Ep. 273: "One Kilometer"
Hello.
Hi, John.
Hi, Merlin.
How's it going?
Oh, pretty good.
Oh, boy.
Were you up making bacon?
No, but I went to sleep early and then I woke up in the middle of the night.
That's how they get you.
You know how that is?
Yeah, it is.
Oh, no, no, no.
That's a house-wide struggle for us.
Oh, the go to bed early and then get up in the middle of the night?
Yeah, my wife really, well, because, you know, once your cycle is off and you're like, it's like it's 730 and I'm tired.
And you're like, you got to power through until 10.
Yeah, but I was like, I'm going to bed at midnight.
Yeah.
Like I keep planning, like a normal.
Mm-hmm.
Like a square.
Like a square.
Mm-hmm.
Like a regular.
And then at 2.45 a.m., I popped awake.
I was like, ha-ha!
There he is.
Yeah.
Hello.
Hello, everybody.
Yeah, it's when I get up to urinate at some point during the night that all of my anxiety comes flooding through.
And now I've made it a habit, so it's working out real nicely on a regular.
Oh, so you get up and you have a little bit midnight time, just you and your anxieties?
Sure.
For me, it's like between two and four.
Get up, pee like a gentleman.
I pee once in the night, usually.
And then at this point, I mean, I'm sure that'll change.
I'll have many more opportunities for this in the future.
But yeah, that could be a five minute to one hour to longer thing for me.
You probably don't get that.
Well, you know, it's hard.
The thing about anxiety is it's hard for me to, I think this is probably true for a lot of people.
It was for a long time hard for me to know what it felt like.
Because it would mask itself as other things.
And I think I still have that problem.
I can't tell when I'm, I don't, it's very rare when I can sit and say like, oh, wait,
I'm feeling anxiety.
It's like it always comes, you know, pads in on little cat feet.
I wish I had the same thing in reverse where for the longest time, I mean, I've had a lot of people in my life with various kinds of depression, treated and untreated, like, well, maybe a plurality, like a lot.
Uh-huh.
And I always felt like I could say with some confidence, I don't have depression.
I have anything but depression.
I'm an unhappy guy.
I said, if anything, I have the opposite of depression.
I get very anxious.
And it wasn't until fairly recently that more and more people would say, at least that I heard, would say, well, you know, anxiety is a big side effect of depression.
Uh-huh.
You know, that there's their fruit from the similar tree.
My problem is the habit, the habit of anxiety, you know, and not to be all Buddhist, but like if you have a bad thought and, you know, kind of let it pass away, you're okay.
The problem is if you make it part of your habit.
And I think that's true for almost any kind of emotional or mental deficit is like we can really, hey, happy new year.
This is good stuff.
Yeah.
yeah this is real happy stuff good yeah do you have to do you have to like touch the doorknob every time you go by it or anything like that no i had a very i don't think so i don't think so i do get um intrusive thoughts not the like you know i want to have sex with a baby and throw it on the train tracks kind of thought that some people get i don't get like you know it is intrusive
Well, I mean, Maria Bamford talks about this a lot.
She has really intrusive, very bizarre sexual thoughts that she doesn't want to have.
It's not anything she wants to do, but once the idea is in her head, she's made great comedy out of that.
I don't get that.
I do get this sort of like, I can't stop thinking a thought thing, and sometimes it's all I can do to pull myself out of it.
You're a muller, aren't you?
Don't you mull?
Yeah.
I do mull.
You mull and you stew.
I do a little bit of stewing.
I do some mulling, yeah.
I do a brood, I think.
You got a special nighttime toadstool just for that?
I just sit in front of a friggin' present.
What was that look the coffee girl gave me?
But I feel like a lot of that is managed now.
Um, a lot of that, a lot of that stuff.
Cause you know, the thing about depression, right?
Is that you think everybody's against you too, or that it's the, the whole world is like a lied.
Yeah.
Everybody sees the worst possible side of you.
Yeah.
And you're the, you're the goat in, in every scenario.
And I feel like the, the, uh, the medicine I'm taking now has relieved quite a bit of that.
So I don't spend all afternoon going like, uh, uh,
But I do still have those tendencies.
But I think more than anything, it's still that parliament of nudges.
All the little advocates for irrelevant, up-the-wrong-channel kind of small problems that just collect and form...
impassable problems.
There's nothing in the way here.
But there's somebody that's like, well, we don't have a single sharpened pencil in the house.
And it's just like, how did that become the thing that keeps me from finishing my record album?
And lately, and it's maybe around the new year, but it also feels like I have these...
I have these periods where I am seized with energy and I say, now we're going to get to the bottom of this.
Now we're going to, here we go.
You know, my dad would do this.
My uncle Jack does it.
It's like, everybody, get your boots on.
Like that thing that went around Instagram for a while.
It's like, okay, all right, all right, stop it.
But I had one of those recently where I marched around and said, like, okay, let's figure this out.
We've just got a couple of things to do, and why is it such a problem?
And, you know, I, like, created some folders on my desktop.
I made some commitments with some people over coffee practices.
I, you know, I've, like, planted some flags here.
But I still am – I'm still standing here with my same self and still every day like not taking first steps, you know, not like actually moving in any direction.
And it – it's exasperating.
You know, I've got the same – I have the same goals –
You know, I'm bad at having goals, but I have the same.
You've got your checklist.
I got my checklist.
Is that the same thing?
You've got your like your three things on your list.
That's the same thing.
And it's like 12 years of it haunting me.
I can't abandon it.
I get all this advice from well-meaning friends.
Well, if you haven't finished it, throw it away because just get on, get on with it.
It's like I can't.
But all it's doing is torturing me.
And what kind of way is that to live?
And so where's the anxiety?
Like in a way, anxiety is all over it.
It's like sticky with anxiety.
But it's not, but it doesn't like, it doesn't jump out and it's like,
joker costume or it's uh i always feel like anxiety is kind of dressed like harlequin the new version of harlequin oh yeah okay yeah yeah daddy's little monster yeah daddy's little monster t-shirt where i'm like i just feel like that's hard that's anxiety for me i don't know enough about her to know that's okay
Does she make webs?
It's complicated.
She treated the Joker at Arkham Asylum, and she basically found herself very attracted to his case and the celebrity of his case, and she got really played by the Joker.
Did she get some Joker on her?
Yeah, yeah, and she helped him escape, and then, I haven't kept up, but that's the origin, which is actually a really good comic, is, you know, that basically now they're in this very kind of abusive, codependent relationship.
Where she really wants to impress him, she's going to be the one who kills Batman.
He's like, no, nobody's allowed to kill Batman but me.
And I'm not going to kill him because we need each other, right?
And so she doesn't get the gist of how to please him.
And, you know, she does sexy things and he's sitting there crumbling up his plans and getting all frustrated.
And...
She doesn't get the depth of his jokes, and so their relationship is very trying.
I don't know what that's like in the movie because I refuse to see that movie, but that's the Harley Quinn in the TV show in the comics.
And what is the Harley Quinn movie?
She's in the movie Suicide Squad, played by the wonderful Margot Robbie.
I see.
And they really, you know, there's a tendency, you've probably never noticed this, there's a tendency sometimes to really heavily sexualize comic book women.
And they went pretty crazy with it in that movie, apparently.
Is that a good personification of anxiety for me, or should I pick another one?
Oh.
Well, I think, you know, because of the Goldwater Amendment, like, I am not allowed to diagnose you from a distance, as we say.
Sure.
But it seems to me, if I were going to dumb this down in a non-John Roderick way, I would say you seem to have not merely a critical voice in
But as you put it, a parliament of critical voices that are at once on message and contradictory that drives you.
So you have Minnie Harley's Quinn in some way.
But I don't know if you have to decide who that is.
But, you know, sometimes people say like when you're trying to face this stuff down.
it does help to identify, this is really good radio, it does help to identify that voice or those voices and then decide how you feel about what that person is saying.
It's like imagine when you catch yourself having those critical thoughts or those like, you know, you're such a dummy, you did this dumb thing, you'll never do anything good, you never finish, whatever your flavor of that is, and it's a different personal health for everybody, that you try to sort of identify like, okay, who is that?
Is that my dad?
is is that is that some kind of like is that my boss randy from the restaurant because all restaurant all stepfathers and and restaurant managers are named randy uh so it helps to identify that you don't have to give it a name you don't have to get you know wacky about it but to go and then decide and this is this is the pro level is to decide how you feel about that voice being there and whether you're going to listen to it and give it any credibility
What about having it be an entire Suicide Squad?
Oh, where you get like the Mean Joker with the braces or whatever?
See, I don't know enough about the Suicide Squad.
You got your own superhero villain team in there.
They bring their forces together.
The Parliament.
The Parliament.
New from D.C.
That whole, like, the voices in my head are a Parliament is actually a sort of a thing I grabbed from Bismarck.
He described his own inner life.
You probably mentioned this before, but Bismarck, huh?
Bismarck is so full of wonderful aphorisms that it's sometimes hard to track down all of his...
all of the great lines from, from his sort of, uh, catalog.
Cause he just, if you, if you read, if you read his, his aphorisms, he reads like Sun Tzu, you know, he's just like, he's full of, full of great, uh, little, little political jobs, but he does at some point describe his own inner life as being this, um, Reichstag of, of, uh, disagreeable,
inner selves.
And so when I talk about it, it's really a direct grab.
Okay.
Well credited.
Otto Vaughn, you know, he I dig his stuff.
You know, I celebrate his entire catalog.
Sure.
If you're such a fan, name his last three albums.
Yeah, that's a really good painting.
I'll use that.
I feel like from a remove, like if you look at other people and other people's hang-ups, other people who have the hang-ups that you do not have, everything looks simple.
And I think this is from my own POV, that's definitely true with procrastination, where people who don't procrastinate
have no sympathy or really understanding of what it's like to be somebody who procrastinates and explaining it doesn't help.
Because, I mean, it's like you've got this extra sense as somebody who procrastinates.
Or whatever one's personal hang-up is, right?
So, like, you see stuff in the tea leaves that other people don't see.
You're motivated in ways that are very exotic and unknowable to people who don't have that.
But...
So let's say, I don't want to trigger anybody here, but it's been reported that someone very highly placed in the U.S.
government has a morbid fear of stares and basically grades.
And so I heard about this, and I went and read a little more about it.
And again, because of Goldwater, we're not allowed to diagnose from a distance.
But it's very interesting.
This is a person who is very scared of going downstairs.
In particular, there's a difference.
There's one phobia about going downstairs.
There's another climbing-based fear of going upstairs.
But that this person, in addition to that, is terrified of falling down steps, but also is, as they say, a germaphobe.
So it doesn't like to touch the rail, but has to touch the rail in order to assuage that other fear.
Now, this gets very, very complicated.
So I don't have that.
I don't see, you know, a screenshot of Teletubbies and get a tiny dick.
Like, I don't get like, ah.
So I look at that and I say, well, that seems very exotic.
I don't have a morbid fear of snakes.
I have what I would consider to be a very normal fear of snakes, which is like if there's a snake, I'm scared.
But I very rarely in my life have imagined that there are snakes in places where snakes never are.
But somebody who has that fear.
Like on a plane?
like on a plane, like on a motherfucking plane.
I'm not sure exactly where I'm going with this, but I think, I feel like if I see this in myself, I see it in others.
I think one of the big problems with all of this stuff is the repetition.
So like, if you, if somebody, and this is again getting a little bit into the mindfulness and cognitive psychology angle, but like if you're somewhere where there's shit tons, at this point I'm just kind of quoting this guy named Robert Wright, who wrote a book recently about Buddhism and cognitive psychology, or not cognitive, I'm sorry, evolutionary psychology.
But he basically says if you're in an area where you know there's tons of rattlesnakes and lots of people die from rattlesnakes for some reason, you can understand why.
You would be very cautious.
And even imagine there's a snake when there's not a snake.
Because even if you're scared of snakes and there's not one there 99 times out of 100, the one time that there is, it served you well from an evolutionary standpoint.
But in a modern society, maybe that doesn't make the most sense.
So I feel like the one common thing through all of this is, yeah, first of all, there is a deficit in perception and cognition.
But then there's also the repetition.
I think it's the repetition that kills us and the feeling that the repetition is out of our control.
So having a thought that you keep thinking that's making you unhappy, but then somehow it's like pressing a bruise.
You can't help but revisit this thing that you hate because it feels so much a part of you.
Does that make any sense?
Yeah.
And even or especially if you're scared of snakes or you're worried about throwing a baby onto train tracks, you don't have to have, according to Hoyle OCD, to be very troubled by this thing where you're going like, I have this thought, I hate it, I feel crazy, I hate feeling crazy, I hate this entire thing, but I can't stop and I don't know why.
That's the part that I think gets so frustrating is you know it keeps happening, but you don't know how to stop it.
And I think that's when something goes from being inconvenient, frustrating, and troublesome for a moment to being something a little bit more chronic.
And what in particular I think for me makes it chronic is that the thoughts themselves, my thoughts,
whatever pantheon of thoughts, none of them are unreasonable.
It's not like I'm scared to go downstairs.
I'm not afraid of snakes in any way, shape or form.
I seek out snakes.
All of my like throw a baby on the tracks, like sort of ejaculatory thoughts are all like interesting and fun.
It seems to me like it.
You talked about your ability, your desire.
You are so historically through your life, you've been so interested in building your own mental and emotional world that you would seek it out to the exclusion of other people's emotional worlds.
You like your internal thing.
Yeah, the whole – like the fantasies aren't problems for me and also none of the thoughts feel abnormal.
They all feel normal.
This was the – you know, when we used to talk about depression when it was really my bête noire, it was just that the things I was telling myself all seemed perfectly reasonable.
I was –
trash garbage person.
And I could demonstrate why.
And my friends did hate me and I could show you the evidence.
So the thoughts that plague me are all these thoughts that if I try and
apply a critical faculty to i come up with some all the more normal and legit yeah it's just like oh well i mean obviously there is a deficit of pencils here i do need five new folders on my computer that are that are named and numbered and until i do that that i can't begin and and having done it now i
I feel like I've done some pretty good work and I need to take a little break.
And so I've got, you know, I've got these files and that organizes my next step.
But, you know, the actual next step is pretty big job.
I should probably have a sandwich first.
And so those aren't easy to say, look, man, I keep coming back to this.
This thought that is intrusive, that I can see is irrational.
It's that I keep, that I am.
But as you described, I'm totally locked in a pattern.
It's absolutely incapacitating.
It is something that feels like there's a solution to.
But what you were describing, which is people that don't share that...
Don't share a morbid fear of stares or germs, feeling like, well, that seems pretty easy to get over, or at least pretty easy to work around.
In that case, you take normal precautions.
You wear white gloves?
Or whatever, just wash your hands often enough.
But yeah, exactly.
You would say, when people look at somebody who has an affliction like that, they go, you're making a problem out of something that is not a problem.
And for that to become pathological is not understandable to me.
Well, when you and I first met and you were the Internet's Merlin man, remember when you were Merlin man?
I do.
I do.
He's stuck in my shoe.
Yeah, it was a wonderful time.
Yeah.
And I remember, you know, you were you were building a name for yourself as a productivity guru.
And I had that in the inside insight into you where you were you were trying out all those methods.
You were discovering all that stuff because you really were trying to solve actual an actual problem for yourself.
Yeah.
Which was I mean, you weren't just like, let me go out and test all these things.
Options for my website you were like how do I how do I solve this problem?
How do I solve for X which is that I want to be more productive?
I mean I eventually became broken as a vocation, but I came at it honestly Which was that I felt like I mean if you had to put it in a non like negative way it would be that I always had the sense that
that I was capable of doing seemingly basic things better, but it was always challenging to me.
And I wondered, was there a fairly light infrastructure I could introduce?
And then when I noticed the infrastructure was getting too heavy, I would try to pull back and go, no, no, no.
Just even if this is your job, this is too much infrastructure.
Well, sure.
I remember the wall of post-it notes.
The infamous or not infamous because it wasn't really famous.
It was just, you know, like at your house, you had stuff on post-it notes and it became a real wall.
No yarn.
No yarn.
No yarn.
But like, yeah, that is a wow.
There are a lot of thoughts up there.
And some of those post-it notes just said things on them like, go!
Get more post-it notes.
Yeah.
And I'm the same way.
And the problem with my repetitive thoughts or the stumbling blocks is that it seems to other people who don't have the problem like it is just a productivity problem.
It's an implementation problem.
Yeah, like all you need is a plan or a system.
You've got all the tools and you've got the will.
There's no reason that you can't just go make a lawnmower engine today.
put some folders on your thing, or here's a book that helped me, or you know what works for me is blank.
And so absolutely, like my close friends, well-meaning people, my own mother, are always making these, you know, they're pulling yellow legal pads out.
They're like, we just have to do this step by step.
They really want to help.
And they say, you know, first thing we have to do is just
is this small, simple step.
And I go, right, dig it.
And then immediately like the wheels come off and it, and it doesn't, it doesn't seem to other people like I'm doing anything but just stopping in the middle of the road for no reason.
And, and it's not that I'm, you know, it's not that I see snakes, but,
uh and this and this is the repetitive cycle that you're talking about because i don't you know i'm in a loop i'm in a loop and um i mean this is amazing radio let's be honest part of it though and it's okay if you want to push back on this but my my own take on that that i think works for a lot of there's a repetition for sure but whether it's procrastination or it's not getting an album done or something to call it fear is a
But to call it a feeling...
of impending danger or insecurity is a better way to put it.
A feeling of fear, you might get a big adrenaline or dopamine hit that says, I need to get through this.
I need to run away from the snake because I literally saw five fucking snakes.
For something that's there, if the bear is chasing you, you should run.
The other part, though, is that part of that repetition is that you just keep checking for the thing that you're scared of or worried about
If you know what I mean, there's something in you that's causing you to not move forward fearlessly.
And it's not fear exactly on the nose, but it is uncertainty.
And it is some kind of like, am I ready for this?
I don't know if I'm up for this today.
I think.
Yeah, I get knots in my stomach laying in bed at night thinking about really simple things to do.
Yeah, I'm not excluding fear because fear is definitely a thing.
I'm just saying that calling it just fear dismisses too easily the role of uncertainty, which is a little bit different.
And fear and anxiety and nervousness and anger are all flavors of a very similar thing that involves the world is not the way that I want and I'm not sure how to change it to be how I want.
Fear fear of success fear of failure are the are the the twin the twin twins of Virgo That I can't tell the difference between them.
I don't know what I'm people people have been throwing that at me since I was 11 You have fear of success.
You have fear of failure and I go well Could just be you have reluctance to change
There's something that says that like change feels risky, even if that's an improvement.
But I do, you know, I do and have over the course of my life made big changes in who I am.
You know, I'm such a different person than I was.
And of course, I'm the same person.
Like I still am.
I still am me.
But, you know, I react.
I try to learn.
And I do I do dig my feet in sometimes, but I dig them in on principle rather than like it's it's in this one small area.
Right.
I mean, like I I am.
It's it's a it's a closed loop.
It's not like a loop that that affects my life.
Like, ability to take a new job or make a switch between being a musician and being a writer or something like that.
Like, that stuff is just like, no, yeah, sure, let's give it a try.
Or fear of change in terms of, like, throwing it all away.
But fear of...
You know, I honestly don't know what benefit I think, like what I'm getting out of these small failures, these constant small failures, the fact that I have this list that only has two items on it.
And both things could be, I could finish my book and finish my album in a month, really, if I didn't
Worry about their quality.
You know, like I could have that record done in two days if I didn't care whether it was good or not.
And it would be off your list and it would be off the list and I would be on to the next thing.
And by caring about it being good, I make it impossible to finish because I can never get a thing that is good.
And that makes me think that I'm incapable of doing a thing that's good.
And that paralyzes me.
So I make a set of folders on the desktop and I say, I'm just going to put all the lyrics that start with the letter R in the R file.
And that will help me organize them and I'll be able to tell which ones are good.
And then I put them in there.
And as I'm putting them in there, I'm like, well, this one's good.
That one's good.
This feels great.
And then two days later, I open up the R file and I think it's full of great stuff.
And I read them all again, and I'm like, there's not a single good thing in here.
It's garbage.
And then I close it, and I don't look at it for a month.
Because it just sits on the desktop as this, like, throbbing red thumb.
And now you've created a taxonomy of failure.
Yeah.
Well, and there's that folder that I know is full of garbage that is all of... And basically, it contains everything under the letter R that I am capable of making.
So to add more garbage to it doesn't seem like the right thing.
you know, process.
And by that point you need a rest.
And I need a rest, you know, or I need to start working on, you know, what I need to do is start working on the novel.
And so I make some files and I go over there and I'm like, this is.
You roll your chair over a couple of feet and you go, right.
Here we go.
Roll up the sleeves, crack the knuckles and sit at the typewriter.
You know, like I have done so much work on both things.
Like the novel has hundreds and hundreds of pages.
And I've had probably eight people read it.
And all eight have come back with really good constructive comments that are not like, well, you need to start over.
Their comments are like, this is great.
Here's my suggestion.
You should just write more about
how you feel and take out a little bit of the stuff where you're like, and then I had another seven up and I go amazing.
And then I read it and I'm like the whole thing.
Basically the entire book is about seven ups and I have to redo it.
I have to redo the whole thing because it's basically just a testimony to the number of seven ups I drank.
And the lyrics, I've got so many files of lyrics, so many files.
Files and files.
Enough for 50 albums.
But I can't get... I can't get that voice out of my head that it's... That when I look at it a second time, it's garbage.
And all the solutions that are suggested by my well-meaning friends are just like, move on!
Get past it!
I...
It just seems like brutal to me.
Why would they even say that?
Why would they suggest such an awful thing as that I should throw my thing away?
Throw all this work away, all these great files that are full of garbage.
Why would somebody tell me to throw away my life's work?
That's my cycle.
Another way to think about this, this is not going to help, unfortunately, but you're used to that.
Another way to think about it, though, is that what's the constant through all of this?
Oh, there's you.
The other constant through all of this is the fucking list.
So, I mean, in my case, the analog is, like I realized a long time ago, I will very likely never be without anxiety.
So even if I clear the decks of the top anxiety, the three under it, and all the other ones, I'm not going to get around the structural problem that anxiety comes to me in ways I don't choose, and I could find myself becoming anxious about almost anything.
So I'm not saying we're the same on this, but, you know, it's that fucking list that's killing you.
It's in some ways it's like, if you didn't have the list, I mean, and again, now some, some kind of armchair Freud is going to come in and go, Oh, well, you know, get rid of the list or throw the list away.
Or to say, you know, I guess all I'm trying to say is that like, at least to be aware of the fact that the one constant is the list.
So there's two extreme example, you know, uh, points of view here.
One, one would be like throw the list away.
Cause it's not helping you start over and do something else.
And then if that includes going back and looking at your R lyrics, uh,
then that's fine.
But another person might say, and this is going to be your fear of failure or fear of success, friends, your imposter syndrome buddies, is going to be like, well, maybe you're worried that once you tick off those two items, there won't be anything left.
And now who are you?
Which is, I mean, that's a hot take, but there's probably going to be people who think that.
What's weird is I always want help and I ask for help.
And I think in my head, I have a vision that someone will take enough of an interest in this that they will actually pull up a chair.
And because I love to sit and like read off a thing and have somebody else hear it and bounce it back, you know, like I love to go back and forth.
What I don't.
Like is when someone sits and listens and goes, oh, great.
Well, it seems like you're on your way or, you know, here's my suggestion for a solution to your problem overall.
And then they get up and leave and leave me alone to.
How does that make you feel?
Abandoned.
Because they hadn't engaged fully.
Well, and the problem is it's an unrealistic expectation because I want some friend of mine who has their own creative life, who is struggling to get their own things done, who is obviously consumed with their own demons to devote themselves for some period of time to helping me.
And the fact that they, you know, like I wrote our good friend Ben Acker the other day and said, I've got this draft and, you know, I'm wondering if you would read it.
And he wrote back and said, the thing about a draft is if you think it's a draft, it's still a draft and you should work on it more.
And when you don't think it's a draft, when you're like, it's done.
Then you have people read it.
And I was like, huh, that's an interesting theory.
If you're still calling it a draft, you know you're not done yet.
Yeah.
Is he implying that it's not, is he trying to motivate you or say that it's not ready for criticism?
He's definitely trying to motivate me.
And, you know, I have this conversation a ton of times, like with Dave Bazan, tried to help me finish my record and did quite a bit of work helping me do it.
But ultimately, like it was, here, let me make files for you.
And then once they're in files, you can sort through them and know what to do.
And I wanted so much handholding beyond...
Just beyond.
And other people's systems, I generally, like, not just struggle to adopt, but actively resist in my head.
If somebody's like, here, let me make these files for you.
I'll order them this way.
I'm like, ah, that's just not how I would order them.
Um, that's just not how I would progress.
I had a plan last year and some, some life stuff got in the way and it, and I was a week behind and the person that was helping me with that plan said, well, you're a week behind, but you can catch up.
And I said, well, because of these life things, I feel like I shouldn't be a week behind.
I feel like we should set the deadline that we had a week later.
And they said, no, let's keep the deadline where it is, and just you make up for the week that got lost.
And I was furious.
Why should I have the deadline be the same?
It should move back a week because of the tornado.
Right.
The tornado that hit the town.
And they opine that that's not really a deadline if you move it?
Well, yeah, or they're just like, it's fine.
You can make up that week.
You can make up that lost week.
And I was like, but that's crazy.
That's crazy to say that I'm a week behind now.
I was doing so good.
You walked across Europe, but the idea of feeling a little bit behind on the project cripples you.
Well, yeah.
That's rough.
That's fucking rough.
You have the ability to power through stuff.
It's just some things are harder than others.
And this is the thing I think a lot of people...
don't believe when I say but I was 30 when I walked across Europe and it was the first thing I had ever finished except for high school and I didn't really finish high school you know they I got to the like they finished you yeah right I mean I got to the end of what the term of high school should have been and they were like that's fine
And so I didn't even have a real feeling of completion of high school because I because I like skirted it.
Wasn't it more like the staff and faculty disappeared you?
Wasn't it more like sort of by mutual assent, by a voice vote, they decided that you just needed to not be at that high school anymore?
Yeah, right.
Like I had actually not completed the requirements and they just took a pencil and erased the zero and added a one.
I miss the analog age.
And said, that's fine, isn't it?
Do we all agree?
Is that fine?
So moved.
And it's like, I knew it.
I knew that they were doing it.
If you look at my transcript, it's visible there.
There's a visible lie or cheat in it that I didn't ask for, and it does feel dishonest.
And it's a white ribbon.
It's a white ribbon, and it's a small thing that I think a lot of people would assume I was proud of.
Or at least relieved by.
Well, I didn't care.
I mean, I didn't care.
I don't think about, I had no anxiety about graduating from high school because I knew if I did or I didn't, it wouldn't matter.
But having not done it, having not actually gone to summer school or repeated my senior year, whatever it was that I probably or almost definitely should have been forced to do, that I didn't actually, it's not actually finished.
Because it was, yeah, it was this like, it's faked.
So the walk across Europe, and I don't know if I've ever told you this, but there was a moment in, there was an evening in Slovakia.
Have I ever told you about this evening in Slovakia?
No, I don't remember.
Is this when you went to the lady's house and she gave you food?
No.
Oh, by the way, our thanks to Mack Weldon.
You know what?
I've got some Mack Weldon stuff on the way.
Like in the mail.
As you will hear on the ad spot, which I most definitely have already recorded, I got three new of the Mac Weldon shirt that I like for the Christmas.
Oh, nicely done.
I don't want to spoil the ad spot that you just heard that I already definitely recorded, but I'm a fan, man.
I ordered a bunch of more silver underpants.
I didn't want to take you off your anecdote.
I just needed a spot.
Those silver underpants really do help me.
So they should just call them that.
Why don't they just call them silver underpants?
Well, I think that's what they are, right?
Should I just make this the ad?
I don't have a problem with this being the ad because it's true.
My silver underpants protect me against danger.
Shit.
Okay, hang on.
I'm going to regret this.
I can feel it already.
I'm going to fucking regret this.
Don't say hi.
Let's see here.
How's it going?
They're not technically bulletproof, the silver underwear.
They're not technically bulletproof, but they make me feel bulletproof.
This episode of Roderick Online is brought to you by Mack Weldon.
And I'm here to tell you right now, you can go to MackWeldon.com and you'll get 20% off your order using the promo code ROTL, just like it sounds ROTL.
Now, what I need to tell you, I'm going to regret this.
I can feel it.
It's military-grade silver thread that is threaded in with the cotton.
John, you can make a military-grade silver thread?
Is that a NASA technology?
The military does it all the time.
I don't know how, apparently.
I mean, it's not something probably that Mack Weldon just does themselves.
They probably source it through military contractors like Halliburton or something.
Mack Weldon is better than whatever you're wearing right now.
pretty sure that's true yeah yeah your underpants have silver in them no you fixate on the underpants and the problem with these mac weldon people is they're always fixating on the underpants i am all about the pima cotton this is this is the ad just so y'all know uh i am uh i i'm a big fan of the pima cotton long sleeve t-shirt and i cannot even tell i i will just tell you this i literally have a drawer full of them because they now are officially my uniform i wear some kind of a short sleeve shirt underneath
uh it could be it could be the mac wilden uh white t-shirt which has a nice long tail much like the chris anderson article in wired uh but this and but i am here to tell you now john is here to tell you about underpants i'm here to tell you about shirts these these are these are soft they're beautifully made they're they're like engineered they actually like the t-shirt looks like something from outer space it's like the coolest thing ever so you know you want to talk more about this threads in your underpants
Well, see, I don't typically wear T-shirts unless the only time I'll put on a T-shirt is if, A, I expect to be hot and I'm dressing up fancy and I don't want, you know, I want another layer.
And I'm always confused.
Does the extra layer make me hotter so that I perspire more?
Oh, I see.
Am I just causing more of a problem for myself, or am I putting another layer in between my shirt and the perforation?
This is why you can finish your album when you're thinking about shit like this.
You've got to consider, is there wicking involved?
Is there wicking?
it's a hard choice and my dad wore v-neck t-shirts but i do not support no no no no no no i am more of a that is not a good look collared shirt i mean if you like them get them hakuna matata but for me i look i look bad i look like somebody in some kind of like community theater version of like you know cat on a hot tin roof or something it's bad yeah
Yeah, no, no, I don't like them.
I don't like them either.
And when I was a kid in the 70s, it was very popular to wear tank tops.
And I had a bunch of cool tank tops that had stripes and stuff.
And I looked very cool in a tank top when I was like eight.
But I don't look good in a tank top now.
No.
And I don't look good.
I don't like a V-neck shirt.
They're also stinky.
They can be stinky because there's nothing to absorb your business.
Yeah, they're gross.
But, you know, Kamuna Matata, if you like to wear it.
Yes, especially if you get them from Mack Weldon, which I'm pretty sure you can.
Yeah, but the silver underpants.
And the thing is, they're not silver colored.
And this is the other thing.
That's important.
A lot of people think it's going to look like a baked potato.
Do your underpants look like a baked potato?
No, because I get the light pastel colors.
Light pastel color.
Yeah.
And I'm not a technical fabrics person, typically.
Right?
I'm going to want your wools and your cottons.
You like pants made of wax.
Exactly.
Right?
I'm talking about doing a motorcycle trip this summer up to the Arctic Circle with some friends.
And they are friends, one of them at least...
is somebody that wears technical fabrics even when they're not doing something technical.
I think I know who he is.
And I'm like, well, I'm not so sure.
It's Jason.
No, no, no, no.
Jason can't figure out whether he's wool or what.
But he's not against technical fabrics.
The thing about my silver underpants is that my feeling about them is although they are produced surely by some technical method that involves military-grade silver thread, it's silver.
Mm-hmm.
Which is like the oldest of the oldest school materials.
It's easily one of my favorite precious metals.
Yeah.
Oh, me too.
I think gold is very gaudy.
I think silver can be very, very classy.
I got silver all over the house.
I mean, you know, all my doorstops are silver.
And I do feel like it's not...
You have bullion.
Don't you have ingots?
Yeah, I do.
But it's not... You got that back from the crackhead's trunk, right?
It got the ingots back from the crackhead's trunk.
And they're back fulfilling their purpose, their ultimate purpose, which is to be $5,000 doorstops.
The thing about Mack Weldon is they want you to be comfortable.
So if you don't like your first pair of silver underpants, you can keep it, and they will still refund you with no questions asked.
Now, I think this is a good policy.
I would not even want to know that somebody's sending used underwear through the mail.
Right.
You're not going to take that back.
Well, God, no.
I mean, who are you going to get that to?
I struggle with that with my socks because I like to rotate.
I'll get a whole new set of gold toes.
And then I feel bad about all of the – there's some socks my daughter can repurpose into sewing projects.
But I feel bad.
So now what's nice is they accept socks in compost in San Francisco.
So you can compost your socks.
You know what I do with socks?
If they're not totally thrashed, if they're just like, these socks have run their course.
They're imperfect.
Socks are in the family of things that I will put back into the river.
Which is to say that once you get like 10 pairs of socks that are all going out, you bind them together into like a... Like a bindle?
Like a bindle of socks.
A bale of socks.
And you take them and you just put them on top of a mailbox somewhere on a business street.
And I guarantee you those socks will be gone in 10 minutes.
But by like a by a fetishist or somebody who just wants to have you socks just for like a collection?
Like, who do you think is picking those up?
Who knows?
Who knows?
This is the beautiful thing about the river.
The river.
If you put something down, if you put something and put a sign on it that says free.
Oh, yes.
It goes away.
Yes.
Almost invariably, it goes away.
Now, if you put a filthy child's car seat down with a sign that says free, it will not go away.
It will stay there and it will grow moss.
So don't do that.
Nobody likes those.
But things like socks, which you would not think anybody would have a purpose for.
See, I've heard it said, hey, listen, don't donate socks that are used.
Donate socks that are fresh.
That's actually one of the most needed things at a shelter is socks.
But nobody wants your used socks is a thing I've always heard.
And yet, a bale of socks will go.
And once it goes, once it's in the river...
Once it goes into the Ganges of your neighborhood, you don't have to worry whether it's a sock fetishist, whether someone's making puppets.
Oh, it's your problem now.
Take the socks.
Just take them.
It could have been the red hot chili peppers that grabbed it.
Oh, of course, because they need that for their attire.
Yeah.
You put it in the river.
You put it in the river and the socks go somewhere.
You put it in the river.
And I don't put everything in the river.
I don't just take my garbage and just put it out.
No, no.
Well, I'm here to tell you, John, Mack Weldon also has socks.
Here's the thing.
Now, Mack Weldon, you can get underwear, socks, and shirts.
They all look good and they perform well, too.
Good for working out, going on dates, or just everyday life.
That's Mack Weldon.
So what you do is, if you have put your socks into the river or your silver underpants and you're ready to re-up, please go to MackWeldon.com
and use the very special promo code ROTL, just like it sounds.
ROTL.
That'll get you 20% off your order.
I'm pulling for the Pima Cotton long-sleeved T-shirt, and the white T-shirt sounds like you're pulling for the pastel-colored silver underpants.
Well, not necessarily, because I also bought two pairs of silver socks.
What?
Silver socks?
I've never had them.
I've never had them before.
Oh, come on.
Is that a thing?
I've never had them before, and I'm hoping that they increase my bulletproof-itude to the point that I basically can defeat the Joker or whatever it is that everybody is so scared about.
If Achilles had been wearing these, he wouldn't be so fucked up.
Ha-ha!
He got dipped.
They held him by his little tendon, and they dipped him into the water as a baby to make him bulletproof or arrowproof, and that's why you got an Achilles tendon now.
extended crew socks oh here we go super fine cotton anti-odor silver business smart oh these are handsome oh they come in purple yeah see anti-odor business i think i need this i need yeah well that's what i'm saying oh wait i did get these i think i got the extended crew yeah i didn't know my socks were silver i didn't even know that but wait they've got them casual is not silver and then you go down and you've got the extended crew right extended crew yeah extended crew
Well, wait.
No, there's extended crew in Casual.
There's extended crew in Silver.
There's extended crew in Merino.
Okay.
Okay.
So there are several extended crews, but if you get the Silver ones that are business smart, I feel like they also...
And I got them so that they're very distinctive from my other socks.
That's what I did, too.
Yeah.
So it's like, when it's time to put on... Because I remember when I had the silver underpants before, before Millennium Girlfriend stole them, that I was... When I put them on, I did feel more like...
And now that I have the socks too, I can decide like, am I just wearing silver socks today without the underpants?
Right.
You don't want to be that guy, right?
You don't want to be too matchy matchy.
You don't want to be like Ken Stringfellow wearing all denim.
Well, maybe, maybe sometimes, you know, maybe if it's like, I, this is, this is a heavy day.
I need some extra protection.
So you go to MacWeldon.com, use the special promo code ROTL to get you 20% off.
Our thanks to MacWeldon for supporting Roderick Online and all the great shows.
Yeah, thank you for making this thing, whatever this thing is.
Yes.
Anyway, so I was in Slovakia.
You were in Slovakia.
I was in Slovakia.
I could have gone worse.
I could have gone worse.
It was pretty good.
I think so.
Yeah.
I mean, yeah.
I didn't say anything gross.
Did I?
Better than the Paisley mattress.
Okay.
Yeah.
So here we are in Slovakia.
We're in Slovakia, and I'm walking, and it was one of these days.
Sometimes you had these days where the distances that you wanted to go, like I want to go 35 to 40 kilometers in a day.
And there were some days where 35 to 40 kilometers put me in a place where I was not around anywhere I could stop.
It's like when you're on tour and you've just got to get through Canada.
Yeah, right.
You don't want to drive 12 hours.
uh, ever on tour.
It's too much, but there are just some places where it's like, sorry, man, if you're going from Calgary, you know, to Winnipeg, you've just got to drive and it's just, there's no other way around it.
You can't, there's no show you can book in the middle.
And this was one of those days.
Yes.
Yes.
Uh, either I stop with a, with like basically what I would consider a half day and stop in this town.
That's 15 kilometers from where I started, which just feels like me.
Yeah.
Um, and a lot of times I would get to that town and I'd look around and I'd say, does this feel like a cool enough town that I could just call it a half day and hang out here?
Just so I understand there's, there's a balance between, uh, on the one hand, you want to feel like you've made enough progress for the day and you got a map, right?
But you want to feel like you've done enough for the day.
Like if you only went like, I don't know what 15 kilometers is.
I don't know what that is in, in regular money, but like if you go, huh?
It's a distance.
Okay, but if you made it four miles today, it would not feel substantial enough, but you have to weigh that against, oh, there's this very small town that may not accommodate me, but I've got to go another 20 miles.
Is that the balance?
Yeah.
And you look at a map and you see like, oh, there's a big, big area here where there are no towns.
I'm guessing it's a swamp or it's an other sort of uninhabitable zone.
Millenniums are not going to understand this.
You have to understand when John and I were coming up, the map you had might not be right anymore.
Like it could be that that road is gone.
Like Ronald Reagan changed that.
It's a different road now.
And your Atlas from 1974 isn't going to be so baller today.
Yeah.
It could be a fucking swamp.
And I'm guessing a lot of times, because it doesn't say swamp, or if it does, it says it in Slovakian.
Nobody likes to call their city a swamp.
That's fucking Rand McNally.
That's a big map.
Edge of Swamptown.
So this was one of those days, and I went through this little town, and I remember actually going through a town and saying to someone...
Stopping someone in the in the street and saying, is there a hotel in this town?
And they looked at me with this with this particularly like late.
20th century Slavic look.
And they were like, no.
As though having a hotel in that town was a stupid thing for me to say.
It was like two levels of ignorance.
It was like on the one hand, you didn't know if there was a hotel, but then you didn't even know what a dumb question it was.
Yeah.
And I looked at them, and then as we parted ways, I thought to myself, who's the dummy?
Like, you guys...
are figuring out like a market economy.
And I know from talking to a lot of people on this side of what had formerly been the wall, there's a lot of feeling of like resentment about the intrusion of this expectation of a market economy.
But all you have to do is say, yes, come to my house and I'll pay you.
what seems like to you probably a lot of money.
Like the original gig economy.
Yeah.
I'll pay you $25, which is, that's like all the dollars.
Yeah, it's a lot.
And all you have to do is have a bed in the back of your fucking warehouse.
So who, who, why are you so smug about the fact that you don't have a fucking hotel in your town?
Like get with the program.
Yeah.
Um, which, you know, which was like,
There's probably a little pension there now.
Anyway, so I kept walking.
And I walked and walked.
And it was a great day.
It was like a beautiful day.
It was a long sort of pleasant walk.
It was kind of a swamp.
But it wasn't like a pestilent swamp.
It was just like a low land.
There were some birds.
There's a lot of that area around the Danube that's kind of river basin-y.
So there's a lot of water.
And this was a particularly rainy season.
Anyway, I get to the end of the day and I'm still quite a ways out from this town that I'm going to, which is called Kolarovo.
And I just keep plugging along because there's just nowhere to, there's just nothing to do.
You know, I could stop and pitch a tent like on the side of the road in three inches of water or I could keep going.
And I kept going.
And then it started to rain again.
And then the sun went down.
And so now I'm walking in the dark, in the rain.
And I get to Kolarovo, and it's a fairly big little town.
And I walk all the way to the center, which is on a river.
And there's a, like, community club.
You know, this sort of former Eastern Block sort of, like, sporting club, which is a bar where they also play music and...
It's a youth center.
You know, it's all this stuff.
And I roll into this place and I, you know, I'm super wet and I get a Coke and I sit down at a table and like inevitably somebody, some brave young person comes over and goes, what are you?
And I say, I'm an American.
I'm walking across Slovakia.
And they're like, wow.
And so all of a sudden I'm sitting at a table with like six really great people
20-something Slovaks.
And we're having a good time.
They're talking to each other a lot more than they're talking to me, but we're enjoying each other.
But you're an interesting curiosity.
I'm a curiosity.
And they are Slovaks who are, this is something that you learn over time, they are Hungarian Slovaks.
They are speaking Hungarian.
They think of themselves as ethnically Hungarian, but they're also very sort of nationalistically Slovakian.
They don't want to reunite with Hungary.
They have a Slovak identity, but they are Hungarians.
And in this part of Slovakia, it is majority Hungarians.
And they listen to Hungarian radio.
And they, you know, it's one of the quizzical aftermaths of the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
So that's a World War I type situation?
Yeah.
I mean, Hungary used to be big.
And after Trianon, they chopped it.
And they gave some of it to Romania and some of it to Slovakia and some of it to all the nations on all sides.
They even gave some to Austria, which doesn't make any sense at all.
And there are lots of in some of those places, like in Romania, they kind of pushed the Hungarians out.
And so you go to these towns and it's like everything's written in Hungarian, but it's all Romanians living there now.
But in Slovakia, the Hungarians stayed there.
They just are now Slovaks.
Anyway, so I'm, you know, sitting there kind of learning all this.
And I think maybe this was the town where I started to really grasp this because I'd been walking for a long time talking to people in like pidgin Slovak.
Which is similar enough to Czech that I, by this point, had learned enough of it that I could greet people and say like, hello, is there a hotel?
And I got a lot of like sneers from people.
And it was only sort of right around this point that I realized, oh, they are all speaking Hungarian.
And so I'd been speaking to them in Slovakian and that was a faux pas.
So these kids explained it to me as I'm sitting there going, this radio station we're all listening to doesn't sound like it's in Slovakian.
And they were like, ha, ha, ha, ding-a-ling.
So then I broached the topic.
Can I stay with one of you tonight?
And then there's always that like, oops, and everybody kind of looks at their fingernails.
But I'd been doing this long enough that
I knew somebody was probably going to step forward.
You miss 100% of shots you don't take.
That's right.
And because I'd asked already, like, is there a hotel in this town?
And the answer had come back, no, not really.
And it's a pretty big town.
Oh, what it was was there were hotels, but they were all booked up permanently.
And I heard this a lot, too.
Yeah, there are like four hotels in town, but they're all booked fully, always, by people living in them.
so they're not really hotels anymore they're apartments wow okay but they're they're like people they're they're workers here like uh highway workers and they just live in the hotels so don't bother calling the hotels because there won't be any rooms now whether or not that's true or not is left to history but that was the that was what allowed me to say well can i stay with one of you and then they have to look out and say it's raining it's 11 o'clock at night
So one of the kids says, look, we're all leaving tomorrow early in the morning on a big adventure where we're going to Hungary for some adventure.
And so you can stay at my house.
I'll stay at my friend's house.
And then but but the problem with that is that we're all going to wake up at seven in the morning and you have to leave.
And I was like, that's fine.
That's great.
And then they say, well, my place is like on the other side of town, which is only a kilometer away.
It's not far, but it's the middle of the night.
It's raining.
They're like, hop in the car and we'll drive over to the apartment.
And I'm like, ah, I haven't been in a car in months.
Like on principle, I'm walking from Amsterdam to Istanbul.
Hmm.
But it's very hard to look at this guy who's like, you can stay in my apartment.
We're leaving now.
It's already now, you know, you're not going to get a full night's sleep because by the time you get there and fall asleep, it's going to be one in the morning.
And I'm going to show up at, I don't know what it was, 6 a.m.
or something.
It's going to be brutally early.
Mm-hmm.
And it doesn't help to add a little element of a little game to it that makes you seem like a weirdo if you're going to be at the house.
Right.
Yeah.
Right.
Where I'm like, well, just tell me where it is and I'll walk.
The American does not want to get in a car.
Just so we're right here.
Right.
I'm going to walk there in the rain.
I'm going to walk that kilometer.
You know, we can look up the street and they're like, it's just up that street.
It's just you can see up there where the light is.
You turn.
And there's not even a traffic light in this town.
Or if there is, there's one.
But they're like up there where that, you know, where that blue light is.
And I'm like, it's very close.
I'm just going to walk.
And they're like, um, really?
Like, let's get this over with.
And I'm like, okay.
And I pile into the car and we drive this one kilometer.
Then the guy puts me in his house and I'm ensconced.
And he had one of those weird houses where everything was in black and white.
Like he had a, he had like black and white checkerboard.
If you went into his bathroom, all of his, all of his, uh, like accoutrements were all black and it seemed very, it seemed very mod and it seemed very like there was a Nagel print.
You know, it was, he had a whole look.
Yeah.
Look.
Yeah.
But then in the morning he wakes me up.
It's cold.
It's, it's foggy because we're in a river bottom and I step out the door of his apartment and
And I look up the road to the center, which is one kilometer back.
And I look at my map, and the direction I'm going is the opposite way.
And it's going to take me probably a kilometer to get back to the main road from this, you know, in the opposite direction, like the other side of the triangle.
And I sit there and I go...
do i walk the kilometer back to my starting point or do i just start walking in the direction that i'm going and the fog and the cold and the and the fact that i was like tired and fucked up and you know of course there's no coffee anywhere kilometers a little over half a mile yeah it doesn't seem that far it's not
You can't throw a Frisbee a kilometer.
Even if you had a wrist rocket and really pulled back on it, I don't know if you could get a ball bearing a kilometer.
I go frequently to a place that's exactly half a mile from my house, and that's about an eight-minute walk.
Yeah, right.
And so I don't.
I don't walk back.
to get my boots on home plate, which is the last place my boots were before I got into this car.
I just walked the other way and I, and I'm like, it's a kilometer back to the road.
It's fine.
It just, it makes up for itself, you know?
But I introduced into my system
which was that I was walking from Amsterdam to Istanbul in an uninterrupted series of boot prints, uh, where I even would walk upstairs rather than take an escalator.
I introduced this one kilometer break, which although I walked 3000 kilometers, uh,
Is still there as a little pea.
Just that one little like tiny, tiny little like hairpin.
From one side of and not even from one side of Kolarov to the other, but just from center of Kolarov to this guy's apartment.
It's just to pee under my mattress.
Oh, my God.
And I don't let it discredit my whole thing.
Oh, my God.
Although there is at least one legislator in the parliament that that runs for office and gets elected every day.
Every election cycle on the strength of the fact that he wants an investigation.
Oh my God.
And that's hanging over your head.
He just is there.
He's just that one, the one parliamentarian who has an issue with the one kilometer.
He's in the opposition.
And for him, you know, that is, that's his like, um, his, like the, the one reason that he keeps getting elected, um,
Like it's his Benghazi.
That's his bringing coal back.
Yeah.
And so he'll never get, he'll never put a coalition together where he forms a new government and there's an investigation into whether that kilometer in Kolarovo is a thing where I have to go back and walk that whole distance again.
Or that I have to fly to Bratislava and take a bus to Kolarovo and make that
And close that link.
But that walk across Europe was the first thing I ever finished.
The first thing that I ever concluded all the way that I got there and I was like, I did it.
I went the whole distance.
There were a million things, a million reasons why I shouldn't have, including that it was a stupid idea to begin with.
Um, but along the way there, there were 50 opportunities to just be like, you know what, this is fine.
Like I made it all the way to star Zagora.
I can just like, I can cash my chips now.
And I never did.
I made it the whole way with the exception of this kilometer.
And the, the, um, it's not only the first thing I ever finished, but also, um,
I get to keep it in that category of things that if I want to say, you know, if I want to look at it, if I want it to be an unopened diploma on my shelf, I can also shift my perception and have it be that.
That might be the most John Roderick story you've ever told.
You've outdone yourself.
I'm not even sure anymore what makes it, what is the qualification of that, but... Oh, they'll know.
The audience will know.
One kilometer.
Okay.
Okay, hang on.
Before we go, one more thing.
John.
Yes.
We've got to tell people you need to come see us at Sketchfest in San Francisco.
Oh, yeah.
Next Monday, instead of doing our show as we normally do, we're going to be doing a live show in San Francisco at Sketchfest.
Yeah, so come out and see us.
There's lots of good stuff going on, but fuck all that.
Come see us.
You go buy tickets.
There's a link in show notes that you can find, or you can Google Roderick online Sketchfest, but we'd love it if you came out to see us.
Do, yes, for sure.
Travel long distances to come see us.
One kilometer.
One kilometer.