Ep. 274: "Lord Sword"
Hi, John.
Hi, Merlin.
How's it going?
Good.
This is so weird.
This is so weird.
There's so many people here, and I can't get sick.
I cannot be sick.
Don't blow your flu on Merlin.
I...
I'm trying to play it off legit, but I've been fucking Howard Hughes all night.
Everything is literally asses and literally elbows.
Very nice to meet you.
Shall we do the bump?
I made him hug me, and I actually was so sick three days ago.
You were so... I was so sick, my daughter threw up on me.
As kids do.
I don't know, but it's lovely when they do it.
It's so sweet.
Cherish those moments.
And someone had been feeding her Cheetos, so it was like a thing that was never going to come out.
And then 60 hours to the minute later, I felt really bad inside.
But unlike a little child, I refused to throw up.
Because I'm a big boy.
Nice.
And so I fought it, just valiantly fought it for 12 straight hours of just, like, misery.
So you were on the verge, and you knew that you could have some... Did you feel like it was going to be a relief, or would you be so mad at yourself for giving up that it wouldn't even feel good?
At a certain point, I wanted the relief, and then I could not.
What about downstairs?
Was it totally an upstairs operation?
It was one of those things.
It could go either direction.
It was standing at the crossroads.
An angry Cthulhu inside.
I'll decide which way I'm going.
Don't you worry about that.
The devil was there.
It wanted to learn to play guitar.
He came up to Manhattan.
And there were a few times where I was like, this is it.
I'm going to throw up.
And I went.
Yeah.
And nothing.
And then finally, finally, at the end of the night, I said goodbye to everybody.
Good night.
I'll see you guys tomorrow.
Went up to the room and the people in the five hotel rooms around mine all called the fire department.
Because I was just like... There appears to be some kind of a wraith.
A wraith is having an incident.
A portal opened to the upside down.
Kitos.
Kitos.
Yeah, kids are inconsiderate about that kind of stuff.
I can't get sick.
It can't happen.
I don't know.
You're not going to get sick.
I'm not.
But, like, how do I know where this is?
I don't know where this has been.
The thing about the flu, and they're saying about the H2N3, am I getting that right?
Any biologists in the room?
H2N3?
Thank you.
Big fan.
Name their last three albums.
It's a real bad one and you can't inoculate against it.
It just comes and it does what it wants with you.
It takes you in its meaty paws.
Yes.
And when the big flu comes, when the disaster flu comes, what are we going to do?
Like, I don't care about other people.
I mean us.
Do you think we should work out a plan?
How do we survive?
Yeah, do we... Is that when you just go home and you say, I'm not going to work for a month, six months?
I feel like the last week has demonstrated a lot of things about how ill-prepared we are on so many levels in this country for so many different things.
My daughter and I had had a nice day at the museum.
I pick up my phone...
oh my god, Hawaii had this whole thing happen.
And then my favorite part of that was the headlines that were like, this message accidentally went out and lots of people panicked.
And I was like, that's not panicking.
Panic is you think you might be at a cumin.
Like, they thought, holy shit, my kebab's gonna suck.
I need to do an Instacart.
That's panicking.
You will die in 35 minutes from missile.
I wouldn't call that panicking.
I talked to my daughter about it.
I said, do you think that's real normal?
If we found out we're going to die in 34 minutes?
Yeah, that would suck.
I'd be panicking fucking hard.
If there's one place in the world that should not have a nuclear warning system, it's Hawaii.
How can we help them?
What are you going to say?
Get on your motorcycle and drive real fast around?
Yeah.
It's coming.
Bring in the roosters.
Save the shave ice.
Everything is literally outside.
They can't get the roosters to stop crowing.
How are they going to stop a bomb?
I mean it in the best possible way.
Is that ping pong?
There's no stopping it.
No, it's not ping pong.
Are we going to run to a different island?
If there's a tidal wave alarm, it makes sense because there's always somewhere in Hawaii that you can go up.
That's true.
Every one of those is an island that has an up... Are you talking about the big island?
The big island?
The big island's got the uppest... It has the two uppest places in all of Hawaii.
Is that right?
Yeah.
Big, big, big ups.
Yeah.
So when the tidal wave alarm goes off, which is like... It's a klaxon.
You're like, oh.
Yeah.
But the bomb alarm?
It's like kiss your ass goodbye.
Yeah.
Yeah.
No, that's not good.
So you think we should have a plan?
So we like to think we have a plan because we have the earthquakes here in the area.
And last time we had one, I was sitting there watching Netflix...
Because I have a very old couch, as you know.
It literally makes that scene.
And I thought, this is it.
This is it.
Because we have not gotten re-prepared for a hurricane since the last time we got prepared for a hurricane, which is when we did what they said on NPR, and we filled the emergency bucket...
which is what you call it.
You get a bucket, you can get a garbage can, you seal it, you fill it full of water.
One day we went out there and literally everything was mildewed.
The water apparently, I went into some kind of a synecdoche New York fugue state and didn't realize that I had not checked on the emergency bucket for three years.
Everything was blue.
It might as well have been in Hawaii.
None of it was good.
The bed thing, the tent, the fake bed, the fake tent, the fake radio, all of it gone.
I feel utterly unprepared.
I need to start over.
I need a reboot.
This is one of the things that people that are storing large amounts of cash need to remember.
Well, it goes bad?
It goes bad.
Okay.
Mice like to eat cash.
You'll get the mold in the cash.
You'll get the lime in the coconut.
You get it all.
Shake it all around.
And so you've got to put the cash into some wrap.
Then you could put the wrap into some...
You dip it in wax.
So you've got to protect your cash.
The same is true with your disaster food.
You suck it out, take the air out.
You can do your spoons, your toothpicks, your cash.
What about German bearer bonds, John?
What would you do with German bearer bonds?
Put them in coffee.
Ladies and gentlemen, the FBI.
What was the one where they put the stuff in coffee so you couldn't smell the drugs?
Wasn't that an Eddie Murphy thing?
That was the Beverly Hills Cop 2 plot.
Then what was the German Barabons?
That was the greatest Christmas movie of all time, Die Hard.
Die Hard.
That was a pretty mixed response.
I feel like that's a meme and everybody's like, played out, played out meme.
Have you seen the video of the fella who gets real frustrated at work and he knocks over his computer monitor?
It's really quite funny.
It's called Bad Day.
My mom, of course, has a plan, which is that you have to eat through your disaster food...
And be replenishing your disaster food in the wake of your own consumption of prior disaster food.
Almost like the power went out.
Right.
You're going to suck down all the popsicles before the ice goes away.
When she moved out of her house, she showed up at my house with duffel bags full of...
cornmeal and canned... Yay, Johnny Cake.
Yeah, like just all this stuff that is her blend of disaster requirements to feed the neighborhood.
Because she feels like if you feed the neighborhood, that's...
60 people that won't... It's going to be like Cormac McCarthy meets Dickens.
It's just going to be all kinds of really unpleasant food that nobody wants.
You ever notice?
It's always emergency food.
You buy all of this shit that you would never in a million years eat.
You're like kippered sardines.
And you're like, well, I don't even know what any of those things are.
I think she feels like if you have a fish fry for the neighborhood, then they don't assault your citadel quite as rapidly.
And maybe they will form a first line of defense against the people in the neighbor.
You have something to offer.
Yeah.
You got Johnny Cake.
They're like, you know, you can't assault the citadel of Johnny Cake Lady.
Right.
And then they fight off the zombies for you.
That's her whole plan.
But she moved all that shit into my barn because she doesn't have a house anymore.
Right.
And she told... Your barn sounds like such a fire trap at this point.
No, no, no.
Because that Johnny Cake won't burn.
Johnny Cake won't burn.
Johnny Cake won't burn.
Oh...
Yeah, it's true.
Everything was blue.
You follow me?
You follow me?
They tell you that you get a garbage can from the Home Depot that has got the latches on it.
Take it off.
Put all your stuff in there.
It's all fake stuff.
The radio's a piece of shit.
It's not really going to charge your phone.
Grow up.
You got these beds you never want to sleep on.
You got a tent that's obviously going to be used.
It's like, oh, it's really cute.
It looks like a McDonald's bag and it's got a rope and your family's going to sleep in that.
And then all these little things that it looks like you bought at the Air and Space Museum as a gift for a kid you don't like.
Right?
It's astronaut ice cream.
Whatever.
And that's your food.
And none of that is stuff that I would eat.
I feel like I should put a clam chowder in there, some beans, something I would really enjoy.
I don't think I've ever had a Johnny Cake.
400 cans of chili is what's in mine.
That'll keep the other camps away.
You're going to want to not go there forever.
This is just to be clear.
The cans are blue.
They've literally been in a garbage can since the old days.
Are you familiar with the Jim Baker buckets?
I am familiar with Jim Baker buckets.
I know Jim Baker from back in the day.
From Jim and Tammy Lee?
Tammy Faye.
Tammy Lee, who am I thinking of?
Who's the one to stand by your man?
Is that Jim Baker?
Tammy Lee had a morning television show and she was married to a football player.
Oh, she was married to Regis Philbin.
Yeah, that's right.
Okay, I know who you mean.
Regis Philbin Lee.
Regis and Tammy Lee.
Who was, in fact, the winningest general of the Civil War.
Give me that again.
Regis Philbin Lee.
Regis Philbin Lee?
Yeah.
Okay.
Is that the guy that would run through the airports in the commercials?
Is that who that was?
Oh, that was BJ.
BJ.
Oh, the guy from Sausalito.
No, he had the bear.
Okay.
BJ Honeycutt and his best friend Bear.
Okay, I remember that story.
That was a good story.
But you know Jim and Tammy, but that didn't extend to knowing the buckets.
I lost it for a while.
See, I was coming up at a time when it was big pastor, as we used to call it.
And this was when I lived in Sarasota.
There was a guy who owned a dog track near where I went to school.
I'm going somewhere with this.
Gather round, children.
This is the guy when Oral Roberts said that if he didn't get hush money from somebody, God would take him.
And this guy, I think, gave him some money because of that.
You had your Jim Bakers.
You had your Jimmy Swaggerts.
You had your Ernest Angeley, who liked to heal people by knocking over.
Kind of heavy guy.
You had that.
Now, Jim Baker, today, I lost the thread for a while.
Now he's back.
He's got no hair, a beard, and a bucket.
That's right.
And he's selling buckets right and left.
If anybody doesn't know, he's got... Is he a prepper?
Is it prepping?
He's prepping.
I think he's prepping for... I'm not sure what he's prepping for.
It seems like maybe he leaves that part out.
How's your eschatology?
My eschatology?
Yeah.
I mean, are you pretty good with understanding how the end days work?
Oh, yeah, pretty much.
I mean, I'm assuming there will.
You know about the millennium?
I know about that.
That already went.
And she stole your underwear.
No, no.
I mean, after the rap, come on.
Any Church of Christ in the house?
So first you got your rapture.
Yeah.
You've got this rapture over here.
All of a sudden, there are a whole bunch of Toyota Tacomas are empty.
Pants, pants, pants, pants, crying girl.
Pants, pants, pants, pants, pants.
Old pervert, right?
The pants are down.
Everybody's gone.
The first wave is the first elevator to have him take some up.
Now, I might have the order a little mixed up in my head because I'm a little behind on maschatology.
I think there's a time, though.
Help me out on this.
I know eventually you got heaven.
And in between, you got the millennium.
You got like a thousand years on earth.
That's right.
You get the sign of the beast.
Right.
So if I'm reading all that correctly.
There's like the disco sucks era, and then there's the disco comes back.
And a lot of people don't understand.
Like New Order is technically a disco band, but a lot of that was very homophobic.
It wasn't just about baseball.
They were named after comfort women.
Is that right?
What about Joy Division?
Well, that's what I meant.
Third base.
Now, the thing is, I don't know what kind of prepping is.
Is it a doomsday prep, an apocalypse prep?
Whatever it is, you're going to have your beans, you're going to have your fake tent, your grinding radio.
What's Jim Baker put in one of those?
Extra Bibles.
Extra Bibles.
My assumption is that they're more Calvinist about it, and they feel like they're the elect, right?
So they're gone in the first wave.
So I don't know what they're prepping for.
Maybe they're leaving that for their cousins and stuff that don't have the message.
That's actually a super good idea.
If you're making your own bucket, if you roll your own, for your bucket, you're going to put all the stuff that you enjoy in it.
maybe there's a white ribbon bucket.
And it's for the people you don't like maybe so much.
My question for you is, once you found the blue bucket, once you found your bucket had gone blue, did you just abandon the whole idea?
You're like, ah, fuck it.
It's so easy when you're not thinking about it.
And then one night you're watching TV and you're like, I really need to get on this.
Let's see KQED.
Every year when we give money to KQED, kqed.org, you can go give money.
They do good work.
That's right.
Michael Krasniewer, right?
Dorks.
They actually literally, their big premium, 1-800-987-825.
And they do this every year.
They go, once again, we are offering the total survival bucket.
This is a five-gallon bucket filled with everything that your family will need for three days, plus a toilet seat that you put onto the five-gallon bucket.
Because presumably in the future...
The people who are left behind, when they take a shit, are going to have to empty five gallons worth of supplies that is everything they have left on the planet so they can shit in the bucket.
I'm guessing that you don't have water to clean it out.
Maybe it comes with a special liner.
I'll have to ask KQED.
That's not a prepper thing.
That's just more like a liberal fantasy kind of thing.
I mean, three days is exactly enough time to really feel your death.
LAUGHTER
And then rise.
Some people could do a lot with three days.
I mean, I feel like if you, what your plan needs to be, how do I get the hell out of here for good?
How do I leave these other suckers behind?
Not just like all sit Indian style around a three day bucket and like watch it go down.
Eldritch horror.
Maybe we should agree that one person's bucket is used for this and one person's bucket.
That's why all those people in Montana have so many guns because they feel like our three-day plan is get from here to there.
It's like the guy getting chased by the tiger.
He says, I don't need to be faster than the tiger.
I just need to be faster than you.
That's on the Montana flag, by the way.
It was someone shooting someone else in the head, execution style.
I was having dim sum with Ben Harrison, and that was his fortune cookie two days ago.
You don't have to be faster than the bear, except it was one of those overlong fortunes.
I don't like, no.
You don't have to be faster than the bear.
You just have to be faster than your other friend who is not as fast as the bear.
No, no.
Were there lottery numbers on the back?
Did it have lottery numbers?
Yeah, yeah, all that stuff.
See, I got a lot of fucking problems with fortune cookies.
They're too long.
Too many of them are aphorisms and not actual fortunes.
Right, or you are a nice person.
No, I'm not.
That's not a fortune.
Fuck that.
There's a fortune cookie factory, like a famous fortune cookie factory.
The fifth famous fortune cookie factory is in... The fifth most famous fortune cookie factory?
Yeah, is in... Where's that in?
Is that in... Remember in Fillmore?
It's on the Fillmore.
The fifth biggest fortune cookie factory?
It's in... It's over on Fillmore?
San Francisco's Chinatown.
San Francisco's Chinatown.
Is that right?
Yeah, you can go... Huh.
You can get a full drone?
You can get a tour of it.
I thought you were going to pull a handkerchief out.
For those of you listening at home, Merlin just did a Shields and Yarnell version of, I guess, making a fortune cookie right on his dick.
It was really weird.
Fifth largest fortune cookie factory thing that's right in the Chinatown.
It's right there and you can get a tour of it.
The heart of the city where it all converges.
That's right.
Although, a lot of people don't know this, fortune cookie was actually a Japanese invention.
Turns out.
Yeah.
Sorry.
Thanks for nothing, asshole.
Look in.
Look in.
Roderick.
Dropping some science ruining shit for me.
Sasquatch isn't real.
Shut up.
This is San Francisco.
You've got to have a turns out moment at least at one point in your show.
Yes.
We live for the turns out here.
People want to get their money's worth.
Oh, we want a turns out inside of a turns out inside of a turns out.
We want a full compliment.
If you get five in a row, it's called a Gladwell.
You get a full... There's a reason it's called Hidden Brain.
NPR jokes!
Yay!
And then...
That was almost, I heard a kind of a wave moan.
If you're going to decide to live when others are dying, you're going to have to make, you're going to have to prepare, even if it's not strictly prepping, preparing, you're still going to have to think ahead.
And you're going to have to stay caught up.
You're going to have to make this part of what you do.
In the same way that I rue the removal of compost from our house every day to go put it in the green bucket, you're going to have to practically think about your stuff like that.
It's going to be like having a fish.
If you want to live, you need to think about your stash.
You've got to make sure your cash stays dry, your fortune cookies are well-defined, and that your water's not blue, and that none of your money's expired.
The number one thing you have to ask yourself is,
Do you want to live on the other side of the apocalypse?
Will you put into it what's needed in order to live?
Well, I've told you this story, right?
I used to work at the magazine store, and there were magazines about if you wanted to buy a castle in Scotland.
And I absolutely wanted a castle in Scotland.
It's not a thing that everybody wants, but some people want it.
That's right in the sweet spot, though.
Let's hear a round of applause for people who want a castle in Scotland.
Thank you.
Let's hear a round of applause from people who know they don't want a castle in Scotland.
It's about 50-50.
The thing about a castle in Scotland, I wanted one, I wanted one, I wanted one, and then I started populating my imaginary castle in Scotland with all the things you're going to put in there, a big billiards table.
Tapestries.
You're going to buy a lot of chandeliers, put them everywhere.
You're going to have the hall of chandeliers.
You might have to put it in a portcullis.
Right?
You're going to get a trebuchet or two.
An old Scottish pork collis is not something you can rely on.
Rebore the arrow holes?
You've got to rebore those.
That's right.
You've got to repoint the masonry.
But then I started to imagine... Oh, and then you could have your own...
heraldic crest maid with you as a... Shit dog.
Your face on the dragon or whatever.
That's like naming a band.
I don't even care what genre it is and I can't play an instrument.
I've got to come up with a name.
So you need a name for your castle and you need something heraldic.
That's right.
And every house in the United Kingdom has a name.
Even if it's like a one-bedroom apartment, it's called like the Fens.
Cock Smokingtons of Glenwood on Pushador.
But so after a while I started to imagine myself living in this castle.
I have a very small family.
I have one child.
I have a mother, a sister, and my child has a mother.
And then some... We're just at this point, I just want to clarify, I don't want to take you out of this, but we are at this point talking just about sentient beings and not belongings.
Right.
That's right.
I do have a lot of belongings.
I could fill the castle.
It's a castle.
But I bet when you got that barn, you said to yourself, I'll never fill that up.
I mean, I would definitely have a hall of mismatched swords.
Yeah.
Welcome to Sword Hall.
We're the primary features of Castle Roderick.
That might be what I call the house.
Sword Hall.
Sword Hall.
Oh, I like that fine.
Lord Sword.
It's a man in a bathrobe rampant on a castle.
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But I started to realize, who am I going to talk to?
Getting the castle, I didn't have instantly more friends.
I didn't have any vassals.
It's not like getting a pickup in college.
You get a pickup truck in college, everybody's your friend.
That's right.
You get a castle in Scotland, you get a moat and stuff.
So I started to picture myself going down to the local pub, and then I'm the American who calls himself Lord Sword that comes down to the pub sometimes and wants to play darts.
Oh, here comes Lord Sword.
Oh, look at me.
I've got a new portcullis.
My moat don't stink.
The post-apocalypse, who are you going to hang out with?
But also so much maintenance.
Yeah, you're right.
Who would you hang out with?
Would it be other castle dwellers?
But we're talking about here in San Francisco.
You're talking about living in the sunset.
Living in the sunset.
Every eighth house is occupied.
The rest are just full of bodies that died in the flu.
Yeah.
And you guys are here.
You got your bucket.
They got their bucket.
Every once in a while.
Share a bucket.
Trade buckets.
Bucket.
I love that word.
Bucket.
You wash my bucket, I'll wash yours.
Fudge, fudge bucket.
How fun is that?
Living in the sunset, see the problem is infrastructural.
There's all kinds of things.
It's going to be difficult.
Gosh, what if the reservoir gets a crack and all the water comes down?
The main problem in my neighborhood is if next door goes out, nobody is going to have any idea.
There's one guy in my neighborhood in particular.
I cannot imagine this guy surviving.
He's so upset about people who look like they might be stealing his packages.
I don't think he even has a bucket ready.
Let me ask you, as someone who gets a lot of packages, do you think that packages routinely get stolen from people's front porches?
I mean, I think it does definitely happen, but it's one of those things where you can, well, obviously, it's like any of these things where, you know, what does Orwell say?
Like, if you get these people freaked out enough, you don't need your packages stolen.
You're mentally stealing your own packages all the time.
You're just there.
You're so intense.
It's like, that person was near my bush for too long.
I don't like the look of that person.
Who wears something with a hood in this kind of weather?
It would seem to me that most package thieves would end up with like 700 bottles of contact lens solution for every one interesting thing they got.
Contact lens solution, diapers, and porn.
People get porn in the mail?
No.
I imagine.
Not everybody has a computer set.
Not everybody's like you.
Not everybody like you goes down to the store and gets a Bitcoin mining rig from the local Goodwill.
Some people got to do it on their own.
They got to watch it on their VCR.
You know, I'm Amazon Prime.
It never occurred to me, at your recommendation, Amazon Prime, never occurred to me to put porn in there and see what happened.
Can you get porn on Amazon?
You might want to look at the Kindle store.
But that's like porn where Fabio takes you in his arms, right?
I wish.
No.
It's like book porn.
Do you want to know?
But Kindle only has black and white letters.
Yeah, but it's about having sex with a billionaire dinosaur.
You know what?
Don't get out your phones because I want you to pay attention to what John has to share with you.
At your earliest convenience, please go on to Amazon and search for things like billionaire and dinosaur.
Because that dinosaur is going to teach you a fucking lesson about how to reimburse your disbursements.
Is it?
Is it fanfic?
Is that what it is?
No, it's professionally written shitty writing that you can get deployed via the Wi-Fi, and it's about fucking dinosaurs and billionaires.
It could be all kinds of different combinations.
Does this have something to do with tentacle porn?
Except it's small arm porn?
Tiny tentacle porn?
Big thighs, small forearms?
No.
You other brothers can't deny.
I like hentai and I can't deny.
So do you feel like you're pretty prepped?
I mean, you've got a castle of your own right now.
You have a perimeter that is very, very well regulated, like your militia.
I have an escape vehicle.
Right, an anti-apocalypse motor van, which is called a GMC RV.
I have a barn that is defendable.
I have an empty swimming pool full of logs.
LAUGHTER
I have... Is that... No, wait.
Hige is when you get lines on your jeans.
What's the thing that's about coziness in Finland?
Is that logs in a pool?
What's that called?
Logs in a pool?
I think that's a different thing.
I don't think that's Jim Baker's bucket by any other name.
If you have too much of the pepper food, you may discover that when you attempt to defecate in the bucket, you find nothing but logs in the pool.
I don't know about Finnish comfort nomenclature.
Logs in the pool.
You guys know about this?
You know about the coziness?
Do you guys not?
Hige?
Is it Hige?
Huga.
Huga.
Huga.
That's not Hige.
Hige is the penis whiskers.
And then Huga is the Finland cook.
Someone's got a leak.
Wow.
Is the feeling coziness?
And the thing is, I'm sure I'm going to get a lot of hisses for this, but I've been spending more time on 4chan again.
Aw, John, we talked about this, buddy.
One of the threads that's interesting on 4chan is the comfy thread where they just post pictures of things that are comfy.
And a lot of them are like little Finnish houses with snow coming down.
They're basically like Thomas Kinkane paintings.
The painter of light with the candle in the window.
And then the next thread is about people being beheaded in car accidents.
But the cozy threads are really nice.
But no, I feel like if you think about being ready for for the disaster is not about being ready to defend your perimeter, because I think it's very true that by the time you are defending your perimeter, you will be defending it against people who are better armed and more motivated.
It's too late.
Yeah.
Like there's not you're not defending it against random zombies.
It's gonna be against people who are Driving around in a Toyota pickup with a 50 caliber machine gun in the back who are like we're taking over right And so don't worry about like guns and fighting just worry about like it's it's the bridge, right?
It's not a three-day bridge.
It's a 30-day bridge.
Okay, can you keep your family fed and keep yourselves like heated and washed?
during the time that it takes to reestablish a grid and
Because what's going to happen is the first thing that happens is the supermarkets aren't stocked anymore.
Well, the first thing that's going to happen is you can't call a kid to go pick it up at the supermarket for you.
I do not want to face that.
You can't yelp to decide which pho restaurant has the best meatballs.
That's the first thing to go.
Ruined my engagement party.
One star.
But we're talking about the 9.9.
We're talking about the one with the accompanying tsunami.
And then the big flu comes.
Oh, I can't get sick, John.
I can't get sick.
It all happens at once is the thing.
World War I happened, and then the big flu, and then not very long, 10 years, the stock market crash.
You got the flappers.
And then right after that, there was a depression.
Yes.
And then there was another world war.
Coincidence.
Right.
And then there was- You got wing walkers.
Yep.
Ticker tape.
That's right.
Barnstormers.
Straw boaters.
And then modern jazz.
Yeah.
Who knew?
It was the Bitcoin.
Not the Bitcoin, the cryptocurrency of its time.
Let me ask you, you've mentioned Bitcoin several times.
Yes.
It's time for some real talk about Bitcoin.
What is this we're looking at?
I saw these, but I didn't want to look at them.
Because if it's what I think it is, I'm pretty fucking happy.
We should, you know what, turn away.
Are those?
Are those phony awards?
Shouldn't they be upside down if they're from Australia, though?
Are those phony awards?
I think they might be phony awards.
They really look like phony.
We did not bring these awards ourselves.
Check it out.
See what it says.
Does it say anything?
Oh, my God.
Oh, my.
It's a phony award.
Mm-hmm.
It's the Phony Award in 2018, awarded to Roderick on the Line for Most Podcast.
Most Podcast.
I promised myself I wouldn't cry.
Thank you.
I just want to say thanks to everybody.
This is a very important time in the movement right now, and I'm very excited to have the opportunity to be up in front of you.
Don't play me off!
Thank you.
I'd like to thank my wife.
I'd like to thank my other wife.
They really spared no expense here with this dowel.
They spared some expenses.
But the... I think the paint might still... Well, it's an interesting color of gold.
It's really gold mixed with chocolate.
It's one thing to never win an award that hasn't been invented yet.
And it's another thing to win an award for a thing that was just made up that doesn't exist.
And for everybody out there who's ever wanted something that didn't exist and didn't understand why they didn't have it, I just want to say me too.
Thank you.
Yeah.
See what I did there?
Makuna tatata.
Shachuna papata.
Survival bucket.
1-800.
That's right.
McTuna Frittata.
Nelly Frittato.
Let me ask you, though, about Bitcoin.
It seems like the type of thing that people would... What time did we start?
I have no idea.
We've only been doing this for 30 minutes.
What time is it now?
We've got another goddamn hour to do here.
Holy shit.
We'll throw the questions after a while and they'll entertain themselves.
It seems to me, there was a moment, right, where all of us wanted to maybe thought about getting a Bitcoin, but then when we looked at how much they cost, they were like $40 and it seemed too expensive.
But you seem like someone who might have gotten a Bitcoin.
Did you get a Bitcoin?
No.
There's a lot of things that I don't understand.
I've made a study of not understanding things, and I feel like that's something I've gotten kind of good at.
It's very, very difficult for me to understand.
From what I can gather, it's like money, but not.
And you need a computer to make it, even though you're not really making it.
But the distribution of what you've made...
involves math and lots of people in power.
And then eventually you can't sell it because the fee is too high and there's too many people trying to do it at the same time.
Oh, there are fees?
I think there's fees.
Oh, that's how they get you.
That's how they get you.
It's a crypto eel.
So it's like the money gets, what would you call it, distributed, disbursed?
Are you talking about a distributed disbursement?
Is it a disbursement?
Is it like a further disbursement?
Did you know Donald Trump went to Kazakhstan?
Tell me more.
He took a $1 million fee.
He goes to Kazakhstan.
Are you aware of this?
No, no, no.
Tell me more.
He went to Kazakhstan.
You know what?
This is the kind of thing those fat cats don't want you to know.
He got a $1 million fee in Kazakhstan.
He got a $1 million fee, $1 million fee in Kazakhstan.
Ah!
It's not what they call a fiat currency.
That's the term people like to throw around when they're saying real money.
That's called a fiat currency.
It's like a made-up phony baloney thing that's based on nothing, unlike a made-up phony baloney thing that requires computers and math.
It's like a fix-it-again Tony currency?
Is that what you're saying?
Yeah.
No, but there's like two fiat owners in our entire audience.
Fixed store repaired daily.
They both live in New Jersey, and they're not here to laugh.
Is there one for Dodge?
I know Fixed or Repaired Daily, which somebody should have workshopped that a little longer.
Is there one for Dodge?
Don't obviously dodge great energy.
It's a backronym.
It's a recursive.
Okay, what about Lamborghini?
Lastly, and more ordinarily, though, lastly and more basically...
Oh.
Oh, really?
Gosh.
How is nothing in nothing?
Gosh.
Bikini.
That was stupid.
Got a Lambo.
Lambo.
47 Lambos.
When you were a teenager, did you have a supercar that you cared about?
You don't care about cars now, but what was your supercar, your teenage supercar?
64 and a half Mustang.
Oh, the first one.
Hexagon grill.
With some kind of special thing?
Pony interior.
The stock one.
Pony interior.
Pony interior.
How does Merlin know these things?
I thought that he hated cars.
I wanted one so much.
I wanted a blue one with the hexagons.
And was it a convertible or a coupe?
In my dreams?
In your dreams?
Maybe a coupe.
Tudor?
Yeah.
I like lots of cars, but at the time that I had these desires that I couldn't fulfill because money, it was called the Mustang II at the time, which is the long-standing fixed-door-repair daily Mustang, which kind of looked like if somebody put tires on an 8-track.
The Mustang II was a Pinto that had a horse on it.
And a Pinto is a horse.
Yes.
Pineal involvement, not troubling overly.
Am I right?
Ralph Nader.
John Roderick, I feel like I should know this.
What was your teenage boy dream car?
I did not go in for all the puffed-up Italian sports things.
I wanted the first year, 1966, Porsche 911.
But it turns out I would barely fit in one.
You'd have to take the seat out, and I could sit in the back, I think.
You'd have to take up the wheel and manually manipulate the steering column.
And there might be someone in here that has an old Porsche who wants to argue with me about whether or not I would fit in it, and I don't want to do that.
That's a complete exaggeration.
You fit in it real good.
But there's a part of me that still wants one.
But all those things have become... All the things that I loved that were for assholes then are for bigger assholes now.
Because now they can get it.
It's like, man, I want this big gym tomorrow.
Get it.
Bring it to me.
Back then, if you saved your money, it was conceivable that you could get an old, cool car.
it's been forever fixed like you get an mg like you get something or you get a like a sprite you could fix something i had a friend on austin healy's sprite and was constantly like fixing it up but like you know now today you can get a fucking banana seat bike on amazon prime my childhood is available on my fingertips assholes i've been looked ever since my truck caught on fire yeah uh which wasn't that long ago
I fixed the truck.
I took it to my guy.
He said it was going to be expensive to fix, and I said, I'm pot committed to this thing.
It's whatever the cost.
This is the one, just to bring our audience up to date, I don't know if people are up to date on the show, you had your truck, and there was a slight incendiary incident.
Something happened.
Something happened.
You know, 99% of the time when an alternator fails, it fails to continue to charge.
It stops alternating.
Yeah, one in a hundred times what happens is the alternator just gets out of the way of the electricity.
Oh, it just says, I'm out-y.
It's like, see you later.
And so 18 volts of pure electricity goes right into everything.
And it caught it on fire, and I put it out with an old-fashioned fire extinguisher that just shoots pure hate at everything.
And as you know, hate extinguishes fire.
Yes.
And paper covers hate.
And so, but now the windshield wipers are always on.
Even perfect rhythm with the song on the radio.
The instruments in the dash are one by one blinking out.
The speedometer no longer works.
Oh, that sounds very distracting.
Well, because all the mica from the hate extinguisher went into everything.
They've changed that the way they make extinguishers now.
You don't get as much hate.
Well, now it's just a carbon dioxide.
It just blankets it with rationality and talks the fire out of it.
Yeah, right.
It bores the shit out of the fire.
Well, by your logic, fire should be everywhere.
the new logic pedant fire extinguisher but i started looking for a car because i felt like you know i owe it to everyone to have a car that has uh electricity it's not just for you it's it's for the well it's for you and it's for my kid who every time she gets into the car she's like why does your car smell like the inside of a tank legacy
And I don't know how she learned how a tank smells, but I think... You know, kids are reading weird books now at a young age.
Yeah.
I think, yeah, she was reading like... She gets on Alta Vista.
How does tank smell?
She and her friends were watching Fury.
Oh, is that right?
The recent Brad Pitt movie about tank combat?
Oh.
No one saw it.
I don't know that.
A bunch of peaceniks in here.
Meh.
Problematic.
Anyway, so she's like, why don't your windows... Why does the thing we have to be in for being on roads smell like this?
Yeah, and why don't the windows roll down with a button?
The smell was not detailed out to your satisfaction, even on repeat detailing.
Ah.
It's not that smell.
It was the normal smell of the vehicle that smelled like naugahyde covered with motor oil.
Yeah.
That's the smell of love.
That's the finish on these boots.
Did you guys notice that we're wearing the same boots?
We did not.
We did not work this out ahead of time.
Completely accidental.
When you are a man of a certain age and you wear Doc Martens, it communicates that you are not getting old gracefully.
No.
Forget you, future.
You know, I love the poor sizing of Doc Martens, but I like the convenience of a slip-on shoe.
Hi.
I feel like I've got a little bit of a Fosse thing going.
I feel like I should get a nice tight cuff.
Get a little tight Fosse cuff.
Oh good, we're doing the pants material.
It's always funny.
It's like tiny things in a trench coat.
It's never not funny.
But so I want a car and I want to get a good car.
It's a legacy.
I want a stylish car.
I don't want to drive around in a fucking old shitty car or like a Tercel or one of these new cars.
People are like, why don't you get one of these cars that looks like a Tonka truck?
And I'm like, because I'm not a fucking Fisher Price person.
You can get one of those Honda Cube boys.
You don't want a Honda Cube boy.
Don't get any of that stuff.
No.
Something with texture, something with nuance, like a brand koozie.
Something curvy and beautiful that can easily catch on fire and they can put out.
Something beautiful.
It's a legacy.
Something that communicates something about me to the other drivers, namely get out of my way.
This guy looks like trouble.
One of the great things about the truck is not that people see you in the rearview mirror and get out of your way.
It's that people who are behind you that want you to get out of their way realize that they'd better leave you alone.
Oh, boy.
Yeah, because it's like, I don't want to honk at this thing.
Yeah.
Who knows what's driving that?
It's good.
On the back bumper, I have an NRA sticker and a Van Halen sticker.
This is like, you don't know which way to go around this car.
I like the new, this is kind of a meme-y thing of you put one sticker over the other.
I kind of like to see a Van Halen sticker over an NRA sticker.
I think that says something like, yeah.
Do you ever get people step to you in your vehicle?
I want to get back to your story, but do you ever have to deal with people?
It's sort of like, you ever notice, on Muni and Bart, you never see two.
Local denizens fighting each other.
A local denizen is usually hassling a normal, like a lady with a baby.
Like, I live in the walls.
I'm wallpaper man.
And the person's like, oh, please just let me have a life.
But you never see two people go at each other, try to shave each other or explain football.
You never see that kind of like, I don't know what's going on.
Air's made of gravy.
They're always going after a normal.
Do you ever have to go up against another crazy vehicle person for dominance?
And also the air is made of gravy.
Yeah, for sure.
I don't need a pass.
It's in my mind.
The thing about a 1979 GMC Suburban is that you are 100% invisible to 98% of the people in the world.
They just don't see it because it looks like... It's like being a 51-year-old man.
Well, or just it looks like, I don't know, a truck that doesn't belong and so their eyes just don't see it.
Razzle-dazzle in a way.
That's right.
But every seven days, a 62-year-old black man will tip his hat as I drive by.
And I'll be like...
Back at you, sir.
So there's just a very small demographic of people that are like, nice truck.
And I feel a fraternal community with them.
But it's not like I ever pull over and get out and say, like, want to hang.
And they don't run after me.
This isn't only part of the code, right?
Yeah.
No, it wouldn't.
It wouldn't.
I mean, you wouldn't always just say, like, after the apocalypse, you wouldn't even just say, do you want to get up in my castle?
Yeah.
No, no, no.
I think what you do is you reach down between your seat and you pick up your fire extinguisher and wave it back at him.
But so I won a car, and I decided that what I need to get is some kind of... You know, I'm going to get a Fern job, because I'm not going to get one of these... You want to look at Chrysler?
Like, candidly, his real youth simply leaves every reach-around stolen.
LAUGHTER
Chryslers.
I feel like the truck industry, right?
They've pumped up.
Everything's so pumped up.
Everything's got so many bulbous fake muscles on it.
Unnecessary diesel.
You've got fenders.
You've got the extra wheels in the back.
What are you going to do?
Are you going to put extra bush light back there?
Come on.
Stuff up front, too.
The grills just look like a face on top of a face.
And so I decided, oh, I'm going to get one of these Mercedes Benzes.
Mercedes Benz.
Because that says a different thing about a man.
Different thing.
But then you look at them and there are two things about them.
They're not cheap even when they're used.
And also you know that every quart of oil you buy has to be Mercedes oil.
And it's $40.
But you're talking like an out-of-warranty old ass.
Not like you've got to take it to the dealer kind of thing.
Something that has electricity.
But, you know, like something cool.
Anyway, that's where I'm at right now.
But I was hoping that this year was going to be like one of these years where I just made a bunch of money.
Everything happened.
It's something a person hopes.
I haven't settled for either.
If I could buy a car from 2012, I would feel like everything was happening.
Sing it, sister.
And then I realized it was still me that was going to be doing things.
And so whatever those dreams of everything working out, they still had one problem.
You are not an option.
Yeah, right.
You're standard on every vehicle.
I was still going to make every decision I would normally make, even in 2018.
Oh, man, we don't get to fool ourselves anymore.
It's fucking bullshit.
It's brutal.
So you got castles, you got cars, you got buckets.
I don't know.
To people who have never listened to the show, this happens on the recordings, too.
Oh, yeah.
Just that I do so much editing on the show, you never notice.
He does do a lot of editing.
This is one thing that I can't do on the show.
My Jesse Thorne pocket square?
Yes.
I can't notice things about you on the show, and I'm noticing that you have a watch modern.
Everything else about you could have just fallen out of somebody's... Falling out of unsuccessful gay porn from the early 80s.
Well, no, or like...
Or like the page of the Sears catalog for cool dads.
And then from like 80, from 1980, but then you're looking at this watch that's just like, it's like R2-D2.
Yeah, not as funny after you have it for a while.
What is it?
What does it do?
It's just, nobody cares.
It's a watch.
It's a dingus.
It's an Apple watch.
Everybody cares.
Everybody cares.
Look at it.
It's so beautiful.
I love you.
I love you.
You have nothing important to do.
Is it mining bitcoins?
It's got a digital crown.
You need more focus in your life.
Okay.
Why are you so unambitious?
What are you afraid of?
I don't know, watch.
I have a lot of problems.
This is funny to you, how?
Jesus Christ.
Is it Siri?
Can you talk to it?
Yes.
Can you say, watch me.
Watch me.
This is great radio.
Let's do it.
Let's do it.
Let's hear it.
What time is it?
Oh, I have the... Here are some movies.
What?
What did it say?
I didn't hear it.
Who is John Roderick?
Here's the contact info for John Roderick.
Whoa, whoa, whoa, turn it off, turn it off.
Ask John Roderick, would you like to... Try again.
Ask John Roderick, would you like to split a bucket?
Nothing yet.
I think it's still mining Bitcoin.
There is a text here from a friend that says, there are a couple of total John Roderick dream girls in my Zumba class.
No photo.
No photo.
Short, curly hair, nose massage, combat boots?
Did you say nose massage?
Mazel tov.
What's the martial art called?
What do you call it?
A car vegetable?
You're talking about cap aware?
Chupacabra?
What's the one called?
What's the Israeli martial art?
Mazel tov?
Kogba Gah.
Kogba Gah?
Kogba Gah.
We'll see you next time.
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Our thanks to Casper for supporting Roderick on the line and all the great shows.
Well, you're unfolding this piece of paper.
Is this our contract?
Does it say how long we have to do this show?
Forever.
Let's move on to the next portion of the program, which is some new bullshit we're making up.
I went on the internet earlier today, and we should also warn people.
We will probably take questions from the audience after this.
We're going to hang out afterwards.
Do not touch Merlin.
I'm not going to hang out much, because you're all fucking going to make me sick, and I have to go home.
I have a podcast record in the morning, and I still haven't taken my sleeping pill.
Don't talk or breathe on Merlin.
Don't get close.
Just wave.
No, your being here is plenty.
Um...
But you can talk to me.
I'll stick around.
But we're also going to take questions.
People show affection on my behalf.
I went on the internet this afternoon, and I said to people, I said, Generation Super Train, is there a topic from Roderick on the line for which you'd like to hear John Roderick provide an update?
98% of them said GMCRV, I bet.
GMCRV is on the list.
All right.
We have not prepared, unless you've seen some of this.
Listener Sean N.,
of Seattle.
He said, the thing about Jews.
Listener Sean N. Sean N. from Seattle asks, what's the thing about Jews?
No, no, no.
There's no what.
It's just the thing about Jews.
I think he wants you to follow up on the thing about Jews.
Do you want to take another question and come back to this one?
Did I do bits on Jews?
That doesn't seem like me.
Not me.
Not me, not me.
You know, I'm a Judeophile.
And that's difficult to say.
I don't think they like to be filed.
LAUGHTER
They enlist.
Too soon.
Listener John, not this John, listener John and many other people, let's be honest, if you want to say in as much as you're comfortable and legally obligated to say, what is the current status of the GMCRV?
The GMCRV is under a tarp.
Out of respect?
It's under a tarp because we're in the rainy season in Seattle, and it is easier to de-tarpify it when there's a sunny day than it is to dehumidify it.
I like the way it smells.
Yeah.
I know, it smells great, but it's just like if it sits in the rain for two and a half months, then you have to go... But it's kind of like Grandma's old underpants in Look magazines.
Yeah.
You want to flip through them, but not a lot.
I do not know.
You are making a reference.
I do not get.
Mildew.
Is that ableist mildew?
It's got a certain moist... You're doing the international symbol of I love this wine.
Oh, it's got... There's so many things going on.
I just feel like there's a lot of complexity in the mouth feel.
It smells like burnt... I'm making that effluvium thing.
You're never supposed to just snort the chemicals.
You're supposed to get an effluvium.
Right, right.
Effluvium.
Yeah.
Tarp, tarp, tarp.
The thing about an RV is that a good RV, a nice RV feels... It should smell like things are wet.
That the exhaust is routed through the dashboard.
It should smell like someone's been living there for a year with a cat.
Like it should smell like you've been frying fish in there since the 70s.
Like all these things mixed together to get this like eau de RV.
And, you know, mine has that, of course.
Like all you have to do is smell the curtains and you get the whole experience.
Yeah.
But I just don't want... The curtains are very rustic.
Yeah.
I think those are original curtains, I think.
And the thing about the RV is it has curtains and louvers, so you can really exclude the outside world.
But you know the back window is this scenic picture window.
You can go on the Pacific Coast Highway, back up to one of those cliffs, and wake up in the morning to the breakers and the seagulls and the oil derricks out there just leaking into the sea.
And the smell of the...
But I tarped it.
It's in the backyard.
The problem was I drove it around the block in preparation to back it in because it was parked like this and I needed to go around the block in order to have the right angle to back it into its spot in front of the barn to be tarped.
Also, is it kind of a good idea to get all the things in motion one last time?
So it doesn't all just kind of freeze up in the same place forever?
And 300 yards from its eventual birth in dry dock,
Everything shut down.
The power went off.
The engine quit.
And I was like, I didn't have enough forward momentum to just roll up to the house.
I was like, I was not even a block away.
And I had to call AAA, who had to come.
They don't like that.
They don't like being called.
In their biggest record.
And it's one of those records that has more...
More like rollers and flashing lights and spotlights on the side than the main ship.
A beeping that you can't turn off.
It just looks like the Close Encounters ship.
As it turns upside down, it's just like lights everywhere.
And all the neighbors came out to see what was going on.
And the wrecker was blocking the tow truck.
So the one neighbor that really needs his mail was really upset.
And I kept saying, when the mail truck gets here, I'm going to explain it to the mailman.
And he was pacing...
So I couldn't even monitor the towing.
You were doing crowd management.
I had to be in the back like, everything's fine, everyone.
It's cool.
Don't worry.
I'm looking for the postman.
And then I saw the mailman coming.
From a half a mile away and had to watch as he stopped at each mailbox, which is what they do.
Yeah.
Like this slow motion anticipation of this.
Was there concern that he would just go around it?
That's what this guy was pacing about.
I'm not getting out of this truck.
But he didn't want to talk to the guy.
And so it's just this like slow-mo thing of like, come on.
I just got a 30-second thing I need to tell you about this guy's mail.
Yeah.
And he's taking his time.
He's sorting through all the circulars.
He's putting the Safeway stuff.
He knows what he's doing.
And your neighbor's upset, but he doesn't want to have to be the one to talk about it.
And the tow truck guy and this guy over here with the soup.
But finally, the tow truck guy backed it in in front of the barn.
They tarped it.
And what it is right now is a problem for the future.
Yeah.
It's an opportunity.
What I like to do is I walk past it and I go, March problem.
That's a problem for March.
And when March arrives, it's going to have come a lot sooner than I expected.
I love the, I don't want to take you off this, I love the idea of the March problem.
It's a March problem.
Oh, that's a March problem.
Yeah, that is not a November problem.
It is not a January problem.
It's a March problem.
Jesus, take the wheel.
I'm not going to think about this for two months at least.
Yeah.
When it's time, it might be time.
I'm not saying it's an August problem.
No.
No.
It's not that good.
And the thing about King Neptune, I'm still King Neptune until June.
With all rights therein too.
That's right.
And that's a June problem.
When I get... This is a fantastic... I mean, I'm not blowing smoke up your skirt.
This is a good thought technology.
The March problem.
You've already got to figure out where the problem goes.
You've got a little file of facts for where it's going to go for your calendar.
And when March comes... Not today.
Not today.
There will be like a ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding.
Like one of those railroad crossing things where the bell starts sounding and the lights start flashing a long time before the arm drops.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And, you know, that's basically how you approach a March problem.
Like... Y'all like, y'all like, y'all like March.
And there's March.
And are you going to get there before the barrier goes down?
Is it beginning of March or just before March is done?
I feel like the reason it's a March problem is that you get your RV ready in March for what is ultimately your April adventure.
So your March problems are really your April adventures.
March problems are April adventures.
Yeah, your May flowers bring June showers or whatever it is.
Yeah, your March problems are April adventures, and you need to, you know, it's dominoes all the way down.
Right?
Yes.
Cause and effect.
Yeah, right, because your April adventures are your May gratifications.
But you can still have April problems.
You can have May adventures.
If you're going to have a...
And I have January problems.
Sure.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
A lot of my March problems come from being, like, November problems.
The thing I keep thinking about is just, even more, like, I'm not a car guy.
I'm not a transit guy.
I'm not a person who likes motion.
But, like, I just keep coming back to fucking Clubhouse.
clubhouse.
It wants to be a clubhouse.
The moisture and the distinctive odor, does that come from one big hole or from a million tiny cracks?
The thing about an RV is it's too long to handle torsion.
Oh, it's an engineering problem.
Yeah.
So when you make a thing this long and then you put it on the road where it's going both up and down and side to side, it's got twisting forces.
It's like a subway six-foot sub.
Like there's going to be some turning and there's going to be motion.
It's a material science problem.
There's nothing that is flexible and also sturdy except for perhaps somebody in here with a 3D printer is going, uh-buh.
I beg to differ.
I have created a polymer.
Yeah, the 3D printing community, they're the worst.
In 1977, when this thing was built out of used Corvette parts...
What they did was they just zipped it together like you would an Ikea thing.
Oh, yeah, right.
But they had rubber buggy bumpers.
And so everything that... 1978, no, when's it from?
What year?
77.
77.
It's as old as Star Wars.
Yeah.
I bet they never... God bless them, the people in that community.
I don't think they ever intended that thing to still be around now.
Oh, they did.
That community of people.
They're all aeronautical engineers.
Not the community, but the GM, or as I like to call them, go... Go monsters.
Go monkeys.
Let's just take the temperature of the room.
How many people in here were born before 1977?
That is a very small proportion of the people in here.
Just for comparison's sake, how many people were born after 1977?
So this GMCRV is... This week my daughter said, do you know anyone who's older than you?
And I said, hey, I've met people who are living that are older than me.
I've got a friend who's over 55.
This thing, it's the equivalent of a Bugatti to us, right?
Like how the hell, how do you even keep this thing on the road?
But so all the little, every time that someone at GM drilled a hole into that fiberglass in order to put a light or a mirror or a piece of chrome or an antenna or anything, every one of those things is now thinking to itself, I'd like to just wither and turn into a hole rather than be a sealed...
As you get older, your sphincter just gets less and less.
You know what also?
It's also torsion.
Because torsion, there's two things that every engineer knows about torsion.
It's cruel and it's patient.
So that's the thing about torsion.
Torsion, everything seems to be fine.
Everything's copacetic.
Everything's playing off legit.
It's not like studs are shitting out of the wall.
It's going to be very subtle.
It's going to be a little bit of... Give me some airplane motions.
You got hue.
You got cry.
You got y'all.
You've got Forge.
You've got Pong.
Pong.
You've got Higa.
You've got Gee.
Gee and Haw.
Right?
Right?
You've got Yoni.
You've got Yoni and Lingam.
Yoni and Lingam.
That's right.
Gaia.
Gaia.
All the different ways that a plane can move in space.
Some of them are in all three of the dimensions.
And that's a lot like what happens with the materials problem of a GMCR-V.
It's very, very long.
But the stresses are going to be very subtle and patient.
Maybe by the time of Empire Strikes Back, everything was still really great.
You get up to the time of Return of the Jedi, some of the studs are getting a little bit curious about where else they could be going, right?
There are a lot of people in the audience who were born in 1987.
And one day, time is going to make 1987 look like 1967.
Yeah.
And that's when you're going to find the material science that went into building you also starts, due to torsion and Gaia, make it so that your sealants and your seals also start to lose their elasticity.
Yeah, regardless of how much Dijon you get into the Yoni.
Right.
there's still going to be a little bit of yaw in the lingam.
That's right.
And there's going to be resistance from the hue.
The hue and the cry.
So you've got the storm over here.
You've got the drang over there.
1977.
Yep.
Right?
And so right now, the GMC RV, like you all, and like me, right now, this will all happen to us at one point.
We're going to end up tarped in front of somebody's barn.
And the GMC RV got there first.
And eventually they'll need to make room and you'll be tarped outside the barn.
I want to turn it into... And you won't be tarped anymore.
You're just going to be a wet old RV.
And nobody can even open the door anymore.
I love you, Grandpa.
I want to turn it into a clubhouse.
It should be a clubhouse.
You get a dehumidifier.
I got a dehumidifier.
I got one for home.
I got one for the office.
I never look back.
You put it in there, it'll suck the shit out of that place.
Yeah, but it's the Scottish Castle problem, which is every time I open Sunset Magazine, I see one of those tiny houses, and I think, I want to put a tiny house in my backyard as a yoga studio or as a Zumba, whatever that is, studio, or as a... It's called limited motion Zumba.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You listen to very calm music and you make very small motions.
I'll have a stand-up desk and I'll do my architecture there, whatever it is.
But then I remember I don't have any more friends than my daughter and her mother and my mother and sister.
Okay.
I don't want anyone living around me.
I don't want people waking me up in the morning or touching my feet when I'm sleeping.
Don't touch my feet, don't borrow my bucket.
That's right.
Don't empty my bucket, don't fill my bucket, don't do anything with my bucket.
What part of me wants to put an apartment in my yard...
Oh, a yard apartment would be so boss.
It would be boss, but who would I put in there?
What if you just wanted to go look at a map?
Would it be nicer?
No, I don't mean like a Rand McNally map.
Like what if you had a really good fucking historical map and you could open the door and you go in there, you got your style of coffee.
You say what if.
I would be in that thing all day.
Well, I told you about how I used to live in the attic a lot when I was a kid.
It would be the same thing for me.
It would be like living in an attic except because I have wheels that don't go anywhere.
I would be so into that except for the smell and I get the dehumidifier.
Okay, second problem.
All right.
And I think this is the main problem.
Yeah.
The door, and there's only one door to the GMC RV.
It does not have a pilot's door.
It's a feature, not a bug.
It has one door.
The door faces the house if the RV is nose in.
Okay.
But I find nose-in parking aesthetically unpleasing.
I want rear-in.
I want to back a vehicle in.
I don't want to nose a vehicle in because... What if you have to get away?
That's right.
When it's time to... You ever see a cop go nose-in to a space?
Once.
And then they're dead.
You always back in.
Always back in.
You don't want to be in a situation where you can't... Even if you have a tarp and the thing doesn't move, you back in.
You back it in.
You can also defend your perimeter that way.
If, God forbid, you had to defend against the bucket stealers and the zombies and you had to be in the pilot of this great craft, you would be able to conduct your turret gun pointing out like a gentleman.
That's right.
And the problem is if it's back in, then the front door faces Patrick's yard.
No.
And Patrick's yard is full of parts from his sewer reconstruction business.
It's not appealing.
I planted a hedge of fotinia.
I want to know more about the sewer reconstruction business.
I have a hedge of fotinia, but it hasn't grown up enough.
And when it finally does... I love that band.
Oh, God.
The shoegaze bands were so good.
When they opened for Mission to Burma, that was really a great tour.
Remember that one song they did?
Go back to your list.
What else you got?
These are real reader mail.
Otherwise.
Do you
see yourself getting back into it or is there a little voice?
Do you have a little voice?
I bet you got a little voice.
Don't answer it.
Too soon.
I feel like RVing is an activity for someone just slightly older than me.
And maybe a little, maybe significantly older than me.
You should wait.
You should wait until you're really.
You know, when I got into it, I thought I would go to these RV conventions and it'd be full of, like, super foxy people who were all, like, in the night you'd hear the doors open and people tiptoeing between RVs.
You know, like, ding dong, hi, I'm here.
Like, there was a whole, I hoped it was a community.
And, in fact, it's a community of... Implying they're swinging.
Yeah.
A little bit or something fun, right?
Not the mean way, but like a nice clean bit of swing.
Yeah.
Consensual, clean.
It's just healthy.
I mean, you know that you're all in RVs.
You're not like weirdos.
You don't mind a little mildew on the sill.
You know what I'm saying?
But instead, everybody in the RV community, they're just in there painting Ronin.
Like they're not... I imagine them making ships.
Yeah.
Is there shipmaking involved?
Ships in bottles, you mean?
It could be a bottle.
I don't know.
You can fit ships in lots of different things.
I wouldn't constrain the imagination of a GMC RV owner.
I think they are tiptoeing between each other's RVs and having sex with each other.
Full-on coital sex?
I think so, but they are past their prime reproductive years.
Good.
You don't think it's just finger-banging mostly?
No, come on, guys.
We're adults here.
Are there kids here?
Is there anyone under the age of 18 here?
Who's the youngest person here?
Yell it out.
You think you're the youngest person here?
Yell it out.
Come on.
Are there any people who are teenagers here?
Okay.
Somebody over here was mouth breathing, and that's a sign of being a teenager.
Actually, I scored very well.
I want my grade average.
I think there would be more finger banging, except the two... Or finger blasting.
The co-pilot seat are about as far apart as these two seats.
So you would have to really be making a big, big right turn.
Yeah, but everything behind the cockpit converts from something to something else.
And that's just the dream space of imagination for the finger blaster in your life.
Listen...
Just hear me out.
You could be sitting there having a perfectly serviceable homemade meal at that table.
You flip the fucking table over, your legs are up in the air, and everybody's getting finger-blasted.
In the back, is that a bench?
Sure, it's a bench.
Guess what?
I close the door, and now it's a bedroom.
In here, I come in here, I add some French onion soup, I go in and I blast a Tudor, and guess what?
I turn some stuff on, and now it's a shower.
Come on in.
Full finger-blast.
You get blasted off from every zone in this place.
You should leave no surface unblasted.
It's a thing that we don't get in America.
I'm going to say just fog up the fucking windows, right?
In other countries, there are bathrooms that are small and turn into showers.
And we don't have that very much in the United States.
You mean in like a normal house?
In just your apartment, right?
The bathroom is small and there's a drain in the floor and it's also a shower.
But I don't know if anyone in the room has ever taken a shower while you were also taking a shit.
But it's two different... Or are willing to admit it.
Two different usages of the word take.
Yeah.
And neither one really, the normal one, which is like to take a drink or take a bottle.
The Brits say that they're going to leave a shit up.
they're going to offer a shit but also like you're not just that you're taking the shower right you're like it's called respecting the royals but it's a great experience I highly recommend it to everybody oh my god it's you know like George Costanza with the sandwich during sex it's that same kind of thing if you could do more than one thing at a time in that bathroom shouldn't you you know just so many options it's already a little bit of mildew smell it's like a meatball in the bathtub well uh la la la la
When you told me there were balls, I was all thinking about your tub.
I have a desk I made of my own design.
Oh, won't you sign it with your tiny pen?
Finger blasting.
La la la.
I could do this all night Stop laughing or I will I'll scrape the mildew from your windowsill Come smell my drapes
I would go to this show for sure.
If you did just a one-man off-Broadway thing where you just... There's somebody in here who one day is going to be somewhere and be a little bit high who's listened to some of my programs.
And Pretty Girls Make Graves, this song by The Smiths, is going to come on the radio and they're going to have a lot of problems.
Yeah.
La la la.
Listener Matt Howey says, if we're going to join John in collecting Filson bags, what's a good price range on eBay for a weekend-sized Filson duffel bag, and what was the best era of Filson bag years to look for?
Answer any or all parts that you want.
You're already a Phony Award winner.
This is all gravy.
This is super difficult for me because I hate to do free advertising for this brand, but I also feel like I've kind of given myself this paper crown.
They could do a lot more for you.
Do you see me having a Filson bag right now?
They do a lot for me.
This is reflective of my life.
I don't have a Filson bag.
This is the curious thing about Filson bags, for those of you who are curious.
They are not actually an old thing.
Filson made jackets and vests and shirts.
Wax pants.
And boots and pants.
And then in the 90s, someone at the Filson company said, what if we made luggage?
I thought that that person was going, in surprise.
But in fact, they were just preparing to cough.
And that is the appropriate reaction to this story.
It's very dull.
So anyway, Matt... Matt Howey... When you're just a little bit older, you'll be so good at GMC RVs.
Here's what's going to happen.
I remember there was a time I had an anecdote about bags.
The bags at the time were quite unusual in the sense that they were neither particularly old...
Or demonstrably new.
And the thrust of the anecdote was that therein lie the bargain.
Now, at the time, there was a band called The Gits.
The Gits did not have the bags because they haven't been invented yet.
I'm going to...
do my eBay store this year, and I'm going to sell my all my... Listener Julie says, what's up with the eBay store?
I'm going to sell so much stuff on there, it's going to be amazing.
If you are an extra large, or know someone who is...
Or want to be like someone in the 90s who's wearing clothes that were too big for them.
Or you want some bags.
Or you want some painted Ronin.
Bags for the extra large.
Right.
Or you want like nesting dolls of different Russian premieres.
My eBay store is going to be the thing for you.
And I think it's called, I don't know what it's called.
You got a name on the account thing at some point.
Is it Super Train?
I think it was Morgan Morgan Morgan.
Morgan Rides Free.
Oh, that's it.
That's catchy.
That's good.
Do you remember the story behind Morgan Rides Free?
Tell me again.
When I was freight hopping.
Try to come up with some kind of clever URL that you could redirect.
Morgan Rides Free dot URL?
Yeah.
Any town USA.
One, two, three, four, five.
When I was a teenager and I first started hopping freights, there were still old men who wrote their handles in chalk or in charcoal on the trains they'd ridden.
Like, you know, Bob's your uncle was, you know, like March 8th, 74.
Hobotagging.
Hobotagging.
Little Kilroy was here, noses and stuff like that.
And I needed a handle and I didn't...
Have a good one.
And it was before I could really brand things very well.
I'm still not very good at branding things.
Hence the name of this podcast.
Morgan Rides Free.
Roderick on the line.
Thanks for all your help with that.
But my middle name...
My middle name is Morgan.
It is?
And I was super into riding free.
Ah.
Both free on these trains that don't cost money because you're... That could have been so much worse.
That could be so much shittier.
Roderick is blazed.
Yeah, right.
Roderick is blazed.
Or something like that.
It could have really sucked.
And there are hobo handles like that.
Of course there are.
Weed 420.
Cool Todd 420.
And then I tried to shorten it to Murph.
MRF, MRF, like MRF.
And that wasn't good.
MRF?
MRF, MRF.
MRF?
It could be Mirf.
Oh, because it's an IC.
Fix it again, Tony.
Capital M, lowercase u. And then Morgan Uber rides free.
And then I was briefly in a hip-hop community where there was a lot of tagging going on, and there was a suggestion that I needed a tag.
And so they decided that my tag was eggs, because I was an egghead.
And so I was eggs.
That sucks.
I know.
That's really, really bad.
Then I was out trying to tag things with a Sharpie as eggs.
Trying to draw a photorealistic egg.
The thing is that...
This one's over medium.
I did it too long.
If you look at the history of tags in hip-hop, you will see that people don't use the letter G very often because it's not very smooth.
There's not a cool, smooth way to... Oh, it's like trying to get the app switcher on your iPhone X. All right.
Yeah, right.
It's a difficult gesture.
Like if you've got a spray can and you're doing like A, that's really nice.
And like even a B, but like G kind of ends.
And so I started doing those Gs that are like little circle, big circle, and kind of trying to make them look like eggs.
Like a 14-year-old girl.
Yeah.
But then I realized that that was really egg-headed of me, and I was living up to my name, and I didn't like that.
Oh, no.
You put an egg on an egg.
That's right.
That's no good.
But then I evolved it.
We need to allow time for our – do folks in the – first of all, does anybody have things that they would like to ask?
Oh, sure.
There are a lot of questions.
Well, I want to make sure.
I don't want to cut this short.
Does anybody have things they would like to ask, John?
This could be very, very short.
Well, why don't we bring up the house lights if we're in the question.
Well, let me just give you one more.
You pick.
You pick.
Here's your options.
Oh, listener Shannon wants to know how the house renovations are coming.
They're fine.
I thought for a while that I had rats in the walls again, and I couldn't figure out how they were getting in, and then I realized I had bats.
No rats, just bats.
I had bats in the attic, and they got in because... It's not cats with tats?
No, it's bats, and I realized that Sam, when I asked him to plug the hole that I knew was next to the chimney, Sam told me that he had, but he hadn't.
It seems like it's a real game of whack-a-mole with song.
He has to do something fairly specific over here, and he goes around the corner, and he's got a different thing.
I didn't go up the two ladders that it would take to get up there to say, like, no, this hole.
And so he didn't plug it, and now bats are coming in.
Oh, that's no good.
Oh, yeah, did you ever find out where he peed?
Psalm?
No, I think he peed in the fatinia.
Okay, show of hands.
For anybody who does... Okay, listen, here's the thing.
John had Psalm come out to his house for about eight years.
He came out almost every day.
Sometimes he wouldn't show up for six weeks.
Psalm came out to his house as his contractor friend and companion.
It was kind of like a Green Hornet and Cato type situation.
Show of hands.
Psalm never peed the entire time he was ever at the house.
Clap.
I'm pretty confident that that's what's happening.
Okay.
Okay, all right.
God bless you.
Other show of hands.
Psalm just fucking ruined that yard with pee.
Show of hands.
It just stands to reason.
No, I don't think so.
You think there's something in his makeup without being ping pong.
You think there's something about Psalm that says, this line you do not cross.
You do not pee on this territory.
You think he just knew.
It was respect.
It's like Henry Hill.
As a teenager, Sam escaped from the killing fields of Cambodia and found his way.
He probably had to pee really bad.
Found his way through Thailand to my house all the way to fixing my porch and lying to me about the hole in the roof.
I'm pretty sure that Sam can hold his pee for six hours.
But also, the fact that I have bats and not rats is now inhibiting me adopting Vito because Vito... Is that a kind of kung fu?
Vito was a rat killer.
Oh.
Oh, the cat.
The cat.
Okay, right.
And I don't know if you know this, but it's illegal to kill bats in the United States.
It's illegal to kill bats in the United States.
You cannot kill bats.
Is that federal?
You cannot kill bats.
It's a USC type situation?
Does anybody know whether it's a federal law?
Anybody know bat laws?
Is there any bat lawyers?
Da-da-da-da-da.
Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha.
To the appellate court, Robin.
I'm the real bat lawyer.
I'm not going to bury another bat lawyer.
We should get to the questions.
Oh, there was a second question.
There was a big request, actually from a guest of yours here, that you talk about the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy movie, but we probably don't have time for that.
The thing when you said, what should we talk about, was they wanted me to talk about that.
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy movie?
Listener 2049 says, honestly, the only thing that comes to mind was the app where John was about to give his opinion on the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy movie before changing topics and never coming back to it.
We have a heart out at 9.30, right?
That story, the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy story, is one of the real long-tail Roderick on the Line stories.
It's going to come back eventually.
Okay, we'll come back to that.
My wife and daughter are reading that right now.
Are they?
It's a wonderful book.
By the time you get to the third book, it's not funny anymore.
I want to take questions because I know there are some enthusiastic ones.
Do we have a mic or should we... No, no, just yell.
Oh, no.
That place is gone.
There's a lot of turnover in the neighborhood.
No, I have never had the house.
I did LSD in college.
And it was a bad idea.
And then I did LSD again and again.
And I did so much of the LSD.
And I really regret it because there's times when I have things happening in my life that I think are real.
And that was a lot like that day with the Chinese food.
But I was there.
Yeah.
You say you were there.
Oh, that's true.
That's exactly what I expect from a hallucination.
I feel like they went back to Alpha Centauri.
Yeah.
No, I haven't had Alpha Centauri.
You know what they did?
They were like, we need to learn to make tea and then we come back.
I think what they said is, let's just kind of float this on a couple.
Obviously, this place is going to be a training ground for teaching greys to kind of mostly pretend.
Right?
That they are normals.
Hence the looks.
Anybody else have another question?
Anyone?
It's okay if you don't.
Don't worry.
Ma'am, there on the side.
Does John have a favorite piece of hate mail?
And if so, what is it?
Well, John's thinking about that.
This is not asked to me.
Are you ready to go?
Yeah, no, go ahead.
There's a new kind of favorite genre.
I think this is a spinoff of Twitter as a genre.
And my new favorite is just when anybody is such a fan of what I do...
that they take the time to reach out to me for the first time with a grievance and a hostility.
And it's so nice to find out that somebody is a fan.
It's not even a shit sandwich.
It's just the shit shit witch of just how terribly disappointed they are.
Such a fan for 15 years, and really, I just can't even anymore.
That's a nice genre.
It's nice to disappoint people you haven't met yet and then find out later.
My favorite piece of hate mail actually was generated here in San Francisco.
Frisco Proud.
I think it was Sacramento it actually came from.
I played a show with my band The Long Winters at The Independent.
A club here.
Yeah, was that right?
And that was the show where I came out at the beginning of the show playing, like, a big electric guitar solo, which we usually save for the end of the show.
And in the course of playing my dramatic, excellent guitar solo, I fell backwards over my amplifier...
into a hole created by drums and amplifier parts.
No stage area.
Yeah, there were some guitars back there, which I landed on, breaking one in half.
And then still the band kept playing, because they know.
When you say it happened in slow motion, it doesn't really capture how long it took for this to happen.
It was not an easy fall.
It was not like a Deadwood help me with my fall fall.
This is more like... It's like... It's over.
Take it all.
Crunch.
Boom.
Bam.
Rock and roll.
The only thing visible is my feet up in the air.
They call that the annual exam.
I continued to solo...
And then flopped over, climbed up, got back to the front of the stage, still playing guitar.
The band was still playing.
I was like, yeah, all right.
And at that time, I had really long hair, and I was missing a front tooth.
As you do.
And I got a letter from a woman who said, I am a really big fan of your band.
I really love your record, When I Pretend to Fall.
This is the first time I ever came to see you play.
Reaching out.
And you had so little respect for the audience to come out so stinking drunk.
Yeah.
At this point, I had been sober 17 years.
Still very disrespectful.
And then she said, and you proceeded to play every song different from the album.
And you did all this talking about chemtrails and whatever else.
And like, why didn't you just put on a professional show?
I'm really disillusioned.
What did you say?
Well, I was like, that's the show.
What's in the show is in the show.
It's true.
Okay.
We've got one more.
Yeah, okay.
We've got to go.
Another question?
Somebody that really feels strong?
Yeah, we'll go.
Oh, how's the album coming?
That's great.
That's great.
Thank you.
I really, I really was hoping someone would ask.
I have a family.
I need to get home.
I can't get sick and I have to lift home.
We all know the answer to that.
I want one more question that is not one that's trying to kill me.
Yes.
Oh, how's the book coming?
Fuck.
Fuck.