Ep. 365: "Meet Me at Ballet"
What the fuck is happening?
I'm a little off my bubble.
Oh, what happened to your bubble?
Is it early?
I'm just a little off it.
Yeah, it's a little early.
Also, tomorrow is my now thrice-postponed colonoscopy.
Oh, nice.
And so today, today I had scheduled my semi-regular Dim Summit.
where i meet uh with the with some high mucky mucks in the advertising game for a large dim sum breakfast lunch that spans hours and sit at a big table and send things around the lazy susan talk about all the different um
All the different beer brands that we're going to make.
It's going to make us millions.
Okay.
These are advertising people.
Yeah, we talk about branding.
Oh, okay.
All right.
A lot of dim sum, a lot of talk about branding.
Also, politics.
This is the politics game.
It sounds like a lot.
I mean, given that you got dim sum, you got advertising, it sounds like a lot of wide-ranging topics.
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
It is a lot of concerned citizens there.
Wow.
And sometimes, you know, sometimes we have a guest.
Not very often.
If you ever came to town, you'd be an honored guest.
I would love that.
We have former mayors come.
You know, that's the whole thing.
Anyway, it's hard sometimes to get a dim sum on the calendar.
Dim summit, I'm sorry.
Got one on the calendar.
Forgot that I had a colonoscopy the following day.
Woke up this morning realizing that I'd done the thing that I do sometimes, which is I had a hard, I had a choice, not a hard choice.
I had a choice.
I had a fork in the road coming.
Do I treasure the dim summit and put off the colonoscopy one more time, probably into the new year?
Or because I have a lot of anxiety about this colonoscopy.
Sure.
I don't want to do it.
I don't want to do it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Or do I just say, get it over with, skip, because what you cannot do, I don't think, is go eat 40 pieces of dim sum,
And then immediately begin the process of preparing for the colonoscopy.
I have a lot of questions.
I think I understand what you're putting down here.
First of all, the lazy Susan is not your sister.
That is the appliance that turns the dim sum on the table.
Correct.
And at the Jade Garden, where we go...
The Lazy Susan factors into it thusly.
There are tables that are just too small for a Lazy Susan.
And my crowd often shows up too few people to justify, in the eyes of the staff of the Jade Garden, a table big enough for a Lazy Susan.
They've got standards, yeah.
They've got standards.
They're putting a lot of people in this restaurant, putting them in, taking them out.
and they see us there, and, you know, they're no nonsense.
They're all business.
You're not showing up could cause there to not be a lazy Susan quorum.
That's correct.
If you don't show up, well, first of all, that's a terrible indignity to your advertising friends, right?
You don't want to, you know, fight club or whatever.
And then on top of it all, you don't want to be the one that causes them to be at one of those little cuck tables that doesn't have a carousel on it.
That's right.
This is going to bounce them down.
And now sometimes if the right person gets there early,
The thing is, they won't seat us until we're all there.
That's a thing now, John.
That's a thing.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Is your party here?
Is your party here.
Oh, and also, I should say, the Jade Garden for dim sum in the noon...
is a freaking zoo there are people there are people swinging from the chandeliers it's nuts so leads me to a very important question here is it the kind where people come around with a carton are constantly interrupting you yeah okay okay all right i i get that i don't love it i don't love it yeah well and the thing is there are there are certain members of our party that will take the that will take charge of
and say, yes, two of those.
No, not those.
You know, like, yes, we want these beautiful ones.
No, we don't want chicken feet, you know?
And for me, and I'm somebody that's like, I've never had that one before, but that's not how you do it, I don't think.
In our group... Depends on the group.
Depends on the group, the dynamic.
Absolutely.
I think you unintentionally reach a kind of a... John, how many times has this come up?
The sort of...
communication, body language, overt statements that one makes sometimes when dining with a group, and that can be very fraught.
If you don't understand the culture of your group, it's easy to get stuff wrong, and pretty soon you're butt deep in chicken feet.
Butt deep in chicken feet is exactly what happens.
So there's one guy that he would order the noodles, but he has been...
soundly rebuked for ordering noodles by the, by the group at large.
No, and, and you're, and nobody wants, um, nobody wants sticky buns.
Nobody wants egg custard.
Yeah.
Like these things have all been, they've all been, uh, they've all been mooted and, uh, and the, you know, the, like the group is collectively scorned these foods.
Mm-hmm.
There is one guy, Mr. Fancy Pants, we'll call him.
No one calls him that, but that's who he is.
No, I get it.
He likes the shrimp with mayonnaise and walnuts.
The shrimp with mayonnaise and walnuts.
He likes this.
He likes this fancy shrimp.
Everyone else scoffs, but somehow we get it.
We get it to please Mr. Fancy Pants.
For no other reason than that we enjoy watching him enjoy his mayonnaise-y shrimp.
But what you say is, I mean, you've identified the problem.
If I don't go, first of all, I'm going to get flamed.
But second of all,
they're not going to get a Lady Susan, which is going to degrade the whole, that's going to, that's going to,
That's an additional level of flaming.
There's so many things in life where our attendance at something makes it bad.
In this case, very much your absence.
Setting aside the company that you bring to the advertising roundtable, you're degrading the experience for your compatriots.
Yeah.
But you also want to get this, as they say, forgive my saying, you want the colonoscopy behind you.
Right?
You don't want to rack up four on the board.
That's right.
And, you know, my doctor, who is the, you know, the woman that however many years ago said, I didn't come to you.
Mm-hmm.
Right?
Yeah.
This is the doctor who got me on prescriptions in the first place.
She's the one that saved my bacon, I think.
Mm-hmm.
Also, her office is the one where the measuring tape on the wall is an inch wrong.
Measuring tape on the wall is an inch wrong.
Yeah, where they routinely lately have been telling me that I'm 6'2".
Oh, these are the people who keep telling you you're shrinking.
Yeah.
You're losing, according to Dr. Medication, you're losing inches.
Only less than an inch, but a noticeable amount that when I say that your instruments are incorrect, they laugh.
But, you know, she's the one that I went to, and she was like, you know, she was a straight talker.
She said, you know, do me this favor.
Why don't you just go see...
See a psychiatrist.
Anyway, last year she said, I want you, you're 50 years old.
I want you, all I want is for you to come tell me that you have scheduled colonoscopy before your 51st birthday.
And I was like, yes, ma'am.
And I waited nine months.
And then I realized I had made this promise and I scheduled it.
And then I canceled it.
I fulfilled my promise, but then I immediately canceled it because I don't want to do it.
Yes.
And then I was right on the, I was like the night before, the night before when it was supposed to happen, I called and I was like, oh, I forgot or I slipped and broke a nail or whatever.
Yeah.
And they were really nice about it and they were like, we'll just reschedule.
And they had to reschedule two months out like they do.
Yeah.
Anyway, the reason I'm late is that I called the doctor and I said, you know, sometimes when I'm talking to somebody like that, I can get really sort of pathetic sounding in the following way.
As a practical thing or just because of the vulnerability?
Yeah, the vulnerability.
So I was like, look, I...
I'm embarrassed to say this, but I don't remember where you sent the prescription for the stuff I'm supposed to take.
Oh, you got to take the stuff.
Yeah, I have to take the stuff.
I have to start taking the stuff now.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
They say it's flavored, but it doesn't help.
And I said, I don't know where it is.
I don't know where to find it.
I looked in my emails.
I couldn't find any record of it.
It could be anywhere.
They probably aren't going to be able to make it today in time.
I have this dim sum meeting.
I'm not sure what to do.
I don't want to, you know, I'm saying this to the woman that answered the phone tree.
It's really more a question than a comment.
Kind of, right?
I mean, you're trying to figure this out.
You're trying to, as you're doing with me as your friend, I'd like to think, you're trying to stipulate some facts for the record.
And you're trying to frame some situations for the decision tree.
And you lay that out.
It might seem at first like a question, but it's really a different question.
It's a question about what question needs to be asked.
Do I have the facts that we both need?
to to make a decision do i have to miss the dim summit and rob them of their lazy susan and and and how even uh do i get this uh this gallon of liquid i'm not going to be able to find it probably right yeah and also if i don't find it i think you're looking for what you're looking if i could say i think what you're looking for here is don't worry
We'll just reschedule it.
That's right.
Our bad.
That's what I was looking for.
Our bad.
We didn't send it.
Maybe we sent it to the wrong pharmacy or maybe we didn't send an email about it to you or something.
Get the dim sum.
Yeah, you go.
You go.
And then we'll start this all over in the new year is what I'm hoping that she says.
And I tell her everything.
It'd be nice if they also said something like, actually, this is a relief for us.
Yeah, right.
That would be the nice thing to do.
If you're from Ohio, at least my part, not your mom's part, my part of Ohio, you try to really open the door to everybody feeling relieved.
You know what I'm saying?
Yeah, yeah.
If everybody apologizes, if everybody apologizes, yeah.
Go on his Christmas break.
And the thing is, this last thing was the last thing he had scheduled before he goes to Italy.
Um, and so, so I say all this and, and, and the, and every single person I've talked to, and this is going to surprise you.
I think every single person I've talked to associated with this colonoscopy appointment has been amazing.
Like every time I've called on the phone and talked to whoever it was that answered the phone, we've had a laugh.
We've talked about, you know, our, our experience, strength, and hope.
Um,
And at the end of the thing, I feel very relieved.
I'm like, oh, okay.
Well, I'm sorry I had to reschedule this time, but I am really looking forward to it next time.
And they're like, that's great.
Don't worry about it.
Everything's cool and chill.
And this young woman was no different.
She said, oh, don't worry.
It's fine.
Yeah.
There's still plenty of time for you to go to the pharmacy.
I found the prescription, and they have it there, and all you have to do is go over there.
And I was like, oh...
Well, I've already had some coffee today.
Yeah.
Are you supposed to start – I'm sorry, just for folks who've never had the – The procedure.
Yeah.
So what they're going to do is get in there and make sure everything in your tubes are lined up the way they're supposed to be.
And the thing is, I guess – I find this difficult to believe from a scientific and medical standpoint, but they really want that to be real cleaned out because they're going to be getting in there and looking around.
And so they want you –
They want you to see what they can see.
Yeah.
But you know, I mean, okay, fine.
Whatever you say, I got to do it.
I got to do it.
So the idea is you drink a lot of this stuff and I, you've had one of these before.
No.
Oh, okay.
I don't think I would be so anxious if I'd had it before.
Boy, this is a real thorny thistle we've got here.
That's what I don't want up in there.
I do not want a thorny thistle there.
But there's all kinds of angles to this that make it extra difficult.
One is that you can say, one can say to the practitioner, this really sucks, can you give me the Michael Jackson drugs?
Now, my sense is you ain't going to do that.
No, no.
You don't want the Michael Jackson drugs.
You don't even want a local.
No.
If they could give you a local, but what you got to do is you got to drink this stuff.
I'm not going to lie to you, John.
It doesn't taste great.
It does not go down surpassingly easy.
You drink a lot of that, and then that makes you go have some reading time for a lot of reading time, really setting aside a lot of time to read.
You're going to want to do that.
well i don't know your new house but in your old house i would say don't go further from like you know the back of your kitchen because you're going to want to get to that side bathroom oh i see what you're saying well you get some pretty rapid transit you know what i'm saying well so all of this you know i was like i have some sense of this and so i said to her you know kind of a last ditch
hail mary i was like i've already had some coffee this morning oh did i already scotch did i already scotch the deal that probably disqualifies me right yeah sure and she said no you can you can keep having you can have a light breakfast breakfast even up until noon which is exactly when the dim summit was supposed to start she's like after noon you have to just switch to clear liquids and i was like
Coffee?
And she said, coffee, but no milk in it.
You can have coffee, but no milk.
I was like, well, that's sort of primitive, but yeah, all right.
And so she just paved the way that everything was fine and I was still on target.
So much still on target that I could switch off my targeting computer.
Yeah.
Right, right, right.
Yeah.
And so I called the pharmacy.
Reach out with your feelings.
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Now, this is all right about when you and I should have begun this show.
Oh, right.
And the Dim Summit was tentatively scheduled.
It's still on.
Here's the real terrible thing.
As far as they know, it's still on.
Wait, noon today?
Noon today.
89 minutes from now?
As far as they know, they're all like, you're going to love this.
My mom just sent me a text.
She said, ran into Jason and he said, you are having lunch.
How about coming by my apartment after and let's handle my business questions.
Bring your laptop.
Okay.
This is, this is the text I got from good old mom.
Oh, she also said your peanut butter jars of coins held $162 and two cents.
Okay.
Okay.
I'll put it, I'll put it into your account.
She said a lot of input here.
That's a lot less than I thought was in those peanut butter jars, quite frankly.
But it's just there was just some coins in peanut butter jars.
So it's not like it's not like I wasn't counting on that money or anything.
Sure.
Anyway, so I call the pharmacy and the first.
Oh, so.
Oh, before I sent you the text that said I'm going to be a little bit I'm running a little late.
I'd called the pharmacy because I suspected it was this pharmacy.
And I got put into a phone hold where they were like, you know, we're experiencing unexpected call volumes.
And so I hung up, I was like, oh, and they said, leave a message.
I was like, do not leave a message at the pharmacy.
If my mom taught me one thing.
That's the one thing, don't leave a message at the pharmacy.
Don't leave a message at the pharmacy.
Just for my own purposes, what happens when you leave a message at the pharmacy?
Oh, that's how they get you.
Oh, God, yes.
You don't have the opportunity to lend context.
Right.
How am I going to tell them about the dim sum in a message?
They're going to be playing that back for each other, rolling their eyes.
Sure.
We got a live one.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I don't need the grief.
But they didn't answer the phone.
And so that's when I called the lady, the colonoscopy person.
And I was like, I don't think this is going to work.
And she was like, don't worry.
It's fine.
So then I was like, I got to call the pharmacy again and leave a message.
And the pharmacist lady picked up the phone on the first ring this time.
Oh, God.
Okay.
Okay.
And I was like, hey.
You already sound very vulnerable, to be honest.
Yeah, yeah.
I said, I got this thing.
I was supposed to pick up this stuff that I was supposed to put into some kind of drink.
But you probably don't have it.
And, um, so if that, if you don't, if you can't get it to me today, that's fine.
I'll just have to cancel.
And she was like, no, no, no, we can get that going.
Right.
It'll be ready in an hour.
And she was really nice.
Is it like a craft cocktail?
Is it something that they have to make?
Is it a bespoke preparation jar you're going to get?
I figured it's something they got on the shelf.
Well, that's, I guess, I was hoping it was bespoke.
And apparently, no, they've just got it there.
You've given them lots of opportunities to say, let's just reschedule.
I feel like it's one of those bins at the natural food store where they just reach in and put two scoops of it in a bag and say, okay.
Go home and make it and you're not going to like it.
Like nutritional yeast or a textured vegetable protein, except this is a butt evacuator.
Yeah, yeah.
What I'm imagining is that it's Soylent Green or Soylent.
Actually, you know, one of the people, actually Mr. Fancy Pants from Dim Summit.
This is the guy with the shrimp almond mayo.
Mayonnaise shrimp.
Okay.
Okay.
He one time – because he's like one of these guys.
He's one of these guys that has a flouncy pocket square, but he also gave me one time a bag of Soylent.
that was like the size of a bag of grain.
Was it in bottles or was it just... No, no, no, just a giant sack.
Oh, this is back when it was a powder.
Back when it was a powder.
Yeah, you got Edron oil and stuff, yeah.
And he said, you know, I'm trying this stuff out anyway, I got one for you.
And he gave me this sack of flour, something that you would make like a dike out of if the river was overflowing its banks.
Okay, so it's like a Dutch powder bag.
Yeah, it's like if the levy breaks, what you're going to throw in there is this bag of soylent.
So he gave it to me.
And for, I don't know, five years, that bag of soylent sat in my cupboard.
And I looked at it all the time.
And I was like, am I?
It was kind of like this colonoscopy appointment.
I was like, am I ready to...
to try am I ready to step through the door into the future where I no longer need food and I just buy a bag of seed every spring and fall and just live on like live on glue or whatever it is I think you know the answer to this well I never was ready every morning I woke up and I called the pharmacy save it for the dike
I called the pharmacy in my mind and I said, am I ready to stop eating food?
And they were like, we can't know.
No, you have to eat.
Did you already eat food this morning?
You didn't reject it out of hand as something that would never happen.
So you got to keep the Dutch powder around.
Because I liked the idea that it was there.
And if a time came along where I was ready to stop eating food, I had a giant bag of human feed that
That had been tried and tested by software developers in the greater Bay Area and had been proven to facilitate human survival.
Wow.
I knew I had that there.
But it wasn't disaster food.
It was, are you ready to step through the door into a higher plane?
It's that aspirational life powder.
It's like Nietzsche's suicide.
It becomes on a Saturday night, that could be a consolation.
You know you've got the life-sustaining developer powder in case that's the route you ever want to take.
I had a dream last night.
Me too.
But mine was, I was interacting with someone
I was interacting with a junkie friend, and the junkie friend and I were sitting debating whether or not they should take an overdose because suicide was a consolation.
Oof.
I was not saying, but you have so much to live for.
I was saying, give it another day.
In that case, you were on the bubble.
And they were saying, I've been giving it a day.
Slow down, slow down, slow down.
Let's not be too hasty one way or another.
You could get a Google Sheet and do pros and cons.
Every morning you wake up, you look at your bag of seed and you say, is today the day that I open the bag of seed?
And I was saying to this dream friend, maybe don't, I mean, if you have enough dope to OD, maybe string it out, space it out, get high for a few days.
Let's talk about it.
You could always do it later.
You could always do it later.
That's the consolation part.
Yeah, what's your hurry?
Yeah, break glass in case of life.
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Okay.
As I sit here, I am on track so far.
Haven't consumed anything this morning.
Not even a dry cracker or a single unsalted hard-boiled egg.
This is still like a Heisenberg situation we're dealing with.
You could still literally go either way.
I could go to dim sum.
I could be on time.
We'll keep it short.
Without giving away too much, you feel like you could finish recording this program and you could make it to Jade Garden in time to be seated with your party.
Yes.
Okay.
And the timing was already baked in.
You wouldn't even know.
No.
You and I would do a regular show.
Yes.
And I would say, all right, well, you know, love you, Merlin.
Talk to you later.
Ding.
Ding.
And then I would put on my coat and I'd swing on out and I'd march into dim sum in time to get a Lazy Susan for the table.
Mm-hmm.
I really want that pork shawai now.
I want it so much.
Well, you know, you're the one that you introduced me to dim sum.
The place with the pigeons closed.
I'd lived my whole life and didn't have it in one time, long time ago.
Merlin, it feels like two lifetimes ago.
30 cents a piece.
They were 30 cents a piece.
You want dim sum for breakfast?
And I'm sitting there with Eric Corson, who at the time had only been to three states.
John, we'd get a party platter.
Do you remember?
We'd get a party platter.
We would walk back from the pigeon dim sum with more dim sum than we could carry.
Yep.
And we would sit there and make concoctions and eat these dim sums.
And the thing is, it was 98% shumai.
We didn't even have any fancy dim sums.
I mean, it's one of those things where like, you know, when you go to the grocery store, I know this is a bit, but there are people who are very self-conscious about buying certain things at the grocery store.
And I think one of the things people are understandably self-conscious about is
is toilet paper.
Because if you buy toilet paper, you mentally wonder if anything you're buying alongside the toilet paper makes you look like a weirdo.
Because you think in your head, because the cashier doesn't care, but in your head you're going, ooh, I probably shouldn't get SpaghettiOs and toilet paper because now it looks like I'm a weirdo.
Right?
What?
That's what I get half the time.
Well, I don't have a single problem in the world, but what I would do is I would get $80
Let's be honest.
90% pork shumai, right?
And then I get a few of the shrimp ones.
I might get a chive one.
Just so I didn't seem like a weirdo.
Because now I seem like a fetishist if all I'm getting is just a whole bunch of doughy pork on a party platter.
Now here's the thing I don't understand about shumai.
There's always something crunchy in it.
They put a little bit of like a down market fish egg on top.
No, no, it's not that.
It's that somewhere inside you realize that what they did to make a shumai is that— Oh, you're talking about where you get like a hoof or something.
Yeah.
Yeah, I've gotten that.
I get that.
I get that in my pho meatballs, too.
Oh, it's the same stuff.
One out of my three pho meatballs will have something very hoofy in it.
What it makes you think is that maybe there's an entire mouse in there.
You know, like they took a mouse and they put it through an extruder.
The only words that an entire mouse is a partial mouse.
Like a half a mouse.
A quarter of a mouse.
Yeah.
But the thing is, the first time I ever had pho meatballs...
And I'm sure I told you this story.
The woman sat down with me.
She was like, have you ever, because all of a sudden.
Didn't she like instruct you on how to make food?
Yeah.
There was a restaurant.
There was a restaurant I went to all the time that was at the time it was before, I don't know, somehow it was before the revolution when there were still restaurants that were just like Asian.
Yeah.
Yes.
And it was just Asian food.
It definitely encompasses Chinese food.
There's something like Japanese food.
And let's throw in a little bit of Indian food just for fun.
Yep.
That's exactly what it was.
And I would go in there and one of the meals that we all loved was this curry.
I can't decide between the chow mein and the tikka masala.
Yeah.
But it was the color of tikka masala.
It was bright orange, except it didn't taste like Indian food.
It tasted like something else.
And so this restaurant, everybody ate there.
And it was called Ballet.
Don't ask me why.
It was called Ballet.
Ballet.
And so in the early 90s in Seattle, you would just say, oh, meet me at ballet.
And at the time, I swear to God, Merlin, we had no idea what kind of, where the people that owned the restaurant were from, what kind of food this was, beyond that it was served with rice, and the people that made it were from Asia.
That was all anybody knew.
I bet it had fortune cookies.
There were fortune cookies.
There were all vegetable meals.
It was the first time I ever saw mock chicken.
Okay.
They were cool enough that they were like, they would serve you the... Oh, and this is what it said on the menu.
Curry chicken.
Okay.
That was it.
Curry chicken.
No explanation of what... No green, no red, no... Yeah, okay.
Curry chicken.
Curry chicken.
And then you could also get mock chicken.
Mm-hmm.
It just makes fun of you for an hour.
And the vegetarians could get it with just vegetables, no chicken, curry vegetable, I think it was called.
There weren't that many preparations.
And one day I went into ballet by myself because this was also a place you would eat by yourself.
And you'd get a little pot of tea and sit and eat curry chicken.
Love that.
I went in and there was a little tent on the table and it said, try our beef soup.
Okay.
Try our beef soup.
Yeah, and I know I've told you this.
I know I've told you the story.
I was like, I'll try the beef soup.
And the lady said, have you ever had beef soup before?
And I was like, yeah.
And she was like, have you ever had our beef soup before?
And I think at that point, oh, and also ballet, the waitstaff for a long time were just the daughters, and they were all between the ages of like eight and 12.
No, I swear.
That's so upsetting.
Like a little girl would come out, and she was a very kind little girl, but she'd been in the shit.
She'd seen it all.
Of course.
Yeah.
This was Capitol Hill in 1991.
There was the two guys, the one little guy with a fright wig who had the big guy on a leash, and they walked everywhere.
Oh!
It was T-H-E, Super Gay Neighborhood at the time, right?
I mean, that was when Dan Savage was still a drag queen.
Okay.
But it was kind of before Capitol Hill got more upscale, it sounds like.
Oh, no.
Jekyll Hill was not upscale.
It was downscale.
And this was grunge people's, too.
And so she brought me the beef soup, and it was at this moment...
that i learned that they were vietnamese okay and i had never put it together before like oh you are v and it was i think in 1991 still like in seattle that we'd had vietnamese restaurants for a long time but like you know that we bill clinton only normalized relations with vietnam right in that era right just within a year or two okay
So, yeah.
So she said.
Try our beef soup.
Yeah.
She said, get it with the meatballs.
But let me tell you, you've never had it with these kind of meatballs.
And I was like, how many kinds of meatballs are there?
And she said, our meatballs are half crunchy, half chewy.
I was like, half crunchy, half crunchy, half chewy.
Yeah.
All right, I'll try them.
And that's exactly what they do.
Crunchy inside of chewy or chewy inside of crunchy?
Because the kind of scale they're working at, they're probably not doing exactly perfect, you know, half and half on like half a ball on this side, half a ball.
Okay, so... I didn't know.
And then it showed up and I tried the meatball and I was like, it's delicious.
It's also...
crunchy and it's also chewy and that's the thing about shumai other other dim sums have regular consistencies but shumai you're like oh it's it's chewy and then it's like crunch oh no there's like a part of a mouse in it yeah it's like getting a baby in a cake in new orleans
It's like getting a baby and a cake and a warm and a tequila.
Yeah, I think so.
Okay.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And so didn't she kind of help you prepare it and everything?
She did.
As you know, that's my favorite part of the pho is it's a different meal every time.
The way I put it together each time, I mean, it's the ultimate do-it-yourself.
I mean, like, you know, there's those companies that will, like, send you a box of food and then you make the meal.
Fuzz like that is a different adventure every time.
Sometimes I want a lot of noodles.
Sometimes I want a little bit.
Sometimes I want more sriracha.
Sometimes I want more MSG.
Yeah, that's right.
I got a shaker of MSG.
And I'll do – it's a different meal.
What, do you carry it in your vest pocket?
No, no.
No, I have it here at my private office.
And my main trick, and I say this to all my kids, it's so important.
It's vitally important.
If you've gotten delivery pho, it's so important that you fill a one liter lab beaker with the broth.
And you heat that up for two to six minutes.
until it is boiling.
Because you're going to put that over cold ingredients in a cold bowl.
I see what you're saying.
You know what I'm saying?
And it's raw meat.
If you're getting thaw, there's some really weird-ass cow parts in there.
God bless them.
But I take out the tripe personally.
But I'm not a fan of the tripe, which I know makes me a little bit inauthentic, a little bit of a fake pho girl.
But I do put that over the raw meat.
It's like ribeye.
It's like very thinly sliced ribeye, but it is raw.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
It's raw.
So you've got to heat that up, I guess.
I mean, it never occurred to me.
But yeah, you're right.
That's all I've got to say about that.
But you can put in a little bit of this leaf, a little bit of that leaf.
Have as much or as little cilantro as you want.
Here's the wonderful thing about being a dad for me, because I like to make a pho preparation that's quite elaborate.
And now, my daughter gets a bowl of pho, which they recognize that they're dealing with a child that's protesting because she doesn't want to get pho because it tastes like flowers.
And...
And so they always bring her a bowl that has extra noodles in it.
Yeah.
When we get this, my kid has part of our meal.
She basically has a half portion of rice noodles with a little bit of broth.
It's basically noodles in a bowl.
Noodles in a bowl.
So now I do my pho preparation, which is very involved.
A little bit of plum sauce, a little bit of...
fish sauce some salt and pepper then you have to crunch up the you gotta personally grab if you like the cilantro is like i yes i i pluck all my cilantro's i personally i do cheat a little bit i use a pair of very sharp scissors to cut up the peppers i also add lime juice my own lime juice that i have here no i'm doing this all by hand doing it all by hand yeah oh no chompers then i also wash my hands while while the broth is heating i go and wash my hands so i don't accidentally burn my eye
You got to wash your hands.
Well, you got to wash your hands before and after because for me, when I pick up the giant portion of sprouted seeds, what are those?
Those are bean sprouts.
Bean sprouts.
I've always done this from the very beginning.
I pick them up and I crunch them all apart between my hands.
I'm going to do that.
So that I make them smaller.
I crunch them.
I like crumbling up a big piece of paper.
And then they tumble into the bowl.
You're really eating it more like soup.
Yes.
I treat it as a bowl of meat that's wet.
I eat mostly with a fork.
No, I do it with the – oh, I make the whole soup.
But what I'm saying is now that my daughter gets a bowl of extra noodles, in addition to all the other stuff, I also have more noodles and broth.
You get bonus noodles, bonus broth.
That's right.
So as I eat the soup – see, we sow the soup and nature grows the soup.
Mm-hmm.
I eat the soup, but then I can continue to add additional soup components that weren't in the initial layer of components.
It's an evolution.
It's an evolution of soup.
It's like, oh, guess what?
Guess who has more soup now?
This guy.
That's right.
And I could eat a lot of this pho soup.
Yeah, just so you know you've got about an hour and eight minutes.
I have an hour and eight minutes to either.
Yeah.
So when I get off of this, am I understanding correctly that noon is the deadline for both things?
I mean, literally your, your, your advertising dim summit is at noon.
And if I understand correctly, noon is also the cutoff point for things like your, your normal breakfast and stuff like that.
Right.
And you were to have had, I don't know if you, I don't know if we ever got to, did you get your bespoke liquid, but you're supposed to have already started drinking that.
No.
When I get off of this program, I'm going to walk upstairs, I'm going to have one more cup of coffee, and then I'll walk out the door and I will decide if I turn right, I can make it to dim sum by noon.
If I turn left, I'm going to the pharmacy to get the potion.
It really comes down to that.
It's a noon decision.
Okay.
Wow.
Okay.
And where I'm standing, I feel like
I tried to get the medical professionals to wave me off.
You gave them every opportunity.
To give me a yellow card, whatever it was, to give me a get out of jail free, to give me a white ribbon, whatever I was looking for.
I tried to get them to do it.
And the resolutely positive and capable professional people that I talked to on the phone this morning both gave me the green light.
Everything was on path.
go to the pharmacy, get the potion, start taking it.
According to Merlin, then you can't go further than 15 feet from your bathroom for the rest of the day and tomorrow.
This might be a good day for Infinite Jest.
And then I'm going to go in a car.
I'm going to lay down on a bed or something.
And they're going to do unspeakable things.
And I don't take a lot of medicine because, oh, did I tell you?
The other day was my sober birthday, and it was my 25th.
My 25th sober birthday.
That's a lot of years.
That was one week ago.
One week ago today.
And I almost always forget it, but I got a couple of nice messages from people that were like, hey, look at you.
And I was like, oh, yeah.
What do you know?
What do you know about them apples?
And I didn't say anything more about it because it always feels a little bit personal, but it was like, hmm, yeah.
Yeah.
But when I think about going to the thing where they're like, oh, don't worry about it.
It's not that uncomfortable.
We just put drugs in you and you don't feel the fact that we're like all up inside you.
I'm like, well, but the drugs don't really do those.
Now, it might be a thing where they're like, it's not that kind of drugs.
But you're saying it's Michael Jackson drugs.
No, not necessarily.
But, I mean, I don't want to go into my history, but it's bleak.
But when I've had to do these things in the past, I don't know.
It's a weird combination of, like, I think...
See, I don't even know.
I mean, I'm not as caught up as I should be, but I don't know.
I think they prefer, you know how it is with doctors.
They would prefer to, this is what we learned, you know, from MASH, like how difficult it is to be what they call a gas passer.
We know, we've learned, what was his name?
Spirit Chucker John, what was his name?
The guy who was the anesthesiologist?
Not Trapper John, but the other guy.
Spirit Chucker?
Anyway, we learn that anesthesiology is a very complex and potentially hazardous thing.
You want to give people the minimum amount.
You're really trying to thread a needle.
You want to give somebody the minimum amount of whatever they need to not feel pain or to perhaps be...
in sort of a dreamy waking state or a fully knocked out state.
But my understanding... They're already threading the needle here.
I mean, I feel like that's the whole process.
The needle is literally what is being threaded.
That's why you're getting... I'm the needle.
You're the needle and they're the thread.
Now lay down on this special bed.
And so I think what they try to do is the minimally invasive and dangerous thing to get you into the condition.
You see this with a dentist where like they prefer to just give you a shot in your gums on this side.
They don't want to have to knock you all the way out.
I'm not saying your only choice is the Michael Jackson drugs.
Um, but what I'm trying, what I was trying to get at, and I, I'm not trying to put you off this cause I think you're going to have a lot of fun.
Um, I think it's, it's that you, you seem like a person who would be reluctant to say, Hey, could you just knock me out for this?
For sure.
Right.
And I think you'd be almost as resistant to say, well, can you give me something to make me a little dreamy?
Well, the only reason I'm doing this because of discomfort,
Well, but you know how I am with discomfort.
I feel like most of the discomfort that I experience in life I've earned somehow.
And maybe... If nobody else will scald your balls, you should.
That's what Ben Franklin said.
But I feel like here's the other equation that's factoring in here.
Every time I eat dim sum, I think at some level...
About the damage I'm doing to my colon.
Oh, really?
In the sense that... Okay.
I eat whatever.
Uh-huh.
Yeah.
And I eat whatever...
Also at whatever o'clock, you know, like, is it, is it eight o'clock in the morning?
I will eat the pizza that's under the bed.
I will order a roast beef sandwich.
Is it 11 o'clock at night?
I'll eat 40 pancakes or I'll put dim sum in me at any hour of the day or night.
I will eat, uh, I will eat anything basically except olives and potatoes.
You don't like potatoes.
Don't even put them on the plate.
I don't want them there.
Can I substitute noodles?
Can I substitute a pancake?
Can I get a bowl of fruit?
Can I get a side salad?
Whatever it is that you have instead of potatoes, except for, here's what I won't accept, cottage cheese.
Oh, please.
Because keep your cottage cheese.
Are we still doing that?
And here's another one.
If you go into a restaurant where the waitresses have blue hair, sometimes they'll say sliced tomatoes.
Would you like sliced tomatoes instead?
Maybe some Melba toast and a lean patty.
What is this, 1978?
Give me a fucking fresco.
What's happening?
I will have a sliced peach half.
I like a peach.
I like a peach.
Well, but only because how often do you see one but sliced tomatoes?
That's not a substitute for potatoes.
But I feel like I have done so many bad things in life.
And that actually, in a way, in the same way that I'm waiting for the grays to rebuild me from the ground up, one of the things that I always imagined the grays would do is replace...
whatever the lining of my of my insides you want to be pink pink and fresh i want it to be back to being pink and fresh yeah and so and and since i've scheduled this thing i've been walking around part of what is panicking me is who knows maybe it's full of polyps maybe i'm maybe i'm already dead no you're fine you know you'll be fine it's just it's just a precaution maybe i got 10 000 cancers in there
Maybe I only have one.
Oh, it only takes one.
Yeah.
No, no, no, I think you'll be fine.
Don't think that way.
You're going to be fine.
What if they go in there and they're like, we see every dim sum you ever had.
Oh, where it becomes like sin.
Yeah, right.
Like we know the troubles you've seen, but also we know the crimes you've committed.
Yeah.
It's a very medieval idea of like, you know, the reason that you're such a misshapen grotesquery is because of your sin and everyone in the village knows it.
That's right.
That's right.
They say all the time, people say, here's one thing that people say to me, you know, you can have a low level infection for a long time and it affects your health.
People say that to you a lot.
I'm like, a low level infection?
Who wants that?
Where would I be harboring it?
I will only accept a high level infection.
Yeah, thanks.
I don't want some, what do you mean?
Like in my ear somewhere?
Like where is it?
Are they implying that you're some kind of a carrier that you're like an HPV or something?
What does that mean?
Yeah.
No, they're not actually even saying it to me.
It's just something I pick up in conversation.
People talk a lot about a low-level infection that you could have and not know.
Yeah, low-level infection, something, some problem in your blood or something, maybe something in your colon.
Oh, you know what they're saying?
It's inflammation.
That's what they say.
Oh, I see.
Which I equate with a low-level infection.
I think inflammation is from unresolved grief.
But I don't know for sure.
Well, we all have that, don't we?
Yes, yes.
Don't we need to get our cries?
Well, I mean, a cry is one way.
I think you've got to have a positive attitude about this.
With all of that said, I'm very interested in this idea that when we're done here, and we should wrap in a few minutes so you have ample time to get your coffee.
But I'm just very intrigued by that idea that literally, if I'm understanding you correctly, just so our listeners understand, I'm going to put a point on this.
Until you walk out the door and step outside and presumably decide to go left or right, you literally don't know which way you're going to go as we sit here.
Is that correct?
I am Heisenberg's colon.
Or my colon is Heisenberg's colon.
It could be in a quantum colon state where you won't know.
Four hours from now, my colon could be so full of dim sum that I can barely walk comfortably.
Or it could be full of some crazy potion that I get at the doctor's office, in which case, according to you, I will also have trouble walking around properly.
Well, I think you should, you know, bring a book no matter what, you know?
I mean, I always carry a book.
I carry a book and a little shaker of MSG, both in the waistcoat, in my waistcoat pocket.
It's so cute.
It's got a little panda on it.
It's really cute.
Along with my, my grandfather's, my grandfather's watch.
Man, this paddle ball game, my favorite chair.
So I, I, but I definitely, I don't normally have anxiety, anxiety of, about, about stuff, you know, about like, oh, I mean, I have the, I have, I have that thing where I don't want to go on stage after I've promised that I will.
Hey, you know, we talked a little bit earlier on this program about not wanting to do stuff anymore.
Yeah.
I was down in L.A.
last week and there were like a lot of different events.
That are the type of thing that it's like, I'm in L.A., so I should go this, I should do that, I should see this person.
I just skipped them all.
Yep, yep.
I should do a lot of things.
Skipped them all to sit in the lobby of my hotel and read issues of art and architecture from 1952 that they just had lying around.
Whoa.
I was sitting in the lobby just sort of waiting for the day to be over.
And I looked down and I was like, what the hell is that?
It's like some kind of hipster.
And it was better than that.
They had gone on the line and had found, I guess...
a cache of early 50s art and architecture, arts and architecture, or art and architecture, magazines where it's just like, look at this new thing we developed.
It's the open plan house.
Yeah, it's a cantilever.
It's a chair that looks like a vagina.
And then there were pictures of Mrs. Cleaver holding up a roast.
And she was like, it's so much easier to make my roast in this house.
That would serve me well at sea.
Sure.
It's all, it's all, my house is all windows.
You can see my roast from the house next door.
And I was like, whoa, this is the world that I've been trying to enter into.
And here I am in a hipster LA hotel.
It was, it's worse than hipster.
It was a Euro trash hotel.
Oh, was there EDM?
Like gentle EDM?
No, well, pretty much.
I said to the people behind me.
Or was it all like Francois Hardy or something like that?
It was, it was that.
I said, I said to the, like the people behind the counter were,
All had accents and they all seemed like they were from they were all from like Tunisia.
And I said, what's the story with this hotel?
And the woman said, it's the only one of its kind in America, but there are many around the world.
I said, is that a Spanish accent?
And she was like, no, it is not.
It's something else.
But I think I'm going to tell you right now.
If you're able to find the combination that I have here for my speech, I will give you a complimentary croissant.
And then so I got in the elevator at one point and there were a bunch of people speaking animated French.
And so the next time I was at the front desk, I said, what's the story?
Is there a French connection?
Wink, wink.
And she said, it is a French hotel.
We have we have them in Prague and in Botswana.
But this is the only one in America.
It's the sort of person where everything they say, it's implied that no matter how much I explain this to you, you still won't understand.
If you haven't been to our location, Frog, then you don't understand the hotel.
But this is our American one.
We'll be like somebody coming up to you and going like, oh, so you use your music like jazz?
And you'd be like, hmm.
Wait, here's the thing.
Here was the ultimate culture clash about this hotel.
I got in.
So first of all, their TV was a Mac.
And it had a remote, a proprietary remote of some kind that looked like a turtle.
Okay.
and you push the button and the computer comes on and then you but but it's not a computer you can't just like is this in your room room there's a mac for a tv and it's the tv and so i'm like all right well what do you got here and it's like do you want to go on the internet i'm like not very much do you want to watch netflix and then i navigate to a screen and it's like here's what you can watch tv
movies, porn.
And it said, it said free triple X porn.
What?
What?
That seems off brand to me.
Free, triple X, and I was like, free?
I've been staying in hotels for a long time, my friend, and they have had porn in them for a long time, but it's never free.
This is like a cash earner for them, right?
It's $25.
That's like a jumbo shrimp, you know, military intelligence type thing.
If it's free, it's probably not triple.
Triple X, you know, that is a non-standard, non-industry definition.
It just means there's going to be some serious beavers, I think is what it means.
Well,
Well, but when we were little, there were three separate Xs, right?
There was X, there was double X. That's marketing.
I don't think there is canonical.
I think there's X as an MPAA rating.
But triple X, I mean, could you have five Xs?
Hmm.
It's like three black diamond, two black diamonds?
Oh, you're talking about the ski porn.
Yeah, one black diamond.
Blue circle, blue diamonds.
Yep, yep, yep.
It's a blue square and a green circle or a black diamond.
Woo-hoo!
But if you have two black diamonds.
Black diamonds!
Is that where that comes from?
Is that where the Kiss song comes from?
No.
Can't be.
No.
No.
Kiss has never been skiing.
Out of the street for a living.
I would love to see.
Oh, as a special feature of this Pauline Halloween episode, we're going to go skiing with Kiss.
All right!
All right!
Woo!
I want to know how many of you like to get on the slopes.
Woo!
And they wouldn't have winter clothes on, or would they?
No, they'd just be in their kiss outfits.
The dragon boots?
Gene would be in giant ski boots, giant ski boots, and really short skis.
I'd just love to see him on the chairlift just looking evil, like the blood coming out.
But now I'm very curious, because I think original X, the number one X, just one X,
was a rating that was given to movies like Caligula, right?
Where there was a plot, but there was also sex.
It was too much sex for an R. Right.
And then Double X was like, not so much plot, more sex than plot.
And then Triple X was just like, this is just sex.
There's no plot.
Okay.
I don't think that's real.
I think what happened, you know what, now I'm just saying facts.
Who cares?
But like Midnight Cowboy came along and for its time, it was considered, you know, too racy even for an R. I think that was the first mainstream non-strictly porn movie that had an X, I think.
is that right midnight cowboy i believe so i'm curious yellow was like the first like breakthrough like normal people go see porn porn but i i don't i don't um boy i just can't stop thinking about kiss um so x wait how did we get to this what were we oh oh so sorry your your mac your mac in low room um has free triple x porn and i shot that it's a virus i'll bet it's a virus
But it's on their Mac.
That's true.
That wouldn't be smart.
And it's in their own... So I was like, let's see what's going on.
And I clicked on it.
And then it was like, do you want free XXX porn or do you want free XXX gay porn?
And I was like, you can have either kind?
Seems a little normative.
What sort of... Well, I mean, I don't know.
How many kinds of porn are there?
I think you come to that crossroads, that's like a dim sum...
versus colonoscopy crossroads too it's like which way do you go here yeah you're gonna find stuff you're gonna like on either side of this but these two things are divided yeah but i mean it's a little bit like one of those unisex you know bathroom signs that has a squid on it it's like well you know i guess you could also say straight porn but so now you're now you're deciding which way is it going to be the lady or the tiger what triple x will i click on
What'd you go with?
If I can ask.
Well, you know me.
I went to both.
I was like, let's see what's over here.
Let's see what's over there.
This is what separates you from the snorks.
You will go to both.
I went to both.
And, you know, of course, these days, anyway, if you're staying in a French hotel that's populated by Algerians and offers free porn, if you click on the porn link, all of the titles are going to be MILF-based porn.
It's all about like, oh, I'm just a...
I just walked in and there was a mom there and she was bad mom or whatever.
You know, it's all about moms.
Yes.
Um, anyway, so I, I navigated away from the free porn cause I didn't, it's not, you know, just, I was there.
There's only so many hours in the day.
Yeah.
I was going to, I went back down to the lobby and read art and architectures.
Fine.
I think you chose well.
Yeah.
What I didn't do was go meet my friends or go to their events and,
Was this related to the Marc Maron dance group?
Was this related to Crackin' Nuts or that was exclusively in Seattle?
No.
So this is something different.
The thing I went to Los Angeles about, I had to sign a non-disclosure agreement.
That's fine.
Don't worry about it.
But I never do it.
I never do that.
If they say, sign this NDA, I'm like, or what?
It's not like they bar you at the door.
They pretend they will.
Okay, so I know it has a door.
Okay.
there was a door okay that's not that's enough said there's big door big door people can try but i went to the thing i went to the thing that i went there to do see be careful buddy be careful i don't want you i don't want you i don't want you on the bubble for a big lawsuit okay okay are they just you know you don't even say don't even say sure okay sure okay okay okay okay oh this this show would get shut down they would come i don't want that i like doing this show headquarters
Nope.
And they would slap an injunction on the door of it.
Oh, no.
Imagine Roderick on the line.
You come home, there's a big, ugly sticker that says injunction on it right on your podcast.
That would suck.
It would be an injunction junction.
Yeah.
You've already said too much.