Ep. 183: "Here Comes Nacho"
This episode of Roderick on the Line is brought to you by Cards Against Humanity.
This week, they ask Paul and Storm to help me say hi to John.
I got all pig iron.
Hi, John.
Hi, Merlin.
I had a little bit of a technical snafu there.
You know, I got to tell you, John Roderick, as I sit here today, I think technical snafus might in some ways define your life these days.
Technical snafus.
I got a lot of snafus.
I got all snafus.
I got all pig iron.
I fooled you.
I fooled you.
man that song's good it's a good road to ride that's a good road to ride it's a mighty good road you know if i had fooled the guy i don't know maybe maybe you get bored when you're driving a train but i don't think i would i don't think i tease that guy it seems like he might call ahead well yeah it's that's exactly right like what keeps it i mean you're gonna stop eventually what keeps him from coming down out of his switching tower and walking down and saying all right you still owe me the money for whatever for your pig iron for your pig iron you can't just roll through here with pig iron you gotta you gotta stop and pay the man
Are our listeners going to be familiar with what we're talking about?
Oh, I'm sure they are.
The Rock Island line, it's a mighty good line.
I'm sure every 25-year-old person working in the tech economy is also familiar with Lead Belly and all of his recorded works.
Sir, I'm aware that it's a mighty good road.
Technically.
Yeah.
So, you know, a big part of a con, I think, is never admitting it was a con.
And this comes up with operatives.
There's a lot of intel that stays sealed for years, even after it seems like you could tell people about it.
That's right, because you don't want them to you never want them to know that they were fooled because the real technology is that you fooled them.
Oh, that guy's a shitty operative.
Well, that's exactly right.
I mean, you know, he could you can reveal that you had a pen camera.
You can reveal that you had an umbrella, a poison tipped umbrella, but never reveal that it was an operation.
Well, yeah.
And also even something – it's a little bit like the stagecraft of illusion and the kind of protecting – Now you're singing my song.
The stagecraft of illusion and protecting the effect because, you know, you want people to know – well, you may not even want them to know they got fooled.
You don't want them to know how they got fooled.
Right.
You don't want them to know when they got fooled.
Right.
This is all really critical.
And then also, I mean, obviously, a huge part for the operatives must be – I don't know.
I'm not an operative.
But it seems like a huge part of it might also be then we don't want you to be able to connect the dots on time and people and places.
Mm-hmm.
You sound like an operator.
Will our listeners know what we're talking about, John?
I'm sure they do.
You know, I often wonder, it was a long time ago, Merlin, when we first started lowering the third wall, let alone the fourth wall.
Remember when we first began this?
You just dropped that one on the left?
When we began this program, we almost never addressed our audience.
I still don't, John.
I still don't.
I still even acknowledged that there was an audience.
And then as time went on, I remember the first time I addressed the audience, I got a lot of angry letters.
Don't let us know that you know that we're here.
This isn't the Fury Road.
Don't witness them.
But now I think our audience has become somewhat self-aware.
I think you should save this for your other show, John.
Actually, I am looking forward to the next episode of your other program because I want to hear what all you got in the mail.
But we have a lot to talk about.
Well, I'm sitting here.
I mean, I'll just give you a little teaser.
I've got 25 boxes, and that is not counting the envelopes.
And I just don't know where to begin.
The crazy thing is that I got here and there were three UPS stickers on the door.
They were like, we tried to deliver this.
We tried to deliver it.
Sorry, we've got to send it back.
And I was like, well, 25 other boxes managed to get here.
And the one box that came by UPS, they just can't.
The guy's like, oh, I'm not going to leave this box.
Well, hearing about one of those broke my heart.
The one that went back to Fargo?
Yeah.
Well, yeah, so they sent it back to Fargo.
I called the number.
Is this Fargo the TV show or Fargo the city?
The woman wasn't clear because she was in Bangalore.
And so she said, I don't know.
She's probably only seen season one.
She said, oh, I see.
Fargo the TV show, right.
Are you not watching Fargo the TV show?
I'm only aware of Fargo the movie.
Oh, dear.
It seemed like a complete universe and I didn't want to
Oh, dear John.
Oh, my goodness.
Is that right?
You know me.
I don't recommend things.
I sent you a comic book once that I asked you to read.
But apart from that, I don't make you watch things.
But the second season of Fargo is a treat.
You sent me a couple of comic books.
I sent you a few comic books.
Did you read that Hawkeye?
Yeah.
You looked at Watchmen, right?
You're familiar with Watchmen.
Oh, yeah.
I liked Watchmen very much.
The blue penis man is like a bag face.
Bag face and angry rapey guy.
Rapey comic.
You got one glove lady.
One glove lady.
Very important.
Key role.
Yep.
Yeah.
It was.
Let's see.
And you sent me the guide to the Marvel Universe.
Did I?
That was probably me.
That sounds like something I do.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And I, oh, I poured over that.
Did Hank Pym really hit Wasp or was that just a continuity error?
But the Fargo TV show, I fear it.
I fear that, I mean, you know, I don't need more Fargo.
I have a lot of Fargo already in my life.
Well, I don't want to go on about this because it's people are already going.
It's kind of like the new wire where, you know, everybody's just.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, all the white guys are falling all over the show because it is it's exquisite.
I mean, the storytelling is great.
The acting is great.
But just purely for the just the beauty, the gorgeousness of the cinematography.
And go ask your pal A.C.
Newman.
The music's great.
They got whoever's picking the music for that show is awesome.
AC Newman has stopped flirting with me on the internet for something.
I know, me too, and I've reached out.
Do you think he's okay?
I don't know.
He's somewhere up there in upstate New York.
He's forgotten his – he doesn't care about us anymore.
He's like raising raccoons or something.
Yeah, probably.
It breaks my heart, though.
I thought I was getting close.
Yeah, you thought you were one of the in crowd.
Yeah.
I'm in with the in crowd.
But so, yeah.
So anyway, they sent this package back to Fargo.
All the shops, of course, in Fargo are closed from October 31st until March 15th.
So all I can do is go to the Internet and say, if you live in Fargo and sent me a package, send it again.
Oh, man.
I know.
It's really sad.
I have times that I think – I don't know.
This is a classic white wine.
But the problem of like delivery services is a little vexing to me.
Like most of the time I don't particularly care.
It's mainly just a dashed expectation.
But sometimes it gets downright frustrating.
And the classic – when you said you had three of those notices, I sometimes feel like –
Maybe the post office in particular sends people around with a big pad of those things, and they don't actually have the package.
They just wait for a moment when you go to take a dump, and they slap it on the door and run away.
This has happened to me numerous times.
I know many people.
You've had the experience of pretty much waiting, sitting by the door because you know a thing is going to be delivered.
And you look away for a second, and you look outside, and there's a notice that they tried to deliver.
Yeah.
It's like when somehow certain people...
You're waiting for a phone call, and then it goes directly to voicemail.
And you were like, wait a minute.
I was sitting right here.
I was waiting for the call.
How did you do that?
It seemed like there were certain people that had special phone skills that could, I don't know, somehow just send it straight to voicemail when they didn't want to talk to you.
That's interesting.
I have a weird similar complementary availability heuristic, which is I almost never call anyone.
You're about the only person who calls me.
Mm-hmm.
You occasionally call me and I don't know why somebody died.
And what happens when I freak a little bit?
I freak a little bit.
It's always great, isn't it?
Yeah, that's it's nice that you can do that to me.
But I don't get or make phone calls until I'm on a phone call.
And that's almost invariably when I get a phone call is when I'm already on a call with somebody.
Interesting.
Yeah, I don't I don't understand how it works.
They're watching you.
I had one a couple weeks ago that was really weird.
No big, but I ordered my internet ramen from Amazon.
It's just really good.
I think I told you about this ramen.
You gave me one.
Did I?
Oh, I did.
Did you try it?
Well, I haven't tried it yet, and now it's going to be hard.
Is it in California?
It's going to be hard to try.
We can cover that in a minute.
We've got to cover that.
But I had to re-up.
I had to do a re-up.
I wanted six new five packs of Internet ramen because I eat like one a day.
And, boy, you got to try that, boy.
It's good.
It looks good.
And I sat there and I watched.
I watched on the Amazon page.
And later on when they made the portentous handoff to USPS, and you know your heart really drops when you see that it's going to be delivered by the post office.
I think you know my history with the post office.
I do.
I just don't get mail.
I get a Safeway flyer and the mail from people two doors down.
That's what I get.
We occasionally have these community events outside where we meet around 7 o'clock and exchange mail with each other that was misdelivered.
So I ordered my Internet Ramen, and I'm just watching it.
You know, I've got a little app here that keeps track of delivery stuff.
It says when it's coming so I can be there, or whatever, just know.
And I watched it.
Watch it move very slowly, very slowly from California, very slowly.
It had to go from just, you know, had to go from Chino, California to, I think, somewhere on the East Coast because it's the post office.
And then it sat somewhere for a while and it, you know, did whatever packages do.
And I said, OK, it's coming.
It's on its way here.
We're coming back to California now.
And I watched and it made it to San Francisco.
I'm like, OK, this is great.
I'll probably get in the next five days.
And so it's out there in San Francisco, which is not unusual at all, because I think sometimes they just get to it when they can.
Of course, they're busy people.
They're busy.
They got a post office to run.
And then I saw that it was out for delivery and then it was still out for delivery and then it was out for delivery.
And then I saw I got a notification that it had reached its final destination and been delivered in Chino, California.
Yeah.
So, so I contacted them and I said, uh, I, uh, I didn't get my internet ramen.
And they said, well, uh, it said your address was undeliverable.
And I said, that's strange because I had five other things delivered from Amazon today because Christmas.
Right.
Yeah.
So anyway, they, they had me verify my address that absolutely works and, uh, they resend it and I got it yesterday or Saturday, Saturday.
Yeah.
Yeah, but not in time for Christmas.
My daughter had nothing under the tree.
I had to print out a picture of ramen and put it under the tree.
Oh, that's too bad.
That's no good Christmas.
I had two of those this year.
I had two of those.
Here's a picture of your present.
Oh, that's like, you know, my dad's famous Christmas present was a paper grocery sack stapled, closed.
Did it have anything inside?
Like folded over with a staple.
And when you saw that under the tree, you knew like, oh boy, here it comes.
And then you'd open it and there'd be a piece of paper at the bottom.
Merry Christmas.
And you'd read the piece of paper and it would say, good for guitar lessons.
Which he would never – Of course not.
That's the last you'd ever hear of.
That's the other side of that kind of present is the – first of all, there's like so many things wrong with that.
The wrapping, perfect.
That's right up my alley.
Then there's the whole like this is a physical good or even when it's not – especially when it's not a physical good.
It's like good for one hug kind of thing.
You know you're never going to deliver that.
I'll do mommy's dishes.
I still have a booklet of those from 1975.
Good for one extra chore.
And somebody gave them to me as a gift?
What?
That's weird.
It's not a good gift.
There's a bunch of opportunities for me to do extra chores?
It's like when you're looking at the ads for movies in the paper and they almost all say no passes.
Oh, right.
Obviously, you're not going to be able to use one of your little giveaway stocking stuffers to go to Star Wars.
It's going to have to be, you know.
So it's probably that.
It's probably, you know, you're ineligible to cash in your hug after 1977.
I ordered a couple of things from eBay, if you can imagine, that were small, small things.
Are these dead soldier pins?
They're little dead soldier pins.
Yeah.
And...
Both of them, they were the first time I've seen this in a long time.
Both things said no tracking available.
And I was like, oh, you know, I kind of like chasing after the packages with the tracking information.
That's like your own little personal travel show.
You get to watch it move across this great land of ours.
Yeah, no tracking available.
And I was like, oh, all right.
And one of them said, you know, to be delivered in three days.
And one of them said to be delivered in a month.
And I couldn't explain why.
And then I did the thing that I...
that is the source of so many of these problems.
It's the source of the 25 boxes problem.
It's the source of a lot of these problems, which is I did all these things and then I immediately left town for three weeks or a month.
And so when I got back, I was looking forward to getting these two small packages.
Neither of them came, no sign of them anywhere.
And so I contacted both of the sellers through eBay and one of them wrote back immediately and was like, my packages always arrive, they never fail to arrive.
it's a guy he's a guy that's selling dead soldier pins so he can't be wrong right the other person actually did a fair amount of due diligence but said i don't uh i don't pay extra for tracking because it's too expensive i was like hmm well neither thing arrived and how does how does that cost extra i'm not sure oh they just put stamps on it and throw it in a mailbox i don't know um
But in any case, the two things that had no tracking are the two things that have not arrived.
Yeah.
And it's just like, well, so much for them.
So much for them apples.
I feel like – this is not interesting.
But I feel like such a crazy person because I'll say to people, especially if it involves money in a check for people who still send checks.
And I just have to say, like, please – Who sends checks?
Mm-hmm.
And –
What?
What?
What are you?
I... In this economy?
But, you know, and I'll just say to people, I'll just, I'll beg them because, like, you know, that can mean a lot of money to me.
And, like, it just probably won't get here.
And I know you think I'm crazy when I say that, but I'll say, could you send it by, I mean, literally any way except the post office and please use a tracking number?
Like, I know that's a pain and I'm so sorry, but you're still using checks.
You must be used to inconvenience in life.
Like, could you just...
You know, just, you know, cut me a break.
Yeah, help a brother out.
Humor me, you know.
But, yeah, I don't know.
Soldier pins.
God, we haven't recorded in a while.
No, have we not done a show since I was in San Francisco?
Nope.
Can that be true?
I think it's like three weeks.
That's just incredible.
Well, you know, we get a little bit of a bye for the holidays.
But we tried to record last week.
Oh, that was sad.
Yeah.
Have you shared your – you haven't really shared your saga, have you?
Do you want to?
No, I haven't shared the saga.
You know, it's a little – I can give a brief thumbnail sketch.
You left me on a cliffhanger.
After I left San Francisco, you mean?
Well, the cliffhanger that I heard over your Skype line from you sitting in a rented truck last week was that it was still in –
Yeah, so... And you're about to find out.
So I want to give people the whole... Do you think our listeners will know what we're talking about here, John?
Yeah, I do, because multiple times in the last week, I have walked into a cafe or along the road...
And someone has walked up to me and said, how's the RV?
No kidding.
And I'm like, oh, well, it's kind of a long story.
He'd rather talk about that than marshmallow fluff.
Yeah, yes.
They're just like, you know, they're just dropping in on the sidewalk, just sort of plop in and say like, hi, how's the RV?
And then they want me to go like, great.
And then
And then they're gone.
And I grab them by the shoulder and start to weep.
And they're like, oh, I just wanted to say hi.
But the long and the short of it is – I think where we left it was you had been here and visited.
And we had what many listeners have now told us were probably Sichuan peppers.
And that's what tasted like batteries.
Thank you to literally everyone for telling us about that.
Thank you, everyone.
Head on back to that place.
Okay.
I kind of want to try it again.
Wait a minute.
You just directly addressed our audience.
No, that was the second wall.
I was addressing the second wall.
I see.
Right, right, right.
The one over here on the right.
Sorry, sorry, sorry.
But we left it where you had been here and you were going to leave town to go out on tour.
The piece that folks didn't know that I knew off air was that you had serendipitously found like an unbelievable deus ex machina solution for the RV because you found a blacklister in the East Bay.
That's right.
who was going to not only lodge your RV while you were on the East Coast, but he was actually going to work on it and fix it up a little.
That's right.
That's right.
And so I took the RV to him and happily left it there in like a holding yard where there were literally 40 other GMC RVs.
And, you know, they're not the largest RV, but when you put 40 of them together, it's very impressive.
And so I believed this man and his team of helper monkeys to be –
They must be the worldwide authority on these things, or at least the regional authority.
And so I left it there, and I went back east to do my rock shows with Amy Mann and Liz Phair and Ted Leo and Jonathan Colton.
And that was very fun, and I had a good old Christmas time back east.
And then the plan was, here's where the wrinkle got wrinkly.
See, this is what happens when you plan.
I had a big plan, and that was that I was going to fly to San Francisco
My mom and daughter were going to fly to San Francisco from Seattle.
And my daughter's baby mama, who was in a conference in Washington, D.C., was also going to fly to Seattle.
All of our flights arriving within an hour or two of one another.
We were going to meet in the San Francisco airport, take a car to the East Bay, get in the RV and drive home.
Leaving Friday night, arriving on Sunday in time for a good friend's engagement party and then a show that I had booked for Sunday night.
Oh, God.
A show where I hosted a sing-along party at Seattle's brand new Cloud Room Rich People Place.
So we all get over there.
We get in the RV.
The RV repair dudes are having their Christmas party.
So they're there late, but they're also all standing around a bunch of GMC RVs all drunk on punch.
And it was 7 p.m.
and it was raining.
And I was like, thanks for the work.
Great to see you guys.
Have a great time.
And the owner was telling me about his time in Vietnam.
And my people were out in the RV already going like, beep, beep, come on, let's go.
And I get in the RV and off we go.
And right away, I know that there's something wrong with the RV.
It's just not running right.
It doesn't have the power that it used to have.
And one of the things I asked them to address was the fuel system.
So for them to have monkeyed with the fuel injection and now it's not producing electricity,
very much power, very concerning to me.
So I get on the phone with him.
He's at his Christmas party, drunk, talking about Vietnam.
Chicken Billy beer.
And I was like, hey, you know, I'm driving here and the rain's coming down and there's something not right with the thing.
And he's like, oh, well, just, you know, put premium gas in it.
And, you know, it's just got to stretch its legs.
So I was like, all right, let it stretch its legs.
And I got out there.
Got out there to about nut tree and I call him back from nut tree and I'm like, nope, it's not that it's starting to backfire.
There's a problem here.
It's the mixture is too lean.
And he says, oh, well, okay, here's what you do.
You get under there and you turn the Allen wrench one full turn to the right.
on the fuel injector.
And I was like, what?
All right.
So I pull over into a Walmart.
I send everybody inside.
I take the air cleaner off.
I turn the thing all the way over one turn.
Then it won't start at all.
I call him back at the Christmas party.
He's getting drunker, talking about Vietnam more.
I said, this isn't working.
He said, oh, well, I'm not really familiar with those fuel injectors.
Maybe you should turn it clockwise one turn.
I was like, all right.
This is instilling a tremendous confidence in me.
in you.
So I turned it back one turn.
But I mean, are you getting the feeling that he's already, he's kind of a little bit dialed out, like his work is done?
Well, the problem with the blacklist is
your work is never done.
Like this is a pay it forward economy forward.
And so everybody on the blacklist knows everybody on the blacklist and thing is this guy comes not with an unimpeachable reputation, but certainly with a legendary reputation.
And so, you know, uh, from what I understand about this click, this community, uh,
There's no, you know, no one ever goes away.
The only people that ever go away are people that that abandon RVing entirely.
But if people that keep their RVs, you see them over and over and over again.
And so, no, I think he wants to keep me as a longtime customer, but he's also 75 years old and it's the night of his Christmas party.
And I maybe have described this before, but in my experience, there are two kinds of people who are incapable of admitting that they did anything wrong.
And one – Dick Cheney.
Well, yeah, and Dick Cheney is sort of – is kind of one of these archetypes.
Studio engineers and producers, people who are making record albums, can never say, oh, shit, I fucked that up.
Mm-hmm.
If something goes wrong, if they push the wrong button, if they got a bad tone and we didn't realize it until later, there's always a reason that it's not their fault.
They won't even get into a he said, she said, you did, you won't.
They'll just look right at you and say, that's what you wanted or...
that's how it's supposed to sound or you know like i just i've never met an i've never met a studio a production person that would say like oh you know what i fucked up and i'm sorry because the problem is that if they say that right even about your some tambourine part like then the artist is gonna for the rest of their lives be like well that record got all fucked up by that guy you know like
It's so fraught making record albums that that class of people will just full-on stare you down rather than say that they have screwed up.
Okay.
Number one, engineers.
Engineers.
And the second group is auto mechanics.
If you bring a car in and you have it worked on and you drive 15 feet out of the mechanic's shop and the motor blows up, the mechanic is going to say, well...
I think the reason that the motor blew up has nothing to do with the work that I did on it because I didn't ever touch – I didn't touch that part, right?
I didn't touch the – I was down in there changing all these other things, but I never touched that one thing that ended up being the thing that failed, right?
And so you take your car to an auto mechanic over and over and over and they're trying to figure out, they're trying to track down problems, they're trying to trace things.
But then you drive away and the car runs worse and they're like, well, I think that problem was always there.
you know, the work that I did is fine, right?
And what it did was just uncover this other problem.
It reminds me a little bit of, like, you know, nowadays the way surgery works, and this has not so much to do with the blame part, but, you know, it used to be like, I remember my grandpa got surgery
open-heart surgery in the 70s.
I mean, obviously, even today, it's a huge deal to get surgery.
But back then, the heart surgery was, you know, what they did to your heart was dangerous and scary, but it was what they had to do to get to the heart that caused a lot of the problems.
There's, you know, just cutting through bones and stuff to, like, get to the heart, I guess.
I mean, like, it was pretty serious stuff.
You've got to cut through the heart bone.
You've got the heart bone.
You've got the auxiliary heart bone.
But I guess what I'm getting at is, in this case, with something that old,
in whatever the condition, just moving all those parts around, it's probably going to end up causing problems that you didn't have before as you fix the problem that you're there to nominally fix.
That must be one reality of it.
It's a massive reality, but as a customer, what you want
is the mechanic to do the work, then get in the car, drive around, and have gotten in the car before.
So you bring the car in, the first thing the mechanic you want them to do is get in it and drive it around and feel the problem for themselves.
And then bring it in, trace it down, fix it, get in the car, drive around again.
Like, you know, shake it out a little bit.
And if it isn't 100% right, bring it back and monkey with it again.
Well, the problem with that is that shop time is $120 an hour for a lot of these places.
And...
You know, they want to keep your bill down.
And so they don't do any of that.
And they, you know, they fix the thing and they move it to the back of the lot.
And that's what happened in this case.
Like they did some work on it and they buttoned it up.
and if they took it for a test drive it was just like they didn't know the rig well enough to know but they should have they should have anyway suffice to say i'm in the parking lot of this walmart i cranked this thing this uh this little bolt
now two revolutions to the left, increasing the pressure in the fuel injector, which is a thing, which is a process that should involve like micro adjustment, right?
I mean, this is like part of a fuel injection system where the person that's doing this work with this Allen bolt should be moving it
Very small increments, testing it, moving it again, testing it.
I can't even imagine.
I don't like adjusting my kid's retainer.
I feel like I'm going to give her some kind of unnecessary wide mouth condition if I get it even just slightly wrong.
And in that case, you're talking about some very minute mixtures.
Yeah.
Right.
And so my family is all entertaining themselves in a Walmart in the middle of the night in Nut Tree, California.
I like Nut Tree.
Yeah, it's great.
We always stop at Nut Tree.
I'm looking at pictures at Nut Tree right now.
They got a carousel.
You gotta stop at Nut Tree.
We always stop in Nut Tree.
You know, when I was a kid, there was a small choo-choo train.
In Nut Tree.
There's still one there.
No, really?
Yes, my kid rides it every time.
Oh my God, I loved that too.
It's so fun.
They have a variety of, they have this kind of famous family-style restaurant there, and it's a lot of fun.
I have not been back in Nut Tree since the 70s.
Do you remember a restaurant that was kind of out in that region called Petticoat Junction?
I don't.
I so would have gone there.
Well, Petticoat Junction was a restaurant somewhere in that region between Chico and Central Valley.
Some were Sacto.
In the Sacramento area.
And it was Petticoat Junction.
All the waitresses were in their 50s and 60s.
And their waitress uniforms...
showed ruffled panties under their skirts.
So it was some trucker's version of sexy pre-hooters sexiness.
Was the dark-haired one Bobby Joe?
Was that her name?
Bobby Joe.
Oh, man.
God, I loved her.
In any case, Petticoat Junction, I've tried and tried and tried to find it.
I used to stop there every time I was going up that highway.
But it wasn't like right off of I-5.
It was on some spur road.
It was always full of truckers.
And, you know, the waitresses had been doing this a long time.
They recognized that part of the show was the ruffles, the panty ruffles.
Sure.
But Petticoat Junction is the place where I saw the kid...
With a giant-sized Coke.
I'm sure I've told you this story.
Giant-sized Coke.
And he was just ripping sugar packets open and pouring sugar packets into the Coke.
And he was sitting at a table with a big family.
After he had a big pile of sugar packet wrappers off to the side, one of his distracted parents kind of looked over at him, slapped him on the back of the head and said, Stop doing that.
I told you to stop doing that.
And so he grabbed his Coke, which now had a pound of extra sugar in it, put the Coke off the table kind of down in his lap.
Well, he went back to being ignored and then continued to pour sugar packets into it like under the table.
And, you know, he used all the sugar packets.
That's a stunning image.
That sticks with you through life.
And I was just like, wow.
And that happened at Petticoat Junction.
So it was like I was already, my senses were already pretty overloaded.
sure anyway so so i do this adjustment to the to the air clean or to the you know to the fuel system i get the whole family back in i bolt it all together real quick check in though but at this point you're thinking you know you've got what like a like a 10 12 hour drive ahead of you yeah yeah but but you're thinking like this is this is all still this is savable everything's going to be fine i'll make this adjustment you know yeah you're still feeling like mostly optimistic
No, no, no.
A large part of me recognizes that whatever the problem is, it is not a thing.
You want so desperately in these situations to be able to take the air cleaner off, move an allen bolt one turn, and all of a sudden the thing just comes alive.
But you know...
If you have any experience at all, you know that that's not actually going to happen.
You have to do it.
You have to try it because what if?
What if?
He's talking to me over the phone and he's telling me to turn it the wrong direction.
So it's not implausible that they just didn't adjust it right because they don't know what it is.
It is infuriating, but it's not implausible.
But at the same time, I'm moving this thing, and I just know that there's no way that this is going to be right.
Oh, no.
So I bolt it back together.
It actually – I have now increased the pressure in the fuel injection system enough that it feels like, oh, okay, here we go.
Like, it isn't right, but –
We're getting some more, like the mixture isn't lean anymore exactly.
It couldn't possibly be.
Like, here we go.
And so we head off down the road.
It's still backfiring, but we're moving.
And so I'm like, what could be causing the mixture to be lean?
Because it's not backfiring out the back.
It's backfiring in the motor.
And so I'm like, fuel filter.
What if the fuel filter is clogged?
What if the fuel pump's bad?
But I doubt it.
You know, like that seems like that stuff had been gone through.
Anyway, this is like a master class in trying to diagnose an automotive problem if you don't really know anything about it.
A little bit of magical thinking.
You know, just like, hmm, what if it's the blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
So I pull into Williams, California.
Home of Grimaldi's famous... Garibaldi's famous Italian... Oh, right.
You're going to make me look this up again.
Griselda's.
Grimaldi's.
Granzella's.
Granzella's Inn.
Famous Granzella's Inn in Williams, California.
There it is.
Not Garibaldi.
It's 5.4 square miles.
Galtieri.
That's it.
Galtieri's...
Italian.
You're just saying words now.
Granzellas.
Granzellas.
And it's one of these places that has, I mean, when I say it's one of these places, I mean that it is a singular place.
A town which has literally nothing left.
At one point, it probably was an almond farming town or pre-almond.
It was a pre-almond economy.
The town was built in a pre-almond economy.
And then it had a flush during the big almond years, the almond rush.
But somehow, Garibaldi's was built there.
As this family style trucker restaurant that also happened to have a fully stocked Italian style grocery with 80 kinds of olives and pickled everything and a deli and all these weird Italian candies.
I mean, basically one of those stores that you go into and you're like, wow, it's Christmas Day.
And then you walk around and you're like, but I don't want any of this stuff.
I don't want any pickled asparagus in a jar.
I'll have a roast beef sandwich to go, please.
I don't actually want any of that stuff.
But there it is in Williams, California.
But there also happens to be a Napa auto parts store in Williams.
So I parked the RV in front of the Napa, and my entire family sleeps in the RV in front of the Napa.
And we have a grand old time, right?
We're in this very, very weird, completely closed central California town, sleeping in the parking lot of an auto parts store.
But we're alive, right?
Sure.
We're alive and together, and it's America.
Yeah.
And this is the first night that we've ever really like spent the night in the RV.
My mom, my 80-year-old mom is there.
My four-year-old daughter is there.
It's all coming together.
We wake up in the morning.
I go into the Napa place.
They actually have a garage attached to it.
And I start talking to a guy named Nacho.
What?
buenos dias and nacho is great nacho's boss is like one of these taciturn like cowboy white guys that's worked in an auto parts store for 40 years and he's just like the only the only thing missing was that he was chewing on a chair root
And he was just like, well, you know, we can look at it.
This is Nacho's boss.
This is Nacho's boss.
We can look at it, but, you know, shop rate's $100 an hour.
So, I mean, I'd probably, well, look at it.
And I'm like, all right, thanks a lot, Mr. Friendly.
Like, I'm trying to solve.
You understand I'm trying to solve a problem.
nobody goes into that place when things are going great yeah right that's one of those things where like he's dealing with not dealing with people who are there to say like oh just want to check back in and let you know everything's going great like everybody who's in there just wants to get some shit accomplished yeah and he and maybe a little desperate so here here it is i'm some i'm some big city slicker from seattle driving a vintage rv
Look at me at my 40-year-old RV with my 80-year-old mother.
I come in there with points on my collars and a city slicker haircut and a little poodle dog on a leash.
And I'm like, howdy.
I think I got a clogged fuel filter.
Would you like a white wine spritzer?
You're a dude.
Yeah, I'm a dude.
That's right.
And he says, not unless round is funny.
So he puts me in the back, and here comes Nacho, and Nacho is great.
Nacho's doing five things, right?
There's a dumb, pudgy-faced kid trying to get a tire off a rim who doesn't know how to use the machine, and Nacho goes over and helps him use the machine.
Then at a certain point, Nacho's down on the ground underneath the RV.
A woman comes over.
Nacho's not afraid to get his hands dirty.
No, Nacho's dirty.
a woman comes over a very clean woman comes over stands there looking down at nacho she's like dressed well very together she stands there next to me with her arms crossed looking down at his feet under my rv and after about five minutes she says nacho he doesn't hear her then she says nacho
He wheels himself out from under the RV and she speaks to him in Spanish for two minutes.
And he goes, si, si.
And then she turns on her heel and kind of stomps off.
gets in her car and drives away.
So she was Nacho's lady who had come by to give him a dressing down.
Oh, no.
And he's like, poor Nacho, looks at me and kind of shrugs and gives a little sheepish eyes.
But then Nacho stands up and he's like, well, listen, you know, it's not your fuel filter.
It's not your fuel pump.
Those things are brand new.
The problem is it could be a lot of things.
And we're going to sit here and tear this thing apart at $100 an hour?
I don't know what to tell you.
I don't think that's a very good plan.
And I was like, Nacho, you are giving me the straight scoop and I really appreciate it.
Give me a handful of things that you think it could be.
And he kind of gives this like, I mean, you got a, you're backfiring.
You got a lean mix and no power.
Jesus.
It's like, start at the top.
It could be your radio antenna.
Like that's the problem.
So that's what, yeah, this is interesting to me.
This is one of those weird situations where as a consumer or a user, we go into the situation and saying, the problem is that this thing's not running right.
There must be a solution for that.
And like somebody who actually understands the problem domain is going to go, well, no, this is the result of something or some things.
And it's almost like somebody going into the doctor and saying like, you know, I have nausea and a headache.
So therefore I must have this.
Like, well, no, no, a lot of different things can cause nausea and a headache.
And Nacho knows that.
Yeah, and he's looking over his shoulder, communicating something very key, which is... Get me out of here.
Yeah, yeah.
Vamanos.
And he's saying, you know, you can tell that Nacho is the only guy in the entire place that knows anything about what's going on, except for his Cheru Chew and Boss, who also knows what's going on, but he has graduated to...
Either I own the place or I work for the guy that owns the place.
And what I'm trying to do is get out of here at the end of the day.
And so when things come up, he gets on the intercom and he's like, Nacho, come to the office.
And Nacho's like, oh, shit.
Okay, hang on.
I got to go do this.
And that happens three times while Nacho's out there talking to me.
So, so Nacho looks at me and he's like, if it were up to me, I would sit here with you and go over this and diagnose this and try and figure it out.
Like it's not that hard, but I mean, it is that hard, but it's like, this is what you do.
I get it.
He's telegraphing a couple of things.
He's what he's trying to say without putting into words is this.
There certainly is a way to fix this, but there's a variety of reasons.
It ain't going to happen here and now.
Well, or what he's saying is if you want to potentially spend eight hundred dollars here today.
And be here all day.
We might be able to fix some of it.
Right.
But no guarantee that we will find anything.
And I can't do it for free or cheap because I got this guy hanging over my head.
This isn't my shop.
One day, man, I'm going to save up the money to open my own shop.
Right now, though, he's got to please the walking boss.
That's right.
And so...
He's standing there and we're standing there and we're doing the thing where we're kicking the tires.
We're standing there, we're kicking the tires together.
And I'm going, I'm not afraid to turn a wrench on this thing.
You just got to give me some kind of... Give me a high sign of some kind.
And he's like, I just...
Anything I would tell you would be just as likely to be false as true and you're going to be what under there like adjusting the timing.
I mean you could do that.
He's like you could advance the timing a little bit.
But again, that's like a micro-adjustment, and you're going to be under this thing like turning the distributor some little bit, some five degrees.
You turn the distributor, see if that helps.
And I'm like, oh, fuck.
For just – I don't know.
You tell me if I'm just dramatizing this, but there's some other – some data points here.
We have to remember now it's a 40-year-old RV.
You've got your entire immediate family in it of differing ages and needs.
At this moment, the family is over at Garibaldi's.
Okay.
And they're having some kind of breakfast.
And it's about, I want to say this would be about five days before Christmas Eve.
That's right.
Oh, there's that too.
By the way, there's Christmas coming.
And it is, at least here, it was cold and rainy.
Cold and rainy.
I mean, it wasn't, the thing is, everybody goes, California.
No, no.
This is central California.
And there's long spots where nothing much happens except cold and rain and lonely.
That's what this was.
So you must have at least partly gone into your thinking.
It was absolutely cold.
It was absolutely lonely.
And it was, yeah, not fun at all.
And also, it seems like Nacho's in Dutch with the wife, and cars are piling up, and he's the only one that knows where the light switch is.
Right.
So I say, you know what?
All right.
I'm just going to drive it, and I'm going to rock on through.
What do you think about that, Nacho?
And he's like, it's as good a plan as any.
So I high-five him.
I go into the office where the guy with the squid, like the Clint Eastwood guy with the squinty eyes and the cop mustache is like, tell you what, I'll only charge you 50 bucks.
What?
Because that's weird.
You know?
Yeah.
It's not, it's not that weird because I'm not actually a city certified dude.
just you know he's he saw me coming in he was like city dude but then you know you get in there you talk about vietnam a little bit sure and everybody's like oh all right all right all right all right you've got a legitimate problem and it's actually a problem and and you didn't just come in here because the radio wouldn't work and you're you actually are up a creek and like all right here 50 bucks just get out of here wow that's super cool
Williams, California.
The almond economy is down and these guys are just sitting around
And for the most part, every other vehicle that was in that shop was like a farm truck that somebody kept running with bailing wire and band-aids.
And so this is a working shop.
Nobody's coming in to repair a dent in their mini Cooper.
There's a bunch of Dodge pickup trucks that, like the kid that was trying to change the tire, get the tire off the rim,
You know, it's a job that you have to sometimes, if you don't have the right equipment, you know, you use a mallet.
You got to reef on the thing.
But this kid's got a ball peen hammer.
And he's wanging on it in a way that even I was like, he's going to kneecap himself.
And Nacho's rolling his eyes at him.
And I'm like, who's this kid?
He's probably one of the Grimaldi's.
Granzales.
And they don't want him working over in the restaurant, you know.
Anyway, so I pile everybody back in the RV and I say, listen, things aren't going so great with the RV, but what we have is A, the power of love, and B, all we have to do is get over the Siskiyous, one of the four worst interstate passes in America.
And, you know, past Shasta and all the way to Medford.
And there's an El Nino storm on the way.
So all we have to do is do that, which seems pretty simple.
You know, it's more or less flat as far as Redding.
And then from Reading to Medford, how bad can it be?
Only 50 semi-trucks overturn and fall down a ravine on that stretch of highway every year.
I got an Allen wrench.
How bad can it be?
Yeah.
So off we off we motor.
And, you know, we're singing songs.
So long, Williams.
Bye bye.
Thanks, Nacho.
I went into Grimaldi's, walked around, couldn't find a single fucking thing I wanted to buy.
And I was like, I have actually I need a little bit of comfort.
I will almost buy a jar of pickled asparagus, but no.
It burned to the ground and was recently rebuilt.
That's right.
That's right.
And the new one looks very much like the old one because I've been to the old one and I've been to the new one.
I know a few things.
So off we go.
And then at a certain point, and here's the awful part of the story.
And for context, we need to go back a little bit.
How far back?
Way back.
Way back to the 1990s.
Hey, give me some of that coffee.
I'm going to break that rusty cage and run.
And I don't know where that you got me hanging from.
so it's so here we are back in the 90s my dad is still living in alaska he calls me up and he says i want to move to tacoma did he do this over the phone yeah i can't live up here anymore it's too goddamn cold and i said how are you gonna do that dad and he says i bought a truck
And immediately I was like, he bought a truck.
Oh, fuck.
No.
Have I told you this story?
You haven't, but now this is after the period where your dad used to fly his plane to the same place in California to visit with a mechanic.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Your dad's a talker.
Your dad would like to talk to the service people.
That's right.
He wants to talk to everybody.
And at a certain point, I think his... His critical faculties, maybe?
No, no, no.
His critical faculties were still sharp, but his cardiologist took away his pilot's license.
And listen, if your cardiologist takes away your pilot's license.
I didn't know they were allowed to do that.
That's pretty fucked up.
Yeah, well, that's what happens if your cardiologist goes, your heart makes you a time bomb in an airplane.
Somehow after this, my dad got his cardiologist to reinstate his pilot's license.
But at this period, he did not have his pilot's license because he had had some myocardial infarction of some kind that didn't quite manifest itself so that the rest of us knew about it.
But his cardiologist knew about it.
So he took away his pilot's license.
So my dad bought a truck, he says.
And he says he wants me to come to Alaska, put all of his stuff in this truck, and drive it down for him to Tacoma.
And I'm like, ugh.
Is this before the band stuff?
Are you working at the newsstand at this point?
Yeah, 1998.
I mean, I had a band, the Bunn Family Players.
But I was, you know, and I had a, believe me, I had a spirit of adventure.
Maybe even more of one then, but I also knew, I mean, it was like the number of alarm bells that were going off made the inside of my head sound like a pachinko game.
I was just like, oh, no.
My dad bought a truck.
That can't be good.
No, no.
There's this whole cascade of what probably has already gone wrong and what can't really go right.
Right.
It's not going to be a fun, relaxing trip.
No, this isn't going to be good.
Anyway, I'm dating a girl at the time who is from La Jolla, California.
And she's a very athletic girl.
She used to she was a she was a ballet instructor and she would wake up at five o'clock in the morning and she would run to Lake Washington, jump in, swim out to the I don't know what to out to the orca buoy, swim back, run back up the hill.
as a prelude to teaching ballet all day like she just had she had one of those metabolisms that was like i don't know she could eat 8 000 calories of food a day and all she wanted to do was dance and she you know she just uh if she if if if you didn't take her out every day and exercise her she was like a racehorse you know right she's like a like a like a border collie
Yeah, she would go bananas.
You got to wear her out a little bit.
She was a wonderful, wonderful lady and remains a wonderful lady.
But like she would actually literally climb the walls.
And she had some kind of Spider-Man capability where she could climb the walls.
Wow.
And you would find her like up in a corner of the ceiling.
Nice.
Just like, come down.
Mm-hmm.
So she was very – she had a lot of energy and she was very excitable.
I think a good friend of mine the other day who has a similar metabolism said to me that she had a euphoria problem.
Oh, interesting.
Oh, like a runner's high kind of thing.
Well, just like her capacity for euphoria is very – she has a very high euphoria –
generator and maybe a low threshold of euphoria being a problem so euphoria just like woohoo and then oh no she was joyful something other than joy euphoria in a sort of like enthusiastic like something that you might say about someone who is having a religious experience and maybe should be confined to a monastery
okay in any case um so I fly to Alaska with my girlfriend she's never been to Alaska and was excited to go and we get there we get to the airport my dad picks us up at the airport and we go out and we're walking through the parking garage and uh
Oh, there's a knock on my office door, and I think it's Mike, the building manager.
Oh, terrific.
Will you hold on just a second?
Yeah, by all means.
All right.
This has never happened before where there was a knock on the door.
Let's see if it is Mike.
Well, one time there was the guy with the alarm.
Well, it's Mike, the building manager, who's a guest star on the program, the first one ever.
Say hi, Mike.
Hello, everybody.
Yeah.
You're the first ever guest on Roderick on the Line.
Wow.
Have you started opening packages yet?
No, we haven't opened the packages.
Mike was the one that was good enough to bring the packages in.
Oh, thanks, Mike.
Please tell Mike I said hi.
So there's a lot to do.
Well, thank you for the key fob.
Should work.
Thank you.
Thank you, sir.
Bye.
Wow.
He seems nice.
Frankly, I'm glad that it was Mike that was the first ever guest on the program because he's a good guy.
He's a good guy.
We had a cameo from the alarm tester one time.
Oh, oh, oh, right.
Okay, so Mike's the second.
Building services.
Let's not tell Mike that he wasn't the first.
No, no, he seems like a good guy.
Yeah, good man.
It's nice that he does stuff with your packages.
That's super cool.
Well, I mean, yeah, although they did sit in the hallway for a week before I called him.
I was like, hey, Mike, can you take the packages in?
Anyway.
So we get off the plane.
So at this point in your RV story, in the 90s, you and your girlfriend are landing in Alaska.
That's right.
So we walk through the airport parking lot, and I'm thinking to myself, my dad bought a truck.
Please, please, please, please let it be a halfway decent truck.
And we're walking through and, you know, it's the parking lot at Anchorage International Airport, now renamed the Ted Stevens Memorial Airport.
And so every vehicle in the parking garage is a truck.
And so we're walking along and I'm like, that's a cool truck.
Please let it be that truck.
And we walk past the truck and I'm like, oh, look at that truck.
Is that, please let that be the truck.
That's not the truck.
Oh my God.
Oh my God.
That truck, that truck is cool.
That's not the truck.
That truck.
Yeah.
Okay.
That truck is fine.
That's not the truck.
And then we get... It's like he did this on purpose.
We get past every great truck.
And then at the far end of the parking garage, there's this truck that looks like it's been there for 40 years.
It looks like...
It lives in the parking garage because no one ever claimed it.
And because it's Anchorage, they never towed it.
Oh.
And I'm like, oh, no, no, no, no, not that truck.
No, no, no, no, no, no.
Please, please, please, not that truck.
And dad's like, there she is.
And it's a. It's like a 1977.
Chevy high Sierra half ton rust bucket that was formerly like when it was brand new, it was like a high trim model.
So is it kind of like one of the earlier suburban guy?
No, it's just a pickup truck, but it's got a canopy on the back.
And in 1977 or whatever, it had been a high trim model, but it's been through so many lives since then.
And we opened the door and it's just, it's completely rusted out.
It's a garbage truck.
It has no value.
And I opened the door and the headliner's sagging and it's clear again that it has been owned by people who both smoke and have dogs and
And big Alaskan dogs, which they do not, as most Alaskans do, travel with back in the back under the canopy.
What if the dog wants to be warm and smoke?
That's right.
They put the dogs up front.
And so, again, I have to restate that it is Alaska.
And so these are wet dogs covered with salt water.
who get in the inside of the vehicle and perspire and mold.
And it's just like, it's almost, you almost can't stand to be in the cab.
And, uh, and my girlfriend is just like Alaska.
and i'm like oh there's so many alaskas baby and this is not the one this is not the one that i wanted to show you this is the other one the one i've been trying to escape the one i thought i had achieved escape velocity from and now here i am back in this truck and dad is like i was down at the cafe in girdwood
And some girl that was wearing an Indian blanket said that she had a truck for sale.
And I said, I'll buy it.
I need a truck.
So we get back to my dad's place.
She's wearing an Indian blanket.
Literally.
She was wearing an Indian blanket and her boyfriend had a sheepskin on.
So he pays $1,500 for this thing and it isn't worth $40.
We get back to his house and he says, you know, load it up, drive it to Tacoma.
I'm going to fly down to Tacoma.
I'll see you when you get there.
And so we have a wonderful time, she and I, loading up his truck and we get on the road and we drive and drive and drive, drive and drive and drive.
We're all the way up in Delta Junction.
And...
I think we're sleeping in the cab.
Oh, I had torn out all the headliner and all the soft material to try and get the dog out of it.
Anyway, we're making it work.
We cross over into the Yukon, and I've been doing all the driving, and I'm finally just wiped out.
And I hand over the driving to her, and I'm like, you know, just take over.
And drive for a little while.
We're up here in the Yukon.
It's just open highway.
There's not even any trees up here.
Just point it down the road.
And I fall asleep.
And I wake up to the sound of the motor seizing.
And I go, what is happening?
Steam and smoke pouring out of it.
And she's like, oh, I don't know.
Like...
all these lights started coming on and I didn't know what they were.
And I just figured it was like, we telling me that, that things were going great.
And everything, the oil pressure's gone, the temperature's all pegged.
And I'm just like, oh, no.
It wouldn't have occurred to me to say, if anything changes, wake me up and pull over to the side of the road.
And so here we were with this truck full of my dad's stuff, and the motor was just a lump.
And that was a terrible adventure.
Because we were out in the middle of literally nowhere and had to hitchhike back and find a guy that had a truck that would tow us back to the town that was made out of shipping containers.
And they had a phone, I guess.
where they could call to the town that had electricity and running water, and somebody came out from that town.
And I said to that guy, look, I don't want to fix this thing.
I want to send it to the bottom of a lake, and I know you guys have a lake up here that you put old cars.
What I want to do is buy a truck from you.
Find a truck in this town that somebody will sell me.
And he was like, oh, I've got a truck.
It's a Ford F-250 and it's got a Chevy motor.
And I was like, sold.
And I bought that truck, loaded all my dad's stuff in it, drove it down and then had that truck for four years and loved it.
Now, fast forward to Redding, California a week ago.
And I say... How'd the rest of the move go?
Oh, we got my dad's stuff down there.
Unfortunately, the stress of that... I did not handle that situation as well as I wished I had.
And the stress of it caused...
uh my lady friend and me to break up oh man also i had lost my glasses so i was driving most of the way just sort of orienting myself on large shapes um
Which is normally fine, except when the sun goes down, then you have the depth perception problem because the rods and the cones.
Sure, rods and cones, yeah.
The Purkinje shift.
Purkinje shift, right.
So...
So that was fine because it was Alaska in the summertime and the sun was up all the time.
But as we got – as we moved further south, the sun started to go down periodically and that made it even more difficult to drive by Braille as I was kind of doing.
I almost hit a Mountie.
Because in Canada, when they want to pull you over on the highway, a Mountie just steps out into the road and waves at you.
Like Claudette Colbert, you just stick a leg out?
Yeah, kind of.
Like they get you on the radar and then up the road, there's just a guy who's standing on the side of the road and he walks out and flags you down and you pull over.
Wow.
You know, he very politely flags you down.
You pull over very politely.
He politely gives you a ticket and you politely go on your way.
Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
Canada Canada Canada yep and I didn't see him and I almost ran him over and then I locked up the brakes and he came running up to the side and he was like you almost killed me eh and I was like sorry man I didn't see you he was like didn't see me I was standing in the middle of the road and I was like yeah and I didn't want to say like I don't have my glasses on right right and anyway that's neither here nor there
So in Redding, California, I say... Oh, no, outside of Redding.
South of Redding, several dozens of miles.
I say, look, I need to just take a little nap.
I've been driving a lot, sort of stressed out.
The thing is running okay.
We're back now in 2015.
Back in 2015.
And I hand the controls over to my daughter's mother and say, like, head it on up the highway.
Just point it down the road and...
And wake me when you get to the mountains.
So outside of Reading, it starts to get mountainous right away.
And when that happens, pull over and wake me up and I'll drive us through the mountains.
through the crazy area because the, this is an RV and it's, you know, it can go highway speeds, but you, when you're going to break, you have to be anticipating when you want to stop.
You know, you have to look way ahead and break well in advance.
So I go back and I go to sleep.
And when I wake up, I, I come forward in the RV and I say, how's it going?
And she says, great.
I mean, we've been smoking for a little while.
And I said, what?
Smoking?
What?
She said, yeah, we're just kind of trailing some smoke.
And I looked in the rearview mirror and we are one of those vintage RVs that is laying down some battleship level smoke screen.
And I'm like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.
Pull over, pull over, pull over.
And almost immediately, the amount of smoke that we are trailing quadruples so that we are just pouring smoke out the back.
Oh, God.
And I'm like, pull over, pull over, pull over.
And we pull off the side of the road.
But we are in the mountains.
We are past Redding.
We are fully in the mountains.
And I'm like, how did we get here?
And she's like, well, I didn't want to wake you up.
And I figured, what the hell?
And so where we pull over is down in a hole.
Uh, right at the intersection of old salt lick road and salt lick lake road.
And there's just smoke pouring out of the RV so that I, I, you know, I, I'm like everybody out, out, out, out, get out because I'm afraid that it's, that it is on fire.
And I have subjected my lovely family to this adventure thus far, but I also now at this point feel like we've crossed some threshold.
I do not want them immolated in the RV in a sudden flash fire.
Mm-hmm.
So I pull the top off the motor.
I've got my fire extinguisher there.
Smoke is pouring out, but it's not coming from the top of the motor.
It's coming from underneath.
And I'm like, you know, I don't want to put the fire extinguisher on this thing.
And like that's not going to be good because there's no fire.
So I sit there with the RV filled with smoke.
Just sort of like, you know, there's something far too broken in me to ever really weep unless it's my cat getting hit by a car.
Sure.
In that case, you know, yes, I can.
It penetrates all the layers.
You're a monster.
Yeah.
But I am not a person who in exhaustion and utter failure sits and weeps, but I am hanging my head.
Because this is a bad situation and we are in a bad place for this to happen.
And so I say, the RV, I do not know what is wrong with the RV.
I do not think that we have blown the head.
I do not, there is no steam.
I do not feel like we have...
I do not feel like we have seized the motor there.
The place that the smoke is coming from makes me think that it is that the transmission has sprayed fluid all over the bottom of the motor and that that that is the cause of the smoke.
It does not seem like it's the motor, but I don't know.
and I do not want to start it, and I do not want to try and drive it.
So I have... This is where it comes in handy, right?
This is where it comes in handy.
Super duper platinum top shelf.
bar brand triple a service i have the top triple a that you got the secret like triple a black like you have to apply that's right you can you can use this to tow anything i have triple a that will get that truck out of that lake in the northern yukon territories and get it running again like the triple a i have the triple a that that will rescue a plane
Like I have the triple A that you can use in Europe.
Like I have, I have the, I have this, I have the diamond level triple A.
And so I'm like, okay, we don't have any cell service down in this hole in this mountain.
So I'm going to climb up the road and try and get AAA on the phone.
And my mom, you know, as previously characterized, is very good in these situations.
And she's pretty good like navigating her way through a phone tree where I often get frustrated.
She's just like...
you know, push two to talk to her, you know, push two if you want to use AAA's new 15% discount at Walmart.
Seems to me on things like that, it's almost like that's her, that's a crossword for her.
Like she's ready to just say, okay, let's do this thing.
Let's figure it out.
Yeah.
And so all of us grown up adults are, are cycling.
Yeah.
One of us will walk up to the top of the road, call AAA.
The other, you know, I'm monitoring the motor sometimes.
We're also playing with the baby.
Is it still running at this point?
I mean, it's done, right?
No, no, no.
It's cooked.
And could you share with our listeners the consequences of the engine on the RV not running anymore?
Oh, well, when the engine on the RV doesn't run, neither do any of the system.
So no electric, no heat.
No electric, no heat.
I mean, there's enough stored in the shore battery that we have lights.
We have fluorescent lights, but the furnace isn't going to run.
And we're in the mountains and it's winter.
And there's a storm coming.
And so it gets very cold.
So everybody's wrapped in wool blankets.
And we get AAA on the phone.
Now, I'm a proponent of AAA.
I think everybody should have it.
But I will say that fully 50% of the time you call AAA, you get the worst service in the world.
And it's because AAA has no competitors.
There's not another service where you call and they come rescue you.
Also, I think at least when I was younger, I did not understand what AAA actually was.
In some ways, AAA has always been mostly in the insurance business, if you think about it.
I remember when I first had AAA service and you get a discount, you get your insurance through AAA.
In that sense, AAA is more like an HMO for your car in some ways.
And that's an imperfect analogy.
But what I didn't realize until I started using it when I got a car again and needed it was that they basically – that's a car that you carry with a number for a call center.
And then they call other people.
Right.
And they pay other people to be their AAA guys.
And what they're counting on is that –
90% of the people that use AAA don't use it.
They just have it if they need it, which they don't.
And when they do, it usually is like, come change my tire.
Um,
It's not a big deal, and it's the rare situation where somebody legitimately is out in the boonies, and I am often that guy, right?
AAA saved my skin when my other GMC, my other ill-advised purchase of a GMC vehicle a year ago.
broke down outside of St.
Louis, they towed me 100 miles with everybody in the cab of the tow truck.
That's a nice thing.
I mean, you don't pay that much more for AAA+, and it's worth it, man.
It's worth it.
And he towed me 100 miles and parked and unloaded my vehicle in the parking lot of the Sharon.
And which, you know, I'd gotten a room there through the price line as I'm driving.
And I was like, take us there.
And it was a nice hotel.
And, you know, Sheraton's not going to kick you out if you're staying there.
So anyway.
But in this case, AAA, you go through all the things.
You're like, you know, the phone tree and enter your number and then they get you on the phone and they want to have all this irrelevant information about your birthday and, you know, what your favorite color is.
And you're like, look, we're standing on the side of the road.
Can't we work all this out after you get a tow truck on the way here?
And they're like, well, we know we have to know, you know, we have to know like the average rainfall in the Amazon basin.
Yeah.
And so finally they're like, okay, a tow truck will be there in 45 minutes.
And an hour and a half went by and we climbed back up the mountain and called them again.
And they were like, oh, sorry, we didn't have one piece of information that we needed.
And so we just didn't send a tow truck.
We tried to call you, but you didn't answer.
It's like, well, yeah, we don't have cell phone service down in the RV where the baby is.
And so we aren't standing up here.
hoping you're going to call.
It's not like you're stuck at the mall.
Yeah, right.
I mean, if you say 45 minutes, you know, like 45 minutes, and they're like, yeah, we couldn't do it until we also got this last piece of information.
But we need you to confirm all the information you added before.
Right.
And then the last piece of information we needed was, what are the last four numbers of your driver's license number?
It's just like, you fucking assholes.
So they take it and they're like, all right, it'll be there in 45 minutes.
And we go back down to the RV and we hull under the blankets for an hour and a half and then we climb back up the mountain.
Where is the RV?
Well, we need to know.
We tried to call you.
We need to know the destination that you're taking the RV.
Oh, come on.
And we couldn't send a truck until we knew the destination.
And I'm like, I don't literally makes no sense.
It doesn't make any sense.
But here's what's happening.
Triple A is calling tow truck companies in the in the larger Reading area.
And they are all saying, ah, yeah, no, no, thanks.
We don't want to take this contract.
And it's because the amount of money that they're going to get for this job from AAA does not compensate them for the work they don't feel on this particular day.
And I'm like, really?
This is optional for them?
whether or not to take the job at this point at this point it's not so different from why we can't get cabs in my neighborhood a dispatcher calls a cab driver and says would you like to drive way the fuck out to the western part of san francisco okay sure they go one block they see somebody else they could pick up they take it they're a tow truck driver who's in the busy holiday season is going to make more money from a bunch of little jobs than one huge job that they may not even get all their money from yeah yep and so they are just not coming
And so they say, all right.
So I say, look, the destination is, I don't know.
I don't know that all the companies in Reading.
It's Friday night.
I called you at 1.30.
It's now four.
The number of places that we could have taken it is rapidly turning to zero.
Please just send a truck.
We'll figure out where to take it.
And they're like, okay, it'll be there in 45 minutes.
Well, an hour and a half later, now it's 530.
The sun has gone down.
The temperature in the RV is 34 degrees.
What?
And a guy comes along in a truck and he says, hey, I saw you here two hours ago.
I didn't stop because I had to go in to get my gun cleaned.
But now I'm back.
Do you want to ride somewhere?
And he takes me down to Mount Shastatown.
Where he has a friend who runs a tow truck operation.
I get that guy on the phone and he says, oh yeah, AAA has been calling me all afternoon.
But I don't have a rig that's big enough to haul that tanker.
Sorry.
And so I have this nice man take me back to the rig.
I climb up the mountain.
I call AAA.
Now, I've shortened this story because... And what you're leaving out as a kindness, I imagine, is that when you go and they say 45 minutes each time and you turn off your phone and you just quietly wait for what may or may not happen, but it probably won't even be 45 minutes.
It's that feeling of that hopelessness.
Yeah, that hopelessness.
And if you start to yell at them, they go into hyper-trained...
uh customer service mode where they call you sir and they say you know they like customer service you to death oh yeah and so you don't want to get too polite yeah you can't yell at them you can't ask to speak to their supervisor because they are the supervisor
And so here's the most amazing thing.
I call them finally.
And this is the 10th time I've talked to AAA this day.
Or the 10th time that one of us has talked to AAA.
All of the grownups have spent time on the phone.
And I call them the 10th time.
And I get someone on the phone who wants to know the last four of my social security number and wants to confirm my birth date.
And I'm like, I was just on the phone before.
with somebody and the woman says, oh, I don't have any record of you in our system as having called today.
And I do start to kind of yell, not really yell, but sort of speak authoritatively.
And she says, get this.
She says, oh, I'm sorry, but we could not find a tow truck company in the region who would take the call.
And I said, oh, so what's next?
No big deal.
Don't worry about it.
And she says, I'm sorry.
I'm sorry to inconvenience you.
That's kind of, that's kind of it, she says.
And I'm like, what do you mean?
I mean, I have AAA diamond platinum RV towing AAA.
I'm in the mountains in a dead RV with my entire family.
You're telling me that there's nothing more you can do?
And she says, yeah.
Hmm.
Sorry.
Is there anything else I can help you with today?
I'm just like, I don't understand.
You have resources that I don't have.
Can you just call a, can you call the Redding police?
Can you call anybody?
She's like, yeah, we've sort of, we've tried everything.
You can call a towing company, she said, and try to get them to come out and pay the money for them and then apply to be reimbursed.
And I was just like, okay, okay.
I got a feeling they don't put that on the poster when they're trying to sign people up for AAA.
Yeah.
And then literally she says, is there anything else I can help you with today?
That's the worst.
As if I'm going to order a t-shirt.
And so I get off the phone and I start calling.
I just Google.
I'm up on the top of the mountain now.
I'm Googling tow truck companies in Reading.
I call a couple of them.
Some nice lady tells me to call Keith's Towing.
And I call Keith's Towing.
and i say i'm in an rv i'm stuck on old salt lick road and he's like oh you're that guy yeah they've been calling here all afternoon um yeah all right we'll come get you and i was like fucking what are you serious and he's like yeah yeah yeah all right we'll come get you we didn't want to do it but yeah all right you called us you're talking to us directly that's yeah okay
And I'm like, are you serious right now?
He's like, yeah, we'll be there in 45 minutes.
But here's the problem.
You have to call us through AAA.
So call AAA back.
Tell them that Keith's towing says they'll take the job.
Tell them it's a T13.
And we'll do it.
I was like, oh, please don't make me call AAA.
I'll just pay you the money.
And he said, you don't want to do that.
It's going to be very expensive.
Do you have a rough idea of like how much?
I have no idea.
When he said very expensive, I was just like, OK, I don't want to know anymore.
Right.
I do not want to know anymore.
You'd be paying like the serious rack rate.
Who knows?
I mean, I'd be paying the cost of the vehicle, you know.
So I call triple-a again and I go through that whole thing again All the phone tree all of the put in your social security number and you can just hear it in my voice It's like the voice that I use with customs people Where it's like I know I've got a bag full of Cuban cigars But I am so mad at you right now that I'm gonna I am going to fucking white privilege you into letting me go through here like just so mad
and i finally say called keith's towing tell him it's a t13 or i'm telling you it's a t13 and she starts to say something and i'm like just called keith's towing please just keith's towing let me just say it again keith's towing please so she does and for an hour and a half later not 45 minutes an hour and a half later now in the middle of the night we are we are conserving our body heat
Here comes this rig, this magical tow truck.
A magical tow truck that could basically pull down a water tower.
I'm guessing it's the kind of tow truck you'd use to tow another truck.
Yeah, it's a semi-towing tow truck.
Wow.
Shows up.
The guy...
that is driving it, Travis, is a great guy.
He's wearing a camouflage baseball hat.
Pretty sure he's a deer hunter.
He's your new nacho.
He's nacho too.
He's not a deer hunter in the sense that he plays Russian roulette.
He's a deer hunter in the sense that he believes in his Second Amendment rights, but he also knows how to back up a semi-truck that's carrying an RV on a mountain road.
And he hooks us up.
He puts the whole family in the cab, which was something that AAA told us 15 times couldn't be done.
And off we go.
And I say, Travis, where are we going?
You know better than I do.
And he said, oh, yeah, I know these great guys that repair RVs.
They're just right up the road here.
Takes us into Reading.
Backs us in to the parking lot, which he somehow had the key to the fence for.
Backs us into this RV repair shop that's just called like
bob's rv repair the whole parking lot is full of rvs backs us up and bob's rv repair has plugins and water and all that stuff for rvs so i hop out i plug this giant plug into the side of the rv and all of a sudden we've got power we've got furnace we've got nice stove we've got hot water for the shower
and so we all sit there we order pizza delivered to the wrecking yard and we spend another fam fam family night in that's right three days before christmas in the parking lot of this rv repair place we walked up to the to the arco station and got some twix bars and
And then in the morning, it was Sunday morning.
no one from the RV places, you know, they're not around at all.
And so like I left a note on the windshield.
It was like, Hey bros, call me up when you come to work on Monday.
You know, obviously you see this RV that's sitting here belongs to me.
And then we rented a car.
We rented a Dodge truck, actually a nice Dodge truck and we drove North.
But by that point, the storm had come in.
And the pass was not closed but an hour and a half wait because all the semi trucks were putting their chains on.
And so we drove over through Klamath Falls, a fairly significant detour but still faster.
But in the end, we did not get to Seattle until 10 p.m.
So I missed the engagement party.
I missed the show.
So in conclusion, the RV still sits in Redding, California.
The problem was the transmission.
Yeah.
Now, at this point, I'm up to date at this point.
And when we talked last Monday, you were still cautiously pseudo-optimistic of saying, like, well, you know, if it's just a thing, I'll get back in the truck and drive back down there and pick it up.
Yep.
So I had the Dodge pickup truck.
And...
I was like talking to the guys on the phone on Monday morning and I said, you know, fix the problem and I'll come down and get it.
I still have the rental truck.
I can bring it back.
And they were like, well, we need until noon to diagnose the problem.
And at noon, he said, I think we've got it figured out.
I think it wasn't that big of a deal.
I think we can have it fixed.
I think you can pick it up.
But we just want to run one more test.
So don't leave yet.
We'll call you at two.
two came around I called them up hey how's it going they were like well we figured this thing out and that thing out but we just want to take one more look at it let us just look at it one more time and then you know then you can come get it and so I was I was just on the threshold of saying you know what I'm just going to start driving right I'm going to start driving I'll get down there you know one o'clock in the morning I'll drive it back tomorrow
But there was just some hesitation, which was based on having watched that thing burn.
But I was like, really, you guys?
It's just that simple?
And so I waited, and at 5 p.m., the guy...
calls me up and he says, I'm sending you some pictures.
And I'm like, that's not good.
And he dropped the pan on the transmission and the pan was full of metal chunks that looked like, it looked like someone had taken a transmission and hit it with a ball peen hammer.
Kind of like that kid back at the Napa auto parts store in Williams.
And the guy was like, yeah, your transmission's
really broken and you need a new transmission.
And I was like, yeah, I know what that costs.
He was like, yeah, we can probably get a new transmission in here for $4,000.
Whoa.
And I was like, yeah, $4,000.
That's kind of what I thought.
And he was like, well, you know, we got to do this to it and that to it.
And there's this and that.
And once it's up on the rack, we might as well do this and that.
And so, yeah, $4,000.
And so I'm in that predicament right now, which everyone who's listening to this program that is over the age of 25 can identify with, and maybe even some of the people who are under the age of 25, which is a decision must be made for which there is no good path, right?
Fix the RV at the cost of $4,000.
at which point I have put what seemed like a bargain, the $8,000 RV, has now become a $13,000 RV, which still has all the same problems that it had.
Oh, the great thing about the RV repair guys is they were like, we fixed your fuel injection problem.
Turns out the guys in San Francisco put a new distributor on there, and the coil was fucked up, and it was arcing across the...
Like the spark was just flying around the top of the motor.
That doesn't sound safe or efficient.
No, that's not very good.
And that's happened to me before.
A bad coil in a distributor and you're just... But it didn't... You know, when it happened to me before, the thing barely ran.
This was a situation where it was motoring down the highway.
It was just arcing.
So they were like, oh, that was an easy fix.
And I was like, oh, fuck.
And then I said to them, listen, in all confidence, can you tell me, did the fact that the coil was arcing and the thing was running badly, did that cause us to put undue stress on the transmission?
Is the transmission failure...
A result of the bad shop work.
And there was a long pause.
And the guy said, I understand what you are asking and it is a good question.
And I can say pretty confidently that no.
It the transmission damage is has been ongoing for a long time.
Um, and there's, you know, there'd be no way to prove that the additional stress
caused this damage, and I doubt that it did, frankly.
Not enough that it would be like... It wasn't a slam dunk.
That's good, though.
That's good to hear.
Yeah, right.
I mean, it's like, who do you want to be mad at?
And the end result is like, oh, mad at yourself again.
Be honest, though.
I mean, the elephant in the room.
How much of that do you think was professional courtesy?
That is impossible to know, right?
The guy that fixed the truck is in the auto repair business in California, and the guys in the RV repair shop are also in the auto repair business in California.
And so who...
fucking knows how omerta oh there might be some omerta in there but it's also not a thing that i can you know i can't get in there and say i want it towed to a third shop for a third opinion that will be the same as this opinion anyway so here we are i have to either reconcile myself to the fact that the rv and i had a very short but very magical run
And that that experiment cost me $10,000 because if I try to sell this RV in the current condition to anyone, it is probably worth about $1,500.
Oh, God.
Or I feel pot committed to this experiment and I somewhere find $4,000, which I do not presently have.
And say, God damn yes, the RV and I have already in this short time bonded with one another to the degree that I will never leave a man behind.
And I'm going to put this new transmission in there and then I will know for a fact that it has a good transmission.
Just like I know for a fact it has a good water pump and I know that it also has a good transmission.
alternator and a good battery because i have replaced those things and now a good transmission you know it's a big big part of of refurbishing your vintage vehicle and there has to be like some part in your mind though you know uh you want to avoid as they say the sunk cost fallacy right of feeling like you're throwing good money after bad but i mean you know then the obvious other thing is like you know who knows what it is after that right
Can you share with our listeners what you told me about what you learned?
I've learned so much.
Which things?
I don't want to give the joke away, but what you were taught about what you can expect in the first year of owning a GMC RV.
Oh, right, right.
So all the old guys that run these things all say, look, you bought an $8,000 RV.
That's great.
That means that you only have to put $17,000 more into it.
If you buy a $20,000 RV, you only have to put $5,000 into it.
If you buy a $10,000 RV, you only have to put $15,000 in it.
The reality is that you're going to pay $25,000 for this thing.
And every one of them costs $25,000 eventually.
When they said that, did that just seem colorful or did that resonate?
No, I understood what they meant and they nodded at me and I nodded back.
But what I expected was that that $25,000 was going to be amateurized over several years.
Yeah, $17,000 in a year would be a bit much.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
That is not... I did not... That's not the budget.
When I was like, I got $8,000, let's... I used to be what I thought was great with money.
I just saved it.
I saved money.
And that was something that my peers didn't do.
Most people I knew would get 50 bucks and they would spend it.
And I was the guy that would save it.
And so I...
I always had a cushion and that was part of my – it was a thing I was proud of, always having a cushion.
But somehow in the last few years, I have just started to be like a guy that gets some money and says, let's live a little.
And I got $8,000.
I bought this RV.
Now, I did not have additional $1,000 to monkey around.
Well, I mean like in terms of just – don't want to get too deep on the psychology, but a part of it would be like if you went to that place –
And let's let's let's.
So it was a Todd.
Is that the guy?
The guy with the sunglasses where you thought it was gonna be this much.
He said, OK, look, just give me eight thousand.
You can have it.
Well, if that had had twenty thousand on it and you bargained down to sixteen, you probably wouldn't have done it.
Right.
You know, I was prepared to pay fourteen for it.
Wow.
Yeah.
But that was assuming I was going to get a loan for it.
And when I discovered that I could buy it for eight, well, I had it.
I had it.
So I just bought it in cash.
Right.
Now,
I could conceivably get a loan.
There are a lot of ways that I could pursue this repair.
And I know that there are probably tons of listeners right now.
Again, I'm going to break the fourth wall somewhat and address them directly.
There are a lot of you who are squirming in your chair and saying, why don't you just do a Kickstarter?
I've been approached by two different people to talk to you about it.
Yeah, or a Patreon or something, and we'll just crowdfund it.
Sure.
And the answer is that I have a certain amount of adult human pride, which this is my folly.
This thing is my folly.
And I know that you all want to participate in it somewhat.
And at this point, there are tens of thousands of people shaking their head side to side going, I don't want to participate in this.
But there are a lot of you who are generous and thoughtful and caring who want to be a part of this folly.
Or at least like save me, pull my fat from the fire.
But I am a full grown man and I have made this ding-a-ling decision.
And I feel like I need to own it and not be one of these modern people who turns to the internet every time that there's a problem and says, help me, Obi-Wan, you're my only hope.
Help me, distributed Obi-Wan.
And so it's not that I don't appreciate the offer and it's not that I don't understand how things work, but that feels like going hat in hand to a group of people that I would not go hat in hand to.
Yeah.
Yeah, I still find that difficult to do.
Yeah, it is difficult to do.
For anything, even for things where it's like there are people, I mean, like with this program, there are people who have said that they would be happy to give us money for that.
That's something I've certainly thought about, but there's something, I mean, I'm not against it exactly.
You know what I mean?
It's just, I'm not against it.
I'm not, and I don't want to be critical of other people's decisions because it's a complicated economy.
And it's certainly something I've thought about, but there's still some part of it that I feel like, I don't know, I have resistance.
Yeah, it's like making records, right?
It used to be hard to make records.
And so you would go and you would scrimp and save and you would get together enough money that you could rent some amount of studio time and then you would have to budget and figure it out.
And now it's just like, oh, I want to make a record and put it on.
Put it on the internet and you can sign up to fund me and that's wonderful.
I appreciate it, but it just feels wrong for me personally to do.
And maybe I will evolve and come around and allow people to...
I'm fairly certain that I will at some point, maybe even in the next year.
I mean, it seems dumb.
I don't want to be as cynical as to say leaving money on the table, but it's also part of being a gracious person is accepting gifts when they're given, which I'm not great at.
But there's a certain graciousness in somebody saying, look, I'd like you to have this.
It's just there's a lot of overhead to accepting things from other people.
That's true, too.
And you don't get the same vote.
And this is nothing against any person.
It's just a, I don't know, it's just a little itch I've got that once you do that,
there are a lot of people you don't know very well who end up being on your ad hoc board of advisors for life.
Well, and the thing is... You need to look no further than our friend Jonathan.
And, you know, just the people... Well, anyway.
It's complicated.
It's complicated.
I'm not opposed to having the RV be owned in part in common by all of our friends and fans who are like...
excitedly and vicariously enjoying this, uh, insanity, which is, I was going to say journey, but insanity works too.
Insane journey, maybe partly fueled by my new bipolar medicine and maybe just, uh, that this is how I've always lived my life.
And, um, and now I'm living it that way again, consistent with all of the weird decisions I've made and really $8,000, you know, in 19, in 1991 dollars, um,
I was buying old decrepit cars then and driving them until they broke.
I just pushed them into a lake when I was done.
And I didn't have a child that I was sitting on the side of the road going, please let this not be the day that I get the world's worst parent award.
But anyway, so I'm conscious of that.
And here's the wonderful thing.
I got an email from a friend who is a concert promoter.
And he said...
Listen, and I've been following your saga.
What if I booked a tour in California of you and some other musicians and we went and played all of the weird rich people towns like Mill Valley and Sausalito and Montecito, all the places where nobody ever plays, but people have more money than God.
Yeah.
And instead of a transportation budget where I rented a sprinter van to carry you guys, what if we just fixed the RV?
And that was the transportation budget for the tour.
That's honest pay.
And I was like, now that feels honest.
That feels like exactly the kind of deal that would, you know, where I wouldn't, where I would have a tremendous gratitude to my friends, but I would also feel like we had, we had done a good trade, a fair trade.
And so that possibility exists.
The problem is that the guy in Reading, where the RV sits right now, is understandably impatient for me to make a decision.
I didn't want to ask.
What's your sense of the time frame to make a decision here?
Well, he was like, so...
You know, send us a deposit.
We'll get putting that thing in right tomorrow.
Or he'll start charging you, what, 200 bucks a day to store it.
Well, this is what I don't know.
So I called him on the phone.
I talked to him on the phone, person to person, station to station.
And I said, I am not currently in a position to have you go right to work on this thing.
And he got very quiet.
Well, and just to be clear, it's at least $4,000.
Yeah.
I mean, the thing is, it's not like it's going to turn out to be $1,500.
$4,000 is what he knows it's going to cost if everything goes okay.
Yeah.
And he said, I have included in this budget an amount that acknowledges the possibility of cost overruns.
And so it could be slightly less than this.
I just didn't want to, you know, I didn't want to put an amount in here that it ended up like not being anywhere close.
And I was like, I'm grateful to you for that.
But having said, like, I'm not ready exactly to pull the trigger on this.
He was like, well, what are we talking about?
And so he and I had a very slow-voiced negotiation where I said –
What if we started to work on it in February?
And he was like, I could keep it on the lot till the first week of January.
And we went back and forth like this with the little badminton birdie of how long can I keep it at your place?
Both sides sucking air.
I don't not quite sure.
And so what we settled on was the last week of January.
I would have a plan.
Last week of December?
I'm sorry, last week of January.
He'll keep it there until January?
He has allowed it to be on his property until January.
That's really cool.
Well, it's very cool.
And he's like, listen, I know where you're at.
And I actually pulled the Christmas card.
I was like, it's two days before Christmas.
And he was like, I know, I know it is.
And I was like, and I kind of just, you know, I just sort of said in that voice that communicated that I was just a regular guy.
who was just trying to put Christmas trees under his Christmas on the table.
I was just trying to put Christmas trees on the table.
And and he was like, you know, we had a regular guy exchange where he was like, I know, man, I feel you.
And I was like, I know.
Right.
And he was like, yeah, two days before Christmas.
Am I right?
Yep.
And so that's where we're at.
That is where we are at.
And so I have a month more or less to both decide and having decided conjure up the cash to fix it or conjure up the cash.
Conjure up the balls to get out of it.
Just fold, yeah.
And I just don't – I still – so what my mom advised me was stop thinking about it.
You have some time.
Now just stop thinking.
tormenting yourself every minute of your life with um with these bad thoughts and let's just look for her yeah she was like it literally is the day before christmas don't um you know don't ruin yourself
doing uh thinking about a thing that you can't do anything about but now i'm on the other side of christmas yeah we're in the week between and i you know i've got to come up with a solution and whatever this uh whatever this offer of a tour is it's not going to be until spring or summer and
and I don't know what his ability is to advance the transportation budget or whether that would trend into uncomfortable territory for me.
I mean, I don't know.
You and I both are somewhat handicapped by our inability to accept
Yeah, sometimes.
But it's also like – this is my brain.
This is not your brain.
But my brain is – because I do live so much inside my own negative head that I can come up with a lot of things that won't go well and that makes me procrastinate because that's just how I am about all kinds of things.
But with something like this, there's just all kinds of – on the one hand, there is – this is not just you.
There's all of us.
We don't like feeling –
It's not even the simplest thing, feeling like a failure, but it doesn't feel good to walk away from something.
Right.
That's its own kind of easy way out.
And, you know, even setting aside the logic and the money and all those kinds of things, there's something that makes you feel, makes you feel like less of a successful person if your answer is to just quit.
And you want to try and find some clever way to either keep it going or to make it better or, you know, again, the tour thing is super interesting, but I mean, yeah, you're not going to get that money for months.
Yeah.
And then you got to think about like, what are the other things you could get?
I mean, you could get $4,000.
That's not that hard in itself.
Getting $4,000 is not an impossible thing.
But then what does it take to get that $4,000?
What else do you forego to get that?
Or what else do you like agree to do to get that?
And so that's where it gets complicated, further complicated in my head by like, okay, if you do get that,
You spend, let's say, $4,000 and as soon as you drive it off the lot, something else happens.
That's the part where – that's the self-defeating thing in my head of like, you know, what if this is just the beginning and now you're at $4,000 more?
Yeah, it's almost certainly just the beginning.
The question is like how –
How far do you roll with that before you say this is not the right time?
Yeah, right.
This is not the right time in my life to have embraced this weird lifestyle choice of being like a...
RV owner.
And I mean, and you know, not to piss in the punch bowl, but it's further to the point of why you may not want to, because I mean, there is something nice and something sort of, it's a wonderful life about, you know, Harry Bailey walking in with the basket full of money and saying, Hey, everything's solved.
Merry Christmas.
Every time a bell rings, uh, there's that feeling.
But like, what if everybody on the internet gets to celebrate with you that your goal was met?
Yay.
I've been Patreoned and then something else happens.
Well, now you're really on the hook.
Okay.
Because now you have investors.
You took a round.
And now, you know what I mean?
Then it would feel like, oh, why did I spend that money if he's not actually going to do this?
And it's like, see, now you just end up owing people in a different way.
I don't know.
That's my head anyway.
Yeah.
And mine too.
I just don't.
Yeah.
Right.
I mean, I'm almost back to like, let's not think about it for another week or so and just hope that.
Yeah.
I wish I could do that.
It's such a good idea.
I wish I could just say, there's not that much I could do about this thing right now, and I don't need to make a decision about it yet, so I just won't think about it.
I wish I had a way to do that.
I wish I had that kind of executive control over what my mind decided to focus on.
Yeah, I am learning it, and it is better than laying in bed in the middle of the night going...
I am an awful person and this is an awful circumstance.
Get out of my head.
Yeah, right.
Like, what good is that going to do?
So just to clarify for the listeners, and people have been very kind and generous, and I've been emailed, like I say, by a couple people.
One person I think you have been contacted by also.
And I just said, you know, this sounds curt, but when people contact me in order to contact someone else, which is something that happens more than one might imagine, I'm frequently contacted by somebody to contact someone else.
And as frequently as I get that request from somebody, I will often just say the same thing, which is this.
what did they say when you asked them?
Because that's probably the same answer.
Like if the answer was they didn't respond, then I'm not comfortable being the person to go make my friend respond to somebody else.
And if they said no, then I really, really, really don't feel like I should do that.
But just for our listeners, then in that case, we'll break down the first wall here.
So you're saying, at least for now, not interested in doing a crowdfunded RV repair system.
Yeah.
I, you know, I think I would, I think you and I have talked about like doing some kind of crowdfunding or patrionic thing for our program.
And I think I would be more interested in that and you and in the two of us continuing to argue about it because we are giving people something.
Whereas what I am, what I would be, the service I would be providing is
our listeners and generous donors by continuing to live in this RV and drive it around the country like a crazy person is less tangible to me.
And I know there are people who would make an argument like, the enjoyment I get out of watching you Instagram yourself driving this RV around
is worth some small, uh, donation to the cause.
Like, I understand that.
I understand it, but it, but it feels to me like a little bit, um, I don't know, less honest, uh, or less, not honest, uh,
No, there's not a good word for it.
It just feels – it doesn't feel wrong, but it doesn't feel right.
Yeah.
It's weird because, I mean, we're all expected to have these really polarized, very strong opinions about things.
And this is one of those topics where I don't have –
It's an impossibly weak position or feeling that I have about it, which is just that, yeah, I could see that.
But then I also see all these horror stories on Kickstarter where like, oh my gosh, the most funded thing of all time apparently is this cooler that has a blender on it.
And then they didn't deliver it to their people before they started selling it on Amazon.
Now everybody hates them.
There's so many ways in which that exposes you.
And this really goes back to probably one of our very first public conversations, which is when I interviewed you for my video show.
And I made that crack about how if you go to a software review site, and if it's free, you'll find these mostly kind of pretty positive reviews.
If somebody charges a nickel for something, everything changes.
Everything changes.
Because as soon as money changes hands, the nature of the relationship really changes.
And I think it's one reason that a lot of us are happy to hide behind more of a business model that doesn't expose you in that way.
So I'm not against it, but I guess we could go talk to some of our smart friends and find out what would be involved in doing that.
But I'd like to see you get it fixed, but I also don't want you to be investing in this.
I mean, it's none of my fucking business, but I also don't want you to have to be funding this albatross for the rest of your near future.
Well, and here's the key thing, right?
And I think part of why I went from being a saver, a meticulous saver, a saver who saved above all,
Like the highest moral good to me has always been saving money.
And the benefit of money in the bank outweighed the benefit of almost any material good.
And that became a tyranny over myself.
And as much as I like as much as I tsk tsked and shook my head at my friends who were buying motorcycles and guitars and and trips and, you know, and just blowing their money and then sitting around complaining about how poor they were.
I had this virtue, which was that I saved.
And I freed myself from that tyranny several years ago by finally acknowledging what I always knew, which is that money is fake.
Money is fake.
And it doesn't actually have, like collecting it has no virtue, spending it has no virtue.
It's false.
And
What does it represent?
You know, what is the thing that you want and what does that mean?
And I realized that I wanted leisure or I thought I did.
And I saved money in order to ensure that I had that security of being able to just take the day off and take the week off.
That was what, that was my highest good.
And other people wanted material things and that was the – and money was just a way of accomplishing those things.
But the money itself is just – it's just imaginary.
And so I started to allow myself to spend money because I was like, you know what?
It comes.
It goes.
Like, fuck it.
Don't sit – don't Scrooge McDuck it.
or smog it where you're don't smog your gold don't smog your gold and you're just in there with one eyelid open while the fucking hobbits sneak in and get your i forget the end of that book i haven't read in a long time what do they do they get in there and they get the the the uh the dwarves get their valhalla back i don't remember yeah smog doesn't win
That's the... Smog's in an awkward position because the more gold in your hoard, the more you have to protect and the more you have to lose.
And no matter how good a dragon you are, that's still no way to spend a lifetime.
Yeah, right.
So you can sit and say, $4,000 for this transmission is half the price I paid for the whole RV.
It's good money after bad.
It's all this blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And now I've paid $14,000 for this thing that's only worth $14,000.
And herp, derp, derp.
But ultimately, like all of that is just knowing the price of everything and the value of nothing.
And money is false enough that I need to constantly remind myself to spend it because fuck it.
And also you'll make more.
And also leisure –
Is not a very good goal, it turns out, for me.
Because I spent several years with enough money to allow myself to take the month off.
And that did not produce good mental health and it didn't produce...
It didn't produce happiness, ultimately.
Money's a little bit like status, or what you could call power, but what I'll call status.
Money's a little bit like status, where in some ways, the more you get of it, the more you realize what bullshit it is.
But the less you have of it, the more incredibly real and important it seems.
So, you know, it all seems like bullshit until you don't have it.
And then it seems and this is this is why I mean, what is where does every conspiracy theory come from in some ways?
Like this conspiracy theories come from trying to explain why the world is the way it is based on what you know, what you think and how you think life should be.
And whether or not that has anything to do with reality, it has everything to do with all the facts that are not in evidence and especially all the status you don't have.
Well, obviously, something must be going on when all those rich, important people have meetings in the teddy bear picnic.
They must be deciding that that must be the Jews deciding what movies are going to come out and what the interest rates will be.
Like that's the only plausible explanation.
Well, no, it's actually not.
But that's if you don't have access to that, that's what it seems like.
And it's what makes us less empathetic toward other people is this constant leveling of how much status and money other people have and like what they deserve and how much of their own feelings they should be entitled to.
Right.
I mean, sorry, that's a little rambly.
But, you know, like I say, the dignity police are always out there looking at other people and trying to figure out what they've earned.
Like earned as in like what they deserve, not what they own.
Right.
And I think very clearly this RV, which catches on fire and leaks and has upholstery the color of Pepto-Bismol, both my friends and my enemies seem to agree that it's what I deserve.
Right.
Oh, my God.
This just went from being about car repair to mythology.