Ep. 177: "When Fleece Became Flannel"
This episode of Roderick on the Line is sponsored by Cards Against Humanity.
This month, they invited Sincere Engineer to help me say hi to John.
Roderick on the Line Roderick on the Line
Hello.
Hi, John.
Hi, Merlin.
How's it going?
It's going well.
It's going well.
You sound good.
You sound good.
You sound like a man restored.
It's pouring down rain here and has been for days.
And that is very good.
You know what's really, that's whatever, but you know what's really interesting is it's raining here.
Oh.
Yeah.
And when it rains in San Francisco, man, that's a fart that everybody is going to smell.
It washes them all down into the sea, doesn't it?
One day a real rain is going to come.
Here at this time of year, when the rain comes, the cold also comes and the rain and the cold arrive together and it scares the living daylights out of all the people who arrived at any point in the last nine months.
It comes suddenly.
Yeah.
And all the people that are like, I moved there in March and Seattle's amazing.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And they spent the whole summer thinking that Seattle was amazing.
And then the cold, icy death grip hand of winter arrives.
And it just arrives one day.
They got sold a pig and a poke.
That happened to me with Tallahassee.
They brought me there.
They're like, oh, come.
We want you to get this job in Tallahassee.
Come visit.
And as it turned out, they brought me there in the midst of a festival called Springtime Tallahassee.
And it is the one week a year when it's really nice in Tallahassee.
That's exactly right.
You go and there's flowers and children are making daisy chains and running around a maypole.
And then like a week later, it's like 95 degrees.
Right.
95 degrees and like the witches are building little stick figures out in the swamps, right?
Right.
They start early there.
Halloween starts earlier every year, Sean.
We're already starting 2016 Halloween.
Stuff's already in stores.
As I was driving in, I went past the methadone clinic and everybody there is running for cover and then all the people that have built camps
Like all the camps in the medians and up kind of under the freeway and stuff, you can just see the blue tarps come out and people are like, holy shit.
My tent leaks.
That sucks.
It does.
It sucks to be wet.
It's brutal.
And then all of the Amazon, all of the young guys in their J.Crew suits and all of the tight jeans people and all of the Macklemore haircut people –
who are making $180,000 a year are like, no amount of thousands of dollars a year can compensate me for this feeling, which is that my bones are cold.
And then I go, muhahaha, because my bones have no feelings.
Oh, is that right?
Not at all.
You seem like a man whose bones would have maybe even sensitivity sometimes.
Yeah, maybe you're right.
No, probably not.
It's funny you should bring this up because this is actually, this is not probably a topic for the show, but my lady and I are both actively looking for new rain gear.
Oh, yeah.
I got a Marmot jacket to replace my old Marmot jacket.
And I think I told you this a few weeks ago.
And it's virtually identical to the Marmot jacket I've been wearing forever.
It's got one critical piece missing, which is it does not have the front outside pocket into which one could put an iPhone.
Oh, why did they take that away?
You know, I'm guessing cost.
Yeah, cost.
But, you know, that's a shame.
And now she, this is super interesting, she's looking also for some rain gear, but she likes to be warm.
So now I've taken it upon myself as a good husband to try and find her some gear that will be warm.
Now, a Filson wear, that's a commitment.
When you get into Filson, you're getting into a whole lifestyle, right?
I don't own a single Filson thing right now.
Yeah, the thing about Filson stuff, let's be honest.
Filson stuff is a commitment to being wet.
It's not, it is.
It's like buying hip waders, right?
You'd want to, you want to like, you really, now you're going to find some place where you could really get in the water.
Yeah.
But you're going to be, I mean, it's wax, cotton, and wool.
It's the old style of dealing with the rain, which is like, I am going to be wet in the rain and I'm going to be smelly in the rain.
Yeah.
But I'm not going to die like a sheepdog.
Yeah, I'm not going to die in the rain because I have this somewhat like impenetrable material on.
But I am not I'm not trying to do this like Healy Hansen thing where I step out of my rain gear and I'm just dry.
It's it's much more of a like I'm going to live in the in the rain.
That's interesting because my lady actually has a Healy Hanson – I think it's a yachting – you can't use the word yachting without sounding like an asshole.
But it's down to like – I think it actually has like a little porthole where you can put a rope through it and stuff.
Yeah, sure.
And boy, is it ever – you could just shoot water at that thing all day long and just laugh at you.
So all of the Alaska fishermen, before they go up to their new season, they all go around and they get a new –
Seasons worth of Healy Hanson stuff.
And it's like a suit, you know, and it's impervious.
It's truly.
I mean, if if if Alaska fishermen choose it, then you can be guaranteed that there isn't a better thing.
Maybe we should fill in some blanks here for people who aren't in places that have rain.
But we're talking about, it seems to me like we're talking about a distinction.
With Filson, you've got some old world technologies in place.
That's right.
Some basically medieval styleways of waxing a sheep or something so you can put it on.
Whereas in the other camp over here, I'm gesturing with my right hand, you've got more of what I will call technical.
You've got things like you've got modern fabrics, modern materials and methods to have a light.
Maybe it's got wicking.
It might have wicking.
That's right, wicking.
Isn't that a big part of having technicals is wicking?
Well, you know, wicking, then you get into your polypropylenes.
I feel like there are the people who say –
So it's a, as you're, as the lightness of the fabric, the light, not just light colored, but like light, like the less you feel the garment, the, maybe it's waterproofness is there, but it's hardiness goes away.
So like when I, in Seattle and in the Northwest, if you see a lineman up on a phone pole and
In the dead of winter changing some transformer in Seattle, there's a very good chance he's going to be wearing Filson because it's not just that he wants to be protected against the elements, but he's also –
doing hard work up a phone pole in the winter.
Right.
It's almost like I've been a fan of the Carhartt product line in the past with those logging pants, those pants with the extra knee in them.
You can't kill those things.
You could climb a pole all day long.
It wouldn't make a scratch.
And Filson's the same except it's like the Carhartt pant was then additionally dipped in hot wax and allowed to cool.
That's starting to really appeal to me.
Yeah, it's amazing.
It's amazing.
And when you see linemen in them,
You realize like, oh, this is a guy who could pick any – he needs his clothes to be like a suit of armor.
It's another tool.
Yeah, and it's – these are not expensive items but – or not inexpensive items but he has chosen them because it's necessary.
And Healy Hansen, it's not something you would want to ski in.
It's not something that you would want to mountain bike in or do any kind of like wee kind of things.
It's stuff that, I mean, when you are on a fishing boat in Alaska, the weather becomes sentient.
It is absolutely trying to kill you.
It is trying to drown you on your feet.
Like as you stand, the weather is trying to cause you to suffocate in water.
Oh, my goodness.
And so the Healy Hansen stuff is for that.
And also you're like pulling monsters out of an iron gray sea, which is only not frozen because it's ocean.
It's too mad to be frozen.
You're pulling monsters out of the depths of this and killing them.
with hooks and so that's so it's a different kind of gear than if you're like snowboarding right right and so as you get up but if you're snowboarding you don't want to be covered with all this weird like bulletproof fabric you just kind of want to stay warm and dry it's a series of trade-offs so it's a continuum like columbia sportswear company which is a company from up here that stuff will keep you warm and dry
I'm looking at one right now that looks like it's right in my wheelhouse.
And this is the, I'm looking at the Columbia, it's this jacket.
But the thing is, it's very, according to this review on the site, I enjoy cool tools.
They say that it is, it's good.
It's very warm, but like you can't even wear it for too long because you get so warm.
And it looks like it's very good at repelling water and it's got a hood, but you really look like you work at Uber.
Do you know the look?
Oh, yeah, I do.
And that is the modern trade-off.
Now, in the old days, Eddie Bauer was the company that made stuff that was like, it was burly enough, but also you could wear it in town.
Or, you know, you could wear it up on the mountain, you could wear it in town, you didn't look like a dork.
But Eddie Bauer went the wrong way.
They sold their soul to the man.
And then everything, like the other day, I was driving with a friend through town.
It was Halloween.
And a couple of people were trying to get across the street.
In the Northwest, if somebody stands on the edge of the sidewalk and looks at you, you are obligated to stop and let them cross the street.
That is the cultural norm here.
And may even be the law, although the cops never stop for you.
You stand on the sidewalk and stare right at them and they'll just look straight ahead and keep driving.
Shark eyes.
But the rest of us are expected to stop for our fellow citizens.
And these two, you know, they're probably early 60s.
They're both wearing outdoor research clothes.
which are kind of a strange hybrid of like an Australian bush hat, except it's made out of Gore-Tex.
And it has strings, you know, it has like a chin rope.
Oh, sure.
I see.
I call that a dad hat.
It's a little bit of a dad hat.
But mom and dad are both wearing these hats.
And they're wearing the requisite purple fleece, some Gore-Tex, some cargo pants by a company called Kuhl, which is K-U-H-L, Kuhl.
I think there's even an umlaut in there where their logo has a mountain in the background.
Enough already.
And they've got some kind of Solomon Adventure Shoe.
You're just making up words.
No, no, no.
And I'm looking across the street and I turn to my lady friend and I'm like, is that a Halloween costume?
I mean, they are so Northwest.
I'm coming as everyone in the Pacific Northwest.
Yeah, it's like, it's ludicrous.
The only thing they need right now are ski poles that they're using to go on a brisk walk.
Maybe like carrying a coffee, a locally sourced coffee and riding a hoverboard.
You getting those yet?
You getting the hoverboards around there?
No, that's the young people thing.
These people are like, they are ready to go up Mount Baker right now, except they're not anywhere near Mount Baker.
That's a good way to play it.
People look like you could eyeball somebody.
It's difficult to tell.
Are they going out for half and half?
Are they on their way to climb Mount Tam or are they potentially going to a wine tasting?
That's right.
There's a certain kind of fleece, upscale fleece that people wear to all of those things.
Yeah.
And for me, the moment that fleece became...
flannel right when fleece became flannel there was a there was a sea change in all of our lives like there was flannel for long long time and you know flannel and like moleskin
And then there was fleece.
And once there was fleece, a certain large segment of the population up here just never thought about clothes again.
Oh, interesting.
Yes.
Yeah.
You know, it's funny.
I don't know.
Again, we always get the word wrong.
Is it inertia?
But there's something that happens.
Something comes along, and then there's different trends.
And then all of a sudden, there's a thing that everybody goes, oh, yeah, that's for me.
Like the Ugg boot.
Ugg boot came along, and suddenly, like, I guess every young woman who wanted to look like she just woke up was wearing Ugg boots.
Ugg boots and yoga pants.
Ugg boots and yoga pants.
I mean, yoga pants.
Yoga pants.
Look, I'm pro yoga pants.
Don't get me wrong.
Well, you know, you never know when you just might need to do some yoga.
Sure.
You go somewhere.
Maybe you go to Hot Sam's.
You go to North Julius.
Well, the thing about yoga pants, like somewhere along the line, the technology of pants.
changed so that they were butt-lifting pants.
I've wondered about that.
It has a brassiere-like quality.
Yes.
Yes.
Would I accomplish that if I wore yoga pants?
I don't know.
I honestly don't know.
I think if I put on yoga pants, that it would be bad.
It would be bad for everyone.
I'd love to see you in a yoga pant.
But there was a time when I was in my teens even where –
There were not that many pants that made your butt look good.
And you had to have a certain kind of butt.
You definitely needed a certain kind of butt.
You're right.
There didn't used to be – it used to be you could have like formal – you could have a formal slack.
You could have – Your butt never looked good.
No, no, no, no.
You could – no, absolutely.
No, no.
Absolutely not.
That's why you got to have the flap that goes over the back with the vents.
That's right.
Okay.
I'm using basically every closed word that I know at this point.
And then you got your Docker style khakis, you know, maybe with the pleated front.
I know you're a fan of the pleated front.
Even before Dockers existed, right?
I mean, I'm thinking about 1984 or whatever.
If you wanted to have your butt look good.
What did you do?
I mean, you could wear Levi's if you had a Levi's butt, but not everybody has a Levi's butt.
Oh, no.
Oh, no, no.
I think Jonathan Richman has a whole song about this.
Well, I mean, it's about jeans, but I think by extension it's about butts.
Is that, you know, we don't all have the kind of butt that one would want to show off.
And I think a Levi's style pant generally is a little bit more hangy.
And we're talking at this point, 84, you're really talking about the twilight of the Jordache and...
Or the Vanderbilt.
Glory Vanderbilt years.
You got your live, live, live in Britannia.
All that stuff is... Talking about some high-waisted jeans.
Talking about a high-waisted jean, and it's a dark rinse, and it's very butt-centric.
And I think we were seeing the twilight of the butt pant at that point.
Well, but I always felt like those high-waisted Glory Vanderbilt jeans were like, if you have a pear butt, if your butt looks like a pear, then you can... I'm sorry, just to clarify, because of the audio, a single pear?
I'm sorry, not pear, P-A-I-R.
I'm talking about the fruit.
P-E-A-R, pear.
It's sort of like Adele's chin.
You got like a little bit of a... Yeah.
Yeah, okay.
Right.
I mean, if it looks like a Bartlett pear, let's say, a ripe Bartlett pear.
then you can wear Gloria Vanderbilt jeans and you look fantastic.
You look like a blue pear.
A denim pear, right?
Who doesn't want that?
But if you have any kind of lumpy butt or square butt or whatever.
Maybe you got a plum butt or like.
Well, a plum butt now.
You got a plum butt, you might have some kind of a little.
When I say melon, I don't mean in the sense of like, you know, big dump truck size.
I'm talking about more like you've just got like a misshapen cantaloupe.
Yeah, right.
With bumps and lumps and stuff.
Oh, my God.
I mean, you don't want your butt to look like it's in a bag, right?
But then one day, and it happened in the late 90s, the seven for all mankind genes arrived.
which had some crazy technology, which was all constructed in denim.
There wasn't any, it's not like there was a wire underpinning.
But all of a sudden, seven for all mankind jeans arrived and everyone could wear, I'm talking about women now, everyone could wear them and they looked great on everybody.
It was just like, what happened?
Why didn't we know how to do this before?
Yeah.
They just ran their sewing machines through this denim in a slightly different way, and now they look amazing on everybody.
That's insane.
It's like how they discovered flat iron stake.
You start cutting the steer at a different angle.
You get a Dutch angle, and then you're able to find an entire stake nobody ever discovered before.
I've never heard of Seven for All Mankind.
I'm looking at it now.
You're telling me they came up with some kind of a technology that would enable you to end up cutting on a bias.
You're doing some kind of verticality that gives a special lift and gravitas, let's
That's right.
That's right.
And then yoga pants came out employing what I can only imagine is the same technology except in like stretchy sweat pants material.
And they, I'm sure, do wicking.
They wick the shit out of you.
I think that's their primary performance characteristic probably.
Wicking.
And yoga pants look amazing on everybody.
And all of a sudden, it just made me feel like all through my teen years and 20s, we didn't have this technology.
And now we do, and I think the world has been improved.
Probably a lot less stress, even if you're not wearing it all the time, you know it's out there.
It's like Nietzsche says.
And so today, it took me a second, but yes, just exactly like Nietzsche says.
I walked out of the house today.
I'm wearing skinny jeans.
I'm a man in middle age wearing these skinny jeans that are basically leggings.
Let's call a spade a spade.
It's just like I cut the stirrups off the bottom of a pair of stirrup pants and I'm walking around in them and I presume I look cool and I think everybody agrees.
I look very cool.
This is not a thing that would have been possible before.
No.
Right?
It's a kind of technology that I've heartily embraced.
I can't believe how different jeans can feel.
Really just pants in general.
I mean, because first of all, I mean, there's this basic problem of, well, gosh, where do you begin?
But there's the whole problem of when you're doing a lot of like, you know, when you've got children making pants in Asia, there's going to be some variations.
So like I learned a long time ago, you should actually try on a couple different pairs, even if it's just jeans.
Wow, I've never done that.
It's not a bad idea.
I've had some lady friends that would never consider just, certainly not just buying them off the rack.
You would try them on.
You might try several pairs on.
But the less expensive, the fancier clothes get, the more likely they are to be well-made and consistently made and to be true to size.
But go look inside your pants now.
Not those pants, but your other pants.
You go look at your 501s.
We've talked about this.
It might be HO in Mexico.
It might be HO in China.
There's all kinds of places where they HO jeans at this point.
Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
And so the thing is, you try that on and the variations, I mean, it can get pretty sloppy.
You can get some serious fruit butt without even intending.
Well, I made a decision not very long ago that I did not want to buy anything anymore that was hate show in China.
And it wasn't because I'm against China.
It was just a decision that I needed to just set some limits on things.
Right?
You need to define the space.
People always want to make these big sweeping changes, but it can actually be very profound to make a change even as small as no HO in China.
Yeah.
You fence off the garden to keep the deer out.
And so for me, it was just like, there's a lot of stuff being made in China right now.
And so if I just decide not to buy any of it, that protects me from too much.
I mean, it makes the first decision for me.
It's already made.
Nothing made in China.
So a thing shows up.
I look at it.
It's made in China.
No, thank you.
And it's just a way of sorting.
And then I had to make some decisions, right?
Because there's a lot of stuff that says made in Hong Kong.
Or made in Macau.
Now, would you say that those were made in China?
I'd have to Google it.
So what about – you're talking about the PRC or isn't there – you've got the People's Republic?
Oh, you're talking about Taiwan.
Is that Taiwan?
And then you could have – is that technically part of China?
Well, I mean depending on who you ask.
If you ask someone in China –
They're going to say that Taiwan is part of China.
But if you ask someone in Taiwan, they are going to say, no, Taiwan is not part of China.
It is its own thing.
But isn't that exactly the kind of thing that would factor into your decision and you're sitting there scratching your head wondering where this is HO?
Well, the thing is I feel like in my sort of worldview, right, I support Taiwan personally.
Because they have decided that they're not part of China and I support them.
China deciding that Taiwan is still part of China.
They just are currently administered by a rogue government.
I don't support that.
Simply because I think China is big enough and Taiwan can be its own thing.
It should be its own thing.
It's its own thing.
In fact, I have a good friend whose family is from Taiwan and he feels strongly about it.
And so I support my friend.
Now, Macau and Hong Kong both were their own colonies, right?
Hong Kong was a colony of the United Kingdom and Macau was a colony of Portugal.
And they were like city states where they, you know, I think Macau was big in the opium trade and, you know, gambling.
They were like sin cities.
Hong Kong was more of an administrative city after a while.
The Brits used it to administer their far-flung empire.
But then...
Times changed.
And in the late 90s or the whenevers, the 90s, both of those things.
So this is what's crazy to me.
They were basically leased.
Like it's one of those 99-year leases where you sign a 99-year lease and you're like, I'm going to be dead before this lease expires.
What even is a 99-year lease?
Oh, that's one of those things like you pay Steve Jobs a dollar a year, that kind of thing.
Well, I know a guy here.
I used to live in a building like an old warehouse here where the guy who owned it didn't really own it.
He had a 99-year lease, and he was saving – I mean he fixed up the building just enough that it could inhabit people.
Yeah.
And then it was just like a rent generator for him.
He couldn't, I don't think, redevelop the property.
Okay.
And he could maybe sub-sell his lease.
I'm not really sure.
99-year lease.
I mean, he's going to be dead a long time before that.
But he has this 99-year lease on the thing.
So anyway, Great Britain and Portugal had these leases of these cities.
And one day they came up.
They came up and China was like, we don't renew your lease or whatever.
The last vestige of that brand of colonialism.
And so both cities, Hong Kong and Macau, returned to China and they're like a special administration area, one of those things.
So you pick up a shirt and it says made in Macau and you go, oh, at least it's not made in China.
And then you go, oh, wait a minute.
That's some label trickery.
Well, yeah, you look at your phone and it'll say, you know, or like Apple devices will frequently say something like, designed in California.
Yeah, moved to Babylonia.
Yeah, condo made of stona, assembled in Austin.
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Assembled in Austin?
I don't know.
But they used to say – it used to say, you know, for a long time you'd say, oh, it's made in America.
And you'd go, well, it's – but there's a real switcheroo because there's some parts that come from here and there.
It gets made in China.
Yeah.
And then it comes back here, and I don't know, they polish it here or something or put it in the box.
I'm not sure.
It's funny.
When you buy – I just got my lady an iPhone for her birthday and you'll see it's – when it ships out of Shenzhen.
Is that what it's called?
And they'll say – then it goes to Hong Kong and then it makes the big jump to Ontario, California.
But yeah, you'll see that it's coming.
It is coming right out of China.
What's amazing I think about Hong Kong and Macau is that they both are – they both somehow have kept one foot in the capitalist world.
Macau was like they still gamble there.
It's like a James Bond town.
Gambling is a popular pastime in my neighborhood.
Oh, right.
They're playing Mahjong.
There's Mahjong.
There's Mahjong fronts.
And there are places that are nominally, you know, bodega style convenience type stores.
That's basically it's just six elderly Chinese guys staring at a keynote screen.
When you say Mahjong fronts, do you mean like people get a new set of teeth, but they're made out of Mahjong tiles?
Yes, they call it Chinese bridge.
Not to be confused with contract bridge, according to Hoyle.
No, it's a totally different thing.
No, no, but I think gambling is a big cultural thing.
I can't say that for all of China.
China's a very big country.
But especially older Chinese guys in my neighborhood really are into gambling.
And the young folks, too.
They play a lot of cards.
They find just cards on the street all the time.
I mean, this might be happening in other neighborhoods.
I can only speak for my own.
So I don't know anything about Macau.
I don't think I know anything about Macau.
Yeah, yeah.
I was watching that documentary about the Indonesian genocide.
I think they were a Portuguese, what, protectorate colony?
Colony.
Colony, yeah.
Macau, look at that.
Yeah, you know, the Portuguese had a strange, they had a strange little empire.
Well, they were big ship people, right?
They had a lot of ships.
My experience in Portugal, which is, I mean, not the world's most extensive experience, but I have spent a goodly amount of time in Portugal, more than I ever expected.
I would do.
And I think the tendency for us here in the United States is to think that Portugal is, I don't know, some flange of Spain.
Yeah, it's like Spain Jr.
But when you get to Portugal, you realize that they really are different from the Spanish.
They look different.
They act different.
They are different.
And it's because they hug this...
wild Atlantic coast, and they just look – they're more rugged.
Well, if you ever want to know if there's a difference, just ask a Portuguese person.
Well, see, that's the thing.
If you ask a Spanish person, they're going to say, ah, there's no difference.
But if you ask a Portuguese person, it's kind of like Portugal is the Taiwan –
Of Spain.
Oh, boy.
Well, you know, in Rhode Island, where my lady's from, there are a lot of Portuguese people.
And, I mean, it really infuses the culture.
They're very – I hope this isn't too ping pong.
But they're very – they're garrulous, like very outgoing, very emotional people.
And it's kind of a fun vibe.
Yeah, they eat a lot of – The Portuguese food, I'm not so crazy about it.
They eat a lot of greasy fish there.
Yeah.
And it's sort of like the Basques.
The Basques love a greasy fish.
Hmm.
Because it keeps their pelts really soft.
And if you have a cold nose, that's good, right?
I just recently met a person of Basque extraction.
And it caused me to think about a new friend.
And it caused me to...
I've also spent some time in Basque country and I love it there.
But then I was like, wait a minute, what did the Basques do in World War II?
I have a pretty good sense of what everybody did during World War II.
And I treat people from European countries differently based on what my preconceived notion of what their grandfather did in World War II is, right?
I kind of am like, oh, hello.
Nice to meet you.
I know what your grandfather did in World War II.
Don't try and buffalo me, mister.
Sounds like a terrible horror movie.
I know what your grandfather did in World War II.
You know, it's one of those things where it's like you go into somebody's house and what people's grandfathers in Bavaria did in World War II is very different than what people's grandfathers in Hamburg.
There's so much to say about this.
I'm looking at the page about Basque.
So Basque is kind of like it's a little bit Spain, a little bit France, a little bit country, a little bit rock and roll.
Yeah, so it goes up into France, it goes down into Spain, and they kind of consider themselves sort of a single tribe, except the French Basques, obviously, are different.
St.
Ignatius Loyola was a Basque.
That's exactly right, and he founded the Jesuits.
So the Basques, a very separate group of people.
Their language is, to linguists, has no...
like analog in any other language in the world.
It is not an Indo-European language.
It is a kooky Wawa language that someone one day invented who lived up in the, in the crazy Hills in Northern Spain.
And I, no one knows where it came from and no one, it, it doesn't behave like other languages.
It's a little bit, you know, it has, it's one of those things where it's like, well, finish.
There's some, there's some crazy aspect of finish that,
like ergo-Hungarian languages, which are similar to Japanese in a way.
And nobody can understand how.
That's one reason I find Portuguese so interesting.
I had a – my roommate for a while in military school was from Portugal.
And when he would speak, I'd hear him on the phone talking to his family.
And he never spoke – there weren't a lot of Portuguese kids there.
But when I would hear him, I always thought it was so strange because it sounded to my 12-year-old ear –
It sounded almost exactly like a cross between Spanish and German.
It had a lot of that glottal kind of guttural feeling of German but also the kind of like that lilting romance feel of Spanish.
I feel like the gutturality of Portuguese developed because they were shouting at each other across the deck of a ship that was in a storm.
I think they call that an adaptation.
It's what John Syracuse would call evolution.
Yeah, right.
Right, right, right.
Because if you're not going to be up there, this is why the Italians never sailed, is because it was too hard for them to yell over the wind.
It's not like a poem.
Right, right.
That's why the Italians, yeah.
That's why they're landlocked.
They just stayed in Italy and they never got in boats because their language was so melodious.
Actually, they shaped like a boot, John, not a boat.
You know what?
It's shaped like a boat that's shaped like a boot.
That's true.
That's a really good point.
So the Basques, their territory is very mountainous.
And if you were trying to invade and conquer those people, you would fail, which is why they were not conquered.
They got two things going on their side.
They got a language where no, it's like Stonehenge.
Nobody knows where it came from.
And then you've also got the mountains.
It mitigates against any kind of an attack.
You can't get in, you can't get out.
And then when you're there, it's hard to ask for directions because they're like, you're not from here.
That's right.
You're not speaking this unintelligible language.
You can't even learn.
It's like Navajo code talkers.
You know how many Basques are on the United States?
Well, you know what?
I do know one thing about the Basques in the United States, which is that they settled in Idaho.
What?
Well, there's 57,793, according to Wikipedia.
Well, 93.
You don't come up with a number like that accidentally.
I'm going to have to see where that came from.
I think that my friend who is a Basque got in here unbeknownst to Wikipedia, and she's not being counted in that figure because there was an intermediary relationship where she lived in the Netherlands.
John, no one knows how to ask her, probably.
Yeah.
Well, that's right.
What do you say?
I mean, not everybody that comes into the country gets asked.
I've gone through customs enough times to know that they don't ask if you're Basque.
Well, no, and they might misunderstand.
They think your last name is actually the city you're from, and they make a chalk mark on your tag, and they put you into quarantine.
Oh, see, exactly right.
And then all of a sudden, you're walking around Corleone.
You're not Corleone.
That's right.
That's right.
But I love that part of the world, and they eat a lot of greasy fish, but it's delicious.
It's wonderful.
I used to think I was not a greasy fish guy, but then I had some sardines in...
Oh, that kind of greasy fish.
Yeah, you know, like the herring, the herrings from the herring family.
And they're just laying out these gigantic grease fish.
And like, I hope you like these.
And I was like, oh.
But then I ate them and I said, I do like them.
I understand what you're doing up here in Bilbao.
I get it now.
But what I didn't know was what their grandfathers did in World War II.
And so I started a little bit of a... I started rabbit-holing, as you do.
Is this about Fresno?
No, I rabbit-holed about Fresno this morning, but I rabbit-holed about the Basques in World War II.
I spent the morning trying to figure out if Richard Carpenter's gay.
What did you come up with?
I'm like maybe a third of the way in.
Right.
It's not super clear at this point.
And I feel like that's where I am with the Basques in World War II.
I'm about a third of the way in.
Okay.
I figured out, you know, because the thing is that there is that whole business, right?
Spain was...
Well, you got the fascists, right?
They're just coming off the big war in the 30s.
That's right.
But they're ostensibly neutral in the war.
And a lot of allied pilots that got shot down over France, the French underground would take them down, hand them over to the Basques.
The Basques would get them across into Spain, and then the neutrality of Spain would allow those pilots to find their way back home, even though the Spanish were pretty allied with the Nazis.
But there was enough of a – they maintained enough of a sort of like neutral posture that allied pilots could get over there.
And then I realized that neighboring the Basque country is the hollandaise sauce county.
Yeah.
Oh, is that Belgium?
No, it's Bern.
You know, Bernays.
Oh, Bern.
That's Switzerland?
Well, no, it's like the... You're telling me Hollandaise is not from Dutch?
No, that's what's amazing about it.
It's from France.
And then this Bernays.
So I don't think the sauce is actually from Bern.
What about Bechamel?
Where's that from?
I'm sure they're all from France.
There were no sauces before France.
Oh, is that right?
It was all their idea.
Before that, people only had dry meats and probably boiled vegetables.
There was no thought of sauce.
They put everything in a pot, boiled it, threw some salt and some dirt in.
That was what people ate.
And then the French were like, what if we made an emulsification of mayonnaise and threw some tarragon in it?
And then the world was forever changed.
Mm-hmm.
But all of those sauces, I think they came from the north, but they named it Bearnaise because, I don't know, because they were doing somebody an honor, right?
Like, oh, you're from Bern.
We're going to name it Bearnaise.
We're going to name this sauce for you.
Because you're the marshal of France.
I thought they were called the God Sauces.
I stand corrected.
It's the Mother Sauces.
Mother Sauces.
Saucier Mamiere.
You've got Bechamel.
You've got Espagnoli.
Espagnoli?
E-S-P-A-G-N-O-L-E.
I don't think I've ever heard of that.
You've got Hollandaise Tomato and Velouté.
Oh.
That's the mother sauces.
And umami.
Umami, I think that's the one on the back of the tongue that the Japanese discovered.
Yeah.
Do you struggle at all with these distinctions with your daughter?
Does she care?
Because my daughter is really becoming a very profound cultural critic, but she has no idea what she's talking about.
You're talking about the flavor of sauce now?
No, sauce is lots always challenging.
She mostly likes a little bit of butter, but not too much.
But when it comes to like, she almost exactly always exactly gets Japanese and Chinese things confused.
She thinks anime is from China.
And she and she thinks that, you know, the stuff we get from the Chinese restaurant is Japanese.
Oh, I see.
Marlo's pretty – I think she can hang with the fact that there are – she's just learning about there being people from all around because she's grown up in a culture where there were kids of every kind of race and ethnicity around her.
So she never – she didn't understand that there was any difference between people just based on their color.
Yeah.
Or she doesn't think that there is.
But she does appreciate that people are speaking different languages, which she thinks is fascinating.
And she's just at the age where she's starting to kind of try and imitate them, where it's like, well... Let's do that in her inside voice.
Yeah, that's fun to do, but it's also an inside voice thing.
And the other day she was wearing some black pants and a black shirt, and she was running around saying, I'm a black girl, I'm a black girl.
And it was like, that's exactly what you are.
And yet that's not a thing that we can shout at them all.
And so we're right at the stage where I don't want to get into her little mind and start filling it with all of our adult human anger and frustration and bullshit.
Right, right.
No, I totally – that's part of the struggle.
I think you mean Alsace-Lorraine.
I mean when we're in Chinatown and there are people speaking Chinese all around us and my four-year-old goes, chong, chong, chong, chong, chong.
I go, ah.
I don't want to start right yet.
like stomping on your enthusiasm with our like intermediary problems.
You know, I don't want to lean down and say, say anything, but I also don't want her to like, you know, they're 99% of the people in Chinatown aren't going to give a shit and they're going to think it's cute and funny, but there's always going to be somebody who has their offense epaulets on.
Yeah.
But it is also always fun to hear – like if you asked anybody – this is not something you would probably do at South by Southwest or maybe you wouldn't do this at XOXO.
But you could say to somebody like, what does a Vietnamese – what does that language sound like?
What does German sound like or any of those?
You can just imitate a Canadian person.
What's fascinating though is to hear people in other countries doing what they think an American accent sounds like.
Yeah.
And you realize like how dumb and puny and weird we sound.
Well, have I ever told you that story about the – when I was at Gonzaga, a good friend of mine had a roommate who was from Japan and who was learning English sort of in college.
And a bright guy and a – like he was a great guy and ended up being a really good friend.
But when he first arrived, he knew – I think he knew more English than he was comfortable speaking.
But he did not really speak English.
And so after a while of kind of hanging out and introducing him to American beer and so forth, one of us said – I think it was my friend Bob said, when you are in Japan and talking to your Japanese friends, how do you imitate Americans?
Like what do Americans sound like?
And he was like, what are you talking about?
We had to explain like what it was.
And by way of explanation, we said, you know, when we imitate Japanese, we're like, oh, aso, chong chong, you know, or whatever.
Right.
And he was, he, like, you could see the light bulb go off.
And he was like, oh, right, I get it.
And he, like, stood with his feet apart, wide apart, wide stance.
And he said, hamburger, hamburger, bang, bang, bang, bang.
And we were like, oh, and we all got really sad.
It's like exactly what you don't want to hear.
Yeah, we slouched back in our ratty couches and we were like, oh, hamburger, hamburger, bang, bang.
Chicago, bang, bang.
Oh, no.
That's the worst.
Are we that bad?
Oh, no.
It's miserable.
Oh.
So, and I think that that's still true.
I think that in the majority of the world, we're just hamburger, hamburger, bang, bang.
I think you're probably right.
Essentially, for Espanol sauce, oh my goodness, I think this might be our gravy.
So what happens in Espanol sauce?
Well, I'm just looking at this photo.
Espanol.
Espanol.
I'm just looking at this photo of beef in this brown gravy with a side of steak fries.
What am I doing here?
Why am I sitting in this cold office?
I'm just sitting here looking at this.
Your bones are freezing.
Beef in brown gravy.
Oh, I went to Morton's last night.
Oh, good for you.
How'd it go?
Well, it went great.
I mean, you know, you go to Morton's and you basically like...
it's like you're stewing in Frank Sinatra, right?
There's Frank Sinatra on the stereo, and then they bring out a plate, and it's basically like half of Frank Sinatra on the plate.
Those fingers in my hair.
It's an honor.
It's an honor.
Frank Sinatra.
He pissed on my fucking head, and it was an honor.
He fucked my wife right on the bar.
You know what the name of that book should be?
Yes, I can if Frank says I can.
So you had a big steak.
Yeah, I had a big steak.
It was good, but I'm suffering a little bit of the consequences today because, yeah, basically I ate a cat and now I'm walking around and it's like, and it was Halloween too and I haven't been eating sugar for a while and if you eat one M&M,
The cravings come back.
Oh, right.
And then you need to go to the methadone clinic because it's just like, oh, my God, I had some sugar.
And there's this giant bowl of Reese's peanut butter cups.
And what can I do?
You know, I'm trapped in the house.
What would methadone for candy be?
Like, let's say you hit rock bottom as a candy user.
Like, what do you think?
What kind of clinic would you go to?
What would they give you?
Splenda?
I'm thinking they would just give you shitty candy.
They would give you, like, licorice.
Ugh.
You know, I had an interesting conversation with my mom the other day where she said, you used to, so, you know, I've talked about my shoebox full of money.
Yeah.
But according to my mom, I also had a giant bag of candy.
Yeah.
When people would, you know, all the candy holidays, which are kind of all the holidays except Fourth of July, they're all candy holidays.
And she said, you would hoard your candy.
You wouldn't eat it.
And I was like, that sounds like me.
She said, but you kept this candy in a bag and you would bring neighborhood kids to
You'd never take the candy bag out of the house.
You'd bring neighborhood kids in and you would give them a choice of their favorite candy out of the bag if they would blank.
Like, you would bribe and manipulate the neighborhood kids into doing what you wanted by promising them a selection from your candy hoard.
And I was like, what?
I sound like a fucking diabolical monster child.
Yeah, you sound like a super billionaire.
And she was like, that's right.
And so then it started to, like, memories started to flood back of my candy stash, which...
was full of all the candy that I didn't actually personally, I mean, I would eat all the fucking chocolate right away, but then I had all the garbage candy, the Smarties and the licorice and the Mike and Ikes and the, all that stuff I didn't care about.
Necco wafers.
Yeah, like just shit candy that they give to people and I would just hoard it
and then offer these beads to kids for their Manhattan Islands.
Oh, yeah.
She'll require you to do a fancy dance for me.
That's right.
Or like, oh, here's the game.
Here's the game today.
You are going to be a dog, and I am going to be a dog killer.
And the kids would be like, I don't want to be a dog again.
And I'd be like, why don't you come in and have an Echo wafer?
Yeah.
And then they'd be like, okay.
And then I'd be like, that's right.
Now I'm going to sit on my throne and you sit here next to my throne.
And if anybody comes, you attack.
But that makes me sound like a sicko from a young age.
And then my mom confirmed that she thought I was a sicko, that this was not a childlike behavior.
But she didn't take it to the doctor or anything.
Well, not as far as I know.
Not until later.
But, you know, my daughter has what appears to be very little impulse control.
Like when we go places where there's a buffet, she just paces in front of the buffet, just trolling it, hoping that someone will give her a shrimp.
Yeah.
you know, and I'm like, get away from the buffet.
You're freaking people out.
And she's like, but look at all the food.
And I'm like, I see it.
You've already eaten enough food for seven four-year-olds today.
Does she eat a lot?
She would never stop eating.
Really?
If I put a trough of four-year-old kibble
Four-year-old chow by Purina.
Right.
If I put it there in front of her room, she would just forage all day.
That's fascinating.
My kid is not a big eater.
She's going straight.
She's a candy lawyer.
She's always looking for like, what do I need to negotiate to get a little more TV and a little bit more candy?
But she does not eat a lot of like normal food.
But your kid will eat like what kind of stuff?
Like if she had her druthers, what would she eat?
Oh, just kid shit, you know, macaroni, hot dogs, grilled cheese sandwiches, scabetti.
She likes some scabetti.
If my daughter, you know how we've talked about, at least I have this fantasy of somebody having a gravy machine in my house.
Like I think if she could have, you know, like some people have draft beer, if she could have draft noodles, I think she would just be pulling a glass of noodles all the time.
I feel like that would be true of mine too.
But she's trolling the buffet.
I don't know what she's looking for.
Grapes?
What does she think is up there?
But she just wants – and she gives the poor street urchin eyeballs to all the adults walking by.
Like no one has fed me.
Like she's a little like a Dickensian character.
Yeah, have more gruel, sir.
And so people are like – I mean I think we've passed the point where any adult would feed a strange child from their hands, right?
Yeah.
I mean, they look around like, where is this child's parent and why is she trolling the buffet?
Like, so that's what I say to her.
Like, you're making people nervous.
Come over here and sit with your family.
And she's just like, as soon as, as soon as you're not watching her, she's back over like, like a, like a shark just swimming in front of the, a beach covered with bathers.
And I go, ah, like, what is that?
But she does not seem like somebody who's going to hoard candy in a bag in order to manipulate other kids.
And I can't tell whether that's an evolution of the family, like sort of a John Syracuse-style evolution.
The way he looks at evolution, right?
Yeah, just sort of like where people see a thing and then they change and evolve.
Evolution, yeah.
Or whether it's a maladaptation and she's not going to be able to...
She's not going to learn how to leverage your wealth into power over people.
I don't want to ask you to talk too much about her, but kids are weird.
Kids are super weird.
It's hard to know what they're going to connect with.
And like, but the buffet, I remember the buffet just being the stuff of fantasy to me.
When we got our first, I don't want to say Duff's in Cincinnati, it was like $3 in like 1976 or $7.
I think it was $3 for all you, well, before they would say all you care to eat, they would say for all you can eat.
Where it was really, it was more like some kind of a challenge.
Oh, yeah.
Ours was called the Royal Fork.
And when you walked into the Royal Fork.
That sounds fancy.
It was.
There was a crown on top of the fork, the Royal Fork.
You'd walk into the Royal Fork and you saw right away that there were like 24 different kinds of Jell-O salad.
And yeah, all the macaroni and cheese you could eat, all the chicken cutlets you could eat, all the scabetti you could eat.
It was an insane scene.
And then I can't imagine why a restaurant like that would go out of business.
But Royal Fork is no more.
I'm looking at some images here from a place that became popular around the time I moved out of Tallahassee, but it's called China Super Buffet.
And there was this real trend in the mid to late 90s.
For example, I think I've told you the first time I ever ate sushi, at least on a regular basis, was at a buffet.
Oh, that's good sushi.
Buffet sushi.
So you go at lunch.
It was $8 for all you care to eat sushi.
They had a Seminole roll.
What's that?
I don't know.
Did Seminole Indians eat their food in rolls?
I think it had racism and wife beating in it.
But no, but there was this trend though in the mid to late 90s where there was like more and more –
buffets taking over and pushing out the more mom and pop version of whatever was coming there so when this place opened you should see this place it looks it's like a it's like a barn it's just giant and so they got all the i'm looking here at the uh at the steam tables full of like lots of you know vegetable heavy dishes with greasy stuff but they also had this entire bar of just uniformly golden brown american food
So it was like all you could eat tater tots, all you could eat French fries, all you could eat.
It's just like going to Publix.
And you go to the hot section where it's just all uniformly golden brown.
Oh, I know, I know.
And people would just go fucking crazy in this place.
I was behind a guy at a salad bar last week.
And I swear to God, you do not want to see an old person at a salad bar.
They put a hurtin' on a salad bar.
I think for a lot of people that go to the salad bar, that's going to be three meals.
Yeah.
I've got a pal who insists that we go to Sizzler.
Not because the steaks are good, but because the salad bar.
They got a hot bar.
Yeah.
Right?
You can go.
You get your soups.
You get a variety of breads.
Yep.
You got pump chili there.
Do they?
Well, maybe the chili is in a serving tub.
I don't want to sound like a fancy lad, but Sizzler is just a little below my bar.
Yeah, I keep saying to this – It's not even fun ironically, John.
It's like going to Chuck E. Cheese.
Yeah.
Did your taste buds stop in 1987?
I mean did they stop evolving like Sizzler?
No, I can't go to Sizzler.
But she insists and we go to Sizzler and I'm like I can't do this.
They don't even have –
They don't even have steak and Malibu chicken anymore.
I couldn't even find a Malibu chicken.
What's a Malibu chicken?
What's that got in it?
What?
You never went to Sizzler and got steak and Malibu chicken?
I don't think so.
Sounds pretty good.
Malibu chicken is basically just a chicken breast with... Oh, a cheese on it.
Slice of ham on it and then some Swiss cheese on the top.
Oh, it's like a poor man's cordon bleu.
It's a poor man's cordon bleu.
You used to get two...
two Malibu chickens and some kind of six-ounce or eight-ounce steak that absolutely fell off the back of a truck, right?
I mean, it's like they don't say USA Choice.
They say like Choice Steaks, right?
Just a picture of a guy in a government uniform shrugging.
Yeah, right.
And it's like, choice steaks, that's different than saying that this steak is USDA choice.
It's probably fine.
It's just saying that you chose them out of a laundry bin of steaks that came out of a processing plant.
Oh, no, no.
We don't mean USDA choice.
We just mean this is what we picked out for you.
Yeah, I mean Sizzler's Choice.
And I think they might even be called Sizzler's Choice.
Yeah.
A sizzler's choice.
That's as good as USTA choice.
But yeah, so the other day I was down.
I was being basically like press ganged into going into a sizzler.
And I was standing out front like digging my heels into the cement going, no, I do not want again to go to a sizzler.
I am done.
And across the street from the Sizzler is an Outback Steakhouse.
And I said, let's just look.
Look, look, look, look, look.
We're here.
Let's just try something new.
You know me.
I like to try something new.
Let's just go across the street to the Outback Steakhouse.
We'll do a comparison.
It's consistent.
It is consistent.
And so we schlep across the street to the Outback Steakhouse.
We go in and immediately we're being upsold a Bloomin' Onion.
We weren't even seated at the table.
And sat there and just sort of got upsold half a dozen times.
The waiter was pretty bad at his job.
Yeah.
But, you know, it was a better class of steak than the Sizzler.
So I had to say, you know, okay.
Did you go to places like a Ponderosa when you were a kid?
We didn't have those in Anchorage.
I don't even know what a Golden Corral is.
That sounds like a Royal Fork.
It does sound like a real fork.
A golden corral, I think is like, well, here's the thing.
Like when I was a kid, you had your York steakhouse.
You never heard of it.
Well, and they were places that did like a cafeteria style line and you could get a $6 steak or whatever.
Or whatever.
You could get, you know, the ground beef patty burger with steak fries and you get a little – just like, you know, you get the pudding and the jello out of the case just like, you know, like you would in any cafeteria.
It's just there would be, you know, it's like slightly nicer than disgusting and like you would go there.
But then I think something happened.
I want to say around the time I was in high school probably where they suddenly, I guess, I don't know.
I'm not sure what market force would have caused this, but they started adding more and more buffet elements.
I think it started obviously with the salad bar.
Then they start – you start having your soups.
You got your breads.
You get more and more.
Maybe there's a carving station.
And I think that feels very luxe to people.
I mean you go to Las Vegas and like people are dying for this stuff.
Did I ever tell you that I was a member of a group called the Cotillion Club when I was in high school?
Was that about dancing?
It was about dancing.
I was in Cotillion Club.
You were in Cotillion Club.
Seventh grade, yeah.
Tell me about yours.
Well, so, you know, sometime around, I don't know, ninth or tenth grade, the kids all started whispering about Cotillion.
Were you or were you not going to get invited to Cotillion?
And I had never heard of Cotillion and I didn't know what to expect, but it was like,
A group of adults chose which kids were the right kids, were the fancy kids.
You're kidding.
To invite to Cotillion Club, which was a special set of dances.
This is in the 80s?
Oh, yeah.
Oh, my God.
Special set of dances that only the chosen kids could attend.
Wow.
And the grownups were like the moms and dads.
And I think that the grownups chose one another too.
Like the moms and dads from the last set, you know, picked the right moms and dads to choose the right kids for the next generation.
And so buzz, buzz, buzz, all the kids are whispering, who's going to get into Cotillion Club?
And it was not a thing that I –
knew about, and my mom was absolutely not one of the right moms.
And I was...
Very definitely not one of the right kids.
Oh, man.
And so Cotillion Club comes around and, you know, it's like the kids are getting tapped.
Like, you know, tap on the shoulder.
It's like skull and bones with dance moves.
Do you want, you know, you are invited to Cotillion.
Do you accept or, you know, accept or refuse?
Make your choice, right?
And all the kids are like, oh, my God, I'm in Cotillion.
Wow.
And so the selection of Cotillion happened.
And I was not invited because the moms who made that decision – I think there were some dads too, moms and dads.
had determined that I was the bad element.
I was the wrong tone because my parents were divorced.
My mother was a single mother who lived in an inappropriately big house considering she was a single mother.
So it was suspicious.
Something was wrong because no single mother should be prospering.
And the suspicion, I think, in the neighborhood was that my mom was there to steal all their husbands or something, whatever it was that they were afraid of single women at the time, single professional women.
So I didn't get invited.
And also I was a bad kid, let's be honest.
But my friends who all were in Catillion Club rebelled.
You never saw this before.
And I didn't think my friends liked me that much.
But they did, like me enough, and they went to their moms and they staged a protest.
Not an actual protest because these are middle class kids.
But there was an insurrection.
An insurrection.
And they said, if you don't invite John to Catillion Club, then none of us will go to Catillion Club.
And it was a completely false threat.
They all were going to go to Cotillion, whether I went or not.
But it was for that week or whatever, it was their Stanford justice.
That was their march on Selma, was that they were going to stop this tragedy that I hadn't been invited to Cotillion.
So...
A week later than everyone else, my invitation to Cotillion arrived and you could just – and you just knew the moms were so mad because I was going to ruin it.
And obviously like there were very few if no people of color invited to Cotillion.
Yeah.
And it was – but this was before anybody felt like – before any white people noticed that there was a problem with that.
And so they had these dances down at the Hilton Hotel where members of the Catillion Club from all the schools would congregate.
And it was basically like these are the right kids.
From the whole town.
These are the chosen kids from the whole city.
This sounds like something from the 30s.
Yes, absolutely.
But this is Anchorage in the 80s.
Even by the 80s, like I think about when I was in like advanced English, they had to come up with a funny name for it.
So they didn't want to call it Accelerator or whatever.
There was so much concern about steering, so much concern about like, you know, even then exiling kids to some kind of area where like they didn't feel special.
Like I can't believe this existed.
But this was extra school.
It had nothing to do with the school.
This was a group that was funded and run by parents who wanted the best for their kids.
Okay.
And it was absolutely like Savannah in the 30s, but there was this super class hierarchy in Anchorage at the time because a lot of the people that settled Alaska in the 50s and 60s came from
uh, the Northeast, uh,
and moved directly to Alaska.
They didn't move west.
They moved from New Haven to Anchorage.
A little bit of French plantation.
Yeah.
So they brought their old culture, which didn't continue to evolve, and then they tried to implant it in Anchorage.
And it was successful.
So that was the first time I ever saw a carving station because you would go to Gatillion and there was like a dinner.
where there would be a giant ham and a giant roast beef under a metal thing and a person in a chef's hat who would carve the meat for you.
And I'm standing there in my like already wearing like a double knit suit because I was like, fuck you.
And I mean, and I went in to Cotillion knowing that I was persona non grata with the chaperones and
And so I really played it up.
Just, you know, just like polyester suits and bad attitude.
So this is not something where your friends wanted you in there, but this was not something that was on your radar.
You did not see yourself going, ooh, like I need to become part of the in-scene with the Cotillion Club.
Well, I always imagined that my role in every situation was somewhere between Bluto and Otter.
Right?
Like, I was Bluto when it was time to start a food fight.
But you can pass.
But I was Otter when it was time to stage a protest at the fraternity sorority meeting.
Right.
So I was the one that shouted gator when it was time to gator.
I was the one that wore a toga when it was time to wear a toga.
I started the conga line.
But if you had a hearing with Dean Wormer, you need to put on a tie.
That's right.
You put on a tie and you go to the meeting with Dean Wormer.
You say, Dean Wormer, you're absolutely right.
We're going to try and straighten this up.
So I would talk to adults.
I actually had a mother...
I had actually had a mother look me in the eye and say, you are such a bullshit artist.
And, you know, and I was 15, right?
And I took it as the highest compliment that, you know, that this mom was driven to such frustration that she would swear at a teen, you know, like it was such a violation of her personal code that I had driven her to call me a bullshit.
And, you know, she hissed it at me like,
You're such a bullshit artist.
I was like, ha, ha, ha, ha.
So I was at Catillion, and I absolutely felt I belonged there, but I belonged there as the person who was trying to ruin it for everyone else.
I'm sorry.
Make it super fun for everyone, but in the process, ruin it for all time.
It looks like your float looks like it's a cake, but it turns into the death mobile.
That's exactly it.
That's exactly it.
And so every time – and over the course of a couple of years, I was expelled from Cotillion and then was allowed back into Cotillion because I wrote a –
Wrote a letter of apology or something to somebody.
It was all just a big farce.
And then there was college cotillion, which was when you got back from college, when you return to Anchorage at Christmas break, there would be a big dance for all the cotillion kids to stand around and talk about their fancy colleges.
And I went to that and I actually really destroyed that dance.
There was projectile vomiting.
There was actually spiking the punch bowl.
Real live spiking the punch bowl as though it was 1950.
That's the 80s in Anchorage.
What was the – if you can remember or guess, what was the endgame for Catillion Club in terms of what did the moms – were they replicating some kind of an East Coast thing that they felt like they lost?
Were they trying to make something new?
Was it a feeder program into some kind of larger social world?
Yeah, it was the best and the brightest.
They wanted the best –
They wanted the best kids by their estimation to understand the bond they had with one another and begin the process of creating an old boy network in the youth where you would like –
you were meeting one another at a time when, you know, you had, you, some of you had already decided to be doctors and some had decided to be lawyers, but the ones who were going to run real estate empires and own the bank didn't quite know what they were going to do yet.
You know, they knew they were going to go into business or whatever, but once you, once you were all 30 years down the road,
And you'd go in to get a loan to start your own newspaper or whatever.
You'd give them the Cotillion Club handshake.
Yeah, you'd sit down in the bank president's office and you already knew each other.
You knew each other from all the way back from Cotillion Club.
Like it's how old boy networks get created in places where – because what we didn't have up there was what you do have back east, which is like family names, right?
So you weren't, if somebody walked into your bank president's office and you were just like, oh, I'm a Roosevelt.
Yeah, like a Vanderbilt or something.
Yeah, right.
So you know what that means.
But in Alaska, that was still very new.
And actually, as a Roderick, you know, my uncle had been mayor.
I was, I've told you that story, right, where I was standing at some party and some adult walks up with this other kid my age, some dopey looking kid.
And they're like, I thought you two should meet both of your, uh, you know, like your uncle was mayor, John and a dopey kid here.
His, his, uh, his dad was governor and you know, you guys should know each other.
And the dopey kid and I sat and looked at each other and was like, huh, that's you.
There's me.
But the idea was like, oh, you guys are both part of political dynasties.
You should be.
So it's so weird.
Yeah.
If you knew each other, then that would be like good somewhere down the line.
I think it still goes on, even as we would all kind of want to shun that or act like it doesn't exist anymore.
I think it still goes on.
It's just it's so coded now.
It has so many levels to it of seeming good intention.
Mm-hmm.
But, I mean, down to, like, God, I remember first hearing some friends of mine that lived in New York.
Their kid's probably three or four years older than ours.
And this woman who's, you know, kind of, she's very prominent in the tech world.
And basically, the first hearing the phrase, theater preschool.
Which is to this day, it just makes me shudder.
That's some Park Slope shit right there.
Absolutely.
Well, I think they might live in Manhattan.
It might be Brooklyn.
I'm not sure.
But in any case.
But like now, I mean, when I first heard that, I was like, you've got to be kidding me.
When I hear feeder school, I think of that is an undergraduate program that tends to get certain kinds of candidates, whether it's medical or business or whatever, tends to get them into like an Ivy League school.
It's a feeder school.
And you know what?
I will even accept that there are prep schools that are feeder schools for undergrad programs.
Like that all makes sense in some kind of catcher in the rye way to me.
But like the idea of a feeder preschool that your three-year-old has to be going to the right school in order to get into the right elementary school.
It's completely bananas.
We applied to five preschools in San Francisco and we got into one.
Oh my God.
Yeah.
And I mean, you know, they weren't like, we're not talking like prep schools.
We're not talking fancy, but I mean, you know, they cost money and stuff.
Yeah.
But they're preschools.
They're preschools.
The preschool near our house, the Montessori school near our house has a required five day a week attendance and it's $1,500 a month.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, I hear this from my New York friends all the time.
Like, um,
The reason that a lot of them don't bring their kids on the Joko cruise anymore is because they cannot afford to miss a week of grade school because if they, if their attendance is,
is bad by which i mean miss one week of school their attendance is that bad they won't get into the right junior high and i'm just like all of the you you should just take your kids out of school if those are the rules there's a part of that i have to say i'm of two minds there's a part of that that makes absolute sense to me and then a much larger part of that that is so fucking bananas i can't even believe it but especially even in elementary school
I mean I understand – I don't like my kid missing school.
I don't like her to be sick and miss stuff because it's all cumulative, especially with Common Core stuff.
Like you really – you need to know the stuff to know the stuff, and you've got to be there, and you've got to keep – you lose momentum when you miss those days.
But the idea that like – just – I don't know.
There's something about that that is really dispiriting to me, especially given how many people I know –
who, you know, can manage to like make a living and live in this atrocious city and like how much time and energy it takes to be like the parent of somebody in that system.
And then like, well, obviously the extension of that being like, holy shit, what about the kids who don't have that?
Like who is like fighting for them to even get like a morsel?
It's insane to me.
Well, you know, one thing we haven't talked about on this program is the billionaire party that we went to.
Oh, yeah.
Do you feel comfortable talking about the billionaire party?
You know, I'm going to type that here on my computer.
We could talk about that at some point.
Yeah.
I mean, we went to a party where Elon Musk was there.
I didn't see him, but I heard he was there.
There's a lot of nice people there.
Very, very nice people, but a lot of people in their 40s, early 40s.
Yeah.
who are also billionaires.
Yeah, Three Comma Club.
And they're all in at a party together.
If a bomb had gone off,
There would be no internet today, or there would be no monetization.
Nobody would know how to turn it back on.
Right?
They'd be like, whoa, the guy that turns on the internet every morning.
There'd be no monetization.
Yeah.
The guy that turns on the internet every morning, he died in the party bomb.
How are we going to make money off of this now?
You know, we can talk about that.
You mentioned...
Last week, which was a very interesting episode of this program, after we finished talking, you had hinted during the program that it was a big week for you in more than one way.
The story that you told last week about getting 94% of your wholeness back was certainly a big week.
But I was curious if you wanted to talk about the other thing that you mentioned.
Which you could save for another show.
Is it still?
What was I talking about?
You were maybe making a down payment.
Oh.
Yes, I will talk about it.
So we can table the billionaires for now?
Yeah, I know you don't want to talk about the billionaires.
Oh, no, are you kidding me?
I got a whole stack right here.
The thing about the billionaires is I know that you run into them at the supermarket, and you have to be like, oh, hey.
They have a special billionaire supermarket.
Hey, Jim.
Hey, Tony.
And they're like, oh, yeah, I heard your program where you're talking about the billionaire party.
First rule of the billionaire party.
Right.
Right.
Yeah.
I did show our text conversation to my wife when you were with me.
I can't do it in your dad's voice, but I met a very nice man today named Evan.
He says that he knows you from something that you worked on a long time ago.
I'm like, yep, yep.
That's, you know.
Yeah, very nice man.
So, so, uh, how can you talk about this?
Well, yeah.
Is it happening?
Yeah.
So the other day I went, I was, so a couple of weeks ago I was driving, uh, up to Bellingham and my daughter's mother had to pick up some apologies.
I had to go up there and get, yeah, get a duffel Philson bag full of apologies and bring it back to Seattle and make it a nicer place.
Hmm.
And so I'm driving up there and my daughter's mother points and yells.
We're in Marysville, Washington.
She points and yells off to the side of the freeway and she goes, GMCRV.
And I looked over and it's an RV dealer and there are 85 RVs, all of them that look like, I mean, gigantic houses on wheels.
And then right in the middle, there's like, it's like a broken tooth.
There's this tiny little thing and it's a GMC RV.
And so I make a mental note of it, and when we drive back from Bellingham, we drive past it again, and we both look at it and go, that is a GMC RV, and it's sitting on an RV lot.
And so we go home.
We don't stop.
Oh, my God.
I asked my daughter's mother, why don't you call that dealership and see what the story is with the GMC RV?
Can I be a little bit of a Norton addition here?
Yeah, of course.
Just to explain that when you say GMC RV, a lot of people are just going to hear some letters.
Yeah, GMC RV.
We had a fairly detailed discussion about the GMC RV.
Yeah.
On a past episode, we talked about this at length.
And what a cherry bit of kit this thing is.
That's right.
Longtime listeners will know what we're talking about here.
And in fact, I've told you before, right, that the GMCRV episode precipitated an email from a guy who said, hey, I loved that show.
Longtime listener of the program.
I also happen to be president of the Northwest GMCRV Club and also the grandson of...
The guy, Mr. Birch, who helped design the GMCRV.
And one of them is called a Birchhaven.
One of the designs is called a Birchhaven, named after my grandfather.
John, that's so much cooler than Catillion Club.
It's very bizarre.
And, you know, we do this all the time on this program.
We talk about things.
And then all of a sudden the other day, a senior editor at the New York Times retweeted our program and said, you guys have got to listen to this episode.
Yeah, that's weird.
And it's just like, wow, that's cool.
He seems like a cool guy.
It's this gorgeous 1970s RV.
It's kind of like a super van.
Super van.
I think is that how we described it at the time?
It's real big.
But it's not Winnebago big.
It's not Winnebago big.
It's like a big van.
You can kind of drive around a town, but it's got a bed in the back and a bathroom and a kitchen and couch and so forth.
Anyway, so we call up to the dealer.
And the dealer says, yeah, we got this thing here.
We don't know anything about it.
And frankly, we don't want to know anything about it.
We're in the market.
We're in the business of selling these $150,000 Winnebago's.
And some guy came in and traded it in on a new Winnebago.
And it's sitting there and it's $13,000.
And so, you know.
What?
Take it or don't.
We don't give a shit.
And we were like, well, that is a – That's not – that is not out of reach.
Yeah, it's a fairly reasonable price for these.
The really nice ones can be $50,000 or $30,000.
But $13,000 is right in the sort of low end of normal or low end of like this one is in good condition, et cetera.
So eventually one day I say, I'm just going to go up there.
Marysville isn't close to Seattle, but it's close enough and I'm not doing anything.
I'm just going to drive up there and see what's what.
So I drive up and I go and I look at it and it seems like
You know, the carpet was changed and it's now sort of 80s hotel lobby carpet.
Some things have been changed about it, but also the previous owners had done a lot of modifications that had improved the vehicle.
And everyone in the subculture refers to them as coaches.
Like motor coach, yeah.
Yeah, what condition is your coach?
And I'm sort of like, ah, coach is one of those words I don't want to say.
I don't want to say coach.
I think you will.
Yeah, probably.
Eventually I will.
What was it like?
I mean, what was the interior like?
Well, they had taken it – so they had changed – the shag carpet was gone and the original upholstery was gone and it had been reupholstered in a sort of color that I can only describe as a blackberry smoothie, which is very divisive.
Certain people see it and they're like that.
But like it's like a used car lot waiting room kind of like industrial carpeting?
No, no, no.
The carpet on the floor has, yeah, like little emblems, little fleur-de-lis on it that are sort of like, I don't know what you were thinking.
But the upholstery is great.
Plush, purple fabric.
Um...
I personally think it's hilarious and great.
Other people in my clan think it is hideous.
Not in the best taste.
But, you know, to each his own.
How many of these are you going to come across?
That's right.
There aren't a whole lot of them, although there is a secondary market for them.
And you could become a hobbyist, John.
This is a great thing to have a hobby about.
Yeah.
So I'm sitting in this RV and I'm talking to the salesman whose name is Todd with one D. Todd with one D. Red flag.
And Todd on his business card has a photograph of himself with a pair of Oakley sunglasses perched on top of his head.
It doesn't happen by accident.
But no, it doesn't.
He was like, rawr, there's the picture of me I want on my business card.
But it turns out I really like Todd.
Todd is like extremely likable.
He is a salesman and he's selling, but he's also a good guy.
Like I just instinctively like Todd.
He probably has jet skied.
Sure.
But I don't hold that against him.
That's part of his culture.
That's right.
So Todd and I are sitting there, and I'm like, well, Todd, I mean, what about this?
What about that?
And he's like, frankly, the thing is as is.
I don't want to know about it, and nobody here does.
So if you want it, buy it.
If you don't, don't ask any questions.
Because if you flip a switch and it goes on, then you know it works.
If you flip a switch and it doesn't go on, you can presume it doesn't work.
How did that read to you?
Because to me, that reads as primarily first-day tactic that he might use for anything on the lot.
But then secondarily, it reads as there's something in there that's going to blow up.
Yeah, exactly.
Both things.
Like there's an axle that's going to go as soon as you're off the lot.
Both things seem true.
Mm-hmm.
And so I thought about it some more and then I called my friend Greg Birch and I said, hey, I want somebody to go look at this with me.
Do you have anybody in your Rolodex?
And he was like, let me call you back.
And then immediately texted me and said, yeah, there's a guy that lives up there who's a member of our club and he will come look at it with you.
That's so cool.
That's why you have an RV club.
Yes.
So I show up at the thing and this man arrives and he's about 70 years old and he is wearing suspenders, clip on suspenders, holding up his jeans.
I like it so far.
And he's got gray hair and he's a, you know, he's a heavyset guy.
And he used to work at Boeing, which is, I think, true of every single GMC RV owner in the Northwest.
Right.
And he walks up and he just starts spinning some knowledge.
And he walks around and he's like, oh, I see they've upgraded the grommets.
Looks like they changed that nipple out for a stainless nipple.
Oh, and look at here.
And they added the secondary boost battery spinner.
Is Todd there while this guy's doing this?
No, Todd doesn't give a shit.
Todd is off selling $150,000 Winnebago's.
Okay.
And it's just me and the guy.
Oh, so this was probably a trade-in.
Oh, it was absolutely a trade-in.
Okay, okay.
And so the guy whose name is Tom, which goes very well with Todd.
I knew twins named Tom and Todd.
Tom and Todd.
Tom is like he's pulling up the carpet.
He's looking in the back.
He's fiddling with the front.
He's down.
He's like, you know, he's an old man and he's down on the ground looking underneath it.
And he pronounces that he thinks the coach is in great condition.
See, I'm already calling it a coach.
He's like, this is a number one coach.
And he loves the purple upholstery.
And so he gives it the bill of good health.
And I'm like, I'm feeling stronger and stronger about this all the time.
Because Tom, I mean, first of all, it must be kind of fun for Tom to get to do that.
Super fun.
I mean, that's good for everybody.
And thank God bless Tom for coming.
But also, I'll bet you Tom, in a heartbeat, would call your attention to something bonkers.
Oh, he absolutely would.
And he had... Like the wheel should not move like that.
Yeah, he had the expertise to say like... I mean, he knew some deep science on it.
And he said some interesting things.
He was like, listen, every RV leaks...
I'm sure this one leaks.
They all leak because they're enormous tubes that are subject to torque and torsion and torsion.
Oh, there's a lot of parts to move.
They move and they twist and they squeak.
They shake a little bit.
They shake.
And so eventually they're all going to leak.
And so don't be worried about leaks.
You have to fix leaks.
But it's just it's part of owning an RV.
If you want to do this.
This is like owning it.
It's like it's like being a boat owner without having to own a fucking boat.
Like there's going to be money and time you put into this.
But you're not living on it.
You're not living on it.
It's not going to sink.
Right.
Right.
So so then I'm talking to I go find Todd.
And I'm like, so what are we going to do with this?
Like, here it is.
It's there.
I think I probably won it.
And Todd, to his credit, says, look,
When I say I don't care about this thing, I'm serious.
I don't care about it.
And so, frankly, if you are... He's a very odd salesman.
Yeah.
He's great.
He's making me very happy.
He's got somebody who's obviously an enthusiast for this kind of fairly rare vehicle.
He's like, fuck it.
I don't care.
Yeah.
So he says, look, if you offer me $8,000 right now, I'll take it.
What?
And I was like, really?
Okay.
I'll buy it for $8,000.
He was like, great.
Sold.
Holy shit, John.
And I said, all right, well, that was the easiest negotiation I ever did.
And so Todd says, do you want to try and get a loan for it?
And I was like, yeah, as a matter of fact, I do.
And so we went and we went through all this rigmarole with the banks.
And the bank came back and said, this person is self-employed and that right there is a reason to reject him.
But also some years he makes this amount of money and some years he makes that amount of money.
And that is too much of a variation.
They're probably not even sure which graph to use.
Yeah, they put all my information into the machine and the machine spit out a giant question mark.
And it started to smoke.
And what I discovered was my credit rating is 830.
And Todd was like, with an 830 credit rating, you should be able to buy an airplane.
But then I brought my tax returns because they insisted because I'm self-employed.
And then the tax returns really confused them.
And they were like, you – what now?
You have your own forms you made up that are written in longhand.
Yeah.
I'm just like, no, no, no.
This is basically – this is super normal.
And they're like, this is not normal.
Your income is incomprehensible to us.
We are a bank.
Right.
And so they rejected me for a car loan for $8,000.
And I was offended.
Sure.
And I was mad.
And then I thought about it for a while and I was like, oh, wait a minute.
I could just go ahead and buy it.
Like I could write a check.
I don't have to get a bank loan.
That was just something fun that I was going to do.
Get a loan for the fun of it.
Don't let that put a bad taste in your mouth.
You're getting a coach.
Yeah.
So I went in and I was like, here, Todd, I'll buy it.
And he was like, oh, all right.
Well, get out of here then.
And so I fired it up and I drove it off the lot and I drove it home.
I can't believe it.
I'm so fucking excited to see this thing.
Well, but here's the rub.
So I got it home and I parked it in my front yard and then I went in.
Now you've really moved into the neighborhood.
Yeah.
I went and I went to bed.
That was Gary checking it out.
I woke up the next morning.
I walked out and I was like, oh shit.
I have become a guy with like an old...
shitty decrepit motor home in his yard you've got a jimmy carter era rv coach in your yard oh this is pre jimmy carter this is 75 this is a it's a ford this is a you know ford rv yeah this is a this is a gerald r ford era recreational vehicle um and so yeah you hadn't thought about like it won't fit in your barn right well there's been some talk about whether it would fit in the barn i don't think it will i would have to move all the vespas all the non-working vespas out of the barn
To fit in my not, you know, my like my hashed up RV.
So you have problems.
So now I'm like shifting into high gear here.
Like I had better join this RV enthusiast club.
I had better.
Oh, and the other thing is I'm tweeting about it.
And I get a I get a tweet from this guy, Isaac Marion, who is a an author who's written some popular books about zombies.
And one of them was made into a movie called where the zombie fell.
It was like a love story with a zombie, like a young, good looking zombie who falls in love with a girl or something.
It was like a Twilight type thing.
Yeah, but with zombies.
And it's sure it's funny.
It's like a like a romantic comedy.
But like one of the people is dead.
And so Isaac Marion is a friend of mine on Twitter and a very nice man.
And he sends me a tweet.
He's like, I own one of those.
And I was like, you what?
I mean, he's like a young, handsome, successful author.
He's a very good looking guy, John.
Yeah, yeah.
He's nice.
Nice looking man and a very nice man.
Smart, smart author, author smart.
He says, oh, yeah, I used to live in it in Ballard before the cops got wise to me and they made me stop living in it.
But I love my GMC RV.
And I was like, Isaac, you got to come up and see this RV with me.
So he did.
He got in my truck.
I went and picked him up at a cafe.
We drove up, looked at the RV.
He was like, oh, this is amazing.
So honestly, what was his estimation of it?
Did he feel like it was a good buy?
Well, so he has a small one.
They came in two sizes and I got the big one.
Oh, dude, I'm looking at the schematic right now.
Yeah.
So he's like got two rooms.
Oh, it's got.
Yeah.
It's it's it's it's as big as a it's as big as a house.
Oh, my God.
It's so cool.
So anyway, so Isaac gives me the the clean bill of health.
And so now I'm in a position basically where not only do I have to join this subculture fast and figure it out.
But also, I feel like I'm going to start a subculture.
I feel like it's time for young people to start buying RVs in general and GMC RVs in particular.
This is not something for retirees, John.
You're talking about people who are still full of vim and vigor, people who are still full of life.
It's time to go out and buy yourself a purple RV.
Get a purple RV, drive it down to Big Sur, and get your picture in Sunset Magazine.
This is happening.
This is a new subculture, and it's going to be like it's the new motorcycle gang for people in their 30s and 40s and 50s.
They move a little slower, and sometimes maybe they like to have a little nap.
Yeah, and you got a juicer on board in case you want some juice.
Oh, that's nice to have fresh juice.
You know, and you wake up in the morning.
You're right there in Big Sur.
You got a fresh glass of juice.
You got a cooking surface?
I'm telling you, there's a refrigerator.
There's an oven.
Oh, my God.
And it's got all these little – like the couch turns into a bunk bed.
I love that.
I love stuff that turns into stuff.
And you've got little things with doors you can put stuff in.
Yep, little things with doors, little things that turn into other things.
God, this is so fucking cool.
So it's got – and it's got one of those old Oldmobile 455 motors, which are like – it's got a – there's a whole cult of people that just care about that motor.
So you could pull Todd's jet ski if you had to.
Absolutely.
I could, you know, I mean, I swear to you, Gary is across the street going, why does that guy get everything?
He's just licking his chops.
He's just like, oh my God, I'm living in my Ford van and he's... You just unintentionally gave Gary the biggest fuck you in the history of everything.
First of all, he doesn't remember that you've met before.
Right.
He's living in a van screaming about Obama on his phone to his lady in the middle of the night.
Yeah.
And then you pull up with the sweetest ride and you pull it into your yard.
Yeah, that's right.
What a fuck you.
Poor Gary.
Well, the whole neighborhood now has to be like, okay, this is either a harbinger of...
Of like a new era where all of a sudden his yard is going to fill up with junk cars.
It only takes one, yeah.
Or he's doing something that the rest of us, you know, like he's our guru.
We need to follow him.
Or a meth lab.
Or a meth lab, right.
But, you know, $8,000, you almost couldn't afford not to buy it.
Oh, I was going to guess.
I don't know how collectible these things are.
I imagine they need a fair amount of maintenance and upkeep.
I was going to guess starting at 25.
Yeah.
And I think you can fix them up.
So now I'm in this whole mode where it's like, well, I'm going to fix this thing up.
I would kind of like to return it to era-appropriate finishes, by which I mean like sheepdog shag carpet in burnt umber.
What I'm looking at has a real overbearing kind of green pattern.
Not even avocado exactly.
There's a lot of paisley.
Yep, yep, yep, yep.
Does yours have bunk beds?
Yes, bunk beds.
Oh, my God.
Bunk beds and a queen size bed in the back and the little dinette set also turns into a full size bed.
You can put six people in there if there are six people that are in love with each other.
You know?
It was the 70s.
You got to be cuddling.
It's a little bit of a key party scene.
Put down some tarps.
And that's the thing about the key party aspect of it.
I feel like if you get three GMC RVs in any one place, there's going to be wife swapping.
Yeah.
Oh, my God.
Oh, my God.
I want to see this thing just pulling up to my house someday.
Well, it's going to.
Can you drive it that far?
Yeah, that's what it's meant for.
I mean, really, though.
Will this make it, you think?
Yeah.
The first thing I'm going to do is go through all the systems and make sure that mechanically...
It is ready to – it's only got 50,000 miles on it.
Like mechanically, I'm going to – So this was sitting somewhere for a long time.
Oh, yeah.
It was sitting in some guy's barn.
Probably somebody had it and maybe it had something he didn't want to fix and he died.
He sat there for 20, 30 years.
He became old and then there it is.
So, yeah, I'm preparing it to be my land yacht.
I'm going to take it up and down the coast all the time and it's going to be my new scene.
It's going to be my weekend thing.
Oh, you know what, buddy?
I got to tell you, I think this is a good move.
I think it's a healthy move.
And I think it's a way to potentially channel a lot of your occupations, pseudo-distractions, concerns, and ruminative gestures into one coach.
The only thing I'm worried about is that I just gave myself –
an all-consuming leisure activity that I wasn't
I wasn't sitting around like, I don't have enough time.
Or I have too much time and I'd like to burn some time and money that I want to burn in a new leisure activity.
It's very much like getting a boat.
I think this is better than a boat.
Boats are redonkiosly expensive to keep up.
Especially if you're not doing too many, you might want to buy the nice AAA.
Is there some kind of super AAA you can get?
There is.
I already have it, though.
Yeah, I got the nice AAA a long time ago because what I didn't want was to call AAA and have them tell me something.
You put the no excuses line.
Yeah, I was just like, I'm going to get the biggest AAA so that when I call you from somewhere out in the boonies, you come without giving me a bunch of rigmarole.
Doesn't take too many uses of that to really pay for itself.
Oh, it's an amazing service, even though...
Even though, as we've said before, at least 50 percent of the time you call AAA, you get somebody who doesn't even know – like they probably – their mom ties their shoes in the morning.
No, some of them are very confused.
At one point, it basically became a proxy for going to the mechanic for me.
Oh, yeah.
To where circa 1989, I got the letter.
Because you can get the letter from AAA.
What's the letter?
You get the letter.
And AAA says, hey, look.
You're overdoing it?
You're overdoing it.
Like, we can't be doing this twice a month for you.
Yeah, right.
And I know that too.
And the other day, the GMC RV, because it had been sitting for a long time, its battery wouldn't hold a charge.
So I went down to the auto zone and I bought a hot new battery.
And my family was like,
Why don't you just call AAA?
Get them to come.
And I was like, because I'm saving up.
Yeah, you got to keep your powder dry on that one.
I'm saving up my AAA calls because I just bought a 40-year-old RV.
It's a coach.
A 40-year-old coach.
And when I call AAA, it's going to be serious, right?
No.
Bigger, bigger, bigger tow truck.
I'm going to be way, way out somewhere and I'm going to need some help.
I wonder if there's a special higher class, like super secret black card version of AAA for people who have a coach.
Where you pay like three, five times as much, but they will actually like tow you to a seat.
I guess it depends on like what's available where you are.
If you're in Death Valley, your options might be kind of limited.
I actually have that black card RV motorcycle.
Okay.
I officially believe you because I didn't know it existed.
Yeah.
RV motorcycle where they'll pick up a motorcycle, which is a certain kind of weird towing, where they need a flatbed, and then they will also tow an RV.
So I'm expecting that when I finally call AAA, I will have to hitchhike to a phone booth.
Mm-hmm.
To get them on the phone because there won't be cell service.
Mm-mm.
And then I'm going to say, listen.
That's how you know it's time.
That's how you know.
Open the provisions.
Like, this is it.
I'm at mile post 4,000 on UFO highway.
Send the really, really, really big tow truck.
Sir, do you think we could just give you a push?
Nope, don't think that's going to work.
They always want to give you a push.
When you get the fuck you level of AAA that we've got, they just want to give you a push.
Have you had that?
No, they want to give you a push.
I think there's levels of time and liability involved in different things.
And I've on numerous occasions had them want to put just you steer and we'll push.
They don't even want to hook you up.
Whoa.
They definitely don't want to bring out the big roll away.
Where are they pushing you?
They get behind you with the big bumper and they want to push you.
To where?
To wherever you're going, wherever it needs to be driven.
Wow, that doesn't sound safe at all.
Yeah, that's worth upgrading from that, I guess.
Yep, get the good AAA.
But the number one thing about restoring an RV is that
The danger is that you get in there and you start putting spice in the spice rack.
Oh, you don't want to lose your way.
Yeah, right.
You can't occupy it until you've got it straightened out.
You can't just start going in there and putting throw pillows around if you're going to rip up the carpet.
Right.
Right.
But also you do want to use it.
Yeah.
You don't want this to just be a boat project where you're just a rich guy with nothing better to do.
You want your family to be able to roll around in this.
That's right.
So the current challenge is prioritizing fix-it-up projects.
so that we get the main mechanical ones done immediately, and then we have a list of the other mechanical stuff that we need to get done, and then we have how much...
like fabric cleaner and Windex do we need to get in here and start enjoying it?
Boy, look at that windshield.
You can just see everything, can't you?
It's a big, big windshield.
And it's one of the nice things about them is that they just have huge windows.
I see this.
I mean, like there's an aside.
It's like your living room.
Yeah, so it feels very light and airy in there.
It doesn't feel like a claustrophobic RV.
Is it stinky?
No.
Well, it's stinky in the sense that at some point along the way, an old person put some sort of fabric softener.
Oh, God, like a potpourri solution.
Yeah, potpourri.
And so you walk in there and you're like, I don't know what the bad smells are in this place because it's all covered with potpourri.
It could be terrible.
It could smell like mold and cats and end times in there.
But I don't – But you want to know what it is you're smelling and you're going to be able to keep the varmints out of this probably, right?
I mean it's got good seals and everything.
Yeah, but I feel like keeping varmints out is also another thing like leaks where you just know that it's part of RV ownership that mice are going to try and get into your RV.
Coach life.
That's right.
Coach life.
It's my new life.
Coach life is the good life.
Is this going to change the way you dress at all?
You're going to get a captain's hat?
It's very unclear to me how to dress in a 70s RV.
Do you dress 70s?
I can see a Commodore Schmidlap kind of look for you.
You know, I'm thinking a double-breasted navy blazer at least.
Okay.
You know what?
I can't believe I just said this.
I said, are you going to get a captain's hat?
You will probably choose a captain's hat from amongst the ones you have already.
The problem with my current captain's hat selection is that I have some shitty captain's hats.
Okay.
It's time to upgrade, huh?
It's time to upgrade to get a good captain's hat that befits my status as the captain.
Captain the coach.
Coach captain.
So fucking sweet.
Congratulations.
You're going to love it.
I can't fucking wait.
Your whole family's going to love it.
We're going to drive around San Francisco together.
We're going to cause a lot of problems for people in this.
Yep.
Yep.