Ep. 409: "Prime Joe Customer"
Hello.
Hi, John.
Oh, hello there, Merlin man.
Can I see a question?
Go, go, go.
What Hertz is this?
How many Hertz?
Hertz.
You ever have a Hertz donut?
I don't even know how to measure that.
I'm just running through airports, jumping over people's suitcases.
It's number one for everyone.
Avis tries harder because they're number two.
I don't know why you'd buy a commercial to say that your company's number two, because that means dookie.
No, you're trying harder.
You're not the big guy.
You're the underdog.
We try harder, Avis.
Because, Avis, we don't know another way.
Because I'm trying to locate a buzz and eliminate it.
I have a feeling it's coming, might be the cable.
People were saying put aluminum foil around it, but that seems crazy.
Around your head.
Put aluminum foil around your head.
Then I'll stop hearing it because they can't get through my cans.
Uh-huh.
So you're saying people are hearing it in the recording?
Yeah.
Oh, people hear a lot of things.
No, it's me.
I'm going to suggest that it's about 60 hertz.
That's a typical... 60 hertz.
Okay.
I'm not sure.
You know what?
Now that as I sit here, boy, oh boy, this is a classic John Syracuse problem.
This is what they call the XY problem, which is I'm not even sure what problem I'm trying to solve.
And now I'm going down some kind of hertz rabbit hole trying to solve a problem I don't understand.
I remember my cable...
I'll figure it out.
I'll figure it out.
That kind of electrical thing is usually in the 50 to 60 Hertz range.
It is super common problem.
It's just when something is, you know, sort of not here right now.
It's not grounded.
I can hear it.
Yeah.
Powered equipment.
Powered equipment.
Powered equipment.
Now what I'm going to try is I'm going to try lots of things.
I seem to remember hearing a long time ago, oh boy, now I've got an XYZ problem.
I feel like I remember hearing that when you coil cable, it creates some kind of an attractor or not an amplifier.
That would be like a Vox.
You know, like the media network.
I heard that when you coil cable, it does something, maybe it's like an exciter, not an aural exciter, but like a Hertz exciter that you're amplifying because it's using some kind of Tesla coil type situation to increase the frequencies.
Now, and if you straighten out your wires and fly right, then you don't have those cable problems.
I'll figure it out.
I'll figure it out, but I appreciate the hurts.
You've created a ground loop.
Ground loop.
Ground loop.
Yeah, I didn't mean to.
Yeah.
No, let's hope you don't have a ground loop.
You don't have a ground switch, though, on anything.
I might have bad grounding.
In the old days, you know, all of our amplifiers had ground switches on the back, as you recall.
And if you were getting a lot of out of your amp, you'd go flip the ground.
And sometimes that would resolve your problem.
Not always.
Are you reversing the polarity?
Uh, well you're, you're, you know what?
You're bucking the hum.
Oh, I see.
It's like a Seymour Duncan type situation.
Yeah.
It's a little bit of a, it's a, it's a, it's a, you flip.
Yeah.
You flip some polarity and the hum goes away.
You should get a lipstick pickup, get a Dan Electro, put a Dan Electro by your humbucker.
It's, it's, uh, yeah, that's exactly, it's exactly what's happening there.
We had, um, we had two, I don't know how this happened, but in our band, cause one, the other guy in the band was a little bit of a gear horse.
I think that's the phrase.
Gear horse.
That's not, that's not a thing we say, but yeah, gear horse.
And we had two regular basses that were used pretty often.
I think there was like a jazz thing or a P bass.
And then the other, that was stinky bass.
And then the other one was fruity bass.
We had stinky bass and fruity bass.
Because stinky bass was stinky.
And fruity bass was a Dan Electron.
It looked kind of fruity.
We don't say that anymore.
Yeah, right.
No, I mean, you know, Juicy Fruit.
You might be referring to Juicy Fruit.
Oh.
That had a fruity taste.
I used to cover that.
Juicy Fruit?
Yeah, I think I still know that.
Let me see.
I sent an email.
I tagged the guy from Action Slacks in an Instagram post the other day.
What, Marty or Tim?
Tim, and it was just a good old time.
Let's see.
I don't think he's replied.
Let's see.
Nope.
Grab your boogie.
Hang on, I'll get it.
Grab your boogie board and a stick of juicy fruit.
The taste is, the taste is.
Ooh, that's not quite it, but I like that nine chord.
Speaking of nine chords,
I got my COVID test today.
Oh, I want to hear about that too, but did you get my reference?
Speaking of nine chords?
Speaking of nine chords?
No.
So if you play a song in the key of A, right?
Yeah.
So you get like a, oh, how was that?
And then you end it with this.
Who does that?
Elvis Costello.
Oh, I just don't know how to begin.
Nope, nope, no Beatles.
Love ending on a nine chord.
I think it's a nine.
It might be a six.
Might be a six.
No, fuck me.
Never mind.
Six chord, six chord.
You got a guitar?
Play an A and then add a G. I don't know how to do any of those things.
Oh, come on.
You play like a regular old white man's A?
Yeah, and then add a G. And then you do this.
Now you get the end of a Beatles song.
I follow this guy, this Norwegian guy, who's like a really good guitar player.
And he does, you know, a lot of guitar player videos online.
They're just hard to watch.
They're not fun.
This guy just, I don't know whether he has a camera on his hat or something, but he just looks at the neck of his guitar and he plays.
Yeah.
And he's a way better guitar player than I will ever be.
But it's fun to watch his hands do stuff.
Uh-huh.
And more than anything, watching his knowledge of chords just manifest itself on the neck of his guitar, where he's just like going around and around and then...
I understand what an inversion is, and I have done inversions, and I understand why that makes Elton John's song so powerful.
But when other people do it, they can play a chord anywhere, and it makes it sound different.
It sounds different.
And that's just chords.
Yeah.
It's like passing notes and knowing where to... This was the thing that used to drive me... Not crazy, but that's what I love and respect about Jonathan Colton.
You know, he's a music major.
Yeah.
He knows all the notes.
Well, a lot of them at least.
This guy in Norway, he can just throw...
It's one of those things about jazz where it's like, there are no wrong notes.
He puts any note on a chord and it becomes right because the next thing he does.
The next one makes it make sense.
Right.
If you only ever played a seven chord, you go, what the fuck is wrong with you?
You say, what is wrong with you while you play a seventh chord?
But a seventh chord just says, oh boy, there's another one coming.
There's another one, even just a seven chord, right?
Yep.
Yep.
And I, and I don't, I don't, I'll never know.
It's like those people that play the, that play like the three tier, um, uh, pedal steels where it's like, you know, they're, they've got a chord and then they, then they flat one note and sharp another and it becomes another thing.
And just to, to understand chords and music that way, my brain will never do it.
And so watching the, watching the,
It manifests itself on the neck of a guitar, a thing I know so intimately and interact with every single day.
And to just be like, oh, apparently it's as simple as that.
John, you just play the right note.
Just play the right note.
Just play the right note and it'll sound really good.
If you play the wrong note, it can sound good if you play the right note next.
You have to play the right note either before or after.
Or you play the wrong note before and then the wronger note and then the right note.
I get it.
Trying to learn Beatles songs on the guitar was always incredibly frustrating to me because you're throwing these, you're trying to make these chord shapes and you're like, it can't possibly be this hard.
They're just going like, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding.
And, but you know, they're, they're just, they're throwing mad notes.
I can tell you how many, I can tell you how many things I've read and especially now in this age watched on YouTube about the, the correct way to play the beginning of, uh, help.
So I always thought when I was a kid, I thought help was just you hit like all the strings open.
And then you're like, no, no, no.
And there's all these levels to this.
And then there's a level like, no, it's actually like an F and it's this.
And then it's like, no, you know what the key is?
The key is it's actually two chords.
And you're like, oh, that's...
That makes a lot of sense.
But guess what?
There's another level, some say, where there's actually three chords plus a piano making that opening chord.
That sounds so accidental and chaotic, but it's three different things in different keys that makes that impossible chord.
They're playing the right note, is what I'm saying.
Yeah, they're playing all the notes.
All the notes.
I feel like you see this.
I feel like there's this guy I like to watch sometimes, this Japanese fella who does just covers on an acoustic guitar.
And in fairness, he has extremely creepy fingernails.
But he's one of those guys, like a Charles Bissell type, where he plays.
There's a word I don't love.
I don't love the word minimal.
And I really despise the word minimalism.
But the ability to play the most economical, minimally viable cover of a song that sounds like you...
You know what I mean?
You know what makes a good cover a cover, right?
When you hear it, because you're like, oh, you know the parts.
You played the right note.
And you know exactly like if you left out that note at that spot, it would be unsatisfying to me as the listener, right?
You could just do like a Louie Louie type 154 thing.
But like when you play that right note in passing, it's like, oh, fuck.
And I just admire that so much, especially when they make it look easy.
Oh, I admire it.
On my way back from the COVID test this morning, I was driving in the car and my little girl said, can we listen to the music on the radio?
And I turned it on, you know, but her mother has satellite radio in her car.
And it was playing Seals Kissed from a Rose, which, as you probably know, came out right around the same time as TLC's Waterfalls.
Yeah, early 90s?
Mid 90s because it happened right around when I got sober.
I stopped drinking and doing drugs and I went and got a job at Check Mart.
As the assistant manager trainee.
Is that a grocery store or do they sell checks?
No, Checkmart was a check cashing place.
Oh, fuck, really?
One of the most exploitative sort of pseudo banks.
So you like worked in a cell?
Yeah, yeah.
Bulletproof glass all around us.
And we were, this particular Checkmart was on First Avenue in downtown Seattle and had contracted with
uh, um, like SSI or whatever to, because a lot of people that use those bank, they don't have a bank or they don't trust banks.
Yeah.
And, but we actually completed the circuit in that we would receive mail from,
From social security there for people who were homeless.
Wow.
They would come in, receive their mail, open up their envelope, take the checkout and hand it back to us.
And we would cash it and take 20% of it or whatever.
I mean, it's a completely usurious business.
And I got it.
I got the job because I went, that was the, that was peak temp, I guess, at least from where I was standing.
I went to a temp agency and because, uh, because I was, uh,
Because instead of learning how to type when I was in typing class, I just sat and wrote manifestos every day.
It's why I got an F in typing.
But I did learn to type.
You got an F in typing, but an A in manifestos.
That's right.
I trained myself to write manifestos.
Yeah, you give yourself that grade.
You don't need any teacher to give you that grade.
Yeah, sure, sure.
F?
Oh, F?
Well, who else came out of this typing class with like 60 pages?
Ted Kaczynski.
He went straight into Harvard.
He started going to Harvard, yeah.
I should have submitted it to Harvard and been like, look, I know I got an F in this class.
The return address just says cabin.
Here's what I was doing.
Anyway, so I could type, right?
And even though I was just a freshly minted...
Person in recovery still, you know, still saw bats flying out across the desert and whatnot.
I, I could type.
And so I went into the temp agency and I was like, give me a job, any job.
And I took a typing test and they were like, oh, you can type.
So do you know how to use?
I think it was even before they asked you if you could use Excel.
But, you know, they were like, can you?
This is probably back when we were still using a phrase.
We don't use this as much today because it's just not as meaningful.
The phrase was word processing.
Because especially on DOS, like learning how to type and do, typing is one thing, but also the formatting in something that's not a graphical user interface.
Like you had to know the commands.
You had to know how to hit the right notes.
Uh, well, yeah.
And, and I could use word, right.
Or at least, uh, at least word star.
Um, and so anyway, I was working at this temp company, just taking these little odd jobs.
And then there was a thing you, I don't know if you ever had this experience.
There was a, what were they called?
Some kind of recruiter where they found a job for you.
Placement.
Placement agency.
Yeah.
And then they took a cut of your salary?
Absolutely.
I did that.
And I think I got really very few jobs out of it.
Or like I found something else before.
But it was often bottom of the barrel type stuff.
But the notion was, okay, Sally's on –
maternity leave, and so somebody needs to fill in at this incredible menial job, you know, for a month or whatever, right?
And they bring you in, like, can you do 10-key?
Can you do word processing?
You know, can you do filing?
That used to be a skill.
Filing was considered, like, and if you could, you could fake your way through that and pass the test, and you're right.
You go into, like, a manpower or one of those kinds of places, a temp agency, placement agency, and then they would give you a battery of tests that you wouldn't be paid to do, and then that would say to them, this is how qualified John Roderick is to hit the right note at word processing.
And I was really good at filing, but I was also bad at it because I'm a perfectionist about that stuff.
So you sit there and look at MC, MAC, you know.
Well, no, I would have a file.
I would find the place in the file cabinet.
I would take the file to the stacks or whatever.
I would find the place in the file cabinet.
And then once I was in that cabinet, I would feel like the way the files were arranged was wrong.
And so rather than go back and get the next file to file somewhere else, I would need to straighten that drawer and get it squared away so that it was more useful.
People could find things more easily.
Okay.
But then at the end of the day, when when the boss would look at the productivity statistics in terms of how many files to John file, that's not going to account for the higher level work of going in and rearranging the operation to be more sensible.
That's not that was not part of your remit, as they say.
That's right.
And so I would say, look, I mean, I've been working this entire time.
I went.
So I took a week off and went to New York with my family.
I was working at Seafirst Bank.
And when I came and they, you know, and I, I got along great with everybody.
I felt like I was, I had a future in banking and I came back from my vacation.
Wait, Oh, is this where you worked?
Uh, the top floor of the building was where they put the files.
Was this that job?
No, no, no.
That was a, that was earlier on when you got drunk on the boat, right?
Yeah, that exactly.
That was before I'd quit drinking.
That was a temp job.
Sorry, sorry, sorry.
Okay.
And that was at the giant, beautiful building that inexplicably used the top floor of the building to store files.
Correct.
Yeah, that building was designed by the same architect that designed the World Trade Center and has many of the same design elements.
Strange choice.
That was a stock brokerage called Piper Jaffrey.
Piper Jaffrey, yeah.
um, was a, was a local Northwest bank, but a huge one.
They had a huge tower.
Okay.
And I think they got absorbed into Washington mutual.
And then of course, you know, it all Washington mutual.
They took over stuff, didn't they?
They really did.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But, uh, but,
I came back from this week in New York.
I came back Monday morning and I showed up and you know, there was a, there was a lobby with a table that had like five receptionists, you know, at it.
And they buzz you into a variety of like 15 doors.
This is outside the elevators.
And I walk in and I'm like, Hey, good morning.
You know, Sally, good morning, Bill.
And they both looked at me like kind of a, like, what are you doing here?
Look.
And I was like, huh, weird.
And I,
You know, they, they buzz me in or whatever.
And I'm walking through the office to my desk and everyone looks up at me with the same sort of like, uh, I'm like, I've only been gone a week.
What happened?
And I get to my desk and there's a little Japanese girl sitting there.
Oh boy.
And I was like, hi.
And she was like, hello.
Hello.
And no one had told me – no one had told her about me.
Wait, hang on.
You had been replaced and didn't know it?
Yeah.
So all of my friends, the people that worked with me really closely, my bros, all looked at me with that same like, oh.
And then my like best work friend said –
uh, like you need to talk to the boss.
Oh, and I walked over to the manager's little desk.
You know, she had a like walls to her desk.
Sure.
Oh, like a partition.
Yeah.
And she said, didn't you get my message?
And I was like, no.
And she said, uh, well, I, you know, I left you, uh,
message or something I don't even think I had an answering machine what would she have done this is probably this might be it might have been voicemail but that was pretty but the thing is and so what did you have for a phone then well that's the problem like I didn't have I gave them a number like of a friend
Yeah, I'd only been sober for a little while.
I didn't have an address.
Yeah, first you got a toothbrush, you got a mattress, you had a key.
But like a phone is not going to be – and listen, these kids today, I mean, what do you say, John?
I think I might have even still been living in the minivan.
Living in the minivan and you had like an electrical cord that would give you power.
Was that right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Anyway, so she said.
They wouldn't give you a key.
Wow.
You've told a lot of good stories.
They wouldn't give you a key to the house, but you were allowed to sleep in the minivan.
You overstayed your welcome if memory serves.
And the electrical cord was not something that I plugged a device into.
It was plugged into the heater core of the van itself.
which allowed the van to maintain a battery charge while i because in order to have light in the van after the sun went down i had got it i see because like okay okay like what are we talking about here what are we talking about what are you gonna be running what are you running in the van a portable tv or radio i didn't have any of those things but it's certainly what i'm saying to these children today these children who don't know from these things they never had a landline phone they don't know you don't have never had a radio
Never had a radio.
Don't need a radio.
It's all streaming now.
Nobody listens to albums anymore, John.
I learned about all my music from MySpace.
Well, yeah, that's the thing.
It's all singles.
It's all singles now.
And also, so, okay, all right.
So the van, not that the van was powering the house.
The house was powering the van.
The house was powering the van.
But so this boss lady, and she had, even then, you know, well, I think this is probably when it was invented, but she had one of those wedge haircuts that had
Uh, that was kind of spiky and also had frosted tips.
She had frosted tips.
Oh, like the mom of Ferris Bueller.
Yep.
Yep.
She had exactly that haircut.
And she said, and I was like, what happened?
I thought we all worked great.
And she said, well, while you were gone, we got another, we got this girl from the temp agency to replace you for the week.
Ruthless.
And she, uh, does four times as much work as you do.
Hmm.
And I was like.
Kind of a callow way to look at it.
Well, and I said, wow.
Wow.
four times as much work well i mean she's doing all that monkey bullshit but have you looked in the drawers and seen what i have brought to your organization well that's the thing when when uh when when a banker would say i need the file about this you know because it was mazy glotz yeah we were doing insurance or whatever i was like i need this file for mazy glotz's rv and boat
Like, did I know too much about you?
This episode of Roderick on the Line is brought to you in part by Squarespace.
You can learn more about Squarespace right now by visiting squarespace.com slash super train.
My friends, there are so many things that you can do with Squarespace.
The main thing is you're going to make a beautiful new home on the web just for you.
You're going to turn your cool idea into a new website.
Whatever it is you want to do, you can showcase your work.
You have a blog, other kinds of online content.
You can put up galleries.
You can sell products and services of all kinds.
You can promote your physical or online business.
You can announce an upcoming event or special project.
You know, like Theodore Herzl says, if you will, it is no dream with Squarespace.
Squarespace does this by giving you beautiful templates created by world-class designers, powerful e-commerce functionality that lets you sell anything online,
The ability to customize the look and feel, settings, products, whatever you want to do.
A few drags, a few drops, a couple clicks, boom, you've got a website.
Squarespace, baby.
Everything is optimized for mobile, right out of the box.
It looks great on every kind of device or dingus, and you can even preview what it will look like on certain size devices while you're building your site.
It's very cool.
They also offer a new way to buy domains where you can choose from over 200 domain name extensions, analytics that help you grow in real time, along with built-in search engine optimization, free and secure hosting with nothing to patch or upgrade ever.
Plus, you get their 24 by 7 award-winning customer support.
They are encouraging folks to make it stand out.
Stand out with your own beautiful website with Squarespace.
You know, you're using Squarespace right now.
I don't want to creep you out, but the Roderick Online podcast has always been hosted exclusively on Squarespace.
They have been great to us.
They've been a great host and a good friend.
And they get my official okie-dokie.
So please, right now, go head out to squarespace.com slash supertrain.
Get a free trial.
And when you're ready to launch, use our offer code SuperTrain.
That's going to save you 10% off your first purchase of a website or a domain.
Squarespace.com slash SuperTrain.
Such good friends of the show.
We would love it if you would support them the way that they have supported us.
Our thanks to Squarespace for supporting Roderick on the line.
Yeah.
John, it's like you were working at a restaurant and they told you to put away a bunch of rotten food.
You got rid of the rotten food and they say, well, where did you put all the food?
And they go, well, I got rid of it.
I solved your higher level problem.
I fixed a bigger problem than the monkey bullshit you put me on.
And now you bring this lady in just because she's four times better at filing bad food?
Ridiculous.
Well, and, you know, basically like, and I went over to my desk to get my
coffee cup and I don't know what pack of cigarettes or whatever things that I had left there that they had all your personal effects drawer in my personal effects.
And I talked to her for a minute, you know, and I was completely humiliated, but she seemed like a nice person.
And, and you know, what she had was a business person.
Maine.
Right.
She was just like, well, I'm sorry if, uh, you used to sit here, but, um, they asked me to, Oh, and, and my boss actually said like, we're going to offer her a full-time job.
Fuck.
And what she said was all these things that you said that you were good at is not in any way in the description of your job that we hired you to do.
Here's your description of your job.
file the files you're like the practice husband like you're the husband that helped the person realize this isn't restricted just to men or women or just romantic relationships but you help them realize that you weren't what they wanted and you help them to clarify what it is that they did want
Though, I mean, am I being wrong?
Am I wrong?
No, you're not.
You serve two valuable functions for them.
And here you are, you got your dick in your hand walking out with your cigarettes.
Yeah.
But then I went, so I went to this guy who was like, I'll find you a job.
And I remember very distinctly saying, you know, to myself and maybe in the room, you know, like I'm sober now.
Um, I spent all those years, you know, cause I wasn't playing music at this point.
I had just been, I was just a scumbag, you know, and I didn't have any, I didn't have any sense that I could actually put the rubber to the road and actually do anything creative in the world.
I had just decided that I was going to be on drugs.
I wasn't playing music.
I didn't write, I mean, I wrote, I wrote tons and tons of stuff filled up those spiral notebooks, but I, I honestly thought at that point,
Now that you're sober, get a job in somewhere that is respectable and white collar.
Yeah.
And... Somewhere where you've got to wear a clean shirt and be on time.
Just like de minimis, like get your train on the rails type thing.
And it was sort of, it was like officer training school.
Like, you know, you're going to be an officer...
in whatever army.
You're a Padawan.
I get it.
That's right.
And so this guy is like, so, you know, I can find you a job, Zabity Zabity Zab.
And he was a real salesman.
And I was like, well, I feel like management trainee is where I belong.
So if you could find me a job in management where, uh, it's in the money making field.
Cause I like to do,
I like to put numbers in order.
I like to watch interest rates accumulate.
I mean, I don't think of you as somebody who's attracted to puzzles qua puzzles, but I think you do enjoy things like the tile mazes of life.
It's like whether that's unmarked MP3s or a forest in Romania, there are things where you like to take a little real-world puzzle and give it order and meaning.
Yes, yes.
And I like it to – I don't need it to all – I'm not OCD.
I don't need it to all round at the end.
I don't need it to be zero.
But if it's not zero, I like to figure it out.
I like to figure out where it went wrong.
I want to know – like I almost want the registers not to tally because I want to find –
The moment in the day where someone took a dollar, someone took a Sacagawea dollar and thought it was a quarter.
Oh, I see.
You want to track, be able to like apply some kind of a logic to figuring out why it's not zero.
Yeah.
I want to get the story.
And once it, you know, because it's always, it always ends up being between five cents and $50, right?
It's not, it's never going to ruin the world.
Um,
but the story, cause you can always, you can always look at the receipts and find the error.
If you're, if you're interested in that stuff, you know, if you're, if you're willing to spend the time with the receipts, right.
And, and if you're, if you have a narrative sense of, of how money moves around anyway, so this guy, he's like, Oh yeah.
Management trainee.
Totally.
Totally.
And I kept thinking he was going to come back and say, uh,
That he had gotten me a job working with the president of Seafirst.
Something where you would be going into meetings around a large table and you may not talk a lot, but maybe you're in the second row.
Maybe you're on the back bench, but you're in the room, you have a legal pad probably, and you're nodding a lot.
Exactly.
Right?
I mean, kind of.
Yeah, right.
Well, nodding along until...
Until, you know, they're all like, how do we solve this problem?
And then from the back of the room, I go.
I think you mutter something under your breath.
And then the guy that, for whatever reason, they call the old man goes, who was that?
Roderick, Roderick, you're just here to listen.
Oh, let's hear what the boy has to say.
That's exactly right.
That's what I was made to be at that age.
And you clear your throat and you stand up and then you give them the, at first, it's just a clue.
You say something like buttonholes.
And they go, buttonholes?
What does that mean?
Or whatever.
You say something kind of cryptic.
And then one guy who's been cleaning his glasses puts his glasses on and looks at you and goes, buttonholes.
Right?
Buttonholes.
Yeah, yeah.
And then by Jove, I think he's got it.
And then like A.E.
Hausman says, you know, when they bury you shoulders high, they carry you to the, well, at first it would just be the main row of chairs, but eventually you would get a large office and buttonholes are just the beginning.
You have figured out a whole new financial angle.
They used to think about buttons.
You're the guy that made them think about buttonholes.
That's right.
That's right.
Everything's changed.
Everything's changed since John got here.
Except that's not how it happened.
This, this slimy little deal maker came back to me and was like, I've got you the assistant manager trainee job at Checkmart.
Not exactly what you know for.
Whoa, whoa, whoa.
Hang on.
Checkmart.
Got that.
Assistant manager, Checkmart, trainee.
Yep, yep.
So you're in a jail cell.
Yep.
Helping people with their SSI envelope and basically, you know, like where you got to put your put your blunderbuss, you know, into the holder before you go in kind of place.
Well, and this is the crazy thing, right?
Because a lot of the people that worked at Checkmart had been working there for years.
They were, you know, they were what to me at the time to 26 year old me seemed middle aged and they were probably 35 or 32.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Um, but, and I hadn't graduated from college.
I'd been to some colleges, but I came in as the assistant manager trainee and they were, you know, a lot of them were women, uh, my, my employees and, and honestly, women of color.
Women of color who've been there for, for, for a long time, but somehow we're not management.
grade.
And I was this guy that was like, I've been sober for six months.
I went to college.
Shit, I went to a lot of colleges.
Mr. Onyx, my father, call me John.
So I went to this training camp for managers.
Is it put on by Checkmark or the slimy guy?
No, it was Checkmark.
And what they did is they're like, all right, here's
the ways that you tell a forged check.
Here's the way you tell a fake check.
Here's the way that you tell all the different ways that people can try and defraud a bank.
And, you know, learned, learned how to read a check and all the numbers and little codes that are on routing numbers.
Oh, all that stuff.
And, you know, my job as assistant manager was going to be that I stood there.
And when somebody was like, um,
Hang on just a second.
And they took a check into the back and they were like, look at this check.
Then I was supposed to consult with the teller and we're like, this is a fake check.
Uh, but what it ended up being was that I worked at check Mart because in order to be assistant manager, you had to know all the ins and outs of working there.
And so for a few weeks.
Yeah, it's an interesting idea, which is in some ways that like you can't manage people who do a job unless you understand the job that they're doing that you're managing.
Absolutely.
But also working the checkmark on First Avenue, you know, you see every.
I bet you see some life.
You do.
And you see all the sailors that got off the fishing boats that just got paid and they, you know, they got paid with a huge check and they don't have a bank.
You get all the people that... What kind of juice you take off a check?
Like, say somebody has a check for a hundred bucks, you know, hypothetically.
What kind of juice are you going to skim off the top for that?
Well... Oh, no, no, no.
I mean, some fees, terms and conditions apply, but do you have a sense?
Are we talking about, like, 1%, 2%?
Like, what are we talking about?
Oh, no.
A lot more than that.
And...
And what check Mart wants you to do is if you sign up with them and get a check Mart, um,
Like a check cashing card?
Like Publix used to get a check cashing card, and that was a way to make the process of cashing your check easier because you've been vetted.
And as long as you can prove that's you, it goes a little faster than I got to hold it or something like that.
Exactly.
And you get a better rate if you – Checks are so stupid.
Yeah.
Depending on –
prime Joe customer or whatever.
Yeah.
We'll charge 2% or something.
If you come in and you're just, you know, somebody with his hat on sideways and he's got a check and, uh, and you know, you're like, I need the money.
Yeah.
You know, we'll take 10% off at 12%.
I mean, a lot of, you take a lot of money from it.
Well, cause there's a lot, I mean, there is, in fairness, there is some risk to like just having somebody come in and hand you a piece of paper that they say is money.
And then you give them actual cash.
Tons, tons of risk.
And people came in all the time with checks that they'd made on a color printer.
And it's like, do you think that we just don't know anything?
Yeah.
Did you really think that we don't know anything?
Look at the name of the building that you're in.
What is the name of the place where you are?
Checks are a thing that we do a lot of.
Yeah, you would have to really have a low opinion of us to think that this, and they're always sweating and their eyes are darting.
Right, but also if you come in dressed like a butler, that's going to be suspicious too.
You're a butler.
Don't you have a bank?
You must have to really get a good fraud off of
on John's check mark, you would have to be just in the pocket of, of being a credulous.
Oh, well, and the other, the other big job we did was that, you know, I mean, something that I think we're aware of as a culture, but not, I don't think are aware of the scale of how much money gets sent back to Mexico.
yeah by people working in the in the u.s a lot and places like the philippines and like places where like people are just almost all of their check is going to somebody back home yeah that's right and the people back home are living entirely on the money that's being made in in the u.s i've heard this for years that it's way higher than anybody would think that's why there's so many places where you're like what is this business there's a business near where i work that's moved a couple times and it's my hand to god john
It's a combination of a travel agency, a mobile phone store.
They sell phone cards.
Western Union.
Well, yeah.
It's like all these different things in one.
And basically, it's something like one-stop shopping for people who want to do stuff with people in other countries.
Right.
They want to send this back to Taipei or whatever.
Right.
So people, so we were a Western union office and people would come in, you know, line up to send money to various places in the world.
And of course we're taking a cut of that.
And if we're, if they come with a, with a check that they've gotten a payroll check, you know, we take a cut to cash it and then a cut to send it.
Uh, it's a terrible system.
And I was miserable working there, but also what I realized is the, the other, my other, I mean, my employees also hated that.
the job and they hated their customers it's interesting and but these are like locals right these are people probably like from the i mean i don't i'm sorry this is kind of a weird question but like it's a lot of are the did you get a sense that the ladies who'd worked there for a while were they people like from the community oh yeah yeah we're coming from kirkland to to work there no no no and and in fact you know it's a job it's a working class job uh
to work at a check Mart, you know, more than a, more than a white collar job.
I was the white collar.
Yes.
You were the white collar trainee, the white collar trainee.
I was, I was the assistant to the, uh, but they, you know, they just spent the whole day muttering under their breath.
Like, look at this scumbag, you know, like everybody that walked in the door, it just felt like, and this is kind of the issue of,
That we see so often with cops and firemen too.
All they see all day long, especially with cops, even the best cop in the best situation, all they see, all they encounter all day is people having their worst day.
Right.
Right.
And, and people that are in, in the check mark business, at least it's like every person that walks in the door is somebody potentially trying to scam you.
Sure.
Otherwise, otherwise they might not be there.
Either trying to scam you or, or really on the skids or, um,
Or have a conspiracy about banks or are from a different country who are trying to send money home.
I mean, it's a little bit like an emergency room in the sense that there's nobody who's there because it's a nice place to be.
They're there for an extremely practical reason, which is in the case of a checkmark.
I mean, I don't want to disparage the checkmark corporation, but like if I had any other option, believe me, I would not be here.
Yeah, exactly.
And, and yeah,
And so there's that.
So, and the thing is, it's a, it's a mentality that grows over time.
Cause when I first started working at the check Mart, I was like, every person that walks in the door is super fascinating.
Like, hello, how are you?
If, if it's like a Mickey Rourke, uh, in bar flight kind of situation, right?
You're going to meet some fascinating Tom Waits style, William Burroughs style characters.
Chuck Bukowski's are coming in.
But my, my take on it was always like, if I can make this exchange,
If you can walk out of here feeling better than you did when you walked in, then I've done my job.
Good for you, man.
Yeah, but still, even though you're a trainee in the white collar, you're saying, let's do this thing.
Let's lean into this.
But over a very short amount of time, my coworkers explained to me by, you know, by way of scoffing at me audibly when I was nice to people that they were like, look, being nice to people is not an advantage here.
It doesn't help you process it any faster.
And what you are doing is you're going to miss that.
They're trying to scam you because you're so, um,
You're so like, oh, this person's nice because we're having a nice conversation.
They're like, no.
And it's the same.
You see it with cops in Seattle.
You don't see this with cops in New York.
Cops in New York tend to be like more like, hey, what's going on?
I've talked about this before.
But cops in Seattle are just like, what crime are you committing, citizen?
Like the assumption being that everybody's got a fucking –
fraudulent check, you know?
Anyway, I worked there for not very long, but, um, the time that I did work there, the radio was on all the time.
Because, you know, we're behind bulletproof glass and, you know, you're listening to terrestrial radio.
And because my workers, my employees were, you know, middle-aged women of color, we were listening to Cube, the sort of pop music.
soul music station.
The one that's, you know, that's playing, um, San Francisco, it's K O I T, which is all Christmas from Thanksgiving through Christmas.
And then the rest of the year, it's, it's the K O I T. It's the, um, it's the one that nobody likes, but also nobody hates.
Um,
And it's like the most palatable doctor's office, low volume thing you can have.
In this case, you're talking about like poppy R&B type stuff, right?
But Cube was always the urban station, K-U-B-E.
And like a lot of urban stations at the time, it had all white DJs that were like, yeah, coming up next.
It's, you know, the new...
uh, the new like run DMC or whatever, you know, the run DMC wasn't on there, but, but, but like destiny's child, new Jack swing, probably new Jack swing.
All right.
And it's like, why don't, you know, there are black DJs.
There are so many of them.
In fact, Venus fly trap.
He's probably looking for work.
Why are they not on this station?
Yeah.
Anyway, during that period, uh,
Uh, because of the way those records or those radio stations work, they have a playlist of like the top 15 songs in constant rotation.
Yep.
It's one of those things where like you're going to hear it just almost every hour.
Yeah.
And in the case of working, you know, a shift at check Mart, I heard kiss from a rose and waterfalls, uh, probably six times a day.
And those songs are burned into my, uh,
soul in the same way that as I've described work, when I finally got the good job, which was at the newsstand and, um, and w you know, we were allowed to play our own music there.
Until one day, one of my fellow employees played a music with a swear.
I remember this.
And then the owner said shut it down.
Said shut it down.
And he had like 10 records we were allowed to play.
And eventually we'd heard them all so many times that it just ended up being kind of blue stuck in the stereo.
And then...
For two and a half years.
No one knows how to get it out.
We have to wait for the true king to remove it.
For two and a half years, we just listened to Kind of Blue on permanent repeat.
I can't hear it.
I can't hear it.
I mean, I can hear it.
That's me in the long run.
The long run, when I was a busboy, because that was all that played.
They just had an eight track that would play of the long run.
And the one time I flipped a car, The Long Run was on.
Then the other one was when I worked at another place.
Oh, it was Pretzel Logic, which I still do like.
But, like, it's not the Steely Dan record I would choose.
But, like, those songs get so – like you say, they get so into your bones that you can stop noticing them.
But it's a very, like –
Manchurian candidate thing for the rest of your life where like as soon as you hear a note of one of those things, it takes you right back to like where they had kept you in a box for a few months listening to one album.
Well, and you know, the guy that actually, I was thinking about him the other day, the guy that put that record on that had the swear.
Yeah.
When I started working there, he had really long dreadlocks and like, you know, like proper main of dreadlocks.
And for a few years,
He had, you know, his dreads were a big part of his identity, and I think that... Was he a man of color, an African-American man?
He was, he was.
But he did not manifest himself.
Back then, that was very intimidating to white people, to see a person with dreadlocks.
I think that was considered kind of a little bit wild.
Well, it was... What I didn't know, because this was, you know, alternative years, and it was... There were a lot of different takes, right, that were happening and stuff.
Bad brains, yeah.
But one day he showed up and he had cut his hair and I was like, what happened?
You know, like it was stunning.
And he said, this is a guy that works at the newsstand with me.
I know him really well.
He's like just regular Seattle dude.
And he said, I just realized that I was not living true to Rasta.
Yeah.
And I needed to, I could not wear those dreads.
Wow, that's refreshing.
I was being dishonest.
Whoa, interesting.
It was like, I still think about it all the time.
Like he worked on those dreads probably for 15 years.
I mean, he wasn't that old.
Yeah.
And he was sitting one day and reflecting on himself and was like, I am not honoring this hair.
Wow.
And cut it all off.
i i was thinking about that the other day like am i living true to rasta yeah do i do i do think i mean i know i know that there are people in a given faith for reasons that are not like what's on the tin like i have friends who go to church because they love singing well back in you know before like like like the singing or like the in my case i love the community aspect of of just a church but also of the faith like i think there are people who just like wearing a cross probably
the people who were there for like, you know what I mean?
They're there for the stuff.
They're there for the thing.
And like, I think that's really admirable that that man would say that.
I think it's really cool and very self-aware to say that.
Yeah.
I did then and I, and I, and I still do like to, to practice, to recognize that.
And I don't know when he first started growing that hair, whether it was in the spirit of, of, of religion.
And he certainly didn't,
He did not even exhibit any kind of
Rastafarian in his lifestyle, but he certainly was feeling it in his heart.
As I sit here today, this is so embarrassing to say.
I know very little about Rastafarian.
I know that it's a, I believe, Caribbean inflection of Judaism in some ways.
It's got a basis, but it's a very spiritual thing.
I don't know a ton about it, and least of all, I think, as much as I associate dreadlocks with that, I could not tell you the first reason why people do that.
I do not know why.
And I'm saying this, I'm just disclosing.
I've seen the dreadlocks for years, and I've never known what it exactly has to do with the faith.
I know mainly Ross Safari and stuff as punchlines.
I don't know that much about it.
Do you?
I know more about it just because of the very varied life I've led.
Rastafarianism is a Jamaican religion, but it is... But it doesn't have something to do with Haile Selassie in Ethiopia?
Well, it does, because Haile Selassie was the manifestation of
a king in Africa that was the, um, that was going to bring.
Oh, and this is where you get into Babylon and stuff like that.
Right.
African restoration of, of the truth on earth.
But, you know, it was completely, it's, it isn't a, like a recapitulation of Judaism.
It's like certain stories out of the old Testament, Testament, like Exodus play a big,
role, but it's also super new Testament.
And it's also the name of a Bob Marley album, if memory serves.
That's right.
Uh, but it's also, and it started like back in the thirties, but the idea was that Haile Selassie was Christ returned and living, um, living among us.
And
that ultimately like, like, you know, the, all the black people were going to return and build a, build a kingdom in Africa, build a Wakanda.
Um, and then, and so, you know, what, how it, um, like, I think the dreads were just like taken from Leviticus, right?
Like it's prohibition.
Oh, like you don't cut your, don't cut your, um, Oh God, you don't cut your case.
Okay.
Yeah.
Right.
Right.
Right.
Yeah.
So, so the whole thing is like a real, it's in a way it's like a, it's like a patois of religion.
Okay.
And then the music.
Just came out, you know, ska came out of soul.
Rocksteady.
Yeah, and then it turned into, it slowed down.
We'll save it for another episode.
I'm taking you off six chords, nine chords.
The guy who came in, because I still have a feeling somewhere deep in the pit of my stomach you're going to bring this back to the Beatles and I haven't figured out how.
Yes.
Oh, fuck, I know you're going to.
Dude, I can fucking feel it.
It's Christmas cream early.
I could feel it.
So he cut it off and you were shocked because he felt like he was not.
And then that made you say to yourself, is John living up to the spirit of Raw Star?
Well, I think about it all the time.
Like, what am I repping that I am not?
fully repping.
You know what I mean?
I do.
I know very well.
Yes.
Can't just go on the internet and yell at people about how, uh, you know, the tax plan is favors the rich or whatever, unless you're repping somehow personally, uh,
a righteous life.
That's not even to say, like, am I being hypocritical, although I think that is an aspect of it, which is that, like, I'm one of those people that's always now-nowing, or they're there-ing everybody on the internet about go be nice to each other, but, like, what am I doing affirmative, for example, but what am I doing affirmatively to put that in place with what I do and what I inhabit?
That's just one kind of example.
There's all kinds of things, you know, for thee and me,
kind of stuff where I'm very, I'm very invested in the idea that everybody should be nice to me, but like, you know what I mean?
There's all kinds of things like that where you're like, if you stop for a second, you're like, Oh no, I'm, I'm just another garden variety asshole.
That's no good.
Right.
Right.
And, um, I, and also, I mean, I think, uh, I think that he said that he used the word hypocritical, uh, when he cut his hair, but, um,
But it's, yeah, it's more, and I think that part of it, part of like my desire to always be transforming is maybe works against the idea that I have a faith that has tenants.
Like generally I don't have a faith that has tenants, tenants.
I have, I rather like my tenants are,
are, uh, are of continual motion, you know, like ongoing self, um, discovered truths that keep hopefully keep changing what your habits are rather than like sticking to a doctrine.
And it's, so it's hard to know, am I, am I fulfilling that prophecy or
Every day.
It feels like I betray it more by, by being static.
Yeah.
you know, betray whatever religion I have.
You talked about this with habits not very long ago.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, right.
And something I had not thought of, which is the potential down, I think of habits as being usually a good habit or something where like you've mindfully, deliberately, again, affirmatively, assertively, like try to put something in place and do it over and over until it becomes part of your personality.
I said after recording, I mentioned that quote from the Margaret Thatcher movie about how, you know, thoughts become words, words become et cetera, and then that eventually becomes your character and your whole, your destiny basically.
Yeah.
Like, you know, that you're, but you realize that if memory serves, you were saying that some habits, a lot of habits, you have to examine your habits, good or bad, and be careful because sometimes habits can be worse than you think.
Yeah.
Personally, for me, like, I, I don't know, my,
My path seems to be extremely suspicious of habits, any habit.
You know, like when I go into a restaurant that I go to all the time, I always order a different thing, never get the same thing.
The only commonality is no potatoes.
If you put potatoes on the plate, I'm going to send it back.
Don't put potatoes on.
You go outside, you take your clothes off, you throw a garbage can through the window and you set the place on fire.
If you put potatoes on the plate, I'm going to ask for a small plate.
Will you give me a small plate?
They always say yes.
And then I put the potatoes on the small plate and I leave the small plate.
They'll say, do you want the potatoes on the side?
And you say, you're not understanding.
Potatoes can't be on my part of the table at all.
They must not, they must not.
It's like, it's almost like when you serve a kid a burger with mustard on, you say, it's okay, I'll scrape it off.
Like you can't scrape mustard off a burger because it's already been mustarded.
Do not potato, don't potato my plate.
The burger, that's why I don't want mustard on a burger in the first place.
It's not that I don't like mustard.
You can't remove it.
And so don't remove it by not putting it on.
And now we're both going to be fine.
I didn't order a mustard delivery plate.
device i ordered a hamburger i made i made a mustard delivery device last night which is a new variation of a meal i call sausage night and it was fantastic and we had it with very rustic german mustard and it was a great new twist really livened up the relationship with sausage night and it was great but you know what i do i mean and this is i maybe this is precious there's certain kinds of things where i very specifically want the food away and my daughter or my wife very specifically does not want a food that way and it's not that difficult to make two
sets of sausage and i get the sausage over here i make it my way and then i made hot slaw a classic ohio german dish hot slaw hot slaw you make you got cabbage and and then it's got bacon uh and bacon bacon bacon uh fat and apple cider vinegar and pepper red pepper flakes and then you very lightly kind of saute the cabbage with a little bit of carrot in that you flip it around you turn it over and now you have german hot slaw
Oh, you're a German hot slaw.
But if you're in the mood for a delivery device, I mean, popcorn is a salt delivery device in some ways.
Popcorn without salt is a human tragedy.
Yeah, that's right.
Like, don't put potatoes on my plate.
Well, it's like unroasted almonds.
Ew.
You ever had unroasted peanuts, boy?
Woof, you're going to get a lot of reading done.
Of course.
A lot of reading done.
Unroasted peanuts.
Of course.
It's like eating someone's shoe.
My friend in college, Chris Colgeron, I've mentioned him before.
Chris's uncle was a peanut farmer and sent him back to college one semester with a joke-sized bag.
I'm serious.
It was like the size of Chris.
It had to be 50, 100 pounds.
I don't know what it was.
And he would drag it out to parties and everybody would eat unroasted peanuts and then have to shit.
It gives you the runs real hard.
Oh, I bet it does.
I bet it does.
But you know, you got to do what you got to do.
But you were talking about dreadlocks and then you were talking about habits.
In Seattle, we used to- Restaurant every time, no potatoes, give John food.
We used to have a, there's a neighborhood that my mom's house was close to and you've stayed at my mom's house.
You know the zone.
12th Avenue.
There used to just be warehouses and car repair shops and nothing going on there across the street from Seattle U.
And then gradually throughout the nineties, but particularly throughout the two thousands, it, it started to be populated by, um, by the,
like Capitol Hills kind of, you know, runoff.
And pretty soon all the little warehouses were like, the way that the Castro captured the hates runoff in the early seventies.
Exactly.
It was like, well, that used to be a, uh, that used to be a, uh, like a transmission repair place.
Now it's a pho restaurant on its way to being a photography studio.
And one of the places was a kind of like shitty band practice place.
Um,
That got really fixed up and turned into a sausage restaurant called Von Trapp's.
And then the Von Trapp family sued them.
Oh, you mean the Lonely Goodherd family?
Yes, climb every mountain.
Of course they would.
They sued them.
Although technically that's Austria.
Well, but they changed it to Rheinhaus.
And what they do is they serve big platters of different kinds of sausage, 13 kinds of sausage.
They get a hot slaw in there.
They get your mashed potatoes.
They put the everything.
Sometimes, you know, if you order the big platter, which of course I always do, it is actually the sides of a garbage can lid.
Oh my God.
Oh.
They make goulash.
The problem is.
Vice sauce?
Not the problem.
They have vice sauce.
The problem is there's this great.
german austrian like like sausage house yeah but it's connected to a like a bro bar that has a dozen bocce ball courts that became very quickly the place that like a um
a team from Amazon would have their team building exercise there.
I get it.
Okay.
And so pretty soon you're, you're there, you're trying to get your sausage and there's a con, there's a, like a person at the door.
A lot of guys in fleece.
Yeah.
He's trying to, the person at the door is trying to seat parties of 25.
Uh, you know, there are a lot of people in the back that are like going woo.
Uh, but, but the, but the, the sausage was, you know, beyond compare a thing, a thing of beauty.
And I miss it because that is mustard delivery.
That is 100% consensual.
You get the mustards.
You decide how much mustard goes on a thing.
You can put mustard on one bite and then the next bite, no mustard.
You space it out.
Sauce deployment is so important.
You should see me eating French fries.
It's a whole affair.
I've got a very carefully organized phrase I learned from kids in the hall, the wonderful TV show Dipping Stations.
I created dipping stations around and I've made very careful decisions about what I want to touch what.
So you got the hot sauce, you got the mayonnaise, mayonnaise, you got the ketchup.
And then you at first you start out and you have the opportunity to just very exclusively dip into just this and that.
Then it gets a little bit smeared together.
But that you know what?
That's OK.
That's a happy family because the mayonnaise and the ketchup always wanted to be together.
You know what I mean?
You get a little dip down the center of that strip, and then you put down a little bit of hot sauce, and then pretty soon, you've basically made your own donkey sauce on the plate ad hoc, but that's my donkey sauce.
There are many like it, but this is mine.
Donkey sauce.
Donkey sauce?
Is that what it's called?
No, no, no.
Donkey sauce is the fucking guy for the anything.
I'm thinking of what's it called?
Boom boom sauce is what you're making.
Chonky sauce.
Chonk.
Chonk.
Do you put free racha in your mayonnaise?
Um, sometimes when I make a, the answer is kind of yes.
When I make my famous dipping, I make a dipping sauce when we have nugget night.
Dipping sauce on a nugget night.
Well, like if you're saying dipping, if you're saying dipping and nugget in the same afternoon, you're having a good day.
And so for me, yes, I have my own bespoke version of boom, boom sauce, which is I'll do, I'll do mayonnaise, I'll do ketchup.
Um, I will do, so I'm basically making like a, almost like a basic, like a, like a cocktail sauce, but then I add a little bit of heat to that.
Um,
And so I'll do frequently – I'll do some peri-peri and maybe a little bit depending on whether I want more garlicky or not.
Now, what do you do?
Do you like to bring the heat?
The thing is I don't make my own dip in sauce.
I don't have a barbecue sauce.
I can't make it hot enough for you.
I love sauce too is the thing.
Oh, I love sauce.
I live for sauce.
On the show, I do where we have challenges every week.
I think we've had at least three different challenges that involve sauce.
Three sauce challenges.
I love making up my own stuff and trying it out.
And then sometimes, you know, I get those squeeze bottles, like with a little witch hat on top.
And I'll fill those up.
I'll make that into a boom-boom sauce, not a donkey sauce.
I'll make my own bespoke sauce, you know.
And, of course, I'm always chasing the dragon trying to get the exact salad dressing they have at House of Prime Rib.
I spend a fair amount of time thinking about sauce.
Mm-hmm.
I, I, you know, I'm, I'm like, uh, I like a great, a gravy based sauce.
Oh shit dog.
You know, my, you know, my measure of success is I get like a fountain Coke machine for my house, except it's all gravies.
Yeah.
White gravy, brown gravy.
Ah, juice.
I want that brown gravy.
Just, just the brown gravy they put on egg for young.
I want that around.
Oh, that's good gravy.
That's fucking great gravy.
It's disgusting and will give you diarrhea and make you fall asleep, but it's a gravy deployment device.
I have just recently learned how to properly make a gravy that finally...
satisfies me and gratifies me.
Interesting.
After decades of wanting more gravy than I was ever given, right?
I spent so many hours and weeks of my life wishing I had gravy and it felt like a mysterious curtain.
I always want gravy, John.
I always want gravy.
When I get breakfast, give me a monkey dish.
Boy, there's a lot of good words this week.
Give me a monkey dish full of white gravy, which is sausage gravy.
Always give that to me and I will deploy it.
I don't want to be all fucking Meg Ryan here, but part of the fun of that is now I can deploy that as something to dip in.
You know what I can do with gravy?
You can put on top of other things like you do with smashed potatoes.
Give me the options.
Give me monkey dishes of all the things.
We're talking about a brown gravy?
What are we talking about here?
Well, so, oh, there's so many, so many gravies as you know, but you know, when I order a large biscuit, what I want is
Sorry, I guarantee.
What I want is raspberry jam and sausage gravy, both there to employ from one bite to the next.
I want a little jam on a Bistick.
I want to eat it.
Then I want to put a little sausage gravy on a Bistick.
You know what?
I'm not here to answer a bunch of fucking questions.
I'm not here to answer both.
I want the biscuit the way I want it.
I want you to bring the things and then I'm going to deploy it.
And I don't want an exit interview about why I would do that.
I'm a grown-ass man.
Is this not what you would have done?
Oh, really?
Oh, how interesting.
Why don't you get your own fucking bis-stick?
Yes, that's right.
But a lot of places, a lot of places don't want it.
They don't want it your way.
They want it their way.
Oh, I want to seek first to understand, said the waitress.
But what I want, and you nailed it already, I want a brown gravy...
That is the kind of gravy that you would put on, say, for instance, do you remember when restaurants had hamburger steak?
Yeah.
Hamburger steak.
It's actually, oddly enough, it's also of the same vintage as the diet plate.
Back when you would get like the lean burger with Melba toast, always Melba toast.
Yeah, hamburger steak can be a hell of a steak.
That place that you've been to in my neighborhood, they still have that.
Yeah.
And that gravy.
Hamburger steak.
I get what you're saying.
But it's one of those brown gravis.
Now, brown gravy could be a beef or a chicken or a turkey.
Yep.
Right?
Do you have a sense of what the base protein in your gravy is that you're making?
Well, so if I'm going to have...
Obviously, hamburger steak is going to be a beef gravy, and if it's a turkey dinner, it's going to be a turkey gravy.
I'm not a monster.
You know, there's the egg noodle component, and there's always going to have to be gravy that kind of goes over onto the egg noodles.
You got me started on that.
You got me started on egg noodles to go with steak, and I never look back.
Never look back.
right it's a life changer you gotta have that what else it's snake noodles all the way down it's the best and you can you can chop up some fresh parsley you salt and butter that shit and have that with a goddamn steak call the cops but here's what i don't here's what i never was able to do and now feel like i'm finally able to do which is to make a stew that is a proper stew that is not a
That's not a stew that's too watery.
It's not a stew that's too flowery.
Yeah.
Sometimes people don't realize how strong cornstarch is.
And people will, at the end, will say like, oh, I want it thicker.
And boy, you can really fuck shit up.
You could basically turn stew into a jello.
You can turn stew into a jello.
You use too much cornstarch.
And also, you know, cornstarch, you just need a tiny bit.
You mix it with the water.
You mix it up good.
And then when you pour it in, you mix it and put in less than you think.
You cannot take cornstarch out.
Yes.
Don't fuck around.
This isn't like I get the grease out with a slice of bread.
You've done fucked up your stew, Jack.
You can't take it out.
You can always put more in, but you can't take it out.
And so you've really, you've really, you've gotten to that.
Are you making this in like a regular old pot, like a Dutch oven?
We, we, we make stew in the Instapot every, every couple of weeks.
What do you, what do you make it in?
Well, so we've, we, I've been converted to the Instapot cult.
And so we use it for rights three times a week.
It's the best.
But I don't, but I don't make gravy in the Instapot.
Interesting.
Interesting.
I, you know, I think what the problem was with my mom psyched me out on gravy.
She, she was like, Oh, it's really simple.
You just have to do it exactly this way.
And if you mess it up at all, it's going to be a disaster and you'll have to throw it in the garbage.
And so I always approached it with a lot of fear.
And I think just in the last six months, since my birthday, I have felt like, you know what?
I'm not, I don't cook.
following instructions at all i throw everything i what i do basically is i get out a caulk gun i put everything in one end of it and i squeeze it out the other you extrude a food and why the hell have i not been making gravy this way and so i was like here's how you what's gonna happen what's gonna happen you fuck up what happens you know you fuck up 10 times what happens you've blown 27 over all of that time but now eventually you keep at it eventually you get a gravy you like
But the danger of fucking up is that you have pan drippings.
And if you fuck up, you lose the pan drippings.
And you only get pan drippings.
You only get those once.
You get one shot of pan drippings.
That's right.
You only get one shot.
Do not.
This happened last night with my hot slot.
The pan drippings are very important.
I'm in the cast iron pan.
I'm getting up the nubbins.
I got to get up the nubbins.
And they say, leave all but two tablespoons of bacon fat.
Give me a fucking break.
I'm going to leave it all in there, man.
Don't leave it on the tarp, man.
This is 2020.
Telling me that I'm going to separate the egg whites from the yolk?
Fuck you.
It all goes into the pot.
Everybody's so cute about this stuff.
But you got there with the gravy.
How'd you land on this?
Because your mom psyched you out.
You're outside the pot.
You're thinking outside the pot and outside the box.
What was the breakthrough?
I just said basically like, I'm 52 now.
Am I really going to live the rest of my life?
depending on my mom.
You could have spent the rest of your life afraid of gravy?
Afraid of trying gravy?
Afraid.
I was living in fear the whole time.
Living in fear, fear of gravy, fear of failure.
So I leaned into it.
I had both of my ivory-handled 45s in either...
In either holster.
I'm laughing a little bit because I'm recalling a quote from George Patton when somebody said, are those pearl-handled pistols?
He said, pearl handles?
What am I, a New Orleans pimp?
They're ivory handles.
Ivory handles.
Like a gentleman.
I was like, okay.
Mm-hmm.
Anyway.
Yeah.
I bet he's pistol whips with good men with those.
Oh, you can bet he has.
And, you know, you can't get in the hospital and you're crying like a little bitch.
Tappa, tappa, tappa.
A little bit, a little bit of ivory.
Get tusked a little bit from the patent man.
You leaned into it.
So you're like, I imagine, see, I'm laughing because I'm imagining you as Yosemite Sam.
You're two and a half feet tall.
You can't really get up to the range top.
You know, but like, so you've done it though.
You're not going to, you're not going to be governed by your mother's fear of gravy that she's tried to instill.
Hi, Marcia.
Big fan.
Keep going.
What I did was I bellied up to the stove.
The kitchen was full of ladies, all trying to get cakes made and other things made.
And I was like, you know what?
I'm going to do the sauce.
And there was a lot of like, you're going to do the sauce.
Rhubarb, rhubarb, rhubarb.
And my mom, who's always happy to not have to do the thing anymore.
Sure.
Was like, you know, she like took the, whatever the, took the rag out of her apron and threw it on the floor and was like, good.
And went in and read a magazine.
And I was like, everybody out of the kitchen.
And I sat and I just was like, I'm making this sauce.
God damn it.
I bet you were really there.
I bet you were like in the moment.
You were fucking living the full catastrophe.
You know what I'm saying?
Because this is my sauce.
This is the one that every holiday when people say, what do you want for your birthday?
I say, all I want, what I want is this particular breakfast that
That has Bistix and sauce.
You get a whole fast stick of Bistix.
I get a fast stick of Bistix.
This is the Welsh rare bit.
This is the one, this is the sauce.
Oh, that's the one that gives a Gomer Pyle nightmares.
And I leaned in and I made a sauce and everybody agreed best sauce ever.
Wow.
And I realized as I was making it like, wait a minute, this isn't magic.
This is, this is one of those things where this is part of my codependency with my mom.
She made it seem really hard to,
I don't know why, to keep me in a state of perpetual time.
She's stopping you from practicing life because you should be out there practicing life and knowing you don't need a net.
You'll be fine.
There's not that much risk to it.
And really, no offense to your mom.
I'm a huge fan.
But I think a lot of people do this.
And now the thing is, we don't realize the impact of our words and our actions sometimes.
And we don't realize how much something somebody said one time will end up sticking with you and give you the fear of gravy, which is also a terrific Talking Heads album.
Okay, so your sauce, and this is not— So since then, I've made a dozen sauces.
You put the brown sauce on the rare bits, so the rare bits got cheese.
It's cheese toast, but then brown— No, it's a cheese sauce.
I was making a cheese sauce.
It's a cheese sauce, okay.
It's the same.
It's the same as any white sauce, any gravy.
It's just a question of do you put pan drippings?
Do you put cheese?
Whoa, whoa, whoa.
Give me the thought technology.
Give me your thought.
Your thought technology is twisting my melon, buddy.
What are you talking about here?
All sauce is just sauce.
Lay that out for me.
All sauce is sauce.
Whatever's in the sauce is in the sauce.
It starts with a fat and then you get a starch.
Okay.
And you put them together and you cook it until the corn or the wheat is cooked and doesn't taste like itself anymore.
And then you put in the liquid, which can be any one of a few things.
Yep, yep, yep.
And then you've got your basic sauce.
Do you feel like you know when it's sauce?
Especially, like, this is sauce, this is gravy, this is water.
Like, do you have a sense of, like, you have an internal sort of barometer, a sauce-ometer, a gravy-inator that gives you the sense of, now we're done, Daddy made a sauce.
Do you know?
No, so now we've got the, now we're done with the base.
Okay.
Okay.
And then you put in the cheese or you put in the – To make it a pyramid.
You put in the garlic.
You put in the stuff, the other stuff.
It all goes –
But I was doing the thing where I was just like, I was rat tattooing it, you know, like a little bit of that, a little bit of this, you know.
I see.
Get out of my kitchen.
You're running around the edge of the pot dropping in chervil and shit.
That's right.
Just because you know intuitively, like when you're released from the hat, you know how to get out and fix this sauce, fix this sauce.
You making a cheese sauce?
Oh, well, don't forget the tiny splash of Marsala wine and the teeny bit of mustard.
Put them both in there.
They're not fighting.
They're not going to hurt each other.
They get along great in there.
Yeah, absolutely.
Worcester sauce goes in things.
You never think about, what am I doing with this?
I put that in gravy.
I'm a fan of the Worcestershire in gravy.
It's got a lot of savoriness to it, a lot of, as they say, umami.
Umami.
It's got umami.
Umami.
Anyway, so we were listening to Seal, and the number of chords in Seal in that Kiss from a Rose song,
Like what I didn't realize is he was incorporating some grunge lexicon.
He had a little bit of Alice in Chains.
Sometimes it's hard to know what part of the song we're on.
He's got a phrase and that the singing phrase and that trails off a little bit.
And then there's another piece that comes in and it's almost like not a fugue exactly, but there's something really strange going on with what part of the song we're in.
When he goes, yeah, and does that little half-step modulation, it's basically like, yeah, no, no, no.
Oh, I see.
You're saying he's doing a half-letter.
He's doing a little bit of a, he's doing some grunge, but he's also, there's so many chords in that song.
And I realized, first of all, that I don't think there's ever been an indie rock cover of
kiss from a rose and if there has been i don't want to hear about it nope because i'm thinking i was thinking like wow this is a thing that i should probably do i should probably do a songwritery cover of kiss from a rose you know what i like i like when he does i don't know what the words are like when he goes yeah or whatever i think it's really remain i love when he does that he does that little um not a yodel exactly but he does it lockively a little falsetto the falsetto he pulls that right off
But it's got a lot of soul without any of that cheap soul theatrics that we get now.
With all respect, given our topic this week, it's not slathered in soul sauce.
It's legit soulful rather than trying to do some kind of Motown or more likely Philly.
It's more a Phillyan mood than Motown, wouldn't you say?
Mm-hmm.
Thank you.
I like that very much.
Love a Philly, man.
You go back.
The shit that was on the radio, the 74, 75.
Woof.
Quiet storm, baby.
Bring it on.
But he's not coming from the church.
It doesn't sound like it's coming from the church.
It sounds like he's coming.
It's not a Dionne Warwick.
It's not an Aretha Franklin.
It's a seal.
No, it's coming from the Beatles.
It's a kiss from a seal.
What?
Okay.
All right.
Yes.
The song, the chords, it's all coming from- What era?
I mean, no, it's not coming from them directly.
No, no, but I mean like in terms of like the decisions for these kinds of chord changes, are you talking about like the fruity era, like the like 67-ish era?
Yeah.
The stacked parts, the way that chords tumble into chords, the fact that there's always a bridge that is always in some ways maybe better than the rest of the song, which is already the best song that you ever heard.
Yeah.
Um, like when, when seal goes to his bridge, like a penny, like a penny lane in my head, it's like a little bit like the way penny lane works.
Yeah.
If you slowed it down and you put more pathos in it, I mean, the lyrics are just as we have somebody else play bass and turn it way, way, way down.
But the way those chords interact with each other and like anticipate or, or sort of mislead you on what's coming next in the song.
I feel like that's a similar, you know what I'm saying?
Yeah, that song has three boon snitties in it.
Right?
Like, is this the pre-chorus?
No, it's the pre-pre-chorus.
Oh, is this the third verse?
No, it's the first.
There's a few things more bewildering in this pop culture world than encountering a song where at first you think this song doesn't have a chorus, and then you start to think this whole song is nothing but choruses, and then you realize it doesn't matter.
It's just the song that it is.
It's 11 choruses.
Oh, God.
It just goes from chorus to chorus.
That's my musical gravy.
Just pour some chorus on me in the name of love.
You remain.
You did it.
You win this one.
Back to the Beatles.
Good job.
I think it's a six, I feel like.
The chord?
Yeah, it's not a nine.
A nine is like a Purple Haze.
Right, I know that chord.
I play that chord all the time.
It's also a Minuteman chord.
If six was nine...
Total whiteboard guilt, that's my problem!
Obstacle to joy, one reason to use some drugs.
If you had one muscle car...
Is this the show?
No, I don't think so.
Oh.
If someone were to give you, or I mean, yeah, it could be.
Let's just do a couple more because it's the end of the year.
Oh, by the way, John, we're skipping next week.
I've decided by Fiat we're skipping next week.
So you could save this.
You guys could break this into two parts.
John did bring it back to the Beatles and I did play a little bit of Minutemen.
So I think Christmas came early.
That's what she said.
What muscle car, if someone were to say, Merlin, I'm going to give you your muscle car.
Yeah.
It's your life car.
But, you know, and I guess you can pick anything you want.
If you want to pick like a 81K car station wagon, you can.
I mean, I don't know a lot about cars, and the only car I've ever really actively wanted is not a muscle car, which would be a 64.5 or a 65 Mustang with pony interior.
But I really have to say, I'm so fucking basic.
I had such a hard-on for Burt Reynolds' Trans Am.
I thought that was the big, the Firebird, I guess, on the hood.
I thought it was so fucking cool.
But I also like the Starsky and Hutch car a lot.
Right.
And I like cars that you get.
I hate to say this, especially today, but when I was younger, I thought it was pretty cool.
What's the one that's not Thrush?
What's the other one?
Cherry Bomb.
But like when you get the thing that goes pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop,
Oh, oh, glass packs.
Yeah.
Yeah, but like Thrush is the famous one.
But then there's the other one.
I like the other.
But I thought that was really cool.
It's basically like having a Harley.
It makes you like just an auto asshole.
I don't know, man.
I don't know a lot about it.
I don't think I'd want to put a baby in one of those.
Those Mustang seats are real low.
But I wouldn't mind an American car that goes pop, pop, pop.
But I'm saying right now, like you don't have a baby.
You don't have to worry about that.
But you still live in San Francisco.
You still have to run the errands that you have to run.
I want an automatic because the Jetta we had before our current Jetta was a stick.
I never want to drive a stick in San Francisco again.
That was insane.
I don't know what we were thinking.
So you like cars that shift themselves.
I like the cars that shift themselves.
Yeah.
I mean, honestly, God, I'm so practical, John.
I'm basically basic, which is I like things that are easy to parallel park.
Like if I got a cool muscle car, like here's the thing.
In America today, you don't see that many shots of what a car looks like from above.
Like even the fucking Pontiac Catalina that we had in 1975, you look at that thing from above, you look at like a, not a Le Mans, you look at like a, or like a, like a big, like their cars used to be so long and you don't see it because you only see one angle of a car at a time, mostly, unless you're looking from the top and you go, shit, man, that's a long ass car.
That's a long ass car.
Yeah.
You know, my first car was one of the longest cars they ever made.
The Dodge, uh, the Dodge, or I'm sorry, the Chrysler Newport Imperial.
Whoa.
1972 Chrysler Newport Imperial.
I want to see that.
Um, it's only a two door car.
But it is a very long two-door car.
That's the funny.
What I was struggling to remember, my friend had a, no, no, it was an Oldsmobile.
An Oldsmobile that was like second or third hand, came from his grandfather.
And what's hilarious, it was so improbably long and so improbably heavy.
And it is so funny that some of the, in my head, the cars I think of as being really long cars often are two-door cars.
Why do I remember that?
It's really hard to open and close the door.
Yeah.
On those early 70s American cars, especially with power windows.
And they called it the battle wagon.
One of the doors didn't open.
You had to get in through the other door, which is very sort of dukes of hazard.
Sure.
I know it's problematic now.
This thing was so fucking heavy, John.
It was unbelievable.
You can ride one of those doors.
You start with the door all the way open.
You can ride it in.
It's basically like you get two free sidecars.
According to my mom, we sprung one of her doors by – Overextending it?
No, by riding it, by jumping up on it and riding it.
And we sprung it and it never fit right after that.
And I had it in my mind that you could spring a door.
And I suppose you could.
I haven't ridden a door for a long time.
Well, because they can close while they're open.
But I mean I feel like you could drive a Mustang around –
uh, around San Francisco.
There's one in our neighborhood.
There's a 65 in our neighborhood.
That's really nice.
But I love that hexagon grill.
It's really sweet.
That's nice.
Yeah.
I wouldn't, I wouldn't, I wouldn't turn away a fastback.
Anything that's not a type two type twos are garbage and they should all be thrown in the sea.
But I do like, I like up through those, you know, and I got to tell you, John, I know it's not a muscle car.
If I had my VW bus again, oof.
But in San Francisco?
No, I don't.
See, I don't need anything.
I've got a Segway, man.
I've got a Segway.
It's like a muscle car.
What are you laughing at?
What the fuck are you laughing at?
I've never seen you on the Segway.
Do you really, honestly, to God, ride it around?
660 miles on it.
Wow.
Yeah.
Like, I've been to Georgia on this thing, baby.
Do you wear a helmet?
I'm everywhere, man.
Do I wear a helmet?
Pass.
Do you have a costume?
Yes.
Like with wings or with streamers?
Yeah, I do.
Oh, my God.
Do you think that anybody that's not in a car is doing cosplay?
I'm not LARPing.
Like goggles or something?
Like what are you?
One of those little leather helmets.
Yeah, like a Snoopy scarf.
Yeah, I put a baseball card in the spokes.
Okay.
You're telling me that you can drive a, and I use the word drive in quotes, you can drive a Segway and not be wearing a costume?
That's really all on others, isn't it?
I mean, do I think you are in costume when I see you?
Pass.
John, look up 1955 Chrysler Newport Imperial.
55?
Yeah.
Because I was just looking at photos to catch up on what your car looked like.
How would you feel about having that automobile?
Check that shit out.
Newport.
It's a coupe.
Oh, so this is based on the Chrysler 300.
Look at those round headlights.
That grill is like a Rottweiler, where it's smart and it's nice until the day that it's smart, but not that nice.
And the two doors and the white walls?
Fuck me.
Look at this thing.
These mid-century Chryslers are widely regarded as among the most beautiful cars ever made.
And they're exactly between two aesthetics, I feel like.
Like, you could see this as a throwback to a lot of 40s cars, but you can also see it as the precursor to, like, the Iacocca.
You know what I mean?
The way that we, like, made coupes fun again.
Mm-hmm.
Oh, my God.
I love this thing.
Look at the top.
That windshield looks like it could really kill a family.
Well, and you know, that's right before the, uh, that's right before the 57 Chevy, right?
If you look at the 55 Chrysler 300, what you're going to see is that Imperial, except a little bit lower and sleeker.
Like it's, it's the one I think.
We were making Thunderbirds.
Like Bob Seger says, they're long and low and mean and fast.
You know what I mean?
Making Thunderbirds.
It's so, so hot.
It's such a hot car.
I think about that car all the time.
You know, they raced them.
No, no, not the Thunderbird.
I'm not a Thunderbird guy.
No, the Chrysler 300.
And that, I don't know, that Newport Imperial model is, oh, can you imagine?
I could drive that around.
300 is an interesting name for a car for that time.
Because this is back when, and maybe that was to be distinctive or European, because there is definitely a European influence here.
But I feel like back then was very much like in the, like, you know, Galaxy 500.
Like you would name things like cool space words and stuff like that.
Oh, I see what you're saying.
So this is sort of like, it's like a sexy Dodge Dart.
And these are fast?
Well, I mean, these are the old version of fast, which is like stock car kind of rev them up and run them in a circle.
Oh, you're saying quarter mile, quarter mile?
Yeah, do the Pan-American.
Go to the blow or quarter mile, quarter mile?
What are we doing?
We run for pinks?
What are we doing here?
I don't think so.
I don't think it's that.
Quarter mile, quarter mile.
No, I think this is a moonshiners car.
Go to the blow?
I think you do the Pan America on this.
Pan America.
Oh, I see.
That's where you take your daughter down to Tierra del Fuego to learn how to fix a Jeep.
Is that right?
Prisci small.
Prisci small.
Merry Christmas, John.
Merry Christmas.