeah and so these guys would all this was the thing you would walk through these events with my dad
And guys would come up, guys with these fat fingers, you know, these hands that were just like, hands that could, they'd stick it in between gears to stop a machine, like big, fat, scarred hands.
And they'd put them on my dad's shoulder and they'd be like, Dave Roderick, how the hell are you?
How's the Communist Party?
And my dad would go, ha, ha, ha, fuck you.
And, and the night after night, you know, he would just, he'd elbow his way through these things and just, uh, he was the token pinko.
But isn't this also, this is how it works.
It was like, like, uh, you know, and, and when I first learned, I knew, I always knew, I know about what they call it.
Okay.
Fabie.
I always knew that wrestling was, was a put on.
You always know that in your heart.
Like, just like, you know, like, you know, Kiss is wearing makeup or whatever.
Sure.
But, you know, when you really do actually hear about, like, Dusty Rhodes and the Iron Sheik, like, in their underwear playing cards.
Right.
And, you know, you really think about the level of orchestration that goes – I mean, I don't know how much you followed this stuff back in the day, but, like, the amount of dance-like –
you know, uh, choreography that goes into not killing somebody when you do a suplex, you know what I mean?
I mean, yeah, these guys get hurt.
They get hurt really bad.
You've seen the pricing that Mickey Rourke movie, but I mean, you know how closely you have to work with somebody to look like you're killing them without killing them.
Right.
I mean, seriously, it's, it's extraordinary and everybody knows it's performance, but you haven't heard the term before.
I think it's called K Fabie.
No, it's sort of like Omerita, except with wrestling.
Oh, it's like, you know what, you know, you know, the fight club kind of silence.
Yeah, well, yeah, absolutely.
You never the whole point of K. Fabie.
I think that's how you pronounce it.
You never know.
Nobody in the racket ever breaks character and reveals that, you know, that basically there are these storylines.
And all of this.
Anyway, it's probably a silly analogy.
But, you know, in that case, if you're going to try and get anything done in Washington, you're going to have to see it as a, oh, I'm going to get, you know what I mean?
Like, you bastard.
Oh, you wascally wabbit.
You just ruined the lives of five million people, you nut.
Right?
I have a picture of these guys, you know, because my uncle was a, who also just recently died, not the uncle that was
Ted Stevens' law partner, but a different uncle, was a member of the Bohemian Club, a San Francisco institution.
Which, are you familiar with the Bohemian Club?
I think I'm confusing it with a thing that Harry Shurer made fun of.
I'm thinking of the Grove people.
yeah that's them the bohemian oh this is uh teddy bear this is oh really okay yeah i do know about this is yeah go ahead it's very so i have i have it's it's like that scene in the um in the matt damon movie where he's a cia spook and uh and you're talking about the the skull and bones retreat up in the up in the lake country where they all wear is jonathan johnson's not in the room with you is he
He's not.
I'm actually sitting in his grandfather's Yale chair, though.
Okay, so I'm just saying, like, you know... These guys all turned down skull and bones because they were whiff and poofs.
Wasn't he in a worse one?
Wasn't he in, like, the squirty weenies or something?
Was it even worse?
He was in the squiggly wumps or whatever, but the whiff and poofs are the top of the... The feathery chili pumps?
They're the top of the acapella singing at Yale.
They've won the slap fights.
But the Bohemian Club, you get these photographs back from those events.
And sometimes, especially when you're family, they forget to censor some of the pictures.
And you get these pictures.
It's like George Schultz and Henry Kissinger pretend making out around a campfire.
And you realize it's all happening there.
Yeah.
Are you being serious?
Somebody didn't comb the carousel.
That's the kind of stuff this really happens.
Oh, sure.
Absolutely.
Not just happens, but taking pictures.
There's a thing at the Bohemian Club where these guys, one of the traditions there is that they are really into peeing on natural.
It's a big part of the Bohemian Grove.
Everybody should be able to just pee wherever they want.
Not a pop cannon site.
So these guys are like peeing over their shoulder and stuff like all these, these men that you think of occupying the very highest corridors of power.
And what they really are into is gathering out in the forest with each other and like, you know, water sports and they're, and they forget like, you know, somebody's young nephew is going to be looking through these photographs and his, and scalding his eyebrow eyeballs with the shots and
and leveraging that series of tubes.
And later on, on his podcast, he's going to be revealing all the secrets, and it will finally blow the lid off of this thing.
Were you wearing a very tight sailor suit by any chance?
I swear to you, Merlin, the other day I bought a sailor suit.
What, a U.S.
like the whites?
No, a proper blue wool sailor suit that's since been discontinued as the official sailor outfit.
You have an anachronistic man sailor suit.
I bought this thing like it's a chief petty officer, you know, first class or something like that.
And I was wearing it around the house like so proud of myself that I finally had a sailor suit.
And I caught a glimpse of myself dressed as a sailor and realized that, you know, I'm 43 years old.
I look like the worst kind of guy.
Nobody likes an old seaman.
You know, I'm like, I'm like the guy when the ship docks in Tokyo and this guy comes rolling through the streets, like all the geishas run for cover.
I think your name would be salty.
They're shuddering the little paper doors as I'm coming through this.
And I'm thinking, and I bought this sailor suit like, oh, this is great.
This is so cute.
I realized there's just nothing cute about me anymore.
I need to not have a sailor suit.
It's just terrifying.
I don't – I mean, you know, I just – I don't understand how you find the time, the inclination, the storage space.
You've apparently owned an orange flight suit from what I can gather.
You have the cowboy boots.
Do you clean this stuff occasionally?
I mean I don't know what kind of level you're playing at these days, John, but do you have like the way old ladies store their furs?
Do you have stuff you rotate out for the seasons?
You know what I need to do?
I need to have a yard sale.
I should have an eBay yard sale.
But I just find even the idea of that so exhausting.
Just thinking about what you'd have to kind of type, just to imagine yourself what you'd have to type into a, like a little text story on a webpage.
God, because every single thing I own, I have at least two paragraphs of like exegesis on it.
Right.
I mean, I need to tell you the provenance of this thing, why it's important, why this particular pair of cowboy boots matters, why you should like, it's not that I'm trying to sell it.
It's that I want you to know that,
It's that you shouldn't have these cowboy boots.
Right.
It would be like selling your kids.
Like, I can't let it go without telling you a couple funny stories.
I get into this all the time when I go to thrift stores.
I found a jacket the other day.
And, you know, if you look inside the inner pockets of jackets, particularly old jackets, sometimes you can find tags that are buried, you know, sewn in the liner that tell you a lot about the jacket.
And there's this jacket for 15 bucks or something.
And I knew right away that it was old, really old.
And, uh, and I tried it on.
It was too small.
And it's like, I'm not, I don't buy things that don't fit.
I'm not, I'm not running a store.
I'm not going to buy this.
I'm not running a museum, but I look, I searched this jacket for clues and I find a tag that talks about how it was handmade for a guy in London in 1939, November 14th of 1939 was the day that this jacket was delivered to
This hand-tailored coat was delivered to a guy.
What?
And I'm holding this thing.
It's in a thrift store in Bellevue, Washington.
I'm holding this thing, and I'm like, you know, this was made for this guy, and World War II had started.
Right.
The Blitz was coming, right?
Yeah, this was during the early days of the Blitz that this jacket was handed over to some guy who wore it through the Blitz.
Right.
And through whatever else ended up emigrating to America at some point died.
And his jacket went to his son or something.
And somehow now it's in this thrift store.
And the next person in here that this thing fits is probably going to buy it.
Isn't even going to look in here and look at this tag.
And I swear to you Merlin, I'm standing in the thrift store thinking that it's my responsibility to go out to the car, get a piece of paper and write the story of this jacket as I imagine it.
on a piece of paper and tuck it in the jacket so that the next person that buys it doesn't go... I mean, it had Bakelite buttons, you know?
Wow.
This thing was, if the right person finds it, then the story continues.
But if some high school kid that's like, I need a Halloween costume comes in and gets this thing and it ends up like... Look at me, I'm a hobo.
Hey, dur!
I drew a... You're like the way a little kid would see a puppy.
I mean, did you adopt it?
No, I had to leave it because my mind doesn't have, like you say, there's no more room in my head for this kind of thing.
And I can't go out to the car and spend 20 minutes telling the story of this coat in a thrift store that has 800 coats in it.
Like I have...
I mean, I'm not going to say that my time is worth more than that, but if it isn't, I'm doing something wrong, you know?
If my time isn't worth more than that, then just, like, sending... Like, basically, that's putting a note in a bottle and throwing it into the water, you know?
The next person that gets this coat, why do I care whether they know... Why do I care anything about this coat, you know?
But I do, and...
No, I'm totally with you.
I don't know how you left it behind, John.
I know your sense of history is really profound.
Well, but that's the thing.
I would have to own a warehouse if I picked up everything that I found that I felt had a story that... It's not that the story needs to be told, but that the story is part of a larger story that I'm interested in knowing.
Like, this jacket, how did it get here?
And what has it seen?
Like, I just want to stand there with my hands in its pockets...
for five minutes there's something really tragic about the way you describe it anyway and as soon as you said I mean I don't know history like you did as soon as you said 1939 England I'm like wow and I'm like wow but I can't believe that survived to make it this far and then end up some kid going to an arcade fire concert or whatever
Yeah.
And who knows whether the guy that, you know, like initially or right away, my imagination starts jumping off like, oh, then this guy joined the OSS and he parachuted behind enemy lines wearing this jacket.
And he's, you know, and he was part of the he was like he was taking supplies to the French resistance.
And, you know, and that's why he ended up in America, because he was part of the intelligence community and.
standing watch over the Berlin wall years later, all this stuff, you know?
And in fact, this guy probably was an insurance adjuster, an actuary.
Yeah.
Also, the Germans would have known English tailoring.
Right.
They would have taken that tag out, wouldn't they?
Just like the Viet Cong, the shaving cream.
See, they can smell that.
The Germans wouldn't.
The shaving cream would smell the same.
I don't want to say that you should write a book about this because you shouldn't write a book about, but this is the kind of thing you should write about.
You're very interested in these kinds of things.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, I don't think anybody would buy it, but it would probably help you.
I don't know if it's the problem.
Is anybody else interested in them?
You should act like you're dead and write your Christie's catalog.
You know, like Elizabeth Taylor in her underpants.
You should write your own Christie's catalog.
You and Bruce Valanche have him peppered up with some little ones.
You could do this, though.
I mean, I don't know if eBay is the right place.
The keyword searches could be a little complicated for the kind of things you want to discuss.
You need like a historical eBay.
You need like the Smithsonian eBay.
I want people to look more carefully at stuff.
Like the people at this thrift store are looking at the tags.
They're pricing things.
Like they're seeing, oh, this is Ralph Lauren.
Well, this is worth $14.
Oh, this is Abercrombie & Fitch.
Oh, that's good stuff.
And what they're not doing is taking that extra second to dig in and see like, oh, this thing actually kind of belongs...
in a museum if museums... I've kept everything I've ever found in the pocket at a thrift store.
I mean, I've got this old cigar box from high school or whatever that I would throw.
I have a... Gosh, what was it called?
It's really weird.
I bought this in Florida, but it was some...
bar in covington which is like where the airport is in kentucky near cincinnati and it was some kind it was like the dew drop in kind of thing and in like that old kind of like thick soft pencil was uh somebody had written a phone number inside the matchbook with like one of those exchanges you know yeah right like central five six two nine or whatever and jenkins 11 you don't throw that away
Yeah, I mean, what's the least interesting story that could be?
That could be hiding a body.
That could be Fast Girl Fellatio.
It could be like Hillbilly Mortgage.
You have no idea.
That number could still be operable.
I should dig that up.
I might be able to get some cheap property near the airport.
Covington.
That's weird.
I don't know, John.
Yeah, my mom still talks about phone numbers that way.
She's still like, oh, that's Federal 7312.
There's a website you can go to and find out what your phone number used to be.
The thing is, there's so many new phone numbers now.
You know why?
Fax machines.
First fax machines and then mobile phones screwed it all up because they had to make up all these new phony numbers.
What's the website that you go to?
It's something exchange where it says something something put in telephone or something.
In our family, you'd have the same phone number your whole life.
My family all had license plates.
We had custom license plates that were not weird vanity plates, but they were all...
Like in order.
It was really cool.
So my grandparents had one that said, uh, what was it?
It was like CA one, one, one, one.
And my aunt and uncle had CA two, two, two, two.
And we had CA three, three, three, three.
And we might've been part of some kind of a program.
I'm not even sure.
That's not like government plates.
Don't they?
Yeah, they do.
Hmm.
Hmm.
I don't know.
Pennsylvania 6-5000.
My uncle worked for P&G, so that's the kind of job that if I were going to have a front, you know, for somebody who was doing something with, you know, Pump Chili or Dancing Generals, I would put him in the paper department at P&G.
Did I say PG&E?
P&G.
PG&E.
Big difference.
P&G.
Pacific Gas and Electric?
Versus Procter & Gamble.
He was at Procter & Gamble, not the gas people.
Oh, Procter & Gamble.
He's in paper.
He's big in paper.
They had the devil-worshipping... Yeah.
That was rough.
That was rough on them.
Yeah, right.
It was Moonies.
It was supposedly the... Not the Unitarians.
The other one.
Not the Universalists.
The Unification Church.
The Unification Church.
Sung Young Moon.
That's right.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, that was during the big era where people were having recovered memories of all the child abuse that they supposedly suffered.
Oprah memories.
Yeah.
I've been reading Bob Mould from Husker Doon about halfway through his autobiography, and he's talking about – I mean, do you remember like late 80s, early 90s, how seriously people took the Satanism thing?
I mean how – I'm just stealing this from the book because it brought back my Oprah memory of how much like mainstream media took that seriously.
Like Judas Priest, didn't Rob Halford like have to go to trial?
The whole band went to trial because supposedly they caused some kid to commit suicide.
It wasn't even backmasking.
They wrote lyrics in a song that made somebody commit suicide.
They also said Grindr looking for meat.
They did.
They said electric eye in the sky.
How did we not see it, John?
It was right there, right in front of us the whole time.
Grindr looking for meat.
Wait, hang on a minute.
You're telling me that a guy with dyed blonde hair in a black leather motorcycle outfit singing, grinder, looking for meat?
No.
Wearing chaps.
Chaps?
What?
I swear to you, when he came out, everybody I knew, all the metal guys were like, oh yeah, I always knew he was gay.
And that was the biggest load of bullshit.
I was like, I was a huge Judas Priest fan and I had no idea he was gay because it just didn't occur.
No, I mean, if I were honest with you now, I totally, I feel exactly the same way.
I, I, I, I, it's one of those things that's like the George Bush thing, you know, where the Douglas Lake cuff, don't think of an elephant stuff.
We're like, Oh, you know, the Republicans, they, uh, they love George, uh, George W. Bush because they liked the man.
They didn't want him to be smart.
They wanted him to be that way.
And in this case,
evidence to the contrary, like coming out of the sky, we chose not to see it that way.
It was a complicated time.
I never saw Judas Priest.
I saw a lot of metal bands, but I never saw Judas Priest.
I just saw them recently, and they were terrible.
Hmm.
Uh, I saw them with KK Downing, although he's not playing with them anymore, but I did see them with KK, but Rob came out.
He had a, he had a cane and he kind of limped around the stage and didn't really hit any of the high notes, played a lot of songs from the new record.
Like everything that you don't want to happen, everything that you don't want to have happen at a metal concert.
They did like really a lot of songs from the new record.
Really?
Come on.
You know, this is one of the reasons I always admired Alex Chilton, you know, because in the era, like after he'd been in Big Star, which is like, you know, it's one of those things like the Velvet Underground that even if you'd never heard of him, people drop their name, which is a shame because they're a really good band.
But, you know, they had these two records that everybody liked.
But then, you know what?
Like, he's like, I got to make some dough.
He went to play R&B, but then he got into one of those package deals where he would go out and like play three box tops songs and say, thank you very much.
Good night and get a check.
I always kind of admire that because he went out and he played the three hits.
He'd go on these tours.
He'd package tours with like the Guess Who or whatever.
He'd do his three, you know, give me a ticket for an airplane and collect a check.
I kind of admire that.
And it's kind of the opposite of Rob Halford literally coming out with a K and saying like, you should get our new album available Tuesday at Sam Goody or whatever.
That's depressing.
It is depressing, but they're doing that now without even having KK Downing.
They got some young guy playing the KK part.
It's hard.
It's hard to make down in that business.
I saw Mission of Burma a few years ago.
The music business?
The one that I'm in?
The business that is show.
It's not show friend.
It's so discouraging.
That's why I'm getting into this lucrative podcast business.
Yeah.
I feel like there's, you know, I've got to have a fallback.
And I heard that people were making a lot of money at this.
You have no idea.
That guy from 5x5 is just raking it in.
I don't know what that is, but there is so much gold to be mined from this.
You can talk about Audible books, you know, the books on tape.
Oh, yeah, Audible books.
Right, right.
You can get those on your Kindle, right?
I don't know.
Arby's.
You know, Arby's has a lot of rehabilitation to do with their image.
I'm afraid that we may have just, if Arby's is doing podcast endorsements,
We might have just blown a shot at it with our Arby's conversation.
How do you think fucking 7-Eleven feels?
Oh, see?
But I mean, 7-Eleven, I mean, they're not putting the dander in that pump chili.
That's good.
That's good.