Ep. 181: "Saltin' Up"
Pay it forward.
Oh, hello.
Hi, John.
Hi, Merlin.
How's it going?
Good.
How are you?
Oh, I'm doing great.
You sound good.
Oh, thank you.
I'm in a professional podcasting studio.
You are not.
Yeah, I would like your voice to be turned up a little bit.
I'm going to look out the window and say to the person operating the board, you turn up Merlin.
Oh, my God.
I have so many questions.
Yeah.
Oh, that sounds better.
Well, that's good, yeah.
Is this happening in your RV?
No.
No, I haven't built a professional podcast studio in my RV yet.
Is it happening inside the American concrete building?
I am.
I'm inside the American.
Well, it turns out I got that wrong.
It's the American cement building.
Oh, I just learned this week that there's a difference.
Yeah.
A huge difference.
I'm in the cement building.
Boy, you sound great.
Thank you.
What the hell is going on?
Well, I'm on an SM7B, which, as you know, is my preferred microphone.
Mm-hmm.
And I'm actually – so where to begin?
So I drove down to California in my GMC RV that I recently purchased.
Are you still there?
Yeah, yeah.
No, I'm listening.
I just hope you're not in jail.
Good.
Is this your one call?
Yes.
And so I get down here to California, and I've got some rehearsals and some shows I'm going to do, and I've got all this stuff.
And I kind of was like, oh, yeah, I'll just stay in the RV.
And somebody gave me a podcasting microphone, like one of those USB ones.
I was like, I'm just going to, you know, I'll pull up in front of a cafe and I'll plug in my microphone into my laptop.
And it's not going to sound great, but it'll be a mobile kind of facility.
But what I didn't really plan for, and I knew this already, is that when you're living in an RV, you're not living a normal life.
And it's kind of like when you buy your first Volkswagen bug and then all of a sudden you see Volkswagen bugs everywhere.
And you didn't know that they were there before.
Yeah.
You buy an RV and you're driving in an RV and all of a sudden you realize there's this whole RV ecosystem that you just weren't seeing before.
And there are multiple layers of an RV ecosystem.
And when you're on the highways, you see these beautiful RVs, these big rich people RVs.
that are traveling America's highways and byways, and they're full of retirees, and they cost $200,000.
But then when you get down into a city, a city of any size, you see the substrata of RV culture, which is the people living in their RVs on the streets of your town.
That's big here.
Yeah.
Really big in California, so much so that...
street signs that I used to, you know, you pull up into a parking spot and there's a street sign that's like five paragraphs long.
And formerly, as a non-RV owner, I would just skim the first three sentences.
You're a standard operator in a civilian car.
You don't need to read all that stuff.
You're not parking.
You're not a monster.
What time is it?
What day is it?
Let me figure out if I can park here.
But now, as an RV owner, you realize a lot of these signs, particularly in L.A.,
They say things like, no vehicles over eight feet tall.
It's like, I don't think I ever saw that sign before.
You know what it is?
It's privilege.
You never saw the discrimination.
That's right.
I was blind to it.
And then signs that say no parking, but from 8 p.m.
to 8 a.m.
I was like, what?
What a crazy sign.
They think you're a vagrant, John.
They absolutely do.
No sitting on the sidewalk for John.
No sitting on the sidewalk, precisely.
And so then I start looking around and I see these people in their RVs and they're parked all over where they can get away with it.
And they're showering in people's garden hose.
It's a whole world.
They're not homeless because they have a car with a bed in it.
And now that's me.
So last night I slept on the corner of Melrose and somewhere.
Melrose and despair.
And I woke up this morning and people were walking their dogs around me and scowling at me.
And I was like, I'm going to podcast today with Merlin.
You know what?
I'll just whip up in front of a cafe somewhere and I'll hijack their Wi-Fi.
And then I'm in the RV and I'm driving around and it's like, wait a minute, you don't whip up in front of anywhere in this thing.
Yeah, you're not just going to slide into an open spot.
You're not just going to slide anywhere.
Pull up into a load only zone and just kind of put your blinkers on.
Like this thing is, it's like an aircraft carrier.
So I'm tooling around and it's like once you get moving, you kind of can't stop.
You're in this sort of big whale shark of a thing and your mouth is open and you're swallowing krill.
And you can't stop moving because if you do, and particularly in L.A., if you even slow down, like just the Mercedes Benzes pile up behind you like red blood cells through a constricted artery.
That's what it's like to be Dick Cheney.
Let's get to that.
That's brutal.
And, you know, like I've always been in L.A.
in a fast car, in a fast moving car.
Even when I was in the tour van, it was a fast moving van.
Now I'm in a slow van and you realize that L.A.
is not prepared for slow moving vehicles.
There's a complete, it absolutely makes sense.
There is a flow chart here.
But it presumes that everyone is, you know, just absolutely flooring their gas pedal at every opportunity.
And so this thing is like, and people just don't know what to do about it.
It's absolutely disrupting the system.
I'm sure I've been inside now for 45 minutes, and I'm sure there are still traffic problems that I created.
Where did you end up parking?
If you can say.
So here I go.
I'm driving along.
I'm like, what am I going to do?
I want a podcast with Merlin.
I'm living in a van now.
I'm a guy that has one Hawaiian shirt.
Oh, my goodness.
You're Matt Foley.
Yeah.
But I'm also trying to interact with people in the straight world.
This is the problem.
If I was fully in an RV ecosystem...
then I would start to be one of the disappeared, right?
And no one would, you know, people wouldn't acknowledge me and I would be eating mostly in Honduran restaurants and I would be in a separate world.
But I'm also trying to go to rehearsals and do shows and be around people.
That's tough in L.A.
because in some ways you're transitioning into a kind of transportation reassignment surgery.
You're very slowly moving into this new world, and that's going to be rocky.
You need to stand with one foot over here and another over there and a wheel in the middle, and you're not going to be welcome.
I've seen these people move in packs.
God bless them.
They've got tribes.
And we had a car trip over the weekend, and we passed one of these places, and the sticker prices on these things are crazy.
But at the same time, I was like, you know what?
For $139,000, you could have a really sweet house that you can drive.
That's right.
Maybe it's my age.
I just turned 49.
Maybe it is my age, but I find that extremely appealing, and I would like to meet the tribe.
I would like some Honduran food and a Hawaiian shirt.
I can enjoy that.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Oh, the freedom is unparalleled.
Except when you need to park.
Well, they stick together because there's safety in numbers and they park all together and then they can like get electricity for themselves and send their poo and pee down a tube.
But when you're renegade, when you're off the RV grid –
Right.
And onto the street grid.
You're a rogue.
You are.
You are a between worlds person.
And, you know, so I'm over at a friend's house and they're like, boop-a-doop-a-doop and we're watching a movie and then they're like, okay, well, good night.
And like three of the people walk out the door, get into Ubers that appear mysteriously and then poof, they're off to an Airbnb somewhere and...
And the grocery is delivered.
Yeah.
And they just they're on their phone and they're like, Amazon, next day delivery, pow.
And I'm like down to some kind of, you know, at a Home Depot parking lot and like trying to get my my raise my TV antenna with a bike chain that I rigged up.
So anyway, so I'm driving along this morning and I'm like, what am I going to do?
What am I going to do?
I can't even slow down without the Mercedes Benzes piling up behind me.
There's no loading zones anywhere.
And I'm like, who do I know in L.A.
that can help me out in this situation?
Is there anybody who does podcasts in L.A.?
I don't think there's that many people in L.A.
doing podcasts.
I could go to Michael.
I could call Michael Penn.
Call Michael Penn.
And say, hey, can I use your studio?
But you know what?
He's in there making soundtracks all the time.
What if I were Romeo in black jeans?
What if I were Heathcliff?
It's no myth.
You got Mark Maron.
He's got a garage, but his neighbor's always running the weed whacker.
Well, see, and, you know, Mark's never invited me on his program.
Me neither.
So I didn't.
I think you're SOL.
You're going to have to go.
What are you going to do?
You go to Orange County.
There's probably podcasters in Orange County.
Right?
Podcasters in Orange County, but they're all wearing Chuck Taylors, and their podcasts are really, you know, like, super, like, compressed, high-energy podcasts.
Oh, yeah, high-mids.
Right?
So what did you end up doing?
So I called my good friend...
jesse thorne of the maximum fun podcast network and i said hey you guys podcast and he was like as a matter of fact we do and we have an opening this morning unfortunately we have a dress code and so i took the elevator did he lend you a cravat well you know he does have he does have quite a few uh menswear accessories in the office including a poncho and
He has a podcasting poncho?
He has a podcasting poncho.
Everything about Jesse is exactly, well, it's exactly dialed in.
Say what you will about Jesse.
That man thinks stuff through.
He is a thinker.
He's a wise grown-up.
He was probably born a grown-up.
I bet he's always been 60.
Prematurely aged.
He has a steamer, a closed steamer in his bathroom here.
He has a very long beard now, which is made out of 100% alpaca.
Anyway, so Jesse was like, well, I'm not in the office right now, but I'm headed there.
And so I come down to this place in the American Cement Building, which is an actual office building in an actual downtown area.
I go upstairs.
I knock on the door.
And there are desks and people working.
In the Maximum Fund network, there are four employees at their desks.
They're probably doing tech support or something.
They're probably answering questions about Samsung phones or something.
They're working on their computers.
You can't make money from a podcast, John.
Well, I'm telling you, it's a network.
Oh, my goodness.
It's not a podcast.
It's a network.
See?
That's the difference.
Yeah.
What it is is it's like – well, it's like China.
You make a volume discount.
Absolutely.
So I come in.
Of course, no one in the office knew that I was coming.
They're all like, oh, hello.
And then – and so I'm saying – I'm unarmed and I have children.
I didn't mention to anybody that I was here to do a podcast.
I was just like, oh, yeah.
And, you know, and –
The people that knew me already were just like, oh, well, I guess this is normal.
I guess John Roderick's here.
John Roderick showed up and now he's making some chit chat with us, eating our donuts.
And then Jesse waltzed in, and we did some technical work.
You know, joshing aside, there's a legitimate engineer sitting here watching me through the glass, which is brand new for me.
This is ridiculous.
I just have to say, joshing aside, Jesse's the best, and I cannot believe that that worked out so quickly.
And thank you to Jesse and team.
Isn't that wonderful?
How super cool is that?
We've done shout-outs to the Maximum Fun network of podcasts.
I don't like to mention other things on this show.
I know you don't.
I think it's unseemly.
It's a little unseemly.
It's gratuitous.
It's a little gratuitous.
Anyway, shout-out.
Woo!
Yeah, here's a little shout-out.
But in this case, they're really going above and beyond.
Are they still making cement there?
Are they administering cement?
So here's the thing about the American Cement Building.
I believe that it's called that because it's made of cement.
Oh, see, they're smart.
You know what they're good with in L.A.
is branding.
It's all right on there.
It says it's a company that sells cement and it's in America.
Just look at the building.
Well, that's the thing.
I don't even know if there was an American cement company, although I guess there probably was.
But the building really showcases the power of cement.
Do you know how important cement is?
I do.
It's extremely expensive.
What?
No, I heard a thing about this.
I heard a podcast about this, about cement and how important cement.
Wait, let me get this right.
You got cement, you got concrete.
Cement is the stuff you, it's like that's the important ingredient, right?
You got a bunch of rocks, you got some water.
There's cement in concrete, but there's not concrete in cement.
Precisely so.
And apparently this is something where it turns out a lot of times when you want to cut corners, because cement is so costly, back to the copper pipe issue, they go a little short on the cement and then your building falls down.
They put extra sand or extra oatmeal or something?
Could be oatmeal.
Could be seitan, I think it's called.
Seitan, yeah.
Any kind of variety of soy substitutes.
There's a lot of protein in it.
A lot of protein, but it's not going to be good for Chinese building.
Right.
Well, and in this case, it's built in a very distinctive, like, latticework, 60s latticework that is slightly reminiscent of the World Trade Center.
Hmm.
But it's more, seems sturdier.
It's less trying to say, it's less emulating birds in flight and more saying, like, this is a, this is like a,
Like a lattice, a natural lattice, maybe a DNA helix.
Oh, my goodness.
Sort of turned into a building.
Okay.
Oh, I'm looking at it now.
Okay.
This is a big deal.
It's a nice place.
It's really big.
No, I see what you're saying.
It looks kind of like... It looks a little bit like a shitty grill, like you'd get in a park.
That kind of lattice, except there's a building that's...
It's a building.
It's like at least like seven, eight stories high.
No, I'm on the ninth floor and there's floors above me.
I think there's 14 floors here.
Oh, this is beautiful.
What I think it is is it's exactly the same lattice that you would use if you were going inside someone's artery and opening it up after it had filled with plaque.
It's a building made of stents.
It's a stent.
That's right.
It's a square stent.
And you know what I like about this, John Roderick?
It's sub-brutalist.
It's not full-on brutalist.
It's not truly brutal.
It's just kind of aggressive.
Right.
It would be at home in Brasilia.
Yes.
But it would also be at home, say, here in L.A.
I bet a lot of people have climbed this thing.
It looks really climbable.
Shh, shh, shh.
Sorry, sorry.
My bad.
We get in trouble for that stuff.
So that's my saga.
Here I am halfway through a...
an RV adventure.
My debut RV adventure.
And I'm in a downtown podcasting office.
Well, here's the thing.
We've known each other for over a decade now.
And there's a question I don't ask too often because it's none of my fucking business.
But what the hell are you doing?
You like how I keep my powder dry for that one?
I bring that one out every couple years.
It's my biannual question.
What the hell are you doing right now?
Are you in a fugue state?
Can you call someone?
This is very confusing to me.
So did I tell you that I went to see a psychiatrist?
Did I mention this?
Yeah, you did.
Yeah.
You actually, you talked about it on air and it sounded like you were giving a game attempt to, you say it in your words, but it sounds like it was a game attempt to say, okay, let's give this a throw.
Sure.
Let's give this a try.
And so the psychiatrist gave me that whole saga about bipolar 2 and we're going to give you some anti-seizure medication because inexplicably that works on bipolar 2.
No one knows why.
Also works for your ADHD.
Is that right?
Oh, that's right.
That's right.
We talked about that.
So I started taking this stuff and I went through the whole thing.
I was like, all the things that I normally would not do.
Like, for instance, when he said, you need to take it for two weeks at a very minute dose just to make sure you're not allergic to it.
Yeah.
And I was like, that's so laborious.
Is it, I'll cut this out.
Is it Lamictal?
Maybe.
Okay.
Does that seem like a good one?
Enough said.
That is an anti-seizure medication with a black box warning that basically, watch out for the first week because you may get a deadly skin disease.
There it is.
That's the one.
Lamictal.
You start with like half.
You start, you start real, real low.
You ramp up and then you ramp the shit down.
Right.
When you take, that's super interesting.
I took that.
Oh, you did?
For several years.
Oh, you did?
Oh yeah.
Oh, okay.
Well, I don't mean to interrupt you.
This is your story, but I also, I will give you a wonderful analogy that my shrink gave me for how it works.
Okay.
Yeah.
So anyway, you got a black box warning.
You talk to the shrink.
Yeah.
Jesus Christ.
This is fascinating.
Well, so, yeah, and our podcast has never been a Let's Compare Medications podcast, but I'm very excited.
Oh, that's a good kind of podcast.
I love that kind of podcast.
Yeah, it's good.
It's good that we're branching off.
So I'm taking this stuff.
I've never taken a...
psychological medication before, right?
Except like, you know, back in the day at parties, people would be like, oh, I'm on lithium.
And I'd be like, really?
Give me four.
And they'd give me four lithium, and then there'd be this uncomfortable screaming in my head, and I'm like, I don't want to take that.
That's terrible.
What's the street name for that?
Do they call that salt and up?
Yeah, doing some salt.
Yeah, let's get salty.
And then people would say, like, well, that's not how lithium works.
You don't just take four of them and, like, get a buzz.
That's bad.
Quit harshing my mellow asshole.
That's bad.
And I was like, fuck you.
And then, you know, everybody's antidepressants, I would always, like, I would always take a handful of them to see what they did.
And that's not how they work.
And so I was just like, I don't want to take any of that stuff.
It's all bad.
It's like taking MSG.
Yeah.
But anyway, so this is the first time I've ever taken some kind of medication that's meant to affect my whatever.
Your personality.
My personality.
But I did what he said.
I took it for two weeks at this minute dose.
I was just so bored of that.
But I'm like, you're trying to join the normals.
You're trying to be a snork.
Just do it.
Do what they say.
Then I started to take a little bit more.
Two weeks at a little bit more.
And I was just like, this is just, come on, let's get to the good part.
Right.
And you do have to take it super slowly.
And I hope I'm not stealing your story.
It takes a while for it to do anything.
Because you've got to get to the target dose, which you want to do super slowly so you don't die from a skin thing.
Right.
I don't want to get the skin thing.
So then I get up to the minimum, what he described as the minimum therapeutic dose.
And he said, if you do not have bipolar disorder, you can take this stuff all day and it won't do anything to you.
It doesn't have any, there's no side effects and it doesn't, it's not active on someone.
It just has some effect that we don't, we don't understand and cannot quantify that.
But it does have a measurable effect on people that suffer from this condition, which we also don't understand.
Pretty much everything you love about medicine in one paragraph.
Yeah, I was just like, great.
Well, shit, why don't we throw eggs at the wall?
We don't exactly know what's wrong with you, but we have a name for it and a drug that may or may not work.
We invented a name for it, and now I'm sitting here because I went to college for a long time.
And anyway, so I'm taking this stuff.
And then in the course of a very short amount of time,
I wrote a song.
I sent it to Amy Mann.
She recorded it and is now talking about putting it on a new record.
And then I bought an RV off of a, like a parking lot in the rain from a guy and was like, great, here's the money.
And then I drove it off.
Was that Todd?
I was like, now I own this.
Yeah.
And, um, I've been making some very, very exciting decisions
Across the whole broad spectrum of my life that are just that seem like great decisions.
And I'm very excited by them.
And then at a certain point, about two weeks in, I was like, hmm, there seems to be a there seems to be a pattern.
All these decisions are like, they're fairly dramatic.
But I feel great about them.
And I'm sleeping well.
It's not like I'm in a manic state where I'm only sleeping three hours a day.
I'm like getting a full night's sleep.
But I am absolutely exhibiting signs.
These are all choices I would make when I was...
On a tear, let's say.
But I don't feel like I'm suffering the other symptoms of a manic episode, which are that I don't sleep, that I forget to eat, that I'm not like...
gambling a lot.
Right.
But, and, and, you know, sometimes at two o'clock in the morning I'll go on eBay and I'll buy five or six different patches from, um, World War II veteran, like last man standing clubs.
Mm-hmm.
But that seems normal.
So anyway, it all seems very related.
I don't know if I would have had the gumption to buy an RV and then set off driving it to California with almost no preparation.
I don't think I would do that in a depressed state.
Mm-mm.
But it also, like I'm handling the things that I, when the water pump blew up in Eugene, I didn't just walk away from it and get on a train.
Right.
Like I fixed it.
So I feel like I am part of an experiment right now.
And maybe I am the experiment and the experimenter.
But I'm taking medication and I'm making some adventure choices.
This must be an exciting time.
Well, we'll see.
We'll see.
Six months from now.
Because I did get a call from my... If you're climbing the American Cement Company building.
I did get a call from my accountant recently.
And she said, you don't have any money.
You ran for public office earlier this year and you didn't make any money doing that.
That's a call you don't want to get.
You spent money doing that.
And not only that, but everything you did, everything you bought when you were running for office, you can't deduct.
You can't deduct any of that.
Oh, God.
Yeah.
And then you just stopped running for office just a couple of months ago, and it's not like you had a wall of money that you needed to unlock.
But that was motivating rather than depressing.
Yes?
Well, yeah.
But what she was saying was, you're in California in an RV, in a 40-year-old RV, and
And you are out of money, so choose wisely.
Choose wisely what things you buy at AutoZone.
Like, don't just go in and buy cup holders for the whole RV.
If you need a cup holder, buy one.
But don't kid it all out.
You know, like, I have to be choosy right now.
Okay.
So that's where I'm at.
Wow, you're having some times.
I'm having some times.
Now I'm going to do some shows in L.A.
with Amy Mann.
I'm going to come up to San Francisco.
I'm going to do some shows with Amy Mann there.
Yeah, and Ted Leo's going to be here.
Ted Leo's going to be there and Liz Fair.
We may get a babysitter and come to that.
Jonathan Colton also.
Yep.
You may have heard of him.
And then we're going to fly across the country to Boston and I'm going to leave the RV in San Francisco somewhere.
And everyone I know in San Francisco lives in a...
In an apartment, basically.
You know, a townhouse.
Yeah, yeah.
There's no RV parking at your house, for instance.
We should talk.
Because there are streets where people park their RVs, for sure.
But I don't know if I could leave that for two weeks.
Two weeks is a long time.
That's a long time.
You would need a friend who moved it for you.
Yeah, that's right.
I would need a friend with a daughter who wanted to go for a ride in an RV across the Golden... It would help if it was a friend with a daughter who won't stop talking about when Uncle John will be here and he should come for at least a couple days because I really want to ride around in the RV.
Yeah, well, and one of the great enticements of the RV is that it was...
It was restored, let's call it restored, in the 80s during a time when one of the popular upholstery colors was something I like to call blackberry smoothie.
Yeah.
Blackberry smoothie with an extra dollop of yogurt.
So it's like pinky, pinky purple.
Mm-hmm.
And it really makes the fake wood grain paneling, it really makes it pop.
A lot of people might think a decision like that makes it look a little over the top.
I'm guessing it looks very accurate for the period.
It looks accurate for the period that it was restored.
It doesn't look accurate for 1975.
In 1975, it would have all been like...
Orange.
That's pretty much every apartment I've ever lived in.
We're like, you kind of wish it looked the way it looked when it was built.
If you go, oh man, mid-century modern.
Yeah, but you know, they had a couple extra grand in 1975 and they used it.
Yeah.
Yeah, that's exactly right.
It was like 80, it was like 84.
And the guy had a deal.
Are these vintage avocado refrigerators you have here?
He was like, get those out of here.
Maybe he had a credit at the discount carpet warehouse.
Oh, and it was expiring.
He had to use the credit.
That's right.
And the people there were like, you know, we got a huge order for carpet for the Ramada Inn.
And we have a couple of extra rolls.
Just enough to do an RV.
So there's a little bit of a convention center carpet.
And then this blackberry smoothie upholstery.
It's a sight to behold.
This sounds like a very exciting time.
Yeah.
Oh, it's a wonderful time.
So was that the surprise?
Oh, the surprise.
Oh, you said I have a surprise.
Well, the surprise was that I was going to call you for maximum fun.
That's so cool.
Yeah.
Can I ask you a question?
Yeah, of course.
So if you are open to considering the idea that there are times in the past when you've been more up than down.
Yeah.
Yeah.
When you look back on those times, can you recognize in retrospect that you were a little bit up at the time?
When you look back at like a couple, three episodes from the past, whatever, 10, 15, 20 years, are you able to look at that and go, oh, yeah, I was probably a little bit manic?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Now that you've maybe got a name for it, maybe provisionally, can you kind of see it?
It's easier to see the times when you're really cratering because you just leave a much darker streak.
on the, on the, on your personal timeline.
It's like, stick your thumb on the ink pad and just scrape it across those three months of the calendar.
Right.
Just like blork.
Yep.
But when you, when you start to, in my case, when I start to put together the like, well, that was the summer that I burned because I was depressed and I didn't, and nothing happened and that was a, that was a dark time.
And then,
That was a, and then over here, that was a dark time.
And then you look at the times in between and you know, there's some normalcy in there, but there's also like, Oh, that's kind of when I recorded the first long winter's record.
And you go, Oh, right.
So I was really depressed for four months and then there were a couple of months in there.
And then I recorded a record where I was like, where I wrote a bunch of songs and was in the studio 18 hours a day.
And then I was normal for a while, and then I was really depressed.
And you kind of go, oh, maybe I made those records and went on those long, long, long crazy tours.
And walked across Europe and rode a motorcycle, you know, from Seattle to Kansas without any tools or luggage.
And suddenly that seven-sided lighthouse starts appearing.
Yeah.
And you're like, huh, maybe there's a connection between those things too, which I always felt like was just my normal personality.
And I was plagued by depression, which felt like a foreigner, right?
Which people... This is not clinical advice.
I'm just saying things I've heard.
I've heard that it is from people who know these things that bipolar is frequently misdiagnosed as depression.
And then you end up giving almost exactly the wrong drugs as a result.
So I never...
I had several manic episodes where it was clearly where I was clearly peaking and people would say things to me like, are you like, are you sure?
Like, um, you know, where I was very much, you know, I never went to Vegas and like gambled my house.
But, you know, several episodes like that.
But for the most part, when I was high, when I was feeling mania, that felt great and normal.
It felt like the person I wanted to be.
So I never diagnosed those as a problem.
And the only reason that I even went to a psychiatrist was that those times had been getting lower and lower.
Like it wasn't, the depressions were getting lower and lower, but also I wasn't ever soaring.
Right.
And so like over time, just to be clear, like when you look back at it six months, a year or whatever later, you know, I like your notion of the crater because a crater can not only be deep, but wide.
And you can kind of gauge like how hard that meteor hit for sort of for how long.
Right.
When you think about like losing a summer or something, you could look at that in retrospect and identify for what it was and how bad it was.
Yeah.
And it felt like, well, there's three, that's three months that's gone, but that's not that big of a deal.
It's not that big of a deal to lose three months.
It doesn't feel worth taking medicine because it's not three months out of every six.
It's like three months every couple of years or three months every 18 months.
But when I stopped getting the peaks, like for the last five years, the best I was was...
coping coping was like the best i could report and the rest of the time i was scraping just just scraping the undercarriage on the on the on-ramp like like it wasn't enough to stop the vehicle but uh definitely made the ride less fun well yeah and just like you just know you're doing damage you're doing damage to the undercarriage right
And so going in and talking to this guy and hearing him say, like, the problem with bipolar is as you get older, your bottoms get lower and your tops get lower too.
I was just like, that's exactly what it feels like.
So anyway, I'm taking this crazy stuff and like I don't feel any, I don't feel medicated at all.
I just feel very, very faintly at the very edge of my periphery.
kind of twinkle or or buzz hiss maybe like just a tiny little bit of not static but some awareness at the edge of my vision that there's something different and it feels a little bit in some ways like like a supporting hand
So interesting you should say that.
One thing, it's a lot like Buddhism.
You don't really notice what normal feels like until you don't have it anymore.
And the easiest example that anybody can call to mind is when you suddenly get a terrible cold.
And you get one of those, not just a cold, but that kind of like where you're wrecked.
for two or three weeks.
I know it's not the same thing, it's an analogy, but you feel like you're getting worse and worse and worse and worse and worse and worse and then finally at some point, like three weeks in, you have a day where you wake up and you feel, this is a very important phrase in my life, where you feel less bad.
Like you say to somebody with a cold, hey, are you feeling better?
And I would say, you know, I'm not feeling better, but I'm feeling less bad.
And that's a nice day because you realize if there's a possibility at that point, you don't know how long you're going to be sick, but you do know that if you're feeling a little bit less bad day after day, that's a really good trend.
And then finally, maybe three or four days in, you wake up, and you don't feel normal, but you don't feel like you're getting sicker, and you feel like it's just getting closer to what normal might feel like.
You're still sick, but you don't feel engulfed by the sickness.
That's what that reminds me of, is that feeling of like...
You know, I'm not high, but I'm feeling a little bit more normal.
And normal actually feels weird now because this is not what I've been used to.
I'm not used to feeling depressed or anxious all the time.
Like, this seems strange.
Should I be depressed and anxious about this?
Oh, whoa, it didn't stick.
That's interesting.
This seems like a good trend.
Yeah.
And it also, just super quickly, what the shrink had said to me about what that stuff does.
Lipitor?
Lipitor?
Are we flipping it out?
No, I don't think so.
All right.
Lamictal.
Oh, Lamictal.
What does Lipitor do?
Lipitor helps your Dick Cheney heart.
Oh, I get you.
I think it helps your heart fats.
The way he described it was if you can imagine that you're... Admittedly, this is, again, another analogy, a big analogy.
But if you think about your personality being roughly the consistency of unfixed gelatin, and you think about it in a box, the problem is a lot of the ways that we...
The feelings that we get, the personality affects that we get, we find a lot of that gelatin kind of going down to this one end of the box.
And the problem is, when you're trying to deal with something like bipolar, you don't want to give somebody so much stuff that it makes all the jelly fly to the other end.
What you want is to just, you can think about it as gelatin or almost like pizza dough, where you want this thing to be the same flatness all around.
Not to be without affect, but to not have big sagging bits or huge spikes.
And that's what this stuff does.
It's not going to make you feel high.
It's not going to give you a rush, just in the sense that it's going to keep you from having low lows and high highs.
And it just happens that you give it to people for, I think, grand mal seizures, and it seems to kind of work for some people off-label, especially for the side effects of ADHD medicines.
But even by itself, it can help people.
I believe—this is not medicine, please—
But, you know, go see a doctor, please.
But I can't help people who have some personality balance issues.
To me, that's, at least in my head, maybe I need more medicine.
But that's kind of the package.
That's what you're looking for.
And a day where you feel less shitty is a good day.
Even if you don't feel awesome.
Because you know what?
Feeling too awesome is not a great day, as you've learned.
Yes.
Well, so I'm kind of wrestling now with the question...
Is, is my, I always used to feel that my normal personality was capable at any moment of buying an RV and driving it off the lot to California.
That just felt like who I was.
Some people are waiting to get jumped in an alley.
Other people are waiting to fall in love, just knowing it could be somebody out there.
When I walk into a room, I could meet my mate for life.
You, you're walking around, you know, this could be the day.
This could be the day.
This could be the RV day.
I might fall in love with an RV today.
I might actually, I might pull into a truck stop and fall in love with a girl and take her in the RV.
Um, but, uh, but so now I'm, now I'm wondering, basically, I don't want to go back to the psychiatrist because if I sit down in the psychiatrist's office and I say, and he's like, how's it going?
Great.
Great.
I mean, amazing.
And I start to report some of the things that I've been doing.
Ah, right.
He might say, whoa, whoa, we have got to adjust the dosage because that seems a little radical.
And you say, hang on a minute, get me a projector.
I have a 193 slide presentation I'd like to show you.
It's got animations.
Can I get a sound out on this?
Right, exactly.
First of all, what you need to do is follow me on Instagram.
But second of all, no, I don't want to adjust the medication.
Like I am very intrigued by this present amount of what feels like a fairly stable state, which is elevated over any recent like stable level that I've had in the last five years.
And if that is the new normal for me,
That's wonderful, and I will keep taking exactly this dosage.
I don't want any more.
I don't want any less.
I'm just fine.
Like, let me work this out myself.
I may go bankrupt.
I may, for a while, have three or four different vintage Filson bags coming in the mail from eBay that I bought in the middle of the night.
But I can find a home for those, and I can make more money.
Just let me work this out.
don't mess around with me.
But he may say like, no, this is a dangerous, like basically buying a vintage RV is one of the signs in the DSM-5 that a person is over-medicated.
And I don't want to hear that.
Desire to buy a vintage RV daily for more than six months.
I just feel like, don't mess around with me right now.
I'm okay.
It's not a thing, you know, it does not feel at all like this is a medication that I would want to abuse.
I'm never going to take two of them because I don't feel it.
I just feel... Yeah, it would be like wanting to take more penicillin.
Yeah, right, exactly.
Or wanting to take more antabuse.
It's like it's not going to be that fun.
But we'll see, right?
I mean, because there are plenty of instances in the past where it felt very normal, but I was in a mania, and I did wake up in Morocco.
And if I wake up in Morocco at any point, I know that I've gone too far.
So you need a buddy.
You need to give these bullet points to a buddy, right?
It's sort of like, you know what I'm saying?
If I come to you and say, let's go to Morocco.
No matter what you hear in there, don't open the door.
And it's after 11 p.m.,
You know to lock me in the bathroom.
If you receive a collect call from Morocco and I'm asking you to buy a Filson bag for me.
Right.
Throw the net.
That's right.
Throw the net.
Call Interpol.
So anyway, the next few months are going to be very interesting.
Yeah.
We'll just see how this pans out.
I'm here at Maximum Fun.
I feel like I could just live here.
I feel like there's an empty desk.
I feel like I could settle in.
I bet they'd love that.
I think how great it would be to just be walking around.
People are like, oh, John, what's going on?
I got a new gig.
You know, over in the old American Cement Company building.
Yeah.
I would love to say that.
I got a desk over there.
The problem is, as you know, I'm useless for doing jobs.
No, you stop.
Don't you stop that, John Roderick.
You're useless for most jobs.
Let's be honest.
But there's probably a very special place for a very special little guy out there.
Yeah.
You know?
Maybe Jesse would get a little matching but slightly smaller desk.
matching his desk and then scooted up so that the slightly smaller desk was facing his desk.
So I would sit and look at him while I was working.
I bet he would love that.
He'd be looking at the pictures of his family on the desk trying to avoid eye contact with me.
Yeah, you know, after six or eight weeks, I bet that would be even more fun.
I'd be super into it.
I'd have a desk blotter and I would just be sketching him all day.
But you could co-work.
Maybe until they find the right position for you at Maximum Fun Corp, maybe you could co-work.
I'm watching Jesse Thorne at his desk right now.
Are you kidding me?
He doesn't know I'm watching him.
Is he podcasting?
He's looking at a computer.
His hands are poised on the keyboard, but he's not pushing any buttons.
What?
Oh, no, he had a finger poised over some... I bet his hands are very, very supple.
They're soft.
I bet he's a gentle lover.
Well, you're going to be the one working there.
You'll find out.
That's right.
I mean, he's now he's pulling on his beard.
Now he's now he's like pushing on his eye, the sides of his eyes, which is a weird.
Save some of this for your show with Dan.
You're right.
You're right.
So this is an exciting time.
But, you know, let's keep it positive for a minute.
Just for a minute.
First of all, congratulations on writing some stuff.
Oh, yeah.
Thank you.
That's been a turtle you've been pushing for a while, and that must be a great feeling.
Well, it was a little weird.
I was writing this song, and it was definitely like a song for me.
It was a song where I was exploring some of the major themes of my work.
I was sitting at the piano, and I was writing a slow dirge about how love is a shit show.
And then I got to a point.
You should send that one to Pat Benatar.
Love is a shit show.
Love is a shit show.
Yeah, I don't think Pat is taking submissions now.
But I was talking to Amy separately and she was like, I'm working on a new record and herpaderpaderp.
And then I was separately writing this song.
And I was going through my normal process, which was I wrote a thing.
I liked it.
Then I was trying to make it better, and I couldn't make it better.
I was trying.
I tried this.
I tried that.
That word was wrong.
I tried to make it better, and I just made it worse.
It was kind of falling down all around me, a little bit of a sugar castle.
And I got to that point where I was like, oh, I thought that I was on to something.
I thought I had written a good thing, but it turns out that it's garbage and there's no way through here.
I can't get to the other side.
And I kind of set it aside.
And then for whatever reason, possibly – because I've been doing that for several years – possibly this Lipitor –
Not actually Lipitor.
Limictor.
Ask your doctor if whatever this is is right for you.
Caused me to go back to this like unformed, slightly dissolved song.
And I went back to it and took it apart.
Basically eliminated almost all of the lyrics but used keywords to write a new set of words that were way better.
And then the chorus suggested itself and all of a sudden I had a song.
I had built – I had taken this dissolved sugar castle and had – I had a tent city in the desert all of a sudden.
And that is a familiar process for me.
That's how I wrote songs.
That's why I've always written songs.
You write a thing.
Unless it's perfect the first time, you end up having to take it apart.
And that's hard to do.
There's a certain amount of suffering involved.
But then you come out the other side with a thing that you could not have predicted.
You couldn't have seen that this was going to be the end result when you started.
And so I did all that and I had this thing and I was very close to finishing it.
And then again, maybe it's the, um, maybe it's the like, uh, collateral or whatever it is.
But I said, Hey, Amy Mann's working on a new record.
We were just talking about it and I just sent it to her spontaneously.
made a recording into my iPhone of me sitting at the piano going, here's a song.
So hope you like it.
Dong, dong, dong, dong.
And then sent it, like sent the little, the little file from the iPhone recording.
And she wrote back and was like, that's amazing.
What do you want me to do?
And I was like, I don't know, finish it.
And so Amy doesn't let any grass grow.
She finished it in two days.
And she did a very interesting thing, which was took ownership of it.
Like, I sent it to her.
I proposed a collaboration.
She accepted that proposal, at which point the song became hers.
Because she's going to put it on her record.
And so... And it was unfinished, right?
I didn't say, like, here's my finished complete work.
I was like, here's the thing.
Want to co-write it with me?
And she was like, yes.
And went, boom.
And then the song...
Went away from me.
Wow.
And she took.
She went through the lyrics.
And at every instance where.
There was a line.
That was very John Roderick.
In the sense that it was.
Very.
Impressionistic.
Like what I was getting at.
Was through several layers of.
Oil paint.
I was.
You know I was making a starry night.
And she went through and really sort of literalized those lines.
And in most cases, it was the last line of the verse where I would say, I was standing there.
You were in a wingback chair.
I was climbing up the stair.
And then the gas fires of the refinery on the edge of the coast created a wave of black night.
sound of gong and she took the whole gas fires line out and replaced it with a shorter line that rhymed with stare at the end that made sense
And I was like, whoa, whoa, whoa.
She's a pro.
She's a pro.
Yeah.
But I felt like, hey.
She does have three lines in a row, Ron.
You might want to do the fourth one too.
Yeah.
And not have it be about gas refineries.
And what was the gas refinery thing again?
And I was like, what is the gas refinery thing?
I mean, isn't that, I mean, that's just.
You can use that somewhere else, John.
Just keep it.
Keep it for the next one.
That's seed corn, my friend.
Right?
Right?
Seed corn.
But so it was, so emotionally it was, I was a little bit like, I haven't,
I have not collaborated with people in this way where I sent them a thing I was writing for myself and they took it and made it for themselves.
But she made it sound like an Amy Mann song just by changing those weird sentences into ones that like actually fit.
And so I called Jonathan Colton and I was like, hey, what's, tell me, walk me through this.
And he said, well, here's the thing.
When I write a song in collaboration with somebody, I do one of two things.
Either they send me half of a song and I try to finish it in their voice, or I'll start writing a song for someone in what I imagine is their voice.
Wow.
And so that song that I sang on his record, his last record...
the Nemesis song.
He brought that to me because he said, I wrote this song in imitation of your songwriting.
It sounds a lot like one of your songs.
Yeah.
And he said, this is just a song that I wrote for you and it would only sound appropriate with you singing.
I was like, oh, that's an interesting skill you have.
The, you know, to do impressions of other people's songwriting.
Yeah.
So he said, when I write songs with somebody, I do not feel proprietary about them because I'm already writing them with them in mind.
I would never consider singing these myself.
And so that was the difference.
I had written this thing and was just writing it the way I normally do, which is imagining myself singing it.
And now it's taken on as, now it has its own life.
It's left me behind.
It's like it's gone to college and I try to call it and say.
How'd you get this number?
Say that I miss it, you know, and that I'm still there if it ever needs to talk to me.
And it is busy.
It doesn't want to, it sort of sends me right to voicemail.
So we'll see.
I mean, it's exciting.
I agree.
Wow, you got a lot of angles here.
It's literally a lot of angles in play.
I'm drinking some coffee that I bought across the street from the American cement building at a Honduran restaurant.
I saw you had one on your lap in that photo Jesse put up.
Oh, Jesse just published a photo of me.
He published a photo of you in situ.
This is the thing.
Literally under glass.
If you're following along on Instagram, you could be three steps ahead of me.
Yeah, I don't.
But I catch glimpses of it because you make it go to the Twitter and then I see your RV and it's like a little game of where's Waldo.
It's like a little, you know, where's John parked?
Yeah, what's he doing?
The first thing Jesse said when I walked in was he was like, oh, hey, Mr. Hawaiian shirt in November.
He's been saving that one for years.
I was like, well done.
I am Mr. Hawaiian shirt in November.
Why don't you go investigate somebody else?
Sherlock.
Sherlock.
No, I was wearing a t-shirt for the last several days.
And then when I woke up this morning, I was like, this t-shirt has run its course.
I'm going to start scaring little kids with this.
So I put on the Hawaiian shirt that I bought at a thrift store.
And I feel really good in it.
I'm in a tropical climate now.
Are you going to tell us when you're coming here?
Or will you find out from Instagram?
Because, you know, we've got stuff we've got to do.
We've got school and jobs and stuff.
Oh, right.
You guys have, like, yeah, lives that you're conducting.
Lives and whatnot, yeah.
Will you give us some kind of a rough sense of, like, when you're at the bridge or something?
Yeah, it's later on this week.
Okay, great.
I will be in San Francisco.
All right.
I'll type that in right here on my scheduling machine later.
I think I may be there three nights.
week.
Three nights in San Francisco.
Okay, terrific.
Two of them have, I'm playing shows at some venue that I don't know with this aforementioned cast of exciting young performers.
Well, these kids are doing great stuff today, John.
Are you following what the young people are doing with music?
Well, yeah, you know, uh,
So the song I wrote for Amy is actually an EDM track.
Does it have a drop?
I worked for hours on the drop.
I was just like, I just want to put it in the exact perfect spot.
It's all about the drop.
It is.
It's about where you place the drop.
And what you want to do is you want to create tension.
By not delivering the drop.
No.
You want people to wait for it and want it.
Again, a gentle lover.
It's coming, just not yet.
Here it comes.
Soft, soft fingers.
And once it comes, you know, it's just one big splash, right?
You get one drop, right?
One drop and then pow.
Yep.
And that puts a lot of pressure on the drop.
You know what I mean?
The author of the drop.
You get one shot at that.
You get one shot.
Do not miss your chance to blow.
Opportunity comes once in a lifetime.
I'm thinking of a master plan.
Ain't nothing but sweat inside my hand.
What's going on in your life?
Nothing, nothing.
Yeah.
No, you know, all the same, I'm not going to attempt to compete with you on this.
I mean, you're in Jesse's studio.
Yeah.
I don't want to waste his time.
He's probably got other stuff.
You've got to have the Flophouse guys come in.
You've got to have the Canadian guys with the beards.
You've got to be there.
Stop podcasting yourself.
The brothers and the brothers and brothers.
You've got all those people.
They all come into that office.
Do they?
No.
Sure they do.
No, they make podcasts.
My brothers and me's make their podcasts in North Carolina mountains or something.
I don't know.
I don't know.
I think the Flophouse act like they're at Dan's house, but I think they actually, other Dan, I think they actually probably could.
You should listen to the Flophouse.
It's a very good program.
Well, so I'm in this studio, and there are a few things that are a little bit, well, they're a little bit different.
Oh, my gosh.
You know what?
Forgive me, John.
I'm busy talking about Limit the Drill.
I got my head up my ass.
Tell me a little bit about what it's like to be in Jesse's studio.
Oh, yeah.
Did you steam anything yet?
Will you have a chance to steam something?
You could go get your shirt out of the car and steam it?
I thought that maybe I would go to a store right now and buy a couple of suits just to come in and steam them.
Because ordinarily you think, hey, this is kind of wrinkled.
I don't know if I want this.
There's not only a shower here in this office, there's a bathtub.
And I'm wondering, seriously, since I walked in here, I've been just sitting and thinking like...
What is the propriety of me just taking a bath?
Let me ask you a question.
Is the bathtub in the same physical room as the primary toilet?
No.
Yes.
Don't take a bath because somebody has used it as a guest bath during a party.
Well, I'm not sure they've ever had a party here.
I'm not sure that they party.
Business, business, business.
Right?
I mean, I've been to a lot of MaxFun parties.
And I don't think anyone has ever used a bathtub for a potty.
It's a classy crowd.
It's a little bit classier.
They're a little bit more discerning.
But I'm just trying to think how much of a violation of everyone's...
psycho sexual space it would be for me to just be like can i take a bath here and then just i'd be in the bath they're unfailingly polite is the thing they're really close to being english in a lot of ways they're super polite and they would you know no one would want to say no but they're all sitting at their desks and this is the also the where they go to the bathroom yeah so i'd just be in there and you know and i take it too you take a long you take a long bath
So I'd just be in there.
You should give them a heads up.
Give them time to maybe give it a good scrub.
You go out get yourself a chili dog and a bathtub desk and maybe pick up a suit that you could steam.
Come in, steam the suit.
I'm guessing there's not a bathtub in the RV.
No, there is a shower, but I have not yet christened the shower.
You're kidding me.
I would be showering three times a day.
I don't know.
It just feels a little bit like, ah, boy, once you start showering in there, you've crossed a kind of Rubicon.
where your fate is sealed.
Is it like sharing a needle, John?
It's like that's when you've really, you become part of the RV people when you're willing to bathe in it.
You have to take Rome at that point because you've declared war just by crossing the river.
Can't turn back.
So I don't know.
I mean, I'm going to do it.
It has to be done.
I hope so.
But I'm just, I'm just, I'm sitting there.
I'm parked off of Melrose.
I'm at the corner of Melrose in despair.
And I just picture myself like getting in the shower.
All around me, people are walking really small dogs.
Ladies and gentlemen, I don't want to disturb your day.
I know you're busy making films and Ubers.
Could you help out down on this lucky musician who's bathing in a van?
It feels like I should have one of those Good Sam Club stickers on the back of my RV.
I think that's code.
That's serious code.
Good Sam Club?
Oh, yeah.
You think that's Key Party?
I wasn't going to say it.
I wasn't going to say it.
I think, yes, primarily, sure.
It's about helping out a brother or a sister or friend when they're having trouble with their RV.
But I think it's also a little bit about, you know, back in the queen size.
Yeah, you pull your RV up into the slot next to my RV.
I wouldn't want to touch those other keys, though.
Who knows where those have been?
That's right.
Leave the door unlocked.
It's okay.
Well, speaking of, yeah, we'll leave a light on for you.
Leave a light on for you.
Speaking of Good Sam Club, so GMCRV culture has a thing called the blacklist.
And when I heard about the blacklist, at first I was like, really?
The blacklist?
Really, you guys?
You're all 85-year-old Boeing engineers.
Is it really called the blacklist?
And they're like, the blacklist.
You need to get the blacklist.
I can't wait to hear what the blacklist is.
Is it okay for me to know if I haven't been initiated?
Well, this is the thing.
The blacklist, it's just like Lamictotil.
Oh.
If you don't have a GMCRV, the blacklist means nothing to you.
Oh, I get it.
I get it.
It only matters if you have a GMCRV.
And what the blacklist is, is a list of people nationwide who are GMC aficionados.
Oh.
Who, if you're in trouble.
You're in a scrape.
If you're in a scrape in Shasta, California, if you are a little bit off the road in Peoria, Illinois, you go to the blacklist, you call somebody.
And it's like the wolf.
It's like the wolf.
Comes out and cleans up.
That's right.
Comes out in his Acura NSX.
Never touches a thing.
Just issues some orders.
Yep.
Tells you where to point the hose.
That's right.
And then splits with John Cusack's sister.
That's right.
So I'm outside of Eugene.
I pull over into one of those rest stops to rest.
I get out.
I do a visual check.
And I see antifreeze pouring out from underneath the vehicle, which you don't have to be a mechanic to know is contraindicated for continuing to move down the road.
So I go fill a milk carton.
Well, somebody else in an RV pulls up and they're like, hmm, they see me looking panicked.
And they hand me, they go back into their RV and hand me a milk jug.
And they're like, fill that up with full water and it'll get you down the road.
I was like, thank you, RV brother.
But it wasn't a GMC RV.
Tell them Large Marge sent you.
Yeah.
I was like, you know, I gave them some kind of Masonic sign and they looked confused.
Yeah.
We don't really have those.
I think I gave the American Sign Language sign for hungry.
Like little babies do where they make points with their fingers and hit them together to say more, more.
More, more.
But I filled it up with water and I drove to Eugene and I called a guy on the blacklist.
Whoa.
And he answers the phone.
His name was Kelvin.
Which I was like, that's apropos.
That's a code name, John.
And I said, hey, is this Calvin?
And he was like, yeah.
And I said, hi, I'm calling from the blacklist.
And he was like, oh, tell me more.
And I said, I'm out on the highway and I'm draining antifreeze.
And he was like, well, I can't come get you.
And I said, no, I'm mobile.
And he said, oh, good.
Come here immediately.
So I'm driving through Eugene all of a sudden through neighborhoods out in like West Eugene.
I pull into this guy's driveway.
I see his GMC RV underneath a RV cover in the back.
And in the front is a classic, like, 67 Datsun B10, B210 wagon, custom wagon.
I was like, that's a cool car.
He comes out.
He's like, we're watching the Oregon game.
Are you sure your water pump is busted?
It might be something else.
And we get under it.
We look at it.
He's like, oh, yeah, it's a water pump.
I was like, I know.
He's like, it's Friday at 5 o'clock.
No place is going to be open on set.
No place is going to be open on Sunday.
You can sleep in my barn, but don't touch my daughter.
That's right.
And I was like, oh, man, this sucks.
You know, I'm headed down to California.
And he was like, oh, boy, that does suck.
I was like, yeah.
And then I kind of said like, well, I mean, shit, wherever it is I go, I'm going to be there until Monday basically sleeping in somebody's driveway.
And he was like, mm-hmm.
And his wife was yelling at the TV about the football game.
And he's sitting there.
He's pulling on his fingers.
And he's like, oh, man.
Because this probably isn't how the blacklist works.
This is exactly how it works.
It's not an extended stay.
It's not a Tom Beaudet type situation.
Well, that's the thing.
And then he starts saying to himself under his breath.
He's like, oh.
really and i'm like he was muttering pay it forward under his breath yeah and so i'm just standing i'm looking at the sky at this point i'm looking down at my shoes and then i'm looking at the sky i don't want to i don't want to jinx it i don't want to do anything but i don't know how to change a water pump by myself in somebody's driveway and the temperature was plummeting may i add it was at that time 40 degrees and he's like
And after about five minutes of us both standing there kicking the dirt with our shoes, he says, all right, let's do this.
And he calls the auto zone and he's like, do you have the following part?
He figures out what the part is.
calls them they're like as a matter of fact we do he's like seriously you have a you have a water pump for a 75 oldsmobile and they're like yeah we do that sounds haunted and he's like all right so we get in his car and we drive to the auto zone we buy this water pump and we go back to his house and he's like
Here's the deal.
I'm going to be on the top of the motor.
You're going to be on the bottom laying on the ground and we're going to do this.
And so we proceeded to take off the fan and then the alternator and then the power steering box and then the air conditioning.
We basically took the whole front of the motor off.
and then took the water pump off, and at this point it's 33 degrees, and I'm lying on the ground completely soaked in antifreeze oil and gas, and he's up in the cabin, and we are turning wrenches, and it's one of those moments where it's like, if you are a mechanic,
you look at a situation like that and you're like, yeah, here's what we have to do.
We just turn these bolts and move these things and turn these bolts and move these things and then your job is done.
But for me, all of that still seems a little bit like magic or just like a thing I would never dare.
It's really daring more than anything.
And watching the whole thing go down and really being in there and doing it with him
It's like, right, there's nothing about this that isn't doable.
It's the daring to say, we're just going to change that.
We're going to do this now.
Because if you get the water pump off and don't get a new one back on, then what you have is a giant pile of garbage in your front driveway that sits there forever.
You know, that's the dare.
Because they stop daring.
Yeah, right.
And that's why you see junk cars everywhere.
Because, you know, it's not difficult to tear the stuff apart.
It's just that if you don't get it back together, then it's done, right?
You have a very short amount of time.
And we get this thing all apart.
And there was, of course, the last bolt.
He's wrenching on it.
And he's like, oh, my God.
I feel like there's something wrong with this bolt.
I feel like I'm going to shear the head off of this bolt.
And I'm like, from under the truck.
And I'm like, don't shear the head off the bolt.
And he's like, I know.
And he's like, he's like, I just don't like the feel of it.
And so we, we jiggle the part and we spray some rust, uh, you know, some like some lube in there.
We jiggle the part some more and we spray some lube and then we wait and we kind of pace around and then we go back and do it a little bit more and he's moving the thing and he's like, I still just feel like I'm about to shear this off.
And if I shear this bolt off, I do not have a bolt extractor.
Now we are really fucked, because that's sort of a big job, considering where this bolt is, and that will require a professional.
Also, he never signed up for having that thing sit in front of his house.
No, no, no.
At that point, we're both pot committed to this, and we sit there for 15 minutes just fretting, and I'm fretting.
I'm like, did we do the thing where we tore the thing apart, and then we shear the last bolt?
And then this just gets towed to a junkyard and I get on a train.
I don't like that story.
I don't like that ending.
None of us did.
And it's, you know, it's freezing now and it's the middle of the night.
And he just says, okay, you know what?
We've gone this far.
I can't just leave it like this.
I'm just going to go for it.
And he goes and he like turns the bolt and he's like, oh, I just, oh, I don't.
And then he's like, wait a minute.
And out it comes.
Oh my God.
And we pull the bolt out and we look at it and it's not damaged.
It was just that it was really.
Is it a 40 year old bolt?
It's been in there a long time.
And so then it was just like we were so rejoicing about this bolt that then putting it all back together seemed like less of an onerous task.
Because every bolt we put back in was a bolt of thankfulness.
It was just like, thank you, engine, for receiving this bolt.
Thank you for receiving this bolt.
And the thing just sort of went back together really fast.
Because we were freezing our asses off and soaking wet with fluids.
God, every reason to just give up.
Yeah, right.
But also, like, here we go.
And it was Kelvin the entire time, just like, he just never faltered.
He never, you know, he never, like, let doubt intrude.
And then, like, 1030 at night, we shake hands.
He's like, yeah, you know, blacklist.
Pay it forward.
Pay it forward.
I was just like, thank you, Calvin.
See you, buddy.
And the last thing he said was, I mean, we're friends now.
Whoa.
I mean, you just changed your water pump in my driveway, like.
We have a bond.
I was like, we fucking do.
It takes an RV and a list to make you really appreciate something like that.
We're not all like that all the time with each other.
No, no, no, no.
That's the thing.
There were...
It was so easy for him to say, yeah, I can give you the names of a couple of people.
You can't park it here, though.
I'm sorry.
My wife.
I wouldn't want to do that.
I wouldn't want to deal with that.
I mean, every step along the way, there was a moment where he not only could, but probably should have said, yeah, you're in a jam.
I'm sorry.
If you have AAA, you could probably get it towed to this place and wait there until Monday.
And I would have been like, that is normal of you to do.
Thank you for that amount of help.
Like, thank you for helping me know that.
And I would have had it towed and I would have sat in a motel or I don't know what I would have done.
Head forward.
But he was like, let's do this.
I was like, the blacklist.
God, your life is weird right now.
Yeah.
It's fucking weird.
But I feel like out there right now, there is this guild of monks or whatever, these people in shawls.
And I have their numbers.
I have this blacklist.
I can call somebody in LA right now and be like, hi, I'm in a GM CRV and I need a place to park.
And do you have any...
is there a chipotle nearby pay it forward and they'd be like come on over god bless the monks they are the priests of the temples of syrinx crazy week dude serious