Ep. 405: "Load-Bearing Bangs"
Hello.
Hi, John.
Oh, hi, Merlin.
How are you?
Good.
I was just reading online about the gallon of milk challenge.
Oh.
Oh.
You got to drink a gallon of milk, huh?
You drink a gallon of milk, but it says here that it's very hard to do.
Doesn't that kill you or something?
No, it makes you barf.
Oh, I see.
It seems like a thing.
I used to have this... This was an ongoing gag...
on the joko cruise because um because one of um one of the the regulars claimed that it would be no challenge at all to eat 50 eggs hey no man can eat 50 eggs that's that's right and uh and she but she claimed that 50 eggs would not be that big of a deal and so it became and but she stuck to her guns and it became a thing where we were like
Come on.
You can't, you know, like this is a legendary thing.
Had she sought to cover herself in glory with this boast?
Well, I don't think she, we never put her to the test.
But this kind of thing intrigues me a little.
I'm not like a sport eater in this way, but apparently the human stomach can only hold a half a gallon of stuff.
Doesn't matter what kind of stuff.
Now that seems crazy to me.
I feel like I could drink a gallon of water in two minutes.
Maybe I'm wrong.
Maybe I'm wrong.
There's a lot of angles on this.
The thing I always think about when I have to pee really bad is I remember hearing that under normal conditions, your bladder holds one liter of urine.
Yeah, which is exactly as much as like a SodaStream bottle or half of a two liter of Coke.
You know, you have these mental models for these things.
When I was a kid, I enjoyed stunt eating.
I would famously mix all of my food.
I had, like, church potlucks.
I would mix all of my food together into something I called Merlin's Mush, and I thought that was very amusing.
Merlin's Mush.
Yeah.
I like that.
I like that.
But I don't know.
Today, even if we set aside the whole, like...
You know, the hardest I ever laughed at a Jay Leno bit, it's a little racist, but it was pretty funny.
Back in the day when Jay Leno was still a pretty funny guy, he did a bit about Mr. Potato Head.
Okay, now forgive me.
I'm going to do a voice here.
But he says, you know, it's only in America can we have this thing where we take a piece of food.
And you put eyes and a mouth on it?
Because that's the original Mr. Potato Head was an actual potato.
And then they just sold you the eyes.
And imagine trying to explain this to someone starving in Asia.
It was a potato.
You put a face on it.
No eat, no eat.
Anyway, I thought that was funny.
I still think about that.
Like, people love the hot dog man.
Right.
You got Joey Chestnut.
You got the other guy.
So many foods that the food itself is personified.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
How do you feel about those billboards where there's a cow and the cow has scrawled in paint, eat more chicken, and it's misspelled the chicken?
Because cows are dumb or they can't write very well.
If memory serves, I believe that is the problematic sandwich chain Chick-fil-A.
Oh, is that so that's so I remember those being I had a friend who bit Brady's bits.
I had a friend who worked at the mall.
And when you get hired at the Chick-fil-A, your first job is that you go out and you give away the samples.
Do you remember the samples?
No, no, we didn't have Chick-fil-A's up here in Washington until very, very recently.
Oh, interesting.
Well, you know, we are, regrettably, because my daughter is, you know, very progressive, we are forbidden from going to Chick-fil-A, which, next to Popeye's, because I apparently hate chickens, was always my treat when we would go on a trip.
Oh, Chick-fil-A.
Yeah, because it's a good sandwich, and the people who work there are really nice, but, you know, they've done some pretty not great stuff.
Bye.
So, but yeah, yeah.
So Todd worked at the mall.
Later on, he became a manager at Arby's where my girlfriend and he worked together.
But yeah, that was Todd's job.
And I feel like I remember, gosh, I remember going to the mall and seeing the cow holding the sign.
I guess it's funny.
It's certainly memorable.
How do you feel about the cow?
It always made me feel terrible.
It just made me feel terrible.
For everybody?
Well, just the implications that the cow is throwing the chickens under the bus.
Yeah.
And the cow has learned...
has obviously struggled to learn to read and write just to communicate.
The lady who just delivered my groceries, I'm going to say about her what I say about anybody.
Her English is better than my whatever she's speaking.
Yeah, for sure.
You know what I'm saying?
So let's not look down our nose at the cow.
The cow's just trying to get paid and stay alive like everybody else.
Well, that's the thing.
The cow, this miraculous cow that can read and write, isn't using its...
isn't using its language to like communicate some, something, you know, ephemeral about being a cow.
It's basically pleading, pleading to not be thrown into the grinder.
Yeah.
And that seems like, I mean, that's a terrible motivation to learn to read.
That's so interesting.
It just, again, survival.
Were you hoping for more of like a Charlotte's web type situation, some pig, like some way that maybe the cow would use its newfound skills to bring us some, some, some wisdom, some insight that we might not have outside the
bovine world well obviously they're going to be if cows can read and write they're going to be cows that are like that are striving for for justice right they're going to be cows that are advocates for cows yes um and but also there should be cows that are maybe speaking more generally about existence about you know showing us something about cow life that we wouldn't know
from the outside, right?
There would be a whole, there would be a breadth of cows.
Like a body of work.
Yeah, that's right.
Like a cattle cannon.
There would be cows that were interacting with the world primarily emotionally.
There would be cows that were very literal.
But this, I mean, this cow seems to, I don't know if this is shared among cows, like this hatred of chickens, first of all, this desire, you know, the thing is they seem reconciled to the fact that we are carnivores and
We're going to eat somebody from the barnyard.
And I don't know.
It just seems really, really like animal farm.
You know, I hate to give them this much credit.
Well, you know, really, I'm giving credit to the ad firm that they hired to do this.
And I'll tell you why I think it's clever, just as long as we're going to tear this thing apart in way too much detail.
Okay, let's go.
Yeah.
You know, you remember in the 80s and into the 90s, there were all of the different wars between the big brands, especially in fast food.
So, for example, when I was working at McDonald's and they introduced the McDLT, that's right around the time everybody started asking, you know, who's Herb?
And with Burger King.
And Burger King was all about, even though they're really just microwaved burgers, but, you know, they're char-grilled.
That kind of thing.
Oh, I see.
Who's Herb?
I don't remember that.
That was a catchphrase for Burger King.
Who's Herb?
Herb is a character introduced, woof, by Burger King.
I'm going to say 85, 86.
I missed it.
And the question became, you know, who's Herb?
Because you kept hearing about Herb.
Well, you know who Herb is.
Herb is the only person who's never had a delicious flame-broiled Whopper.
Oh, poor Herb.
He was a nerd.
Herb was a nerd.
I think that's how, that's definitely how he was cast and portrayed.
That's a nerdy name, right?
Do you remember when there were certain names that were like, ah, that's a nerd name.
All you had to do was say like a nerd name and everybody knew you were talking about a nerd, like Leonard.
Or like a Norbert.
Norbert, yeah.
What about a Filbert?
What about a Filbert?
Filbert, Norbert?
Anybody named with a Bert is going to be a nerd.
And you're going to be able to laugh at that person.
Well, there's a theory around that that's a little bit cockamamie.
And what's it called?
Because I always forget the name of it.
It's called something like nominal determinism, I want to say.
Nominal determinism.
Tell me more about it.
I don't know if I'm getting that right, but that's what I'm going to say for now until I look it up.
I'm not going to type.
And so let me give you an example of that.
Oh, he's such a beautiful boy.
Let's name him Jeeves.
Now, what's he going to grow up to do?
He's going to be a butler, Merlin.
He's going to be a high-status butler.
High-status butler, of course.
He's going to be in a fun status game with Bertie.
And so you get things like that.
Now, I mean, we gave my daughter an old lady name, and she changed it.
I was given an old man name.
Now, when my grandfather was given the name.
Wait a minute.
Is Merlin an old man name?
Yeah.
Well, my grandfather, born in 1900, was given that name, as was my father, as was I. And at the time, it was a much more popular name.
Marlin Man 3.
Yeah.
We've got to get back to this cow, but did you spend a lot of time on baby naming when that was something you were thinking about?
Oh, we really... It's not that we struggled...
We're very creative people, obviously.
Absolutely.
And organized.
And wanted a name that was creative.
A lot of our friends, I mean, you kind of jumpstarted a trend because a lot of our friends were giving their kids old-timey names.
I did not discover that our friend Jonathan, I didn't know until it was too late that they had already given their daughter the same old lady name that my daughter was given.
Yeah.
Well, but, you know, we have another friend who named their daughter after your wife.
Hmm.
Hmm.
You knew about that.
It's a good name.
Yeah, it's a wonderful name.
Yeah.
But then their other child, they named a name that I think when I was a kid, if somebody had even said the name aloud, I would have gone, ha, ha, ha, old lady.
Yeah.
When I was like nine years old, I would have known it was an old name.
Well, you know, John, I got to say, we got to get back to this goddamn cow.
But you brought me on a journey last week where you were reeling off the names of all these feisty Catholic girls.
And they, to a gal, all had like fun names that you just don't hear so much anymore.
Yep.
When you get your Kellys, you get your Marines, you know.
There's certain kinds of names.
I always wanted to have a girlfriend with like a certain name.
It always really appealed to me, you know.
Well, in our case,
I don't know if I told you this, but at some point in the gestation period, those classes that they make you take, you don't realize when you have a baby that you don't get to just do it on your own.
You're forced to take classes at the local hospital.
Some classes are better than others.
But in this case, at one point, the person teaching the class was like, at this stage in the child's gestation, it's about the size of an eggplant.
Right.
And we were really taken by that, because you can picture an eggplant.
I can.
And it's kind of child-shaped.
Can you imagine?
You know, it's kind of like a little bit of a... It's like an R-crumb drawing of a shapely gal.
Yeah, big, thick thighs.
It's thick and small.
A little sturdy gal.
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Situation say it thrice and it's almost like praying the best deal offered right now headspace.com slash super train today Thanks to headspace for supporting Roderick on the line and all the great shows Okay, and so I started sure sure so when we would refer to the baby because this is another thing people that haven't had a baby you realize you talk about the baby all the time the baby doesn't really it's not around yet and
But you refer to it.
You start referring to it.
I've got to be honest with you, John.
I don't know if that's wholesome, but I've got to tell you, I don't think I would trust somebody who wasn't always talking about the baby.
Yeah, you're talking about the baby.
What else are you going to do?
You can still watch The Wire, but you should be discussing The Wire in the context of little Tyler, which is our fake name for the baby.
And the thing is, Mom is experiencing the baby on an hourly and minute basis.
She's pushing right up against that one liter bladder.
Yeah, that's right.
Real hard, real hard.
You know, she's going to want to say, like, the baby X, the baby Y. And pretty soon, I started referring to the baby as aubergine.
The color of the eggplant.
It's a little eggplant.
That's a pretty name.
What's aubergine doing?
And she would say, oh, aubergine is this, aubergine is that.
So by the time the child was nearing completion, I had been calling it aubergine for so long that I felt like, well, the child is named.
Oh, in your mind, it was already sorted, as they say.
You were done.
She's aubergine.
All she has to do is debut.
But literal coming out ceremony.
That's right.
My daughter's mother, however, said, I am not going to name my child eggplant.
And I said, well, it's not eggplant.
It's aubergine.
It's a wonderful, you know, and she's like, it's eggplant.
I'm not going to saddle her with a lifetime of being called eggplant by mean boys.
And I was like, huh, okay, all right, all right.
But, I mean, I'm really invested.
But she went through this whole thing where she was throwing all these goth names at her, like Imogen and Celesticine and all this stuff.
And I'm like, what is that even, Imogen?
It's like an old lady name with eyeliner.
Yeah, we're not having an Imogen.
You might as well put a pack of clove cigarettes in her baby blanket.
Ugh.
And so we're back and forth on this, and the thing is, you settle on something, and then as soon as you decide that you're not going to do that, then you're right back to square one.
Like, Jane...
Beth?
I mean, we were so close and now we're so far.
But I mean, don't you feel like, I mean, I do feel like it's sort of, understandably, the final decision does fall to the person giving birth, don't you think?
Well, no.
I mean, it's at that point.
You don't think she has a right to choose.
I do feel like a woman has a right to choose right up until the time the baby is born.
And after that, no more choosing.
After that, it's 100% a democracy.
Okay.
But no, what you want is the name that as soon as you say it, it just rings like a bell.
And everybody goes, oh, there it is.
That doesn't need to be.
Listen, I don't want to get up on somebody's shit.
That does not need to be a cute name.
No.
Well, and so what happened?
But the problem with us is, you know, we can't decide.
If somebody says, like, let's get tacos, it's two hours later and we're still listing all the taco restaurants in Seattle.
You know, like we're not good at stuff.
And two days after the baby was born.
Because we spent the night in the hospital the first night.
And then I think the second day, neither of us wanted to leave the hospital.
We were like, this is fine.
I mean, I was sleeping in a chair.
I hate the chair.
And we were like, you know, the chair is such a cruel joke.
It's really I think it's a way of letting the father know.
What's what?
On a go forward basis, this chair is now an analogy for your role.
It's here.
It is technically a chair.
It's not good for sitting.
It's not good for laying on.
It turns into different things.
And each thing it turns into is less useful than the thing that it used to be.
And that's you.
That's your role.
It reclines and you're like, oh, thanks.
And then it's like, this is worse than being on an airplane.
Yeah.
But I'm so tired.
And also I have this tiny baby.
Yeah.
But we were there and, you know, we were like, don't kick us out.
We're not ready to go out into the world yet.
The world's so dirty.
It's dirty and you're just going to give us this baby?
We don't know anything about babies.
Put this kid in a car?
Drive it somewhere?
In this economy?
Yeah.
They said, you got to go.
Yeah.
But we need this.
A woman came into the room and said, we're not going to release you until you come up with a name for the baby.
Because we have to write it down before you go.
And so you have to come up with a name for the baby.
Also, you have to go.
So you're in this – it's this – you're in kind of a logical conundrum.
That's a very strange way of saying we demand you name your child now.
And that's what it was.
They're like, you have to name the baby and then you have to go.
But you have to go.
So you can't – this isn't another opportunity to stall.
And honestly –
We're like, we've thrown every name in the book at this child and it's all like, you know, like Barb?
No.
And the nurse, the nurse.
had a name.
This was the nurse that was there for the whole ceremony.
The one who was introducing you to the nurse's riddle, which is that what we're going to get to is you name this kid, but you do need to leave, but you can't leave until you name the kid, ergo, Socrates is all men.
But the nurse had also been there in the delivery, same nurse, and I really liked her name.
And then my daughter's mother liked her name.
We were like, we're just going to name the baby after you.
Come on.
Really?
And it was great.
And we were like.
And then you left.
Well, no, because at the very last minute, her mother said, I would like.
Her middle name to be Imogen.
And I was like, you're going to try and sneak Imogen in there?
Because my feeling was Imogen has no connection to either of our families.
Like every person in my family has some – Yes, it's tough.
It's tough.
We're all named after some Welsh great-grandmother –
Where it's just like, why is my middle name Morgan?
Because my great-grandmother's maiden name was Morgan.
Marwinden.
Marwinden.
Just a classic kind of Jensenminden.
Yeah, but a classic kind of Welsh name, just lots of Ys and Ws.
Yeah, but like Imogen, we don't have any Imogens in this family.
I'm not against Imogen, but it does fall into that.
We kind of did the same thing, but like you fall into this, like you got attached, she got attached, and you know, like let's say in Peter Schaefer's Equus, moments snap together like magnets, but all we know, all she knows is this is definitely an Imogen.
Well, and Imogen's like an Irish name.
Neither of us are Irish.
Imogen is a, I just, I see like a black Irish girl, dark black hair, light blue eyes.
Who's like, like sitting on a cliff.
Would she be a scullery maid?
Maybe we're kind of distillery.
Would she be on a sailboat?
The wind is coming over the fens or whatever, and she's about to throw herself off of a cliff because her betrothed died at sea or something.
That's a little bit goth.
It's super goth.
Yeah.
It's super goth.
Is there wind blowing in her hair?
Is the wind blowing in her hair?
Is her great ginger mane flowing?
No, it's black hair.
Black hair.
Black hair.
Yeah.
She's crying for Heathcliff or whatever.
That's not us.
That's not us.
No mess.
But she's, you know, she's, like you say, she's done a lot of work recently, and she's like, I want Imogen in there.
I'm not going to say, you know, I don't have the power to say no, but I said, well, if she gets Imogen, if you get Imogen, then I get Aubergine.
And so in our punch-drunk insanity...
of that moment we named our daughter after the nurse and then we gave her two middle names oh jeez john really and then it's like homer's car what are you doing her last name then then her her mother's last name is her third middle name so she's got five names
Because we didn't, nobody told us, nobody told us going into this, like, don't do that.
Nobody told us, like, hey, go in.
This is one of those things where you don't go into the studio.
Your scientists never stopped to say, you know, should the child have five names?
You don't go into the studio with three song fragments and book two months and say you're going to make an album.
Oh, yeah.
What are you, Paul McCartney?
We'll just make one song.
You go in, you have 10 song ideas.
If you're not a surf, you have 25 song ideas.
This other part where the bass is really, really loud.
But in this case, we just went in like, oh, what are you talking about?
You have a kid and then it probably comes out with a little card that has its name on it.
Uh, so anyway, we have, we've not, she's not quite old enough yet where she's looked at us and gone, wait a minute, you really named me this?
Like, like one of the situations like on a TV show that actually is like life for some, some children, um, only hear their full name when they're in a little bit of trouble.
Is it one of those things?
Well, her name takes two minutes to say.
Yeah, you should have thought of that.
You got to come back to mine because I had so many tests.
And one of my tests was the back of the porch rule.
Or if you like the playground rule, which is I should be able to yell.
You're lost.
I don't know where you are.
Maybe it's Target.
Maybe it's a porch in Ireland.
I should be able to yell your name and not be embarrassed.
And you should be able to hear it and recognize it.
Right.
Well, so do you have a whistle?
On me?
No, but like a whistle, like... Oh.
If you're in a crowd or a forest or something, and you want to... Oh, you know what?
We did.
We had a... Signal?
Oh, my God.
What was it?
We had a secret knock for that, and I've already forgotten it.
We probably talked about it years and years ago.
Knock, knock, knock.
Uh-huh.
Doot, doot, doot.
Yeah, something like that.
We do.
We do.
You know, every... My dad's whistle was one of those where he put two fingers in his mouth, and you could hear him for a mile.
Ugh.
And his was like...
Dude, I cannot play piano.
I can't draw and I can't whistle loud.
And all three of them are terrible regrets in my life.
I've tried so hard, John.
I've gone on, you know, with the internet, you can go and look things up for a lot of stuff.
And I've tried to learn how to finger whistle.
I lost a lot of the pliability of my mouth.
Yeah.
I just can't do stuff anymore.
Yes.
So I can do the role.
My daughter is the rare case of being able to make the W. Have you ever seen the W?
I have.
I've seen it, yeah.
It's incredibly upsetting.
When she cried as a baby, she'd make a W tongue.
That's a very rare genetic thing I'm given to believe.
No way.
That would be extremely unsettling.
I'll send you a photograph.
It's very upsetting.
If you looked into a crying baby and if it had a W in there, that was like wasteland.
I would lend some levity by putting my hand over her mouth and doing sort of the thing we used to do when we wanted to emulate First Nations people.
So she'd go, and I'd go, over her mouth, and it was so funny to me.
I never learned to whistle either with the two fingers, and I feel like it's because I have a tongue that won't cooperate.
Like I have that geographic tongue that makes it hard to do.
I can't tie a cherry stem into a knot or whatever.
But it's terrible for me.
I am a man who should be able to signal to someone across a football field with a very loud whistle, and I can't.
All I want to be able to say is I want to make the whistle that says, hey, look over here, which is like I'm going to I'm going to make the sound that sound.
Yeah, right.
Yeah.
Like as in like I'm parked here and I need to cut through or, you know, for example, you're you're at a theme park or something that that's all I really want.
I feel like... You know what?
Maybe this is my new bar chords.
That whatever that day was in 1982, that Saturday morning I woke up and could suddenly play bar chords, where that Friday night I couldn't.
Maybe I just need to push through to be able to finger whistle.
See, geographical tongue?
This could be like another quarantine task.
Challenge.
I've learned to play so many things on the guitar that I didn't know how to do back in February.
Maybe if I went on a deep dive...
And you did two that was like, let's watch YouTube videos that teach you how to finger whistle and just practice and practice and practice until we can find it.
I love this.
It would change my life.
It would change my life, too.
But it's also, I mean, it's got to be one of those skills where it's like you say to somebody, hey, yeah, I wish I could learn how to whistle with my fingers.
And they go, oh, just do this.
And you're like, well, you know, that doesn't really help.
It's like saying, well, you flip an omelet by doing this.
And it's like, well, you mean like be good at it like you?
What are you, Gordon Ramsay?
Like, I...
I want to learn whistle mouth, though.
You know what?
I'm going to do that.
I don't think we're done yet, John.
Let's do it.
I think we might have a couple more weeks of this.
Let's do it.
Let's do it.
Okay, I'm ready to get down and learn to whistle.
Yeah, there's still time.
There's still time.
I mean, I had the great fortune of the last time I cut my hair in January.
I did a terrible job of it, but I did a terrible job of it that was passable.
You know, I kind of did a just shaggy kind of whatever.
Just get it done.
I was leaving the next day.
Get it done.
Some kind of shag.
But it was one of those great bad haircuts that as it grew out –
It was consistently the same amount of bad.
It's the opposite of a Floyd the Barber haircut.
Floyd the Barber haircut, you look great for a few days to come in a couple days later for your next haircut.
You did the opposite.
You did one out of the gate.
You know, it's going to be a grower, not a shower.
It's the kind of haircut that you grow into, and let's be honest, grows into you.
That's so great.
It was January was your last haircut?
Well, so all through the pandemic—
Where I could have and under normal circumstances would have been out of sheer boredom and insanity cutting my hair on a like thrice weekly basis.
And I would have had my hair down to, you know, just like this tiny fuzz.
And I've been sitting and fucking with the ears and stuff.
Yeah.
Every time I looked in the mirror, I was like, huh.
looks fine because you you know what you don't get in the warning signs like right now i'm getting that thing where like i look a little bit like lobot where i'm getting like the sides are getting a little bit crazy yep and you're like okay so this is we need it's time to tamp this down but you had the consistent experience for months of saying why would i why would i get rid of this magic yeah because you know cutting your hair there's always a trigger event right like you're saying where you look in the mirror and you're like uh-oh
Oh, I got to take care of that.
Yeah.
And then it's, then it's just like straight downhill.
Big one for me is like when I can feel it on my face when I'm trying to sleep, which drives me crazy.
I hate that feeling.
I do that with my, my, my beard.
If my beard, if my little beard hairs get in the corner of my mouth, but anyway, it's your body telling you it's time for nine months.
I've been looking in the mirror.
Oh, look at that little baby's tongue.
Look at W. That's crazy.
Uh,
It's like you could catch dew.
I know.
A little dew would pool there on the top.
She can still do it.
She'll do it on demand.
Not demand.
I demand she stop, but she knows how much it upsets me, and she does it.
Anyway, for nine months, I didn't touch my hair.
Didn't touch it because there wasn't a reason to.
It was just like...
I couldn't believe it.
You're like Fonzie.
You're like that wonderful scene in the... Like when Fonzie goes in the bathroom, he walks up to the mirror, he takes out his comb, and he goes like this.
It's perfect already.
But a week ago, I looked and my bangs, the hair in the front...
were, you know, kind of like whispering down a little too.
They were just like, it was, it was a little bit too, uh, river Phoenix.
I was just getting these bangs that were going down and I was like, you know what?
I'm just going to trim a little bit off of the bangs.
And I, and I, and I brushed them down and I got them down and I cut, I swear to you, what half an inch off of the end of the bangs.
And immediately I,
the entire haircut fell apart.
Just like... Those were load-bearing bangs.
They were load-bearing bangs.
All of a sudden, I looked like I was in the Bay City Rollers.
Oh, no.
And I was like, like 30 minutes ago...
I looked like Indiana Jones if he had fallen down a hole in the search for the Lost Crusade and had been living down there for nine months.
That's a great look.
I looked that cool.
And now I look like one of the guys in Slade.
Oh, I know exactly what you mean.
You know?
Yes.
I screwed it up.
So you specifically, I think you're saying you look like, I want to say Derek.
The blonde guy from the Bay City Rollers.
But you could also be, what's his name, Naughty Holder?
Naughty Holder.
The two high bangs.
I had, well, and the thing is they weren't even too high.
That's the thing.
Queen's Gambit.
Queen's Gambit, similar bangs.
Just wrong.
It wasn't that they were, they didn't stand out as bangs.
I had created an imbalance.
Yeah.
And it wasn't clear what it looked like all of a sudden was that I had too much hair on top.
And then I was like, well, now that I've done it, and so then last night I cut some hair off of the back to try and, and now I look like a mushroom in Fantasia.
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That's rough.
For some reason, it reminds me of another thing I don't understand, which is flower arranging, which I believe flower arranging is a thing because even as a non-expert, I can eyeball something and go like, well, that just looks like a bunch of stuff in a vase versus that looks like an arrangement.
If you just roll up on a good arrangement and start snipping off some roses, that's not going to help that arrangement.
But you can tell an arrangement from a set of things in a vase.
You can or can't?
I feel like I kind of can.
I mean, I've always been interested in that idea of like a French garden versus an English garden.
I think it's an interesting analogy for life.
There's one kind of garden that's all about control and regimentation and the other one that's all about like very lightly...
Being a steward of chaos is a more English kind of garden.
But in any case, you think about a painting, you think about anything, you think about le mot juste.
You never know what the thing is that's holding the goddamn thing together.
Take a famous phrase, take the cadence of any rhetoric, and you take out a word, and the sentence falls apart.
Sentence falls apart.
Kind of, yeah.
Well, this is what I don't know about my daughter.
Does she need five names?
Maybe she does.
She's never said— If you took out one of those names, it might be like Jenga.
Well, that's the thing.
If you take out Aubergine, her middle name is Imogen, which just sounds like her mother grew up in the 90s.
wearing baby doll dresses and Doc Martens.
She got the name Imogen.
She was Miss World.
Right?
Imogen got in there somewhere.
It was the name of her favorite purse or something.
Or it was like one of the colors at Benetton.
Like, oh, this chemise is Imogen.
And she was like, I love that.
And it's just like me.
I've been carrying around the name Alyeska as a name for the husky puppy that I was going to buy for 35 years.
Yes.
But I never bought a husky.
And it's only been later that I realized that every third dog in Girdwood is named Alieska now.
That's the other thing with names.
You think you're getting ahead of the curve, but like you pick what you think it's going to be.
You don't realize that this is a very John Syracuse kind of point.
It's not about evolution, but it is about this idea that like there is no, there's a zeitgeist for almost everything.
And when you pick, for example, an old lady name, like within like two years after that, old lady names were everywhere.
Yeah.
Think about the bar think about is you'd like you said Barbara Lisa Jason There's like these certain names that are just like they just explode Well, and everybody's having that idea and it takes that much.
It's like it's like a corona explosion It's like is are there gonna be a lot more than six people the sick people two weeks after Thanksgiving?
Yes Yes, but does each individual person at Thanksgiving think I'm part of the problem No
Oh, it's like the guy who got paid with the rice on the chessboard.
And then pretty soon you got to give him all the rice in the world.
Yes.
When I was growing up, every dog in Girdwood was named Barney or Fred or something like that.
That's so sweet.
Fred, you know, and that was
You know, that was back when the general manager of the ski resort used to kick dogs if they were in his way as he was walking around.
That's what he used to do.
People were mad at him, but he was just like, these leashless dogs shouldn't be wandering around my ski resort village.
He's bringing some frontier justice.
He's like the Chitty Chitty Bang Bang guy.
But they were all named Barney.
Barney's a great name.
All of the kids that were watching that scene were thinking, when I grow up, I'm going to name my dog Alyeska.
And now they're all named Alyeska.
The point is that our little girl could not have one middle name and have it be Imogen.
But it sure as hell couldn't have been Aubergine.
People would think we're insane.
I only realized it like nine months later.
Like, was I insane?
When I was a kid, the basic pattern, well, everybody had normal, like mostly normal names, white people names.
But over time, I feel like middle name is where you had a little bit more, and I think we named, given this convention, which is, first name, you know, listen, John, I have very strong opinions on this, and I don't want to upset anybody.
As somebody who entered every first day of school, knowing that I was going to have to tolerate...
jazz about my name.
I didn't want to give that to a kid.
I did not want to give a kid a name.
You know, my rule of thumb is you can have one cute thing about the name.
You cannot have two cute things about the name.
The child's first name must be something that can be pronounced.
It could be said over the phone without needing to be spelled.
But if you can't live with that and you got to do Daenerys...
If you're going to name your kid Daenerys, don't put a G in front of the D and say, oh, the G is silent.
That's too cute.
Daenerys.
No, no, there's no, no.
Daenerys.
It's just that is way too cute.
But if you did that Hakuna Matata, God bless you.
Sure, sure, sure.
You do you.
But I think the middle name is where you can get a little cute.
So we gave our kid an old lady first name and the name, the last name of one of my favorite short story writers as a middle name.
And like, there's a lot of determinant.
Ellison?
Well, she wrote, you know, everything that rises must converge and a good man is hard to find.
Novels of the grotesque about people who might as well be named Eleanor.
Sure, sure, sure.
Flannery O'Connor might as well be named Eleanor.
Like, what was I thinking?
Right.
You could have named her Flannery.
Well, that is.
That's her middle name.
Yeah, exactly.
I think that's a good middle name.
Fanny.
Yeah, but I mean, it's not like she's any giant fan of, you know, she hasn't even been to college yet.
She hasn't had to read, you know, A Good Man is Hard to Find.
You know what he says?
You know what the Misfit says?
He says she'd have been a good woman if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.
Shoot her?
Oh, don't you remember?
Remember the Misfit?
He shoots the old lady?
Spoilers?
No.
A good man is hard to find.
I went into this with this.
Here was my approach, and this is a very me kind of approach, which is, first of all, there are all kinds of names that were just not going to cut it for me.
Too many way too cute names.
Right.
But I also wanted to give my daughter a kit from which so here's your name, your name.
And I'm telling you a second what my number one pick was.
Your name is now X. This is the name.
And the thing is, I have explored this.
And the name that I wanted to give my daughter was, to my knowledge, the most flexible kit.
female name that i am aware of i mean there's others you could certainly get way cute about it and turn it into like a jumble but no elizabeth oh there's so many nicknames for elizabeth you could be you could be elizabeth you could be uh bess you could be beth you could be you could be so many i like how margaret turns into peggy i always thought that was really cute i don't know why that happens and can i tell you why it got instantly nixed oh why because
Because there's one name inside of that particular role of jumble.
Boy, it's Lizzie.
Liz.
Don't love Liz.
Don't love Liz.
And also the mother of my daughter was harassed by a Liz at one point in middle school.
Oh, no, you don't want that.
You don't want to recapitulate your trauma.
Bully Lizzie.
But don't you think I mean in that case now I realize that's the little too because we didn't have any like there are all kinds of things Oh, you give them a family name.
Oh and the other one obviously like as you said of your child's 11 names one of them could be like a family last name Right, right.
Well all of my all of my family's middle names are all family last names that sound that you just heard by the way yeah was this this stupid pea-brained cat
trying to get up on the windowsill, and she actually stepped on the microphone on her way across the room here.
Precious Angel.
No, don't give her that.
Don't give her that, Precious Angel.
Let me ask you this.
Yes.
And I know that you're traditionally reluctant to talk about your name too much, but... That's fine.
Has it been, on the whole, throughout the course of your life, more a blessing or a curse?
Pound for pound.
I mean, if I put it in terms of emotions, I would say that pound for pound over time.
I think I have a kind of a cool name that most people don't think is actually really my name.
They say, is it a stage name?
And I say, would you pick that first stage name?
Is that what you would do?
You would name yourself the third?
You would sound like somebody from the rich kids camp.
Oh, that's so great.
I sound like I'm from Camp Mohawk.
I don't love that.
No, no, here's the thing.
So my dad and my dad was always Merle, and I was Merlin.
And real quick, so I thought my name was, it was just, I would brace for like the first day of second grade, third grade.
It's like you got to say, and this is before, John, let's point something out here.
It was not always the custom to say, I'm going to read the names for the first time, and I want you to tell me if I'm pronouncing it wrong, and I would like you to tell me if you would prefer to be called something else.
This is a new invention.
Yeah.
Correct?
Yeah, no.
When they used to call a role, they would call everybody's name.
And if they got it wrong, they just kept going.
Yeah, there's actually a pretty funny Etsy commercial about that.
Etsy's got some pretty good commercials right now.
But so, like, here's the thing.
My dad died.
So, Merle was gone.
And then, here's the thing.
The first time I ever remember being asked that very modern question was Ms.
Hare's class.
Ms.
Hare.
H-A-I-R-E.
That's rough.
Yeah.
Ms.
Hare's class, fourth grade, Ann Weigel Elementary, Cincinnati, Ohio.
Don't be creepy.
And she says to us, she says, I'm going to say your name.
Please tell me if I'm pronouncing it wrong.
If you prefer to be called something else.
Completely off the dome, in the moment after she said my name, I said, here.
And I said, and if you don't mind, I would prefer to be called Merle.
And so that September day, because school should start in September, September 1976, that's when I started going by Merle, which you still to this day call me, as well as what my wife calls me, too.
Yeah.
Are she and I the only ones that call you Merle?
Almost completely.
Wow.
But to answer your question, I mean, now I like it.
I think it's kind of cool now.
As I've said my entire life, I really just wanted to be a Todd or a Jason.
I wanted to have like a normal name and a normal life.
If I couldn't have the Brady Bunch room, at least give me a normal name.
To be a slightly – well, how does one say?
Not particularly monetarily advantaged child with an incredibly pretentious douche name was sometimes a little rough.
You know, my name is an invisible name.
And yet, weirdly, every single John is different, right?
I mean –
John Flansburg, if he and I were in the room with one another.
John Flansburg and John Linnell, look no further.
Right.
Right?
And we are routinely in a situation where John Linnell, John Flansburg, John Hodgman, Jonathan Colton, and I are all in the same room.
And in some cases are the only men in the room.
I know so many Johns.
It's like I do podcasts.
regularly with John Roderick and John Syracuse, and often enough with John Gruber, that there's this entire flight of Johns that I'm dealing with.
And yet each John is different, right?
Absolutely.
There are other names where that's not always true, but Johns, you know, there's nothing but exceptions to prove the rule, because there's no rule.
It's just Johns.
If you knew six Bryans, you'd be like, what am I doing wrong in life?
How do I know so many Bryans?
That reflects a poor decision-making.
That's an unexamined life.
Too many Bryans.
It was like that time early on in life when I suddenly realized...
Oh my god, the first five women I've dated as a as a grown-up all have red hair.
What is that?
Like I don't probably a coincidence.
I don't have a preference for red-headed girls.
That's not a thing I had a similar thing where every woman I met said she didn't want to dress up like Catwoman It's a weird pattern
Until you find your Catwoman.
Absolutely true.
I think there are names like that, that Brian, Brian, or like Scott's, well, I won't say what Scott Simpson says, but let's just say he has a lacrosse name.
Scott Simpson.
That's very lacrosse.
Very lacrosse.
I wanted to be named Peter.
Yeah.
Because Peter, you could say with the British accent.
Peter.
Peter, like blue Peter.
Whereas,
John.
It just feels like it doesn't have the same impact.
John, Ian, Ivan, Juan.
You have many variations on that.
Now, the thing that happens now is there's, oh, boy.
It's what Nate Silver calls reversion to the mean.
You get a bunch.
Remember, a few years ago, it was all bell tones.
It was all bell tone names like Jaden and Caden and Layden.
Those are bell tone names?
What does that mean?
It's got that, I think it's called a bell tone.
It's that sound, that A, that A sound.
In the 2000s, earlier, sort of like, yeah, around the millennium, I feel like those came into ascendance.
I feel like maybe Britney, Britney, Britney.
They used to drive me crazy.
Their name is not Britney.
It's Britney.
Britney.
I think Britney had a bell tone kid, like a Jaden, Layden, Caden.
And now today.
But you're saying Aiden, Baden, Caden is not a thing anymore?
Winnable Bibble.
Well, I think they're still around, but yes, I can tell you for sure, because what I was about to say is, you know the names, a name has gone worldwide when you have to say it's Aiden, Aiden L, Aiden K in the class.
Do you have any, have we talked about this?
Do you have instances of that where there's more than one, more than one Jaden, too many Jadens?
My little girl is always happy to report with any group of kids, the ones that are like,
There's an Aiden, there's a Jaden, there's a Baden, or, you know, there's a Hal, a Hole, a Hall, and a Hull.
Well, then you get the old man names that have come up.
You know, you could get like a Sam or a Max or, you know, one of those kinds of old-timey names.
Yeah, so every year there is that.
But then I think back to there was some point when I knew a Kirsten, a Kirsten, a Kristen, and a Kirsten.
John, that one needs to stop.
That one, you guys need to get together and pick one.
Kirsten, Kirsten, and Kirsten?
My wife works with a Kirsten.
She's Kirsten.
I was like, are you sure your name's not Kristen?
Because your name sounds like Kristen.
Can you be Kristen?
Yeah.
I thought that I knew the world until I dated a Megan.
And then all of a sudden.
That's my first Megan, John.
She's my first Megan.
I always thought it was Megan.
My Megan is your first Megan?
Well, I've known Megan's.
I believe that's my first Megan.
Well, so Megan.
So I dated a Megan.
And then all of a sudden, every Megan I was uncertain about.
Then I was like, Megan.
A name should not introduce doubt, John.
It should provide clarity.
Because Megan isn't spelled, my Megan at least, wasn't spelled with an A or two E's.
It was just spelled like Megan.
And that breaks my rule.
That breaks the cute rule.
It's actually pronounced jennifer.
And it has no N's.
The N has a tilde, but you don't pronounce it.
I still don't know how to say it.
My daughter's name is New Yorker, and we have a diuresis over it.
New Yorker, but with a G. With a G. New Yorker.
Well, my mom, when she divorced my dad, she changed her name.
Yeah.
And she changed her name because, you know, she wanted to change her identity and she had always hated her name, apparently.
But she didn't want to change...
Her driver's license and her bank account.
So what she did was she changed the pronunciation of her name.
But she left it spelled the same name.
Your mother's first name.
That's where that comes from.
That's right.
Her whole life.
So your mother has a name that we're all familiar with that is historically always pronounced this one way.
And when I first heard you say your mom's name and I knew it was pronounced differently, I think that's the first time I ever heard that.
It's a little bit of a jennifer.
It is a little jennifer.
And...
And as a child, this was very – this created a whole like decade-long –
feeling that I was being gaslit because she changed like somebody like somebody's playing a trick on you like one time one time my brother-in-law just slightly older than my wife she he knows how much my wife loves spaghetti and they had seven kids in the family so there was never quite enough food and one time he put a bunch of hot sauce like like uh hot sauce on a plate and gave it to her and said here's spaghetti sauce and she ate it oh she got really sick that kind of thing where you're like are you really is this a dare like a terrible gaslight
actually, because she changed her name when she divorced my dad and moved down to Seattle.
Changed her first name.
Changed her first name, but it was spelled the same.
That's so good.
Everyone in my family, my dad, my uncles, my aunts, my cousins, everyone pronounced it the old way.
Do you think they were grandfathered in?
Well, no, because my mother...
never explained to me that she had changed her name.
Oh my God.
And there's never a good day to ask.
Hey mom, do I know your name?
No, there, there, it was never a question of asking because there is something about, there's something very definitely in the character of my father and his family where at least to me as a four year old, it seemed like,
Like they were intentionally mispronouncing her name in order to antagonize her.
Oh, I see what you're saying.
And so from the age of from the age that I first heard my mother say in a kind of a clenched voice.
Uh, actually it's Jennifer.
Well, no, she just said it's, and then her, you know, like, I don't know why I'm not, I don't know why I'm not going to call my mom Jennifer.
No, her name, the name that she was born with, I'm just going to say it because everybody, it's not, it's not hard to find.
Her name was Marsha when she was born.
Yep.
And in 1971, she changed it to Marcia.
Yeah.
which is a plausible pronunciation of that spelling of the name, M-A-R-C-I-A, because Marsha also has a separate spelling that's like Marsh.
More phonetic, yeah, yeah.
But so the first time my mother ever said, it's Marcia, my dad, and I mean, I can kind of, I don't remember the exact moment, but I remember the vibe for sure, where my dad kind of snickered and rolled his eyes.
And my perception of that moment was as a kid, well, clearly my mom knows her own name.
So why is my dad throwing shade on her and pronouncing it differently?
And then everyone I knew on my dad's side of the family referred to her as Marsha.
And to me, the name, even still, the name Marsha sounds like an intentional diss, like an insult.
And I swear to you, I was 12 before it occurred to me finally.
Wait a minute.
Did my mom change the pronunciation of her name at some point?
Oh, my God.
You must have felt insane.
And I said to her, I don't even know if I was brave enough to say it to her.
I think I might have asked my dad.
Because I, I think what happened was I finally was as a young, like a teenager even was like able to stand up to him enough to say, why have you consistently like, why have you been doing this all these years?
Why do you torture me with this?
Why do you like, why do you insist on calling her by the wrong name?
Right.
And my dad was like, I was married to her for
10 years her name is marcia she's marcia and then she changed it to marcia and i just i don't know how i can't i can't i've never been able to fully and i was like you what she what and i think i didn't believe him and i think i went to her and was like did you and she was and she just in her way you know just sort of offhandedly like oh yes well you know i didn't want it i didn't i never liked my name
And then she breezed off into something else.
And I don't know if none – I think none of the adults in my life ever realized that no one had explained it to me.
And that I had grown up in this – and it was a major feature of the way that I perceived my relationship between my parents and the way my relationship with my dad was colored because of this feeling that he –
intentionally mispronounced her name as a diss.
Damn.
And that all of his relatives did too, that they had had a meeting and said like, we're going to call her Marsha just to fuck with her.
None of my relatives.
Because you were, let's just real quick, you were three or so when that happened, the divorce, and presumably the name changed.
So your memory is of nothing but Marcia.
Yeah, I wouldn't have ever heard her name pronounced before that and probably even recognized it referred to her, right?
She was just mommy.
And probably what I realized later was most of my relatives had never even been told she changed her name.
Because she didn't interact with them.
As soon as she divorced from my dad, she went on with her life in a new way.
And so they just called her Marcia because that was all they ever knew.
Of course, yeah.
You know, if somebody said, like, it's Marcia, they would have gone.
I could see, I'm not agreeing with this, but I could see them going, yeah, that's not going to happen.
You know, like me going to Starbucks and being expected to say, what, Grande or Venti or whatever.
It's like, I'm not going to say that.
Now, in the case of your mother, that was an important thing.
That is the name that she has chosen.
And let's just say this, as long as we're having fun.
Let's just say this.
It's my feeling that people should be allowed to say what they want to be called.
And it takes very little effort to just be decent enough to call someone what they like to be called, because that's the name they've chosen for themselves.
Even if it's the name that they were given at birth, they've still chosen to keep that name.
And that name means a lot to them.
That's what Dale Carnegie says.
It doesn't mean anything for Starbucks to have me say Venti.
That's not helping fucking anybody.
And I'm not going to say that because it's stupid.
I want a small or a medium or a large.
That's what the sizes are called.
I'm going to be 54 in a few days.
I'm allowed to have an opinion like that.
But you should call somebody what they like to be called.
You're saying maybe there wasn't like a card that went out.
You know, the kind of thing that, again, something that happened more in the 80s of the like, oh, by the way, it's our divorce announcement.
Here's the protocol sheet, as Buckingham Palace would say.
Yeah.
No, and I mean, if they didn't ever think to explain it to me, they sure as shit didn't think to explain it to my Aunt Julia Lee.
I doubt there was this dedicated series of phone calls working this out.
And the thing is, it is consistent with my father that after a certain point, let's say 1977, after she had said to him, it's Marcia, David.
that he would have made a point at that point to stop calling her Marsha.
And he didn't.
And that is consistent with my dad.
It is a way of, you know, it's just him being a dick.
And I felt that energy for sure.
But I also felt, I could also recall back to my young childhood when my dad just seemed confused and bruised.
Yeah, I mean, for example, for the last few weeks, there's a thing that I have done over and over and over again.
I'm obsessed with the TV show Ted Lasso, and my family loves it.
We watch it a lot.
I think almost as many times as I have called the show Ted Lasso, I have called the show Ted Leo.
Oh, Ted Leo.
Well, isn't that a kind of a potentially like a similar thing?
Like, they know what I mean.
We talk about, oh, you know, Coach Beard, you know, the guy who works with Ted Leo.
And you know what I'm saying?
Like, okay, I know what you mean, but that's not correct.
And sometimes, well, most of the time they correct me because they live to correct me on things like that.
Yeah, right, right, right.
Oh boy, if I get gender wrong, boy, I'm going to hear about it.
The thing is, if my mom had changed her name to... I called Lara Jane Grace the wrong gender.
I have the wrong pronoun.
And I'm never allowed to get anywhere near the point I was trying to make.
I just wanted you to see the video where Lara Jane Grace sings with Miley Cyrus.
But before that, we need to watch the actual true trans soul.
And before that, we need to watch back when the person was called John.
But then I said, forget it.
You don't get any of that.
You don't get any of that journey I was going to take you on because you're yelling at me.
I don't recognize any of those names.
But my mom, if she had changed her name to Tiffany or to Jennifer.
It might have been easier, but it would be like if I said, from now on, I want you to pronounce the H in my name.
I want to be Jahan.
Jahan.
And it would, I think it would be fine if you never read it, but if you read it, like your mind is just going to read it as the word that you know it as.
Right.
I mean, and Marsha anyway, it, the gaslighting of that it's with me today.
Like I had to reevaluate what I thought were the people closest to me's motivations and
Where I had all because I had defended her, you know, I'd gone into those events and just been like it's Marcia Right and people would look at me like why is this kid?
It's so good so cruel to put you in that position Well, but but like it but it's the kind of cruelty that they used to do in the 70s and 80s Which was just it was just thoughtless.
They just didn't nobody put me in that position They were having an adult fight and nobody explained it to me and so I took sides and
And fought like ferociously for a thing and didn't realize that I was...
I was fighting for a thing where I didn't completely understand what, you know, where everybody was coming from.
Sure.
And the, the fact that my mom would never have said it and would have, you know, kind of stood there with that, would stood there with her hands on her hips, just like, fuck.
Was that like Ohio resolve?
Yeah.
Um, but, but never have like said to me like, yes, it used to be pronounced Marsha, but, but that's not what I want anymore.
Like I would have understood that instantly and would have fought for her, but in a different way without that feeling of like brokenheartedness that my own father was, you know, was doing this like terrible thing.
So I, I definitely don't want, uh, I didn't want my daughter to have a name that she was embarrassed by in any way.
And yet I feel like I've given her a name that if she shows up instantly,
the first day of college and her roommate sees her name written out on a piece of paper, that it will just be, it will just be like the source of no end of fucking shit.
What do you think?
You mean the full name or just the first name?
Yeah, the full name.
No, the full name is wonderful.
No, no, no.
The whole kit and caboodle of like, what kind of hippie parents did you have?
You know, because what it says, it says a lot more about us than it does her.
And it's the kind of thing that in high school, I don't think kids are sophisticated enough to, to understand that your parents are dorks.
But by the time you get into college and people see your name and they're like, Oh, your parents were dorks.
Yeah.
Cause we gave her a dork name, you know, like, and, and Imogen, Imogen would be dorky, but Imogen Aubergine, like dork city.
Yeah.
It's a, it's a, that's a lot of name.
That is a lot.
It's a lot.
It's a lot.
And it's, and it's, it's, I don't know.
It's, it's unforgivable.
When I was a kid, my friend's grandmother, um, my, my best friend, uh, John, his grandmother had been with John, John.
Yep.
John.
Oh, and his middle name was Wayne.
How about that?
John Wayne.
What?
Well, I don't want, Oh, you never mentioned the last name.
Yeah.
And so here's the thing, though.
His grandmother had been widowed and his grandfather died.
They moved into their house.
His dad was real handy and had like finished, made a finished basement for like apartment basically for her.
And she had been widowed.
And then eventually she got a boyfriend from church and married him.
And just for the bit, I do need to say her entire name.
Are you ready for his grandmother's name?
They called her Nani, which they spelled N-O-N-I-E, which I thought was confusing.
N-O-N-I-E.
Her name was Ardith, Elsa, Friederika, Branhorst.
Then she got married.
The last name really sold it.
We're not done.
We're not done.
We're not done.
She also got married and was widowed and remarried.
Ardith.
Elsa.
Friederica.
Branhorst.
Donahue.
Beal.
That's a pretty cool name.
That's great.
Ardith.
Ardith is a very good old lady name.
It is, and it's a very Irish-y sounding name.
Oh, you're right.
She might be out there.
Yes, but she wore a wig that would be blowing in the breeze.
The false teeth.
Oh, man.
She would transform.
Before we headed off for Sunday school, we're eating the Eggos, you know, in the morning, fixing to go to church.
Wow, she really underwent a transformation Nani did.
Ardith.
Ardith.
Now I feel like that's, I mean, it's a little bit Game of Thrones, that name.
They put a G in front of it, yeah.
Go Ardith.
In the Iron Island, yeah.
I don't know.
I mean, you know, it all does get very personal, but it's...
You know what?
I've said enough.
I don't want to get into any more trouble.
But you do need to really check yourself in terms of what you are saddling.
We say a baby.
We say a child.
No.
Saddling another human with.
Like if you name your child fax machine and then spell it wrong, that's rough.
Don't do that.
There's all kinds of levels to that where they're just going to be going, you know, fax machine, like you mean like the machine from the 80s?
And you're like, yeah, but it's spelled different.
right right no it's f-a-i-c-h oh it's welsh yeah my my sister uh in the 80s started spelling her name with a z susan oh that is wow that is very hyper color well it was and i thought at the time i mean that's the type of thing that i normally would you know would have uh
I antagonized her about.
But in fact, I thought it was very cool.
I was like, oh, I wish that there was a way I could put a Z in my name somehow.
Jean, Z-H-A-N, Jean.
But Susan, it was very easy.
And she at that point in time, she was doing that thing where she had adopted a new handwriting style.
Yeah.
Oh, interesting.
Wow.
She was quite a, what do we call it, like a swan.
Like she's doing a whole thing.
She was punk rock new wave.
And so she no longer could just write her words in cursive.
She had to have a kind of, you know, she had to have a new gel pen style where she...
you know where she dotted her eyes oh i see i see yes yes yes and she changed her name susan with a z and i was like that's so cool like i really approve of that that's like really cool like if you if you're gonna have a street name have it be your name except spelled with a z how how awesome well i was talking to her the other day because she's going through this experience i don't know if you know anybody that's having this experience i imagine you do
But, you know, Susan has been sort of a new age wellness person for a long time.
I would say she feels like a human potential kind of character.
Yeah, I think it started, I don't know when.
Back, she read The Secret.
So that's kind of part of the point of the story.
Yeah.
She went through a transition where all of a sudden she was all about bells and chimes and incense and whatnot.
And I was like, OK, sure, whatever.
Is that how she would describe it?
No, but she really then – she's gone full into it and for the last decade at least has really, really been trying to –
uh, discover and unraveled practice of spirituality and Eastern thinking and medicine and so forth.
And now she's been writing a book about it.
Whoa.
Uh, and about her own path through this whole, this whole experience that for a long time I was like, okay, you know, Reiki or whatever that is.
And, and now like, I'm really proud of her.
She's, she has, uh,
invested herself in a kind of, in a, in a, in a school of thought that although I don't, I don't interact with that school of thought personally, I do appreciate the difference it's made in her life.
And she has, you know, she's now sort of pivoting to being a teacher.
But about a week ago, she came to me and said, I was talking to my Reiki teacher and
And she told me that she made some reference to the fact that during Trump's second term, there would be an awakening.
And I said, uh-oh.
And she said, what does that mean?
Susan often comes to me and is like, I read this or I saw this, and what does that mean?
I lost the thread for a minute.
Who said there's going to be a second term?
Say that again.
My sister's Reiki teacher.
Oh, okay.
And I said, well, I know this because my friend Ben Lee...
The singer-songwriter from Australia is a— Oh, I know that guy.
He sang that song about You Like the Pixies.
I used to listen to that guy.
You know, he's married to Ione Sky.
You know what?
You told me that.
I did know that.
I apologize.
It's quite all right.
But Ben Lee is part of the wellness community.
And the wellness community, I think, is the term of art that envelops—
All of the people that you would imagine belong in a community, a wellness community.
I don't think I belong there.
You and I don't live within a wellness community.
Would you agree?
I do agree.
I mean, I would ride my scooter past that community and not be worried, but I don't think I would spend like a day there.
Sure, me too.
It's just there's elements of it that are extremely appealing, but it is the omnibus all in all the different things.
Like, no offense, but like it's just all this.
It's one thing, you know, for me to, you know, enjoy Buddhism or getting things done.
And another thing for me to be like all in on like every single pink book in a section of the bookstore.
Right, right, right.
Or called relationships or in this case, self-help.
So Ben Lee has been online very vocal about the fact that there has been a – and I think this is now – is becoming a mainstream understanding that –
QAnon has infiltrated the wellness community through the back door of anti-vax and the back door of save the children or whatever.
And so all of a sudden, all of the yoga instructors and what I would have considered the ultimate hippie bowl ringers and people that were just like the true granola crunchers, the linen pants crowd...
are all of a sudden like talking about how Tom Hanks is drinking baby blood.
Because it actually, these things have a lot in common.
If you look at it from an angle, that's not the straight on angle, which is like a suspicion of authority.
Well, check for me, suspicion of authority.
Like, you know, there's all like, don't tell me what to do.
There's the, like, there is a secret or not secret, uh, or,
a series of organizations that keep us subjugated, right?
I mean, there's a lot of it.
This isn't just like Ribby Ridge shit.
A lot of this is the kind of thing you would read in a book about colon care in the mid 80s.
Right, right, right.
And it's weirdly nationalist at the same time, but also all of the wellness community has been talking about how one day the, you know,
I don't know what they're all going to ascend directly to heaven and leave their Nikes behind.
Belief kind of trumping, you know, sort of evidence kind of stuff.
Steve Jobs getting juice for his pancreatic cancer.
There's there's an element of like this is the reality that I prefer.
And like you telling me that that's not real is is a real problem for me.
Because alternative medicine, when it says Western medicine is incomplete and the fact that it rejects these older medicines is a flaw in it and to practice these other medicines in conjunction with it is a more holistic approach.
Like that argument always resonated with me.
Absolutely.
I mean, like the thing is, if you have a headache and the headache's not going away, going to the same doctor and getting the same treatment is not going to be helpful.
If you do, or if something unharmful happens in your life, you figure out how to squeeze that little webby area of your hand and that works for you.
I'm not sure reflexology is something they'd probably teach at Harvard Medical School, but maybe that's exactly the point.
If it fixes the thing, that's one thing.
But like drinking colloidal silver, like a lot, a lot, probably not a great idea.
Right.
Well, but it's, I think, even scarier when people start to say Western medicine as a whole is bad, not useful, unholy, right?
Like, to say holistic medicine is a nice...
way of broadening Western medicine is totally great to say holistic medicine replaces Western medicine.
If you have an, if you have appendicitis, I wonder what you're going to do.
And it's the Christian science problem or whatever, you know, it's like, absolutely.
I mean, like the, like I've, I've always said, for example, like if you can't figure out what to do in a situation, ask yourself what advice you would give to someone you love in that same situation.
Right.
But there are people all the time that, I mean, this used to be a thing all the time where people would get prosecuted for sitting there praying next to their kid while they died of cancer.
Well, that's what I was going to say is like, okay, so if your kid was having what Western medicine calls appendicitis, like what would you do about it?
And I don't know, maybe I'm just too much of a liberal elite.
But when you ask it that way, you know, it's like, well, hopefully you're going to take care of your kid.
There are all those people right now that are dying of COVID and trying to claim that it's gum disease or whatever because they don't want it to be COVID more than they don't want to die.
So my sister's sitting here, and I'm trying to explain to her, when your Reiki teacher says that during Trump's second term there's going to be a quickening... Is it considered a drop?
What your Reiki teacher is saying is that she believes that Tom Hanks is drinking baby's blood.
And Susan's like, what are you talking about?
And I said, text your Reiki teacher right now and ask her if she...
if she thinks that Hillary Clinton is... Harvesting adrenochrome.
Harvesting adrenochrome.
And her Reiki teacher writes her back, and in the space of about a minute and a half, says to my sister that The Matrix was a documentary, that there are things that Susan...
What she wants is for Susan to red pill herself.
And her Reiki teacher has been educated recently.
She has a couple of documentaries she'd like Susan to watch.
Oh, boy.
But the long and the short of it is that, yes, Hollywood and politicians are harvesting babies and adrenochrome is real.
Yep.
And so the more scared you get the kid right before you kill him, the higher quality.
Oh yeah.
You got to get an extra terrified.
And I, and Susan was like, what the hell is adrenochrome?
And I said, do you remember if you're in loathing in Las Vegas, you know, we had this wonderful conversation about how adrenochrome, you know, adrenochrome really, if you really want the good shit, it comes from monkeys.
You got to milk, you got to milk a monkey.
But so, so Susan starts texting her wellness people.
And within the course of,
48 hours she finds that she is personally acquainted with and in a professional kind of like like intimate sort of spiritual new age relationship with five different people who believe that tom hanks is milking uh scared babies for adrenochrome and susan's standing there in this state of like like uh she's she's almost
She was comatose with confusion.
So she was shocked.
I'm sorry, just to clarify.
She was shocked to find that this was happening and that it was so many people that it was happening with.
She'd never heard of it before.
And then all of a sudden she realizes that she knows people that believe this.
And then all of a sudden she realizes she knows multiple people that believe this.
oh my god what an afternoon that would be i know and they're all and because she's still struggling with the fact that like wait a minute we're hippie leftists like we're the ones that believe in the oceans and stuff how can you possibly be like and she still doesn't have her head around it but in the course of that i was like you know you you've been going through this new age thing for the last decade or something and and
And I understand that this is having a profound – this is a profound upturning of what you believe the whole movement is.
And she said, what do you mean for the last decade?
I changed my name to Sue Zen back in the 80s.
Oh, boy.
And I said, I was like, Sue Zen?
And she was like, yeah, Zen.
Oh, come on, John.
No.
This is how you found, oh, my God.
I was like, it was Zen?
That was a Zen instead of like a Zed in the middle of a cool punk rock name?
Holy shit, you did it again.
You did it again to me.
Holy shit.
Suzen.
Suzen.
Uh-huh.
Music for our mess age.
Ching, ching, ching, ching, ching, ching, ching.
Reiki.
Kamuna batata.
Lava ganoush.
Adrina groan.
Corpse position.
Corpse position.