Ep. 80: "I Was the Red Robin"
I love you
Hi, John.
Hi, Merlin.
How's it going?
Good.
Can I say why that's funny?
Of course you can.
Yeah.
I think that we should reference yesterday multiple times.
What?
No, no, no.
I just blooped you on the Skype as a joke because I remarked about how you tend to clear your throat at the top of the episode, as you say.
Okay.
And so I think my exact quote was clear your throat because here we go.
I saved it for you.
I wanted to hear all the little rabbit babies that I was keeping in my cheeks.
What's that from?
You just came up with that?
God, you should write songs.
You are good.
What did you have for dinner tonight?
Well, it's a good question.
Thank you.
I'm still wandering around in a kind of carb-less daze.
And I was sitting here at my house and I was just like, I can't imagine another meat entree that isn't going to just make me despair.
All I want is spaghetti with cookies on it.
God, I've never thought of that until you just said it, and that sounds so good.
It does.
It would be a real carbo load.
But then I looked in the refrigerator and I realized that I had made a stew, a carb-less stew.
And I had also roasted a beef.
Oh, like a rib roast?
What kind of a roast?
I had made a roast beef.
That sounds delicious.
It does, and it is, but I don't have a meat slicer.
And I realized that at least half of the enjoyment I get out of roast beef is out of the thinness of the slices of the beef.
Yeah.
Is that right?
Now, was it like a rib roast or what kind of a roast did you make?
Was it a sirloin roast?
It was like a prime rib.
No, no, it was a beef butt.
I don't mean to give you the beef voir dire.
I'm just trying to figure out which.
So you like a thin cut.
You like a traditional roast beef thin slice.
Yeah, rare cook and very thinly sliced.
And then, of course, on a fresh French roll, but I can't have that.
See, that's how they get you.
That sounds delicious.
Yeah, so anyway, I ate the rest of the stew.
I'm feeling better.
I'm feeling less like...
like diving into a swimming pool sized strawberry shortcake.
I'm, I'm just, I'm just, I'm getting by, you know, it is not, it's not torment at all.
It's just a constant feeling of, of being, uh, of not knowing what's not, not knowing how to live because, because of this, this, this bizarre,
simulacrum of a life that you've been leading all these years yeah i've been i've been i've been hopping from from shortcake to shortcake like a frogger so many freight trains and now now i'm this person who's like i can eat any any meat i want and it's and it's all delicious and after after a week i'm like meat is the most boring food
See, it's just the way.
It's like having a steady girlfriend.
I don't know if this is useful at all.
You've probably already discovered this.
I might be repeating what you just said.
But when I was struggling to make the no starchy stuff thing work, I discovered that the worst part was before I would eat the actual meat.
That's when I would feel the meat fatigue.
But if I forced myself to eat something protein-y, like you say, the shortcake train desire would abate a little bit.
Yeah, it goes away.
And what's funny is— And you realize how much it's in your head.
That's what I'm saying.
A week ago—
Somebody said to me, well, why don't you just take a celery stick and dip it in a peanut butter jar?
And I was like, well, for one, I'm not four at the daycare center.
And for two, I literally have not eaten a thing like that since 1973.
And I cannot think of a thing less appetizing.
You should make ants on a log.
You do that?
You put some raisins on top?
Let's not talk about ants.
Nom, nom, nom, nom.
But yesterday, I'm walking around.
I'm just like, oh, celery with peanut butter on it.
That sounds so delicious.
It's only taken a week, and already, I think...
of vegetables in a different way i'm like oh get me some vegetables like that will at least they'll fill you up they really well and they dress up your dumb dead uh your dead shoe leather whatever thing you eat don't you feel a little fruity though like i know in my heart that well like i really like as you say asparagus i love asparagus i like broccoli i love spinach like sauteed with uh
You know, cloves of garlic is so good.
I'm glad that we're finally doing a cooking podcast.
Hi.
Welcome to Nom Noms with John and Merlin.
Here's the thing.
You know what?
This is super boring.
But all I'm going to say is this.
I'm going to say one and a half things.
Yeah.
One is that in my head – so I've got meat and I want to talk more about meat because my family is away and I've been eating nothing but meat.
But I'll think to myself, hmm, I should go make some asparagus and I could put a little spritz of lemon on it.
And I feel like such a fruit when that thought goes through my head.
But I make it.
It's delicious and I eat it.
Isn't that a silly thing?
Well, I absolutely feel you.
A friend of mine was in town.
I had not seen him in many, many years.
He and his family live in St.
Petersburg, Russia.
And they were passing through Seattle.
And they said, we're going to be here long enough to get dinner.
Let's all meet for dinner.
And I said, well, absolutely.
Where should we eat?
And they were unified in wanting to eat at the Red Robin restaurant.
Because they're going back to Russia.
They're going to be in Russia for another year.
And Red Robin was the American style bonsai hamburger with a pineapple ring on it.
And a strawberry milkshake sounded like, I mean, that was their dream, right?
You can get a lot of things in St.
Petersburg, but I'm guessing you can't get nachos with like strawberry compote.
You can probably get a rocket launcher faster than you can get a pineapple burner, I'm guessing.
Right, right.
So we all go to Red Robin.
And I, you know, I used to work at the Red Robin.
I was the Red Robin.
Is that right?
Did I never tell you the story?
I have not heard how you became the Red Robin.
It was one of my earliest jobs.
I was 17 years old.
The Red Batman?
I was a bus boy at the Red Robin in Anchorage.
And they didn't trust me to be a waiter.
They didn't think I had the maturity.
But I was running around bussing tables.
And one day I was in the back storeroom.
And back there behind all the boxes of Dixie Cups.
Hanging on a hook.
is this, you know, I came around the corner and was like, and here's this life size red Robin costume hanging on a hook, like dead lifeless.
How long had you been there before you realized this?
Well, it was a, it was like a back store room that kind of never got used.
And I was there, I was working there a couple of months, you know, before I went around and saw this and I was sent into that room.
You had to have a key sent into it to find something, some cash register item and,
And here's this Red Robin.
And it looked exactly like, hanging on the hook, it looked exactly like the Alec Baldwin chicken face in Beetlejuice.
Like, you know, like he had reached in and pulled his nose out and had fingers for eyeballs.
And I was like startled and scared.
And I mentioned it to the manager and he was like, oh, yeah.
You know, usually, well, for a long time we had somebody...
being the Red Robin, but you have to be big and like to dance and like kids.
And I was like, hello, big, like to dance, love kids.
And he was like, you want to do that?
You like a snazzy outfit?
So I run back, I throw the Red Robin costume on, I go out into the restaurant, and I don't know if you've read these studies recently, but it's been discovered by the guy that provides sports mascots to sports teams in America, that severely autistic people...
make the absolute best sports mascots.
Like a big head character.
Yeah.
I've never heard that.
Once they're inside... I mean, and these are people who are completely internal, like Rain Man level of autism.
They put on the costume...
And they become incredibly animated, incredibly social, gifted, like child-hugging, cartwheel-turning super mascots.
I've never heard that.
And then you take the costume off of them, and they go back.
It's almost an awakening kind of situation.
Wow.
So it was, it was, I had a similar experience.
I put on this costume.
I walked out into the restaurant where I had been working at toiling as a, as a bus boy, the lowest guy on the totem pole.
And suddenly I was the red Robin and everyone in the restaurant wanted me to come over to their table.
And all the waiters were like, you know, stepping aside to let me pass.
And
I never wanted to get out of this costume, Merlin.
I inhabited the character of the Red Robin, who, as you know, is both a mix master or a mixologist and also a burger master.
Two things at the time.
I've never eaten at a Red Robin, but I passed by them.
And I'm just looking at the character.
He appears to be a red bird.
And he's got a little bit kind of like a... What?
Like a... He's got a beanie cap on.
He's got like a backwards... Well, here he's got a baseball cap.
I guess he probably used to have a beanie.
He's carrying a burger like Bob's Big Boy.
He's got big, adorable yellow bird feet.
That's right.
And beautiful, beautiful blue eyes.
To those of our listeners who are not in America, it is a burger restaurant that was started in Seattle.
It's a chain restaurant.
They have burger places all over the country.
And their twin selling points were this menu of outrageous burgers.
Outrageous burgers with outrageous toppings.
And then also a very fun bar component where master mixologists, and I believe the term mixologist was invented at Red Robin.
Turns out.
I take it all back.
This looks fantastic.
It says here it's America's Gourmet Burgers and Spirits.
What a brilliant idea.
Way ahead of its time, I'm guessing.
So mom and dad could go and get one of these tall drinks that had 15 shots of liquor in it that tasted like a banana.
And the kids could eat all-you-can-eat seasoned fries and a giant burger covered with Skittles or whatever it is kids want.
Yeah.
And they used to have, oh, they had amazing food, a mud pie, nachos.
Anyway, so I had such a good time as the Red Robin.
I was such a success that they started to, somebody got a truck and they would put me in the back of the truck and we drove to all the hospitals and I started visiting sick kids.
Oh.
As the Red Robin.
What kind of response did you get?
Oh, that was amazing.
You walk onto the ward and all the little sick and hurt kids.
And they're so thrilled.
You know, the hardest part, I think.
It must be so boring to just sit around.
Nobody comes.
Yeah.
Mom and dad come visit for an hour or whatever.
But nobody's there.
It's just dull.
And here comes this giant freaky bird.
Half of the kids had no idea what the connection was to the restaurant.
It was just like, here's this giant freaky bird.
And thinking about it now, like we were doing this really rogue, like it was this one assistant manager and one of the waiters owned a truck.
And we were like, I know, let's go to hospitals.
I can't imagine that happening today.
I don't even think we called ahead.
I think we just drove to hospitals, walked in the door.
And the nurses in the ER were like, oh, hello, let's go, and then took us back to the kids.
There's like 50 things about that that would never happen today.
Right, right.
If a John Roderick-sized red bird walked into a hospital today, there would be so many questions.
You'd get black bagged.
Yeah, but this was, you know, and the entire trip across Anchorage with me in the back of this pickup truck, I'd be waving and people would be honking.
I really felt like...
like queen for a day every time i put on this costume and it transformed me so we started going to like state fair and and stuff like that where the red robin you you the manager didn't mind you doing this the manager loved it because first of all i was a not a very good bus boy
Win-win.
Get that chicken out of here.
That summer, all of a sudden, the Red Robin was literally everywhere in Anchorage.
You could not get me out of that suit.
And every time somebody opened an envelope, I was there in the Red Robin costume like, hello!
It's a silent roll.
So I didn't say anything.
I was just bouncing and jumping and dancing.
i mean you know dancing to like schoolhouse rock or whatever it is that they play but i mean it's probably not entirely different from the the spectrum kids where like you disappear into this character and it's not like the interesting thing about it is like everybody sees you as a big dancing bird but like all you see is the people's reaction which it's not like you're watching yourself on video going god what the is wrong with me why don't i get a girlfriend like you you would you would just see the delight you walk up and see the delight in people's eyes and do a little dance
Everybody in the world should walk into a hospital ward of sick kids dressed as a giant bird.
Everybody should have that experience once because the looks of, like, pure joy and adulation on these little faces where they're just like, you came to see me?
And, you know, and I'm like, mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
And high five and big hug.
And it's just like, oh, you know, I it was it was as it wasn't my first job, but as one of my first jobs, it was a it was a hell of a revelation.
So I have a tremendous soft spot for Red Robin, even as they have.
succumbed to cost-cutting measures such that I feel that their current mud pie is a shadow of its former self.
That's a goddamn shame.
Don't you hate to see that when a place you really love starts going downhill?
The old mud pies, they...
literally opened a jar they opened like one of those two quart glass jars of adam's peanut butter and just turned it upside down on this chocolate ice cream pie and it was like okay i'm i'm getting dizzy i need to sit down because this just smelling this this ice cream cake pie then you could do that no one would stop you
No, I mean, again, it seems like a different role.
On the one hand, I can't believe that you didn't have to go to like six weeks of training and sign a bunch of insurance forms before you put on the suit.
But at the same time, I think about like my 10th birthday at Farrell's.
I don't know if you've ever seen Farrell's.
I ate the pig's trough at Farrell's.
I made a pig of myself.
I got the ribbon on my toy box.
I did.
I made a pig of myself at Farrell's.
My 10th birthday there was amazing.
Do you remember?
They'd have this ice cream thing that came out on a stretcher.
Yeah, they're all wearing straw boaters.
But you could eat it.
You could just sit there and eat.
21 scoops of ice cream.
Yeah, there was one really crazy one.
I think the pig's trough.
Oh my God, John.
I on numerous occasions ordered and ate something called a pig's trough.
Was it 21 scoops?
I thought it was like six.
It was a lot.
There was one that was really, really big.
It was called like the roller coaster or the ice capades or something.
There was one that was just ridiculously large.
But, I mean, it was a banana split.
It had basically everything you could conceivably put on there.
Yeah, it was just like a fire hose.
A scoop with like every flavor.
I'm going to find out now.
I'm looking at these Red Robin burgers.
Do I remember correctly that you don't like an onion roll?
Do I remember that correctly?
Onion roll?
I seem to recall one time I seem to recall asking if you liked an onion roll for a burger.
Oh, no, I don't prefer an onion roll.
Okay, pretty good, huh?
Yeah, that's a good memory.
Yeah, and look at these burgers.
I have a feeling you don't really get that much tall avocado on your burger.
But I'm looking at some wonderful, beautiful... Some of those burgers will sit you down.
Those fried onions are very generous.
Oh, well, and so I go to this restaurant with my friends who live in Russia, and they are just tucking their napkins into the front of their shirts, and they're like, here we go.
We're going to eat one of these 6,000-calorie burgers.
We're all going to have milkshakes.
And the waitress came around to me, and I was like...
cob salad please oh god and they they looked on me with pity they looked on me with like they didn't want to so strong they didn't want to say anything too they looked at me like you know like i had just said um i would i just said like i'd like some radiological i'd like a glass of radiological and the waitress is like okay and i'll be going no ice
Here comes my Cobb salad.
And it is, I mean, it's seriously the size of a bear's head.
Really?
It's very, very generous.
It's a massive Cobb salad.
There's nothing to be sorry about.
But, you know, my friends are over there like eating their burgers in slow motion, licking their chops.
And, you know, and I'm here with my egg and my little slices of turkey and avocado.
So it's kind of like a chef salad.
I went out with my – I had lunch with my friend Dan a few weeks ago, and he had a Cobb salad.
And I remember it seemed very hearty.
Yeah.
Oh, so they're amazing.
They're great.
But it is not a thing I would have ever chosen for myself at a Red Robin.
And I know the menu inside and out.
It would be like going to House of Prime Rib and getting a really good Filet of Soul or something where you're like, well, that's good.
But you're kind of missing out on what makes that place special.
Yeah.
Yeah, that's exactly right.
You always read the menu, and there's always something like the Filet of Soul where you say, the only person that's going to order that is a guy who's putting a nitroglycerin tablet under his tongue before he sits down at the table.
That's a bunker meal.
Where the scar across his chest from open heart surgery is still throbbing.
That's the only guy that's going to eat the one fish meal.
I have a friend who's a vegetarian.
A bunch of us went out a few years back, went to House of Prime Rib.
You've been there, right?
Merlin?
What?
Don't tell me.
Don't tell me you've never been there.
For the entire time we've known each other, which now is 10 plus years.
It's officially 10 plus years.
10 plus years.
You have been talking about the House of Prime Rib.
Oh, my God.
And every friend of yours, Scott Simpson, Jason Finn even, Jonathan Colton.
Hodgman's been there multiple times.
They all talk about Hodgman Jesus.
It's like a cult.
It really is like a cult.
They all say, oh, you know, how's the prime rib, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, with Merlin, blah, in San Francisco, der, der, der.
I feel so bad.
Well, listen, we need to make a trip.
We need to make a trip.
We need to schedule a show here and a show up there.
We'll bring our families.
Not the House of Prime Rib.
You know where you take me when I come visit you?
I do.
You take Walgreens.
Oh, it's not a good Walgreens.
And we buy.
We never leave our neighborhood, do we?
So we should tell.
Did we tell the story about your pants?
Have we ever told that story on here?
No.
I'm not sure.
Do you remember that night?
What happened?
We were rushing off to go to dinner and you had figured, you'd figured that, and this is exactly the kind of thing that drives me nuts with people.
It's like, if I know I have to be somewhere and it might require pants, I'll bring five pairs of pants.
And you came to town.
We were going to go out to fancy dinner and you had not checked what pair of pants you grabbed.
A, mistake number one.
So you showed up.
It was kind of late.
Do you remember this?
You must remember this.
Yes, absolutely.
We were going to dinner with Mr. Fancy Pants.
Mr. Fancy Pants and the other guy and the other guy.
And so we – great guys.
But we – And legitimately like fancy restaurant in a fancy area.
It's this place in Knob Hill.
Anyhow, but you got here and you had not checked what pair of pants you grabbed.
And I don't know which decade those pants would have worked on you.
I don't think those pants would have fit you three years ago.
i mean these pants were little they were like little boy pants so mistake number one mistake number two you didn't even bother to like grab you're like we gotta go we gotta go we gotta go and you were driving you were like bullet i mean you were having your san francisco bullet moment driving down market street hyperventilating i've never seen you so anxious yeah because you don't be late for this you're gonna they're gonna give you shit if we're late for it and so we
go to in a complete frenzy we drive so first of all you don't have pants number one number two you decide you're not going to bother to bring any pants with you because that would be inappropriate you're wearing like like big richard nixon shorts yes with with with a suit jacket you look kind of like like a like a beefy angus young yeah we're already we're already late for dinner we're late we're on the other side of uh you know over here in west bejesus we go to our crappy goodwill there's nothing there and it all costs 50 bucks
Right.
And then we finally, that's right.
We went to that Goodwill up.
I got a photo of you.
I got a blurry photo of you.
I'll put it up.
It was just like, there's nothing here.
It was everything.
Everything was, uh, they were all dockers with three pleats.
Yeah.
For like, for like $80.
Yeah.
Things I was not going to touch with my hands.
Yeah.
So then we, we haul ass.
And now, now you're real anxious because, and everything you put on was too small.
Cause as we've discussed, everything at a Goodwill, only small people die and everything at a Goodwill, unless you really spend some time in my experience is, is all tiny, tiny men clothes or triple extra large.
Yeah.
right and luckily you're right in the middle you're triple extra large because because uh triple extra large people they die like hell so anyway it was just it was and then we got we got to the place we were we got to like the castro we parked and and i stayed in the car and you tore ass in your angus young pants and like ran and so what happened then you went to like uh so so i so i'm you're like there's got to be some place in the castro there's all kinds of like vintage stores fancy boy stores there's all kinds of stores
So here we get down to the Castro.
It was like, okay, we're just going to park in the gas station.
You parked in the zip car spot.
I was very uncomfortable.
I'm like, you guard the car.
And I ran down.
I'm going in alone.
I ran down to.
In a suit jacket.
In a suit jacket and like underwear, basically.
I ran into this vintage store.
And I'm like, men's pants.
And she's like, in the back, you know, over by the tuxedo jackets or whatever.
And it was some Castro thing.
It was like on Market Street, like in that kind of fancy strip between Church and Castro.
It was like a thrift vintage kind of – Oh, it's real upscale, that area.
I mean, as far as like you're not just going to go in somewhere and get like a skinny tie for a buck.
Yeah, no.
I mean, that was – it had been – it was – how do you say?
A curated store.
Ugh.
And I run in the back, and I'm flipping through all these things, and they're all, it's just like a bunch of hammer pants.
Ironic sweaters.
Yeah, just like garbage, garbage, garbage, garbage.
And then I come upon this amazing pair of, so what were they?
They were reproduction buckle back wool pants that a forest ranger in the 20s would have worn.
Like very full leg, very heavy.
Outdoorsy.
Very outdoorsy pants.
And I looked at them and I was like, and they're, you know, kind of high waist, like buckle back, uh, very earlier style.
And I was like, these pants, not only are the right pants, but these pants are dynamite.
These pants, I'm going to walk into this knob Hill steakhouse and
And everybody in the place is going to have to reevaluate what they chose, which is how I like to walk into a place.
It worked out in the end.
It worked out.
It worked out.
So I go into the dressing room.
I wear the pants out.
I'm waiting in line behind a guy dressed like Ichabod Crane.
No, I left the shorts.
Oh, really?
Adios.
I'm waiting in line behind a guy that's wearing a tri-cornered hat who's walking.
and he's in here buying puka shells or something.
And I'm like, come on, come on, come on, come on.
I throw my money down on, you know, throw cash down where I don't have to wait.
run back up to the gas station where you're sitting in the zip car spot, drumming your fingers on the dashboard.
And off we go.
And by the time we got to Van Ness, I honestly thought I was going to die.
You, you, no, you know what?
It wasn't even like, it wasn't even Steve McQueen.
You were, you were Gene Hackman and the French connection, like banging on the dashboard.
We were going fast.
You were chasing the heroin dealers.
But it was, but you know, I just, it's, it's interesting.
And then again, now the fact that you left the shorts, you know, I would take the shorts because I, I contingencies, right?
You never know what's going to happen.
You might want to go skinny dipping.
You might want to go swimming.
Well, you're not skinny dipping, but you know, pants, pants swimming.
In fact, what we did is we went and everybody, everybody after the, after the dinner was smoking pot out of an e-cigarette.
Yeah.
And I made fun of your friend.
Yeah.
And oh yeah, you did.
You did a very good job of making fun of that guy.
I've stopped doing that.
I don't make fun of people anymore.
I don't know.
That was pretty great.
Yeah.
I don't even remember what I said.
Well, you know, everybody had had a few cocktails.
Yes.
And you were just calling attention to the fact that his house was vulgar.
His taste was vulgar.
I didn't say it.
I don't remember any of that.
Well, you were just like, this is a very expensive house and it's very expensive.
Everything in it is very expensive.
This is something you know about me.
There's a couple situations where I shut down.
I shut down when you yell at me and I cry.
I shut down when people start lying compulsively.
I can't be on compulsive liars.
You get very mad at that.
Well, I – you know what it is?
It's very similar.
Compulsive liars and people who are ostentatious –
Probably – not in this case.
This guy actually had a lot of dough.
But who were like insecure, falsely fancy, high status douchebags.
And this is something I picked up from a friend of mine in college.
But like somebody says, well, you know, that's my Thursday BMW.
And I go, wow, that's a really expensive car.
Yes.
But for a while I'll play along, but then it gets to like, wow, that's a really big boat.
Cause I don't, I don't know what to say.
I will not be, I will not be, I am not going to be a Vichy.
I'm not going to be complicit.
I'm not going to go, go gladly along with this little game you're supposed to play.
It's the same reason I can't stand like, like fake friendly, like tchotchkes kind of waiters.
It just, it makes me apoplectic.
I just, how are we doing tonight?
Yeah.
What we're doing is shut up and take my order.
Stand up like a gentleman and take my fucking order.
hold the tomato between your knees.
Well, no, this party was fantastic because every new room that we went to in this house, there was a new, it was, it was like a curtain parting and it was revealed a new level of pretentious vulgarity.
It wasn't that bad, but it was really fancy.
Soaking tub and the, the shower stalls that had pebble floors.
You had a bathroom with its own bathroom.
yeah and you were just everywhere everywhere went just increases louder and louder wow how much did that cost you must have really spent a lot of money on that and the guy was oblivious to you that's a really large piece of granite that is an artwork that must have been very expensive in the store and then and at one point we're standing on his roof of his whatever it is gorgeous gorgeous five-story house yeah
And I look, everybody's looking at the beautiful San Francisco, which is panoramic view.
And I look off the backside of the house and down in the cavern between his giant house and the little 1920s bungalow behind it, the five foot space between his house and the wall of this little house.
And I realized that
Oh my God, this little bungalow behind his newly constructed house had for 100 years or for 90 years, that little bungalow had an incredible view of San Francisco from its yard.
And then this giant 2001 A Space Odyssey modernist monolith slammed into the vacant lot on the corner.
God, that would be so frustrating.
Blocked out the light.
And so as we're all standing around smoking pot with the e-cigarette, myself excluded, I say to our host, so who are the neighbors?
What's their story?
And he kind of looked over his shoulder down at the house and he was like, huh?
Oh, I don't know.
And we went back to talking about the music business and I was like, wow, he doesn't even... He's in the aristocracy.
he doesn't even know them like he doesn't even understand he doesn't recognize that there's a neighborhood behind his house it was also this is nothing it's a beautiful house he's a very nice guy it's just that super nice never say a bad word about the guy good good good cook makes her own clothes super nice guy yeah pretty face yeah uh sweet guy never married
It's kind of in that style that became popular when lofts started getting big in San Francisco.
So I'm sure it's the same way in Seattle.
But you get the place that's got the combination of like – it's kind of like a place where people would work and it looks a little like a boat and the stairs all have that like wire –
you know, high tensile strength, like wire stuff instead of like, like normal, like, you know, slats or whatever.
And they have the lights extra big, like kind of slides like you're in the, in the meatpacking district.
And then you get those lights with the, with the covers over them so that when you're unloading your forklift, you won't accidentally knock out your porch light.
Right.
Right.
It's funny.
I mean, cause that, that, if you go to like a city where, where, I mean, let's be honest in most places, maybe in, uh, maybe New York.
Sure.
Maybe in Seattle.
Sure.
But in most places here, they made that on purpose in 1998 to look like that.
And it's, it's kind of, I don't know.
It's not even as cool as living in a tree house.
It's kind of, it's kind of like, I don't know.
It's like, uh, it's like the, uh, the, the single, uh, 45 year old man's version of a race car bed.
Not that there's anything wrong with that.
I'm sitting here reading a Batman comic, so I'm not going to say anything.
I know, but you're not sitting in a race car bed.
Not that you know.
Not yet.
Not because they don't make a king.
I drove past the new Seattle, the new University of Washington football stadium the other day.
Which they are kind of rebuilding this football stadium.
And your father was an ardent fan, right?
He was.
He was.
We used to go to every game that we could and sit up in the absolute highest seat.
Sometimes he'd fall down and roll.
He would.
At one time.
I love that story.
Sorry.
So, new stadium.
New stadium.
And I'm driving past it and I'm astonished to the point where I almost had to pull over because I was so gate-mouthed at the fact that
the $700 million bond or whatever it was that they passed to build this thing.
And all the architects that had to, had to pass, uh, is rubber stamp this plan that they have made this football stadium, a 50,000 seat football stadium.
They made it look like a Panera bread.
Like what it has, it has all the art.
Is that like a bread bowl?
Bread bowl one.
It's less like a baguette.
It's more like a big, big roundy.
No, you know, Panera Bread is one of those strip mall bagel places.
Oh, sure, okay.
Out in the hinterlands.
A stadium shouldn't look like that.
That's terrible.
Yeah, yeah.
It's so architecturally undefined.
It's like, oh, it's like...
Tinker Toys plus Faux Brick.
Well done.
Round of applause for everybody.
And I'm sure that there's 10% for art or whatever, and you walk inside and there is a statue of a seagull or Joe Heisman or somebody.
Joe Heisman?
The exterior of this thing could not be
It isn't unappealing.
It is non-appealing.
There's nothing.
You look at it and your heart just keeps pumping at the same rate that it was pumping before.
I think you nailed it.
It's not unlike the fake boathouse or fake warehouse house thing in that sometimes you can look at something like that.
And you can't immediately put your finger on it.
Like you could say, OK, this is vulgar and garish and like weird.
But but maybe on closer inspection, you go like, you know what?
That's not real brick.
Like that's you know, that's the equivalent of wood paneling.
Like you've you've put that as a face on like the cheapest conceivable earthquake safe building materials to keep the place from, you know, just falling down the first time people sit in it.
But there's something about it that like and, you know, have you been to a Giants game?
You've been to a Giants game.
You went with Mr. Fancy, right?
I have never been to a Giants game.
We have a very fancy stadium.
They were way ahead of the curve.
It used to be Candlestick Park, which is freezing.
There's a whole team of... They hire a bunch of kayakers to catch their old balls.
I think they're interns.
No, they're unpaid ball catchers, like a lot of people in high school.
It's got it all.
It's got the garlic fries.
Of course, you can get the bread bowl with the sourdough bread bowl.
God.
Sure.
We got one of those here in Seattle.
I hate that shit.
Yeah.
It's got a Wolfgang Pucks in it.
Although I guess every airport.
It's like airport food.
Yes.
California pizza kitchen or whatever.
But this, our stadium.
It looks garish is what I'm saying.
Okay.
All right.
You guys got good sushi there because of the Pacific and whatnot.
Yeah, we do.
Seattle's known for its seafood.
You know what's good?
My wife won't shut up about those noodles we got that one time.
This is fascinating.
This has got to be fascinating to people.
Yeah, the high-nutrition shaved barley green noodles.
Oh, my goodness.
Those are awfully good.
I'm sure our listeners, particularly our international listeners, are doing this tour of Mexico.
Let's bring it back.
Let's bring it back to what we're eating these days.
Right.
Yeah.
But you know what?
The big hack...
of this whole thing.
Every time I say hack, you sniffle.
I like your science fiction book words.
My big, my big, my big hack.
What's your big hack, John?
Was I made all this bacon, right?
I made two pounds of bacon.
You made out a bacon hack?
It's a bacon hack.
And you think you've got every bacon hack, but I'm telling you this is a new one.
I think I almost wrote a book about them.
I got those little snack bags.
Not the, the little Ziploc snack bags.
I'm talking about the half size bags that are only good for like 10 candy corns, right?
Oh, like you would get like a, like a, like a dime bag or like, you know what I mean?
Like little rolling ones, like for kids snacks, you put Cheerios in it, that kind of thing.
That's right.
That's right.
Little short, short bag.
And so I, I, I've got all this bacon cooked.
It's still, it is, and I've cooked it so that it's crisp, but it's still warm and pliable and
And I put four bacons per Ziploc bag.
So I'm making four strip bacon pods.
I love this hack.
Then I push all the air.
You cook bacon and you put it in a bag.
I push all the air out of the bag, right?
And then I'm stacking bacon pod servings in the freezer.
Wow.
That's good.
And then every time I'm like, hmm, bacon.
That's like a 20-second reheat, isn't it?
I mean, it doesn't take long.
No, here's the... It's a double hack, Merlin.
This is a double hack.
I pulled the first time, I grabbed the first bacon pot out, and I was like, huh...
i'm on my way to the microwave to put them in there for a 30 second reheat and i break off a little chunk of it and put it in my mouth no frozen bacon what a treat is like the popsicle of the gods
It is so delicious.
You're like the Thomas Edison of cured meats.
Because of the way that bacon is, because of its consistency, its natural, crunchy, meaty consistency, freezing it does not change its consistency at all.
It is still just like crispy bacon.
You want to drain it very well, I'm guessing.
Oh, yeah.
As you're cooking the bacon, you take it out and you put it on some paper towels so it's not covered in coagulated fat.
Oh, boy, that sounds good.
And then frozen bacon and four strips at a time, perfect serving.
You get four strips.
Okay, so then frozen bacon in a mini bag.
Check.
You make a fist, you crunch up the bacon in the mini bag, and there's your topping for your quarter iceberg lettuce salad.
With blue cheese dressing.
You've got this shit wired tight, my friend.
Boom, boom, boom.
Every day, a new use for four strips of frozen bacon.
Because you don't have to wonder.
You're not sitting there because it's a little bit of a production.
It's like making pancakes almost.
It's something where you go like, I should make bacon.
But it takes a few minutes.
But just having it around, my goodness.
Your whole house gets greasy as fuck.
It's terrible.
And once you're making bacon, as you know, it is much less effort to keep making bacon.
Right?
You have inertia.
You have bacon inertia at that point.
That's right.
And making two pounds is like making ten pounds.
And there's never enough.
I don't mean to get into the whole internet bacon thing because who fucking cares.
But I will tell you every time, I always think I have enough bacon.
I now buy three pounds of bacon when I know you're coming to the house.
It's like crab legs or something.
There's never enough.
Right.
So three pounds of bacon.
Make it.
Put them in bacon pods, freeze them, and you will—it's a complete transformation.
It'd be great if you had a job, too.
You could take it to your work that you don't really have, and you put it in the freezer, and you could have a treat.
Anytime you go get a cup of coffee, have some fucking frozen bacon.
Have four bacons.
I'm doing that tonight.
I wonder if it would be good with ham.
Probably not as good because of the consistency.
It would depend.
I think part of what makes it incredible is that the bacon is already thin and crispy and freezing it doesn't really change that.
Like the mouthfeel, if you will permit me to use the term mouthfeel, the mouthfeel of the bacon is unchanged except it is now freezing cold like a popsicle.
Let's take a couple calls.
We have Ryan on the line from Grand Rapids.
He had some questions about things that he could do with leftover roast beef.
Ryan, you're on Roderick on the line.
Hi, Ryan.
Food.
Here's what I'm thinking about with roast beef.
I hate when people talk about food.
I hate it.
Oh, I know.
No, I like what we do.
It's like orgasms and farts.
I don't want to think about anybody else's.
Other people's food.
Or orgasms or farts.
Mine are awesome.
I never want to think about other people's farts except half of Twitter now is just people talking about their farts.
Literally?
I love thinking about other people's orgasms.
Boy, you are really a big hearted fella.
Are people actually talking about their farts?
I think it's one of those... Oh, you mean an analogy-ishly?
No, I mean literally about their farts.
I feel like it is a kind of... I might have done that thing... So three or four times in my Twitter life, I have followed... Here we go, back to Twitter.
I've followed a few people and then followed the people that they seemed to think were the best.
And pretty soon you kind of end up in a cul-de-sac of people where you're like, oh...
It's called the Paul F. Tompkins singularity.
Yeah, or I ended up kind of over in the Jake Fogelnest camp recently.
That's not a real name.
That's not a real name.
And you follow people, you unfollow them.
I'm fine with all that.
But every once in a while, I realized that I have followed numerous people, and now I'm over somewhere in a sideland somewhere.
that feels like the center of everything, but it's really just what this group of people is talking about.
And I'm ready to kind of back out of that room quietly and close the door behind me.
And that, that group of people is the people I've been following.
Some of them are weird Twitter superstars and, um, you know, various, uh, Twitter comedians.
And I'm just, I'm ready to kind of just back out of there and, um,
close the door.
Yeah.
I, yes.
I, um, I don't like to follow that many people on Twitter who are like me.
Yeah.
Um, and I really, I, we've had this conversation.
I, I just, I can't follow too many of the comedy insiders.
It's just, it's too exhausting.
Um,
No, it's too bad.
And, and, and the new thing that I really, they're not funny.
They're not funny.
It's not funny.
Like Camarino is funny.
Like there are people who are funny.
They can be funny.
But last time I watched Louis CK, who's one of my all time favorite performers, his, his Twitter was like the bulletin board at the laundromat.
It was just awful.
He's going to, Oh, you're going to be over at, uh, at sloppy Joe's this week.
That's great.
Yeah.
The people that I'm really enjoying on the internet now are the ones who very selflessly curate a stream of interest, right?
A stream of consciousness.
Sort of like a blog used to be.
Like they are micro blogging.
That's exact.
It is a micro blogging platform.
Micro blogging.
Somebody should invest in this idea.
Micro blogging.
I think you might be a thought leader, John.
Let me, let me just, could you do a deep dive on this for me?
Okay.
Let's, let's put a pin in it.
Well, you know what we need to do?
We need to get Elon Musk on this.
Would you stop talking about him, please?
I remember where I heard about the Google balloon story.
Now it's that, uh, it's that, uh, um, Bill Gates thinks it might not be a great idea.
What?
Well, you know, when I was with them until you got to that comma, because as long as there's kids with malaria, I was like, Oh God.
No, I get it.
He's like few people help the world the way his foundation helps the world.
Like, in fact, apparently turns out I don't get into it because I can't afford to get the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation on my ass.
Are you afraid that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is also listening to our conversations and keeping a blog?
I think they are much more likely to do something with the information that I couldn't understand.
They might come and inoculate me in a way that makes my life very complicated and not even in a time frame I can understand.
It might be I wake up a year and a half from now and I'm just sitting and giggling and playing with my spit or something.
Sitting under an apple tree in New England.
I wish I'd agreed about the Google balloons.
Oh, Bill Gates.
Bill Gates.
Hey, I like that Pearl Jam single.
Oh, is there a new Pearl Jam song?
They got a Pearl Jam song.
It's good.
I don't know why I told you that.
Every once in a while, Pearl Jam surprises me with a new rock jam that I feel like is a totally rad, valid rock jam.
Yeah.
It hasn't happened before.
This might be my first Pearl Jam song I really like.
Yeah, on the whole, Pearl Jam is... Nice guys.
Never married.
To me, I like them all.
I like them personally.
They seem like wonderful fellas.
They are the Bruce Springsteen of the Northwest.
Get ready.
Here it comes.
That I understand why people like Bruce Springsteen.
I understand his appeal.
It's been a while since I've updated the list, John.
Let's go through these together.
Religion...
Twitter.
Oh, music.
I think we shouldn't talk about music.
Oh, no, sorry.
Not the music, the culture.
I personally don't.
Bruce Springsteen does not move me.
Okay.
I'm going to put him on the list, too.
And, you know, and I have a friend now.
We have a friend.
I have a friend, a British guy that you might know.
You got a Brit.
Who has become personal friends with Bruce Springsteen.
He goes over to his house.
Wow.
And I keep getting, like, he'll blow up my phone.
Like,
hey, guess where I am?
And I'm like, I don't know.
That's creepy.
He shouldn't do that.
That's really creepy.
And then he's like, it's him and Bruce sitting around.
Bruce is just sitting there watching him text?
Is he fixing his car?
What's he doing?
I'm just bragging about being in your house to all my friends.
Yeah, he's like, hey, Bruce, I'm going to send a picture of you to my friend.
Is that cool?
And he's like, sure.
And so, you know, sends like a selfie of him and Bruce.
I bet he's a really, really nice guy.
Seems like an amazing guy.
He seems like a very, very nice guy and generous in a quiet way, which I really like.
I am dying for the opportunity to go to Bruce Springsteen's house because this is not a completely unrealistic opportunity now.
Like it is conceivable that at some point I will be back East.
I will be in the New Jersey area and,
And my friend will say, why don't we drop in on Bruce?
I'll text him.
I'll text Bruce Springsteen.
Fuck yes, let's do this.
Okay, so help me understand.
I don't want to get into it, but I want to find out.
Go ahead.
Go ahead.
So there's two problems.
I'm shielding myself, John, because I really like Bruce Springsteen, and I don't want to get into a thing with you.
It makes me cry.
I know, I know.
I don't want to get into a thing that makes you cry either.
But I'm afraid, first of all, that saying that Bruce Springsteen does not move me is like there is a Bruce Springsteen NSA.
I think he does not care one iota.
He doesn't care, but all those people that are like out in the bushes around his house are who I'm afraid of.
Oh, yeah.
And then also when I get there, like, I'm not sure what I'm going to say.
Like, I really liked the way that you, here we go.
I really liked the way that you totally dominated the culture of America during my high school years.
Is this for my benefit?
It was really amazing.
Did you ever read about AJ Weberman?
The guy who like was the self-appointed Dylan scholar who used to like go through Dylan's trash.
And then like Dylan comes out and starts yelling at him and he records the conversation and shit.
Super creepy.
What are you doing in my garbage?
You're like a pee, man.
Yeah, go search AJ Weberman.
It's real, real creepy.
But like can you imagine like somebody out there who – I guess it's kind of like being a royal watcher.
Can you imagine being a royal watcher?
Well, there's all, I mean, there's like, yeah, there are self-appointed vultures, like in all the trees, watching everybody.
I told you, didn't I?
I mean...
Sorry, that's a fantastic line.
It seems like as you're driving up the long, long lane, the lane with giant alder trees on either side that leads up to Bruce Springsteen's house.
And there are probably like some $150,000 thoroughbred horses trotting alongside your car.
Probably.
a personal union steam steamboat steel mill he's got people out there building automobile tires
It's getting very hot today!
Because you don't like Billy Joel for the same reason, right?
Your rental minivan suddenly transforms into a 57 T-Bird.
And you're like, how did I get here?
It's like I'm in Willy Wonka land.
Hey man, hit that button.
Why?
What does it do?
Just hit it.
Why?
It turns it into a vintage submarine.
But in all the dreams...
Like Chris Christie is up there with binoculars and a crossbow.
And everybody's up there like, you don't love Bruce enough.
You know, the list of people that love Bruce that should be able to go to Bruce's house before me.
Because that's the feeling those people have.
They love Bruce so much.
If anybody's going to get to go to Bruce's house, it should be me.
And that list is like 15 million people.
You're like an Amazon.com of wrong.
I don't even know where to begin.
You don't like Bruce Springsteen as a person.
You don't like his music.
You have nothing...
You've already said, you stipulated, you have nothing to talk to him about.
But you're worried that his personal NSA, which includes a still rather portly bowman, is going to somehow get this information and then scotch the trip that you don't want to have with the musician that you don't really like?
Or if not scotch it, then I don't know.
I mean, just, you know how it is when you're driving up a country lane and you feel like people are in the trees scorning you.
Oh, yes!
That would be the self-appointed vultures in all the trees.
Yeah, well, you know.
Yeah, no, I've been disturbed by trees.
I've been thinking a lot about bows and arrows lately.
Serious?
Oh, because you're reading comic books again.
No, also, also, yeah, I watched this martial arts movie, Wuxia, is that the name of the genre, called Hero.
And there's this, you've got to see this movie.
You've got to see this movie.
There's no question.
It's amazing.
It's like the greatest martial arts movie of all time.
Hero.
With Jet Li.
Yeah, yeah, Jet Li.
He's the one that runs along the treetops, right?
Yes, but this is better than Crouching Tiger.
He's such a ninja that he can run along, he can jump from leaf to leaf.
Oh, it's astonishing.
But what was my point?
Oh, yeah, arrows.
Phew!
man, they got some great bow and arrow scenes.
We're like, you know, you've got a big army.
Can you imagine how scary it would be to be somewhere when hundreds and hundreds of guys with all different kinds of bows and, you know, crossbows and longbows and the kind where you lay on your back and pull the thing back.
Can you imagine seeing like 15,000 arrows coming at you?
That's like, that's like the scare, just about the scariest thing I can think of.
It's literally all I have done.
For months and months.
Imagine what it would be like to be there.
Well, we've talked about the Battle of Hastings.
Yeah, we sure have.
And the lack of Bowman on the English side.
We've talked about Agincourt.
Yes.
Like a rain of arrows.
It's not like a bullet where you don't see it coming.
It's like you do see it coming.
You just don't know which one has your name on it.
Nothing to do about it.
There's no way you could outrun it.
You just, you crouch down, you put your little, you put your little wood shield over your head and you just, because this is the terrible thing.
In most cases, if you got an arrow in the knee, that's no better than one between the eyes.
You're just, you're just going to die of infection now.
Right.
It's like in Pass of Glory.
The guy's like, are you more scared of dying or of being hurt?
And if you think about it, you're really more scared of being hurt.
And in that case of the like whatever asepsis or whatever, like the fact that you're going to sit there, they're going to have to move on.
And the best thing that could happen is if your friend comes up and kills you because you're just going to die of an infection in horrible pain.
Like imagine getting shot in the gut with an arrow.
It's pretty cool, though.
It's like artillery, right?
Same idea.
You got from so far away, but you see that.
I bet you got a good 10 seconds to go, holy shit.
And just hear this like... We should watch this movie.
It's good.
Rain of arrows coming down.
They break them with swords.
It's really cool.
When you survive an attack of archers, I bet you feel pretty good about yourself.
Especially if you can become a banjo playing stand-up comedian.
Excuse.
God, that was stupid.
I'm sorry I said that.
We should talk some more about food.
He was a really stupid comedian who was so funny.
He was so stupid.
It has not aged well, John.
So much of that, with the possible exception of among the majors, Richard Pryor has aged best, but Robin Williams, I mean, Bob Newhart, to my sensibility, stands up a thousand times better.
Totally bulletproof.
oh my goodness still so funny so weird yeah in its way i mean but what i would i mean it's been very inspirational to me that the button down mind yeah and the one side of a phone conversation is funny it's just very very funny but now robin williams my gosh now i just want to stipulate here this this this could be also want to talk about billy joel um nice guy nice guy robin williams have i told you robin williams stories well you met robin williams
No, no, you know what?
It's not appropriate.
I was going to say when my family was staying at this house in another state, this person had a giant, like probably at least, at least like 150 cassette tapes.
And I think this person who owns the house that we were staying in, renting, is probably five to ten years older.
Maybe just five to eight years older.
Because it's like three Pat Benatar records, five or six Billy Joel records, like three REM albums that aren't that great.
The original Eddie Murphy Raw or the one before that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Hollywood Bowl or whatever.
Yeah.
But first of all, it's the first time my daughter ever saw a cassette tape, which really made me think.
Wow.
What was that like?
I mean, I don't want to exaggerate it for fake comedic effect, but it was really fucking funny.
She opened it up.
She didn't know how to open the case.
Because remember, like, they're kind of weird and fragile.
Sure.
I still don't know how to open one of those cases.
Well, no.
Remember the later ones where it had the full J card?
Not J card, but like a U card, like all the way around.
Yeah.
Did you ever have a cassette of – did they make cassettes of –
I'm sure they made, like, 50 gajillion gram LPs, but did you ever have cassettes of, like, where she can do his arm?
Did they make cassettes?
Did Josh make cassettes?
No, we never made... So, the Western State Hurricanes...
only ever really had a cassette.
Right, the Phil X cassette, right?
Yeah.
You still have a copy of that?
I still have a couple of them, yeah.
But by the time the first Long Winter's Record came out, everybody knew that cassettes were not a viable form of releasing music.
Isn't it strange?
Because, you know, I...
I went through a phase where, I mean, I was kind of on the bubble.
I had a stereo, but so like, let's do it in my car circa 1988.
Uh, of course I would have to dub it, you know, from the LP to the cassette.
And that was an art like to get the loudness exactly right.
And I remember my friend Richard had a CD player that would scan the entire CD to find the loudest point.
So you could set the, uh, set set up.
Cool.
What a cool idea.
Was it a Nakamichi?
No, I might've been a Macintosh.
I'm not sure, but, uh, or a Fisher.
Yeah.
but, but yeah, it was always, it was like an intermediate, like medium.
Cause unless you were John Lennon, you didn't have a record player in your car.
So, but here's the thing.
If you bought the cassette copy of something, it sounded like shit compared to the album.
I,
I never did that once and it never made sense to me.
I would see people with the, with the cassette, you know, of, of the pretenders or whatever.
And I'd be like, why didn't you just buy the LP and then record it onto a 99 cent cassette?
Yeah.
And then you get two records for the price of one.
It's true.
It's true.
And I mean, like, I remember Alcatraz, the, the, the, the first post, the Steve Vai one had that on cassette.
I had, uh, the, the rainbow one with, uh, since you've been gone.
Yeah.
Like still, I paid eight bucks for that.
Anyway, this guy, so I, it was my daughter's introduction to cassettes and it was her first major introduction to Billy Joel.
Cause I played a lot.
I think I might be a little bit back into Billy Joel, John.
oh my god he's got a couple of really good records well i mean billy joel is perfect uh he's perfect for someone your daughter's age it's the right about it that's right about it he's saying he's he's a never mind it's i'm saying i'm saying that it's kids music getting very hard today that's a great jam though that's a that's a great record yeah i i i gotta say allentown i still catch myself singing it
And that's his Beatles record.
And you know what's a good song on there?
There's one song on there.
You know, John, I hate this.
I hate when this happens.
So many songs from about 1981 to even like 1990 suffer.
And I'm not going to go into the gating, but I'm just going to say like through the 80s, like the production is so...
it's crazy and the the keyboards the synthesizers are so lame there's this one song called surprises it's really good don't get excited surprises at all it's really good yeah i've heard that but it's like it's it really it's got that like a like a prophet or a one of those squeaky yamaha dx7 i think it was before that but it's oh god you remember when the dx7 got popular super frustrating
It's on every record for the next five years.
Whenever I hear Tina Turner, whenever I hear that What's Love Got To Do With A Private Dancer record, to me it just sounds like somebody at a mall playing a demo of the DX7.
Yeah, it's like church music.
And that fake harmonica that was on every record.
Oh, the DX7 harmonica.
I feel like I should make a record with gated.
I mean, I should make a record full stop.
You need a plan.
You need a general plan.
Gated snares and DX7 harmonicas and like, yeah, sure.
Just Radio Shack sounds.
Can I sing like Billy Joel on it?
No, no, no, no, no.
You had to be a big shot.
You know what I'll give you, John?
Can I give you a freebie?
His lyrics, not always great.
And his lyrics actually sometimes just actually don't make sense.
I never really realized it until this listen through over vacation.
But some of his lyrics, at one point in Allentown, I think he says something about the graduations hang on the wall.
The graduations hang on the wall.
Like, what does that mean?
Does he mean diploma?
Does he mean, like, mortarboard?
What does that mean?
He's trying to... You know that scene in Deer Hunter?
Uh-huh.
That lasts 45 minutes.
It's like, get to the part with the... Get to Vietnam.
Can we please get to Vietnam?
Get to fucking Vietnam.
I never... This is like a fourth-rate deliverance.
Move on, Chimino.
Move on.
Am I right?
There's 45 minutes of them sitting in that bar in some upstate town, and it's just like the broken-ass town.
It's like the characterization bomb went off.
It's just a bunch of families that have been living there for generations, and the dad worked at the factory, and the granddad worked at the factory, and they're just sitting in this bar with these Schaefer beer signs on the walls, and you just feel that movie like...
That scene is so long and so unendurable and you just feel like, oh, the whole point of this is to make me feel exactly what it's like to grow up in one of those shabby little Pennsylvania shithole towns.
And...
That is every time I see that scene, I am just transported into the mind of Billy Joel.
And I feel I feel like I never would have thought of that, but you're totally right.
His whole and his whole all his fans, they're all living in that first 45 minutes of of deer hunter.
Right.
Okay, well, here's another one for you, though.
Do you know that one song?
It sounds like it sounds like Tony Bennett and Randy Newman.
Is it New York State of Mind?
I got a New York State of Mind.
But the thing is, when he sings the song, it kind of goes like this.
And you're like, wow, he's kind of trying to do Tony, but he's really kind of trying to do Randy Newman.
And it occurred to me, like, Randy Newman...
To his peril over the years, or stupid people's fault, but I mean he writes songs that are from a character's point of view.
Like short people is not about short people being inferior.
It's about some dickhead who thinks short people are inferior in some ways.
I mean he sings from this character like he sings as a slave master.
Sure, he's the expert at it.
Billy Joel sings from a character, but every character is him.
But it's like a first draft of a five-paragraph essay.
I'm convinced that that voice that you're hearing is actually Billy Joel singing like John Lennon singing like Tony Bennett.
Oh, I'm going to send you a song.
What's it called?
Layla, Lila, Karen, Jennifer.
There's some song on the Nylon Curtain, which is a very good record.
Lila, Lila, Karen, Jennifer?
Yeah, it's a Tom Waits song.
Yeah.
so the graduation let me read this to you so the graduations hang on the wall but they never really helped us at all no they never taught us what was real iron graduations iron and coke chromium steel that's right those are real
The graduations hang on the wall, but they never really helped us at all.
No, they never taught us what was real.
Fucking graduations.
But I'm telling you, it grabs you.
They just sent us to Vietnam.
You hear, I'll go down.
It's a good record, I'm telling you.
All right.
There's this one song in there that really sounds like it's, I don't know.
You know what's weird?
He also lives in that weird zone where it's like you can't tell if it's a parody song.
Or not?
No, no.
You can tell that it isn't a parody.
And he thinks it doesn't read as a parody.
It reads like a parody.
But there's certain like intonations.
You know what I mean?
There's certain ways of singing that you go, oh, only Brian Wilson.
Nobody sings like that except Brian Wilson, for example.
You know what I mean?
Sure.
But he's used to chewing up the carpet in these casinos up in Schenectady.
Oh, man.
And, uh, that's, uh, you know, that's like he's lost.
He's like David Copperfield.
He's lost any sense of, and he did any law.
He lost it in 72.
He never had it.
But, you know, I'm coming at America.
The piano sounds like a cuddle.
I'm coming at it from a different perspective because, of course, as you remember, I grew up in America, but also far away from America in the great state of Alaska.
Floating over it like a great cloud.
That's right.
America was already kind of a fetish item to us because these places were incredibly exotic, like eastern Pennsylvania.
Some Adirondack
mining town was as exotic a place as any place in the Ural Mountains to us.
You know what I mean?
It was just as foreign.
And so I came at...
all of that culture that and i include like uh johnny little johnny cougar and uh and and uh and bruce i mean all of these guys and especially when john cougar got into like that that that farm aid phase where he got all that who produced his record he had that that who's the dude bob rock
Yes, Bob Rock.
He went from Kiss to John Cougar.
But yeah, no, you know what I mean.
Ain't that America.
He was producing Shania Twain.
No, that's Mutt Lang.
Oh, right, whatever.
Bob Rock, Mutt Lang, it's all, you know, monosyllabics.
I'm sorry I interrupted you.
Yes, but they're all fake Heartland people.
Well, and that sense of Heartland was a thing that I already only understood as a cartoon, right?
It was not a thing that we had direct exposure to.
So it seemed cartoonish already.
It's like the first time you land in New York and you walk up to a cop and you're like, hey, which way is the World Trade Center?
And the guy turns to you and he's like, oh, yeah, you're looking for the World Trade Center.
He's right over there.
And you're like, what the fuck?
You're real.
That's like legit.
The transit authority, like you hear all these jokes about there and you go there like, oh, my God, this is exactly what I imagined.
And it's horrible.
Is that what it's called?
Is that the place where you go in?
What am I thinking of?
What's it called?
That's a Chicago album, I think.
The Chicago Transit Authority?
The bus terminal?
Yeah, you know what I mean.
You go in there and it's just all people laying in urine and nobody's actually waiting for any transit.
But then what's funny though is with people like Bob Seger, God bless him.
He's got some good songs.
But then it's like a rock commercial thing.
It's something against it.
I'm glad the guy made some money.
But it exactly underscored how silly that kind of fake earnest successful rock musician thing is.
Well, and that and Jesus, I mean, that is the jumping off point for for the the kind of the whole cultural the whole love it or leave it America culture.
And I guess it existed a long time before.
I mean, Bob Seger was it was a cartoon when Billy Joel and Bob Seger were kind of.
caricaturing it.
It was a cartoon when Bruce Springsteen was caricaturing it because it's a thing that goes back to what the war.
I mean, those guys are being nostalgic about World War II, right?
Or about their father's
their father's experiences of coming home and coming home to this, you know, we're, we're all still suffering PTSD from having won the war and then not creating a utopia, but instead 20 years later, having race riots.
Yeah.
Yes, exactly.
I think that's, that's what kind of kicks kicked off a lot of that, that, that, uh, strain in some ways, but also just the fact that there was a time in America, uh,
That sounds like a Morgan Freeman.
Tom Woods, a man with a high school education, could get a job in an automobile factory.
Or Bing Crosby, I'm not sure.
But that was a thing.
I mean, the GI Bill?
You can get how she a graphic about it, but that was a pretty good time.
I'm only realizing now... Go ahead.
Well, I was reading this book not very long ago called The Farm.
Let me see if I can find a copy of it here.
A book called The Farm, and it was written...
It was written in the early part of the 20th century, but in a very modern voice.
And it's a book of... It's sort of a nostalgic but wise, worldly book about...
This guy kind of looking back in his own family to the settling of the plains, to a time when his great-grandfather arrived in Ohio and cleared the land and built the farmhouse that today is the oldest building in Cleveland or something, or the oldest building in Akron, let's say.
And at the time it was just all farm and they, you know, they lived together in one room while they were clearing the forest and eventually built on a second room and then a third room.
And pretty soon they built this mansion.
And this book, The Farm, it...
We're able, from our perspective, yours and mine, to cast back in our own imaginations and through our family histories and newsreels and books.
You know, we can get back only so far before the reality of...
historical times becomes a becomes just a just kind of a constellation of images right we don't have any sense of what it was really like we just have we just have put together some pictures in our mind from books and movies and so forth but this guy was writing this book at a time when a time prior to
uh, prior to really much, very much media where he was a modern person and a modern writer and a modern thinker, but he was, he had access to his grandparents who were still alive, who were pre civil war, uh,
homesteaders and they were able to tell stories about their grandparents who arrived on the scene in 1790 or whatever and so he was able to write about this stuff in a very direct way in a way that wasn't uh mitigated by having seen a lot of movies about it also you know he didn't see he had you know he was hearing about the pioneer times and talking about them in in
More or less as a still very alive game of telephone.
It was a first order thing.
He wasn't removed from it and reading about it or seeing it in movies.
You're saying he had direct access to this.
yeah like like his great great great great grandfather had five kids and the descendants of all of those five children were all people that he still knew or knew about like he could he could say like then this house got built over here and this clan
lived in it, you know, it was, it was, it, there was a certain point where that got incredibly splintered at the end of the 19th century.
And now nobody can go, nobody has the ability in America, except a very few people to say like,
five, six generations back.
And I still know all the cousins or I know who they are.
I know their names and I know, I know where they ended up, you know, like that.
What, what the great migrations of, of, of immigrants in the late 19th century, just America's population just exploded and everybody went running for the, running for the corners.
But anyway, this book is, this book is a spectacular kind of glimpse of the,
Because he is experiencing nostalgia, too.
He's experiencing nostalgia for sleigh rides.
You know, that Courier and Ives nostalgia that we don't even know about.
We don't even know where, we see a picture or we sing a Christmas carol of people riding in a sleigh, horse-drawn sleigh, and it's just kind of, it's kitsch or it's part of our collective culture.
But this guy is saying like... It's like carolers in a Dickens.
Right.
Like Tableau or something.
Yeah, and he is talking with nostalgia about these things which have been lost to the motor car.
But again, in a way that makes you really feel it firsthand and you recognize that voice of like, oh, well, it used to be that a man could make his living off the land.
And it used to be that, you know, like, sure, we had an indentured servant who lived here.
Yeah.
But we put his kids through school.
There's always been somebody there to help out for free on farms.
Before subsidies, there were black people.
And this was, you know, our indentured servant was an Irish guy, but he came over here.
You know, we paid his passage or whatever.
And he worked for us his entire life.
But his kids...
you know, went to school and became, you know, and one of them's a barber.
Eh, little Seamus.
And so, you know, but you're reading this kind of story and I don't know, whenever I think about the nostalgia, because by the time the nostalgia wave has reached us,
I mean, 85% of what we think of as American culture is just misremembered, nostalgic.
It's like mythology.
Right, right.
We're such self-mythologizers.
We're such a young country still, and yet we have all these epic heroes and all these fallen martyrs and
And the race of technology of the last 200 years, it feels like an American story more than any other.
So you can say like, well, a motor car was invented in the UK, but it's really an American story.
I mean, all these things are American, steam engines and so forth.
So when I hear that Billy Joel nostalgia for the post-war factory worker in the context of like,
Even the 40 years before his dad got a job at the mill, let alone the 140 years before, it just feels like... I got a theory.
I got a theory on that.
I mean, my life is full of mythologies and stories and stuff and ways of understanding the world.
But, I mean, until you become senile in life, information and memories really only flow one way.
Things in your life rarely become less complicated as you get older.
And the stories that you tell, you tend to tell – so I guess what I'm trying to say is we start with ourselves and say like, oh, gosh, boy, I wish I was 14 again.
I would do that differently.
Or I wish I had a job –
Making the equivalent of what I make now except I spent less and I would have done everything differently back then.
It was so simple.
Everything was simple.
I mean that's how it feels.
Everything feels simple.
You remember your pain.
You remember things like that.
You remember heartbreak or tragedy.
But by and large, I think yesterday seems less complicated than tomorrow.
or the prospect of tomorrow.
And I think that it's not so different with these stories we tell ourselves.
And that's why we always get back to this.
Things used to be simpler.
Like every generation thinks the kids are getting stupid and dangerous.
There's never been a generation that thought their kids were better than they were.
They might have wanted more for them, but they think they got more sass mouth.
They're having more intercourse.
They're doing more alcohol and drugs.
They're doing more dangerous, careless things and they're not having to work as hard.
I don't think there's that many generations that have skipped on that.
I think almost everybody feels like they worked harder than their kids and that their parents probably worked harder than them.
And everything used to seem simpler.
But you know why things were simpler?
They were simpler because a bunch of people died because there were no vaccinations.
It was simpler because white people ran everything and you didn't have to be confused by the black lady at the Starbucks.
It was simpler in a way that benefited you.
She is confusing.
The thing is, the good old days weren't all that good, and tomorrow ain't as bad as it seems.
Is that a Billy Joel lyric?
But everything before that was me.
Oh, God.
I feel kicked in the balls.
I think it's true though.
I think people are always – they're pining for the fjords.
They're always looking back to those days that seemed so simple and they weren't.
They weren't simple.
Like all those times that like you're a little kid and you remember it that way because you didn't know enough to know how fucked up everything was.
I think you can't get past that whole like how much people just used to die for dumb reasons.
Losing a hand, losing a hand of farm machinery, getting some dumb disease.
I told you about – I don't want to get into it, but I told you about a health scare my family had the other day.
It turned out to be not what we worried it would be, but it was fucking harrowing.
I mean we found out that our family had potentially been exposed to a deadly disease.
As it turned out, it was a mix-up at the hospital, but –
I don't want to get into it, but, but like, that's the kind of thing used to happen to people all the time.
They go, Oh, by the way, your kid's going to be blind and lose an arm because they did this one thing.
That's what life used to be like.
Polio.
And you're going to walk around with a, with a brace on your leg.
So you're staying in the house from now on and not going outside and breathing.
Well, I mean, this is why for many years, and I cannot escape this idea even still, I am one of the people, and you may scoff, but I'm one of the people that have met you.
I allow you to scoff.
Oh, also, incidentally, I found the book The Farm here, and it is written by Louis Bromfield, if anybody's interested.
Louis Bromfield.
Bromfield.
Um, you can't escape this.
I am one of these people who continues to hold out the possibility that he will sell everything and move on to a sailboat.
And as, as much as I recognize that that is a, um, that that is a terrible idea.
I also, uh, it's an inescapable one.
Like I keep feeling like at some point I am going to have to do this because I
So my mom's boyfriend...
We'll call him Johnny Roadster.
That relationship has run its course.
Oh, really?
Yeah, it happened very fast.
That was fast.
So the long weekend didn't go so well.
Well, no, I think it went well, but it's just... Fortunately for me, my mother is still herself and did not get swept away.
Good.
She came back and picked up Gibson and everything's back to normal.
She came back to her senses.
But the experience of...
I guess it's an experience that I have going to so many estate sales with our mutual friend, Chad.
We go to a lot of estate sales or he goes to a lot more than I do.
But, you know, you come into these people's houses and you see their collections and you see them and you see that they were hoping that their things were going to stave off death.
And you realize that all of their, you know, their 150 shot glasses in a in a custom made case on the wall.
Um, all they are, all they ended up being because their kids don't want them.
All they ended up being was just another thing that some estate sale company had to put a little price tag on and it, and a lot of it gets sold and some of it just goes to the thrift store.
But you, you, you go into these houses and you say like, Oh, right.
Everybody's trying to like hoarding and collecting crapola is, uh,
exceptionally common it seems like maybe one of the number one ways that people that people build a framework to hold back time or they build a they build some sugar candy like a memory dam
Yeah.
Right.
Like, no, no, no.
I'm going to be like books.
They had never read that they will never read and, and useless item upon useless item.
And I come back.
Oh, it's also, it's also like an aspiration sink.
It's like all the things that should happen as well.
Right.
Right.
The yacht club that they, that they one day are going to join the sailboat.
They're one day going to move on to.
And I look at my own collection of everything and,
And I go like, okay, I, I, for instance, I love our crumb and over the years I have collected, uh, just not, not as a collector, but just out of interest in him.
I have collected a great number of our crumb comics.
Uh, because I, every time I saw one, I would buy it cause I like, cause I like his art.
And now I hold them, I hold on to them because part of me imagines that one day I will introduce my children to the work of Arkham and their minds will be expanded.
But I know that that is not going to happen.
Like, the chances of, the chances of, like...
my daughter going through my books and finding our crumb and finding him at all.
Interesting or appealing are like next to zero.
It's about ourselves.
So, yeah.
So I'm carrying these are crumb with me and I look at them.
I'm, I'm, I'm in my forties right now.
I'm looking at these are crumbs on, on a shelf and I'm thinking, Oh, I could be, I could schlep these around for 40 more years and I'm never, maybe I'll read them one more time.
But like I don't consult them.
They are books that are – they're among the 10,000 books I have.
Back to this problem you talked about a long time ago, those cubic inches of your life that are being taken up by all these things that you have this like uncertain, nonexistent or unnecessary relationship to, right?
It's not square inches, it's cubic inches.
That's the important thing.
It's got depth.
I'm beginning to think that it should all go.
Everything, including everything but the very smallest box of family photos.
The rest of it...
Like, if I need to read The Hobbit again, I think I can find one.
I think I can find a copy.
And the copy of The Hobbit I have is something I checked out from a library 30 years ago and never returned.
It still has the Dewey Decimal tags on the side.
I should probably take it back.
I should probably – I should do one of those library things.
I think it's like a fur coat, John.
I mean as long as you don't commit the crime now, it's okay that you keep the old one.
You just can't have – you know what I mean?
You can't have a fur commission.
Right.
But you can have a vintage fur coat.
What you could do is – you could certainly do that.
That's a little bit crazy and seems like the beginning of self-harm.
But what you could also do is to keep your favorite –
your favorite candelabra, your favorite pair of cowboy boots, your favorite braille playboy, box the rest up, put it in a storage shed for six months and see how you feel about it.
And then if you want to say, you know what?
I miss those braille playboys, but I'm going to frame five of them and put them on the wall and make it a, make it a thing.
Cause right now your problem is the inertia.
If I may say, if I could tell you what your problem is, your problem is that stuff hasn't moved in either of you.
And that's when here's, here's, here's, here's the thing, John, I'm going to Dr. Phil mode here.
Yeah.
You can't slice a tomato unless you buy a knife, and that's going to hurt.
We'll be back in five minutes.
I don't know what show I'm on anymore.
Does Dr. Phil sound like Bill Clinton, or is your Dr. Phil just Bill Clinton?
I used to have different Southern voices, and now they all kind of sound like foghorn leghorn.
I'll say a boy.
I'll say a boy.
Keep one of each and put the rest away.
The exercise would be good for you.
It's not that costly.
And this is a hack.
It's not a bacon hack.
But it's an old trick that lots of people have suggested, which is that if you've got some kippel around the house – I know you're a big Philip K. Dick fan.
If you've got a lot of kippel –
So you get rid of that stuff, put it in a bag or a box with a date on it.
And if you don't need anything from that box in six months, throw it away.
Now, I'm not saying you should do that for Braille Playboys.
That's special materials.
Give those to me if you need to get rid of them.
Well, I can't escape.
Like when I was younger, when I was a younger man, I was acquiring these things because I was imagining populating my future life with them.
absolutely you can imagine like the big like bruce wayne library with all that stuff and like a big globe right stuff right right people would come into my house and they would be astonished by my by my one half scale replica of the fucker tribe and they would say my god man does it fly and i would study is so eclectic
I got it in Africa.
But now I'm in my life.
I am presently in the middle of it.
You can't escape it.
And all of this stuff is... I literally do have a Bruce Wayne library that has not a half-scale Fokker tri-motor, but like a 1-8th scale.
Was that a Red Baron plane?
No, the Fokker tri-motor was a... He had a Fokker, right?
That was a... Well, let's see.
The Rick Baron... Oh, wait a minute.
I am conflating two airplanes.
The Fokker Triplane and the Ford Trimotor.
Oh, there you go.
The Ford Trimotor was a three-engine passenger plane.
What a handsome guy.
And the Fokker...
Treat regardless of the plane in the scale.
It would look great in a study, but alongside all the other things, it's accumulating.
Yes?
Well, it isn't just that it is continuously accumulating.
It's like you're saying.
I feel like Jotzel, the Austrian glacier man, stuck with my little bag of muesli.
You definitely need to get rid of some books.
And my homemade fur boots.
Is it from a commercial or a book?
No, you know the guy I'm talking about.
Oh, Ricola?
Yeah, but yeah, that guy.
The one that now they've decided was killed in a battle.
I'm so lost right now.
You're not talking about the guy in the cough drop commercial.
No, I'm talking about the prehistoric man who was frozen in a glacier in Austria.
Oh, that's not Lucy.
Not Lucy, no.
Lucy's just a bone fragment and a story.
Nice.
Classy.
Very classy.
He's saying that about ladies all the time.
Lucy's just a fragment of a jaw and a good tail.
That sounds like a John Cougar song.
But this guy, the Austrian, his name's not Jotzl.
I don't even think that's a name.
I'm sorry, I'm tired and I have to pee.
Whatever his name is.
Yotzl.
Yotzl.
Yotzl, the Paleolithic bugler.
Right, right.
Who died on a glacier and was frozen for literally thousands of years.
Okay.
And the whole time he was in that glacier with his little bag of grain and his quiver of arrows, he was probably thinking, why do I have so much stuff?
I'm a little lost in the analogy.
This is you?
You're Yotzl?
I'm Yotzl.
My stuff is the glacier.
And what's the grain?
Get them very hot today.
Hit my salt shaker by accident.