Ep. 399: "The Initiating Woundedness"
Hello?
Hi, John.
Hi, Merlin.
How's it going?
Sorry to beep in so late today.
It was just so early before.
So early.
No, no, you're good.
Don't worry.
Mm-mm.
Of all the people, Merlin, you're the best at this.
You really are.
I'm sorry.
I'm going to mess with my pre-PC again.
Your pre-PC?
My pre-PC is a mess.
Oh, no.
I didn't even know you had a pre-PC.
I do.
I got a pre-PC mix, and it's a mess, as usual.
Oh, dear.
You want to start the show?
Anytime you want, yeah.
Ready to go?
Yeah.
Oh, Roderick's on the line.
I'm on the line with Roderick and you're humming along.
Why is today unlike any other day?
You stole my joke because it's very early.
Is today different from other mornings?
Is it earlier than usual to you?
It's pretty early.
I don't know why it's so early today.
But sometimes, you know, you just can't get out of the space.
You can't get out of the room, the headroom.
You can't get out of the room in your head.
I've been trying to adapt to our new later recording time by telling myself that I can sleep later.
Yeah.
And it's not really taking...
Do you have the thing where you wake up at the same time in the morning regardless of whether it's Sunday or fun day?
Not really, not anymore.
I feel like I used to, especially when my kid was little.
But no, I mean, since the – I've covered this a thousand times, but obviously time is a strange thing and my schedule has –
you know uh you know adapted and no i don't i know people who like that there are people so i don't have to set an alarm i got an alarm in my head yeah so like i have that kind of have that like when you're traveling you don't have to like set an alarm to like be somewhere or be up at a certain time catch a plane that kind of thing even now i don't wake up at the same time every day if you say you can sleep until noon i'll sleep until noon
If you say you have to be up at 8, I'll sleep until 8.
But I find – I don't rely on it.
But I find that I generally wake up five minutes before I'm supposed to wake up.
Yeah.
So supposed to is doing a lot of work in that sense.
If I can, I'll roll back over and go immediately back to sleep if I'm allowed to.
Mm-hmm.
Which I often am because I have no master.
I have no lord.
There are no lords, no masters.
I'm living in a perfect libertarian fantasy land.
Good for you.
Yeah, it's wonderful.
No masters.
Yeah, and it's also nice because now you don't have anybody to blame, you know?
And no one to blame.
No masters, no one to blame.
Mm-hmm.
It's like Howard Jones says, no one is to blame.
Yeah.
no one ever uh very you know it's very that that music so touching oh yeah i often think that i should have uh sung with more gravel in my voice you know like if i put more like
You can sell yourself on blue diamonds.
If I, you know, given myself a little bit of like a blues voice.
Oh, like a, um, who am I thinking of?
Not lead belly, lead belly.
Like, who am I thinking of?
Like, uh, how, how in, how in Wolf, Alan Wolf.
Yeah, Helen Wolfe had a huge impact, I think, on Captain Beefheart.
I think that's why Beefheart sings like that and probably kind of why Tom Waits sings like that.
I don't want to sing all like that.
I just feel like— I like it when you sing clear.
I mean, I like growly, too, but, you know.
Growly, clear.
Mm-hmm.
Your people sing every part of the Buffalo.
We do.
Mm-hmm.
I feel like I've gotten back on the news cycle, which is part of the problem.
That's why I feel so early today.
Oh, me too.
I fucked up.
I fucked up.
Back on the news wagon.
They pulled me back in.
I was out as of last week.
And then ever since, I guess, something happened on, I want to say, Thursday or so.
Yeah.
And now I'm back in the morass.
And it's not making me happy.
No, because the news isn't coming fast enough.
You know, every five minutes you're like, okay, well, there's got to be some more news, right?
What do you guys – you're a lot of people making news.
Who's in charge here?
Well, if you were the sort of person, if you were sort of the – let's put it this way.
I would never do this.
But if you are the sort of person that has a, I don't know, a small – not a dead pool, but a draft of people whose names you're waiting to come up.
Oh, uh-huh.
You want to fill out your card, you know what I'm saying?
Right, right, right.
Sometimes bingo, news bingo.
Sort of, yeah.
Uh-huh, uh-huh.
One might find oneself in slacks and text threads just shouting out people's names with an exclamation point the same way that I go, baby, or sweet dog.
I got my eye on a couple of these people.
It's bad.
I'm on the cycle.
I'm looking for more punditry that I'm getting right now.
I'd like some punditry.
I feel like...
We've got a situation where there are some sky is falling pundits that don't need any new news.
They can just sky is falling it all day, any day.
There's no fresh meat for them.
Also a good chance for them to re-up their article from April or December or whatever.
Just re-upping in light of today's news.
Yeah, just proves their point.
You've got to re-up it.
I wish I had more things to re-up.
I have to be honest.
I do not have many things to re-up.
So I'll sometimes just retweet myself.
I've got hair in my palms at this point.
No, we can go back to 47 folders and bring that forward.
48, 49, as many as it takes.
Do every one of the folders.
That's stupid.
Your people use every part of the folders.
Yeah, I guess we do.
I guess we really do.
But I don't want –
I've been quiet, largely quiet, through all of this because there's nothing to be gained by me communicating to the world that I'm just sitting here with my fingers crossed.
What does that do?
What does that show?
I realized a very long time ago, this is not particularly insightful, but it's important to me, which is that on Twitter in particular, I guess in lots of places, but especially Twitter, there's no way to say what you're not saying.
There's no, there's no, you know, there's no, no sort of like, there's no way to do, I mean, I'm here, but I have nothing to say about this.
I returned.
No, you know what I mean?
Like there's, it's, there's not an affirmative way to not participate in a conversation.
Now with that said, there are people who will infer what one's silence means because it suits their own view of the world.
But you know, I don't, I don't want to be a dick, you know?
No, but you do, you do want to kind of say like,
it's not that I'm on vacation.
It's not that I am, uh, it's not that I don't care.
I'm right here.
I'm right here with all of you, and I have got comments that I'm not sharing.
Yeah.
Aye, aye, aye, aye, aye.
Aye, aye, aye is right.
Aye, aye, aye, aye.
Lucy, you can't be in the show.
Aye, aye, aye.
I've been feeling – I exchanged a series of letters with a friend recently where it was – where the precipitating letter –
was me feeling like, well, this has happened a few times recently during the coronavirus, Merlin, where I said, well, you know, this friendship that I have with this person has a lot of tension in it.
It's been a friendship where it used to be close, and now it's gotten all...
all messed up and, you know, tension begets tension.
And so the quality of the relationship has declined over time because most of it now is being conducted via text message, which I'm terrible.
I'm terrible with that.
I'm great.
I'm great at, at quippy texts.
I'm great at like, um, at long texts, um,
But as soon as it gets, as soon as there's any kind of emotional component to it.
I think I'm great at it.
Tone is hard.
Tone is hard, and it's why we came up with emoticons and stuff like that.
But anything that we do to try and add sort of human qualities to letters at that length is going to fall short because you don't know what's happening with that other person.
You, for example, this is not a criticism, but you are not a fast responder.
And I'm accustomed to that, and I don't take, unless I need to, I don't think I take any particular concern away from that.
But I know for a lot of people, well, it depends on my relationship with people.
Sometimes if people don't respond, I think they're dead or they're mad at me, or both.
Yeah.
Right.
They were mad at you and then they died and they took it to their grave with them.
Yeah.
Now I can't do anything about it.
And I'm not going to go to the funeral.
Those are super spreader events.
Yeah.
I know that happens a lot.
Yeah.
You know what I'm talking about though?
Like people, people will different people, different ways.
Obviously, John, you know, you're a grand ass man.
Everybody's different and people infer different things that were not meant to be implied.
Right.
It's true.
And I do it so badly.
And, and I do it even as I know that I'm doing it.
I'm looking, I look in the mirror and I'm like, you're doing that.
You are, you're assuming that what they are saying is something, but they haven't even said a thing.
And now you're reacting.
And you, for example, or me, for example, or whomever, whatever kind of responder you are, if you're used to other people, this goes for email, this goes for everything.
If you're used to another person being very receptive and happy and gay when they respond, and they respond slowly and then say, sounds good, period.
Yeah, right.
You could, if you're in the wrong state of mind, maybe feeling vulnerable or angry or whatever, you could draw inferences from that that may or may not be real.
That's right.
Yeah.
And I don't know what it is, but I assume, well, I do know what it is because that's how I've lived my whole life.
I assume people are mad at me.
It's a safe assumption for me.
Right?
I know what I did.
Yeah.
Everybody was always mad at me when I was a kid.
They were always mad at me when I was in my 20s and 30s.
Why would it not be true now that everyone is still mad at me all the time?
Yeah.
And so if somebody's like sounds good, period, I'm like, oh, shit.
Yeah.
And so I never give it the benefit of the doubt.
But I've watched a few relationships just either explode in a ball of fire or gradually just degrade into a kind of like grinding sound because of text messaging.
And how, and I, I think for years I defended that I was, I was great at texting.
What are you talking about?
But then I realized, no, no, no, no.
You do this all the time.
And then, you know, long texts and people send me a text that's even remotely accusatory and they're going to get five texts back that are all six paragraphs long.
So the other – They've unleashed the Kraken.
They have.
Just like, oh, well.
Yeah.
But the other day, maybe a couple weeks ago.
Oh, you want to go?
You want to go?
Fuck around and find out.
That's right.
You know who can long text?
Me.
I can long text.
Oh, no.
I'm your boy.
I got nowhere to be all night.
I wrote several articles.
Just steaming, John.
I wrote several articles for CMJ using T9.
So my thumb can go, buddy.
Yeah, yeah.
But I wrote, in the middle of the night, I sent a text to somebody that I'd gotten into a text war with early on in the coronavirus, where it was just like, you know, where they were texting me like,
you know, I keep trying to call you and you won't pick up like what's going on.
And I was like, I'm never picking up.
Screw you.
And they were like, but I wrote him and I was like, Hey, I'm sorry about that.
Whatever that was, I was wrong.
It was the wrong thing.
There's, I didn't want to end our friendship over some dumb thing.
Like that seems crazy now.
And it has seemed crazy the whole time.
I'm just stubborn and,
and uh you know and and prideful and right and they wrote back immediately like oh my god thank goodness you know i always knew we would be friends i just i wasn't sure what's going on and i was like oh oh good good good good you know but it just it sort of felt like with with that situation i was long past the point of saving anything you know like it was
I got to the point of like, well, why not?
What's going to happen?
I'm not friends with them anymore?
Like if I send them a thing that apologizes and they're like, screw up?
Because you've got to break the skin on the soup.
Now you're going to get back into it.
If there's nothing else to be learned from season one, episode nine of The Wonderful Show, Ted Lasso, it is that...
Forgiveness that you share with somebody, even if you don't say – it's not like you're being imperious about, oh, I forgive you.
But forgiveness is cleansing for everybody.
There's something about – you can call it clearing the air or whatever it is.
But to reach out to somebody –
and be like, you know, this feels weird.
I'm sorry this is weird.
I had a big part in making this weird.
Like, it's just such a, it's one reason I begin so many, I have, listen, listen, I have a deal with several friends that any text we send to each other, I have a shortcut for this, all I have to type is the letters Y-N-T.
Y-N-T.
Any Apple device that I own, and that expands to you are not in trouble.
That is how every text message should begin unless you're a monster.
You are not in trouble.
You are not in trouble.
Oh, that's nice.
It's the opposite of we need to talk.
Wait a minute.
I've never had a you are not in trouble email from you or text.
Well, you know you're not in trouble.
Yeah, you know you're not in trouble.
But like, you know, two quick angles on this.
One angle is something that happened to me last week.
I was having a crazy day, and somebody whom I worked with was having a crazy day.
And it was the kind of crazy day where we had to just, like, you know, it helps just get on the phone.
And long story short, I just discovered in the third act of the call that that person had a real bad day and, like, had gotten some bad news.
And I was like, oh, fuck.
Yeah.
Why am I getting you on the phone?
I had no way of knowing.
It's nice to think that you could live your entire life assuming everybody you're talking to is having their worst day.
If that's the baseline that you need to not be a serial asshole, that's really good, but it's difficult to do that with the entire world.
But then the other part is – you remember they say in Germany after the war it got so bad you needed a wheelbarrow full of Deutschmarks.
After the first war.
Yeah, the original war, the OG.
You needed all these – a wheelbarrow to like buy a loaf of bread.
I don't know if that's true.
That's what they say.
Do you remember the famous pictures of people lined up at the bread store with wheelbarrows full of Deutschmarks?
They were just using it as wallpaper.
Yeah, yeah.
Wallpaper.
Smiley face.
Hey.
I used to be a person who wrote in whole sentences with a period, and now John Syracuse is the only person where I know we have a mutual deal to communicate with each other like adults.
And everybody else, just the inflation goes up and up and up, and pretty soon there's more exclamation points.
Do you know what I'm saying, though?
So there's a certain hollowness to what we're saying, where if we're not...
laying down on our back with our belly up in the air and saying, I'm sorry in advance.
Like it's, it sounds like you're being an asshole that inflation has caused an emotional hollowness that I I'm not sure is that much better than occasionally wondering if somebody is having a bad day.
That, that is true.
Uh, absolutely.
But there, there's another, there's another level of sensitivity that,
that's operating, I think.
And I think you and I are both like this, which is, um, very sensitive, um, easily injured and, um, and then injury, uh, injury recapitulates injury.
I can get injured by, by, um, by, by slights and by, uh,
you know, situations where I feel, um, I mean, almost all of it boils down to rejection.
I can feel rejected.
And when I feel rejected, everything comes into play.
All of my, all of my worst defensive, uh, like, uh, like brittle easily, uh,
shattered kind of uh feelings childhood feelings like it all it all comes up yeah feeling feeling abandoned feeling um disliked or disrespected and the irony of that is that it only takes about one second uh if you're if you are if one is like that it only takes about one second of feeling defensive to now begin three hours of being offensive yeah well that's right and so what happened
Yesterday?
Yeah, yesterday.
About a week ago, I was out raking some ground bark.
Pfft, pfft.
And you know, raking the ground bark.
Is this out in your boulder area where the birds are?
No, no.
It was up, up, up.
I'm taking the grass out.
Okay.
What I don't want is grass.
Grass is bad policy.
It's bad policy.
It's basically, it's not a yard.
It's a project.
It's a bunch of, what it is, is it's a mole environment.
It's a mole habitat.
I don't, I got no interest in providing a habitat for moles.
They're not paying rent.
They're not.
uh i mean they're maybe paying rent if you feel like you've got a infestation of grubs i should put that i should put that more sensitively if they are paying rent you may not be receiving it that's right they're paying it to somebody you're checking the wrong mailbox um but i don't you know like i've mowed lawns for i've i've mowed my last lawn if you know what i mean and so i'm covering but it's a large area of grass at this uh property and i'm covering it with ground bark and what i did was i signed up for a
Signed up for a service.
This is a thing you can get on the internet on your phone.
It's called Chip Drop.
Oh, is this when people and weirdos come to your house and – is this what you've done before where people just show up and get your wood or whatever?
Is this a similar thing or is this just for – Yeah.
So before it was, hey, I got this bunch of wood and a bunch of weirdos came and took it.
This is chip drop.
Chip drop.
You sign up and all the people around the town that are – where their job is to go to somebody's house and cut down a tree and throw it into a chipper.
At the end of the day, they've got a truck full of chipped up wood –
And they've got to put it somewhere.
And you can sign up for ChipDrop and they'll just come dump their huge load of chipped up wood.
Which becomes a win-win.
It's a win-win for everybody.
They don't have to pay to get rid of it.
Right.
Basically, since it's an app...
They're not – it's – nobody's in a hurry, right?
I'm not in a hurry.
They're not in a hurry.
And so if somebody just happens to be in the neighborhood with a dump truck full of this stuff and they look on the app and they're like, oh, this guy over here wants it.
They just back up in your yard and dump a huge load of free wood chips that if I had to pay for it, it would be – that would be a big deal.
Anyway, so I've gotten a few of these.
I'm on this chip drop list and every once in a while I'm just like, drop me some chips and then they come.
Yep.
And then I'm raking them.
But I'm raking the chips and I'm doing the thing that you do if you have an inner voice.
If you talk to yourself with an inner voice.
I'm running down some old disputes.
I'm thinking of some old disputes.
Freeze up your mind to turn over some problematic sod.
Yeah.
Let's review.
Let's go over a few things we never quite worked out.
Remember that time back in 1994 when a guy came into the store I was working and I said, hey, nice tattoos, and he thought I was fucking with him?
remember that yeah where that guy is now john that's just a misunderstanding that's a shame it was just a misunderstanding but he but he got mad and he confronted me and yeah and then you know and because happy people don't get tattoos because it was 1994 i responded with smugness and condescension and boy did that make him mad
No, I'm running down some old disputes, and I'm thinking of a dispute that's been affecting me a lot.
It's an old friend, someone that I care about very deeply.
And in our relationship, kind of just over time, like bad animals got inside of it.
And what it did was it made it hard to communicate.
And because neither of us, you know, we're both introverts.
Neither one of us wants to be the, you know, the one that initiates the apology or the explanation.
You know, we both want to be fine.
We want everything to be, you know, just like we want to be cool.
But little critters got in and were chewing on the wires.
And we both could feel it.
And what it did was it made us – it made it harder and harder to really talk to each other.
And so our relationship was just – was going along like powered by the tremendous affection we had for each other and desire to be together.
But it got more and more uncomfortable in the cockpit.
Yeah.
Where it was just like, okay, well, I guess we're fine.
Yep, me too.
Totally fine.
Great.
Well, then we're fine, I guess.
And, you know, and we hurtled along like that until this past New Year's.
And we had this terrible New Year's, just the worst.
And came out the other side of it just like, just, I just felt awful.
And so I'm out, I'm raking chips.
And I'm thinking about this friend.
And the problem is, even though this New Year's was awful, devastating, like the worst friendship ending level of disaster.
After a couple of months, we started just sort of texting each other.
And it's the kind of texting that's like,
Oh, hey, I saw this and I thought you might be interested in it.
Oh, thanks.
You know, like, we're fine.
Right.
But it's become sort of bloodless.
Yeah, there's this dinosaur in the room and bloodless is exactly, you know, you can't
Because the dinosaur is like, hey, sorry about what happened, or hey, what happened, I think was actually the question.
It comes in a kind of way, in my experience, it's become about as convivial and deep as a nice exchange with a cashier.
But it's not like you're going to...
It's not like you're going to be super tight pals now.
And sometimes that's because you never really – you agreed not to be mad anymore, but you never really fixed the original thing.
But also maybe you're a little bit gun-shy now.
Gun-shy is exactly right.
Because you don't want to – it's the slow reply problem, right?
You don't want to say, hey, I just want you to know that –
Whatever happens, I really love you.
And then not get a reply.
Oh, right.
Oh, yeah.
Absolutely.
Oh, no.
Like, what happened?
Or get a reply that's like, thanks, you know.
You'll always be my pal.
I love you, too.
But I'm raking.
Back at you.
Back at you.
Ditto.
Or like, can't talk now.
Emoji.
I just texted my wife that.
Yeah.
I'm rigging chips.
Yeah.
And I'm thinking, you know, like this, I have somehow almost burned this relationship to the ground.
And there was, I cannot think of a single reason for it.
There's no incompatibility between us.
There's been no betrayal.
There was never any, we did not go into business together.
We, I have never loaned this person money.
We do not differ in religion or politics.
We have not fallen out of affection for one another.
You know, there's, there is no reason why this relationship should feel like it has foundered far from it, except for me, my behavior, my paranoia, my
uh, my like brittle and easily injured.
My, my woundedness, my woundedness.
And I know this person also has woundedness and, and responds to my woundedness with woundedness.
But I really feel like my woundedness was the, was the initiating woundedness and the one that propelled it.
And so I was just like, ah, there's just nothing good about that.
Um, because I don't want to lose this person and I don't want to, I wouldn't want to lose them if there was a reason.
Yeah.
Let alone just lose them because, you know, because I turned one misread thing into, and, and there's a lot, there are a lot of dynamics, a lot of dynamics about
a lot of dynamics around the fact that i don't really know how to have friends and relationships really i mean i kind of do i feel like it's a lot of work as you get older it's really a lot of work it's a lot and and part of what part of that whole identity that i have always had where
I could be friends with anybody and I was, you know, and I was a member of a lot of different communities and could come and go freely.
All of that is another way of saying that I wasn't really a member of anything.
Came and went freely because I left right when...
You know, like I helped build the cabin, but then on the first night when everybody was like, we're all right, everybody unroll your sleeping bags.
I was like, gotta go.
And so I could say like, Hey, I helped build that cabin, but I never spent a night there.
And, and I, and I always felt like, well, the hard part is building the cabin.
Spending the night is like, you know, like you guys are reaping the benefit of the, of the hard work I did, but it's speed.
It's spending the night in the cabin.
That is the friendship, you know, helping, helping build it is like you're, I'm just moving around.
I'm just building cabins with all these different groups of people.
And then when it's time to spend the night, I go and roll my sleeping bag out under a tree somewhere.
So, so I put my, my rake down.
And I picked up my phone and I sent this person a text and I was like, have I ever told you what you mean to me?
Whoa.
That is as they say a lot.
Send.
Woof.
And then I was like, picked up my rake and raked, raked for a while.
Rake, rake, rake.
And you know, I turn off all notifications on my phone.
It doesn't buzz.
It doesn't bing.
It doesn't flash.
Yeah.
Because I'm just like, screw you, little machine.
I'll look at you when I'm ready.
But now I've sent this thing and I'm like, well, now I don't know if they've replied.
And I was like, don't look at it.
Just rake.
Just rake.
Yep.
So I raked for a while.
And then I looked at the phone.
And the reply was...
No, you haven't.
And I'd be curious to hear what you had to say, which is make you work for this one.
Exactly.
You just got Dan Harmon a little bit.
Exactly.
Right.
Just like, Oh, and you know, period, right?
Like ended with a period.
No, no supporting exclamation points or smiley faces.
Yeah.
And it was, and I think that was intentional.
I think it was very much like, oh, have you got a, are you going to tell me what you, how you feel about me?
You're ready to be decent on your own schedule.
Okay.
All right.
I'm here.
What do you want?
What do you want from me?
Phones charged.
Let's hear it.
My notifications are on.
So then, you know, so then I'm raking and I'm like, well, shit.
Now I got to.
Now I got to back this up.
And that's, I can't just put the rake down and send them three long texts, you know?
So as you say, I'm not a quick replier.
And that does get me in trouble.
You know, our friend Ben Acker of California, if you text him at any time, 24 hours a day, you will get a reply within 30 seconds.
You also are very good at replying.
You reply very quickly.
A lot of my friends are good at replying.
And when I get a text, I often look at it and put the phone down and go back to raking.
Yeah.
And, you know, it's like I know that you're an agent of chaos is what you are.
Yeah, I know.
I'm just staring at the word delivered.
Yeah.
That's nice.
Thanks for the heads up, buddy.
It's really true.
And I do it right in the middle of making plans with somebody.
They're like, okay, so we're meeting at two.
And I'm like, really bad.
It's really bad.
But so I went home that night and I was like, okay, well, this is the kind of thing where I feel like I should be pretty good at this, which is like, I got nothing to lose here, right?
This relationship means a lot to me, but it's also...
it's also feels damaged beyond repair.
And so I don't have any, I'm not, I've got nothing to protect, right?
Like I, it's too late to protect my dignity or, or my pride or anything, you know, like I have to show all my cards because I, because I basically sent a text that was like, you can't bat, you can't, you can't walk back from that.
You can't reply to that by saying, well, how do you feel about me?
You have to just like, well, shit.
All right.
So I wrote a letter, like an old-fashioned letter.
Wait, wait.
Sorry, don't talk about this on the show, but when you say letter, you often mean email.
I always assume you mean email.
That's your fun way of saying email.
Did you write a paper letter?
No, I wrote an email.
Okay, cool.
Although I do have a person that I have been thinking seriously about writing an actual put it in the mail letter.
Now that's going to take a while.
That's going to take more than a couple minutes just for what it's worth.
I'm going to have to find a stamp for one thing.
Yeah.
But I know that this person values letters in the mail.
Like, I think we all would.
Yeah.
It's very intimidating to receive a letter nowadays.
Well, yeah, but if it's a letter and it looks fine.
It's got drawings on it and stuff and front stamps and stuff like that.
That's fun.
Stickers.
You know what that is?
That's a way of saying you are not in trouble.
You're not in trouble.
Hello, there's a sticker on this envelope.
If you draw Snoopy or something, I think they're going to know.
This is not going to be a death threat probably.
That's very good.
See, that's very good.
I don't want to be somebody that's like, I'm a crafter and my project is I'm going to send letters this year.
I also do not want to be that.
That feels like a recipe for disaster.
But it would be nice to send letters.
Although when I get a letter now, a handwritten letter, I'm always like – I'm not nervous.
I'm just like –
Oh, boy.
Am I part of your art happening?
Well, it's different.
I think about letters I would exchange with people in the summer between years of college.
That's some of the best letters.
Because I've got these smart friends that are very creative, and we'd send each other letters, and we'd make each other tapes.
And that was a whole little happy ecosystem, as far as I'm concerned.
I did a lot of drawing in those letters, those like see you in the fall letters type of thing or like how's your summer going.
I would do pretty extensive cartooning and send the cartoons along with the letter.
I would love to see those again, but I feel like a lot of – I used to save all my notes from high school and all my letters from college, and I keep them in – they'd be organized.
I keep them in different boxes, like the way that I store my different cables in Ziploc bags now.
I have that too.
There's a box, a big box that I open that's full of old letters that are organized, and –
some of them were scented perfumed even now they're all scented huh the box yeah the box is like redolent when i open the the the lid i'm like oh wow it's it's from an earlier time it smells like it smells like calvin klein obsession
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It smells like obsession.
I dated an obsession girl.
Oh, I know.
There was an obsession girl in my life, too.
I hated the smell of obsession until I had an obsession girl.
The smell of obsession is like choking on an after-dinner drink.
Or sniffing a hippie.
It's like sniffing a hippie, but then when you fall in love with somebody that smells like that, then you're like, oh, no.
Hippies need love, too, Joan.
Let's be honest.
Oh, that girl.
Yeah.
Oh, my gosh.
She's a smoker, too.
So I send this email that's basically like, I don't know what went wrong.
I don't want to just go down and detail our whole relationship, but I feel like here's where we started.
This relationship started in a rough place for us both, and we rocked along.
It was kind of one of those relationships where you meet somebody and you're like, wow, you just saved me from a lot of just meeting you.
I confirmed that I'm not confirmed something about myself meeting you and spending a couple of days just like palling around made me realize that I was who I thought I was, or maybe I was a little better than I thought I was.
That's a nice relationship.
When those come along unexpected, at the right time, you didn't know how right the time was until you're already pals, that's a hell of a feeling.
Isn't that nice?
It's really nice.
That was my relationship with you 100%.
Well, again, with college, I mean, I keep coming back to college, but I keep thinking of orientation week.
That's when I met the obsession girl, because I'm a serial monogamist.
But it's so much easier when you're proximate to all of these other people that are also going through an exciting experience.
It's probably why people bond at whatever Paris Island is now or whatever.
You've gone through something together, whether it's a happy thing or a sad thing or a whatever thing.
I've left jury duty sometimes thinking, wow, I want to be friends with three of these people forever.
Yeah.
But that's less difficult because you're all in it together and you have no choice but to get along, hopefully.
But then as you get older, that's why I say it is work.
Not that it's work that's not worth it, but you will not have the ease of friendship.
To quote the great Ray Romano on an episode of Dr. Katz, talking about his daughter.
You remember when you could just be friends with somebody because you both like candy?
You don't get that in your 40s as much.
Yeah.
It's hard.
We have the same brand of nicotine gum.
It's one of the nice things about the style of my career that I fly to places and I do these shows and the shows are often like...
You know, six guys and, you know, like six people that do different things.
It's a comedian and an actor and a juggler and a talk show host.
And they're all going to do three things together tonight on the Sketch Fest stage or whatever, you know.
There's so many of those shows.
And so I get introduced to people all the time that...
uh that it does feel like the first day of college where it's like oh wait a minute uh you're hilarious i mean so many of my good friends have come i talked to david backstage at a show once and i still talk about it uh he's an actor that i like a lot and he's uh we're at the same quote-unquote comedy festival he's a comedian i'm an idiot but i just i did you know you know you know the one thing i'm good at is like oh hey um you know whispering because we're backstage i go i really enjoy your work
And he says, oh, thanks.
Thanks, man.
He's really nice.
Anyway.
So this letter.
So I sent this letter.
Yes.
And I said, I said basically all the things.
I said, when we met, it was great.
We had some great times.
And then I remember exactly the day that it started to feel weird.
And I feel like it was my responsibility.
And I
like my pride was involved and we went down and, and get, and, uh, and hit a kind of bad spot.
And, and even though we recovered from it, even though we had many, many great adventures after that, it was always kind of, there was always a tinge from that, from that first bad experience.
And then every time a subsequent bad thing came up, it kind of just added to that.
And I never was able to say anything in real time because I don't know, I didn't feel like,
Didn't feel like you would be receptive.
There was just a tendency between us to be kind of defensive.
And it just got worse and worse and worse and worse and worse.
You're focusing, this is not a criticism, but you're focusing on the what happened after whatever happened mostly?
No, I mean, I needed to say that.
Because I just needed to say all the things that I'd been afraid to say about, like, what happened.
But then I also, you know, needed to say, like, none of this is what I wanted.
You know, I treasure you.
And I always will treasure you.
And this isn't a thing that I want – the reason I'm writing this.
I mean, this isn't a thing I want to just –
Sort of dissipate in a cloud of bad feelings and, and, and, and hurt.
And so I was like, you know, there's nothing to lose here.
Right.
I mean, because if I send this off, the only thing that the only way I could lose, I mean, the only way that this could be, uh, that this could have been a suicide mission.
is if the reply back is like, wow, thanks.
I got your letter.
Super sweet.
Cool.
Cool.
Cool.
Um, you know, like right back at you, it was really good knowing you is basically the one, you know, the, the, the reply that I would have walked away from it going, why did you do that to yourself?
Like, and that's the suspicious mind.
My suspicious mind is,
is the one that is like, well, don't put yourself out there.
Don't do that.
Don't, don't write them and say, did I ever tell you what you mean to me?
Because they're going to write back and go cool, cool.
And then you're going to feel like an idiot.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But it's like, it's the middle of Corona virus and who cares?
I guess like what, what do I, everything's, everything's destroyed.
Um,
Why should my dignity be any different?
So just to be clear here, you knew going into it, you say there's nothing to lose, but you knew going into it that it could be a somewhat perilous mission, not least because you don't know where they're coming from right now, and you're putting yourself out there.
But you know, when I quit drinking...
In the moment that I did, you know, the risk to reward ratio was – it felt really high.
You know, like I'm risking everything that I know about my life, which is that I'm a good time party guy and that life is just one like stoner –
trip to the beer store after another.
Um, and I'm trading that for what some kind of like, Oh, membership in a cult.
And then I walk around and I'm no fun for the rest of my life.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You know, like it didn't seem like there was any thing to be gained really, except for this, you know, this feeling that I was descending into insanity.
I would like to be rid of that.
Um,
But it turned out that in a lot of those cases, you don't know what's waiting for you on the other side.
You don't know what the actual rewards are.
And the risks aren't – one stoner trip after another to the beer store is not actually – you're not actually putting that much of a stake up in terms of what the rewards are.
And in –
in this situation it just feels like i'm thinking about this all the time i'm out here raking chips and i'm thinking about this relationship and so every one of these hurt moments where i've said well that's got to be the end of this it's just too much pain in it i'm better off without this constant going back to the well
Um, clearly that's not true.
I still have not, I'm not resolved.
I'm still thinking about this.
And when I think about it, it's all about the things that I wish I'd said.
It becomes, it becomes, we have lots of millstones, but each one of those is its own different little millstone.
Even if we're not carrying it today, it's always kind of hanging around.
It's millstones all the way down.
Every millstone has a millstone.
Whoa.
See, nobody ever thinks of the millstones.
That's right.
Think of the millstones.
Right.
Well, so millstones.
Sorry.
Well, so, so now she writes back confusingly, not confusingly, a sense of text.
I'm glad to get your, I'm glad to get this email.
She texts me.
I'm glad to get this email from you.
She says, uh,
And I read this text several times to make sure that I got the right, that I got it right.
Because I misremembered it and I went back and read it.
What I remembered her saying was, I'll treasure it.
And so after having read the text and like a day goes by,
I remember I was sitting somewhere, probably raking chips, and I was like, I'll treasure it.
I'll treasure it.
I'll treasure it.
That has a finality to it.
Yeah.
I'll treasure this as I go on in life and think back never seeing you again.
And then I went and read it again, and the text actually said, I treasure it.
That's different.
It's very different.
Right.
But then the text went on to say, I want to reply, but this is not the right time.
You know, I'll get back at you later.
And I was like, you know what?
I said the things that I said, and I got a favorable reply that had just enough in the difference between aisle and aisle.
that I'm okay with it.
It wasn't a thing where I felt like, I just need to get this off my chest.
But it also wasn't a thing where, I mean, I have to acknowledge that this is not the time or place where relationships need to get hammered out.
You know what I mean?
It's not like anybody's going to see it.
Well, sometimes it's not, I mean, as much as, I'll speak for myself, I am sometimes, I just...
If I'm not following my better angels, what I'm really looking for is somebody to just go, we're good.
If I'm not being the person I know I should be, I'm mostly just looking for some kind of affirmation that I'm not in trouble.
And that's a long way from the work of fixing what one has done.
And sometimes that other person may not be ready to just respond to a text and say, well, now it's 19-whatever again.
You know what I mean?
Yeah.
I thought about that a lot.
Yeah.
This is just coming out of the blue and, you know, this person's in the middle of their life somewhere.
And the fact that I'm thinking about them while raking these chips does not mean they're thinking about me while raking their corresponding pile of chips.
Yeah.
Does not necessarily.
And I can't take that as a slight.
That's just reality.
I can't be like, well, why were you thinking about me?
If I was thinking about you, everything should be equal in the world.
And so, you know, and I was working on that on my own pile of chips.
I was like, okay, remember.
Not everybody is, you know, everybody's in a different place in life.
And they could have received this email on the same day that the guy across the alley from them proposed marriage.
So there's a lot going on.
Or as you were saying, imagine it's the worst day in their life.
Maybe they got some bad news that day.
Yeah.
But last night, I got a long email in reply.
And it was...
It's astonishing how, first of all, how much our, our shared experience, our perception aligns.
Like it wasn't one of those emails that I was terrified of, um, where I had laid out what are the structure or, you know, I had laid out the timeline of our relationship and the email I got in reply was like, that's not how it happened.
It wasn't one of those.
It was an email that where we agreed on what,
all had gone down kind of at every step and the blanks that I'd left unfilled were filled in.
So it was like, Oh yes, we, these, these perceptions match.
And I didn't realize that was true.
I mean, that was the thing I was most scared of that, that, that our perceptions didn't match.
And it, it went on to be an email that the, the, the long and the short of it was I had, uh,
I spent three years feeling like I couldn't communicate very well with this person.
And it turned out in this email that I – that this person felt the entire time that they couldn't communicate with me.
And we had a completely shared perception of –
what we were having so much trouble communicating about.
Like a mirrored, like you both thought the same, you thought the same thing was the problem.
Yeah.
And it was, it was, and we went down all these examples where it was like, well, I waited for you until, you know, until two o'clock and you didn't come.
So you didn't show up.
So I figured that you weren't showing up.
And, um, so I left and didn't text you because, you know, I figured, I figured I didn't want to bother.
Um,
Uh, and so I went and, you know, and didn't talk to you for four months.
And then the reply was like, yeah, I stopped at the, I stopped at the cake store to get you a cake.
I was 15 minutes late.
And when I showed up and you weren't there, I figured that you went out to buy a comb for my hair.
I was just thinking, yeah, exactly.
I sat here with the cake, the ice cream cake melting in my lap, waiting for you to get back.
And when you never came back, I assumed that you had just gone off and
got married and so anyway I didn't text you because I didn't want to bother you yeah I'd give it a second edit but that's pretty good it's a good start it's a good outline you know and just over and over like oh so that time that it felt like this world ending catastrophe it was just that it was yeah it was just that I went I went out through the the door on the left and you were coming in through the door on the right and so you know of course it doesn't nothing
practically nothing has changed in my life right i'm still sitting here in in my quarantine bubble they live in a different part of the world and are in a quarantine bubble there of a different kind and we have no there's no time or place that we have scheduled that we're going to be anywhere near one another or any there's no there's no future that this changes or
Well, that's not true, but there's no... In my project management days, I would misuse a word from the world of law.
There's nothing actionable here.
There's nothing that needs to be done about this.
There's nothing that can really be done anymore about this.
This is not in service of some kind of a near-term thing we need to work on.
It's just kind of hanging out there now in some ways, right?
Well, yeah, except when I'm raking chips now...
not only am I not, I mean, the, the danger is to go back and, and replay all those moments where it's like, wait a minute, I was going out the door on the left and you were coming in the door on the right.
That's a tragedy.
Um, I could replay those and, and this is part of my habit, right?
To replay that and, and, and say stupid, stupid, stupid, you know, or, or to feel like, um,
Like a lot of the good things in my life have turned to bad things because of me.
Yeah, yeah.
But in kind of choosing not to do that, it's pretty easy to choose not to do that, in this case at least, and say, the real thing here was that I felt like this was a situation where communication wasn't possible.
That we like, we're, we're like at an impasse.
We're at an impasse.
And that, and part of why communication is impossible is that I didn't want to put myself out there and feel embarrassed.
I didn't want to, I didn't want to send that text and say, Hey, where are you?
Because a, Hey, where are you?
Text is, it just feels needy.
It feels a little sweaty.
Yeah, exactly.
And so, so in order to never send a like, Hey, I'm here.
Like, are you coming or are you, you know, like, where are you?
Rather than send that, I assumed they weren't coming or assumed that, assumed the worst.
And not assuming that they're having the worst day of their life, but assuming that
You know, today is the worst day of my life.
I don't— When that stuff happens in the moment, I think it's—so sometimes you'll have a big blow-up fight with somebody and then be pals again, you know, later that afternoon.
That's junior high, right?
That's—
The easy kind of like, we can get back through this, we know we're both a mess.
But I feel like part of the complexity is, you probably, I mean, let me ask as a question, did you know at the time that this would become the big thing that it did?
I'm going to guess not.
You probably didn't realize at the time that this would be the temporary end of our relationship.
Uh, going in, I, I, you mean, it's like, I went to get you a cake, a comb and a watch.
Like, did you, did you realize on, on the day that what just happened would lead to years of non-communication and impasse?
Yeah.
You did know.
Okay.
Yeah.
It was, I mean, it felt big.
Yeah.
Some of these events felt, felt super big.
Yeah.
Okay.
And this is true of, you know, the, I had a fight with Ben Acker and,
Earlier this year.
You both have very strong personalities, not in a bad way, but you both have very strong personalities.
Strong personalities.
We like each other very much.
Ben Acker is one of these guys like Dan Benjamin where I send one text and then he sends 15 texts all in a row because he writes two words and pushes send.
You used to do that to me until I was like, Merlin, stop doing that.
And then thankfully you stop.
You don't do that anymore.
You don't send.
I do what I can.
You don't send those crazy texts.
But, you know, but Dan, you can't do anything about.
And Ben, you know, I would say, I'm not 15.
Just put all your thoughts into one bubble and don't have my phone just sit here going ding, ding, ding.
It's part of why I turned off notifications.
Yeah, I understand.
Ding, ding, ding.
But we were talking about something in the middle of the night and we got our wires crossed.
And I was like...
I said, what did you say to me?
And he was like, what?
And I was like, don't what me.
And this is all by text.
And he was like, what, what?
And I was like, don't what, what, what me.
And, you know, like burned it all down.
And then later on I had to say, I was talking to my sister and she was like, wait a minute, you burned your whole friendship down over something like some dumb thing on text.
And I was like, well, yeah.
How else do you burn a friendship down?
And she was like, pfft.
you need to, you need to set that.
You know, my sister is just like, you need to set that straight.
Like in my face, a third strong personality is the chat.
I'm like, I don't need to set anything straight.
She's like, that's where you're wrong.
Let me straighten you out right now.
So I was like, all right, let's see how that goes.
And I, you know, texted him.
Hey, I don't know.
He was like, hi friend.
I was like, oh, okay.
Well that feels better.
That was better than, than I'm not friends with Ben Ecker anymore.
So it happens to me a lot.
And realizing that it does and trying to figure out, like, why am I so fragile?
I don't know why.
I had two friends in Tallahassee that were tremendous friends, collaborators, in a band together.
And their relationship ended completely.
fortunately, temporarily, just for a few weeks or months, based on one afternoon of drinking a new kind of canned iced coffee that neither of them had had before, and basically not knowing how powerful it was.
And they were so psychotic after two hours of drinking iced coffee that their friendship ended.
But it left such a mark.
Because you know that feeling, you walk away going like, oh, now I am like, ooh, like Yosemite Sam.
And that, I don't know, I'm not going to say that necessarily cuts trail in your neurological system, but close enough.
It becomes like, oh boy, I'm not going to do that again.
What an asshole.
And it's really, you were both drinking the coffee.
Yeah, well, and...
It's part of having these ratcheted up friendships.
I mean, at the end of Game Changers, the show that we did, however many, it's like 10 years ago now.
I came out of that Game Changers and I wasn't friends with John Hodgman anymore.
I was so mad.
So mad at him.
For people who don't know, John Hodgman has a sometimes very charming habit of taking over everything.
And he took over your panel in a way that was, I have to say, I'm a huge fan, but it was extremely disruptive and he was not reading the room.
He was definitely not reading his friend John.
Because you were, as you like to say, throwing shapes that he really should have been able to pick up on.
Yeah.
I think eventually it was like, John, stop doing that.
Stop taking the microphone and wandering around in the audience looking like the Unabomber.
This is not, people did not pay to see that.
Well, and especially since the whole theme of the show was, okay, and then John does a bit and then Jonathan Colton does a bit and then you and I do a little bit and then it flips over to Scott Simpson who's going to do a bit and then you do a bit with Merlin and I do a bit with John and blah, blah, blah, blah.
And yeah, Hodgman just could not stand to be on the stage and not be running it.
And so I was mad and I think I was mad at him on stage and
Anyway, we got to a place, he and I, long distance, where I was like, screw that guy.
And Hodgman was sad, but seemed to want an apology from me.
And I was like, I'm not going to apologize.
Because he had been wounded and it was your fault.
You overstepped a pound.
Right.
In his opinion.
And we went back and forth several times where I was like, I would rather die than apologize.
I would rather die than apologize for something I'm not sorry for.
And he was like, I want, he kept saying, I don't want you to apologize.
I don't.
And there was this wording that I couldn't parse.
And I was talking to Jonathan Colton on the side and I was like, what is going on?
And Colton – the way that Colton stays on an even keel is that he just slides through life like a –
Like a hot dog going down a jello slide.
You've heard that phrase, ego assertive.
In my experience, Jonathan Colton is the opposite of ego assertive.
Maybe he's it unassertive.
I don't know.
But he does not exercise his will actively on people very often.
Yeah.
Right.
And this is a situation where two of his closest friends are having a huge fight.
If I were in that situation, I would be so excited right in the middle of it.
Like, let's get together.
Let's here's what he said.
And here's what you said.
And maybe if these and he just didn't want any.
You become like Sally Jesse Raphael.
Yeah.
I'm just like, let's.
OK, now behind the curtain, it's her.
It's your baby mama.
Yeah.
And God and the Bible.
Yeah, yeah.
Life is precious.
But what it turned out, because I stuck it out with Hodgman because I was partly because I was curious about just exactly what he was trying to communicate and what we ultimately found a way to discover was what he wanted was for me
to be sorry that he was sad.
He wanted me to be sorry that he had gotten sad.
He got his feelings hurt.
But he didn't want me to be sorry for having hurt his feelings, which I refused to.
It's a subtle distinction, but I totally get it.
I want you to feel bad because of how this is right now.
Yeah.
He said, you know, it was basically, he just needed me to say that I felt bad.
He, he did.
It wasn't enough that I said that I was mad because he understood that he needed me to feel bad.
He needed me to feel sad that he was sad.
Oh, okay.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And as soon as I, as soon as I got there and was like, well, that doesn't affect my dignity.
Like,
To say that, well, I am sad that you're sad, John.
I don't want you to be sad.
I'm mad and not sorry, but I am sad that you're sad.
And his face, I was...
His face brightened.
You know, you could, you could just see it on it.
He was like, great.
Okay.
Well, I'm sorry that I screwed up your show.
And I was like, oh, oh, okay.
Well, then I guess we're fine then.
And it was like, but it, but that was his, that was what he needed.
And he, and he really needed, he needed me to be sad that he was sad.
Yeah.
And I think – I still think about that.
That was a very specific –
need but he it wasn't it wasn't pro forma you know he wasn't putting me through he wasn't like you need to apologize he wasn't doing like um olive oil's father in the movie papa you owe me an apology he was he was it sounds like he was offering you it was like some kind of dutch auction thing where he was offering you up here's what here's what i need to for you to put me in this car today i need you to be sad that i'm sad
Yeah, but he really, you know, it was very emotional.
He really was sad.
He needed me to be sad.
And in this recent letter and this letter I received, you know, the takeaway is amazing to think that between the fact that text messaging is no way to conduct a relationship—
And the fact that this friend and I see each other only occasionally and so have to conduct a long distance relationship.
Somewhere between those two problems, conditions were created that were incredibly caustic and traumatic and relationship destroying where they didn't need to be.
where none of it was real.
It was all, um, it was all in the, the, the style.
There was no substance.
Um,
Yeah, something I wrote down like 20 minutes ago, I have two observations, a second of which I'll share after you say your piece.
The first one of which is sometimes, again, this might be a distinction without a difference, I think it is different, but it's, I'm not saying this is the only two things, but sometimes we're
Sometimes we're unhappy or angry or hurt about what somebody did, and I think sometimes we're upset about how they did it.
So, I mean, the thing is, a lot of times, the thing the person did, what one would think of as the initiating incident, it may not even be such a big deal on any other day, but there's something about the way that they did it.
There's the deed and then the implementation, the operationalization of whatever that person did.
And sometimes it's difficult when you're having a dispute with somebody or you're mad at each other.
Sometimes...
It's one thing to say, like, I don't like the thing that you did.
In my experience, it can be much more difficult to say, I don't like the way that you did it.
Because one of those is, like, you had a bad day and you fucked up.
The other one is, I don't like how you are.
Or how you, that this is, maybe, you know what, any other day that wouldn't have mattered.
But the fact is, I'm much more upset about the way that you habitually do what you do, rather than the actual thing that you did.
It could be the most innocuous thing in the world.
But on the wrong day, that can be very...
triggering for lack of a better word.
It's like, you know what?
Fuck it.
I'm done with this.
The way this person operates is not tenable.
And so if you try to, I mean, ultimately you do want to address the like, Oh, we've, we've, you know, hurt each other thing, but like, I feel like it can be really arduous, um, and fraught to get to the like, yeah, but you know, you do kind of roll this particular way and that can be tough sometimes.
And I wonder if you know it, especially if the way the rolling is,
is I have a hard time saying what I feel with you.
Like I don't feel safe talking about my feelings because I'm afraid I'm going to get... It's going to turn into a whole thing.
Yeah, I'm afraid I'm going to get snapped at.
And so I don't, and then in not talking about my feelings...
it just backs up and you're unintentionally, maybe not consciously.
I feel like at least I will be totally unintentionally keeping score in some ways, not keeping score, not in the way of like, Oh, I always end up paying for dinner more than this other person, but more in the sense of like, I don't even realize I'm keeping a score until the day that it just goes off the charts.
I'm like, you know what?
Fuck this.
Right.
Right.
And, and this is so present in my relationships with my male friends.
Um,
There's so much of this sort of like real touchy-feely stuff that it's not that we don't know how to communicate it because we're stuck in some toxic masculinity because none of my male friends really live in that place.
We don't know how to talk about it because we don't know how to talk about it.
And because –
you know, and I guess the comparison is it's not like my female friends are super good at talking about this stuff either.
You know, I just, I feel this stuff so often with my guy friends where we are just, it's just assumed that we're, that everything's cool and that we're going to be cool.
And there's so much stuff that's just not cool.
There's so much stuff that is just like, this has really been bothering me or hurting me or something.
And, um,
And it gets impacted over the long term.
And coronavirus has really amplified it because I don't get to see my friends.
And there's just not that much reason to text every three days or even every three weeks.
I haven't talked to Jonathan Colton in weeks.
Because why?
What are you doing?
Nothing.
You are, asshole.
What are you doing?
Nothing.
Oh, is that good?
Yeah.
Fine.
Yeah.
Cool and everything.
All right.
Well, good.
You know, here's a text of some stuff or here's a picture of some stuff I saw.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
I do four podcasts about how COVID made me sad, basically.
That's my life now.
I don't have any life hacks.
I'm just talking about how COVID made me sad.
This is not directed at you, but just to close my parentheses, not meant to be directed at you, but it might be helpful to somebody.
There's a thing that I've, I don't know, I don't do this too much because it's kind of shitty to do this a lot, but when I feel like my kid is being a little bit unreasonable or maybe a little bit
I'm grateful or whatever.
It's not just her, though.
This goes for everybody, and you can bet your ass this goes for me.
A thing I've said to her and that I find myself needing to say to myself, do you want to be right or do you want to be happy?
Now, that might be, I don't know.
Maybe that's pesto-aggressive.
I don't know.
I don't know what that is.
But I think sometimes in life, we would rather be right than happy.
And the cost of being right all the time or most of the time, the cost of being right...
There's so many downsides to preferring that everybody be right than everybody be happy.
And I'm not saying we all have to agree on cheese, but I mean in the sense of, is this going to make this environment more generative?
Is it going to make it more open?
Is this going to make this an environment where people can be safe to be a little fucked up sometimes?
But if you're always looking to find the proximate blame for everything that happens to you,
Or even just that maybe I guess somebody who buys milk but doesn't drink milk is supposed to telepathically know when the carton's empty.
I do not have that particular mutant skill.
I'm trying to say that less because it sounds like a dick thing to say, but I do try to check in with myself and say, do I want to be right or happy?
Because, and you can take that a million ways, but the short version of that to me is that if you're the person who needs to be right all the time, you're going to be very lonely.
But if you're willing to be the person who works a little bit at finding somewhere in between, and yeah, maybe being a little bit vulnerable, then there's more opportunity for both of you to be happy or similar.
But also, if you find that you can't be right or happy, well...
you know, that's, that's good to know because maybe, maybe you both have moved on to other things and now you don't have any interest in either of you being happy and you're just want to go be right with someone else.
What, what do you do if you can't be happy unless you're right?
Tune in next week for Roderick on the line.
Oh, episode 400.
Check that shit out.