Ep. 231: “First Banana”
Hello.
Hi, John.
Hi, Merlin.
How's it going?
So good.
Yeah.
So good.
So good.
Are you at home base?
No.
Well, what do you mean by home base?
What do you mean by home base?
Well, there are two ways to think about a home base.
I don't like to talk about being out of the house when I'm out of the house, so I can understand if you want to make something up.
Two kinds of people in this world, Merlin.
No, in fact, I am back in my office.
Wow, you got the internet?
I got the internet in the office.
That's such a good, you know, if you're going to do work on the internet, it's nice to have the internet.
It really is.
And the person that came and finally fixed my problem for me said that my CFIT authenticators had been mislabeled.
as uh rfqi uh defibrillators oh you know that's one of those things like a corrupted font it's the last place you look that's right that's right did he check your fonts john he checked my fonts he uh reversed image searched a lot of the uh the key key cues oh he probably had to reverse the polarity at least a couple of times were you getting any kind of depletion in your deuterium uh
My deuterium was, let me just say, it was... It's pretty normal for a man of your age.
There was a team of SAS commandos that parachuted in to destroy my deuterium factory.
And they almost succeeded.
But then the bombs didn't work.
The back door had an extra padlock on it.
Oh, right.
And now look at me.
You've got to be careful of your back door.
That's how a lot of people make intrusions.
Well, I'll say.
You've got to check your six, if you know what I'm saying.
I do, exactly.
I was without internet here for months.
And I asked them to refund my money.
I demanded satisfaction.
Was the ARFID polarity problem something that they recognized as their issue?
Yes.
Interesting.
So who's the crazy one now?
That's right.
Who's the crazy one now?
That's right.
It was some kind of thing where they were, I think they were probably clean in house, let's say.
And they renamed things.
They went down and things that had no name.
The girl who had no name...
The man without a face.
Okay.
The eyes without a face.
The eyes without a face.
Turn the holy water into wine.
Somebody said... Somebody higher up said, we need to clean up all this, you know, this...
And they went in and I don't know, they didn't recognize what it was, they named it something that it wasn't, and then they couldn't find it.
This is not, if I understand what you're saying, this is a kind of error that people make that I have made a lot, where you think, oh, you know, I just need to reset everything.
Or I just need to do this one thing.
And you don't realize, you haven't really thought it through.
You know, an example might be, okay, like, I need to really redo the whole area near a TV because it's turned into a rat king.
So you just start unplugging everything, and then you're like, oh, I don't know what goes with what.
Yeah.
Why is there one washer left over?
Oh, that's a horrible feeling.
I saw an example.
Somebody...
Somebody posted an example.
I guess the people who do Trivial Pursuit decided that they needed to clarify that KM means kilometer.
And so they did, this is the kind of thing that keeps John Syracuse up at night.
They apparently, they appear to have gone in and done a universal search and replace for the string KM.
And so now Hugh Jackman is in Trivial Pursuit as Hugh Jackalometer Man.
I love that.
That's kind of a visual joke.
You need to type it to really appreciate it.
Yeah.
Out here in Washington, KM, we all recognize it as the Ken Mirth brand.
Really?
But KMFDM is a drug against war?
Yeah.
KMFDM, I think, was The Art of Noise.
Oh.
Who was that?
Who did the Donk Donk song?
The Art of Noise.
Is that Trio?
No, they did Da Da Da.
Triage.
Triage.
Who am I thinking of?
Did you know Father Mulcahy passed?
I did.
That made me sad.
I did, it did.
I did, I did.
2016 just keeps taking from us, John.
Yeah, even still.
Even still.
Manson's feeling better, so.
Yeah, I'm not really concerned about him.
Really?
Interesting.
For a long time there in the mid-2000s, I mean, it's not that I won't talk about Charles Manson.
I just don't care whether he lives or dies.
Okay.
That's a good distinction.
For a long time in the mid-2000s, I don't know if you remember, but Radar O'Reilly, do you remember the little hat that Radar O'Reilly wore?
You're the one who taught me that that is not a freestanding hat.
Right.
That hat is an accessory to a helmet.
It's a helmet liner.
I didn't know that for cold weather.
But you put that in like it's a tank helmet liner, right?
Tank helmet, right.
And radar had it.
And then I don't maybe this wasn't true where you lived because you live down in different climes.
But in the in the in Alaska, that was a hat that you wore if basically if your dad worked in a tank.
You know, like that wasn't a hat.
That was a hat that communicated a certain kind of like, well, communicated exactly the thing that Radar O'Reilly was.
You notice that no one else on the cast of MASH ever wore that particular hat.
The Radar, what I would like to describe as the Radar O'Reilly hat.
And so you would see them...
in alaska on people but it always was sort of it always said the same thing you know like i work in a tank interesting if you if you were to wear that and not be in a tank does that count as stolen valor a little bit it felt i mean not that radar couldn't wear it because radar he served he served and also probably like some tank guy threw it to him and said like like mean joe green throwing him his uh his jersey
There's probably a two-part 1981 series where everybody cries a lot about how Radar got that hat.
I bet you're right.
Some kind of big flashback.
Written by Alan Alda, directed by Alan Alda.
So in the mid-2000s, when all of a sudden that became the fashionable hat, I've talked about this before.
It made me very upset.
I did not like that hat on people.
I didn't like it on indie rockers.
And there was a particular kind of indie rocker that wore it.
was like decidedly not someone who had worked in a tank but someone who was maybe still wearing like not still but like was wearing bell bottoms but not hippie bell bottoms i'm seeing it i don't know why i can't tell you why but i see it as an everything but the girl guy hat
Okay.
You know everything but the girl guy?
I do know the other thing but the girl guy.
He's the guy who got real sick and skinny.
Remember, didn't he have some weird disease?
I think he would wear a hat like that.
I could be misremembering.
Yeah.
I'm going to say it was, well, the most egregious example of it, the one that really upset me, was I was at Bonnaroo one year and Ben Folds was wearing it.
And I was like, Ben Folds, come on.
What's he repping with that?
This is not your hat, my friend.
Why are you wearing it?
Why?
Because there are a lot of... I mean, it's not a skate rat hat.
It's more of a... Like, I got these beads in Guatemala hat.
Except within the indie rock context.
Anyway, I thought that plague was gone.
I thought that it had been eradicated.
But the last two days... Well, ever since I found out... More than two days.
Ever since I found out Father Mulcahy died...
I've been seeing those hats everywhere.
And I don't think they're in tribute.
I think it's some kind of... I think it's something weird.
You think it's real, though?
You think it's not an availability heuristic?
You think it's really there?
You're seeing more Raider O'Reilly hats?
Well, I can't tell whether it's when you buy a Volkswagen, do you suddenly see Volkswagens?
Honk, honk.
Or is it there really are suddenly more of these back?
Are millennials discovering them again even though they're only 10 years old?
Match is fairly hard to stream, I think.
So they probably don't know it exists.
And they definitely would not put the asterisks in the name.
No.
No.
Match.
Yeah.
It would confuse the database, too.
That's another thing.
When I was naming my band, after about two years of the internet, my mom came to me at one point and she said, if you ever have another band and decide to name it something, consult with me first.
And I said, what are you talking about?
And she said, well, I want you to have a band name that's Googleable.
Because she apparently spent a lot of time looking at like Laura Ingalls Wilder posts.
Oh, right.
Right.
I do remember that tale, the tale of the Wilder's estate approaching you to get your, as Colonel Potter would say, get your official okie-dokie on using that name.
Is this going to be a MASH-themed episode by any chance?
Which colonel?
Do you prefer Colonel Potter or Colonel Blake?
That's a really good question.
Do you want to finish your anecdote?
Was I in the middle of an act?
I think that was some of McLean Stevenson's best work.
And what's going to surprise you, I think McLean Stevenson was on there for, I think, a total of two seasons, maybe.
Isn't that crazy?
It feels like it was sort of like with Frank Burns.
Well, and Trapper.
I mean, Frank was there a little bit longer.
Well, Trapper and Henry left.
I think at the same time.
Season two.
Season two.
So the story I remember reading in Dynamite magazine, I remember the specific phrase, was that Wayne Rogers was sick of, quote unquote, being second banana to Alan Alda.
He wanted to be the first banana.
Why was he second banana?
That's what he's saying.
Right.
And can you imagine how bummed he was?
Can you even imagine when they did the Trapper John MD medical drama?
Mm-hmm.
Hey, hey, hey, who's going to call Wayne?
No, sorry, Pernell Roberts.
Not interested, Wayne.
Which banana was he then?
He was the last banana.
But, you know, I got to say, there's something special about the first couple seasons of MASH, because it's more anarchic, it's way less preachy.
I mean, you know, toward the end it got really bad.
We don't need to cover the end.
Well, I mean, do people know this, John?
Did they know that after about 1979, the entire Korean police action was, I think, two years in length.
Yeah.
And that show was on TV for, I think, about 10 years.
Yeah, 10 years.
Yeah, yeah.
But it was always a metaphor for Vietnam.
Yeah, like a Romana Clay.
It was like an international Romana Clay.
But I really liked Colonel Potter, and I loved everybody's relationship with Radar.
But Colonel Potter was sweet.
But, you know, like any of these things, you've got to sand off everybody's edges.
Like the whole point of Hot Lips in the movie and in the early seasons was that she was insufferable.
But you can't leave somebody insufferable for ten seasons.
You've got to make them a little lovable.
Right.
You know, you've got to bring in a Donald Penobscot.
You've got to have a Penobscot.
Right.
I forget to pay the electric bill, but I remember the name of Hot Lips' fiance.
Will you put, gotta have a Penobscot up on the big board?
What?
He's coming down here?
He's gonna see the big board!
Hey, that's good.
Thank you gentlemen.
There's no fighting in the war room Let me let me just say I think that My sense of mash and its legacy is that the last seasons Colored it completely for so many people oh yeah that it became you know I hear people talk about it like people talk about the Eagles
Like, there was nothing redeemable about MASH.
And I'm like, listen, man, I watched all ten seasons of that show.
It only became awful... I mean, it trended awful for a while.
Well, I mean, it's... The problem is, like, after... So, you get into, like, after Burns left, and they bring in Winchester, which was a little bit of a record scratch, because part of what made Larry Linville... I know the names... Ha ha!
Part of what made Frank Burns so interesting was that he was actually not a good surgeon.
It was interesting.
My friend John Patton and I used to debate this all the time.
Like, is Winchester a good character?
Because, you know, he's very dignified.
They could take the piss out of him a lot.
But he was a very good surgeon.
I'm going to say up until 76, 77, 78...
You know, I think they were running out of brand new ideas.
So they had to like keep bringing back Hawkeye writes a letter to his dad.
They had to bring in the like, oh, let's let's act like everybody's being interviewed for for a documentary or like orphan Korean boy.
who ends up being just an irrepressible scamp, gets adopted by the... They teach him how to run the still.
That's right.
What's his name?
Not Hop Singh.
What's his name?
You know what?
I'm not going to work ping pong.
Yeah, it was something that we would consider problematic.
But let's be honest.
You know what?
Let's consider the last few...
seasons for the purposes of our program it's non-canonical we'll just we'll just kind of leave it out for you agreed and i you know and i liked uh charles winchester the third uh but um but you're absolutely right and i think probably making him a good surgeon uh eliminated for them the very difficult ongoing difficult problem of
The idea that there was someone on the cast that was patching up American servicemen badly.
Oh, interesting.
That's a hard thing over time.
It's one thing to have an arch remark about, kind of secondhand remark about Vietnam, and it's another thing to say that our boys aren't getting good service.
Yeah, right.
And as Alan Alda, or as the writing got more histrionic,
It's hard to take as like slapstick the fact that Frank Burns is doing a poor job.
Right.
He's got the Dunning-Kruger problem.
Now, what did you think of Colonel Flagg?
I love Colonel Flagg.
I look forward to him and Alan Arbus.
What was his character?
Dr. Sigmund Seamus?
What was his name?
Sigmund the Sea Monster.
Seamus.
A special episode?
Those were very special episodes.
We're not even getting to the chicken.
We're not going to spoil it for you.
Captain Flagg is absolutely right out of Dr. Strangelove.
Oh, absolutely.
I mean, that's a broad character that's meant to, in the pre-CIA days, like pre-Sage, like what we were learning about the CIA at the time.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
He's there to protect us against having our precious bodily fluids, Sap.
Didn't he break his own arm at one point?
Oh, no, you know who he is?
G. Gordon Liddy.
Oh, he's Liddy.
You know what?
You get a ding for Liddy.
Thank you.
Yes, yes.
And that actor was so good.
He was so committed.
I was explaining Watergate the other day.
Oh, God.
Who is the lucky recipient?
Please tell me it's your daughter.
No, no.
She's been asking some very interesting questions lately, but she has not yet gotten to the, Daddy, can you explain Watergate to me?
And boy, I'm going to treasure that moment.
Daddy, who is Daniel Ellsberg?
Yeah, one day she will say, will you explain the Pentagon Papers to me?
I keep hearing about the Saturday Night Massacre.
Who was Bork?
No, it was my millennial girlfriend.
She wanted to know more about Watergate.
And so I gave, you know, I gave a very tight 20 minutes.
And I realized, like, Watergate, the formative moment for our entire generation and the generation that preceded us, the crime that gave its name to a thousand crimes, now just seems like...
Just in the last.
It's so hilarious.
Just in the last six months now seems like comically innocent.
And so, yeah, it was pretty enjoyable to go over.
It was in retrospect.
It's so dumb because they were totally going to win the election.
Oh, no, it's dumber than that, Merlin.
They had won the election.
Nixon was already reelected.
But, like, so this is 73, right?
Anyway, I haven't boned up on Watergate in a while.
Well, you want my hot 20 minutes?
I suppose.
No.
No, it's a matter of, like, here's the thing.
You don't hire a shark to be... Here's the thing.
This is my Dr. Philism.
You don't hire a shark to be your babysitter.
Because that's not what a shark is good at, and it can't take a kid to the park.
Right.
The thing is, this organization that they had put together was so fucking weird and paranoid and so hungry for bizarre behavior that something like this had to happen.
Right.
And then once it had to happen, then they had to cover it up.
And then they had to have all this other shit come out about all the even weirder stuff that had been going on.
It's just that this particular shark had to kill.
There was nothing... Do you know what I'm saying?
Sharks have to kill, Merlin.
They do.
Otherwise, they can't swim backwards.
Do you know what I'm saying?
Something this dumb had to happen.
Not because of Nixon, but because of the sick synergy of the people...
He needed around him and those that that that malignant combination of all of those terrible broken personalities made something like this six energy It's like six Sigma.
It's energy was one of my favorite baseball managers
Go Cubbies That was not a ring for me.
That was a ring for the room.
Oh, that was that was a ring for the table.
That's like a pepperoni.
Yeah, okay pepperoni ring bell.
I Listen yeah, I Don't want to talk about time travel.
Okay.
I feel like Do you follow you you're not on Twitter anymore?
Are you now?
You know I'm adjacent
It's gotten so hard there.
It's gotten pretty rough.
There is a person who inhabits the character of Richard Nixon on Twitter and just does it very successfully, so much so that I feel like I know Nixon in a new way.
And I really look forward to his posts.
He comments on contemporary affairs.
Because Nixon was kind of like Steve Jobs.
We're like, you know, it's like, oh, fucking amateur hour.
Look what these guys are doing.
Right.
That's a lot of what that Nixon persona does.
Isn't it?
Isn't a lot of like, oh, can't do this bullshit.
Are you serious right now?
Are you kidding me right now?
And most of it is.
This is your idea of corruption.
But it makes me, yeah, it makes me miss simpler times.
Yeah, me too.
And then we got Gerald Ford.
Yeah, and then this guy over here.
Yeah, no soup.
I had a very scarring experience.
I told you I wrote a letter to Gerald Ford.
I told you that story, right?
Yeah.
Okay, yeah.
I think we're pretty much out of stories at this point.
We'll talk about MASH.
Who, you and me?
Yeah.
No.
No.
There's so many good stories you have to tell.
We should talk about parenting.
People love that.
I don't even, you know, there's so many things I don't know about you, Merlin.
Oh.
Good.
What was your favorite year of high school?
My favorite year of high school was my freshman year of college.
Boy, that's a Merlin answer.
I think the most interesting and significant one, the one that I romanticized the most is 10th grade because that was a really important year where I had a lot of firsts and it was a year that in my memory was filled with so much sadness but also so much contradictory stuff.
A lot of the forces that led up to 10th grade
There's 10th grade, and there's what happened after 10th grade.
And 10th grade was, as you say, a crucible.
That's where a lot of the story got cooked out, but it was super fucking interesting.
The stuff that I was incredibly into in 10th grade were disparate and contradictory in a way that is kind of amazing to me now.
Mm-hmm.
Is that when you joined the Society of Creative Anachronism?
No.
It's a year into playing D&D.
But no, but it was, you know, it's funny because my kid's nine and she's growing up real fast.
And there's just, there's a million things that I talk about.
I talk with other, you know, like my friend John Syracuse has a daughter about the same age.
Dan has a son about the same age.
And it's really weird when you think, and this is not going to be about parenting, but it is really weird how each person
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
You know what I mean?
I really was still very much a kid and still struggling to just figure shit out.
So for me, I'm going to go with 10th grade because I was really into The Who and Ozzy.
I was kind of getting over Rush.
I was still mad at Rush about subdivisions.
But I liked a weird mix of music and culture, and I was still very pliable.
So that was the last interesting year of me being fucked up.
That's not true.
But anyway, I'm going to go with 10th grade.
How about you?
What's your favorite year of high school?
11th grade.
10th grade was maybe my... Well, let's see.
It's hard to pick a worst year of high school.
But 10th was... I mean, exactly as you're saying... When's your birthday?
Late November.
I should know this.
So you were always...
One of the older kids in class.
I was always old, yeah.
Right.
So I was always young, and so it probably, we're probably talking about the same year of life, right?
Oh, right.
We would have been the same age when I was in 10th, or when you were in 10th and I was in 11th.
So you were born in 1981.
I was born in 81.
No, you were born in 74, not 4, I can't be, no, you were born in 68, what am I saying?
Yeah, 74, what are you talking about?
I get confused, I have a lot of friends named John.
Um, I, uh, in 10th grade, I was like really unformed and just flailing.
Um,
It was in 10th grade that I said it was the summer after 10th grade that I that I made my little list on my desk blotter All right Where I was like this cannot go on you need to This is when you decide to become a big man on campus.
Yeah, you need to step up and so 11th grade was
11th grade was the one.
That was the one full of firsts for me.
You know, first kiss, first moment where someone, where some peer recognized me as cool in some way.
You know, like, good job.
Or what, you know, some, there was some acknowledgement.
Some senior said, that was pretty funny, Roderick.
And then, you know, spit in my milk or whatever.
But still, like, I'd gotten a, I was starting to come in on my own.
And I could look at myself in the mirror like I wasn't a complete human crater.
So 11th grade was it.
And then by 12th grade, I had already squandered everything that I had earned in 11th.
And in 12th grade, I just became an enemy of the people.
But yeah, for a brief shining moment there in 11th grade, I had it all.
I had it all.
By all you mean you had more than nothing.
Well, there was a little I was on a trajectory in 11th grade where where I started off the year with there was still a lot of like residual halo of loser around me.
My freshman year, there was only one picture of me in the yearbook, and it was a picture of me in a black sweatshirt covered with dandruff and a very, very greasy bowl haircut.
Dandruff sufferer John Roderick waits patiently for lunch.
Yeah, the caption didn't even include my name.
Oh, no.
It just said, come on, it can't be that bad.
That's the only picture of me in my yearbook freshman year.
Oh, that sucks.
And I was flipping through the yearbook, and it's like somehow my normal picture didn't make it in there.
I wasn't in any clubs.
It was just this picture.
It should have said, definition, freshman.
Oh, my God.
And then 10th grade, I was involved in stuff.
I was getting into it, but I was, like you're saying, still six years old.
I was the kid that if two juniors were sitting on the couch at lunch kissing each other, I would walk by and go, just didn't understand how to play it cool.
So junior year when I first started, there was a little bit of like...
There was quite a bit of uncool still stuck to me.
But I had really cleaned up my act.
And all of a sudden I was, what was, I got elected to the Student Congress.
Wow.
I was arts and culture editor of the school newspaper.
This all happened in the beginning of junior year.
Wow.
I must have been stuff you would not have even imagined the year before but I wrote big man on campus on that desk blotter big man on campus BMOC on that desk blotter and I circled it and I was like I don't even know what that means but my dad says this all the time and I'm gonna figure out what it means and it's gonna be me I had a girlfriend that didn't happen till after New Year's but you know I was like I was talking to girls and
And they were absolutely telling me to go away, but they were telling me to go away with a giggle, you know, instead of with like a look of horror.
And what else?
Oh, and so I was writing for the school newspaper.
So people would come up to me and say, like, I really liked your article, which shocked and amazed me.
And so, you know, I had a car all of a sudden.
Oh, my gosh.
You know, like it seemed and I was a member.
I was a member of my little gang.
There was a gang formed and I was and I was a bona fide member of it.
Not not a tag along.
That's a tremendous amount of progress.
Oh, it was incredible.
I was like, look at me.
I mean, I my hair wasn't greasy anymore.
I had cobbled together a wardrobe of crewneck sweaters.
Had you done your whiteout jacket yet?
Oh, see, the jacket was senior year where I lost the plot.
Oh, so this year was a little bit of an outlier.
Yeah.
Yeah, because in freshman and sophomore year, I was the guy with the two alligators humping on his jean jacket.
And in senior year, I had a floor-length duster trench coat with a white-out skull and crossbones on the back.
It was just junior year where I was not...
I wasn't fucking up at all.
I just had on a crewneck sweater and a button-down shirt and top-siders, and I was writing for the school newspaper, and I had a girlfriend.
You flew too close to the sun.
Yeah, it seemed like from there, anything could happen.
I could go to college.
This is so great, though, because there's that phrase I fucking hate, which is someone, oh, I've really arrived.
I've always really disliked that phrase.
Not always, but I've come to really dislike that.
I'm always thinking like, yeah, you've arrived, but how do you know how long it'll be until you're asked to leave?
Yeah, that's right.
Could you stop arriving now?
Could you go arrive somewhere else?
Go, yeah, arrive.
Arrive elsewhere.
Arrive at the exit.
Yeah, by senior year, I was, my hair was greasy again.
Oh, God.
You're Cinderella.
It was, yeah, that's right.
My carriage turned back into a pumpkin.
Yeah.
But by senior year, because in sophomore year, I was still, I don't know, somewhat pubescent, right?
I mean, I wasn't pretty to look at.
And then senior year, I was not pubescent anymore.
I was just...
Like a gross 17-year-old.
Grotesquerie.
I mean, I was.
It was awful.
I mean, just think about it.
I'm a member of the Trenchcoat Mafia.
I was the founder.
You were the member of the Trenchcoat Mafia.
That's right.
There was nobody else in it.
So, I don't know.
I look back at junior year.
The thing is, there were a couple of those, right?
The first year after I quit drinking, the first time I quit drinking,
I got myself into the University of Washington.
Grunge was happening all around us here in Seattle, and I went straight.
And I cut my hair, and I shaved off my scraggly beard, and I put on my crewneck sweaters again.
I went to the University of Washington and I was so proud of myself because that was my dad's college.
And I'd gotten in.
I'd gotten into the big school.
And having already been grunge for several years and now really cleaned up my act, walking around the campus and seeing all the students who were wearing grunge clothes...
And like practicing grunge as a lifestyle choice.
I was very contemptuous of them.
Because I looked like I was really coming across very L.L.
Bean.
But, you know, I'd been in the shit.
Yeah, sure.
And there was this real pull in me.
Like...
At that point, it was a pull like, which way is my life going to go?
Am I going to go straight?
Am I going to be successful?
Am I going to go to my uncle and ask him for a job?
Am I going to be a U.S.
senator?
Am I going to be a grown-up person?
And I held the till.
The ship was going into rough waters, and I was...
I was catching the wind, and I just couldn't hold it.
I couldn't hold the...
There wasn't anything in it that I could find that worked for me.
How much of it do you think the successful... God, there's this wonderful word, the Latin phrase... I don't even know how to pronounce it.
Annis Mirabilis?
Oh, right.
Miracle year?
Yeah, like you've had a wonderful... Yeah, miracle year.
For your particular Annis, how much of that do you think was...
Not to take anything away.
How much of it do you think was dumb luck?
Like how much of it do you think was like you successfully formulated the right potion or potions to have this school year, academic year mostly go well?
How much of you think you got lucky?
I mean, because it seems like that plays into it.
You might have just gotten dealt a flush and didn't know it.
Do you mean junior year or junior year in particular?
Here's the thing.
Here's the one of the fucking problems in this country, in this world, if I may say, is that we instruct young people to see life as a series of arrivals that mostly get better and better, at least in the pre in the area before the millenniums.
Like, I think that's really a thing.
Like, OK, eventually you're going to be old enough.
You don't get to walk to school.
When you get a little bit older, you get to go to an R-rated movie.
You can drive.
You can go to college.
It's a series of arrivals, and I don't think people are naturally as prepared for the idea that those arrivals are not a guarantee of any kind of success.
It's an indication of not abject failure, but you can expect some serious downs alongside the occasional up.
For sure, and I think my junior year is much more a result of... What?
From the time that I first started going to see Jan Lindemann, my family counselor, and I've told you that story where we went as a family...
Remind me whose idea it was.
Was it your mom's?
My mom and my dad were trying to figure out how we were going to solve our family dynamic.
And the four of us, my mom, my sister, my dad, and I all went to this family counselor.
And after a couple of months...
Of going, my sister who was pretty young to be this aware.
She was maybe 11.
Somebody spoke to her.
in the room finally and she said I've been sitting in this family counseling for two or three months and no one has ever asked me a question or said a word to me so obviously whatever the problem is in this family it isn't mine and I don't want to go anymore to this and everybody I think was embarrassed by this because that was the the elephant in the room was you
Oh, for sure.
And the idea being that our family dynamic was a problem.
Nobody believed that that included them.
And so then it was my mom and my dad and me going to family counseling for a while.
Your dad was game for that.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
My dad was really into psychology.
And...
My dad and my mom had in the 1950s.
I mean, my dad had been seeing a psychiatrist like a Jungian psychiatrist in the 50s.
My mom and my dad signed up for LSD trials.
What?
In 59.
Oh, my God.
And didn't do them for some reason.
But, you know, they were very curious about that stuff, like very exploratory.
Anyway, so we're sitting in family counseling.
Everybody's yelling at each other about what a problem I am.
And at a certain point, my mom stood up and said, obviously, David and John have a lot to work out.
And I don't... It's not a very good use of my time to be in here listening to those two bicker and argue about...
What is obviously their broken, you know, broken relationship.
So I'm not going to come to this anymore until some progress has been made.
And then there were two.
And then there were two, me and my dad.
My dad and I continued to go see Jan Lindemann for another couple of months.
And then my dad said, hey.
I can't make it this week.
No way.
I've got a big meeting in Washington, D.C.
I'll see you next week.
And then never came again.
Was it eventually just Jan?
No, because I kept going.
So Jan, the family counselor, and I continued to see each other for three years.
Did Jan pick up the mantle of yelling at you?
No, Jan never yelled at me, but Jan also was a family counselor or something.
Jan never realized, there was never an acknowledgement that I was a teenage boy and I needed some special help.
Uh, like, like when I would say anything about a girl, like I, you know, I love this girl or I have these, I'm sort of having this problem with this girl.
Jan would change the subject.
She did not want to give me relationship advice.
Oh, that wasn't, uh, that wasn't covered by Jan's expertise.
I guess not or something.
I mean, I'm still confused about it, but when I was 13, 14 years old, that's all 15.
That's all I wanted to talk about.
Are you kidding me?
But, but it always, uh,
deflected.
That wasn't a thing we were going to discuss.
But all of that, that whole process, really confirmed in me the understanding that A, everyone in my family thought I was the problem.
B, Jan didn't disagree that I was the problem.
And I was already convinced I was the problem, personally.
So...
Going into 11th grade, I had this huge shockwave right behind me of not just a feeling, but also I'd been given the language to describe and had the power of conviction of a whole group of people, an army marching behind me.
That all agreed that I self-sabotaged, that I got in the way of my own self.
I intentionally took steps to impede my success.
This was a widely held situation.
belief in my clan, that all I needed to do, even as I say them, I can put myself back in those mauve and taupe-colored rooms with ferns all around us.
And here, this idea promulgated that all I needed to do was just do the thing that needed to be done.
I didn't need to do the other things that I did, which was examine the logic of the thing that was being asked of me.
I didn't need to...
If somebody said, draw this in two colors, I didn't need to draw it in 14 colors to show them how much better it could be.
I didn't need to argue with the premise.
I didn't need to...
I didn't need to write in the margins.
I didn't need to tell the teacher that her question wasn't relevant.
You know, all these things.
I just needed to get out of the way and just do the thing.
And the thing seemed so simple to everyone else.
If I could just do the simple thing, why couldn't I just do the simple thing?
And I couldn't.
I never could do the simple thing.
I was so, I mean, half the time at least, just so offended by the
Yeah, just so offended by how could any of you do this but going into 11th grade I said I looked at that BMOC written on the on the blotter Mm-hmm, and I was like, what do you do?
How do you how do you get to BMOC?
You know right now I'm LMOC and What do you what's the transition?
And so I started trying to do this thing, you know, get out of the way.
Like, if you finally manage to get a shirt with a crocodile on it, don't sew another crocodile on it.
Oh.
Leave it.
Just leave it.
That's right.
That just seems like you're just antagonizing people.
And, you know, like you can have the crocodile and disbelieve it.
You can have the crocodile and imagine another crocodile on it.
Mm-hmm.
Just don't go that extra step.
You need to be a better editor of your behavior.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And it was because what did I want?
Imagine, you know.
No, no, no.
Don't even say it.
Guarantee.
What was really important to you?
Listen, I frisked a thousand young punks.
No.
What I wanted was to get kissed.
I wanted to kiss.
I wanted to kiss.
I wanted to kiss somebody.
Didn't you also want to be special?
Well... I mean, I'm putting that in a fruity way.
Okay, let me put it in a more punk rock way.
Didn't you want to not be just another fucking drone?
That was not... I realized, I think at that point, that was no longer a risk.
I was never going to be... I was never going to buy it hook, line, and sinker.
I was not... I wasn't mentally or emotionally vulnerable in that way.
That I couldn't conform...
Because it was not in my heart, but I could but I could Like start to recognize what?
Where to make my stand right to pick my battles fight the real fight don't
don't sit and lose the initial battle of even getting your foot in the door because you show up wearing a double-knit suit that you got at the Goodwill for a doll.
You were getting in your own way.
Yeah.
For the first couple of years of high school, I had planted my feet somewhere on the topic of Levi's, a thing that we've discussed at length.
I wasn't going to wear Levi's.
Levi's were trendy.
And I didn't know I was I was dumb.
I didn't know enough about anything.
But at that point in time, you know, super tight Levi's that had been ironed, you know, like people are ironing their Levi's like I did not.
I wasn't going to wear Levi's.
I was only going to wear like army pants and stuff.
And in 11th grade, I said, you know what?
Whatever that was, you spent two years fighting Levi's.
And what do you have to show for it?
Levi's still exist.
Yeah.
All you have to show for it is that everyone in the school is wearing Levi's except you and no one cares.
Like you haven't won anybody over to your way of thinking.
You haven't collected a group of like a new army all wearing army pants.
And so I was like, Levi's fine.
You know, like I did, I did some of that.
So in answer to your question, like, did I have a string of good luck?
I might've, that was right when I had my growth spurt.
So all of a sudden I was tall and that couldn't have hurt.
And my sense of humor had come in the same way that your mustache comes in.
Although my mustache had not come in, but my sense of humor had come in.
You know, like, you know, that's a good way to put it.
Yeah, I was no longer like, there's an atom bomb in your shoe.
You know, I was I wasn't quoting.
Stripes?
Or Monty Python anymore.
I was able to sit and kind of like toss off little quips that were fairly biting.
And that scene I recounted earlier where a senior said, that was a pretty good one.
That was an actual event.
A guy named... His name was John...
What the fuck was his name?
He was a senior to my junior and I had always admired him.
He was the he kind of had a pockmarked face.
I mean, he wasn't like beautiful, but he was the real the real cut up of the great ahead of me.
He was the Bill Murray.
And oh, I really wanted his approval.
and one day standing in a group of people i uh you know i pulled out my my verbal derringer and hit somebody in the gun belt and uh what the fuck was his name john somebody or other he he uh he kind of like took a little bit of a a little head check and was like huh that was pretty good you know
And and it it didn't feel like a like I'm kind of doing it in like a coach voice like, hey, nice job, kid.
And then a little hand mussing the hair.
It wasn't like that.
It was like, huh, pretty good.
And then immediately he was like, now I am going to war with you because you have just demonstrated that you.
are the new threat to me.
And now you want to play with the big dogs?
So it was a tense moment, but a great moment for me to have gotten his attention.
And then we did go to war, and eventually I prevailed.
Oh, interesting.
Because my sense of humor came in hard when it came in.
It all came in at once.
Like a big mustache.
It did.
It was just like.
Have you guys seen John?
Well, yeah, because I'd grown a foot in height.
And I'd gone from being kind of picked upon and pushed around and like, hey, John, drink this.
That type of treatment.
to just really quickly, like nobody could get the better of me, at least in the...
In, like, the teenage way.
Wow.
Hey, John, drink this.
Oh, you mean, is that your mom?
You know, like, whatever, when you're 16 years old, like, oh, is that your mom in a cup?
And, you know, and it's just like, what do you say to that?
There's no response to something like that.
All you do is hang your head and go fucking bang your head on the locker because you just got schooled.
Is that your mom in a cup?
Is this your first day?
Is this your first day?
Yeah, I had a friend tell me many years later, he was like, you've never been as funny as you were in 11th grade.
Oh, God, that's horrible to hear.
Yeah, but he's an idiot.
Oh, yeah, okay.
What he meant was just that I was... I mean, because when my sense of humor came in, I was also very... I had been abused, and so I was...
pretty vicious you're carrie yeah right yeah you didn't ask for it but but you showed up and you got a power yeah i got a power all of a sudden and now there's going to be a reordering of things so i know i have never been as bad as i was in 11th grade being a nice teacher isn't going to save you tell you what when did your sense of humor come in
Well, the sense of humor, to use my own phrase now, I mean, I had a way of blurting out lots of stuff, but I was always a terrible editor.
Wait a minute.
Well, I came to embrace it later.
You know what?
I'm going to reject this line of questioning because you're laughing.
Not in a good way.
No, I'm laughing in the best possible way.
Sense of humor.
Okay.
So like there's there's like I mean, not to dissect this too much, but there's the like you develop a personal sense of what's funny in the world.
You develop the ability to say things that make people laugh as against the true meaning, which is like you you see the tragedy of life and how it plays out in ways that can be funny.
Right.
Right.
I don't think I got the last one.
I may not still still not have it, but I don't know.
I got funny things I would like to imagine in my head that I was bullied.
I was very lightly bullied.
I mean, I was bullied the way every kid was bullied.
That's something these kids today don't understand is that everybody lived in fear at a certain point.
That's true.
um mostly from emotional um i mean the teachers everybody like it was just awful it was just awful to be a kid at a certain point but um i i suspect like a lot of people who regard themselves correctly or not as funny for me that was a kind of a defensive thing and i think it the the kind of like john roderick humor you're describing there that started probably in eighth or ninth grade because the thing is it's like
I remember when I first moved to San Francisco and I was spending a lot of time sleeping at my friend Michael's place.
And I always had to park my rental car at, like, McAllister and Fillmore.
which is like a very doing donuts, shooting guns sort of intersection over by the Fillmore.
I mean, it's pretty rough.
I mean, there would be lots of gunshots in the night.
And this is probably just ignorance, but I would always remember thinking I would park and I would walk past lots of people that if I had any sense, I'd probably be scared of.
But I always felt like a noncombatant.
I always felt like I had a white cross on my head a little bit or that like I was like an NPC.
I was not really in this particular game of D&D, an example I'm sure they would have treasured.
But I always felt like I was not like, you know, if it was exactly the same person, but black, I feel like I might have gotten more hassle.
And I think in eighth grade, I was like you, maybe I did not register very much with people.
I was just just another dork.
And then ninth grade was the beginning of kind of starting to feel those oats a little bit more.
And in some ways, like when you are really just an anonymous dork, I might be getting this wrong, but I think when you're just anonymous dork, you're not really as exposed.
If your profile goes up a little bit, that's when you get exposed, and that's when you run into more concentrated trouble from people.
That's right.
That's exactly right.
But I've still never been in a fight in my entire life.
I don't want to start.
Well, you know, I've been in a couple of fights.
I've heard.
I've heard.
You made some of our listeners very uncomfortable a couple years ago talking about one of these incidents.
Yeah.
You know, I don't like to make our listeners uncomfortable.
I want them to feel bathed in a warm chalice by you and me.
It's like your favorite uncle you look forward to seeing every year, and then he talks about Hitler for two hours.
I'm cupping their heads, and you're just pouring, like, ointment on them.
They're there.
Yeah.
No, but I never... To be honest, I think...
I don't think I even ever experienced that much physical friction.
It was much more emotional.
And a lot of it was visited upon myself.
A lot of it was, there's no fucking way anybody is going to see my dick in this locker room.
Boy, I'll say not.
You know what I'm saying?
Don't.
The showers?
No, thank you.
That was one of the most debilitating... I'm just being straight up here.
Shower down and get an A. Shower down and get an A.
Oh, wow.
Shower down.
All right.
That's right.
I forgot about that.
But in Buddhism, they call it the second arrow.
There's the arrow you get shot with, and then there's the arrow you shoot into yourself.
And for me, a lot of the things that I dreaded the most, certainly there were things like, I am about to get bullied by this guy, and I really don't want to walk by where I know he's going to be.
And that's a thing you think about all fucking day.
But then it was also like, I am just dreading third period.
I just, the entire thing of having to see the naked people having to like, you know, be the naked people be, but it was, I was, it's just a weird thing.
Like today I could be naked anywhere.
I don't care.
But like back then I was just, I was terrified of that.
And that's the kind of thing.
I mean, say what you will, what that says about me, but I would just think about that all the time.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, right.
I got, I took a D in gym rather than get in the shower.
Yeah.
It's barbaric.
It's barbaric.
Our showers were like a big... Not big.
I mean, they were like a hexagon the size of a walk-up phone booth.
And the thing is, to be honest, I don't think this is... This is not the apparent homo... I hate that word.
It's so abused.
It's not that I was worried about being gay.
It was that I was worried about having a tiny, tiny dick and no body hair.
I was worried more.
It was less of the obvious.
Today, the millennials are going to hear this and go, oh, well, obviously you had the nascent homophobia of the 1980s.
No, it wasn't that.
It was that I was really underdeveloped, especially in my own eyes.
I think I was probably pretty normal.
But boy, was that ever something I did not want anybody else to see.
For me, I was fat.
oh you know i was uh eighth grade yeah i had a i had a gut i was doughy i was i had lots of baby fat yeah then that was and there's other guys there's other guys that look like roger staubach it's like this is not fair this guy's already balding he's got hair everywhere yeah yeah that's so not fair and just the i mean i when i look it's the classic thing right you look back at pictures of yourself and you're like
I looked great.
What was I so worried about?
I look fine.
I don't look broken by life yet.
Yeah, but I was very worried that I was chubby.
It didn't even occur to me.
I think it didn't occur to me that penises had different sizes.
For a long time.
Yeah.
Because when someone was naked around me, I averted my eyes so immediately that I had, you know, I'd been in locker rooms.
I'd never seen a penis.
You're embarrassed for every aspect of what's happening.
But there's obviously some guys that are much more into it than others.
Oh, yeah.
I don't want to be normative, but the guys who got locked, the guys who are used to being naked and who have like tons of secondary hair because they've been through puberty, they're walking around cock of the walk.
Well, and I think if you're a sports person and you're physically capable on the sports field, you carry with you a kind of body comfortability of like... Yeah, and it's like a fucking Easter parade for you.
This is the room you're in all the time.
You understand how things work in this room, and you're kind of the de facto prime minister of nakedness.
Yeah, if you can throw a football all the way down the field, who cares whether you have a gut or not?
Because this is your, yeah, right.
And they don't look scared.
Whereas I looked, I probably smelled scared.
Yeah, you communicated scared.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, and I think, again, back to that transition into 11th grade, like I had already, 9th grade, 10th grade, I had made my world with the nerds.
Like, the kids that sat at the edge of the lunchroom, the D&Ders, the Monty Pythoners.
Like, I'd made my bones with them.
But it was in there, in that circle, that I felt...
I felt going into 11th grade, like, is this me?
Am I going to hide out here?
Am I going to hide out in the corner of the lunchroom?
Right, right.
Are you staying overnight?
Or is this going to be like where you live now?
Right.
Is this me now?
Am I throwing dice the rest of my life?
I remember that feeling.
Yeah, because this isn't me.
Like, I'm over here because I feel safe here and accepted here.
But I'm not going to double... I mean, I remember sitting with a friend...
And he was taking metalworking classes and he was very, very excited about being able to use the forge because and then he opened his notebook and here were very, very detailed drawings of the broadsword that he was going to forge.
Wow.
And I was both intrigued by like, whoa, you're going to forge a broadsword?
That's pretty badass.
Like, tell me more.
But also a recognition that forging a broadsword does not bode well.
Just in that a broadsword is not a useful implement now.
We don't use them a lot.
And to want one in that way, but not as a, like, I'm going to buy one and put it on the wall, but, like, I am going to forge one in the furnace of Mordor.
Yeah.
It was... I mean, believe me, I lived in that fantasy place a lot, walking home from school imagining that I was being gifted magic power.
You're conjuring an orb.
I was conjuring orbs right and left, but I also saw that...
contemporaneous with us there were people who were preparing for a life in the world or even i mean yes but also just even like trying to buy beer like their overnight stay was years ahead of ours whatever whatever dumb shit they were doing with vandalism or like you know you know what i mean but there were like these levels of of like the dumb way stations the truck scales you have to go through to get to the next thing
And, like, even though you might recognize that as, like, this is dumb kid behavior, you were still doing, like, really younger dumb kid behavior.
Or dorkier.
Well, I mean, yeah, I was playing with G.I.
Joes in the bathtub while people, not maybe my own age, but my own grade, certainly, were actually, like, having sex with each other.
Not just making out and going to second base.
Coitus.
They were all the way moving on.
And I was like...
Oh, the engine's on fire.
Talk about being in the shit.
I was fucking deep in the shit.
And so it was that conscious decision to go out of where I felt comfortable and safe in a place where, you know, I was able to live.
I was able to be comfortably in fantasy.
Yeah.
And move into this terrible, terrible world where people were going to where people like a big part of of how that world discriminates is by starting with the premise that they don't want you like you're somebody like me who was not.
Like a hero yet.
Well, there's better and more interesting people than you who aren't welcome.
That's the thing here.
It isn't a zero or a one.
I mean, there are a lot of people that were a lot cooler than you that were still not going to make it.
Still not going to make it.
I mean, you're really screwed.
So how did I achieve enough velocity not only to penetrate, but of course I was not, once I was headed that way, I wasn't going to be content until I was in the center.
Because you're going to be the BMOC.
That's right.
BMOC is not like big assistant man on campus.
It's not big sidekick on campus.
I wasn't going to be somebody else's sidekick.
You weren't going to be the second banana.
I wasn't going to be second banana.
You're going to be Owen Alder.
You're going to be the first banana.
That's right.
I'm going to write and direct this episode.
And it's going to be about me saving a little Korean boy named Top Hat.
And Frank Burns is trying to read him the Bible.
And the thing is, that's kind of true now, too.
I'm adjacent to this world of Hollywood...
comedy actors and In the same way that you for a long time have been adjacent to Silicon Valley
And, you know, I look at that world all the time.
I'm down in Hollywood a lot now and I'm sitting around in a cafe and I'm looking around the room and I'm like, why do I hate everyone in this cafe?
Oh, they're all working on their screenplay.
Like everyone in here is either meeting with someone that they hope will...
Option their screenplay or you know, they're all working.
They're all like just Striving yeah to do a thing that they you can almost just look around and say like oh clearly this isn't gonna pan out for you, but there's a version of where I am now that feels like I'm I've been safe in my in this place that I built for myself, but Am I prepared to go down?
To California and, you know, and cold call Joel McHale and say, hey, you know, and you're just you're embarrassed at the prospect of it.
Like, hey, Joel, I'm in town.
I don't really have any good ideas, but I was hoping that I could like.
Right on your coattails.
Call me back.
There's so, so many of those calls and emails I don't make where the thought goes through my head and I'm just like, wait, stop.
This turns out great.
How?
Yeah, right.
We're like, you know, I mean, I'm acquainted with Chris Hardwick.
I'm not super good friends with Chris.
And this is from a time when, you know, maybe I was more famous, he was less famous.
But, like, we were acquainted.
And we would talk about things and, you know, play at the idea of doing things.
Let's do some things sometimes.
Yeah.
And, like, the thing is, time passed.
Yeah.
And he's gotten real big and real successful with stuff.
And there's still sometimes we'll have an exchange somewhere and people say, Chris, you should have Merlin on your show.
And I just want to hide under a rock.
Because I'm just like, no, please don't make it so he even has to consider that.
It makes my insides so uncomfortable when that happens.
It's not shame.
It's just more like I don't like...
I don't like even inconveniencing people with ideas, because I know ideas weigh something.
Yeah, right, right.
This happened the other day.
I was down in L.A.
There was a sold-out show.
How's it going?
I just happened to be in Hollywood.
What's up, Joely Joel?
What's up with that girl I met?
She seems to be doing a lot of movies.
What's her name?
I was down in L.A., and Patton Oswalt was playing at Largo.
And...
I said, oh, I'd like to go to that show.
And it was sold out.
And I said, well, sold out doesn't matter to me, to daddy.
You're John Roderick.
Yeah.
I know everybody at Largo.
The Largo account faves my Instagram posts.
Like...
Oh, God.
I've never been more tempted to cut something out.
I'm really up here.
I'm up on the top of this.
Oh, wow.
The Instagram account for Largo, huh?
Yeah, the Instagram account for Largo faves my shit all the time.
So this shouldn't be a problem.
Yeah.
And I'm gearing up.
You go up holding your phone.
I'm standing at the front door like I know the show is sold out but check it out.
You guys have liked my last seven posts The thing is I know everybody that works there, right?
I mean and I'm I don't live in LA, but I'm there I've played a lot of shows there There's not a lot of turnover in the people that run the place.
Yeah, and so and I know we're all friends and so I'm gearing up
I'm not like, here we go.
I'm just sitting and I'm thinking.
So just to be clear, you have not done any prep work here.
Your plan is to show up and just kind of waltz in.
That's right.
Okay.
And not just show up and waltz in, but show up with people and waltz in.
Oh, my God.
And I'm sitting there and I'm thinking, I'm running a Merlin Mann on it.
I'm like, what are the potential outcomes here?
Let's just run through this.
I'm not somebody that if I show up at a place with a bunch of people and I get turned away, I'm not especially embarrassed by that because it always is like, well, give it a try.
Let's go across the street and eat blintzes or whatever.
You're not going to pour a bucket over my head.
But as I sat there, I thought, this exact thing you're describing, why give my good friends at Largo any memory of ever having turned me down for a thing?
Like right now, no one there has ever turned me down.
Why?
Why risk even establishing the notion in anyone's mind that I'm in a category of people that get turned down for things?
You know what?
That's somewhere in my mind.
I never really quite put my finger on it.
But you're right.
I don't want this enough to live with what the no means.
Yeah.
To take... To put...
to do on your own put a black mark next to your name and it's not a black i mean so what that would mean but it's a black mark that's a that's accompanied by the noise oh yeah right what that would mean is now i'm on a list of somebody that gets in to some shows sometimes if it's not that big of a deal and right now because i decided not to go right and i told the people i was i was planning on taking let's do something else yeah
What that means is that I'm not a person that gets turned down for a Patton Oswalt show that's been sold out for a month.
Right?
I'm negative.
I'm not on that list.
I...
very well might be somebody that could have gotten into that show.
Sure.
No reason to think it would be any different.
Yeah.
And that's, you know, that's a big way.
Science only falls apart if you test your theory.
That's a big way of running your Hollywood game a little bit.
But I do feel sometimes like, am I not pushing myself hard enough enough
Like, shouldn't I be... Oh, just the word audition makes me want to sit in the bathtub with a bowl of macaroni and cheese.
I have some counseling on this, and I have some thoughts on this.
Let me hear it.
Well, first of all, another admission along this is that... And this sounds like some kind of weird, like... I don't know.
We're sounding a little bit Robert Evans at this point.
But... I don't know if you follow him on Twitter, but it is really a lot of fun.
I do follow him.
Boy, he's...
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
He's great.
He's 105 now.
Yeah.
Yeah.
He quotes himself with a pound sign.
Yeah.
Living in the house Jack Nicholson bought him.
Living in his house that Jack Nicholson bought for him.
Oh, you bet your ass he is.
Like, there's some times where, like, you know, first of all, I'm from Ohio, and I don't really talk to people.
And I'm not really good at keeping up with people.
And so, like, anytime I'm, like, keep going to, like, catch up with somebody, I always find myself, like, doubting.
or questioning why I'm doing it, which is so terrible.
Why don't I just keep up with everybody?
But then I think, oh, God, people are busy, and they're going to think I want something.
I'm talking about all my friends.
This is why I don't talk to any of you.
It goes through my mind.
It's like, oh, if this goes well, what's going to happen?
We're going to have planned something that I don't have time or resources to do?
And I just go through that.
But...
You know, all I'll say is this, is that like if that's something you actually want to do, not to use the A word here, but if you'd like to be in more things, the only thing I could think of that does help is to first set your mind to the fact that you're going to do that and then make it easy on other people.
I think it's really different from showing up at the door and saying like, you know, hey, I'm a friend of Patton or whatever, you know.
that's that's needy but like if you have a thing where you can actually this sounds like stupid networking i don't mean it that way but like if you have a way where you actually could be useful for something for somebody else like that's that's not a bad thing you're not asking for anything but you know luck favors the well prepared like if you're ready like you got to be ready to like say talk to a producer who that person has to convince you should be in it do you know what i'm saying
Now we're talking more about a commitment and you realize how much of this you really want when you start thinking about what's involved.
Yeah, my problem is that I always feel like I have I always feel that I offer utility to every situation.
Sure.
BMOC.
Yeah, I'm not showing up there with a bouquet of flowers and a bottle of champagne.
The bouquet of flowers and a bottle of champagne is me.
Hmm.
Here's the other problem.
I'm trying to teach my daughter this with the cat.
In the 11 months we've had her, she's really warmed up to the family.
She's still a hideous monster.
But she's become, in her way for a 10-year-old cat, she's become kind of affectionate.
Just in the sense that she likes to be petted at certain times in certain ways.
How much hair does she have?
Right now she's shaved.
I'll send you a picture.
She's a monstrosity.
But here's something I'm trying to teach my wonderful daughter.
Which is that with the cat...
With the cat, it's all about building up way more trust than you think is reasonable or certainly way more trust than is fun.
So like a lot of times when you feel like petting the cat, don't pet the cat.
Oh, that's right.
Leave the cat.
Leave the cat alone.
And if the cat really wants it, the cat will come to you.
Now, if the cat does come to you, I'm just gonna tell you, like mom and I know this, like here's a couple places.
and ways that the cat likes to be scratched you can scratch the back of the cat's neck right here forever and she'll be very happy if she likes that you can pet a little bit under her chin and that makes her really happy here's what you don't do don't walk up to the cat pick up the cat turn her around do a dance put her on your lap and then start like scratching her like on her underside
Because that doesn't build trust.
That builds suspicion.
Mom and I got to the point where we can scratch the cat on the neck because we figured out that's what she likes.
And we don't mess it up too much.
And I'm not sure exactly what the message is for you getting into Dan Harmon's TV shows.
But you know what I'm saying?
here oh yeah that to me is like just keep your personal credit good yeah in that way like don't fuck it up with something stupid because every time you try to scratch the cat's butt because it's cute like that makes the cat trust you less and and the cat didn't really get scratched you didn't get to scratch the cat and all that's really changed is your relationship i i feel like i've all the ship has already sailed in being in dan harman's productions have you ever had any follow-up with him
No, and I don't think that he feels like it's his job to reach out to me.
Also, it doesn't help that our wonderful fans have missed very few opportunities to make this into an unnecessarily oppositional thing with Dan Harmon.
Yeah, they really have.
That has not helped.
They really have.
Hey, Dan!
Hey, check it out.
Dan Harmon stole an idea.
No, he didn't.
What?
Yeah, check it out, man.
I bet you're still mad at Dan Harmon.
I'm like, no.
No, no one cares.
Stop saying that.
Stop scratching the cat's butt.
Stop it.
You know, like, how to scratch the cat.
I think that should go up on the big board.
Okay, I'll put it up here.
What was your other one?
What was the other one you had on the big board?
Somebody will tweet it at us.
Yeah.
I mean, all those things, right?
Ultimately, it's the big question, do I?
Yes, I do.
Yes, I do.
I'm sorry.
I think I passed off for a minute.
Ultimately, the big question is, do I?
And the answer is, yes, I do.
Yes, I do.
Okay.
But do I?
I missed the context for that, but I like it.
Do I?
Do I?
Do I?
Yes, I do.
Yes, I do.
Do I?
Do I?
Yes, I do.
You bet your ass I do.
You could be certain of one thing today, and that I'm the one that's going to do it.
I'm going to do it.
Yes, I do.
It's your impression of Tom Waits doing Louis Armstrong.
Oh.
I heard so much Randy Newman in it.
Oh, okay.
Well, I got a question for myself.
Is this a thing I'm going to do?
If I don't answer the question, it's going to make me blue.
Do I do?
Yes, I do.
Do, do, do.
The question is, do I?
And the answer is, yes, I do.
Yes, I do.
That's it.
That's the whole game.
You could very well stop right there.
That's pretty fucking good.