Ep. 90: "A Small Archipelago of Noses"
Hello.
Hi, John.
Hi, Merlin.
How's it going?
Merlin, man.
I've got a phone call with John Roderick.
Merlin, when was the last time you had a chili dog?
Can I ask you a question?
Was it recently?
Do double chili dogs count?
I think so.
Answer?
Just now, my hot dog place has introduced a new product called the Double Chili Cheese Dog.
And it's two big old dogs on a bun with chili and cheese.
One bun, two dogs.
One bun, two dogs.
Just like a video.
That was my favorite one of those 80s ski movies.
Yeah.
What do you mean you're going to ski the Tesseract?
I just had a great bachelor meal.
You know, I'm very busy right now, and these are busy times.
You're very busy.
I can't believe you found time for this.
You were on TV in a goodwill a few minutes ago?
I was on TV literally one hour ago, and I'm just stopping by the Roderick on the Line studios.
Ha, ha, ha.
To try and talk to you for a little while.
I sat down with John Roderick, who found a minute to... And so here you are.
And tonight you're doing more media.
It's just a storm of media.
And as you know, there was an election in Seattle recently.
Yeah, I heard.
We should talk about that.
Is that okay?
But I got home and I was like, I need some food.
I am still not eating carbohydrates.
And it's very difficult to continue to get food in your body.
So hard.
So I got home and I was like, what do I have?
And I go into the refrigerator and I'm like, I pan-fried a couple of chicken breasts in olive oil the other day.
And I had those.
And I was like, right, but I can't just eat two chicken breasts.
That's just a little bit too fern bar.
You know what I mean?
Two olive oil chicken breasts, too fern bar.
So I was like, what else do I have?
Well, because I have a daughter...
I have string cheese.
So I took some string cheese out and I stringed it.
You pull it apart and make strings.
And I covered the chicken breast with string cheese.
And I was like, but it needs something else.
And then I saw that I have some roast beef.
So I covered the string cheese with roast beef.
And I microwaved it.
And I tell you, it is the greatest food I've had in weeks.
My mind is spinning.
See, now the thing is your brain.
I'd be thinking noodles, noodles, noodles.
I can't have noodles.
What am I going to do?
You took it in another direction.
You've invented an entire new kind of cordon bleu.
It's basically a cordon bleu except with children's string cheese and sandwich meat, roast beef salmon.
Oh, my gosh.
And the whole thing, so I ate it with a knife and fork, and every bite I was like, can the next bite be better than the last?
And every bite was better than the last.
You know what would be good?
A little bit of hot mustard on that.
Oh, now that you say it, I have some hot mustard.
I bought some of that great German hot mustard.
Or some horseradish.
Have you been back to your... I don't want to derail you.
Have you been back to your German Lanier shoppy?
No, because I'm so busy that I'm afraid to stock up on anything.
But no, here's what I did.
There's a butcher in Seattle's Columbia City neighborhood, which actually, point of order...
My family lore, my great-great-uncle Junius, the racist, the racist lawyer, I think his brother, another great-uncle of mine, not my great-grandfather, George Alfred Caldwell Rochester, but their third brother, all of whom escaped from Tennessee after the Civil War to make their way out west.
LAUGHTER
The third brother was somehow responsible for the plaiting and selling of Columbia City.
In my family, he is regarded as the founder of Columbia City.
Now, and you know within my family that you have to take that somewhat with a grain of salt.
But it's been said so much that I believe every time I drive through Columbia City, I'm like, well, this basically belongs to me.
This whole part of town.
But there's a butcher there named Bob the Butcher.
And he's like one of these last remaining storefront butcher shops.
And his... Bob just recently died, but his son, who looks exactly like Jeffrey Dahmer, used to, you know, give me like butcher treatment.
The butcher...
A business where he'd wrap, I'd pick a piece of meat out and he'd wrap it in white paper and it felt very much like how I wish the world still was.
I went in there the other day and there is a little Korean gal and then her mom, a littler Korean gal, and they both...
were giving me the hard sell on, on my butcher experience.
They're like, you know, what do you want?
Let's go.
Let's get it moving.
You want that?
We can do that.
That oriental efficiency.
Do you want two of those?
You want four of those, right?
And I was like, uh, yeah, well, see, now we're, we're starting to get over here.
And I, you got these Porter house over there and they're like, listen, what you want is you want one of these bulk rates.
And they handed me a piece of paper and,
And it was like, for $167, you can get five pounds of bacon, five pounds of sausage, five pounds of chicken, two whole free range chickens, a rump roast, four porterhouse steaks, and 10 pounds of hamburger or something like that.
And I was like, yes, I do want that.
That is the way a man wants to shop.
Give me a piece of paper with a lot of meat on it, and then I give you some money.
Yeah.
Oh, and three pork roasts and a half a dozen pork steaks.
And I was like, well, I want that, but I don't want this.
And the woman was like, that's fine.
We can do that.
We do it all by weight.
And so then all of a sudden it gets into, it turns into this crazy transaction where they're like, all right, well, you're taking two pounds off of that and we're going to give you two pounds more of this.
And they're writing it all down and putting it on the scale.
And I kind of feel like she's putting her thumb on the scale and the daughter's weighing something over across the room that I can't see.
And I'm trying to like run over there and see,
that and then i come back and and the mom has already wrapped up four porterhouse steaks that i kind of like was like wait a minute i didn't know no no that's that's that's big city butchering you don't want that it was super big city butchering and then all of a sudden i'm like whoa wait a minute and it's all in bags and it's like 167 dollars please
And I didn't want to have a... It was another one of these difficult cultural exchanges where it's like, do I go back and have them unwrap all this stuff and weigh it all in front of me?
No, I don't.
I accept that this is the way this transaction ran.
I'll know better next time.
And I walked out of there with two bags of meat that were... Each bag required both women to lift it over the counter.
Yeah.
So I'm walking down the street with two basically meat anvils.
And people are getting out of my way on the street because they just instinctively sense here comes a lion with a wildebeest in his mouth.
Like I had so much meat on me.
Anyway, I've been eating through this meat.
And frankly, it was worth $167, even if she was putting her thumb on the scale.
Have you thought about seeking redress with Bob Jr.?
Well, that's the thing.
I can only assume either Bob Jr.
has sold a portion or the entirety of his business to these women, or perhaps Bob Jr.
is married to one of them.
And they were like, listen, Bob Jr., we got this.
We'll take care of the business from here on out.
And he's just sitting in the back chopping up teenage boys.
I don't know what he's doing.
I haven't seen him in a long time.
I know his dad died.
But, you know, the meat is all from local farms.
But the butcher shop does not advertise itself in any kind of hippie, dippy way.
There's no sign out front that says locally sourced, artisanal, anything.
It's just like, yes, we get our meat from the following farms that are around the town.
But we're not precious about it.
And the meat is actually much cheaper than it is even in the grocery store.
I'm not usually the type that wants my hand held in situations like that.
If it's something really straightforward, if I go in and I say I want two pounds of roast beef, I don't want to have a conversation about it.
But I think in that case, they're leaving behind a little bit of the high-touch service that would make you seek out a Bob Jr.
Yes.
Bob Jr.
used to sit and talk to me about every cut of meat.
Is this the guy who used to talk to you about grass-fed things?
Uh, no.
Bob Jr.
was a little bit, I have to say, a little bit on the spectrum.
So he could talk about meat.
That's a good job.
That's a good job for us.
It's a good job for him.
Yeah.
He could talk to me about the meat, but he wasn't like a scintillating, like wide-ranging conversationalist.
And I realized something the other day.
A lot of my problem in the world, and I feel like this is true of you too, is that I do not like salesmen.
And it doesn't matter what they're selling.
I so don't like salesmen.
That I feel like in the course of my life, I have made bad decisions or I have thwarted myself repeatedly because the person on the other side of the table was trying to sell it to me.
And I was like, you know what?
fuck this place.
I threw a garbage can through the window and I burned it down and I ran, you know, like, like, I roger it instead of, instead of endure five minutes of some guy selling me something in that voice and in that tone.
And it's why I don't like, it's why I don't like pastors.
It's why I don't like mortgage brokers or car salesmen.
I totally agree, and I think that I do share that with you.
It's partly I always feel like I'm a mark.
They may see me as a lead, but I feel like a mark.
That whole thing of as long as the salesman is still talking, he's still closing.
As long as I'm still there yelling at the guy at the door, there's still a transaction that could potentially happen.
Yeah, and I guess it is that they are never, ever, ever interested in me
in any way other than that i am a human-shaped cutout with a bullseye on his face you know like there's whatever feigned interest they are displaying like i went to my dentist the other day she has a new dental hygienist i've gone to the dentist in two years because my dentist drives me insane with that stuff well and i'm my dentist i like very much but she has a new hygienist who's like a young gal
Who was talking about like when I graduated from high school in 98 and I was like, stop right there.
But she was giving me that whole business of like, so where are you from?
So what are you?
And I was like, lady, seriously, don't like be friendly.
But we're not trying to learn about each other.
Like, don't pretend that you are trying to learn about me for anything other than some kind of mental Rolodex of, like, how's your daughter type of comments that you're going to sprinkle through the years.
Like...
Just let it ride.
You know, just chill, baby.
Chill.
Well, and with my dentist, he's very charismatic, very handsome.
But he and his whole staff, and by the way, his mom is his hygienist.
Uh-oh.
She's the one who always gives me the printouts about how I can get heart disease if I don't floss enough.
She keeps giving me the same Xerox about how I'm going to get... I guess it's a real thing.
But apparently, if you don't floss enough, you get heart disease.
Yeah.
Because the plaque goes through your gums into your heart?
Because science.
Yeah.
But the problem with this guy is I always feel like he's – you know what it is?
I do feel like he's selling me something.
Like he's selling me a deep clean.
That's coming.
He's selling me some kind of – like any of those folks.
Trust your mechanic, right?
Back to the dead Kennedys.
Like he's looking for some inroad about my own –
fears or sensitivities to find some way to sell a dental product.
Right.
And, and what it comes down to for me is like, I feel like this is, and this is me.
Maybe, maybe I want a bad doctor, but I want a bad doctor.
I want to go to somebody who's like, yeah, you got fucking emphysema.
We got to fight that shit.
You mean bad doctor, like bad Lieutenant.
Kind of like take me out if he has to.
I want somebody who's like a lawyer.
Like I want somebody who's on my side.
I want somebody who's like fighting the health problem with me rather than being like the mediator with the health problem.
Like, well, I've been talking to your heart disease and we're pretty sure it's because you need a deep clean.
It probably makes you feel pretty bad.
You got a kid.
You really don't want to die.
And I just, you know what I mean?
I don't, I feel like when I go in there, I want somebody who's going to, I want somebody to clean my teeth, you know, not show me endless slides of the furniture that he has made.
God bless him.
But I just, I always feel like I'm being sold and that puts me on the defensive.
And now I'm that guy.
Yeah.
I feel like the only sales pitch that I respond to is I don't give a fuck whether you buy this or not.
It's the – like I'm selling it because I believe in it or because I made it.
And if you don't want it, then you're a dumbass, but it doesn't matter to me.
Yeah, but if that's something where like you're in there as a motivated buyer, if you go in there and say, I want to get this certain – what's the big – international harvester.
What's the big transporter?
What's the name of the big car you want?
Yeah.
If you go to Bob Suburban and Bob Suburban Sr.
is there, you go in there and he can help you make a decision about what fits your budget and your needs.
That's the kind of salesman I could use.
What I don't need in there is somebody going, you know, you really are a dickless wonder.
You should get a Suburban.
Right.
Or all those guys on Craigslist who are like, well, I think I told you, right?
I could text more pictures.
I went and looked at a Suburban and I wrote the guy and I said, yeah, Suburban's got a lot more rust than you said it had.
Like, I asked you to send me some pictures and you sent me some pictures of the parts that weren't rusty.
But then I went and looked at it and it's got all this rust on it.
And he writes back and he says, well, that rust is typical for a 73.
I was like, really?
Like my, my lying should have been anticipated.
Yeah.
Thank you for the education about what is typical and what is not.
But in fact, like, like if you're, if, if you, if the thing is honest, it sells itself.
Right.
And if it's like, I went and looked at a Cadillac the other day.
This is another one.
I'm going, I'm going out looking at a lot of cars.
Like an old, like giant Cadillac.
It was a 65 Cadillac.
It was a massive Cadillac.
And he had taken these cool pictures of it.
And I was like, is there any rust?
And he's like, none at all.
And I said, how big is the motor?
And he was like, it's a 500.
And I was like, this Cadillac seems like my kind of Cadillac.
And I went to look at it.
And as I drive up, I'm like, what the...
And I said, has the suspension been modified?
And he was like, oh, yeah.
The guy before me, like, lowered it, but he only lowered it in the front end because he couldn't figure out how to take the suspension out of the back end.
And I was like, aha.
So the front bumper is dragging on the ground because some kid tried to put it on airbags, but didn't know what he was doing.
And that is a thing that you, now that I look at the photographs you took, you took these photographs and
I did like a Peter Jackson angle.
Yeah, with the sure knowledge that that was not being revealed.
You said nothing about it in the ad.
We talked about it.
You included the line, please don't waste my time in your ad.
And now I'm out here and I'm looking at a car that is basically a Halloween pumpkin.
And, like, you know, I have learned not to look at a guy like that and say, like, by the way, fuck you.
Because I don't... I cannot afford to walk around thinking that my time is worth money.
Because if I did think that, I would be just so depressed.
It's easy to think.
If I thought my time was worth money.
So I'm just like, you know what this was?
This was a nice drive in the country out to your suburban house to look at this thing for one and a half seconds and know that...
what it needs is to be put back together.
And I'm not going to stand here and argue.
I mean, you know, he was like $7,000 firm and I'm like, yeah, firm like the suspension probably is because it's sitting on the axle.
Anyway, go, go fuck yourself.
But you know, like go fuck yourself is implied in those situations.
Yeah.
I just, you know, it's, it's, it's what hardens me as a person though.
And not in a good way is it, it makes me continually feel like I have to protect, uh,
I want to be somebody who trusts people because that's my nature.
But then you have enough experiences like that or somebody who doesn't tell you about the black mold in the basement of the house that you're buying or whatever.
You almost have to approach each of those situations assuming that there's a body in the trunk.
There's something you're going to have to figure out about this that they're just not going to tell you.
You go up to them and you can just say, what's really fucked up about this that you're not telling me?
It would be so nice to have that conversation with somebody and go, well, you know, actually that odometer might not be right.
I'm not sure.
Give me the five word answer of the thing you are most afraid that I'm going to find out about this product.
That's really good.
You could go into it and say to somebody, I'm going to tell you what I'm worried about and you tell me what you're worried about.
Right.
Like I'm, I'm worried that this may not get great mileage, but like I want it so much that I'll even, you know, what are you worried about?
I'm worried you'll find out that it's sitting on the axles.
We're better people than that.
Yeah.
The door sills are full of moldy cocaine.
I'd buy that car.
Yeah.
Is that costly to fix?
I think cocaine, I think even moldy cocaine has some street value.
For somebody.
There's always somebody.
You probably would have had that at some point.
What, moldy cocaine?
Well, you're at a party and somebody says we're out of the regular cocaine.
All we have left is the moldy cocaine.
You go, okay, I heard you have cocaine.
I definitely had some drugs that were transported in a gas tank.
Oh, no.
Because they smelled like gas.
And they were the only drugs in that town at the time.
Small mountain town.
And everybody knew that it was really the worst possible thing.
But...
They were the only drugs available.
And so you'd be sitting around and you're drinking beer at somebody's house and they'd be like, a certain point they'd pull out the bag and everybody'd be like, is that the gas stuff?
It smells like a VW bug.
And you're just like, it's the gas stuff.
And it came across the border in a gas tank and it wasn't sealed properly or something.
And everybody was getting high on this gas.
So even though the provenance, you know the provenance is fucked up.
You know that it's at least been in a gas tank.
Let alone what you can't smell on it.
Oh, yeah.
And half the high is just chlorofluorocarbons from like, it's just like smoking unleaded gas.
Yeah.
I used to feel like I was going to pass out sometimes when I was driving my VW bus.
I mean, the smell of gas was so strong.
Pretty much every old school VW I've been in, it's like that.
Yeah, it's a part of the air-cooled engine.
It routes the exhaust through the dashboard.
It's very clever.
Well, I feel like this thing, you know, like one of the unexpected and nice things about the rise of the internet and all of the kind of social mediation.
is that you and I both, like, the word is out about us, right?
Everywhere I go, people already know
they already know where the rust is in my door sills because it's, it's part of my online brand even, you know?
And when, when, when the name of your superhero rust, that's right.
When the internet first came up, I don't, I mean, we can, we can set the way back machine.
It wasn't that long ago, but you know, I remember people telling me like, don't post on message boards.
You need to keep your privacy and the mystery about you.
As an artist, and I was very worried about privacy.
We were also worried about privacy.
But the reality is that the truth of me is available to anybody that wants to look for it at all.
You've put out a 200-hour Craigslist ad.
Yeah, right.
That says no flakes.
If you read the whole thing, you'll probably figure it out.
It's in all caps.
There's no punctuation.
Just did a keyword search for Hitler.
This podcast is for men and manly women.
No flakes.
Don't waste my time.
Don't waste my time.
And that is a tremendous relief in a way now because it feels like in the aggregate over time, the true story of any person who is like pursuing a public life, the true story is ultimately revealed that
You cannot manage your story completely.
Over time in a sort of daily posting and people posting about you, you cannot hide the truth.
And it's not like I ever wanted to.
I always felt like I'm, you know, that disclaimer business on a first date with somebody or the first time you meet somebody and you want to sit down and say like, here's the thing.
No mind games.
Here's the thing I'm afraid.
I'm most afraid you're going to find out about me.
Right.
And then the person goes, oh, oh, shit.
You're like, yeah, I know, right?
I have two huge dicks.
And then we have to navigate, like, what does that mean?
What does that mean for us?
What does that mean for you?
What does that mean for me?
Listen, this is going to come up.
Listen, eventually, I don't want to be a surprise.
And so, but now, like, all of that is out there.
Right.
And the presumption is that people, you know, before they sit down with you for the first time, have already done at least that first swipe of, like, who the fuck is this person?
Right.
And I think, you know, on that first page of results, it's like all the info is there.
You can tell that this guy, like Merlin Mann is going to be a challenging interview.
John Roderick is going to be a difficult boyfriend.
Yeah.
Like this stuff is basically in our Wikipedia page.
And I no longer feel like privacy issues in that sense.
It's like what it's maintaining your privacy about certain things is like so easy, really, as long as you're not trying to hide the essential truth about you.
Yeah.
Well, you know, when you're a public basket case, I think people really – they cut you a break.
That's what I like to think anyway.
Well, that's – yeah.
That's why we have pursued this public basket case persona.
One funny part of it with the social media stuff though is that I think –
A lot of people are looking forward to the day where somebody sees them and goes, oh, you posted that funny thing on Facebook.
Or your Instagram photo of some telephone wires was really inspiring to me.
And they keep waiting for that.
And the day that that happens, it's really magical.
But then after that, if your Instagram photos of telephone wires inspire enough people, eventually you're like Instagram telephone wire guy.
Right.
right like and that story is not yours anymore that's that's the thing is like whatever it is whether you intended it to be that way or not like screech probably didn't think he was going to be screech when he went to the screen test he just he just showed up for a gig oh poor screech or screech i found some photos of mason reese yeah he's a handsome kid he's a club owner you should see if you can get a get a get a gig in his place borgus morgue
I had an interesting experience the other day.
I'm doing a lot of media recently, and a DJ posted a link to an interview that I did on his podcast.
This DJ, Marco Collins, who was a famous... Oh, yeah, the Marco Collins sessions.
That's right, the Marco Collins.
He was a big proponent of grunge and indie.
I know him from that Silkworm record.
Was he a local DJ?
Yeah, he was like the...
alternative rock dj before there wasn't such a thing as indie rock like a rodney on the rocks kind of career maker john peele kind of character he was the one who discovered and made the career of harvey danger wow uh and he used to live across the hall from me we have a long history together but he he he had me on a podcast he does and he posted a link to it on his facebook page
Which he connected to me.
And so I went, followed the link to where it was posted on his site, and there were a series of comments underneath it.
And as I'm reading the comments, I realized that some of the comments are hidden from me.
Oh, this is like a Facebook thing, right?
There's like some stuff you just can't see on Facebook?
Or I can only imagine that it's because those people have blocked me.
Or they're not like a friend of a friend or something?
Isn't there some stuff where you can see it in certain places, in certain situations, but you think it's like they willfully blocked you from seeing things that they do?
Well, the reason I know that they're there is that...
that the, that, you know, five or six comments down, there's a comment from a guy who's like, Oh, and I suppose you've ever done anything as brilliant as when I pretend to fall in your life, Mr. Guy.
Ooh.
And I was like, but that got you curious.
I was like, Hmm, who's that in response to?
And I read the five things before that were like, you know, first or whatever.
Uh, and I'm like, this is he's, who is he talking to?
And then three or four comments down, he's like,
Well, in my experience, John Roderick has never been anything but the nicest guy, and he let my band open for him once in San Diego, and they were super cool to us.
You want to see what people are defending you against.
Yeah, and I'm like, who is he arguing with?
And then further down, another person chimes in, who is obviously responding to a second person.
And saying like, I happen to think that the John Roderick is like a prince and a sweetheart.
And I'm like, who are you arguing with?
And what are they saying?
And I, you know, I, I realized just from looking at the reflected argument that through the course of this, you know, however many long comments, I, you could tell that the, that whoever it was that had an ax to grind was,
was grinding a personal axe they weren't saying like i hate his band they were they were saying john roderick's an asshole they were yeah or similar and it was coming from a place where they were probably somebody that i once punched in the nose like there there is this small archipelago of noses
that I have punched in the last 20 years who are probably also on Facebook and who are, they continued to live.
After I punched them in the nose, they did not, they did not go and, and,
And be gone.
They are alive people in the world who I have forgotten completely, but for whom that punch in the nose was a singular event that they have not let go of.
They are still, they remember me.
And the idea that I am out there doing well, having fun, still infuriates me.
But you could tell by the tenor of the people defending me that were visible to me that the complaints against me didn't make sense to anyone in the context of this post, this podcast.
Yeah, it was some kind of a little dive bomb.
Yeah, people were like, what's your problem?
And but but what was curious to me was that there were at least two people on this on this Facebook thread that that were like grinding pretty serious axes.
And and, you know, it caused me to reflect, like, what is the what's the worst thing I did to somebody that I have forgotten completely about, but that they are probably will nurse to their grave.
That sounds like the basis for a game show that would run for probably four or five seasons.
Yeah.
it's kind of like, it's kind of like this is your life meets what's my line.
It's like, you're the one who's blindfolded and somebody comes in and you have to, with a minimum of information, try to remember what you did to them.
Yeah.
Right.
They're like, they're still so mad.
You can just hear the seething in their voice.
And you're like, what, what did I do?
You know?
And it turns out like, Oh, Oh, Rachel was your ex girlfriend.
Uh,
oh i only hung out with her for a couple of weeks and the person's like yeah i broke up with her eight hours beforehand and she like hooked up with you that night and i will i'll hate you forever it's like oh i never even met you dude i she didn't say anything about it i was just like i met her at a show you know hey do you wish you had equal time
No, I mean, that's the thing.
If I cared, I think I could probably game the Facebook system in such a way.
You could get one of your non-blocked friends to go and look at it, right?
Yeah, and I'm sure, having now talked about it, somebody from the internet army will find out what it was.
But no, ultimately I don't care because ultimately every one of us has...
left probably enough of a trail of hurt.
It's just that it's just that in this, in this case,
Because the forum where it was happening was on this rock and roll DJ's Facebook page.
It kind of opened the door to all these people out in the world who maybe still are mad at me about my punk rock article.
Or maybe we worked together at a pizza parlor 20 years ago.
And all that weird stuff happened.
from when you're 20 where it's like, oh, was that a drug deal gone wrong where the stakes were $15 and you are still convinced that I am like an evil person because like you didn't get your $15 worth of weed that time.
I mean, you can't, I can't carry that forward because I know, I mean, when I think about what's the worst thing I ever did,
I always come to this blank space where it's like, well, probably the worst thing I did was some...
mostly inadvertent act of discourtesy or, you know, like inconsiderateness that where I was oblivious and the other person was left embarrassed standing there.
But I mean, if that's the worst thing you ever did to somebody, I think it's like I can live with it.
You know, I never, I never looked somebody in the eye and said, I will love you forever.
Yeah.
Well, the thing about what you're describing though, and I've, you know, I've, I don't know, I guess I've been in situations like that is, is, you know, 25, 30 years ago, that would have been what we would just simply call talking behind someone's back where somebody tosses out something that they heard or believe or reckon about somebody.
And then somebody else comes back with what they've heard or believe or reckon.
And, you know, that could be about John Davidson.
Like, who knows?
Like, you're going to sit there and have a conversation about whether a football player is gay.
You could have a conversation about whether Rod Stewart drank semen, whatever it is.
Why would he do it?
I still wonder.
So Rod Stewart, at some point in the early 80s, probably heard that there's this urban myth about him and jizz him.
But like, but he never had to go.
Yeah, he was knee deep in Rachel Hunter at the time and he didn't.
Sure.
But, you know, you got to stay hydrated.
But at some point he probably, you know, came across that.
It's just, excuse me, I shouldn't have said that.
But it's just that today it's happening right in front of you.
And in your case, you can't even see part of the reckoning.
Yeah.
That's the crazy part though is that it is – the part about that's kind of funny is it sounds like some of those people know you a little bit.
But it's interesting to watch people fight an extremely abstract fight via proxy and via reckoning.
Well, I heard John's really nice.
Well, I heard one time, John.
It's true of everybody.
Anybody who's ever seen something like that, it feels like you're dead at your own funeral or something.
You're like, what are you people talking about?
This is weird.
Yeah.
Well, and what you say about this talking behind people's back, I've struggled with that my whole adult life because there is absolutely a segment of the world, the segment of the world that we both grew up in,
definitely a big part of the culture in Alaska, but it's part of rock and roll culture.
It's part of Southern culture is this idea that you don't talk shit about people.
And it's not, it's not classy.
It's not classy, but it, but, but taken to a, but, but taken to like an old West extreme, um,
It, you know, it becomes, I mean, I have always considered it to be like a very strange rule when applied to situations where like, well, somebody did something bad and...
uh, to not mention it is a kind of a gross oversight amongst people, you know, I mean, discussing someone that you personally know, like, Oh, this person cheated on that person.
This person I know cheated on this other person.
Yes.
The whole idea of like, of,
Because I've always admired that kind of image of a man who is incredibly reticent, who keeps quiet and...
Doesn't let on what he's thinking.
Makes no verbal judgment.
Never lets you in.
Like that Clint Eastwood squinty-eyed sort of Appalachian quietude.
That is in such contrast to my verbal processing, my exuberant, the kind of exponential way that I talk and think.
And so that culture of difference, I've always wished that I could be a little bit more quiet and swaggering instead of so...
instead of so verbal and, and it, it is, it's, it's the most that different, the, the, the, the, the tip of the blade of that difference is always in exchanges.
I have in the music scene with punk rockers or rock and rollers, like the tough, tough kids who make a point to, uh,
who just don't, who don't talk, but are also very protective of being talked about.
You know, they're, they're hyper worried about being talked about.
And like, for me, disparagingly at all.
Really?
Yeah.
And for me, for the, for the last 20 years, like if somebody was talking about me, I had a secret,
pride or secret joy i i remember a girl a girl came up to me in a bar one time and she said there's a there's something really interesting written about you on the women's room wall and i was like what she said i'm not gonna tell you and all of a sudden i'm sitting in this crowded rock bar looking around
And thinking every woman in this bar has read this because, you know, because it came out over time, like other people would say, like, I read that thing about you on the crocodile bathroom wall.
And I was like, what does it say?
Nobody would tell me.
It was fun.
And over time, I was like, I'm not going to go in there and look at it.
I love that there's something written about me on the bathroom wall that everybody thinks is... Like, I would say, is it mean?
Is it unflattering?
And they would say, no, not unflattering.
One of John's two giant dicks is crooked.
Yeah, exactly.
Like, one of John's two giant dicks really satisfied me forever.
But the other one...
Was too into itself.
Was crooked, yeah.
I couldn't get it to work.
But the knowledge that that was on the bathroom wall...
whatever anxiety I felt about it, as soon as I understood that it wasn't, it wasn't saying like, uh, John Roderick gave me tooth decay or John Roderick was mean to my lady parts.
Like from that point on, I was like, hooray, there's something written about me on a bathroom wall somewhere.
Like I'm gonna, I'm going to write about that in my journal.
And it was a, it was, it was something that I took pride in, but there are,
I know for a fact most of my rock and roll peers would be seriously bothered or not most, but let's say half of the people I know would be seriously bothered that that was in there and they would want to erase it immediately.
You know, they would not want to be singled out in that way, called out publicly.
Yeah.
And I had this long standing dispute with a local producer who came up to me drunk at a built a spill show one time.
And he said, I hear you're talking shit about me.
And I said, what are you talking about?
And he said, I just heard that you were talking shit about me.
And I said, you mean that we had a recording session together that went really badly because you were a snob?
And he said, I'm not going to tell you who said it, but don't talk shit about me.
And I said, I don't think it's talking shit about you when I relate to another musician what my experience of working with you was like.
And he said...
Quit talking shit about me.
Again, it was a drunk exchange.
But then every time I saw him for the next two and a half years, he would most of the time be drunk with his fists kind of clenched at his sides, swaying back and forth, trying to figure out whether he was going to punch me or not, trying to figure out if he could...
If he could punch me, basically, was what he was trying to suss out.
That's deranged.
Well, it's basically what's happening in every bar south of the Mason-Dixon line at all times.
But he's standing there, you know, you talking shit about me.
And I'm like, really?
Like five years ago now?
Is that what we're talking about now?
And each time he was just trying to figure out if he could punch me and he never could.
But it kept hammering home this point of like talking shit, talking shit.
What does that represent to people?
Yeah.
Because I have never, ever, not only have I never said to somebody, stop talking shit about me, but I have never felt that.
You know, when somebody says, I heard from somebody who will remain nameless that you blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Like, I always feel like, well, either it's true, in which case I deserve to have that reported about me, or it's false, in which case, who cares?
Yeah.
Like it's false.
This person is saying something false about me and that's anybody who believes it is not a friend of mine and I don't care like outside of like my friends.
I don't care what a bunch of ding-a-lings think.
You could say people I'm sure tell lies about us all.
So I never understood, like, what is talking shit?
Is it saying something true about you that you don't want people to know?
In which case, that's your problem.
Or is it saying something false about you?
In which case, who cares?
It's just people are lying about you.
I guess.
I mean when you say talking shit, I mean I would take that to mean that someone is deliberately undermining somebody, trying to incite some kind of a whisper campaign where enough people know about something.
Or it could just be you're just shooting shit and you say, oh, well, this guy was real drunk in the studio or something like that.
But it feels like that is humanity or that is one of the foundational elements of civilization.
I mean, I'm in this preschool with my daughter.
What the hell do these moms stand around talking about after you're done talking about what dumb little idiots and shitty roommates your kids are?
They just start talking about the other moms.
And yes, it's insidious.
Yes, it's... They mostly talk about things that have disappointed them, in my experience.
That's the common parent topic, is what's disappointing.
Disappointing about...
Oh, you know, just about – just something that didn't go their way.
It could be – and it could be something germane like talking to a teacher.
It could be something with a cleaning person.
It could be – I don't know that the yoga studio changed the recipe for their lattes.
I don't know.
But I mean it's – I think there's – I've heard other people say this.
But the one topic that almost every American can talk to someone else about is bad customer service.
I think we're always willing to bitch about how we feel like we've been treated by other people.
That's pretty much what almost every conversation eventually comes down to.
Well, and I guess that is the definition of talking shit, right?
Maybe.
Talking about the bad customer service you got from a friend or a coworker or a person.
The talking shit part is that you're being malicious.
in saying those things.
You know, we all have opinions that we, we have, we may have opinions, maybe strong opinions, maybe controversial opinions, some of which we keep to ourselves and some of which we don't.
I think the talking shit component is that you're out there like deliberately trying to like undermine me with friends and strangers by saying something that that person probably feels is not true.
I'm guessing.
Yeah.
I'm just, I don't know.
I'm not saying it's right or wrong, but I think that's what most people mean is like, you're saying untrue things about me behind my back and trying to make me look bad.
And I guess I feel like that is...
That is pretty rare.
What type of person goes out and intentionally says something untrue to make another person look bad?
It seems like that would have to be a lot rarer an occurrence than people saying something that they kind of know is true about a person.
The deliberately dishonest, inaccurate part, that's the part you think is rare?
Well, there's enough bad things to say about people without having to make them up.
Yeah, like this local producer, he felt like I was talking shit about him because some musician that came to work with him said, I talked to John Roderick and he said that you were a snob about the music that you made together.
And it's like, well, uh, that isn't talking shit.
That is like a Yelp review that is, um, or maybe Yelp reviews are talking shit, but like how, how else do we know who to work with and who to avoid?
Right.
If you don't consult your other friends who have worked with people and they give you an honest, and I think his expectation and the expectation in, in this community, um,
would be that I would say, you know, it's that whole business of recommendation letters, where the recommendation letter is like, they performed their duties.
And it's like damning with faint praise.
Yeah.
Like that's not really much of a recommendation.
And the expectation that some musician would say, how was it working with dude X?
And I would say it was sufficient.
I mean, you know, maybe that's that seems like just as much shit talking as just saying straight out like the guy was not very good.
Yeah.
And you can read this for yourself.
But the story goes, Burt Reynolds approached him about working with this one director.
And Jack Lemmon was like, oh, you know, he's okay.
He's okay.
Burt Reynolds went and worked with him.
And he came back and was like, what were you talking about?
That guy – that guy is like the biggest asshole I've ever met in my life.
It's like the worst gig I've ever had.
He goes, well, yeah, I can see how you say that.
So in a way, you might kind of also be saying, well, like that –
Like an incomplete, let's say, recommendation letter, quote-unquote, you're actually doing a disservice because you're kind of conveying – I guess depending on the tone of conversation you're used to having with somebody, you're conveying approval tacitly onto somebody where you probably should have given more information.
Like with the producer guy.
You wouldn't want to say to somebody who's about to spend money or give points or whatever to say like, oh, this guy's – this is a guy – it's hard to make music.
It's hard to be in the studio.
Even in the best of situations, it's stressful and costly.
And you would want to believe that somebody you go in there with is somebody who's going to be looking out for you, unlike my dentist.
be looking out for you and making sure that the best product possible is being made in a way that makes you look good, makes the music look good and where they go out of their way.
And you wouldn't, you didn't have that experience with this person.
Kind of.
I feel like, I feel like culturally the, the attitudes that don't talk to the cops attitude is,
is like, uh, is against society.
It is not, you know, don't talk to the cops is, is this kind of, uh, don't snitch culture.
Yeah.
Don't snitch.
It's this sort of like urban circling the wagons against the, like the perceived enemy of the cops.
But in fact, don't talk to the cops.
Don't snitch.
When that becomes endemic in a culture, uh,
What you end up with is a culture that is ruled by the mafia.
The way the mafia gets power is that it circulates this idea that snitching to the cops is ineffective and is destructive to your...
you know, the unity of your, of your smaller community.
But what you end up then with is no recourse to the cops, no recourse to the culture.
You only have recourse to the ever shrinking, like snake eating its tail of this, of, you know, the, the, the separate, the separate law of the kind of the outsider law.
And I feel like that is, that is absolutely true with this.
in a different way with this like i never say anything bad about anybody culture because what you end up with is like like walter matthew maybe was a very sweet man but i would not trust his word about a thing you know like i i you end up you end up being untrustworthy because if everything's fine you
Well, clearly everything isn't fine.
Right.
And I, you know, I have always felt like my friends are people about whom I speak candidly and I expect them to speak candidly about me.
And that is the foundation of our trust.
Not that they keep my secrets and I keep theirs, but rather that what I like about them is that there's no...
That candor isn't a threat to them.
And ultimately, I feel like anyone to whom candor is a threat is an untrustworthy person.
But don't you think that's kind of endemic to things like movies, music, politics?
I mean, if you speak outside of a certain kind of code...
then you get your comeuppance.
Because when you speak, as you say, candidly in certain ways about certain things, especially I think in politics, it has a very specific meaning to it.
It means you're kind of taking off the gloves.
Well, yeah, but I increasingly feel like
That is our duty as people who want the world to be a better place.
We cannot keep living in this new speak era of no bad news, no bad talk.
But in politics, though, you have to have that certain level of decorum in order to keep working together even when you disagree with each other.
But you'd never want to get it to the point where, like, look what happened with the sequester or whatever it was called.
It was getting kind of uglier and uglier and more and more at this.
It was – you get beyond that kind of surface level of like we disagree on these things.
This person is wrong.
You get it down to this person is bad.
But then pretty soon, like when you really strip it all away, you start to get to the basics of what real bare-knuckle politics is, which is that we're all part of the same hypocrisy, Mike.
Yeah.
Or whatever the line is.
We're all in this game where we learn to circle our wagons around the one who's growing in power and to marginalize the one who's falling out of power and all that kind of – I mean isn't that part of politics?
But it's the ugliness of politics.
I mean I feel like my main complaint about the Obama administration is that he never –
takes the gloves off i wish that obama had been had had spoken truth to power at the beginning of his administration their their decision to not prosecute the bush administration for war crimes to not ever speak ill of the bush administration which was a criminal enterprise but in order you know in order to preserve the republic he he entered office with this you know basically like ford pardoning nixon
this blanket pardon of 10 or 8 years of total insanity.
And they never revisit it.
And the Obama administration never says, like, the problems that we're having today are a direct result of these maniacs
from you know from eight years ago they just it's just like all happy talk and i and i don't believe in it because i mean this is the this is the problem with monitoring language instead of ideas you know at a certain point we we uh as a culture we said we no longer use the word nigger and then it was like we no longer use the word negro and then we no longer use the word black but racism survived
And people like David Duke learned to use the word urban and all of his followers knew that urban meant black.
And in most cases, all of his followers knew that urban meant nigger.
But so the work that we did to expunge the language of its ugliness had very little effect on expunging the rotten core.
All it did was mask it under seven layers of euphemism.
And I am absolutely a proponent of cutting through euphemistic language when talking about... I don't think... I do not think... And this is the thing that... This is Bellinghamming at its core.
The idea that civic discourse, that civility...
is the thing that preserves our comfort and our way of life and that if we all step aside to let one another go through the door first that that is what constitutes civilization and in fact it's just it's just ever deadening layers of politeness that mask our
that mask this growing animal hatred we have for one another.
I wish there was more honesty.
Like when Clinton was pilloried for his blowjob in the Oval Office or whatever, and he's out there euphemizing left and right and barefaced lying,
And revealing himself to be duplicitous and an obfuscator and all this, like you watched his character just kind of come apart through that whole experience.
I still cannot understand why he didn't sit in his chair and say, none of your business, next question.
Like, ultimately, it was none of anyone's business.
It did not affect the execution of his office.
None of it had anything to do with his effectiveness as president.
It was not anybody's business.
And he, of all people, had the power at that moment to say, I will not answer this line of questioning.
It is irrelevant to the conduct of this office.
And any argument like that his character was on trial, people's character, like that is what elections are for.
You judge a person on their character and then you elect them and then you're no longer, they're no longer running.
Their character is no longer the question.
And so I feel like, I mean, my mayoral candidate yesterday lost his election.
The other guy won.
And in his, like, the day, basically the day of the election, I got an email appointing me to a commission.
And I am now a commissioner.
Hmm?
The city arts and film and music commission.
I am now on that commission.
Wow.
It's a three or four year appointment.
Wow.
Congratulations, man.
And you may now call me the commish.
Try and stop me.
And this commission meets every month in the city hall in a hearing room, which is open to the public.
And I think maybe our commission meetings are broadcast on the public access channel.
And like citizens can come in and stand at a microphone and comment.
And we will conduct some business of the city.
And like this is the this is and this is a it is a commission I have accepted.
And I can't understand politically, like, is this one of those things where, like, the president pardons 50 people on his last day in office?
I don't understand why I was appointed to this, like, four-year position.
Well, it's Thanksgiving.
You know, it's like the time of year when you save one turkey from the table.
Yeah.
But anyway, now I am an officially appointed... Commissioner Roderick, that sounds like you get a double-breasted blazer for that.
But it's going to be very interesting to me, sitting on this commission, which is now in the public record and in the public sphere in a small way, and I think an ineffectual way, or I can't imagine that this commission... I don't believe I am granted the power to tax.
I do get a parking pass...
for city hall.
Whoa, sweet.
Right.
So you can probably use the bathrooms too.
I can use the bathrooms at city hall.
I might, they can't, they can't throw you out.
I might have a, I might even get a laminated card that says commissioner, but it's going to be very curious to see like how I, how this tiny little toe in the water of like public life, how it plays out for me.
Because I don't think there's anything at stake, but I'm going to be sitting up on a dais while some guy with dander on his fleece vest stands there and yells at me about how they closed down his street to film an episode of Mad About You.
that's not still a show and i'm gonna be like listen guy you don't think i got talking about this you don't think i got better things to think about i'm trying to get zip lines put in in this whole city don't waste my time you're yelling at me you got how many bags have you got how many grocery bags have you got there you got like 14 grocery bags get out of here yeah i mean i know it's early early goings early days but i can't wait to hear the planks in your platform
Well, yeah.
I imagine you get a platform.
I feel like your caution the other day where you were like, hey, are you sure that you should be talking about this on the internet?
On the airwaves?
You know, I feel like I have to keep... First of all, there's nobody listening to this program that's going to out us.
Right?
It's all... They might start talking shit.
It's a total cult audience now.
Everybody is like... They're all...
moving the deck chairs around the titanic who's gonna who's gonna say i i think that i think merlin and john are dangerous and must be stopped i don't think there's any i mean it's only some random person that swings in and listens to one episode you can take them out no problem says these people are maniacs that's right we'll just well we got a cult we could certainly have uh have them circle the wagons around that person
They're going to come out of their apartment, and in their hallway, there's just going to be Super Train stickers on every flat surface, and they're going to be like, oh, fuck.
I had no idea who I was messing with.
What's the name of the actual commission?
the Seattle film and music commission.
Wow.
So presumably like some, like Michael Bay is going to come and, and may try and make a dinosaur movie in Seattle at some point.
And I'm going to have to approve.
I'm going to have to be one of the commissioners who approves or denies his permits to, uh, you know, to block off the street.
I just want to take a moment to review your Brachiosaurus easement.
Uh,
I'm saying here that you made Transformers.
And I have to say, that was a shitty movie.
Can I have your personal assurance that we're not going to be facing a situation where we see Seattle looking like it's going to be beaten up by robots that might also be trucks?
I've got one pair of glasses down on the end of my nose.
Point of information, why is Commissioner Roderick talking like that?
One pair of glasses on a gold chain.
One pair of glasses on top of my head.
Oh, I beg your pardon, sir.
I need to get some white three-piece suits made.
You do.
You do.
And I'd like to see you have like a cane with like a tip on it that you could tap on the table when you're getting restless.
Look at me.
I'm the big actor.
Blah, blah, blah.
Are we still talking about this?
All right.