Ep. 36: "Uncle Licky"
Feeling that way.
Hello.
Hi, John.
Hi, Merlin.
Oh, where's my button?
Where's my button?
I'm fine without the button personally.
I think you get what you get.
You do.
That's right.
You get what you get.
How much are you paying for this podcast is what I would ask.
That's a good point.
They say that at a birthday circle at my daughter's school when they give up.
If a kid brings presents for everybody, you say, you get what you get and don't be upset.
Oh, that's a nice adage.
Yeah, it's both useful and passive-aggressive, like so many brown minds.
I'd like to say that to all the 40-year-olds I know who are like, why aren't I rich?
You get what you get and don't be upset.
Get what you get.
Boy, you know, John, that seems like that might find a place.
I don't want to try to circumnavigate your ethos, but I could see that finding a place in your ethos.
You get what you get and don't be upset.
Right?
The way I just said it, it kind of takes on a... Oh, I like the way you said it.
A little tougher, right?
Yeah, when teacher Rima would say it, she'd say, you get what you get and don't be upset.
When you say it, well, you get what you get, don't be upset.
That's right.
There's a little bit of fatalism, there's a little bit of like, eh.
Well, yeah, it's a nice mix of, first of all, obviously, if I may say you're being helpful, but there's also a hint of resignation, of I've been there, I've gotten, and I've been upset, and I'm just telling you.
There's a little bit of farm wisdom to it, too, like shut up.
You know what I mean?
Like shut up.
Shut up.
The basis of a lot of farm wisdom?
Yeah.
Shut up is basically... That is farm wisdom condensed to two words.
Shut up.
I was hoping to go to the dance this weekend.
Can I plant the corn now?
Shut up.
Shut up.
No one who ever lived on a farm...
Ever spoke that many words in one sentence.
Are they taciturn, the farmers?
They are.
They have to be taciturn because the wind is whipping down the plains.
Because they get up at dawn and they eat 12,000 calories of gravy biscuits.
Ha, ha, ha.
There's no room in them for, like, chattiness.
Yeah.
I imagine once you get on that tractor, you're on one cheek for a lot of the time.
That's taciturn.
Yeah.
I mean, do they have hand signals or anything?
Farm people?
Well, I mean, obviously, there are going to be people.
I don't want to say hand signals because, obviously, sometimes a tractor takes a hand.
But occasionally, it seems like you would want to signal to people, like, paw, it's time for chow, or I lost my other hand.
There's a bell for that.
Okay.
Or I want to go to the dance.
Can I plant the corn?
There's a bell for that.
There's a bell for that.
Yeah.
Ma comes out on the porch and she rings the I want to go to the dance bell.
And Paul says, shut up.
Is there more than one bell?
Oh, there's a whole panoply of bells.
A panoply.
Now, on a boat, you have bells to tell what time it is, right?
You've got so many bells.
That's right.
Okay.
On a farm, you have different tones of bells.
That's like Mandarin.
Yeah, to ask different questions.
That's right.
It's a tonal language.
Okay.
And Pa, my sense of... See, now, I'm speculating a lot of this because although my mom grew up on a farm, I did not.
I guess that's close enough.
She's brought a lot of shut up.
You know what?
If I may say she's never said shut up.
Yeah, but she's brought that value to your home.
Has she not?
She has said you get what you get and don't be upset.
I didn't want to be the one to say it.
That seems I think you can just say that.
You know what makes that effective is she never fucking needs to say it.
It's there.
It's in the room.
It's like Gibson.
My sense from her is that her grandpa.
Really never said anything.
He just communicated through the furrows in his brow.
If the furrows were, the furrows in his brow mimicking the furrows of the land.
Deep as corn.
That he worked his life.
Worked his whole life.
Boy, you get to be really full of shit when you're on a farm, don't you?
Well, I think, I mean, look at the music of John Cougar Mellencamp.
It is the music of the full of shit side of having grown up on a farm.
Hmm.
Anything to do with the production that when Scott Lit does your record, does that make you like a full of shit farmer?
Hmm.
No, no offense.
No offense.
I enjoyed some of his records.
I think Scott Lit is just bringing out the intrinsic full of shitness in his artists.
Don't you think they're a little heavy on the reverb for my liking?
That was a style, the reverb.
I remember the first band I was in, a guy said, I don't want any reverb on this.
Well, I know reverb is something we don't talk about.
That's in the Phil Collins pile.
But this does get us back to the Billy Joel problem.
I'm willing to open the gate, the farm gate on Billy Joel, because that's a certain kind of full of shitness.
But on a farm, it seems like you've earned it.
You've lost a hand.
You've had some very heavy meals.
You own a tractor, and you don't talk much.
It seems you've earned that.
If you're like a real talky guy with a loose tie and a fucking brandy snifter on your piano, I'm not sure you're qualified.
I don't know if you're ever qualified to say shut up.
Well, then you're discounting the ability of all the people who live in cities to say shut up, and I don't think you can do that.
They just have a different shut up.
They got to shut up.
Tell me more.
Shut up.
Yeah, but that's pretty flaccid compared to... Compared to the hard shut up of a man whose feet are in the earth like the roots of a tree.
Well, you really do wax.
I don't know if you'd call it waxing, but you wax pretty poetic about this bullshit farm stuff.
Well, I mean...
The problem is that farmers, frankly, are always the problem in any culture.
This is what they say.
They say the single, I think we've had this discussion just a little bit, they say the single worst thing to ever happen, Western civilization or otherwise, agriculture.
It all starts with that.
It all goes back to agriculture.
Everything today.
The worst thing that could have happened is agriculture.
Yes, yes.
Imagine if we were still just living on what we found in the stomach contents of a squirrel.
How big is a squirrel?
Well, you've seen a squirrel.
You know how big they are.
I don't know.
It might have been a Paleolithic squirrel.
No.
Paleolithic squirrels aren't any bigger.
Show me the Natural History Museum diorama of a Paleolithic squirrel that's bigger than a cat.
I'm not going to use the keyboard.
I'm not going to search right now.
But you know what?
I'm going to write that down.
Find a giant-ass squirrel.
I bet you prehistoric squirrels were probably smaller, not bigger.
you think that's an adaptation we can expect the squirrels to keep getting bigger i think squirrels are getting bigger i but yeah i think if you were out like with a blunderbuss or a homemade uh bow and arrow and you were hunting squirrels and you found a squirrel and ate the stomach contents of the squirrel as you would have done to get grain that's all the agriculture we need is our nuts a kind of grain i thought they were kind of nut
Well, squirrels eat all kinds of stuff.
Is that right?
Sure.
Now, the small or large squirrels, are they the bane of the farmer?
I'm just saying that before agriculture was invented, we were probably just eating squirrel stomach contents to get our grains.
And, you know, you probably make a halfway decent pancake out of what's inside a squirrel.
Well, yeah, especially if you ran in with your blender bus wagon.
Yeah.
I bet the farmers have a lot of – By the time we had blunderbusses, blunderbye.
Is that how you pronounce it?
Blunderbye.
Blunderbye.
By the time we had those, we also had agriculture.
I think agriculture came first.
It's too late, way too late at that point.
I'm guessing that farmers have a lot of existential veins.
Just the ones I've captured so far, you've got large or very small squirrels.
You've got children that like to dance.
You've got talking.
And you've got the occasional maybe lack of a bell.
Like, what if a squirrel came and stole your fucking bell?
Or the wrong tone of bell.
What if somebody comes, some guy, an itinerant bell salesman comes and sells your farm wife a bell, which she starts to employ that day.
He warned her.
He warned her without saying so.
Never spend money.
He warned her with his furrows.
For sure he did.
And then he's out on his tractor.
He hears an unfamiliar bell.
And he thinks, my wife is having sex with someone.
Or, you know, it communicates like a thing that... Oh.
You know what it is?
It's rural perfidy.
When you hear a different fucking bell, you know your wife has been jacking the mean bone with somebody.
There's no question about it.
What a terrible phrase.
Yeah, and the thing is, if it's the wrong bell, you might never come in.
Because you're going to work from can't till can't.
Till can't, till can't, till can't.
And if the bell doesn't ring, or your armless son doesn't wave at you with his dance corn, you're going to stay on that fucking tractor.
And you may never get to pinch a loof.
You may have to just stay in the field.
That sounds like a hard life.
Well, you can pitch a loaf in a field.
Now, is that something you can do if you're a farmer?
Take a shit in a field?
Yeah.
Does a farmer shit in a field?
We are a philosophy podcast.
Well, as a Hobbesian... Yes, farmers shit in fields all the time.
If you'll notice, most farms...
have windbreaks, which are groupings of trees that are left to keep the wind from blowing the fields away.
This is why the Dust Bowl happened, because they tore down all their windbreaks, because they were greedy.
Greedy farmers chopped down the trees.
They wanted to sell the brakes?
No, they wanted to plow all the land.
Plow it up.
Bad farmers.
Anyway, the windbreaks are places where you dump your old Model A car.
Or you take a shit.
Like an old bell?
Or...
Yeah.
You can make a bell reef.
The idea, though, is I think with a bell, you'd want to keep the bell as long as you can, right?
Bells don't go bad.
I have bells that are super old.
Man, you sure?
What about that bell in Philadelphia?
That thing was flawed.
They should send that thing back.
There are a lot of old bells.
That bell's smaller than I expected.
It's less smaller than I expected.
Well, you just have that American inflationism.
You're like, the Liberty Bell is going to be huge.
It's going to be the size of, it's going to be like the world's biggest pumpkin, but it's not.
I might be a size queen.
It's like a normal super large pumpkin.
The Liberty Bell.
I don't want to work ping pong, John, but I just, for the farmers, not interested.
I have no interest in farms or farmers.
Setting aside that they've literally ruined the entire earth.
Farmers are inherently conservative, and that's where you get nationalism.
Oh, boy.
Here come the tubas.
That's where you get the Nazis, right?
I mean, it all starts in the farms.
You're saying, if I understand you correctly, yes, there is a basis in Roman culture and certainly in a variety of Germanic mythologies, but really it all comes down to an agrarian sense of genocide.
Is that what it goes back to?
Basically.
The Jews come through and they're ringing their wrong sounding bells and it just gets people mad.
Selling a lot of stuff we don't need, asking us to talk.
Prosthetic hands.
A lot of early bell sellers.
We're members of the tribe.
Oh, there's no question about it.
I think it's all right there in Deuteronomy, probably.
You know, here's the thing.
Deuteronomy.
I know, right?
You call that a Pentateuch?
It's early.
I'm sorry.
And I just ate so much hollandaise sauce.
It's early.
Why are you eating hollandaise sauce for breakfast?
Oh.
That's not a breakfast food.
Can we come back to farms?
Oh, wait, wait, wait.
You were eating Eggs Benedict.
It was a kind of Benedict.
It was a hybrid kind of California Florentine.
Yes, it was eggs, and yes, it was English muffin, and everything else was just, you know, they don't know fuck all about making these things.
I had spinach.
It was spinach and eggs and hollandaise, and I had a crab cake.
It was a crab cake, crab cake.
Were you at a Mother's Day brunch or something?
Shut up.
What kind of menu is that?
I was in a hurry.
The thing is, if I don't eat, I get weird.
What do you mean you were in a hurry?
That meal would take two hours to prepare.
You'd be surprised.
I think the crab cakes might be flash frozen.
I don't know if it's a fresh crab cake.
Was this a Trader Joe's Mother's Day breakfast?
It was.
Pop it in the microwave?
Yep.
They call it Trader Mom's.
You know how Trader Joe's and everything's got a cute name?
Like Trader Jose.
Well, you know, the first time I ever had hollandaise sauce, this is the thing back in the 70s.
The only time I saw hollandaise sauce, it was on steak.
Yeah.
Oh, and one of those little metal pouring things?
Yeah.
It's only recently that the only place you see hollandaise sauce is on English muffins and eggs.
You're saying the ecosystem is getting narrow around hollandaise?
I used to put it on the asparagus.
Asparagus used to have hollandaise sauce.
Right.
I think people are starting to lose some of the traditional usages of hollandaise sauce.
That's a shame.
Well, here's the thing.
It can power your lawnmower.
Is that right?
It's a renewable resource.
Now, is it actually from Dutch?
No.
Is it Holland?
I'm guessing it's some kind of a Dutch pun.
Hollandaise.
That sounds Cajun.
He's like a Cajun farmer.
It's a Cajun man describing where he got his sauce.
Where'd you get that sauce?
Hollandaise.
Dutch catalog.
But what is in Hollandaise sauce?
It's just eggs and mayonnaise and whipped cream and pepper.
I've made my own.
Yeah, so, I mean, that's perfectly possible.
As memory serves, it's been a long time since I made hollandaise.
I'm married now, right?
Are you saying that making hollandaise is something bachelors do?
I'm married now, so I don't get into that hollandaise.
I was hoping somehow there might be a new euphemism that arose from that, but now I think we hit it too hard.
But I know it's eggs.
It's for sure eggs, right?
I guess it's an oil, and it's got lemon, and I think it's got tarragon.
I think you should be very circumspect.
I'm not a farmer by any means.
Tarragon and cilantro, I mean, I think you need to be really circumspect.
Well, certainly, I wouldn't put cilantro and tarragon in the same family of how to be careful.
You don't think so?
To me, it's like the Smiths.
There are just going to be some people that don't like tarragon or don't like the cilantro.
And cilantro creeps up in a lot of surprising places today.
Well, tarragon is a thing where I think, yeah, it's like fish sauce.
You put in a little pinch of it and the food tastes better.
You put in any more and the food just tastes like tarragon.
Exactly.
Exactly.
But cilantro.
I think you got to use it sparingly.
I would go crazy going nuts on MSG long before I would ever dump in a lot of tarragon.
I put a little bit of tarragon and some scrambled eggs.
Not a lot.
I love MSG.
I agree with tarragon, but cilantro is, I think, a different category.
Tell me what you put cilantro on.
Do you have it on a taco?
Yeah, I only use cilantro on, like, nouveau Mexican.
I'm not going to throw cilantro in any other kind of food.
And if I show up in a restaurant and I order something, I order eggs or I order something and there's cilantro on it...
I get right up and I walk into the kitchen and I grab the chef and I put his face down on a hot burner.
And you say, well, his face is still sizzling.
What the fuck are you doing back here?
You grab him by his stupid fucking faux hawk and you push his face into the plate and say, what is this?
Ow!
What is this?
Ow!
What is this?
It's cilantro.
It's cilantro.
What are you doing?
I totally agree.
Oh, boy, all that phony bologna stuff.
You know, it used to be parsley.
I think that was the leading edge of this is when they first started putting that crappy American parsley on the side of things.
You know, people still buy American parsley.
You can get Italian parsley anywhere, and people still buy American parsley like suckers.
You know, I grind it up and use it as a...
Well, I use it as an enema.
I use it as a face cream.
Huh.
It's like witch hazel.
It has all the shrinking properties without any of the drying properties.
That's so handy sometimes.
It really is.
I got some witch hazel in my bathroom.
Tightens up.
I was reading the witch hazel, and it says on the back, it has absolutely no application for how you're supposed to use it.
I think people just know how you're supposed to use witch hazel.
Yeah.
And on the back, it's got directions.
Hydrogen peroxide, same.
Hmm.
Hmm.
It says something along the lines of apply directly to affected area.
But then it says if the condition persists, it says nothing about what the condition is, but if the condition persists for more than two weeks, seek medical treatment.
For more than two weeks, right.
I just love the idea that there's extremely specific faux medical advice for a condition that has not been named.
Yeah, if you have a crossbow bolt in your side, put witch hazel on it for two weeks, if it's still there.
Go to a doctor.
They should just put a picture of a middle-aged woman on their back winking and going, meh.
You know what I do with hydrogen peroxide?
Sometimes I just pour it in my bath.
I just pour it right in the bathtub.
Is that safe on tissues?
Hydrogen peroxide?
Yeah.
Oh, yeah.
I use it as a mouthwash.
I pour it on my head sometimes when my scalp itches.
I'll use hydrogen peroxide everywhere.
I'm having a brain fart here.
What is hydrogen peroxide?
What is the main on-label use?
You buy it to clean a wound?
Is that what it's for?
Yeah.
Okay.
Hydrogen peroxide, and you pour it right on your head.
Is that refreshing?
Yeah.
It is refreshing, although I made the mistake one time.
You know, I had an itchy head.
Because I have a condition where I'm allergic to myself.
I'm sorry.
Yeah, it's one of those things.
I mean, specific parts?
It's one of those things I don't talk about.
But, you know, if I don't... I don't think, personally, that a person should wash their hair much more than once a week.
That's my philosophy.
You know what happens if you do that?
You have to wash it.
Well, and what has happened with me is that I'm allergic to my own head oil.
And my head starts to hurt.
My scalp, my skin gets sensitive.
If I don't wash my hair.
You need some kind of cranial surfactant in order to not be allergic to yourself.
You might give yourself hives.
And my hands get allergic to themselves sometimes.
It's selective outbreaks of self-allergy.
Is there any chance that you're magically real?
I don't know.
I think you might be a very, very short Marquez story.
Do you think that I could one day just ascend directly to heaven?
I think you could fall out of heaven with enormous wings.
I'll try it.
Yeah.
That sounds fun.
Discover ice.
But in any case, I'm officially out of Marquez references at this point, just so you know.
I've got about 10,000 more, but I'm not going to use them.
Um, I poured hydrogen peroxide on my head and it was like, Oh, thank God.
You know, it kind of relieves the, the, uh, it relieved the, the, I mean, it hurts a lot more at first, but that's kind of a good feeling, you know, like, Oh, that's good.
It's working.
Yeah.
That's how you know it's working.
Exactly.
But then I made the mistake of, of, um, of going to bed.
Um,
without having rinsed the hydrogen peroxide out of my hair and when i woke up in the morning my hair was yellow because hydrogen peroxide is what you what they use to dye your hair that's how they make ladies hair like blonde right yeah exactly so all of a sudden there i was and i was like oh it's the same stuff i knew that hydrogen peroxide was what you use to dye your hair i just didn't know it was the same stuff that you buy at the drugstore to put on your itchy scalp
Was it like straw-colored?
Yeah.
Like buttered popcorn?
No, I mean, my hair is already light, and it just lightened it more.
Was it flattering?
Well...
I was embarrassed to be perceived as having dyed my hair.
Sure.
And so, although it was not, I did not dislike it.
It was not unflattering.
I also felt the need to over explain to people why my hair was a different color.
And as you can imagine, 90% of the people that I ran into did not notice my hair was different.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I think the peroxide doth protest too much.
It sounds to me like your real concern was you were maybe thinking of doing it again.
Yeah.
Well, exactly.
Once I had done it and saw how easy it was, you know, I think a lot of people, if they put hydrogen peroxide right on top of their head, their hair turns purple or something.
You know, you have to, or they feel like they have to go to a salon and put the foil in your hair and ladies with long fingernails and it costs $400.
Well, then you got to have like a bluing agent because you don't want it, right?
Exactly.
I think so.
Like with old ladies, when your hair turns, not old ladies, but you know, older ladies, when your hair turns gray, That's a nice distinction.
Yeah.
No, no, no.
No, I wasn't calling you an old lady.
No, I mean, I'm sorry.
Nearly dead women.
My grandmother, who's dead.
Wrinkle pusses.
Farm hookers.
You know what I mean?
Bell woe mine.
Yeah, cow udders.
My grandmother would go in, and she went to one of those places that was all nearly dead ladies getting their hair done.
And they put that stuff in.
I forget what it's called, but I remember they'd always wear gloves.
It's toner, right?
Or it's a... I always remember, if memory serves, it looked like a takeout place mustard thing, except it was really gray.
Yeah, and they put it on with a spatula or a tongue depressor.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, like, yeah, it's a term of art, but yeah, a spatula.
And then there's foil, and then that would make your hair – and then sometimes you see blue hair at old ladies, right?
Yeah, right, right, right.
Which I think is pretty ping pong.
But that would make your hair less brassy.
I think the problem is brassiness.
Brassiness, right.
In your case, I could see that.
You have a very large head, and I could see that really being head-turning, not your head, but other heads.
I could see people say, John Roderick looks good with that yellow hair.
The brassiness is a quality that comes if you are taking really dark hair and trying to dye it light.
But since I already have light hair, it was not brassy.
It looked very... The $1.98 bottle of hydrogen peroxide poured directly onto the head and then left overnight, created a kind of natural blondness.
That was actually very, I have to say, it was very appealing to me, but I could not square it with my overall sense that dyeing your hair is a vanity that's intolerable.
An intolerable vanity.
Really?
Yeah.
So I walked around for the rest of that summer.
You felt like a hypocrite.
Yeah, I have this great blonde hair and it probably cost me 25 cents of hydrogen peroxide to get it.
But after it grew out, and it still happens, I go into the bathroom and I look at the bottle of hydrogen peroxide there on the sink and I go, maybe I should just pour it all over my head and go to sleep and accidentally dye my hair again.
And then I go, no.
Oh, it's like Sabbath peroxide.
Intolerable vanity.
Intolerable vanity.
We've talked about this before.
You'll just keep liquor and cartons of cigarettes around your house.
You've probably got bath salts.
You just keep it there because it strengthens you to know it's there and you're not using it, right?
You might stock up on hydrogen peroxide just to go, fuck you, peroxide.
Shut up, right?
I do have hydrogen peroxide all over the house, but it's because I use it in a variety of applications.
Navy SEALs might come into it.
None of which are pouring it on my head and accidentally dying my hair.
My friend Harry in college, well, he had very long hair, actually.
It's like being named Jeeves.
Yeah, well, you know, Haram, actually.
He was Dutch.
Haram, Franz, Hendrik.
Get ready for this one.
You ready?
Haram, with two R's, not Haram.
Haram, Franz, Hendrik, Monkhorst.
Yeah.
That's a hell of a name.
It's a hell of a name.
He was Dutch as hell.
He was super tall.
He had long hair.
He looked like a cool Michael Stipe.
He had really long curly hair.
Michael Stipe was pretty uncool in the 80s.
Oh, I liked when he was nervous.
I liked him then.
That's my REM.
That's mine.
I was being facetious.
Michael Stipe was the coolest thing in the world at that point.
Shut up.
he was no no i i'm trying to get my daughter not to say shut up but now i think that's going to be a catchphrase i think people are going to start saying shut up because of this show but in a farm voice shut up you get what you get and don't be upset but harry taught me something uh that i at first like so many of the things that have become important in my life eventually i was resistant and he said here's the problem he says you go in there first of all he bought the cheapest shampoo you could get which i think at the time was like white rain and which now in retrospect sounds awful especially given the consistency
White rain.
Yeah.
I had a girlfriend that smelled like white rain.
Man.
Is that a euphemism for semen?
See, that's, again, hitting a little hard.
Sorry.
It's early.
It's early.
It's early.
You understand?
No, I got the hollandaise.
I'm not yet.
I'm getting there.
I got the hollandaise on the side.
I'm going to send you a photo of this.
I'm going to send you a photo of my hollandaise.
Because even after I'd used a little bit of hollandaise on my eggs, I think I have about two cups of hollandaise left in this thing.
Imagine you went to a place, like at an airport, and got some chili.
Not like a big chili, like a side chili, like a sandwich and a chili.
It's that size of hollandaise.
You have that much Hollandaise, what, in your fridge?
Sitting next to your desk?
Well, no, I'm just by the door.
I'm taking it outside.
I want it in my fucking house.
I don't want it in the office.
I just don't... Oh, right.
It doesn't keep, yeah.
Well, yeah, and I don't... It's like peroxide.
I don't want it staring at me all day.
You're telling me that you had a cup of Hollandaise that you could have put on your eggs and you left it off?
Here's the thing.
I had probably...
two to six tablespoons of hollandaise sauce i'm not i'm not a you know i'm not a mathematician i think i had up to six and six tablespoons yeah yeah yeah that's a range and uh it was felt like a lot of fucking hollandaise and still i barely put a dent in it and you know how it is i mean this is the problem with america this is the problem with agriculture the large plate right america is a large plate and it feels like we have to fill the plate and this is why we knocked down our wind brakes
Right?
Right.
Well, yeah.
Yeah.
And so anyway, what Harry said was, Haram Franz Hendrick Monkhorst, he said, your problem is you're like all these other suckers.
You wash your hair every day.
And do you know what happens when you wash your hair every day?
You have to wash your hair every day.
Can I say Carmex?
Did you ever go through a Carmex phase?
Well, sure I did.
Well, what happens?
You say, oh, this is nice.
This smells like vanilla.
You know what Carmex is?
It's wax and aspirin.
Did you know that?
No.
Acetylsalicylic acid, which is so fun to say.
Acetylsalicylic acid and basically a waxy base and it smells like vanilla.
You put it on your lips.
And you know why it's great for chapped lips?
Because it's putting aspirin directly on your cracks.
Right?
So you start out nice and simple.
Also, really?
Fever, blisters, and cold sores?
Give me a break.
Take that off the label.
It's ridiculous.
It does nothing for that.
No, you know what the solution to fever blisters and cold sores?
Popping.
You told me this.
Popping.
You got me on the popping now.
You go into it like a man, popping and alcohol, and then suck it up.
Does it work?
Does it work for you?
Oh, shit, yeah, it works.
It hurts like a motherfucker, but your cold sore goes away.
Yeah, get it done.
Well, you know, my mom's philosophy about fever blisters, or stress bumps... Stress bumps is a common... Is she takes a hair dryer, and she points the hair dryer right at her lip.
Ha ha ha!
Until she can't stand it anymore.
And she can stand it for a really long time, I bet.
She can.
And then she takes a break.
And then she points the hairdryer right at her face again.
She's got a pretty well-defined schedule.
She probably will make time in that.
And how long?
Are we talking about like three or four seconds?
As long as she can hold it until the burning, the hot air face burning, she can't take it anymore.
You ever put a clock on her when she does that?
No, no, no.
I don't want to watch it.
When somebody is doctoring a stress bump, that's a private time.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So she believes that the hairdryer is the solution.
I believe that the aggressive popping is the solution.
You taught me this.
Now, this is going to be – for people who don't like coughing, cold sore popping is – I just want to say that there are people out there who suffer in silence.
I would like to just finish the thread on farms and hair, and then I would like to do a deep dive on cold sores if that's okay with you.
That's fine.
Talking about cold sores is very uncomfortable for people.
Well, yeah, that's because they're suffering in silence.
They need to suffer loudly and then shut up.
You're suffering in silence because of the shame of a socially communicated disease.
Yeah, but see, this is the thing.
All I've got is the, like, my immune system sucks kind.
I don't have chancres on my weenus.
You don't have shankers on your weenus?
I'm not judging, but I've gone out with people who had shankers on their weenus, the girl weenus.
Yeah, on their girl weenus.
But as long as it's not that time, you know?
How did you know, when did you first get cold sores on your mouth?
High school.
And how did they get communicated to you?
As in communicable?
Or how did they express themselves?
No, no, no.
How did they arrive upon you?
Who was the transmitter?
Oh, no.
See, your problem cannot be gone into the amount of time we have.
You have a lot of fucking problems, John.
I do.
It's not herpes of the kind that was in magazines in the 80s.
No, but it is herpes simplex one.
Which is a different simplex, but it is still... But that's like saying melanoma is a kind of cancer.
It really overstates it.
It doesn't overstate the fact that it is a thing which is communicated from one person to another.
But you can get... Okay.
When you had your first herpes sore... Stop saying herpes!
Stop that!
In the 70s or whenever you were in high school...
It didn't just come down.
You didn't get it off of a tree.
You didn't get it from licking a light pole.
You got it because you kissed somebody or drank out of a drinking glass.
This is bananas, John.
This is like you're giving me some kind of interrogation on how I got a cold.
How did you get a cold sore?
Did you kiss a bad girl?
I kissed a lot of bad girls, and there's so many more that I wanted to kiss.
Oh, Donna Hall.
Did you drink milk out of a milk carton that a bad girl had milk?
Can I have one just meta moment with you, and I'm not cutting this out.
Do you want to go directly into your herpes talk, or can I finish up forearms and hair?
Okay.
You know what?
Never mind.
No, no, no.
Finish up forearms and hair.
Never mind.
Never mind.
I'll talk about my blonde hair all the time.
Okay, first of all, just to get it out of the way, farming is bullshit.
Second, Harry says that as with Carmex, you start doing too much and then you need it.
Why do I say this?
Because John Roderick, what is it that you have to teach us?
Well, one of the many things you have to teach us is you've got to be careful.
Because what it starts out simple enough.
You do a few bumps of bath salt meth and wash it down with a boilermaker.
And then pretty soon, you're doing that a lot.
Isn't that kind of... But it turns out it's not inspiring you to eat face.
Did you read about that?
The face-eating... See, I have not followed the bath salts.
You taught me about bath salts, and now it's everywhere.
The face-eater guy was just on the marijuana.
He had never had a bath salt.
So he had the munchies.
Yeah, that's it.
If that guy had been carrying hydrogen peroxide with him, everything could have been different.
He had some other thing.
Did he really eat his face, or did he just bite him on the nose or something?
Did he really eat his face?
He ate his face off.
I don't think that's a pot thing.
This sounds like the kind of thing the CIA would plant.
You know, I've smoked a lot of marijuana.
Yeah.
And it's just why, in part, you can't be in the CIA.
Yeah.
That's right.
This is exactly why you don't want to get that close to somebody.
You want to get a pot addled CIA guy.
If you're going to do a plant for a story like that, it's going to have to be more credible than that.
I'm sorry.
Guy on an off rant smoking pot, eat somebody's face.
I don't think so.
That's right.
I think I bet some somebody story.
It doesn't even make any sense.
Somebody in a helicopter shot a dart at him.
Oh, that was full of some secret new mind control device.
And it caused him to go crazy, take his clothes off and eat some homeless guy's face.
It has nothing at all to do with that.
Oh, he was homeless?
The guy whose face got eaten was homeless.
Oh, okay.
All right.
Here's the thing.
Paul Allen, I'm really glad that you're buying Eddie Vedder's bongos and Jimi Hendrix's cup.
But if I were Paul Allen, and I'm so glad that I'm not, I would take some of those ample resources he's got, some of that yacht money.
When you started this thread, you were addressing him directly as though he were a listener of this podcast.
I'm like one of those people who Google something, lands on a page, and starts talking like that person is there.
Paul Allen, listen, this actually happens.
I'm pretty deep in the stack at this point, but that happens a lot on the internet where somebody will mention Oprah on a webpage.
And then in the comments, people will go, Oprah, I think it's really disappointing that you ended your show.
And you're like, Oh my God.
It helps.
It helps you understand so many things so much better when you understand that people actually think they're talking to James Dean on a webpage.
Yeah.
You were such a great actor.
Come back from the dead.
Do you think you'd ever make suddenly last summer too?
Um,
I, I, uh, I think, uh, I think a farmer, I think farming is bullshit.
Yeah.
Uh, I think you shouldn't wash your hair too much because then it gets like Carmex and you got to do it all the time.
Right.
I think the bath salts thing sounds like, uh, that sounds like some kind of a, uh, what do they call that?
A, uh, a mock-up, a mash-up, a setup, a, uh, what do they call that?
It's a setup.
Not a setup.
What's the word for that?
A, uh,
Mash-up.
A horse-up.
Anyway, it might have been a horse-up.
And you also think somehow that cold sores are just a thing like a cold.
You think it's a cold that you get because somebody sneezes on you in a supermarket.
This may be our Sound of Music moment, John.
This may be the moment when we sing Edelweiss and walk off the stage because I'm just about fucking done with you.
I know.
I know you're very uncomfortable.
You can just get a cold sore and it doesn't have to be from a dirty girl.
This is why people don't talk about cold sores because you were all Mr. Let's talk about them.
Oh, no.
Do you see this?
Look, it's on two cards.
Let's get him out of the closet.
And then I start talking about him.
You're like, whoa, no, back in the closet.
Question.
Yes.
I know we can't talk about this yet because it's not a thing.
But will you know what I'm talking about if I refer to the thing?
The thing that we are doing.
Yes.
Okay.
I went and did some research on The Thing.
Do you think that Paul Allen will be at The Thing?
Probably not.
We could potentially reach influencers like Paul Allen.
But very close to Paul Allen.
Okay.
Here's the thing.
You got the, you know, like in England, you know, they got that phony baloney system of government over there.
It's like chicken and waffles makes no fucking sense.
Oh, we got a queen, but then we vote too.
Okay, fine.
She has no power, but she has a lot of money.
Yeah, we have to vote people into the Tower of London.
Yeah.
Exchequer.
What the fuck is an exchequer?
It's an accountant.
No, it's made up.
That's like you have to get a comptroller.
Okay, so here's the thing.
You've got the cabinet and then you've got the shadow cabinet.
So I don't know what that means, but I think we need a shadow CIA.
And by the way, I'm sorry I'm saying any of this because as you know, we're probably going to have all kinds of problems now.
There is a shadow CIA.
But anyway, go ahead.
The NSA.
The NSA is a shadow CIA.
Oh, they're like the deep web.
The dark, the black web.
What do you call it?
Sorry, it's ping pong.
What do you call it?
What's the thing you talk about?
Is it the second internet?
The dark web?
I don't ever talk about the dark web, although I think about the dark web.
I never say it out loud.
I'm going to a public library in a different town and doing a lot of Googling.
And you don't know what day.
It's not me.
That's not my IP address.
John, all I'm trying to say is this.
I don't want to...
fucking busted gut, but it breaks my heart that you're not in the CIA.
Not just because I know it meant a lot to you.
It meant a lot to you.
You could have been a SEAL if you learned to swim.
You could have been in black ops if you were black.
You could have been in the CIA if you hadn't smoked all that weed, had all those drugs, and harmed all of those people.
And I think it's a goddamn shame that you're not out there.
If you're going to do one of these mashups where you actually make somebody look like their face got eaten by somebody on the weed, you could make that look so much better.
You might not even need a dart.
And I want to know my question to you, John Roderick.
Why the fuck is Paul Allen out there buying yachts and helicopters when he could have a shadow, shadow, shadow CIA that you essentially are running but you wouldn't admit it here?
Your answer.
I wish to God that he was listening because –
I have it all written out.
It's all planned.
Is it written in urine or lemon juice?
It's all written in my mind writing.
But if Paul Allen wants a private security service that is going around... Oh, you make that sound like Pinkerton.
I'm talking about something much deeper, aren't you?
No, I'm talking about something deeper too, but I have to encode it in certain language.
For instance, somebody chastised me the other day for constantly referring on this program to CIA agents.
Mm-hmm.
And they said, an agent is someone in the field that has been turned into an asset by a field operative, by a case officer.
That's just the kind of horseshit you would expect to hear from a fucking CIA agent.
I had to say to this person, I know that.
But I am doing a podcast that has lots of different listeners.
Some of them girls.
Some of them people who have not read every spy book.
And so CIA agent is the common parlance for someone in a trench coat and a fedora lurking under a phone pole.
Lurking under a light pole on a dark street on a radio.
But they have a big wide fedora.
And if I start talking about case officers...
It sounds like somebody's hitting a kid.
Yeah, a case officer is a guy sitting at a desk with a comb over, and he's monitoring his assets.
That's not what we're trying to... Yeah, I don't know, John.
A case officer sounds like somebody you would have had to see a lot throughout your youth.
A case officer is somebody I had to submit signed pink slips to every Monday morning.
Really?
And I don't want to revisit those.
Was that KUFL?
Who sent you there?
Oh, my God.
Kufel.
You're so good.
How do you remember Kufel?
I'll never forget Kufel.
Do you remember Mr. Fennell?
Yes, of course I do.
Okay.
Mr. Kufel, yes, did... We should, just for what I'm sorry to derail you, we should have, just if, no, not if, when we do Hitler and stuff, we should have a panel with all these people on.
If I can find Mr. Fennell and he still has his paddle and his shorts.
Oh, yeah, we'll get him.
We'll fly him in.
Paul Hellen will pay for it.
Well, he uses his air yacht.
His tennis racket with the two, two and a half pound barbells on either side.
But in any case, to you listeners out there who are checking off boxes at home, yes, I know the difference between a case officer and an agent.
And also, my secret intelligence service that I'm running in conjunction with Paul Allen, I am deliberately using the wrong words to describe it so that it throws you off the scent of our trail.
That's good.
We're in the Straits of Malacca on the octopus.
What?
What do you call that?
You call that a red herring?
What would you call that?
A red herring, yeah.
Now, is red herring a real term, or is that in itself a canary trap?
No, I think red herring is a real term.
You know what a canary trap is?
A canary trap isn't a real term.
Oh, you know what a canary trap is?
No, apparently.
I'm super into canary traps.
What's a canary trap?
Canary trap.
Oh, what?
Because you want to find out who was singing.
Here's what you do.
They do this in Hollywood.
They really do this at Apple.
So let's say, for example, something's coming.
Somebody steals an iPhone off a bar.
Oh, God.
And here's the kind of thing, though.
At Apple, everybody there is Sergeant Schultz, right?
No.
I don't even want to know what I don't know.
I don't know.
I just, I don't even know if I'm in a building.
There may be a check.
I don't know why I'm talking.
Shut up.
That's a great company.
You know, they're all rich, all those people.
They're rich as hell.
Yeah.
I don't think.
But it's true.
And here's the thing, though.
When you get to the point where you are getting, I mean, I'm talking someone out of my ass because no one actually knows what happens at Apple, right?
Oh, right.
Because it's behind all those Maxwell Smart doors.
Mm-hmm.
I've spoken there in a very... When I visited there, it's been in a very, very public area.
You don't go anywhere near the black ops areas there.
There's buildings there... Well, is it Building 5 or something?
Doesn't matter.
Anyway, here's the thing.
Let's just speak in the abstract.
They have a space program there.
I'm sorry.
I said too much.
Go ahead.
I'm going to put a marker there.
Space program.
Got to cut that out.
Okay.
So here's the thing.
You've got a company, right?
And there is like a thing that you've actually got to do.
Maybe it's going to be a product release.
And so what you do is you circulate to everybody inside the company.
You say, okay, everybody, here's the blue copy.
Like everybody look at this, look it over.
This is going to be like the press release or what have you.
Like everybody check it out.
But by no means should – obviously, as with everything here, this must never be leaked.
So what happens?
Right.
It's going to be self-destruct.
And so when it does get leaked – Oh, wait.
Is this a red herring?
No, it's not a red herring.
Is this a canary trap?
It goes out.
Every single one of those has a word that's a little bit different on every page.
Yep.
It's, you know, like the watermark, the DVDs now for the movies and stuff.
And so you can find out pretty easily through a nearly imperceptible difference.
And here's the thing.
Those guys are not going to compare notes.
They don't have a way of knowing.
Everybody's terrified the Gestapo's coming.
Exactly.
Right.
And so in that instance, right, you're certainly not going to go compare notes with people.
Why would you?
What?
What?
What?
You know, all of a sudden you're back in Oceania.
You know what I'm saying?
Sure.
Canary trap.
Isn't that a great idea?
It is a great idea if you live in a totally paranoid culture.
Oh, and how is it to work for you in your shadow, shadow, shadow, shadow?
How is it to work for me?
I'm a great shadow boss.
Really?
You feel like you're pretty good, like maternity leave and that kind of thing?
All that stuff.
I mean, Paul Allen is great on that, and this is a subset of his company.
So we have the same HR policies that the overall Paul Allen organization has.
Okay.
All right.
So it's like a title, a title six and stuff.
Oh, that's, that's awesome.
That's awesome.
Now, now I'll cut this part out for, for broadcast, but he's goofy, right?
Paul Allen.
Yeah.
Well, I know you do lots of stuff like orthogonally related to what he does and, and is he still involved with that goofy museum?
Yeah.
He made the museum, but he's not super involved in day-to-day activities at the Google Museum.
It's not a question of him not being involved.
It's a question of, hey, made this museum, and then he... It's kind of like KEXP.
He gave them a bunch of money.
And then quit funding it.
Yeah, and then he said, all right, sink or swim.
It's kind of weak.
I've told you this story about EMP.
At one point in the 90s, early 2000s, they had like 800 employees here.
There were people dedicated just to... Just to buying Eddie Vedder's bongos.
Just to cataloging Eddie Vedder's bongos that they've already bought.
Whew.
And then at a certain point, it was like, oh, sink or swim, you guys can't survive this way.
And then they fired 690 of the 800 employees.
Oh, my God.
I think you described it once.
I might be misremembering this, but I think you described it as being a little bit like Rosebud, like Charles Foster Kane.
They had crates full of stuff they hadn't even opened.
Oh, that's still true.
There are warehouses in Seattle where there are incredible... Well, let me strike that.
Let's... If you believe that grunge was important...
That style of music was good enough.
If you believe that grunge even actually was a genre.
If you believe that in 25 years... If you believe that those five bands had anything in common other than a fuzz pedal.
If you believe anything about the Seattle music scene in the 90s other than that Nirvana came out of it.
A couple good records.
There are warehouses full of people's old tennis shoes and
Like drum diapers or whatever drummers wear.
Shelves and shelves.
John, they're called pull-ups.
Jason Finn, sweat vials, all this stuff that they bought for dollars on the penny.
Just filling acres and acres of warehouse.
Jason gave me a sweat vial when we were at dinner.
He just had some with him.
He's like, 2,000 bucks.
And they're like, sold.
I mean, seriously, they tried to buy everything.
And so they don't even know what they've got.
They've got a big van-sized crate, and they're going, this could be Tad.
This could be Mudhoney's van.
They don't know.
They don't care.
Because they started buying that stuff in the late 90s.
when people were still convinced that Seattle in the early 90s was like San Francisco in the 60s.
Overrated.
And one day, it's going to be historical, and everyone is going to care about Green Apple Quick Step.
What the fuck?
Did you just have a stroke?
What is that?
Green Apple Quick Step?
Green Apple Quick Step was a band in Seattle.
Is that an 116 band?
There's no excuse for a name like that.
Those kids used to walk around Seattle wearing, I swear to you, feather boas in the middle of the day, walking around with those big white Kurt Cobain sunglasses and feather boas and fingernail polish.
And they were like, we're going to be the next Rolling Stones.
It was like, you're not even going to be the next steel pole bathtub.
Get out of here.
You're not going to be the last Murder City Devils.
The one kid, I see him all the time.
He's still out here.
Oh, these guys look very, very silly.
Yeah, well, that was the time.
So anyway, they bought a lot of vans and bongos.
Yeah, if you believe in Seattle, the thing is, if you could go back to 1967 and buy all of Grace Slick's drum underwear...
or whatever it is that people you know if you go back to the 60s and buy jimmy hendrix's you know broken uh bell bottoms you could go buy those because now they'd be i'll bet you're a great boss and now you could take those to one of those dan akroyd uh rock and roll uh hamburger places and put them up on the wall in a glass case and sell them for a million billion dollars you know
You may be the first person I can't keep up with.
Oh, my God.
You know what?
God damn it.
Cold sores.
Fuck.
So, yeah, I bet you're a great boss.
But is this totally self-funded at this point?
You can't really say.
I'm not at liberty to say.
Okay.
Let me ask you some very general questions.
Yeah, okay.
All right.
So, for example, I don't know if you have an office, but obviously you have some kind of a work environment.
I guess that might be some kind of a helicarrier.
I'm sitting in my work environment now, and I am wrapped in a sheet.
Yeah.
Like my forefathers.
Because of your modesty?
Like my farmer forefathers.
On weekend nights, they wrapped themselves in a sheet.
They didn't have sheets.
They had woven corn blankets.
So, no, I am wrapped in a sheet because I'm always trying to find the right amount of comfortably unclothed.
where I can do the podcast, do my work, be unclothed, but also be comfortable.
Does nudity seem disrespectful, or does it leave a stain?
It does seem disrespectful.
I don't want to be doing the podcast where I'm just sitting here in the all together.
Yeah, I'm fully clothed, but my pants are filthy.
Well, and I'm sitting in a leather chair, so if you sit for an hour and a half in a leather chair with no pants on... You have to propose.
LAUGHTER
Yeah.
Six months later, you're going to have piglets.
Okay.
So I guess I'm guessing the work environment you have.
I'm guessing it's like hot and cold water.
You know when to turn on and off.
You've been very selective in your hiring.
I imagine there's a certain sense of humor, but you also know when to be serious.
Right.
I hope so.
Well, people, they can tell by my look.
They tell by the glance.
You don't have to say anything.
You don't have to say anything.
You get what you get and don't be upset.
That's right.
I look over, and then they go back to work.
They know what they've done.
Boy.
Fucking farmers.
And you know, all this bullshit about family farms.
Well, yeah, but I mean, the family is really, really, really rich, and they've probably never even seen the farm.
Yeah.
And the subsidies.
You get a subsidy to not grow.
You kill chickens for a year and get $50 million.
Boy, you're telling me.
Family farms.
Let's call Neil Young.
Give me a fucking break.
Give Merlin a fucking break.
When's the last time you had a good peach?
Be honest.
You know what?
I'm not a super big peach eater.
Tomato.
When's the last time you had a good tomato?
I don't like tomatoes.
When's the last time you had a good steak?
See, it probably didn't come from a farm.
You know where it was?
We were in Minneapolis.
It was just recently.
This is your third Minneapolis story.
I was in Minneapolis and we went to one of those Brazilian steak restaurants.
That's what Jason and I went to.
Jason and I had sword steaks.
They come out with the steaks on the swords and they just feed you steak until you are insane with steak.
Until you have had an insane amount of steak.
And it was very good.
I don't want to speak for Jason, but I think I may have changed his game that night.
His team is right for being changed.
Okay.
Hmm.
He had some good notes on you, boy.
Oh, he had some good notes.
He doesn't know me.
He doesn't know anything about me.
Well, he knows enough about you to give me some good... You know what?
He's making it up.
He just thinks he knows about me because he sees me around.
All right.
All right.
I'll save it for the after dark.
He sees me around and he's like, oh, yeah, I know that guy.
He's got a bunch of story.
Don't pull out the easy one, if you know what I mean.
What I'm saying is...
He had insight.
Oh, I bet he secretly works for you.
Plausible deniability.
You just caught me in a canary trap, didn't you?
Oh, you know what?
Say nothing.
Shut up.
No, not that shut up.
I mean the catchphrase, shut up.
You know where cold sores come from?
Here's the thing.
I used to baby them.
Okay, so here's the history of my cold sores.
You got them one time, the first time.
God damn it.
You call toilet seats.
Donna.
Uh, are you, are you, um, is it a, is it a, you say PNW?
Is that right?
PNW.
It's every Northwest.
Sounds like a root beer.
PNW is, uh, they say stress bumps.
That's a Belling.
Is that Bellingham ease?
Stress bumps is a joke because... So many people have herpes.
The guitar player of Harvey Danger used to get cold sores.
Jeff.
What we would call cold sores.
But Jeff, again, because of the shame of the socially communicated aspect of cold sores...
And Jeff did not want to be getting cold sores, like so many people.
He did not want to have cold sores.
Now, he had them, but he did not want to have them.
And so he would call them stress bumps.
He said, oh, man, I got this stress bump.
That is so sweet.
And we would say, you mean cold sore?
And he'd say, no, no, no, it's not a cold sore.
It's a stress bump.
I get them when I'm stressed.
That's not inaccurate.
That's when I get them too.
It's when I'm not sleeping enough.
Definitely when I'm not sleeping enough.
Because your immune system goes down and then the negative energy that you got from kissing toilet seats or bad girls comes out in the form of a giant pustular throbbing beacon to other people that you are unclean and unsafe.
It's a warning sign.
It's a warning sign.
It says, do not kiss this person.
Do not fall in love with this person.
They are hideous.
They have been places you don't want to know about.
I think I just figured it out.
I think what you're saying to me is I got what I got, but then I got upset.
You're saying I should not be upset, right?
You got upset because you got what you got.
You know what?
There's a lesson.
Even in the things you're so very wrong about, there's always a lesson to be gleaned.
You know what gleaning is?
Gleaning is when you go through after you got all the big corn.
You go about small corn.
You know about gleaning?
You know what gleeking is?
I can gleek.
I call it snaking.
I cannot gleek, but my daughter can gleek.
Accidentally or on purpose?
She's too young to gleek on purpose.
that'll do pig right there she's too young to glee on purpose okay thank you um uh here's the thing it started out too young it started out when i was a child yes i had not kissed any toilet seats or a girl named donna but wait a minute are you are you are you do i get my day in court at any point are you saying that girls named donna are fast
Well, it doesn't.
I mean, if they're not, they're missing their best bet.
Don't you think names are destiny?
I think girls named Donna are fast.
Oh, it's no question.
Is this a common thing?
Do people think girls named... I have a relative named Donna.
It's right there in the name, Donna.
Donna.
Right, exactly.
It's a fast girl's name.
Okay, let me ask you this.
I don't mean to make this a bit, but if you name your kid fucking Jeeves, if you just call your kid Jeeves or Jeezy, what are they going to be?
They're going to be in the service industry.
There's no CEO named Jeeves.
No.
Right?
Same with Babscombe.
Or Bascom.
And that means he's going to be a gay?
No, Babscom was Richie Rich's... Oh, Bascom.
Yeah, Bascom.
End episode.
You don't even have to say anything now.
You just make the sound and it's hilarious.
This is why you should never date a woman with a waitress name.
Donna is also a waitress name.
Yeah, fucking fast waitress.
She's a very fast waitress.
You might as well, instead of skip school, just drop her off at the Denny's.
She's a waitress, but she has a tear in her pantyhose on the inside of her thigh.
She's not afraid to bring you a Grand Slam.
Uh-oh, Donna.
Now, wait a minute.
What are we going to do when it turns out somebody's listening to this podcast and her name is Donna and she's like a really nice chaste girl?
I guess have intercourse with her?
Turn her out?
Is that what you're saying?
Give her some herpes?
Can you wear a mean stick and give her a stress bump?
Hey, Donna, how'd you stay a stress bump freak?
Now, would she have a shrill voice or would she be smoking so much, if you know what I mean?
Donna's got a horse voice.
She's got a horse voice.
She's got a rough voice.
She's got a lady horse voice.
She does.
Oh, brother.
We're going to need Paul Allen to get us out of this one.
It all started when I was a child.
What are the other fast girl names?
Oh, other fast girl names?
Let me think about it.
I'm not talking about the obvious ones like Candy or whatever.
You want to faster like Donna.
Or Intercorsi.
Intercorsi.
That would be a terrible name.
Don't name your daughter Intercorsi.
There's those jokey names like Hortense.
There are actually women named Hortense.
ah scullery maids oh god why'd you say that now do you want to hear about my cold sores or do you want to talk about fast girls i'll talk about i would be happy to talk about fast girls because i think we could develop a whole taxonomy of these things that could help a lot of young people men and women listening to you talk about your cold sores and talking about fast girls i have a sense that those two roads are going to converge
Two roads converged in a yellow wood.
Yeah, and that made all the stress bumps.
That I traveled both.
I saw a fucking bird in a tree.
I necked with the toilet seat.
Journey was playing.
Of course it was.
Of course it was.
You hotboxed a cigarette with some girl behind the camera.
You can't get a stress bump from hotboxing.
I don't know.
See, this is the thing.
You are, at the heart of it, a scientist, a rationalist.
You're a man of reason.
You're a Hobbesian, whatever the fuck that means.
I think that means you like eating people.
And, I mean, you know.
Come on.
It started when I was a child.
And I would get what was then referred to as fever blisters.
Oh, so it started for the love of God!
Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha.
Waitress names you got to look out for.
So some uncle licked you when you were a little kid.
Oh, my God.
It's all coming back to me.
It was Uncle Intercorsi.
Uncle Intercorsi licked you.
Why did they drop me off with Uncle Intercorsi?
And you had stress bumps your whole life, and you blotted it out.
You think it's some natural thing.
Every time it went away, he'd come back in the canary trap and give me another one.
Your folks were in the other room drinking gin martinis and Uncle Licky is in your bassinet.
I'd say, why?
And he'd say, shut up!
You cold sores.
You get what you get!
Don't be upset!
Lick, lick, lick.
Cold sore, cold sore.
It started when I was a child.
And I would get what was then referred to as fever blisters.
And this is like when you'd get a cold.
You'd get your wart.
B minus.
Oh.
Oh, God.
It's an anger that's become physical.
It's shot through my sick immune system.
I think I'm literally getting a cold sore on my witch hazel right now.
I'm going to have to pop this shit.
Okay, let's go straight.
You know what?
Let's go straight to the functional component of this.
Have you ever gotten a cold sore on your nose?
No, you can't get a cold sore on your nose.
Yes, you can.
What the fuck have you been doing, John?
It's a mucus membrane.
If Uncle Licky put his tongue up your nose, he'd have cold sores in your nose.
That would have to be a pretty small tongue.
Oh, man.
You can get a cold sore in your nose.
Now, I've heard of people having no sex.
What?
You can have sex with almost anything if you want it enough.
You mean they're putting their noses in one another or they're putting their jump up somebody's nose?
You always give me a fresh way of thinking about everything.
Thank you.
Yeah, I call it docking.
So here's the thing.
Let's skip my childhood and go straight to the functional component of this, which is that there are people who get stress bumps.
And here's what they do.
It's a fucking rookie mistake.
They baby it.
And they go, mew, mew, mew.
And they say, oh, oh, oh.
You don't want to put moisture on it.
Oh, it says on the internet, I have to put an ice cube on it.
What?
the fuck you know what you're gonna get a wet chin and a big cold sore stop put the ice cube down you're spreading disease to your chin put it down so okay what do you do next ready for step two oh oh oh this is where it gets all clinical look at me i'm a doctor you go and you buy some fucking blistex and you know what you do with your filthy little finger you squeeze some useless blistex on your finger and now you've got you've got a shiny pointless lip and herpes finger
Now, you've got a way.
You might as well just go rub your stress pump all over everything in the house.
That's right.
Including your remote that people are going to touch.
That's right.
And you might as well just go into the kid's room and lick them.
Because you're going to get it eventually.
I just want to make sure I've got this right.
You've got to watch out for Donna.
You've got to watch out for her in one of two ways.
Either look out or hey, look out.
You're saying she might have Blistex finger.
I'm saying once Uncle Licky's been into your bassinet, there's no reason not to start dating Donna.
There's nothing worse that's going to happen.
Oh my God.
Uncle Licky and Donna, that'd be a hell of a hobo fight.
Now you go to the next level up and you're going pro.
So you bought some finger cots, you got some acyclovir, and you're ready to go to town, right?
This is going to be your weekend in Vegas.
You're going to take care of this shit.
You're doing everything right.
Yes.
It's your high school reunion.
It's your 20-year reunion.
You don't want to stress them.
You've got limited amounts of time.
Right.
Now that will work.
And it can work.
But...
Should we really go to the pro level?
I think people need to know this.
Should we go to the pro level?
Go to the pro level.
I learned this, I think, from you.
This is an educational philosophy podcast.
That's correct.
You taught me the basics of this in a way that made me shudder.
And like so many of the things you've tried to help me with, I immediately set it aside as being impractical and completely insane.
Right.
But then did some research, and I looked on the internet.
I realized that, yes.
I realized I was wrong.
Uncle Licky made me hurt.
Yeah.
You know what?
We shouldn't talk about this.
This is just too disgusting.
It's just too disgusting.
You were about to go to the pro level.
All right.
Well, here's the problem.
This is where you get into the fucking Jonah Lehrer bullshit because I'm going to tell you everything you know is wrong.
You ready for that?
Here's your freakingomics.
You keep touching it.
Stop touching it.
Don't play with it.
Don't put things on it.
Here's what you put on it.
You ready for this?
You go wash your hands like a fucking gentleman.
You get the sharpest needle you've got.
You get some cotton balls and you get some alcohol.
Wash the hands good.
Put the alcohol into something you're probably going to throw away.
Put the needle into the alcohol.
You can burn the end if you want to.
Get it in the alcohol.
Get it all clean.
And now here's what you're going to do.
As soon as you start to get the bump, you take the needle with the alcohol on it.
You take the cotton ball with the alcohol on it, and you poke that shit.
Boom!
And then you put the alcohol straight on it.
Do not touch anything else.
It all goes into a hazmat bag and throw it away.
Then you're just going to be putting so much alcohol on that area.
Alcohol, alcohol, alcohol.
It's going to dry you out.
Your lips will turn white with rage.
But you know what's going to happen?
It's going to go away.
It's not going to spread.
It's not going to spread.
You're not going to go to the one to the three stress problem that a lot of people get, right?
You ever had that?
You ever had the one that turns into three?
Sure.
And then they go up your nose.
I don't think... I think that's a canary trap, John.
I don't think you can really get them in your nose.
No, you get them in your nose.
That sounds uncomfortable.
If you go on the internet, which I don't think you should do right now, but after this is over... I'm going to wash everything I've got.
I feel like Uncle Licky's been on everything I've got.
type in cold sore nose and i bet you you find some terrible photographs you never wanted to see you know if you poke the cold sore you turn it from a cold sore into an owie but it's a treatable owie it's a treatable owie then it's just an owie on your lip like any owie anytime you would get an owie if you burned your lip you're sitting there and you're sitting there and you're watching your lip get big and it's like having some kind of you know you're on a
Oh, you know where you're going.
No, no, no, no.
This is the thing.
It's the worst feeling in the world.
There's a feeling that everybody who gets cold sore stress bumps gets, which is the feeling.
Even before it's a physical feeling, there's something in your heart that goes, uh-oh, I shouldn't have thought that thought.
I was a bad person once, and now I'm going to get my just desserts.
It's nothing to do with Donna or Licky.
You can get it different ways.
What about a fork?
Can you get it from a fork?
You could get it from a fork, but you're eating off of a fork that was eaten off of by a bad person.
It's such a shame you're not a Puritan.
You can help so many people.
You can make so many people feel so bad about so many ways.
Anyway, the alcohol is key.
It's a fork that was insufficiently cleaned since it was last in the hands of a bad girl.
Nobody said Uncle Licky was hygienic.
I can't even say it.
Oh, God, Donna.
I read the Skyride with her at Disney.
Oh, man, the Skyride.
And she was wearing those jeans that were kind of high-waisted.
I couldn't even tell if they were jeans.
She looked like she had legs made of denim.
They were...
Those jeans with no back pocket?
No, no, no, no, no.
Man, she was not afraid to wear white jeans.
That was a proud lady.
She might have admitted menopause.
She was 14.
If you go fast enough, you can hit menopause.
Her bangs were feathered.
John, stop fucking freaking me out.
She had the second biggest hoodles of any girl I've ever met.
She had the giant things on the side.
She had braces.
Big wings, braces.
She acted like she liked me for almost three weeks.
Do you know how painful that is?
It's like waiting for a cold sore to bloom.
Oh, Donna.
Still haunts me.
She's that musk.
That Jovan musk.
Oh, Jovan Musk.
Oh, man.
I missed that.
Oh, it was good.
No, no, no.
Not too much.
I'm not talking patchouli levels.
I'm talking very gentle.
Gentle daps.
Sure.
Somebody taught her to put a little bit on either side of her neck underneath her ear.
I wish I could have been there.
One down in the panty area.
Oh, Jesus Christ.
And then a little bit of feeling that way by Journey.
God damn it.
Fucking Uncle Licky.
He ruined everything.
You know, there absolutely are people listening to this podcast who, A, were not alive in the 70s, and B, have never had a cold sore, and they're thinking to themselves, why am I listening to this?
This is not helping me.
But they don't realize that... I've never been to the Globe Theater.
Shut up.
They don't realize that now that they are listening to this podcast, they have entered into the guild of people who know Fast Girls and who sometimes bad things happen to them.
And you're going to get a cold sore one of these days off of a fork.
Oh, you know how many people are going to get a cold sore just because of this show?
Because we made them think about it.
Isn't that awful?
We should do trigger warning, trigger warning.
We should put a thing at the beginning, trigger.
And when you do a trigger warning, do you have to do it in Pig Latin or how does that work?
You say old K or say...
I'm not sure how that works.
You know what?
After I look up nose sores, I'm going to look up trigger sores.
Anyway, you know what's key in all that, John?
Self-awareness and alcohol.
I mean, not the kind that you're, you know.
Self-awareness and denatured alcohol.
Yes.
Do not waste your money on that 70% shit.
Go straight to the 91%.
Yeah, that's tough talk.
No, it's pure stuff.
If you've got to clean a mouse or get rid of a cold sore, you want the strongest stuff you can get.
And can I be honest with you?
It's going to hurt.
It's not going to be the soothing and delicious licky kisses of an ice cube.
No, this is going to fucking hurt so much to put a needle into a bloated blister.
But here's the thing.
Don't wait until it's bloated.
Start early.
And then alcohol.
You know, more alcohol.
Keep going.
And learn to go into the pain.
Now I'm speaking to you directly, audience.
Learn to go into the pain.
Yeah, exactly, exactly.
And don't treat it like a fucking fondue.
One straight deep, you go right in.
And then, you know, there's going to be, let's be honest, there's going to be a little bit of a liquid that comes out.
That's right.
No, no, that's the deadliest substance in the world.
It must go on the cotton ball with the alcohol.
And that goes into the hazmat bag.
That's right.
Wash your hands.
Wash your hands again.
Wash your hands again.
It's like the liquid that comes out of that cold sore is like a sourdough starter.
It's got Napoleon's molecules in it.
There's a little bit of Napoleon in it.
There's a little bit of the cold sore that Napoleon got from Josephine in the liquid that's coming out of your lip.
Josephine is totally, I'm sorry to interrupt you, Josephine is totally a fucking waitress name.
My God, Joe.
Oh, brother.
Hey, Joe, can I get a warm-up here?
Whew.
Sure thing.
Sure thing, Boney.
Be right over, Boney.
Are you going out with Joe?
Oh, I am.
Her name's Josephine.
Be careful for the stress bump.
She wants to be called Josephine.
She's Hollandaise.
He's given her more than a few tablespoons of hollandaise.
Light rain, if you know what I'm saying.
Ooh, anytime that you want me.
Ooh.