Ep. 280: "A Sensible Hat"
Hi, Merlin.
How's it going?
Good.
Good.
I mean, it's early.
Well, yeah.
Yeah.
It is.
I've been doing better with my sleep, and I've had a productive morning.
Listen to you.
You sound so like...
So, productive.
Productive.
It doesn't take that much.
I've always said my family has a low threshold for celebration.
Yeah.
You know, it doesn't take much to, I'm an eternal prospective optimist.
Yeah.
Yeah, we have a high threshold for celebration here at Shea Roderick.
Really?
And it's not necessary that it be that way.
I should let a little bit more.
I should let the balloons in.
I should let the streamers in.
But, you know, they're knocking at the door.
Streamers are ringing the bell.
And I'm like, did we really earn this?
Oh, that extends beyond you.
That goes to your immediate family.
Did you really earn that?
I think it goes.
I mean, I won't look at somebody straight up and be like, did you earn that?
But I do feel like party inflation.
You let your look of disappointment do the heavy lifting.
Yeah, I mean, you know, there are people around me in my orbit who believe that when it's their birthday month, that signifies something?
It sounds like you have talked about this, and it sounds like whether you were able to choose or not, that's on you.
The birthday month is a thing you do now.
Yeah, or certainly a birthday week.
But no, I think the thing that you're talking about is like...
I definitely don't let myself celebrate small accomplishments or even big ones.
But I do have a tendency, I think, to, I mean, you know, I give high fives.
I give high fives when things get straightened up.
And when, you know, when people do good things, I give high fives.
But I don't think that's enough.
I don't think it's enough.
I'm interested in this.
I, boy, and you know what, I can't say this.
You know, our teacher conferences are always a breeze.
Yeah.
Oh, yeah.
Because our kid does well in school, and she's impossibly easy to deal with.
And I don't know.
This latest one...
I was a little bit, hmm.
Because she said something like, you know, I don't know, I can't quote her, but she kind of said something along the lines of, you know, you don't want to praise too much because then you're setting up an idea where when there's not praise, you should be worried.
And that just leads to more praise.
And now you're on some kind of a praise train.
Praise train.
Which I kind of get, but I have really mixed feelings about it.
Because I don't know, I believe in, you know, the positive reinforcement.
I see somebody's going to email us about this.
But I like the idea, they say that when you're trying to train an animal, you reward the good stuff and mostly ignore the bad stuff.
And that that also works for men and other people.
And I've tended to think that that's true.
I think I feel like I know for myself as somebody who rejected all authority in life that I rarely saw even valid criticism as being something I needed to think about because I tended to just explore what was broken about the person doing it.
So I tend to think that, well, no, think about this.
Think about how like if I don't know if you're like this, but I mean, how's your consistency?
Let me ask you that.
Oh, I mean, I'm very consistently inconsistent.
I mean, I don't even say that flippantly.
That's the truest thing about me.
There's a couple of things I knew going into this racket.
One thing I knew was I didn't want to unintentionally pass on anxieties that I didn't need to pass on.
And I knew that consistency was very likely to be the most difficult part.
Right.
So there's a certain amount of arbitrariness.
I promise this whole episode will not be about parenting unless it is.
I don't really care, frankly.
What's in the show is in the show.
You don't talk about the show in the show.
What's in the show is the show.
That's what the show is.
The show is the show we did.
I think a lot of people don't understand that.
They think the show happens somewhere else.
The show is when you're doing the show.
I think this is wind-up for the show, I think a lot of people might think, and then the show starts at some point, but no.
No, this is the show, yeah.
I'm wrapped at what you're saying.
Okay, well, it's almost done.
All I was going to say was that, like, okay, so you know that there's a certain amount...
Let's do some real talk here.
I'm flipping my chair around.
We're going to have a rap session here.
Let's go.
Put your hat on backwards.
Okay, fellow teens.
Let me tell you a little bit about what it's like to be a parent.
You are obligated to pretend to care greatly about stuff that you absolutely do not care about.
I think there's a tendency perhaps among some kids, some children, some offspring to think that I actually give a flying fuck about the rules that I am compelled to enforce.
I don't.
I would just as soon watch kids in the hall on YouTube until three in the morning with you.
I would be fine with that.
Well, you know what?
Let's go watch Gavin again.
That's funny.
We'll watch.
I have to say it's bedtime because it's bedtime.
I don't think that's fun, but I got to do that.
And there's all kinds of stuff.
I think homework, you know what?
I'm going to go there.
I think homework is mostly bullshit.
But we have to do the homework because that's a thing that we do.
And so, you know, the consistency part is now when that gets to behavior is where it gets interesting.
Because if I'm in a great mood, I can put up with almost anything.
Right?
Yeah.
Some slightly aberrant, that's not typically okay behavior.
If you're on vacation or you're having fun, it's the weekend.
And dad's in a great mood.
Woo-hoo!
There's all kinds of stuff I'm fine with.
If I'm exhausted and my attention is frayed and it's 7.15 p.m., which is generally when my attention is just about to bottom out, it's time to brush teeth.
It's time to brush teeth.
Now, we really, really need to get the jammies on and move toward bed.
It's really time.
And that's where the consistency fails for me.
Because that's when I'm at my weakest in some ways.
If I'm tired, if I'm shagged out, if I'm stressed, if I'm just not in a good mood, to be honest.
Not a terrible mood, but you're just like, ugh.
it's time to be rule boy again.
I got to go be rule boy.
And that's, that's where I, that's where I struggle because like I should be in some version of myself.
I should be as consistent no matter what, anytime, regardless of the situation or the mood, right?
And there's just certain things we always do.
Cause that's the thing we do.
Some of those things I'm good at.
Many of them I am not.
I don't know.
I mean, you have to I guess I practice the is this what life is like philosophy of parenting, which is, yeah, they say, you know, be consistent.
But life isn't consistent.
My life has never been consistent.
Long time before I started making the decisions.
You didn't change that.
That's not you.
I mean.
It's it just it feels like this is our life and I perfectly consistent is just not that's not anything.
It's kind of like divorce, right?
My folks were divorced.
I know a lot of people whose parents were divorced at a young age.
I know a lot of people whose parents weren't.
But what do you what what's normal, you know?
Oh, yeah.
And think about how many people's folks stayed together and are just like very, very publicly unhappy.
Sure, or when you were a teenager, you could just tell which ones of your friends' houses was cold and weird.
You could even suss out sometimes when they'd reached an accommodation, when they had a Bill and Hillary type situation where they're like, here's the things I'm going to notice, and there's a whole bunch of stuff I'm just not going to pay attention to.
Yeah, and in our era, the dads that would sort of disappear into a den with the door closed, and it's like, hmm, don't knock on the door or make any noise around the den.
Yeah.
And I of course I've told you about my friend who's dead I came over
One time, and on the living room wall was spray-painted a list of house rules.
Wow!
If you told me that, I forgot it, but please share.
There's so much about that that intrigues me.
So he was... I wonder if he really... Did he really plan ahead?
No.
No, no, no.
He was a surgeon.
Oh, God.
And there were a lot of German people in my neighborhood, like Catholic German...
Like doctors was sort of the neighborhood that I grew up in.
And he was a very successful surgeon and very much a technical one.
But he was the – of all the dads in the neighborhood, he was the one that was always in an insulated –
full-on mechanics suit, like a winter mechanic suit, who was out in the yard taking the lawnmower apart.
Oh, he was always busy?
Yeah, he wasn't like PTA dad.
He was just like tinkerer dad.
He wasn't like, let's get soft-serve dad.
No, no, no, no.
I don't remember ever having an encounter with him that was kind, but not unkind.
He was just like, he was severe.
That's just how it was sometimes.
It was how it was, and it certainly was with him.
And then his wife was matronly and gregarious.
I mean, you know, strict.
She was just kind of like...
The house was her domain.
The neighborhood was her domain.
And she just, I mean, she didn't quite wear like a like a Hofbrauhaus uniform type of thing.
Like, you know, like a dirndl.
Like a puffy shirt or whatever, but but but close.
And she would feed us and so forth.
And there were three boys in the family and they were all like borderline sociopathic with each other.
You know, like they would really hurt each other.
And just water off a duck's back, you know?
I mean, they would get in fights with each other and shoot each other with pellet guns.
That was just normal.
It was just the normal.
Anyway, I came over to the house one time, and I walk in, and it's unavoidable that in black spray paint...
on the living room wall, house rules, and then like all the way.
In their actual living area.
This is not like a piece of plywood in the garage.
No, all the way down the wall.
John, that's mental.
There's no way that's not like clown crazy.
Three, four, you know.
Oh my God, he laid them all out.
Homework done by seven or whatever.
Could you see where he'd added ones later?
It was just as he goes down, you know, the course the the writing got smaller as he realized And and and my friend and the family Tried to play it off Like it wasn't there.
Yeah, no mention of it at least and I was like
And after a little bit of kind of, you know, when his mom bustled over to some other part of the house, I was like, so what's up with the, and my friend said, oh yeah, well, you know, I mean, dad just felt like things had gotten a little slack around here.
And we needed to tighten up.
We needed to get, you know, chip shape.
And nothing says I've got things totally under control, like a spur-of-the-moment spray paint session.
Yeah, just like, you know what we need around here?
Some reminders.
I wonder how Mom felt about that.
Well, you know, obviously it was still up because some... It was still up on the wall because some accommodation between the two of them had been reached where...
She knew
Well, I, and I'm not a hundred percent sure whether painting the walls was his responsibility.
And so she was waiting for him to, it's an extension of his world defining capability.
We're like, it sounds like he gets to define things about how the world operates in our home.
And she does a lot of the detailed implementation kind of.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, and well, except no, I think she, I think she had a sense of humor and
And it was not always on display, but I think it was a situation where she recognized that the shame of this did not actually rub off on her.
Like, this is clearly insane and clearly has nothing to do with her.
So she could bustle around the house with just the hint of a smirk and be like, well, somebody needs to paint that.
Somebody needs to paint the living room now.
So when somebody gets around and he's, you know, and I'm sure when he came home the next day, he was like, well, you know, like he wasn't.
I mean, it's not something where he was like, oh, God, I'm ashamed.
I need to cover this up.
I think it was, but I think he also felt, I mean, it's that classic, like, dad who has gone too far.
Yeah, where he's just like, well, I mean, I do, there are some good points on that, Walt.
You know, like, he couldn't, he couldn't,
He couldn't be in there red faced scrubbing it off.
He had to leave it for like two days in order to make his point.
Oh, God.
And within that culture of that family of that moment, that was just it made sense.
That was just how they were all getting down the road.
And and from the standpoint of my family.
It did not make any sense at all, but a lot of the things... Can you imagine how your mother... I mean, just the first thing I think of, can you imagine how your mother would react if anybody spray-painted her wall?
I mean, she doesn't like the way people do the dishes, let alone spray-painting a wall.
My God.
Well, no, but my mom didn't have... My mom wasn't married my whole life, so she didn't...
There was no other person to answer to in the house.
So she could make the rules anything she wanted.
She runs a pretty tight ship.
And they ran a very tight ship.
I mean, that house, you could eat off the floors.
But from their perspective, the craziest thing in the neighborhood...
was that my mom was a divorced woman who owned her own home.
Right.
Okay.
Yeah.
You talked about this once before.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
So that was already a thing that the very presence of had destabilized the neighborhood.
Hmm.
um, from a, from the standpoint of like, what's, what's happening in the world.
Can you imagine what that would do to property values?
Well, that's right.
You know, like a white lady who owns her own home.
She's a computer programmer living in the neighborhood.
Jeez.
Um, so, so, you know, from their perspective, like this is just something that their marriage is accommodating.
It's not, it's not like they're, it's not like the fabric of society is crumbling.
Anyway, that,
But the last couple of days I've been struggling as a parent.
I had just had a tough weekend with my little girl.
Just the last couple.
I mean, I'm just trying to figure out what to do now.
There's so many unnecessary crises in my house.
And I try so hard to head them off.
I try to prepare...
And it's just, it's Sisyphean.
There's just a de minimis amount of weird drama that's going to come up, no matter how much you try to be cool about it.
Well, and I had a kind of a connected realization, even in last night, like, and you may laugh, but I have always thought of myself as very chill, pretty chill.
Yeah.
But I'm starting to think that maybe I am dramatic.
It's a very interesting little nibble of an insight.
That maybe I am, as Ben Acker said, I was texting with Ben Acker last night, and I said, do you think I'm dramatic?
And he said, oh, you're the king of drama queens.
And I said, now, seriously?
And he was like, no, not at all.
I said that as a joke because it's ridiculous.
And I was like, who would say a thing like that to you?
Oh, my gosh.
I can't think of anything more ridiculous than somebody would say.
Well, and I said, now, are we locked in one of those irony Ouroboros where I don't know which one of the things you're saying is serious?
Of course, you just hit the home button, put your phone down, and didn't give it another thought.
Because you don't do drama.
What the hell?
What the hell?
And he was like, see?
And I was like, which one is it?
But I'm sitting, I'm chewing on that because my kid is very dramatic.
But I'm thinking, wait a minute, am I really dramatic?
I might be.
There's a lot of evidence in my life where things get, where there are things that are happening that are dramatic that
maybe didn't need to be except for me.
And like, I've been kind of walking around with my hands behind my back, um,
sort of pacing the house, pacing the rampart, going like, wait a minute, do I live on a windswept shore where I'm constantly staring out at the sea, where in fact that's not necessary?
It's definitely one of those, you know, there's those classic kinds of things that passive-aggressive people know how to do, which is things, you say to somebody something like, wow, you seem defensive.
And you're like, what?
I seem defensive?
Yeah.
No matter what you say, or for myself, it's something like me going, oh, God, I wonder if I think too much.
Do I think too much?
And you're in a Mobius strip.
You're never going to get out of that because now you're on this loop.
Well, let me ask you this as long as you're bringing it up.
When you're walking around your ramparts looking down on your land thinking about this, do you feel vulnerable when you're wondering if that's the case?
No.
Well, I've been feeling a lot more vulnerable lately.
Like, I woke up the other day.
So, this is a little bit... I don't know what's happening.
Do you want to save this for your show with Dan?
No, no, no.
I don't know what's happening in that I never felt like I had anxiety.
I never felt like I had... Certainly, I never panicked.
Mm-hmm.
But I woke up the other morning in what could only be described as a panic attack.
Oh, no.
Shit.
And I was like, and not a panic attack that was unrelated to anything.
I'm not just sitting there like, not sure what's going on.
Like, I'm claustrophobic.
Yep.
And as I get older, that claustrophobia gets more and more related to breathing.
Right.
Like, it's not just claustrophobia, like, don't put me in a box.
It's like, I don't want my breathing constrained.
And that gives me, just the thought of it gives me claustrophobia.
That's the way the panic works.
It's like, as soon as you think the thought, it's like, yeah, here I go.
Yeah.
And so the other day, and this has only happened to me three times in my life, one time decades ago.
maybe not decades, but like 10, 15 years ago, I was on, I got on the Lufthansa flight from Frankfurt to Seattle, some crazy fucking long airplane flight.
And it was, and I was seated in the third row from the back on a plane that had what I remember as being five aisles.
Just a massive, massive fart barn.
I wasn't going to say it, but you don't notice the fartiness of a plane as much as you get closer to the front.
But when you're in the back, especially when you're kind of near the latrine, you really get the full aspect.
You see the back of all those heads and all those dirty asses in those dirty seats, and you just know how much fart there is.
There's so many fart PPMs in there.
And I feel like this was some old plane that still had ashtrays in the seats.
I mean, it was like...
It was not good.
And I got back there and I was like, get me the fuck off this airplane.
Really?
And I'd never ever had that.
And I was like, and the plane is like pulling away from the gate and I'm like, Oh no, no, no, no, no, no.
I can't be on here.
And I'm looking around and I don't know what, I honestly didn't know what to do.
Like,
Am I having a premonition can you get that feedback loop right?
If I am having a premonition does this happen all the time right before airplane crashes where like five super sensitive people on the flight are like I can't be on this plane and then they just like go well too late and then they die or
And so I'm sitting there and I'm like, my breath starts to go and I'm like, I cannot do this.
Now you're thinking.
Yeah.
And what walked me down was...
Are you going to be that guy?
Like, walk me through this, that you're going to get this plane taken back to the airport.
You dipped into your strategic reserve of shame.
I did.
I did.
I might need this.
Break glass in case of emergency.
I'm sitting in the chair, you know, and I'm trying to calm my breath by saying...
give me the play-by-play that you ring the call bell now.
Or that you get up out of your seat and start walking to the front of the plane.
Like, just walk me through this.
And so I calmed down and then I got my head right and was fine.
But I'd never experienced it before and I was like, oh shit, is that just like right under the surface?
Because I'd never experienced anything like that.
Were you able to do like a quick... I mean, because sometimes if you're somebody who goes through this, you learn little tricks.
And one of the little tricks is like, okay, just a dumb one.
Did I have too much coffee today?
Was I stressed?
Did it feel like an organic, full-on... I'm guessing it felt like an organic, full-on, oh no, this is a real thing happening.
This is me.
I have one experience that helps me in moments like that.
And it was...
one of the world historical classic like young person foibles where I was super baked with my super baked other friends and I started to hyperventilate and I said I swear to you I think this pot was laced and I'm
I am like pretty well known as a broad mocker of the idea that any pot is laced.
But at this point in time, I was still young and still susceptible to the idea.
That there were drug dealers out there who were giving away free drugs.
Yeah.
By lacing.
Economically, it doesn't make sense.
But I couldn't account for what was happening to me because I was like, this was not a normal response to pot.
I was freaking.
I was just like, I'm having a heart attack.
And so in this room, I'm like, call you guys call an ambulance because I couldn't get my breath.
I couldn't get my, I couldn't get equilibrium back.
And my friends are all crouched around me like, dude, oh no.
And I'm like, fuck, you know, like I need help.
Like I need help immediately.
Oh God.
Like call a fucking ambulance.
And there was a guy at this, it wasn't a party at this event of four dudes that was like a tangential friend, like a little bit older.
And he was like, hey, can I ask you a question?
And I was like, what, what?
And he's like, is that a 64-ounce Mountain Dew in your hand?
And I was clutching this giant 7-Eleven Super Gulp of Mountain Dew that was probably my second one of the day that I was just sitting and nursing.
As I was panicking, I think I was reaching for it and like, and I was like, what, what?
Yes.
And he was like,
do you know how much caffeine is in a fucking 64 ounce Mountain Dew?
And it was just like the, it was this incredible little, just like, he put a sensible hat on me for a second.
And he was like, you're not freaking out.
You're so fucking like ramped up.
You're gacked out on Mountain Dew.
You're gacked out on Dew, dude.
And it was enough, right?
It just, it was like a shock that,
And it shocked me out of this feedback loop I was in.
And I calmed down.
And even at the time, and this was before I was typically somebody who was going to say thank you to anybody.
I was like, thanks, dude.
That was like really wisdom.
He was like, yeah, well, you know, it's not my first rodeo.
I was like, wow.
So in moments like that, I hearken back to
the unreliability of first-person perspective.
What if there's something about this that's not me?
Right.
Kind of.
Because part of the problem is that panic loop becomes this... I feel like I run impossibly fast between these two points of like, is this thing happening?
And oh God, this thing is absolutely happening.
And each lap that I make makes it worse.
Well, so what happened recently...
I got on a flight from L.A.
to Seattle, and I'd been sick, and I had a plugged ear.
And I knew it was plugged, and I wasn't thrilled about it, but I felt like I could manage it with some yawning, with some pro-level yawning.
But I get on the flight.
We get up to altitude.
The plane gets pressurized to whatever altitude a 737 is pressurized, which is about, I think, like 10,000 feet or something.
And my ear, and I'm yawning, and I can't clear the ear.
And I'm trying, I'm trying, I'm trying, and I can't get it to do that satisfying.
I'm about to yawn right now just because you're mentioning yawning, but the most frustrating thing is when you're trying to yawn and you can't.
You feel crazy.
Well, trying to yawn and can't, right, which you do feel crazy, but also trying to pop an ear where you can't.
get it.
It's right there.
You just can't get it.
It's a deeper head version of trying to hock a loogie.
It's like, oh, I can feel.
I know all the signs are there.
I can do this.
Just come on.
Come on.
Come on.
And as I'm sitting there doing it, I start to feel a panic rise up in my gullet that's related to claustrophobia.
That's related to... It's not that I can't breathe, but I just started to feel like my head...
There were passages that weren't clear that it started to feel like I was being smothered.
And it wasn't affecting my breath.
It was just that, you know, I don't know, if you could plug my ears, you could just as easily plug my nose.
Sure.
This is probably just how it starts, right?
You know what I mean?
The feeling of like, oh, this is probably just the beginning of what's going to kill me.
Well, this is going to get so much worse.
And I am...
Now I'm sitting in the front of the plane and I'm looking at the gal.
I'm sitting in the front of the plane because I'm a little bit older now and, you know, I don't sit by the toilets anymore.
And I'm thinking, I mean, we're at 30,000 feet.
And I want out of this plane.
And I never, never, never, never, never, never let that happen.
And it's because, and I'm sitting and I'm trying to, I'm yawning, I'm yawning, I'm yawning.
And I actually got up out of my chair and went into the bathroom and I'm throwing water on my face.
And I'm like, you know, what the fuck are you going to do now?
First of all, the bathroom on a plane is not less claustrophobic.
Like, what are you going to freak out in here?
And I'm talking to myself like, what are you, what?
You can't freak out.
First of all, it's not on brand.
Second of all, you fly all the time.
this is not a precedent.
Like don't start scratching a little like line on the windowsill with your fingernail here on panicking in airplanes.
That's not where you want to start making your mark.
And I get out of the bathroom and there's a flight attendant there.
And I said to him, uh, do you have something for, uh, for like a plugged ear?
And he said, uh,
And he actually looked up and he said, go take your seat.
I'll be with you in just a second.
And I sit down and I'm just like, I mean, really trying to stave off.
Because I don't know what to do in a panic attack.
I guess nobody does.
That's part of the problem.
Your mind just races.
What if I hadn't tried to calm myself down?
What if I just let myself go?
I have no idea.
What would I do?
Run around?
You're going to be on BuzzFeed as that guy that made the plane turn around.
Yeah, am I going to start throwing yogurt on people?
Sorry, inside joke.
And he comes over and he's got a plastic cup and it's got one of those hot
towels in it from first class.
And he says, put this cup on your ear.
It's like, all right.
Maybe this is just one of those power of suggestion things, or maybe this is like, here, bounce this pencil on your nose and you'll forget about your ear.
But so I put the cup with the hot rag on my ear.
And now I'm sitting there and it looks, you know, it came from the flight attendant.
So it looks official.
So nobody's like giving me the side eye.
It's not like your comfort cup.
No, it's not like I pulled it out of my bag.
I was like looking over at my seatmate like, hang on, I've got a little bumper.
This is my comfort cup, Cecil.
I'm going to heat up my rag.
Excuse me.
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Oh, brother, the speed.
The vision test is self-guided and takes less than five minutes.
Think of how much time you save compared to making an appointment, get to the eye doctor, taking the time off.
Ugh.
Think of it.
Think of it right now.
Speed.
Just a reminder that this is not a replacement for your periodic full eye exam.
Okay?
Consider yourself reminded.
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$30 off our thanks to simple contacts for supporting Roderick online and all the great shows I Have a prescription for this cup.
Yeah, I just have to I just have to would you like a hot right?
So I'm holding it to my ear and goddamn if it doesn't work.
Oh, yes and and I'm like And everything all the panic just like goes out through my recently cleared ear and
And I'm fine.
And everything's fine.
But what really happened was that I had etched a little line on the windowsill of my heart brain that's like, oh, okay, now this is a thing that could happen.
You could have a panic attack on an airplane.
You never used to could have.
But now it's happened.
So what are so my head is like, what are the conditions where this will happen?
Because that seems like a small thing.
Plug deer.
That's a small thing.
Now, did I have 14 cups of coffee?
Probably.
It would be a rare day that I didn't.
What's your point?
But so the other morning I woke up in bed.
Having a panic attack that I wasn't.
Actually Trying to stop, you know I was in that in and out of dream state and I came up out of a dream and I was panicking in the dream.
I woke up Maintained the panic in that in that sleep half sleep state and then actually went Voluntarily kind of went back down into the panic dream and
About like waist deep in it, right?
I was like, I'm gonna stay here.
I'm gonna stay in this the the the I'm gonna stay waist deep in the waves here of this dream I'm not trying to get out of it.
I'm trying to be in it for some reason and it was a Panic dream about being on an airplane and panicking.
Oh god Not about anything happening on the airplane.
It's just like okay now.
Let's say you're on a flight to Australia and
Like, what do you do if you have a panic attack on a flight to Australia where you're just out over the fucking open ocean for 12 hours or whatever?
Like, what are you going to do then?
What are you going to do then, panic guy?
Are you going to ask for a cup?
Are you going to bring your comfort cup?
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
And all of this is incredibly unusual to me.
Like, I don't, these are not feelings that I've, I used to fly with my friend Jesse Sykes, who was a Seattle musician who put out a couple of beautiful records.
And she was somebody who, as soon as she sat down on the plane, she would start to cry.
Oh, really?
Because she hated flying so much.
And the engines would spool up and she would be gripping the armrests and the plane would start running down the runway.
And like her bandmate sitting on one side would be petting her shoulder and I would be holding her hand.
And through the whole flight, she never, ever, ever got fine with it.
That is tough for that occupation.
Really bad, right?
And she also, her band was big in France.
Oh, shit.
Fucking France.
All these gigs that was like, it wasn't even, hey, come over and do a month-long tour of Europe and at least you'll get paid in France.
It was like, no, fly over, play a show in France and fly home.
Like the worst kind of crazy.
But in France, she could get enough money that it was worth doing.
And, you know, she's just sitting there panicking the whole time.
So I don't know what I don't know now what to do.
And so this like weird little like gremlin, this panic gremlin is now walking around a new.
Basically, he just bought a new house in my head.
And he's walking around trying to figure out.
Talk about a bad neighbor.
Right.
He's like, where am I going to put my couches?
Like, oh, I've got a lot of room in here.
And he's on the phone and he's calling up, hey, panic about being buried alive.
Why don't you come over and hang out?
It's almost a little bit more like a Russian hacker.
I know what vulnerabilities tend to be in place and I know how to exploit them.
And I'm not going to choose one pathway for this.
I'm going to try 90 different things and see what works.
Yeah, including last night I'm reading my book about how to sleep better, which is helping me, my sleep book.
Mm-hmm.
But Mr. Sleep Book Guy starts talking about, during REM sleep, your entire body is paralyzed.
In order that you not, like, freak out and start fighting demons in your bed, your body is paralyzed, and then you begin to hallucinate.
And I'm laying there like...
Why are you doing this to me?
Like, yes, I understand it.
And I'm sure if I was reading this book at like 11 o'clock in the morning, that'd be great.
But I don't want to be paralyzed.
That's another, like the gremlin is just like, oh, paralyzed?
Is that something that you don't want?
My friend Max has a morbid fear of anesthesia.
So, like, when he goes to the dentist, like, he, like, not, so it's sort of like, I don't know if you read that story about the guy had extreme anxiety about vomiting.
And, like, even after he drank Ipecac, he wouldn't vomit.
Scott wrote an amazing book about anxiety.
Max has a similar thing in that, like, even when they, like, try to dope him up, he, like, won't.
go out and i'm not trying to call him out or something i think that's a fairly maybe more common than a lot of people think feeling is like i do not want to be paralyzed i do not want to be out of control and i certainly don't want to be awake in a way that i don't have any physical way to say hey i'm awake yeah yeah the the uh the metallica metallica the metallica problem exactly
Darkness imprisoning me.
There are all these related ones, right?
The Metallica problem.
There's the...
Oh, well, and because I did hallucinogenic drugs for a long period, there's the, what if I start having a bad trip and never come out of a bad trip?
I wish I could redo the 86 to 87 academic school year so much.
I would do so many things differently.
I would be so much more picky about where I got my hallucinogens.
Well, right.
I mean, would you walk up to Mike Mills and say, just let me roadie for you guys?
I don't know.
I don't know.
Would you have bought Bitcoin back in 87?
It was only like negative 40 cents.
It's funny you should mention that because you made me think of an anecdote.
I'll throw it back to you in a sec.
But there was some kind of cryptocurrency event, I don't know, weeks or months ago, where a bunch of people went to this event.
And they had lunch and then they went on their merry way.
I think it was a cryptocurrency event.
And people started feeling really, really fucked up.
Like something is very, very wrong.
And basically, according to the story, owing to bad signage, people did not realize that there was, I guess, a shit ton of weed in some of the food.
Yeah.
And the word they used for it was really funny.
It was like, I forget the word, but it did not say this has a shit ton of weed in it.
So like my morbid fear in some ways, like think about this.
So like you're going to go out and do some tripping.
And at least for me, there was a whole like ritual to it.
Like this was a whole, I had cleared my calendar and it was just a whole bunch of shit.
I was going to make the most optimal experience.
And then two hours into it, we'll take a walk here and there'll be a whole thing.
Did you have a little bag that had like stuff in it?
I probably did.
I'm sure my roommate did.
But imagine you start tripping, but you don't know that you're tripping.
Talk about a fucking morbid fear.
Imagine you start tripping balls and it doesn't occur to you like, oh, maybe I had some weed at the cryptocurrency event.
Doesn't that seem like madness?
Well, so I was dosed one time while I was sleeping.
Oh, my
Did I never tell you this story?
You might have.
Go again.
Like, my friends came in while I was sleeping.
Who does that?
That's psychotic.
And put, like, two hits of acid in my mouth.
Oh, look at me.
I'm a little imp.
Well, the problem was, like, I... I'm going to simulate madness and not tell you that it happened.
You're crazy now.
Bye.
Sweet dreams.
This is not a thing I ever would do to somebody, right?
Yeah.
But my friends at the time, this was within the allowable set of things that
that they could do to me i i mean i wouldn't ever do it to somebody dose somebody i wouldn't even like hey have a have some punch ha ha i mean or anything like that right it's just like sometimes sometimes the reasoning on that is dude if everybody just tripped it would be such a better world and it's like that's sort of like saying well you know i ran a marathon or like i survived in the wilderness with lots of preparation so i'm gonna start dropping people off in a helicopter and put them out in the wilderness because it's gonna make the world better it's like no dude you can't do that to people that's madness
Their logic was, look, we're all going to be tripping today, you included, and we're getting started and you're sleeping.
And so let's just...
get this show on the road.
And it wasn't that we were all going to be tripping because this was prearranged.
It was just that somebody got some good acid.
They know that I don't have anything to do that day.
Like the only thing that I'm even alive to do is to hang out with these people and do drugs.
So they were just like, Oh fuck, you know, when is he going to wake up?
And rather than say like, let's go wake him up.
They said, I know.
Let's just go put dope in his fucking mouth.
Oh, my God.
So I had the experience of coming out of a dream state into a dream state.
Right.
I was like woke up hallucinating.
Yeah.
And it was only that I was very familiar with the feeling.
waking up and seeing that like oh you're like new to stop a minute and do an inventory I mean just sort of like okay I know I am awake but like my but things are leaving tracers and there's a very distinctive other a sense of like not out of body exactly but like that you're watching some very strange movie happening very slowly and you can't change it
Yeah, and I'm basically alone in a room.
So, huh, that's curious.
And of course, you know, your feeling is like, have I overdone something and tripped some light switch in my brain in which now I'm just like Tripper Joe?
I just have tracers all the time.
And I think very luckily, lucky for me,
That this was this day ended up being and this batch of LSD in particular was like the kindest, greatest.
LSD Among the small handful of the greatest LSD I ever had.
Oh, so it wasn't too harsh.
It was so gentle but also Incredibly visual like not it wasn't like oh fuck Like civilization is just a rat hole.
It wasn't anything like that.
It was just like it was like dude Do you see those orbs?
Yeah, I do.
I mean, like, there's pink orbs all around us.
I know.
It was like orbs.
And if you took a book and let it fall open on a table, the pages would just keep going to the walls.
And so I came into a very gentle place where I
It's not like I said, if this is my new reality, I'm cool with it.
But the gentleness gave me the extra 30 seconds to go like, oh, wait a minute.
Like I hear voices in the other room like, my friends are here.
Something's not right.
And then some girl like peeked her head around the door all like,
like contact style, like, and, you know, and it was a girl I knew and liked.
And so I was like, wait a minute.
What are you doing?
Uh, but not a thing that I want to happen now.
I do not want to be, I do not want to be dosed.
I don't want any hallucinogens.
I have a friend that owns a expensive pot.
shop here in Seattle and she is making very high grade chocolate.
People love the edibles.
Laced with dope.
Dope.
And I had her at an event and
that I was doing where she came up on stage with me and was like, Hey, I'm doing this expensive chocolate and it's really great.
And here I brought you, I brought you a gift bag, John, or a Bastic, like a big Bastic of chocolates.
But you knew it was special.
Well, no, she leans over to me and whispers like, this doesn't have any pot in it.
Like I'm not allowed actually to give away pot chocolate because the law, something.
So this so we make some chocolate that doesn't have pot in it, that it looks like it.
It's like, you know what I mean?
And I was like, yeah, you know, these microphones are live.
But she gave me this this plastic of what looks like delicious chocolate.
But I studied the wrappers afterwards very carefully to see some fine print or some little strikeout or something that said this actually isn't pot.
And there isn't any.
And so I have this bunch of chocolate that I look at
And I'm like, I want some chocolate.
But there's a percentage chance that this has pot in it.
And I don't want it.
I don't want that.
I mean, we talked about how I struggle every morning with, like, I have this whole, like, workflow of, like, dealing with all of my capsules that look identical.
And even when I do my workflow correctly, they go from the right to the left.
And when that goes into the ramekin, and now I know this...
is the probiotic and this one is the nootropic because i don't want a lot of this one and not of that one and i instantly doubt myself no way am i gonna eat badly labeled pot chocolate no way that's that seems like poor police work on her part i mean doesn't that seem like she should do something to clarify that seems weird
Is she being mischievous?
No, no, no, no.
I think that from her perspective, I have this chocolate that looks like pot chocolate, but it's not because we have to make some to give away in case there's a police here.
But...
But in my culture, there aren't that many people actually who don't want some free pot chocolate.
Jesus.
And I'm well known as the person that doesn't want it.
I think that's why she said it.
But it's not – no, I think that she did all the due diligence she needed to.
But for me, that little gremlin that's setting up house –
is you know also is taking that little portfolio and all these little it's like the jerry kushner of your dreams like it just keeps taking whatever whatever's available let's put it up put it in the portfolio that's right you don't give this gremlin power this is gremlin just takes power that's unattended you don't drive a rocket you ride it
And so, like, I also, I'm a Max Temkin.
I don't like anesthesia.
I really don't like the idea of going out and then waking up later while people are fucking with my mouth and stuff.
I don't like the prospect of a doctor coming into a waiting room and going, he didn't make it.
And having my family go, it was a wisdom tooth.
Yeah, but we did something wrong.
But we never say wrong.
You sign the form, you know, it just happens sometimes.
Sometimes we just don't know how to do our job or entropy.
People just fucking die for no reason.
People die for no reason.
It's your occupational hazard now.
Once you give them a thing that reduces the amount of breathing they're doing, anything could happen.
People will tell you that's the toughest part of that whole racket is anesthesia.
It is very difficult to get right.
I have a sister that was an anesthesiologist.
She's a potter now.
Hmm, that's not Susan.
That's a Merlin man term.
This is from your ceramicist?
Is this from your alternate family that I don't really know about?
No, this is my older sister, Laura, my dad's oldest daughter.
You keep producing family members.
I don't know.
You're like Cardini.
You can't get rid of those siblings.
She was an anesthesiologist for many years.
She lived in a house that was right on the ocean there in Olympia.
And her husband, did I ever tell you the story?
I went to visit them.
And her husband was like, I mean, it's crazy to think of now because I was 20.
I was probably 21.
No, not even.
I was 20.
And so my sister was, what, like 36?
Right.
35, 36.
And they lived in this kind of ramshackle, hippie, like hippie mansion.
You know what a hippie mansion is.
Oh, I've done lots of drugs in a hippie mansion.
Hippie mansion.
There's a famous hippie mansion I would go to often where I went to college.
And this guy had come into some money and built the ultimate hippie mansion.
The walls moved.
The walls were on casters.
So you might go into the isolation tank for a little while and come out into the house with a different configuration.
What?
And the same goddamn Wyndham Hill sampler would play over and over and over.
George Winston.
I will find you, George Winston.
You think that's relaxing?
One point the needle stuck on a Shadowfax song, and I thought this was it for me.
This is how it happens.
Not like this!
Not like this!
Shadowfax!
Dick Cheney was in a room staring at his sink.
I like that one track, Shadowdance.
This was a hippie mansion that had like maybe one or two extra stories above what seemed normal.
You know, it's like this house is seven stories tall, but but not wide.
Right.
It's just like a Dutch house.
It's like, yeah, but but but on the water in the forest and sort of and maybe with the maybe with the chimney that kind of stuck out and then went up like like like the one the Weasley's live in like an air set.
It's a Harry Potter house.
Like a Harry Potter house, right.
Like if you took 40 school buses and stacked them up on top of you.
Nice.
Like a fabulous Furry Freak Brothers.
Okay, all right.
Anyway, her husband was a lawyer, but they're like 36 years old, and at the time they seemed like fully grown adults.
Yeah.
And he said at one point, hey, hey, you want to go, you want to see my go fast?
I was like, you're GoFast.
He's like, yeah, you want to see my GoFast?
And I was like, I do.
I don't know what you're, I don't know what that is.
I'd like to learn a little more about what I'm signing up for.
Sounds like the last thing you hear from a clown.
Want to see my GoFast?
And he was like, he was a guy, this was in the 80s, he was already like Mr. Cigar guy.
He had a whole bunch of, he had a room full of cigars.
Oh, he was ahead of the douche curve on that one.
Yeah, but he was like, he was definitely.
He was a cool guy.
He definitely was a proto-douche, but he wasn't like that guy yet because that guy didn't exist.
He was some other guy.
And I'm like, yeah, let's go, you know, go fast.
Sure.
And I'm like, what room of the house is that?
And he's like, follow me.
And we go out of the back door and we start walking and we walk into the woods.
And at this point in time, and it's still true here, Washington is kind of crazy.
You can buy...
oceanfront property here for not that much money because there's so much ocean there's just there's just a lot of ocean here and a lot okay you know and this is like the last part of the country to really get settled so there's like that it's like that what do they call it the border of scotland problem like you've got so many little fjords and invaginations that you have a lot of bioavailable water yeah yeah that's exactly it
so they have this hippie mansion and it's in a very nice area of olympia very close into town but it's at a time and and uh in a place where you can have a waterfront home and then also a neighboring forest and so we walk into the forest and we walk for a little while and i'm like
And he's chatting and smoking cigars.
But I'm thinking... Is he going to whack me?
Like, what's next on our adventure?
And we come through the forest.
And here is a parking lot the size of one car.
A freshly laid tarmac...
And looking up, it's a driveway that goes up to the main road that's brand new, a driveway that comes all the way down into the forest for- He's got like a secret secondary forest car?
And in his one stall parking lot is this car, which is a Ford Taurus SHO.
Now, if you Google a Ford Taurus SHO, it is not what you would think of as like if you're going to have a Porsche or something, if you're going to go – if you're going to like build –
A separate driveway for your 1986.
This is like a retired lieutenant colonel car.
That's right.
It looks like somebody put costly wheels on an Aleve.
So put 1986 Taurus SHO.
That's what it should be.
So it's basically a cop car.
Oh, Jesus.
A 1986 Ford Taurus SHO.
It's invisible.
It's just like the generic 80s car.
Right.
Except that the SHO aspect of it, I think SHO stands for Special High Output or Special Horsepower Organfall or something.
Um, it made this a sleeper.
It was a sleeper.
It's very fast.
That's a grower, not a shower.
That's right.
It looks like nothing.
It looks like it doesn't, you don't even see it.
It doesn't look like anything, but it goes, it's a go fast.
And I'm thinking if you're going to have this secret life,
Yeah, get like something that's all like a hot rod.
Get like a red barchetta.
Right, but no.
No, no, no.
No, he wants this.
And so we get in it, and we go...
And the thing is, this is a secret from my sister, his wife.
What?
He has a secret go fast and now you're part of the conspiracy?
He has a secret go fast.
He apparently has a secret acre of land.
What the fuck?
If it's not a secret, then he secretly built a driveway in what my sister thinks is an undeveloped acre of land.
All of a sudden, spray painting a wall seems a little healthy.
Yeah.
I mean, oh, believe me, he was a nut.
I mean, they did not stay married.
But they did have a child, my beloved nephew.
Okay.
But so we start driving through the twisties in the like forest land of Olympia.
And he's just, you know, he's taking these hills where we're like the tires are coming off the ground.
And I'm just holding on for dear life.
This guy sounds super stable.
Because it's a sedan.
The great thing about him.
is that his father was a lawyer and was like a contemporary of my dad.
And my dad thought that his dad wasn't, was like,
A danger and a menace.
Like they were my dad and his dad.
It's like a family of nuts.
Well, but they were contemporaries and competitors for like who was I think who was like the real nut on the scene.
But I mean, they were they were like they butted heads.
And then, of course, his son married.
my dad's daughter.
It was just like, it was, and I think when it happened, it was like, well, here it is.
Like the, the, the house, the houses combined.
It's the, the war of the roses or whatever.
Um, but, but I, and I have no idea what the actual story was about his, uh,
go fast hidden and he was like you can't tell laura whatever you do don't tell laura it's like i mean i don't it's not going to come up in conversation this is so unlikely like it's not when it does she's going to say who else knew about this well but i you know like i'm her little that was the great i mean one of the great things about being
in my dad's family and being me was that no one even knew I existed until I was a grown-up you know when I was a kid they were they were all so I mostly know of the you and Susan era but don't you have don't get into it but don't just for my own clarity because I feel like I'm losing my mind you kind of have at least two and kind of three sets of siblings right there's the OGs there's the middle ones and then there's you two right
Right.
Okay.
Is that kind of right?
Because I'm thinking of it probably in reverse.
Probably to everybody else, you guys are the weirdos.
You're the ones everybody's forgotten about.
Who are the recent ones?
Well, so what happened was there was so much...
The older kids were the ones that happened at a reasonable time.
When it was normal to have a kid.
Yeah, my dad was 30 already when he had his first set of kids.
He was in his late 40s when I was born.
So all the family drama that revolved around grandmothers and grandfathers and drunk uncles and people arguing about
about property and, and who's going to get these candlesticks and, and yelling about, you know, yelling about whether, whether John F. Kennedy is a papist and all this stuff.
It all already happened way before I was born.
So by the time I was born,
The family was, I mean, it was established what everybody's job was.
The kids that were going to be bad ended up being bad, which was all of them.
Like that was the, my older siblings were all baby boomers and they all ended up being bad in one way or another.
And all of their cousin, you know, the cousins like sort of varying degrees.
I mean, it's hard to grow up, really grow up in the 60s and 70s and not turn out bad.
A little bad.
If you make it at all, you're probably going to be bad.
Well, and so, for instance, my Uncle Al, Alfred Ruffner Rochester, was famous...
For being for like having some drinks at the dinner table and starting a fight with my grandmother, his sister or with his own wife.
And then my dad, who was the oldest boy of his generation or the oldest of his generation.
would jump into the fight and take on Al in defense of his mother or his aunt.
And then Al and my dad would be fighting about, and it's not physical fighting.
It's just like, you know, you don't know what you're talking about, God damn it.
What the fuck are you talking about?
Back and forth.
And then somebody, generally my grandmother, would get up from the table in tears and throw her napkin down and say, I can't.
And then she'd storm off.
And then, you know, somebody would knock over a wine glass.
This is what it was like in this clan in 1958.
God, I would have an ulcer.
I would have an ulcer.
Well, yeah.
I think this is why a lot of people get eating disorders, stuff like this.
And I think it's why a lot of people get alcoholism, or at least if you have it... It's a nice pairing, yeah.
It doesn't stay dormant, right?
So Al was famously... Not disliked, but everybody in the family is like, Al.
You know, like, he was a problem.
He was problematic.
And he was a Seattle City Councilman.
So he had...
And his wife was wealthy and glamorous above his pay grade.
Anyway, when I was born, something clicked in Al.
He was now like an older man.
He was in his 60s, which in 1968 was old.
And he decided, or whatever, or my innate charm...
created a situation where Al never turned on me.
And he did it to everybody else, but Al just cherished me and then my sister, the both of us.
He...
picked up the mantle and became our grandfather, essentially.
Wow.
And never was ugly to us at all.
That must have driven other people crazy.
Well, they didn't even know.
They were just like, they didn't know because they were all so self-absorbed that they had just gone on to their own thing.
None of them were, they just weren't perceptive.
Of their environment like a lot of times I will say things to my adult siblings or people in my family.
I'll be like well, you know, this was true About our family and they'll look at me and be like were you there?
Were you alive then?
And I'm like, yeah, I knew those people, too.
And they're like, oh, you knew Cousin George?
It's like, yeah, I knew Cousin George.
Like, he lived until 1990.
Like, why would I not?
And they're like, oh, I kind of didn't think you were born yet.
Yeah.
It's just like, oh, my wife gets this because she's the youngest of seven.
And she and her, especially her, though, like the history of the family had largely been written by the time she was of age.
Right.
And like people forget that you were there.
Like, hey, I was there for Christmas.
I remember the fireplace.
What's wrong with you people?
Yeah, I remember the fireplace.
Exactly.
And, you know, and there are some things I don't remember.
Like, I do not remember my grandmother.
Right.
She was alive when – and I was probably two and a half when she died.
But I just don't have a clear memory of her.
And she was a legendary person.
So, like, I knew her until I was two and a half.
I met my mom's dad once.
And that's my only contact with any grandparent.
My dad's dad was dead for 15 years before I was born.
And my mom's mom died in 1934.
Jeez.
So, yeah.
Anyway, all by way of describing that there was no, I don't know, there was no love in Whoville for me.
As a kid, I was when we would show up at events, everyone else was an adult.
And so somebody would go find a bag of like Raggedy Ann dolls and Tintin comics in French that were in the bottom of a closet.
And they would hand me this box and they'd be like, go to town, kid.
Seen and not heard.
And I'd go find some back staircase.
Stay with these till you fall asleep.
Yeah.
And, you know, and the thing is, I'm 11.
Right.
And I'm like on some I'm on the the the servants stairs playing with my Belgian Tintins and some toys that were knackered by 1960.
And just like to do to do.
And, you know, and listening in, listening in on the conversation downstairs.
But nobody was caring about me.
And because my dad liked to be the center of attention, he would briefly forget that I existed, too, because everyone in the family loved him.
So he was downstairs, you know, holding court and was the star of the party.
And he would, you know, he'd be like, oh, my kids are, yeah, I think he's over here.
Anyway...
It was a different time.
It was a different time.
So then Eisenhower gets out of the car and he says to me, Adelaide Stevenson.
Son of a bitch.
Well, Adelaide was a son of a bitch, but everybody knew it.
But so what do I do with this?
What do I do with my panic gremlin?
Like, I don't know.
I don't want to fly with a comfort pheasant.
You're not even allowed to take him on planes anymore.
No.
And...
But I don't want to get on a flight to Australia already pre-dinged with the gremlin, like, buckling in and like, hey, you know, let me get a Bloody Mary here, Virgin Bloody Mary.
Because I can show up at any time.
Yeah, right.
Like, I have no experience with this.
I have no anxiety management, panic management stratagems.
And I'm only just starting to even consider the idea that maybe I'm the king of the drama queens.
That's a lot to grok.
It's all happening.
And I don't even think I'm a good parent.
Yeah, nobody does.
None of the good ones do.
Think they're good?
They better not.
I mean, jeez.
Geez, where are we getting to slice this enchilada?
I don't know.
Is there a chance that, it sounds like the most front of mind thing right now is the panic gremlin.
That's like the biggest, like on the graph of this, that's the thing that has the most threat and portent and front of mindness.
Well, because waking up and feeling panicky...
It's another thing where it's like, is this a new reality?
Is this going to happen all the time?
I don't like this.
And it doesn't seem controllable.
And then I read my sleep book and the guy's like, well, when you're paralyzed and hallucinating, I'm like, well, that's not helpful.
Yeah.
So what do you, I mean, what do you, as somebody who's like been managing anxiety for a long time, like what's your, what's, what do you got, what do you got for me?
Not too much.
Something I think I said last week that I still stand by is that, I mean, you're, you're already on to part of it.
Like when you're on the plane, you got this, that, and you heard me kind of coaching this a little bit, but like, I think a big part of it is like realizing that this is a thing that's happening.
Right.
One hokey way to think about this that I think is really useful, and forgive me because this is very corny, is to sort of think to yourself, I'm the sky, not the weather.
All right.
Do you get what I'm saying here?
Yeah.
I'm the sky, not the weather.
This is my meat case that I walk around in, and things are going to happen.
But it's not that every single thought and emotion and...
Not everything that goes through my head has to equal me.
And again, there's a clinical component to this that I wouldn't begin to address, but I think part of the anxiety and panic thing, first of all, anxiety is very related to depression.
Anxiety can be related to lots of different things.
But the anxiety and panic part only really becomes a problem if you don't like the way it feels and it won't go away.
Nobody likes feeling anxious, but most normal people or most non-anxious people experience anxiety.
But A, it doesn't bother them much that long, and it does go away.
So that sounds really patently obvious, but I think that's important to really internalize and rehearse in a way that will serve you well when the panic gremlin jumps up.
Because at that point, I don't know if you're this way, but I tend to go like, oh, this is going to be the rest of my life.
This will be my downfall.
I'm going to suffocate.
I'm going to die in a box.
Whatever that feeling, we all have our own little dumb personal things that we feel and worry about.
But there is a window of opportunity at any point, really, to say, stop, hang on a minute.
How much of this is sky and how much of this is weather?
On the sky, not the weather.
On the sky, not the weather, which is really corny.
But I think that's a valuable thing to realize.
I don't think you need to get into an Eastern philosophy to feel this way.
I think for simple self-preservation...
It helps to give yourself this little inventory.
Do you remember that?
I mean, like when you first had a kid, we went to a class where they taught us, okay, here's how you deal with a baby.
Dealing with a baby's bullshit, but here's how it works.
Here's a list you're going to put on your refrigerator.
Babies are dumb and they cry and they're sad and you don't know why they cry and they're sad.
So here's seven things that you keep checking over and over until the baby's not sad anymore.
Is it hungry?
Is it sad?
Is it bored?
Is it in pain?
Yeah.
Is it tired?
And you just keep checking every one of those.
Keep checking that diaper, seeing if they're tired.
But you may not be able to fix tired right now.
You may not be able to fix bored right now.
But these are the things you can do, and eventually the baby will fall asleep.
You don't really know when.
I feel like doing a similar kind of inventory does not have to be compulsive madness.
A similar kind of inventory can be, first of all, in the sky, not the weather.
Have I thought about the fact that somebody might have dosed my Mountain Dew?
Have I thought about the fact that I had a lot of coffee?
Have I thought about the fact that I didn't sleep last night?
There's even a really good website you can go to that's like, I don't feel good.
And it says, okay, have you done this?
Have you done that?
It's a really good website that's like, have you eaten recently?
Have you eaten a high protein meal?
Have you gotten sleep lately?
Have you drunk a glass of water?
Have you taken a walk?
There's all these little things.
And I think in a similar self-diagnosis way, you can get in the habit of saying, again, to repeat what I said last week, something is bothering me, but I've decided not to let it bother me.
that like it's my feeling i'm getting so deep in my own shit at this point but this is so useful it's like it's the feeling of being bothered about the feeling that gets you feeling bad is a normal human condition being obsessively unhappy about your feeling about the feeling is what really does you in that's what makes the stuff compulsive in my mind so i am not over this by a long shot but one little form of self-preservation is to go through that array of different things have i considered this might be something external have i considered that this is something where i haven't made my peace with why i feel bad about this
all these different things all the way down and have a fucking glass of water and go take a walk like piss on a spark plug dude like any of that might work but what doesn't work is feeding back into the loop of thinking about the thinking about the thinking there's got to be some kind of a break in the code you got to be able to hit the escape key and like give yourself a little break in distance and then there's just a few things that you can try you're the sky not the weather don't think about the thinking
yeah that's that tripping that terrible tripping feeling i told you about my first bad trip that i can remember was remembering feeling that my that the liquid in my brain that moves thoughts around had stopped moving and that i would have no way of knowing if i was currently thinking the last thought i was ever thinking and this is probably the last thought i would ever think look yeah hallucinogens in 1986 it was a hell of a thing but you gotta you gotta hit the escape key
My sleep book was saying the EKG readings for wakefulness and for REM sleep are largely indistinguishable from one another.
Except for the paralysis part.
And that's what he's saying.
It's just the paralysis that distinguishes sleep from wakefulness.
And, of course, I was just immediately like Jacob's Ladder about it.
Like, well, then how, which one is this?
Right.
Ah.
Holy shit, am I dreaming right now?
Yeah, right.
Like, what, who, how?
Like, when I cross that threshold, am I going from what I think is like, ha-ha, sleeping, to like, wakefulness?
Whoa.
Or is it just like, oh, fuck, you know, here we go through the time hole again.
And everything about that world that I was just thinking about is gone.
And now I'm living a completely separate life.
That is no more or less real.
And then I'm going to go back over there.
Here's another one.
My wife and I both struggle with sleep in slightly different ways, but she's been real smart about it.
And she's read some books and she's had mindfulness classes.
And I woke up one morning after a potentially tumultuous night of sleep.
This is a little personal, but I woke up at 6.45 usually is the latest I wake up.
And I woke up and I was like, ha ha!
I fucking nailed it last night.
Can I tell you how?
And she's like, sure.
I was like, I'll tell you what fucking happened.
I had the huge, which is I go and I drop a tanky and I come back to bed and I go, ah, ah, ah, ah.
And I have like a slightly anxious thing that's now going to keep me up, I'm pretty sure, for 20 to 90 minutes in the middle of the night.
And then I'm going to sit there and try to psych myself out and talk myself out of it.
And do the breathing exercises that make me even more anxious when I do the breathing exercises.
Breathing exercises for me equals equals anxiety at this point.
But I had a flash at like whatever, 2.30 in the morning.
And I thought to myself, what if I decided not to let it bother me?
What if I said to myself, hey, fucking big shot, why don't you say, I'm going to be awake for an hour.
Why don't you get up and look at your phone or do whatever.
And then say, I'm going to fall back asleep in an hour, but I'm not going to stress about it.
It sounds really stupid.
But like, I did it.
I did it.
I said to myself, I'm not going to be stressed out about this.
I'm just going to be awake.
The awakeness is just a state of physical being.
I bring all the garbage and emotion to how I feel about that.
And guess what?
It doesn't make it better.
So what if I just said, fuck it?
I'm just going to go look at Twitter or whatever.
That's real relaxing.
But whatever it is, I'm not saying I'm a paragon, but I'm saying that night I fucking nailed it because you know what?
I fell back asleep in a little over an hour and I woke up feeling less terrible about myself.
Yeah.
And she said, you know what?
That's exactly what they taught us in the mindfulness class.
Life hack.
It's your feeling about the feeling that does you in.
Now, what is a mindfulness class and where do you take one?
Oh.
Mindfulness tends to be heavily associated with both Buddhism and meditation, but it's not strictly the same thing by a long shot.
Mindfulness is just the idea of being able to observe your own thoughts without judgment, which takes a redonkulous amount of practice.
And meditation, in some form or fashion, tends to be the least, I'm not saying easy, but the least difficult way to do that in some ways.
But mindfulness is just, which is one of those words now, like Zen, just fucking doesn't mean anything in popular culture anymore.
Mindfulness is just the idea that I will be able to regard the thoughts that pass through my mind and look at them without judgment, almost like turn them around in my hand and look at my thoughts and not feel completely captured in them.
I once heard a description of meditation that I think applies for lots of good stuff.
Meditation is the process of standing on a bridge, looking into a river and trying not to catch a fish.
And that's kind of what mindfulness is.
Mindfulness is like, or another one I heard was you're standing by a highway watching cars zoom by and not getting into any of them.
You're just watching the traffic go by.
But who is the one that's doing the looking and not judging?
Right?
What?
Dude, look at your fingernail.
What if you're fucking... You know, it's that we tend to feel that we are our emotions, that what we're feeling right now is the world.
And it can lead us to things like feeling like everybody's out to get us.
It can lead us to feeling vulnerable and having low self-esteem.
It could even lead us to feeling very angry, like what I've said on the show with Dan, the seven dwarfs of bad emotions.
Like anxiety, depression, you know, sadness, anger, rage, like all these different things that we feel that stem out of an unresolvable feeling about our feelings.
Like when you feel okay about your feelings, you can just feel like shit and be okay with it.
But I don't know who the minder is.
But I think, and this does not have to be real wackadoo, like, oriental thinking bullshit.
It's oriental in the way we were raised, like the do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do way.
This is much more like, no, just be a person for a minute.
Like, you've survived this long.
Stop.
Chill for a minute.
And try to think, like, is this, like, first, are you even aware that your mind is racing?
You may not be aware your mind is racing.
And the same way that you may not be aware that you fucking chugged a Mountain Dew.
And like, so you do a sit rep and you kind of go like, okay, what is happening right now?
What is the thing that I'm thinking?
I don't know.
It's, it's, it's a practice, but even just knowing it's there can be a comfort to know that at any moment you can choose to hit the escape key for just a minute and like do the sit rep and figure out like what's happening right now.
And what are my options?
What's the sit rep?
Because isn't it the feeling of the suffocation?
Is it the more I think about this, the worse it's going to get, even if it's not actually happening?
And then pretty soon it is happening, because now you've made it happen.
You've forced your body into this panic mode, where now it thinks it is gasping for air.
Yeah.
I don't know.
But what's a sit rep?
Oh, you're doing the situation report, I think is what it means.
Oh.
Oh, situation report.
I think it's sit rep.
So like... Yeah, like what's going on?
What's going on?
Tell me what's going on.
Talk to me.
And then at the end it's like... Prints out a thing.
And you're like sitting and scanning, scanning, scanning.
Oh, I like that.
Sit rep.
Ah!
You want to see my goat face?