Ep. 359: "Cowboy Tune"
Oh, jeez.
Oh, boy.
Oh, boy.
Oh, boy.
I got to get the mic over.
Okay.
Okay.
Okay.
All right.
Just about here.
Okay.
All right.
Okay.
Hi, Merlin.
Hi, John.
Oh, wait, wait.
Hello?
Hang on.
Take two.
... ... ... ... ...
Poor old Johnny Ray.
Sit inside upon the radio with a million hearts and money.
Hi, John.
Hi, Merlin.
How's it going?
I've noticed that when I do a big stretch like that, it actually scares my little girl.
When I go like, big stretch, she's like, cowers.
Cowers and runs.
Yeah, between my groans and my unintentional anxiety noises, I'm a very compelling figure around the house.
Oh, I still do that.
I still make the Dustin Hoffman noise.
Sometimes I still go...
I got a bump on my finger.
You got a bump on your finger?
What bump with finger?
Well, you know, a couple of years ago, you may recall, I broke one of my fingers.
Yeah, on some fool's face.
Yeah, my first my first finger, my index finger.
And, you know, it's always I can't say that it plagues me, but it's it's always a little bit, you know, it's a little different.
Let's say it's different.
It's different.
Yep.
Anyway, the other day it made a just just yesterday, I think maybe the day before.
It kind of bothered me.
It kind of had a little bit of a pain that came out of it, and I was monkeying with it and trying to figure out what's the pain.
It was a little bit of a sharp pain.
And then I noticed down in between the two fingers, so what you would call, I guess, the crotch of the fingers.
Oh, yeah, like where you scissor them.
Yeah, that's right.
A little like a finger pocket.
A little finger pocket.
Down in there on the first finger side...
there's a bump.
And now I'm checking.
It's a bump.
It's not on the other finger at all.
There's no bump over there.
Okay.
There's a bump.
It's a little bit of, it's like a hard bump and it hurts.
It hurts.
And it also is contributing to pain that feels unrelated to it.
Like, uh, like my, like the finger hurts elsewhere.
Okay.
And so I was like, that doesn't seem like a good thing.
And so my friend here said that it was some kind of cyst, like a hyperbarian cyst.
Okay.
Subcutaneous?
It's a Targaryen cyst.
Okay.
All right.
I'm not sure what kind.
There's a couple of kinds.
There's a...
There's the one you just said.
Sebaceous.
There's a sebaceous.
Oh, sebaceous.
Okay.
But this isn't that kind.
This is a different kind that appears in your hands.
Skin has a lot of... First of all, let's get this out of the way.
Skin's the largest organ on your body.
Okay.
All right.
Your butt's your biggest muscle.
I'm listening.
And so what I know about skin is that.
And I also know that skin has layers to it.
Okay.
So you get you a zit type thing, you know, a little zit kind of wound.
That's going to be on your top layer of the skin.
Skin zit.
It might go further.
It might have roots.
You get something like a wart.
That strikes me that a wart is something that goes a little deeper.
I'm getting here from you that this is going to be in one of those deeper skin layers.
You feel it further down in the pocket.
Okay.
Did you get warts when you were at any point in your life?
I have something that I think is like a wart, and I never even remember where it is.
It's just maybe... The short answer is no.
Never got them.
I don't get a lot of skin tags.
I have other kinds of skin things, but I don't know.
I was never a wart person.
I think I might have one.
Yeah.
But you can feel by feel.
When you feel by feel, you can feel when something feels like it's at a deeper layer.
I used to get warts.
Okay.
I had a couple of them burned off.
When I was in elementary school, I had one on my thumb, a big one.
And like you say, they have roots.
They feel like the roots go all the way down into your... And what I realized when I was... Because I was a little bit of a picker.
Maybe I hadn't grown up to be yet a full-grown... We're both definitely hobbyists at this.
Yeah.
At least.
At least.
I mean, I'm at like a ham radio level of popping a cold sore thanks to you.
Mm-hmm.
I know how to get in there with the needle and the rubbing alcohol in a secure environment.
In the case of the... Stress bump.
Sorry, stress bump.
Stress bump.
That's right.
In the case of the wart, I realized that you could put pins in it all day.
Mm-hmm.
And you didn't feel it because it was a wart.
It didn't have nerves in the same way that your nose does.
Yeah, or like an eyelid.
Or an eyelid.
So I would sit and use it as a pin cushion.
I would fill it full of pins because this is fifth and sixth grade back when they would give kids pins.
Yeah, what's your changing body?
You're acquainting yourself.
That's right, exactly.
It's like body modification.
And I would monkey with this thing.
I had pins in it.
I would slice it and dice it.
Eventually it got burned off.
When you slice off part of a wart or otherwise wound it with a needle, does it grow back?
Is there something in your DNA that knows this wart needs to be here and it can recreate it from scratch?
It grows again.
Is that because of the roots?
It must be the roots.
You can slice a whole wart off.
as big as a pencil eraser.
And they're very unusual.
You look at them and they kind of look like, I don't know, they have a kind of cellular structure that looks like a mushroom or something.
You know, it's got like, it's got a different kind of design.
Like when you look at the stump, is it like bloody?
Well, if you cut it too deep, it'll start to bleed.
Because of all the layers, yeah.
Yeah, you can't cut out the root yourself.
But it looks like a labor canoodle a little bit.
A what?
Yeah.
A labor canoodle.
Oh.
That's like a liver meatball.
A liver ball.
Liver canoodle.
Okay.
Okay.
But you can't cut the root out yourself.
What you have to do is burn or poison the root, which I learned when I would go to the doctor and they would put, like, hydrochloric acid on it or whatever.
It would sit and smoke.
That was always fun, too.
Oh, my God.
Yeah, it's pretty crazy.
So they burned it out.
Eventually, I don't get worse anymore, but I do get skin tags and moles and stuff.
My dad had those.
I've had a couple of skin tags removed, one of them in a private area.
You had a private skin tag?
A skin tag for money?
If you go online and you say, can I take this skin tag off yourself...
And the online says, for the most part, yeah, go ahead, snip your skin tags off if you don't mind bleeding all over.
But they said the one exception is if you have a skin tag in a private area.
They said don't mess around with those.
Go to the doctor.
Do you go to the same kind of dermatologist?
Is that an in-office procedure?
Do you have to go to a private?
Let's be honest.
Are we talking about the front or the back?
Okay, it's on your moneymaker.
No, not on it, but in the vicinity.
But it is in your bathing suit area.
In the bathing suit area.
And I was at a dermatologist for a separate procedure, something else.
I don't even remember what it was.
Maybe I was getting a tattoo removed or something.
And I was there and she said, anything else bothering you?
And I said, well, actually, I've got this skin tag and I get those and they don't bother me.
But this one, because it's in this swimsuit area, it does kind of bother me.
It gets, you know, it's like, you know, it bothers me.
You're going to notice it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And she said, oh, no problem.
We deal with those all the time.
And I was like, really?
Because it's down in my... And she was like, I'm a doctor.
Oh.
I was like, okay.
So I sat on the bench and she, you know, I think dermatologists really...
In order to have that job, you have to really like snipping things off and picking things and dealing with things.
I think that's part of it, but I think also you have to have a certain morbid curiosity about grotesqueries.
You're going to run into a lot of stuff that your garden variety observer might find upsetting, and I think you have to be very interested in that.
Show me what you're working with here.
She had one of those little wheelie chairs, and she wheeled over, and she was in her white coat, and she pulled down some sort of goggles like the person that was making eyeballs in Blade Runner.
Okay.
Oh, yeah, I made your eyes.
Yeah, she didn't have a puffed-up suit or anything.
But I covered the area that would have been – I mean the Supreme Court doesn't know –
uh they can't tell you what's obscene but they know when they see it yeah i covered that with a with a towel okay and then she so so she just had a view of the of the skin tag and she was like oh yeah you know it's whatever she didn't compliment me on it or anything but she um she approved your diagnosis though yeah she snipped it right off and i guess put a band-aid on it it hasn't bothered me since
But now I have this thing.
Did she use like a scissors for that?
Like Dr. Scissors?
What do you use for that?
You know what?
I might have looked away.
I don't know.
Some kind of little snipper.
Okay.
I'm not sure.
She got it from her doctor bag.
Okay.
She reached in and some steam came out and a yellow glow and...
It was Marcellus Wallace's soul.
So anyway, were you sitting on the bench with the paper on it?
Yeah.
Okay.
All right.
Cool.
Well, because I was already there for another thing.
I don't remember what the other thing was.
You wouldn't have gone just for this.
No, no.
I'm not the type of person that's going to go for a skin tag.
You're not a vain man.
No, no.
But and also, but, you know, it was just comfortable.
Yeah.
Sort of like that bump that was on my head.
It was there for years.
I didn't do anything about it until it finally got uncomfortable.
And then I had that.
Then I was at the doctor for a completely separate reason.
And I said, you know, he said, is there anything else?
And I was like, well, there's a bump on my head.
And he went and started monking around up there and he was like, oh, yes.
And this was a sebaceous cyst.
It was like, oh, I can deal with this.
I can do this.
This is an in-office procedure.
And I was like, really?
Yeah.
Give me a hard one, right?
Like, this is this one I got.
Sebaceous cyst I can do.
But I was like, I've had this thing for nine years.
You mean every time I go to the doctor, I could have just said something?
And he was like, oh, you know, nurse, get my stethoscope or whatever.
And he runs out and she comes in and they prep me for surgery.
And he comes back in wearing his lab coat and his white gloves.
And they cut me right open and pulled this whole – I mean it was basically – it ended up being about the size of a banana.
When you get to the roots.
Because you have to get to the roots.
But it feels great.
I'm so glad I got that taken away.
Oh, man.
Yeah, I'm looking at, you know, I think we've talked about this before.
When you go and you search for your ailments on the Google, sometimes you'll get an image.
And they have an image here of a man.
It says here, a sebaceous cyst, also known as a WEN, W-E-N, is a small, slow-growing bump that's usually self-diagnosable.
And there's more than 3 million cases a year in the United States.
Yes, yes, I was one.
I was one of those.
That puts me in the 1%, right?
It can develop as a result of trauma or blocked glands.
Well, I think it's probably trauma in my case.
Yeah, well, you know, my intestinal disorder comes from unresolved trauma.
Oh, is that right?
Yeah, I have a chronic, as you know, I have a chronic intestinal disorder that's been in remission for years, knock on stolen desk.
But yeah, yeah, and it's usually only Eastern European Jews get it.
So, you know, I'm a little bit what they call a corner case, but they say it comes from unresolved trauma.
I don't know.
I did used to go to the bathroom a lot.
I remember.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It was kind of, it was like one of your, it was kind of my, my deal.
Yeah.
I had basically for several years, I had a, about a 20 second window in life.
Anytime someone asked you a question, you would say, Oh boy, I'll be right back.
Another way I feel great kinship with two-thirds of the McElroys is for many years, anytime I went anywhere, the very first thing I did was explore what the bathroom situation was like.
Yeah, with a path.
Am I going to be able to stay here?
If we're going to sit in the banquette, I need to be on the outside, the corner, or I need the aisle seat on the banquette because I may need to beat a hasty retreat to the men's.
Right.
But I've never had a cyst.
Do they drain it?
Is it drained?
Oh, well, so the one in my head, the sebaceous one.
Now, this is a terrible story.
And there are people, and I think you know this already, but there are people that go online and watch videos of people popping their pimples.
Yeah.
In fact, on Shark Tank, there was some folks that came on where you could buy a pimple popping product.
You could pop make-believe pimples.
I don't remember if it got funded.
That seems like a good fit for Lori.
It wasn't real.
It was fake pimples.
You pop a fake pimple and it's refillable.
I think it's a Polaroid or the Gillette model.
of pimple popping product.
And yeah, so you, you know, you, you know, major twice, cut once, you can do that.
Now, I don't know if you, they probably, I should find out.
Can you have a home cyst draining system?
A system, that's what it's called.
C-Y-S-T-E-M.
System.
That's wonderful.
Copyright that immediately.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Um, I, uh, I went in and I was like, but you know, by the time that I had my sebaceous cyst dealt with, it had the, it had, it felt like it was made out of what?
Spongy?
Kind of spongy?
No, it was like, it felt like there was a mouse under my skull.
Okay.
Under my hair, under my hair.
A mouse.
A small mouse.
A little hair mouse.
Yeah, a little mouse.
Well, it was a mouse under the hair.
I don't know what it was made of.
Okay.
Okay.
So, but it was making it uncomfortable to wear hats, although I don't wear hats.
But when I would put on a hat, I'd be like, ow.
What are you talking about?
You wear hats.
You got a Stetson.
Yeah, I wear it around the house, but it's not like I'm a hat guy.
No, I'm not going to go out in the world like Dan Benjamin wearing a hat.
No, that's not going to happen.
You had that cool chick magnet hat for a while.
Oh, see, I did like that hat.
I don't know where that hat is.
You were in front of so many things that became, how does one say, hipster cliches, but you were there first.
You had a wallet chain because you needed one.
You carried a lot of cash.
You weren't even into ska and you had one.
And then you had your chick magnet hat.
It was a trucker cap that you had.
Yeah.
Long time before that became a weird thing.
Although no one ever had a chick magnet hat.
That was my... That would open a lot of doors.
It's like the Macklemore haircut.
Now everybody's doing it.
You know what I'm saying?
Not anymore.
Undercut?
You don't see an undercut?
Oh no, I see those, but who wears a trucker hat in
anymore.
Only truckers.
Oh, yeah.
Or maybe people are into ska.
Truckers?
Hats?
I don't know.
I think hats, we're going through another one of these moments, and this is very quick, but I think we're going through another one of those moments, like the John Kennedy thing.
Where you're not seeing as many hats.
Or you got Clark Gable with undershirts.
He single-handedly, supposedly, he single-handedly killed the undershirt industry.
I see what you're saying.
Because he took off his shirt and he didn't have an undershirt on it.
And people said, I want to be like Clark Gable.
Look at that guy.
He's got more talent than Sinatra.
Vavoom.
Vavoom.
They probably didn't say Sinatra.
They probably say he's getting more tail than, say, Rudy Valli.
Yeah, he's getting more, well, probably not Rudy Valli.
They probably said he's getting more tail than John F. Kennedy.
Well, we're talking 1939.
When's the last time you saw somebody walking around with a megaphone, you know?
Let's see.
Who would have been getting the most tail?
He's getting more tail than Benny Goodman.
Benny Goodman.
Oh, sing, sing, sing.
Yes, yes, yes.
One down the banks.
There should be a doctor that you can go to that's just for stuff like this.
They are not allowed to ask you any questions about your health.
They only, you walk in and it would be like getting, so here's the thing.
When you go in and you got a problem with your catalytic converter, they don't say, have you considered buying a Tesla?
They fix your goddamn converter, right?
I want a doctor where I go in.
Well, I just – the thing is that's a different business.
They're not in the business of talking you into a new Buick or similar.
I like the idea of a healthcare – it doesn't have to be a doctor.
It could just be a very talented registered nurse or a nurse practitioner.
That's like a lieutenant colonel for doctors, right?
Yeah.
Well, but nurse practitioners ask you about your health.
They know more about your health than you do.
There should be a place like Jack in the Box or similar where I can go in and just take care of all the things that you're talking about.
Well, this is the thing I'm worried about, though, because in the case of the sebaceous cyst.
Arthur Conan Doyle.
Yeah.
Well, no, that was a wonderful Hardy Boys book.
Yeah.
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I have...
I had talked to several doctors over the years where I said, I have this thing on my head and they touched it and they were like, oh, it's a sebaceous cyst.
And the thing is, none of them ever said, I can take that out right now.
It's an in-office procedure.
They all said, it's a sebaceous cyst.
If it isn't bothering you, it's not a problem.
And of course, when presented with a challenge like that,
Like, I'm an American male.
I said, it's not bothering me.
And they were like, fine.
Anyway, have a nice day.
Now, what they did was they missed their opportunity to charge me $1,500 or whatever.
Yeah.
Because they phrased it like, if it's bothering you, we can take it off.
Well, for the thing to rise up to the level where it was bothering me, like, at that point, to say, it's bothering me.
i wouldn't i wouldn't have done i needed to i need i not only wasn't it's not very it's not a very masculine thing to do i barely even noticed it are you kidding yeah i'm fine i'm good yeah i could have 40 of them on my head and it wouldn't bother me head mouse doesn't bother me no sir and so the doctors were like sebaceous cyst anyway and the fact that they were so blase about it meant that i felt even more blase about it oh sebaceous yeah
And so it took me, you know, eight years to build up enough feeling about it.
Yeah.
Where I was finally like, this bothers me.
I'm just going to come right out and say it.
Having a mouse under my scalp has, and I think when I said it to the doctor, I was like, it's just started to bother me.
It's been there for a long time.
It's just started to bother me.
The scalp mouse is a small concern.
It's not going to be – it's not a deal breaker.
It's not the kind of thing where I'm going to go to the – they say ER.
Now they say ED.
I'm not going to go –
Check myself in at the ER or ED, which I think also means erections.
What is ED?
See, now my lady who works in a medical school, she says ED.
The same way that now we don't say patients, we say clients.
It's like ED is emergency department.
That's the more proper use.
I also learned from Dr. Don that we don't say STD anymore.
We now say STI.
You say sexually transmitted infection, which I think is a nice distinction.
Yeah.
It's a disease, not an infection?
Or it's an infection, not a disease.
We don't say STD anymore.
Now we say STI.
STI.
We don't say DMV.
We say DM... What do we say?
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Okay, sure.
Yeah, because it's so much more now.
We got kiosks now.
They're working on a whole thing.
Now they have the super driver's license you got to get.
I know you already have the super driver's license, but they had to bring in some, Gavin Newsom had to bring in some kind of Silicon Valley brain trust to come up with a way to make the DM, well, what we used to call the DMV tolerable in this time of needing the super driver's license.
So I think they've got kiosks now.
Also STI sounds like STI, which is also a skin thing.
Oh, no, I wasn't thinking of DMVs.
I was thinking of DWIs.
Oh, yes.
What was the other one?
Oh, DUI.
Driving under the influence.
We used to say DWI, which was driving while intoxicated.
Right.
And then it was DUI, driving under the influence.
And I was like, well, come on.
And before that, we would say drunk driving.
Drunk driving, let's call it what it is.
Yeah, and then you get mad.
Mad is mothers against drunk driving.
And then a bunch of smarty pants came out with damn, which is drunks against mad mothers.
So it's a recursonym.
Pow, pow, pow, pow.
Yeah.
Well, the problem with this thing on my finger, though, is that I don't know.
So I've been diagnosed by my friend with a ganglion cyst.
Now, the first thing that you figure out when you read a ganglion cyst is it says ganglion cysts are non-cancerous lumps that develop in your wrists and hands.
Ooh.
And then it says they can be pea-sized, which this is about.
It's pretty big, and it's also called a Bible cyst.
Well, this one is a small pea.
It's not a big pea.
Okay, good.
Like a lassoer pea.
Yeah, but if it were under my mattress, I would feel it.
Okay, yes.
This says ganglion cysts can be painful if they press on a nearby nerve.
Okay.
Well, that seems like what it is.
And then it says, if your ganglion cyst is causing you problems, your doctor may suggest trying to drain the cyst with a needle.
Okay.
It often clears on its own.
If troublesome, see, what are these weasel words?
Just tell me, is this a thing I need to do?
If troublesome, it can be drained or removed.
So if you want to keep it, if you like, if you like, it's like Obama says, if you like your ganglion cyst, you can keep it.
And then you keep it, but drain it.
So I guess they just make it manageable.
Okay.
Well, so I knew a guy in high school who had a ganglion cyst on his wrist, but it was big.
It was bigger than a pea.
It was the size of a mouse, basically.
Yeah, this one on Google looks like a robin's egg.
Right.
Well, this one was big.
It stuck way up off of his wrist.
Like a chicken egg?
No, it wasn't that big, but it probably was the size of a robin egg, you know, sticking up.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, sure.
And so, and at the time, it was like, wow, that's really, that's crazy.
And he ended up getting a cyst on his neck that had to be surgically removed, and he's got a big scar that looks like, you know, he was in a sword fight.
Oh, no.
But he has a dueling scar?
Yeah.
He does.
But this one on his wrist, he it was there on his wrist and it was, you know, it's in high school when somebody gets a big bump on their wrist, you kind of maybe you're going to say like, what's going on?
But maybe also you're going to play it off like, hey, what's up, man?
You know, like not not say anything.
Yeah.
And I think we didn't say anything about this thing on his wrist.
It was pretty big.
And then one day he was at my house and he was like, I'm tired of this cyst.
And I don't even know if I knew what a cyst was.
And I was like, you're tired of it.
And he was like, yeah, this thing on my wrist, I'm sure you noticed.
And I was like, oh, oh, I guess.
Sure.
And he said, get a book, get a big book.
Okay.
And I went and got like some big dictionary.
And he put his hand down on the desk like he was like a Civil War guy who needed to have his arm amputated.
And he said, hit the cyst as hard as you can with the book.
Oh, that was a pivot I wasn't expecting.
And I was like, what?
Okay.
And he said, just slam the book down on my wrist as hard as you can.
And I had a big book.
Mm-hmm.
Because I think he said, like, get your biggest book.
And I was like, I got a big book.
Did you initially think he was going to be looking for medical advice?
No, because he didn't specify what the big book was.
Okay.
He just was like, get a big book.
And I didn't know what was happening.
But anyway, so now I was given both the opportunity and the challenge that I needed to hit him as hard as I could with a book, which is like not the easiest thing.
It's not a pinpoint weapon.
If you're going to try and do that in one medical strike, you need some self-knowledge and some clarity and focus because you don't want to be doing that repeatedly.
You don't want it to become like a Warner Brothers thing.
You want it to be like one and done, right?
Right.
You don't want to hit him...
You don't want to hit it wrong.
I don't know if you've ever been in a situation where someone was throwing a very large book at you or you were throwing a large book at something.
But even throwing a big book is kind of hard for your attack to be successful.
I don't know what number of sighted die you would roll.
Yeah, no, I was thinking you would need a 19 or 20 probably.
And ditto for the defense unless you're armor class covered books.
Unless you're like a librarian rogue or something.
Because you throw the book, the book's going to open up its wings and stuff.
I'm thinking of the very large dictionary we had when I was a kid, which probably weighed maybe four or five pounds and had real sharp corners.
Now, if somebody threw that at me and the corner hit, that's going to be a difficult defense.
It would hurt, but the problem is it's like the book is going, it doesn't have a constant center of gravity, right?
Because the pages are going to open up, it's going to be changing.
So it's full of words, too, yeah.
But what he was saying was hit him with the flat side of the book.
Like a cover, hit him with the cover.
Like if you're looking at the front cover, you hit with the back cover on the wrist system, we'll just see what that does.
Grab the book with both hands.
He specified to do it hard.
Is that correct?
Hard.
He said hard.
As hard as you can.
And, you know, he was only 17 as I was, but he was one of these Alaskan types that was like, oh, I'm tired of this.
We're going to fix this problem now.
And he must have talked to somebody about this book trick because I don't think he would have just come up with this on his own.
I've heard about it since.
Oh, really?
But anyway, I picked up this dictionary and hit him as hard as I could with the dictionary, and it popped the cyst.
Not on the outside, it just popped it on the inside.
What?
And then it, like, drained away the fluid that was in it, went back into his blood system, I guess, and it was gone.
Oh, my.
Oh, my God, John.
John, that's why it's called a Bible cyst.
You hit it with the Bible?
Holy shit.
According to kidshealth.org, anti-inflammatory medicines can help minor pain.
You might have heard a ganglion cyst called a Bible cyst or Bible bump.
And that's because a common home remedy in the past was hitting the cyst with a Bible or other thick book to try to make the cyst rupture or pop.
Well, that's what happened to me.
So there was not an alien-like explosion of goo.
It went back into the client's body.
Went back into the client's body, whatever it was.
Now, that's not what happened with my sebaceous cyst.
There was actually a lot of material removed from my person.
Okay.
But in the case of – well, so anyway, so now if I am to –
Except that this is a ganglion cyst inside of my finger, and it's causing me discomfort, up to and including pain sometimes.
But I cannot reach it with a Bible.
I can't even reach it with a chick tract.
I was going to say a chick tract could do it, could fit, but it doesn't have the performance characteristics of the King James.
Exactly.
And it's in your little scissor pocket, which is, I think, going to make it very painful.
Yes.
I could paper cut it to death, but it's deep in there.
It's got roots.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, you got to count for the roots.
Well, apparently there's YouTube videos of popping a ganglion cyst with a huge Bible.
I'm not going to look at that, but.
Are you sure you're not?
I don't see.
I don't look at things like that.
I see the title and I just because now my recommendations are important to me.
And that's why I don't look at Nazis.
I go into incognito mode to look at Nazis because I don't want that affecting.
I mean, I already get way more videos about Disney World than I might prefer.
He has some drinks, and you learn about Disney World, and pretty soon it's Disney all the way down.
Right.
I don't want that with Nazis or Bible cysts.
No, no, no.
Jeez, John, I mean, so, but you, are you, are you reluctant?
So it hasn't reached the point of, the medical term is troublesome.
It hasn't become troublesome enough that you would, oh God, schedule...
An appointment.
So what happens?
At least if you're with fucking Kaiser Permanente, you go in and you just deal with a system mostly.
You go into the system and you say, hey, can I please have medical care?
System.
C-Y-S-T-E-M.
You deal with a system.
Mm-hmm.
And so you, first of all, you got to make calls and say, hi, can I have some medical?
And they go, okay, please hold.
And then eventually, six months from now, we'll set you up with some ding-a-ling regular doctor.
And the regular doctor goes, hmm, I don't know.
Is it troublesome?
And then maybe like three years from now, you eventually go get to see the non-genital dermatologist.
I don't know what your insurance is like, quote unquote insurance.
My shrink says we should just walk away from them.
He says you don't want to get your medical care from a company that's also an insurance company.
And I think he's right.
We're in the zone right now.
It's that time of year and we're shopping around.
Well, you know, I still have really good insurance for one more year.
One more year.
One more year.
One more year.
I have real insurance.
And then I'm going to be back out into the cesspool.
And maybe by then, you know, we'll have free medical care.
Mm-hmm.
Who knows?
Who knows?
Maybe by next year we'll be living in a socialist state and I won't need to – well, none of us will.
There will be doctors everywhere.
Well, so maybe you get fewer assists because of infrastructure.
Who knows?
Maybe.
Maybe each one of us will have our own doctor and nurse practitioner and they follow us around with a little red wagon.
Can you get an estimate?
Can you call?
Are you allowed to call and get an estimate?
Oh, you just get into a phone tree.
No, the thing is, I have to make this determination.
First of all, what are the chances it's not a ganglion cyst and it's actually finger cancer?
Yeah.
Because that's not a zero.
I have a friend who's dealing with that right now.
Really?
They thought it was something else, and then it turned out to be something else?
They went in, and yeah, now they're going through procedures for a finger cancer.
It does happen.
No, really?
A very good friend of mine, yes, yes.
Well, so no, I just put finger cancer into them.
I can hook you up with them.
I mean, they're very nice.
They go by they now.
They go by they now.
But they have good insurance, I think.
And yeah, that's what they're dealing with.
You should be able to call and get an estimate.
You should be able to call.
I don't think so.
It's like calling Comcast, and you should be able to say, I'm pretty sure something's wrong with the DNS server, but can you check on this for me?
I think you should be able to say...
I have a Bible for comic reasons, but I prefer not to slam it into my finger pocket.
Is this something where I could, can I just come in and have you take care of this for me?
Well, this says here, a painful finger as first sign of a malignancy.
Oh, Jesus.
Bone metastases are frequently seen in patients with malignancies.
Let's see.
So this is saying that the malignancy isn't in the hand.
It's just the first sign of one that's about to kill.
It's of the hand.
Yeah.
An 83 year old woman was seen with pain and swelling in the right middle finger.
So I have the right index finger since three months.
This is weirdly, weirdly written, but it was written by a doctor.
Okay.
A radiograph of this finger showed a lytic lesion of the proximal phalanx, a metastasis, primary bone tumor, or osteomyelitis was considered.
I think he's one of the guys in Watchmen.
Osteomyelitis.
Yeah, yeah.
He's the smartest guy in the world, they say.
Does he have a big blue penis?
Yep, yep.
He's got a big blue penis in it and a comic-sized cat and he watches a lot of TV.
He's got a really cool crown.
Does he live on a rock in space and his daughters are mad at him?
Wait a minute.
Wait a minute.
I know that one.
Yeah, one of them's a robot.
Yeah, one's a robot.
An adopted daughter, but she cares about him just as much.
Hey, you know, blended families are still families.
I know.
Believe me.
And it's got Amy Pond.
Amy Pond is the robot.
Amy Pond from Doctor Who is the robot.
Anyway, so how do I know that this isn't one of those?
Here's the problem.
This is why I want to go to a medical practitioner who's not allowed to talk to me about serious problems.
Because my concern is if you go to a regular doctor, oh, they're so hyper gay bones for finding cancers and stuff.
I want to go into somebody.
And you know, I told you about Jerry.
I told you about Jerry the mechanic.
Jerry the mechanic.
I told you about Jerry the mechanic.
I just want to love about Jerry the mechanic.
First of all, he's a basically honest man.
and and i know i in a good way like he's he's a at his core an honest an honest man he lives in the sunset and he can be trusted and here's what happens when you go in with your car to jerry and now now i i screwed this up i did that i screwed this up but here's what you do you go into jerry and jerry says okay here's the thing right now the thing you brought this in for is this you've got this electrical problem and uh you know what uh that's uh i can fix that up for you 400 bucks you know
know whatever uh but you also have this other thing that's like a little thing that we could fix and you cost you almost nothing now what i need you to know is that your timing belt will blow out in the next few months so oh that's bad you don't have to fix this today but it's very important that you fix the timing belt okay now that's what i love about jerry he's honest and he breaks it down in ways that even somebody like me can understand so
Now, it is very important you do fix the timing belt or you will be going back to Jerry in a year after your wife has yelled at you for not getting the timing belt fixed.
That's on me.
The problem is your timing belt's going to break when you're on the 405 or something.
And that's not when you want it to break.
Oh, yeah.
Was your timing about break?
No, no, no.
We had a rental.
We rented a very, very, very large BMW SUV, and it was quite a thing to be riding around Los Angeles in.
Yeah?
What were you doing in Los Angeles?
My wife ran a nighttime half marathon in Joshua Tree National Park.
Oh, how exciting.
Yeah, it was really dark.
And she did it.
She ran 13 miles and then just came home like a person.
You know, I've been out at Joshua Tree in the Dark.
We watched Zootopia back at the hotel.
It's more of an inn, but they have a wonderful inn in 29 Palms that I can highly recommend.
Well, it's great because you go there if you're having an affair with a Marine.
Yes.
There's a lot of dollar stores and Marines.
Do you know, Merlin, that it was a pizza parlor in 29 Palms where I developed the pizza for the table technology?
Shut the fuck up.
It was 29 Palms.
29 Palms.
29 Palms was the first place I ever ordered pizza for the table.
Holy shit.
See, my problem is I don't tell people when I do things until I've done it, and then sometimes I still don't.
Right.
But I'm going to trust our listeners not to be a creep and try to form patterns.
How are they ever going to form a pattern that you guys are going every once in a while to Joshua Tree to run a midnight marathon?
That seems like a weird pattern.
You could scrape DNA.
You could scrape DNA.
You could go through the trash and stuff.
Like, who knows?
Okay.
Sure, sure, sure.
There's no limits.
But Jerry, the thing I loved about Jerry was, bet on me for not getting the timing belt fixed, but as long as we had need of Jerry, he was good to us.
And I kind of want that from a doctor.
Oh, I get it.
Yeah, I don't think this is... So, you know, deal with me.
Take me how I am.
You know what I'm saying?
I'm just as God made me, sir.
My doctor as a kid was my doctor.
For my whole kidness.
Me too.
For my whole kidnitude.
Yep, me too.
And he knew everything about me.
And, of course, when I was going through puberty...
And he, who was 70, and my dad, who was 70, stood there and he said, you know, and then he said, you know, Dave, why don't you take a walk?
I'm going to talk to John.
And my dad was like, all right.
And it was obvious that they had conspired on something.
And the doctor wheeled forward in his squeaky chair and he was like, now let's talk about, let's talk about what's happening to your body.
And I was like, no, thank you.
No, I'm fine.
It's so bright in here.
It's so bright in here.
Can we not?
Do you have a pamphlet or something that I could read?
I really learned by reading.
Did he have coffee breath?
Oh, they all smoked.
You're going to be feeling some new feelings that might seem a little strange to you.
I'm not one of those.
Oh, no, what it was was he was giving me the late bloomer conversation.
Oh, why there's no hair down there?
There are some boys...
who mature faster than other boys and i was like yeah yeah i know i know i got it i got it honestly i really do learn a lot better by reading your balls are gonna drop your balls are gonna drop someday you're fine let me tell you you're a normal young man i was like yeah yeah i know i know i know yeah i know i'm still i'm listen these are the best years of my life i know i'm enjoying them while i while they do you find you have sensitive nipples
Sir?
Excuse me?
I have these pamphlets for you.
And listen, if you ever get a mouse on your head, make sure you get it taken care of.
When I was in puberty for about a year, I routinely was misgendered by people.
Is this when you look at a scallop?
No, no, no.
It was before my jaw got long.
Right?
So I still had a child's
face.
And I was, you know, I had kind of plumped.
But also, as you say, my nipples were sensitive.
And my body was, you know, like morphing at different rates.
Yeah.
And it happened all the time.
People were like, you know, like, they called me young lady a few times.
Some other boys were like, is that a boy or a girl?
You know, like yelled at me across the playground.
Did you have a big butt?
Yeah, I think I was.
I think that's a lot of it.
A lot of it is like little breasts.
Yeah, you get little breasts, sensitive nipples, big butt.
And I think because your body's it's almost like, again, back to Warner Brothers cartoons, like different stuff is popping out at different rates.
And it can be very confusing to people, especially you.
But I had one of those blonde like Cousin Oliver haircuts.
Is this a question?
This would help me a lot.
So the cover of The Worst You Can Do is Harm is you and the Alice in Wonderland teacup ride at Disneyland, correct?
Right.
Circa 76, probably.
76.
Okay, so you're about – 75.
So you're – what would be – you'd be eight in that picture?
Yeah, between eight.
Between eight.
Okay.
Yeah, probably eight.
So it's after that.
Okay.
Okay.
Yeah.
Okay.
So, but you know, it wasn't, I didn't start looking like a boy until I was in 10th grade, maybe.
Not even 10th grade.
In 10th grade, I looked like John Denver.
It was 11th grade.
11th grade before I really started looking like a boy.
And it was 11th grade before I even started acting like a boy.
So I used to get that.
And, you know, the doctor is just like, don't worry.
And I'm like, I'm worried about a lot, but you're not helping.
I wasn't worried until you told me not to worry.
This is the problem with medical care.
All I want to do is go home.
But the problem with this particular medical care is that I don't anymore have a mechanic who's like, you don't need to, well, you know, what I have is an architect.
Did you know that?
I lucked out in the grand scheme of things.
And a good friend of the program and of us, my motorcycle adventure facilitator friend, Ben King, the architect, it's great to have an architect around.
And we had a conversation yesterday where he was like, well, are you going to change the pipes?
And I was like, and it wasn't one of these 220, 221 conversations, because I do know a thing or two.
And I was like, well, I wasn't going to change the pipes, but if I have the walls down, I'd be dumb not to change the pipes, right?
It's a timing belt thing.
Oh, 100%.
I mean, that was the thing with, again, back to the VW.
I used to have the VW bus, and there's a time we had, and you can pull out your own engine with two scissor jacks.
Like, it was great.
You just roll the bus away, and there's your engine.
But as long as you're doing that, if you're going to replace the gaskets,
Might as well.
There's a whole bunch of other stuff you might as well do if you're pulling the engine.
Fix all the things.
Do a little bit of a cowboy tune on it.
Cowboy tune.
Is that like an Italian run-through?
Ben King did that to me one time when the RV wasn't running right.
We had the top off the motor, and the timing was all screwed up, and nobody could figure out how to get the timing right.
Because in order to get under there and shoot the timing gun at the...
at the flywheel or whatever you couldn't see you couldn't look down at it there wasn't any way to see and so a couple of guys had tried to to to set the timing on this thing and nobody could ever figure it out and we were sitting there looking at them you know the motors going like oh that sounds like timing that sounds like a timing yeah it was a real timing issue and ben uh leaned in and he grabbed the the distributor cap and
And he just turned it with his hand slowly until the motor was like, and he was like, that's about it.
And then he said, what?
And he was like, yeah, you just cowboy tune.
Cowboy tune.
Cowboy tune.
Oh, that would cover so many things in my life where I just need a cowboy tune.
That's funny because that reminds me of the phrase I use, the Italian run-through, which might be racist.
A friend of mine, he talks about when you're going to do a presentation and you've been practicing and practicing.
You've been practicing the presentation over and over.
And then you don't want to over-practice, especially on the day of.
He says you want to do the Italian run-through.
I don't feel that way about guitar.
I feel about that way about guitar.
You don't want to over-practice.
So there's practice and there's rehearsal is what you're saying.
Yeah.
Well, also, you know, if you're indie rock, if you're grunge, you don't want to, like, over no music, you know what I mean?
Oh, absolutely.
And so Italian run-through is when you just kind of go, you dip, dip, dip, you go through, and the Italian run-through, I don't know, it just makes total sense to me, and it's very similar, I think, to the cowboy tune.
Italian run-through?
Is that like a reference to their system of government?
Yeah, you run around in those Mini Coopers, have a heist.
Yeah.
I'm doing Italian run-through right now because, so, you know, I get asked to play shows.
not very often anymore but i got asked to play this neil young show uh which is like a big it's one of these big things that happens in seattle all the time where it's like let's get everybody together and everybody plays a song oh i see one of those tribute things you do yeah and they're they're kind of a pain in the ass because all you you know because you work all this time you have to stand around backstage and all you do is walk out play one it's like recording it's like recording a multi-track 10 second song it's like so much work goes into something for so little product
It's it's it's hard, but but the nights themselves are amazing.
And this already was one of these great nights where, you know, Kim Thale is going to be there and it's everybody in the town is all getting together.
Would you do a solo acoustic song?
Solo acoustic song, except there's a band.
There's a backing band that's there and they've learned every song.
And so they're all set up and they're a bunch of hot players and you walk out and you're like, hey, it's kind of like the it's like the last waltz thing I do.
Yeah.
But you walk out and you just you're standing in front of this really great band.
So you kind of can't lose as long as you don't fuck up.
Yeah.
But last week they said, oh, surprise announcement.
We've added Dave Bazon to the bill and also Dave Matthews.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And it's like Dave Matthews has lived in Seattle for years, but he never does any of these things.
Like you see him in restaurants.
He's kind of a big deal, right?
He's a big deal.
Okay.
He's big.
He's like, he's still, he's still got, he's still like a pretty big deal.
You could argue.
I mean, he is absolutely one of the biggest rock stars ever.
in seattle ever and i'm i don't know if you okay let's let's just ask the internet ed ved versus dave matthews let's see what that what happens if you just put that in there i think dmb
dm of dmb i think he's a pound for pound probably a bigger deal you think so i mean this is i'm not going to search net worth i'm not going to do it because it's not only inaccurate it's creepy but ed ved but yeah boy i'd like eddie to be bigger he seems like such a nice guy well i mean i i just did it i just it's also my favorite episode ever of portlandia
This says Robbie Williams is worth $300 million?
Robbie Williams, the singer from the song, that one song?
Right, right, right.
Take that.
And then he had that song in 1999 about the end of the millennium or whatever.
Yeah, but nobody in America cares about Robbie Williams.
He's worth $300 million, which is what James Hetfield is worth, which is what Eric Clapton is worth.
Robbie Williams is worth the same amount as Eric Clapton.
Oh, that seems disproportionate, John.
So Dave Matthews, also $300 million.
So is Bjorn Ulvaeus of ABBA.
See, now, I could see Bjorn and Benny, because Bjorn and Benny, they did a little switcheroo where they got all the writing credit.
I'm pretty sure them and that producer, who also has a Swedish name, the three of them, I think, got writing credit for everything.
And as you know, that's where the money is.
Okay, but here's the flipperoo on you.
Are you ready?
Bjorn, and then one above him is Anfried Lindstad.
Really?
Otherwise known as Frida.
Frida, and she is also worth $300 million, and that's above Benny.
Oh, I don't understand that.
Adam Clayton, Roger Waters.
This is a crazy list.
Adam Clayton.
Adam Clayton.
Keith Richards.
Adam Clayton from the band U2.
Yeah, Ringo Starr.
Okay, Mick Jagger is up there.
I don't think Sting, of course, number seven.
I don't think we're going to find Ed Ved up here.
Jon Bon Jovi.
Elton John.
Thank goodness.
Thank goodness.
I want Elton John up there.
What about Bernie?
I feel like Bernie Toppich should get more credit than he gets.
He does.
He should.
But he really should.
I mean, like everybody thinks of like, you know, I'm still I've had this like three month long obsession with the song Tiny Dancer.
which is maybe my ultimate Mona Lisa song that I did not appreciate enough my whole life.
But it's such a good song.
I still listen to his version.
I listen to the Florence and the Machine version, which is sublime.
But, you know, the reason, I mean, I love the music a lot, especially that pre-chorus.
Pre-chorus on it is so good.
But the lyrics are so good on Elton John songs.
And I think maybe I'm projecting, but I think a lot of people just think of them as Elton John songs.
Well, but unfortunately, also, some of the lyrics on Elton John's songs are really bad.
Lay me down in sheets of linen is a line that I find very perplexing.
That's nice, though.
What else could it be?
Could it be like sheets of saran wrap or sheets of paper?
Like, it's...
Cotton, have cotton poly blend.
Lay me down in sheets of cotton poly blend.
That's probably closer to what most people's lives are like.
But also, you know, linen is what you wrap up a body in, right?
Don't you, yeah, you wrap like a dead body in linen.
Isn't that some traditional thing, I think?
So it might be a portent of death.
Dead body in linen.
That's what good lyrics do.
Bernie Tompins.
Okay, and so, no Ed Ved.
No, but you know number three on the list above the boss?
Jimmy Buffett.
Because he has that... Senor James Buffett.
He's got a whole empire, you know.
Well, he's got all those shrimp shacks.
Yeah, he's got the musical.
He's got a musical.
His posse's on Broadway.
He's got... Anyway, then we got Bono and we got Paul McCartney at the top.
But what we don't have is Ed Ved anywhere around here.
Is Ed Ved the primary songwriter?
Well, he's the lyricist, and that's, as you know, like half the cash goes to the lyrics.
But no, I think the band – oh, wow, this says Eddie's only worth $100 million.
But Dave Matthews is worth three times what Eddie Vedder's worth.
He's worth three Eddie Vedders?
Yeah.
That doesn't seem just.
Well, it is what it is.
I mean, I'm glad anybody, that's a lot of money and good for them.
But like, now Ringo, now the thing is, Ringo's going to get his dough from having written, like, well, let's see, what's one of the ones he actually wrote?
Did he write Octopus's Garden?
I don't think he did.
No.
He didn't write, not Maxwell Silverhammer, what am I thinking of?
Oh, Help From My Friends is Lenny McCartney, I believe.
Yeah.
But what about the song like Photograph?
Did he write Photograph?
By Def Leppard?
I don't think so.
That's better to burn out than fade away.
You should cover that.
So I'm on this bill.
And now it was me and a bunch of my friends.
And, you know, like, obviously, if you get Kim Thale on a show from Soundgarden, it's like the beard.
He's the guy with the beard.
He's a good guitar player.
He's good.
He doesn't play that kind of thing very often.
Yeah, but no young, come on.
He's on the thing.
It's a little bit of like, oh, yeah, we got Kim to do it.
And actually, it was kind of a bummer because when they said, what song do you want to do?
I was like, Cinnamon Girl, because the Longwinters used to do it.
And they were like, ah, Kim already asked for that.
Oh, shit.
So I kind of got bumped a little bit, but that's understandable.
And it was not bumped probably by seniority.
It was just he got there first.
Well...
Did you, did you, I, did you, boy, I can tell you the songs I'd want.
Oh, oh man.
You could do, you could do a lot of love.
You could do, you could do, you could do, tell me why, tell me why would be really good.
That's super fun to play.
And, and bonus points, John, you could use the riff.
Oh, you mean the Creed Rift?
You could do the dum-dum-dum-dum-dum.
It totally fits in that song.
That one?
Yes.
Well, so what I did choose was the walk-up.
You could do the G-A-B-C, if you're playing it in C, the G-A-B-C walk-up.
Boom, boom, boom, boom.
Right.
That's how the song starts.
I chose a totally different song.
Whatever.
Let me guess.
Whatever.
Whatever.
Whatever.
What's the song required?
I'll zoom in for you because usually what I do at events like this is I practice it the night before.
And then I show up and I'm backstage and I'm trying to remember the lyrics and I'm kind of strumming the guitar.
And I'm like, what is that?
How does the song go?
Shit, shit, shit.
And then I'm on stage.
Yeah.
And sometimes I'm reading the lyrics off the back of my hand that I wrote with a Sharpie.
And sometimes I'm just like, woohoo.
But, you know, it's like for a long time I've thought, oh, don't overpractice.
But I want to do a good job on this one because I haven't done a lot of shows lately.
And I feel like, what are you doing with your life?
Anyway, the band called.
That's the backup.
And this isn't happening until Thanksgiving.
The band called in the form of Mike Musburger, who is arranging the band.
Mike Musburger, original drummer of the Posies, your favorite band, the Posies.
Is Carl Block going to be there?
I'm sure he is.
Anyway, Musburger said, hey, I'm putting the band together, trying to figure out what everybody needs.
Are you going to play the harmonica or should I get a harmonica player?
Well, this was quite a question, I thought, because I don't know how to play the harmonic.
But either did Bob Dylan or Neil Young.
Really?
It adds a level of difficulty.
It adds a level of difficulty for a man with your fingers in coordination.
It adds a new layer of difficulty, though, to doing a good job with singing and playing guitar.
It sure does.
It really super does.
It would be cool for you to go up there and be able to do like a Thunder Road type opening.
But if you're playing guitar and singing and want to be good,
That's a big, big ask.
Well, so here's the thing, though.
I have forever.
So the first – so when I left Anchorage and was first hitchhiking across the United States of America –
Summer of 1986.
Out there on those long American blue highways.
Trying to find that lost America.
America was falling in love with Goose and Maverick.
Yeah, I was... I was 17...
And I was going to be, I was going to find, I was going to get on down that long, lonesome highway.
And I was going to, you know, I was trucking and I had my chips cashed in.
Everything.
All about it.
And I remember I was walking along a stretch of road.
And I was making, now bear with me, I was making harmonica sounds with my mouth.
I was going... Because I didn't have a hard one.
And I was writing blues songs in my head.
Because that's about the level I was at.
Pentatonic hobo miming.
Hobo miming.
Walking down that lonesome road.
Just bending that fifth.
Dropping that heavy load.
You know, I had all my 17-year-old blues going on.
Yes.
And I remember saying to myself, now this is exactly in the same category of what in about 1982 when I said,
I hated the fact that everybody loved the TV show Dallas so much.
I just hated everything about it.
I just instinctively didn't like the... Because there are a lot of Texans in Alaska and that whole materialism, that gross kind of soap opera.
I was like, I'm never going to Dallas.
I made a pact with myself when I was 13.
Never going to Dallas.
And then one...
Then early on in the long winter years, we booked a tour and I looked at the tour routing and it had Dallas on it.
And I honestly, you know, this is 20 years later.
I was like, well, what am I going to do?
I made a pact.
I'm never going to Dallas.
And the entire tour.
up to going to dallas i was fretting about it thinking like well i you know disloyal to your to your vision and promise yeah yeah and i didn't want and i was like well maybe the dallas date will get canceled maybe there'll be a flood and until we were leaving austin headed north
I had just been like, well, something will happen.
You know, it was too late to call and say I couldn't do the show.
And so I said, you know, I turned the stereo off and I was like, hey, guys, I need to talk to you.
And the band was like, what's up, man?
I was like, I made a pact when I was 12 or 13 that I would never go to Dallas.
And now we're driving into Dallas today.
And I just don't know what to do.
And, you know, credit to the band.
They took the problem seriously.
And everybody was like, well, how do we, what do we do?
Like, how do we sell, how do we make this going into Dallas thing?
How do we make this a healing experience rather than like a betrayal?
And I was like, I don't know.
I don't know.
And I don't know who it was, Sean or Eric.
Somebody said like, well, why don't we all, why don't we stop and buy cowboy boots?
We'll all get cowboy boots.
And I was like, that's a great idea.
And so we pulled over.
As soon as we crossed into Dallas, we pulled over at one of those giant cowboy boot stores and everybody bought cowboy boots.
Sean Nelson walking around in cowboy boots.
Oh, it wasn't Sean, right?
Because that's inconceivable.
So no, it was.
No, I could definitely see Eric in cowboy boots.
I think it was the tour where we were with Ken Stringfellow.
And Ken bought cowboy boots.
Eric, Michael, and I all got cowboy boots.
I remember Michael.
Yeah, so that works for me because I do remember Michael stomping around in cowboy boots when y'all were here that first time.
He loved them.
He ended up
But so this was a similar situation.
I was out on the highway making fake harmonica sounds, trying to ease my load, my heavy load.
And I said, as I'm walking along, I said, as soon as I get to a town, as soon as I get someplace, I'm going to buy a harmonica.
Because I...
because i want to know how to play the harmonica i believe it is a good it's a good instrument to have along every you know let me ask you this merlin who is more welcome
at any gathering than somebody that can whip out a harmonica no one it's the opposite of a banjo player absolutely if you are with any group of people and you pull out a harmonica and can play it well it's the least objectionable instrument uh not true for recorder certainly not true as we say the problem is i said this to my daughter just this weekend i said the problem a thing i learned from john roderick the problem is not banjos the problem is banjo players
banjo banjo put it away put that away don't do that recorder no thank you no nobody's carrying around a recorder if you can carry around a piano people like to hear a piano but even a guitar is not going to beat a harmonica no a harmonica if you're sitting around outside at a party and you're like
pull out a harmonica and just kind of, oh, come on.
It's like... Also, people are probably less likely to ask if they can do a jam.
Oh, can I play Don't Go Back to Rockville on your guitar?
No, no.
Exactly.
No, no, no.
They're not going to ask to borrow your harmonica.
That's right.
And if somebody is being shitty... Don't blow another man's harmonica is what I say.
If somebody is at a party and they're playing the acoustic guitar and they're kind of like ruining the party by being that person, and you pull out a harmonica and go a little...
You know, like give a little like honk on it.
Wow.
Did you learn how to do chords yet with your tongue?
Press your tongue against it.
Don't blow one hole.
Put your tongue against it and you'll make a nice chord.
Okay.
It's hard when you get up to the higher registers.
I played one as a kid.
As a kid, I had a Hohner harmonica that I got as a stocking stuffer, and I tried to get good at it, and it was really fun.
It's a great instrument.
I've had 50 harmonicas, but I've never been able to do anything more than go... Anyway, that's all.
It seems like that's all Bob Dylan is doing either.
But what I didn't do on that day when I got to the next town, which I think was Stanwood, Washington or Bend, Oregon or somewhere, I did not go by Harmonica.
And ever since that day, there's been a thing in my head that's right up there with the why didn't you graduate from college?
Why haven't you finished your book?
When's the next long winter's record?
And it is.
You had a window.
You had a window and you blew it.
Why didn't you learn to play harmonica when you were 17?
That's when you learn to play harmonica when you're 17.
And you're out on the road where you can learn to play the harmonica and not bother anybody.
You're just all by yourself out in a field.
You'd be honking on a harmonica all day.
Didn't do it.
So when Mike Busburger asked me, are you going to play the harmonica or do I need to hire a harmonica player, a harmonic assist?
A harmonic assist?
A harmonic assist.
A sebaceous harmonic assist.
C-Y-S-T.
Trademark.
I said, you know what, Mike?
I'm going to learn to play the harmonica, to play this show.
And he was like, okay.
Okay.
Check.
I'll talk to you later.
Cause he's putting together a band.
He's, he's backing up 15 guys.
He's calling, um, he's calling Shelby Earl tomorrow.
And like, what do you need?
And she's like, I don't know, 14 tambourine players.
Or he's like Dave Matthews band.
What do you need?
And so anyway, I bought a harmonica in the correct key.
I bought a harmonica rack and I've been walking around.
One of those Anakin Skywalker things that you like, like Neil Young and Bob Dylan.
Yeah, that's right.
And I am and I'm and I'm and I'm playing my song and I'm trying to both learn the harmonica and learn the song and learn to play the guitar and the harmonica at the same time.
What could possibly go wrong?
And I have three weeks.
So if I can, I mean, in three weeks, Merlin, you know, I learned Arabic in three weeks.
I can, you know, I can learn to do it.
I just have to.
So I'm walking around the house in my stocking feet, playing the same four notes over and over again.
On both the guitar and the harmonica.
Just trying to get the swing.
Just trying to get the swing of it.
And I feel like I'm going to do it.
I'm going to pull it off.
And Dave Matthews is going to be there.
I've only met him one time.
I bet he's nice.
He's very nice.
And this is how he's going to remember me.
Because the thing is, the first time I met Eddie Vedder...
I left an impression, I think, that I was what?
That I was taking the piss.
I was taking the piss.
Oh, did you big time then?
No, no, no, not that.
We did an event.
You're having a laugh.
I was having a laugh.
I was having a little bit of a laugh.
We did an event where it was called Burn to Shine, where they burn down a house.
And before they burn it down, a bunch of musicians come in and play in the abandoned house.
And, uh, and Eddie Vedder was there and Dave Bazzan was there as a matter of fact, and Ben Gibbard and, uh, the long winters.
And I was just, I don't know what, I was in a mood at that point in my life.
I showed up, I was dressed in a, in a Canadian tuxedo and for the, Jean, Jean, Jean, Jean, Jean, and before and for the event, just for the event, I went and borrowed a guitar that had a whammy bar and
And I played the entire song.
I played the entire song.
And the band was really – I, like, turned everybody up really loud.
And, you know, Eddie Vedder's playing a ukulele, and everybody else was playing acoustic guitar.
And I'm like, one, two, three, and just play the entire song.
And it infuriated everybody.
I'm sure –
I mean, I like when that when that whole thing came out, it was released.
And there were people that wrote me concerned letters like, are you all right?
Like, that was really terrible.
And I was like, I don't know, man.
Wow.
I never watched it.
It sounds.
Yeah.
But anyway, that was the impression that I think I made with Eddie the first time we met was like, oh, yeah, you guys are amazing.
I'm not going to make that mistake with Dave Matthews.
Oh, no.
You really get one.
You know, they say, you know, he's only one chance to make a first impression.
Can you get a whammy bar for that?
Wait a minute.
Wait a minute.
Wait a minute.
Oh, wait.
So this... Uh-huh.
Hmm.
Hmm.
What era?
What era?
What era?
the problem is this is the wrong key and this is what's screwing you up i don't think that's a key just for what it's worth this is a c harmonica and i should be playing it on a g harmonica but somebody some uh listener to the omnibus project sent me his grandfather's marine band uh harmonica and it's it's in a key so anyway i have it laying here you know it kind of tastes like lapsang sushang
Just like Bob's mom used to make.
Yeah.
She lived in a bookcase.