Ep. 176: "The Opossum Had Distracted Me"
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hello hi john hi hi merlin how's it going good i just feel like you know that's how i feel yeah it's a it's a rainy morning in seattle the fall the winter fall is finally arrived winter fall
That was my favorite James Bond movie.
Actually, no, that was the shittiest of them.
We'll meet again at Winterfall.
Yeah, so it's good.
Yeah, things are great.
I mean, it's a busy morning, but things are great.
Yeah, you're running around a lot.
Yeah, you know, I got a lot of things to do.
A lot of ins, a lot of outs, a lot of what have yous.
You know, I'm a busy guy.
Yeah, you are a busy guy.
You know, I got my keys right here.
You want to hear them?
Jeez, Louise, that's a lot of keys.
See what I'm saying?
I'm not a one-key guy anymore.
Oh, yeah, really?
Yeah, I know.
I got all these keys.
Look at this.
Oh, my God.
How many of those do you use in a given week?
I use them all.
Use every one of them.
Look at them.
There they are.
You got your boat?
You got your other boat?
That's right.
I got my... This one's to the propane.
This one's to the lock on the tool shed.
The things you own start to own you, man.
Oh, that's right.
That is right.
You know what these are?
Analog yields.
Oh, God.
Tell me about it.
Yes.
How about yourself?
How are you?
You seem relaxed.
I'm all right.
I'm all right.
Yeah.
I need to improve my quality of sleep, but that's an ongoing thing.
I don't know.
I don't know if I'll ever have good sleep again.
Really?
You know what?
It's not anything to talk about.
It's just that I think – you know what it is?
I heard a thing on an old episode of This American Life today about people who thought their house was haunted, but it was actually carbon monoxide poisoning.
Oh, no.
And now I spent the whole morning thinking about – because according to this expert person they talked to, many of the things that people talk about when they talk about creepy, scary, haunting things are attributable to low-level carbon monoxide poisoning.
Oh, no.
And I've had this suspicion.
As you know, I'm not a lunatic.
No, no.
But I am a theorist and I have my reckons.
And I've been wondering for a while if there is some part of my house that might be harming me.
I don't think it's a ghost, but it's old and it has not been extremely well maintained.
And carbon monoxide is right in my wheelhouse.
Yeah, no, that's true.
I mean, you are...
First of all, let's just say a ceramicist and an anthropologist.
Sure, sure.
I'm a lover, a father, a thinker, and a person.
That's right.
And also not a person who is insensitive to environmental, climactic change and also haunting and also monoxide.
Yeah.
I'm trying to keep my eyes open, keep my ears open, and keep my mind open, if I may say.
You know, I don't want to shut all the doors to my mind.
Here's the thing that carbon monoxide does.
It starts shutting doors in your mind.
Oh, isn't that a terrible thing?
It's like the toxoplasmosis.
The call is coming from inside the cat.
Oh, my God.
You know, we recently had a couple of cat deaths in our extended family.
I'm sorry.
Well, don't apologize to me because I thought that they were both...
fairly unredeemable cats.
And one of them in particular.
People don't like to talk about this, John, but it's true.
Some cats are assholes.
One of them.
So one of them was just a troubled cat.
And I feel like she's gone to a better place.
One of them was a devil cat.
So these cats used to live fairly close to me.
They were not my cats.
But they were close enough.
Close enough that we had to come to an arrangement.
And then it was the toxoplasmosis.
When my baby was – she had yet to arrive on the scene, but she was in transit.
You get a lot of warnings about this these days.
And I was like, listen, whether toxoplasmosis is real or not, this is the excuse I need to send these cats to go live on a farm.
Oh, nice.
Yeah.
And there was no arguing about it because I had a piece of paper that had a long word on it.
It was like, I don't even – the real reason I want these cats to go is that they are spiritually bankrupt.
You don't need that.
But that is harder to prove.
Yeah, it doesn't have the same kind of pithy name.
It doesn't have a Greek name.
Yeah, that's right.
Or, you know, potential harm to your –
innocent baby who can say anything against that and mind control cat shit fog and the cats the thing is as much as cats can be deliberate assholes I don't think that they know that they're making you crazy I think that's that's how it works it's a it's a symbiosis it's a host organism scenario
Yeah, but, you know, you open too many doors and a lot of wind comes in.
So, you know, you start thinking about these things and you start thinking about the toxoplasmoses or you start thinking about we do not currently have a carbon monoxide dingus in our house.
You know, those are easy to find and easy to buy.
Yeah.
Well, we tested our tub for lead one time and we're not doing that again.
Yeah.
It was like, you know, continued on next Walgreens test strip.
It's so bad.
Honey, please don't drink the bathwater.
There's so many reasons not to drink the bathwater.
Oh, no.
Walgreens, give us this strip.
I don't know.
You know, I've been turning... There's a thought technology I've been turning over in my head that's not...
Particularly novel, but I don't know.
I've been thinking about how whenever something shocking comes along or something that shocks the sensibility, shocks our credulity, or it's something that just seems so wrong and so bananas, but in time starts seeming less bananas.
I don't know.
It just makes me think that I want to start being less shocked by things that happen in the world.
Not like atrocities or something.
But like, you know, I'm just realizing that, you know, you think like a Duchamp or a, you know, a Rite of Spring or something like that.
There are these things that come along that, you know, cause riots and medium posts.
And, you know, I guess I'm just starting to finally, at my advancing age, realize that everything new is shocking.
Mm-hmm.
And like you should give it some time before you just throw it out.
Sure.
Jane's addiction was shocking.
They told us all along.
It's right there right on the tin.
Nothing is shocking to them.
That's true.
So I've just been thinking about that.
Do you feel like the U.S.
government is complicit in the South American drug trade?
I don't know enough to say.
Whenever it comes to anything conspiratorial, I mostly just write it off with a kind of – it sure could happen.
It wouldn't surprise me.
It seems like – if you look back at the history – I don't want to get into the whole 80s drug thing.
But you think about like, oh, there's all these different theories and reckons about what caused what in the 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s because CIA –
The part that mitigates against dismissing all crazy theories is that so much dumb shit has happened where there were meetings and plans and calendar events and HR decisions to do some really crazy shit that makes you go like, you know what?
You never know.
Right?
I mean, there's been a lot of dumb stuff.
Oh, there's been a lot of dumb stuff.
Yeah.
I'm not putting that too strongly, am I?
No, no, no.
I think that's a – The government – I don't know.
The government – I don't know.
I don't know.
I want to – I seriously want an MP3 of that.
The government – the government – I don't know.
I don't know.
I don't know.
I just want that to be my ringtone.
I'm more worried about the lone gunman.
You know what I mean?
Yeah, for sure.
Because you don't even have to have a meeting to be crazy on your own.
Well, and all those kids out there now with carbon monoxide guns.
I got to get one of those things.
I should probably have the place.
I have to have a plumber come out this week.
I should probably also have a carbon monologist.
Sure.
That's somebody who comes out and does a monologue about carbon at your house.
Well, and you should have a diviner come out and see if you, you know.
Oh, to find out if we have water in the house and don't know it?
If there's water?
We found water.
My wife was the diviner yesterday.
She texted me and said, we got that drip under the sink again.
So now we got to call the guy.
I need one of those except for finding dead animals in my walls.
Oh, are you still at that?
So I went around the house and by I went around the house, I mean largely my mom went around the house.
And I mean, this lady loves a project, right?
And she's – when I was running for office and I was very, very busy and I was struggling with the fact that I was routinely now trapping possums in my crawl space and then –
Realizing that trapping possums wasn't enough.
They foreclosed on a house a couple of doors down from my house, and some house flippers came in and rehabilitated it.
And that caused the great rat diaspora.
Yeah, that's right.
And so then I was trapping rats.
I'm trapping possums.
I'm trapping rats.
It's just a fucking – it's not a good scene because it's also –
July and it's 110 degrees and if you trap a rat in your attic when it's 110 degrees the rat the decomposition process happens a lot faster and the company that I hired to trap the rats had this policy of like well if it's a live possum in the trap we'll try and get out there this afternoon and I'm like really yeah we're busy but if it's a dead rat
Well, that's not going anywhere.
We'll come by on Saturday.
And I'm like, it's Sunday.
You're going to let the dead rat sit in my attic for a week?
No.
And they're like, well, you know, if you read the contract.
So that was a bad relationship.
But then my mom...
loves a project put on her overalls which are covered with different colors of blue paint and are worn out at the knees her favorite overalls coveralls and she came out and she started uh filling every hole the size of a dime in the outside of the house and she just was having the time of her life
rat proofing this house.
Wow.
But there, and so all the rats, we captured them all.
We got all the possums.
We got everybody out of the fucking house.
And then I walked in one day, and there was the smell of a dead animal somewhere.
And I wandered around the house, and I was trying to find it, trying to find it, trying to find it.
Couldn't find it, couldn't find it.
Finally, upstairs in one of the rooms,
I realized that my suspicion is that the rat climbed up in the wall and got to right next to the heating vent.
But when I took the vent face off, I couldn't.
It was like on the other side of the sheet metal.
It wasn't in the HVAC.
It was like in the wall outside of the HVAC.
And it just died up there.
And so it was like, oh, you miserable bastards.
I would eradicate your entire kind.
I would stand there and kill you in front of each other so that you would know that you've transgressed against a monster.
But so I sealed up that heating vent and
taped it completely off and waited for the smell to go away and was just like that's just i guess when you own a house i've been in this house seven years and nothing has died in the walls yet but now we're at war with these rats and i thought i had trapped them all but somebody got in and then we sealed it anyway so no rats no critters and then two weeks ago
I hear something crawling around.
I'm like, you sons of bitches.
And so then I go all the way around the house with a high, you know, like a 10,000 watt flashlight.
And I find a hole.
that we didn't look for because the stupid ass company that was trapping possums for me told me that there were no holes in this particular location.
And then I found a hole in that location.
And I was like, you guy with your possum trapping coveralls, you didn't actually get up on the ladder like you said you did.
So to make a long story short,
when I was gone, when I was down in San Francisco, I started getting reports from the various people who look after my property that there was a strange smell in the house.
And I was like, really?
Did I forget to take the recycling out?
And the report came back, I don't think it's the recycling.
And so when I got home, sure enough, there was a very, it's a, you know, you know what the smell is.
It's a very particular smell.
And so I spent the entire week
with my divining rod trying to find the location of this beast and could not.
Short of tearing the drywall apart, I could not find where this critter had decided to breathe his last breath.
And so all I could do was just sit in this house that sort of vaguely smelled like a dead something.
And I'm just like, why?
Why?
Why this?
Yeah.
I mean, in the grand scheme of things.
Yeah, but you got to live there.
Yeah.
You know, it's funny.
Houses are a funny thing because, you know, you feel like you've closed the windows, you shut the door, maybe you've even kind of weatherproofed the door, but you're not even close.
I mean, a house as old as ours, like we have a...
Almost 90-year-old house.
And I think it gets like an old man.
It gets a little loose and flabby.
And it was probably never like the fanciest place to begin with.
But for me, this started in Florida.
And when you first hear, there's a factoid that you can't unhear in life.
Which is that there are certain kinds of, I'm going to call them varmints.
I hope that's not very progressive.
But there are certain kinds of varmints where if their head can get through it, their body can get through it.
I believe this is true of roaches.
And I'm pretty sure it's true of rats.
And I know it's true of squid.
You ever seen those squid videos?
Oh, yeah.
The squids will get right in your house.
You don't want a squid up there.
Well, and mice and ants.
But they got the, you know, the skeleton and the musculature of these varmints, you know, will collapse through a whole like the size of a freaking dime.
Yeah, they got detachable penis.
Yeah, that's true.
And so, you know, of course, in Florida, it's pointless.
I mean, they're coming home in the grocery bags.
They're coming through the walls, you know, coming through the MTV.
You're just getting all kinds of roaches and stuff in the house.
But we had our first mouse incursion.
was probably around the time, not long before my kid came on the scene, which made it extra kind of crazy.
You don't want a kid and a mouse in the same house.
If you've got a mouse, you've got a mouse.
If you've got a kid, you've got a kid.
You know what it is?
Again, my favorite word, vulnerability.
It makes you feel vulnerable when you know that there are mammals in particular that can just kind of wander in and out of the house and decide if it's a place that they want to stay.
Yeah.
Who knows what the mouse is thinking?
Is the mouse watching you masturbate?
Yeah.
That's not a thing I want to consider.
Might be a turn on for the mouse.
See, it's a mammal, right?
They could be communicating telepathically with each other.
They could be alien life forms from a different planet masquerading as mice.
Yeah.
You know, like, you know, if a crab wandered into your house, you would think, well, that's kind of weird.
You know, like, how did that happen?
And I have to say, you know, I have no ill will against the crab.
I think a crab that came into your house probably just wandered in.
Maybe it was checking things out.
It was in the neighborhood.
But, you know, I see that happen all the time.
And I and I, you know, I shoo him out.
Shoo.
Shoo crab.
Shoo.
Shoo.
Yeah, but the thing is with – so in the rainy season here, you get the sugar ants.
And then at any time, you could just get mice or rats.
We're fortunate, knock on everything, literally everything that we haven't had rats.
But a mouse is looking for a place to camp out and maybe bring family.
And I think when you see one, that's often an emissary.
That's an explorer, a scout.
Sure, or somebody from the mouse State Department.
They're coming in there.
I don't know exactly how it works.
I have a pretty good idea how it works with ants.
I've read part of an E.O.
Wilson book.
But with the ants, it's real simple, which is when it rains, they don't have a place to live anymore.
And in San Francisco, it doesn't rain at all until it rains.
And then when it rains, it rains really hard.
And so basically, usually around, well, you know, we don't really get rain in California anymore, but definitely December and January, it's full on like sugar ant time.
And they will come in.
Now, there's just not a whole lot you can do about that.
You can hire companies to like stake the place out and spray stuff, but like that's not going to go away.
You got to just kind of make your peace with the ants.
Right.
But I will not abide a rodent.
Right.
And what is the San Francisco spider story?
Nothing like Seattle.
We get some awesome single spiders, I think probably bachelor spiders, come and hang out, usually in the bathroom.
I love them.
My family doesn't love them.
I am always the one who is charged with the catch and release program for spiders.
I love a spider.
I feel like a spider might be good luck.
I don't even believe in good luck.
Yeah, I'm a fan of spiders, but as you know, in Seattle, there are multiple kinds of spiders.
I mean, it's pretty bad, right?
I mean, it's really legitimately too many spiders.
It's too many spiders, and the garden spiders, you watch the garden spiders get fatter and fatter and fatter throughout the fall.
So you'll see a spider, and you're like, oh, look at that guy.
And then the next day, it's visibly bigger, and you're like, huh, that spider.
that spider's getting kind of big.
He's got some rings and a walking stick.
Yeah, and then you're like, a few days later, and you're like, that is a freaking fat-ass spider.
That spider's body is big as a walnut now, and I am not any longer like...
Let the spider be.
And they're mostly ladies.
Is that right?
Can you tell from the way they're dressed?
Yeah, just in sort of their attitude.
They're just really to interrupt.
They're sassy.
But what I don't want is to be walking through my own garden and take one of these in the face.
Yes.
And so I walk...
For three months out of the year, I walked through my yard with one hand up in front of my body.
No surprise spiders for you.
Yeah.
And the thing is if you make the mistake of putting your hand up where the tips of your fingers are at eye level –
You will catch a spider web in your forehead.
I don't like that.
And so you got to keep your hand up above your head and out far enough that you can hit a web and like karate chop it.
So now my daughter walks through the yard with her hand up.
She doesn't know why.
She's just imitating daddy and we're walking through the yard with our shark fins out.
And chopping down spider webs.
And even with that technique, I catch three spider webs in the face pretty much every day.
And then you got the house spiders.
And there are the fast-moving, the super-fast-moving ceiling spiders.
And then there are the...
innumerable kinds of spiders, let's say.
And I am in a family of ladies, right?
I'm the only guy in my family.
My mom doesn't, I mean, literally a lobster could be on my mom's ceiling and she wouldn't flinch, but...
But there are other characters in my clan who do not want a spider around.
Well, in fairness, I just want to say that I think of the – I guess we'll use the word phobias.
Of the phobias, the spider one is there are a lot of people who are utterly unhinged by the idea that there even might be a spider in the room.
Well, and particularly the fast-moving spiders.
Again, a surprise spider.
A surprise spider where it's like, that spider's not moving very fast.
That spider's just hanging out.
And then the spider moves fast.
And you're like, oh, no.
Oh, no.
No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
So I understand, but I'm pro-spider and I'm kind to spiders, but it seems like at a certain point in the year, my number one job, above all else, is moving house spiders outside.
And I have no way of knowing whether a house spider...
can survive outside, or whether the house spider turns around and immediately walks back into my house through one of its many, many holes.
Right, right, right.
Do you think it has that sense of, see, it's something we do a lot.
Now I'm thinking about all the varieties of things that we have around here.
Like if we're walking down, I'll pick up my kid up at school, we're walking around the corner of the school, there will frequently be little, tiny, super fuzzy, yellow, I want to call them caterpillars.
I like them so far.
Maybe half an inch.
Very, very tiny.
And they'll be working their way across the sidewalk.
And I'm not sure how to handle this because my daughter will immediately go, oh, we've got to get it out of the road.
We've got to get it out of the sidewalk.
And so we move it.
This happened last week.
She picks up a caterpillar because she's awesome.
And she goes and puts it back in what we guess is where it wanted to originally have been.
And then we're walking along.
We see another one who had made further progress.
And she says, oh, that's its friend.
It wants to be with its friend.
She goes back, picks up the caterpillar sub one, and then puts it over so it can be with its friend.
Now, part of me, I had an environmental ethics class in college.
I've thought about this a lot.
And I sometimes wonder, like, should we, A, pick it up and get it out of the way to somewhere we think it belongs?
B, pick it up and put it with who we're calling its friend?
Or C, leave it where it is because nature?
Right.
Right?
How much should we intervene?
Now, I'm just here to tell you, like, I do not, like, I'll kill the shit out of a flying insect.
I do not like a flying insect.
I will go way out of my way.
I will inconvenience myself.
I will pause the television to get a spider out of the house, you know, even though, A, I didn't mind it being there, and B, it'll probably come back in eventually.
Probably.
What's your general feeling on moving animals?
God.
uh flying insects in my house i don't you know the other day there was a moth in the house and i was sitting there in the company of uh of some friends and the moth was doing it's like sort of flight and the moth went by me and i grabbed it by the wing out of the air
Oh, wow, like Mr. Miyagi.
And that was a good party trick.
But then I felt bad for the moth.
And I let it go, and it kept flying in contravention of what I thought would happen.
They seem very delicate, like any injury at all, and it's going to lose the ability to fly.
Yeah, but this guy kept on keeping on.
And so I was like, shit, you earned the right to live.
um just by you know your indomitable spirit yeah uh but i lost one i lost my dad's harris tweed blazer to moths and i think they're different moth the big moths don't eat the wool as i understand i think the blazer eaters are a lot smaller they make little little tiny holes
Yeah, they're the little ones.
But they really went after this blazer, which I'd had my whole life and which my dad had had since the 50s.
And it was his signature coat.
And he handed it down to me in threadbare but serviceable condition.
And then under my stewardship, this thing was attacked by mods.
Yeah.
and tattered happened on your watch yeah it did it did i had to bear the responsibility for it and so moths uh like i i broke no truck with them i am i'm but i don't know exactly how to kill them other than carbon monoxide and as you know that
That creates the illusion of a haunting.
So I don't want that.
You don't want to haunt a moth.
No, no, no, no.
Transitively.
But other things, bees, I try to shoo them out.
Wasps, I try to shoo them out.
Flies, I kill with impunity.
Fruit flies, definitely.
Oh, I got a whole project literally right now happening in my kitchen.
Yeah.
I got a project.
Have you got some of the balsamic vinegar in a cup?
I got a red wine trap working right now.
Oh, that's nice.
That's fun.
You take a bowl.
You take that bottle of wine from a few months ago you never finished.
You pour that in.
What I do over the top of the bowl, I put two layers of saran wrap.
Oh, hello.
Two layers.
Then I take a bamboo skewer and I poke maybe 11 holes at irregular intervals so they don't see the pattern, right?
You know, they're pattern matching.
Oh, absolutely.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
You don't want to make it clear.
It should look like, you know, it's like a tiger trap, right?
It should be like terrain.
And then they're like, oh, hey, you know, free J. Laura Cabernet from a few months ago.
They get in those tiny little holes and then they can't get out.
And I just, you know what I do?
I just put it right in the compost bin.
Oh, this is just compost.
Don't worry.
Oh, really?
Oh, so you put it in a disposable... It's double disguised.
It's not disposable.
I'll take it out eventually.
I got the presence of mind.
Oh, I see.
I see.
Oh, you put it right in the compost.
Oh, it's literally... It's in there right now.
Oh, my God.
You're not kidding around.
It's just compost.
Come on in.
Sure.
Hey, it's just another little jar of wine.
Here's the thing.
Why do we have fruit flies?
Well, we take the compost out pretty regularly, and then we got one of those garbage cans where you pop it up, and it's got one of those fancy garbage cans where you open it with your foot.
One side is garbage, the other side is recycling.
We use the other side for compost.
We try to take that out regularly, but you also got to wash out the actual can because that detritus will attract many of these various varmints.
Now, my concern is, hmm, why so many fruit flies?
We don't even eat that much fruit.
And we take out the compost pretty often.
So now my concern is, is there something else rotting somewhere that I don't know about?
You see where I'm going with this?
Oh, yes, I do.
I do.
Because it's, you know, the circle of life, Hakuna Matata.
You don't get one kind of varmint.
Varmints attract other varmints.
See, varmints beget varmints.
That's in the Bible.
It is.
I think it's in Ecclesiastes.
Now, you get something with the bees.
I did not know this.
I was admonished almost exactly two years ago.
I helped chaperone a field trip to the pumpkin patch.
And you know who loves pumpkin patches is Yellow Jackets.
Yeah.
And our group of five-year-olds were set upon by Yellow Jackets.
One kid got the shit stinged out of him.
Yeah, yeah.
And so I'm going to be the hero.
I'm whacking and waving.
So first of all, I learned, A, I'm hearing, you tell me if this comports with your information, your knowledge base.
Number one, don't wave and whack.
At a yellow jacket because that just makes them mad and or attracts them.
Now here, B, you ready for this?
Don't smash a yellow jacket because guess what happens?
The other yellow jackets.
They get mad and they're attracted.
They smell a dead yellow jacket and apparently that makes them swarm on you.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
You've heard my tour stories, right, about driving through the Midwest at certain times of the year.
Yeah.
Certain times of the year when the big bugs are out.
Oh, yeah, right, right, right.
When your windshield is just covered with all of these bugs.
It's just caked with it like the top of a German chocolate cake with just dead bugs of every size and shape.
And then when you stop...
to get gas or to go in to get into the hot case and get some JoJo's, you come back out and the front of your vehicle is just swarmed with yellow jackets because they're there to eat the other bugs, the dead bugs.
Nature's a dick.
It's terrible.
And so then you're trying to get back into your vehicle with yellow jackets everywhere and you can't keep them out.
And so then you're driving across the country with yellow jackets in the car.
That's not good for anybody.
Being on tour is really not as glamorous as it sounds.
I've been in your van.
I know that.
You have been in the van.
That's right.
Get in the van.
Yeah.
I don't know.
It could be carbon monoxide.
I should probably get it checked out.
But then my feeling is, and this just tells you where I am in life.
I go, okay, well, now I start having this sense, oh, it's probably carbon monoxide.
I'm probably haunted by elements.
Oh, haunted by elements.
That's a thing I had never considered.
So now, let's say I find out we got carbon monoxide.
What am I going to do about it?
How are we going to get the furnace vented better?
And it's where I become irrational, where I start compartmentalizing and thinking maybe if I don't look for the mouse, there won't be a mouse.
It's like Heisenberg uncertainty mice.
Schrodinger's fruit fly.
As soon as you look at the mouse... There's a 50% chance there will be a mouse there.
That's right.
That's just science.
That's precisely right.
And what happens is...
because of spooky action at a distance, this mouse and other mice are all in the same orientation.
So as soon as you look at this mouse, you have also predetermined the posture of mice sometimes very far away.
It's a kind of predestination.
And it's impossible to know, which is the great thing about physics.
So much of it is impossible to know.
That's comforting to me in a lot of ways.
I'm talking about mouse physics now.
No, I understand.
But I also feel like in the same way that you have – let's be honest.
Let's go back a little bit.
You have established a certain kind of a detente.
You've got a separate piece that you've made with various kinds of animals, you and the raccoons, you and the crows.
You've worked some things out.
You've looked at each other.
I feel the same way.
I feel like spiders are like anchovies.
Let's work this out.
I don't mean the kind of swimming kind.
I mean the kind you get in a can and put on your pizza.
Sure, the salty ones.
That's salty ones.
Let's make a deal here.
We're not going to surprise each other.
Right?
That's the thing.
I think we should have a way where we could say, almost like a couple who wants to get divorced but has to live together, you stay in this room.
You have that room.
You have that room.
You know what?
You can have the bathroom all night long as long as you don't jump on me if I urinate in the middle of the night.
That's a good policy.
Not the anchovies, but the spiders.
But to me, it's a similar principle.
If you order a Caesar salad, you got to expect that you're going to get spiders on it.
It's right there on the tin.
It says Caesar.
It's going to have anchovies in it.
But if you order a pizza, you have no – there's no reason that you should have to find an anchovy there.
Or a spider.
Or a spider.
If a spider leapt out of your Caesar salad, you would want to have words.
Spiders are the anchovies of house pets.
I couldn't agree more.
I feel like my relationship with raccoons and crows is based primarily on, in the raccoon's case, the opposable thumb.
And the fact that it looks at me knowingly and I have seen them in action enough over the years that I feel like we need to reach an accommodation.
I will allow you to have tremendous leeway in my world.
And you let me pass.
And maybe one day I will call upon you for a favor.
The crows, on the other hand, are, I think, running the whole show.
I think a crow's mind moves very quickly.
Yeah.
We've talked about this before.
Well, a little bit, yeah.
But, you know, they're running the whole show.
The more I see the way they work, the more I feel like a lot of the mysteries...
are just the crows like laying a path.
Understanding crows could explain a lot.
I think it could.
Well, let me give you some context for this.
I show up at my daughter's school and pick her up as I do every afternoon and I'm picking her up at the time.
It's after snack.
The children have left the playground and now there's lots of children garbage and children foods and like little bits of sticky things all over the place because they just had their snack.
Yeah.
And there are very few children, but there are three kinds of birds in this space.
You got your pigeons, which is your fat urban pigeon, your big basic flying rat, dumb as a bag of hammers pigeon.
You got some seagulls who seem disoriented and not entirely sure why they're there.
They're so confused.
Right?
You got seagulls because we're – But they're big.
Oh, they're seabirds, John.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, to be a seabird, there are no small seabirds.
No.
Only small parts.
No.
And then, and then, and then, in fewer in number, but much greater in force, you see these little fellows up here on the corner.
They're looking down and you see the crows and they're just, they're watching everything.
It's a fucking heckle and jekyll.
Oh, I know.
Yeah.
I think those are magpies, technically.
Is a magpie different from a crow?
I think they are very different.
Somebody sent us a diagram of this, and I should probably pull that up.
You know, they're like the crows.
They're like the racist crows in Dumbo.
Okay.
Yeah.
And so the pigeons are – I don't know how the pigeons – I just keep waiting for them to kind of like fall over and forget how to live.
They're not super bright.
They're walking around.
They're like eating bottle caps and shit.
You get the seagulls who –
are sort of like the meth users of the playground.
And then way up on high, you've got these crows that are just taking their time.
They are on a different time scale.
They are seeing everything.
They're moving slowly.
They're like Paul Sorvino, right?
Yeah, that's right.
Paul didn't move fast because he didn't have to move fast.
He was like a crow.
Yeah, Paul didn't have to move fast.
He was watching everything.
The thing about a crow is he's not going to just fly down and eat a French fry.
He's going to watch the French fry for a while.
He's going to learn about the French fry.
He's going to see who's interested in the French fry.
He's going to remember that and he's going to tell his friends.
You meet back at the parking lot over by the Safeway.
There's going to be some serious high-level crow discussions about that French fry.
And what I notice about crows is that they will let a seagull eat the French fry.
They are not – like they see a French fry.
They're watching it.
They're learning about it.
Siegel comes in, eats the French fry.
The crow's not disappointed.
He learned.
There's always more French fries.
He knows more about that French fry than that Siegel will ever know.
It's like Lex Luthor.
He can read the candy wrapper and know about the secrets of life.
I don't really know much about the DC universe.
You're not missing anything.
So here's the thing that I don't – here's what I learned over the past year is that I do not have very much respect for possums.
The one thing about possums that I do respect is that I have seen a possum and a cat –
live in harmony with one another.
I have watched a possum and a cat encounter one another in my own yard, and it wasn't like all the way to hail fellow well met, but it certainly was that they each had diplomatic papers.
They could move freely.
They could move freely.
Yeah.
And that surprised me because I would not see a possum and a cat.
I would not imagine that they occupied the same emotional space.
But it seemed like they really did.
And so I went to my mother, the sage, and I said, possum and cat, describe.
and she says, and then I said, activate.
And she said at one point in her life, she had several cats that she fed outside and that the cats and the possums would eat out of the same bowl at the same time.
Wow.
And I was like, okay, that is, there's something going on in nature that,
where those two species have reached an agreement, a détente, and it increases my respect for the possum as it decreases my respect for the cat.
Right?
And I don't mean to be colonial here.
No, no.
I mean, you and I were from a different time.
Yeah, that's right.
We're from an earlier age.
We learned about the world in a different language.
So I've had a very momentous week.
You know a little bit of this story.
I didn't know if you want to talk about it.
It's a crazy story.
It's a crazy story.
And it's not the entirety of how momentous this week has been.
I'm a little curious how you're going to pivot from cats and possums to your Filson bag.
But I'm here.
Yeah.
Okay.
Well, so last November, I saw a possum in my yard.
And this is prior to my mom's closing up all the holes.
Oh, this is when you were – is this the time when you were waiting for it?
You were facing it down?
You were like – you were sitting there at night in a doorway waiting for the possum.
Waiting for the possum because I wanted to see – I wanted to track its behavior because at this time in my life, I was fairly pro-possum.
And I was like, there's a possum in my yard.
He's coming around.
I would like to know more about his behavior.
That's almost like if somebody wanted to date your daughter, with all respect.
You would say, this is something we can talk about, but first we need to sit down.
That's right.
We need to hash a couple things out.
Yeah, I'm going to watch your reactions to the following questions.
And while you're doing that, I'm also going to be...
playing with a dagger on the coffee table.
Tell me, using only single words, how you feel about my daughter.
So I watch this possum, and this is the time when I first sort of see the possum encountering the cat.
And I'm like, you know, it's Wild Kingdom back here.
I'm learning a lot.
The raccoons are...
Very clearly watching this all go down from their perch high in the trees.
And they've got no dog in the race, right?
They're just taking it all in.
But the possum is a ding-a-ling.
And he's blind.
But he's out there.
The cat's out there.
And then the possum goes under the house.
And I'm like, oh, shit.
Possum's under the house.
That's no good.
And then right around the late autumn, I hear the possum in the walls.
And I'm like, fuck.
I was watching the possum.
I had a pretty good bead on him.
And then the possum faked me out and moved into the house.
And because of the way my house is constructed, there was the original house and then there was the addition to the house.
The original house was built in 1912 and then the addition was built in 1930.
But what they did is they put the addition on the side of the house where the chimney was and the chimney goes all the way down.
You know, that's the first thing they build.
Yeah.
The chimney is down there and what had formerly been the outside of the chimney is now enclosed inside of a wall and the possum got under the house and then went up the chimney but inside the house.
So anyway, the possum's in there and he's scrubbing around and he's scribbling and scrubbing and I can hear him or her.
I think it's a her.
Just by the way, she carries herself.
Yeah.
And
So the winter goes on and I'm not – I haven't reconciled myself all the way to like call the varmint people because I feel like this possum is going to – this possum is just here for a little bit, just visiting.
And then she's going to move on.
But she didn't.
She stuck around.
And I could hear her.
Still just a single possum.
As far as I know.
They're solitary animals.
But I hear her at night.
Unless they got a brood.
Well, see, this is the thing.
I hear her at night, scritching, scritch, scritch, scritch.
And I'm like, ah, God damn it.
But I don't call the critter control because I just feel like, listen, this is just a temporary situation, and I'm going to pretend that this isn't happening.
So one night I'm in my house, and the possum's making a lot of noise, and I'm like, ah, God damn it.
Okay.
Okay, possum.
We've crossed the threshold.
But I was leaving to go on the Jonathan Colton cruise.
This is at this point February.
This is February.
This is not – I was not leaving the next day.
I was leaving very early in the morning the following day.
So I was lying in bed and I'm like, you've only got one day tomorrow to deal with all the stuff you need to deal with before you leave.
on a long cruise and you can't deal with this possum right now and that sucks she's she's really making noise in the wall and i am mad but i have to just roll over and go back to sleep because this possum is not a thing i can handle
right now.
It feels like such an act of maturity to go, you know, as much as this is driving me nuts, I'm going to put aside the scritchy scratchy and I'm going to be an adult homeowner and go to sleep because I have to go get on a boat and there's stuff to do.
Whereas any other night, literally like any other night, you would have been out there with a 10,000 watt flashlight trying to find this thing.
That's right.
This would have been, this was the moment where I was like, all right, game's over.
I'm coming in.
I'm chasing you down.
So the next morning, pretty early in the morning, my phone rings.
And unlike most, I mean, and I think because I was about to leave on the cruise, I was like, I'd better not let everything go to voicemail.
I'd better answer the phone because I'm leaving.
And if this is something that needs to be dealt with, I should know.
And pick up the phone and the person on the other line says, this is John Roderick.
Do you, you know, with the following birth date or whatever?
I'm like, yeah, who's this?
And she says, I'm from Visa or I'm from American Express.
And your American Express card is being used to buy gasoline somewhere.
And they didn't know your zip code or whatever.
And we're calling to find out if that's you.
And I was like, what?
Impossible.
She said, well, somebody just tried to buy gas with it in some neighboring town.
I was like, well, let me get to the bottom of this.
And so I wake up and I go downstairs because, you know, when I come into the house, the first thing I do is take off my pants.
So my pants are downstairs.
Well, I get downstairs and I'm still asleep and I'm looking around and like the back door is open.
And then I realized that the house has been rifled.
And I'm on the phone with American Express and I'm like, my house has been robbed.
And she's like, oh, I'm sorry.
Well, do you want us to cancel the card?
And I was like, yes, cancel everything.
And then I'm standing there in the early morning with the realization that while I was in the house,
I had been broken into and ransacked and I had heard them and I thought it was the possum and I rolled over and went back to sleep.
After two decades of hyper nighttime vigilance where I was up
Perimeter checking, walking around my yard in a bathrobe and a sword.
Nothing happened in any of the neighborhoods I've lived in at night where I didn't know it, watch it, report on it.
this one instance where the possum had distracted me with her, with her occupation, I rolled over and went back to sleep.
The one time I have been like robbed while I'm in the house.
And so of course it's a, it's feeling of violation, but more than that, like it is totally against my brand.
Yeah.
Like I'm sitting upstairs in a room literally bristling with weapons.
I've been in some ways waiting for someone to break into my house for the last 20 years so that I could choose the saber.
And here I am just like the fucking possum.
It's some kind of mind twisteroo.
And so then I realized, shit, I'm leaving on the cruise tomorrow at 7 a.m.
and I'm searching my house and they stole my passport.
They stole my passport and my wallet, which had all my ID in it.
They stole my computer, which I didn't care about, or my iPad, which I didn't care about.
They stole my entire Sonos account.
stereo system.
You're kidding.
The whole thing.
They sat and took the time to unhook the whole... They must have thought no one was home.
Well, but they never came upstairs.
And upstairs I have... That's the real vault.
Enough said.
So they knew I was home.
So I called the cops.
Oh, and so in addition to that stuff, they took my challenge coins...
They took a box of my dad's political lapel pins and tie tacks.
What?
Like Hubert Humphrey tie tack and, you know, like Truman beats Dewey lapel button.
All this, you know, this whole like box of little pins that he collected and then I collected.
Took that.
Took like a collection of foreign currency that wasn't worth anything.
It was just a collection of foreign currency.
And they took my 100-ounce silver ingot that I was using as a doorstop that for 20 years I've been using as a doorstop.
And my mom has said over the whole 20 years, somebody's going to steal that one of these days.
And I'm like, nobody knows what it is.
It's a 100-ounce ingot.
Like, no crook is going to know what it is.
It's just a hunk.
Well, they knew what it was, and they took it.
Oh.
And so, but of all, of everything, I'm most devastated by the passport because A, I'm traveling out of the country in a day, but B, that passport was in its, it was trending toward its retirement, right?
Oh, it's got all the stamps.
Everything.
The passport is nine years and six months old.
This trip, the Joko Cruise was going to be the last time I traveled on it, and then it was going to go in the shoebox.
I was going to get a new one.
It had stamps of...
All the rock and roll touring.
It had stamps from, not just from South America, but from all of the, from the time I went to Niger and Djibouti and Ethiopia just recently.
It was very important to me this passport.
All gone.
And so I spent that entire day running around town.
I went to the DMV and I was like, I need a new driver's license.
And I sat for the photograph and filled out all the forms.
And then I went up to the counter and I was like, great, can I get this?
enhanced driver's license because that will at least allow me to that's the one that has the passport abilities yeah and they said oh well we'll send it to you in 15 days and i was like what no i just went through i just spent two hours at the dm fucking v and you're and you can't give it to me today and they're like what no and i and i'm thinking back to like my first driver's license
I'm thinking back to all the driver's licenses I have had over the years, and I am not crazy.
They used to give them to you right then.
They would take your picture.
They would laminate them.
They do it right in front of you.
You watch it come out of the little dingus.
Yeah, here you go.
And they're like, no, no, no.
Nowadays, we mail them to you 15 days from now.
I'm like, this doesn't help me.
I'm burning daylight here.
So I run down to the passport office and I'm like, look, I know you can expedite this.
Can you do it today?
And they're like, oh, sure, for $1,100 or whatever.
I was like, okay, let's do it.
And then I'm down at getting my picture taken at a Kinko's.
I'm so frazzled by this point.
But I do get a passport and I question whether I should go, right?
Of course.
I was amazed that you came.
But I was like, I'm going to go on the cruise.
Like I'm just going to –
There's nothing I can do.
I can't hunt for the burglar.
I don't know how you did that.
I mean when I heard this, I think probably from Jonathan or maybe Paul.
But anyway, I was just like – I was just sitting there and thinking like – because you know me.
Like before I travel, I'm frenetic about everything.
Yeah.
the money stuff and the time stuff and everything stuff and i just could not imagine you knowing that like you didn't have credit cards you didn't have id and just if anything else just the sense of like wanting to like go burrow into your bed with a sword and and like process what had happened i couldn't believe you were able to walk away without really processing that well and in a way it was a lesson for me of like how
All this talk that we have done over the years about the materialism that has infected my life, my thrifting habit, and the fact that I no longer have five personal items that I have imbued with significance.
I have 500 that I have imbued with all the significance where it's like this thing and that thing and that thing.
And remember the time I bought that thing?
And this was when I had my first kiss.
when I had my first case kiss in April of last year, I had this thing on, you know, just like this mania of attaching emotional significance to physical objects as a way of keeping the demon dogs at bay.
But in that moment I realized, Oh, I don't give a shit about anything.
Like if it all burns down, I don't care.
I just want that passport back because it has the, that really does have emotional significance.
And yeah,
And that silver bar, because I bought it in 1982 with the money I saved from mowing lawns.
But like a computer?
Who cares?
Burn it.
And so I just said, I'm leaving.
And I had a very interesting conversation with the police.
They showed up right away.
It was a female lead officer who said, well, this is probably a meth-ed.
To come into a house where there is someone inside...
Is totally desperate behavior.
this person's going to end up dead or these people are going to end up dead.
It's insane to do.
And so it has to just be drugs.
And, but the problem was it was, it was diabolical.
This person found the one window in my house that didn't have an alarm on it.
That was where the, where the windowsill was a little bit rotten or dry rotted because all the windows in my house are original and
And they took a footlocker off of my porch, moved it around under the window, jammed a shovel that they found in my barn.
Oh, my God.
Popped the window.
And they waited for my timed lights that I have around the house to go off, which they went off.
They were timed to go off at 3 a.m.
And so my sense was, holy shit, my house has been cased.
They've been watching me for weeks.
I had no idea.
I was scanning my brain for like, have there been any suspicious cars?
I would have noticed because this is my brand.
All right.
Who are these geniuses?
And then the suggestion arose.
I forget who made it at first, but it was made by several people.
Do you think it's a Roderick on the line listener?
Because the items they took are exactly the things that are either crazy or diabolical.
roderick on the line listener would take your silver bar your passport your dad's political pins this is like crazy land maybe it's some roderick on the line listener who has triangulated to your house and is either obsessed or
is so, is such a criminal mastermind that they are doing this to get your attention as some kind of like, like they are mind gaming you.
And I was like, oh no, I cannot consider that possibility because I know there are a lot of very smart Roderick on the line listeners who have myriad talents.
I do not want to think about this.
So I went on the cruise.
Well, how'd you end up on that theory?
I mean, had you at length discarded that?
I mean, is there a chance?
I know this sounds like a long shot, but if it is somebody who's a meth head, as they say, is there a chance they just got really lucky?
Well, I dismissed that possibility above all else.
I imagined that it was three people because
Of the way the house was rifled, I just felt like they're unhooking the Sonos system.
They had staged a guitar by the back door, but I think I probably rustled in bed or they got spooked or something and they ran out.
But not before.
Oh, and they stole my Filson bag, which I think they probably put everything in or they put the ingot and the passport in, took the Filson bag.
Anyway, so I came back.
I had to go through all the rigmarole.
I got a Costco card, got all my new credit cards, changed all my passwords, had to go in and change all the auto payments to the new credit card.
It's just a major hassle.
But the worst part was, even though I...
gone on the cruise and was gone for whatever, 10 days after the theft.
When I came back, the feeling was still very raw.
I couldn't sleep at night.
I was, it wasn't just that I was waking up at night.
I would just lay there and couldn't sleep.
I was waiting for them to come back.
Also, they took my car keys and,
And had ransacked the car.
Oh, my God.
So this is why I'm thinking like there's got to be three of them.
There wasn't anything in the car except some like Chinese money that they took.
I was like, all right, good luck spending that.
They're not even really – that's not even real money.
They're not even on a real international exchange rate.
Anyway, so I didn't sleep for months, honestly.
And I reinforced all the windows on the house and I re-dug all the tiger traps.
But I never felt safe.
And fortunately, that night, my daughter wasn't staying there.
It was just me alone in the house that night.
but i just felt always a little bit on edge and i was i was scanning my neighbors faces like you know it was bad right okay so i run for office can i ask you one thing yeah of course um i mean you always hear the stories about what police tell you about how it's likely to go one way or another what was the general prognosis from the police about catching the person and potentially getting any stuff back
So a couple things.
The Seattle officer said they took your car keys and that means two nights from now they're going to come steal your car.
So you got to get your car re-keyed.
And so there were a lot of things that I had to do.
I had to set in motion before I went on the cruise.
I called some friends.
I was like, can you get my car re-keyed?
Can you get my house re-keyed?
Because they stole the house keys too.
And my good friends were like, yes, this is a pain in the ass, but I understand and I will do these things for you.
And so my car got rekeyed, my house got rekeyed while I was gone.
The detective, not detective, I'm sorry, the patrol officer found a pair of rubber gloves in the garden.
And she said, oh, this is good because typically they wear rubber gloves to avoid leaving fingerprints.
And then they take the rubber gloves off and throw them on the ground.
Which now have fingerprints in them.
So we're going to take the fingerprints and we're going to start a case and burp-a-derp-a-derp.
You'll probably never see this stuff again, but if we get a match, we can prosecute.
So when I got back, I called the detective that it had been assigned to, got the detective's voicemail, left a voicemail, never got a call back.
I had cataloged all the serial numbers of the things.
I sent them.
I called pawn shops around.
No hits.
So I reconciled myself to the fact that these things were gone, but all year I'm walking around and I'm thinking passports come back to me.
Can, if you can find me, find me because I lost my first passport.
I was at a house party in, in Moscow, Idaho in 1990 and I lost my first passport and
And that passport had all the stamps in it from my first trip overseas.
which was back during a time when you still got a passport stamp when you went from Portugal to Spain, or you still got a passport stamp when you went from France to Belgium.
There were still passport controls between all those European countries that now there are none.
So I was getting all these, what I later learned to treasure, which was these old-fashioned, just prior to the institution of the European Union,
Passport stamps, including Morocco.
There's a visa in there for Algeria back in the 80s.
And I went to East Germany several times, East Berlin, like all this stuff in there.
And I lost this fucking passport at a party because I was drunk and who knows.
And it has haunted me.
Because I have all my dad's passports.
I have my dad's first passport from 1948.
And every subsequent renewal of his passports, it makes a little book.
Not a little book, a big book.
And I love them.
I love his old passports.
And I wanted the same collection for myself.
And the first one, the foundation, the keystone is gone.
And now I had lost my second one, and it actually – I mean, I have one in the middle.
I have my second one.
That would be – did you have the one from the walk?
That's the one from the walk from the early days of rock and roll touring.
I mean, that's a key, key, key one.
But then I lost my third passport, and when I was on the cruise, I honestly was having this thing of like –
God, are you trying to teach me something about the impermanence of things?
Are you trying to teach me that the passport is meaningless because the memories matter?
And are you trying to teach me that if the passport is meaningless, then all material items are meaningless?
Is this you, God?
It's me, Margaret.
Are you trying to just slap me across the face with a fish?
Well, it's one thing to be taught a lesson by God and another thing to not be sure what the lesson is about or for.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, I feel like when God— Lessons usually have a reason.
When God works, it is in mysterious ways.
And I'm just—I'm sitting on this boat in the middle of the Caribbean—
uh, can still showered in privilege and, and my life is great, but I'm asking God these serious questions.
Did, are you pranking me?
And, and if so, it is a bitter pill to swallow.
Um,
Anyway, so for the last nine months, I have been telepathically communicating with my passport.
I know you're out there.
I do not have find my iPhone for my passport.
And frankly, find my Apple stuff didn't work because whoever stole these things never turned them on.
Well, yeah, I'm sorry.
I don't interrupt you or belabor this.
But, you know, I mean, my sense is that when you've got things like these property crimes, you have a window of almost no time to get any of it back.
And I mean, isn't that generally how it works?
If we're talking here about, you know, I don't know a great deal about how this works, but it seems like anything there, like what, maybe a Sonos, the Sonos shows up, you know, in a pawn shop or something.
Within a week, yeah.
Yeah, but I mean like maybe I've just watched too many movies about New York.
But my sense is that people grab the stuff that's valuable and small that you can sell quickly and then just throw everything else away.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Because I mean even if you're a ding-a-ling, like why would you be carrying that around?
You're going to sell the silver.
You're going to like for 20 bucks or whatever, right?
Isn't that how it works?
I mean like there's no – why would any of that stuff ever –
survive what you know is praying to your passport or you know communing at a distance with it it's a hopeless gesture right well so there are a couple of there are a couple of possibilities right there this person is a meth person and in which case they are just going to take their stuff probably directly to their dealer and say here is a laptop will you give me some meth and the dealer will say yeah sure and the dealer gives him one hundred dollars worth of meth
And the junkie gives the dealer a $2,200 computer.
And then the dealer is mobbed up with the network of fences.
The dealer will get $500 for it from somebody.
Now, in this contemporary world, the world of John Siracusa, the...
Danger is that the laptop then will make its way not to a pawn shop, but to a network of Russian hackers who are primarily interested in it for identity theft.
And with that narrative running, my laptop, my passport, my wallet, which contains not only my enhanced driver's license, but also my GOES card, which is the secret government card that allows me to go through passport control in major airports without even stopping.
where you just have been pre-security checked and you just hold up this card and go boop and you are moving, right?
While 800 people are lined up to go through passport control, it's like you are done.
And so with a combination of these things, some canny identity theft people could basically –
get terrorists onto a plane they could start a business under my name they could who knows what they could completely take over my life but it's more than all the physical objects then it gets into the as you say the identity stuff but like it's like every conceivable aspect of your life that can be sold for parts could yeah and I'm so I'm picturing like some chop house outside of Bangkok where
where they are incising the picture out of my ID and putting in the picture of Le Chiffre.
And he is entering the United States illegally to carry out an extrajudicial assassination of some kind.
And I'm just like, oh, this is bad, bad, bad news.
If this material makes its way to an identity thief, and just like you with the mouse, my ultimate reaction to it was, you know what?
If I pretend the mouse isn't there, maybe the mouse isn't there.
But the thing is, that's the thing about this, is that you don't know.
I mean, any part of your normal rational brain, if somebody was telling you this story, you'd go, oh, that shit's all gone.
It's in a dump somewhere.
Yeah, right.
But the rational part, the rational part would go, well, obviously, it's, you know, like whatever, Occam's razor.
Like the simplest solution for this is that it's all just, it's in a landfill.
Except the guy, whoever he or they were,
They thought to take the passport.
It's not like they were just sweeping stuff in.
Like the passport was separate from all the other things in its own location.
They recognized its value.
And its only value was for this.
Like this person realizes that somewhere between his dealer and the world of fences, there's.
value in a past.
Oh, like you're thinking that person might have known that there's a potential market for this.
Oh, absolutely.
They didn't take it because they were like enamored with my visa from Djibouti.
They were like, this has value.
And they made a mistake with like the challenge coins.
Like my challenge coin from the drone base in Ethiopia doesn't really have much value.
It's just shiny.
And that's what made me feel like it was potentially someone like a Roderick on the Line listener who had gone to the dark side, who was either insane to begin with or had been driven insane by our program.
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And they were like, I am collecting memorabilia of John Roderick from his own house in order to build a scarecrow.
Yeah.
A golem of him.
I don't want to hear this.
Right?
Like, I am going to build an effigy of him, which I then use black magic to turn in.
Getting hair off a brush.
Yeah, yeah, right.
Exactly.
I had no idea.
Because you're trying to figure out what they stole, too.
And it's like, how many Scrabble games did I have?
I thought I had four Scrabble games.
Did they take a Scrabble game?
That would be an indication that it is an unhinged podcast fan.
Because that doesn't have any value on the open market.
Anyway, four days ago, I'm sitting right here at my desk in my office looking at bring a trailer, looking at a picture of a 1978 Mazda RX-5.
And the phone rings.
And it's another instance.
It rarely happens.
But it's an instance where I pick up the phone.
I'm like, huh, that's a weird.
Why am I getting a phone number from an unknown caller?
And a guy says, is this John Roderick?
And I'm like, yeah.
And he says, hi, this is Detective Akimoto from the Renton Police Department.
And I'm like, the Renton Police Department?
And that worries me because my house is close enough to Renton.
And he says, I think I have a bunch of your stuff.
And I'm like, what?
And he's like, yeah, I got a passport here and like some kind of giant
really heavy chunk of metal that has a bunch of serial numbers on it.
What?
And an iPad and some other shit.
Holy shit.
Stacks of shit.
And I'm like, are you serious?
He's like, yep, got all this stuff.
And I'm like, where did you find it?
And he proceeds to tell me a story.
My house was broken into January 30th.
On January 31st, the day that I left on the cruise, a patrolman in Renton, the nearby town, sees a guy sleeping in a car.
The car is running.
And apparently in police land, if you're sleeping in a running car, that is suspicious.
It's suspicious enough for an officer to pull up and say what's going on, which is funny because I have many, many, many times in my life been asleep in a parked car.
Never been hassled by a cop, but there's the situation.
The cop says, huh, guy sleeping in a car, goes over, looks, sees that the ignition of the car has been jimmied, says, well, that's enough suspicion to feel like this is a stolen car, and it is.
He arrests the guy for car theft because I just learned it's not illegal to be in a stolen car.
It is illegal to be in a stolen car if there is enough sign that the car is stolen.
Because you could legitimately claim, hey, I didn't know it was stolen.
A guy gave it to me.
I mean like isn't that just how it works?
You say you're under arrest for suspicion of stealing a car.
But if you're in a car and instead of an ignition key, it has a kitchen knife, then it's fairly reasonable to conclude that you know it's stolen and therefore you are the stealer of it.
So they arrest this guy for stealing a car and he's got a meth pipe in the car.
So that compounds the problem for him.
And they impound the car and they process this guy for car theft and they prosecute him for it.
They send him to jail and then nine months go by.
And Detective Akimoto is sitting at his desk.
He is a car theft detective.
And he gets a call from the property room now in October.
And they say, that case is closed and we're cleaning out the shelves and we're going to send all this stuff to the dump or to the auction house.
But there's enough paperwork here, IDs and stuff.
You might be able to find this guy.
And Detective Akimoto says, what?
What is all that?
And they're like, oh, it was in the trunk.
Oh, my God.
Nobody...
connected the stolen car to the trunk full of what is clearly somebody else's shit.
Maybe the car stealer is also a house stealer.
No one at the police department.
I wasn't sure about your detective work there, Lou.
Nobody does the policing.
Oh, my goodness.
And the thing is, I don't know.
I enjoyed talking to Detective Akimoto.
I learned that he commutes to work on a recumbent bicycle.
But what I did not learn...
From anyone there at the Renton Police Department was how you would put a bin of shit, including other people's wallets and passports, and not do a little bit of research.
Just all went on a shelf somewhere.
Wait a minute.
So the passport is in there?
The passport is there.
Your passport with your name on it and your photograph and information about you was in that passport, and no one ever thought to track down that you might want it back?
Not only my passport, but my enhanced driver's license, which also has my address on it, which is about two miles from where the Renton Police are.
Are you kidding me?
No.
It also has my GOES card, which I have to say, I called the Department of Homeland Security four separate times to cancel my GOES card.
And the first time, it was immediately afterwards, and I was like, this is an emergency.
They have my GOES card.
They could be using it to infiltrate Al-Qaeda members to the United States.
And I called the number, and the phone picked up, and it went...
You have reached the Department of Homeland Security.
It's like a fucking cassette tape.
And so I sat on the Department of Homeland Security cassette tape phone tree for 45 minutes where they're playing like Elton John's Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.
And finally I was like, hey, I got other shit to do.
And I got off their phone tree.
I did that three more times trying to call the Department of Homeland Security to cancel this incredibly important and sensitive document.
And I finally surrendered and just said, you know what?
If Al-Qaeda gets into the country by using my ghost card, that responsibility is shared between me and the Department of fucking Homeland Security, an organization I already have a lot of suspicion about.
Anyway, my ghost card is in there, too.
And I never canceled it, so... Nothing made it to the Indian Chop Shop.
So what made it to the Indian Chop Shop was my laptop, which I am 100% sure he took immediately to the dealer and was just like, here's a laptop, give me some crank.
And the dealer was like, here's some crank.
And the laptop just made its way into not any kind of identity ring, but just like, hey, MacBook Air, you can sell those for something.
And it just went to some...
You know, like the thing is Renton cops didn't even talk to Seattle cops.
The Seattle cops were in the process of processing the burglary while the Renton cops were putting the stuff from the burglary on a shelf.
I don't know how to feel.
I really like Detective Akimoto, and I'm even now picturing him riding to work in the rain with his helmet, which has a little rearview mirror on it.
Maybe a GoPro.
I love the idea of a guy who investigates car thefts all day not having a car.
There's something really, really satisfying about that.
And I said, you ride this thing?
You ride this recumbent bike to work every morning?
And he said, well, in all honesty, I put it on the train.
I take the train, and then I ride the recumbent bike from the train station to the police station.
And I'm like, you are really – and he's a Japanese cop.
And I'm like, you are a Northwest original, my friend.
Good on you.
But the policing is where I feel like there is some improvement that could be done.
And I don't know if it's your fault or the patrol officer's fault or the way you run the property crimes division.
I don't know who to hold responsible.
But I think what it was was this went into the system as a car theft.
And then the car theft people handle things a certain way.
And whoever put it in as a car theft didn't also include or, you know, I don't know.
They impounded the car.
Somebody, I don't know.
I cannot fathom.
But you got your passport back.
So I go down there and I just get all the stuff.
That must have been so surreal, John.
Totally surreal.
And including my dad's box of pins, my challenge coins, my Chinese money.
The only things that didn't make it back to me were my MacBook Air, as I said, and my taxi wallet.
The entire contents of the wallet minus the money was there.
All the credit cards, all the.
Someone took out all the stuff in your wallet.
And took the wallet.
That's how good taxi wallets are.
And my Filson briefcase.
And when the cops were investigating the crime, when they were wandering around my house and I was like, I think they took my Sonos and they took my silver bar.
And of course, the cops were like, oh, really?
A hundred ounce silver bar?
How convenient.
Yeah.
And I'm like, no, seriously, I had a 100-ounce silver bar.
I use it as a doorstop.
And they were like, uh-huh, really?
Did they also get your Rothko, sir?
Yeah, did they take your Hope Diamond?
And I'm like, no, fucking seriously.
I've had it since I was a child.
It was one of the first things I bought with my own money.
And they're like, oh, really?
And I'm like, look around the house.
There are dolls of all the United States presidents here.
Do you really find – there is a pair of crossed snowshoes above the fireplace.
Do you really believe that I don't have a 100-ounce silver bar?
And the cop had to concede like, oh, yeah, I guess I see how it fits into your decor.
But then I said I lost a Filson briefcase.
And the cop said, oh, yeah, they always steal the Filson stuff.
Wow.
I was like, really?
They're like, oh, yeah.
It's very identifiable and there's a huge aftermarket for it.
That's amazing.
Are you kidding me?
So I see this guy.
Oh, so here's the thing.
Detective Akimoto says the burglar was Cambodian or Laotian.
He actually said Laotian.
Laotian.
He was repeating what he said.
Yeah, that wasn't an error on my part.
And I'm like, oh, he was Southeast Asian?
And he's like, yeah, something like that.
I'm like, okay, first of all, you're Japanese.
You should have your Asian races more dialed than that.
But that was not what I expected.
And my picture of three burglars or my picture of a maniacal Roderick on the line listener now suddenly was like, it was a guy like a guy from Southeast Asia.
And now all of a sudden my next door neighbors who are Vietnamese, I'm like, wait a minute.
Was it one of the low rider guys that hang out over there?
Oh my God, like my whole vision of the crime switched around.
I no longer felt like somebody had been casing my house for weeks.
I suddenly felt like, was this just a meth crime of opportunity?
Where the person got incredibly lucky, pried open the one window where my security system...
They made it around.
They waited for the light to go off.
They found a shovel.
They picked the single – all these things.
This sounds like a fucking Mission Impossible thing.
Absolutely.
That window – and the reason that window was vulnerable was it was painted shut.
I had never opened that window and I figured it was unopenable.
But the rotted sill allowed them to put the shovel.
And so I didn't put an alarm on that window because it was a painted shut window.
But they popped it with the shovel and broke the paint seal.
And that was the thing that woke me up.
And I was like, this fucking possum has got to go.
So now I am made whole again, not only that I have all my shit back and I sat with the passport and we had a communion and also by challenge coins and all this other crapola.
But I'm also made whole again in the sense that I no longer lay in bed at night thinking that there is a giant conspiracy that
Around my house, imagining Russians in Thailand looking at my house from a satellite, trying to figure out my comings and goings so that they can best impersonate me.
Right.
It's just a guy who didn't even have the brains to not...
fall asleep in his car, his stolen car.
And two, I mean, one reason that crazy people do things like have ingots of silver is because it's imminently sellable.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
I mean, like, you know, the thing is, you can get your crank dealer, your crank connection may give you a couple hundred bucks for a laptop, but like, boy, silver's pretty sellable.
And the ingot of silver at the prices of silver at the time, worth more than the laptop.
A lot more.
I mean, this ingot was just like, it is better than currency.
You could go to the white homeland with that.
Let's not attract new people, John.
Right, right, right.
You're right.
And probably this guy wouldn't be welcome at the white homeland, no matter how much silver he had.
He's Loatian.
That's right.
He's Loatian.
In any case, so that's my week.
That's only the first thing that happened this week.
There are two other monumental things, but I may save that for another episode.
I think you should.
So here I am.
Just, you know, like pockets full of challenge coins.
And...
You know, on the laptop, gone.
The Filson bag, gone.
But whatever.
It's just that small potatoes.
Oh, I got all my Sonos stuff back.
What?
I don't even know what to do.
This is jarring.
This is very jarring, John.
Oh, and the cops at the Renton Police Department, this is the best part of their job, right?
Hey, we got all your stuff.
And I was so grateful.
And I was just like, wow, thank you.
And I loved being in the property room and all the cloak and dagger of those guys.
Which I have to say is pretty shabby cloak and dagger.
But at least it's like you got to buzz through the room.
Oh, and Detective Akimoto had his magnetized security card in some kind of hip holster.
Ooh.
So every time we came to – and he wasn't a tall guy.
Every time we came to a door, he turned around and hiked up his butt and touched it to the –
And the first time I saw the move, I was like, huh, that's kind of an interesting little.
But then I realized that he does it 40 times a day.
And he turns around, stands up on his tiptoes.
He does like a hike and a quarter flip?
He like cocks one ass cheek in the air and bonks it kind of like sassy disco bonk onto the floor.
Onto the magnetized, and then the door pops open.
All that recumbent biking span off.
You said it.
And by the third or fourth time he did it, I was like, this is a, this Renton Police Department has some fucking sassy shit here.
it was, you know, there's not a lot going on down there.
It's seemingly not so much that they couldn't have investigated this crime a little better.
Yeah.
But, so they returned me all this stuff, and so I'm so grateful that I don't, I don't sit them, I don't say, is there a conference room somewhere where we could go sit down for a second and let me ask you a few questions about this?
Because,
You could have saved me nine months of hurt feelings by solving this crime.
And mental and psychic self-torture.
Yeah, right, right, right.
You could have solved this crime in one day.
But it took you nine months to realize there had been a crime.
even though the Seattle Police Department, who never returned my phone calls and by all appearances never did any investigation of any kind.
But then Detective Okamoto is excited.
He's like, oh, they maybe have fingerprints.
Maybe I can tie this crime to the guy.
He sounds giddy.
I'm like, yeah, you'd have to be giddy to ride a recumbent bike to work every day.