Ep. 32: "Incidental Boners"
Hello.
Hang on a second.
Can you hear me?
Yes.
All right.
Hang on a minute.
Oh, God.
My audio situation.
I don't think I understand computers anymore.
Oh, that's all right.
We can edit all this out.
Hi, John.
I can find my place just fine.
Oh, shit.
You didn't actually listen to it, did you?
No, I was just guessing those were the lyrics and that was the two.
God.
I wish I had a selective way to make sure there's certain things that you never see that I've done.
I just wanted you to see my effort.
That's all I cared about.
I know.
It's hard.
It's hard.
I made a multi-track song with many, many singings.
I'm not a professional, John.
I'm not a professional anything.
It was great.
Don't say that.
No, I really liked it.
No, you didn't.
Yes, I did.
I was singing it.
I can hear it.
I can hear it in your voice.
You can't hear anything in my voice.
You think you know me.
You think he's a crazy man?
You think you know what I say with my voice?
Your standards are very, very exacting.
And there's like – I wish I could selectively – like I think – can I just say I like to think that I could make –
a dick or poop or Hitler-related joke that you would enjoy.
I hope we're close enough that you would tell me if I was not entertaining you with that, but I don't want you to ever hear anything I've ever recorded regarding music.
It's hard.
The thing is that the first thing to mature when we are young artists is our critical sense.
Long before we are good at making a thing, we are good at knowing the difference between a good thing and a bad thing.
I think I have failed that test on every level because I don't even understand what that means.
Most people, what thwarts them as artists or as creators is that they hone their ability to say, like, that's a great song, that's a terrible song.
before they've ever made a song and then so they have that they have that that faculty and then they make their first song and they know that it's not good because they're already critics oh yeah yeah that's a different podcast i do but you're absolutely right and it keeps people from doing stuff yeah you start you develop your appreciation um
And then you hate your own work because you're a new artist.
You don't know what you're doing yet.
And then people stop.
They stop making stuff a long time before they have failed enough times to make something good.
So I love the fact that you continue to fail to make something good, Merlin.
Thank you, man.
I appreciate that.
Like I say, I really like to be rewarded for the effort.
No, thank you.
Seriously.
Well, no, let me respond.
I'll just say that I have a method for that that I have employed since about 1987, which is that I have really low standards and I'm very pleased with myself.
Mm-hmm.
And so, you know, I have a sense of things that I like and I don't like.
And I know when somebody is trying to sound like the Buzzcocks, but don't realize they're trying to sound like the Buzzcocks, like I'm pretty good at that.
But I essentially masturbate for a living.
And I'm very grateful in the sense that I get to mostly make things that hopefully turn out the way I liked.
Is your company accepting applications?
Well, it depends.
Can you tell me a little bit about your background?
Yeah.
I've been masturbating for, boy, almost 30 years.
30 years.
How much of that have you done professionally?
Well, depending, I would say probably I've been professionally masturbating for 15 years.
So 15 years as an amateur, and then there's that pro-am period.
They call it prosumer masturbation.
Prosumer.
And then I think I've been working at a pretty high level.
I've been masturbating at a pretty high level for the last 10 years.
Well, this is terrific.
I've just been quickly looking over your resume, and it seems like there was a hockey stick curve, if you like.
Uh-huh.
That's part of my technique, the hockey stick curve.
Oh, they call it the hat trick.
You ever done the hat trick?
That's under a dictionary.
Well, I got to tell you, I think there's a lot of things that we can talk about here.
It looks like, I don't know, it seems like a lot of your masturbation isn't as public as it used to be.
Boy, that's the truth.
Are you storing up?
You saving it for somebody special?
I'm storing up, and when I start back again, it's going to be like that Sherwin-Williams logo.
You're going to cover the world?
Cover the world.
Oh, man.
I got to show you some stuff on the internet.
Oceans of spooge.
I am really curious about how much internet com is real.
Because a lot of it seems like it really seems kind of like stagecraft, a lot of it.
You know, my first introduction to porn was... Whoa, whoa, whoa.
I didn't know we were going to talk about porn.
Masturbation is one thing, but porn... You're talking about cum on the internet.
Were you just going to bucketsofcum.com?
That's with two Ks for bukkakaki cuck?
It's not... Bukaki bucket.
Is that a thing?
It's not connected to porn at all.
It's just shots of warehouses of 50-gallon drums.
Ha ha!
It's a very rarefied vertical space, if you know what I mean.
Okay, Bukkake.
That scene at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark, just wheeling a cart through the house.
Yeah, like Citizen Kane.
It's just cartons and cartons and cartons of manges.
So Bukkake, I always spell Bukkake wrong.
And then I'm going to go with Bucket, with B-U-K-K-I-T dot com.
Bukkake.
Bukkake Bucket, with two Ks.
Uh-oh, brother.
I didn't even know what Blumpy was, and now we're talking about Bukkaki.
Yeah, Bukkaki Bucket.
You know, I'm not going to buy it because I'm actually shedding, but any of our listeners, if I could say, I don't want to give you guys business advice, although, you know, I think it's something John and I could help you with.
Bukkaki Bucket with 4Ks, excuse me, 5Ks is available.
Last night we were talking about why is there no, why have I never seen a bass guitar
Shaped like a giant bone.
Seems like a natural thing that somebody would have done years ago.
You're playing a bone bass.
But we went online last night.
We were having a little party and we were like, what the?
Bone bass?
Come on.
And we couldn't find one anywhere on the internet.
Are you thinking of a traditional cartoon bone that a dog would chew on?
Yeah, like a bone.
If Bam Bam from the Flintstones was playing bass in a 60s cartoon Archie style band.
I think that would be Mike Anthony, I think.
Right.
Why doesn't Mike Anthony have a giant bass that looks like a cartoon bone?
He's got the money.
You know, he could go to what they call a luthier.
Or Les Claypool.
Why doesn't Les Claypool have a giant bone base?
Bucket up, bucket up, bucket up, bucket up, bucket up, bucket up, bucket up, bucket up, bucket up.
It's the same song.
Bucket up, bucket up, bucket up.
That's when he hires the homeless guy.
That's the bridge.
Oh, so anyway, my introduction, my first introduction to porn.
I want to come back to the bone, though.
I got a couple questions about that.
Someone introduced you to porn.
Please continue.
Passive Overcome.
is the German phrase, Uber come.
Oh, God.
I want to start every aspect of this over.
There's no way this is going to turn out well.
My Skype was broken.
I got a 31-track song you don't like, and now we're talking about Bones Boners and Jizz Bones.
jizz bones jizz bones jizz dry bones my god jizz bones what a great band name let's see hang on let me check jizz bones j-i-z-z-b-o-n-e-z dot com jizz bones boom that's the second one bukkake bucket and jizz bones
People are going to gobble these up.
I mean like a Japanese lady.
Well, and we'll get our venture capital 5%, right?
I want to let you talk about porn.
I want to let you continue.
But do you think that we could possibly – this is a vertical space that we could have some kind of a penetration with.
We could get somewhere deep inside the porn sites with lots of Zs and Ks.
Uh-huh.
And that could be the thing.
After all the things we've done in our lives, that could be the thing.
Okay.
And we'll start an ISP called – I'm trying to think.
So jizz, bucket, jizz – You know what?
Jizz bones.
You know what?
The thing is I think it writes itself.
And we could be angel investors.
We could be early comers.
We get in there early.
Okay.
You'll be one of those guys like in the early days of the internet where you're just stealing all the... You're just sitting on all these great names.
And then when the culture turns our way, when the culture finally catches up with us... People accept the prominence of bones that we're clearly putting out there.
When the culture arrives, as it will one day, when the ship of culture docks at the dock of Jizz Bucket...
The great and roiling jizz-filled seas.
And all of the nerds and freaks are like, jizz buckets, jizz buckets.
And we're sitting there on top of all these J-I-Z-Z-B-U-K-K-U-T-T-E-S.
I have so much I have to do today, and yet I'm going to probably spend the rest of my day – I'm going to make a 29th version of that song, or I'm going to spend the rest of my day finding combinations of Zs and Ks that involve coming and boners.
Now, John, because of that, I want to let you continue.
But when I just now – it doesn't really matter exactly why, but I have a setup on my computer here where when a website doesn't come up, it takes me to this alternate thing that says, hey, this didn't show up.
I don't just get an error for what it's worth.
Just for what it's worth, I don't know if this is something we – obviously, we want to do angel investments.
We want to get in early, get out early, really, really withdraw from the entire process as early as possible to earn back what we have coming.
And so just for what it's worth, when I went to –
When I went to... Oh, my God.
I so want to buy this.
J-I-Z-Z-B-O-N-E-Z.
Jizz Bones.
Jizz Bones.
Okay.
But when I... I didn't get an error.
You know what it says?
Did you mean jazz bones?
Because apparently in Tacoma...
Which I think is near where you are.
There's a place called Jazz Bones, and I'm just saying, you get a bucket of that fucking Sherman Williams cum paint, and you change an A to an I, and you get jizz bones right in Tacoma.
Tacoma jizz bones.
Letterman takes an I off of his letter sweater, and he changes jazz bones to jizz bones.
There was a place – I was telling my daughter about this because I learned about letters and reading that I've always been fascinated by places that used to be something else.
Actually, I couldn't put my hand to it now, but there used to be a website that was all just photographs of things that used to be different things.
All those Thai food restaurants that are in old A&W root beer drive-ins.
Exactly.
You could tell what used to be popular by what kind of Asian restaurant or dentist is in it now.
Right?
It's like, oh, it's a Pizza Hut or a urology clinic.
We're not sure.
There's an International House of Pancakes, which is a pretty distinctive architectural style.
Blue-roofed, like, Bavarian shack.
And it's totally like, House of Hong.
Yeah.
There was this chain of not very good restaurants, you know, like diner-style restaurants.
You know, like there's that kind of – in the 70s and 80s, there was those places that weren't really – like a Denny's, right?
It wasn't really a diner.
You know what I mean?
They were trying to do a family-style restaurant.
It was called The Clock Restaurant.
And their hook was that every sign – hang on for this.
Every sign had a clock, a literal working clock on it, which is kind of cool.
It was called The Clock Restaurant.
The Clock.
Right.
Yeah, yeah.
And down the street from my house, one of them went out of business like most of them.
And some jackals went in there and took the place over.
They didn't feel like putting a lot of dough into creating new brand equity.
So they went out there with some black paint and changed it to the old look.
With an apostrophe.
The old look.
Exactly.
It's like as you do.
It's an Irish cuisine, I imagine.
They took the C out.
The old look.
The old look.
There wasn't an exclamation point or anything.
It was just, oh, look.
Well, you know, there's this restaurant down here by Boeing Field that we go to all the time.
It's right next to the Boeing Black Ops area where the engineers are making airborne space lasers.
That's not a very good Black Ops if you know there's a restaurant next to it.
Sorry, we'll cut that out.
I know things.
Okay, sure.
You know jazz bones.
From where I live, I can look down into their black ops area, and I see them killing squirrels or whatever they do to fight the Soviets.
So this restaurant's next door, and it's one of those places, and I think it used to be a Sambo's.
Oh, yes.
And then many, many years ago, a guy named Randy must have bought it.
It still has the orange naugahyde seats, and the ceiling is covered with model airplanes of different sizes.
But at a certain point, the Randy's sign... So he changed the sign to say Randy's, but then there must have been a hard wind or something, and the top of the D fell off.
So now it says Randy's.
Randy's.
That's kind of weird.
It's great.
In my head, I always thought Sambo's and Denny's were exactly the same restaurant, except one of them had a racial slur.
Oh, and had a little coolie boy riding an elephant.
That was the...
Well, yes, you know, Denny is a denigrating term for lions.
You shouldn't say that.
I don't know what that standalone fucking shit means.
You shouldn't say Denny?
No, you shouldn't say Denny.
Denny is very disparaging to lions.
It's not family friendly for lions.
They live in dens.
I had to help you on that one a little bit.
That's ping pong.
Jizz bones.
You had to walk me through it.
Bukkake bucket and jizz bones.
So I'm watching porn.
Porn.
I'm in fifth grade, sixth grade.
I don't even know what porn is.
You came to this early.
The only boners I had ever had were incidental boners because of corduroy.
Yeah.
With the whistling?
Yeah.
But so in Anchorage, before there was cable TV, there was something called Visions, which was you had an antenna on your roof that was shaped like a giant candy corn.
And everybody in town that had Visions pointed their candy corn antenna at this central location where they would broadcast one channel.
Visions was just one extra channel, but it had movies and stuff.
And you could kind of drive through Anchorage and see.
It was a shorthand class indicator.
Who had a Visions antenna on the top of their house?
You knew they had a little bit of money to spend on extra TV.
And again, we have to just state for the kids that having cable in the 70s, if you got it, it was a big deal and it was expensive.
If you had HBO and Showtime, that was a really big deal.
Yeah, it was like having a BMW parked in front of your house.
And this was back when class and status, I think, were more like everything in America.
When we were in high school, there were only four kinds of kids.
There were the rockers, there were the preps, there were the jocks, and there were the losers or whatever.
And now there are 450 different kinds of kids.
You could have 74 different permutations of rockers.
I don't even know how you would be in high school now because you'd be like, oh, I'm Swedish death metal.
Oh, I'm, you know, Belgian death metal.
And it's like, we don't talk.
But when we were kids, right, there's only four different kinds of things.
And there were only four different ways that you could show you were rich.
And one of those ways was that you had a visions antenna on your house.
Anyway, we did not have visions.
But at one point, I was clicking through the channels on my dad's old TV, which had a, this is going to be very hard for young people to visualize, but it had a knob that you turned the channels, right?
It was pre-digital TV.
It would go two through 12 or 13, I believe.
Two through 13, and then there was UHF, right?
And you click through click, click, click.
UHF was like tuning an AM radio.
You had to get it right.
Yeah.
Well, and that's exactly what happened here.
So I was clicking through the channels one time, and I got in between two channels, and all of a sudden on the screen came this ghostly, like, shadowy image of another channel.
And, you know, so we had channels, we had channel 4, 7, 11, and 13 were the, oh, and 9, I'm sorry.
No, no.
Yeah.
Well, whatever.
There were four channels.
And then all of a sudden there's this fifth channel, this mystery channel.
And I realized very soon that if I turn the, turn the knob in between these two channels, I was getting visions from some neighbor.
Some wires had crossed or somebody had put too much foil on their windows and it was broadcasting visions into my TV.
If I sat and monkeyed with the, it wasn't scrambled.
It was just, just, um, this was pre scrambling.
Oh,
God.
They came up with scrambling like a year and a half later.
But this is, they were just broadcasting it, and obviously they came up with scrambling because people were hijacking the signal this way.
So then, because I had heard from kids at school that they had dirty movies on visions late at night,
I stayed up late to watch my first porno.
And I could... My dad, when he snored, you could hear him four blocks away.
So I knew that I was safe.
He was sleeping.
I could hear him snoring in the other room.
And I snuck down and I turned the TV on.
And here was this porno movie...
And I had never seen any of these things before.
I had never seen a penis.
I had never seen boobs.
I had never seen any of this.
And these people start having sex and they get to the end.
And this is one of these 70s porno movies that was probably shot on 75 millimeter film.
And it had a plot about a princess who was fighting like some ogres.
And then there was a pizza delivery guy.
And then it was Corvette Summer starring Mark Hamill.
Yeah.
There was all these things, right?
There was all this plot.
But the big climactic scene, literally, the woman...
starts having an orgasm, and they must have rigged up some sort of, like, landscaping hose, some plastic tube that you would use to water your ferns or something, hooked it up somehow in a way that my knowledge of anatomy didn't enable me to, like, fully grasp.
And she started to have an orgasm, and this foaming, like...
shaving cream lotion started like fountaining out of her and it was i it must have had something to do with the plot of their move she was a space princess or something and she had this foamy orgasm
But to my fifth grade eye, it was the most horrifying thing I had ever seen because clearly if you had sex with a girl, you needed a hazmat team to come in afterwards.
She was like buried up to her ears in this stuff.
And it traumatized me for years afterwards.
In fact, ever since then, every time I have sex with a girl, there's a part of me that thinks, is she going to... Is she one of these girls that's going to have the... Was it like a hot lather machine?
It was... They rigged up something.
It was like a Rolling Stones video.
Oh, like when they're in the tent?
Yeah, there were guys in sailor suits.
And all of a sudden, it was like a foam party.
It was like Ibiza.
And again, it was coming through kind of grainy.
So I'm not sure what I was seeing, frankly.
Okay, so first of all, my first thought on that is that they knew exactly what they were doing and they were sending some kind of a black ops false porn signal to keep you off of it.
Like maybe they were going to do something like maybe another night like a hot dog fell out or something like that.
Or maybe she came paperclips.
I'm saying maybe they deliberately sent you.
There's probably a term for this in your industry.
We'll cut this out if it's a problem.
But they probably were sending some kind of a canary trap, kind of like fake signal that they knew would scar an entire generation if they were stealing UHF TV.
Wow.
I don't know.
I don't know.
I don't want to get too far into the lady parts and the liquids, but it's just very disturbing to me.
But I think a lot of the people – I thought this about sandwiches, that sometimes I think the people who make sandwiches have never eaten a sandwich, right?
I think sometimes that the people who – I thought you were going to say that lady parts resemble a sandwich.
Oh, you ever have a sandwich that tastes like a 9-volt battery?
No.
Because it's like full of blood?
You never heard that comparison?
No, I guess not.
Some people say a lady, her basement tastes like a 9-volt battery.
That's what some people say.
Oh, I see what you're saying.
I was just saying that lady parts kind of look like a roast beef sandwich on its side.
You know, I always thought that too, like a roast beef taco.
I used to think that.
Oh, this is terrible.
Yeah.
Okay.
My only thought on this is, people who make... Okay, so I used to get this a lot of times.
You go to a grocery store, you're hungry, and you get a sandwich.
And they make a sandwich that is nothing like any food that I ever had in my life.
There was no intention at ever being eaten.
They would never make themselves this fucking holocaust of a sandwich and then eat it, right?
People, for example, you think like, okay, the people who work at a bank...
and have lots of money like they you could tell that they probably never use their own website because it's so unusable and you would never in a million years want to even trust that organization i think a lot of people who like make pornography do not even masturbate i think they have some kind of an artistic vision that did i say autistic because that's probably what i should have said an autistic vision because because what the fuck why do i need foam coming out now which is an african-american lady a caucasian lady could you tell her background
Like I say, it was kind of pixelated.
She seemed green and orange.
You had a color TV?
It was a color TV, but it could have been that she was a space princess, and green and orange was actually the makeup she was wearing.
This is the problem.
Now, today we've got Tivo's, we've got Video On Demand.
There's so many ways.
There's no way you could have gone back to find out why she had shaving cream coming out of her vagina.
No, although I did recently remember I had a memory of this same era watching a movie called The Great Texas Dynamite Chase.
The plot of which was that two girls in halter tops and short shorts, Daisy Duke shorts, hooked up with a young cowboy and went on a...
cross country crime spree where they were using dynamite to blow up banks or something.
I don't remember, but I saw it when I was young and it was at a time when I was a tremendous pyromaniac and all I wanted in life was to have dynamite.
I thought if I had a box of dynamite,
That all of my problems would be solved.
I would never be bullied, certainly.
You'd certainly never want for anything again.
Right.
What can you not get if you have a box of dynamite?
Well, it's a little bit like today, like you feel with money.
You're like, if I have money, you know what I mean?
I can buy what I need and I won't worry anymore.
When I was a kid, I felt like if I had money, I would buy dynamite.
Like dynamite was the thing at the top of the, like, yes, money, right, in order to get dynamite.
I could skip money and just have dynamite, and I would already be there.
Is this the era where you would pick up the things that they put on the railroad tracks to warn people?
What are those called?
Oh, the torpedoes.
Is this around that era?
Same era.
I had fireworks, catalogs.
You know, I was expelled from—I was put on emergency suspension in ninth grade.
Ooh.
because i had uh i was basically making pipe bombs and selling them to other kids at the school you were like a elementary school tony stark you're like selling munitions and materials to to people
Yeah, yeah.
Is that what that's called?
Ordinance?
Ordinance.
And I had suggestions like, hey, you know, it would be great if you tried to flush this down the toilet.
Light it and then flush it down the toilet.
That would be hilarious.
I love the idea of you being a pipe bomb salesman.
So I had these.
I was making pipe bombs.
And, of course, I didn't know.
Well, first of all, there's no safe way to make pipe bombs.
And I was practicing.
I knew enough not to, like, try and tamp down gunpowder with a metal spoon.
But beyond that, like, I was not handling this material in a safe way.
This materiel in a safe way.
And on top of that, like, I was not even trying to be secretive about it.
I was like, get your pipe bombs.
Line up, you know.
And in high school, there were all kinds of crap.
creeps and this is before the before Columbine obviously there's a lot more creativity then yeah you could you could there were a lot of there's no template there's no template there were a lot of reasons that a ninth grader might want a pipe bomb other than like hurting his classmates blowing up the school right you would take a pipe bomb a lot of reasons you might want it and sister a cat a bike sure just like you know just throw it in the
So, yeah, they put me on emergency suspension.
I was suspended.
You know, there was a clause in the student handbook that said, like, you know, your first suspension is three days, your second suspension is six days, and then you're expelled or something.
Wow.
But emergency suspension was a thing where you were an immediate danger to yourself and others, and you could be put on indefinite, immediate indefinite suspension.
Sounds like something Dean Wormer would do.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And I, oh man, I was in trouble.
I had to meet with the police.
That's serious, John.
Yeah.
And my mom was really, she was a good sport about it.
She made me sit at a table in our kitchen.
for nine days with with my books open in front of me and she would she would like come home from work and give surprise inspections and she wanted to see she wanted to see at the end of the day that i had done homework assignments she would she would measure the stack with a ruler you know what i mean like i had to do homework assignments
co-measure it with having sat at a table.
That's just pure punishment.
There's nothing to reform you there.
That's pure punishment.
Just sit at this table.
I do not want you to get up.
I do not want to see a comic book having been read.
I don't want you to have a glass of water.
Sit at this table.
you bomb making inconvenience like f in class earning little ninth grade piece of shit now i want to understand you're obviously you're it sounds to me like your business had been uncovered were you bringing them to school or were you taking orders and delivering them off-site
No, here was the problem.
I had a locker full of pipe bombs.
See, that's a rookie mistake.
Yeah, and my favorite teacher and mentor, and ultimately he became the principal of the school.
This isn't KUFL.
No, this isn't KUFL.
This is pre-KUFL.
This is Don Shackelford.
Don Shackelford was the one who, like...
Basically, he caught wind of me having these pipe bombs.
I might have even mentioned it to him.
And he ratted me out.
He ratted me out and he stood there while the security guards emptied my locker and led me from the school.
He stood there calling me an asshole.
Like...
bombs in your locker you brought bombs to school you asshole and i i felt really betrayed until you know he was on your side i did i was like don jackleford you're my guy and he's like not with the not with not when it comes to bombs and then i realized of course he was he uh he was absolutely right
When did you realize that?
Like, just now.
So you don't blame Shackleford anymore?
I'm still a little mad.
It's a little bit of a betrayal, but I feel like he probably did the right thing.
It was probably a health and safety issue.
Some kids have allergies to milk and shrimp.
Maybe there was, you know, just concerns.
You know what I'm saying?
I think he wasn't worried that I was...
So dangerous as much as I was like selling these things.
That's what my mom would say.
My mom would say the reason that you can't leave the house is that it's not, you know, it's not you that I'm worried about.
It's the rapist in the woods that I'm worried about or whatever.
Or driving.
That's my words, not hers.
But she would say, you know, driving.
I'm not worried about you driving.
I'm worrying about the other people.
Which I think she meant and believed, and I often think that same thing.
That's how I feel about these fucking people on the bikes with the stop signs.
You know what I mean?
It's like they're causing tremendous chaos for people.
I don't know why they do it.
And I keep thinking, this is my theory on this, where I'm coming to you with this.
You're talking about bicyclists who are riding in the street like cars, but when they come to stop signs, then suddenly they turn into magic bikes that don't have to obey laws.
Yeah.
Oh, absolutely.
Well, there are some people.
It's a thing.
I'm sure you've seen it there.
I know you've seen it in Portland.
But it's a thing to just bust through stop signs when you're on a bike because I guess that's just a special thing you get to do.
So there are some people, like skateboarders, who are really good at it.
And they know to at least turn their head slightly to the left and the right to see if they're about to hit anything.
Because if a car hits you when you're on a skateboard, you really notice it.
I would say next to maybe like a raccoon or a Taco Bell rapper, you're going to lose to almost everything when you're on a bike.
Yeah, right.
You're definitely going to lose to a raccoon too.
You know what?
You're right.
They got those claws and they're very – you know what?
I should start over.
So anyway, I'm not sure where I'm going with this.
But my thought is here's the problem.
I call this the two-asshole theory.
If there's one asshole, we'll probably be fine, right?
If one person blows through a stop sign like a fucking sociopath –
endangering my and my child's life not that i'm angry that's a problem because i'm looking for them right right and of course a lot of these folks are super entitled about this and they're like oh yeah well do you know what car well yeah well but i like i got a car and like i can't see you and you know and i'm looking out for the other assholes and then you fucking blow through a stop sign now my thing is or you know cars obviously cars do this too anybody who blows through stop signs and stop lights it's like people who don't stop for ambulances like they should just be put somewhere
You always pull over for – like a gentleman.
You fucking pull your car over and you sit there.
You don't get mad.
You sing the fucking national anthem and you wait until somebody goes and gets their goddamn life saved.
Yeah, yeah.
It's a gentleman issue.
It's a gentleman issue.
Now, here's the thing.
Here's my thing.
And this is actually – I have to say literally setting aside shaving cream coming out of a lady on TV.
I would have to say my biggest fantasy is for like four bicyclists to do that at the same intersection at the same time and to make some kind of like keystone cops –
It's all going to be like ironic mustaches and fixies everywhere.
Messenger bags flying through the air.
Do you think they have hipster ambulances?
Maybe?
I'm just thinking they come out.
In Brooklyn, they have those Hasidic ambulances.
How does that work?
They're less expensive?
How does that work?
No, not at all.
So the Hasidic Jewish community in New York has its own— Very tight, very tight, very closed community.
And they have their own ambulance service and their own special Hasidic police.
So if you have a crime committed against you, you don't call the regular cops.
This is such a Saturday Night Live sketch.
Absolutely not.
Google it or Bing it or whatever you use.
Bing it.
Yahoo it.
Instead of sirens, it just goes...
What are you going to do?
What are you going to do?
For real?
Okay, seriously.
But it's a standard EMT-style setup.
Are they wearing the garb?
Are the EMTs wearing the garb?
Absolutely, except on the sides of the ambulances, instead of ambulance, it says ambulance in Hebrew.
Oh, see, that's not smart.
Well, my question has always been, if one of those is driving down the street...
not on its way to somewhere.
They're just like coming back or something.
And they see me have a heart attack.
and they're just driving by eating a pastrami sandwich or whatever, are they going to pull over?
Or do I have to... Would you be in a car when this happens?
No, let's say I'm walking down the street, and they're stopped at a stoplight, and I'm walking right in front of them, and I go, and I have a heart attack.
Like you get hit by a hipster on a bike.
Let's say I'm walking across the street in Brooklyn, and it's a four-way stop, and four hipsters collide, and I get hit with a crank from one of their demolished bicycles.
Is the Jewish ambulance going to help me or like, do they, have they sworn to the Hippocratic oath or have they sworn?
No, no, no, no, no, that's, that's Greek.
That's, that's Greek.
That's totally different thing.
That's a new Testament.
Here's the thing.
Here's what you need to understand is that there is, there is a law about all of this somewhere in a book.
It's a good Samaritan law.
That's, again, the New Testament.
But here's the thing.
First of all, they would want to be sure that you don't have dairy and meat on you at the same time.
That's one thing, I think.
They would have to use a separate set of plates.
They have a separate ambulance.
They'd have one ambulance for your meat and the other for your dairy, I think.
Right?
And they have separate stretchers for this.
If I get hit with a crank from a demolished hipster bicycle and my dairy is separated from my meat...
You should be on the visions with your dairy and your meat.
I don't think I want to be saved.
Okay, quick concept.
Hasidic porn.
Never mind.
I'm just saying.
I'm just saying that dairy and meat...
There is, I think, porn.
There is a whole subset of porn now about quote-unquote Arab women wearing hijabs.
I've seen that.
I've also seen Indian ladies with the dots.
Oh, yeah.
Well, that's sexy.
You like the dot?
What is that?
An eye of God kind of thing?
I don't know.
Does it mean you're taken?
Does it mean you're a pledge?
What does it mean?
When the Amish paint the door red, it means that they have a marriageable daughter.
What?
I thought they weren't allowed to use red.
Well, there's a whole code of what color your front door is in Amish culture that indicates to passers-by whether your daughters are courtable.
Your entire means of progress and egress is based on who should marry your daughter and what you think her value proposition is.
You get a door.
You change your door based on her status.
I think that's true.
I think maybe it's a blue door, something like that.
That must be a big day.
Your daughter gets to be 14, 15.
Maybe you buy her a button.
And you paint the door.
Or you go to Homish Home Depot and get a new door.
I think you keep the old door, but you paint it.
Okay.
Is this Sherwin-Williams paint?
Yeah, that's right.
They cover the world.
I'm sure they make their own paint out of pigments that they grow themselves.
You don't think that's prideful at all?
I thought that was a conceit of the English.
Color?
Yeah.
I thought they weren't allowed to have color in buttons.
Well, they wear blue and lavender.
Did I ever tell you about the time I was on a train up in northern North Dakota, and every time the train stopped... This was an Amtrak train, not a freight train.
Every time the train stopped, all these Mennonites...
would get on, and they were all wearing, like, lavender and peach.
Not peach.
What am I trying to say?
Lavender and, like, these shades of kind of green and blue that were... They were so beautiful.
Like Easter egg kind of pastels.
Easter eggs.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And they'd all get on the train...
in one little tiny North Dakota town.
And they would ride it two stops to some other little tiny North Dakota town.
Then they'd all get off the train and some different Mennonites would get on.
And I realized that Amtrak is running this like Mennonite taxi service across the Northern Plains.
That's the only way they get between these.
They're different villages.
And I'm sure they're putting their marriageable daughters on these trains and sending them two villages up.
Did you ever figure out, is it like a hanky code?
Did you ever figure out what the colors meant?
No, but it's the same.
I think it is a hanky code.
I think that's what it is.
Lavender probably means something.
So you wear like the standard garb.
It's just that it's in what would normally in like Pennsylvania might be considered kind of a garish.
Yeah, but it says like I'm a taker or I'm a giver or whatever.
Right.
They have those for stuff like urine too.
The hanky coat is very complicated.
I read about it once and I had to put it away.
It was just too much.
I want to be peed on.
And if you put it in the wrong pocket, that gets everything wrong because then you send the wrong message.
What you're really saying is you might be saying that you want to be the rider and not the lady horse.
And if you put that in the wrong pocket...
There actually was a while in the 90s when I would walk around Capitol Hill, Seattle's gay neighborhood, with an assortment of hankies in my back pocket just to scramble the airwaves.
That's awful.
I'd put a green hanky in my back right pocket not knowing what I meant.
You didn't even research it at all?
Not knowing what it symbolized, just knowing that it meant something.
And then I would walk around Capitol Hill.
I think it means you're into mucus.
Sending this message.
It was just part of culture jamming.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, you must have, did people ever talk to you about it?
Because I think when you do the hanky thing, there's a couple of messages.
The second message is that, you know, I like blood play or poop or lady horses, but I think the first message is it's okay for you to come talk to me about this.
Right.
It's like, you know, it's like in San Francisco, there's people walking around with two large dogs and they're all mad when you ask about them.
Right.
Which is fucking ridiculous.
And I have two huge Afghans, but please don't stop and talk to me about it.
That's right.
Well, but the thing is, yes, I have five cormorants.
They're flightless.
The thing about me walking around Capitol Hill with a handkerchief in my back pocket is I didn't ever stop.
I didn't slow down.
But don't you think people had questions?
Don't you think they wanted to maybe buy a coffee?
I was like a blue angel just coming right down over the surface of the lake and just...
strafing strafing the gaze just strafing him and they'd be like what he do you see him he's into he's into mucus he wants to be a mucusy lady horse but i'd be gone i'd be two blocks away even just completely like immune completely ignorant of what i had just done man you're stirring a pot my friend
We used to... I think we had weird cable by the time I had cable.
I think it was getting very mature as an industry.
But my friend had the cable where you get the scrambling.
And it's really weird because there's also a weird... I don't know if this is a gay thing.
I've never thought of it this way.
But there is kind of a thing about watching porn with your friends that in retrospect is kind of weird.
It seems to me that that should be a... That should be... You should do that in your Garrett.
Well, the thing about teenage boys and gayness...
is that I think that the culture... I wish that the culture when we were teens was more accepting of a little bit more gayness than it allowed for.
Like penis gayness?
Or what kind of gayness?
Well, I don't know.
I feel like when I was about 13, 14, there was a window of gayness
that I wish I had gone, I wish I had sat on the ledge of the window of gayness.
The sill of gay.
I wish I had sat on the sill of gay a little bit with my feet dangling out, a little bit longer than I did.
And it was absolutely because, like now, I get the feeling that if you were a teenager and you are sitting around with your friends watching porn,
and somebody says something kind of gay, that you might be a little bit more accepting of it in the full flush of that moment.
And at the time that I was a teenager, you had to maintain a rigorous...
Yeah, rigorous separation.
Yeah, you got to say disparaging things about the people.
Yeah.
Oh, this is gross.
Why are we even watching this?
Yeah, or that's what... See, that's what I would do, but I think also you could talk about, you know, you could remark about how you like that lady's bosom, or you could remark about how that person's not as attractive as you would like.
You could remark that that's not the kind of tool belt that a cable guy would actually wear.
You could point out... Yeah, I don't know if I knew that much about tool belts, but...
I was always changing the subject moments like that.
Always changing the subject.
But I look back, I look back at that time.
I think I can think of a couple of, a couple of specific episodes where there was, where I was a 13 year old and there was another 13 year old and he, he said something like after school, we would be like playing stick ball and
Or whatever it is that kids do.
I don't remember being a kid.
But he would insult me in such a way that we would start wrestling.
I would grab him, and then we'd be wrestling.
And you're 13, and it's like, what are you wrestling about?
You're not really wrestling.
Oh, I think I know what you mean.
He was taunting me, but he was taunting me because he wanted to wrestle.
And then I was like, I'll get you, and then we're wrestling, and it's kind of like we're...
We're all tangled up with each other in a kind of wrestling thing.
And you want to say, and I look back at those and I'm like, oh, we were being, we were experimenting.
We were being gay with each other.
And if we had just had, if we had a little bit more freedom in those moments, we would have been able to just be like, just full on gay.
But it seems like it falls somewhere between ballroom dancing and spitballs.
And obviously dancing is an opportunity to be very, very close to a woman in a way that would hopefully not be very threatening to her.
You know, you both get to have this public thing.
If you think about dancing, it's pretty crazy.
You get to touch her, you put your arm on her.
Oh, my gosh.
I remember just finding it so disorienting.
But think about dancing.
It's pretty intimate to dance, close dance with somebody.
But then you've got spitballs.
When you're a little bit younger, you want to get a girl's attention, you throw things at her.
And that becomes an acceptable form of intercourse, to throw things at a lady.
Yeah, to dip her pigtails in your inkwell.
Yeah.
Precisely.
And then you get hit with the ruler, the hickory stick.
Yeah, with the hickory stick.
With the hickory stick.
There's probably a handkerchief for that.
There's probably a hickory handkerchief.
I think that my fear at the time was that if you went too far, if wrestling turned to frottage...
And you went too far and you exhibited actual sexual interest in another boy.
Even though that's clearly what he was doing.
Even though that's clearly what you were both doing.
But if you went too far, you could never go back.
You would have it in your mind that you had done, that you were a perv or that you were gay.
Right?
It would flip a switch.
And once you had done it, you could not, you could never take it back.
Right.
This was the idea that I think all... It's like a homosexual Rubicon.
Yeah, right, exactly.
All little boys carry this in their head, that if you cross this line, then you're in trouble.
And now, as a fully grown person, I realize, oh, no, you can cross that line freely.
It is not a Rubicon.
It is not even really a guarded border.
It's just a path.
There's a lot of pressure, though, John, a lot of pressure.
There is, there is.
Well, even now, I mean, even now, there's a lot of pressure on guys to not be gay.
Are you familiar with this term, down low?
Oh, absolutely.
It's how African-Americans get to suck each other's cock.
Is it really true?
Is it really a thing or is it like an urban myth?
No, it's absolutely a thing.
So I don't, I mean, I heard about this a while back and I don't know, but supposedly it's a, you tell me, well, you tell me, I think I heard it's a phenomenon where it's believed that amongst some men, and I led to believe African-American men, that like if you're getting your dick sucked, you're not gay.
Right.
Absolutely.
Is that correct?
In fact, it's the source of... By another man, by another man.
Right.
Right.
It's the source of one of the Long Winters' favorite memes from the early days, which was, I'm not gay.
I just can't keep these faggots from sucking my cock.
I'm sorry.
You know, you don't quote comedy things, but there was a headline in The Onion that a long time ago, every time I think of it, I still laugh, which is, Why do all of these homosexuals keep sucking my cock?
I think it's all probably like a Bill Hicks routine or something.
All these fucking faggots that I meet in bathrooms constantly want to suck my cock.
It seems like I can't go more than a couple hours standing in a bathroom for two hours until some fag comes up and wants to suck my cock.
And I hate these guys.
Well, I think it's actually that kind of down low, that phrase is very much in the American black culture.
But I think that attitude pervades in Arab cultures.
Like men are able to be physically affectionate with each other all the way up.
up to and including sex with each other, and it's much more, it's thought of as a kind of fraternal bond and much less of an aberration, you know?
And that's how they keep peace in the streets.
But I wonder how many African-American men that are comfortable letting another man not gay suck their cock would be comfortable, like, sitting around naked in a hot tub.
It's not nearly as intimate, but it's much more gay-seeming, probably, in that culture.
Yeah, I don't know.
You know, there are also a lot of – I mean, I think down low is a – I looked it up on Wikipedia.
It's absolutely a documented part of the culture.
It says here down low is an African-American slang term that refers to a subculture of men who usually identify as heterosexual but who have sex with men.
That's the short description.
They often avoid sharing this information with female sexual partners, which seems like a terrible idea.
I understand why you wouldn't want to share that.
I mean, it seems like a good idea at the time.
But, you know, there's also the sort of the understanding about in African-American culture that cunnilingus is kind of frowned upon.
And also the blacks can't swim.
Are they scared of water?
Did I just go ping pong?
God damn it.
You went super ping pong.
White people be talking like this.
What is the deal with swimming?
I keep thinking about your angry stand-up comic remark.
What is the deal?
But man, talk about compartmentalization.
Let's go straight back to your point, though, I guess.
Just because you're having oral sex as a recipient, I guess in the top-bottom thing, that makes you a top-ish person, right?
You're the receiver of pleasure.
Is that the idea?
You're the one who's running the show?
Yeah.
You bring up a very interesting question.
I have never fully understood the blowjob politics of the gays.
Because there's definitely giver and taker of the butt sex.
It's not like doing dishes.
They don't just do alternate.
I have to assume that that's true.
But see, this is the thing.
In heterosexual sex for a thousand years, or at least when I was a kid, the thousand years that I was a kid.
For at least 20.
For the thousand years that I've been on this planet, undying, never aging,
Like, sex seemed like it was, yeah, it was just sort of like it happened in The Handmaid's Tale.
It happened through a hole in a sheet, and you never saw the other person, and you exchanged no kind words with them.
It was strictly like a missionary position type of thing.
But you introduce an awareness of dominance and submission into it.
If you're unaware of dominance and submission, or at least if you're not upfront about it, you're having all this dominance and submission play, but it's not overt.
But as soon as everybody knows that those are things that are in play in sex, like, are you dominant?
Are you dominating me right now?
Am I being submissive?
Am I doing it for fun, or am I doing it because I'm really submissive?
Like, do you and I only have sex where you're dominant and I'm submissive, or do the roles change?
Are you talking about, like, in strictly kinky sex or in, like, normal people sex?
No, that's the thing.
Like, it used to be kinky to even use the words dominant and submissive.
But you're talking about, like, young couples having gleeful sex in a meadow.
Or even normal, like, old, fat, wrinkly people like Mickey.
Okay.
Where it's like, all right, when I was 21, I would never have used the word dominant or submissive.
It sounds a little gay.
It sounds a little gay.
It sounds, well, or it sounds just, yeah, a little... Transgressive, at least.
A little tweaky, right?
Mm-hmm.
But as you get older and you realize, like, right, in every, let's say you're having sex with somebody for 45 minutes...
Concurrently?
45 minutes from start to finish.
By 45 contiguous minutes, that's not over a series of months?
No, 45 minutes, but that could include drinks and dinner.
And apologies.
And apologies afterwards.
In my case, 45 minutes is just enough time because I like to take the panties off very slowly.
Oh, God.
The clock starts running when I touch the panties, and the panties hit the ankles 45 minutes later.
Jeez, jeez, jeez, jeez.
But in any case, the idea of like, okay, in this 45-minute period, you're going to be dominant for a little bit.
I'm going to be dominant.
We're going to flip back and forth.
Ultimately, I'm going to be more dominant.
I mean, these are ideas that, that are, I think you're doing dominant in the sense of like, you decide what to do or you do it rough.
Like, what is, what do you mean?
If you're outside of, if you're outside of like the community, you're talking about like normal people, but cause I'm just guessing a lot of ladies probably don't get to push around and say, Hey, you know what?
Take a walk downstairs.
I think they do.
I think that's part of healthy sex, and at the most vanilla, it's just a question of who's on top.
Yeah, first base.
Right, and then as you get more and more serious about it, it's like, okay, now I'm restraining you, right?
Now I'm actually kind of holding you down.
Now I'm just kind of pretending to cut off your air for a little bit.
And you think a lot of women do that to men.
It's just for fun.
Right, women will just do that to men for no reason.
I'm going to choke you a little until you take out the trash.
You know, I think there's two different shades of what you're talking about.
There could be way more, and I really would really rather not talk about any of this.
But there's two.
On the one hand...
What you keep alluding to is a kind of like, you know, a BDSM community kind of thing where you're like, that's right.
I like to, you know, I like to dress like a cowboy or whatever.
And that's like a thing.
I like to be a lady horse.
Or a lady horse.
But, you know, but here's the thing.
There's a big difference between like we're going to have a little play here and we both agreed what the script is versus I just like choking people.
or demanding or demanding that people fillet me or, you know, or whatever.
There's a, that's a big difference.
There's a big difference.
And maybe that's your point, but you know, I think, I think the point is that those, that the people that are like out there on the fringe, that has been, that has been introduced to mainstream American culture.
And maybe it's because I live in the city and that I'm a rock musician and that I, um, that, you know, that, uh, that I get to have the pinky up the butt.
Um,
And sometimes I wear... I'm never going to get this part of my life back.
Sometimes I wear different colored handkerchiefs in my back pocket, unaware of what it means.
And then I'll follow people based on the signals they give me.
But it seems like Dan Savage, for instance, his column has introduced a lot of these words and a lot of these concepts into mainstream culture so that you can no longer say with a straight face that you don't know what a dirty Sanchez is.
Okay.
Where 25 years ago, nobody knew it at Dirty Sanchez.
Do you think a Dirty Sanchez has ever happened?
Happens all the time.
I mean, like, actually happens.
Oh, a real Dirty Sanchez?
Well, I mean, I know the word happens all the time, but do you think that actually happens, do you?
I think everything happens.
And part of it, and this is part of dealing with kinky culture.
Oh, God.
From within kinky culture, people feel like it's really a question of their needs and their rights.
And from without kinky culture, it's very easy, and I do it too, to say, what happened to you that you can't enjoy normal sex?
Why do you have to get poop on your face?
I don't think that many people outside of Germany actually enjoy that.
Well, people enjoy a lot.
Well, here's the other problem.
And I literally don't want to talk about this anymore.
But the problem is that being an asshole is not the same thing as being dominant.
In fact, it's kind of the opposite of that.
No, being an asshole is just being an asshole.
It's just being an asshole.
And I think that the problem is when you start introducing this kind of terminology, Dan Savage, notwithstanding.
I think you're basically telling a lot of people that there's a fancy upscale urban name for being a dick.
Yeah.
Oh, no, no, no, no, no.
Being a dick is being a dick and being... Unless that's part of your bit and you've worked it out ahead of time.
Yeah, dominance and submission is a thing that people... Well, it's just natural.
Okay.
You cannot have two... You cannot have... Well, in everything in life, there is an... There is always... Every interaction, there is an unequal...
power thing, you know?
And I think part of the problem with our generation is that we were raised to think that any exercise of power over another person is undemocratic and bad, you know?
Right.
They should get a vote on whether they're being choked.
Yeah, right.
I mean, it is one thing to consent.
It's another thing to...
It's another thing to like reflexively require consent for everything you do.
I feel like we are about two paragraphs away from just look at what she was wearing.
Why do you have words like materiel and ordinance that are deliberately spelled wrong?
Is that an army thing just to fuck with us?
Yeah, it's French.
Materiel is different from material.
Right.
Because it comes from when the French were the great war makers.
I'm guessing that was a pretty long time ago.
Yeah.
Well, yeah, they were great war makers a long time ago.
But they had good technology, right?
They were good at the... They made trebuchets and stuff, right?
They did.
But also, you know, in the United Kingdom, because the French were... Because after the Norman Conquest, the French...
the royal family in England spoke French for many years after and there is a thing in English law where they actually the lawyers and the courts in England continued to speak French all the way up like through the 18th century so there are all these terms in English law that are that are spoken in French still because of this because of well basically because of the Norman Conquest and
And that's also true in war making and the terms of art and politics and so forth.
I never found the actual attribution for this.
And you know what French means in sex, of course.
Oh, surrendering?
You tried to get me off this.
I'm not going to get you off of anything, John.
Yeah.
If we're going to have – listen, let me just explain one thing to you.
I will cut this out if I have to, but I want to explain one thing to you.
If we are going to be in business together, if we are going to cash out, if we are going to have an exit event on Bukaki Bucket –
I want to know what the hanky in my back pocket symbolizes.
I cannot think of a single thing in the world I want to know less than the color of your hanky.
Is that that book on your making resumes?
If we're going to do jizz bones or we're going to do bukkake bucket, we're going to have to work very closely.
And I want to ask the fucking ground rules.
I don't want to talk about sex.
I don't want to talk about power.
I don't want to wrestle.
I don't want to wrassle.
You don't want to talk about politics either.
I don't want to talk about politics.
I will talk about Hitler or the Cold War.
You're living in a stockade.
You're like some army guy.
It's a stockade where I don't have to think about you having an orgasm.
And that's a happy fucking stockade.
And now... You know, I have an orgasm like a girl.
Oh, God!
You mean fake?
No, no, no, no.
Long.
Oh, God!
Ugh!
Four kinds of kids, candy corn antenna, incidental boners.
That's going to be a good title, Dancing in Spitballs.
Wow, I should have eaten.
But anyway, if we're going to work together... Go ahead.
Please continue.
Have you ever heard of BB Cafe?
I'm sorry, BB Cafe?
BB Cafe.
B-I-B-I Cafe.
No, no.
Is that stripper?
This is something that... I don't know if I should even mention this to you because you're going to...
I'm going to guess not.
It's going to change your life.
Oh, God.
It is coffee.
It's Italian.
Yeah.
It's coffee and fizzy water together in a bottle.
Isn't that like Christmas porn, though?
Like, why would you fuck up two good things?
No, no, no, no, no.
You got this stuff.
It's coffee and fizzy water.
Like mineral water?
Or like seltzer or soda water?
Like seltzer.
Okay.
And it's concentrated, and you pour it over ice, and you add a little cream.
Oh, that sounds refreshing.
And it turns into this fizzy coffee milkshake...
Super Santorum.
Like foamy girl jizz.
Oh, God.
And it is incredible.
There's no way out.
So I used to drink BB Cafe all the time.
And for the life of life, I can't remember who introduced it to me.
This is years and years ago.
But anyway, they stopped importing it to the United States because it was too... It was like... I don't know why.
It has to be because it's like heroin.
But anyway, a close friend found me a bottle of BB Cafe the other day.
And so instead of my regular coffee before our podcast, I have been drinking BB Cafe.
You sound imbued today.
Oh, BB Cafe.
It's in a bottle.
Look at that.
Sparkling espresso drink.
Oh, dear me.
This looks awfully good.
BB Cafe.
It's a slightly effervescent premium Italian espresso drink with hints of caramel and vanilla.
Yes.
It is bonkers, but you can't find it anymore.
I used to buy it by the case, and now it's like the effervescence has actually turned into like you can't even find it or see it.
But anyway, I got this one bottle of BB Cafe, and I'm just...
And the espresso, it gives you this kind of, it almost gives you synesthesia.
You can see colors when people play notes.
Do you feel like off your nut, though?
Not at all.
No, it's very controlled.
Oh, clean.
It's so clean.
Yeah.
It's so clean.
It's so top shelf.
There's no jitters.
BB Cafe.
I think that from what I can tell looking quickly, it looks like it might have been discontinued as a brand.
I'll have to spend some more time on this.
Don't tell him that.
Well, I'll have to do some more research on this.
We've got a lot of long hours ahead of us if we're going to make this business happen.
So we're going to need something to keep us on our game.
If there's anything that in America, if there's any place in America, you should be able to find BB cafe.
It is San Francisco.
We love, we love weird drinks here.
Do I know that for net Bronco?
We're the single largest consumer of for net Bronco, San Francisco in North America, in North America.
There's a, there's a, I told your buddy about that.
You're a noise pop buddy that, you know, they gave it away when you're at noise pop and within a year, everybody was hooked and it tastes like shit.
That happened up here.
For years, Seattle had this tavern law where you could have taverns or bars.
And a tavern, you could sell beer and wine and you could have windows in the place.
And you didn't have to sell food.
But if you had a bar, you couldn't have windows and you had to sell food.
Wow, I love laws like that.
Yeah, it's just like, what?
So there were all these taverns, because to have a bar was a big operation, but to have a tavern, you could just start selling beer and wine.
And the tavern that I used to drink at was called the Comet Tavern.
I think I might have even taken you there.
Wow.
Um, so they sold, they sold all different kinds of beer and they only had, they decided not to sell much wine, but they started selling port, um, porto port.
And you could get a little shot of... It's a kind of fortified, strong wine.
Yeah.
You get a shot of port to kind of help your beer buzz bloom.
And at a certain point... And Porto is a European brand.
And it's thought of as... It's maybe not a high-class beverage, but it's certainly like a glass of port is something that you...
Something you have after dinner with a cigar, right?
Exactly.
It's something for discerning tastes.
Well, anyway, the story is that this company in Portugal that makes Porto said, there's this bar in America that is selling more port, more of our port than anywhere else in the country.
And we have to send a representative there to see what this incredible...
bar is that wow you know this amazing fern bar or whatever they must be sitting around smoking cigars drinking our beverage we have to send somebody there and and and thank them and give them a plaque like thinking it's gonna be real fancy yeah and this guy shows up and it's this fucking wino bar full of grunge rockers who are just throwing back the porto
And the guy was horrified and ashamed and went running out of there.
He came here from Portugal?
Yeah.
To give them some kind of, like, plaque.
Wow.
And then he realized, as soon as he walked in, that, you know, there was just a scrim of vomit on the floor.
It's one of those bars where the ceiling is covered with dollar bills.
People have written, like, fuck you, cunt on and thrown it up and through.
Yeah, and everybody's like...
This guy walked in.
I'm here to give you the... Oh, shit!
Oh, God.
It's nice.
Scrim of vomit, huh?
It keeps the floor slick, but they do give you a free turkey dinner on Thanksgiving.
Really?
At the Comet Tavern.
Yeah, they have a big turkey.
It sounds like something Richard Hugo would write about.
It's very Richard Hugo.
And in fact, it's actually right around the corner from the Richard Hugo house.
Which is where your band used to practice, right next to that, right?
That's right.
Now, is there a real Capowson?
There is a Capowson Tavern.
I've seen video of it.
A who?
Capowson Tavern.
Yeah.
Oh, absolutely.
Isn't that the death of the Capowson Tavern?
It's one of my favorites.
I know you're a fan.
I am a fan.
I got to get off of this.
I want to come back to the four kinds.
John, this has been awful.
This has really been hard for me.
I know it has.
You've made me tweak or squick.
I think I squicked.
You squicked a little bit?
Yeah, yeah.
You're going to have to go take a cold shower and scrub yourself with a loofah?
You're going to have to really get in there with a hanky.
Is there a hanky for I don't want to talk to John about sex?
What?
I don't know what's going on with me.
It's a spring, I guess.
It's spring.
Yeah, you're full of beans.
Now, the BB Cafe, we've got to find out more about that.
It's like the first time somebody gave me an Adderall.
It was like, the scales fell from my eyes.
You know what I mean?
Yeah, no, I've never had an Adderall.
Good for you.
Stay away from that.
Candy corn antenna.
Incidental learners.
Don Shackelford.
What's Don Shackelford doing nowadays, you know?
Well, interestingly, I got in touch with Don Shackelford recently.
He's living in Alaska.
Ever since he retired, he got an earring.
Which ear?
I don't know.
That symbolizes something, too.
I'm not sure which ear.
Oh, it's huge.
I got mine in the left.
It's got to get in the left ear.
You know, I'm one of those people that never notices if someone's wearing a wedding ring or what ear there is pierced.
Like, all those symbols that people are... All the flags that they're flying, like...
I'm into this.
For years, guys would walk around with leather jackets with those cock rings hanging off of the epaulets, and I had no idea what it was.
I thought it was like a plumbing supply.
I did not know that it was a cock ring and that that's what it's supposed to be.
I don't know if I want a cock ring that's been used on outerwear.
That doesn't seem hygienic.
A little bit rough trade.
So how'd you find out Sheckleford got an earring?
So he came down to Seattle.
I took him around one night.
Oh, that's lovely.
We went and hung out.
I mean, he was a great teacher.
He was definitely my favorite teacher in high school.
And he ended up...
He ended up being a good mentor.
He was the one that famously, after he was the principal of the school, called me into his office right before graduation and sat me down and put a stack of computer print out in front of me and said, this is the list of all the graduating seniors in order of grade point average.
I'd like you to find your name.
I'd like you to sit here in front of me and find your name.
And I started at the top, and I said, well, I'm not first.
Flip, flip, flip.
I'm not second.
He was like, let me help you out.
Flip to the last page.
Last in my class.
But Don was a good...
That was probably... Did you discuss the Great Texas Dynamite chase at all?
The dynamite incident?
No, sorry.
I'm sorry.
Not the Visions movie.
Did you discuss the dynamite in the locker incident?
Did you have a laugh?
That always comes up.
He is very... Because I've now seen him a few times.
And he's very unapologetic.
And he says, you know, straight up, you were an asshole.
And if I could bust you, if I could have busted you twice, I would have busted you twice for bringing pipe bombs to school.
Have you come around to that point of view?
Yes.
Yes, I believe that he...
You know, it is, I have said it before, but it is a miracle that I live to adulthood for so many reasons.
And there were not, there were actually surprisingly few people who stood in between me and me blowing myself up.
But the few people that did, you know, probably saved my ass.
And Don was one of them.
Yeah, you got to be grateful for those.
At the time, they feel like such a hindrance.
Yeah.
There were a lot of other times when what saved my ass was just that I had not inserted the fuse properly.
And the lighter I was using was something that I found on the ground and it didn't have any fluid in it.
So there is some part of you that wants to go back and do it over.
There's a big part of me that if I had it to do over, I would have definitely, I would definitely blow myself up.
Yeah.
All right, there it is.