Ep. 257: "Sonic Posture"
hello hi john hi merlin how's it going well uh we're starting off this podcast with me in motion and moving from this room to that room i'm carrying my whole podcast studio with me geez yeah it's very complicated here today there's a complicated sonic posture to the
to the whole estate okay are you gonna you're gonna clue us on what has made the posture and what in particular made it complicated yeah yeah so uh um so i was i was working on my house this summer and i did the thing where you know where i had a thing that i wanted to do it wasn't an easy fix i wanted to fix the front porch which had
which had sustained quite a bit of weather damage, and I felt like I was equal to the task.
My carpentry was equal to the task.
So I began to work on the porch, and I got to a place where I needed to tear some stuff apart.
And, you know, I get a little zealous.
I get a little obsessed.
And I continued to tear the thing apart because I kept finding things that needed to be remediated.
And then I tore the whole porch apart.
Oh, boy.
And then I studied it.
For a couple of weeks.
I studied the problem.
A lot of people will tell you there's a lot to carpentry.
Everybody knows that you need good tools.
You need to measure twice, all that kind of stuff.
But sometimes you just need to look at where your porch used to be.
That's a big part of carpentry.
Yeah, it is.
And I had a little bench there.
Some look at where a porch used to be and say, why?
And I say, why not?
Why not?
That's right.
That's what Bobby Kennedy was talking about.
Right before Sirhan killed him.
Too soon.
So I have a little park bench there that also needs repair.
that I was going to get to right after the porch, and I would sit on the broken park bench and survey the damage that I'd done.
Your work in progress.
Yeah, and I had a bunch of different stuff.
I bought some lumber at the lumber yard that was on sale, and I had that stacked there.
Oh, God.
And I spent a couple of days working with the chop saw to get my mitered edge technique.
Mm-hmm.
And then I had a lot of stuff to do.
I went out of town.
I kind of left the porch in its current state.
Oh, did I mention that I had dug a trench around the porch?
No, I didn't know.
Like a moat?
A moat.
So it wasn't really possible for the mail delivery person and the UPS people to really transit
through my yard without it being kind of a hazard although this is not conventionally not conventionally approachable why'd you make a trench sean well because i wanted to do some further remediation against you know the the elements and also i have in mind to build a path a walkway but i needed to get down there and put some cement board some hardy board as we call it down
beneath the level of the ground so that it wasn't... I don't like a porch that has just sort of lattice on it.
I want a porch to feel solid, like it's really connected to the earth, which means, in my case, digging a trench and putting hardy board down below the surface of the earth and then backfilling the earth and then putting up the wood...
I'm learning so many terms today.
Oh my goodness.
You always do your hardy boards before you do the belly boards.
Is that right?
I mean, there are some people that would make belly board out of hardy boards.
Well, that's the kind of person that fixes their porch on a weekend.
This is a more ruminative process for you, right?
I'm not that kind of guy.
Anyway, I'm studying this.
I come back from my long trip.
I continue to study the porch.
And my friend Peter happens along.
And Peter says, I was walking through a different neighborhood, a nice neighborhood, let's call it.
And there was a carpenter there named Sam, a Cambodian guy named Sam, who was doing some great carpentry work on this house that I passed by that looked nice.
And so I got his card.
Here it is.
He's a professional carpenter.
Hmm.
This is Peter, you know, passing by, being a pal.
And at one point I was like, oh, God, you know, I've been studying this problem now for several weeks.
Maybe I'll give Psalm a call, see what he has to say.
So Psalm comes out.
He says, well, it's impossible to bid this job because you've torn the house apart.
I can't know how long this is going to take to fix.
So I'll just go at it.
And we'll work it out.
Well, that's troubling.
Well, it is.
But at the same time, I had a fairly good feeling about Psalm.
You know, he had a kind of like, sure, I'm a licensed and bonded carpenter.
That's not a problem.
It's right there on the sign.
But I also, you know, I'm trying to make a living.
Well, you know, I'm taking what they're giving because I'm working for a living.
And I said, yes, sir, Johnny Paycheck.
So I said, tell you what, Psalm, you do what you see fit.
I'm going to pop in.
I'm not going to make any suggestions, really, as like a fellow carpenter here.
I'm going to act as the homeowner and just nod while you tell me what you think.
And then I'll set you loose and we'll figure out how much it costs later.
Did you have a rough, like within like half an order of magnitude, do you have an idea about what this might cost in terms of paying some?
Did you have an idea in your head about what you wanted it to cost?
Did you have an idea about no way do I want it to be more than this?
I'm not asking for a number.
I'm just asking if you have a range in your head.
I have a range in my head.
I have the range of what it would cost for me to do it in terms of blood and treasure.
Right.
I do this all the time with stuff where I feel like this makes me a learned man.
It's because sometimes I will say whether it's the money I would like to receive for something or the money I'm willing to pay for something, I'll frequently do something as ridiculous as a little Excel in my head.
Where I'll say, there's no conceivable way this could be done properly for less than $500.
But it would be very surprising to me if this costs more than $500.
$2,700 or what have you, or maybe higher, maybe higher.
But you have like within, you know, an order or two of magnitude, you know.
So if somebody were to say to you, yeah, sure, I'll do it for $60,000, you'd say, I'm going to get another bid.
Right.
Well, and the contractor who's working on the house across the street came over.
And looked at my project at one point along the way.
And he said, huh, this is one of those things that could cost $300 or $30,000.
Oh, boy.
And I was like, yeah, that's about the range.
And he was like, because now that you've got the porch torn apart, boy, we should just jack up the whole house.
As long as you're pulling the engine out, you might as well take care of these other things.
Right.
And I said, you know what?
You think just like me.
And he said, I remember the first time I dug out the basement of a house.
And I said, tell me more.
And he said, well, I was 24.
And I went, fuck.
Right.
Of course.
And he said, it was the dumbest thing I ever did.
And I rue it to this day.
But on the other hand, my family and I sit in our basement, our cool basement all the time and watch television.
And I said, boy, you're really not making this easy.
But in any case...
I realized that I was not... Let's be honest.
What you're describing there is the fuel.
That's the fuel that drives the rumination.
Is that like, well, as long as I'm doing this, I wonder... It's not even as long as... In my opinion, it's not even as simple as, as long as I'm doing this clear thing, which is tearing my porch down to a certain degree, I might as well do that specific thing.
It's more like there's a world of possibilities now.
What are the worlds that you might have opened up that would have never been available to you while you had an intact porch?
Well, that's exactly right.
Like, you know what this house doesn't have?
A laundry chute.
Oh, God, I would love a laundry chute.
If you're not going to have a monk hole, you could at least start with a laundry chute.
See?
Why the heck wouldn't you?
I went and toured a house on one of those real estate tours where you go with an agent and you look at a house.
And it had this laundry chute in the floor.
It was a house that was built in the early 50s in an architectural style that I'm learning to appreciate.
But at some point, somebody realized the master bedroom was over the laundry room.
I don't know whether that was the day they built the house or some subsequent time.
But they were like, what this house needs is a laundry chute.
So they just cut a square hole in the floor of the closet.
That looked down into the basement.
And so I was looking around the house and I looked down this hole and I was like, oh, awesome.
A hole in the closet floor that goes downstairs.
It's meant as a laundry chute, but if you widened it a little bit, I bet it could be a monk hole.
If you want to get out of a place bad enough, a lot of things can be a monk hole.
Oh, heck yes.
Well, and this could be like a pretty nice monk hole, right?
You're like, hang on just a second.
I need to go in the closet for
And then where's John?
Where'd he go?
Well, especially if like burglars pop in and they're like, we're taking over and I would just be like, all right, listen, while you guys ransack the house, my daughter and I are going to hide trembling in the closet.
I want to get out of your way.
Yeah.
And then then we're halfway to Mount Rainier.
But so I don't want to do that in this house.
I realized that
So, Sam came by.
He said, just, you know, turn me loose here.
I'm not going to rip you off.
And I said, you know what?
I like a guy who tells me he's not going to rip me off because that's a guarantee that he's not going to rip me off.
Word is bond.
Word is bond.
So, Sam gets to work.
Now, Sam is telling me a thing I already know, which is, look, you can pay $300 for this or $30,000.
If you did it, John...
You would do $80,000 worth of work because you're out here already with a nail file, like trimming little tiny microscopic edges on things that no one else can see.
I'm not going to do that, says Psalm.
I'm going to, let's be honest, hack this back together.
And I was like, you know, I'm at the stage having studied this now for weeks.
That's exactly what I'm looking for.
You hack this back together and then I'll come out
And sit with a nail file and like trim it up.
Handshake.
So this morning I wake up, I realize, you know, I'm doing my podcast with Merlin.
It's at our new earlier time.
But I wake up to the sound of a circular saw or chop saw going in the yard.
But also to the sound of Psalm hammering on the other side of the house.
And I think, now wait a minute, Psalm works alone.
But also, you can tell by the sound of the way the chop saw is being used, the person using it does not know how to use a chop saw.
Oh, no.
I also have some serious concerns about that other side of the house thing.
Is that like a supporting beam type situation?
No idea.
But I mean, it's a chop saw.
They don't have a hand saw, like a circular saw that they're just out there chopping the house.
It's the sound of a saw that is on a table that's being used to chop pieces of wood.
But the person using it doesn't know how, and you can tell because the chop saw sounds like this.
That's how it should sound.
I'm imagining with these kinds of things, it's a little like being a surgeon, where you don't want hesitation wounds when they're going in.
You want to hear like... You want decisive, I know exactly what I'm doing, some high-level Bob Vila shit, where you know I just took off an eighth of an inch with the chop saw.
Precisimal.
Otherwise, you're going to get splintering.
The wood's going to get all shit to shot.
And so I can hear this chop saw being used, and it's going like this.
And I'm like, what the fuck is that sound?
I know Psalm knows how to use Psalm.
That can't be Psalm.
No.
So I pop out of the bed.
And I stumble down the stairs.
I stumble into the kitchen.
I pour myself a cup of ambition.
You yawn.
You stretch.
I do.
I try to come to life.
And then I go out on the porch.
And there's some on the porch.
Where the porch would hopefully eventually be.
I go out on the nascent porch.
The hallowed ground of where the porch used to be.
And he looks up and he says, oh, hey, John.
Uh...
How's it going?
Didn't you take your daughter to school today?
And I'm like, Psalm already knows my schedule.
I said, in fact, no.
Her mother took her to school.
What's going on?
And he said, oh, just working.
Just huckily buck, chucking along.
And I said, I was listening to the sound of a chop saw.
And it sounded like somebody... And he said... He stopped me right there.
And he kind of leaned in and he said, I think...
I think that's the Thai people that live behind you.
And he gave me a look that only a Cambodian carpenter could give that suggested that Thai people don't know how to use a chop saw.
Oh, he's throwing Cambodian shade.
He is.
And I was like, you know, America is going strong.
This is exactly the type of thing that built this country.
A suspicion of people from slightly different places.
Yeah, from just slightly south.
And he said, yeah, the Thai neighbors over there.
And these are new neighbors, by the way.
The Thai family just moved in behind us.
Behind me, rather.
Me and Som.
And your porch mate.
They like to have evening lunch.
where they sit around laughing on the back porch, which is not a thing the former neighbors did.
So now there's a new sonic signature in the evenings of people having a lively porch party behind me where formerly there was just silence.
There was just nothing.
I love silence.
So that has complicated things for sure, because, you know, I pop around, decide sometimes I'm going to sleep in this bedroom.
Sometimes I move to that bedroom.
It's, you know, there's a lot going on anyway.
So the chop saw is going in the back and I'm like, I can't record the podcast where I normally do because not only what is it irritating just from being a loud saw, but it's also really irritating because it sounds like someone is
is using a saw improperly.
Oh, that's very distracting on a lot of levels.
It is.
So I say to some, listen, I'm doing a program upstairs, a radio program, and he looks at me like,
This is not the first crazy thing I've said to him, but it's in the family of crazy things that I've said to him in our short acquaintance.
And he's like, right, a radio program.
And I said, basically a radio program I'm doing upstairs.
So the chop saw is very irritating.
So I'm going to kind of move to the front of the house, but that's where you're working.
So anyway, just that's just sort of a heads up what I'm doing.
And he said, well, before you go in, I was thinking what this house needs is to be painted.
And I'm willing right now.
He goes into this like, I'm going right now to make you a one time deal on the whole project.
Oh, boy.
Because I'm about finishing up with the porch today.
What?
And now and I'm like, wow.
But I'm standing on the porch.
I can't see what he's done to the front of the porch.
And I'm frankly, I don't want to know.
He's standing in your underpants at this point.
I have put on pants out of respect because I don't know what the cultural complications would be.
The carpenter mores.
Yeah, there are some people you could stand out on the porch in your underwear.
It wouldn't be a problem.
I know I realize that Sam is a Cambodian fellow, but you never say anything about the Thai royal family.
You know that, right?
I do know that.
Everybody eventually learns that.
Some people learn the hard way.
There could be a thing with Cambodian carpenters and underpants that you just, not out of cultural insensitivity, but culturally, if I may say ignorance, you just don't know.
You don't know.
I think trousers were a good choice.
But you didn't go and cross the moat to go get a reckon on how things were looking?
No, he was in the moat.
I didn't go into the moat with him because I had a radio program to do.
Okay, upstairs.
You know, I learned that I learned that don't talk about the Thai family before before I did it.
So I didn't make that problem.
But I did one time sitting at a dinner table in Fez.
Make a comment about the king of Morocco.
Which which resulted in me being kicked under the table by three different people.
Oh, my gosh.
And the implication was not, see, the Tyrell family you don't say anything about because they are beloved.
The Tyrells?
Oh, the Tyrell family.
The Tyrells, not the Tyrells.
Okay.
The Tyrells, no.
I think I'm watching too much HBO.
People have complicated feelings about the Tyrells.
Yeah.
But the Thai royals are beloved.
Part of the problem is, here's the thing.
I don't want to be culturally insensitive, but when you put a giant, giant, giant portrait of somebody in an extravagant
outfit and it's a very very very large outsized portrait as is so often the case at many of the tyrell uh restaurants it's it's i'm not saying you're asking for it but all i know is i said to my pal that i went to school with who happened to be the nephew of the owner of the ty restaurant we went to i was like hey what's the deal with he goes no no no
Nope.
Don't get my uncle mad.
Like, you don't want to get my uncle mad.
No.
Say nothing about the Tyrells.
No.
And the thing is, if you want to call the Tyrells late at night and take an elevator up to play a game of chess, that's also manageable.
Okay.
But in this situation, oh, in the Moroccan situation, it was not that people were like, oh, our king is so beloved, don't say anything.
It was kicks under the table indicating we don't talk that way in public because it's dangerous.
And then everyone sort of smiled and were like, the king is amazing.
And I was like, oh, and it was I did not until that moment realize that there was a element of Moroccan civic life that was inhibited somewhat by suspicion that there may be.
But, you know, OK, so, for example, my daughter is not a fan of the current president.
And sometimes she will say things that are untoward and we can have a high five about it.
But there's certain kinds of things in America, you know, to never say.
about the commander-in-chief.
Sure.
Like, one time I was in line with guys from military school.
We were in line to see Gerald Ford, and they were checking us in, and one of the guys made a joke about having a bomb.
And they did not think that was funny.
Oh, no, they don't think that.
So maybe that's our Tyrells.
It's like, you don't make that kind of remark.
Just because you're like, oh, no, that's... You know, for what you get back on that kind of remark, the risks are high.
Yes.
Yeah, that's right.
You're not going to, I mean, especially Gerald Ford, right?
Yeah.
This is 1979.
There was discussion that there was guys running up and down the aisle saying, like, nominate Ford, right?
Will he make a run against Ronald Reagan?
And it was not a very interesting event.
It was Gerald Ford.
But you have to imagine, as the guy who pardoned Nixon, his approval ratings went through the floor when he did that.
Yeah, they did.
That cost him a second term, or some might say a first term.
Anyways, so you and Sam are... So I moved my portable podcast studio to the front of the house to escape the chop saw.
Okay.
But then, as I'm setting up, I'm getting ready to go.
I'm talking to you on the text.
I'm like, here we go, but it's complicated out here.
There's a very, if I may, you see, there is a very complicated sonic posture here at the moment.
I'm hoping it will resolve favorably.
That's right.
Immediately after typing that, I hear the portable transistor radio.
Now, I'm talking about a transistor radio the size of a pack of cigarettes.
Kind of like you might...
get in Phnom Penh in 1971.
Okay.
Battery-powered.
Two knobs, right?
The FM... Tune and volume.
Tune and volume, right.
I think even a... Usually you wear one of those little hearing aid earpieces, right?
Well, you can, or you can just have it play out of its five-cent speaker.
You just jam it out.
It's like six-inch speaker or whatever.
So Som carries that on his belt.
Okay.
Okay.
And it is playing an inscrutable mixture of... Oh, I shouldn't have used the word inscrutable.
No.
It is playing a difficult-to-parse mixture.
A good at math.
Of some kind of music, but also talking.
But it's very hard to make it out because it's coming out of a speaker.
Oh, boy.
But it always... It's like his theme music that plays whenever he comes along.
And he's getting something out of it because he's carrying it around.
If we learn anything from movies like Full Metal Jacket, you know, the music that you have behind something can be very... You take an apocalypse now.
That becomes very memorable.
It ain't me, fortunate son, you know?
That's right.
And he walked on down the hall!
Am I thinking of Forrest Gump?
That was a very popular movie.
Yeah.
Fortune and Son's in a lot of movies.
It's kind of like the way Blitzkrieg Bop is in all the commercials now.
Is Blitzkrieg Bop in all the commercials now?
There's at least two commercials I've been watching a lot of CNN because my mom was in The Path of the Hurricane.
And, yes, Anthony Bourdain has a show.
He can't believe it's already the 10th season of this show.
Right.
He's pretty punk.
Yeah.
And then there's another one.
It might be for boater medicine.
I'm not sure.
But Blitzkrieg Bop, like Walking on Sunshine, appears in a lot of medicine ads and various things.
Did you know that Walking on Sunshine is the song that kept...
Till Tuesdays, voices carry out of the top spot on the charts.
The devil you say.
And as a consequence, Amy Mann hates when you reference the song Walking on Sunshine.
That's so interesting.
I love Amy Mann, but I really also hate when people mention that song.
And what's hilarious to me is that, because as you know, I love to find a chink in someone's armor.
Well, easy.
Yes, but no, I know that's the first thing you do.
You size somebody up, you look them up and down, you go, what's this person super insecure about?
Yeah, right.
I mean, if it can be said, I don't think it's something you have control over.
It's a superpower.
It's like a mutant power, right?
It's like telling Cyclops to turn off his eyes.
Yeah, it's like saying to the girl with the white stripe in her hair, oh, don't touch anybody with your hands.
Right, stripey.
Yeah, stripey.
She's a little self-conscious about that, I think.
Anytime it comes up in conversation, I'm always like, oh, Amy, you know, are you going to play Walking on Sunshine in this set?
And she's such a dick.
She's so mad.
That was 1985.
It was the song that kept her out of the top spot.
It was 32 years ago.
Oh, we have fun.
So I'm sitting in the other room getting ready to broadcast and I hear Psalm's radio.
But it turns out Psalm is on the roof.
Sam is now standing outside my bedroom window and he is talking to himself, which I also knew he did.
But I can never get close enough to him to know what he's talking about because he stops talking to himself whenever he sees me.
People who talk to themselves do not like it when you notice they talk to themselves and they really hate it when you ask them what they were saying.
I don't know if you've had this experience.
I'm just telling you, if you're around somebody who talks to themselves and you ask them about it, it's like knocking on the door while somebody's pooping.
You know what?
You're not allowed to even act like this is happening.
Listen, this is like getting kicked when you talk about the king of Morocco.
It's not a thing I'm going to do, right?
I'm not going to walk up on somebody and be like, can you turn your transistor radio down and tell me what the hell you were talking to yourself about?
Why are you on my roof, Psalm?
No, no, I don't want to know that.
You don't.
So Sam is right on the other side of my window, and the curtains are drawn, so he doesn't know that I'm in there.
I just told him I was doing a radio show.
Okay.
He thinks I'm in some radio studio somewhere.
Okay.
And I'm listening to him talk to himself, and he's talking to himself quite audibly and as though talking to another person.
And he's saying, oh, no, this doesn't look too bad.
Well, wait a minute.
Is he speaking English?
Yeah.
He talks to himself in English.
He talks to himself in English.
Sam is Cambodian, but has lived in America for a long time.
Is he a dreamer?
No, he's an actual first-gen immigrant.
He said to me one time, so Sam's been around here for a little bit.
I should have indicated that we've been interacting quite a bit, and it's because...
And one of the other things he does is he says, see you tomorrow.
And then at nine in the morning, he texts me and says, I'm not coming today.
Okay.
But he and I are very much alike in that.
And I just, I respect that enormously.
Yeah.
But I mean, you know, be careful if you marry or hire someone who's too much like yourself.
You know what I'm saying?
Oh, I know.
You already got enough of that.
But that's how we got to this point with the porch.
He does end up coming.
Okay.
And I'm like, okay, you're here.
But so we were out in the barn one day.
And Psalm said, are those Vespas?
But he pronounced the V like a W. He said, are those Vespas?
And I said, they are.
And he said, wow, when I was a kid, you had to be a rich, rich guy to own one of those.
And you have two of them.
And I said, yeah, I mean, neither one of them.
He's really in tip-top shape right now.
And he said, still.
Maybe he could throw that into the deal.
He had a real moment.
He does the porch.
He does the painting.
He fixes the roof.
And maybe he fixes your Wespas.
I don't want them fixed by Psalm because I met a guy not very long ago.
So my daughter had a play date with a little girl.
And it was a situation that was set up by a mom.
Let's be honest, a busybody mom at the elementary school who said, you know what we need?
We need first graders to mentor kindergartners.
We do a little of that.
And I heard this, and it wasn't something that had happened when my daughter was a kindergartner.
And I said, you know what?
We do need that.
Why didn't we have that one?
You know what?
Why didn't we have that before?
Why haven't we always had this?
She's like, that's what I'm saying.
It's good for everybody.
That's right.
It's good for the kindergarten.
It's good for the first grader.
It's good for the parents.
It's good for the school.
So I said as a father, I volunteered my daughter on her behalf.
I said she would love to set up a play date with a kindergartner.
Because I knew that she would.
And so we set up a play date with this young lady who is a very self-possessed young woman who's about to begin kindergarten.
And we went over to her house and we played together with her.
And watching these two little girls interact, because it turns out they're only six months apart.
And at one point, Harper came over, I'm sorry, the little girl came over to her mother.
And her mom said, because the mom and I are chatting, the mom said, how's it going?
And she said, I think I'm done now.
I mean, I've met this girl, and I feel like we've completed this mission.
Because her mother forewarned me that she was shy in particular.
And her mom said, well, honey, we're not ending this now.
You're going to have to go back and play with...
John's little girl some more.
And Harper was like, okay.
And turned around and kind of went.
And she came and did this because my little girl was up in her room still playing happily, contentedly with her toys.
Yeah, we're not done with the mentoring yet.
Yeah.
And then later on, my little girl came down and said, yeah, okay, I think I'm ready to go.
And I said, oh, well, what was your favorite part about being here on this play date?
And she said, hmm, her toys.
And I was like, I think we need to go back and do some more playing.
And my little girl went, okay.
And then whatever, they crossed whatever little girl Rubicon they needed to cross.
And they got on the other side.
And then they were at war with Rome.
Rome being me.
And then they could have played together for 14 hours.
They had become friends.
Whatever had happened, they'd become friends.
And now they were inseparable.
And mission accomplished.
And I liked her parents very much.
But as we're leaving, they open the garage door to put the little battery-powered pink Mercedes-Benz that her grandparents had bought for her back in the garage.
Wow.
The garage door opens.
The garage is full of Lambrettas.
That's a different kind of WESPA?
That's a different kind of WESPA.
And it's the kind of WESPA that if you're a WESPA person...
for many years, and you decide that this is the life you're going to lead, you graduate to Lambrettas.
So they're one of those, we always get the nicest one families.
They got the nicest pink Mercedes and they got the nicest Wespas, which are actually Lambrettas.
Although they say, and they were both quick to say, they were both quick to apologize for the pink Mercedes-Benz,
By saying, like, the grandparents bought this.
It's a gaudy thing.
It's not a thing we ever would have bought.
And I said, don't worry, don't worry.
There's no judgment here.
And then garage full of Lambrettas.
And I was like, Lambrettas?
The thing about Lambrettas is if you see one, you know everything about this person now.
You know everything.
You know they like to tinker.
You know they're meticulous.
These are nicely maintained Lambrettas.
You know they're meticulous, you know that they are all kinds of things, right?
I mean, they're mod, clearly, deeply mod.
But also, yeah.
It's interesting, because I would consider you more of a rocker.
I am, right?
But my Vespa, I'm one of these, I'm a mud duck, right?
You like to really get in that mud.
I'm a dirty rider, right?
My bike is intentionally rusty and fucked up.
Yeah, bright and dirty.
It's got a sticker on it that says aviation gasoline only.
You know, I'm that guy.
I'm the one that's like, you know, I don't have, it's not like I have a machine gun mounted to it, but it's my gearbox, the gear head.
Yeah.
I'm not the one that's like, that's out there restoring some rare.
And so the, the dad comes down and he's, and he's, when we start talking Lambrettas and he's like, well, you know, this one, they didn't even never imported.
There's only 85 of them in the world.
It's like some super sport model.
That's not our, that's not our pink, uh,
It's not our pink thing, but this is something else.
And I was like, these are gorgeous.
And he said, yeah, well, here's the problem.
My grandfather or my father-in-law or my uncle-in-law or somebody like this has this Porsche that he wants to give us.
And I was like, tell me more.
You really have my attention now, sir.
And he said, it's this 1966 911 S. And I'm like,
You know, and I start to, I'm sweating now, you know, breaking out.
And he's like, and the thing is, I want to keep it here because he doesn't want it anymore.
You know, and I'm just thinking like this car is worth so much money.
This car is so incredible.
And I'm sure it's meticulously maintained.
And he says, I want to keep it in the garage, but I don't know what to do with these Lambrettas.
I don't want to just park them.
I don't want to get a storage space.
And I said, you know, I have a barn.
You could...
In return for fixing up my Vespas to this Lambretta standard, you could keep all five of these Lambrettas in my barn.
And then I would have such a cool barn at that point.
It would be like a freaking Lambretta showroom.
I see.
You're making room for the 1966 9-11.
Asked by moving the Lambrettas to John's barn where they could have friends with the Vespas.
That's right.
And then he can come out.
It's a kind of motor play date.
A motor play date.
Precisely.
He can come and tinker not only on his Lambrettas, but now tinker on, because there are a lot of people that like a project, right?
Yeah, I'm getting that idea.
Right?
I have a friend that loves to come over to my house.
I found out why Sam was outside your room.
We'll get to that.
So I have a little friend who likes to come visit me and she comes into my house and immediately begins knolling all of my belongings, which is wonderful because she does not want me around for it.
So she basically is like, shoo, go run and play, John.
I'm busy now.
She's like that shrimp in Finding Nemo, right?
She's got to clean.
She can't stop cleaning.
Well, but cleaning isn't her thing.
It's organizing, right?
It's gnolling, gnolling, gnolling.
I have another friend.
You've met her, the lady motorcycle gang mistress.
Yes.
Who said she wants to come spend a week here at my house just getting rid of stuff.
She said, I just want to come here and just help you by getting rid of stuff.
It's nice that for a man who has so many projects that he could to so many other people, particularly women, also be a project.
Right.
Well, women who make me a project or my projects, their projects.
My little friend who knolls has knolled so many little... How little is she?
She's not big.
No.
She goes around and I find little places where she's knolled things that I wasn't even aware of before.
She might knoll a canned stew or something?
Well, she went across the top of the piano and she put all of the people's business cards that I've received in the last two years, like all in little piles.
But hilariously...
Weeks after she left, I realized that she had moved a very, very heavy vintage desk from one part of the house to another and taken a lightweight desk from that part of the house and put it where the heavy desk was.
And I swear to you, I don't think I could have moved that desk.
That's some high-level knolling.
Yeah, she's a 100-pound person, and she's moving big, big pieces of furniture around and doing it in a context where there are big, big...
other things in the way huge other things that she would have to navigate carrying this desk that i'm not sure i could have carried it was a magic trick because i didn't even notice it she didn't point it out she was gone for days and days and i was walking through a room and i was like wait a minute how did that table get in here there used to be a really heavy desk there and then i like walked really slowly through the house kind of peering around the corner like
Is that desk over?
It is.
How did that?
How?
How could she have done it?
I have no idea.
How could she have known to do it, first of all, because it was the right move?
That's what's the amazing thing.
She had the method, the means, and the opportunity.
Somehow I was gone.
I was gone from the house.
She shooed me out of here because she was at the time like knolling marbles, you know, matchbooks.
And when I came back later, all this magic had happened.
I wasn't even aware of it.
And she, of course, wouldn't have pointed it out because that's not her style.
So some is outside the window.
I'm about I'm waiting for you to call me and Psalms out there.
Going, well, I think I could probably do.
Oh, look at this.
How am I going to get that?
Well, you know what I could do?
I could take that.
And he's like actually poking on the window with a little with a little screwdriver, like three feet from me as I sit with my headphones on prepared to receive your phone call.
And I'm like, the sonic posture here is very complicated right now.
I don't know why Som's on the roof.
I don't know how long he's going to be on the roof.
If I move back into the other room, I hear the bad Saw.
I don't know what... I have a lot of rooms in this house.
I don't know what room to be in because there is very complicated...
Southeast Asian construction techniques being exhibited in every corner.
And then I heard his radio sort of retreat into the distance, but I wasn't confident that he wasn't going to start
fixing my bedroom window, which is not a thing that we had agreed upon.
Yeah, that sounds like that's a little out of scope.
But he's industrious, and he recognizes in my house that there are a lot of things that need to get done, and he's like, you know, after I've hacked this porch back together, why don't I hack this window back together?
It sounds like he's got a vision.
I think he does.
I think his vision is partly to stay employed.
Mm-hmm.
And he likes it out here.
I like having him here.
We'll just have to see.
We'll have to see next steps because I have to go down into the trench and see exactly where we're at.
Do you think he wants to be retained on an ongoing basis?
Well, because our current arrangement is this is an impossible project to bid.
Why don't I just start working on and I'll get back to you.
But you might be over $300 at this point.
We've lost the floor at this point, I'm guessing.
We're over 300, but we're under 3,000.
Oh, good, good, good.
So anyway, I moved.
When you called, I was in the process of walking the entire podcast studio through the hall back to the room where the annoying saw was.
Because it sounds like what they did over there, what the Thai carpenters were doing, is cutting all the wood at once.
They were making all the bacon.
Interesting.
For a project or for practice?
It sounded like, I don't know what they're building, but it sounded like they cut 40 pieces of wood or whatever they were cutting.
I don't know.
They might have been cutting up encyclopedias.
I have no way of knowing.
That's the kind of thing your mind turns over, though, right?
I don't know what that could be.
That's a very strange sound for the saw to make that many times.
Are there a lot of precision cuts going on?
What are they doing back there?
Maybe they have a 26 set of encyclopedias, old encyclopedias.
including the yearbook.
They like to laugh.
We know that.
And maybe they're just like, what are we going to do with these?
Maybe they're old Mad Libs or something.
They love to laugh.
All this stuff is on the internet now.
Why do we even have this here?
Let's cut them up with the Saw.
Right.
Okay.
But it seems like they've cooled it out.
And now I'm in the back room.
Saw could be on the roof as far as I know.
And they...
The Thai family could be like now burning the encyclopedia.
The half encyclopedia.
Do you feel like, I mean, boy, this is a lot to grok.
Do you feel like this is something you need to check in on?
Do you want to do a check in with Psalm and just pause a minute?
No, I feel like for the length of this podcast, I am willing to just let things roll.
I'm going to leave them.
Let the chips fall.
I'm going to let those chips fall.
If I come out in the front and Psalm has rebuilt the porch so that it looks like the bow of a ship,
Or if he has rebuilt the porch so that it looks like... That would be a pretty sharp look, I gotta tell you.
He has a sharp look.
If he's made it look like the Monitor fighting the Merrimack, that would be an interesting, like... Any kind of nautical porch would be a good look.
If it looked like a U-boat, that would be nice, too.
Oh, wouldn't that be a cool porch?
You don't... See, the thing is...
With Psalm, there's a couple things that come to mind.
For some reason, I'm thinking of that, I don't know, it seems like an important metaphor for me.
They're always painting the Golden Gate Bridge.
They're never not painting the Golden Gate Bridge.
It takes one person here, because it's more than one person.
But they're never not painting the Golden Gate Bridge, because there's always you paint, you paint, you paint, then you repaint, you repaint, you repaint, you repaint.
So that's a project that goes on and on.
You never say, oh, we're done painting the Golden Gate Bridge, because that's just the thing we do all the time.
And if you think about that, that's a certain kind of, to me, very interesting mindset about how one does one's work.
And I'm wondering if that's the kind of thing that Sam is bringing to the situation.
Does he have an idea?
How will he know when he's done with house?
How will I know?
Well, yeah, exactly.
But is it in his bailiwick, as you say?
Is it in his wheelhouse?
Is it in his estimation that he could say to you, John, here's the big picture.
This is why I'm on your roof right now.
Because you seem oddly incurious about Psalm's methods and means.
Mm-hmm.
And I'm wondering if at a certain point you want to sit down maybe with a little memo pad and maybe kind of write down some ideas about what the scope of this project is, the budget timeline, the kinds of things somebody like me thinks about, or do you say this is more of a human experiment?
The thing is that if I were in Psalm's place and he were in mine...
And we had established the report.
Maybe you should offer that.
Maybe you should come over to his house.
Well, the thing is that I think that he typically has, he's able to get up in the morning, turn his transistor radio on and go to work in a way that I do not prefer.
So for now, at least, I feel like we are in our right place in the world.
But if our places were reversed and he had exhibited the trust in me that I have exhibited in him,
I think I would absolutely be on his roof in a heartbeat.
Okay.
Because there's a lot to see.
To rule it out, though, you're not, I mean, now if it's me, because I'm wired real different from you, I would be thinking, oh, my God, is this going to turn into a sudden invoice for $27,000?
Oh.
And then you go, whoa, some.
This is a little more than I was expecting.
He's like, well, what do you think?
I'm here with my transistor radio most days.
Yeah.
What do you think this kind of thing costs?
If you want your house to look like part of a boat, that doesn't come cheap.
Right.
You never talked about a budget.
I assume the sky was, as they say, the limit.
I have a good idea.
Well, first of all, as the doctor who ended up sending me to the psychiatrist once said... That is an excellent dependent clause.
You are... You are...
Pretty suspicious of doctors.
But you know what?
I didn't come to you.
Oh, sure.
Right.
She said that's exactly the kind of thing a doctor would say.
Yeah.
She said, you're sitting in here bagging on doctors.
But it's not like I came to you for help.
And I was like, touche, doctor lady.
And she said, so I'm going to send you to this psychiatrist.
You can go or not.
And I was like, you know what?
Thank goodness for New York doctors because a Seattle doctor.
would have just wrung their hands.
But you just said, you talked to me like a New York City policeman.
You were like, you can go do it or not.
I don't give a fuck.
Yeah, I get paid either way.
So in this situation, Psalm could reasonably say,
I'm not the one who tore apart your porch.
And I could say, true.
He's going to play the porch card.
So he doesn't have to say that because I already know that he's going to say it.
So he's on the roof.
And if I go out and say, this is a little bit of mission creep.
Why are you on the roof?
He's going to say, look, I didn't tear apart your porch.
Yeah.
I don't have any track record of being at your house tearing shit apart, do I?
I'm the guy putting shit back together, aren't I?
And I'd be like, yes.
So he's like, so if I'm on your roof doing something, it's probably putting stuff back together, not tearing it apart.
Oh, it's kind of his version of whatever's in the show is in the show.
Right.
Except it's your house.
And the thing is, I know what needs fixed up there.
Yeah.
If he's poking on the window and saying, oh, I think I could get this done.
I know what that is.
I know what he's seeing.
Because I've been on the roof looking at it.
I've been sitting on a broken park bench on my own roof looking at it going, oh, Jesus.
I don't come to your house and slap the rolling 808 out of your mouth.
That's right.
I know because one of the things that I liked about this house was that it had not had its old windows replaced by new vinyl windows.
Mm-hmm.
But that means that what's nice about it is that the glass is all wavy.
Oh, yeah.
Because as you know, glass is a liquid and it's still in motion and it gets all wavy over the course.
It's alive in a lot of ways.
It's alive.
It's alive with the sound of music.
But these windows are not manufactured.
They're made.
They got a bunch of glass out here.
They had a bunch of old fashioned carpenters who knew how to make things.
And they were just making windows.
They're one of the guys on the construction site.
There was the guy who was driving the team of horses.
There was the guy who, you know, who had goggles on that was running the steam powered spaceship.
And there was a glacier.
Is that where you have a glacier?
That's what you have a glacier do.
Yeah.
He was out here making windows.
And it isn't one of those Henry Ford type situations where you can just grab any window and stick it in any hole.
This is a bespoke glazier window for a given hole.
Right.
And Sam was walking around the house and he was like, oh, right.
Every single window is different.
It's all custom windows built.
built by a glazier to fit the hole that was cut by the carpenter, who was eyeballing it too, because this was a farmhouse and there were like nine guys dressed like locomotive engineers.
But the glazier and the windowlier have to work together.
They have to agree on the hole.
At some point, right?
They have to shake hands and say, here's how big this hole is probably going to be.
So Sam's out there.
What he's looking at is one of these windows.
I'm sorry.
He's on the windows at this point.
I think that's what he was doing.
He was looking at windows, and he was like, I'm going to have to rebuild this window if we're going to do this right.
A downstairs window?
No, an upstairs window.
The one on the roof.
Okay.
And I'm listening to him through that window, through that self-same window.
Oh, I see.
Talk to himself as he's like, I think I could do this.
Oh, look at this.
Yeah, I could probably, well, this would only be...
And I'm like, yes, yes, yes.
Okay, okay, okay, good.
And you don't for a moment doubt that this all needs to be related.
He's seeing the house as I am.
You're curious about where this is going.
How we got from a missing porch and a trench to talking about windows.
And painting.
I feel like if you're the surgeon and you open up the body and you're in there to address a tumor and then you find a house key in there, are you going to leave it in or are you going to take it out?
Are you going to wake the guy up and make him sign something?
No.
Right.
You're going to deal with what you've got.
So your house is the open body, and you don't even know if you found a key yet.
Because then what if you actually, I don't know, find a sandwich or something?
Like, oh, all of a sudden the key's not as important.
The sandwich's going to go bad if we don't get it out of here.
You don't even know how deep into the project.
There's no way to know.
There's no way to know even if it's really begun yet.
You might still be in the stage where he's just deciding what needs fixed.
When Hawkeye Pierce opens a guy up on the operating table to fix one thing, he gets in there and he realizes there's shrapnel throughout the body.
What do they call it meatball surgery?
He calls Houlihan over.
He's like, put a clamp on here.
He knows she's a great nurse.
This is the thing about Mark.
This is the difference with Frank Burns and Hot Lips get cut from whole cloth, but there's really a very different situation going on there.
Hot Lips is very, very, very talented.
She's an extremely talented surgical nurse.
Frank Burns is a fucking hack.
Yeah.
Right.
Yeah.
And I'm always called an old ferret face.
Those two couldn't be more different.
And how how it is that they that their love of military pomp and circumstance would bring them together.
Any port in a storm.
It was a police action.
And, you know, you take love where you find it, much like a sandwich or a key or part of part of a tumor.
I guess so.
So there's talk of windows.
Can you give me, just without getting too specific, apart from giving me this man's name, about how long, as far as you can tell, as far as you can reckon, how long has he been working on something at your house?
When did you first engage Psalm?
So your buddy tells you about Psalm.
When did you first start the engagement process with Psalm?
Yeah.
The thing about Sam is I have to assume that that name is just like Kim in Korea or like Pierre in France.
Pretty much every guy you meet in France is named Pierre, and I imagine that's the same in Cambodia with the name Sam.
Because it's a name that rolls off the tongue, right?
I'm not even sure.
He's never actually pronounced his name to me.
I read it off of his business card, and I've been calling him Som this whole time.
It might be pronounced Som.
Yeah, my landlord called me the wrong name for like 10 years.
I never corrected him.
Did he call him Melren?
No, he called me Charles.
I have no reason to understand why, but he always called me Charles and he was consistent about it, which I appreciated.
So I never corrected him.
Because I knew he meant me.
Because I was always Charles.
Not Charlie, Charles.
No, you're Charles.
You'll be Charles from now on.
You know you do kind of look like a Charles.
Like a Winchester?
No, I would think more like Charles Nelson Reilly.
Ha ha ha!
Okay, so I don't know if you're deliberately avoiding the question.
Okay, let's get back to orders of magnitude.
Psalm has been in some form of engagement with you and your homestead for a day, a week, a month...
It feels like forever.
Okay.
All right.
So it's like you've always been in the gold room, right?
Yeah, but Sam has actually been here three days.
Oh, well, my goodness.
Of course.
Well, that makes a lot of sense.
Okay.
Some days he's there.
Some days he's not.
He calls you around nine, lets you know.
Yeah, it's been three days over the course of 10 days.
Oh, in that case, he's making tremendous progress.
He is kicking ass and taking names.
Yeah, that's right.
He wants to understand the whole scope.
Here's the thing.
Let's get back to your body on the table, right?
Yeah.
Laid out like a patient etherized on a table, except that's your house, right?
That's what T.S.
Eliot's talking about.
In this case, what are you going to do?
You're just going to show up and say, hi, I'm Robert Surgeon.
And I make surgeons, surgeries, right?
I'm not going to bother examining you.
I'm just going to get my favorite scalpel and get started.
No, they want to get the full examination.
They run a battery of tests.
They want to make sure you've got blood and stuff.
You don't just dive straight, even though the surgery is the fun part, as Hawkeye will tell you.
They call it meatball surgery.
In this case, he was to scope out the entire body.
to know where to begin, right?
Well, here's your typical guy.
My eyes are up here, you know what I'm saying?
Your typical guy shows up, he looks at it, he goes, oh boy.
Oh yeah, Charlie fix it, here he comes.
And then he throws out a number.
Now that number...
As far as I'm concerned, that number is just like a parenting plan between two divorced people.
If you put together a parenting plan, which every lawyer and family counselor will insist that you do, what that parenting plan is is a roadmap to failure.
Because it's trying to accommodate the worst possible scenario.
But then once it's on paper and in front of you and you both sign it, you're both going to work toward that eventuality because it's in the parenting plan.
Right?
So it's like, oh, you know, before the parenting plan, you go, oh, I'm going to the movies.
Can you watch the baby tonight?
Sure.
After the parenting plan, oh, I'm going to the movies.
Can you watch the baby tonight?
Well, tonight's not my night.
Right?
That's what a parenting plan is.
Yeah.
Unless you got real bad problems.
But a guy shows up here.
He looks at my house.
He goes, oh, well, it's going to cost $6,000.
Now, it might cost less, but I can't know until I get in there and see.
That's your typical guy.
Mm-hmm.
Now, he is going to find a way to make that thing cost $6,000.
Because if you go, oh, okay, I hope it costs less.
He's going to know, oh, this guy can afford a $6,000 project.
So once I get in there, you bet I'm going to find $6,000 worth of work, right?
So when Psalm says, I'm just going to jump in here.
I'm going to see what it is.
I'm going to tell you what it is when I find it.
I was like, okay, you know what?
That works for me because you're not throwing out some crazy thing.
Now it turns out you've worked here three days.
It's going to be $600 instead of $6,000.
But he won't know until he's tapped on the windows and talked to himself a little bit.
That's right.
But what Psalm didn't know, what the Duke boys didn't know...
Was that Roscoe had already blown out the bridge.
And I had already been under the porch for several weeks.
And as part of tearing the porch apart, what I also did was I cut out all the dry rot.
And I replaced the dry rot with good wood.
Now, this is a thing.
When you look at a torn apart porch, what you're thinking to yourself, if you're Psalm or anybody, is, oh, boy, I bet there's a lot of dry rot under there.
Uh-huh, but he has a look under there and he goes, oh, it looks like somebody's been down here with some good wood.
So he gets down there, he's like, oh, there's good wood all around here.
You didn't tell him that, you let him discover that.
That's right.
Because if he comes out of that hole and he's like, oh, there's a bunch of dry rot under here, I know there's not any dry rot under there.
I remediated all the dry rot by cutting it out and putting in good wood.
But you've also given Psalm a little bit of a puzzle here.
Right?
Not a puzzle.
You give him a little bit of a maze.
He's going to have to go figure some things out.
It's not going to be easy assumptions that John's just a little too overambitious because, oh, guess what?
Surprise, no dry rot.
Right.
He's going to say, oh, Johnny Fix-It here tore his parts apart.
Lol.
And then he's going to get underneath it and he's going to go, oh, Johnny Fix-It did some structural work, some supporting work here.
He did some non-obvious good wood.
Yeah, he did the hard stuff.
Well, not the hard stuff, but he did the stuff that makes the other stuff possible.
He can take a sunshine and make it and turn it into rain.
Take a nothing date and suddenly... Did he admire your moat at all?
Did he see that as a promising thing where you're like, oh, you know, to put the Hardy Boys in here.
Like, oh, John knows what he's doing.
You put a buckboard down here and a little Hardy Boy up the side, and now you've got a way to build your hull.
Yeah, one of the first things he said was,
Did you dig this trench?
And just give him a look like, yeah, I don't know.
What do you think?
What do you think?
And I was like, I mean, they did not dig it.
Was there someone here before me who dug this?
Was this trench always here?
Is this going to be a John Wayne Gacy type situation?
I just need you to help out around the house a little bit.
Yeah, the trench used to go all the way around the house, and I've been filling it with carpenters one after another.
You like reading the Bible?
Why don't you come back and meet my Thai friends who are running a chop saw for me around?
You like encyclopedias?
Sam, would you consider yourself a learned man?
so uh so he's really just he's here's my thing and i don't want to get too far ahead of this obviously we're in very early days of your relationship with some but is there any chance this could turn into something where your house is brian wilson and he's dr eugene landy what i want do you want a eugene landy
What I want is to live in a house where there's a SOM walking around with a transistor radio on the roof.
There is a small girl that's knolling things on the piano.
There's a motorcycle girl who's throwing things away.
I would like somebody with a clipboard and their hair bun telling me what I have to do that day.
This is the new the new Roderick group.
Right.
And I feel like if I could and then I feel like there's a rich guy out in the barn fixing lambrettas.
Oh, God.
This is all coming together.
You're like Leonard Bernstein.
Oh, my God.
Now I'm seeing it.
You're the conductor.
This is the game.
All I'm trying to do is figure out... You're the composer and the conductor.
You don't need to tell people what kind of wood to make the robos out of.
You just need to make a beautiful noise.
Yeah, I'm walking around.
You might get the Thai family working for you at some point, working with you at some point.
Not with that saw.
Well, maybe you both have something to learn.
Maybe there's a little bit of Lambretta movement going on here.
You know what?
I'm going to say, if you need a place to throw those encyclopedias, I got a big empty pool here.
And a girl who will know them.
Right?
No, no, no.
Come on.
I'm going to take the fence down.
You guys start partying in my backyard.
That's what I needed to learn.
I needed to learn how to have fun.
Yeah.
You didn't know what you were there for.
Right.
Currently, my job is just to find what room in the house is quiet enough to do my radio show.
Radio show.
This is going to be fun to watch.
I can't wait to see how this, I don't want to see how it turns out because this could really, I think, if you accept that this is just a new ongoing process and that the Roderick group is whoever's there right now.
This is kind of like your factory, like your Andy Warhol factory.
People are going to come in and out of the scene.
maybe the velvet underground comes and plays some tunes there's somebody with body paint doing a go-go dance and then you got some with his radio and he's up here on the roof and he's tapping on your windows you're not sure why because it's not time to know yet it's not time to know right well and what's what's very interesting about so i've only named just a few in the of the cast of uh of colorful characters that come around here peter
Actually, Peter that introduced me to Psalm.
Peter is currently doing a little bit of work in my basement.
The devil you say.
Because Peter came around.
Peter is a very old friend.
He was the first friend I made after I got sober.
When I got sober at the... Did he get a chip for that?
Well, he doesn't get a chip.
But when I got sober, I was newly 26 years old.
And at that point in time, I did not understand how you could be sober because everyone I knew was a drunk.
And so who do you hang out with?
Do you hang out with normals?
Do you hang out with just people that are like standing around?
You've kept them around all that time.
Well, so Peter was this guy that I met because I was sleeping in the alcove at the top of the stairs of this house.
This is before you got a toothbrush.
This is, yeah.
Early, very early days.
Very early.
I couldn't get a room anywhere.
I couldn't afford a room.
And it's before you lived in the van.
It is before I lived in the van.
It is after I'd been kicked out of everywhere, I was trying to get sober so I couldn't sleep on people's couches.
You know, that was I had to have a little bit of dignity.
And I and I met these people that lived in this house because I knew this girl, Julie, somehow, because Julie knew this guy, Brent, and Brent was a drunk.
But Julie wasn't one, and somehow Julie invited me over to their house, and it was full of people.
This house was one of those houses where six people lived, and none of them were drunks.
That seems statistically unlikely.
It was unlikely.
They were artists, and they were kooks.
There was a drum kit in the basement.
Somebody had painted a mural of a senator on the wall in the living room.
That's a senator who's a senator?
It's a centaur, right?
I always pronounce it a centaur.
It's a sexy, sexy beast.
The thing is, this might have been a centaur rather than a senator because the person that painted it was an art student who did not yet understand the musculature of the human body.
Yeah.
They don't teach you that the first day.
No, they don't.
Because this centaur, or centaur as you say, had two biceps.
Yeah.
And I remember sitting in the living room and going, that's terrible.
I mean, the head of the centaur looks correct.
Okay.
But it has two biceps.
Does no one else see this?
How can you sit in this living room all day with this painted on your wall?
It's got one in the chamber.
That's why they call them guns.
Interesting.
Anyway, so I met Peter.
This is where you met Julie somehow?
Yeah, Julie somehow.
And this ended up being how I met Laurel, who became my first sober girlfriend.
Huh.
Because I realized that these people did not drink but still were kooky, weird artist people.
And in fact, they were kookier, weirder, and more arty than the drunks that I knew.
But it wasn't a cult.
Because usually you see that in a cult.
If people are that interesting and they don't drink, it's usually a cult.
Well, it turns out that there's a whole group of people out there in the world that are just interesting and aren't also drunk.
And it's not that they weren't fucked up because they were all fucked up.
Sure.
But they weren't.
Drunk.
So, Peter has been around in my life ever since.
Peter was the original bass player of The Long Winters, but he quit before our first show.
Whoa.
Because he said that our music sounded too... It wasn't authentic enough.
Peter has been a thorn in my side, let's be honest.
But Peter was doing some work for my mom, and then she said, why doesn't Peter come out and do some work on your basement?
Yeah.
And I was like, it's going to be complicated for me and Peter for me to be paying Peter.
And I sent Peter a text and I was like, is this complicated for you to be working on my house after everything we've been through?
It was like at this stage in my life, I'm playing video poker for a living.
I want to just make some money.
So I'll come work on your house.
So let's just have it not be complicated.
He, that's none of my business, but is it because Peter's independently wealthy that he plays video poker or does he do it to make ends meet?
He's trying to make ends meet.
Okay, all right.
But he's not, is he at this point, is he coordinating with Psalm?
Are they, are they have any kind of formal relation or the knowlers?
Are these people aware of each other?
Not really.
Okay.
Peter right now lives on a houseboat that is owned by his sister.
Okay.
But it's not one of those houseboats that is like in Sex and the City.
It's a houseboat that is basically like a
As far as I know, it's like a tool shed.
It sounds like something out of Popeye.
Like entropy moves a lot faster on water is a thing that I'm aware of.
Yeah, it's an older place.
It has one of those crooked smokestacks that you might see in an Appalachian home.
Like the way a child draws a chimney?
That's right.
And his sister owns it for some reason.
I don't know what.
His sister has money.
She has a condo downtown.
She's often out of town.
Peter has a place to live.
He's currently driving a Lexus because somebody owed his brother some or his uncle some money.
And the guy paid him in a Lexus.
Okay.
The guy gave the Lexus, his uncle gave the Lexus to his daughter to take to college.
She thought the Lexus was ostentatious.
And so somehow Peter inherited it.
I felt it Peter.
Okay.
So he's living in a houseboat, driving a Lexus.
Right now he's working in my basement.
Is he doing structural things, or is it moisture abatement, or what kind of stuff, if you can say, if you're comfortable saying, what kind of stuff is he doing in your basement?
The basement was, at some point in its history, was like a practice space for a teenage heavy metal band.
You can tell from the graffiti on the walls.
At some point it was a root cellar.
There's still a coal hopper from when the house was heated with coal.
Wow.
The coal hopper still has coal in it.
Although at some point before I bought the house, people started throwing Mountain Dew bottles down into it, too.
So it was like coal, like ancient coal and also more recent Mountain Dew bottles.
Treating it like a laundry chute.
Right.
And so Peter was like, I'll get those Mountain Dew bottles out of there.
But what we really need is to put up some better walls.
And I said, here's my vision.
I want it to be beadboard.
Right.
And he said, yeah, I can work with that.
So Peter's basically building beadboard walls in the basement while Sam is building a monitor in Merrimack out of the front porch.
And when they see each other in the yard, when the body meets the body passing through the rye.
They nod at each other because if it weren't for Peter, there'd be no psalm.
Oh, that's true.
That's true.
Okay.
But they have no, but they're not interacting with each other.
Two separate projects, different sides.
At this point.
And Peter works very quietly.
He's not part of the sonic signature.
I'm just, it's just, I'm just, excluding the Lambrettas and the Knoller and the Motorcycle Girl, just even keeping them out of the scene for the moment in the Wespas.
It seems like at some point, Sam's scope might expand or transmogrify in such a way that he may bump up against Peter in a way where they need to work some things out.
In which case, Sam would probably be kind of like the sub-project manager for that part.
Here's what's going to happen.
Peter's going to start working up the basement stairs.
He's going to start at the bottom of the basement stairs.
He's going to be working up the basement stairs.
Peter is like me.
He's too meticulous.
So Peter's going to be spending too much time making things perfect in the basement.
Is that part of the plan or is that something you just kind of know about?
That's just one of the things you have to deal with when you're dealing with Peter.
Okay.
If it isn't right, Peter's going to scream fuck, and then he's going to rip it out, and he's going to have to do it over.
Okay.
You have a way of knowing when the deadline's changed, probably.
You hear the yelling.
Yeah, well, and there's never a deadline with him because you just have to let him do his thing.
You wind him up, you feed him some Peter Chow, and you let him go, and it gets done when it gets done.
That's part of the problem of hiring your friends.
that was the problem of the early long winters i put i didn't hire the best musicians i could find i just hired my friends and it made the band i didn't i didn't eric eric's been the best member of the long winters and he was the only guy i didn't know before i started the band everybody else i could have just i could have just put an ad in the newspaper and said wanted dudes that love slayer
So Peter's going to be working up from the bottom.
Eventual disappointments.
Psalm is going to come down from the roof and start working on the side of the house.
And there's a place at the basement door where there needs some siding report.
There's some siding work that needs to get done.
And it's right where Peter is going to be arriving at the top of the stairs.
That's your golden spike.
That's your golden spike.
That's it.
Yeah.
He's going to be working on that door from one side while Psalm is working on that door from the other side.
And that will be the thing that ties the whole.
It'll be like.
And the project is completed until Psalm shows up and says, listen, I got to paint your whole house.
I can't leave it like this.
But I'm going to give you one price.
Well, that day is going to be amazing, though.
One deal on the whole thing.
The whole thing.
Excluding the basement.
I'm going to do the whole thing.
Peter's in the basement.
Pick it out, Dale.
Peter's in the basement.
Pick it out.
All right.
Let's stop.