Ep. 24: "The Wrong Mustache"
Hello.
Hi, John.
How are you?
Hi, Merlin.
I'm sorry again.
Merlin, man.
I hate being late for things.
I know.
We were going to meet at 11-11, and now it's 11-25.
Yeah.
We know this podcast can't be evergreen anymore.
Oh, right.
Oh, geez.
I let a peek behind the curtain, didn't I?
Yeah.
Now people realize that it's not happening...
simultaneously with their ears.
Here's another peek.
Here's another peek.
Okay, so A, I hate being late for things, and I'm sorry.
It's all right.
And B, computers.
I fucking hate computers.
Mm-hmm.
Oh, boy.
Now we're on a topic that we both agree on.
Ugh.
You know... I'm always late to things, too.
We've talked about this many times.
Yeah, but you don't... You thought it was going to take you nine minutes, and...
This is what makes this such a compelling experience, I think, for our listeners, the people you're helping, is that we are very different people.
You and I, yes.
Well, I mean, in some ways we're very different.
I'd say we were pretty different.
Yeah, but I mean, you know, aren't we like mostly 95% the same as chimps?
You and I both are 95% the same as chimps.
No, I think it's more than that.
I think it's 97.28.
Is that logarithmic or is that arithmetic?
Arithmetic?
Or is that Aramaic?
Is that on an Aramaic scale?
It's Aramaic.
We are Aramaically... On an Aramaic scale, we are 97.253.
Actually, it's Mixolydian.
Oh.
Oh, sorry.
I thought we were still on Phrygian time.
Phrygian daylight?
I call it the snake trauma time.
Hello, I'm Richie Blackmo.
It's time to reset your clock.
That's not even funny.
Do you think he talks like that?
Is he American?
I don't think anybody talks like that.
The only people that talk like that are community theater people who are...
trying to do a british accent my mother-in-law my mother-in-law directed a lot of plays in rhode island she did your mother-in-law my mother-in-law who's a pistol you and my mother-in-law that was she is a pistol she is oh darling oh how have we never met your mother-in-law no she's back you know she's back here she she spent some of her time with family in florida and uh other times with family around here so actually we're gonna go see her tomorrow which is gonna be nice
Yeah, we need to all be in the same place at the same time.
She should be a guest.
Anyway, you know what a lot of people may not know because they have a life and they don't really research these things?
Science.
Science, math.
Yeah, a lot of people don't know those things.
Everybody likes politics and nobody looks at civics.
Can I just put that on a card?
Oh, my goodness.
That's a great statement.
This is kind of a civics podcast.
God damn it.
You're fucking right.
This is a podcast about how to be a better citizen, according to us.
And I'm a little bit offended when I go on iTunes and it says that this is a personal journal podcast.
Oh, that was my choice.
Would you rather have it somewhere else?
Yeah, civics.
Is there a civics category?
Or education, religion?
You know what?
I'm going to take that all back.
I'm going to cut all that out.
Education.
Personal journal.
I don't know.
That sounds very... What was that thing that all the kids were doing?
Live journal.
Live journal.
That's where I learned about you.
Yeah, I know.
That's where people talk about stuff.
I never joined.
I had a photograph of you before I had any idea who you were.
You're holding snacks.
You're not alone.
A lot of people have photographs of me because I'm an archetype.
I represent a certain kind of approachable, cuddly...
Yeah.
Yeah.
Like a statue crossing a statue and a teddy bear.
Lovable statuesque teddy bear.
Vagina dentata.
A cross between a gazelle and a catfish.
Hmm.
Is that good eating fish?
That's just a gazelle fish.
That's really more of a description of a baseball wife.
I've seen Richard Hugo used to write about gazelle fish, the silvery blue gazelle fish and the gazelle fish.
You know what?
Here's the point.
There's an image.
Excel fish.
Another one of those great unmade Nazi Jerry Lewis movies.
Here's the thing.
What people may not realize, this is an audio presentation, but there's an image that is associated with our visits that I think you've seen before.
So it's a little logo for this show.
Do you remember what that's from?
It's a picture of you with some really creepy-looking glasses and me with a bad haircut looking at you.
And I took a photograph with my feature phone, they call it, my flip phone, in about 2004, 2005.
And it's a photo of you and me at...
the UCSF computer store, because my lady got a discount there, and we bought you a computer that day.
That's a photograph of a camera taking a picture of us on a screen, and I took a photo of it for any particular reason.
Well, that was the early days of computers that could take photographs of you
No, no.
This was my phone.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
So there's... You're correct.
Laptops.
Laptops that had a camera facing you.
It might have been like a security cam, like a webcam, like a creepy underwear cam.
Because... Hmm.
Now, when we... So we went in there and we got you... A laptop.
A laptop computer.
And then that was... Which I still have to this day.
Yeah, but it's all dead now, right?
Oh, no.
I mean, it still works.
It's just over in the corner because I got a...
right i got an ipad yeah god you like it well i do like it but i don't like to advertise things i understand but you have big you have really big fingers you remember you i do you remember during the uh during the the 90s when bands would put a piece of black electrical tape over the fender logo on their guitars because they didn't want to be advertising yeah you can't tell that's a fender exactly
Oh, what kind of guitar is that?
Oh, I see.
It can't be the name on the headstock.
It has that headstock that's literally a fucking trademark of Fender.
Nobody can tell.
Yeah, it's a Jaguar.
I'm driving a Jaguar, but I put black tape over the little fucking cat.
It's a Les Paul, but it's, yeah.
I did that with my camera.
What, you put a piece of black electrical tape over the word Casio?
Well, I read about this, and at first I thought it was a douche thing, and then I thought it was kind of smart and cool, and now I think it might be a douche thing, but it's still kind of cool.
Is this not using shaving cream so the Viet Cong can smell you?
You know what?
Can I just say?
It is almost exactly that.
Not really, but kind of almost exactly that, which is I've got an okay nice camera.
Like, you know, I don't use as much now that I've got the same brand of... An iPad?
Nah, you know, taking pictures with an iPad.
You might as well wear a fucking fanny pack.
You're like such a dick taking a picture with an iPad.
I see these dads running around the playground and, you know... I'm wearing a fanny pack right now.
They look like they're making the world's saddest independent student film.
Yeah.
You know what's sad?
Dads.
Dads are sad.
Helio Aristotle, look over here.
Shut up.
You put a piece of tape over your camera.
I have an okay, nice camera.
I have an SLR heavy camera.
It's a Trump camera, isn't it?
It's a camera that's... My friends who are nerds disagree.
I think it's more camera than I will ever need in my whole life.
Because my old camera that I loved a lot got stolen and I bought this one a couple years ago for my birthday.
I bought it for myself.
So anyway, it says it doesn't matter if it's a Canon because only faggots use Nikons.
So it doesn't matter.
But the front of it has the word Canon on it and a number of...
whitish things.
Okay, how about this?
John Roderick.
Whitish things.
You know, I know you know this.
I'm pretty sure we've discussed this.
Do you know about the style of camouflage that they would paint onto, I don't get the terminology wrong, warships that Americans, it's an incredibly disorienting
Right.
Can you describe it?
Because it's very angular and it makes it very... I don't want to spoil the ending, but it makes it very difficult from a distance to see what kind of ship it is and if they're in a group, like potentially how many there are, right?
Right, yeah.
It's gray and white and very diffuse colors and giant trapezoids painted on the sides of...
These ships, you know, it's like a Mondrian painting.
I was just going to say, but with some weird diagonals thrown in where you'd never expect them.
It's a little bit like when somebody tries to make an Escher cube in real life.
You know what I mean?
You ever see those kinds of things?
They're really sad.
No one expects a battleship Mondrian.
I get that.
It's true.
Our primary weapon is Mondrian.
I think he's a little overrated.
You know, all modern art is overrated.
I went to that Los Angeles MOCA, Museum of Modern Art, MoMA.
MoMA.
MoMA.
I went to it and I walked around and, you know, and they got the Jasper Johns's and they got the this's and the that's.
Jasper John drew flags on wood.
A lot of flags on plywood.
But, you know, it's a museum of modern art.
They had one of everybody.
And I know that as a cultured person, as a public intellectual, I'm supposed to be walking around.
Really as a public figure.
As a public figure, but not just a public figure.
I mean, Lady Gaga is a public figure.
I'm a public intellectual.
Okay.
I find modern art to be a thought crime.
okay just really quickly i i'm gonna put that over here in the very very special pile to just get this out of the way because it's not that interesting and i want to be done with it i heard that one good way to keep your camera from being like quickly stealable this is going to sound crazy it's like the battleships though you take some uh gaffers tape yeah which unlike duct tape is you know a matte tape and it's not as like you know scaringly permanent
And you just take little bits of this tape and you put it over the logo, but you also put it over any like non-black piece of the front of your camera.
Now two things happen.
This sounds crazy, but I swear to God, it's like the battleships.
If you saw me across the room and I don't have a strap also because that's how I roll.
It just looks like a piece of junk camera made out of tape.
It doesn't even look like a camera.
It doesn't – here's the thing, John.
This is the thing about why I say it's like a battleship.
It doesn't read as a camera.
What?
You situate camera-ness and SLR so much by that logo where the flash thing should be.
You know what I mean?
And there's little – I'm telling you – So it just looks like a black pop can that you're holding up to your eye.
If you really looked carefully at it, you would see it's a camera.
It does not stick out like these idiots downtown with their little fucking can is with the plastic lenses on it.
Grow up.
Get a decent lens.
I don't know.
Interesting.
And that's why I did that.
But now here's the other thing.
Here's what's cool about that.
If you are going to try and take photos on the sly guy, who's usually a dick, like you are much less likely.
You're talking about upskirt photos?
No, no, no.
My mom always used to tell me she used to worry about mirrors on shoes.
You ever heard of mirrors on shoes?
That's old technology.
It's all iPhones up the skirt now.
Everything's fiber now.
I have a good friend that caught some guy taking a picture up his girlfriend's skirt in a Costco, and he beat the shit out of the guy.
Right in the Costco.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Just like, because he was walking, he was, you know, he was 15 feet behind or whatever, and his lady was up ahead, and this guy swoops in, and with the phone, like...
up the skirt and my buddy just did a flying like a flying tackle.
No, really?
Yeah, took this guy right out and then big, big brawl in the Costco and the creep was trying to break his phone and it was a whole to do.
Wow.
But that value pack of punches.
Yeah.
It's one of my, it's one of the great stories.
Japanese men seem to seem to like, well, they like really dirty things for their own sake.
It strikes me.
They're like dirty, just dirtiness as a thing.
And it seems like the upskirt thing is maybe they're just the largest producers of this.
Maybe it's like China.
They have, they are very comfortable with fetishizing youth, young people.
yes the school girl uniforms yeah and so the upskirt photo is a i think is a side is an adjunct of the like little girl sort of panty fetishism that is so popular in asia that's part of the dirtiness though is i'm really not supposed to have this you can't just walk out and go with like you know hyzer vending machine where i can blow a baby you can't say things like that but you can like buy panties from a machine is that correct have you heard this
You can buy panties.
Well, you know, here in America, you can get panties online.
You can buy used panties online.
Using your computer.
Using your computer.
They will come up.
I'm sure you can get them next day air.
I had someone offer to buy my shoes once.
No.
Kind of caught me off guard.
Yeah.
You know, the guitar player, the presidents of the USA, his shoes are, his old shoes that he spray painted gold are at the EMP.
They're one of the displays that you pay $25 to go walk around and look at.
Did Paul Allen pay to acquire those?
You know, when they were first opening the EMP, it seemed like they had billions of dollars.
Well, they did have billions of dollars, but what it seemed like at the time was that the grunge movement was going to be just as famous and earth-shattering as every rock movement that had come before it.
Right.
And so here was an opportunity for people to buy, basically to buy Elvis's shoes, right?
If you could go back in time and buy Elvis's shoes or buy Jimi Hendrix's shirt.
Like a broken strap.
From those guys for, you know...
uh for 25 bucks or whatever wouldn't you do it and so it was it was a little too soon after the grunge years and all these guys were still standing around and a lot of them didn't have any money anymore and they opened up this rock museum and it was like a goodwill guys just guys just shut up like you want to you want to buy my works they said they said well it's it's not that they showed up it's like
The EMP sent 50 people out into the city knocking on practice-based doors and saying, hey, you guys got any?
Can we buy your old guitar, your broken guitar that's over there in the corner?
You look over and there's some $25 thrift store guitar.
Sure.
How about that tube screen where it doesn't work?
I don't care.
$2,000.
And they were just throwing it down.
So the EMP has a huge warehouse.
Wow.
full of all this crap that belongs to these also-ran bands.
It sounds like a sad Goodwill.
It's incredible.
I mean, it's truly amazing.
They bought Soundgarden's van, their old Ford van.
Is it interesting?
Not at all.
No.
What Soundgarden should have done, and in any other situation would have done, is sold that van for $500 to some fledgling band who drove it until it caught on fire, and then it would be sent to the crusher, and it would survive only in photographs, and that is how history is made.
But in fact, this van is preserved...
in a hermetically sealed warehouse somewhere in Seattle on the off chance that 45 years from now, somebody's like, oh man, Soundgarden's van.
It's worth a fortune.
I'm just imagining the docents who work there who probably have very thin bones and large glasses and they have to walk by and go, you know, this is pretty much a blue van, but we're pretty sure can fail Pete in here at one point.
That's all we know.
Yeah, it's not, it's, you know, it may be too early to say, but I'm going to say that it's
But it's never going to be Elvis's shoes.
You know what I mean?
No, totally.
And, you know, part of it is now you're you know how markets work, right?
I mean, it's it's beyond supply and demand.
It's, you know, the whole diamond racket.
The way that works is that they deliberately produce only so many to keep it kind of scarce.
Right.
So in this case, you're not even trying to make scarcity out of diamonds.
You're making scarcity out of like Kleenex boxes.
Right.
You know, and I think when hard times come, you know, some, what did I just read about?
Some, what did some museum just acquire something really squirrely?
Um, and I forget what it is, but you know, the thing is if you fall on hard times, it becomes like, like trading, uh, trading pogs or Pokemon's high on 45.
Yeah.
Remember Pogs?
It's like trading Pokemons.
I don't even know what Pokemon is.
I know it's a card game with angular animals.
You trade them and that's... No, it's like Beanie Babies.
People invest a lot of money in Beanie Babies.
Just like the tulips.
Exactly.
Beanie Babies.
And then it got so big, it was like the tulips.
Everybody was buying it.
I went to one of these estate sales one time and walking through this house and in the back of the house, there's an entire bedroom...
Just full of Beanie Babies.
Like, they've built giant industrial-strength shelves and bins and bins and bins of Beanie Babies.
Oh, my God.
Were they nicely displayed, or was it just... No, no, no, no.
I mean, it was clearly a hoard.
It was less a collection and more of a hoard.
And these people, because it was an estate sale, obviously they were old people.
Mm-hmm.
And they had hoarded these Beanie Babies thinking that they were going to be worth a ton of money.
This was their retirement, this room.
There were 10,000 Beanie Babies in there.
You know that phrase, sunk cost fallacy?
You ever heard that term?
Was that in The Tipping Point?
You keep sending me these books about economics and... What?
Wait a minute.
Wait a minute.
Hang on.
You know, I'm like the opposite of that guy now.
Now I'm suspicious of that guy.
The Tipping Point guy?
Oh, God.
You were an evangelist of him.
No, just hang on one minute.
You know what?
I want to get back to public intellectuals and art being a fraud.
Did you know that there's only one place in America where diamonds?
Turns out.
That's my phrase that sums up everything I fucking hate about this stuff.
Some guy gets up there and goes, turns out.
And he's just discovered something amazing.
And it comes out of some bullshit study.
You're mad at the TED Talks.
Oh, brother.
I'm going to tell you a funny story.
I can tell.
I can tell right now that you are mad at TED Talks.
I'm going to tell you a funny story.
I can't tell you on the program, but it's pretty funny.
Here's the thing.
Now, yes, you are correct.
Did they ask you to do a TED Talk?
No, they haven't.
And Hodgman kept saying he was going to try and get me in there, and he never did.
I would do that for him.
Well, it's harder than it looks to get people in there because it's all deranged billionaires in there.
It's a good point.
It's a good point.
You know, and now people like they go to the TED or what's the other one?
What's that?
What's that big douchey one?
The in like Switzerland, the Davos.
Oh, Davos.
Yeah.
Jesus Christ.
Don't let anybody in there.
Yeah.
You know, a friend of mine, a friend of mine wanted to ask a question one time at TED, who's actually really smart and make stuff.
She's like wanted to ask.
She wanted to ask.
It was during like a time when people could could make remarks about something.
And she got totally cockblocked by Cameron Diaz.
Her question.
This is my friend who's made a company that makes products I used to use on your site, for example.
She made something really important, and she got totally cut off for Cameron Diaz to get up there.
And I don't know.
I'm not a fan of Cameron Diaz.
Oh, we've talked about this.
This is problematic.
Anyway, about the diamonds.
You can't – the problem is I think when your museum falls on hard times or even if you're just trying to get a new pog, you can do things like trades.
Like assuming that you don't have a bunch of Nazi art somebody wants back.
You've got things and you hold it.
Like if you've got – say what you will about Andy Warhol.
It was kind of an interesting project.
If you've got – you discover you've got – if you scratch off some paint, you discover you've got a Van Gogh or something, you hang on to that.
You trade it.
I'm just saying I don't think there's that much currency in the Beanie Babies of the Grunge era.
That's not going to retain their value.
No.
But, you know, honestly, I feel that way about all modern art.
Okay.
Let's go.
Can I just be clear?
Contemporary art or modern art?
Where's your line for this?
Oh, yeah.
I'm going to say any art made after 19.
Okay.
Okay.
You know what?
I'm a fan of Jackson Pollock.
I will say that.
Can I ask just one informational question?
And this is not in any way to guide the discussion, as you know.
But do you have any fucking idea what you're talking about?
Or should I just be prepared to nod along as you talk out of your ass?
You know, I got into a huge argument at the University of Washington.
That's not really an answer.
Which is that, you know, if you go around Europe, there are monuments to World War II all around Europe.
And as you can imagine.
And it's not just burned buildings and destroyed churches.
There are monuments that artists have made.
And there are monuments to World War I also all over Europe.
In Flanders Fields.
They're very into that in Canada.
They are.
They wear poppies.
The monuments to World War I...
are invariably very tall obelisks that have a bunch of figures arrayed around the base.
Generally, some guys heroically holding up their bayonets or some nurses tending to the wounded.
Maybe the big monuments have like some horses on them.
Some guys, maybe somebody's holding a...
holding their rifle aloft.
You know, they're like monuments that have been made to war for a thousand years.
There's somebody in a tri-cornered hat holding his sword up and an obelisk, and it says, to our glorious... You're honoring the sacrifice in a very dignified way of these people.
Now, in general, World War II monuments around Europe and in America tend to be a giant stone donut
on some kind of ellipse with no words on it, or if there are some words on it, it's something obscure in Latin.
And this donut, this stone donut, or a stone egg...
It became this motif for World War II monuments because the world's mind had been infected with the plague of modern art.
And it was thought that this donut better represented the sacrifice of however 40 million people died in the war.
That it was such an incredible war and there were so many lives lost that we could not represent those lives figuratively.
So we made this large granite egg.
The only thing that could do it, the only thing that could capture our imagination was a giant donut.
And Holocaust monuments are even worse because it's even more inconceivable what happened in the Holocaust.
And so the donut is even more, like generally a Holocaust monument is a fractured donut, right?
A donut that's been, that's like got a crack in it.
Oh, but it could be, in that case, you're moving into a more heavy-handed kind of abstract nonsense.
Right, exactly.
It's abstract nonsense, but they couldn't really let the abstraction live on its own, and so they had to put a crack in it because they had a little bit of actual realistic symbolism in it.
So I'm walking around Europe all these years, and I came back to the University of Washington, and I was like...
I was in some seminar and I stood up and I said, modern art is crap.
All modern art is crap.
And as exhibit A, I submit this slideshow of World War II Holocaust donuts that I find personally offensive.
I find they do not symbolize the war.
They do not honor the dead.
You sure it's not a bagel?
Oh, that's a terrible thing to say.
No, I'm... I'm pretty sure it's not a fractured bagel.
Ugh.
Okay, so then you get to Vietnam, and what did they get?
They got, like, what, a big, like, letter V?
They got a black letter V in a lawn, but at least it has names on it.
Now, see, how do you feel about letters and words?
I think, you know, I think this started with fucking Philadelphia and the big love sculpture.
People fell back in love with words.
There's a phrase I try to avoid.
I actually used it yesterday.
Well, words as a way to basically provide a giant footnote for what the fuck the thing means.
If you get a guy, not a Pieta exactly, but the war version of a Pieta, a World War I Pieta, you get a guy in one of those identifiable World War I helmets holding his buddy as he dies.
That's incredibly fucking moving.
Can be, if it's sculpted well.
And it does not need, in giant Times New Roman, have to say sacrifice on it.
Oh, right, exactly.
Well, that is the problem with World War I monuments, is that they actually go around and every panel says loyalty or fidelity.
In World War I, you say?
Well, yeah, but I mean, all those... I mean, all...
All figurative art.
You know how reluctant I am to talk about the Holocaust, but I'm going to send you a link here in the robot.
And this is actually – I'm going to write this down.
I'm going to come back to this phrase, the exception that proves the rule, because I think that might not make any sense.
This is, I assume, some exception that proves some rule.
This is a place that I've been in Miami that is really moving and incredibly fucking scary and freaky.
Yeah.
Are you there?
Mm-hmm.
Okay, so this is called the Holocaust Memorial of the Greater Miami Jewish Federation.
And it's weirdly well done, and it is super-duper creepy.
So you can see the primary figure is a—I don't know how many feet.
Would you say probably about a 30-foot-high human hand with an arm?
And the arm is like from the wrist to what would be the elbow—
is just all like desperate skinny people clinging.
And wouldn't you say that's pretty horrific?
I mean, it gets to the flavor.
It gets to the flavor.
But then there's also like these frozen figures there, almost like Pompeii.
Now, I don't know.
It's so emotional that like, I can see why you would do that there.
But I mean, in that case, I mean, this gives you a sense.
I don't know if you'd say in an abstract way, but that's very emotionally compelling.
Yeah.
What I worry about is— In a way that a donut is not.
No, absolutely not.
I mean, you know, I'm just saying, like, if you get too abstract with this stuff and you get into the donuts and the eggs and the Vs, I don't know.
And then you add a water feature.
I mean— Oh, yeah, a water feature is nice.
Do you like water features?
Well, a water feature reflects the donut in the sky, and it causes you to really, really think about it.
Oh.
Whereas the donut was causing you to reflect and think about it.
Then you see it reflected in the pool and you're like, oh, right.
Have you been to Washington, D.C.
?
Yes.
I have been to Washington, D.C.
You always fucking talk about the Baltics in Romania.
I've been to all 50 states.
I've been to every metropolitan area.
All right, Hank Snow.
I get it.
Me and my little dog drove around in my camper truck.
and saw everything in america this sounds like an nbc show from 1978 i am charles carralt no like what was your dog's name was it like fluffy or cute cute what was it called roderick and the dog i have been did you have a truck i've been everywhere man boston and st clair did you know that he is from canada
who hank snow the man who wrote i think wrote and sings that song and he's a lot of great americans of canada some of our best americans are truly from canada would be very surprised you know who's from canada is sloan the band sloan is from canada um there are a lot of great americans from from canada and i and i you know when i meet someone from canada i don't hold it against them because i think they could be they could be a great american for all i know
Yeah.
Their money doesn't make a lick of sense.
What, their Canadian money?
Well, you know what?
I like the coins, though.
I have to tell you.
I like a toonie.
I like a coin.
Here's what I used to love about Canadian money.
It was super cheap.
Oh, dude.
First time I was there, it was $1.66 American to a loonie.
And here's what I hate about Canadian money now.
It isn't super cheap.
It feels really fucked up that they're doing as well as us.
It's really bad.
Isn't that wrong?
Super depressing.
They're nice people, though.
They're super nice people.
Well, here's the reason I asked.
There are a lot of serial killers up there.
No, really?
Yeah.
You didn't know about those two guys in Vancouver that owned a pig farm and they... Was it a lady pig?
Were they doing lady pig stuff?
No, no, no.
It wasn't lady pigs.
They would have big parties out at their pig farm where they would invite all the prostitutes from Vancouver and then they would do bad things as serial killers do and they would kill these girls and then feed them to the pigs.
And then... Is this in British Columbia?
Yeah, it was in Vancouver, yeah.
And then they would sell the bacon...
Back to the... This sounds like a Roger Corman movie.
There's no way that is real.
Yeah.
The unknowing citizens of Vancouver were eating their... Because, you know, in Canada, of course, they have seven flavors of bacon.
Oh, the bacon.
They eat hooker bacon.
Well, this is hooker bacon.
They were selling hooker bacon to them for years because prostitutes were disappearing off the streets of Vancouver for years.
Doesn't it seem like once you saw Mimi go into a van and not come back, you would think twice about going into a van with a bunch of... Well, these creeps, and these guys were creeps too.
You just look at them and you knew they were creeps.
But they would have these huge parties, these huge prostitute parties, prostitute junkie parties out at their pig farm.
It started out fun.
Oh, I think for a lot of people it was always fun.
But so one person doesn't make it back.
Oh, I get it.
Okay, so I'm sorry.
I apologize.
I thought it was like pump chili.
I thought they came into some shoot because they thought it was a party.
They dropped through a tiger trap and they end up in some hooker bacon.
You're saying that a lot of times you go and you have fun.
You bring your friends back.
It's like a pyramid scheme.
Yeah, right.
You're like, oh, man, there's all these drugs and there's lots of hookers and we go out to this pig farm and it's a blast.
And then everybody else goes home except for one hooker doesn't make it back.
And then each time, but nobody ever puts it together because in Vancouver, they were adopting the policy of let's pretend that hookers don't exist.
Oh, that's not good.
For a long time they had that policy.
Now I think they have the whole like, oh, we're watching bar hookers now because we lost so many.
This is awful.
You know what?
You're not making this up.
No, no, it's terrible.
This wasn't very long ago.
And the thing, you know, the Northwest likes to produce serial killers.
And so these guys in Vancouver and the Green River Killer were operating somewhat.
There wasn't a ton of overlap, but they were both out roaming around at the same time.
And there's some question about whether there was ever – whether they knew each other or – I don't know.
There's creeps or creeps.
Is there a zeitgeist or a mass hysteria or just that we've got better reporting tools?
Doesn't it seem like we go through times where there's suddenly – for example, it turns out supposedly there's a lot fewer child abductions today than there were in the 40s per capita.
It's just that it's heavily overreported.
I don't know if that's accurate.
But in this case, it seems like we had a real golden age of brutal serial killers in the last 60 years.
When was Ed Gein?
Was he the 50s, 60s?
Yeah, 50s, I think.
You know, they used to tour Ed Gein's car.
You can go see Ed Gein's car.
I think there's a band by that name.
At the EMP?
What would it take to know that Paul Allen has finally gone too far?
It's the Experience Music Project and Science Fiction Museum and Serial Killer Warehouse.
He wants something like the Mütter Museum, but much more personal.
Something really... I wonder about this, about whether there were always... I mean, clearly there were always serial killers and mass murderers.
Right.
But whether or not...
I kind of think that in, I mean, Jack the Ripper being one example, he was very public, but if you owned a pig farm in 1805 and you were abducting hookers, which obviously there were hookers in 1805 because it is the oldest profession.
Pig farming?
No, hookering.
Okay.
You could always go find hookers and there were always pig farms.
And the temptation's always there probably.
Yeah.
Well, no, I'm just saying you have a lot to take care of on a pig farm.
You have slopping, you have de-slopping, you have watering, you have bark.
I thought you were talking about on the bell curve of human desires.
Well, I'm just saying farmers are busy.
They've got a lot to do.
They don't have time to run into town and get a People magazine.
They've got to really think it through.
They've got to have something that's going to have longevity.
And I'm just saying I don't want to be insensitive here, but I'm just saying if you can improve your bottom line by throwing some sex workers into your meat.
I mean, I would never do that.
You're saying that some of their motivation might be that it was cheap pig food?
I never studied anything agrarian.
I don't know much about it.
Yeah, I think it was much more than, I think it was, I think that feeding it to the pigs was an afterthought.
They did that on Deadwood.
You know what's weird about this?
I'm reading about Robert just for our listeners who don't have the internet.
It's Robert Pickton, also known as the Pig Farmer Killer.
Pig Farmer Killer.
I sure got that pretty close, didn't I?
Yeah, I think that's a big black album.
And so he's 62 now.
He's still doing fine.
He's in for life.
Now, here's what's interesting.
His number of victims, 6249.
That's a big spread.
6249 is a big fucking spread.
There could still be some bacon out there.
That is fucked up.
That is so fucked up.
But see, I don't know.
I don't know much about the 1800s.
And farmers in general... Today's farming seems very scientific.
But back then, I think you put a lot more of yourself into it.
And potentially your prostitutes.
Well, this is the thing.
In the old days, you'd clear 100 acres.
And then you'd have three sons...
And one of them you'd send to the army.
Well, let's say you'd had five sons.
One of them you send to the army.
A lot of them will lose a limb.
Let's be honest.
A couple of them are going to die, right?
Sure.
One of them is the gay one is going to become a priest.
And then you've got a couple sons.
And so you had 100 acres.
Now you have to give each son 50 acres.
And the daughters, who knows what happens to them.
They marry somebody else.
She sleeps in the barn.
So then two sons have 50 acres.
Then those guys have five sons, and they send the gay ones into the ministry and one to the army.
But eventually their farms get split up, and pretty soon everybody's got 20 acres, and then everybody's got five acres.
You know, four or five generations down the road, everybody's trying to make a living off of these little cut-up little teeny farms.
And that's the Portland, Oregon model, right?
If you had five acres in Portland, Oregon, you'd be the king of the town.
Because you'd be making artisanal pigs and you'd be feeding them artisanal prostitutes or whatever it is that happens down there.
Small batch, they call it.
But a small batch, right.
Small batch.
Sex workers.
Hooker.
I think the fur term is sex worker.
But so then industrialized farming came in and they took all these farms.
They bought them all cheap.
And then they took all the fences down and then they just have robots making food now.
Most of the call girls are from India.
Yeah, right.
Now you literally call them in Bangalore.
It's much more expensive to fly them over and feed them to pigs than it is to... Well, they buy them VoIP, VoiceOver IP, which helps a lot.
They can talk to the pigs and... My name is Sandra.
I'm enjoying volleyball.
Okay.
Hooker Bacon.
Here's the thing.
I want to go in two directions, if I may, John.
I want to get back to this, your art problem.
Do you want to pass on?
Should we move past that?
No, no, no.
I'll talk about what a thought crime modern art is all day.
I mean, I know I'm just antagonizing people, but that's really one of my favorite things to do.
I do want to talk about this diamond mine in Arkansas, though.
You got me thinking about diamonds.
I don't know anything about that.
Arkansas's got a diamond mine.
Well, that's the only place in America where there's a diamond mine.
It's in Arkansas, and you can actually go there and sift through the rocks yourself.
Like you go to the museum and look for geodes?
Yeah, or you go pan for gold in the Yukon at the pan for gold...
museum.
But you can go to this Arkansas diamond mine.
Is the four represented by a numeral four?
Pan four gold?
Pan four gold.
Dig four diamonds.
But apparently, very recently, some guy discovered a six carat yellow diamond.
Six carats is a lot of carats.
Yeah, at this search for yourself diamond mine in Arkansas.
But it's like a jokey, it's like pick your own apples kind of shit, and he finds a fucking six carat diamond?
I think so.
Holy shit.
That changes the whole revenue model.
It's not about selling t-shirts and marmalade anymore.
You're going to move some fucking rock.
I'm thinking every tour I do from now on, we're going to route through Arkansas and spend a day at the diamond mine there.
Try and pay for the record.
You know, you could probably run some basic figures.
You could do a Microsoft Excel's computer thing.
You could probably figure out what the chances are.
A show might get canceled.
A guy with a cigar in the back peeing off $100 bills might try and fuck you.
You're going to have to balance that.
That happens in the entertainment business.
It seems to me you have a very small band and people keep quitting.
But if you got enough people, if you got like what?
Like Donkey.
You got one of those like 10-person bands.
Or, you know, like the one with the Andrew Bird guy.
Remember that?
Remember the big band?
They were good.
Did you ever see them?
What were they called?
Red Hot Chili Peppers?
What were they called?
Yeah, they were really good.
The Squirrel Nut Zippers.
They were fucking great.
Here's the thing about a 10-person band.
Here's the thing about diamond mining.
If you have a 10-person band, you literally need to mine diamonds.
Oh, I don't need everybody in macaroni and cheese.
I don't know how people smoke these.
This is why you look at people like Billy Bragg and Jonathan Colton.
You go, that's why those guys have so much dough.
Right.
Right.
They go in, they call it a back line.
You go in there and there's already stuff there.
They got a PA.
You can plug right in.
Billy Bragg, last time I saw him, he was flying a white helicopter.
They don't make white helicopters.
White helicopter, it's like a... When you fly a red helicopter?
iPhone branded.
A white helicopter?
Yeah, because he's raking it in.
He's making the big dollars.
If you sing songs about socialism long enough, you're going to make some serious coin.
I've heard you have to put out three albums or three books before you make serious money.
Well, about socialism.
Before you can.
Or three books about socialism.
Then you're rolling in the dough.
Yeah, and then Johnny Marr starts calling you.
Nothing wrong with that.
Well, you contrast that with the arcade fire.
Everybody thinks, oh, these guys are making a ton of cash, but there's 15 people on stage.
I literally beg you not to mention them again.
They have to pay for the hurdy-gurdy tuner.
They have to pay for the... Oh, they got to get their helmets tuned for the drumming.
They got to get a helmet tuner.
By the time it's all done, those people are making like 15 grand a year each.
Oh, the math on this.
Don't get me on the Steve Albini.
Six carats is 1.2 grams.
It's about half the mass of a penny.
But in diamond terms, that's pretty big.
You put that on a ring.
You're not going to do dishes in that.
That's a fucking big.
Can you have a six carat ring?
Oh, yeah.
You can have a six carat ring.
All those baseball wives that look like half gazelles, half catfish have them.
They're the French manicures.
Yeah, yeah, that's how you tell a baseball wife.
Six-carat diamond ring.
Wow, yeah.
That's a lot of carats.
Okay, so anyway, and Arkansas.
So they thought this was going to be a jokey diamond industrial because most diamonds are used in industry because you can't get a big full one, right?
You use them for nail files and stuff, right?
Yeah, you use them for those big underground tunneling machines that make the channel, for instance.
One of those big screws in a cartoon?
Yeah.
Yeah, the big screw in a cartoon that's digging through the wall of the underground bank.
You know, my grandfather comes from Diamond People.
No, really?
You come from Diamond People?
British Guiana.
He grew up within Kool-Aid throwing distance of Jonestown, what would become Jonestown.
He's from, yeah, British Guiana.
His family, they're colonists from London.
My grandfather is English, but they live in British Guiana.
Wow.
Wow, what an unusual place to go.
What an unusually malaria-prone place to go from Britain.
Well, the diamond thing can be very attractive.
I mean, people aren't going to go to Arkansas just for barbecue or whatever.
You know what I mean?
In his case, he came to Ohio to learn to be a dentist, which I think sounds like a front.
Doesn't that sound a little bit like cover?
uh to come to ohio to be a dentist you're gonna come to from a warm climate he never liked being in cincinnati he was unhappy until he moved back to florida the year i was born uh strangely enough pretty weird timing so he came from british guiana to ohio to become a dentist yeah he was born in 1901 and he moved in so he's about he was just a little under 30 and he moved to cincinnati to learn to become a dentist but he never became a dentist
Well, you know, it's like maybe he was an elf and Santa said, you're going to make toys.
And he was like, I don't want to make toys.
I want to be a dentist.
Is that an analogy?
Oh, you're talking about Hermie.
Hermie.
Oink, oink.
I want to be a dentist.
Amhocks and guitar strings.
I love Yukon Cornelius so much.
The thing about Ohio in 1920 is that most of the Indian wars were done.
It was a good time to be a dentist.
You know what they called it?
Well, later they called it the Queen City, but for a long time it was known as Porkopolis because of the number of pig butcheries.
That's right.
It was a big pig town.
Big pigs.
Well, you've got to wonder what they were feeding those pigs.
I didn't want to draw that line, but thank you.
You know, Cincinnati, they put cinnamon in their chili.
Oh, they sure do, buddy.
Yeah, that's good stuff.
I've never made Cincinnati chili for you, have I?
Oh, you make Cincinnati chili?
My mom's got an airtight recipe, yeah.
That's Skyline.
What's the other one?
The other big one in town.
I'm buying a ticket.
Yeah, you should.
Buy another San Francisco ticket.
I'm going to come down and you make me some Cincinnati-style chili.
I've got a whole plan for us to do something together.
I haven't told you about it, but I've got a plan.
Oh, all right.
We're going to take the show on the road.
I haven't told you about that yet.
Oh, boy.
I like to go on the road.
You know, this week I'm driving down to the Salton Sea.
I think this is another one you're made.
Can I just say I wrote a term here earlier, intellectual LARPing.
Is there any chance that a lot of what you're doing is like if you meet people who LARP or do rent fares or do like, look at me, I'm in the Army of the Potomac.
And you're like, no, you're not.
But see, they don't actually really believe that they're at Gettysburg.
They're just heavy and have authentic buttons.
You know what they call it?
OOP.
Out of period, they call it.
Yeah, you don't want the wrong buttons.
You don't want the wrong mustache.
That's one of the things that I hate about those things.
The wrong mustache.
When I see some reenactors and some guys got the wrong mustache, I'm like, that's not the mustache they had.
because because of trimming issues yeah right you can't just like you can't just rock any mustache you can't just wear your like steampunk mustache to a civil war reenactment that's not how things are done what is it does it have unnecessary brass yeah it's just you know it's like oh sure you're mr curl your mustache up or whatever but but there was no there was none of that then droopy this is a droopy mustache event
I haven't read a lot about this, but it's my understanding that there's a lot of more authenticity than now going on.
It's a lot like being at an independent record store or a camera shop or a comic shop.
Let's be honest.
It's a lot like a comic shop.
It's like a comic shop with a tricorn hat, basically.
But there's a lot of like, no, your buttons are not aesthetic.
You wouldn't have a zipper.
Down to fleas, John.
I've heard that some people will get fleas because their guy would have had fleas.
Speaking as someone who has some not small experience with fleas.
You're not immune to fleas?
No.
I can say that is a really stupid thing to do.
You're not giving yourself fleas.
You're not going to get a statue, buddy.
Do you think they have make-believe memorials for people who make-believe died?
Here's the number one problem.
There's your donut in your reflecting pool, asshole.
Here's the number one problem with Civil War reenactments.
Yeah.
How many cards should I have for this?
There are a lot of problems.
Number one problem with Civil War reenactments.
Please continue.
Number one problem with Civil War reenactments is that 99% of the soldiers in Civil War were 17 to 20.
And 99% of Civil War reenactors are 55 to 65.
So you look at a Civil War reenactment and there's all these fat old guys dressed like privates.
Marching, profusely sweating in the Tennessee summer.
Marching over to reenact this battle.
And it's like, there is not one single one of you that looks like a Civil War fighter.
Because skinny 17-year-old Tennesseans now are all wearing white baseball caps on backwards.
And they're trying to find the nearest Juggalo encampment.
They are not.
They are not reenacting the Civil War.
And that's what you need.
Basically, these fat old guys should get their sons, like actually happened in the Civil War, they should force their sons to reenact the war.
Okay, I think I understand.
You're saying there's something much deeper here.
I don't care about your fucking buttons and your dysentery.
There's a deeper problem, which is there's no fucking way.
You would die the first week.
Now, what you need to do is go get your kid and make your kid.
You're saying you stay back on the pig farm.
And you make your kid who has both arms, he joins the Army of the Potomac.
Right.
He joins the fake Army of the Potomac.
He gets killed by Sherman.
That's right.
And that would be a true Civil War reenactment.
Hmm.
That's pretty good.
Yeah.
That's the number one problem.
Could you just tell me what the number four problem is just off the top of your head?
Mustaches.
Wrong mustache.
Mustaches.
If you go watch, they should hire me, and I just walk down the ranch and be like, no, wrong mustache.
You're out.
You know what?
Frankly, I don't care if you get that job, but I would like you to go down to the t-shirt barn at whatever mall you have and get Federal Mustache Inspector.
Maybe on a trucker cap.
You can get a trucker cap, John.
They're going to think that that means something else.
Besides, nobody wears trucker caps anymore.
Can I threaten to change the subject in an inorganic way by asking you about something you mentioned once to me?
Is it true that you have a Tumblr about Juggalos?
Is that accurate?
I want one so badly.
But, you know, Seattle is not really Juggalo ground zero.
You know, I really think like Tennessee is where Juggalos, that's where Juggalos really, that's the heart of the community.
Between Detroit and Memphis.
It's like Portly Kudzu.
There's like a juggalo, there's a vein of juggalo that runs through our nation, our great nation, and it starts in Detroit and it ends in Memphis.
You sound like a speechwriter for the worst presidential candidate ever.
They appear in street clown makeup, drink what?
They drink Faygo?
Is that what it is?
Yeah, Faygo.
And they're proud of being repulsive.
And it's the classic problem of people being too stupid to realize that they're stupid.
So that they're proud of precisely the thing?
I thought they were reveling.
I thought there was a culture of dumb fuckery where you could become a lieutenant colonel of dumbassery pretty easily because you're respected by your peers for being more into being a dumbass.
You don't think so?
You don't think it's self-aware?
Do you think there's some self-awareness?
It seems like an outsider culture.
I read an article about this.
Did you read that article about the Juggalo get-together?
I read every article about Juggalos that I can find.
It's like the Holocaust.
I can't stop reading about it.
I'm super fascinated by it.
The one where they threw things at that skanky lady while she was performing?
Did you read that article?
That's a good article.
It's a really good article.
It's a very good article.
But I've seen a lot of...
I've seen a lot of things in my time.
In fact... You've been to every state.
I actually spent some quality time, some intimate time with a young lady that had a juggalo tattoo.
And she claimed that it was an ironic juggalo tattoo.
And I...
Had my doubts.
Is this like a logo?
What does a Juggalo tattoo look like?
A Juggalo tattoo is a little guy.
It's like, you remember the Pearl Jam 10 stick figure?
It was a little stick figure with this guy holding his hands up in the air and he had dreadlocks.
He had dreadlock hair.
It was a stick figure.
It wasn't even, it was just some graffito that they turned into their logo, the 10 logo.
So the Juggalo logo is basically that guy, the guy with some dreadlocks.
It's a stick figure.
Oh, it's very Rastafarian.
He has a machete in his hand.
A butcher looks like a meat cleaver.
He has a meat cleaver in his hand.
So this is the Juggalo logo.
And this young lady, a friend of mine, a lady friend of mine,
She does not live in the West.
Let's be clear here.
She lives in the center of America.
You seem to be slightly delusional about a variety of things with the women in your life, which I'm not saying is a bad thing, but what was your actual relationship?
Did you meet her at a show?
How...
What kind of lady friend was this?
She was an early fan of the Long Winters, and in the early days of the Long Winters, they were nice enough to let us stay at their apartment, and she had a separate area that was hers, or her room, if you will, which was sort of the area that I stayed in.
Yeah.
If I'd known better from the beginning, I would have had a dedicated Roderick Zone.
Yeah.
Well, you know, depending on the town, in our early days of touring, depending on the town, there was always somebody had to sleep in the van, right?
Because I'm paranoid about our van getting broken into.
I did not want to be one of those bands that was like riding home and saying, oh, our shit got ripped off.
I hated those bands.
I hated them because all your shit got ripped off because you were stupid, because you parked your van full of stuff on the street, and then everybody went in and got drunk.
Yeah, you left your equipment in an Econoline in Manhattan.
Yeah, or no, Manhattan is probably the safest place in the world.
Turns out.
There was a bar here in Seattle.
I used to work at this bar, the off-ramp.
Yep, the Grunge Museum.
And the Grunge Museum, right.
And people would play the show.
They would load their stuff out into the van.
And this bar was, like, on a deserted street next to a freeway.
And then they would all come back inside and drink, like, four beers each.
So 3.30 in the morning.
They've got a fucking pinata full of fenders, like, sitting in a parking lot.
Yeah, and then they would come outside, and all they had to do was leave it unattended for 20 minutes.
I mean, these guys would swoop in, break the lock on the van, and it would be empty, like...
All you had to do was turn around and not leave a guy out there.
Seriously.
Like sand people.
Like sand people, that's right.
We built a bed in our van and we just never left it unattended.
And in some towns, the fact that one guy could sleep in the bed, in the van, ended up being like that guy was the king that night because we were sleeping.
There was one time, oh my God, we slept at these people's house.
And all their sinks had clogged, but they hadn't stopped putting dirty dishes and pouring their beer into the sink.
Yeah, it was like still water.
Every sink was absolutely filled to the brim with black water.
And there was a layer of three inches of cat vomit on everything.
And we pulled up to this thing and went inside, and the house was dim, dimly lit.
Yeah.
And everybody pours into the house like, yeah, we're partying.
We're having some after show party with these people.
And I got to the top of the stairs and I looked left and I looked right.
And I saw in all the corners of the hallway that skin flakes and pubic hairs had accumulated in little piles so that you could almost, if you were a mouse on a skateboard, you could actually do ramp tricks.
Juggalo tinsel, they call it.
And I got to the top of the stairs and I was like, hey, you guys, guess what?
I'm sleeping in the van tonight.
And I was outside all comfortable in my happy little van while these guys were being bitten by fleas.
And probably if there hadn't been a group of us, one of them would have ended up in pig bacon.
Or LARPing.
Anyway, so this girl, this juggalo... Oh, sorry, sorry, sorry.
She claims not to be a juggalo.
She claims to be an ironic juggalo appreciator.
This was a long time ago, too.
She was my first introduction to juggaloism.
I don't understand tattoos.
And I have to say now, I really, really don't understand ironic tattoos.
Boy.
Did you get the thing I sent you?
I used to have a circle jerk shirt.
I had this guy skanking on it.
And it looks oddly close.
Was he skanking?
He certainly was not.
But it's weird.
It makes me realize the Juggalo logo looks a little bit like a cross between the circle jerk skanky guy and a swastika.
It has swastical elements, but look at the Pearl Jam 10 logo.
Okay.
It's got swasticality.
Is that what you call it?
It has a little swasticality.
But so does the Circle Jerks guy for that man.
It's one of my favorite Busby Berkeley dance sequences.
And the Circle Jerks guy also happens to be a skinhead.
Well.
Yeah, I think he's from, like, L.A.
or I think he's from, like, you know, the Valley, maybe.
Oh, you're saying, like, he's a peaceful skin?
No, no, no.
He's a racial equality skin?
The first hardcore show I ever went to was a circle jerk show, and it scared the living shit out of me.
Right.
Those kids dancing around in that little circle in 1986 was some scary stuff.
I mean, that was violent, scary stuff.
I did that.
I did that quite a bit, that stuff, that slam dancing.
Yeah, are you Welsh?
You should probably be Welsh.
I am Welsh.
I could see that.
Who is it, Dylan Thomas?
Somebody said if you show a Welshman, two doors, and one of them says self-destruction, you always know which one it'll take.
When I was that age, I only know it now in retrospect.
At the time, I didn't realize this.
But I honestly could only feel things...
In the absolute most extremist sense.
So if I was feeling bad, the only way I could really connect with feeling bad was that I would like fall.
I would belly flop on the floor.
so hard that it would shake glasses off of counters and stuff.
Were you like that as a kid or just grown?
No, no, no.
It was just when I got into my late teens.
I had suppressed my emotions for so many years that the only way I could feel emotions was to... Basically, I was never... I didn't cut myself.
I just went into... You weren't a goth.
I went to punk shows and I flailed around and punched people and they punched me.
Wow.
That was one of the ways in which I experienced emotion.
I just sent you a link for something called sensory processing disorder.
I think you might have gotten that at some point in your 20s.
Some kids have this today.
I think it might be on the spectrum.
These are headbangers, right?
They bang their heads on the wall?
These are like little kids who have to run into things.
Yeah, that was me.
But it took many years to develop.
I wasn't like it as a kid.
How'd you get started?
Well, I suppressed my emotions.
I was one of those, I was a modern kid that was like, oh, I'm fine.
I'm fine.
You suppressed your emotions.
I'm fine.
I'm fine.
Until when?
Until I was in my 20s.
Until I was in my late 20s, actually.
In my early 20s, I was still suppressing my emotions.
Really?
And when I say suppressing my emotions, I mean all of my emotions all the time.
I had only one visible expression of emotion, and that was that I would get so... Basically, anything, if I felt anything...
extremely, and I'm talking about even extreme happiness, but the only way I could express it was to go sit in a corner and stare at the floor.
Honestly.
That's not funny, but that's funny.
It wasn't funny at all.
I would go sit in the corner and stare at the floor sometimes for hours.
That was angry, that was sad, that was happy.
I just want to be clear though, that's not when you couldn't feel an emotion, that's when you felt it strongly.
That's when I was really feeling it, I would go stare at the floor.
The rest of the time, emotions made no... I had no...
I had no contact with them.
And then it is why I went through a very long period where people thought I was a real asshole.
Not during the suppressed emotions period, but during that period immediately afterwards where I was like, you know what?
I need to feel... I need to start feeling emotions.
As fissures developed.
And I had no...
I had no idea how to do it.
I had no idea how to do it in a socially acceptable way.
So I would feel these emotions and I would just like go, and it was a little bit scary because, of course, I had grown up.
I was very big and I had a very fierce look that I practiced for many years of not feeling things.
So when I did suddenly have an emotion, boy, it was terrorizing.
Now I've been working on it for a long time now.
I have emotions all the time.
I'm having one right now.
Can you give me a rough idea?
Sort of a knot in my stomach with a little bit of nausea.
Maybe it's happiness.
Maybe it's that donut you ate.
I'm still a little bit unclear on how emotions get felt.
You should get some Faygo.
I should.
You know what I should do?
Now that I'm in my 40s and I have basically injured every single limb in my body, now I should go get in a mud bath with a bunch of 20-year-old Tennesseans and really let my feelings come out.
No, I don't think so.
A culture like that, I mean, like one thing I admire, I always admire, I don't say always admire, let's just say I'm very interested in outsider cultures.
I'm very interested in people, you know, it's one of the few good things about the internet and potentially deadly and dangerous things is you can find people who are into the same thing that you're into, which is great.
I think anytime you have a community of people who feel adrift, they can meet people who like what they like.
I mean, it's easy to make fun of, but it's kind of cool.
It's so easy to make fun of.
Yeah, well, I mean, sometimes you end up, you know, on a ranch, like, you know, collecting guns and stuff.
Or sometimes you end up at Comic-Con, walking around dressed like Boba Fett.
You claim to like it there.
You say dressed as Boba Fett.
Yeah, I did like it there.
But, you know.
I was dressed as Boba Fett, so nobody could tell who I was.
I'm always amazed at the people who dress as an extremely minor character.
That's the ones I really admire.
Yeah, those are the geniuses.
In fact, you know what?
We got some fan mail the other day.
Did we?
We got some fan mail from a listener.
We have a way to receive fan mail?
Well, a listener in Germany...
it's already funny sent us some packages to barsuk records my record label who forwarded the packages to me and i took the liberty of opening your present cool what is it is it a nice thing or is it well so my present was a book uh that had iggy pop on the cover and
And it was a collection of short reviews of the 315 best songs in the world.
Rock and roll.
315 best rock and roll songs.
Nice.
It's a book, you know, that you keep in the bathroom and you thumb through and you're like, oh, right.
I agree that that's something by the Beatles.
Seasons in the Sun by Terry Jacks.
Right.
Great song.
I'm going to go check and see if it's in it.
The present for you.
was an action figure.
It's still in the original packaging, of course.
I have not molested it.
It's MIB?
It is an action figure from the movie Wall-E.
No.
And it is the minor character of the robot washer.
Mo?
Mo the robot washer.
That's my daughter's favorite and probably my favorite.
I love Mo.
Oh, my God.
That's so sweet.
It's literally on my Amazon wish list.
Maybe that's where they saw it.
Our fan in Germany sent you a mo.
Oh, my God.
Which I have here.
It's right next to your cello.
No, I got your nausea knot.
I feel terrible about what we've said about Germany.
No, no, no.
I didn't even know they had a way to get us things.
Germany's fine.
They can take it.
You know, the Germans are used to being teased.
They like pastry.
Don't they?
They like certain pastries.
They like pastries with poppy seeds on them.
They like poppy seed pastries.
Poppy seed pastries, but you got to give them cake.
They like cake in Germany.
You like cake.
You love cake.
You know, they like cake in Austria.
In Germany, they like bread with mustard.
That sounds hearty.
They're a hearty people.
You like toast with honey.
That's not dissimilar.
I like toast with honey.
You know, I was thinking the other day, in all the gas stations in Germany, they sell these hot dogs, which they call sausages or versts.
They sell these really long...
sausages like comically long well like a tapeworm like how long comically long i mean they they have these uh they have these jars these glass jars this is in every gas station in germany oh god is it like the eggs is it like that kind of thing yeah yeah it's like it's like a hard-boiled egg next to the bar except it's a glass jar filled with like hot dog water and it has all these these like 18 inch long sausages oh god
And you go in and you get one of these things and then they give you a roll to go with the sausage.
But the roll is the size of a baseball.
So you have this 18 inch long sausage and then this baseball sized roll.
And for the life of me, I mean, I've been there dozens of times, and I love these versets, but I do not understand how they're meant to be consumed.
I don't know if you hold the hot dog in one hand and the roll in the other, and you take a bite out of one and then a bite out of the other.
Yeah, I think you'd have to alternate wiener ends.
Or do you cut the worst into quarter?
Do you cut it down lengthwise and then in half?
Could you make just a small incision and fold it to make a triple dog?
It says here, just quickly, 18 inches is 45.7 centimeters.
Forty-five centimeter verse.
Forty-five centimeter verse.
It sounds to me like, and you said the bun was approximately six inches.
Right.
Which would be, what, then, 15 centimeters.
It seems to me, and by the way, that is the worst would be eight and a half credit card widths.
Right.
The worst you can do is harm.
I thought we weren't going to quote your records.
You're allowed to.
You're the auteur.
So what you're saying is you could actually fold this versed in thirds and put it in the bun.
Germany's got a lot of rules.
They've got a lot of rules about a lot of things.
They do.
We shouldn't get into some of them, but I've been learning a lot about things that are illegal in Germany.
And maybe verse folding is maybe something that's frowned upon.
I couldn't tell.
You know, you sit in these gas stations and everybody that's in there, you know, the Germans, they're not making a lot of eye contact with each other.
Oh, we're sitting around gas stations, the Germans.
Everybody's sitting around this gas station eating these worst, and I've been watching them trying to figure out, like, what the way to do it is.
Everybody's got a different method.
It's like eating Oreos.
It's like eating Oreos.
Maybe it's the German Oreo.
There's a hot dog in a small bun.
A long hot dog in a small bun.
That's the German Oreo.
That whole like eating out of a jar.
I mean it's such an obvious joke for like a Simpsons thing.
But like I have never – John, we've talked – I mean I've eaten a lot of shit from a 7-Eleven.
I know you have.
Like actual literal shit.
Like I've had some very bad things from a 7-Eleven.
I've never had any desire to reach my arm.
Is it brine or vinegar?
Do you have any sense of what's – Something.
Okay.
I'm sorry.
I'm being reductive here.
I'm doing the intellectual LARPing I don't like.
Let me ask it as a question.
John, to your knowledge, first of all, have you ever eaten an egg out of a jar in a fast food place?
No, but I have eaten a jalapeno pepper out of a jar.
Hmm.
I've got, you know, I'm very uncomfortable, as you know, I'm very uncomfortable with open containers of food, any kind of salad bar type scenario.
Ever since 9-11, I can't stop thinking about it.
Here's my problem.
I don't like eggs.
Not at all.
No, no, no.
I mean, I like scrambled eggs.
I like baked eggs.
But I don't like a hard-boiled egg.
I made you eggs.
I make good eggs.
I don't like a hard-boiled egg.
Not at all.
And I don't like a brined egg.
Most people way overcook their eggs, including my wife.
I have a method.
I have a method for... She doesn't listen to this podcast.
Never.
She keeps thinking that she's going to listen to the Rubber Girl episode, but... Is that the one you're going to introduce her to?
Start at the top, right?
Give her a revolver.
You know what I'm saying?
Here you go, honey.
Play with this, darling.
Well, we'll get back to them.
I'll write that down for later.
But I do have a bulletproof egg cooking method.
But, okay, so you've had... Wait, did you see?
I saw this on the internet yesterday.
Somebody saying the actual best way to make a hard-boiled egg is not to boil it at all, but to put them in the oven.
To bake the egg.
Turns out.
In the oven.
Have you considered this?
I had not, but that would not be boiling.
Well, no, but it would be, I mean, the egg probably would be boiling inside itself.
You know, the best way to cook fried bacon is slow broasting.
Well, no, here's what you do.
You get a rolling boil, right?
This might be straight out of Craig Kilbourne.
Wait, is that the Daily Show guy?
Anyway, the New York Times guy.
Craig Kilbourne.
Okay, thank you.
I was actually on his show, the Craig Kilbourne show, when I was in Harvey Danger.
No kidding.
Was that out there?
I think Harvey Danger playing Sad Sweetheart of the Rodeo on the Craig Kilburg show.
Oh, that's a great song.
And it was my first time ever playing the bass through an amplifier.
You're kidding.
What?
Oh, come on.
I've told you this story.
I refuse to believe that.
Late, late show with Craig Kilburg.
Oh, my God.
Go search.
And you're right in the thumbnail, John.
You're wearing a blue shirt.
I see your face.
And I was the keyboard player in the band.
Right.
And Aaron Huffman, the bass player of Harvey Danger, got sick while we were on tour.
He got very sick.
Nice guy.
And he had to go home.
Oh, no.
And we were at the airport.
We were at Reagan National Airport in Washington, D.C., where I have been multiple times.
And we're standing in the airport.
Aaron's like, I got to go.
I got to go home.
I got to go to the hospital.
And he did.
He went to the hospital.
Would he have a flu?
He had pneumonia.
Poor Aaron.
He's such a sweet guy.
He's a wonderful man and a great musician.
They're a good band.
Yes.
Agreed.
But so we're standing at the airport and we're waiting to get on an airplane to go to Los Angeles to play on the Craig Kilbourne show.
And the bass player basically walks across the airport to a different airline and puts his credit card down and is on an airplane and
20 minutes later and it is gone like poof and so we're standing there sitting on our guitar cases and the the the band's like well what are we going to do we got to cancel this show and talking back and forth and then they all kind of look at me at once and they're like could you play the bass 42nd street get out there kid and i was like sure although i had never played the bass
That's got some fruity changes on it, doesn't it?
It seems straightforward, and then it's got some changes.
Aaron is like a lead guitar player who's just playing the bass.
Oh, gosh.
His bass lines are not easy.
Like a high-up-the-neck guy?
Well, and just like he plays through a distortion box, he plays melodies.
so i'm like i can do this and they got the bit this is before 9 11 so they got the base out of the base case they put it in my hand and they said carry this on the airplane listen to the song on your headphones and learn it while we fly across the country in a plane seat so i'm sitting in the back of this airplane with this because i walk on the airplane with the base and they're like can we help you put that in an overhead compartment and
And I said, lady, I'm supposed to be on national television tomorrow, and I have never played this instrument before, so you are not touching this guitar.
I'm going to have this with me.
And they put me in a seat in the back where there was nobody sitting next to me, which, again, does not happen anymore.
And I spent the whole plane flight...
with this bass in my hand and listening to the song we landed and there was a limo to pick us up and I sat in the limo with the bass and my headphones and we got to the hotel and I stayed up basically all night learning to play the bass my fingers were all blistery and red and I was like meh and in the morning I woke up
Did it again.
Listened to the song playing the bass.
The limo came to pick us up.
Took us to the Craig Kilbourne show.
The whole way there practicing.
And we walk in.
They walk us onto the stage.
And there's a guy standing there and he hands me a cable.
I plug it in to the bass and go, bump, bump, bump.
And that's the first time I've ever played an amplified bass.
And then I turn and there's a man standing there who goes, you're on in five, four, three, two.
And then we start playing the song.
And I had never played it with a band.
I had never played an amplified bass guitar.
Yeah.
And that is the version of Sad Sweetheart of the Rodeo you'll see on the internet, on the Craig Kilburn.
I'm scared to watch now.
How'd it go?
It went great because I was fueled by, I had massive waves of adrenaline, right?
So I'm just like, woohoo!
And not only am I playing the bass, but I'm also singing the harmony parts, which I had not been practicing.
God.
This is so much like a dream from junior high.
It was crazy.
I used to sing harmony parts from behind the keyboard, but as I was learning the bass part, I forgot that I also had all these singing parts.
And then once I was out there and we were playing the song and I was playing the bass, I just started singing my harmony parts too because I was fueled by such a massive adrenaline wave.
And it went fine.
It went great.
But then so we're after the show, we're in the green room and I'm coming down like off of a thousand waves of cocaine power of having just done that made my base debut on national television.
And everybody looks at me and they're like, well, you know, our next show is in Buffalo in two days.
Can you learn the rest of the set?
Can you learn the whole set on the base?
Yeah.
And I was like, yes, I totally can.
And so I spent the next two days, again, on an airplane, flying to Buffalo, in the hotel in Buffalo, learning every song in the Harvey Danger set.
And the first night was pretty rough.
The second night was better.
And by the third night, I felt like, yeah, I've got it.
I just learned 15 songs on an instrument I've never played for.
My hands were just, every night were just covered in blood because I hadn't been able to develop any calluses.
It was just, I had just shredded my fingers.
And after the third show, I was like, I got it.
And I quit practicing.
And that night, I went out, had some food in a restaurant, watched a little TV in the hotel room, went to sleep, woke up the next day feeling good, went for a walk.
And then we went to the show, and I had no recollection of any of the songs.
Oh, God.
I could not remember the first note of any one of the 15 songs and walked out on stage somewhere in Pennsylvania and was just like, uh, nothing.
It had, I stopped practicing and it was kept in my, it was kept in my Ram or it was kept in my ROM.
Never wrote to disc.
It never wrote to disc.
It was just in, it was just there in flash memory.
Yeah.
and then it was all gone and i had to i basically had to start at the start and and relearn how all the songs went again that night so that by the show the following day i kind of had it all back but there's one show in pennsylvania and thank god this was before people had camera phones there's one show in pennsylvania where i was out there just throwing my biggest bass shapes and
And basically was improvising, improvised soloing over the entire set.
So you can remember what key it's in and just hang out on the root a little bit.
I'd look over at the guitar player and he'd be glaring at me.
And I was just like, what is the note?
What was Sean's response?
You know, Sean... He's a pro.
He's a pro.
He's the front man, right?
So he's out at the front of the stage.
He's trying to put on a show.
And he was used to the band behind him being a little chaotic.
So this wasn't... Probably that show in Pennsylvania where I didn't remember any of the notes probably wasn't even the worst Harvey Danger show.
It's probably in the top... Including with or without you?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I mean, there are some shows where I wasn't even in the band that probably rivaled it for, I mean, certainly a number of people on stage who don't know what they're doing.
I don't think it was even in the top ten.
Were you in the audience for any of those?
I saw some Harvey Danger shows before I was in the band, some that were miraculous, some that were absolutely on fire, and some that were truly miraculous in another way.
And then, so what?
Did you get back at Sean later by making him sleep in the van?
Well, Sean realized, as everyone did pretty early, when we first started going on tour... For those who don't know, you... Then I hired Sean Nelson in The Long Winters.
Right, singer of Harvey Danger.
Singer of Harvey Danger became the Long Winters keyboard player and backing singer.
How do you like them apples?
Take that!
Say hello to the new boss!
Sam is the old boss!
But at the beginning of those early tours, there was a lot of resistance from people to sleep in the van.
Like, I don't want to sleep in the van.
I want to sleep in the hotel room.
And so I was like, all right, I'll sleep in the van.
You guys double up in some bed in a Super 8 motel.
But then people realized that...
you know, they're young guys.
They're most of the guys.
Well, everybody else in the band besides me was in their twenties and they want a little privacy.
You got a compulsive masturbator in the band.
They want a little, they want a little masturbation time.
Yes.
And so if you slept in the van, that was your opportunity to play with yourself.
Well, it's also, it's like six hours of not having to be around the other guys, right?
Six hours must've been huge.
Oh, my God.
No one is trying to tell me any stories about the Civil War.
No one is lecturing me right now about Tippecanoe and Tyler 2.
Don't touch my Tinkerbell poster.
No one is yelling at me.
No one is opening a can of tuna fish and spreading it on a pita bread.
No one is explaining to me why Sebado is the greatest band in American history.
I can just sit here and masturbate and enjoy a little alone time, sleepy time.
So the van became like a thing that people would fight over.
So I keep thinking the whole time you say this, answer however sensible, but what – there must have been times when that – if you like paid off by somebody being there when somebody tried to break in.
I mean how many times did that happen and who was there?
Well, our drummer, Michael, our drummer at the time, Michael Schilling, who is now a professor of literature at Cornish College of the Arts.
Nice.
Was in the van one night when a guy jumped up on the back bumper and started shooting Roman candles.
Yeah.
like bottle rockets no roman candles oh oh the sparky kind yeah uh well like shooting flaming balls like boom boom roman candles and michael tells this story it sounded kind of like a fever dream um where he uh the thing is we never he came running into the hotel room was like you guys you guys come out there's this guy's attacking the van and we all ran out there and there was nobody there and there's
Nothing, no sign of anything.
It kind of reminded me of the ghost of the Civil War dead that I saw when I was sleeping in the van out in front of your house.
Yeah.
So I can't think of a time when somebody, when like two thugs on a crowbar snuck up and were going to try and break into the van.
But this is also because when I would leave a club...
With a van full of gear and some dudes, I would take a circuitous route to lose any tails that I might have.
I would use some of my tail losing techniques that I learned in my FBI surveillance manual.
I would lose any tail.
So by the time we got to the hotel, it was pretty safe, pretty secure in the knowledge that we had not been followed.
Just a bunch of people from some kind of black ops just shaking their fists at you from like a Volvo.
Damn it!
Well, and the other thing I would do is if I felt like somebody was really going to, if I felt like it was a situation where there were a lot of guys lurking around eyeballing our van, I'd get everybody in the van and we'd drive for three hours out into the countryside.
In the direction you needed to go?
In the direction we needed to go.
So I was like, you know, if you guys want to rip off our van, that's fine.
You just have to follow us out into the night.
At 4 a.m.
we're going to pull over at a Super 8 somewhere.
And then do your worst.
There's something – I try to be sensitive about these things because I know you are – I have to imagine somewhat circumspect about what you share in a public forum like this.
Certainly your knowledge and your wisdom is something you're very generous with sharing.
But the various techniques that allow you to conduct yourself in the way you do now or in some kind of an apocalyptic world are things we want to – you don't tell people where the gun's hidden, right?
Exactly.
You don't say, oh, yeah, I've got a bunch of like –
silver ingots that I'm using as book stands.
What are those things called?
We put it at the end of a row of books.
You're a canny man.
No, over a Krugerrand.
You take an ingot over a Krugerrand?
Well, they don't make silver Krugerrands.
You don't want gold?
Don't they make a gold Krugerrand?
Well, they do, but gold's a lot more expensive than silver.
Oh, sure.
Okay.
It's easier to cash silver, too.
If you go to a Denny's or something.
Oh, I thought you meant cash like C-A-C-H-E.
Oh, sure, sure.
Sure, like geocaching.
And the thing is, before I had had as much exposure to you in general and specifically to your...
Just call it your training, especially via this program.
Self-training, autodidactic training.
Your autodidacticism.
I remember one day – stop me.
Again, we'll cut this out if it's anything that reveals too much.
No, no, no.
I'm comfortable.
You and I were on public transit going somewhere here in San Francisco, and you would do this thing.
You wouldn't even –
We didn't want to talk about that you did this thing, but you would always do this thing that struck me as being extremely weird.
And now I think it's really fucking weird, but I understand why you do it, which is I would stand up when our stop was coming.
I would stand up and I would go stand by the door.
And you would sit there in a way that was not only a stand, not only weren't standing up, but you kind of acted like you didn't know me.
Like maybe this guy just happened to be sitting there and I'd be turning around and looking at you.
Your expression would not change.
The doors would open.
I would walk out like an adult.
And at the very last moment, like Han Solo jumping through the closing sphincter, you would dive through the door.
And I would say, John, just for future reference, if we ride Muni together, when I stand up and move toward the door and say the next one's our stop, you can get off with me.
And you said, what did you say?
Well, you tell me.
I think what you said was, I don't want people to know my movements ahead of time.
Because that Chinese lady with the chicken in the six pink bags, you know what I mean?
That could be like a kind of Goldfinger situation.
i still do that you know when the when the uh when i was traveling with hodgman and we're sitting in an airport and they're like all right uh now boarding rose you know one through 15 and hodgman stands up and he's like that's us i'm like that's you
He's like, what do you mean?
We're both in row two.
We're sitting next to each other.
And I'm like, you can get on now if you want.
So he's like, well, I do want.
I'm like, okay, bye.
So he goes and he's staring at me all the way down the, and I'm just sitting there reading a newspaper.
I don't get on an airplane.
Maybe I'm not even taking a flight.
Maybe I'm just here.
Maybe I work here.
I work at the airport.
I'm not going to be reading this paper.
This might not be a paper.
You keep moving.
Don't worry about me.
When the woman from the airplane actually, when they have said final boarding call.
The doors are about to close.
And when they've said that three times and the woman at the gate kicks the little rubber foot on the door in order to swing it closed, that's when I stand up and walk briskly to the gate.
You hurl your carry-on bag and die.
Yeah.
A lot of times I'll be getting on the plane and they'll actually be shutting the door and I'll be like, oh, one more.
Coming through.
Tearing off your fake mustache.
You know, if I'm the last on the plane, it means whatever guy was following me didn't make it on the plane.
That's right.
Maybe next time, comrade.
Oh.
I think I could find a spot there.
So Hodgman gets on.
Let me turn this off.
Hodgman's like you.
He's like, oh, it's time to board the plane.
Oh, yeah.
No, here's the thing, John, is I get swept up.
I get swept up like anybody in the whole boarding thing.
And you know me.
I'm a Buddhist, not really a Buddhist, kind of a Buddhist.
I like to keep my head about me.
I don't like to be somebody who's being driven by the anxiety of people around me.
It's a terrible fucking idea.
It's no way to lead your life.
Agreed.
And so the thing is, at every moment of travel – I thought we were stopping, but I guess we're not –
The thing about traveling is that every step of the way, unless you have the right mental attitude about travel, you will constantly be going, I can't fucking wait to get to the next thing and I'll be angry until I do.
That's the default state of all travelers.
And so you want to get to the fucking airport.
You get to the fucking airport.
You want to get your fucking bag checked, right?
Security, hot dog, coffee, line, fucking what?
Really?
Really?
You're in seating area four and you're standing there with your six bags?
Yeah.
Why don't you, why don't you fucking move and let this lady with the baby through?
God damn it.
It makes me mad.
Everybody's, but I'm not really angry.
Right.
Cause I'm in the moment.
I got my head.
I'm a Buddhist.
I'm a fucking Buddhist.
And I sit there and I sit in my seat like a gentleman until they call it.
Right.
And then, and then I go up and I see that.
That's what I do.
And then you get in there and everybody's jostling around.
No, you're writing in first class with mustache boy.
So you don't have this situation.
Right.
But, uh, I don't know.
How, how do you score a first class seat?
Did you pay for that?
You know, sometimes... You're a musician.
You're a musician.
You can't pay for things like that.
You know, sometimes now they give you these, like, first-class upgrades for 50 bucks.
Alaska?
You fly in Alaska?
Yeah, Alaska.
Okay, so Alaska's different.
But the thing is, I'll tell you why I can already tell.
Not to reveal you.
I can tell that's bullshit.
First-class always checks in 100% full.
I have to say a redundancy every time.
Well, nowadays they do.
Always checks in 100% full.
100% totally full.
Nowadays, when I travel with John Hodgman, my travel is paid for.
Oh, he just peels off one of those novelty-sized bills.
He does.
He peels off a novelty-sized bill and he's like, this one's on me.
You know, he did over 60 of those commercials on television.
Yeah, I know he did.
I saw a photo of him on the internet.
We shouldn't talk about it on the show.
I saw a photo of him on the internet the other day.
Are we still doing the show?
I thought you'd cancel.
I thought you'd closed us out.
Yeah, yeah.
We stopped a long time ago.
Don't worry.
No, we're still recording.
And I saw him.
He still has that creepy mustache.
But he had kind of floppy, cool guy hair.
Is he working floppy, cool guy hair?
Or was he like Shemp?
He just needed to kind of pat it back down.
Because he looked kind of cool.
He looked like he was working a look.
Well, here's the thing.
Here's the thing about John Hodgman.
He, like a lot of people, he struggled to find the right haircut.
For a long time, I think, because, you know, he has a unusual head shape.
He has a head shape that that you can't just go into a barber and say, give me the standard preppy haircut.
I don't think you could either.
You have an extremely large head.
Well, that's why I taught myself how to cut my own hair.
Right, and he went to Yale.
And he went to Yale, so he was used to going to barbers and having barbering done.
I heard they have a whole skull and bones salon.
I don't know if that's true.
Skull and bones barbershop?
Yep.
But so for a long time, I think he was just having his hair cut by somebody, and he would get a different experience every time.
Well, in my sense, we've known each other.
I mean, I think at one point,
His wife even suggested that I cut his hair, and he was very, very unwilling to have me cut his hair.
How did he feel about her even offering that up on his behalf?
He was furious at her.
He was just like, no, no, no, no, no.
And partly it was that he didn't want me touching him, and partly it was just that he did not want...
He did not want that.
That was not a thing.
And she was like, but I mean, I think, you know, so he grew his hair a little bit.
And I think the prospect, maybe even the prospect of having me cut his hair was enough to what was enough to cause him to start thinking about his hair.
As he did, it had an effect.
Well, since that time, he has started wearing his hair in what I think is a much more becoming style for him.
And, you know, for me, I think like if I cut my hair too short on the sides, it really exacerbates the bigness of my head.
Does it make you look more like a juggalo?
It makes me look more like a guy that used to be in shape and now has a 26-inch neck.
And sells – Right.
But he still thinks of himself as being like beefy.
Yeah, he's beefy.
He's a slick guy.
He's got one of those – they call it a graphic tee with like this douchebag German Gothic black letter things on it.
It spells out Stussy or something like that.
Oh.
That guy.
Do you have to prove you've done date rape to buy an Ed Hardy shirt, or how does that work?
Ed Hardy is the hot rod guy, right?
I don't know.
Now, what about Adidas shower sandals?
Those are kind of rapey.
Boy, I have never... You know what?
I don't have shower sandals.
Good for you.
I take my chances.
I get in a shower, and it's like, am I going to get foot fungus here?
Is that the concern?
The concern is contagion?
Like you're going to get some kind of toe virus?
You're going to get toe virus.
You're going to get jock foot.
Yes.
And so I take my chances.
Yeah.
What about flip flops?
I don't like flip flops either.
I don't like them.
I don't like them.
I don't like anybody in them.
When I was living in New York...
It was right during the transition between when girls, girls during the 90s, you remember, all wore big chunky boots.
Combat boots, yeah.
And I thought that was so sexy.
On little skinny legs?
Yeah, big chunky boots and little baby doll dresses.
And then right there at the end of the 90s, there was this transition and all of a sudden they were wearing really expensive flip-flops.
Like expensive flip-flop, high-heel flip-flops.
Yeah.
I don't think you can do that.
High heel flip flops.
That was the new fashion.
And I was so disgusted by it, first of all, because people's toes are disgusting.
No, absolutely.
Second of all, combat boots were sexy.
I figured when we got to combat boots and baby doll dresses that we were at the end of fashion.
And that girls, this was going to be sexy from here on out.
Oh, that somehow it would be like the NASDAQ in 1999, that we would just be able to sustain this level of awesome sauce forever.
Yeah, right.
You can wear different dresses.
You can have pants.
We'll see variations on this, but at this point, the taste has changed.
But the boots, tall boots.
Mm-hmm.
That's we're done.
It's a great look.
And then high heel flip flops came in and I was and I'm right on the subways all the time looking at these girls and I'm like, you have craggy gnarly toes.
I don't want to see this.
I want you in boots.
It's big here.
You know how cold our neighborhood is like almost all the time?
Like it's 53 in our neighborhood every day.
Because the winter comes in.
We have a very, very unusual climate even for San Francisco.
San Francisco has got a crazy climate.
But even – I live in a pretty cold neighborhood where there are days will be – it will be 52 or 55.
It goes up and down.
But, I mean, homeostatically, it always ends back around 53 or 54.
And these kids, if they're not wearing their Ugg boots, they're wearing their fucking flip-flops.
And I think it's literally an atrocity.
How much worse can it get?
It's worse than Hitler.
If there's anything worse than Hitler, it's a lot of this modern footwear.
And really, the Ugg boots, it's like you either dress like a hooker on duty or a hooker on her day off, and not in a good bacon way.
That's awful, John.
I'm not even talking about going to the laundromat.
I'm talking about walking around the mall in flip-flops.
That's not appropriate.
Basically, if you are a girl between the ages of 13 and 60...
You should be wearing combat boots at all times.
But no navel piercings.
No piercings of any kind.
Maybe ear piercings if you're Mexican.
But combat boots.
But now you're attractive.
You represent the apex of fashion, at least in the last century.
And you're ready to run if shit goes down at the airport.
You're not going to get in John's way.
Thank you.
Yes.
Not only are you not going to get in my way, but if I grab you by the hand and say, come with me.
If you want to live.
Come with me if you want to live.
You have the appropriate footwear that we can team up.
Basically, if I'm in an airport, I'm scanning to see which girls have combat boots on, and then I'm choosing among those who I'm going to use as a mate to repopulate the world.
And that, I mean, it's a lot like, let's be honest, Dr. Strangelove, you're going to need that attraction, you know, especially as you age.
You're going to need an extremely high level, maybe untenably, let's be honest, untenably high level of sexual attraction in order for you to be able to even do anything toward approaching repopulating the planet.
Yeah, I mean, that's a big responsibility.
Let me ask you this.
They say this is it.
This is the last call for flight 3515 to Seattle.
The door is closing.
You throw your bag.
You hurl yourself through, and right behind you comes a slender girl with no belly button ring and a baby doll with big-ass combat boots.
Dang it!
And she gets up, she dusts herself off, and she says, I win.
She's almost certainly a Smirsh agent.
I'm really stopping there.