Ep. 381: "Slots in Some Imaginary Future"
Hello.
Hi, John.
Hi, Merlin.
How's it going?
Oh, boom.
Do you get songs in your head?
Of course.
I don't know.
I mean, I know you're not a fan, but I mean, like, I'm very triggered by audio things where I'll get a song in my head.
An obvious example is twice in the last week, I've heard someone sing a little of the song Belle from Beauty and the Beast.
Hmm.
And now that's just in my head all the time.
Aww.
You know the song I'm talking about?
Nope.
Oh.
There goes the baker with his tray like always.
The same old bread and rolls to sell.
Nope.
Can't say that I know that.
It kind of sounds like a Morrissey song.
Every morning just the same since the morning that we came to this poor provincial town.
I know for a fact that you have Morrissey songs stuck in your head.
I know that for a fact.
Yes, I get Morrissey cadences in my head.
But that's actually a very good example of this larger phenomenon.
And yes, I've talked about this in different places because it's part of my life and that's what I talk about.
What I'm here to say is that sometimes there will be a certain rhythm to how someone says something.
Hmm.
That will trigger a phrase or a song.
And sometimes it won't be until a few hours later that I go, huh, why do I have this song in my head?
And then I have to go kind of backtrack to figure out where it came from.
What stimulated me to have that in my head.
Do you have these things?
Does this happen to you?
Well...
I mean, I get songs stuck in my head.
Yeah.
I think you're being nice and you're not – I think you're my friend, I hope.
And you're avoiding saying the obvious thing, which is I'm out of my fucking mind.
You don't think I'm out of my fucking mind?
The other day I was sitting in the living room and my daughter was sort of working on something.
She was absently just sort of humming a thing.
Yeah.
And I kind of zoomed in on what she was doing and she was humming 99 bottles of beer on the wall.
Jeez.
And had been doing it for a long time.
Do you think she was keeping a count?
I'm not sure.
Yeah.
But it seemed like of all the things to get stuck in your head, you know, take one down, pass it around just over and over there.
That would be a maddening loop.
But, you know, she's a young person, so I don't think that they I don't think that things make them insane yet.
No, you could just sit and do that.
Ninety nine bottles of beer on the wall for two hours and and just be fine.
You know, not not want to pull your ears off.
Yeah.
And then sometimes I'll pivot.
Sometimes I'll start, I'll get one song in my head and then that sounds like another song.
And then I make kind of a girl talk style mashup in my head of those two songs.
And then that's stuck there for a while.
Do you have a song that you go to when you're trying to get a song that's stuck in your head out of your head?
Oh, I know there's one that exists that everybody says.
I don't.
I should.
Do you?
Do you have a cleanser?
I always try and go to a Beatles song.
I always try and do help or she loves you or something.
Something that I know really well and it's really catchy and I can try and get going and get owner of a lonely heart or whatever it is that's been in my head for a month.
Why you got to do me like that?
Get it out.
And so it's just like, I need somebody.
Much better than a...
Lose yourself.
You always live your life.
I am bringing in my sampling keyboard.
What is that?
Pryosinclavir?
What do you think that is?
It's got that famous sample that everybody used for a while.
The orchestra stab, is that what it's called?
Something like that.
But there's something pretty rad about it.
You know the ZZ Top Eliminator album?
Oh, man.
Which reputedly involved – I think the story is now – I'm going to get this all mixed up because I haven't been –
I haven't been up on the latest ZZ Top gossip.
But my understanding was that Frank Beard...
got an owie of some kind or was somehow unable to do the drumming job.
That's why they used that drum sound?
So they started using the drum sound and then they were like, hey, this drum sounds great.
And then Frank Beard was like, wait a minute.
Hey.
I didn't want to – it's not like I wanted to be just playing along with a drum machine.
If you look at those guys when they're on stage, they don't seem to enjoy –
each other very much.
And Frank Beard, more than any of them, just doesn't seem happy.
He doesn't seem to want to be there.
For some reason, I don't know.
They're playing, they're chugling.
I mean, if I chugled that hard, I don't know.
I wouldn't want to be anywhere else.
For our younger listeners, please tell our younger listeners what's interesting about the drummer of ZZ Top, Frank Beard.
Oh, he's the only one without a beard.
He's the only one without a beard.
Isn't that great?
Isn't that great?
Isn't that wild?
Now, the other two guys have beards and their guitars can spin around.
Some of them can.
Fur ones and stuff.
But, you know, ZZ Top is just as susceptible as any other band from the late 60s to having furry guitars and to deciding at some point that they weren't going to play through amps anymore.
I mean, they've done everything that Weezer's done.
Sure.
To this day, what's his name?
River Phoenix.
He still plays his guitar with a peso.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
Because of Billy Gibbons?
Yeah.
So that was run over by a train.
Yeah.
Billy Gibbons.
Oh, wow.
Wow, wow, wow.
So you get a little bit of sharpness to it.
I just invented the train.
Oh, come on.
You're having fun now.
But do you remember after their groundbreaking album...
That included so many hit songs like Sharp Dressed Man and She's a Lady or whatever.
And that record was called Eliminator.
An out of nowhere hit.
That was at once such a ZZ Top record, but also like, what the hell?
Why are there so many synthesizers on a ZZ Top album?
How, how, how?
Really incredible.
How did you make, how did you make like a country pick in Texas blues?
Like a boogie, a boogie synthesizer record.
And yet it's all synthed out and drum machines everywhere.
It was genius.
Totally genius.
But then they followed it up with a record called Afterburner.
And this record came out, so I'm going to out myself.
I was a big ZZ Top fan, and I really liked Eliminator, even though most of the time when a really good band comes out with a super pop record right in the middle of the 80s, I was going to line up against it every time.
Oh, see, also Rush.
I got good and mad about Signals.
I was a big Def Leppard fan, and I did not like Pyromania.
I didn't like In Excess Kick.
I did not like YouTube.
I'm with you.
When I saw Let It Go, when I saw Bring It On The Heartbreak, I saw your toots about this.
I was exactly the same.
I was like, what is this magic?
It's incredible.
They're incredible records.
And then they re-released Bringing On The Heartbreak with that weird synthesizer.
What was that?
The drummer lost his arm, so we got to, like, you know, we're back.
I wouldn't say I lost it.
Yeah, no, that was terrible.
And they had to give him special drums.
This Afterburner record, it was one of those things where the day it came out,
You remember those MTV events where you were like, oh my God, today's the day.
Tonight at 8 o'clock, the world premiere of the new ZZ Top song, Sleeping Back.
Yeah, yeah.
And you'd all get around the team.
You remember when Jazz and for, just not to change topic, but for example, do you remember when Jazz and for Blue Jean came out?
Far from my favorite David Bowie song, but it was a whole event and he had makeup and it was a production.
Only the Lonely Motels.
This was art at the time.
It was pretty startling, pretty, you know, considering that his makeup for the rest of that album, Bowie's, was like his most regular.
He just had a regular haircut and a suit and was looking, you know, he was looking pretty normal.
for Bowie, and then all of a sudden that Blue Jean video came out, and oh, man, it was so sexy and scary.
I do remember the event.
I remember the eventfulness, and again, for the youths.
I mean, we grew up with radio, and you'd sit around waiting for the song you liked to come on, but I mean, every minute, there was times when we had cable, we didn't have cable.
At one point, my grandma had cable, and we didn't, but you had to drag me out the door
to get me to stop watching MTV because there's a handful of videos.
They didn't play very much.
And if they did play it, if they played out of man, stand and deliver, like that was the highlight of my week.
You know what I'm saying?
Oh, I do.
I've, I've said it on this program before, but, uh, but captain sensible's what?
Yes.
What?
It had me rooted to the, to the floor until I realized they were never going to play.
Did you know he invented rapping with that?
Interesting.
Yeah.
I thought Dylan invented rapping.
So ZZ Cop, sorry.
Anyways, this record came out.
I was front and center for it.
It was not, you know, being a fan of Eliminator.
You know how this was in the 80s.
There were a lot of bands that you liked, but you couldn't quite rep.
Or at least in my culture, I couldn't wear a ZZ Top Eliminator shirt.
Just a couple years before this, I deeply, deeply loved two albums by Hall & Oates.
And later I came to love their back catalog.
But by the time that Maneater came out, it was not very cool to like Hall & Oates.
Yeah.
Couldn't.
No.
That's right.
You could like that one Christmas video, but then you got G.E.
Smith up there hamming it up.
But still, but I take your point.
There's these bands where you're like, yeah, I like them.
It's good.
It's comfort food for me, but I don't feel cool about it.
So I was in... I took a...
I like line readings.
This episode of Roderick on the line is brought to you by Squarespace.
You can learn more about Squarespace right now by visiting squarespace.com slash super train friends.
There's so much that you can do with Squarespace and
In the main, I will say that you're going to use it to create a beautiful website.
That's what they do.
That's Squarespace.
But you're going to turn your cool idea into a new website.
You can showcase your work.
You can publish a blog or put up other kinds of internet content.
You can sell products and services of all kinds, promote your physical or online business.
You can announce an upcoming event or a special project and so much more.
You can do this all, right from your computer or from your connected device, as they say.
And you're going to put that on Squarespace.
Now, how do they do that?
Well, Squarespace does this by giving you beautiful templates created by world-class designers, powerful e-commerce functionality that lets you sell anything online, the ability to customize the look and feel, settings, products, and more with just a few clicks, literally just a few clicks, and
Of course, everything is optimized for mobile right out of the box.
I love that you can preview what your page will look like on different devices, but it's responsive, so it works on every dingus.
You can tell them I said so.
Squarespace also has a new way to buy domains.
You can choose from over 200 domain name extensions.
They offer analytics that help you grow in real-time, built-in search engine optimization, free and secure hosting with nothing to patch or upgrade ever,
And, of course, they have their 24 by 7 award-winning customer support.
Make it stand out.
Stand out with a beautiful website.
Build it beautiful, as we used to say.
You know, I'm a big fan of Squarespace.
And you're using Squarespace right now by listening to the Roderick on the Line podcast because all our stuff is on Squarespace.
Like, all of it.
The things.
It's all on Squarespace.
So be like us.
Most like me.
John doesn't really do much with this.
I mean, you know, he's the heart of the show, but I do...
A lot of the heavy lifting along with Squarespace.
So here's what you do.
You go to squarespace.com slash super train and get yourself a free trial.
And when you're ready to launch, use the offer code super train to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain.
They've been great to us.
They've been great to me.
Please go to squarespace.com slash super train and use that offer code super train for 10% off.
Our thanks to Squarespace for supporting Roderick Online and all the great shows.
You know, I wasn't very successful in high school.
And that manifests itself in a lot of different ways.
But primarily in the sciences.
Because in the arts, even though I got bad grades, every time they tried to, and I'm talking about when I say they, I mean the man.
I knew what you meant.
When they tried to break me down.
When they tried.
They sure tried.
When they saw me getting high and they tried to knock me down.
And they put me in.
What they would do is they'd try to encourage me.
Through negative reinforcement, they tried to encourage me to do better by trying to put me in classes that were beneath my rating, beneath my dignity.
Beneath your station.
And the idea that I would be so – that I would be so enraged at being in like a regular English class that it would inspire me to work hard.
And they tried that a couple of times and they realized that that just was not a strategy because what I did was I destroyed the class that they put me in.
I made it impossible for anyone to learn.
And so they couldn't keep – so they had to leave me up in the upper arts classes.
But the sciences, they could do this because the sciences they had – it was –
Science.
And you have to do science.
You can't just like... I'm sorry, real quick in passing.
You just triggered my Thomas Dolby.
Science!
Here's the word.
So they're trying to stimulate you to be the you that you can be.
Not a complete success.
Well, no, but they're also... This was the 80s, and they're just trying to punish you.
They don't know what else to do, so they're just trying to punish you.
And so they put me in...
a chemistry class that was not the upper – it was not AP chemistry, right?
It was not chemistry where my friends were.
It was chemistry – it was rocks for jocks.
It was chemistry for regulars.
And it's strange to reflect upon like the social division in high school –
Where I showed up for this regular chemistry class and I felt like I was in a different school entirely.
Like it was just down the hall from the AP chemistry class.
But all my friends were in the AP chemistry class and none – and I knew no one.
I'd never seen any of these kids before.
There were 30 kids in this class.
I'd never laid eyes on them.
Wow.
And I walked in and sat down and I felt like I had been sent to a gulag.
And it was just a regular – it wasn't a remedial class.
It was just a regular – That's how I felt about eighth grade math.
This is when I just officially stopped trying.
And I was so insulted by my placement that I undid myself for years with my behavior.
Right.
Right.
And it's crazy now to look back at –
And think like, you know, just take chemistry.
It's not – chemistry isn't really even what you care about, but it's not hard.
You just sit and do it, you know.
But that was what my dad used to say to me.
Just do it.
And I'd be like, I don't know.
I don't know why I can't, but I'm not going to.
Anyway, I sat in this class and for I think a whole semester, I was in this –
room with just normal students from East High.
Snorks.
Snorks.
And I gradually came to kind of like it there because it didn't – there wasn't the super competition that was among my friends.
And my friends were incredibly competitive with one another.
We were always putting each other down.
We were always like not pranking but just –
You never, never could let your guard down with each other.
But I mean, we loved each other, but, but we were vicious to each other, you know?
And in this place, it was just sort of like everybody was just trying to do chemistry.
Everybody was just trying to get through this chemistry class.
Like there were no whizzes.
Nobody was going to end up getting a PhD in chemistry in this room.
You know, it wasn't, we weren't all competing for the, for a few slots in some imaginary future.
It was just 30 kids all trying to go get through chemistry.
And my lab partner was this girl that she had like kind of a new wave haircut and she wore a denim jacket.
And, and when I was first paired with her, I was like, snork, like look at this regular girl who's just wearing, just wearing a regular new wave haircut and,
And she had a ZZ Top Eliminator pin on her jacket.
Whoa.
And I was dumbfounded by this.
Like, who is repping that?
Like, the pin that you... If you're going to wear a pin on a denim jacket, it's going to have to encapsulate...
Your whole thing, right?
It's the ultimate example of, in some ways, of don't put anything on that jacket that you don't want to talk about or explain.
Do you know what I mean?
It's basically you're wearing a lot of invitations to ask you about your life and preferences.
That's right.
And if your one pin is the clash...
Oh, yeah.
It's like – You're probably Ted Leo.
I get it.
You're Ted Leo.
Right.
Did I ever tell you we were – the first time we met Nada Surf, we were on tour and they were on tour and we connected somewhere out in the world.
Like their van pulled into the parking lot of a –
a diner somewhere and our van pulled in and we were going to begin some dates together with Sandra Lerke.
And this was our first meeting and we like climb out and we're shaking hands.
So hang on though.
This was, was it sort of, um, were they, you were both on Barsook at this point.
They had just, we, our first record had just come out and they're, they had just joined Barsook.
Okay.
And so, uh,
So we're standing there shaking hands and Matthew is really great about like, hey, I've been listening to your record and I really like it.
He's such a sweet man.
I was like, wow, thank you.
Nice to meet you.
We can't wait to do these shows together.
And then Daniel Lorca.
I'm sorry.
I'm sweeping away my imaginary dreadlocks as I lazily smoke a cigarette.
Smoking a cigarette.
And he walks over and he's like, hello, it's nice to meet you.
Yes, I am from Europe.
And he's wearing a denim jacket and he's got one pin on it.
And I look at the pin and I say, you know, I'm making conversation just as you said.
You don't wear a thing on your jacket.
We don't want to talk about it.
Right.
And I was like, oh, what's your pin say?
And Daniel takes a drag.
He goes, The Clash.
The only band that matters.
But it's in Spanish?
No, but he says it like this.
The only band that matters.
And then he turns on his heel and he walks off.
And Sean...
Sean just exploded.
His eyes rolled around in his head.
It sounded like he had just run the pool table.
It sounded like a bowling alley re-racking.
And Sean just couldn't – and I didn't even – I'd never – I don't think I'd ever even heard that phrase, the only band that matters.
So I was sitting thinking about it like The Clash is the only band that matters.
And Sean was like, no, no, no, no.
That's a thing.
That's a thing.
That's the equivalent of Vera Clapton as God at the time.
Yeah, right.
Right.
And then – oh, but Sean never let it go.
If you were to walk up to Sean right now and say Daniel Lorca, he would say, the only band that matters.
Became a real – and that clash button, right?
That was that – that's exactly what – I'm sure Ted Leo has one on his suit jacket.
Absolutely.
But this girl had ZZ Top Eliminator.
Like who –
Who wants to talk about that record as the thing that they want to talk about?
But so I was in this class, this class of snorks down in the regulars, feeling like I had been banished to a faraway place.
And yet...
Here my lab partner was this girl that unabashedly repped Eliminator, an album that I could only secretly like.
Because if I had had an Eliminator pin on, I would have been ripped to shreds by my friends.
Right.
Like, Eliminator?
Yeah, yeah.
John Mulaney has a funny bit about this, about, like, if people, you know, are bullying you and, you know, making fun of you, like, oh, you mean, like, friends?
It's like, no, no, no.
But, you know, oh, yeah, you mean, like, friends?
It's true.
You probe one another's vulnerabilities, and then that becomes a bit.
And then that gets built upon, and miniature legends...
develop over time in the way that you give and get with your pals.
Even though you, as you say, love each other, it's also very important that you always continue probing vulnerabilities.
Yeah, absolutely.
And we have probably 20% of the catchphrases my friends in high school had were, I mean, I'm talking about memes that we still use, were digs at each other.
Like, uh, like Rick Garnett and I were having an argument in the hall one day about, uh, about Jack Kemp's economic policies or something.
And Rick's made some assertion that I knew was false.
And I was like, uh, read up on it, Rick.
And read up on it became a thing that we would say to each other.
Like, why don't you read up on it?
Yeah.
Read up on it.
Anyway, over the course of this, of this semester, uh,
in this class, I grew to really like this girl.
And she wasn't sophisticated.
Is this pre-Kelly?
No.
This is... Kelly and I are now in a... After the summer of junior year, Kelly and I were very joined at the hip.
And it got to be too much.
And
I've been thinking about this a lot.
Kelly worked at the Nordstrom Cafe, which was a very good place to work if you were a teenage girl.
You only really need to sell one of those cookie recipes a month.
Well, and the Nordstrom Cafe was the place that the ladies who lunched went to lunch.
And, you know, and it was it was during the Fern Bar era.
So you could get like tea there.
And but it wasn't just Lipton's, you know, and she wore and everybody.
Oh, this was the era when one waiters and waitresses in restaurants like that.
all wore unisex, like white shirt, black bow tie, green apron.
So it was kind of, uh, what would it, androgynous, uh, but classy, but classy in a fit in a fancy way.
But Kelly and I, at the end of that summer broke up and broke up because, you know, and I, I told the story so many times in the, in the day, I haven't told it in 25 years, but I,
At the time, I said – and this is the problem.
It's like a photograph of you as a kid.
If you looked at it enough times, you don't remember whether you remember it or you remember the photo.
Right.
But I said – I started to say like, hey, I'm going to go meet up with Kevin and Rick and we're going to go out with Jim McNeil and we're going to drag them all or whatever.
And she would say, okay, well, I'll just wait here for you to get back.
And I would say, well, I mean, we're going to be dragging them all afternoon.
Why don't you like go hang out with your friends?
And she would say, man, I don't really want to hang out with my friends.
I'll just wait for you to get back.
And Kelly was the, she was the president of the junior class.
She was, you know, the, she was a big wheel and she just got very domestic and
And it freaked me out.
And all of these things that I've spent the rest of my life feeling like were true of me, that I was an introvert, that I didn't want – that I felt pressured by other people's love.
I didn't like to accept compliments.
I don't want –
to owe anybody anything.
I don't want to be watched.
When I was 15, I didn't have any of that.
I didn't, I had no awareness of it if I did because nobody had ever watched me or shown me any love or given me any compliments or wanted to wait for me anywhere or, you know, and in this first relationship, I,
a first relationship that I really had desired and pursued and, and spent six months just in this, in this idyllic place.
It came to an end.
I broke up with her because I felt like she needed to, uh, like she was,
too possessive or not possessive.
She was just, she didn't want to do anything, but, but be in a relationship.
Right.
She was, she was majoring in you.
Yeah.
And, and the whole reason that I was, that I had not the whole reason, but you know, I'd been fascinated by her because she was so independent and so, uh, powerful.
She was, she was the, the most powerful girl in the school.
And I didn't understand it, and I didn't... You know, I wanted to go drag them all with Jim McNeil.
Not to the exclusion of her.
I didn't want to go do that.
But what you're describing, though, I mean, I'm really reminded of something that happened.
Actually, it would be 2000, probably.
And it's as the dot-com boom was really about to fall apart, and our company was running out of money, and...
And I was I mean, I moved out to California and I was making really good money and, you know, had a girlfriend and stuff.
And I I was really I'd become such a pain in the ass to my wonderful, wonderful boss, Giles.
And I was constantly just, you know, totally 100 percent me.
I was just constantly, you know.
imploring him for some kind of assurance.
I always was looking for assurance that I would be okay, and I would not be fired, and our team would be okay.
You know what I mean?
The kind of thing I do, where I was just like, I cannot stand not knowing.
Are we cool?
Yeah, are we cool?
Yeah, exactly.
And like all men, I just wanted to listen long enough for somebody to say, don't worry, you're not in trouble.
But at one point, he was under a lot of pressure.
And I was saying, look, this is a really hot skill right now.
I was being such an asshole.
I didn't realize I was an asshole I was being with this wonderful man.
And I was like, oh, go to monster.com and look around.
And he's like, and he's like, he kind of like rubbed his eyes a little bit.
And he's like, Merlin, I really can't afford your loyalty right now.
And I was like, oh, that's right.
You have a job too.
You have people, you have a much harder job than I do.
And I'm making your job more difficult by constantly, by you, you're trying to, as you say, throw some shapes here that I need to like, just step back and do my fucking job.
Yeah.
And instead, I keep coming.
So I'm not saying Kelly was the same way, but sometimes you can't afford someone's loyalty, even if it's somebody that you love.
And there's no amount of assurances.
So when you want to go and read up on it with Rick at the mall, in the back of your head, you're thinking, oh shit, Kelly's sitting there tapping her foot, right?
Kind of?
Yes, absolutely.
As well as saying this is really at odds with your primary value to me, which is that you're better than me, right?
And in every way.
And the whole point of this is that I don't deserve you.
So if I'm the one who's thinking we shouldn't be together as much, that takes some of the value off of this automobile.
It's funny because...
She and I had a really good teenage relationship in this – if you're talking about it in the context of a group of teenagers that are super competitive with each other.
Like she and I really liked each other and we liked one another.
We liked to hang.
I mean she was a really good hang as we would say.
And we enjoyed just sort of doing stuff.
But the other thing about Kelly was that she was a really good athlete.
And she was busy, right?
I mean, you don't get that powerful and that smart and that everything and then go to medical school, right?
Yeah.
You don't do all of that stuff as a laggard.
She probably had a – I can't even imagine what her schedule was like in college.
But even in high school, she must have had a lot of shit to do.
She did everything.
I mean, I have this memory of – she was doing a mountains to sea quadrathlon.
Yeah.
And I was her chase vehicle.
So she skied – the race starts at the top of a mountain.
They ski down.
They get out of their downhill ski boots and into cross-country gear and they cross-country ski down through the snow, the base of the mountain.
down to where the snow runs out.
Then they take off their skis and they put their running shoes on and they run.
Oh my God.
And they run down to the flats where they get on a bicycle and they bike to the finish.
And it's some, you know, it's, it's a long all day race.
What's the fourth thing?
It was downhill skiing, cross country skiing, running and bicycle.
Okay.
Got it.
So it's like a triathlon, but then you got two kinds of skiing.
Two, two kinds of skiing.
Okay.
And, um,
And I was in my Chrysler Imperial, my 74 Chrysler Newport Imperial.
Nice.
With the sunroof open.
And I think at that point in time I had a – I'd bought an expended –
like shoulder fired rocket launcher at the army navy surplus store for uh for nine dollars and i had strapped it to my ski rack on my car so i looked like i was so i looked like i had a you had an urban assault vehicle to all appearances trunk trunk mounted rocket launcher oh god it was the 80s yeah you know it was a different time
So I was, you know, I was like her support vehicle.
I would, I had all of her gear and would meet her at the different places and would, would, you know, uh, and I was not doing any, I was not doing any of that.
I wasn't like her support vehicle because I was somebody that would have, would have done the race except I broke my toe.
I was, you know, I was like drinking Dr. Pepper and like, come on, babe, you can do it.
But not, you know, it wasn't, that's not where I was coming from.
But that whole energy of like, I can't afford your loyalty right now.
That's the first time I can think of that I ever experienced it.
And I experienced it.
whole.
It's a tough distinction to make with our dumb language.
There's knowing something and then there's knowing something.
It's one thing to intellectually or abstract unconsciously understand something.
It's another thing to go like, oh, this concept is now an unavoidable fact in my life.
It's hard to articulate, but sometimes you're like, oh, this is that thing.
Yeah, and I don't know whether at that point in time I ever – I don't think I would have had an intellectual – I didn't know it.
I'd never heard of it, right?
My mom didn't want people over to the house.
My mom didn't want my name in the newspaper and my mom didn't want –
anyone at work to know anything about her but she had never I mean the reason that she broke up with my dad she said was because he was a bastard not because he was not because she was an introvert or whatever you know like I didn't have the language to to there were no shoes for me to fill yet but I felt this so intensely like wait a minute what happened
What happened here?
Like, I was chasing you, and now you're just caught?
Like, believe me, I didn't like chasing you.
The thrill of the chase isn't what I'm all about.
But, like, why don't you go do something with your friends, and then I sit here and wait for you?
And she's like, no, that's fine.
I'll just sit and read until you get back.
Mm-hmm.
And this overwhelming stress and guilt, you know, guilt was on me.
And it's guilt that I still feel.
It's this exact same guilt that I feel.
It's not the same, it's not motivated by the same thing, but that guilty feeling is familiar.
Where someone else, where I feel someone else wants something from me that either I can't deliver,
or that I don't want to deliver.
And I feel bad about it.
I'm not, I can't just be like, sorry, sorry, babe.
You and I with my friends.
You know, I went to the mall that day and I felt awful the whole time and then came back and was like, okay, I'm back.
And she's like, oh, and she, you know, she's fine.
She was reading, you know, it wasn't her.
Do you think she realized how, um, I mean, obviously at some point you broke up, you broke up with her, but like how much do you think she had a feeling that this was not working for you?
Um,
The thing is that her parents are still married.
Her parents met in high school and got married and are married now, 40 or 35 years later.
And so what she modeled, what she saw in her life was mom and dad.
And dad had...
an orange chair and mom had a yellow chair and mom's chair was slightly smaller than dad's chair.
And they, and they were set up Kelly's chair was just right.
And the television was in the corner in the living room.
Uh, and, uh,
Dad sat in his chair.
Mom sat in her chair.
Kelly and Peggy sat on the couch and they watched the McNeil-Lair report and they ate a TV dinner.
No, no, no.
Ann Kiefer was a good cook.
So they ate dinner.
But like she had a – she had an idea of what it looked like when you were in love and I didn't.
You know what I –
grew up with was dad lived in this state and mom lived in that state and whenever they were together it was like 36 hours where everybody was getting along and then there was a huge fight about something and then dad was mad at me because I wouldn't eat my eggs so I didn't have any I didn't know what looked normal or what I was
I guess what it was, I didn't know what I was, what I want or what I was searching for.
You know, if you had asked me before, cause Kelly was my first girl.
If you had asked me before Kelly and I started going out, did I want to get married?
Would have said, of course you want to get married and have kids and live in a house.
Of course.
Do you want to, uh, you know, be in love with your wife?
Of course.
I didn't think when I was 16, like, no, I want to be lonely for many decades, and I want to never quite click with anybody, and I want to...
Feel like every relationship is burdensome.
I want to know that many things are very, very wrong, but I'm not sure which things, why and how.
Yeah.
I can't wait.
You know, show me the path.
All I know is that this is not right.
Show me the path, genie, that I can, you know, that I can spend what feel like years in the desert.
Yeah.
And, um, and yet here this, this feeling rose up in me like whole cloth.
And I broke up with her, and it was something that's happened many times since then, where I broke up with her, but I did not mean that I didn't want to still be close friends with her and still consider that we were mostly still going out, just not with this whole thing, not with this whole problematic part of it.
And so I broke up with her and she was hurt but rebounded pretty fast.
And at the beginning of senior year, she started going out with David Brust.
And David Brust was exactly the same age as me.
We have the same birthday.
Oh, wow.
But he was a junior.
Because since I was born in September, there was that like, are you going to hold your kid back a year?
Uh-huh.
And in the Brust house, they held him back here.
And in my house, they put me forward.
And, you know, and I've always felt like – I still feel like – I know it's not a popular opinion.
I still feel like that's destiny.
It's like naming your kid Jeeves.
Like it shouldn't matter and it might be an availability heuristic for me, but like –
My kid and me, for example, got held back, as you say.
I guess that's the term for it.
We're old and tall.
Not tall, but she's tall.
We're old for our grade.
Whereas, for example, my wife and my mom...
We got the treatment like you did and kind of hated it.
I mean, my mom super hated it.
She was born in November and like me.
But anyway, you know what I'm saying?
I do feel like that sticks with you for so long because that's 12 years of are you taller or shorter are like, do you have more or less pubic hair?
Like all of the things.
No matter how smart you are, you might still be shrimpy in some way.
That's exactly right.
And my shrimpiness was emotionally.
Yeah.
That's not funny, but it's funny.
You had emotional strippiness.
I did.
You couldn't see it in the locker room.
No.
Well, I got a little bit of a shrimp down there.
It's more like a salad shrimp.
Yeah, it's not a jumbo shrimp.
It's a grower, not a shower.
Yeah, a shrimpy jumbo.
I looked, by the time I was 16, I looked like everybody else that was my age, except they were all 17.
And I just didn't – I just wasn't grown up.
But the fact that she started to go out with David Brust who was very handsome and – but not – but 100 percent a snork.
Like not good at things.
Well, let's talk turkey here.
Was he a lower status choice?
Yeah.
For sure.
Except – Because he's a junior.
You don't go out with a junior.
But also so handsome.
Yes.
He sounds like a guest.
And he was GQ.
He was very fashion conscious.
Oh, I see.
He was not – was he a preppy?
He was beyond preppy.
Was he a Tompkins?
Yeah.
Preppy had – no, no, no.
He wasn't a dandy.
He was a – Was he a fop?
He was not a fop.
OK.
He was that style of 80s – when I say GQ, it was because he read GQ.
Oh, boy.
And that was a – there was a huge dividing line between if you wore – or if you read GQ and if you read Esquire.
Right?
If you read Esquire, you were – there was a lot of stuff about men's fashion, but it was also like there was –
Yeah, if you were reading the primarily porn-free men's magazines, it was very classy.
Dominic Dunn was writing about the Kennedys in Esquire.
Whereas in GQ, it was just like, here's the latest swatch or whatever.
I mean, I never read GQ.
I just knew from looking at it.
You don't know enough to make fun of it, right?
Yeah, it was just like something over there.
No thanks.
And David one day showed up.
He was wearing his watch on the outside of his shirt because he heard that Enzo Ferrari did it or something like that.
It was just that whole culture of like you put a Ferrari sticker on your Volkswagen.
You put gel in your hair, small – you're fashionable is what it is.
You're not –
chic.
You're not stylish.
The thing is, if you're in high school and you are a young man and you put almost any amount of thought into how you put yourself together, you're playing on the A-team.
You know what I mean?
In the sense of you're going to be admired and respected by people like we talked about with Google and PageRank.
Cool people are going to think you're cool.
But if you're – you know, I've talked before about the different – the big cycles at my school and the difference between the socials and the conserves.
And David was way on the social side but into this other level of like precious –
egotism where and that is a class of of of dudes but he was pulling it off right
He's incredibly handsome.
But I mean, do you feel like he was successful in his endeavor?
By the Roger Ebert terms of this, was he successful in what he was trying to accomplish, do you think?
Yes.
Oh, absolutely.
He got Kelly.
Nothing wrong with that.
Well, the problem was that it was a completely different – she was slumming.
Right.
Like to David, not only because he was in because he was junior, but also because he was not going to go to a good school.
He was never going to work for NASA.
He was never going to write a book.
He was going to work in a health food store.
You know, like David was not going places.
He was not part of the Going Places gang.
And for Kelly to do it – So he's like a bi-week for her.
It was a boy toy situation.
Got it.
Okay.
And for her to do that when she was queen of the preps – and this was the year that she became student body president.
To date a boy that was so –
Light weight.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But pretty.
Was for her a power move, you know, like the her girlfriends and the other girls in the school were like, wow, nice job because, you know, she was not.
um, she wasn't renowned for her beauty, right?
That wasn't her, that wasn't her strength set.
She sounds like she didn't need it, but, but she was able to land this arm candy and everybody's like, Hey, you know, Hakuna Matata, nice work.
Well, sure.
Because she was, you know, she was like queen of the scene.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And I couldn't believe it.
I just – I was so indignant because – I have some notes.
You know, there were like – there were four guys that if she had started to date them, I would have been devastated because they were the four guys that I was in competition with for the world.
But she went all the way around those guys and was –
And was dating a person that wouldn't – I wouldn't have ever in a million years picked him as my potential rival.
And this was part of it, right?
Like he's now – in dating him –
He's now my rival.
Like he's my peer.
This guy.
He's not my peer.
He's not even in.
I wouldn't.
I wouldn't.
Yeah.
He gets stuck in your bracket, even though you consider yourself a much higher seat.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And retroactive.
But more attractive.
And also the smugness of an attractive person.
I'm starting to not like this guy a little bit.
No, he's not very likable.
You've been pretty kind for a while, but now the truth is coming out.
I think he might be a little bit of a fop.
What he was was just like, I mean, everybody in Alaska is an asshole.
Whoa.
Did that just occur to you or is that something you've just known in your bones for a long time?
Pretty sure.
You know, Virginia's for lovers.
Alaska.
We're assholes.
When I went back to Alaska after the grunge thing happened, I went to a club and there was a little gaggle of
people standing there in floppy watch caps with chain wallets.
Basically, it was David from Mr. Show.
Yeah, exactly.
Jesus Christ, superstar character.
Shorts on over long underwear.
Check this shit out.
And combat boots.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And I was living in Seattle at this point.
And I was like, who are you?
you guys are wearing Seattle clothes and this is Alaska.
Like, and what David was doing was David tried to talk knowledgeably about Milan and what was happening happening in the men's fashion world in Milan.
And I was like, this is Alaska, bro.
Like this doesn't, this isn't,
You're not real.
It was something to that effect, right?
Like this isn't real.
You're not real.
You cannot be real here and that at the same time.
I just was so – I just had so much pent up class awareness and status awareness that when I was on the side where I was making – when I was trying to assault the castle –
And all the kids that were up there that were like, well, we're rich and also successful.
And I was like, you know, watch me as I tear down your walls.
That was all very fun.
But once I was up there in the castle and like and so what happened was Kelly kind of made it OK.
And then Rick Garnett started dating a soci.
And I was like, what is going on?
Is this Rick of Read Up On It?
This is Rick of Read Up On It.
He started dating a very prominent soc girl, which was just like, what are we going to do now?
Start partying with the socas?
Am I seriously going to...
have to go to parties now where I'm with I'm in a party with them people named Blake people named Blake I mean I was super ducky right at this point you're not gonna know whether to shit or go sailing you know like what the fuck I can't I'm not gonna hang out with with like yeah Andrew McCarthy hockey players fuck that oh give me a break anyway I'm in this I'm in this chemistry class and
This is the beginning of I think what you would term my fall because senior year started.
Kelly's dating David and I got bounced out of.
upper level science and math.
Oh God.
And was at this, you were being evicted from several castles.
You're like Nicolas Cage.
Yeah.
I was at this point, this crossroads where my 1.2 cumulative GPA had caught up with me and it was no longer, I could no longer just, but you didn't yet know that by voice vote, all the teachers would say, let him go.
Right.
I didn't know that I was giving the paper, get him out of here.
They were going to say like, just keep moving.
But, but,
But what happened was in my junior year, like our futures were still far enough away that it still was just a game of who's quicker witted.
And by senior year, it was now a question of what colleges have you been accepted to?
Yeah, I was going to ask.
Did you know at this point where Kelly was going?
so kelly kelly wanted to be a doctor and applied early admissions i guess to johns hopkins and i always wondered why and i because because it felt like she could have gone to any ivy league school and it was johns hopkins was an expression of her super matter of factness like her super she had she had what
could only be described as super practicality to the extent that she... She didn't feel like she needed the extra sort of bronzy patina of an Ivy.
Exactly.
Wow, that's confidence.
If you could get into, I don't know, I guess Harvard, Princeton, not Brown, but if you could get into those, why wouldn't you?
That's insane.
Your whole family would be like, what's wrong with you?
And it's like, well...
This program is better for what I want to do.
That's exactly right.
At the time, she, with supreme confidence, said Johns Hopkins has a better pre-med program than Yale.
And I was like, well, who cares?
Like, you go to Yale if you can.
And she was like, no, because I'm interested in the following, you know, like seven different
brain chemistry tracks that are only available.
And I was just like astonished.
Right.
So, so she was headed there.
Rick went to Duke like the, the, the class, the, the castle was, was morphing.
To the to the big castle.
People were on their way to the big castle castle.
Right.
And I realized that there was a gate here.
This was an aperture that you had to make your way through that all these people had been aware of.
You're going to hit this point and where you end up at the big castle is determined by everything.
Yeah, they're like existential preppers.
Like they had a different manual or a better manual or something.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I know that feeling of being like by the time I realized what I needed to do, it was way too late.
I'd fuck myself so hard.
And people have been saying that to me since.
But you didn't get it.
You knew it, but you didn't know it.
And I felt like I was just up until that moment, I felt like I was going to be able to waltz into the world and go to the front door of Yale and ring the bell.
And they would say, like, hello.
Yeah, that's right.
They'd open the door and they'd go, hi, there he is.
That guy.
And I'd say, la-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da.
And we'd be off to the race.
Are you dancing with a top hat and a little stick?
Hello, my baby.
Hey, hello, my honey.
And honestly, I'm not 100% sure whether –
If I had maintained my confidence through senior year, I'm not 100% sure what would have happened.
Hmm.
Because
Setting off to junior year, I had this list of things that I'd written on a – On your blotter.
My desk blotter, right.
And by the end of junior year, I had accomplished them all.
I honestly had.
Oh.
I was – You might have peaked too early.
I was dating the queen.
I was Sergeant Arms of Student Congress.
I had started doing all the pep assemblies.
I was Mr. Mann.
And then M O C B M O C. Yep.
But then it all turned and I was, and my confidence went completely out the window because I all of a sudden didn't see a path that I could waltz in and explain to people why I belonged there or explain to them just by the cut of my jib.
And I was no longer even allowed into the upper division chemistry and biology classes.
I wasn't allowed in.
Not because anybody could deny that I – up until that point, I would have said, well, I belong there.
But at that point –
Senior year, they were like, well, we're actually doing work now.
So it's not a question of whether you belong here because it's just a question of did you rank here?
Like, can you do the work?
And you can't.
So you don't belong here.
I was like, but I belong there in a class sense.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And it's like if you are – if one is a very motivated person and has the support system and the abilities, you can make your own luck.
And if you're somebody like me or presumably you, you're much more used to waiting for somebody to say you're my good boy.
So you go get to be in this thing.
I rarely made my own luck at any point by then.
So I was much more just counting on other people to think that I was a special boy and put me where I thought I belonged.
Well, except I had –
tremendous arrogance, right?
I just showed up where I knew I belonged.
And if they said, do you have the right pass to be here?
I would say these aren't the droids you're looking for.
Absolutely.
You once said, to paraphrase, you can give me the exact quote, you once to paraphrase what you said of a well-known American TV showrunner that every room was created for him to walk into.
He was the lion in the room for every room.
And you say that's a tip that I've shared with my kid.
Walk into a place like you belong there.
Always.
Always assume that you belong there.
You don't have to be arrogant about it.
But if you go in looking sketchy, people are going to treat you like you're sketchy.
If you go in acting like you're just another waiter going in the kitchen, like nobody's going to bother you.
I think about this.
I think about the first time I went.
when I started running for city council, the first time I went to one of those big events in a downtown hotel that I'd always gone to with my dad and,
Where all the political players are all there and it's a lunch and it's there and it's a lunch on behalf of the World Wildlife Foundation.
And, you know, Senator Patty Murray is there to present an award to the, you know, the director of the Water Conservation Society.
And, you know, those people have those lunches.
There's one happening right now, except it's happening on Zoom now.
But they have those lunches three times a week in every city in America and it's just what the political class does to – that's just what they do for work.
They have lunches.
And the first time – I'm guessing to state the obvious, it's a huge networking opportunity amongst other things.
It's the 101.
It's the room where it happened, yeah.
Because every one of those tables is – somebody is the sponsor of that table and they said, I'm going to put $25,000 in this envelope.
And so I put 10 people at this table that are my handpicked crew and then they're all going to put money in that envelope at lunch.
And then I'm going to take that $25,000 envelope up to Senator Patty Murray.
And this is how America is run.
Yeah.
And I remember walking into that event, and I'm in a suit that I found at a thrift store wearing a tie that has a secret naked girl in it.
You're like a fun uncle.
Yeah, and my glasses were made by my guy in Yakima, and the shoes were my dad's.
And I ride the escalator up into this room and I look around and it's the entire political class of Seattle, but I'm not here with my dad.
I'm here because I'm running for Seattle City Council.
And it was the first time in a long time that I had to stop at the top of that escalator and go, okay, you belong here.
And it had been so long since I'd had to say that to myself that
That I forgot how incredibly stressful it is to walk into a room where you're not sure whether you belong there, let alone walk into a room where you know you don't.
And I walked around.
If you have to ask, you can't afford it.
If you're needing to – in the situation you're describing here, if I understand it correctly, the need to sort of pump yourself up before you do that, it's just going to make you a little sweaty.
Yeah.
Yeah, right.
And so I'm and I was there and I was feeling a little flop sweat and I'm standing at the top of this escalator.
I'm looking around.
I know a lot of the people in the room, but I'm a new candidate.
And so they're not racing necessarily over to like you don't have a lot to offer anyone.
The first the first person that comes and shakes my hand, everybody in the room is like, oh, I guess Dow is endorsing John.
Right.
You know, there's that element of it.
And I'm standing there and there's some guy that's like lobbying for shell oil or something who's talking to me.
And there's a judge that's standing there that's got some business at the council that is like, hi, nice to meet you.
And then and then my opponent.
Tim Burgess.
He comes up the escalator and he is perfectly tailored.
And he sees me.
Comparison is the death of joy.
The thing is he looks around the room and everybody in the room, he's the president of the city council.
Everybody in the room knows him.
He comes up to the top of the escalator.
He scans the room.
He's like, hello, hello, hello.
And then he sees me.
And in that moment,
He turns away and he turns away in like sort of shock and fear like, oh shit, that's that guy.
And when he did it, when he saw me and flinched, I knew that I had –
all the power in the room that anyone could have.
Oh, so you've been training your whole life for this because he goes back and forth with your buddies at the mall.
You know, you, you, you know that look or that feeling or that unintentional, uh, tell.
Yeah.
He's lynched and he's 10 years older than me.
And he has, he's been in Seattle city council for 15 years.
You know, he's a former cop.
Like he's everything that, that, that plays in this world.
And whether that flinch was – because what happened was he did opposition research on me.
And in that world, and I guess in the world, if someone Googles you or somebody Googles me and they've never met us and they have no idea about this world, we seem like, oh, wow, they've done some interesting things.
I don't know what any of those words mean.
What the hell is – what the hell is –
inbox zero, but there sure are an awful lot of web pages about him.
I had that thing I mentioned here where I want to find fun people or cool people to follow on Twitter.
It's not so much the follower count kind of stuff, and I've actually been trying to
do more of that and but like for example like i i have to imagine sometimes like i noticed a couple people from slate started following me over the weekend which is cool because i'm i really admire their work a lot and i was like i wonder how i got on their radar screen i mean i i've been just another person on the internet saying things like hey good show i enjoyed this because that's the thing i try to do but that was weird i was like i wonder if somebody said something in a slack about me
And they pop in and – you know what I mean?
I always – I do wonder things like that.
It's like when you see like – just on Twitter in particular, like why is this tweet popular?
I don't understand – especially with somebody like us or like me in particular.
Like what the fuck is this guy talking about?
When he retweets a fitness device that looks like a hatchet –
But somebody from Time Magazine goes snare and he retweets that and 20 people like it.
It's like, what the fuck does that mean?
It's like, but exactly.
You see who's going to swarm around whom at the party and there is no clearer indicator that that's maybe where you should be swarming to.
I mean, in the room you're describing here.
Yes, right.
I got a bunch of followers that were all French in the last day or two.
And I was like, what's going on with that?
All of a sudden, a bunch of French people.
And then somebody sent me a link to an article in a French Star Wars magazine that quoted my daughter's tweet.
And I was like, fuck.
There's 20 Frenchies that are going to be trying to explain to me why Anakin... Le fil du... Arthur did not know that Anakin became the Darth Vader because Anakin never showed him.
But I...
Senior year, I'm now sitting in this chemistry class with this – God, you're so good at this.
I can't believe you always bring – I'm sorry.
I have to acknowledge – our listeners know this, but Jesus fucking Christ.
How do you remember what you were talking about?
I don't want to know.
I like the magic.
I like the effect.
Yeah.
So anyway, there's a girl, and you got partnered with a snork, and she's got a ZZ top pin on her denim jacket.
Well, over the course of that semester, I gradually realized that she's very pretty, and I like her.
Now, here's the problem.
She's not smart, and she doesn't have any...
plan or ambition she has no sense of the way the world is divided into classes of people she doesn't look at a room full of people and immediately start separating them into groups of class she's just a person who's living in the world who's trying to get through this chemistry class and she's new wave but
not afraid to wear a ZZ top pin.
And partly it is because I don't think she had very many friends and the friends that she did have were not the new wave kids, right?
If she had been,
properly new wave, I would have known about her already because she would have been part of the new wave kids that I knew and had already classed and divided into boxes and said, like, here's the new wave kids.
And that is the head new wave kid.
And that is the girl that is the most dangerous of the new wave girls.
And, you know, like I knew everybody and ranked them and put them into who they were.
Right.
Right.
This girl was not one of those.
The new wave kids would have scoffed at her, not just because of the ZZ Toppin, but just she didn't she wasn't one of them.
she was a free woman in the world a free agent a she was an unaffiliated and just a person who who had to get through high school high school school and she wore her hair new wave because she liked it she saw those people on mtv and she was like i want to do my hair that way it was kind of
Short and spiky, but like – and she puts some purple color in it.
It's interesting what you're describing in some ways though is – I mean I'm describing this swarm phenomenon where like E.O.
Wilson's ants, they're following some kind of a trail.
But there's also this sense of like the people who maybe are not so high status, part of it is they either – they possibly don't care about –
but more plausibly don't know about signification of some kind.
Or there's something, Roland Barth, I'm sure would have something to say about this, but you don't know something semiotic about what's happening here.
You don't know the shape that you're throwing.
Or it doesn't matter.
Or it doesn't matter.
She's just one of the people that is just, and, and I think if I had gotten to know her better and had asked her, you know, where do you think you fit in the world or who are you?
She would have been like, well, I don't, I don't have that many friends.
You know, I just moved here a couple of years ago.
I like to draw, go to church.
Like, yeah, I like to draw, right.
And my, you know, we live in a normal house in a normal neighborhood and, you know, and I get, I get good grades in school and,
And I'm saving up to buy like an IROC Z. But she didn't even have that much like – she didn't want an IROC Z. She just wanted a Toyota Celica.
And in the course of this semester, we became friends.
And I started to think about her.
And as soon as I started to think about her, I –
became incredibly confused because I would have thought that I outranked this girl in every way that I could imagine a series of ranks.
But I was thinking about her now and didn't know what to do.
And had with, with, when I chased Kelly and,
I knew what to do because I knew where she ranked and I knew where I ranked and I just had to surmount the obstacles.
Like I had to overcome objections.
I had to, I had to do the sales pitch.
I did.
Well, and I had to prove to her that I was not only her rank, but like outranked everyone.
In whatever way that I could show that.
That I could do things that no one else could do.
But with this girl, 85% of what I had trained to show, she was oblivious to or didn't care about.
You know, like I didn't.
Oh, your Jedi mind shit wasn't working on her.
The fact that my boat shoes were boat shoes that put everyone else's boat shoes to shame.
Oh, the Sperry Topsiders?
Well, no, because Sperry Topsiders are what David Bruss would wear.
Oh, that's a so-shoe.
Yeah, I was wearing fucking Quatties or whatever.
Some crazy shit made in Maine.
Shit dog.
That you would only notice if you cared.
And she was just in a... It wasn't that she didn't care.
She just...
And so what did she care about?
Well, I liked ZZ Top's Eliminator 2.
And we could talk about music and we could just talk about things that didn't have – there wasn't any competition.
We weren't competing with each other.
And I wasn't blowing her mind.
I was just her lab partner.
And then I could tell that she liked me.
And toward the end of the semester, it was obvious that she liked me and I liked her.
And I was thinking about her all the time.
Sorry, quick fall semester of your senior year.
This is fall.
Okay.
And I'm being tormented by Kelly walking down the hall on David Brust's arm.
And when he would see me coming the other way, he would put on his smuggest, like one eyebrow raised.
I can imagine him looking like that Jared Kushner looking motherfucker who's in the motel room with Kevin Bacon when they beat up, is it Hoover or Pinto?
You know what I mean?
There's that one Jared Kushner looking guy.
I imagine him having that face.
100% that guy.
Except with not the ROTC-ness of it.
You know, like David was that guy except –
He was basically tucking his guest jeans into his socks.
You know, somebody that just – Was he pegging?
Was he pegging hard?
Did he do a hard peg?
He was 100 percent pegging hard.
Yeah.
And would have gotten his ass kicked if he hadn't also been like strong and handsome and – he was just like – he just – he – David was somebody that – if David had wanted to go to Hollywood –
Uh, the thing is David just didn't have that much confidence.
He's, uh, he ended up staying in Alaska, you know, and he did, he, he managed the natural food pantry and, and, and nothing makes me happier.
But, um, but the, the quarter was coming to an end and this class where we were together, this girl and I,
I was going to be leaving this class and I think it might be because I flunked out of it.
Oh, God.
Although I really enjoyed doing the science with her.
I just never turned in the assignment.
And it was in a – this was in regular high school, right, where you couldn't just go up to the teacher and say like, why don't you give me a gentleman's D?
Yeah.
The teacher was just like, I opened the book here and I see no, I have no marks for you.
You've never turned anything in.
And I'd say like, well, I mean, I never, I've got it all here.
I just.
John Blutarski, 0.0.
I just never wrote the answers down because I felt like, you know, the answers.
Am I right?
Yeah.
Come on.
I should have my work.
But I remember sitting at my dad's house and I have these memories.
Sometimes I'll have a memory and it's very clearly that I'm at my mom's house.
And sometimes I'm at my dad's house and I don't know why those things are divided.
But I think of this girl as being someone that I thought about at my dad's house.
Which is so different from thinking about somebody at my mom's house.
I thought about Kelly at my mom's house.
Oh, interesting.
I thought about this.
And when I say this girl, it's because I have no idea what her name is.
Toward the end of that quarter, I realized I needed to ask this girl out.
She was waiting for me to ask her out.
I need to ask her out.
I had a car now.
I wanted to ask her out.
And as the, as the quarter came to an end, we were doing our work at the lab table and both of us were completely distracted.
And it's not that we were nervous talking.
We were both, we were very comfortable with each other at this point.
It was just like, Hey, Hey, um, so we needed like, I guess do this.
Okay.
Okay.
And it was sweet and it was – and the only stress that was in it was that I needed to make this move and I had no idea how.
And I didn't know – and part of it was I couldn't imagine us together.
It absolutely was a pretty and pink thing.
Like what are we going to go to together?
What kind of – I'm still going to my conserve parties even though I'm not – even though Kelly and David are sitting on the throne and I'm over here.
Like I'm pouring another bottle of 10 high whiskey into the punch bowl.
And, you know, and putting us putting a Snickers bar in the pool or whatever the fuck I was a hundred thousand dollar bar.
Like I had become that person.
I mean, guess what I am.
I was I was Lutarski in every way.
But I can't show up to that party with this with this new wave girl with the ZZ top pin on.
You're feeling resistance.
On some level about letting go of this castle.
This castle never wanted me in it in the first place.
It was never your castle.
And I assailed because I had something to prove.
And then once I was there, I didn't want to be there.
And here was this girl that I could just be myself with.
But I didn't understand what kind of life I could possibly have with her.
I don't even know if she went to college.
And I didn't have another vision.
I didn't know another way to rank things in the world or to rank myself or to know if I was doing good or not other than these very clear ways of seeing.
And I could not see her except when I was with her, I was normal or I was fine.
And the end of the semester came –
And I didn't ask her out.
And on our last day of class, I was like, well, I really enjoyed having you as a lab partner.
And she was like, yeah, me too.
I was like, well, this has been really fun.
I guess I'll see you around.
And she was like, okay.
And I, as far as I know, never saw her again.
Wow.
That did not go the way I expected.
The second half of senior year, I pretty much got bounced out of school.
school and was and went to the Career Center which was
the career center was a place that if you wanted to be in the hospitality industry or the radio and television industry, photography, it was like, okay, vocational, you're going to learn a trade.
Yep.
And I hope you're good with your hands, buddy.
And my trade was radio and television.
But what I did was I went there and I, you know, they were like, okay, so here's how a camera works.
And I was like,
while you guys are figuring out how a camera works, let me show you how a television anchorman works.
And I would go sit behind the desk and go today on career center news.
And the camera dudes were like, well, we got somebody to film and the teacher was thrilled.
Oh, there's a kid here that wants to, that wants to be on camera talent.
Like that's exotic.
And so I went to the career center and just sat and just, it was my, it was perfect for me.
I just shot the shit.
I just produced a bunch of weird radio programs that no one ever saw.
But I didn't go to East.
And my Going Places friends went on their journey and I kind of stopped washing my hair.
And then I started drinking.
Okay.
And I never saw the ZZ Top Girl again.
I've never stopped thinking about her.
Whoa.
But there just wasn't a path.
So you're thinking about her again.
Well, thinking about Kelly.
You say you never stop.
I saw you posted a couple of photos on your Instagram of her.
I posted some pictures.
Some classic pics.
Well, they were, but they're ones I had never seen.
And the reason I posted them was that I went on Facebook.
Everybody was doing that.
Like, here's pictures of me in high school.
And I was like, there are no pictures of me in high school.
And then a bunch of people took that.
It's just the drawing of a scallop.
It's not pictured.
That's right.
Not pictured.
And a lot of people posted pictures that I had seen.
You know, it's like not hard to find my yearbook picture.
And it doesn't even look like me.
My yearbook picture looks so unlike me that it's not.
If I sent it to you right now, you'd be like, that's you?
Really?
Okay.
But then Kelly was on my Facebook page and she was like,
Uh, I take this as a challenge and I was like, well, I've seen every picture that you have and I hadn't.
And she sent these pictures, one of them, her sister Peggy took of us sleeping on the floor of her parents' living room.
And I'd never seen it before.
And in not having seen it, I hadn't built a callus around it.
I hadn't seen it and seen it and seen it and seen it.
And so contextualize it in all these ways.
All of a sudden I saw this picture and I could not.
remember a time I was that innocent.
I could not recall a time when I could have fallen asleep on the floor holding hands with Kelly.
That's really sweet.
Well, it's sweet, but it's like, I was not that person again.
I was never that person again.
And when I was that person, it felt like natural and normal.
And that was the, that was normal.
Mm hmm.
I, Kelly and I were teenagers who fell asleep talking to each other on the phone where three hours into the conversation was like, are you still there?
I'm still here.
Are you, are you going to sleep?
Are you going to go to sleep?
Maybe, you know, and then, then we fall asleep with the phone in the crook of our neck.
I never did that again with anybody.
I never chased anybody again.
And so looking at that one picture in particular, I just stared at it.
I stared at it for a week trying to understand that I was a normal sweet kid at some point.
And so I started thinking about this girl in the – because I've never talked about this girl to anybody.
Like talking to you about it today is the first time I've ever mentioned her at all.
Never mentioned this easy top pin and the denim jacket and the, in the chemistry class.
And the only reason I'm, I am is that, that she was, she was an alternative universe.
The alternate, the alternate universe that, that I look at that picture and I see me and Kelly just staying together.
And getting married and being together, which is possible.
Her parents met when they were 16.
A lot of people do meet at their 16 and they're still together.
Kelly and I could still be together.
We could have that picture where we fell asleep holding hands on the carpet and that would be like one of our earliest pictures together.
And I never would have imagined that until that picture showed up.
And in trying to make sense of it, all of a sudden this little new wave girl came back.
And I realized like she pops into my head all the time.
I don't sit and think about her like, well, what if?
I just think whenever I see ZZ Top, whenever I think about ZZ Top, I think – which is not never.
I think about ZZ Top and I think about that pin and it wasn't like –
It wasn't cool ZZ Top.
It was like an afterburner ZZ Top.
Was there ever anybody cuter than Karen Allen in 1978?
I'm listening, but I am looking at a lot of photos of Karen Allen in 1978.
Karen Allen... I think she might be single.
In that moment where Boone...
comes in to try and win her back.
And then he hears Donald Sutherland's voice from the back of the house.
Yeah.
And she goes, boon.
And she has that like, desperated, but also like,
When Boone storms out, she turns around and Sutherland's like, yep, he's got to get something out of that cabinet.
And I mean, no, that until Ali Sheedy in War Games.
Oh, God.
I what?
That's a special thing.
God, those crooked teeth.
Ally Sheedy in War Games, which is not Ally Sheedy in Breakfast Club.
Oh, shit, dog.
Totally different head.
Yes.
Ally Sheedy in War Games where she was like –
Oh, my God.
She's – yes.
She's so brunette.
If I could – I think ZZ Top Girl might have been closer to Ally Sheedy in War Games than Kelly was.
Woof.
Ally Sheedy in War Games was what I hoped maybe would happen.
I just didn't know how – I didn't know how to talk to Whopper.
Yeah.
That's your love.
I sure had a lot of pop culture references.