Ep. 192: "King of Tahiti"
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This is it.
This is the show?
This is the show.
This episode of Roderick on the Line is sponsored by Cards Against Humanity.
This week, they asked James T. Green to help say hi to John.
Hello?
Hi, John.
Hi, Merlin.
How's it going?
It's so good to be back.
Oh, you're sick.
I'm a little sick.
Right.
You're still sick.
It was a bad one.
It was a virus that snuck past.
See, I got a flu shot.
It wasn't a flu virus.
It was a other virus.
Oh, no.
Mystery virus that snuck past all of my defenses.
and then conned me into thinking it was just a normal cold for a couple of days.
Oh, my battery won't start.
My family's in the car.
I'm here to interview for a job.
Yep, yep, exactly.
Classic.
Fan belt, my fan belt.
Fucking fan belt.
I got a fan belt right here to prove it.
Oh, so it must be true.
Right?
So it's one o'clock in the morning, and I'm just going to run to the fan belt store.
You seem like a nice virus.
You're clean and articulate.
Sure, come on in.
Yeah, so I had a little sore throat.
I had a little stuffy nose.
And then in the middle of the night, I was 104 degrees, and then I was freezing cold, and then I was 104 degrees.
And I was like, this is no normal cold.
Oh, man.
And then I had a fever for three days.
And then I went to the doctor.
Oh, shit.
Which I don't do.
No.
And I was like, you got to be kidding me with this.
Let me guess.
He told you you had a virus.
The doctor.
It was a she and she said, you have a virus.
And she said it with like a smirk on her face.
Like she knows your shows.
Yeah.
She was like, yeah.
Oh, you're sick, huh?
Good thing you came to the doctor.
Happens sometimes.
It's a good thing you came.
It is.
It's a good thing you came because it could have been something worse and that's why we ordered all these tests.
But she did an amazing thing.
She hooked me up to an IV and gave me a whole bag of
what is probably, you know, radon.
But it's medical grade radon.
Yeah, but it plumped me right back up and I was like, oh, I was dehydrated in addition to being all these other things, feverish and miserable.
Are you shitting me?
They actually connected you up to a bag?
Just filled me up with saline.
And then you felt better.
I felt better.
I mean, I didn't feel great.
No, no, but I mean, I would do anything to not feel terrible.
Can you imagine just getting hooked up to a bag once in a while and feel better?
That was the thing.
I sat there and I was like, can you throw some vitamin B12 in that too?
And whatever else, give me some of that shit that Kennedy had.
Oh, the Kennedy shit, the Addison fighter.
Yeah, give me the Hitler shit and the Kennedy shit and I'll go out and...
Run for president.
Anyway, so I'm on the mend, but here's the caveat, which is that I may explode into a coughing fit that no one wants to hear.
And as you know, I don't have a cough button.
So if it happens, I don't know whether you can insert some hold music or cut it out or whatever it is that you... I think you can probably guess what I'm going to do.
I'm just going to listen politely.
Oh, but it's so... This is a very real cough that I have right now, which is a cough where I am...
I'm off gassing, right?
Except it's not gas.
I am.
Yeah, I am.
I am mucinexing.
Oh, it's productive cough.
That's exactly right.
It's a productive cough.
So I'm not sure that our listeners around the world are prepared for what it sounds like when someone in Seattle offloads.
Yeah, you guys don't use umbrellas.
Yeah, it offloads some of that moisture that I collected when they put me on a bag.
I realize you're in a vulnerable place right now.
If this is too philosophical of a question, feel free to skirt it.
I'm just curious.
I know you like to avoid intoxicants strictly for purposes of intoxication.
You don't even generally like to take cold medicine.
It's true.
Where does saline from a Mad Max bag, where does that fall on your spectrum of acceptable things to bring into your body?
You know, this is a very good question because...
I'm very... Intoxicants I don't partake of because they present a risk to me, I feel.
Whereas a bag of saline, it's unlikely enough that I'll have a friend or a street friend that knows how to put an IV in and has a bag of saline or can make it available
And it didn't make me feel that amazing.
It was just like, oh, shit.
That's like I just drank six cups of water.
Oh, right.
Because part of this is dehydration when you get the fever and all that.
Yeah, you're just like, oh, I don't want to go downstairs and drink water.
I'm shivering.
And everybody says, you've got to keep hydrated.
You've got to keep you hydrated.
It's like, I'm fine.
I'm fine.
But I'd run down.
So I'm okay with saline.
But this is one of those, this is a deeper question I think you're asking.
It is kind of a deeper question because, yeah, go ahead.
But I think there's at least two parts to it with you.
And it started out as one and became another, I think.
And first of all, I just want to say, I think the idea of the Mad Max bag is a terrific idea.
I think you did the right thing.
I think even if you put some vitamins in there, I don't think that's so bad.
What I hear you saying is there was a time when substances were trouble for me.
And I know to avoid deliberately ingesting something to make me feel very different.
on whatever level so i think obviously that makes a ton of sense but i also think there's something to it that's more from your like your alaskan stock which is you're like i want to see if i can do this whole thing without the epidural like i want to see like i don't even want something even if it's something that's benign even if it's a placebo i don't even want a placebo because i could think i could do it without it
Right.
And, you know, if I were a woman, I know that and I were pregnant, I know that I would want to have the baby the old fashioned way and screaming.
That's right.
Screaming and have it sort of ruin my body as it happens, because that's how God intended.
And there are plenty, plenty of people that I respect very much.
They're like, are you crazy?
If you have a cesarean section, you can schedule the moment the baby arrives, go to the hospital, go to sleep, and when you wake up, there is a baby there, and everything was monitored, and it is, and you're...
And you did not get split in half by a giant bubble of fat.
And that makes perfect sense to me.
And it is like the technology is here.
Why not employ it?
But I still personally would not find that convincing because I would think that in the experience of having a kid, there would be some mystery that I would unlock, some lasting reverberation in me and the kid that couldn't be duplicated.
If nothing else, you might always wonder what it would have been like.
Yeah, and I think the cesarean people are like, yeah, uh-huh, okay, well, I think I can handle imagining or pining for what it was like, but I was healed in two days and could walk fine immediately and so forth and so on.
So there are all kinds of...
Like, why don't you use the most current technology?
Why haven't I gotten LASIK surgery, for instance?
I'm walking around with glasses.
They no longer really work for me because my eyes are becoming dried up little corn husks.
Why wouldn't I, years ago, have gone and gotten LASIK surgery?
And, you know, there's a...
There's a part of me that feels like, what if I'm trying to be an astronaut and they're scanning me to see if I am one of the genetically pure.
Oh, I see.
Some kind of Gattaca meets Whitcomb thing.
And they go, oh, we've detected some cyborg technology here.
Yeah, we've seen that you've shaved your eyes.
And if you had to shave your eyes, that means you're not one of the goods that
It could be something as simple as you can't handle the – your eyes couldn't handle the pressure of takeoff.
Or it could just be, you know what?
You're not really up for this.
If you're getting your eyes shaved, you should be down in the commissary.
Well, that's the thing.
Just the nature of the fact that your eyes were misshapen means that you are genetically inferior, right?
Because the perfects –
The perfects are perfect.
Now, of course, if they're measuring that type of thing, they would recognize that my eyes were misshapen already.
And besides, I'm 47.
I'm not going to be an astronaut.
But it's that lingering sense of, like, don't modify yourself.
You're closer to having your ashes shot out of a can in space than you are to getting to ride in a takeoff.
Yeah, I'm hoping that one of our listeners who works for NASA will name a star after me.
But...
That was in control.
I was keeping that one in control.
I think you sound great.
Oh, thank you.
So there's that.
And that extends to like I don't have any tattoos, obviously, but I can't argue with anybody that does.
But then we get into the category of elective surgery, which is akin to the eye shaving.
But like, where does the line on elective surgery lay for me?
Or lie?
I never know which it is.
Which one would you use in that situation?
I always use the wrong one, unintentionally.
Where would the line lie?
Yes.
Where would the line lie?
And you're talking here about an entire spectrum of different kinds of elective.
So there's one kind of surgery, which is, if we don't take out your gallbladder,
there's like an 80% chance you'll die in the next month.
And that's a non-elective.
You really know.
We have the technology.
We can do this.
Your chances of living and having a good life are better if we do this surgery.
That's over here.
And then you got, then what?
At the very, very far, far, far, far, far end of the spectrum.
Oh gosh, I'm going to get in trouble for this.
But you've got like a re-up of something like Botox.
Yeah.
Or you've got, you know, like, like freshening up a plastic, an existing plastic surgery.
And then all along the way on the spectrum, you've got all kinds of things where you've got stuff like, you know, if there's certain kinds of surgeries, you know, sometimes when you go into these, especially when you go into like these certain kinds of doctors, whether that's an orthodontist or you go into a...
What's the doctors that do the face surgery?
A plastic surgeon?
There's more to plastic surgery than looking like a cat lady.
That could be like we help you after a mastectomy to have a bus line that you can be happy with.
There's all kinds of things in plastic surgery that go way beyond just like I'm a horrible person from Los Angeles.
But sometimes I think what they'll do is they will also – it's like getting your car fixed.
It's like, hey, as long as we're pulling the engine –
We probably want to look at a couple other things, too, because we're not going to pull the engine that many times.
And there's some things where you may not need it, but we could do it as a precaution.
You see where I'm going with this?
Since we're in there anyway.
So, for instance, like my teeth don't fit together.
And the doctors have been telling me for years that the first thing they wanted to do from the time I was 17, they were like, we got to break this kid's jaw.
and reset it in a different place so his teeth fit together.
And I was like, even at the time, I felt like, that seems crazy.
They were like, no, no, no, it's very routine.
We just break your jaw and move it back
and fit your teeth together, and then we saw some part of your jaw out and put it back together.
When you phrase it like that, it sounds... When you say it as break your jaw, it sounds like Lou's going to come in and give you a good sock to the face.
Yeah, but it's like cut both sides of your jaw and take some part of it out.
No, but it's serious.
I have a person very near and dear to me in my life who had that procedure, you'll remember.
Yeah, and it's enormous.
It's a huge deal.
It felt like a huge deal.
That's exactly right.
And then as I got older...
They started saying, I ran into, they kept, every dentist was like, oh, we got to cut your jaw in half and move it back.
And I was like, yeah, yeah, yeah.
And then I started talking to some oral surgeons who were like, no, no, no, no, no, we don't break your jaw and move it back anymore.
What we do is we cut off your upper palate entirely.
We cut your whole, we saw your top layer of teeth off completely from your skull and move them forward.
We move your top teeth forward so they fit with your bottom teeth.
Because what happened was not that your jaw grew too much, which is what we thought had happened, but it was the top of your... That seems really extreme.
The top of your mouth face...
failed to grow enough.
That seems like mowing your lawn by making the neighborhood move around under your house.
I mean, really?
Doesn't that seem even more extreme?
I don't know.
Break your jaw off or cut the top of your head off?
I mean, I don't know.
Both things seemed crazy.
But what they were saying was...
That it would make my teeth fit better together, which would increase the longevity of my teeth because right now, the way they fit together, I'm slowly grinding them apart.
And I'm going to grind my face apart until it's just a soul patch touching a nose.
And at every opportunity, I've said, I don't want... What a horrible, horrible image.
You didn't even say chin.
You said soul patch.
Just a soul patch tickling a nose.
Hey, guys.
Harbour, harbour, harbour, harbour.
I didn't want it.
Heard the new fastball?
You know, the last time I talked to a dentist about it, I was 46.
And I said, I'm 46.
I'm halfway to the goal line.
And they were like, you're going to need those teeth.
And I was like, yeah, I know.
But I'm hoping that technology somewhere along the line can give me aluminum teeth or teeth that are made of plexiglass that have little goldfish swimming in them or something cool where you don't have to saw either part of my face.
And they just shrug and go, well, that's what we do.
And I'm like, exactly.
That's what you do.
Right.
It's a failure of your imagination.
That's why you drive a Porsche 911 because you saw people's faces in half.
I don't see it as a necessity.
But when the guy said he was going to move the top of my face forward.
I did have a thought, which was that is going to make my mustache look very cool.
Oh.
Because it's going to push my mustache out a little bit.
And I've always felt like, now that you mention it, I've always felt like my top, the area between the bottom of my nose and the top of my lip was a little too small.
I had always, I had never, I guess I had never thought of it that way.
Because you really know you're introducing something very interesting here, which is really truly thinking about your face as having three dimensions.
Right?
Kind of.
Instead of saying like, oh, here's a rough drawing of an oval with some dots on it.
This is a three-dimensional thing.
You're talking about adding architecturally, adding more bioavailable mustache surface.
So what happened was from a young age, I wanted a mustache.
When I was 17, I wanted a mustache.
And of course, God realized.
that this was something I wanted and God was going to deny this to me because that's the mysterious way that God works.
That's true.
He wants to put obstacles in front of you in order to, you know, test you.
And so I have studied men's mustaches over the years very closely and all the mustaches that you'd like, the Tom Sellecks of the world.
If you look at Tom Selleck, he has an enormous area between the bottom of his nose and the top of his lip.
It's a fucking soccer field.
You are changing the whole way I think about mustaches, and you're filling in a lot of holes for why mustaches look weird sometimes.
Yeah, so he's got this huge area.
He's got this big mustache.
It looks great.
And then you start looking at men's faces and you say, this area between the bottom of the nose and the top of the lip is a very crucial area for men to look trustworthy and capable.
If you look at Zorba the Greek, he's got a big area there.
Like all the guys that you instinctively go, ha, this guy is going to handle things.
I'm thinking about Sam Elliott.
Sam Elliott's got a huge area.
He's got a huge area which can accommodate a, frankly, enormous mustache.
If you try to grow a, what do you call that area between your lip and your nose?
I don't know, the top of your under nose?
Your mustache holder.
Mustache holder.
Or you know what I mean, the conveyance, the bucket, the mustache bucket.
Your divot, your trough.
You got your hair trough under your nose.
If that is even just, oh, my gosh, just picometers too small, you're not going to be able to do too much with that.
You're going to be like one of those guys who can't really grow a beard but keeps trying to grow a beard, and you're like, you look like a gray.
Stop doing that.
Yeah, so my whole young life, 21, 24, 26, I got a big, huge beard.
I got a big beard-shaped face.
And I've got this little teeny little, you know, like hand strap, this little blonde sort of wispy little mustache that's in an area too small to contain a mustache.
There's nothing you can do about that.
Nothing I can do about it.
And so all the great mustaches...
I was just like, yeah, you know, Rob Delaney, the comedian.
If you look at Rob Delaney, he's got a huge nose trough, a huge mustache trough.
Rob Delaney.
Rob Delaney.
He's a famous Twitter guy.
He's on some British TV show now.
Oh, look at that guy.
Look at that.
He's a handsome guy.
Well, see, and how much of that handsomeness is just that area.
Yeah.
So.
They're talking about this enormous sawing of my face to get my teeth fitting together better, which seemed to me to be a completely like it's just a Porsche conveyance for these for these doctors.
Because they're just – they're sitting in those conferences in Las Vegas where all the oral surgeons get together.
And they're saying, what's a new thing that we can do?
I totally agree.
I hate to admit this.
And the problem is – and I argue with our friend John Syracuse about this because I honestly – I don't have any way of being able to judge when they're just saying some shit versus giving me life-saving advice.
It is indistinguishable.
They never give you a percentage –
estimate of how much what they're saying might be totally might be total bullshit that only makes sense for a little while they could be fucking theodoric of york for all i know yeah well and this happens at universities all the time right somebody gets up and they give a paper they write a book and they're like what if x was y and what if blue was orange and if it if it makes sense then everybody suddenly is like well x is y and blue is orange
And so a dentist gets up at a, at a, one of these conferences and gives a presentation, a Ted talk where he's like, one time I saw the guy's face in half and moved his teeth around.
And a boy, the results were amazing.
He never had any problems after that.
And then all of a sudden everybody in the room is convinced that that is a, that's a key surgery, a key thing that has, that makes modern life better.
Right.
And we need to encourage people that have this problem.
I think half the population, their teeth don't fit together.
Right.
Geez, I got so much feeling about this.
Because, I mean, there are the kinds of things.
What you're talking about, the teeth thing, having been around this in my household, is that there's more to it than my teeth don't fit together.
Even in the case of my daughter, she's got retainers because her teeth are going to come in weird in a way that's about way more than whether she can be a model.
There will be an impact.
There's all kinds of things that can happen.
You can get TMJ.
You can get all these different things that can happen.
So, you know, you want to nip that in the bud.
Sure.
If you have to gnaw on whale blubber in order to survive a winter.
You're not going to make it.
You're going to want those teeth to be strong.
You're certainly going to advocate for whales.
Yeah.
And then... Yeah, go ahead.
But so... But my thing was how... So all of a sudden I was considering this surgery in part because so many dentists had recommended it, but now suddenly in part because it was potentially going to increase my mustache area.
Now I'm listening.
And so then I had a crisis...
Right.
Like a like a like a conundrum, like a like a serious sort of spiritual crisis.
How much of this now am I considering as an elective surgery?
Oh, am I going if somebody said, hey, we've got a new surgery that expands your mustache area, I would say that's ridiculous.
But what if I get this necessary tooth surgery that just coincidentally expands my mustache area?
Only I know until now when I'm reporting it to everyone.
Well, sort of like you introduced me to hydrogen peroxide.
In your early days, you would use that as a surfactant, as a mouthwash, as a debriding agent, but also as a way to deal with your allergy to yourself.
you'll remember you discovered as a side effect of that that you also got super cool blonde hair out of it.
Was that not a similar Dark Night of the Soul for you?
It was, and you will notice that I don't ever put hydrogen peroxide on my head anymore.
It's sitting there.
You could do it right now.
That's right.
Not because I didn't like the blonde hair that it gave me, but because I know that it will do that, and so doing it now, even to counteract the fact that my body is trying to kill itself,
It seems like secretly I would be doing it in order to go, oopsie, I got blonde hair, which I don't, you know, like this is the thing with taking cold medicine.
It's like, oopsie, now I'm high.
What could I do about it?
I better have more cold medicine.
It's good for me.
Yeah, I'm sick.
I need cold medicine.
And then...
Then I'm riding across America on the back of a motorcycle with some guy named Steve.
So that's not what I want, right?
No, no.
And so all these things, it's like how much of those secondary repairs that follow upon a quote-unquote necessary surgery –
How many decisions are getting made in that gray space?
And there are elective surgeries that are intentionally augmentative.
And then there are elective surgeries where, you know, like, for instance, my second toe is longer than the first toe.
That means you're smart.
Well, yeah, it means I'm descended from Russian royalty.
No kidding.
I heard it means you're smart.
It means you're smart because you're descended from royalty, and everyone knows they're the smartest.
QED.
Right?
So... Excuse me.
Not at all.
So, let's say...
Rather than taking pride in the fact that my second toe is longer than the first toe, which I do, because I have somewhat of a set of prehensile feet.
You got mucky toes?
I got monkey toes, which enabled me to grab and peel an orange with my toes.
That's an adaptation.
That's nice to have.
Yeah, I know.
I know a lot of people who are self-conscious about their monkey toes.
I feel like that's a mitzvah.
Well, see, this is the thing.
Better than have those little Donald Trump toes.
Nobody wants those.
But let's say you are somebody who looks down at your feet and says, oh, they are grotesque and misshapen.
if there were a surgery and perhaps there is to have your second toe shortened or all your toes shortened, but it's really, and here's the funny thing about that second toe longer thing.
If you look at my feet, you realize it is the first toe, which is too short.
It's not that the second toe is longer.
It's that the big toe is too small.
That's how all the second toe longer people get away with.
That's a mind bend.
Yeah.
If your big toe was long enough, you'd have normal looking feet.
You don't want a big toe that's too long, though.
You don't want it to look like a thumb.
Well, if my big toe was as long as my second toe, it would not only look like a thumb, it would function as a thumb, and I would not be living here.
You could peel oranges for others at the same time.
I would be in Tahiti.
I would be king of Tahiti.
And that sounds pretty good.
So let's say there's an elective surgery that shortens my second toe to make my feet look normal.
Yeah.
Or an elective surgery that elongates my big toe so that I can become king of Tahiti.
Yeah.
which one of those acquits with my idea of, you know, personally, which one would acquit with my sort of validity needs?
Given that they are both a kind of elective cosmetic surgery, which one would keep you truer to your final form?
Mm-hmm.
Right.
But when you describe the palate slicing technique, that sounds more like we're going to move all four toes that aren't your second toe and pull them out and make them longer.
Mm-hmm.
It's a boil-the-ocean model for teeth.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Well, and so many elective surgeries are.
So to take this to a Wired magazine place, which I know you and I like to do because we're thought leaders, we're technologists,
How many articles have you read in Wired Magazine about enhancement drugs that are going to make you better, faster, stronger?
You're going to be creating apps while you sleep.
This was a hot topic in the late 90s.
Right.
And I dipped one of my perfectly normal-sized toes into this topic a little bit, which is smart drugs.
To this day, I continue to take a version of smart drugs for things.
Mm-hmm.
Well, they have less of an impact because they're having to fight off me.
Right, right, right, right.
But there was a time when this was a very hot topic.
I feel this is like a Wired magazine post-rave, Future's So Bright I Gotta Wear Shades thing, where you were going to be able to create your own personal...
cocktail is putting it too glibly, but cocktail of different drugs that would enable you to be your best self.
Your best self.
Not with the goal of intoxication or enlightenment, but just basically what?
Unlocking potential that's otherwise difficult to access.
The whole business of like you only use 20% of your brain business, which is not true.
But a lot of those Wired Magazine think pieces, let's call some of them think pieces.
Some of them were just reportage, and some of them were think pieces.
They all start out with coverage on a scene.
Here's coverage of the smart drug scene.
Here's the thing we've heard about.
Let's talk to some of these people.
That's kind of like where we are right now with people who want to be robots.
There's a lot of just general coverage of like, oh, I've got this thing.
Like I heard a thing on NPR, which is like the Wired of the 2010s, of a guy who has a thing that he has an augmented antenna for his head that helps him see colors because he's colorblind.
Oh, so you know, I support that.
People razz him.
I guess he looks like an anglerfish, like a female anglerfish.
People razz him about it because he's got a head antenna that helps him see colors.
Oh, and it's necessary that it be an antenna.
It's not a thing where he was like, can you make that look like an antenna because I am a... No, it's not a Gleep Glorp.
I see.
But no, you're right.
That's where it starts out.
And then you get into the whole, like, I think it gets into the... Then you go into the first person reportage.
Like, I tried taking pyracetum for a month to see what happens, right?
Uh-huh.
Then, of course, you get into the double thinkpings, the tricky three part turn American life version of like, do smart drugs really do anything?
Whoops, they do.
It's not what we expected.
Whoops.
Twist again.
Right.
And the and the twist, the ultimate twist is always if you don't take smart drugs, are you going to be able to keep up?
Are you going to be are you going to be competitive?
Are you going to be still working on your first app?
When the people at your school who weren't even as smart as you.
Right.
Are already making their sixth or seventh app.
Right.
Right.
Are you still working on your first TED Talk when, you know, when the little kid on the block.
You're still sketching it out while this guy down the street, he got a couple shots of saline back in 2002.
And now look where he is.
Yeah.
He's done.
He's done like six TED Talks.
He's got venture capital funding.
He's got an app that makes apps.
Yeah.
You know what I'm saying?
And you're sitting there with your dick in your hand wondering if you should make something for the BlackBerry.
Yeah, he's sitting in a Cosmodrome somewhere getting ready to be blasted up to the ISS.
Yeah, right.
Getting his Darth Vader helmet put on for him.
Which he's paid for with the fucking petty cash.
Right.
And you are driving around in a Honda Civic.
Trying to figure out even what an app is.
I drove here tonight in a BMW.
You can't even trade your fucking three-year-old BMW for a new BMW.
You see this watch?
The leads are weak.
You are weak.
It means you are wanting.
How do you even set the time on a Rolex?
I don't even know how you do it.
I think you need a second Rolex.
It's called two-factor authentication.
You send the Rolex back.
Yep.
There's a very small, large fee for sending in the Rolex.
They set the time.
They send it back.
But they give you a loaner Rolex.
To make sure that the time's still correct.
John's taking a minute to cough.
Oh!
You sound like you're getting better.
Oh, yeah.
Oh, yeah.
Oh, yeah.
That was great.
That was like a trout was living in my lungs.
And now he's not there anymore.
He's in a tissue on the table.
I think tattoo removal is going to be huge.
It's going to be huge.
People have been saying tattoo removal is going to be huge.
For 20 years, right?
I told you the story about the guy who had his arms covered with hot rod racing tattoos.
The man's ruin tattoos and the tumbling dice and the naked devil girl surrounded by a halo of flames.
And I told you this story, didn't I?
Tell me again.
Not everybody listens to every episode.
I was with them at a party and somebody was like, we need somebody to go on a beer run.
And I was like, you got a car?
And he said, yeah.
And I was like, all right, let's go.
Let's go to the beer store.
And I think, you know, partly I picked him or pointed him out because I was like, this guy's going to have the hot rod of all time.
Oh.
Right?
He's got cross-checkered flags on his forearm.
And we get out to his car, and it's a 92 Toyota two-wheel drive pickup.
Oh, man.
I was like, got in the car, and I was really disappointed.
And I couldn't help but say something.
I was like, so what's the story, man?
You got this Toyota here?
You got all these hot rod tattoos?
Do you race motorcycles?
And he was like, no.
I said, do you have a hot rod somewhere?
No.
Did you ever?
No.
So what's with the hot rod tattoos?
And he was like, well, this one used to be a dancing bear.
And this one used to be, you know, poo.
They were all cover-ups?
This one was Winnie the Pooh flying a yin and yang flag.
Yeah.
And this one over here was a fucking smiling sun.
And this one was, you know, Jerry's hand missing a finger.
And I was like, you are fucking kidding me.
You had hippie tattoos all over and now you've got hot rod tattoos covering them all.
And he was like, yeah.
And I said, what are you going to do when hot rod tattoos are the hippie tattoos of the 2000s?
Because the 90s are going to make the 60s look like the 50s.
And he was like, it hadn't even occurred to him.
Right.
And that turns out I was wrong.
Hot rod, uh, punk rock, hot rod tattoos never go out of style.
He had fucked up the first time and gotten hippie tattoos.
And then he decided he didn't want to live in that, in the rarefied air.
of rainbow gatherings.
And now he had gone hot rod and I'm sure he's still very happy with those.
But people have been saying tattoo removal, tattoo removal, but I don't see it.
I just see more and more tattoos all the time.
You think it's like virtual reality?
Like we're just going to keep hearing about it like every three to five years?
It's never really going to get big?
It's just like moms and people that didn't get tattoos constantly wanting to be vindicated.
Because to a certain minority, I don't know if it's a minority, but I guess it's probably still the majority, but a certain group of people take a moral stand on tattoos and they keep wanting to be vindicated.
Right.
Oh, you're going to be sorry.
You're going to be sorry.
And all the people with tattoos continue to not be sorry.
And there are plenty of people out there who have aged to old age and died already who had tattoos the entire time and were not sorry a little bit.
Well, yeah, maybe.
I don't know if it's moral in my case, but I mean part of it also is like there's never – it's never a good day to be 75 and go, what the fuck did I do?
Well, yeah, but this is the weird thing.
What I have discovered in my long travels is that there are people who do not have regret.
Right?
I want to hear this, but the only reason I mention this is because of my dad, who as you know passed away in 1974, and he had a tattoo removed.
Oh, what was it?
He, when he's in Korea, got an ill-advised tattoo with the name of his then fiance and his mother on it.
He was drunk one night in Tokyo on leave and got a tattoo.
It's like the worst cliche of all time.
And he it was not my mom.
It was him.
He's like, I got to get this.
Got to get this removed.
I don't remember ever having seen it, but I guess I don't remember exactly when he goes before I would have cognizance of these kinds of things.
And apparently the late 60s, early 70s version of having a tattoo removed was not pretty.
No, I think they put a grinder on you.
It was – I mean from the accounts that I've heard from my mom, it was just ridiculously unpleasant.
I guess – so part of what I'm saying is, yeah, I don't like tattoos.
Whatever.
Who cares?
But what I'm saying is like also like think about a world where getting a tattoo removed –
is 80, 90, say 90% effective for most kinds of tattoos that aren't colors.
I heard colors are really hard.
But certain kinds of things.
Colors.
What is that from?
I know that.
Colors.
What is that?
Colors.
Colors.
Colors.
So I could die for your life when your shotgun scatters.
Is that Fort Apache the Bronx?
What is that?
Colors.
Colors.
Oh, iced tea?
Iced tea.
That's iced tea.
Iced tea.
But imagine if it got to where you still want to get a tattoo and commit to it, but that door's not closed forever.
Let's say it's about as hard as John getting his teeth adjusted.
You go down to the Bartels and you get it done?
Or somebody has to saw your face?
Well, I'm thinking, like, what if it's enough for you to go, like, eh, I'm not so sure if I want to do this.
But let's say something is really awful.
Like, say you got a tattoo of something where, like, for any variety of reasons, like, you know, something outside of your control.
Like swastikas on your knuckles?
Bill Cosby tattoo.
Oh.
Let's say you got a tattoo of the cause.
Ooh.
So even though I think we can all still say he is easily one of the great stand-up comedians of all time, I don't know if I want him on my face.
So you got your reasons at that point.
I see what you're saying.
Well, you know, there are a lot of people I know and you know who have one tattoo, right?
Like Hodgman.
I hope I'm not giving anything away here.
I don't think I am.
He's pretty open about it.
Hodgman has one tattoo.
Wow.
One tattoo, which is an inexpert tattoo.
Not quite a prison tattoo, but close.
Which is up on his shoulder and it is of a diamond, a tiny blue diamond with little rays.
I did not know that.
I've never seen him shirtless.
It's a tiny little thing that he doesn't
He has an explanation for it.
He doesn't buy clothes around displaying it, for example?
No, no, no.
It's in a personal area that you wouldn't see unless you had seen Hodgman without his shirt on.
And he, I think, spent a great many years where he avoided that.
Opportunity for most people.
Like most nerds, he'd rather keep his shirt on.
Yeah, that's right.
And, you know, for years I would go swimming with Hodgman and he swam in an outfit akin to a 19th century swimming costume, which is perfectly in character also.
Like a Gibson girl going to the beach, bloomers kind of thing?
He didn't have bloomers, but, you know, like an old-fashioned weightlifter's costume with a curly mustache.
Right, kettlebells.
And like a weightlifter's costume.
But so he has this tattoo.
And the thing is, it is absolutely a ridiculous tattoo.
But he's not ashamed of it.
He owns it because it represents that moment in time.
Right.
And I think there are a lot of people that have one tattoo for whom it represents a moment in time.
And they wouldn't have it removed even if they could because there it is.
Right?
It's there.
Oh, yeah.
I get that.
Yeah.
I was 20.
Yeah.
But I wonder if you could just go to Bartels and get, and this is not an advertisement for Bartels.
I don't know what Bartels is, John.
Oh, I'm sorry.
Well, now in that case, it is an advertisement for Bartels.
It's a drugstore.
It's a drugstore that started in Seattle.
And my dad, in the 20s,
was a delivery boy for Bartels.
People would order stuff from the pharmacy.
My dad would go in his knickers and his lace-up boots that he needed a little hook to lace up.
Oh, my goodness.
He would ride his bike to the Bartels.
They'd put the stuff in a basket in the front of his bike, and he was the delivery boy for the Chinatown, Japantown neighborhood.
So he would race around.
and take little bags of medicaments into... He said he would go into these Chinese tongs, which are like secret societies, and there'd be all these people in a smoke-filled room playing mahjong, and he would walk through with his little newsboy cap,
And his knickers and he would go and knock on a door in the back and they would open it and there'd be all these guys in a really smoke-filled room.
And he would hand a little paper bag to one of them filled with who knows what and he would give my dad a couple of coins and he'd go ride his bike back to the Bartels.
My dad would tell these stories endlessly.
And it's why...
Is that like your canonical drugstore now?
So Bartels is like all over Seattle and you can go to a Rite Aid or what's the other?
CVS or Walgreens.
Walgreens, right.
The Walgreens where they come into a neighborhood and they plop down their quote unquote signature architecture with their little hammer or pestle.
Mortar and pestle.
Hammer and pestle.
It's a hammer and pestle.
That was the Soviet flag was the hammer and pestle.
Yeah, so Bartels is our homegrown store here.
And, you know, my dad has a connection to it.
So that makes it a good... I will advertise for free for them.
And if they ever got tattoo removal there, you would put your blessing on that.
Well, but that's what I wonder.
I wonder if, let's say at some point in your early 20s, you got a giant tattoo on your neck of the Virgin Mary, not because you were Catholic, but...
But because a giant tattoo of the Virgin Mary on your neck looked rad to you because you like drive like Jehu.
And then at a certain point you were like, I work now at a job.
I got a trying to get, you know, I'm trying to date online.
I'm not sure if this is repping what I'm repping anymore.
But then again, I think if you get a Virgin Mary on your neck, you keep repping it.
Yeah, I think it's definitely become a lot more okay, which is good.
I have seen a lot of – there's a cop in our neighborhood who's got – poor John.
See, I think that there might be – there are certainly right now –
some Germans and Scandinavians listening to this program who are already compiling a list of homeopathic drugs that I should have been taking the whole time.
No, I thought the Germans didn't like that.
No, wait, wait.
Germans like St.
John's Ward or they hate St.
John's Ward?
I always forget.
My experience of Germans is that they believe in herbs.
And they don't like Scientology.
They do not like Scientology.
Didn't Germany come down pretty hard on the Scientologists?
Oh, yeah.
I think they made it illegal because they have a thing about cults.
But they believe in herbs because they are still animists there.
Germany's relationship to certain ideas is a little bit like your relationship to certain kinds of substances.
Consider.
All right.
Go on.
Well, for example.
I see what you're saying.
Yeah.
I don't want to put too fine a point on it.
But there's certain kinds of ideas that they would just as soon we set aside.
Because, you know, there's a reason we don't keep, you know, a bottle of whiskey by the refrigerator.
Yeah.
Oh, because you would have a sip every time you went to the refrigerator?
Yeah, yeah.
And pretty soon the whole house is whiskey bottles.
So if you get something that's a little bit like a cult or you get an idea that's a little bit too sticky about a certain kind of authoritarianism, you know what I'm saying?
Yeah, you're making some connections.
Yeah.
Actually, there's a really good episode of 99% Invisible about this, about the, what's it called?
It's just this idea in Germany that there's, I think it's called the Giftschrank.
Are you familiar with this idea?
The Giftschrank.
Is it about shrunken gifts?
Because they do have those also.
Gift shrunk.
And so this is the idea that there are certain kinds of books in particular that have ideas that are so dangerous that we have to maintain a copy of these.
Sort of like a virus that you'd want to keep around for experimentation, but you have to keep it away from the public.
And this is an idea that has continued to endure to this day.
And not to spoil the ending, but Mein Kampf is out of copyright now, so you can just put it all kinds of places.
But it's this idea that goes back, I think, centuries, starting in the 1580s.
The idea that the church basically had these certain books that they kept a single copy of, but you weren't allowed to see.
That's a very German idea.
Right.
Right.
Or like as Chief Wickham says, Ralphie, why are you so interested in daddy's forbidden closet of mystery?
You know what I'm saying?
Well, this was the thing with the anarchist cookbook, right?
Every time I would buy a copy of the anarchist cookbook, my mom would find it on the shelves and she would take it and destroy it.
Because it was about explosives.
Because, yeah, it was about setting tiger traps and, you know, refighting the Vietnam War.
and uh i was more interested in like just the clandestine spycraft stuff i didn't care about the how to make bombs i just thought it was cool for all the like it was that what's that not fan of graphics what's the name of that that publishing house that put out all those books yeah well oh those books i don't know fan of graphics put out a lot of those comics
Well, oh, no, you're talking about survival research laboratories?
No, I'll find out.
But you get that little catalog.
Yeah, the ones that were all about vivisection and Jim Rowe's Sideshow Circus.
Oh, there's that research.
But yeah, anyhow.
Research, that's what it was.
Anyway, but there was all kinds of stuff in it about how to hop.
and it was all that kind of spy stuff that you would love as a little kid.
That's why I wanted a copy.
I loved learning how to make bombs, and the Anarchist Cookbook inspired me to start making pipe bombs, and I went through a phase where I made a lot of pipe bombs and blew stuff up with them until I realized that the next thing I blew up was going to be me.
And also you disappointed your teacher, if memory serves.
Yeah, and I got in big trouble.
I got in big, big trouble.
But I feel like...
I feel like that impulse to have a safe room that has all the forbidden books is... I disagree with that entirely.
I feel like that is a bad... That's a bad principle.
That's more like a form of fetishism.
Yeah, right?
And I mean, it's just ultimately like... This is for the dirty, dirty ideas that I don't want anyone to know about.
Well, sure.
And what it inspires is like then the Protocols of the Elders of Zion...
leaks supposedly and all of the people that want to believe that stuff have reason to believe that there's a secret room with all the secret books and so this one snuck out and the idea that there's a place where books like this exist
which isn't public knowledge, validates the idea that this secret book must be true, even though it's... It's also not dissimilar from the reason why a lot of us don't want Apple to weaken the encryption on their phones.
People...
don't understand like what's at stake here with this right and so you know it's like we've talked about before like you know do you want to have let's say you go out and you buy the most secure safe that's available and you put it in your house and you have an entire room it's so important you have an entire room in your house and the door says safe on it and you open it up and there's the safe yeah well you know no matter how secure that safe is now like everybody knows where the safe is yeah and all you gotta do is tear the walls down to get in
Yeah, you got to tear down this wall.
Tear down this wall.
That's right.
And then the walls came down.
Forbidden things, dangerous things, all these things, like we imbue them with power when we put them in the gift shrunk.
That's exactly.
And that's why no gift shrunk.
No gift shrunk.
You put that stuff out there and let everybody hassle it out with each other.
Because, yeah.
What about kids and drinking?
Where do you stand on the whole, like, no, no, well, you know, like I'm saying, like, I got a thought on this, but I want to know what your thought is.
Because I think it would be a very interesting point of view.
There's a lot of people who say, hey, look, you know, in Italy, kids have a little wine with dinner.
Most kids don't like the taste of alcohol.
But now they've tasted alcohol in the house.
And it's not in the gift shrunk where they're going to have to go drive out and find it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Just the whole idea of like, I think, taking the magic out of this forbidden thing.
Do you have a thought on that?
I support it.
I support that.
Although, you know, there's a lot of smugness in Europe about drinking because they all say, oh, you know, we give our kids drinks and we don't have this alcoholism problem.
We're not hung up like you Americans.
That's right.
Or the British, too, are notorious alcoholics.
And the sort of continental Europeans are all smug about it.
But the thing about continental Europeans, in my experience, is that, yes, they do practice moderation, but wherever their line of what is moderate intake of things is pretty high, right?
So in Europe, there are a lot of people who are just drunk all the time, and they don't fetishize it to the point where they are
you know, uh, alcoholics like you see in shakes the clown, but they are the picture of the picture that's often drawn of the role of vodka.
Yeah.
Right.
Yeah, that's right.
That's right.
Where people are just drinking themselves to death.
Sounds pretty bad.
But in France and Italy and Germany, people are just fucking drunk all the time.
They're just, they keep a lid on it.
And they manage to go to work the next day.
The kind of maintenance drinking where you're just having a little bit all day.
Well, they're just, yeah, they drink with, they drink with lunch.
They drink with dinner.
They drink with late breakfast.
They drink with, they just drink all the time.
Yeah.
And so the, you know, so the smugness is like, oh yeah, right.
Okay.
You guys are all living life.
You're really sucking the marrow out of life, but you spend all your time in restaurants, which are really bars, and you're just always a little bit shit-faced.
So, yeah, I think that kids should drink a little wine with dinner, but I also feel like alcohol is a human, is like this widely accepted way to be checked out most of the time.
Right, right.
So, two things on this topic.
One...
Skeeter died.
Oh, no.
Gary?
Not Gary.
Roscoe.
Roscoe slash Skeeter.
Oh, no.
Just last week, shuffled off this mortal coil.
For our newer listeners, can you remind people who Skeeter is?
So Skeeter and Gary live across the street from me.
Neither one of them is the leaseholder.
Gary lives in his van in the front yard.
Skeeter lives in the house.
Gary still lives in the van in the yard.
Gary is still in the van.
Gary has grandfathered himself into the neighborhood.
Could you ever have guessed it would be this long?
No, no, no.
Oh my goodness.
And I used all of my psionic power to dismember Gary while he slept.
But Gary has matured.
into kind of a lively character drunk in the neighborhood.
Does he remember you now?
Oh, yeah.
I'm Gary's best friend.
He remembers me having met you now.
So not only does he remember me, but now I have to avoid Gary because he's going to strike up a long conversation with me about... And part of the conversation is about Jesus, which I'm just like, Gary, look...
Of all the things that you shouldn't be representing to me right now is the power of Jesus.
old living in your van street drunk guy.
But Skeeter lived in the house.
Skeeter was going to marry the matron of the house.
The lady who owns the place.
That's right.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but over time she's been very generous about making this a place that's almost like an ad hoc halfway house.
People could come and kind of like get their legs under them there.
She has a generous spirit.
She is always trying to rescue people.
She's a rescuer.
And so she rescued these two ding-a-lings for some reason.
I have no idea why they – I think that she knew Skeeter for a long time.
And Gary is native to the neighborhood.
This is the thing that I found out not very long ago.
Gary grew up in that neighborhood.
Gary might have been living in that front yard.
No, I remember when he moved in.
But Gary, as a teenager, might have been sleeping in that front yard.
Wow.
Anyways, the reason I called Roscoe Skeeter was, of course, because he had a neck tattoo of a giant mosquito sucking blood out of his neck, which was just like, oh.
Like a Trump loyal?
No.
It looked like it was sucking it out?
No, like a shitty...
Like a shitty tattoo he got in Kodiak.
Okay.
Of a mosquito as big as your hand.
Sucking blood out of his neck.
Which was just like... The first time I met him, I was like, let me guess.
You worked in Alaska.
And he was like, how'd you know, man?
I was like, there's only one reason you would have a tattoo of a mosquito on your neck.
Unless you're from Siberia and you don't seem Canadian...
You worked in Alaska, and he was like, I did 25 years of abba-dabba-dabba-dabba.
Anyway, so he and I, and he used to, I mean, Skeeter was a, and the fact that his quote unquote real name was Roscoe, there's no way his name was Roscoe.
His fucking name was probably Brian, but nobody knew it because he'd been going by Roscoe since, since back in a time when calling yourself Roscoe seemed cool.
Right.
Can you, you remember the, remember the party in 1982 where you're like, I'm Roscoe.
Everybody said, that's great.
And then it just stuck.
Mm-hmm.
But Skeeter worked much better for me, so much so that I started calling him Skeeter to his face, but he didn't know what the fuck was up or down.
And so he died of liver failure.
Oh, no.
Which I had watched the decline across the street until he was just experiencing all the... I don't know if you've ever watched somebody with liver failure, but it's not pretty.
Oh, no.
You get bloated and you get jaundicey and...
And all that was happening.
And there were a couple of times I'm talking to him in the street and I was like, Hey man, you know, you're past the point now.
Like you got to get some help or it's, it's, uh, like you're, it's not, it's not a joke anymore.
Obviously you know that.
And he was like, yeah, well I'm trying to this and that.
Uh, but he wasn't.
And so I didn't think he was about 55 or that's all.
Yeah.
57.
He looked like he was a thousand years old, but so,
So Skeeter's gone, making Gary top dog.
Like Gary now, yesterday... The boy Prince has ascended.
Yeah, right, because Skeeter always kept Gary down.
But two days ago, I...
I look out my window, Gary's laughing.
He's walking up and down the street.
I don't think celebrating, but I just feel like he finally, he felt released.
Cause he, Gary would tell me in the middle of the night, I'd run into him in the street and he'd be like, you know, Roscoe threatened me with a knife.
I was like, you know, my name's Paul and this is between y'all.
He's like, no, no, no.
He like some, you know, some like fish knife.
I was like, seriously, I don't want to hear it.
I don't want to hear it.
You guys are all bananas.
Yeah.
So that's one element.
This is what happens when there's a power vacuum.
Well, so I don't know what's going to happen.
You think he might try to move in?
She won't have him, right?
She won't have him in the house, but he has graduated to trusted handyman.
Oh.
I don't know if he's ever been up on the roof cleaning out the gutters, but he's doing little inconsequential chores, taking out the garbage, that type of thing.
But what I worry about is that she...
that she saved some other guy that we go back.
We go back to young Skeeter.
We reset.
And there's, you know, some next guy.
I don't, I don't know.
I, I root for her.
I think she's a lovely person.
Right.
And I know that.
You've been very concerned about her, her actual, like, you know, kidding and stuff aside, but concerned about her welfare where, you know, she wasn't on the scene very much.
People seem to be coming in and out of the house a lot.
There was a bad time there.
There was a bad time before, before Roscoe lost his agency.
where he was just, it seemed to me like he was stripping the place.
Right.
Anyway, that's one side of this conversation that I thought that our longtime listeners who wonder about the saga would want to know.
I'm sorry to hear that.
Yeah, well, you know, he was a colorful guy and he burned brightly.
He went ungently into this good night.
The other side of this conversation that may interest you is that when I was very sick and getting an IV the other night, the doctor, who was convivial, and gave me a look...
That communicated to me that she might be aware of who her patient was.
Because at this point, this is the thing you and I got to think about, is there's lots of people in positions of power who are a lot younger than us.
There's people running for president that are younger than me.
I know.
I know.
That's a new one for me.
None of them qualified.
But this doctor was our age exactly.
And she almost gave me a look like she was a fan.
She was a doctor, right?
So she was keeping her.
She was giving you a little bit of the head nod, you know, Professor Roderick kind of thing.
At one point when I had my IV, about halfway through the bag, I was like, oh, I've got to go to the potty.
because this bag has filled me up with water.
And so in my little gown, I grab ahold of my little, because there's no, you know, it's a hospital, so there's nobody around, right?
There's nobody actually monitoring you.
Did you have to go to the emergency room?
I went to the emergency room.
Oh, shit.
Because it was late at night.
Yeah.
and so drive yourself yeah of course you're shitting me which everybody was like what are you doing and I was like did I ever tell you the story about the time I got hit with a hatchet and they were like no this is the first time we've ever met I was like it's a great story remind me to tell you sometime drove myself to the hospital then with blood running down my face oh my god anyway so I'm walking down the hall with my gown and my IV bag attached to me and I'm pushing this little IV stand and I'm headed to the bathroom and
And she is coming the other way looking at a chart, as doctors do.
And up until that point, she had maintained a very professional demeanor with me.
But as she passed me in the hall, she looked up, saw me, and there was a momentary candor that went across her face.
And her guard was down.
And she gave me like this.
I don't know what to describe it to you as other than a look I've seen many times, which was like a little bit of a titter, almost a titter.
I was like, oh, interesting.
I'm not sure whether she voted for me or not.
I hope every doctor in the town did.
Oh, right, because of politics.
Because of politics.
Because of politics.
I was thinking of the music.
I forgot about the politics.
But she's my age, right?
So when she was 29, she could have been a fan of one of my bands.
But anyway, at the end of the thing, she's like, at that point in time, I was coughing.
such a way where it looked like I was gonna die like I had to bend over hold my lungs with my arms and I was I was just coughing like like the like the alien in the first alien movie just you know like my second set of teeth came out and was coughing up stuff and it was now it was a racking cough extremely painful
And so the doctor very sort of blithely prescribes me codeine cough syrup.
And there was a moment where my reflexive reply, which I have been using for 20 years,
The reflexive reply being, oh, I'm sorry, I'm in recovery.
And so I don't do codeine cough syrup.
And I've said that 50 times to various doctors and they always go, oh, oh, totally understood.
And they prescribe me Imodium or what are, you know, like.
Yeah, they give you something non-narcotic.
Yeah.
But in this case, I'm sitting there in tremendous pain
And I have gone to the emergency room for a thing that turns out to be a virus, right?
And I went to the emergency room in part because I'd had a fever for four days and I mistakenly said so on the internet, which I hardly ever do.
I complained about a symptom on the internet and I got 45 replies on Twitter and 400 replies on Facebook, all telling me that I needed to eat raw garlic.
But there were... This one surprising trick.
Yeah, but there were several, several people who were like, I am a medical doctor, and if you've had a fever for four days, you need to go to a doctor immediately.
And so, all of a sudden, what I knew to be true, which was that if I just cowered under these blankets for two more days, I would start getting better, turned into this bug in my mind, which was, oh shit, you've got pneumonia and you're going to die.
Or...
Or rather, it is normal to go to the doctor under these circumstances, and so I'm going to go do it.
And so I called the doctor, and they were like, well, the doctor's office doesn't have any appointments available until March of 2017.
Yeah, no big.
You know, no big.
It's not like a health issue or something.
Yeah, so you need to go to the emergency clinic, the walk-in clinic, which of course is, you know,
An emergency room by any other definition.
And I go in there and it's every kind of person all miserable.
So she prescribes this coating cough syrup and there's a part of me that wants to feel like my illness is bad enough that it justified this trip.
Because I don't want to walk out of here saying, well, she gave me a pint of saline solution and patted me on the head and told me I had a cold.
So she gives me this coating cough syrup.
She prescribes this to me.
And I'm like, well, yes, the seriousness of that medicine validates how in pain and how laid low I am.
And so rather than tell her no, I just sat there quietly.
Like everybody, I mean, I think probably half the population, when a doctor says, well, I'm going to prescribe you some codeine cough syrup, they silently rejoice.
Oh, my God.
It's like hitting the lottery.
It's like, oh, boy, I'm going to get codeine cough syrup.
I totally agree.
I haven't taken this stuff in 20 years.
And so...
I went home.
I filled the prescription, and I went home, and I sat and I looked at this bottle of coating cough syrup, and I said, you, sir, are a problem for me because you are a narcotic, and I haven't taken narcotics in 20 years.
This is a bad scene.
This is one of those scenes.
You did get it.
You did fill the prescription.
You had it in front of you.
I had it in front of me.
Wow.
I'm like, now here we are.
Mm-hmm.
And then I went, and I bent over.
I was in a cough so badly that I dropped to my knees and was banging my head on the floor.
Oh, Jesus, John.
With this cough that was coming from my pelvis.
And it's a virus.
It's just a thing.
It's just a little thing that was floating in the air that snuck inside me and is trying to kill me, but isn't really trying to kill me.
It's just trying to send me a message.
It's trying to send me a message that God is watching me and that I was expressing too much hubris somehow.
Take me down to size.
And so I poured myself four or five millimeters, five milliliters,
of coating cough syrup and I took it.
And then I went to sleep and then I woke up the next day and woke up to a racking cough and I went downstairs and took five milliliters of this cough syrup.
And now I was in this tricky place where I was like, I have now taken five milliliters of coating two times prescribed by a doctor and
For a bad cold, where am I?
Where am I right now?
Do I need to go back?
Do I need to go to an AA meeting for the first time in a year and a half and throw my 20-year coin at them and say, I start over.
Oh, okay.
I start over.
I'm back to zero.
Or do I just chill?
Because it's not like I'm...
It's not like I was like, whoa.
But then halfway through the day, I had another terrible episode of coughing, which, as you know, I don't typically... Well, I don't exaggerate at all under any circumstances.
No, but at a certain point, it's one thing to go like, excuse me.
It's another thing when you have this entire...
torso-rattling cough that starts in your pelvis where you're like, I will do anything to get this out and make it stop.
Because then it's going to come again.
And it is really, really painful.
Oh, it's awful.
And you dread it.
You come to dread it.
And then you worry like, well, if I think about this, will I start coughing?
Because it's going to start all over again.
And it just lays you low.
Yeah, the cough would start and I would try and sequester the cough in my throat
Like somebody with with bad asthma.
Right.
I do not want to start coughing and I'm trying to keep I'm trying to dampen this cough because if it goes then I'm just ruined.
And like there's nobody in my house.
I'm there by myself.
It's not like I'm performing for anybody.
I don't even have a cat.
I'm not putting on a show.
I am like laying on the floor writhing in agony.
So I go to pour another cup of codeine cough syrup.
And this time I give myself seven milliliters.
What's your sense of how much that is versus the recommended dose?
Beats me.
Probably less.
Well, yeah, there's a cup, you know, like one of those cough syrup cups.
And I am just putting a tiny little, you know.
So you're probably well below what you would normally take.
I'm certainly well below what I would have taken 20 years ago.
But, you know, it's like three quarters...
three American coin quarters stacked.
That's how much it is.
Wow.
Wow.
And so then I went to seven milliliters, which was adding another quarter.
Now it's a stack of four quarters in the bottom of this little cup.
And that amount of escalation,
When I put two more milliliters in that cup, just unconsciously, just not just like, well, I just, that was a really bad one.
I'll just give myself a little bit, just juice it a little bit.
Then I was like, holy shit.
Whoopsie daisy.
Oh no, you felt something.
No, no, no.
No, I didn't really feel anything.
But like that was, that was coming from inside me.
Oh, just that one extra quarter, something hit you and you went, okay, that's the quarter that could undo me.
That was me upping the dose.
Oh, shit.
Okay.
That was not anything.
I didn't feel it any differently, but that was me upping the dose.
That was me upping the dose, hoping that I could scrape the underside of feeling something.
If I just keep going up two milliliters at a time, I'm going to get to the underside of this.
It was all just happening.
Right up to the edge.
I'm laying on the floor coughing by all rational thought.
This is a medicine which is helping me.
But I just went, I just went that little beep, boop beep.
And I took that codeine cough syrup and I put it in the furthest darkest corner and was like, that does not exist.
That is long gone from my world.
And, you know, for about a half a day more of racking cough, I was like, you know, just one more little shot of that would help me a lot.
And I was like, fuck you.
Fuck you.
Fuck you.
So I don't know whether I throw my 20-year coin at him.
Or who gives a shit?
It's not about that.
But that's the furthest little test I've made.
Every once in a while, I'll walk through a party and there'll be people smoking pot.
And I won't make an attempt to not inhale or whatever.
But if somebody pours me a glass of juice and I put it in my mouth and I realize there's alcohol in it, I will go to the bathroom and spit it out.
So in 20 years I have never taken a quote-unquote accidental drink of liquor.
I've spit every one of them out.
And never had any codeine cough syrup or anything like this.
But this was a situation where it was just like the combination of factors.
And all of a sudden I'm like dip, dip, doe, dip, doe.
And didn't notice it at the time, but immediately looking back, immediately recognized the tendency.
Wow.
I feel about that.
I mean, so to just state the obvious, so you're not having any more of that.
Oh, I don't want that stuff near me.
And, you know, how I feel about it is people ask me this a lot.
Is there a point where you stop thinking about having a drink?
You know, is there a point of sobriety where you stop thinking about it?
And in my experience, no.
Right?
There's never a time when it doesn't come up.
I mean, you're living in the world.
There's almost no day in my life where the topic of alcohol doesn't come up somehow.
You know, I work in bars.
Right.
But also it's the world.
You drive down the street and it's just alcohol signs all around.
People just alcohol alcohol.
So no, it's not a question of it never occurring to you or never coming up.
It's always there.
And as somebody who's quit drinking, it's constantly there.
The question, what if I had a drink?
You know, that's the little question.
The little voice, one of the voices is just always saying that it's his one line.
And just point of information, that's sort of a, it seems like, you know, AA seems like such a mature culture where there's just a huge part.
It seems to me like a huge part of AA is, yeah, we've heard that before.
Or, yeah, we've seen that before.
Or, you know, what you're going through right now is very well understood in the community.
You're not experiencing anything any different than what people have experienced, some people a dozen times.
Yeah.
And one of those is, I can have a little bit, right?
Oh, yeah.
I mean, that's the big one, right?
That's how people come into AA and go out of AA.
That's how people get sober for nine months and go out.
That's everybody's desire.
Nobody wants to be an alcoholic.
Every single person that wants to quit drinking doesn't want to quit drinking.
They want to drink like a normal.
Right.
So they quit and they're like, I feel great.
What was the problem?
I was just in a bad way.
I can have a little bit.
And then they're back to being a wino in no time.
And so a big part of going to meetings all the time is to keep that voice at bay by reminding yourself what will happen.
And doing that by sitting in a room full of people who all are having that experience and who are coming in, they're like, I was sober for 20 years and I got a bad headache and somebody gave me some codeine cough syrup and three days later I was on a barge to Shanghai.
Right.
And I was out again for 14 years and now I'm back here and I'm 16 days sober and thank you so much.
And everybody applauds.
And you go, wow, you know, it's that easy?
all you have to do is slip on the ice one time.
And, you know, for guys like me who say to themselves, oh, you know, it's, I've been clean for 20 years and, you know,
And I've got a lot of willpower and I got this thing licked.
There's no part of me that thinks that I can go have a drink.
You know, I'm not a dummy.
I've heard enough stories.
But it's fucking hilarious to see how little it took.
to how little it took for me to do do what i did but it's also i mean i i totally take your point but it's also a testament to your vigilance that you were able to see that you know one more quarter was too much you were you were it's it's great that you had the ability to catch that
Again, because I've heard a thousand stories.
I ran into a guy that I'd known for a long time in the program.
One time about 10 years ago.
And he looked all banged up.
And I was like, hey, what happened?
And he said, oh, I was riding my motorcycle and I got side, I got T-boned by a car and I flew off the motorcycle through the front windshield of the car and it split my helmet in half.
Oh my God.
And, you know, I wasn't sure whether I was going to live or die.
They were picking glass shards out of my eyes.
Oh, my God.
And just insane story.
And he was in the hospital, all messed up, and they had him on a morphine drip.
And when he woke up,
out of his stupor, he spent a day on that morphine drip and then he called the doctor and he was like, take me off the morphine.
Oh, man.
And the doctor was like, are you serious?
You've got glass in your eyeball.
And he said, yeah, I know, but if you keep me on that morphine, the result for me will be worse than suffering through this with no painkillers.
And he told me that story, and I was like, whoa.
There's a guy who is vigilant because he fell so deep that he knows he doesn't want to go back.
Right.
And I don't want to go back.
And so, you know, there was, that was my, I wasn't even on a day on a morphine drip.
That was just me left alone with, you know, with something like left alone with something where I had a justification and I've been in that situation 30 times, sicker than I was, you know, but for some reason, right this moment, it was a little, it was a little check and, and probably I should go to my first AA meeting in a year and a half and tell that story.
It might be useful to somebody.
It might be useful to somebody, and it would be useful to me to just be in a room full of people who are like, ha, ha, look at you.
Look at you.
That's the hubris.
That's your hubris right there.
Your hubris.
Man who flew too close to the coding.
It's huge how hubris-y you were.
Because I don't want to end up like Skeeter.
Nobody does.
Nobody wants to end up like a Skeeter.
I don't want to end up like Gary.
Gary's going to live forever.
He's going to be over there listening to Jethro Tull.
He's going to be calling 911 on you.
That's right.
Well, you know, he decided... The house next door to where Gary's van is parked is a house where a couple of Mexican families moved in, and they are large families, and they are living in... And it's a fairly big house, and they...
They are great neighbors, although they have a rooster now, which is driving me crazy.
Oh, no.
It's awful.
But, you know, I feel like it's a small price to pay.
Everybody in the neighborhood, I think they're probably the best neighbors.
But this fucking rooster.
I don't know why they have it.
But...
Gary at one point decided that they were coming over and messing with his van.
Oh, no.
And I was like, Gary, the last people that are messing with your van are those families.
They've got like a lot of kids.
Everybody in the house is trying hard.
They got a foothold.
You know what I mean?
Yeah.
Last thing they want to do is go cause trouble.
They're not causing trouble with you, Gary.
You got nothing of value to anybody.
Because this is the way I talk to Gary.
And then he starts telling me about Jesus.
But so at one point, Gary took to, in the middle of the night, standing on the other side of the fence and shouting,
into their darkened house where everyone was sleeping.
Oh, no.
Like shouting sort of slurs and kind of pacing back and forth saying, stay out of my van, stay out of my yard.
I know what you're doing.
I know you're coming in and you're damn blah, blah, blah, blah.
And I had to go tell Gary that that was not in keeping with neighborhood standards.
You know, I don't know what pornography is, but I know it when I see it.
It's not hospitable.
It's inhospitable.
And also, nobody's messing with your van except for fucking gnomes that you're imagining.
Ding-a-ling.
I hope you feel better.
Thanks, Marlon.
I got to ding you out on that one.
Yeah.
You have a bad cough, John Roderick.