Ep. 41: "In Lieu of a Laundromat"
Roderick on the Line is sponsored by Instapaper, the critically acclaimed app that saves webpages to read later.
Get it now at instapaper.com or search for Instapaper in the App Store.
Hello.
Hi, John.
Hi, Merlin.
Why did you sniff?
Why did you smirk at me?
There was a noise, and it sounded like you were falling onto your chair and then onto your mic.
And then I started to laugh, but then I ended up laughing because I thought maybe you were doing that old guy thing where, you know, old guys...
You know, as you get older, you have a way of getting into and out of chairs.
You kind of go and like fall into a chair.
Do I?
Do you do the kick to get out?
Do I ever?
I bet your dad did the kick.
Did your dad do a kick to get out?
No, dad.
Did he have one of those lifty chairs?
No, later on in life, what he did was he fell to the floor and then worked his way up the wall.
But no, no, he always... He was an athlete.
My dad knew it.
He was good with chairs.
He knew how to center himself, get his center of gravity, and then up.
No, my problem in this instance was you called, and I was looking at something else, and I reached...
for my headphones and i grabbed my coffee cup instead and i almost poured it on on top of my head i almost put my coffee cup on my head like it was my headphones i don't want to go meta but could we please have a little bit of fan art of that maybe as a small animated gif i was you know i was looking i was looking away and i reached out and everything on my desk is black black phone black microphone black headphones is that right
Yeah.
Except for my bell, which is orange.
You get an orange bell.
I have an orange bell because it is from an old board game that involved a bell.
I don't remember the game.
I don't remember even ever playing the game, but I got it for Christmas and it had a bell, like the type of bell that would sit on the...
at the check-in of an old-fashioned hotel.
But it's painted orange.
And I've loved it.
I've had it my whole... I mean, I got it when I was like five or something.
It might be that old Parker Brothers game about that Northern Ireland game about marching season.
It was called The Troubles, right?
Now that's funny.
It comes with a pop-o-matic.
That's good.
That was such a stupid fake smart joke and you totally saved it.
My grandmother... We're here for each other in that way.
I absolutely feel that way.
My grandmother, as she got older, she eventually passed because of the Alzheimer's, which is funny.
They die, old people.
You know, it's pretty consistent.
Yeah.
It's one of those things where if it's not Alzheimer's, it's going to be something.
It's like meeting a girl in a bar.
Like it's really consistent that it's just going to go a certain way.
Yeah.
So anyway, long before I think we even had those names, things were – you know how it is.
Which names?
Oh, like the names of doctors who discovered –
Well, yeah.
We just – back then you used to call it – you don't want to say senile.
You say you get – Oh, I see.
Right.
So no, senile.
Of course, that's what we called it, right?
Oh, sure.
As you do.
But it was a slog.
It was a slow go.
Like for a while, she was still like doing lots of stuff in her yard and going to the store and everything was fine.
And over time, over a period of like five to eight years, like weirder and weirder shit started happening.
You started walking out into the Okefenokee swamp and –
No, no, we weren't Finocchi adjacent.
But the main thing was she kept – she'd drive over to our house and she would just have – That's good she was still driving.
Well, she would have at first small dents in the car.
Right.
That first she was not aware of.
Right.
And then when she saw it, she would slough it off like it was a pimple or something.
She'd say, oh, that's just nothing.
Sure.
Yeah, hail.
It was hail.
It could have been hail.
Very specific hail.
And then when we kind of like eventually started to kind of take her to task on this because, you know, well, grandma, can you tell us a little bit more about the dent?
And a la your headphones and black desk problem, she always had a reason.
And at one point, she did actually complain about the size and clarity of stop signs.
Oh, right.
Well, that's something we should write our congresspeople about.
If stop signs were only twice as big and twice as clear.
Yeah, and does this feed it all into the super trained notion of where stop signs will fit into things?
Do you have a solution for somebody like my grandmother?
Traffic circles.
God rest your soul.
There shouldn't be stop signs.
There should be traffic circles.
But more importantly, I think the solution to the problem with your grandmother, like the solution to the problem that I had with my dad as he got older, my dad did not go senile at all.
He was sharp as a tack.
All too sharp.
But he began to drive his car up on the sidewalk with a concerning regularity because I think he just stopped giving a fuck.
He would come into an intersection at a, you know, into a, like, he'd make a corner, let's say.
At a speed that he felt was appropriate.
And he would, he'd just cut the angle.
And he'd go up onto the sidewalk.
And he would, I mean, when I inherited my dad's car.
Hoopty number two.
Hoopty number two.
It had a broken axle.
It had, the entire front end was wrecked.
It was, and it was the same thing.
I would get in his car and I'd say, dad, your car's got a weird shimmy.
And he'd go, what?
No, it's always been like that.
And I'd say, no, it's not.
It hasn't always been like that.
I feel like we are driving on a Dyson vacuum cleaner.
It's not tracking the road.
And he'd go, what?
No, no, no.
That's how it came from the factory.
And eventually, I determined that he was basically one...
He was one small stroke away from driving through a farmer's market at 65 miles an hour.
Oh, that's horrible.
And so my solution to your grandmother and my aging father and everyone's aging parents, senile or no, is that as you get older, you should have to take more frequent driver's
It should be more and more difficult for you to drive a car by yourself when you are 85 years old.
This is part of the super train.
That is so super train.
This is part of the super train like sort of paternalistic society that we're going to have where most people in the prime of their life are free to do whatever they want.
But when you are young and when you are old, you are monitored more closely because you do not have the cognitive faculty to make good choices.
Yeah.
I've actually been thinking a lot about this and like all utopian visions, it is ultimately truly dystopian.
In order for your system to work, it seems like – Hitler thought he was helping a lot of people, right?
He did.
Yeah, he helped a lot of German people.
And so here's the thing.
Like right now, you can say if you sent my grandmother a notice in the mail, well, she responded to email or she responded to her postal mail, like to everything.
You could send her like a – you remember when they started sending out those fake FedEx envelopes?
It was actually about like a mortgage refund.
And she filled out all of the publisher's clearing.
Oh, you got to put the green sticker.
She wants the green card.
All right.
But I guess – Scrape off the – use a quarter.
Scrape off the code number.
Oh, gosh, I have so much to ask you about.
Do you know that you get on different sucker lists?
That's what they call it in the industry.
You get on different – truly, different sucker lists depending on how much of that shit you do.
Do you know that?
My dad was on every single one of them because at a certain point, I feel like he would get those letters in the mail and he'd go, oh, this guy seems kind of nice.
He said, you know, the letter said, hey, Dave.
And so I wrote him a long thing back.
And eventually it got to the point where he was getting 300 phone calls a day from really nice women in their mid-20s who wanted to sell him a timeshare.
And at one point he bought a timeshare.
Oh, you're kidding.
No, and he had this vision.
You know, he's 87 years old, and he had this vision that he was going to buy a timeshare.
Because my dad was a liberal politician his whole life.
He didn't make a lot of money, and a lot of his friends from college...
Became capitalists or were born capitalists.
You said he advised one of his friends to go out and get a little tootsie.
Don't sit around.
You said he had a friend who was 80.
It wasn't his friend.
It was his brother-in-law.
My aunt had passed away.
And he was like, you're a millionaire.
You should go get a girlfriend.
Yeah.
But so he's an old guy and he gets into this state of mind that I think happens as you're reflecting back on your life.
And he's thinking, he was thinking, well, it was hard for him to remember that he had done all these amazing things in his life.
And all he could think about was that he had not...
He didn't have any business to hand me down as his heir.
He wasn't able to give me the keys to our family laundromat or our Pontiac dealership or whatever it is where you give your son something.
that then sets him up in life.
You know what I mean?
His only bequest to me was that I used English properly and that I could walk into a cocktail party and immediately establish that I was the biggest cheese in the place.
Check.
Those were the things that he gave me in lieu of a Pontiac dealership or a laundromat.
And so he's 87 years old.
He's like, oh, I got it.
He calls me and he says, I got us a vacation house.
I will never get sick of this impersonation.
And I said, you got us a vacation house.
What?
And he said, oh, it's great, a vacation house in Tahiti, Bahama somewhere.
And I said, you don't have the resources to have gotten us a vacation house.
What are you talking about?
You didn't buy a timeshare, did you?
Oh, I don't know what that is, but I got this thing.
It's great.
You go any time, we'll all go sit in this house.
So I go to his place, and he's got these brochures.
And yes, he bought a timeshare.
And he had many, many conversations with this delightful young woman.
And I review all the information and they've set him up in something where it's direct deposit.
It's taking 800 bucks out of his account every month.
You know, it was a complete like...
And absolutely the point at which whatever your capitalist enterprise is that's preying on old people, you and everyone that's involved in the business have convinced yourself that you're not doing a terrible thing in the world.
You're just trying to make a living or you are selling things that people want or whatever it is that people have to tell themselves.
And some people, they come to despise their marks.
Your dad was a Glengarry lead.
he was he absolutely was and and i and all those people i could not wish a more virulent pox on their house but no a lot of those people those old people hold on to those records pretty well i'm thinking if you started going to estate sales in advance of super train officially being launched you could start gathering you know like all the time shares
You know what the NRA says?
The NRA says Hitler.
Hitler went through, found out who had the guns.
They had lists, right?
Hitler had lists.
They had lists.
So again, I don't want to conflate super training with Hitler, not by a long shot.
Here's the thing.
It's like Stalin, right?
There's going to have to be an awkward period where there's a little bit of governmental nudging.
A little oversight.
Would you say that Stalin nudged a little bit?
Okay, Mao.
Mao was a nudger.
Mao nudged.
Stalin was much more of a knock on the door in the middle of the night kind of guy.
But Mao gave people plenty of opportunity to get on board his super train.
You've got a barbecue girl sitting out back.
There's no reason you can't be making fucking steel.
Do you know about that?
You know he had people trying to make steel in their backyard.
Yeah.
I've been thinking, you know, that's the best thing about Super Train is the amount of new steel we're going to be producing.
Because of all the recycling.
Because we're going to be recycling rust all across America.
You know what?
You're going to be like the greatest hits of the 1940s.
You're going to – I see you creating a kind of – Pennsylvania 6, 5000?
Pennsylvania 6.
That's a great song.
That's my favorite scene in that Jimmy Stewart movie.
It's a great hit of the 40s.
But anyway, go ahead.
Oh, no, I'm sorry.
It's your program.
Well, what I ended up doing with this timeshare woman... Can we circle back to this, though?
Because I think this might be important.
Yeah, I think we can.
But what I ended up doing with her was I sicked my sister on her.
Oh, brother.
And on them.
You called the action line.
I really did.
And it was a sight to behold.
It was a beautiful thing.
I insisted that I be there when she called them and explained to them patiently that she was a lawyer.
which she's not, and that he was a lawyer, and that we were going to sue everyone a thousand times if they didn't return all of the money and a written apology and the whole nine.
Susan demanded satisfaction.
She demanded a level of satisfaction that even I am in awe of.
Susan is able to get people on the phone who are the people who are trained to deal with hostile
customers right and susan is able to basically skeletonize them like like they are a cow that walked unknowingly into an amazonian stream and they come out the other side and not only are they a skeleton but they are happy to be a skeleton and they are apologizing for any inconvenience their meat may have caused as she consumed it like she is she is a
An extremely, extremely, not even a small-town apology, like a village, like a Hamlet apology.
Like a truly, you're saying like deferential, deep bow.
Deep bow, happy smile, and not only here is a refund, but here's interest on it.
The thing about my sister, though, is that it is like unleashing...
It's like unleashing the curse of the mummy.
Like, if you try and if you have an idea of what you're going to unleash the curse of the mummy on, you may in fact be able to bend it to your will for that immediate...
amount of time or that immediate purpose but then the curse of the money is loose on the world like i do not i do not invoke my sister unless i basically have a scorched earth policy like if i turn susan loose then i
I have no – everything in this 45-degree angle is potentially going to be salted earth.
You think of her as kind of like a nuclear option.
She's a – or to mix the metaphor, a customer service commando.
Like if you call her out, things are going to break.
Well, but the thing is, it's not that they will break.
It's that she gets satisfaction and also, like, everyone is hugging at the end.
It's not like me.
When I walked out of that North Face store, I think they probably turned the sign to closed and spent the rest of the day, like, in the back, like, having an employee meeting.
Yeah.
They brought in counselors.
An encounter session where it was just like, let's all talk about this.
Let's get this out.
Let's talk about what happened.
It's like the Columbine of backpacks.
Whereas with my sister, at the end, they are exchanging phone numbers because they're going to go snowboarding later.
She converts the whole thing until they feel like... I've watched my sister in a train station in Europe
have an exchange with gypsy pickpockets where the gypsy pickpockets returned the pickpocketed goods and then there were hugs all around.
Now, I don't know if our listeners have had a lot of experience with gypsies who pickpocketed people.
I think they like to be called Roma or Aleuts.
You're absolutely correct.
They prefer to be called Roma.
They even stole the name from Italy.
For the sake of clarity, no, no, no, it's the other way around.
Okay.
But yeah, Susan somehow... But the thing is, once it gets happening, it's like there's a... It's a viral...
Susan, once you turn her loose, you better also have a stack of bills that you want to contest because you really have to turn that power in a direction.
Otherwise, she'll be calling customer service agents just for the thrill of hearing.
She's like Dark Phoenix.
Now she's got a little bit of that energy, and now she can't stop.
She's going to keep settling things for the rest of the day.
That's right.
That's, that's, that's, I think everybody needs a person like that.
First of all, can I say kudos to Susan?
I wish I had that in me.
I don't, as you know.
Yeah, I know.
Well, I've, I've mentioned my friend Pete Butler before back from back in Tallahassee and my friend Dave used to call him action line because if you ever needed anything done and you had exhausted, it was the ombudsman.
Yeah, you kind of, I mean, it started out real nice because Pete was real civil at first.
Yeah.
But the thing is, you know what?
Here's your chance.
You know what I mean?
This is your chance.
We could do this.
We could do this like gentlemen and we can settle this.
Is it the easy way or the hard way?
Right, right, right.
And he would go into it.
And of course, like you say, you're dealing with scoundrels.
You're dealing with people who spend all day basically trying to destroy people.
And like Susan at a more amateur level, these people, they probably, there's something to it.
When I was a telemarketer, I was a horrible human being.
I took a certain amount of joy in the awfulness of my job because that's how you survive.
And in their case, they're sitting around trying to screw old people.
Like my grandmother.
My grandmother – you tell my grandmother, my late grandmother, you tell her you're a Christian and she'll do anything for you.
She tried to refinance her house in order to have it painted.
Right, right, right, right.
This is the kind of thing that we do.
So you call somebody like Pete and the action line comes in.
I told you my dad – when I finally took his car away, I said –
I said, Dad, what do you need a car for?
You're 87 years old.
What do you do in your car?
He said, I got a lot of things I do.
I got to run errands.
I said, what errands do you do?
I go to the drugstore.
Yeah, all right.
Well, we can handle getting you to the drugstore a couple of times a week.
What else?
What else do you need the car for?
Well, I go to the mechanic.
You go to the car mechanic.
To get to the car that doesn't have a broken axle looked at.
And he goes, yeah, yeah.
How often do you go to the mechanic?
Oh, I don't know.
Once a week?
You go to the car mechanic once a week, and that's one of the things you need a car for.
He was going to this guy who was quote-unquote fixing his car, and it was some local guy who figured out he had a live one, and my dad was just going down there to talk to him about
news of the day or talk about baseball and he would put the car up on the jack he surely saw that it had a broken axle and a you know he'd put the car up there and put new air in the tires and charge him 400 bucks
Yeah, give me a new Johnson rod.
You know, this is the thing.
When I went on that screed several years ago against the Firestone Tire Company.
I don't know about this screed.
Oh, well, in fact, I think it was my first ever Twitter store.
It used to be that you could trust.
Firestone, it could save your life.
This is equipment that could save your life.
I took this car, this self-same car, which has a book value probably of $1,800, and which my family, if you take all the members of my family that have had possession of this car at one time or another, we have probably put $40,000 on it.
into into fixing the the car the number of times it has been like demolished by my dad and then put you know pasted back into shape i think right now at this very moment my mom is driving this same car down the street but i took uh i took it to this firestone in north seattle
And they repaired it at great expense.
And I got in the car, started the car, put it into gear, and it made a sound like if you threw sea gravel into a blender.
And I turned the car off and I walked very slowly back into the office and I said, I don't think that you have fixed the car.
And the manager said very patiently to me like, I'm sorry, sir.
What is the problem?
I was like, why don't you come outside and you start the car and tell me what you think the problem is.
And he starts the car and it makes this horrible sound.
He's like, oh, dear.
And I said, yes.
So you called me down here to come pick up this car.
And no one in your organization thought to put a key in it and started to see that it was ready and repaired.
And he immediately started taking an approach with me that he had been clearly trained to do by some corporate disaster preparedness person.
Where they were like, when a customer becomes hostile...
You should immediately retreat into a very condescending manner.
And you should immediately start to be on guard.
And if the person uses profanity, here's what you say.
And so the guy says to me, well, I mean, I think we can get it done by a week from next Tuesday or something like that.
And I said, you have got to be shitting me.
And the guy says to me, I swear to you, sir, there's no need to use profanity.
Oh, boy.
And I was so covered in a thousand layers of...
desire to firebomb the business while it was open and full of customers like i was looking around for saving them you're saving them i was going to be saving everyone in this neighborhood by immolating them in this firestone rather than live another moment in a world where this asshole has any authority over me and whether or not i can drive away in my car
And so it was the first tweet storm I ever did.
I had been on Twitter for a year or so.
It had never occurred to me to tweet storm before.
But I started sending out tweets like that Firestone, the company, are like abortion providers and puppy killers and child rapists and...
And I went on for a day.
And it was very exciting.
Hashtag Firestone became a trending topic that day because other people joined me in the fun.
And I did not get any corporate satisfaction.
And I don't think at the time...
Firestone had a dedicated Twitter monitor.
So it wasn't like when I tweetstormed the Hilton Hotel and I started getting emails right away and frantic knocks on my hotel room door.
But I do feel like
I do feel like on that particular day, I cost Firestone a little bit.
I took a little bit out.
Maybe it is a completely impotent position, but I do believe in my heart of hearts that I have affected their business permanently to the tune of the $1,800 that I spent there.
Let me encourage anyone listening to this show to never patronize of Firestone.
They are, well, like I say...
Abortionists.
And baby killers.
Fresh human blood.
Not even baby killers in the sense of aborting babies.
Yeah, babies.
That's something that happens.
They actually kill live babies.
Oh, the ones they wanted.
That's right.
Oh, geez.
Babies that were wanted.
Yeah.
Firestone will kill them.
That's totally unacceptable.
Baby seals.
They're a shitty company run by shitty people who have a shitty policy about how to deal with people who use the word shit.
In a conversational use of the word shit.
Like, I know that the guys working in the Firestone occasionally use the word shit.
Right?
Like, if they are turning a wrench and they hurt themselves, even the most Christian of them is going to say shit periodically.
Because they're grease monkeys.
They are a swearing class.
Right?
Grease monkeys are a swearing class.
This is not so different from what we were talking about last week with Cyrano, right?
The thing is you run into somebody and they go, oh, you want to play?
Is that the thing?
Is that what we're going to do here?
I'm coming to you and I'm telling you that this is fucked up.
I'm telling you that you fucked something up and you have a chance, right?
This is like the whole Tylenol thing, right?
And now you're going to make it about me using profanity instead of how you and your business have fucked me royally out of three days of my life?
Oh, absolutely.
And you go out and they go buy ads and they put stickers on NASCARs and they make beer koozies and shit.
And they do that all day long.
But then – this happened – my friend Heather, who is a very successful, well-known blogger, she got a – I love that phrase.
Yeah.
she has a nine bedroom house john i wish i had a cough button nine bedroom house nine bedroom house yeah so she um well-known blogger here's the thing she she was patient and she was kind somebody had i think it was a washer and dryer that she had gotten and she you put put yourself in this position john would you have done that if you had 20 followers no listen i wish i was a successful and well-known blogger anyway figured out how to monetize my blog
What are you monetizing right now, John?
Me, personally, right now?
Yeah.
Well... We can monetize this.
We're monetizing it a little bit.
Let me see.
Point being, she was in the same position you and I have been in, which is that she tried to be the girl version of a gentleman.
And she said, look, guys, I bought this.
It doesn't work.
You got to fix this.
And she went through, you know, I can find this link for you.
Go back and find it.
But she was really cool about it.
What they didn't realize...
Oh, successful blogger.
Look out.
No, I think she didn't even – I don't even think she tried to play that particular card, 1.5 million followers.
And so she – She didn't pull out her clout score.
Well, what did you call it?
Twitter bomb?
Twitter storm?
tweet storm yeah she went happy go jappy on that shit and you know what they did they did the anti-hilton they they she made them look so bad and got so many people marshaled on her side because you've been there like everybody's been there you've been in that situation of saying like look i played your little game i waited for you to do the phone call i filled out the rma like i did all the things blah blah blah and you're fucking stonewalling me because you think i will stop
That's what's happening in the Firestone training seminar.
All those fuckstains think that they are being trained.
If they wait long enough, John Roderick will put his tail between his legs and balance scrape out of there and then come back again like Dave did.
Frustrated, I'll go away and then I'll come back and pay my bill politely and feel ashamed for myself that I said poo.
What was the resolution at the Hilton thing?
I seem to remember that you never really got satisfaction, and when I ask you about it, you sound like you're still a little frustrated that nothing had really come of it.
No, no, no.
It's not that I didn't get satisfaction.
The entire concept of the clout score and the tweet storm to me is a case of –
The corporate world has figured out that people do this, that if you're dissatisfied with how your hotel room is prepared, that they can contact you on the side.
They'll tweet you from their corporate account.
They'll say, hey, follow us so we can DM you.
Nice try.
And then they DM you and they say, hey, sorry about the problem.
How can we make it up to you?
How about a free night in a hotel?
Yeah.
And so what they are offering you is to provide you the service that you originally contracted them to provide, which is a night in a hotel.
They're trying to placate you with nothing.
Placate you with nothing.
And 99% of the people out there – and this is the whole business of clout and this kind of similar attempts to –
Every time you say that, I imagine somebody in 1965 saying Beatles, like an old guy going.
It's like our music teacher at New College.
Anytime he wanted to sound current, he'd say talking heads.
Yeah.
Beatles.
Here's the thing.
The problem is you got the clout.
But 99% of the people that I see on the internet who start a kind of like, hey, Delta Airlines, you screwed up my reservation.
Yeah.
And then Delta Airlines comes back and goes, oh, sorry, how about we upgrade you on your next flight?
And then people are like, I got satisfaction.
Oh, my God, these guys are so great.
I was so mad.
Oh, I was so mad, and they're so great.
They're so responsive.
And my feeling about it is that, and this was the thing in the Hilton Hotel, and this is the thing in the Firestone.
I am contracting them.
I am paying them to provide me a certain service, and I am not an unreasonable person.
And let's say you spaced it.
Let's say your credit card didn't work.
Let's say for whatever reason something went wrong.
Do you think that they would just go, oh, that's cool, we'll let it skate?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
No, they have worked out every single aspect of all that fine print and you sign a thing that says basically I agree to be fucked.
Yeah, yeah.
And if you said, oh, how about if I make it up to you by paying you the money tomorrow, like it's not going to work.
So my feeling about the power of social media is that at a certain point,
I am no longer working for the possibility of that company rectifying their mistake.
And now all of my energy is going into a kind of scarlet letter that I want to brand that business with that says, the satisfaction I'm going to get now is not the satisfaction of you making it up to me.
It is the satisfaction I'm going to get out of spending a day of my life
Publicly hating you and watching you twist on the line.
And the Hilton Hotel sent a guy to my door.
They found my personal email and were frantically emailing me to stop.
Instead of just fucking fixing it.
They were tweeting me.
Well, they tried.
The thing is, I got into my hotel room and it smelled like an abattoir.
And I called down to the front desk and I said, I'm sorry.
I asked for a room and you have obviously put me in a place where they butcher sheep.
Can you move me to a room that does not smell like this?
And they gave me a bunch of bullshit.
And I was like, I'm not coming back down to the front desk.
I am not going through any.
I'm not jumping through a single hoop.
I'm going to sit here in this room, not touching any surfaces until you send a person to my door with a key to a different room.
And they responded.
They sent a guy to my door with a key to a new room, which was to a room down the hall on the same floor where they had been butchering sheep, and my new room was no better than the last.
That's not a solution.
And at that point, I said, I have given you the opportunity.
You have...
You've blown it, and now you coming to my door and offering to put me in the bridal suite on the 15th floor is not a solution.
That is like you trying to plug a hole in the dike.
No, the bridal suite in this case, you're not talking about the one down the hallway.
Right.
You're saying you had your chance and you blew it once.
The guy came to my door after I started tweeting about it and he was like, sir, I understand there's a problem.
And I was like, well, and I shout through the door.
Yeah, there is a problem.
I called down to the front and you put me in a different room and it's just as bad as the last.
And he was like, well, if you'll come to the door, sir, I think we can rectify this situation.
And that was when I said, like hell I'm coming to the door.
You send your jackbooted thugs to my hotel room door.
How about instead you slide the new key under the door and then call me when you're downstairs.
And so eventually I said to the customer service rep who was based in Houston who was sending me five emails a day, how do we make this right?
I said, here's how you make it right.
One week in Hawaii at the Hilton Honolulu
on waikiki that is how you make it right you just you just hit my big fat fucking button you know okay here's the thing and it is hotels hotels big time restaurants sometimes big time you know what mine is mine is exactly oh it's so fucking angry oh you're mad right now oh oh i hear how mad you are you know what you just you just unleashed a dragon i did you just i just i'm gonna i'm gonna invade all over your first class
Are you always finding great articles on the web you'd love to read but just don't have the time?
Instapaper saves webpages for reading later for iPad, iPhone, Android, and Kindle.
You can read when you're waiting online, riding the bus, eating breakfast, or lying in bed.
You can even read offline.
Great for when you're on a plane or the subway and don't have an internet connection.
Pages are shown without clutter or distractions.
You can adjust the text to a comfortable size and font and much more.
Read more and read better by reading later with Instapaper.
Get it now at instapaper.com or search for Instapaper in the app store.
What is your beef Merlin man?
Okay.
First of all, here's how it should go.
You call down to the desk and you say, I'm not pleased with my room.
It's not clean and it's stinky.
You don't even have to ask for anything.
And you know what they say?
They say, I'm terribly sorry.
We'll take care of it immediately.
And what they do – here's what they do.
They call you right back and say, okay, we're putting you in the pope suite at the top floor.
In just a minute, our best bell person is going to come to your room.
Our top bell guy.
Top bellman is going to – bell person, bell lady, beltron is going to –
It's going to come down and personally move your luggage up there.
You're going to get a free meal tonight, and there will be a bottle of wine that you're not going to drink because you don't drink.
That's what we're going to do.
And you know what you don't do?
Here's the problem.
Hey, you know what?
It smells like a fucking sheep abattoir in here.
Sir, what do you want me to do about that?
You are in the service industry, fucktard.
You take care of it.
You're telling me you work in a hotel, and you don't know how to take care of somebody who's unhappy about the hotel?
No.
The guy that I called at the front desk said, well, we're really busy down here at the front desk.
That was the first thing.
And I said, I'm aware that you're busy at the front desk because I only moments ago waited in line for a half an hour to get checked into my hotel room while you guys played fucking tiddlywinks and were doing like words with friends or whatever the fuck you were doing instead of checking people into their room.
So I know how busy it is down there.
You're about to get a lot busier.
I am across the threshold now.
I am in my room.
I am a customer now.
I'm not some dope waiting in line to be a customer.
I am ensconced in customership.
I am now your only customer.
That's right.
I am the only thing in your mind right now.
Get up here and put me in the Pope suite, and they took me out of the place where they stored the dead Tauntauns, and they put me down the hall in the room where they expected me to sleep inside a dead Tauntaun, and I was not prepared to do that.
I hope that I... I just want to put it this way, John.
I am not asking for a favor here.
I hope that someday...
I hope that someday I earn the right to be on something like the Super Train board if you don't kill me, which I certainly deserve.
But here's the thing.
You have a place there now at the table.
Here's how this works.
Your problem, Firestone guy, Hilton guy.
Your problem is you tried to do – or social media douche.
You tried containment way too late.
That's right.
Containment is you take care of it as soon as I say something.
That's right.
And if you want me to be the guy who says, oh, thank you for DMing me on Twitter, you know what?
You're much more likely to get that if you agree that you fucked up, apologize for it, and then fix it by exceeding my expectations.
That's right.
Don't ask me –
what you can do to make it right.
You know what you can do to make it right?
Try some shit out.
Do everything that you do.
And I said to the guy in Houston, I was like, what are you empowered to do?
That's my question.
Like, are you some mid-level guy who's empowered to give me a night in a hotel?
Because if you are, fuck you.
If you are some guy in Houston who's sitting in a wood-paneled office and you are empowered to fly Paris Hilton out here to give me a handy while she sucks my toes, then get on the phone!
She's very live.
This happened to me in New Zealand.
I want to encourage people, and this is what I did on Twitter that day, was encourage people who have 500 Twitter followers, who have 115 Twitter followers, to also not sell...
their good name too cheaply don't do not sell your satisfaction for a gift bag of hand lotion like say no you know what for today you have fucked up and it is more gratifying to me to punish you
And to put your social media people to work so that maybe this is going to end up... A printout of this exchange is going to end up on some manager's desk.
Like, I think in the long run, that's going to have a more profound effect than if the guy whose job it is to give people free hotel rooms gives somebody a free hotel room.
He gets to check the box that he did his job today.
His boss checks his box that he did his job today.
And...
And you're still sitting in a room that smells like sheep guts.
And it's like... Or maybe you're in the Pope suite by that point.
But it all is just running a little too smoothly.
And we all need to stand athwart the coming...
mediocrity storm and say basta enough i will not be placated by someone whose job it is by someone who has only the authority to placate me and nothing else to make no corporate two words neville chamberlain this is about so much more than an abattoir hotel room this goes so much further than that this is there there is i'm
It's not even purely about satisfaction.
It's certainly not about hotel rooms.
It's about a slippery slope in which we slide deeper and deeper into letting these people have some kind of private fuck-up.
That's right.
Are you a Chamberlain or are you a Churchill?
We will fight them on the beaches.
We will fight them in the air.
We will never surrender.
Oh, my God.
It makes me so fucking angry.
My problem is I don't have any staying power.
The thing is I will burn and I will steam.
I will steam – in one case, I think I mentioned the Google Me episode.
I actually did go to the business computer and look up the name of everybody on the board.
I went to their pages.
I found out their email addresses, and I think the depths of my douchiness was me walking up to the desk to the person who had wronged me the previous day and pulling out – not what it looked like.
It was about 10 sheets of paper, but it was really two.
And I flipped through it very casually and I said, is Robert Lewis Jr.
still the hospitality director for Name of Parent Corporation?
Yes.
Oh, and is he still on Pico down in Santa Monica?
Is that correct?
Or whatever, whatever.
You were threatening them with implications.
I think I might have actually acted like I was talking on the phone too.
Were you talking into your wallet?
My wallet.
My wallet where they put a hold on my card.
Oh, brother.
Well, you know, the thing is that I have always felt that denying yourself gratification is probably the most important training exercise you can do.
You need to sit in your place, wherever you are right now, and the thing that you want the most, you want to try and deny yourself that thing.
This is a core value for you.
That's right.
And the more that you are able to sit in a place where you really want something and deny yourself that thing, even if that thing is the satisfaction of sending somebody an angry email, or somebody wrote me an email the other day that was...
The email from them should have been an apology, but what the email said was, we shouldn't hang out right now because you're too unstable and I'm too unstable.
Right.
And I was like, well, no, in fact, I'm not unstable at all.
You really fucked up in this situation.
And I agree we shouldn't hang out right now.
But the reason is that you fucked up and owe me an apology.
And to write me a thing that says we shouldn't hang out right now because we're both too fucked up.
is it demanded a response from me and as i started to compose the response where i explained to the person that they were fucked up and that i was not fucked up i realized that there was no that my end game was that i had no end game no no this is where you get on your phone you say listen i'm standing in front of sal's please deliver a large truck full of chairs and a bunch of matches and gasoline i'm taking my clothes off get here as soon as you can
And so I realized that this was a situation where I needed to deny myself the thing I wanted most, which in this case was to reply to this person, to retort and to say, no bullshit.
Fuck you.
And I, I needed to, I kept saying to myself, like you'd say to a dog, I kept saying, leave it, leave it, leave it.
Leave it.
And it would pop into my head and I would go, but this cannot stand.
This person's fucked up-ness cannot stand.
It needs to be called out by me.
And then I was like, leave it.
Leave it.
Leave it.
Leave it.
And I say that to myself so much in the course of a day.
Leave it.
Leave it.
And what that does is it trains me to go all the way through a process like the one with the Hilton Hotel where there are a thousand opportunities to, like, get a kind of cheap satisfaction, a cheap, like, oh, oh, I'm going to come.
Oh, I came.
Mm-hmm.
And to say, no, I am not going to come.
You drink water and you sit and read the Bible.
I'm going to sit here.
Build it up.
Just build it up.
I'm going to sit here on my fucking carpet of nails.
And I am going to cultivate this peak that I'm in until I have a diamond point.
And I am not going to satisfy this.
Are you getting a lot accomplished while you're doing that?
Oh, well, yeah.
No, no, because the thing is to make a diamond point in a hotel room, that takes a lot of focus.
It does.
And what I am accomplishing is that I am climbing a ladder.
And it is not the Buddhist ladder of enlightenment.
I have no doubt that when I – if there is reincarnation, when I am reincarnated in my next life, that it's going to be something – it's going to be a very oblique angle into my next form.
You know what I mean?
I am not working my way into a higher –
frame necessarily there's going to be it's going to go through a prism and i'm going to come out the other side as like a box of cracker jacks or i'm going to come out the other side as a wave like a solitary wave on the ocean
I don't know what's going to happen.
You're going to come back as a wave?
I'm going to come back as a wave.
I'm going to come back as a wind.
I don't know what it's going to be.
Would you be self-aware?
I have no way of knowing whether the wind is self-aware.
Oh.
I've had some encounters with wind where I'm like, you've got to be fucking kidding me right now.
Yeah, your timing's bad.
I know what you're doing.
You are working on me, and I'm not going to sit here and pretend that you're just some wind.
You're going to tweet bomb the wind.
You are a wind that is acting with a kind of agency.
And maybe that is somebody like me who died 100 years ago, who came back as the wind.
I don't know.
This is not so far off the not a problem problem.
Like we said last time, you say thank you and they say not a problem.
Well, part of it is you sit there and you've got my room.
Now, you know, one of the first things I do in my room in addition to putting on gloves and a mask is I go in –
Oh, when you go into a hotel room.
Hotel room.
All the marketing materials, anything that's got a logo on it that I can tear off of something, it all goes into the lowest drawer.
And I don't, including the water.
I always check my bill because they bill me for the water that I didn't have.
Whoa.
Because I don't even want to see the water.
I don't see any of it.
I don't see any logos.
I don't see anything.
It all goes in a drawer.
If I were to sit down and read that though, I would read so much about their luxurious service and how they take care of you and so on and so on and so on.
But then I sent you a
link that that uh dana boyd was you know she she travels a lot she always goes to the same brand of hotels and she had this this sizzling blog post and tweet bomb about this do you know how bad they oversell hotels oh they oversell hotels and the answer to her was she was in airplanes she got there yeah yeah and she got there and they're like oh we're oversold
Uh, we're going to put you on a bus essentially and drive you to another part of town, even though she got there early, like she's going to do her work for her presentation tomorrow and be, and be like in the building with where the thing's going to be.
Oh no, no, no, no.
We're going to, we're going to put you, we're going to take you over to Starlog 13, which is not as nice.
This happened to me in Argentina one time.
I was in Buenos Aires and I showed up to my luxury hotel.
It was during, I swear to you, one of those Rolling Stones concerts where they play for a million people.
Right.
And it's a thing where the last 550,000 people.
Argentinians love big stadiums.
They do.
The last 550,000 people are watching it on a video screen and it's a time delay where the riff is getting to you like 11 minutes after it was played.
But anyway, the city is completely sold out and it's sold out and it's full of South American Rolling Stones fans.
And I show up at my luxury hotel and they're like...
Sorry.
Oversold.
Lo siento.
And I said, what do you mean you're sorry?
And the guy looked at me.
He was a very well-dressed Argentinian.
You know, they're very good dressers.
Very clean.
The Argentines.
They're extremely fashion conscious.
He was a very handsome young man.
And he looked at me over the desk, and he was very, very clear that he was not in the least bit sorry.
And I had a language.
He should have just said, you know what, dude?
I can't help you.
It makes it so much worse.
He said, there's a hotel somewhere that I can get you to that's over somewhere else, and it's not as good as this one.
Something, something.
That's the deal.
Anyway, next.
Oh, dear.
In a way, it was refreshing because he did not...
He did not offer me a solution that was not a solution.
He said, this is the deal.
You are arriving here at too late, basically.
We sold a bunch of hotel rooms, and then everybody got here before you.
So...
Maybe that's your problem, but this is South America, my friend, and we're not pretending that this is going to be fine with you or that we care.
You're never coming back here.
Eat shit.
So what'd you do?
I went to a restaurant and had a delicious steak.
I heard they got lots of steak there.
And then I said, you know what?
I don't even need to be in Buenos Aires.
What am I doing here?
And I went down the road.
Was I doing ping pong there?
Isn't Argentina where they put the soccer stadiums to use?
No.
I'm confusing that with somewhere else.
Oh.
What are you... Are you talking about the... Is it Argentina where they disappeared people?
Wasn't that Argentina?
Yeah, that's right.
They disparatecedoed them.
Oof.
Oh, that sounds terrible.
It was terrible.
Yeah.
You know, the thing about Argentina is it's not some banana republic.
It's a... It's a real... Like a grapefruit republic or a steak republic.
It's a gaucho republic.
They have... Yeah, when you're there, you feel like you are in...
spain which actually also disappeared a lot of people there in the 20th century actually you know what the holocaust could happen anywhere at any time the monsters inside of us you know that that totally struck me today i'm sitting on i'm sitting on pins and needles here in my chair because the blue angels are here we get the blue angels it's awful 7 30 in the morning fucking strafing our house waking my daughter
Yeah, they go everywhere.
And I am a fan of the Blue Angels.
I'm a fan of them because I like the technology of super fast jets.
I am a fan of them also because that experience that you're having of being strafed in the safety and security of your own home is a feeling I think every American should have.
Once a year where they're sitting there and then all of a sudden they are under attack, brutal attack.
Just a little reminder, little taste, little taste of London.
Here's what it feels like.
That's right.
It's like there are people all over the world right now who are sitting in their little mud house and American jets are flying really low right over them and maybe unleashing some machine gun fire.
So you should just, if it hurts your feelings, if it, if it spills your water glass, you should just let it be a reminder.
Yeah.
You're saying it's like sitting there and not coming.
This is something where America could be improved by a little bit of strafing by our own jets.
Well, it's happening.
We are being strafed by our own jets.
Deal with it.
Because certainly every coastal town, the Navy comes in at one point or another, and they have Navy days.
Or in our case, it's seafare.
Seaman, seaman.
And the Navy takes over the town and they go through all the bars.
Fucking come on everything.
That's right.
And there's a lot more rapes.
And then the jets fly over real low.
And it's like you have been occupied by an invading army.
It only lasts for a little while.
And all the Chamber of Commerce guys are thrilled because the businesses are profitable for a month.
But it's something we should all keep in mind.
This is how much we spend on this stuff.
It's very expensive to build these things.
And we should all have a firsthand experience of what they're there for, which is to fly really low over people's houses and have them shit their pants and scare their little babies.
$30 million.
I fact-checked that tweet I just sent you.
$30 million for one of those jets that was strafing us.
So I woke up this morning, and what they do – what the Blue Angels do is they fly – They practice.
They practice a lot first.
They do.
But they have a C-130, which is a four-engine turboprop transport plane that is full of their crew, and it flies the – why are you smirking?
I'm sorry.
I'm imagining somebody takes off work to take their kids to see the air show.
It's just a very, very slow-moving cargo plane and slow collapse.
But it takes 15 minutes.
I think the C-130 is an amazing airplane.
They shoot a zero out of the sky with a .45.
I've actually flown in a C-130, and they are tremendous airplanes.
The Hercules is what they're called.
But so the Hercules, it flies the course that the F-18s are going to fly.
It's a good looking plane.
It flies very low and it has a very distinctive sound.
Those turboprop engines have this very like big throbbing.
And it flies.
My house is right by the airport.
So they fly about 150 feet over my house.
And so they woke me up this morning in the C-130.
And I said, usually that C-130 flies over and three minutes later, their F-18s basically touching their landing gear on my chimney.
Like they go over my house so low, I can read their driver's licenses.
And so I wake up and I'm like, you know, I've got a baby here.
It's just the two of us.
It's me and the baby.
And I jump out of bed and I run downstairs and I get her out of her crib.
And I'm like, you know, she's 16 months old.
And I say, today is airplane day.
airplane and she knows what airplanes are and she points to the sky and i'm like that's right airplane but today is different today big airplane day loud airplane and she's looking at me like why are you talking to me like this i have a dirty diaper can i have a banana and i'm like banana in a second
Airplane.
Because when these airplanes go over, I know she's going to shit her pants.
And I'm like, airplane, airplane.
And all morning, I'm like, airplanes, they could come at any time.
They're so loud.
Because that's how these things are.
They give you no warning at all.
They're really, really fast, and they fly over.
This is the part that drives me crazy.
I can't understand why you would want to fly a $30 million jet over a populated city and make a boom.
Because...
We paid that $30 million, and this is them showing off for us.
Oh, I get it.
It's like, look what you bought.
Look what you made.
We can rattle all your little Hummel figurines right off the shelves just by flying over and hitting the gas.
So anyway, all day long, I know these fucking birds are here.
I have been down to the airport.
I went down there last night, and there they all were, lined up there on the flight deck, and I'm like...
The Blue Angels are here and they never miss a chance.
And so all day I've been in this kind of pregnancy of like, when are they going to fly over the house?
It's going to come.
I know it's coming.
It's probably going to happen in the middle of my podcast.
And yet it is deathly quiet.
The birds are not tweeting.
The insects are not buzzing.
Everything knows that the storm is coming.
But there are no planes in the sky.
I don't know why they're not strafing my house.
It's driving me crazy.
It's like some psyops that they're pulling this year only where it's like, yeah, we're here.
It's a beautiful sunny day.
Oh, we could be flying.
It's like your own personal World War I. You're just sitting there dug in.
You know they're out there.
You don't know where and you don't know when they're going to come running over the hills.
It's Christmas Day.
Do we play soccer or are they going to snipe me as soon as I stick my head above the trench?
Were they both Paul McCartney?
Who?
The Germans and the British?
Oh, yeah, that video, Pipes Apiece.
Remember that?
Paul McCartney made a video, and of course, I believe you're a Paul man too, but both of them were Paul McCartney.
I vaguely remember this, but this was during the Give My Regards to Broad Street era, if I'm not mistaken.
Well, it was after when Wings was good, so that's all kind of one big hairball for me.
Yeah, there was a point there between 1977 and the present where everything Paul did, I looked at only out of the corner of my eye.
I could not look directly at it.
Yeah, but it's like Drunk Dad.
You still, like, every once in a while, you're like, oh, I wonder if this will be really, really good.
When he made that acoustic record, that was actually really great.
I've heard that's good.
I enjoyed that very much.
There's always... I mean, you're absolutely right.
I look at everything...
but but i particularly like when he's doing music videos where he is both characters i just can't look directly a real phil collins kind of thing to do it'll burn onto your retina and then you can never really see honestly i mean how do you feel about phil collins's face being on so many records if you're such a big phil collins fan doesn't that bug you that his giant fat face is on the cover of all his albums
Well, here's the thing about Phil Collins.
Take a good look at him.
Take a look at him now?
Take a look at him now.
Will I still be standing here?
Take a look at your girlfriend.
That was pretty good, you got to admit.
That was pretty fast.
That was nice.
Me coming back to him is against all odds.
If you take a look at Phil Collins, you will realize he is five feet tall.
Hmm.
Is bald.
Hmm.
He looks like someone carved a face into an apple and then left it sitting in his mouth.
He looks like a self-satisfied ass.
Or butt.
You know, a bottom of behind.
And yet.
And yet.
In spite of all that, at the very height of the era where we were all claiming that music video had made it impossible for bands like Foghat to succeed, because Foghat existed in a pre-music video era where they were all stupid-looking...
Scorpions are no bargain either.
Klaus Meine.
Classic example.
Five feet tall.
He looks like Gallagher without a mustache.
He looks like rejected Tolkien characters.
Yet Phil Collins was the biggest star in the world.
And so that should give us all hope.
And not only the biggest star in the world, but as you say...
His face was his brand.
He put his little bald head on the cover of every album and was the biggest star in the world.
He was in every music video.
He was a massive sexist.
He's like that guy from Simply Red who has supposedly bedded every famous starlet of the 80s.
They call him Ginger.
That little creepy little ginger midget.
I'm sorry.
Small person.
I think it's we red men is the way they say it in Scotland.
You know what?
I'm sure that we have a whole contingent of our listeners who are not only bronies but are also ginger.
And they are trying to decide right now whether they should send a tweet.
I think he was at that famous sex pistol show, I think.
Who, the Simply Red guy?
Mick Hucknall.
I think he was.
Mick Hucknall.
Yeah, with the buzzcocks and everybody.
He was sleeping with supermodels that he literally had to stand on a stack of phone books just to insert himself into them.
Oh, God.
Oh, God.
He was a very, very famous, popular person.
Simply pink.
And yet you could not look at him without feeling like he was kind of like the model on which...
cabbage patch dolls were designed like he's not he looks he looks like a cross between uh a lot of miles from thompson twins why do i know that name and maybe allison and maybe allison moyer science yeah you just pulled out the name of the girl who shaved her head except for the eyebrows she cut off her eyebrows and then she had the floopy hair she had floopy hair eyebrows what was the deal with that hat
They love their hats in Thompson Twins.
I saw them.
I saw them with Berlin.
You saw Thompson Twins in Berlin.
And my girlfriend passed out at the show.
Did she pass out for joy?
Nope.
She watched somebody pierce something because this is when punk rock people would still go to these shows and try and look tough.
She saw somebody take a Thompson Twins pin and try to pierce themselves with it and she passed out.
Oh, scary.
The Thompson Twins were not as good as you'd expect.
No, no, no.
They were kind of terrible.
I was listening to a Thompson Twins record the other day.
It has not aged well.
Scritti Politti still works.
Scritti Politti, amazing, because that's such a distinctive vocal style.
It is.
And what's the other one?
The one where they had the same name, album, and song.
You know the one?
Art of Noise?
No.
Say a name like that.
It'll come back to me.
But they're really good.
They had albums in the 90s that were really good.
One time I was in San Francisco.
I was hitchhiking.
Talk, talk.
Talk, talk.
Well, see, talk, talk.
Better than you think.
Better than you think.
The second, like the original talk, talk, where talk, talk, talk, talk.
Talk, talk, talk.
That was a certain kind of early 80s pop.
But then the later talk, talk.
It was good.
It was just amazing music.
That album, The Color of Spring, is one of the great...
I used to have throwaway lines about Talk Talk and Scritti Politti, and I have been corrected.
I've been sent back to my room to go and listen to them, and they are really, really good.
See, now in my head, Talk Talk is like Psychedelic Furs, which has one or two good songs per record, and maybe like who did Whisper to a Scream?
You know that band?
Whisper to scream.
What's the other one?
The other band.
The guy with the bad teeth.
Oh, oh.
Oh, shit.
Oh, hang on.
Give me a minute.
That's what it all sounded like in 1982.
Hang on.
Give me a second.
Icicle Works.
Whoa.
Is that right?
Icicle Works?
Intense that you pulled that out.
Icicle works.
Whisper to a scream.
Yeah.
What's the other band I'm thinking about?
The guy with the hat and the bad teeth.
That wasn't Depeche Mode.
The guy with the hat and the bad teeth.
Send me an angel.
Send me an angel.
Right now.
Right now.
You know who else is pretty good?
Big Country.
Real Life.
Real Life did send me an angel.
Also, Big Country.
Better than people think.
Pretty good.
Steel Town.
Boogie Town.
What's that record they have?
Steel Face?
They had that one band.
I think you're having a little bit of an 80s pop Tourette's moment now.
Getting a little Tourette's-y.
Scorpions!
Fuck!
The thing about real life...
The thing about the Psychedelic Furs is that they had a couple of good songs per record and the rest were shitty songs.
Total shit.
They're like, you know, Cheap Trick, they have like one or two amazing songs per record no matter what.
And then a lot of stuff where you're like, you know, you could have just done an EP.
You could have done an EP.
But it's rock and roll.
The shitty songs on Cheap Trick records will not hurt your feelings.
If you buy a Psychedelic Furs, even Psychedelic Furs' greatest hits...
Oh, I bought it.
I bought it two weeks ago, and I'm already... You get five songs in, and you're like, oh, the rest of this is perfect.
You got Love My Way.
Late tune.
Right, right, right.
But I mean, like, President Gas, really?
The original Pretty in Pink, before they added all that fruity stuff to it.
President Gas, terrible, terrible song.
Yeah.
In Excess is an example of a band where they had two, absolutely two great songs per record, and then the rest were fine.
Everybody wants to go to Soup and Solid Bar.
Yeah.
Okay, some of them were terrible.
That was a terrible song.
You know what's good?
I like that.
What's that song that goes?
I think I'm doing a John Flansburg song.
But now Talk Talk.
Talk Talk.
Talk Talk is a band where the singles are very, very good, but the level of quality throughout the record remains very high.
I've heard that.
The production is very 80s sounding, but the Talk Talk records as a whole you can put on and you can go about your business and the records will not hurt your feelings.
There's not going to be any like...
Oh, surprise reggae tune.
Oh, here's the song that's the surprise reggae tune that we didn't have another tune on.
Throwaway techno clash.
What about Roddy Frame?
What about Aztec Camera?
He was like the Scottish Ben Lee.
Remember Aztec Camera?
I do, but we're getting deep into some Tourette's.
You know what?
Nobody cares about music.
You know what?
If you start talking about Mitch Easter, I'm going to have to ring the bell.
Not without talking about Don Dixon.
Most of the girls like to dance, but only some of the boys do.
You know what?
The thing is, REM, we should have a separate podcast for REM.
This is something like our 41st episode, and we still haven't done the REM episode.
We need to do an REM episode.
I was going to say one time... Let's Active?
You want to talk about Let's Active?
I do not want to talk about Let's Active right now.
Right in the book.
I was hitchhiking in San Francisco and I got picked up.
Cutting all this out.
This is one of those things where I don't know how many of our listeners have ever hitchhiked.
I doubt anymore anybody under 40 really does much hitchhiking because it's not a thing that's regarded as safe.
But when I was a teenager, it was never regarded as safe, but it was still...
It was fairly common practice.
It wasn't something like a known deadly thing.
Yeah, you don't – it's not like people say don't ever hitchhike.
If you ran out of gas, you could hitchhike.
You could hitchhike.
And I did quite a bit of hitchhiking and, in fact, hitchhiked across America a couple of times and hitchhiked across Europe a couple of times.
A couple of times, huh?
A couple of times.
But one time I was in San Francisco.
This is just for what it's worth.
One day I'm going to sit down.
I'm going to sit there in a spreadsheet.
I'm going to fucking write all of this down, and I think the math is not going to stack up on your side.
There's just no way.
You'd be surprised.
You've been to Germany literally millions of times.
Millions of times.
I hitchhiked from the southern coast of Portugal to Amsterdam at one time in three days.
Wow.
And I challenge anybody to do that.
We should say all this in your father's voice.
One day I will.
When I'm 87 and I'm sitting in a chair and I'm like, one time I hitchhiked.
And the kids will be like, whatever.
Pop on a curb and you're hooptie.
But so I get picked up.
And this is one of those things.
If you've ever stood out on the side of the road hitchhiking.
And particularly if you've stood out on the side of the road for a long time with your thumb out and cars just going by and nobody's picking you up, your mind starts to daydream if you are a person like me.
And you start to imagine that the next car over the hill is going to be a red Jaguar driven by a woman in her mid-40s.
Or three women.
Boy, there's two versions of this story.
Either it's a red Jaguar driven by a woman in her mid-40s who has just left her husband.
She's looking to even the score.
She took his car.
I'm 20 years old at this point, and I'm standing out with my thumb out, and I'm like, this is my fantasy.
Either it's this woman.
She's in this red Jaguar convertible.
I know what number two is going to be.
She's going to pull over, and I'm going to throw my bag in the back, and I'm going to go, where are we going?
Okay.
That's version one.
Version two is... Am I right?
Three girls in miniskirts?
Three girls in miniskirts in a Volkswagen bus.
Oh, I was thinking of Eliminator.
oh right no in a in a 32 ford coupe yeah i can't even tell you how between catwoman between catwoman and zz top my sexual cosmology is so permanently fucked up the sharp-dressed man which is a great song and i know you're a fan you wanna you'll
what show are you on?
You're on a show talking about ZZ Top on the public radio, right?
Weren't you on a show?
And my feeling is that ZZ Top's Eliminator, like all the ZZ Top fans are all like, oh, no, no, no, it's all Tres Hombres, like back when they were wearing dirty blue jeans.
No keyboards, no trigger drums.
ZZ Top.
Easy Tops Eliminator, where it is all done to drum machines with samplers and keyboards, is still such an amazing album.
And if you hate it because of the 80s production, you are a fool and you are depriving yourself of great, great guitar playing and great songwriting.
It's true.
You know, you got me on that.
I was going to ask you about Steeler's Wheel.
I got that Jerry Rafferty record you recommended.
Same deal.
And pretty good stuff, right?
It's really great.
And he doesn't... This is so boring.
But I'm with you.
I'm totally with you.
And we can't throw out the baby with the bath.
And this is why I'm writing down Missing Persons.
I want to come back to Missing Persons, too.
Go ahead.
As you were saying about those music videos, I did not realize that I had any interest in a girl in pink pumps with frilly ankle socks.
Oh, my God.
Me neither.
In a miniskirt.
I did not realize I had any interest in a girl like that.
They dance when they stand still.
Until she climbs out of that 32 Ford.
And then I was like, well, wait a minute.
Is there another kind of girl?
Please throw me the keys.
But no, my version of getting picked, because those girls aren't going to pick me up.
Okay, so number one is like a slightly older Christy Brinkley with a sense of humor.
Exactly.
Okay, got it.
Check.
And the second one is a Volkswagen bus with three hippie girls, but not hippie girls with like nose rings and dreadlocks.
Portland.
Not gross hippie girls.
Hippie punks?
I'm talking about kind of hippie punks, yeah.
And this was in an era before people had tattoos, so I didn't have to ask the question, tattoos or no tattoos.
They were just going to be three girls in a Volkswagen bus who had decided that they were going to drive across America.
And they pull over and pick me up.
So those were the two fantasies.
So I'm standing outside of San Francisco.
I've got my thumb out.
I'm in Marin County, and I'm trying to get up to the northwest.
I'm standing by the side of the road, and cars are going by, and I'm fantasizing about who's going to pick me up.
and over pulls a black Volkswagen Jetta, and the door opens, and it is a girl my age, which was remarkable in and of itself.
She was a Zaftig girl.
You mean heavy and Jewish?
She was both.
Well, I wouldn't even say heavy, but, but, but she was confident.
She was, she was full figured girl.
She was, she was dark, Jewish, Hispanic, and she was new wave.
She was like one of those girls in those Hernandez brothers comics.
You know what I'm talking about?
She probably had stuff on her rear view mirror.
She had some stuff on her rear view mirror.
She had an extra earring or two.
And the two of us drove from San Francisco all the way up to Olympia, Washington together.
And she played Berlin.
Berlin.
At the time, new Berlin album, the one that came out in 1988, or whatever album that was.
And I got into that car pretty convinced that I had no interest in Berlin or Missing Persons.
And she played Berlin and Missing Persons, basically, the entire way.
And it was a deeply shaping experience for me.
So that the music of Berlin and Missing Persons now...
will send me into a reverie where I float.
And I float on this cloud.
You're transported on a pile of Bozio.
I'm transported on a cloud shaped like a black Jetta.
And it just floats me up the Pacific coast.
And I will not hear a bad word spoken about either of those battles.
Did I tell you about the time I met Terry Bozio?
Do you mean that the singer?
Yeah.
No.
What, what era?
It was like 10 years ago.
Nice.
I was, I was, uh, the off ramp.
No, I was riding my bike down the street and, uh, only a nobody walks in Seattle.
Uh, um, and, uh, I'm driving through pioneer square and, um,
I'm driving past this club that doesn't exist anymore.
I'm sorry.
I just keep imagining a 40-year-old woman in a plastic bikini.
Oh, wait.
No, no.
I'm talking about Dale Bozio, not Terry.
Terry was her husband.
He was the drummer.
And so I'm riding my bike, and there's this tiny, tiny, tiny little girl with a big shock of blue hair standing out in front of this club that no longer exists.
And as I ride by on my bike, I look down and she looks up.
And I don't know where it came from.
I don't know how I remember her name.
But I was like, it's Dale Bozio.
And I think they actually pronounce it Bozio.
And I might have even said Bozio.
But I was like, it's Dale Bozio.
And she goes, yeah, hi.
Oh, my God.
Hi, who are you?
And I screeched my bike to a halt and I jump off and I'm like, hi, my name is John.
You know, and she's standing there with like a roadie and her bass player at the stage door of this club.
And I was like, oh, my God, I am.
I'm actually a massive fan.
I know that that sounds strange, but but I actually am.
And she was like, oh, are you coming to the show tonight?
Because she's Edith Bunker.
Because she's absolutely.
Is she Bronxie?
She's so East Coast.
Are you coming to the show tonight?
And I said, I didn't know that you were playing the show tonight.
And she was like, oh, yeah, we're playing with talking to.
Oh.
I'm fucking definitely coming to the show tonight.
And she was like, I'll put you on the list.
Fuck you.
Are you serious?
She puts me on the list.
And so I come back and she's, she's five feet or she's four feet tall.
She's like four foot three.
I never, I would guess she's statuesque.
No, no, no.
She looked exactly the same as she did in her MTV days.
Was she wearing lots of pancake makeup?
She had all kinds of crazy makeup, but it wasn't pancake-y.
It was just like, I'm crazy, and I put on my own makeup.
So I come to the show, and first of all, Tommy Two-Tone is opening.
And he plays.
I have a pretty good idea what he played.
I kid you not.
No, no, no.
This is the best part.
Did they play it twice?
He played for an hour and 45 minutes.
Oh, God, no.
And there were like 40 people in this club that could seat 700 people.
And he played 8-6-7-4-5-3-0-9 or whatever.
But then he played 8-6-7-5-3-0-9 Revisited.
Which was his new, from his latest album, his new version of the...
Of the song that made him great.
Tell me three tone.
Where it was like where he had basically rewrote the tune.
I mean, his set was an example of how not to do the casino circuit.
Right.
And then she comes out on stage with the missing persons who were five guys in their 20s who all looked like they had auditioned for Marilyn Manson's band and didn't have an interesting enough serial killer name.
Right.
Was there like eyeliner?
There was so much eyeliner and so many weird piercings.
And the guitar player's name was something like Rosalind Gein.
Something like that.
I don't get it.
Well, anyway.
Like all these 20-year-olds.
And then she comes out on stage.
And it was such a tragedy.
She was so on cocaine.
Oh, man.
And at the time, what was I?
I was 33.
She couldn't have been much more than 48, let's say.
Still a very handsome woman, although a little bit road-worn, let's say.
But she comes out on stage, and when I talked to her outside the stage door for 10 minutes or whatever, she was a very reasonable, normal-seeming rock-and-roll person.
But she walks on stage and she's so full of cocaine that she cannot focus.
And she's walking around.
She's adjusting people's amps.
She's trying to talk to the guitar player while he's playing a song.
Oh, God.
She's yelling at the sound man, but she's not yelling into her microphone.
She forgets that there's a microphone there and she's standing.
The band is like cranking away on a tune.
And she's like...
To the sound man.
She'd sing a verse and then forget to go to the chorus.
She's wandering around the stage like a bag lady.
And it was so depressing.
I didn't even stay to see them play Destination Unknown.
I was like, this is terrible.
I can't watch this.
It's all coming apart.
How did you imagine it going?
Can I ask?
I have a pretty good idea.
this is the problem with being, with getting old is that,
Dale, Dale Bosio.
I'm going to settle on Bosio.
Yeah.
Dale Bosio.
And, uh, who was the girl, uh, that wore, uh, electrical tape on her nipples?
Uh, Wendy O. Williams.
Wendy O. Williams.
Um, these, these women had a, had a, a profound effect on my burgeoning early teen.
They were very comfortable with their bosoms.
Sexuality.
They were comfortable with their bosoms.
They were some of the first bosoms I'd seen.
Mm-hmm.
You just didn't see a lot of ladies with bosoms out in a chainsaw.
You didn't.
This was back before Madonna made it even popular to wear a shirt that exposed your belly button.
You have to remember how conservative it was.
Mm-hmm.
Certainly, these were some of the first boobs I saw in motion.
You never forget that.
Playboy boobs... They make it very quiet.
They make a little noise.
Yeah.
A little sort of flap-flap sound.
God, I'm sorry, John.
It's brutal.
But in any case, I was hoping...
That I was going to be a teenager again and that she was going to be a young woman in her 20s and that I could redo my whole life.
And she would call me under the tour bus and off we would go and it would be 1983 again.
And I would put a lot of gel in my hair.
I wouldn't have had all those experiences in college.
I wish I could forget.
And instead, it was just that she was on cocaine and I was in my 30s riding a bike.
Yeah.
And, oh my god, I'm looking on the internet.
This is terrible to do.
Especially when you're doing a podcast.
But there's a picture of Dale Bosio.
It's a mug shot.
Oh no.
Where she was put in jail
for her animal cruelty conviction.
Oh, dear me.
These are big braids.
Thirteen animal cruelty charges stemmed from Bosio's failed attempt to save feral and sick cats from the New Hampshire woods.
Two cats were found dead and twelve were put down following an undeterminable period of neglect that came to a head while Bosio toured last fall.
That sounds like scrapbooking.
Oh, my God.
My goodness.
She's a cat lady and...
Oh, dear.
New Hampshire.
You know, people think of people out West think of New Hampshire as kind of like an idyllic place where Bob Newhart owns a hotel and there are a lot of picket fences and it's a there's a library that has a bell tower maybe in the town.
And the biggest problem they have is maybe that there's still a Soviet spy who's waiting to be activated as a Manchurian candidate kind of situation.
But in fact, most of New Hampshire, people have Corvettes up on blocks in front of their trailer homes.
New England is some of the craziest, like, messy, weird America you could possibly find.
Yeah.
It really is.
It's strange.
Because coming from the West Coast, when I first went to New England, I really expected that the biggest problem I would have was just dealing with headless horsemen.
Which is not an inconsiderable problem.
I assumed there were headless horsemen.
But you were prepared for that.
I was prepared for headless horsemen.
I knew not to walk down any country lanes in the middle of the night, although I did do that.
And I was accosted by headless horsemen.
But I was not prepared for the fact that there were just going to be weird, trashy, drug dealer-y people wandering around towns where the shops were all boarded up.
And it just felt like some of those towns in southern Arizona had been relocated to a kind of woodsy, colonial-looking place.
Really, it's a very strange part of the world, New England.
I thought it was kind of like a New England version of Utah.
Are people tasked to turn gun owners in New Hampshire?
Is that really a Matthew thing?
kind of Bellingham-y.
That's what I was going to say, yeah.
And then New Hampshire is much more sort of live free or die.
That's their motto.
Live free or die.
Did the big granite face guy break?
The big granite-faced guy broke?
I think so, yeah.
I think it's on the quarter.
I mean, not the broken one, the one that was functional.
Yeah, you know about this, right?
The grand old granite New Hampshire granite face.
The grand old granite New Hampshire face.
Oh, oh.
I think Josh just signed them recently.
It's like a natural bridge or something.
Old man of the mountain.
old man of the mountain and he broke his face broke well i'm just saying you know life is complicated and if if uh you know if there were oh my goodness freezing and thawing open fissures in the old man's forehead i love philip larkin and by the 1920s the crack was wide enough to be mended with chains nevertheless formation collapsed to the ground between midnight and 2 a.m may 3rd 2003 just about when the meth problem started
Oh, my goodness.
That's a shame.
It's on a quarter.
Well, it's one of those things where in the state of Alaska, there are probably 15,000 rock formations that...
That actually look like a man that you could identify like that actually look like Herbert Hoover or Alan Alda or something like potato chips.
There are so many rock formations in Alaska that that if you wanted to, you could you could.
You could put them on a quarter.
But in New Hampshire, I understand that their weird little man on a mountain is something that they're real proud about.
Now he's gone.
There's a picture.
There's a picture.
It's a very wistful picture.
It shows through an overlay where the old man would be if he were still there.
The old man of the mountain.
A composite image of the old man created from images taken before and after the collapse.
Yeah.
We actually had one of those in our backyard in Alaska.
It was 4,000 feet taller than that one, though.
Really?
Was it a Hoover?
Who'd you have?
Nobody cared about it.
That's a shame.
No, no.
The one that was in my backyard actually kind of looked like Ed Asner.