Ep. 236: "Into the Hat Weeds"
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Hello.
Hi, John.
Hi, Merlin.
How's it going?
Oh, it's so early.
Yeah.
It's really early.
How about that Lindsey Buckingham, huh?
Yeah, he should be president of the United States.
Yeah, I take it.
He's 64 years old in that video.
You know, so am I in this video.
It's so early.
I was out last night with some other old people.
When I say last night,
i mean you know between 5 30 and 7 30. i don't talk about time travel and uh and so i'm really really conscious of you know there's a small group of us small group of us old old old men all talking about how young we look it's really nice oh well do you start by complimenting each other or you just kind of casually note how interesting it is that you continue to look so good and then everybody agrees
Oh, no, no.
It all starts on congratulating your friend on how young he looks.
You look so amazing.
You look great.
So good.
How do you do it?
You look great.
No, you look great.
And then there's quite a bit of like, we're all good looking guys.
Yeah.
You're a good-looking guy.
I'm a good-looking guy.
We're all good-looking guys.
I need a group like that.
Yeah.
It's a lie, though, of course.
A lie agreed upon, you know?
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
A lie agreed upon.
Is that a legal phrase?
Mm-hmm.
It's a line from, it's the titular line from an episode of the TV show Deadwood.
Ah, Deadwood.
I know that you care deeply about Deadwood.
Deadwood's special.
They have a good guitar playing on there, too.
Yeah, that's one of those shows, you know, this is the thing that has come up, I think before in conversation between me and other humans.
The shows that have modern music.
All right, you talked about this with Peaky Blinders.
Yeah, Peaky Blinders.
I can't, I can never quite, I get it.
I get why it's very stylish.
They don't do that on Deadwood.
Deadwood is very, it's very period appropriate except for the very elevated language.
Well, I thought the theme, the actual theme song of Deadwood was a little bit, how you say...
Head in the heart.
Which is a little bit like a modern recreation of what the imagination is.
Sort of a modern... What's the word?
Take?
A modern take?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
We're like, if you didn't know much about music from that time, you might think that's what it sounds like.
Yeah, if you throw a banjo at a thing, it doesn't make it a thing.
That's a really good point.
You know what I mean?
If you shoot a banjo at a thing, it still doesn't make it a thing.
You got strong feelings about... Well, it's banjo players that bother you.
It's not the instrument itself, right?
Contempo, let's say, I don't think it's a banjo player.
I should refine this.
The banjo, first of all, the banjo is a wonderful instrument.
I think it's if you take a banjo player and you put a certain kind of hat on him, right?
Like, I love banjo playing.
Mm-hmm.
It's just that if a certain kind of hat goes on a banjo player, then you're headed down a road.
Oh, okay.
You're on a path now where I'm going to start to peel off.
So is that a little bit like the version of having a ring?
Like does it start to do stuff to you?
The banjo player version of having a ring?
Oh, you know, like the Lord of the Rings ring.
Oh, I see what you're saying.
Like just having it kind of like start to change your personality or, you know, say you're walking around with some kind of a horcrux.
Is it going to do something to like start affecting the way that you think and act?
You put a flat cap on a banjo player and pretty soon everything's out of control.
I feel like if you are learning an instrument, you are learning the instrument that you have, right?
You go to war with the instrument you have, not the instrument you want.
So if you are somebody sitting around, you're like, I want to learn the piano.
But the only piano that you have is a tack piano.
You're going to learn to play the tack piano.
You're not going to learn to play the concert grand.
You're going to learn to play the tack piano.
And so you're learning to play the banjo.
Let's say, hey, here I am.
I want to learn to play the banjo.
I think...
There are people who grow up learning the banjo as their first instrument But I think what a lot of the time they learn the guitar and then they they try to like retro like they they They modify
They modify down to banjo, they think.
Interesting.
So whatever you started on, you start with an instrument.
That becomes your way of conceptualizing how music works, and then you kind of back into different instruments.
Right.
This was the interesting thing about Paul McCartney, right?
He learned the guitar, but he learned banjo chords.
We've been listening to a lot of Beatles, happily, at my daughter's request.
And I still can't get over his bass line.
I sat there and Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds is not, by a long shot, my favorite Beatles song.
His bass line on that is bananas.
It's like, where did that bass line even come from?
Or something like Hello Goodbye?
How does he just keep getting better and better?
And it's all over six or seven years.
It's nuts.
But you know, he was originally a guitar player.
Now, was he originally... Wasn't his dad... His dad played, like, clarinet.
I wonder if he started on a woodwind instrument.
I think the story was that they taught him that his mother...
Oh, new banjo chords.
And she taught him banjo chords on the guitar.
You know, I haven't read my library of Beatles books lately.
We haven't talked about the Beatles in years.
It's been quite a while.
Used to talk about them exclusively.
Used to be just pretty much Beatles, Hitler, and getting out of the way.
But so, I don't know.
If you set down a path and you're like, banjo is my thing now.
And you put on a hat as part of that.
Okay.
Right?
You see what I'm saying?
I think I do, yeah.
If you're just devoted to the study of banjo and you're just in there banjo studying, or you're sitting in a tree or whatever, wherever they teach banjo, I think generally when you learn it, it's taught in trees.
I think you're supposed to, I mean...
I'm not sure about this, but I think you're supposed to be on a paddle wheel boat with no shoes and one leg swinging over the side.
That's a great way to learn the banjo.
I mean, Kermit the Frog learned it in a tree.
It must be hard to keep it tuned when you're in a swamp.
Well, sure, because of the humidity.
It's not the heat, it's the stupidity.
But if you pick up the banjo and you're like, this is my new instrument, I'm going to be in a band that requires a banjo player, and I'm going to pick up this instrument now, and then immediately, as part of that process, you put on a certain kind of hat.
I'm talking not like put on the banjo player hat, but put on an actual hat.
And you think that that's a component of being the banjo player in your band.
That's where we part ways.
Oh, interesting.
I mean, if you think like and it's I don't even think it's a question of like, this is my magic banjo playing hat.
And without it, I cannot play the banjo.
But it's that you think as the banjo player in this band, which I am just beginning on this course of life, I'm going to start out with this hat on.
And this is going to be my hat.
We're divorced.
You and I are divorced.
I feel like I really want to talk about Chris Thiele someday, because I'm kind of obsessed with Chris Thiele right now.
But I've been watching a ton of videos of... What's that?
He's a tremendous musician.
I don't even know where to begin.
I've been watching a lot of videos of Punch Brothers and Nickel Creek.
Yep.
In addition to loving his hosting of Prairie Home Companion, the show has transformed.
Oh, good.
I'm glad to hear that.
I know it's a show you won't listen to, but he's been doing it for a while.
And the guests that he has on there, he writes a new song every week that every week is a really good song.
And he plays the shit out of a mandolin.
And he's also, there's lots of good natured jokes about being someone who, just on Saturday night's program, he said, you know what they say about mandolin players, they spend half their time tuning and half their time playing out of tune.
There's a lot of strings, and they're very close together, and there's not very much real estate.
Every time I pick up a mandolin, I'm like, seriously?
Really?
Why don't you stretch this out a little bit?
You know, you can make this a little longer and a little wider and there'd be more room.
But he plays that thing like if Jimmy Page was good on guitar.
He just, he rips.
He rips on that thing.
And then he even has the presence of mind, like when he wants to quote a famous line, when he wants to quote the famous line from Losing My Religion, he drops the tuning on one of the strings just a little bit.
So it sounds a little bit more Peter Bucky.
Yeah, isn't he clever?
Isn't that nice?
But I was watching, so like I say, I've been watching a lot of videos.
You know, again, I'm kind of obsessed with that AV Club thing where they come in and play covers.
And the Punch Brothers did an amazing cover of Just What I Needed.
Totally unironic cover of Just What I Needed.
And I noticed a lot of guys in the band have hats.
That's the first thing I noticed.
The second thing I noticed is that you don't see two guys wearing the same hat.
Have you noticed this in bands?
Would it be unseemly to show up for a performance, banjo player or otherwise, and you turn out to be wearing the same shirt as somebody else in the band?
Unless you were doing that for an effect.
Like to highlight that these were twins or something.
Like you wouldn't want to wear the same hat as somebody else in the band.
Is that part of the hat process?
You have to get some independence of your hat.
So my understanding of hats, which isn't deep or broad, but you are meant to have your own way.
Right?
You're meant not just to have your own... I mean, you're meant to have your own
Your own style of crown.
Your own king hat.
Yeah.
And every person that, I mean, from ye olden times, like from ye olden times, like say 1950, if you look at a picture of like a crowd shot of people in 19, let's say 1940.
Mm-hmm.
And you're looking out, and there's a sea of people.
And you look at their hats.
They're all wearing hats.
And you look at their hats, and everybody's got their own individual take on it.
Yeah, at first glance, it looks like a lot of men wearing the same hat.
But when you look more closely, you see their different styles, their different materials, their different bands.
And then they wear it differently.
They might be at a different angle.
And what's curious is that there's not a huge color palette.
They're brown, black, white.
tan and gray.
It's not like any of those people is wearing a blue hat or certainly not like a red hat.
They're all very muted.
But yeah, the way the brim is, the way the crown is, the way you kind of grasp it with your hands when you're taking it off.
And of the hats that I have, and I have, what, probably nine
to 12 Stetson-style, you know, felt, vintage felt hats that I've come upon in the years.
And there's one of them in particular that really nails it for me.
Like, that's my look.
That's my hat.
As soon as I saw it, I was like, whoa, hello.
And when I sit and monkey with the other ones and imagine turning the other ones into this one, it's never right anymore.
And I can never, all the different, you know, they're all very distinctive because they once belonged to somebody.
It's not that different from blue jeans.
It would be like getting a pair of jeans that somebody had worn for 20 years.
Right, right.
And, but, oh, not just that, but somebody, it's like blue jeans that someone had from the day they bought them already designed a certain way.
Because your hat, it's not like hats came out of the factory all uniform and they took on these characteristics by being worn.
When you went to the hat store, you said, here's how I want my hat steamed.
And the hat person would put the hat on the steamer, and then they would create and shape, mold, craft, sculpt your hat so that it was to your liking.
You can steam a hat and redo this on it.
You can take a hat that you don't like and take it down to the hat steamer and have it steamed and made again, made anew.
It was like having your suits tailored.
You would have your hat tailored.
And that's a thing.
When you look at a cowboy band where everybody on stage, including the stage manager, including the guy running across the stage dressed all in black with a Leatherman on his belt and a Maglite, all of them are wearing hats in these cowboy bands.
And they might all be black hats.
But every hat, I think, if these people have any class, is going to be
Like, you know, a lot of Mexican bands, they all actually wear uniforms.
They wear all the same hat and all the same clothes from top to bottom.
Like a Banda band.
Yeah.
I think you will find that they're hats.
I have a special affection for that kind of music.
Do you really?
Yeah.
The ballads of the Narcotieros?
Is it Norteño?
Is that what that is?
I've dipped into that just a little bit, but I'm going to be the white guy for a minute, just going and getting burritos.
I would hear that music, and I'd go, this is very interesting music.
The production on it is extremely... I don't want to take you off your topic here.
I want to get back to the hats, but it's a very interesting style of music, and they do some pretty burning covers.
Have you ever heard the Bonda cover of Still the One?
By Shania Twain?
I have not.
I'll find it for you.
It's a barn burner.
I thought you were referencing Still the One, the old NBC television theme from the 70s.
That wasn't America.
That was Player.
Player was that band.
Player the band, yeah.
You're still the one who could scratch my itch.
Still the one.
We're still having fun.
And you're still the one.
Still the one.
And that was a popular song on the radio.
And then I think it was NBC.
I think it was ABC.
ABC.
Orleans.
It was Orleans.
It wasn't Player.
Player was Baby Come Back.
Yeah, that was still a hit song on the radio, and then it was made the ABC television theme.
And that was very confusing to me as a kid, because I was like, which is it?
Like, what's happening?
This is being played on AM radio.
I found it extremely confusing.
Yeah, I'm still confused.
Yeah.
So the hat thing, I feel like a lot of young people are not having their hats tailored because they don't even know it's a thing.
Yeah.
And so I don't think you get up on stage with the same hat as your bandmate.
But I feel like what that has produced, and I'm getting super down into this now, into the weeds, into the hat weeds.
What that produces is here you're going on stage with your friends.
You have decided that you're all going to wear hats.
And you don't want to wear the same hat, but you don't understand hats very well.
You don't understand that you could all go down and buy the same Indiana Jones hat, but just have them steam differently.
And so what you end up with is four people on stage who are wearing hats that don't belong together.
Huh, they're incompatible.
Right.
So one person's wearing like a very, very small brimmed Frank Sinatra era trilby hat.
And one person's wearing like a flat topped, like silver buckled Mike McCready hat.
which is like the bad guy from a certain kind of spaghetti Western hat.
Oh, I know what you mean, like a Lee J. Cobb kind of hat.
Right.
Yeah.
And then you've got like somebody wearing a straw boater and then there's somebody wearing like a Robin Hood hat with a giant feather in it.
And it's like, you guys don't, this isn't, you're just, you just look like a, you look like a weird catalog of shitty hats.
You don't just having hats doesn't make you a band.
Uh, so it, so that, that really irks me because it doesn't feel, it doesn't feel to me like the hat wearers are, are making the hats their own.
They're just trying to distinguish themselves by having a
An interesting, a more, an interesting style of hat.
Well, can I come out for a take on that and you give me your diagnosis?
Sure.
Not many people, you know, again, famously one of these things where since, what, JFK, people have been increasingly wearing fewer hats, men have been wearing hats less as a thing, to where today a hat is a statement that
In and of itself, but also by virtue of the fact that not many dudes wear hats.
We've also become less nuanced in our understanding of what the hat signifies or the subtlety of that.
Like you say, looking at six hats and saying like, oh, these are actually really different.
I couldn't eyeball that.
Do you think, I mean, is it something where like, it's sort of like you go on vacation, get cornrows, or maybe you get a Hawaiian shirt and you don't really think too much about it.
It's just a thing you did.
This is a hat I picked up.
It's not something where you're investing much in it or you're not even necessarily participating in hat culture in an overt way.
And this may be a situation where my desire to understand the history of a person
Culture right even a little bit in just just a slight penetration of the history of hat wearing what hats signify Maybe has clouded my ability to understand that in the 21st century the way hats are worn is like everything else in the 21st century.
It's a complete undifferentiated hodgepodge where
It's just checks and polka dots and plaids all thrown together.
And to be even remotely interested in the fact that this used to mean this or this is different from that because of this change in history or in tempo or in the moment, that's no longer relevant.
And the question is, what hat do you like?
What hat do you think is cool right now?
And...
That kind of thing.
Maybe I'm being inhibited by my desire to have things mean things.
But like the top hat...
The top hat is not a single thing.
If you look at top hats from 1820, I guess, when they first kind of came on the scene up until the top hats of 1920.
Right.
I think I think you'll find presidents wearing wearing top hats.
At formal events, I want to say at least into the 20s and probably 30s.
Woodrow Wilson, you will see him often in a top hat, but I don't think you'll often see FDR.
Maybe FDR.
I will find out.
He did wear them, but he's a very fancy guy.
Harry Truman never had a top hat on, so let's just make the line next.
Let's make the line, FDR was a fancy man and wore a top hat.
Lots of photos of him in what looks like a silk top hat.
Here he is in more like a fedora, looking really smart.
I'm sure somebody's going to pull out a picture of Harry Truman in a top hat.
Well, a lot of people could pull out a lot of things, John.
but uh but oh there's a top hat with a top hat case look at that this has jesse thorne written all over it they're beautiful and it says fdr on it that's his top hat case look at that but the but the the the actual hat itself in that hundred years really really really evolved um and became like a it was a hundred different things so the the um
the top hat that chester a arthur wore and the top hat that slash wears are like not just the same they're not they don't even look anything like each other if you put them next to one another and if you understand why aren't you teaching in a university
So like choosing – so let's say – so there was a time in the early 2000s where –
the Long Winters took a photo, a band photo, where we were all wearing hats.
I remember this.
This is when you guys were kind of getting big, and this is one of your first, like, we've gotten big photo sessions.
Now we have a photo session.
Were you wearing a blue shirt with, like, an orange background in that?
I mean, we were also wearing suits and ties.
We never fully understood.
Yeah, was it Sean?
Was Sean wearing a top hat?
Sean was wearing a top hat.
I remember this.
And I went with him to the hat store that day.
And the thing about a hat store these days is that you're not going to find an elegant silk top hat anymore.
Because they're not worn.
There's no situation unless you were at the opening day of the...
of the the horse track in england right what's that day where the derby day the derby day right is that what it's called or derby they say derby derby they say derby they say clark smurp okay um it's gonna be a costume it's like me when i bought a straw boater you go to a store and there's a a there's a single high quality straw boater you can buy that's right if you're a straw boater person you're not you're not like um
splitting hairs over, this isn't the straw boater I want.
It's like, if you want a straw boater, and that's what we've been reduced to, right?
If you go to a hat store and you want a bowler hat, there's one bowler hat.
Even though there are, in the history of the bowler hat, 25 different iterations of the bowler.
So with Sean, we wanted a kind of, or rather, Sean wanted a kind of
uh mad hatter style top hat but it's got kind of that sort of um what's the word i'm looking for it starts out kind of big and gets more tapered as it goes down a little bit it's it's got quite a bit of taper but not one all the way to like
The type of Mad Hatter hat that you would wear if you were going to see Alice in Chains.
Right?
You don't want a Mad Hatter hat that says, like, my younger sister is a juggalette.
Right?
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You want one that says that you are like Tom Petty during the period when Tom Petty was wearing a top hat, which Tom Petty did for a while.
Before Slash, even, Tom Petty was rocking the top hat.
He was, I think, the modern rock top hat person.
He lit the fuse.
And Tom and Sean was a you know, he's obviously like a formidable person.
He has formidable hair and he needed a hat that could that that projected a hat in us that was as big as he was.
Right.
You're not going to you're not going to Sean is not going to wear a trilby and have it.
do anything but make the hat ashamed of itself.
The trilby hat is going to slink off and say, I'm not enough of a hat for this person.
And the top hat was so good on Sean that he wore it periodically.
There are some shots of us playing live, not just once, but multiple times with Sean wearing a top hat.
And the rest of us weren't wearing hats or in any kind of
other than just our rock clothes.
Sean was wearing a top hat and I liked it.
You know, it was, it looks good.
Like a lot of the time when, when, when a rock person affects a weird thing,
My feeling is sort of like, not quite.
But this top hat on Sean, I was like, absolutely, I think you should wear it every day.
And it's not, I just sent you a photo I found off the internet of this, one of your sessions here, photo shoots.
Eric's wearing like an Amelia Earhart aviator helmet.
You've got a, what would you call yours?
Yours is not a Hamburg.
It is.
Is it a Hamburg?
I would call it a Homburg.
Michael is wearing what appears to be a wig and some kind of brown hat.
Yeah, the wig belongs to me and the brown hat belongs to me.
Michael did not have those things in his own library.
Good for Michael.
And what was funny is at that point...
You know, up until, and I don't want to feel too much.
No, we usually redact this.
Yeah, but Michael had only recently shaved his head.
Great look for him.
Great look.
Had been liberated because shaving your head, now you are not any more concerned about what's going on with your hair.
You remember that 12 hours after we met, Chris Cornelius shaved his head in my kitchen.
Oh, right.
He was going through a real phase then.
He really wanted to keep it tidy?
No.
Did I ever tell you?
We were driving through the Nevada desert on the way home from a tour.
We played our last show.
We were in Nevada.
And everybody else is asleep.
I'm driving.
Chris is in the passenger seat.
And he said, pull over here, will you?
This is like UFO country.
And I said, yeah, you got to go to the bathroom?
And he said, no, I'd like you to pull over.
I think I'm going to walk home from here.
And I said, Chris, it's the middle of the night in the middle of the Nevada desert.
I'm not going to let you out to walk home.
It would take you five months.
He was like, I really feel like that's what I want to do.
I really feel like right now I want you to pull over and I want you to let me out.
I'm going to walk home.
And I was like, you know, Winnemucca is a six-day walk from here.
And there's nothing between here and there except UFOs.
And I talked him out of it.
But...
He was sincere.
If I'd pulled over, he would have gotten out with his bag.
He wasn't like, let me out of the truck.
He wasn't mad.
He was just like, I'm going to get out here.
And obviously he wouldn't have died.
He would have finally figured out and put his thumb out and hitchhiked to Winnemucca and probably bought a bus ticket.
But maybe he would have walked.
Who knows?
But yeah, that time in your kitchen where he was like, I'm shaving my head right now.
I'm sorry.
I should have said he was shaving Michael's head.
Oh, I see what you're saying.
He shaved Michael's head.
Yeah, I feel like I remember this pretty clearly.
I remember thinking, huh, that seems a little familiar for knowing each other 12 hours.
In my kitchen.
I see what you're saying.
Where my children play with their toys.
Chris was a delight.
I bet he was a handful.
He was a very, very quick, very, very funny... I don't know how you guys made it with you and Chris and Sean in that same van.
There are so many competing, super strong personalities.
I mean, not the other guys don't have it, but those...
you and Sean were enough, but with Chris in the mix, that guy's a wild card, man.
Well, the amazing thing about Chris was that he, in the 90s in Seattle, Chris was not regarded as funny.
It wasn't a thing that he would have said.
He never projected like, I'm the funny one.
We had a culture here of people that were doing a lot of
playwriting and there were a lot of actors there was a lot of music we had a pretty tight and interesting group of multi-talented people that were doing all kinds of art and Chris was not really he was deeply in the mix but he never said like I'm funny I'm doing funny things
Um, he was sort of, um, you know, he was like the handsome one.
Let's, let's put it, let's put it how it is.
He was the handsome one and he worked as a bartender downtown and he was charming and he had a lot of girlfriends and his charm was, was pretty quick.
You know, somebody would come up to the bar and they'd say something snarky to the bartender and Chris could put them, he could put them away.
But again, he wasn't, you know, like, I'm funny, and Chris was a friend of mine, and I never thought, like, oh, Chris is really much competition in the funny department.
But we got on the road, and I think this was as much a revelation for him as it was for the rest of us.
And Chris, all of a sudden, it seemed out of nowhere, revealed this incredible talent.
storytelling, comedic voices, comedic personalities, such that he could take up, I mean, we could drive for five hours and Chris would just be doing a sort of a one-man performance the entire time.
And Sean and I, so part of the dynamic between me and Sean was that we were both
we were both funny, but also we're trying to sort of get deeper.
We were, you know, we were having critical discussions about critical thought, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And Chris just cut through that like a hot blade because Chris just did an hour of, uh, he basically, we were driving through the desert and he would be like,
Well, this is, you know, Bob Jenkins, Northern Arizona Radical Radio.
And he would just do like a talk radio guy from the location we were in the appropriate voice and as though you were listening to the radio.
And all Sean and I could do was periodically be like, ring, ring, ring.
Hi.
It's a caller.
And Chris would take the call.
Wow.
Go ahead, caller.
And we would have something.
We'd try to throw some tennis ball in there.
And he would just very deftly take our call and handle.
And it was like tears streaming down our faces.
And I'd known Chris at that point for 10 years.
And I had never seen it before.
and no one I know had, and I don't think Chris had.
We drove around for a year where you couldn't wait to get into the truck.
Wow.
And in a situation where you would think, like Sean and I were always jockeying for who was jockeying for top dog, but Chris just blew the whole thing out of the water.
Chris was faster than Sean, faster than me, faster than us both.
But there wasn't any real resentment or competition in it because he was so much better.
Wow.
Did Sean think so too?
Absolutely.
Sean fell in love with him.
And I think it's hard for Sean to fall in love with somebody that is operating at that kind of level.
And Sean just loves him to this day.
So it was a tragedy that Chris couldn't stay in the band because he really made those miles disappear.
And was a source of a lot of real joy.
Not just distraction, not just like lol, but he was tapped into...
He was tapped into some bigger thing.
That must have been such a gift at certain times.
I can't imagine the drudgery of what that trip could be sometimes if things weren't... It was an incredible gift.
And it caused me to realize why he had been such a successful bachelor.
Looking back 10 years before, I did hate Chris in 1993.
Because you'd be sitting at a table talking to
somebody that you wanted to... Chatting up a bird?
He'd be chatting somebody up.
And Chris would walk through and he would never... It's not like he would steal somebody from right underneath you.
But he'd come in and this is the other crazy thing.
He wouldn't sit down across the table from you and be like the brightest light.
And everyone flocked to him.
It didn't work that way.
He would just be sitting over there and
Like his seduction was all done in whispers.
You never knew what he was saying.
Because somebody would, you know, he'd be sitting there and Chris would lean over and he'd go buzz, buzz, buzz, buzz, buzz in their ear and they would go, and then they'd leave.
And you're like, what the hell does he say?
What does he say to people?
And so later on I realized like, oh, he, you know, what he was saying in their ear was something probably pretty amazing.
Yeah.
But he never showed this until this period of just a couple of years where he was arcing through the sky.
And the problem was it was only happening in the van.
Like when we got on stage, there wasn't really an opportunity for him to step up to the microphone and do this routine.
And he wasn't really comfortable on the microphone.
Right.
You know, like if he had an opportunity to join in that kind of thing, that like onstage banter in front of a crowd, he didn't, that wasn't where he wanted to be.
He didn't like it there.
And we were in the van every day like, oh, we've got to, you know, we have to make a TV show about you.
We have to like, we're just strategizing.
Like, how do we get you in front of people?
You're the world's greatest actor.
He could do any voice.
And after he left the band, he went to New York City.
He joined an improv theater group.
He joined UCB.
What?
Really?
But never made it above the level of people that were paying to take classes at UCB.
Right.
And he taught a couple of classes at UCB, but it's not like he joined a successful improv group.
Whoa, he's still handsome.
Look at him.
He's a very handsome guy.
And he went to L.A.
He's got great, great hair.
The greatest.
He had great hair when he was young and it was completely jet black.
And then as it started to get salt and pepper, it was great.
It never stopped being great.
My great uncle, my great uncle Truman, who was in the Merchant Marines, had the exact same hair.
He was incredible.
Truman was 85 years old, and his hairline had not budged an inch from when he was 15 years old.
Just looked like a washer brush.
Like a badger brush.
Anyway, Chris was one of my closest friends for a long time.
And I haven't talked to him in a couple of years.
Don't know what's going on with him.
Somehow it wasn't... Somehow that...
pressure cooker of being in that van and I think part of the pressure of being in that van was that Sean Nelson was there and that I was there and then that was a that was a kind of audience and a kind of a cauldron but if I could if I if I could have put on tape the that year and a half in the van you know it was it was a
something I can't quite account for.
You know, like you meet people and you feel like, I know who you are.
Like, I know you, Merlin, and if we went on a road trip together and you cracked me up the entire time, I have an idea of what that would be like, right?
You could crack me up the entire time, but I know what it would look like.
But I didn't see this coming, and this was somebody I'd known for years.
He was my roommate, for Christ's sake, for three years.
But I didn't – I had never seen this before, this –
And it's not that he wasn't himself.
He was still himself.
He just all of a sudden just had the power of complete mimicry and the power of just like improvisation in character.
I feel like this is a phenomenon that you could most succinctly summarize as just because you can crack up your frat brothers.
There's no guarantee that you would be a good stand-up comedian for many, many, many reasons.
And when you start untangling that, you realize how complicated all those things are.
There's some people who crack up their friends who could potentially become a comedy writer.
You could become a comedy producer.
And this isn't just true for comedy.
It's true for music.
It's true for lots of things.
But it's so rare to be able to take...
Let's just stick with comedy for a minute.
But to take that skill of being funny to people around you and convert that into being funny professionally on stage or screen.
Because it takes this totally different skill.
I mean, there's this totally different X factor that goes beyond knowing how to crack up John and Sean and Eric and Michael.
You know what I mean?
But it feels like it's right there.
It could feel like it's right there.
Just slightly out of reach.
But then you realize, oh, but there's...
there's the, the grind of having to get into a group like that, or like having to make these decisions.
And I just, I just heard a really good interview with Keegan, um, Michael Key about, is that his name?
You know, the guy from Key and Peele, about how he basically, they're asking him like how he decided to go to mad TV rather than something else, like say Saturday Night Live.
And he's like, well, it was money.
Like they, they were paying better at, at mad TV.
And that is also where he ended up working, working with, um, his partner and doing like writings, writing, um, sketches together.
Um,
I don't know.
This is a topic that I always find so interesting, and you can expand it way beyond comedy.
Comedy is where I feel like one of the places where you can feel it most strongly is that what a leap it is to go from cracking up your friends to doing this for a living.
But I think it's true for music.
I think it could be true for writing.
It's true for so many things.
I wonder how often people who have succeeded with something could even go to a high school and give a talk on how it is that they were able to make it big.
Because I bet there's so many ineffable qualities and micro decisions that would be almost impossible for that person to identify.
Well, and I think you're right.
The number of guitar players I've known...
Between the time that I first started knowing guitar players, let's say I was 15, right?
It's funny that I never knew a kid that was 10 years old and already a virtuoso.
The first guitar players I was even aware of, I guess, freshman year in high school, I knew that there were guitar players.
I mean, it was a thing that you could actually do.
It wasn't just on TV.
But by 15, I knew guitar players.
I owned a guitar.
But from that point until the present day, I have known so many guitar players.
And so many of them were amazing.
Amazing musicians and amazing, even like songwriters, who couldn't get to a position where they were in a good band.
Like, let alone...
a good band that went anywhere, but like they couldn't even put it together to get into a good band.
They either kept trying to make, kept trying to flog bands with a fatal flaw or bounced from one band to the next and couldn't ever settle in somewhere or wanted the band to be really centered on them, but they were missing a crucial skill like singing and
Um, and you, and you feel like then there are those few instances where you're sitting with somebody and they start to idly hum along with the radio and you go, Whoa, I didn't know you could sing.
Oh, you know, sing along with the radio.
No, no, no.
You have an incredible voice and it happens.
Mm hmm.
I regret to this day not doing a better job of corralling this person, but I was in one of those, something called a rock lottery.
It started in Austin, but we had one in Seattle, and I think maybe it's still ongoing.
But what would happen is they would invite...
a dozen musicians across a wide spectrum of, of instruments and ability and put them all together, you know, divide them up into like groups of five, two dozen musicians like here, you're five of you, you're five of you.
Like there's two bass players, a clarinetist, a person playing hand drums and a opera singer in this group.
And, and then you're responsible for writing a song and then singing it at the end or performing it at the end of the day.
It's one of those things that's interesting to do and interesting to watch.
I'm not sure that if it was happening in the garage of the house across the street right now, I would go over there to watch, but I guess I probably would.
It would be noisy.
I would have to deal with it.
But I participated in one of those.
And one of the other groups, so at the end concert, we're watching the show.
And it was like, oh, yeah, that's really interesting.
You guys had a theremin player.
Isn't that something?
He's wearing a hat.
But there was one of the bands that had a singer.
And he was a guy that just looked like kind of a punky guy.
Also wearing a hat and a leather jacket.
And seemed like somebody that smoked a lot of cigarettes.
And he seemed fun.
But he started to sing, and I just saw the future of music in him.
Like, you're the most rock and roll person I ever saw.
And it wasn't that he was that rock and roll looking.
It was just that his voice came out, and I was like, I want to start a band with you.
I want to be the guitar player in your band, and I don't want to play anything complicated.
I want to play three chords.
Every song is three chords, because it's all it would need.
Mm-hmm.
I just want to be that person, loud guitar behind you while you do that, whatever it is.
And I went up to him afterwards and I was like, wow, you're incredible.
Who do you play for?
And he named some band that I hadn't heard of and that I haven't heard of now.
And
I was like, wow, I'd really love to get together sometime or like just meet for coffee or something.
And he was kind, but he very much had that like, well, I'm pretty happy with my band, The Lamp Shades.
And I was like, okay, well, cool.
I mean, still, you know, we should hang out.
And he was like, yeah, we should totally do that.
And it wasn't like he was condescending.
He was just like pretty much saw a lot of – he just saw what –
He saw his future in the lampshades.
And I really wish I'd gotten his name because in music, it always changes, right?
Six months later, he might have been like, I wonder who that guy was.
I'd really like to get in touch with him.
But it doesn't happen very often where you see somebody that has that kind of
gift that no one has you know a gift and it's like they just stepped off the bus from Spokane in Hollywood and they're like which way do I turn I want to make it in the big town
And you want to be the creep in the powder blue Lincoln Continental who's parked across the street from the bus station, who's like, hey, need a ride?
Want to ride in a hot meal?
I think I know what you're talking about.
And it's a funny thing where if you think about how you would, in some ways how you, this is very cynical, but how you could reverse engineer success out of a lot of careers.
You take a person who is humble and
easy to get along with, shows up on time, looks for opportunities to be helpful, constantly improves their craft, is open to change, and accepting.
But if you think about what makes people successful...
Whether it's a guitar player or an actuarial or whatever, there's these certain qualities that you see in lots of people.
They may not be considered the Abraham Lincoln of what they do, but there's somebody that everybody could look at and go, oh, that person's a pleasure to be with, and it was great to work with them.
You've talked about Christina Aguilera and how she's always the hardest-working person in the room.
So you take all those kinds of qualities...
I'm probably missing a few, but anybody who has to do work with other people and in kind of changing situations, those are the kind of qualities you would want in everybody.
It would almost be better to engineer this...
this, uh, super race of terminators of people who had all of those qualities and then teach them guitar or give them voice lessons or do these other things.
Cause in all of the things we're talking about, sometimes it's just reluctance or not seeing that that's who you are, who you could be.
But so often it's like, well, you know, it's really, if you really think about what we do instead, it's kind of bananas.
Wow.
I somehow accidentally got really good at guitar.
So, you know, why am I not in the rock and roll hall of fame?
I was like, well, did you check all those other boxes?
Um,
Because all those other things are so important.
I think about this quite a bit, right?
Because just think about our good friend Lindsey Buckingham, who by all accounts is a miserable, awful person to not just work with but be around.
It sounds very, very unpleasant.
If you've seen that documentary of the Fleetwood Mac Getting Back Together, some Getting Back Together documentary, I forget what it was, where they're working on some album in recent times that
And Lindsay is just, I mean, you can't even stand to be, you can't even, you have to avert your eyes from the screen while he's on the screen.
Because you just have, there's so much bad blood in that band for so many very good reasons that it's such an act of graciousness just to even be in a room with each other that like you would all just, it seems like you'd all want to be on your best behavior and say, you know, bygones be bygones.
And let's just, let's just agree not to be assholes with each other for a few days and like try to do this thing.
And there's a camera in the room, so you're aware of that too.
And through all the years of Fleetwood Mac gossip, of course I always thought that Stevie Nicks would be the difficult one.
She's dancing around in a thousand scarves and singing about Rhiannon.
She's going to be the high-maintenance person.
But watching these documentaries, you go, Stevie Nicks is amazing.
She's the soul of, like, patient professionalism.
And Lindsey Buckingham is driving me and everyone else crazy, and they are going to great lengths to accommodate him.
And yet, here he is, this incredible guitar player and great... But always, like, pushing his personality into the center of everything.
And this is the... So this is... And I think not...
an invalid line of questioning, which is that in our contemporary world, we're taking it as read that what we should be doing with our kids and in our culture at large is removing all obstacles for friendly, good-natured people.
We should be teaching friendliness and good-naturedness.
We should be removing obstacles from the path.
of young people so that they don't have to confront adversity in the same way that we did, right?
We no longer put our cigarettes out on our children's arms.
But that's how John Bender became John Bender, right?
John Bender was the coolest guy in The Breakfast Club.
Mm-hmm.
It's just because nobody else had it.
Nobody's father had ever put a cigar out on him.
If you want to make an anomaly, you got to break some kids.
Right.
So but but the question is, like, Lindsey Buckingham's awful.
John Lennon was awful.
And would those people now have been kicked, had been bumped out of whatever their career path was at a much earlier time by people saying, you are awful, you're an awful bully, you're a mean person, and so you're not going to be given this opportunity, or we're going to be privileging that, your behavior, over your talent, right?
And so we're dis-including you and we're including, you know, Joe Goodnature over here.
But what you're missing is the what ends up like neutering the art is the discomfort, the missing discomfort, the missing frision.
And what you end up is sort of.
What you end up with is this kind of gray, nutritive paste of music and culture that I think we're even now starting to see.
Very few people who are really burning bright...
In that way where they're so captivating because they're on this path of self-destruction that you see like, oh my God, they are going to crater so hard.
And then they don't.
Think about even Nile Rodgers or whatever in 1978.
He was...
He's not on the path that we think of he's on now, right?
He was really burning bright.
Is that right?
No, just not – he wasn't a bad guy, but they – There's a lot of material out there to consume.
Yeah, living hard.
So I don't know.
I mean, you never want to – and obviously you can't reverse engineer it.
You can't say like, oh, let's – if you sit in this chair and you prick the ends of your finger with a needle –
Every day for an hour that will give you the the association with pain It will give you the familiarity with pain that will allow you to write meaningful music or make meaningful art But but we we are right now in
In a moment in human culture where we are hostile to pain and devoting a tremendous amount of energy to relieve pain and suffering from as many people as we can to as great a degree as we can.
Is pain too strong a word?
Because, I mean, you know, I think it's normal to say, like, I don't want my kid to have an infection and die.
It's another thing to say, like, I don't want my child to ever be inconvenienced.
Yeah.
But, yeah, there is that weird world between infection and death and inconvenience that I think this is all happening.
So this also gets into the things like we've, in quotes, bad words.
This is kind of this larger issue of, like, nothing should ever come along that makes you feel bad.
In my daughter's class, there is a child who at a certain point just this year went through a kind of looking glass and by all accounts before was a very nice person and now is a hitter.
And the school district doesn't know what to do.
The school district isn't very well equipped.
I mean, this isn't the first time this has happened and they have a lot of
They have a lot of solutions on a long continuum, and one of them is a weighted vest, and one of them is an employee of the school that comes into the class and is an assistant to deal with this kid.
And I know the kid, and he's a – you can see he's a lovely little boy, and he actually – there is something going on.
He does not want to hit.
He doesn't want to be –
He doesn't want to be having this experience.
Yeah, a lot of people don't appreciate that about all these problem kids.
You can just see the misery of them being run by some kind of clockwork, and they don't like it either.
Yeah, something's inside him.
And his parents never saw it before, so they don't know how to deal with it.
And it only happened when he went to school for the first time.
But now we're in a situation where my daughter comes home from school every day and says...
Well, you know, I got hit again.
He's hitting her?
He's hitting everybody.
Oh, God.
And nobody wants to be around him.
But he's also a nice kid and people want to play with him.
But what is happening ultimately is that everyone in the class is being affected by it.
Like they are getting – they are having an inferior experience of school because –
a component of being in school is that you might get hit at any time by this kid and he's disrupting learning.
And so here, but, but we're in this problem of like, do, at what point is he removed from school?
At what point is he sequestered?
At what point is he put into a, into a box of like, uh, the unredeemable, but, uh,
by the same token, do all the other kids have a right to be able to be in school and not feel like they're going to get hit?
And he's not a big kid.
He's a small kid.
He's just like, this just happens, right?
And I think every parent in the school, and given the makeup of this particular elementary school, it's really astonishing to me the amount of
Just general sort of class-wide patience everybody has.
It feels really different.
Yeah.
There is no parent that I've yet experienced in this group who's like, my child is having their education affected and I want this dealt with now.
Everybody's just like, well, let's see.
Let's try other things.
Well, we're three-quarters of the way through the school year.
And when I talk to my daughter about it, and I think back on my own childhood, you know, there were kids that hit me.
There are kids that hit.
And ultimately, like, the amount that her education is being affected by it, I feel like there's another side of that, which is that she's getting an education, right?
In the fact that there are people that hit and then nobody else knows what to do.
Like the grown-ups don't have a solution.
And this is painful.
It's painful for him.
It's painful for everybody.
And it's one of the things.
Yeah.
And the adults that feel like they should, I mean, I think in a lot of other cases, and it might just be that we have a very lucky group of 22 parents where everybody recognizes the depth of the complication.
You could be in a lot of other schools and there would be some crusader who demanded that there was something done.
Or somewhere in the school administration office, this got put into the file folder of bullying, which we've all agreed is a no tolerance thing.
And then this kid becomes tagged as somebody that needs not just like special accommodation, but needs some punitive information.
um, reeducation.
Yeah.
And so forth and so on.
But, but what we, what is a five or six year old kid?
Yes.
Six years old.
Yeah.
Um, or, or, or that he needs to be medicated, like profoundly medicated to, uh, you know, in order to survive in, in, in, in order that he be a good, uh,
six-year-old in this context where the stakes are listen to stories learn to use scissors you know learn your alphabet in order to do that he needs to be on some kind of like cocktail of drugs and so my take on it is look we're we're just trying to we're just trying to be in this on this arc hopefully
Every year, there won't be another kid who makes you scared.
But there's always going to be a kid that's a problem.
There maybe are a couple.
And one of the things that you learn when you have a kid that hits is don't stand too close to him.
Or don't be next to him without being aware that he might hit you at any point.
Be his friend.
Be nice to him.
But keep one eye open.
And these aren't necessarily bad lessons.
You know, it's not what you would want.
Everything you're describing there, I feel like as somebody who, you know, I have my own room.
I was in mostly safe schools, safe neighborhoods.
You know, one of the things I found challenging for a lot of my adulthood is just I'm the super class of issues I'm going to call dealing with neighbors.
So that could be people that could be your roommate in college.
It could be people in the adjacent room, people above, people below, but people you do not have control over and people where you can't just press a button and make them change.
Um, even if they are quote unquote wrong in your eyes.
And a lot of times until you get your head right about this, you think everybody's wrong.
That's not doing it the way you want.
You know, they're, they're using their car at the wrong time of night or whatever.
They put out their trash wrong.
There's all these grievances that you can come up with because maybe, I'm just speaking for myself, maybe because I got very accustomed to being able to control my environment and have recourse for when it didn't go my way.
A certain kind of privilege, if you like.
And I think that's one thing where what you're describing here is super complicated, especially with a little kid.
We're not talking about somebody who's in 10th grade and setting off firebombs.
We're talking, it sounds like, this sounds very similar to what happens at my kid's school, which there are little kids that are...
they're different.
They're, they're not, they're not, um, governable in the way that everybody would like them to be.
So as you say, so what is the solution?
Do we put them in the Brown reading group?
Do we fill them full of drugs?
Like, what do we do?
But that to me, that's, that's, that's one place where like, it's been a hard road for me is dealing with the superclass of issues that I will call neighbors.
Cause I felt like, Ooh, I would be all you like Yosemite, Sam, like you've got to stop being that way.
And like, no, they don't have to stop being that way.
If you grow up amidst lots and lots of people living a 24-hour life in a way that doesn't comport with yours, well, then you naturally grow up understanding that, well, I could put in earplugs or I could move or I could do these other things.
But it's like pushing a rope to try and change everybody to conform to your idea of how that behavior should go.
And in the case of the poor people at your school and the poor people at my school, I mean, there's really at least two problems.
One problem is that what that kid's doing is disruptive and potentially dangerous.
We've got to deal with that.
But like I said, the ungovernable part is the hard part.
You've got one kid in a class like that.
I'm very sympathetic to this because these poor people are just at sixes and sevens with the resources they have.
You get one kid like that in a class, it's a pain in the ass.
What happens when you get two kids like that?
Or you get two and a half or three kids like that in the class.
And pretty soon, that teacher is spending 60 to 80% of their time
just being a referee or uh or a paramedic yeah right and that and the other kids are just staring at their fingernails and that's not why we send them to school not getting noticed let alone rewarded for the fact that they're not punching somebody else or you know what i mean so but my my my take on what my responsibility here is is that my like
Everybody's trying to figure out what to do with this little boy.
And everyone is taxed because of all the things that you're saying.
You can't just change him.
You can't take him out.
You can't adapt the entire school to him.
But what I can do is not be a problem in the sense that I can use it as a teaching experience for my kid myself.
And we can, you know, and you never want to say like, I'm sending my kid to this school and now I'm in a position where we're trying to make the best of it.
But in fact, that's what you're always doing.
In every situation, you send your kid to the public school and you try to make the best of it.
And even if everybody in the school is friendly, your kid is getting educated en masse.
Nobody's getting a tailored experience.
And in this situation, there is this other issue.
And if it wasn't a little boy, if there was a radiator in the class that every day at 1.45 suddenly went on with no...
and couldn't be turned off and the temperature of the room went up to 102, there are lots of kids in America that are in a classroom like that.
And if it was just that right across the street from your kids' elementary school was a guy with a jackhammer that for an hour every day jackhammered for a month and a half, that's also something that's happening in schools across America.
And so in this situation,
I'm trying to help that little boy and his family and the school and my own kid by saying, yeah, you know what?
Sometimes you got to sometimes it's the neighbor problem and your neighbor puts the garbage out wrong.
And after you leave five super passive aggressive notes taped to the garbage, you have to realize they're not going to change.
And so don't.
Let yourself be in a situation where you get hit by this kid.
How about that?
It sucks, but it's better than... I mean, what would the advice be for something like, what are you going to do?
Are you going to stop riding public transit because occasionally there's somebody on there acting erratically?
I mean, you're not talking about bombs going off every month.
You're talking about the occasional interactions with people who you can't control, that are doing things that you don't like and scare you.
And in that case, I mean, the only solution is to walk away.
I feel like we're now over a kind of hump where there is, at least at this level, and I'm surprised.
I went into public school thinking that the other parents and that the conditions within the school were going to be kind of as I imagined they were 10 to 15 years ago, where this would have been addressed with a lot of over...
action that there that this would have been an emergency situation it would have been a situation where the the parents of the child were really over examined like you start with some pearl clutching the pearl clutching turns into something must be done about this now my you know my child is in this school too and is being you know harassed and bullied and subjected to physical violence by this other kid and i want redress you know all of that stuff that i imagine i
Was what was going on in the schools 10 years ago, because I remember then, you know, I lived through those years and I thought that's what what is how it would be now.
And I feel like there is because of the ebb and flow of time there has been reintroduced into these institutions.
and I think it's largely because the parents are coming from a different place, some reality and some sense of like, you know what?
Yeah, this is just how it is.
And we all recognize that there are limited resources and we all recognize that this is just one of the normal challenges of life.
And so nobody's going to go to prison and nobody's going to be put on Ritalin.
We're just going to figure out a workaround here.
And, you know, what's funny is when I come into the school now,
the teacher will often say, hey, will you go over and just give him a really big, strong hug right now?
The first time I was like, what?
Because I like him, but I wasn't sure if that was even allowed.
She was like, yeah, I think that I can feel him building up, and I think what he needs is a big, strong hug from a big man.
This is a thing.
And I was like, yeah, okay.
And so I went over and I was like, hey, buddy, how's it going?
Come on in.
And he was like, huh?
And I wrapped him up and gave him like this.
You're a good guy, you know?
And you could just feel him like.
Yeah.
Like he just wanted.
He just wanted somebody that was way bigger than he was to envelop him for a second.
Did you ever see that Temple Grandin movie with Claire Danes?
No, I remember last night I was watching a Claire Danes movie called Homeland.
Melancholia.
Melancholia.
In that movie, she invents a machine for basically squeezing herself.
And they're trying to throw her out of school because they think it's some kind of a sex thing.
I think there's a lot of thought on this now.
I've thought about getting a weighted blanket.
It's a thunder vest.
I've thought about, I mean, because I think that would calm me down a lot.
But when I'm anxious when I sleep, I think having a weighted blanket would help.
I think there's a lot to that, to the sort of self.
Well, the swaddling is basically what it is.
Absolutely, yeah.
Swaddle your ass.
And I think there are a lot of people probably listening to this program who are right now thinking, is there a way that I could find something in my own house to swaddle myself with right now?
Self-swaddling.
Yeah, you got to get a little bit.
I think it's a weighted blanket.
I'm betting you don't have one.
I've looked into it.
It's hard to get from Amazon Prime because they're pretty heavy.
Yeah, right.
I mean, that's the thing.
Shipping.
It's shipping that's going to kill you.
That's how they get you.
Yeah, that's how they get you.
But I do feel like...
I do feel like part of being sane and raising a child in a sane way is to not expect that there's a solution to every problem to not expect that you are going to get perfect redress for every complaint.
And that's, and I feel like that maybe was the philosophy for a while there.
And that, that, that it was, that it, you know, that where we are now is a product of having been through that and seen, uh,
Oh, we're not going to go back to a time when the bully was on the playground and was physically torturing your child.
But we're also not going to take every kid that brings...
Like that every kid that sits out on the playground and sharpens a stick, we're not going to immediately put him into protective custody or like I'm trying to be circumspect about this because I think when you get into these issues, it is helpful to think about privilege.
I really I really do.
Because one thing you're saying there is like I think you're making a really good point here about like, you know, how you get redress.
And there's that term they use, I think it's a legal term, where they say to be made whole, which is the idea that somebody has done something or caused something to happen to you that has taken money from you.
It's usually money, but it's taken something from you.
And now there has to be some way to make sure that that is made right, that you are essentially made whole.
Meaning, so like in one example, well, if you're working in a mine and you lose an arm...
just hypothetically, because the company was careless about something.
Well, you can't give me my arm back, but you should give me something to compensate for the fact that you took my arm.
That's going to have a huge impact on my life.
Now, what are we going to do to make me whole, so to speak?
Right.
But that idea, I think that is an idea that you talk about like sort of a baseline of like, we need to get back to my normal.
I think that is such a privileged position and people are not aware of it.
It's like, hey, listen, what is the rest of the world going to do to get me back to where I'm comfortable about how all of this works?
And to me, this is just a thousand angles here into this whole, like, you know, whether it's making America great again, which it's essentially this idea of let's go back to a time when everybody but white people had a reason to be scared, where we could demand that we be made whole and everybody had to capitulate to that because reasons.
So I don't know.
And I do agree with what you're saying also, where my kid's been in school for a number of years.
It feels so different than when I was a kid.
I mean, it might just be because I'm an old man now, but I don't know.
There's just so many things that seem so different.
And there does seem to be less hysteria about almost everything than I expected.
whether that's from the parents or whether that's from the teachers the faculty the faculty and the staff like there's just less hysteria about stuff than there used to be i'm super gratified by it i it's it's so much better than i expected because you're dealing with adults you're not dealing with slightly advanced children who are wondering how they're getting ripped off yeah yeah i i really i really did expect that i was going to sit in a group of parents
And say like, well, you know, kids will be kids.
And they would all go, no, kids will not be kids anymore.
And in fact, everyone's just like, yeah, I tried to make cake pops to make them all to appease them.
But they're monsters.
And I was like, yeah, high fives all around.
Right.
Cake pops don't solve anything, do they?
I, I, I feel, I feel like when I hear that made whole thing and that whole mentality, I just, I reflect.
You just pick at that.
Just pick at that just a little bit.
And it's completely, it's crazy is what it is.
It's like, so the world owes you and you're like, you're again, you're olive oil's father and the world owes you an apology.
It seems like it seems what I hear is two people in divorce court.
And you think about the number of divorces where that feeling that I'm going to be made whole and I'm going to take it out of my partner.
We're splitting up and I'm going to be made whole.
And the acrimony that comes into a divorce when...
In fact, everybody got about what they're due, right?
Like you can't be made whole here.
You're breaking up and it's not a question even of money.
Like you're just mad or you're sad and you want you and you feel like your arm got lopped off and you've lost all sympathy for your partner.
And so you're going to be made whole and, and the divorce takes a,
It takes a path where what could have been – I mean it's like the partition of Palestine or whatever.
There was a moment when Arafat could have signed the piece of paper and nobody would have been happy.
But there was a solution there.
Bill Clinton was standing there with his fucking hat full of milk.
And it was like, we all agreed.
Here it is.
Here's the plan.
We all agreed on this.
We've been working on this for decades.
This is it.
Here it is.
This is the moment.
And Arapat was like, but if I do that, I won't be popular with my little gang.
And so, nope, I'm not going to do it.
And then it was like, that was the one chance in history.
And
And you blew it because you wanted to be made whole in a way that you couldn't be made whole.
There was never a way to actually work for peace, a peaceful solution here and also for everyone to get what they want and particularly for you to be made whole.
Nobody gets nothing.
And I think about all the divorces that happen where it's like you're right there.
You both acknowledge like this is it.
We're done.
Like you get the car.
I get the boat.
Uh, here's our visitation.
Here's like the, you know, here's how it all splits up.
But you want me to say that I was wrong.
Or you want, or I'm not going to leave here until you shake my hand.
Or it's Festivus and it's time for the airing of grievances.
Here's all of the things that I have been storing up and tolerating for years.
And I want to give you this Excel spreadsheet of emotional brokenness.
Then I want you to go through each item and explain it and apologize and pay me for it.
Right.
And enter it into the court record.
And at that point...
What could have been a like largely amicable solution to what is a fairly normal problem of two people splitting up goes into a thing where it will it can never be repaired.
And it was over nothing.
It was over something symbolic or some desire to be made to to have a thing that cannot be redressed be made right.
And.
I try to see in every conflict now, and particularly since I'm now receiving treatment for mental illness,
and say, like, is there a way to be made right here?
No, because time has passed.
I can never be made young again.
You're putting a Band-Aid on a wound that healed or scarred years ago.
Yeah.
Like, no amount of Neosporin is going to fix that wound.
I was at a music commission meeting the other day, and one of the magazines here in town, the weeklies, wrote an article about the music commission.
And that article made the music commission visible for the first time to people in the larger community who are like, oh, there's a music commission.
And so we had a commission meeting in our in city hall where we sit around and the chairman has a gavel and people give us PowerPoint demonstrations.
And we sit at a big table with nameplates out in front of it.
And all of a sudden there were all these people in the room and it was like, and every time we have a meeting, it's like, all right, well, we'd like to open it up for public comment.
And periodically somebody gets up and says, Hey, uh, you know, I just, I work for real networks and I just thought I'd come and see the meeting.
Thanks for having me.
And they sit down and you go, great.
All right.
Anyway, like who approves the meetings or, you know, let's approve the notes from the last meeting or whatever.
I don't, I hardly pay attention, but yeah.
This time, the chairman was like, let's open it up to public comments.
And several people got up who were members of a protected class here in Seattle, which are the people who get up at public meetings and rant about their problem with the city, their problem with the city.
And so there were several people who gave little speeches, but two of them gave...
And they worked in concert with one another.
They were like a little a team.
One got up and gave a 15 minute long speech where she excoriated the music commission for things that we can do nothing about.
And then her friend followed up and both very emotional, long presentations.
About how it was all our fault about something.
And they hadn't even been aware there was a music commission until this article came out the week before.
So we're sitting there just like, and it's very emotional, like, whoa, this is really heavy.
And it's emotional in a way that the chairman feels like, I don't want to interrupt because this seems very cathartic for you.
Or like, maybe this is stuff we all need to hear or this type of thing.
And at one point, one of the women said in the in the height of her fury about all the injustices, she said, you know, and now I'm standing here and, you know, now I'm standing here leaning on a cane.
I used to be young.
And it was like, whoa, I don't think the Music Commission has the power to... She really buried the lead with that one.
Yeah, like, I don't think we can address that.
Oh, God.
That you used to be young.
But, you know, this is the public comment period.
Now, the reason I bring it up is there are all these emails back and forth from Music Commissioners, like, all apologizing to each other because no one knew what to do.
And it was like, hey, you know what?
Nobody knew what to do in there.
You don't have to apologize.
It's a wild one.
Did you guys decide to take any action as a result?
I moved that we make her young again.
But I didn't get a second.
There was just a long, uncomfortable silence.
That is so painful.