Ep. 112: "The Takeaway Dream"
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Hello.
Hi, John.
Hi, Berlin.
How's it going?
Good.
Did you put your avatar in your Skype profile?
Isn't it?
It's jarring.
It's like we've been doing this a long time and there was never an avatar in your profile.
There it is now.
What you probably stopped noticing was that what I had up there was whatever I threw into Skype in order to have an image in probably 2003.
Yeah, yeah.
It's a selfie.
It's a selfie before we called it that.
A placeholder image that was there for a long time, and now you've gone and you've cleaned up your metadata.
Your image could use a refresh.
What is my image?
I don't see it.
I'll get a screen grab for you.
Well, you can't really appreciate it because you're probably seeing it at the small size that does not exaggerate the...
the lossiness of it.
So you got Nipil glasses.
You look like you're blowing out an imaginary birthday candle.
And, uh, it, it looks like it's being presented at approximately 12 times of the intended image size.
Yeah.
It kind of looks like somebody smeared Vaseline on you.
Oh.
Not in a good way.
Well, you know, that was the era.
That was the look at the time.
Do you remember those days?
Do you remember how crazy that was?
I saw some picture of me holding a bag of pirate's booty not very long ago when I was really...
Early.
You were Mimi.
I was early young.
Mimi, I know you're a goldmine.
Pirate's Booty.
Pirate's Booty.
That's before I had met you.
That's when I merely knew one of your songs.
Yeah, that was a thing in the early days of memes.
That was a weird thing.
Why did we do that?
I don't know.
It was very odd.
For those of you who are not all the way into the Wikipedia,
of merlin some kid came up to me in boston that was my first long winters tour and i had little short hair and i just was wearing little little clothes i was so little and the guy comes up to me and he hands me a bag of uh uh snack food and he says can i take a picture of you holding this snack food
And I said, you know, sure, at the time, any kind of communication with people was important and craved.
And so I hold up the bag of snack food and I make a playful face like I am thrilled about it.
I'd never seen Pirate's Booty before.
I'd never heard of it.
Didn't know what it was.
And then it turns out that you were collecting photos of people around the world through an army of minions holding pirates booty.
And that was part of your early Tumblr?
No, Flickr.
It was a Flickr Tumblr.
Well, there's a lot about this that really feels like a different era.
How do I begin to count the ways?
First of all, it started out as a thing that my friends and I were doing on the LiveJournal.
LiveJournal.
And I don't know if you were the first one.
That was probably my friend Dan.
Who at the time, I think he was going to Emerson.
He was like maybe 19 at the time.
Young, young guy.
He's a full grown ass man now.
That's right.
And very smart guy.
And he, yeah, yeah, he got pictures of you, some pictures with the dismemberment plan, not a serf.
um all the classic bands of the air classic bands there's some what they might be giants ben folds and i don't know why but it became a well i don't i can say why it became a thing because it was funny and it was stupid and so then every time somebody came to my house i'd make them take pictures with a bunch of snack food now how is this different in so many ways my goodness where do i begin this preceded my flicker time oh wow did it really
I went out and went to SourceForge and downloaded some open source content management system and installed it on a server and created one of those like, this is a gallery of images.
And thus was born Booty Shots with a Z. Booty Shots with a Z. My friend Peter in the 80s, he was doing a considerable amount of traveling as some of us did in our younger days when we had nothing else to do.
And we used to drink a lot of Schmidt beer.
Which, I don't know if you had that in Florida.
I know it passes the basic test of being probably cheap and probably causing diarrhea.
Yeah, you were probably drinking Ballantyne or something, right?
What was the cheap beer down in Florida when you were in college?
Oh, not to derail us, but for me, a Bush was always a good beer.
Or an old Milwaukee.
And if you got to the real bottom, you'd get the generic ABC brand.
Sure.
The Bush family, of course, are the Anheuser-Bushes.
Yes.
They're very big in Atlanta, those people.
I think it was back in St.
Louis, they married the natural light family.
Right, that's right.
And that's when Empire was born.
In the Northwest...
Natural Light is a very refreshing beer when you're in Florida, John.
That's all I'm going to say about that.
Well, I'll tell you what, because there's nothing in it.
Same for Florida.
It's just yellow-colored water.
But up here in the Northwest, Schmidt Beer really had a lock on the cheap rock and roll beer.
And a lot of people called it animal beer because the cans had pictures of different...
Sort of 50s graphic art of like salmon or moose or, you know, it looked like animal illustrations from boy's life.
Oh, it looks from a distance.
It looks more like a can of soup.
Yeah, it had a little bit of a can of soup vibe.
Oh, this is cool.
What a great logo.
And there's a guy water skiing.
These are wonderful cans.
Yeah, and you could get a half rack of those for $4.
And Schmidt beer just was... It was so good for the money.
And also, it felt like a lot of beer culture.
It became a kind of cult.
people that drank schmidt then insisted on schmidt like i would turn down any beer i would turn down any top shelf beer for a schmidt at the time and my friend peter went so far as to carry a can of schmidt in his backpack and
One in the chamber?
Yeah, as he traveled around the world so that he could get a picture of himself holding a schmidt in front of the Taj Mahal.
Get a picture of himself holding a schmidt with the Dalai Lama.
And he still has a...
a photo album of yellowing 25 year old photos of him holding a Schmidt beer, um, you know, at the temple Mount in Jerusalem.
And I mean, in a lot of cases it was, it was borderline offensive that this kid was standing here holding a beer at, uh, you know, wall.
Yeah.
Um, but, uh, I was with him on the steps of the Vatican and,
one day and he pulled out a schmidt his schmidt to you know to to ready himself to take his schmidt picture and he set the beard down on the steps of the vatican and while we're standing there with our little uh you know plastic like disposable cameras
one of the Swiss guards with his like long pike and his big feathered hat or whatever, he, he sees this kid put a can down on the steps of the Vatican and he walks over and happened really fast and,
walks over, picks up the can, and turns it to face him and looks at it.
And it was clear that he just wanted to make sure it wasn't a bomb or something.
You know, like if you put something down on the steps of the Vatican, apparently the Swiss Guard takes a renewed interest.
And there's this moment that is burned in our minds of this Swiss guard in full regalia holding a Schmidt beer and looking at it with this quizzical look of the apes looking at the obelisk in 2001.
And none of us could get our cameras up.
We were so dumbfounded.
That we're standing there holding our camera just like, uh.
And then he realizes what he is.
He gets a kind of smirk on his face and he puts the beer down.
It all happened in just a split second.
And then we were like, sir, sir, could you hold the beer again?
And he wouldn't.
Then he went back to completely ignoring us, stone-faced.
And it's this photograph that didn't happen.
That is more impressed in my mind.
I have this fantastic picture in my head of the Swiss guard holding a Schmidt.
That turned out way better than I expected.
I saw him pike in that thing.
Oh, wouldn't... I mean...
Any interaction with a Swiss guard.
They're like the beef eaters out in front of... I know what you mean.
The guys with the funny hats.
The fuzzy hats out in front of Buckingham Palace.
You can't get them to respond.
It's like a bro dickhead move.
Hold the sign with a hashtag on it.
Well, you talk about LiveJournal.
I remember people on LiveJournal.
I was not on LiveJournal.
You were widely discussed on LiveJournal.
But I remember being a topic on LiveJournal, and I was very upset.
Because you couldn't see what they were saying.
Couldn't see what they were saying.
And I remember saying to you, what are they saying about me on LiveJournal?
And you said...
What happens on LiveJournal stays on LiveJournal.
Oh, I don't think I would have said that.
You did.
You wouldn't tell me what they were saying because it violated the LiveJournal code.
Oh, yeah.
The nice thing about LiveJournal that I don't think anybody ever got quite as right, at least not among sites I use, was just how easy it was.
It was very easy to post.
It was a real simple site.
But they made it really easy to share stuff with a very small group of people.
And that was probably really frustrating to you.
But it was very easy to use.
Yeah.
And you could share things on the internet that not everybody saw.
And this is – we're talking – this is 2000 maybe when I started doing it, 2001.
But it was on LiveJournal.
It was funny because I found myself more and more writing what I would now think of – what I would then think of as a blog.
And that's what led me to go start my first actual According to Hoyle blog.
And so what –
What has happened to all that premium content?
I think I deleted all of it.
Really?
You never imported it over?
I'm trying to remember what happened.
I mean, I had a lot of stuff up there.
I mean, it's probably still up there on archive.org.
A lot of it.
Mostly, I wrote a lot about music, things I was outraged about, how angry I was that the shins were in a McDonald's commercial and what sellouts they were.
Oh, I know.
God, that was the worst.
Oh, boy.
And you know who changed my mind about that?
Who turned me around was Dan.
Oh, really?
He's like, what?
You know, what do you think these guys are making?
Yeah, that's right.
And, like, now they can, like – it was like when Super Chunk – remember Super Chunk in the BK's commercial, the British Knights commercial?
It was a really big deal because before it was, like, around the time that – what was that first?
No, it was around the time No Pocky for Kitty came out.
And the story goes, at least according to Spin magazine at the time, I think it was – God, it was a great issue.
It was this one issue of Spin that had, like, Nirvana and –
Super Chunk, there's a whole bunch of the new bands that you need to check out.
There was a moment there where Spin really was nailing it.
I loved Spin in the late 80s, man.
I never missed an issue with Spin.
But the story went, according to this, and this is kind of the framing for this story.
It was the year punk broke, right?
And so, as they say.
But the story goes that British Knights...
It sounds like something from The Simpsons.
Basically, they came to Super Chunk and said, kids, we love that song you do with the thing.
We're going to put it in a commercial.
Because, of course, you have to talk like that if you license music, as you know.
Is that what the Mini Cooper people sound like?
You know, I never actually talked to them.
I just talked to the young guy with the British accent that's running their ad campaign.
Okay.
And they said, you know, we're going to give you this much for this.
And they were like, actually, you know, that's not really a thing we do.
We sell records and we tour.
And we don't really want our stuff in and out.
And they said, well, they made it apparently abundantly clear to them that there's a hard or easy way we could do this.
We could basically, by next week, have a song that is legally just different enough from this.
that would still be confused by most of your fans with the song, or, you know, you can let us give you whatever, what would you think?
Probably like $8,000 or something to let us use this song.
They did it.
And then they were able to like, uh, buy a van.
Well, as the classic Todd Berry routine goes, um, I don't, I don't know if you, I don't know if you remember it, but he did a routine long time ago, 10 years ago about how the, uh, the bass player in Fugazi was like, Hey guys, uh,
Maybe we should charge six bucks a show so that I don't have to have a roommate when I'm 40.
Oh, they're so easy to admire from afar.
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I woke up this morning having had one of those dreams, like the last dream of the night, right?
The one that you remember, the takeaway dream.
And in my takeaway dream, I was having a minor dispute with a shitty gal at a rock show.
you know, one of those situations where somebody pushed me from behind and I bumped into her and she turned around and was mad.
And then I woke up and I'm like, it's like having a dream about being at work.
You know, it's like, it's like dreaming that you're working at a cash register and then you wake up and it's time to go to work.
Like to have, to have a dream where I'm just in a minor social situation,
You have a minor bit of social awkwardness in a public place.
You know, I remember such few dreams compared to what I used to.
I feel robbed to have a dream like that.
Yeah, I felt robbed too.
I woke up and I was like, that's really?
You're sending me into the day with that feeling?
The feeling of just like, you know, if the event had happened in real life, it would be one of those situations where then you're sitting in your car 20 minutes later
And you're still thinking about what you should have said to her.
Like, oh, God.
And, you know, two days later, you're like, oh, that fucking... And it didn't even happen.
It's a dream.
That's the worst.
I'm sitting here mad at an imaginary person who said something to me at an imaginary rock show.
You ever heard that phrase, L'Esprit de l'Escalier?
Mm-hmm.
You know that phrase?
Mm-hmm.
Are you kidding with me?
You know the phrase?
You know the one?
It's basically, it's the George Costanza moment.
This means, I think, spirit of the stairs or wit of the stairs.
The French phrase meaning, like, it's the thing you realized.
The thing you should have said.
The thing you should have said after it's too late to say anything.
Yeah.
I hate when people tell me their dreams, and consequently I do not tell them my dreams.
But can I tell you what I dreamed about last night?
Oh, yeah.
You remember your dream.
I don't know.
It's interesting for regional reasons.
My takeaway dream, I had the Manhattan person's dream.
I had a very intense, super clear dream that I found extra rooms in my house.
Oh, fun dream.
Apparently, this is one that happens a lot to people who live in Manhattan.
And it's not super interesting to go into.
They open the closed closet where the ironing board comes down, but it turns out it's actually a door to like...
Another bedroom and another bathroom.
Yeah, the beauty of that kind of dream, there's the kind of dream you have where you're a little kid kind of dream where you move a brick and you see that there's a room behind there.
The really excellent Manhattan person's dream, though, is when you get something out of your closet and you actually see a literal door there and you go, oh.
I never realized I have a whole other house inside my house.
It was great.
It had a coin-operated laundry, and it was apparent based on the expiration dates of the yogurt in the refrigerator because, yes, it also had a kitchen, was that people were using it.
And the yogurt had only expired a couple weeks ago, which led me to believe that people were coming in there.
And then I felt kind of bad, but I thought, you know, I am – I don't know how the lease would include that.
I don't know if invisible –
You know, law can be very complicated.
I'm not sure if that would be governed by the lease.
Change the locks.
When you go to sleep tonight, the first thing you should do is change the locks on that place.
I'll tell you, though, man, I'm a grown-ass man.
I woke up this morning, and this has happened to me the half dozen times in my life I've ever had this particular flavor of dream.
You can guess what I wanted to do.
I was like, there's got to be hidden rooms somewhere.
I know I've been around the perimeter of my house.
I figured if it's anywhere, it's probably outside, or it's in what appears to be...
You know, it's like in Watchmen when Rorschach figures out that there's a hidden area by measuring the size of the closet.
I'm thinking there's got to be a panel.
You ever get this feeling?
There's got to be a room in here.
There's got to be like an Amityville horror room that I don't know about because that would be so sweet.
Oh, for sure.
Well, you know, and the problem is I have a couple of rooms like that in my house.
But their utility to me is somewhat diminished by the knowledge that all you have to do is smoke me out.
There's no panic room.
There's no monk hole because all you have to do is set the house on fire.
Yeah, you're back in your secret room.
Good job.
Good job, little toad in a hole.
You'd be roasted no matter where you were because it's a wood house.
And there's no, there's no like, what it really needs is, yeah, a monk hole, like a, like a, like a tunnel.
Yeah.
And I don't think there's a tunnel.
At one point, some guys from the city came and they had a little underground submarine.
Yeah.
Uh, they were, they were, they were moving my gas line and I, so I go out there and I, I get it, I intervene and I say, Hey, I see that you guys are getting ready to move my gas line.
I want you to move it over here instead of where you're moving it.
And they were like, well, and I said, well, here's the thing I want to, I want to excavate here where you're putting the gas line.
I want you to move it over on the other side.
And they talked about it for a while and they were like, alright, we can do it.
And they pulled out this probably two foot long torpedo that was connected to a pneumatic hose of some kind.
And they dig a trench and they stick this torpedo in the ground like a spike going sideways.
And they turn it on and the thing vibrates and
starts to travel through the earth.
And it's like a, it's like a mole, a robot mole.
pulling his little tube behind him, and he heads off onto the yard.
The vibration causes him to move in any direction that he can.
Yeah, right.
Move him forward.
They can move him forward.
That's a very clever, primitive little submarine robot.
It was very interesting, and he's going forward, and then when he gets to the other side, they kind of set him in motion, and then there's a guy on the other side who's dug a hole waiting for him to come out.
And then it's a perfectly sized hole to run a gas line through.
wow so I was like wow this is cool and he gets about halfway across the yard and then it's like oh what happened he's not he stopped moving
And they tried to pull him back and they couldn't get him back.
They tried to go forward.
He wouldn't go forward.
And I was like, oh, God damn it.
This is exactly what I didn't want to have happen.
And so all of a sudden they go into emergency mode.
And it seemed like primarily because they really loved their little mole and they didn't want to lose him.
But they could tell by how much line had gone out, like how far he was probably.
Yeah, they knew where he was.
And they were super worried about the mole.
All of a sudden it was just like...
You know, we got to get the mole and it's because I guess it's expensive, but also like you get attached.
Yeah, they seemed like they felt like he was their friend.
And so all of a sudden there are four guys from the city in those flat hard hats.
jumping in the center of my yard with their shovels out.
And I was like, whoa, whoa, everybody, hold on.
Let's slow down before we... And if it's too late, they were like... They were completely in like a chain gang mode of digging.
And now there's a six foot... That's where the training really kicks in.
There's a six foot deep pit in the center of my yard.
I'm like, oh, fuck.
Like, no.
And they discover a giant...
They discovered that that whole part of my yard was a septic field for the old septic system.
So it hit a wall, essentially?
It hit a cistern full of poo.
Poor Moly.
And managed, he was making such good progress through the ground, that he managed to penetrate one wall of the poo cistern.
And then he fell into the muck.
Oh, no.
And he probably just kept on working.
And he was just like, but he couldn't.
There was nowhere for him to go.
With like Johnson administration poo.
Right.
I mean, this house has been hooked up to the local sewer system at least for 50 years, probably longer.
And so now Moli's in the hole.
Moli's in the poo hole.
And these guys with their hard hats are standing around.
And so they uncover this septic cistern.
And they're all standing.
And there's a lid.
And they open the lid.
And they're looking down into it.
And they're all real disappointed.
Because they love Moli.
But nobody wants to be the first one down the hole.
Yeah.
And I'm standing there really upset that my yard is all trashed.
And these guys just don't, you know, they're like, and the foreman, the foreman was like, this is your fault.
You told us to move the line.
If we'd put the line where we were going to put it, it would have been fine.
Well, it's like, it must be like firemen, firefighters being mad, like you being mad at a firefighter because they broke a window.
And you're like, this is our job.
You know, this is what we do.
Yeah.
And to a certain extent, I was like, hey, look, I mean, I told you I wanted you to move the line.
It's not like I became the boss of you.
You're the chief.
You're the guy who knows.
I didn't even know these things existed.
And it was – when I bought the house, of course, we pulled up two huge 500-gallon oil tanks out of the yard, one that was for the house and one that was over by the barn that was like – Except for heating oil?
Well, I think the house one was heating oil.
The one over by the barn was a massive tank.
I think it might have been tractor oil or something.
Yeah.
Anyway, so all of a sudden I'm looking at this yard and I'm like, what else is buried under here?
Maybe there is a tunnel.
Maybe it's a network of tunnels.
Maybe it's tunnels all the way to Hanoi.
Anyway, so they figure out the guy, the foreman, goes over to their big truck with the multitude of flashing lights, and he pulls out some elaborate hook-majigger that's specifically designed to retrieve Moley from shitholes.
And he gets down in there and he's like, this had better work.
And he manages to hook Moley and they pull him up.
And the funny thing is we're all standing around this hole.
There's no smell because whatever poo and pee is in there has been sitting in there for 60 years.
and i'm like basically compost probably right yeah i'm like there's no poo or pee in there it's just dirt and water by now and the foreman turns and looks at me and he's like oh it's poo oh it's poo let me tell come on and it's like it's not poo it's it's dirt it's dirt and water but in any case he didn't want to get he didn't want to jump down in there
And, uh, so he retrieves Moley and they unhook him and they're like, all right, well, we're going a different direction.
And they ended up putting the, they ended up putting the line where I didn't want it.
Oh man.
So they filled it back in, but you had like a, they filled it back in, but they had, they had trenched across the roots of a big tree that I was really worried about.
They were going to, suffice to say there is still an enormous scar.
in my yard from this balderdash.
Oh, God.
And, you know, what can I say?
And also, I have the awareness that there's a poo cistern under the yard, which is not a thing that I can forget.
I suppose there are some people who can let time sort of...
fog that knowledge out so that they're just like, Oh yeah, my yard.
But I'm all, every time I walk across it, I'm like, I'm standing right on top of it right now.
Somebody else's poo and pee.
It's not even mine.
People long dead.
Part of the problem also is if you did install, I say a network of tunnels, even if you installed one basic means of egress, tunnel speaking, everybody could see it.
You'd have to cloak your yard, which would seem suspicious.
How would you even do that?
Well, the way to do it is to begin a capital project where you are doing a lot of improvements all over the place.
And the yard is just a hustle bustle of activity.
And one of those things is...
One of those things involves a backhoe and a large trench, and it could be sewer electrical.
There's a lot of things that could be happening, but you're focusing their attention on...
The fact that you're also replacing the roof or building a windmill or whatever it is.
Misdirection.
Yeah, exactly.
Misdirection.
And then you finish off the escape trench and then just let people, again, let that fog of memory happen.
Because people are not expecting you to be thinking that far in advance.
No, and that's the tragedy is they wouldn't even expect it.
It seems to me, though, if you could even get something to get you from, like, you punch a code into the washer dryer, something moves, you go down and you come out in the barn, that would still give you a nice head start if you had to.
Oh, absolutely.
And that's, you know, the thing is not to give away too much, but that would be one direction to build an escape tunnel.
From the washer and dryer to the barn.
If you're going to break ground, I mean, I think you should have multiple solutions.
If you're going to break ground on some kind of a system, you might as well have several things.
And obviously don't tell me because I might collapse under torture.
Right, right.
Well, one of the things I wanted to do was go to the local elementary schools.
And a lot of them are…
A lot of them are using the portable method of increasing capacity for their kids, right?
They cover the playground with portables.
And some of those portables are old.
The oldest ones, I think, date to the 20s.
And those portables have like hardwood floors and... Oh, it's like a cabin.
They're beautiful.
Like oak floors and woodwork.
The new ones are basically mobile homes.
But the old ones are more like... Yeah, right.
But the old ones are beautiful old.
It's like living in a boat except if the boat had 15-foot ceilings.
I went to first grade in one of those, and they had the most wonderful euphemism for them.
They didn't call them the externals.
They didn't call them the mobile homes.
They called them the colonies.
Isn't that sweet?
And it was.
It was like a cabin.
It was a pretty nice setup.
Well, so what I want to do is go around the school district here, and the problem is that nobody appreciates nice things, and they surplus these things all the time.
And some of them just go into landfills, and some of them end up, I don't know where they go, but grab one of those, truck it over here, put it over the swimming pool,
Use the swimming pool as a, because the portables, and I've measured, I've actually gone and measured local portables at nearby elementary schools.
The portable would fit perfectly over the swimming pool.
Oh, man.
You're not using that.
Then the swimming pool goes away, but it becomes like a bunker under my little cabin slash dance studio.
Yeah.
in the backyard and then how much extra work would it be to dig a network of tunnels not much extra when you say you measured it you're not you're not you're you're saying in three dimensions it would fit into the pool no over the pool huh it would fit it is larger than the pool the pool is a large pool but the portables are i see so you get it built in it's it's like it makes its own basement
Exactly.
I have one of those 100-foot measuring tapes, as you do, and I carted one down to the local school, and I was out there in the middle of the night measuring the portables.
What could possibly go wrong?
And came home and measured the pool.
And I was like, you could put this portable on the four corners.
The pool would go away.
And the decking, the concrete port decking around the pool would just become the sidewalk around your portable.
It's the apron around the outside.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And then, you know, I think what you do is you'd face the big windows of the portable toward the house.
Get the afternoon sun.
And then when you're in there stretching, doing your yoga, dancing, doing your seven minute workout, uh, like, uh, the, you're, you're basking in the glow of, of, of like your little colony.
It would, you'd be basically creating a colony here.
You are really close to having a compound.
It's just, it's right around the corner.
Yeah.
And I think, you know, right now, of course, like we call this house, the farm, but I think if I had one more building, I would start calling it the colony.
Yeah.
Yeah, and at least one 17-year-old girl named Sunshine.
Like the Yellow Deli in Boulder, Colorado.
All the girls have long braids, and they all have Old Testament names.
Yes.
And they are making roast beef sandwiches.
Methuselah, where's my sandwich?
I used to have really mixed feelings.
There was a certain thing.
I haven't thought about this in years.
But like you discover like a girl has been kidnapped or a boy has been kidnapped and kept in a hole like down underground.
I always had mixed feelings about that.
You have mixed feelings about that?
Yeah, because on the one hand – So some of your feelings are positive and some of them are negative.
Okay, let me finish.
Yes, okay.
It's not a good idea to kidnap a kid and keep him underground.
Let's just take that as read.
But there was something about seeing a cross-section of an underground living space.
Part of it was – I love cross-sections.
But also the idea of having a place where you could go and nobody could find you if you wanted to.
Well, yeah.
That was very appealing to me.
I'd want a way out.
In every one of those stories, there's always someone else living in the house with the bad man who purports to and believably purports to not have realized that there were people living in a hole under their house.
That's always so strange.
Or like, you know, even Gacy.
They found like over 20 bodies on his property.
I mean, didn't it ever seem weird how few young handymen came back out of the house?
Did that never seem strange?
Yeah.
I don't know if you remember the description, but one of the searchers went down into the basement and...
This is a terrible description, but like... Is this an odor thing?
Because that's how they found it.
They found it because neighbors were like, what is that smell?
Yeah, the odor was overpowering, but he stepped onto the dirt floor of the basement and sank up to his waist.
Oh, my God.
Because the dirt and decaying bodies and lye had just become a kind of liquefied...
There was no ventilation and it was just a liquefied sort of... Okay, that's not ideal.
No.
I would want someplace dry with no sinking up to my waist and bodies.
That guy in Austria who kidnapped his own daughter and fathered two children with her or three children with her in the hole, her mother was living in the house.
And never heard, never was like, are there rats in the walls?
Like, there was never a scratching?
Yeah.
I mean, I can hear my freaking neighbor's karaoke.
I can hear the intake of their breath.
And obviously, of course, they're using amplifier.
Amplification.
What kind of songs do they sing?
They're all in Vietnamese.
I have no idea what they're singing.
You have Vietnamese karaoke that you can hear in your house.
My next door neighbors who are Vietnamese Catholics.
have a home karaoke system that i i my only my only suspicion or my only guess is that they used to own a restaurant and when the restaurant closed they brought the professional grade karaoke system home they're like what are we going to do with this i don't know we have such fun doing karaoke let's just put it in our house because it is it's got to be it's got to be 6 000 watts
And they sometimes have small parties, but a lot of times it's just mom, dad, and their son.
Like the way you would play Parcheesi or Nintendo Wii?
They just sit around and sing loud Vietnamese karaoke songs?
And do karaoke.
Whoa.
Now, if you've ever listened to Vietnamese pop music or Chinese pop music, there are tonalities.
Yeah.
easy there are tonalities that are that are foreign to my musical ear right there are intervals that they use there's a certain soaring sonorous quality to the high notes that is paint peeling
Well, at least to my musical ear, when it's done expertly, I hear the beauty of it.
I understand what the music intends, I think.
But it's a musical language that's foreign to me.
And so I'm always listening to it kind of as an outsider, curious about it.
I don't think this is super complicated.
There's a place in my neighborhood where I go – I can pay my PG&E bill at this place around the corner where they butchered pigs and lots of vegetables and it's real – and the guy has always got super loud Chinese pop music playing and my daughter loves it.
I love it.
But what I really love is that I get to leave.
I really enjoy – I really enjoy hearing –
a Cantonese version of I Want to Hold Your Hand really loud for a couple minutes.
And then get out.
Yeah, but the beauty of that music is that you can get away from it.
I cannot imagine being in my home and having to hear that.
Well, do you ever hear... I'm sure in San Francisco you have opportunity to hear that.
They hear this instrument.
We hear it here in Seattle.
Yeah, the little fiddle thing that people play in the subways.
Yeah, the two-string violin banjo that you play with.
It's very beautiful for a minute.
Yeah, but it's very reedy.
And and loud.
And I mean, I can't I can only imagine what what I can't imagine playing it for someone that you love.
Well, but like when they're played fantastically.
Yes.
Like it's an it's an amazing instrument like any instrument, although still a pretty reedy instrument.
Not a warm... It hits a frequency that even with my bad ears is a little owie.
But here's the thing about karaoke.
Now, if I'm sitting in a bar and someone is doing a pretty bad out of tune... Man, I feel like a woman.
Right.
Or like a rock.
Or whatever.
You know, I'm familiar with the song, so I know where they are going astray.
I'm familiar with the tone of the original, so I know where the singer is failing to achieve that tone.
And I can listen to it kind of grimacing.
but with knowledge of how far the singer has to go to achieve, or how far away the singer is from actually accomplishing what they think they're accomplishing.
In the case of my neighbors, he is a terrible, terrible, terrible singer.
And yet, I do not understand what he's going for.
Because I don't know the source material.
So I sit and I listen and I say, there is no musical language in the universe where the note he's singing and the note of the backing track belong together.
It is mathematically...
somebody from another planet could look at it on a piece of paper and say, that is wrong.
Like, those two notes cannot coexist.
So I know that.
I know it is not a question of me not understanding the musical language.
I know that it is a question of him.
And he has the wrong kind of vibrato.
He's just so flat and so dead-voiced.
Just like...
How's the rest of his family?
I mean, he's not the only one, right?
Well, the thing is, my impression of how the afternoon goes is that their son, who is kind of wearing one of those Radar O'Reilly caps on sideways... Helmet liner?
And has like a white tracksuit and is just sitting and playing his...
He's playing his Game Boy or whatever.
The son doesn't leave.
This is what's amazing.
The son drives one of those Subaru WRXs with a big wing on the back and an air scoop on the front and expensive rims.
The kid is...
The kid is part of an outside culture where he should... If I were he, I would be at whatever discotheque it is where there are girls, right?
But he...
is sitting in the living room with his folks.
This is a thing they do together.
I never get the sense he sings.
He just sits while mom and dad trade off songs, which I imagine they're singing to one another.
So he's a teenager or like early 20s?
He's 25.
Okay, but he's doing a community, like a family thing by being there.
I think he might be the one that knows how to turn the machines on or something.
He knows how to turn it up.
They're only 10 feet from each other.
They could be whispering these songs to one another, but instead they are using a larger PA than any band I've ever been in has owned.
But they're not in a soundproof basement.
They are in their living room in the middle of their house in the middle of the neighborhood.
You could hear this music.
I imagine all the raccoons in the neighborhood all take this opportunity to go raid the trash in a different neighborhood because it's just sonically so...
I mean, even raccoons know.
In terms of background, I don't want to triangulate too much here, but in terms of background, is this the same person where you've had some words about that tree being on the property line?
Didn't you have some words with a person next door about a tree and some roots and the fruits thereof and so forth?
Well, it's not – I never had – Don't you have a fruit tree or something that you were arguing with them about?
Well, it was never an argument.
What happened was when this house – They call it a police action.
When this house – there was a police action.
When this house went up for sale most recently, it was –
it was occupied by a family of devout East African Muslims who would in that same, in the same room that they're now doing karaoke, the Vietnamese family is now doing karaoke.
The East Africans would sit in that room with all the windows open and listen to what sounded like a, like a shortwave radio broadcast of an extremely fiery sermon that,
It sounded like they were receiving it on a crystal set.
That's gutsy.
Well, it was gutsy, and it was also a little scary.
There were a couple of guys and a multitude of mothers, and then a lot of kids.
There seemed to be more mothers than there were fathers.
That sounds like a compound, John.
If you're looking at that in a one-to-one ratio...
Although I think the fathers there were the fathers.
There were just multiple wives.
And they would sit and listen to these sermons that were obviously tape recorded.
And I think the original recording was made in a bunker somewhere.
It was very cultural.
And I did have an encounter with them that wasn't 100% positive, that was effectively like...
no infidels shall cross our property line type of confrontation.
But when the house went for sale and that family moved out, there is a fruit tree that I object to on their property.
I object to this fruit tree.
It is a garbage tree.
And anyone with any responsibility would have taken this tree out a long time ago.
And so the house was empty and I went over there and I stood in their yard and I stared at this fruit tree and I said, I've had enough.
And so the following morning at the crack of dawn, the most inconspicuous time to run a chainsaw, I snuck over into their yard with my chainsaw and I cut down the tree.
In their yard?
In their yard.
Wow, that's quite an act of aggression, John.
Because, well, the house is empty.
And whoever it is that owns the house does not live in the house.
Right.
The owner now, and there's a for sale sign in the corner.
It's not for rent anymore.
So the owner is divesting himself of this property.
Right.
He hasn't been there in years.
He should have cut this tree down years ago.
The new owners, you know, I'm thinking this through as I'm standing in their yard, hands jammed in my pockets, staring at this tree.
The new owners are going to move in.
They're not going to do anything about the tree.
They're going to assume that the tree's always been there.
That's a typical, you know, you move into your house that you don't, normal people don't start cutting down trees the day they move in.
And I said, nobody's going to miss this tree.
There's only one person who can deal with this tree, and it's me.
And so I went over, and I chainsawed down this tree, and I took the tree around into my yard, and I threw it in my swimming pool.
Well, the great error I made was that there was a second tree that I also should have cut down.
And after I cut down the most offensive tree, then my brooding attention just... It was only sated for about a day and a half before I realized that I should have cut down the other tree.
And then the house sold...
And people were hustling and bustling.
And once the house sold, I no longer felt comfortable.
In that period where the house was for sale, I felt like, I'm cutting down this tree.
All it's going to do is increase the value of the house.
The house is in limbo.
I'm not taking anybody's tree.
I'm just taking a tree from a guy who doesn't want it.
And the next people aren't even going to know it was there.
But once the house had sold, I felt like, okay, those new people have bought a house that has this tree, this second tree.
for me to cut down that tree now would be to actually be cutting down a tree that belongs.
You should have finished the job when you had a chance.
I should have finished the job.
When you were still in country.
I was in country with a running chainsaw.
My neighbors were all, you know, I'd been in there for 10 minutes, so they were already used to, they'd had 10 minutes of chainsaw to get used to.
Another 10 minutes wouldn't have bugged them.
I should have taken down that second tree.
And now that second tree haunts my dreams.
But in any case,
The fact that my Vietnamese neighbors can be making what is, by any estimation, music that is a crime against humanity...
And I can hear them breathing through their noses into those microphones through three double walls and 20 feet across the yard.
And yet the mother of that Austrian girl couldn't hear her own daughter in her own home?
I totally agree.
I totally agree.
And you know what though?
I mean the human mind is such an interesting thing where it's that old thing, don't think of an elephant or try not to think about your tongue while you're eating.
Oh, I just thought of an elephant.
You can't – because there's no such thing as not thinking of an elephant, right?
It's that – and once you start noticing something, it becomes very difficult to unnotice it.
Now, the thing is –
So tree aside, I mean, brass tacks.
Have you thought about talking to your neighbors about this?
I don't know if that's the kind of thing I've done in your neighborhood.
It's like you're kind of a laissez-faire kind of neighborhood.
It's a little bit of 54-40 or fight up here.
So we get along with one another in a sort of like wave over the fence kind of way.
Right.
Right.
And there's a little bit of a pick-your-battle situation where it's like, of the issues that I have with the next-door neighbors, do I want to, A, address the volume of their karaoke machine, or B, suggest that they let me cut down one of their trees?
LAUGHTER
what is what is the what's my next move with them it's such an adult thing john i used to i used to feel like every you know i feel like somebody in a roadrunner cartoon like slapping people and demanding you know duels i used to think that every slight had to be answered and until i was like a petulant child where everything had and today i process everything according to that stack that you're describing where i'm like i you know
these people might be crazy.
I should wait until there's something that's actually dangerous to both of us to bring it up with them.
Well, and there is a little bit of the Alaskan sort of the sanctity of one's own home philosophy that the enjoyment that they are deriving from owning their own home is bleeding over their property line and it is causing me mild discomfort on alternate Saturdays.
In the afternoon when they have their karaoke parties.
I mean, they're not doing it every night.
Oh, that's good.
Yeah, it's just alternate Saturdays.
It's like you can hear the... Saturday is such a nice day to just be around the house and not be bothered.
That's the thing.
You just want to lay out in your backyard.
But the thing is, Saturdays for them are obviously a day they look forward to where dad and mom are going to serenade each other.
with the sound of... Well, Junior plays Mario Kart.
Well, Junior plays Mario Kart.
Mom and Dad are going to imitate the sound of throwing fully grown hogs into a wood chipper or whatever it is.
Throwing cats at other cats.
However they would describe the sound of the music they're making.
And so this is one of the challenges that I have as a fully grown person.
At what point does my... Does my...
interest my naked self-interest become you know become something that i need to privilege over someone else having like the empathy that i have for someone else having innocent fun in their own home right and and it's you know every musician has to learn at some point or another every rock musician has to learn that louder isn't better
But that is a process that a lot of musicians, I guess, never learn.
A lot of people don't understand that louder isn't better.
For most people, at some point in their arc, the louder it is, the better it sounds.
And that's what they have going on over there.
They have reverb on their voice.
And they obviously feel... And I don't... The thing is...
One of my problems is I don't understand karaoke at all.
I don't understand people singing like a rock.
I don't understand the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald in a bar.
Because it just seems like... That's a busman's holiday for you.
Well, for me it is, but also like...
I don't – because I don't have a tin ear, I don't understand what it's like to have a tin ear.
Right.
Well, there's so many things that are weird about it because the thing is karaoke – the weird thing about karaoke, if you really think about it – and let's be honest.
It's a little like bowling.
Most of the people who do it are super serious about it and then most other people do it once every couple of years.
But mainly what you're doing is sitting around, acting like you're enjoying, listening to other people.
sing karaoke while you wait for your turn while you wait for you politely wait for your turn you applaud and there's all kinds of like weird isn't there like weird culture around karaoke like you got to make sure you don't do somebody else's signature song at a visiting thing i can only imagine i stay so far away from karaoke i can't it is like kryptonite to me and but but like i understand that is what car stereos are for right you put your favorite song in the car stereo you sing at the top of your lungs as you're driving down the street
I was strong as I could be.
All right.
Oh, Edmund Fitzgerald.
They said never gives back or dead.
You play the drums on the steering wheel like, yes, you are in your bubble and you are having a blast.
That's like you and the tennis racket back in junior high.
And that is a perfect example of the tennis racket and ZZ Top's Eliminator were two things put on God's earth by God for one reason.
Tennis rackets are not for tennis.
They are for playing the Eliminator record in front of the mirror when you are a young teenager.
That's the whole of it.
And karaoke...
Feels like playing a tennis racket in front of the mirror, except you're forcing your loved ones to be the mirror.
And the tennis racket is actually a 3,000-watt amplifier.
And I just... I cannot... So I don't understand karaoke.
I definitely don't understand karaoke in the role it performs within Asian culture or Asian cultures.
And I further...
do not understand my neighbor's particular version of super loud have you gotten to where you can recognize particular songs there are some that come back you know there are some that i hear multiple times there are others that you know because the because the the musical bed is all yamaha dx7 like tinkle tinkle chords
That are just like, it's garbage music to begin with.
It sounds like amusement park music where you're at an amusement park and all the characters that they're putting forward are like subpar Hanna-Barbera.
Yeah, like you swap out a calliope and put in a middle-aged Vietnamese immigrant.
Yeah, right.
Like, that's not Tony the Tiger.
Oh, I see what you're... Oh, no, no.
I totally know what you mean.
You know, that's like a plywood tiger made to look like Tony the Tiger, which is a breakfast cereal tiger.
And that tiger is enticing me to go on a roller coaster that... Not so different from the fake Super Chunk song.
You get it just close enough that you can go, oh, that's Anthony the Puma.
Clearly, that's supposed to make me think of Tony the Tiger.
Yeah.
Except it's got the DX7 chime sound.
What's love got to do with it?
Do-do-do-do.
But so I don't want to go over and intervene in their... What I can only imagine... And I mean, and this is a little bit... Maybe this is too much extrapolation.
But like this guy, my next door neighbor, definitely is from Vietnam and is older than me.
Meaning that he survived the war.
Right?
He had... Who knows what his...
what his life was like during the war.
I don't think he's old enough to have been a soldier, but he's certainly old enough to have...
I don't think there was a single person in Vietnam that didn't have to confront that war right up front.
It's not like there were suburbs where you were safe from the war.
And so whatever his life experience is, his English still isn't very good.
So it's not like I go over and sit in his living room and we talk about our shared experience.
Yeah.
And I just feel like there's so much about what they are doing over there that I don't understand that the work that I am trying to do on it is not the work of confrontation, but it is rather the work of sitting in my own home and trying to learn to appreciate that.
What they are doing.
Or realizing that if there's enough of a pattern to it, it's better off to just maybe be out of the house.
Frustrating as that might be.
Yeah, like Saturday afternoons is their time to do their show.
And hopefully, you know, I think they also drink.
So maybe by late afternoon, they, you know, it starts to slur off.
And then, like, I don't know what happens.
Maybe they make love.
I'm not sure.
It is a prelude to.
But like, I'm...
I'm much, and this is the thing about, this is the thing I encounter all the time, which is that other people are irritating.
And I cannot figure out if it is just that.
Other people are truly irritating and everybody else pretends that they're not or whether there is something in me where I am just more irritated by other people.
I don't think I am more irritated by other people.
I just think that I think that everybody else assumes that other people just are.
I have no idea.
Honestly, I have no idea how people work downtown.
And don't get into fistfights every day.
Oh, I totally agree.
And so, you know, right now, the other neighbor, my neighbor across the street, is running some kind of loser's lounge halfway house.
Is this the one that had the guy living in the RV?
The guy is still living in the RV.
He was out walking down the middle of the street the other day in a leather vest with no shirt on.
The leather vest had the Harley Davidson symbol across the back.
And he was walking down the middle of the street in a gunslinger pose.
Like, panted out.
And he's obviously walking to the store to get a beer.
And in his mind, he's like in a showdown.
Spurs.
Tick.
Chick.
Chick.
And I'm looking at him and I'm just like, there are so many things that I want to say to you right now.
And I'm and I can't like prioritizing what to say to the drunk guy living in his van behind my neighbor's hedge.
Like when you when you run down the list, the answer is say nothing to the guy, because the first communication I'm going to have with this guy is going to be when I'm standing next to a cop.
And the cop is saying, how long has this been going on?
And I say, you know what, officer?
The reality is this has all got to go.
Like this guy, he's unsafe at any speed.
I mean, it's going to happen.
One of these days, this guy is going to set his van on fire or something over there is going to happen.
But, you know, the other guy with the mosquito tattooed on his neck, like he's got his arm in a sling now.
Somehow and and the guy with the vest and I'm just like, OK, what's my problem with them?
Where do I start?
And I'm, you know, like I love living.
I love living in my neighborhood.
And I think what I am trying to learn is a little bit of acceptance.
I'm learning a little bit of like, this is my neighborhood and this is what happens.
And if I was living north of the Ship Canal, if I had paid three times more than I paid for my house, then the neighbor next door...
My neighbors around me would probably be even more entitled, and they would be out in the backyard playing yoga music.
Oh, and they would have qualms with you that they would bring up with the Homeowners Association about how you used the wrong shade of white on your mailbox or something.
Right, or something worse.
Yeah.
You know, it's so funny.
I feel like I've evolved a lot with this stuff.
There's still stuff that bugs me, and I try not to be noisome to other people, but just, I don't know.
There's still some kinds of things where, like, there's something about the basic impossibility of the situation that makes it worse.
Like, in your case, these sound like they're not bad people.
You don't want to go over there and, like, read them the riot act and be that guy who's always complaining.
I think they're super nice.
They're not broadcasting any sermons.
Nobody's parking their car on the lawn.
If you're going to have somebody making a lot of noise, how nice is it that it's a family of homeowners singing together?
That's kind of nice.
That's kind of nice.
But then you get to something like the barking dog situation, and there's so few ways to handle that in a way that isn't from the get-go confrontational.
Because by the time you say, okay, I'm going to be a patient person, even though this dog is literally barking all day.
All day long, making me into an insane person.
I'm not going to complain about it.
But then by the time you very first kind of broach the topic, you're already so loaded for bear.
And they're like, well, what do you want me to do about it?
I have a dog and it barks.
Deal.
That seems to be the attitude.
Whereas somebody like me, who's on the other end of the barking dog situation, is kind of like, well, you know, the thing is, I noticed this.
Oh.
And I bet a lot of other people do, too.
Nobody wants to be a dick and call the police or something.
And then they say nobody else has complained.
I get this a lot.
I get this a lot.
Nobody else has complained.
People love dogs.
Oh, people love their dogs.
Harf!
Harf!
Harf!
Harf!
Yesterday, somebody here in the neighborhood, I don't know who, either had their...
either had their niece over visiting, or it might be the family on the far corner that has a lot of kids.
But whatever it was, I was sitting in my bathtub, as you do in the afternoon on a Sunday, and some little girl that I estimate was between the ages of five and seven
Had discovered her scream.
Oh, yes.
The blood-curdling scream that every little girl eventually learns.
Well, now this is a question that I have for you because I was a little boy once.
Yeah.
A long time ago.
And I knew a lot of little girls.
I had lots of little girlfriends.
Some of my best friends were little girls.
Hmm.
And I do not remember in the 1970s little girls entertaining themselves with a blood-curdling scream.
Shrieking is a thing.
You see it.
Sometimes we'll go to the playground.
You know, you think you've got problems.
Your kid's like, oh, my kid's such a pain.
It's so hard to get her to put her socks on.
And then we go to the playground and there's like a child there that's like a hellion.
And yes, there are little girls who would just stand on top of the slide and shriek for an hour.
And that's a thing.
Well, so that was not – it didn't used to be a thing.
It is a cultural thing that has – It's probably vaccinations causing it.
It's probably vaccinations.
Exactly right.
You know what it is?
It's all the estrogen in our drinking water.
Chemtrails.
But somewhere along the line, little girls have been – have taught one another, and I think it is something that they learn from one another.
Yeah.
But they are – I don't think it's something that they are being encouraged to do.
What it is is it's something they are not being discouraged from doing.
And the thing is it's important to understand that it's different from somebody yelling really loud, which is annoying.
But there's a certain kind of like horror movie shriek that little girls – Yes, yes.
And then they start doing it together and they kind of egg each other on and they look for reasons to have to shriek.
And so somebody kicks a ball at them, and instead of kicking the ball back, they shriek.
And then a bird flies over, and instead of going like, oh my god, they shriek.
And so this little girl, I'm in the bathtub, so I can't see her, but she's on my block, somewhere on the block.
And she...
for an hour just takes in breath and then shrieks as if she's being murdered and then takes in breath and shrieks as if she's being murdered and the and the shriek is long and each one gets more and more evocative how do you not stop that
If that happened once, I would be like, don't ever do that again.
Well, right.
And the thing is, I hear there are other children out there playing with her, and I hear there are adults.
I hear a father's voice.
I hear people speaking to each other.
I hear people speaking to her.
And so I can only picture it.
At no point do I get out of the bathtub.
Because, again, it's one of these things like, all right, it's Sunday afternoon.
There's a family in my neighborhood that's out either in their yard or in the street.
They're playing ball or they're having a family activity.
And one of their little children has discovered her scream.
And she is really practicing it.
And no one in the family...
says, okay, Esmeralda, that's enough.
Not another one.
And then she shrieks again and they go, you know what?
Not one more or we're done.
And she does it again and then they say, okay, we're done.
And they take her inside and then they sit her down on a chair and they have a conversation with her where they say, that shrieking is not...
It's not an appropriate way to express yourself.
If you are feeling emotional, then let's talk about an appropriate way to express your emotions.
If you are having fun, there are ways to express having fun.
It doesn't register, though.
It doesn't seem to even... It must register, but it's so far beyond anything.
I am so white.
I am so white, John.
To me, a shrieking thing is not a thing that we should be doing.
It's not even going to be a discussion point.
It's not an inside-outside voice thing.
You don't just shriek.
No, you never
shriek we're not going to do that that's not going to be a thing that we shriek if you are being murdered it's the one time that that sound is appropriate right you need to if you need to communicate across a mountain valley that you are being murdered yes and that's the only or or if you are being attacked by a bear which is a form of being murdered like it's true in every instance that i can think that that is an appropriate sound the end result is murder
It's, it's unnerving though.
It's really unnerving.
And, and so, you know, you think, I think I find myself thinking cause then now I go down a think hole and I start going, well, wait a minute, this is not bothering them.
Is this potentially like a relief for them that they get to be outside now instead of having an echo around in their small living room?
Or are there people that are saying, well, I don't want to, I think this is a, this is a thing that, that happens in parents.
Ego assertive about the shrieking.
Or I don't want to inhibit her.
She'll grow out of it.
This is just a phase and it's important for her to... It's not like she's being fake murdered.
It's important for her that she make the worst sound that a human can make over and over and over and over again in a public sphere.
And I'm sitting in the bathtub and I'm like, here's again another instance where I feel like if I had a megaphone...
I would be in more trouble than I am not having a megaphone.
Because if I had a megaphone, I might get out of the bathtub, put it out the window and say, stop your child from screaming.
With the robot voice.
Stop your child from screaming.
but not doing that 20 seconds to comply i don't want to like open my bathroom window and stand there steaming john with the steam coming off of me going stop it god for the love of fucking god stop screaming it's not but you know but what it is it's just like the thing with the dog it immediately becomes a thing where you are talking to the other parent
Well, you're a human.
You're a grown-ass man, and now you seem like the crazy one.
Yeah, right.
Like, oh my gosh, suddenly this is a big problem?
No, it's been a problem for years and years and years, and I finally just had one day where I couldn't take it anymore.
Oh, you don't like little girls having fun?
Oh, you can't stand... If you were a father, you would.
And it's like, I like the sound of little girls having fun.
That is not the sound of someone having fun.
That is the sound of someone... Especially if they're in the pool with this cabin over it.
She is fully conscious that she has arrived upon a power that she has to basically rule everyone.
The child becomes aware that they have a new power that no one else can do.
No adult can make that sound.
That would be so unnerving.
You know, if an adult made that sound, you would be like, oh, fuck, this person is possessed by, like, that is a sound an adult would make just before their skin split from head to toe and the giant pterodactyl that lived inside them was freed.
It's a pterodactyl sound.
Yes.
But the child realizes like I am now not only in control of everyone that I can see, but I'm in control of the entire block.
Like no one can think because of this sound that I have learned to make.
And I don't know.
Again, it's a thing maybe that I should be thinking about ways to harness it.
If you got 40 little girls in a room and told them all to make that sound, what could...
What power could you generate from that?
I mean, you could take them to Guantanamo and all of the people in shackles there would start spilling the beans, whatever beans they had left to spill.
If you could take that sound and weaponize it and record it in high fidelity and then broadcast it on battlefields.
Instead of playing Ride of the Valkyries as your troops move into a situation, you just play highly amplified Vietnamese karaoke and little girls screaming at the top of their lungs.
Armies would flee before you.
Who would go into battle if the sound of the opposing army was that unholy cocktail of noise?
You'd throw your gun down and coward.
They could shatter glass in advance of going into the slurry, like Ella Fitzgerald.
Max L. Boy, it's hard.