Ep. 250: "Disaster Coffee"
Hello.
Hi, John.
Hi, Merlin.
How's it going?
Good.
Spooky.
Spooky.
Yeah, there's something spooky going on over here.
Oh.
Is it something you can share with our listeners?
Yeah, I think so.
It's a mystery.
It's like a Nancy Drew mystery.
You know, we've talked about this before.
You're not...
You're no stranger to swag bags.
Oh, yeah.
Swag bag to me, it's something you get.
It's called a gift bag.
It's a bag or box of things you get usually for participating in something.
Maybe it's from a show, like a trade show or a performance.
And the second characteristic is it's usually got some kind of promotional materials, like, hey, try this coffee.
And third, it's usually clearly identified why someone gave it to you.
Don't you think are those performance characteristics of a swag bag?
You don't get non-promotional stuff for not doing something and not know where it's from.
Absolutely.
Did they tee you up on that one, you think?
You nailed it right to the carpet.
Here in the Northwest, of course, all the stuff in the swag bag is also locally sourced.
Oh, of course.
Right.
Farm to swag bag.
Farm to swag bag.
And so I do a lot of this kind of event where you are partially where you are promoted to even within the event.
with a bag of things and usually there's some chocolate covered coffee beans there's a gift certificate to get a coupon for an app i have sometimes a coupon for an app or a comic book that someone uh on someone that's also on the show has recently done a lot of flyers but also typically the nicer ones up here will give you a bottle of local wine
And a, you know, a big bag of local coffee.
And of course, I'm not interested in the wine, but I am interested in the coffee.
And so I always if it's a show with multiple people on the.
On the bill, I'll kind of do a little wheeling and dealing.
Yeah, you said this is how you get, this is one of your primary, if not the, one of your primary sources of coffee is you will trade wine for beans.
That's right, wheeling and dealing.
And they're happy to get the wine, you're happy to get the coffee, hakuna matata.
Happy to get the wine, happy to get the beans.
Every once in a while I'll do a show with somebody like Bobcat Goldthwait that's getting on a plane the next day.
He doesn't want either thing.
He's like, yeah, you can have my coffee.
So you walk out of there, armful of coffee.
You passed by that one pretty quick.
Are you telling me you've met Bobcat Goldthwait and he gave you his coffee?
Oh, I've definitely met Bobcat Goldthwait several times.
All right, I'm going to put a pin in that.
I'm not 100% sure if I ever got a bag of coffee from him, but it's... Maybe an app coupon?
It feels likely that I have.
I just almost know it.
I mean, you know, Jeff Goldblum.
Whoa.
Like the law of big numbers.
At some point, Bobcat Goldthwait will give you coffee on an infinite timeline.
Yeah.
I mean, given the world in which we live.
Anyway, so as we've discussed before on this program, I have a stockpile of coffee.
Probably, you know, somewhere out there there's an axis.
There's the axis of how long is this coffee going to be storable before it becomes putrefied or whatever happens to it.
My sense is forever.
But I had coffee everywhere.
I had coffee like monkeys in the trees in Thailand.
Everywhere you looked, there was a bag of coffee.
Hmm.
In the refrigerator, in the pantry, in the freezer.
You know, because people yell.
Some people say, put it in the freezer.
It'll last forever.
Other people, coffee people.
A lot of people say not to do that.
Don't do that.
Dries it out or makes it bad.
Yeah, because it kills the biome.
I had so many bags of coffee that I could try every one.
I could put it in the freezer for the freezer people.
I could put it in the crisper for the crisper people.
It was in the pantry for the pantry people.
It was right on the counter for me.
Well, I went downstairs today.
to prepare a pot of coffee for our program.
There's no coffee in this house.
I looked everywhere.
This is not the first time this has happened.
You've shared this before.
This is always a news story.
You know, every day somebody's born who hasn't heard about your coffee.
But you've talked before about the spooky action at a distance of having as a background situation that there's coffee around.
And every time you look, there's always coffee there.
And then suddenly you get your swag coffee.
And then suddenly one day you go, you need new coffee.
You look in the crisper.
You look in the freezer.
You look in the pantry.
Boom.
No coffee.
Where'd the coffee go?
Yeah.
Yeah, but there was... This isn't a thing where I was like, oh, I used all the coffee and I didn't remember.
This was like there were apples on the apple tree and then the next day there were no apples.
And so I'm wandering around and I'm like, what the... As my daughter would say, she's picked that up from me now.
And she will say 40 times a day.
Sometimes, oftentimes to herself.
what the oh it's very cute when a six-year-old goes cute what the she doesn't know that the next word is fuck or hell good for you right good for you that takes a lot of restraint she just thinks that the phrase is what the yesterday yesterday i before i could catch myself i i angrily called somebody a dipshit oh felt kind of bad she said i don't think that's a thing i said believe me it's a thing
Oh, it's a thing, my dear.
So the pantheon of what my family likes to call inside words continues to grow.
Dipshit is now in there.
A dipshit's kind of like a ding-a-ling, right?
Dipshit and a ding-a-ling definitely will cross the street holding hands.
A jackass is way too harsh.
Oh, God, look at these ding-a-lings.
What a dipshit.
Yeah, a jackass is something else, yeah.
A jackass is shitting closer to an asshole, I think.
I mean, asshole continuum.
You're closer with a jackass.
Yeah, if you're a jackass, I get the feeling that a jackass is what you call an asshole if you are standing in front of a diner.
Well, see, I think also I think a dipshit is not being the way they are by design.
I think I think I think a dipshit is an accidental idiot.
And I think a jackass is a deliberate asshole.
Precisely.
Right.
Like a dingaling has good intentions.
A dingaling thinks they're doing fine.
That's the that's the primary characteristic of a dingaling.
They think they're doing fine.
This is why I'm late.
I'm late because I'm a ding-a-ling.
Oh.
I mean, I want to hear your what the story, but just for what it's worth, I was trying to be helpful this morning.
As I left the house, I saw a quantity of things.
There's a class of things that we have taken away to have things done to them and then brought back.
And I thought on the front porch were the things being brought back.
And so I congratulated myself to my wife.
I said, oh...
It looks like we got a bunch of this stuff that was taken care of.
In this case, it's laundry.
The laundry has returned and there's three bags and they didn't screw up the order.
And she's like, that's dirty laundry I put out this morning.
And you know what I thought to myself?
I thought to myself, you are such a ding-a-ling.
Yeah, that's a little ding-a-ling.
I'm going to have to go home and take it back outside.
That's almost – yeah, I'd say you were a dipshit there.
You're right.
You know what?
I think I've taken that hard right turn into dipshit country.
Yeah.
So what the – you say to yourself, what the – So ding-a-ling, right?
But then there's ding-dongs.
Oh, Ding Dong's kind of a little bit affectionate.
It is.
Ding Dongs are like, you know, you're pals, right?
Yeah.
You're Ding Dongs, but they really don't have it.
They just can't figure it out, right?
The Ding Dong will lose your keys over and over again.
Like, my brother is a little bit of a ding-dong every time he comes over to my house.
He calls me, like, 45 minutes later and says, did I leave my wallet there?
What a ding-dong.
Like, why did you take the wallet out at my house?
Definitely not a jackass.
Just a little bit of a ding-dong.
What a ding-dong.
Mike Squires is a ding dong.
He's also a jackass.
Oh, so you say to yourself, you say, what the?
Oh, what the?
And I'm walking around and I'm thinking, you know, I don't know.
We didn't talk very explicitly about it.
But, you know, my relationship with my millennium girlfriend is a thing of a thing of the past now.
Oh.
Okay.
Take a moment.
Okay.
Okay.
This is the first I'm hearing of it.
Yeah.
Okay.
So more coffee for you.
She moved out.
Oh, boy.
Okay.
Okay.
Well, here's the timeline.
She moved in.
You sure you want to talk about this?
Is this okay?
No, it's fine.
I'm not going to go too deep into it.
Don't go too deep.
But that was about a few weeks ago now.
And it was a bumpy road, a hard road.
But as I'm walking around my house, I'm like, didn't she, as she was leaving...
steal all my coffee oh no don't think that thought don't think that thought knowing that i wouldn't know it because i had you know i had the coffee that was in present use which was left alone did she steal the reserves millenniums don't see race and they don't understand revenge so that so that i wouldn't even notice until it was until like three weeks later you think your millennium ex-girlfriend was gaslighting you a little bit i don't know it's like that's part of the gaslighting is you don't know how how would you even know
Here I am one wandering around in my night shirt in your house in my house Where you where you sleep where your children play with their toys?
Yeah, I'm opening up the crisper.
I'm going I'm looking I'm looking behind the bags of frozen blackberries in the in the freezer.
Those are good for smoothies.
Oh, they're nice Put them on ice cream.
Mm-hmm
Pushing stuff aside, like, oh, you know, back there.
I'm all the way back there where the packages of white fish that I bought some time long ago, aspirationally.
You're not going to eat those.
You're never going to eat those.
I'm going to eat fish.
I'm going to learn how to cook fish.
Fuck you, I got fish in my freezer.
Fuck you.
All the way back there.
I'm rumbling around.
There's not a single, there's nothing.
And so not a bean to be seen, not a bean.
And I know that I had, well, let's say $2,500 worth of coffee somewhere in this house.
And it's just like Hitler's gold.
It's like gone.
And so I'm thinking this was, I mean,
Boy, I misunderstood her.
Yeah.
If only you'd known earlier.
Yeah, I know.
That's pretty good.
I didn't know what you had coming.
Every girlfriend is basically just a future ex-girlfriend.
Whew.
okay so so far in my life you got the cod you got the cod you got the white fish yeah yeah and but no beans so uh so here's what i ended up doing would she throw it out would she put it in the attic is the whole point is the true gas lighting to put it somewhere you would never look and then make you feel crazy when you finally find it there i don't think so no your daughter put it in her hope chest
I think she filled a bag with it and then at the airport was just handing it out free.
Just like, hey, you want some coffee?
It's like the Hamburglar meets Robin Hood.
Yeah, that's right.
She took from the rich and she's giving to people in an airport.
Dennis Moore, Dennis Moore.
So I'm drinking right now.
I had to go into... So I told you, right?
My mom sold her house.
And her...
I didn't tell you this.
Jiminy.
We got to do this call more often.
My mom woke up one day and was like, I'm selling my house.
That's how she works.
She gets up 430.
It occurs to her.
Maybe she writes a letter.
Maybe she sends me a slightly terse email.
Maybe she realizes it's time to just move this unit.
But with perfect clarity, right?
Isn't that part of the hallmark of her decision-making?
It's just utter clarity.
It's just hanging right in front of her.
This must be done.
She's like, fuck these eucalyptus trees.
They're gone.
Fuck these particular eucalyptus trees.
She's like, Barney's about to go live on a farm.
I'm like, Barney is one of our favorite things.
She's like, not anymore.
And so she sold her house.
It's not like it happened overnight.
It was a totally brutal process that partially involved her saying...
All of these things that are yours in my house have to go.
Oh, God.
And another part of it was all this stuff in my house that belonged to me that was part of my crazy—this is in her voice—that was part of my crazy world also has to go to you.
And so her 50-year accumulation of disaster materials in preparation for Mount Rainier erupting, in preparation for a 1 in 10,000-year mega-earthquake,
in preparation for the failure of the grid due to a Stuxnet virus, in preparation for every conceivable kind of disaster my mother had, all of the required conditions.
implements and accoutrements.
And now all of that stuff is at my house.
Where would it go?
I'm sorry, John.
The stack is insane.
Where would it go in your house?
Well, I do have a barn.
Oh my God.
And a basement and a crawl space.
A barn wants to be empty.
Well, not this one.
Scooters, prepper supplies, probably got some powders back there.
So many saws.
Candles, D batteries.
Saws and other saws.
Saws and saws.
And also, there was a while there where I would, every time somebody was tearing down an old house, I would pull up and I'd say, you using those columns?
Oh, you're like liquidators.
Yeah.
So I'd grab everything.
I'd grab all the old windows or the columns or the faucets or whatever.
I'll have it.
I'll have it.
So there's, you know, I could build another barn with what's in the barn and outfit it with its own scooter and chop saw.
And anyway, so, but part of the disaster material is there's enough Nescafe on my property to,
To feed like the second brigade of the third army.
You could give Patton's third army coffee for a year.
With the freeze-dried disaster coffee that my mom had stuffed into the spaces between her rafters.
And now it's all here.
And I'm like, ugh.
I mean...
But the thing is, as soon as you throw away your disaster coffee, then Stuxnet, and then where are you going to go?
Who's the smart guy now, right?
Yeah, right.
And a freeze-dried coffee doesn't take up any space, you know?
You stuff it everywhere.
Put it in your medicine cabinet.
So here I am, drinking disaster coffee, wondering if everything, you know, wondering if this isn't the fucking Truman Show, and some prop designer just forgot to put all the coffee back after they've
after they switched out the whitefish in the back of the freezer.
You say maybe you were away somewhere doing your work, and they had to strike the set for the next setup.
Yeah, or something.
They were coming through, and oops-a-daisy, right?
I don't know how many times they flipped this stuff.
Part of the storyline, it's just you can't know, because then it wouldn't be the John show.
I mean, it would be amazing...
If they were able to maintain as much continuity as seems to be in play here.
Yeah.
But every once in a while.
Until you start looking for it.
Like once you start noticing those cracks.
Oh, my.
Okay.
So is this going to get to a point where you're going to tell me that you're drinking instant coffee?
I'm drinking instant coffee.
That is a disaster.
I opened a giant jar that was like, John, I'm not even picky about coffee.
But like instant coffee is not good.
Yeah, I feel like I'm backstage at a, at a, like a Belgian rock show.
That's, that's the, the, the, the bitter taste.
They put out some, they put out some, well, they put out, they put out some Belgian, for craft services, they give you some Belgian fruit, they give you some, some Belgian, some Weissen beer in, and, and then, and you say, and John always says, hey, any chance to get some coffee?
And they say, maybe in sewer, and they bring out a jar and a spoon.
For Belgian disaster coffee.
They do.
There's a little bit of that.
There's Belgian disaster coffee.
I mean, Belgians also will give you a mushy meatball that you're not sure what's... It's kind of like crunchy on the outside, mushy on the inside.
Which, hey, look, I'm not opposed to a mushy meatball if you're washing it down with some instant coffee, but...
Right before you go out for a show, that a big glass of milk, just ready to go out and rock the house.
Right.
But the terror that's in me now is not just that this may have happened, but I have to go to a store now and buy coffee like a regular.
And I don't even know how to do that.
Yeah, you could, you know, you could, there's a service in your area that you could utilize.
You could have it two hours, maybe less.
Did you know that I joined Amazon Prime?
The devil you say.
I did.
I did.
I lay down.
I flopped down.
And I did that thing that my dad used to do, which is he would flop down and just go...
And then you knew that whatever it was, the decision had been made.
The game was afoot.
That's like just that slightly breathy sound of hope leaving your body.
Like when you decide this is a thing you've got to do.
And so my mom has been yelling at me about Amazon Prime for I don't know how long, forever.
It's quite a thing, John.
And she bought me Alexa.
you have an echo in your house because she talks to alexa all day don't say don't say the name sorry sorry sorry you're gonna say uh optionally hey dingus alexa who is merlin man oh my god you're gonna make me edit this aren't you um ask who the mother of dragons is alexa who is the mother of dragons
Well, my Alexa's in a different room, so she can't hear me.
Or maybe her little light is spinning and she's like...
waiting for waiting for me to say something i don't know i'm not sure my relationship i'm struggling with all respect i'm struggling for breath right now because there's at least four revelations this week that are very the least of which the least troubling of which is you drank fucking instant coffee that's that's the fourth weirdest thing this week yeah i know i mean this is a big week john this year you're dropping a lot on me are you is there any more coming
Well, baby, maybe there's a ton going on.
Maybe, baby.
Maybe, baby, there's a ton going on.
There really is a lot of stuff.
A lot of stuff going on.
A lot of balls in the air.
A lot of balls in the air.
There's an Echo Dot in my house listening to me all day long.
I forget it's there.
You know, and I'm talking to the walls.
I'm talking to the plants.
I'm running things by.
I'm running things by the plants.
You know, what do you guys think of this?
The plants kind of, they give me good advice typically, but now Alexa is listening.
Or Ding Dong is listening.
I don't know what she's doing with that information.
But I got Prime.
Every once in a while I'll remember there's a dot on my counter and I'll walk by and I'll say, Alexa, play Black Sabbath.
And then it's like immediately, and I'm like, nice.
Stop.
You're going to be using that one a lot.
Yeah.
So I've got this Prime now, and I know for a fact I'm not using it to its best advantage because all I'm doing with it is I'm just watching like McHale's Navy for free.
You get the Man in the High Castle.
Bet you'd love that.
Man in the High Castle?
That's right.
Yeah, that's the one.
That's the Philip K. Dick Nazi one, right?
I've never seen it.
It's the Philip K. Dick novel about the what would happen if we'd lost World War II.
Oh, I love those.
It's a pretty good program.
You should check it out.
I mean, they're not paying for this.
Man of the High Castle.
Right.
But I have not yet done the thing that you appear to do, which is like, I need a Kleenex.
And then there's like a guy holding a Kleenex.
Well, it's not proud of this.
But yesterday, as I was walking around making a nice coffee, I said, hey, hey, dingus, reorder paper towels.
And it's out on the truck now.
Oh, wow.
Well, technically tomorrow.
Bleep, bloop, bleep.
Hey, Dinkus, order paper towels.
You know what's fun is you're in front of your web browser.
Yeah.
Is that your definition of fun?
You know, it's fun.
You're in front of your web browser.
Go to Alexa.Amazon.com.
Alexa.Amazon.com.
And then if you're not already there, click on the home button in this ugly web page and you'll see a history of what it heard you ask for.
No, really?
mm-hmm some of these no some of these there's most of mine are play kqed uh at some point it thought i said and then you can actually listen to the audio of what it heard you say uh it heard me say uh play god mommy so i played a song called god bless mommy uh it heard how old is andy andy summers i did ask that 74 uh should use tinder
It heard me say?
Is nice to her?
It heard me say?
I'm just saying, it might be kind of fun to go down and look at some of the things it's heard you say.
Maybe you didn't even notice it heard you say.
Alright, well, here's... How much is that a Sinbad?
how much is that a sin bad all right here's here's what it's telling me i wanted to know the weather and then the weather and then the weather and then the weather oh it's really paying for itself already isn't it and then i said how are you and she searched bing for how are you and she said i'm just fine thank you and then um
And then I said, what's a dog's favorite instrument?
And she said a trombone.
Oh, that's the weather.
That's funny.
And then the weather.
Weather.
I listened to or someone here listened to Radiolab.
And then I said, say Alexa.
And she said how to pronounce Alexa.
Why is Lena Dunham controversial?
Who is Lena Dunham?
Is there controversy about Lena Dunham?
I have no idea.
Other people are in my house.
There's some multipurpose copy paper that I bought that I don't own a copier, so I don't know why.
There's lots of copy paper here.
Here's some more of mine.
Is good?
That's what is that's on you?
Yeah, here's thank you doesn't feel that but.
Hmm.
Oh, that's okay.
Is your desk okay?
Are you factory?
As far as I can tell, the only thing on this that I have any recollection of ever saying to Alexa is...
Alexa, play Black Sabbath.
So I've used it, as far as I can tell, other than, I mean, maybe I woke up in the middle of the night and I was wandering around mumbling about Lena Dunham, but I think the only thing I've ever said to it is play Black Sabbath.
And it did that very successfully, so I should... June 7th, 2017, 9.01pm, play Iron Man by Black Sabbath.
Boom.
That happened to you, too.
Oh, yeah.
It comes up a lot as like, you heard me earlier riffing on that Monty Python sketch, which my daughter and I watch a lot of Monty Python now, and she didn't remember what I said.
And so I said, oh, play Dennis Moore.
And it played me a snippet from Dennis Moore.
A lot of times I'll say, oh, you know that one Black Sabbath song, the one from the Iron Man movie.
And it'll play it for you.
Brown noise, brown noise for sleep.
That's nice.
A lot of KQED in here.
Brown noise for sleep.
It's not the brown sound, it's brown noise.
Yeah, I was going to say.
You've got to be real careful what you ask for.
Please no brown sound.
Stand up your Christine.
You know, I say that to people all the time.
Stand up, you're Christine.
Stand up, you're Christine, sir.
Who won Get Up on the Downstroke?
Get a ball in the down stroke.
So I kind of need to learn from people.
I'm just going to tell you, buddy, let go and let God, because it is a process to get comfortable with doing this.
It might take you weeks, but it will pay off.
It takes a while to not feel like a ding-a-ling or a ding-dong.
When you're doing this, because you're going to feel you might if you're like most people, and I know you're not.
If you're like most people, you will feel very self-conscious about doing this.
You will feel perhaps stupid doing this, but it does eventually take.
You're saying talking to the to the bot.
I'm saying the whole stack.
I'm saying first of the gal.
Getting comfortable with the whole idea of this thing being in your house is difficult.
Getting comfortable with remembering that it is there and what it can do, that's a whole other thing, as you say.
Doing it often, then remembering enough and then doing it and not feeling stupid, that's two weeks right there.
But then eventually you just find yourself doing it all the time.
Huh.
Not necessarily to buy stuff.
Like I say, I mean, like I decided I'm not using a clock radio anymore because I wasn't using the clock and I wasn't using the radio that much.
And I wasn't never using the alarms.
I don't want alarms in my life ever.
I mean, like reminders, but I don't want to like, you know.
So we've gone to pure, we have 8 o'clock in the room, but that's how I play the radio now.
I play the radio through my dingus.
So is your dingus hooked up to other dingai?
We're a multi-dingus household.
Yeah, I bet.
Okay, I'm sorry.
I did not mean to take you.
God, we have so much to cover.
So you what I was going to say, though, is you can do what's called Prime Now.
Are you aware of Prime Now?
No.
Go to primenow.amazon.com.
All right.
Hang on.
And now I live in a far flung part of town where you can't get like instant or like one hour delivery.
But usually within within two hours, you can get almost not anything, but a lot of the most common stuff delivered.
Index cards, compost bags, cat litter, Carhartt caps, batteries.
These are things that you want, but will they deliver like vintage Navy uniforms?
Let me check.
Vintage Navy uniforms.
No, they have men's Navy adult crew sweatshirts for $8.99.
It looks like it's salmon in color.
Okay.
Will they deliver Tony Llama boots, size 12?
That's one L, right?
Yeah.
Size 12, okay.
No, no, they don't have that.
No.
Let's see if they have llamas, L-L-A-M-A.
I can get a book called Llama Llama Jingle Bells or Llama Llama Mad at Mama.
What about boots?
Boots.
Boots.
This is, oh, they got all kinds of boots.
Shama Llama Llama.
Shama Llama Ding Dong.
You could get, see, but let's look at coffee, C-O-F-F-E-E.
Oh, yeah, coffee, coffee.
Well, that's the thing.
You can get you some Starbucks, some Dunkin' Donuts, some Jevalia.
Oh, you get a big Maxwell house.
You love that.
You can get these, these terrines of this.
I'm not saying this is always going to be the best, but this is our go-to.
We do get either Pete's or Starbucks.
Uh, French roast is our go-to.
And they, they will bring that 12 ounces of that to your house.
Five 99 in two hours.
Whoa.
Now I know it's killing the economy.
Oh,
The other day, I was looking for some Red Wing boots for a friend of mine in size 15.
And I discovered that size 15 shoes are not easy to come by.
The companies all are like, well, we make all kinds of shoes up to size 14, and then they quit.
That's officially where the curve gets to.
There's not enough people at that size to produce those at scale and have them in stock.
Yeah, that seems crazy to me that they wouldn't at least somewhere out there be like, yeah, we can get those for you.
We do have some.
We just don't, you know, we're not keeping them on the shelves here.
Very hard.
So can you see if Amazon can can can your Amazon help me find a size 15 red wings?
Well, I'm going to just guess they're not going to have size 15 shoes for two-hour delivery.
They're looking more at the kinds of things one says, oh, I'm out of paper towels.
Yeah.
Or you could buy another Amazon Echo.
They'll deliver those to you.
Isn't that ironical?
That is ironical.
It echoes all the way down.
Let's see.
You can get Amazon Echo in black or white.
You can get a dot.
You can get a case for your dot.
Oh, a dot case.
But aren't you supposed to just leave them lying around?
I live naked.
Why would you put a case on them?
I don't know.
I think some people are fussy about those things.
That seems like a Jesse Thorne kind of thing to do.
Put your dot in a case?
Yeah, you put your dot in a case.
I don't want that.
I don't want that.
Then you get a case removing tool.
It seems to me in my own life that things like paper towels and coffee and butter and socks and stuff like that are never the things that I...
find myself needing.
What I need, what I look on the internet for in the middle of the night is just really weird stuff.
A Wendell-Wilkey campaign pin.
Yeah, but I feel like I desperately need that delivered in 24 hours.
Oh, I know the feeling.
That's the problem.
I need as many
descent pullover windbreakers as i can get what's your bottom price get them here asap and then you know then i order them on mass and then i sit every every day on my chair and i watch down the road for the truck to arrive i know and it's like come on come on this is what i need and it's like butter and bread and stuff that you know that stuff finds its way to you it's a quotidian
You know, that's the easy, as you say, the low-hanging fruit or the low-hanging bread.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So, okay, so I'm looking here at primenow.amazon.com.org.
I see here snacks.
Mm-hmm.
Shop clothing and accessories.
I'm going to go there in a minute.
Shop Ben & Jerry's.
That's a whole layer.
That might be a business development relationship.
Top layer.
Ben & Jerry's summer treats.
Business development.
Okay.
But just go to the search field and search you some coffee.
Here's some partners.
Elijah Meyer.
Do you have those there?
This is regional.
Elijah Meyer.
Oh, these are local stores.
I see.
And right here, the first local store in Seattle?
Amazon.
Yeah, shop local stores.
You've got Amazon, Peninsula, Beauty, Pet Food Express.
We have Bartell Drugs.
I've talked about Bartell.
You've talked about Bartell.
It always confuses me.
Okay, top categories.
Grocery, alcohol, health and beauty.
Health and beauty.
HBA, they call it.
Oh, I do need some Q-tips.
See?
Yeah, you know, never stick anything inside your ear bigger than your elbow.
Except for this thing that's specifically designed to do that that you're not supposed to do.
I do it every night.
I do it every night when I'm watching TV.
Do you know Scott Simpson gave me a Japanese ear cleaner?
Hi.
He gave me some sponges.
Yeah, he's crazy about those freaking sponges.
He loves the sponges.
You know, we're talking about a guy I haven't spoken to in a year because he won't return my text.
It's like he turned into a cloud.
But I still have all these sponges under my kitchen counter.
Every time I look at them, I'm like... Yeah, you get the magic sponges.
Yeah.
Household Essentials, electronics and video games, Amazon devices.
That's its own.
I could get a Fire tablet.
pet supplies toys kids and baby home and kitchen i am so sorry john i i have grossly derailed this whole conversation by introducing you to this world i just wanted you to be aware of it headphones here's a question about headphones how many times do you buy a new pair of headphones
uh like things to listen to music on that go on my ears okay uh not that often um so my average is out to once a year
Now, see, my go-to, one thing is I bought the Apple cordless ones, and I'm pretty happy with them, so I use those a lot.
Before that, I used these really nice in-ear, look like little butt plugs you put in your ear, and they were really nice, and they work great with the iPhone, but they weren't made very well.
I'd have to replace them just about every year, but no, not too much.
Do you go through...
You've made the transition to wireless earbuds, and you're no longer somebody that's yelling at Apple for not having a headphone jack?
No, I'm still yelling at that, because if we want to listen in the car, we've got to have a dongle.
You've got to have a dongle, John.
Ding-dongle.
Ding-dongle.
Oh, Funfetti.
Pillsbury Funfetti.
Wait, wait, come back.
What is that?
What is Funfetti?
That looks fun.
Oh, look at that.
Gluten-free cake?
I don't want it.
I don't want that.
If they brought it free, I would need it.
Leave it.
Oh, strawberry.
Oh, strawberry frosting.
They'll just bring frosting to your house, John.
Like a tub of frosting.
Okay, I would order that.
Shit, dog.
You know what?
Here's what a shit show it is.
Ben and Jerry's Summer Treats.
I clicked on it.
Here, there's only five flavors.
Okay.
Caramel Sutra Core.
I don't know what that means.
Caramel's felt with a K. I don't either.
Americone Dream.
Ugh.
Chocolate chip cookie dough, which is like it's good, but I'm not a freaking secretary in an insurance company.
Nobody like I'm a full grown man.
Yes.
Peanut butter cup and chocolate fudge brownie, also a secretarial.
brand so where is the new york super fudge chunk where is the everything but the these are the great flavors these are the ben and jerry's top flavors oh there's one i like a lot what's it called it's like chocolate fantasy everything but the girl there's one that's like chocolate chocolate chocolate and chocolate it's like it's like again it's like a monty python sketch but it's like it's like fudge ice cream with fudge and more chocolate and and like it's all what's called chocolate fantasy
Fudge Master?
What's it called?
Here's the thing about the word fudge.
Yes.
There's no way.
There's no accent.
There's no accent.
There's no way.
There's no type of way to say fudge.
It's really gross.
Without it just.
It sounds dirty.
Just resonating in the room.
Fudge.
And you try to get it out.
You try to slip it into conversation like, oh, I'm going to get the fudge.
And it's like boom.
Boom.
You might as well have just clanged two cymbals together.
Fudge.
And then it just rolls around in my head for the rest of the day.
Fudge.
Now you've got to live with that.
Fudge.
If you had a lisp, still fudge.
Fudge.
There's no lispy way to say fudge.
Nope.
You can have any kind of accent.
Fudge.
Fudge.
So anyway, that's a way that you could get coffee.
All right.
And this strawberry frosting looks pretty good.
It's got the little doughboy right on it.
Creamy supreme.
Strawberry frosting.
No way.
I am going to try out their cakes, you know, because I'm always looking for, okay, I'm going to put this in here.
This is one thing I want in the middle of the night.
Choco.
Well, you're saying that this isn't going to come in the middle of the night, though.
Oh, I mean, you should go check.
So here's what you do.
Go put something in your cart.
Click on the cart, and I betcha it'll tell you.
Let me see.
So when I go to proceed to checkout.
Oh, signing in.
Mini vegan chocolate cupcake, 12 count.
No.
No.
Oh, yeah.
See, look at that.
Select delivery time, 12 to 2.
Boom.
Leave it at the door.
Leave it at the door.
You tick that off.
If it's not perishable, then leave it at the door.
You don't have to interact with people.
Leave it.
Leave it.
Ice cream chocolate molten cake.
No, here's my objection to cookie dough brownie cake.
Fudge.
It is that ice cream is more expensive to make than cake.
Ice cream is more expensive to make than cake.
Yeah.
So every time they put cookie dough in your ice cream, what they're basically doing is hollowing out a giant space in your ice cream and putting some cheaper shit in there.
Mm-hmm.
Right?
You might as well get cotton ball ice cream.
Mm.
Get as much ice cream as you can in your ice cream.
That's why they call it ice cream.
And then if you want cookie dough, you can go get cookie dough.
You're saying you slather it with aftermarket fudge and cookie dough.
But don't put it in there for me.
I'm not a child.
I know how to fashion my own dessert.
Say that again.
Oh, no, no, no.
I was just suggesting that if you're a grown-ass man, you know what kind of aftermarket.
If you want the spinning rims, you know how to put that on your ice cream.
You don't need some Wall Street fat cat drizzling up your ice cream for you.
Just give me the fucking ice cream.
I know what to do with ice cream.
Don't be cute with ice cream.
If I want to put strawberry frosting on there, Creamy Supreme, I know how to do that.
Do it.
You know what?
Go buy a bag.
I don't need a canister of that.
I don't need that shot through my ice cream.
Just give me the ice cream.
That's why it's called ice cream.
That's why it's called ice cream.
And this is the thing.
Like cookie dough.
Mm-hmm.
Cookie dough is wonderful.
You're saying that's how they get you, is what you're saying.
That's exactly how they get you.
They fill it up.
They're like, what's cheap?
Cookie dough.
What's cookie dough made out of flour and water and...
So let's throw a bunch of that into this tub that should be filled with fat, creamy ice cream.
I heard on an informational podcast the other day that in the old days, one way of ripping people off is when you'd sell them like a barrel of oil, you'd like half fill it with water.
So the oil would be on top and then you get the water underneath.
It's a similar situation here, except with bad dessert decisions.
That's exactly right.
That's how you hide a radio in Hogan's Heroes, right?
Or you put it in coffee like Eddie Murphy does, right?
You get your German bearer bonds and you could stick it in and it throws off the dogs.
Yeah, that's right.
Those bearer bonds, they'll alert a dog like pow.
They train them on bearer bonds.
They smell like cocaine is why.
Well, because if you take any bearer bond, it's going to have a trace of cocaine on it.
Well, I don't know if that's exactly scientifical, but I think in practice you're going to find Flex-A-Coke on pretty much any kind of a monetary device like that, especially from Germany, let's be honest.
Well, you remember in the—I think this was not a thing—maybe they said this in the 80s, maybe it was only in the 90s, but that every $100 bill in circulation in America had cocaine on it.
Mm-hmm.
Did you ever hear that?
You think that's a law of large numbers type situation?
Yeah, I feel like it's one of those things.
I'm starting to think that explains almost everything is the law of large numbers.
Law of large numbers?
I think it feels to me more in the category of the type of thing that
stoners say to each other while they're sitting around like messing with their drug paraphernalia you know what i mean like sure yeah like like like a cop if you ask a cop if he's a cop he has to tell you he's gonna show you his dick yeah right um like oh dude every hundred dollar bill in america has cocaine on it it's just the type of thing that drug people say in order to yeah the kind of conversation that's like why snopes exists
Why Snopes exists.
Yeah, did you know if you go into a Baskin-Robbins with a dog, they have to give you free ice cream.
It's like, well, are you sure about that?
I'm pretty sure I read that somewhere.
I haven't tried it, but I'm pretty sure it's, yeah.
You know, it justifies, I think within a drug subculture, it justifies a certain worldview.
Like it promulgates it.
That we're not the ones that are crazy.
It's the world that's crazy.
Mm-hmm.
It's that little bit of – there was a while there where every person I knew that was on the drugs was reading a book called Behold the Pale Horse.
Are you familiar with the book Behold the Pale Horse?
Behold the Pale Horse.
is, I think, one of the original source materials for the... Conspiracy theories.
It was one of the original tomes where all the extant conspiracy theories of the time, and I'm saying, you know, 80s or whatever, they were all gathered together into one sort of comprehensive, like,
Aliens are controlling the government.
They live under the North Pole.
This is what explains all the windmills in the desert outside of Palm Springs, but it also explains Jackie Kennedy's, the fact that her ring was red yesterday and today is green.
It was really a comprehensive overview written in the style of, this is obviously coming out of one guy's obsessive
research into this stuff pre-internet.
And so a long, long time before internet, this book went around the land of tweakers, and it wasn't
It was not associated at the time with any kind of liberalism or conservatism.
It didn't have a taint of being – it wasn't as hilarious as this might sound.
The idea of our government being controlled by UFOs was not yet tainted by politics.
Yeah, it was it was a it was a nonpartisan conspiracy theory.
Right.
It felt like you could be you could absolutely.
And I think this is still true.
I mean, I have a lot of friends who are leftist nominally leftist.
God, it's it's no no question.
Absolutely.
And but it's it's it's something that explains some kind of a big thing that doesn't have a plausible explanation another way.
And it's satisfying.
usually these theories are satisfying of a way as a way of understanding the world and the beauty part of most conspiracy theories is it serves to prove that everything you suspected about some kind of group is true because obviously this is this is the kind of effort that they will go to in order to keep us blind to reality that's right well oh and this is the great thing so this book behold the pale horse was uh written by this guy bill cooper and
And his his credentials are this is and I remember even at the time as people were passing this around, I read it.
I read it and I remember this was this was the source of my my great revelation laying in bed one night, just like totally whacked out and.
And the jumbo jets go over Capitol Hill in Seattle.
And this jet was coming in on final approach to SeaTac Airport.
And I was like, if the UFOs.
We're going to disguise their ships as something.
Wouldn't they disguise them as jumbo jets?
Oh, we had this conversation.
I know.
And then from then on, I was like, every airplane is a UFO.
And that came from that came from reading Behold a Pale Horse.
But so Bill Cooper, here's here's his.
And it's not in Behold a Pale Horse.
That was just my extrapolation of some of the data.
Now that you got your mind right.
That's right.
Now that I'm now that I'm now that I'm.
I've had a glimpse behind the curtain of the top secret world that actually is.
But Bill Cooper's, his like CV or his bona fides were that he was a former United States Naval Intelligence, wait for it, briefing team member.
Hmm.
And it's like, huh.
Right at the end of that, it sort of peters off a little bit.
It peters off in a way that I wasn't quite expecting.
Like, former United States Naval Intelligence, yes, yes.
Briefing, yes.
The only thing that can make that sillier is if you added the word spouse.
Team member spouse.
Right?
I was adjacent to someone who attended a briefing, possibly.
United States Naval Intelligence briefing team member spouse.
Yeah.
You know the Germans haven't heard from them.
Secret wife in here in plot.
So, I mean, so that, even at the time, I was like, hmm, team member usually is something that indicates that you're working at a Kinko's.
I don't see it like a rank there.
It's not like Commander Bill Cooper, former U.S.
Navy intelligence briefing team member.
So anyway, Bill Cooper had some info.
He had some data sets.
But this was a thing that now that we'd all read it, the fact that we were sitting around doing like bad drugs that had been cut with baby laxative –
made perfect sense given that of all the people in the world who should know about what's really behind the curtain it would be us it would be this group of people that had that you know that never washed their sheets um i think that's still still true today there's something about sleeping on dirty sheets we're doing other things on dirty sheets it gives you it gives you insight sleeping on dirty sheets and that's a really good little soul lyric
pretty big week everything's coming everything's coming unglued i've you know it it's one thing you know i'm i'm prone to melancholy well you know it's just good you're ruminative yeah a good friend of mine just recently said goes with the territory which which territory
Well, she wasn't 100% clear on which territory it was.
That's something you're going to have to just think about.
Like you wake up maybe 2, 3 in the morning, you go pee, and then for a couple hours you think about that.
Yeah, you're like, hmm.
She presumed that I knew what she meant and that we were talking about the same thing.
And she was like, yeah, it goes with the territory.
And I was like, right.
But it was never clear exactly what that territory was like.
Is it all the territory?
Is it none of the territory?
Is it her territory, not mine?
Are we overlapping territories?
I was thinking about territory.
But it's one of those things that it's hard, strictly speaking, to disagree with.
It's one of those statements, like, I'm going to say, like, what are you going to do?
That's right.
What are you going to do?
Yeah.
What are you going to do?
What can you do?
What can you do?
Right?
Am I right?
That's one that you say all the time, am I right?
Yeah, but it's also just one of those, like, it seems to be a statement about something, and it's really just more like a social declaration of solidarity about something.
Right, and I think that's very, very true of, goes with the territory, because I think the assumption is that that territory is, what, either that if you're arty,
you're prone to melancholy or if you're i mean there's you know i'm i'm public with being a lot of things right you're you're oppressive right prone to prone to prone to melancholy that's the territory really chronic coffee loser yeah i mean you got you got an umbrella uh stand full of swords
That's right.
You're very, very forthcoming about these things.
That, in fact, may be the territory she's referring to.
You know, look, if you have an umbrella stand full of swords, you're going to be a little melancholy sometime in the middle of the night.
That territory is going to have things that go with it.
Well, sure.
I mean, do you want to talk about it?
No.
Why?
Well, it goes with the territory.
Yeah.
Talk about it.
What are you going to say about it?
What can you do?
You know, I'm a little melancholy.
Oh, okay.
That was a nice talk.
Fist bump.
You know, oh, don't be melancholy.
What?
Can't say that.
Nobody that's in the territory would ever say that to anybody else in the territory.
Yeah, it's like in the X-Men movie when the parents say, have you tried not being gay?
Or in this case, tried not being a mutant, which is code for have you tried not being gay?
It's code.
People speak in code a lot of the time.
Right, right, right.
Oh, sure they do.
Even now.
Even now that everybody's out, you've still got to speak in code.
You better.
Because that's fucking poetry, too.
Yeah.
Am I right?
Am I right?
Yeah.
I was walking around the backyard.
Well, no, let's be honest.
I was mowing the lawn.
And what I just first said wasn't untrue because I was walking around the yard.
It's just that I was pushing like a... It's a whole different picture, though.
When you go from any image of you walking around on the lawn, you suddenly seem much more focused if I imagine you with a mower.
Is it a hand-push mower?
Yep.
Is it a circle-swirly Brady Bunch or is it like a snapper?
You know what I'm talking about?
We got a circle swirly one because we don't have that much yard.
You know, like a Peter Brady.
No, no, no, no.
It's the ones with the rotary blades you push around like you're an old man.
what's the other kind what's the other kind oh yeah oh i see what you're saying like oh the right the did i use the wrong term of art for what i'm talking about here talking about a manual lawnmower like a non-powered manual yes right so when i was a kid that my mom didn't trust me with a with a motor vehicle and so she just gave you rotating knives on a handle
Yeah, so she gave me one of these 1925 lawnmowers, and I was out there.
We had a huge lawn.
That was my job, right?
I got out of dusting and vacuuming.
No, wait.
Vacuuming was my job, and...
and mowing the lawn was my job i didn't have to dust so really any kind of machine on a stick that is pushed that's going to be in your wheelhouse from the time i was about seven years old those were my jobs okay and so i'm out in this giant yard pushing this like it took me all day in the hot sun to mow the lawn but that was you know look it's cutting trail that's where i got the idea that's right anyway i'm out there mowing the lawn and i decided
I decided this year I was going to try something new, which was that I was going to let my grass grow tall.
I was going to let it go up to seed.
Oh, you're going to regret that.
But I was going to cut paths through the yard.
Cut paths through the yard.
You get like an English garden.
That's right.
Isn't that a phrase?
You get an American garden and everything's got to be in perfect rows and containers.
The English, they love a crazy fucking garden.
Let the garden be the garden and then we'll create what you call a desire path.
I will make a path.
I will make a path through the English garden.
Waiting for the sun.
Well, quiet desperation is the English way.
Off I went and I was making little roads through the grass that I maintained for a while.
And it was very fun.
And the little roads would come to little intersections where they would connect with some other little path that was headed over Hill and Dale.
And you could go and you could get in my little system of paths and you could go wander all around.
Question, are they curvy?
Oh, yes.
Fucking A, I love this.
Yes, because I learned from the United States Interstate Highway System, if you make a road too straight for too long, people will fall asleep and drive off the road.
Is that what they learned?
Yes.
The original Interstate Highway was, I think, the Ohio Turnpike or the Pennsylvania Turnpike.
And their first attempt was like, let's just build a road.
Like, let's just build this road.
We're going from here to there, point A to point B. Let's just build this giant straight road.
And people, after a fairly short amount of time driving on a just flat, straight road, just would just...
Become mesmerized and just drive into the ditch.
I've done that where I've driven for maybe half an hour and forget that I'm driving.
And then I remember I've been driving.
Yeah.
So they realize that they need to put sort of giant gradual turns and swoopy little, you know, like give the driver some work to do.
Even if it's just kind of keeping these big, broad, swooping curves.
But don't let them look all the way out into the horizon and see their destiny.
Is this a real story?
Because that's super interesting.
It's almost like it's a tiny little bit.
Obviously, there's the visual and physical, the visual stimulation, the physical feedback of doing that.
But I bet it's also just the most tiny little microscopic dopamine hit.
In the same way that if you're driving a race car around a track really fast, I bet that's tons of dopamine because you're making so many decisions.
But that's just the littlest bit of like, hmm, I'm driving a car.
That would totally keep you aware.
Well, so I feel like this is a real Malcolm Gladwell-y kind of thing.
This is sort of a TED Talk-y thing to talk about.
Did you know, and I have no real, I cannot cite anything that I've read about this.
I don't think there'd be any way to disprove you, so I wouldn't worry about it.
But if you think about it, you should be able to go, you should be able to leave Yuma, Arizona, and drive to...
austin texas without ever having a curve in the road i guess going through las cruces you might have to like but certainly it could be you know i'm guessing this is i don't want to think about this too much but i bet part of it is also like what land we could get you can eminent domain the shit out of a bunch of that land to make it straight but then there's sometimes you're gonna get the old man in the up house you're gonna have to like have a little path go around that or you get a las cruces
Something where you have a movable object and a, you know, an immovable road, you have to accommodate that.
When I crashed my motorcycle back in 1986 in Oakley, Kansas...
My excuse for it was that the road had been going straight for a long time, and then as they were building it, there was like a cow that wouldn't move, and the farmer was pulling on the leash on one side, and the U.S.
Army Corps of Engineers guy was pushing on the cow's butt.
Like, just cow wouldn't move, so they drove the road around him.
They built the road around him, and that was where the curve came, and I didn't see it, and I drove off of it.
They added like an unnecessary semicircle.
Unnecessary semicircle.
Because I'm hauling ass, right?
It's like 1135 at night.
I've got the throttle wide open.
And way off in the distance, I see a car come up over a hill coming directly toward me.
And I've got my brights on.
And I'm a courteous driver, even then.
Even at the ripe old age of 17.
And so, and here I am.
I've just got this motorcycle just wrapped out.
Wah!
On Highway 40 outside of Oakley, Kansas.
And I'm thinking, I'm making it.
You know, I'm making it to Kansas City tonight.
Or whatever I thought.
And here comes this car over the hill, and I go, I'm a courteous driver, and I turn my brights down.
Oh, no.
And at this point now, I just have my regular headlight on.
And at the speed that I'm going, that is giving me some advance notice in the three-second range.
I see something come into my headlights that is three seconds away.
And your brain...
So there's one part of your brain that consciously goes, I'm a courteous driver, I turn down my lights.
But there's some part of your brain, and maybe I'm spoiling the story, but there's a part of your brain that also goes, and I'm assuming, naturally, that this will continue to go exactly straight in the way that I'm straighting right now.
Exactly.
Because the car that's coming toward me is coming in a straight line.
I see...
That pattern.
And I see myself.
And so what could possibly be in between us?
Is there going to be... Is the bridge out?
No.
Let's assume no.
Sinkhole?
Let's assume no sinkhole.
Let's assume no corn monster.
Corn monster commemorative cow.
It would just be natural to assume this has been going straight the whole time.
Why, for heaven's sake, why would it not keep just going straight?
Right.
And...
Again, my courtesy is that I don't want to be coming at this person for the next two and a half miles shining my bright right in their eye just to turn it down like when I imagine that the distance is close enough that light suddenly becomes... Oh, now he can see my light.
Now my light is bothering me.
Well, the two things we know is we're both driving and we know this thing is impossibly straight.
That's the two things all we need to know.
We are in Kansas.
It is by definition straight.
And so here I am.
Wah!
It's three seconds ahead and the road goes.
All of a sudden, out of the gloom, out of the gloaming, I see the little reflectors on the side of the road just indicate that the road just goes left turn.
If there was a sign, you didn't see it.
There was not.
Well, I don't think you didn't see a large like cow semicircle next half mile.
No, no.
There was no like a roundabout ahead with a cow in the middle.
Yeah.
And this road went zoom.
And I was like, wow.
And I was not, let's be honest, the world's most seasoned motorcyclist at this time.
You know, there are a lot of things about being on a motorcycle.
I have tried to drive motorcycle like things and found it hard.
But my feeling is that like so much in a young person's life, most of your time on a motorcycle is spent not crashing.
And if you haven't really driven a motorcycle until you've crashed it a bunch, because that's always an option.
Yeah, you have to crash to learn how not to crash.
If you haven't had your ass kicked yet, it's not really that you're successful.
It's just you're really only successful after you've lost.
Yeah, I agree, right?
You're skating along.
It's like young people celebrating how they're healthy.
Well, it's like, of course you're healthy.
You're young.
Like, you didn't earn that.
Right, right.
You're just not broken yet.
Of course you're healthy and free.
Of course you still have your life in front of you.
Of course you could get a different degree than... If you spend a lot of time on forums... Of course you could have put $40 a month into retirement.
Just fucking $40 a month.
What a difference it would have made.
You know, when your kid goes to college, it's going to cost a million dollars a semester.
What are you going to do then?
Yeah, right.
Of course, you could have considered you might have a kid someday.
Yeah, you better have matching funds.
Go ride your fucking motorcycle.
Ride your fucking motorcycle.
Get out there.
Get on the cow climbing circle.
Let me know how that goes.
Do you ever go to forums?
Yeah, sure.
I go to forums.
Okay, so one of the forums that I go to is old men that drive Porsche 911.
The drivers or the people who observe them or both?
All of it.
It's a whole enthusiasm.
It comes with the territory.
Oh, boy, they love to bitch.
But one of the things that's true about old Porsche 911s, because they're a rear-engined car.
The Germans love a rear engine, don't they?
Well, you know, they like to engineer things.
I don't want to be too normative.
But the thing about a German is they will engineer it, right?
They want to build it.
They want to draw it and then build it according to the drawing.
Anyway, if you are in a Porsche 911 and you are going fast through the twisties, let's call them that.
Let's say that just to please people.
You're going through the twisty roads.
A truism is that you do not lift off your accelerator in a corner.
Because if you go into a corner with your foot on the gas and then you're going too fast and you get a little scared and you lift your foot off the gas.
The back end of your Porsche 911 is going to cut loose, and it's going to spin out, and you're going to crash.
Oh, because it's behind you.
Get thee behind me, engine.
So if you get scared in a corner in a Porsche 911, the thing to do is give it more gas, not less.
Turns fucking out.
I never would have guessed that.
Yes, because if you push the gas down, the car will sink down and the turn radius will... It's like learning how to back up a truck with a trailer.
You have to let go of everything you think you understand about angles.
That's right.
You've got to put your hand on the bottom of the wheel and steer backwards.
You have to go against every instinct.
You know what I'm talking about, right?
Oh, yes.
You've done this.
You were there when I...
The one trailer driving story of all time.
That's one of my favorite times I've quivered in fear with Sean Nelson.
And so many times, but that was one of the best ones.
Vanderslice really hadn't worked that out with you ahead of time, had he?
At all.
So you've got a rear-engine German.
Yep.
And so you're going around the curve.
But so this is true of motorcycles, too.
If you go into a corner and you realize that your geometry is wrong and that you feel like, oh, shit, I'm in this corner.
I'm going too hot.
And if I don't figure this out, I'm going to go off the road.
Yep, yep, yep.
And your instinct is to let off the gas because, right, you're going too fast, so you let off the gas.
But if you're on a motorcycle and you let off the gas, you're going to straighten up and now you're really going to go straight off the road.
And what you what you need to do is give it more gas and you will.
It's this incredible feeling.
That seems that seems so crazy.
That's like me and anti-lock brakes as somebody who used to own a rear engine Volkswagen bus.
Uh, I'll tell you what I knew is you just, you pump lightly.
Pump-a, pump-a, pump-a.
Not pump-a, pump-a, pump-a, but pump-a, pump-a, pump-a.
Like you're trying, like if you're, like you're trying to, trying to awaken a fat man.
Just gentle little pushes.
And then you get into one of these, and so that's, I made my bones on these terrible old cars that you'd never slam the brakes on, because guess what?
Everything locks up, and you're in the paper tomorrow.
And now today, you don't do that.
You don't go, you don't go tappa, tappa, tappa on brakes anymore, right?
uh no i don't think it's a whole new it's a whole new world john i mean it's not that new but it's still newish to me most of the driving that i've done in my life was on non non anti lock brakes i guess i guess you call them lock brakes uh well i mean you probably started off in a car with drum brakes and then it had disc brakes was the big it was the big invention but
Now, yeah, you don't do that because if you do, you're just messing with the anti-lock brake system, which wants to do that for you.
Because guess what?
It's pumping for you.
It's pumping for you.
Isn't that right?
It's doing its own pumping, right?
Yeah.
And if you get in there and try and get involved in that process, you're just gumming up the works.
You're going to fudge up the works, yeah.
Yeah.
But the machine is trying to do it, and the new car is doing it.
All four wheels are doing it differently based on the traction that they sense through their phones.
Is he using science for that, John?
So much science.
You know who else likes to engineer things?
Japanese car makers.
But the thing about driving a Porsche and a motorcycle is that if you do want to slow down, you do it before the turn.
Before the turn.
So you let your gas off while you're still going straight.
Here comes the corner.
You let your gas off while you're still going straight.
You don't necessarily have to put on the brake.
Just letting the gas off will allow that sort of engine compression to slow your vehicle down just enough.
And then as you set up to go into the turn, you put on the gas, not take it off.
This is so messing with my head because I feel like the one piece of knowledge that I've got about cars, and as you know, I don't enjoy driving.
I don't like cars.
But I feel like the one piece of knowledge that I have, it's got a little bit of Eastern philosophy to it.
I feel like in my head, the first step towards stopping is to stop starting.
So before you hit the brakes, like for example, let's say you're going on the grapevine and you suddenly see the red brake lights start going and getting closer and closer and closer.
Before you hit the brakes, stop accelerating.
Oh, that fucking grapevine.
The grapevine.
Well, my number one rule on the highway is if I see brake lights of any kind, I put a little Mario Brothers coin over that car and the coin says ding dong.
Right.
At this point, they are identified merely as a ding-dong.
That coin could go up in value if they turn into a dipshit.
Right.
Because you do not need to touch your brakes in normal driving.
No, the Germans have whole studies about this, John.
Have you read the studies about how traffic will be better if we quit driving fast and hitting our brakes?
Wow.
i feel that in my oh shit dog there is a body of fucking work about this about the problem i've seen visualizations of this the problem is you don't you want to be going faster than everybody else but you're in traffic so you drive real fast and you're breaking you drive real and the impact the knock-on effect that that has for everybody behind you it could take
It could take an hour for that traffic to clear up just because you hit your brakes.
It's like a Chevy with butterfly wings.
I'm hurting inside because it's so evident.
It's unnecessary.
So you're driving.
And if you want to slow down, take your foot off the gas.
Because the thing is, you should be looking...
far enough ahead that the person in front of you doesn't matter.
It's the person, five people in front of you that matters.
And so if you see that person start to move in a different way, take your foot off the gas.
Take your foot off the gas.
Because you know it's going to come.
You know whatever they're doing is going to come.
If you see a brake light, there's no world where, at least in my head, because you could probably simulate this with VR, I don't know.
But to me, there's no world where I see brake lights anywhere in front of me and I accelerate.
Right.
That just is wrong.
No, that's the wrong thing to do.
But that does not mean that the opposite of accelerating... Is not braking.
The opposite of accelerating is no longer accelerating.
Right.
Take your foot off the gas.
Number one thing.
Like, I will oftentimes drive all the way to town and never touch my brakes.
They're two different instruments.
It's two different instruments.
It's like when you try to end your hammering by grabbing a screwdriver.
It just doesn't stand up to logic.
I told you the time we were driving on the PCH and Chris Coniglia dared me to go all the way to Big Sur without touching the brakes.
Oh, that's the wrong guy to dare.
Don't dare, John, to do that.
It was such a fucking Nantucket sleigh ride.
He's a jester.
He's a crow.
He's an imp of a man.
He's always provoking people.
Isn't that his main job?
He's a provocateur.
Yeah, it was, certainly.
Is he dead, John?
He didn't die, did he?
I don't think he's dead.
Is he still doing funny yuck-em-ups?
Isn't he doing funny yuck-em-ups now?
I think the last thing I heard was that he's teaching improv in Portland, Oregon.
Yes, and?
If you want to go learn improv in Portland, Oregon, look for Chris Cornelia.
I think he's got a new—he's hung his shingle out.
Farm-to-table comedy with Chris Cornelia.
But if you—seriously, if you want to—
If you want to get your money's worth for those adult diapers that you just bought, drive down the entire PCH without ever touching your brakes.
There's a couple things about it.
I'm thinking of one.
Maybe I'm not thinking of PCH, but I'm thinking of one.
And I imagine it's similar where there's a couple performance characteristics that really make you want to have some brakes.
You're going to have weird hills.
You're going to have weird curves.
You're going to have Wile E. Coyote guardrails.
There's a lot of things I'm guessing that are going to make you want to hit the brakes.
Yeah.
The curves in particular, the curves at the bottom of the hills.
Yeah.
And you're on an automatic transmission, right?
So you can't just clutch your way into this.
We were driving the van fully loaded with gear and dudes.
That was what made it even more sporting.
But I did it.
I got there, and he had to buy me dinner.
He had to buy me dinner.
You made it?
Oh, yeah.
Well, I made it to, like, that restaurant Naropa or Yerba Buena or whatever.
Was Sean awake when this bet was going down?
Oh, everybody was gripping the – they were – I don't see Sean loving that.
They had double seatbelts on.
Well, no, it was Michael Schilling that was really making the most noise.
Oh, man.
But, you know.
Anyway, so – He's a pretty loud drummer.
Uh, so, so in this night outside of Oakley, Kansas, all of a sudden the road goes to the left and I did not, I was not a seasoned enough motorcyclist to know what to do in this instance because I had zero at this point now, zero seconds to make a informed decision.
And so I did the wrong thing, right?
I took my, I let the, the gas off the motorcycle stood straight up and
And I went directly off the road over, you know, because the road was built up on an embankment.
And I went over whatever rickety cow fence there was and went right into a plowed field.
And a plowed field where my front tire and front forks went down into the dirt.
And, like, bent into themselves and hucked me and the motorcycle over, and we just went tumbling.
You did a full evil Knievel.
You should be totally dead.
Yeah, we went tumbling through the night.
But it was a freshly plowed field, so it was—or disked.
It was a disk—the—whatever, the weed had been harvested.
That's their version of one of those giant, like a Peter Brady lawnmower.
Yeah, that's right.
That's right.
And they had cut up, you know, they had rain on the scarecrow and the blood on the plow, you know, and they'd cut up all this dirt.
And so I just went, I just, you know, I Steve Austin, except with with, well, no, exactly.
Steve Austin, less dust and more dirt clods.
Oh, Steve Austin, not Austin 316, the wrestler.
You're talking about full-on bionic man plowing into the ground.
Now we have to replace your legs.
That's right.
We can rebuild.
We have the technology.
Better, stronger, faster.
And I ended up... And all of this is happening in the middle of the night, and it's also...
It's also 30 years ago now.
Can you use the pronoun we?
We.
Me and the motorcycle.
Oh, okay.
All right.
It wasn't like a girl or anything.
No, no, no.
Me and the motorcycle.
At that point, in a situation like that, you're talking about we.
Because you and it are, you have a special relationship.
You are flying through space together.
It lets you.
It lets you fly through space.
And you both have expectations.
I mean, you're helping each other and you think this road is going to go straight.
Why would I need to think about that?
Yeah, exactly.
And now that you're in a crisis, you're really depending on one another.
I'm depending on the motorcycle not to go in such a way that it crushes me or mangles me.
And it is already mad at me because I've ruined it.
I've wrecked it.
But, you know, it's not vindictive.
Anyway, as far as I could tell, I came to rest on the inside of the opposite curve where the road turned back around the other side of the cow and continued again then in the exact same direction straight along the road.
And here came that car still because it was fucking 10 miles away and I did not need to have turned my brights down.
If I had my brights still on, I maybe would have had time to correct.
I don't know.
I was a bad motorcyclist.
Let's be honest.
I was a dumb teenager.
What the hell was I even doing in Kansas?
Did the car stop to help you?
So I then I was I was pretty trashed, but I was able to like
kind of claw my way up to the road the car did slow down because i was like now i was on the shoulder kind of with one arm in the air like help help motorcycle helmet still on oh thank goodness you're wearing the helmet oh yeah well it was the 80s but and when i first got the motorcycle i didn't have a helmet i
I was like, who needs a helmet?
I'm free in the wind.
And then a like a poisonous dragonfly wasp bird hit me square in the face at 70 miles an hour.
And.
Oh, the carnage, like all those great scenes of like like Harley dudes out riding in the wind.
This is like a Fabio on a roller coaster type situation.
Fabio on a roller coaster.
Remember Fabio's on a roller coaster and a fucking bird hit him in the face and gave him a bloody nose?
No, I didn't know that, but that's a basic story.
I'm totally unclear about your vernacular here.
Was it more of an insect or a bird or somewhere in between?
I think it was a bird-sized insect.
Would you rather fight?
LAUGHTER
It hit me and almost knocked me off the motorcycle, and I realized then there's another reason to have a helmet besides just being a scaredy cat girly man, and it is because there are things flying in the air, and if they hit you, you are square fucked.
This almost took me off the bike.
Little did I realize that later on, I had so many great experiences on this motorcycle before I crashed it.
Later on, a wasp
I'm screaming across our great land of America.
A wasp went up inside the helmet.
Oh, no, no, no.
The call's coming from inside the helmet.
Hit me on the chest and then went up and stung me on the face.
Oh, no.
My lip and on my face like 40 times.
No, no, no, no.
This is hell.
That's like 1984.
What a nightmare.
It's so bad.
And I'm trying to stop the motorcycle.
Pulling off to the side of the road.
Scrudging in the dirt.
Meanwhile, just this wasp.
Right on my face.
Throw that helmet off.
And I'm fucked.
I just got stung 20 times on my face.
And I'm like... It sounds like a lot.
It sounds like you are...
Let's be honest.
You are somewhat culpable in your motorcycle adventures.
But so far, the real provocateur appears to be roads and animals.
You got the cows.
You got the wasp.
You got the flying shitbird.
Right?
It sounds like you would do fine in a universe where you could be on a motorcycle and didn't have to deal with animals in particular.
Animals or their consequences.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, for years as a child and into teenage hood, I would find old copies of Easy Rider magazine and In the Wind and all these because biker culture was a big part of the 70s.
Young people can't understand how big biker culture was.
Biker culture was the like seedy uncle of CB culture and CB culture was the seedy uncle of country music.
and country music is the seedy uncle of popular culture.
Right, and popular culture, father of the internet.
There's a good Medium post waiting in here somewhere, I think.
Yes, hello.
Which I'll curb from TED Talk.
This also weirdly hooks up
with your conspiracy theory guy thing from back in the time when there were nonpartisan conspiracy theories, because it wasn't about which side of the notional aisle somebody was on.
It was more like, how do you understand the way the power differentials work?
And so the thing was, my sense of, and first of all, I agree with you, there was so much motorcycle gang-ish culture or motorcycle club-ish culture around.
But see, now, what do you call that?
Is that conservative?
Is that conservative?
liberal well it's is it libertarian well it's kind of a little bit of all of those things it's like you know we want to be free we want to be free to ride yeah we want to be free to without getting hassled by the man yeah that's right free to run our machines um yes right you need to at the time it felt like oh it's liberal because conservatism is something that belongs to richard nixon and so we grow our hair long we drink beer and we party and we're rowdy
But now the whole game has flipped.
And now, like, that is – those are the signals of conservatism, right?
We're just – fuck all you downtown –
uh, effete college people were like motorcycle.
Here's one for you is like, are you okay with somebody telling you what the rules are and that you must follow them?
And depending on what decade and what side, that's a very interesting thing.
Well, you know, actually in a lot of cases, you know, I'm not okay with somebody telling me what the rules are and, uh, and then demanding that I do it.
Well, everybody's a rebel now is the thing.
That's true.
And it and it used to be that there were some people that were like, I'm not a rebel.
But, you know, who are you going to find now that says they're not a rebel?
It's true.
But but so I would read these magazines and it was like those people seem like they're having fun.
First of all, they're wearing bell bottom jeans.
A lot of them don't have shirts on.
And that doesn't matter.
It doesn't matter whether you're in shape or not.
And it doesn't matter whether you're a girl or boy or a third option, you don't have a shirt on because motorcycle.
And people are doing they're having camp outs.
They're driving motorcycles in the dirt.
They're doing Papa wheelies there.
They also have like like Dodge vans that have pony kegs in them.
Think about being a little kid and just I'm just pulling this out of the air.
But like you're a little kid and how's your day start?
Your day starts with you walk in the snow a little bit to get on a school bus.
It takes you to school where you follow rules all day.
There is no part of that that does not seem greatly improved by being in a motorcycle gang.
First of all, you got a nicer climate, better weather.
You don't even need a shirt.
You're probably in Virginia or you're in Alabama.
Think about how many bikers were born out of school buses.
Like you have to go sit in this area and not make noise while you go somewhere to follow rules all day.
No, thank you.
Oh, you know what?
You know what it was?
It was the kid in Bad News Bears.
Yeah.
Oh, of course, Jackie Earl Haley.
Yeah.
Russia.
Jackie Earl Haley.
Harry Shearer.
Jackie Gleason.
Harry and the Hendersons.
That's right.
His whole dirt bike thing where he came over and tore up the baseball field and then...
He was the one that was like, I'll play you pool, and if you win, I'll join the baseball team, and if I win, I get to do whatever.
Wink, wink, nudge, nudge.
And then he won and got to do whatever, which happened offscreen, but then joined the baseball team anyway.
I mean, he could hit it out of the park.
That influenced the eight-year-old me a lot, too, about the power of motorcycles and the freedom that that entails.
Yeah.
Anyway, I started wearing a helmet because I realized that you can get hit in the face.
And then once the wasp got in there, it was too late to not wear the helmet.
So I survived.
And I flagged down the car, laying on the side of the road.
And the car pulls up.
This is the middle of the night in Kansas.
And the driver rolls their window down one and a half inches.
Oh, God.
And says, you all right?
And, you know, the motorcycle is like smoking.
One turn signal.
I think if there's been a motor, if you're adjacent to a motorcycle accident and the person is not on the motorcycle anymore, that's all you need to know.
Yeah.
Even if they are okay, like roll your window all the way down like a gentleman.
Yeah.
And so I struggled to get my helmet off.
And I said, no.
No.
Help, you know.
And they said some version of, okay, wait here.
Rolled their window up and drove off into the night.
Did they send help?
Well, so I lay there in the dark with the blinker going, on this motorcycle that was too far away to reach.
And my leg is mangled.
I have a mangled leg.
Oh, God.
Which, if you'd like to come over, I could play you all the notes that that leg is capable of playing, even still.
It's kind of like... See, I was thinking it was a string instrument.
You're telling me it's a percussion instrument.
No, it's a Dr. Rhythm Machine or whatever.
Fence, fence, fence, fence.
If I do Mr. Bojangles, that leg does all the work.
LAUGHTER
And... Oh, that is a disturbing image.
Yeah.
And then after some... You roll your way onto a subway and start playing your leg.
That's the song.
You're the piano.
That's a weird choice of song, sir.
Yeah, it sounds like I'm sending... It sounds like I'm putting dried corn into a paper shredder.
Ah!
But then in the middle distance, after some long, long indeterminate time, I see the rotating lights, the emergency lights.
And then little by little, I hear the...
Wait, wait.
I don't know if you've ever been rescued by an ambulance that you could see coming for 15 minutes.
Not that I remember, but I bet it must have made you feel pretty good.
You're thinking, I hope that's for me.
Well, I'm pretty sure it is, right?
As it gets closer and closer, I'm like, because there's no other car on the road for half an hour.
Like, I bet that's coming for me.
That person in the car that didn't appear to be very helpful at all did go somewhere.
You said this in 1986?
Yeah.
So you're not talking about any kind of Skynet that's going to be able to see you and say, deploy ambulance to Cow Circle.
There's going to have to be somebody who intervened at some point.
This guy drove to what was probably a closed store at a crossroads, got out, put a quarter in.
Because we didn't have 911 yet.
That was kind of the early days of 911, but there was no guarantee that would be everywhere.
He probably had to spend a quarter.
Yeah, maybe a quarter or a dime.
Called somebody, hey, Al, it's Jim out here at the crossroads.
Oh, Al, how you doing?
Oh, pretty good.
Well, say, so why you calling?
Well, I just passed a young feller out there on Highway 40 outside of Oakley.
Seems like he could use a little help.
Oh, really?
One of those conversations.
Sounds like the beginning of a terrible season of Fargo.
That's exactly what it is.
And so here comes this ambulance and they pull up and they jump out.
They're very activated.
And they come over and they talk to me and they roll me over and they take their...
big scissors and they cut my pants off and they cut my boots off that's some serious scissors but they're scissors i know like oh goodbye boots and i'm like but they look at me and they go and they you can they the the aid car people like it was a guy and a gal i guess and
They both, like, they went at me right away, like, work, work, work, work, work.
And then when they got me all cut apart and they looked at me, you could see them both sit back on their heels, like, relax, and both go like, oh, man.
They were braced for something much worse.
Yes.
And I said, you know, am I okay?
And the gal who was driving said, you know, when we get a phone call that says motorcycle wreck out on the highway.
Yeah.
You don't want to know what we usually see.
So you're going to bring a snow shovel and make a phone call.
Yeah.
And we got out and we could see you were moving.
And that at first was both good and bad because it means that this could be really, really bad.
We could sit here with you on the side of the road and watch you die, which is not very fun either.
But you're fine.
They could be home watching Dynasty.
I'm like, I don't feel fine.
They're like, no, no, no.
You're fine.
Don't worry.
Whatever it is, if your leg is broken in 40 pieces, you're fine.
If you were hurt, you'd know it.
I was like, oh, okay.
Well, that makes me feel better.
And we had a jolly old ride into the local whatever that wasn't a hospital.
I think it qualified maybe as an aid station.
There was somebody there.
Like a Quonset hut, like a Gomer Pyle building?
It was something where each room we went into, somebody had to turn the lights on.
Like, oh, here we go.
Turn the lights on.
So there was somebody going ahead, turning the lights on in the different rooms.
That was when I learned that the aliens were controlling our government.
Did you ever drive a motorcycle after that?
Yes.
Really?
You got back on the horse?
That must have been a little bit scary.
I beheld that pale horse.
I wanted...
And I wanted and want still to be a motorcyclist because I like being on motorcycle.
It's wonderful.
And I like the accoutrements of motorcycle life and culture.
I like the I still like the freedom of it.
You know, in a way, my GM CRV was just a big old man's motorcycle.
Interesting.
You know, it had all the motorcycle qualities like here's a here is a gas powered carbureted.
You think about people who buy those those big motorcycles that have three wheels and like a like a soft serve machine on them.
I mean, technically that's a motorcycle, but it's really more like a small van that happens to not have any kind of an enclosure.
You remember the ones in the 70s that had a gas tank made out of a pony keg?
And they had more fiberglass on them than a cord.
Do you think that's safe, John?
I don't think safety is what you're thinking about.
A lot of those had Volkswagen motors.
I think I've even seen a tricycle motorcycle that had a Chevy 350.
It's part of a customization culture.
It's part of a build-it machine culture.
It's very show-off-y.
Motorcycle culture is very – there's a lot of peacocking, which I'm also – I like peacocking.
Sure.
But there is also a thing that I have to acknowledge about myself, which is that I do not have good judgment.
And that has not really plagued me my whole life.
It's been wonderful.
Listen, bad judgment is wonderful in most cases, but it is like a counterindication of motorcycle ownership.
And I don't think that's true in the past.
A lot of people with bad judgment have owned motorcycles.
But in my case, it's like the chance that I will try and thread a needle that cannot be threaded.
is too high this is a politically fraught discussion but i think that there are some kinds of things devices that become bad judgment multipliers where it's difficult to see when it is functioning as a good judgment multiplier because it's so much easier to see when it's a bad judgment multiplier right all the fun all the fun that i could have out on the salt flats
Or like rolling around in Venice, California with a motorcycle that I work on all afternoon.
Like in Seattle, in a rainy, hilly town, not that great.
But you've also seen, and our listeners have too, like how much trouble I can get into just with a ladder and a rusty hatchet.
Yeah.
There's not even a motor involved.
I mean, I don't need much, like two coat hangers and some Elmer's glue, and I could get myself in the hospital.
Maybe you should get a hatchet that's not rusty.
If that hatchet wasn't rusty, I wouldn't be here today.
It was the rust that saved me.
That's not the first time I've said that either.
Mm-mm.
glad you made it here I am