Ep. 63: "A Topcoat of Bonkers"
Hello?
Hello?
Hello?
Hello?
Hello?
Hello?
Why don't I hear anything?
I think I'm here now.
Oh, there you are.
I fooled you.
You had a mute on.
It's worse than that.
It's a technical failure on my part.
What was the mic not plugged in?
Do you really care?
Yeah, I do.
Really?
Oh, I like to know about glitches.
Yeah, an amateur technologist no more.
I had the wrong audio input set up in Skype, and so my USB microphone was not used as the audio input.
Well, I thought it was me, because Dave Bazan was over here the other day, and he was trying to target disk mode some files.
He knows about target disk mode?
Into my computer, and he hot-plugged my Fireface Firewire interface.
Huh.
And so I was like, oh, shit.
You know, back in the old days, if you hot plugged something, if you hot jacked it, then maybe it frizzed your whole motherboard.
I was super concerned that my motherboard was frizzed, and that's why I couldn't hear you.
Right.
Well, you know, you've got to be careful if you're doing any kind of hotboxing on the pop board.
You want to make sure that you've got a full USB bus on your trigger bite.
That's what I was worried about.
Yeah.
So anyway.
So how did it go?
Was he able to – that's a tremendous thing, Firewire Target Discman.
So he's getting some songs off to give you probably.
Yeah, and what we ended up doing, this is the thing that's embarrassing, is that we were sitting around here and we couldn't figure out... In my octopus's garden of 7,000 cables, 7,000 different versions of FireWire and USB cables here, we couldn't find the right cable.
And then he pulled out one of these little USB drives that's the size of a house key...
And he was like, oh, I think I can put four gigs of stuff on this.
And I was like, oh, I got a couple of those around here too.
And we did it all on those little, those dumb little, totally losable USB drives.
Did that make you feel like a wizard or a doofus or something in between?
Hmm.
I feel like a wizard when I can do that.
It's definitely amazing.
Yeah.
But I looked at this room full of gizmos and boxes and cabling and all this...
all this gear, and then I looked at the little USB drive, which has an entire album on it, and I was like, I feel a little bit slow.
I feel a little bit dumb now.
Because this thing, I mean, you know, Jonathan Colton gives away those USB drives with his entire catalog on them.
That's smart.
It's amazingly smart, but the equivalent at Barsouk is that they sell you reel-to-reel tapes in a box that has its own wheels.
Yeah.
So, uh-huh.
You know, those sprockets can be real hard to replace.
You know, you have to oil them.
Got to oil your sprocket.
That's nice that they're doing that, though.
They're moving forward, right?
We're all moving forward.
Like it or not.
Can't help moving forward.
No, sir.
I'm glad we did this.
I'm glad we did this, John.
And you know what?
You know what, Merlin?
I'm sitting here, and in front of me are two comic books.
On my desk, two comic books.
Two comic books?
Two separate comics.
Are you doing this to take me somewhere where you're going to provoke me, or are you being straight up?
My first comic book here is Joe Sacco's Palestine, a graphic novel.
And then there's one over here, Shigeru Mizuki's Onward Towards Our Noble Deaths.
Were these gifts?
They were, but I have decided.
Here's what I have decided.
I always loved graphic novels from the very beginning.
And what am I trying to say?
Like American Splendor or Dennis Eichhorn.
We talked about Dennis Eichhorn.
Sometimes they call them Slice of Life comics.
It's kind of a silly name, but they're like the Harvey P. Carr stuff.
It's like real world people in it and stuff.
Yeah.
And I always liked that stuff.
And then that... And R. Crumb, of course, being my introduction to it and the great American hero.
But now I've decided that graphic novels are an art form that everyone else is enjoying.
And I am not enjoying them just out of a spirit of curmudgeonliness.
Wow.
Because I go to bookstores and I see the graphic novels...
which used to be like four titles.
It used to be Mouse... Mouse, Watchmen, and two others.
Yeah, Mouse, Watchmen, and then like Arkham's greatest answer, Fritz the Cat, you know?
Right.
And now it's like a... It's a whole wall of the bookstore that stretches to infinity.
And I look at it and I go...
You know what?
It's probably all manga.
It's probably all just dumb porn.
It's like octopuses having intercourse with schoolgirls on ships.
Exactly.
And you read it fucking backwards.
And you read it backwards, and I don't want it.
Fuck that.
I don't need that in my life.
No.
But I'm realizing that I am wrong.
I'm being a curmudgeon.
Wow.
And I actually love this art form and that I need to get over myself.
Whoa.
No, it hurts me to say it.
And start participating in this wonderful turn of events.
A couple of years ago, somebody gave me a graphic novel called Blankets.
which is written by a guy in Portland that I know.
And my friend Tucker Martine was working on a record that went along with this graphic novel.
And it was a heartbreakingly beautiful book.
And I was like, and of course, as I read it, I was like, well, this has got to be the exception.
There are no octopuses fucking teenage girls in this book.
This is about someone losing their faith and falling in love for the first time.
That's a black swan.
There can't be any more of these.
Yeah, this is too beautiful.
And this guy, this book that I have on my table here, The Palestine by Joe Sacco, I read a book by him one time a few years ago where he was talking about the war in Bosnia, and it was beautiful and fabulous.
And I was like, well, this can't be a thing that is normal.
This has got to be an aberration.
Now I'm realizing it is my taste that is the aberration.
Wow, John, this is good on you, man.
We've talked about this before.
I think it's good for men of a certain age and ladies to be somewhat circumspect.
I'm super calcified on a lot of things.
I admire this, though.
And you keep up with the music, and now you're looking at the...
sophisticated funny books.
This is awesome, man.
Not just as a person who's always talking about comics.
I'm just saying it's good for you for looking at something that's a little foreign and silly.
What I had to admit was that
From my very first exposure to this type of book, which probably happened in college, I don't think I met Harvey Picard and Dennis Eichhorn until I was in college.
But I immediately identified with the form, and I wanted to make a graphic novel of my own, or I wanted to make an autobiographical, long-form comic book of my own.
And I didn't know how to do it.
I can draw, but I'm not a drawer.
And I was like, this is the great art form.
And I think maybe my disappointment that I never was able to figure out exactly how to put the pieces together to actually do a book like that of my own caused me to turn my back on it a little bit.
Because I was like, oh, I'm so mad.
I'm thinking about it.
I think you got your finger on something very interesting.
I think that can certainly happen with music.
I bet it sure as heck happens with films, filmmaking or anything like that.
You've seen this with the young kids where you understand the vocabulary or something.
You know how to play the tennis racket, but it's really different from spending enough time inside of that process to actually produce something that you don't hate.
Yeah, when I was young, I imagined that the barrier to entry was imaginative.
That the thing that kept you from making films or making graphic novels was that you didn't have enough imagination yet.
You didn't have a great, good enough story.
But you realize later that the barrier to entry is often just...
structural it's just it's technical like you don't know how to work a camera and you can look at a scene and say this is how this is the picture I imagine the picture but I can't I don't know what an f-stop is I can't take that I can't take the picture and to say that the barrier to entry to making a graphic novel is that you don't know how to draw is pretty like no duh but but also
I mean, if I had been working on this for 20 years, I would have developed an ability to draw well enough to accomplish what I was shooting.
You might be a retired comic book artist at this point.
Yeah, right.
But instead I was like... Sorry, graphic novelist.
A retired colonel in the graphic artist's army.
So anyway, yeah, I'm having a very exciting time now letting some of the hardened calcium that has built up around my idea of comics.
I'm having a fun time chipping away at that and reading these wonderful books that have pictures, drawing pictures.
Mm-hmm.
Well, I don't want to insert myself into this process.
As you know, I'm going to stay out of it.
And I'm going to reward this by not going on and on about comics with you.
And I will wait at least 30 days before I start sending you trade paperbacks you never asked for that I think you should read.
Because that's kind of a thing that I do now.
Oh, wow.
All right.
Well, I love getting things in the mail.
I love mail.
Yeah.
I was talking to a young person the other day.
They still got this up there.
It's happening more and more, strangely.
I don't know why.
Just follow the mustache.
But I said, yeah, you know, back in the old days, I used to have dinner in this particular cafe so much that when people were traveling...
And they wanted to send me letters.
They would send the letters to this cafe instead of... Because they didn't know where I lived.
I moved too much.
But they would send me... They would send letters to this cafe and care me.
And the young person said...
Oh, did you and your friends, like, were you into, like, sending letters and stuff?
And the young person said it in such a way as to betray that they thought that sending letters was like a pretty cool gimmick, like a pretty cool, like, shtick.
I mean, like, almost like it was something retro they might want to pick up, like knitting or something?
Yeah, like it was artisanal emailing.
And I said, well, yeah, we did.
We sent letters back and forth because that was all we had.
That was the only way you could communicate with someone when they were in Thailand.
Once you run out of pigeons or signal flags.
They sent me postcards because otherwise I didn't hear from them for nine months.
And this person, you saw them kind of look off and go, oh...
Right.
Right.
Well, and then look back at me kind of like, you can see that they saw me.
They saw a bowler hat on my head and a monocle and spats.
I was like, yeah, I know.
I'm an old person.
Nice snuff box.
Yeah.
I still have a box that has a bunch of letters from girls in it.
Tied together with a little ribbon.
Dear John, you are the biggest asshole ever.
I burned all mine in a Weber grill.
You did?
Oh, God, yeah.
I used to have them in separate boxes by...
By girl or by time?
Let's say person.
Okay, by person.
Some of them were big boxes.
Some of the really angry ones were small boxes.
And then at one point I was cleaning out some of my stuff out of my mom's house and I was like, I can't pack this.
What am I going to do with this?
I can't take this home.
So I went out and I just started up the grill.
Oh.
Yeah, I found some Starlight mints and some ticket stubs and just let her rip.
I mean, you know, but I was exactly the same.
Now, to me, there was a big passing notes culture in high school.
There's a certain way you'd fold the note, you'd pass them between classes, and it became like some kind of a, I don't know, an adenoidal underground railroad where you would move messages back and forth.
Yeah, I still have several notes collected from that time that it's on one piece of paper.
And in the top of the paper, in my handwriting, it says, be my girlfriend.
And then it's folded 25 times.
And then underneath that, written in like a purple pen.
is, I would not be your girlfriend if you were the last boy on earth.
And then under that, in my handwriting, it says, you know you want to be my girlfriend.
Stop being coy, you minx.
And then under that, it says, you are the grossest boy in this school.
Why are you writing me notes?
And I swear to you, I'm not even kidding.
And it goes down one side of a piece of notebook paper and up the other.
And I'm saying, if I'm so gross, why do you keep... Exactly as long as the customer's talking, the salesman is still closing.
That's right.
And she says, I'm doing it because this is boring and I'm transcribing this note in my own notebook as evidence when you try and kill me or whatever.
We go back and forth and this girl ended up being my girlfriend.
I have like a stack of notes of me wooing her.
Wow.
She was... My high school girlfriend was much higher status than I was.
She was... Going into 11th grade, she was absolutely the queen of our... She had a 4.0.
She was the president of the junior class.
She was captain of the cross-country running team.
She was... All these things.
She was absolutely the queen.
And I was... As I've said before, last in our class...
If memory serves, you were essentially asked... If I remember right, there was actually a project amongst the teachers and administrators to make sure that you found the door with dispatch.
That's right.
They tried to see if I could spend all of high school in detention, and they realized that that wasn't going to work.
So, like, let's just keep it moving.
Keep it moving.
Out the door.
But so I set my... This is... You know, at this age, I don't...
I haven't done a thing like this in years, but I set my sights on her.
And I said, I'm going to make Kelly Kiefer my girlfriend.
It almost never works.
No, no.
And this is very... Even if not you, but even if one is super creepy, especially maybe, but it almost never works.
It was very John Hughes...
Because I was, you know, I had absolutely nothing to recommend me.
Like, there was no way that this girl who sat at the front of the class wearing an Argyle sweater...
And like had the answer to every question was ever going to ever go on a single date with the kid in the back of the class that had spaghetti sauce on his shirt and was, you know, was back there going.
And, and yet through this, through these notes, the passing of these notes and my, my relentlessness of just like, listen, you don't think so yet.
But one day you will love me, and when it happens, I will try very hard not to tease you about all the time that you were sure that this wasn't going to happen.
I'm going to try very hard not to have this be a thing that I make fun of you about later.
And she was like, you have so much chutzpah and you are so repulsive that I don't even have the words to reject you as fully as I want to reject you.
And I was like, that's fine.
That's fine.
You just keep talking, little lady.
And little by little, and she said the turning point.
She maintained this impenetrable wall until Christmas break, and she and her family went to Mexico.
And they were sitting in a hotel.
And during my junior year, I was famous citywide in Anchorage for being the master toilet paperer.
I would enter a neighborhood, and I would toilet paper that neighborhood absolutely into submission until people were like, Finn, please.
I would knock on somebody's door, a kid I knew, and I would say, hey, man, I'm out toilet papering the neighborhood.
I'm out of toilet paper.
Can I borrow some toilet paper?
Yeah.
And the kid would go inside and bring me out a big 12-pack of toilet paper and be like, yeah, go get them, man.
And they'd shut the door, and I would start toilet papering their house with their own toilet paper.
I was a terrible, terrible teenager.
And Kelly said she was sitting in a condo in Mazatlan with her family, and they were looking out over the beach.
And a single roll of toilet paper came from higher up in the hotel, and she saw it fall down.
in front of her balcony and as it fell she realized that she loved me like a shooting star it was like a shooting star and she she said from that moment on that you know i owned her body and soul and i had no idea i was still back in anchorage like when you know when school starts again i'm gonna resume my letter writing campaign and she came back and and apparently you know
She saw me in a new light.
Her new eyes did not see the spaghetti sauce or loved it.
And did it last for a while?
It did.
I mean, she was my only girlfriend in high school.
Is this the Irish cornrows girl?
Yeah, this is the red-headed cornrows girl, yeah.
Wow.
Yeah.
And, you know, she now is a, she is a, well, as far as I understand it, she is the chief of residence at Dartmouth Hospital.
And is one of those people.
One of the people that wears a white coat that has pens in the pocket.
One of the people that might treat you for free.
And speaks to you kind of in clipped, abrupt tones about your own insides.
Is she committed to anybody at this point?
Maybe it's time to start writing some letters.
She got married to a wonderful man named Seth.
And I actually like Seth a lot better than I like Kelly.
There aren't that many wonderful men named Seth.
Well, the thing is, this Seth had every strike against him.
He, A, has a ponytail.
B, is from California.
C, he's a Seth, right?
You meet him and you're like, mm, Seth.
And he's some kind of brain scientist, but not a doctor.
Like a brain scientist who isn't a doctor.
There's a lot of things about that must be like being a barren midwife.
It's exactly what it is.
Like I look at him all the time and I'm like, why didn't you just be, why didn't you just go the little extra way and be a doctor?
If you're going to be a brain scientist, but he, but that's part of his sethness.
You know, he's like, Oh no, I really like this brain science.
And I'm like, yeah, I know.
But dude, a little bit, you know, be a doctor.
Your epaulets have a little bit more scrambled eggs on them.
And then everybody gets out of your way, and he's like, oh, I don't want everybody out of my way.
That's such a Seth thing to say.
I sit on this stool, and I put this stuff from this Petri dish into that Petri dish.
I'm like, oh.
That's really frustrating.
You don't understand anything.
But it turns out, and when Kelly started dating Seth, I was like, this is not going to work.
This dumb hippie.
He doesn't know anything.
And Kelly was like, no, he's nice, and I like him.
Yeah.
And they got married and they had a couple of kids.
Kids are nice.
And Seth is nice.
The only problem is Kelly is a terrible person.
Okay.
Um, but that just goes, I mean, you don't get to be the, uh, you don't get to be the, the chief resident of Dartmouth hospital without being a terrible person.
You know what I mean?
No, I do.
I mean like that's, that's the kind of profession where you don't go in that to be a nice corn road lady.
That's or, or, or guy.
I mean, that's, those people are, they're animals.
Yeah, they're animals.
And she's one of these people, every time I send her an email, I get an auto reply telling me, an auto reply that isn't like out of the office for two days.
I get an auto reply that is like a page and a half of boilerplate telling me that my correspondence is confidential and she can't answer emails.
And, you know, there's like 700 different clauses.
And I always write her and I say, get a fucking personal email address, asshole.
She might have one.
Oh, you think?
I think she's a busy lady, and she's only got so much purple pen left.
She's got kids to take care of, coats to clean.
She's the worst.
Oh, that's a shame.
But you know what?
I'm proud of you, though.
It just shows you that you got gumption.
You got stick-to-itiveness.
I used to have gumption, Merlin.
I used to be able to have stick-to-itiveness.
You've got gumption.
Don't be that way.
You've got gumption.
You just don't have gumption where you expect it to be, and I think that frustrates you.
You've got plenty of gumption.
Oh, are you saying that I might have gumption in areas I don't?
I'm not.
I'm not even going to go look for the can opener on this one.
I have gumption other places, and then right in the center of my heads-up display, there's like a burned hole where the gumption that I want.
You know what?
You go to war with the gumption you have, not the gumption you want.
That's right.
Absolutely.
There's the gumption we know and the gumption we know we don't know.
Right.
Yeah.
I bet it helped a lot that she was a runner, that she knew that she could get away if she had to.
Yeah.
Those people – my wife's a runner.
She's like a middle distance runner and did marathons and stuff.
And I think that's part of the – why she would even consider looking into something like this.
Kelly was one of those high school girls that was so full of sass –
I love sass.
She would sass a rhinoceros to its face.
She had no compunction.
She had no worries at all.
She knew where she was going.
She was one of those 15-year-olds that knew she was going to be the chief of residence at Dartmouth Hospital and just get out of her way.
And that was definitely part of why she was so interesting to me.
And I was trying to overcome the fact that I had no idea even where I was in that moment, let alone where I was going.
Where did the spaghetti stain come from?
Really?
I mean, I was sitting there like, I don't know, should I take up tobacco?
Or should I join the Peace Corps?
Or should I just die right now?
To quote the great John Hughes, you didn't know whether to shit or go sailing.
That's exactly right.
And how does that recommend you to anybody?
Like, hello, how are you?
I'm fine.
I'm going to be a doctor.
What are you going to be?
Uh...
But you weren't even like a – what's his name?
Matt Dillon.
You weren't even like an outsider's kind of character, right?
You weren't like a leather jacket guy, right?
You weren't an orange flight suit guy anymore at this point, right?
You were a preppy.
Did you dress like a preppy?
Well, I dressed like I do now, which is like there's a base coat of preppy, right?
You take the naked person, you put on a base coat of preppy.
A little bit of dignity primer.
Yeah.
And then on top of that, you put like a second coat of like Northwest Wool, Northwest Wool Necessity.
Yeah.
And then the top coat is like eccentric bonkers or Ignatius P. Reilly.
You know, like you got preppy and then just wool necessity and then...
And then, like, bonkers hat.
Bonkers hat, scarf, and poop.
And then just the private comforts that can only come from roomy corduroy.
Yeah, and so during the grunge years...
Like, I definitely wasn't grunge and all the grunge kids were like, what the hell is that?
But the bonkers on top of the Northwest wool, it was just like, right, okay, sure.
There was enough overlap with the grunge look that like, okay, the boots and the hat, okay, you're in.
And growing up in Anchorage, it was the same thing.
Like, well, do you remember when Columbine happened?
people were describing those two kids and, and the fact that they called themselves the trench coat mafia and they were, they were obsessed with guns and they felt like outsiders.
And I remember at the time thinking, you know, I would have known those kids.
if I had been at that high school, I would have been friends with them.
And in a sense, at my own high school, I was the equivalent kind of trench coat mafia, where if you asked me, I would have said, yeah, I'm a total outsider.
But in fact, I was a functioning member of the school and actually an insider.
But I did have a trench coat.
And it had a skull and crossbones painted on the back in whiteouts.
And it was a big skull and crossbones.
I used an entire couple of jars.
You know, goths make errors too.
And I did this, and this is the top coat of bonkers.
Where it was like, sure, trench coat.
And it was like a World War I trench coat that I bought at an Army-Navy surplus store.
And then I just felt like it needed something.
And I realized it needed a skull and crossbones.
And how was I going to get the skull and crossbones on the trench coat?
Whiteout.
Because whiteout was my main artistic medium at the time.
Whiteout's everywhere.
It was kind of a newer product.
It smells good.
It's available.
It smells good.
It has a brush right there.
And at a high school, you can avail yourself of whiteout.
It's an unlimited supply.
It's not like spray paint where you got to go show your license or something.
You could pick that up anywhere.
Right.
Those are medium.
And whiteout, you know, I mean, it's pretty weather resistant.
So, now try and picture the scene.
Me walking down the hall of my high school in this... And it was pre-Duster era, but it was a very long trench coat.
It was ankle-length trench coat with the skull and crossbones on the back.
It is ludicrous.
It is... If you needed a picture in the dictionary next to geek...
It's complicated, though, because you're not even sure which part to begin making fun of.
Right.
There's so many aspects to the layers of bonkers in that.
But at the same time, you really couldn't make fun of it because I was already six and a half feet tall.
And I was pretty serious about it.
I was pretty serious about, like, look out.
Look out.
Do you see?
I am poison.
It says so right on the back in Whiteout.
I am dangerous.
Skull and crossbones.
What does that mean to you?
Do not induce vomiting.
That's right.
That's right.
And so, you know, so now try and picture anybody being interested.
I keep picturing Kelly.
I got to be honest with you.
And she's this, you know, she's this willowy high school superstar with auburn hair like an Irish setter.
And it was... And then Breakfast Club came out.
And we're at this Breakfast Club.
And here's the prissy, red-headed girl.
And here's the John Bender character who...
you know, who had been Hollywoodized enough.
That's the, what about you dad guy?
Yeah, exactly.
He'd been Hollywoodized enough so that the, the, the set dressers on the film were like, should we put a white out skull and crossbones on the back of his trench coat?
No, that's too far.
But, you know, he was – and the problem was – and this probably was true of you.
We were all every one of those people in Breakfast Club.
That was why the movie was successful.
Every kid could look at every one of those kids and say – I think that's actually the epilogue to the movie, yeah.
I'm kind of – oh, is it?
Yeah.
When they go walk by the goalposts, I think that's actually what – What reads?
We're all every one of these?
They're all reading from the thing that they wrote, you know, for that guy from Trading Places.
48 hours?
Which one was he in?
Yeah, that one guy.
He was the principal.
Wasn't he... Didn't he have a... One of the great character actors.
Didn't he do a movie with a monkey?
He didn't.
I think he was sodomized by a monkey.
Oh, no.
You're saying the guy that's like, two months.
I got you.
Yeah, you get the bull... Mess with the bull, you get the horns.
That guy?
Oh, you get the horns.
That's a great line.
That guy's a great actor.
Yeah.
Yeah, he's the one who does the jam up on, not to derail you, does the jam up on Dan Aykroyd in Trading Places.
Great movie.
Right.
Exactly.
He does the jam up.
He's the detective.
You gotta put your hand in the next guy's pocket.
He's the one that the brothers bring in.
I love that that movie is such a touchstone for a great movie.
Well, every time, every Christmas, I dress like Santa and I always put a full smoked salmon in my beard.
Yeah.
In homage.
Man, there's so much here.
I try not to talk about myself, but I totally – I feel the same way in two ways.
First of all, at the time, I would have done something like – I told you about it.
I used to walk around with my members-only epaulets unhooked because I thought that was really –
Well, wait.
Let me just be clear, though.
You're just putting a little bit of extra flair on that thing.
Yeah.
You're not doing this.
Hey, look at this.
I got this members-only jacket down at the flea market.
It's not a real members-only jacket.
I got the – I'm wearing knee pads.
I slide down the halls on my knees.
And it's a thing I do.
And I thought I was like such an outsider.
But the second part that really – in retrospect, the part that's the real head slapper is the whole like, oh, you know, I –
I wasn't really outside.
It's the kids that I was sitting around making fun of that were really outside because I was extraordinarily – as much as I'd like to consider myself like in retrospect like a Peter Parker character or something, it wasn't.
I had a ridiculously sarcastic and cutting wit that made a lot of people feel really bad and I'm sitting around acting like I'm Judd Nelson.
I wasn't.
Speaking of graphic novels, I just received in the mail a very interesting graphic novel as a gift from somebody, which is a book about going to high school with Jeffrey Dahmer.
And this comic book artist, who's an artist that I'm familiar with from alternative weekly magazines, he's been writing...
comics for years and years and he's one of the you know he's one of the greats you would recognize his work but it turns out this guy coincidentally went to high school with Dahmer and was and wrote this autobiography which is basically saying the same thing like we thought we were uh real you know real nerds and outsiders and Dahmer was our was our uh was kind of our mascot
But in reality, Dahmer was messed up and we let him into our gang only enough that he was kind of our pet because he was such a weirdo.
And we loved having this weird mascot that we could walk around school and like Dahmer imitated having cerebral palsy and we all thought that was hilarious and that was kind of our, it was one of our motifs and
I mean, they went to school in the 70s, right, before pretending to have cerebral palsy was considered gauche.
Yeah, before everybody was doing it.
John Backdorf?
Yeah, Backdorf.
Backdorf.
Durf, all right.
He goes by Durf, apparently.
And so this book is really...
is really heartbreaking because he's talking about Dahmer before he had, you know, when he was still out in the woods gathering animal skeletons or he was still picking up roadkill before he had ever hurt anybody.
Right.
He's still in that harming cats phase.
Well, it was even before he was harming cats.
Didn't he do a lot of animal harming?
He ended up doing it, yeah.
Animal harming is kind of a gateway drug to killing boys.
But this was still when he was just picking up dead animals out of the woods and expressing like an unusual, unnatural fascination with them.
But so this guy is telling the story and it's like, and he's looking back kind of with a feeling of responsibility, but also pointing a real finger at the adults at the time and saying, this kid was...
getting wasted drunk before school every day and trying in every way to cope with what was going on in his mind and he was being ignored by the by the faculty and the kids were just you know we let we let him into our gang because he was he was such a because he you know he reinforced our kind of like we're the we're the funny kids we're the
were the benders.
To state the obvious, he probably seemed emblematic of the edginess they wished that they had, and having him around lent some of that from a certain remove.
Yeah, he was a legitimate outsider, and they kind of took as much of that as they were comfortable with onto themselves.
But as he says in his book, as Durf says in his book, we never invited him over to our house.
We would hang out with him at the mall
As long as he was funny, and then we would stand there right in front of him and make plans for later in the night and not include him.
But Dahmer, if you read his own kind of, after he was caught, his own writings or his own confessions, he's talking about the same period in his life where he is feeling these urges and trying to suppress them knowing they're wrong.
Oh, where he still had that kind of – not distance exactly, but he could still see that what he was doing was – well, like it's one thing to say like there's certain people who have a certain kind of like deliberate cruelty, a kind of if you like evil where you're deliberately harming –
things where people just for the purpose of harming them and enjoying it but he still had a certain amount of remove we might like feel a little bad about it oh he felt terrible and you know and he he he was wrestling with the fact that he was gay and he and he couldn't he couldn't uh obviously admit that to anybody in 1977 but he also had this
He had this desire to be in complete control of a living thing to the point that he would torture it and kill it.
And he knew it was wrong.
But it was an overwhelming urge, I guess.
It ended up, certainly, he ended up expressing that.
But to read this graphic novel is to be put kind of into this moment in this kid's life where you're like...
Oh, you there.
It was still possible for someone maybe to have intervened and directed him in in like somewhere else instead of like when you first realize that your kid is collecting.
uh roadkill in jars of formaldehyde in the barn out back of the house like do you have a talk with him well i mean like you notice your kid cries when they come home from church or you notice that they're not doing well when they sit in the back of the classroom you try to put one and one together about these things that why they're not thriving right right kind of yeah and nobody did that in this instance but i think about those columbine kids in that same way when that happened
I thought about myself in high school and I was like, I was building pipe bombs with my friends and we were going out on weekends and blowing up
parked cars really yeah you've harmed parked cars yeah and it's not a thing that I've ever talked about because I wasn't sure about the statute of limitations but I think it's passed on blowing up cars but you know we learned we all had the anarchist cookbook
And the Antichrist cookbook is great, except it doesn't really quite go far enough.
We tried to make our own black powder.
We realized after we had spent weeks and weeks working on a black powder mixture, we realized two things.
One, we were making very effective smoke bombs.
But that making black powder was harder than just mixing three ingredients.
Black powder is essentially three ingredients, but you don't just mix them in rough quantities and stir it with a wooden spoon and then you have black powder.
Well, I mean, there's not that many ingredients to make Coke, but you've got to know the right mix.
You've got to know the right mix, right.
And so we had all these different black powder mixtures that we've been working on, and they all turned out to be basically smoke.
They made smoke.
They made acrid smoke.
And then we realized, you know what?
They sell black powder at the Fred Meyer because we live in Alaska and it's 1983 and people still are hunting with black powder muskets up here.
What?
It was a thing.
Okay.
It was a thing.
That should come to Portland.
Guys were hunting with muskets still.
Locovores with blunderbusses.
And so you could go to the Fred Meyer and for like $5 buy a can of smokeless powder.
Yeah.
And it wasn't even behind the counter.
It was just out in the aisles.
And there were multiple times, Merlin, I swear to you, in the mid-80s, where I would, as a 15-year-old, walk up to the checkout counter at a Fred Meyer with three cans of black powder, five lengths of...
of lead pipe with end caps.
No, no, no.
Yeah.
And they would go... Do you need your receipt?
Yeah.
Would you like your receipt, sir?
The total comes to $24.97.
And I would walk out with a bag of what could only be bombs...
I ended up getting put on double secret emergency suspension from school.
Oh, they found it in your locker?
They found it in my locker.
You brought it to school.
I brought it to school and told the teacher about it because I was so proud of myself that I was making and selling pipe bombs.
And he was deeply disappointed.
He was very disappointed in me.
But we were using these bombs to, you know, we were going out and blowing things up.
And we were doing it very whimsically.
But because you are a high school person, you do not have any judgment whatsoever.
We had no sense that what we were doing was any different than, except that it was cooler than what any other kids were doing.
Or that this was just normal.
I don't know, normal.
I stopped messing around with pipe bombs when we were pulling away from a party one time.
And we had gone to a party at a different high school, and it was a lame party, and they were jerks to us.
And we climbed in my car, and we were leaving this party, and my friend, who had worse judgment than I did...
opened the glove compartment of my car and there was a pipe bomb in there and we had figured out that if you went to the if you if you went to the the gun store if you didn't buy your black powder at fred meyer if you went to the gun store where the guys were actually selling blunderbusses that they also sold cannon fuse literal like fuse for your homemade cannon
And so we bought 50 feet of this cannon fuse and we stopped using the solar igniters from model rockets to electrically ignite our pipe bombs.
And we just stuck fuse in them and started making basically pipe bombs you could light with a lighter.
And I had one of these in my glove compartment.
And this buddy of mine, as we're leaving this party...
Just pulls it out, lights it, and throws it out the window.
Like an anarchist?
Like he made almost like one of those little bowling ball things.
He lit a bomb and threw it.
He lit a bomb that I had in the wisdom of my youth that I had in the glove compartment of my car in case I needed it.
And he found it and had a lighter because we were smoking pot, lighter in his hand.
And he was like, oh, check it out.
These guys at this party are assholes.
He lit it and threw it out the window into the front yard of the house where there were 350 kids at this party.
And as a teenager, I did the only thing that you could do, which was slam on the gas and
And I'm screaming at him, what the fuck did you just do?
And we're peeling out, getting out of this neighborhood.
And in my mind, I've seen these bombs go off.
And I know that this is a yard full of kids.
This is a house full of kids.
This bomb is going to go off.
It's going to break every window in that house.
And it is going to hurt somebody.
It is going to kill somebody.
And I'm...
like i have never felt a dread like i did as i am driving away from this as i'm peeling out away from this place and the and the guy next to me is like fuck those guys and we get to the end of the block and i'm waiting for
I'm waiting for the ground to shake because these things are, these pipe bombs we were making were like real bombs and nothing happens.
And when they, I mean, I don't know a lot about this.
When it explodes, there's going to be the equivalent of shrapnel.
I mean, there's going to be massive metal, hot metal flying through the air at hundreds of miles per hour.
Lead shrapnel that, that, I mean, we, we, we tested one of these.
I mean, we, we tested these things.
And the lead goes right through a car, like just peppers it.
And I'm sitting at the end of the block waiting to hear this explosion and wondering, like running down the scenarios.
Basically running down me being brought in front of a courtroom and being asked to explain why I killed these kids.
And nothing happens.
And I wait a couple of minutes, and I know how long the fuse was, and I mean, nothing happens.
So I turn the car around, and we very slowly drive past this party, and everything is just, party's just going on, and out in the middle of the yard is this dud pipe bomb that didn't go off, and...
And I'm looking at it and I'm thinking, what is my responsibility here?
I don't want to run and grab this thing.
It could go off at any moment.
I don't want to stop and get out of the car and yell, bomb!
I don't want... I want to be a half an hour ago and have this not happen.
But also, isn't there some part of you?
My first thought, sickly enough, was now it's evidence.
It's not a bomb.
Now it's evidence.
It's got your fingerprints on it.
Well, except now it's just a...
nine out of 10 people are going to look at it and say, what's this length of pipe?
If you aren't in the pipe bomb making business, it doesn't even read as a bomb.
It just reads as like, why did somebody put two end caps on a short length of pipe?
And it just sits there.
It sits there throbbing in the lawn.
And my friend is like, let's get out of here.
It's a dud.
And there are a lot of those things were duds.
There's a lot of reasons why it would have been a dud.
It's not a surprise.
But I kind of parked down the block and watched the front yard of this party not knowing what to do.
And continuing to choose wrong, which is to sit there and watch it rather than go run in there and say, everybody out!
And it never went off.
And eventually I was like, let's just put the car in reverse and slowly backed away and went on with our lives.
But picturing how different my life would be if that bomb had gone off, and I don't mean to make that equivalent to those kids at Columbine who actively went into their school and shot a bunch of people.
But when the Columbine thing happened, I was able to put myself in their shoes pretty easily.
Because I could identify with the feelings that they had had.
And I mean, I was a full-grown adult.
But I remembered feeling that way and I remembered thinking that I was pretty cool.
And it was obvious those Columbine kids thought they were very cool.
And they went in and they killed a bunch of their friends because they were teenagers, and teenagers are stupid.
So... You don't have the wiring.
I mean, it's just not there.
I mean, there are some people who maybe out of, in my case, maybe out of fear or the desire to be liked would, you know, quote-unquote, do the right thing.
But, you know, it's...
It's like, I don't know, like transubstantiation or something.
I mean it would be something where I'm like doing it because I believe that there's this thing.
But I didn't – I was very rarely a good person just because of some sense of ethics or doing the right thing.
It was – all the thought processes that went into almost everything I did at that age were really – even when I thought they were good, were really twisted.
Yeah.
I don't think most people – I mean I think there's some serious neurology behind this, but I think you just don't have the wiring at that age.
And in fact, it's my understanding that when you are 13 or 14 especially, I mean it's pretty bad.
I think the basic wiring of a teenage boy at that age is pretty close to psychopathy.
Well, and that's why – Just in the sense of like not really having any sense of like what this means to the rest of the world.
That's why the most dangerous people on city streets are teenage gangbangers.
If you see a 25-year-old thug, he is so much more like a reasonable person.
But if you see a group of 15-year-old gangsters...
Those kids have no limits.
They don't believe that their actions have consequences.
That's why they're great soldiers, but they're the worst citizens.
Yeah, I don't know.
I feel like this trail building plan is a solution.
Like if I had spent my junior high years building trail rather than sitting in school.
Making pipe bombs that don't work.
And learning the many artistic uses of whiteout.
I would have been a better teenager.
I would have been a healthier 15-year-old if I had done some hard work when I was a 12-year-old.
I feel like we have a... There's starting to be a groundswell behind Super Train, Marlon.
I'm feeling it.
I'm aware of this.
What are we doing, really?
We're a little bit like Kelly, except without the coat.
We're kind of writing a prescription for ourselves, retroactively.
I know you don't believe in time travel, but I'm just saying I...
Or I suspect you don't.
Don't talk to me about time travel.
Okay.
I think that's part of it.
I think that when we do almost anything as adults, we're in some ways trying to compensate for something when we were younger.
Yeah, I agree.
But we need to start figuring out... We need to start implementing phase one of SuperTrain.
I mean, I guess we have been implementing phase one.
I think it's time to start... You're saying it's time to move beyond the Whisper campaign.
Yeah.
I think people are ready, and I feel like the longer we wait...
The longer we wait, the more – a million voices are screaming out at once.
Super train.
See, I don't know if we have time to go into this because I think there's – I would like to see in as much as you're comfortable just even seeing the – I don't even want to see the pages of the plan.
I just want to see the size of the plan just roughly because I imagine some of it is documented somewhere on some cocktail napkins or pieces of plank or something.
But, uh, but I mean, do you see it something as it's written in whiteout?
So it's a, it's, it's, it's a much bigger document than it needs to be.
That's so undignified.
It's one thing to write on your, write in your duster, make, make a, uh, on your, uh, what did you call it?
Your world war one jacket.
Yeah.
Yeah.
World war one trench coat.
Yeah.
So it's one thing.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I got to tell you, dusters, dusters, when I see a duster, I just, that's man.
I see, when you say, I see dusters, you know, you see dusters.
Do you see dusters?
Yeah.
Well, that's the thing.
Dusters are the, dusters are the official coat of the software engineer who didn't get the memo.
Yeah.
Like the duster and the Australian-looking cowboy hat?
Yeah.
The troubling part is that the memo has been delivered.
It's just he hasn't been checking that mailbox.
The memo has been delivered often, at least weekly, for some time now, and he's just a little behind on the newsletter.
Yeah, so especially when you see a guy in that hat and duster getting off the bus or waiting downtown in line at a coffee cart, and you're like, listen, you are dressed...
You are dressed as somebody who should be riding a camel.
You are seriously, you are dressed for a post-apocalyptic camel battle.
You are waiting in line at a coffee cart.