Ep. 430: "PILF Pants"
Hello.
Hi, John.
Hi, Merlin.
How's it going?
Good.
I just noticed that our entire Skype chat history is me saying beep, lowercase b.
I don't know the last time you replied.
It's just beep, beep, beep, beep, beep.
Yeah, the reply is we start the show.
That's right.
But you know, you bring up an interesting point, you know, context.
Without context, that probably doesn't make a ton of sense.
Right.
If there was an FBI team that was going through my stuff.
When there's an FBI team.
And they're like, what's this relationship with Merlin Mann?
And they go into the Skype chat and they're like, what the fuck?
Right.
And you just respond.
They ask you a question.
You say, beep.
Beep.
Do with that what you will.
Anytime they mention your name, I'll just say beep.
I'll be pretty forthcoming about everything else.
Let's get back to Merlin.
You're the Merlin Manchurian candidates.
Beep.
All right.
That's the end of the show.
No, we're done.
That's it.
We've got nowhere else to go.
I'm not really awake yet.
It's Monday, July 5th, and I'm not really awake yet.
I'm not very awake either.
And I'm also a little... It's weird because it's 85 degrees, but I'm a little chilly.
You know that thing when you're like... Pardon my saying.
I bet your homeostasis is a mess right now.
Huh.
You know what?
I'm going to take it a step further.
I bet the homeostasis of your world is crazy right now.
You're saying the homeostasis of my world is crazy right now.
Listen, I'm not a scientist.
Crazy right now.
Yeah.
But...
I mean, homeostasis, it's like inertia for things, right?
You got to be a certain way to get a certain way.
We did not record last week because if memory serves, it was over 100 degrees in the room in which you would be recording the program.
A lot over, yeah.
Yeah.
But I mean, like that's going to have effects on, I don't know, the familiarity of your house and what you're used to your house being for or what your car is for or what your clothes are for.
This sounds silly, but I think when we experience something that's disruptive like that, I don't know, we tend to realize how inertial our world is.
And then you go, oh, no, I'm somewhere else now.
Yeah.
There's never a good time to say it's like having been in a disaster.
But if you think about the results of a disaster somewhere, you're like, wow, I have a whole new way of understanding my world.
I'm somewhere else now.
Kind of, yeah.
I mean, you expect your environment to work within certain parameters.
And like when those – if those parameters are exceeded, I mean –
It's surreal.
It's the very notion of surreal to like walk into a room that has never had six inches of water in it and discover it has six inches of water.
That's now an entirely new and different place.
Without giving too much away.
Yeah.
Do you know where the closest hotel to your house is?
Kind of.
Yeah.
There's one that we put my mom up in down by the water.
But we don't have – San Francisco is a weird city for stuff like that.
I'll say.
You mean if I had to bug out?
Well, that's the thing.
You know, I live close to the airport.
There are a lot of hotels down here.
They're not other hotels that I've driven by my whole life.
They're not a hotel that I would have any reason to patronize.
And yeah, occasionally somebody will be in from out of town and I'll go into the lobby of one of these hotels and I'll be like, oh, so that's what this hotel is like.
But when the temperature gets to be 107...
All of a sudden, these hotels take on a whole new... Because they got the air conditioning.
That's right, Merlin.
The thought technology of going and spending a night or two in the $99 airport hotel that's just right over there with air conditioning and sex in the city is on the TV and you can close the blackout curtains and...
You just go away.
And all of a sudden, your super hot house that no one ever thought to put air conditioning in, it just fades into your memory because you're watching...
Sex and the City Marathon.
Having a Toblerone.
You keep the lights weighed down, you're having a Toblerone.
How often do you eat triangular chocolate in your house?
Never.
But in a hotel, in an airport hotel.
And, you know, these are nice hotels, but they're inexpensive.
It's kind of like a Marriott quality.
Like you're just going to be here, you're going to get a shower, jerk off, sleep a little bit, and then get up and put your shirt on.
That's right.
They turn it around.
That's right.
It's a turnaround hotel.
You got an early flight or you got a late flight.
Yeah.
And so, yeah, for a long time when the weather gets – and I only mean the hot – when the weather gets too hot in Seattle, I have periodically snuck off.
to a $99 airport hotel where I turn off the lights and I watch Sex and the City until the heat goes past.
Because it's never more than a day here, you know, or a day or two maybe at max.
And that is one way in which our communities are similar.
It's very unusual for, I think, I mean, I haven't been to a lot of people's houses in the last few years, but my sense is that, you know, in our neighborhood, like, you don't even see, like, air conditioner units and windows.
Right.
No.
It's just not necessary.
I was telling somebody the other day, we didn't have screens on our windows until about two or three months ago.
Same house for 20 years.
We just don't get back.
It's not like Florida.
You know what I mean?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But anyhow, I see what you're saying where it's like, it would be crazy and expensive.
And, you know, you're dealing with these old buildings in San Francisco that never had central AC.
You can get heat that'll be good enough, but it doesn't get that, that hot or that, that cold.
Yeah.
And the fog just mostly takes care of itself.
Yeah, well, and I think up here, and this is probably true there too, you know, we have an intransigence that's part of our just identity.
And no one wants to admit that.
that anything has changed.
I mean, that's not to say that everyone up here isn't a hippie that's screaming about climate change.
I see.
No, no, no, but it's like the people in Florida where the, okay, no, seriously, it's a hurricane warning.
It's coming.
There's two flags up.
It's happening.
And they're like, oh, no, I made it through Betsy Lou in 1967.
This is not going to scare me off my land.
And we are just not- Stubbornness.
Stubbornness about what you survived in life is part of it.
But we're definitely not prepared to say we need air conditioners now.
It's like buying umbrellas, John.
Who would do that?
That's right.
It's exactly like buying umbrellas.
We're not going to start using umbrellas now.
And so there's a little bit of an air conditioner gap.
Yeah.
Oh, I see.
Yeah, pardon me.
The new houses that were built after 1997 have air conditioning because – Because the year didn't exist.
Well, that and also the arms race of contractors building big, dumb –
like awful uninhabitable mega mansions.
They had to keep upping the ante.
Like, what do we add?
What do we add?
We got the stainless steel refrigerator with the, with the computer in it.
Like, Oh, you get the front of the French doors, you know, you get the mud room.
Yep.
You got the Juliet balcony.
Oh, the Juliet balcony.
Oh my gosh.
Get the 30 foot entryway.
How are we going to sell these houses?
It'd be crazy not to put air conditioning in that.
That would be a ding against you.
That's right.
But those people now with their, uh,
you know, with their middle aged baseball caps and their, you know, their,
Freaking flip-flops.
They are comfortable sitting in there.
Are we turning into Las Vegas?
John, I want to hear the end of this.
But is it possible we're just all turning into Las Vegas?
What you're describing sounds a lot like Las Vegas.
You're going to have funny-shaped giant beer cans.
You're walking around in cargo shorts.
If you really enjoy baseball, wear the cap.
But could you not wear it backwards?
With your flip-flops, could we not do that?
Yesterday, I was in a parade.
Huh.
The neighborhood.
I'm trying to remember.
I don't think, let me see, what was yesterday?
It was the fourth?
I don't think I was in a parade.
You were in a parade yesterday, you say?
A little parade, yeah.
A little parade.
A private parade?
Here we are, sort of.
Here we are in the suburb.
Why is the concept of a private parade so funny?
It's sort of, you know, not far off.
General disorder.
Major catastrophe.
Private parade.
We...
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We've got a little suburban community here.
It incorporated itself back in the 50s.
It calls itself a town.
City of, actually.
City of.
There's no real center to the place.
There's a grocery store and there's a couple of Mexican restaurants, but it's not like there's a Main Street USA.
But it is a town and they do have some town pride and they have a 4th of July parade.
And I was in it before.
In order to be in the 4th of July parade, all you have to do is step off the sidewalk and start walking in the direction of the parade alongside it or in it.
Pick your spot kind of thing.
Oh, one simply walks into parade.
Like you join parade.
You join parade.
Now parade is, you know, it's a bunch of classic cars.
Yeah.
And the definition of what constitutes classic cars, very stretched...
So it's basically, do you think your car is a classic?
You're getting some 85 Thunderbirds in there.
And that's absolutely what you're looking at.
Come and see the world's largest ibuprofen.
My mom said there was a car, there was one, you know, we stand on the side at first because we like to look at the cars and my mom is like- It's more like a Quaker church.
You wait for the spirit to move you and then you join parade.
That's exactly right.
That's exactly right.
So we're watching and my mom is like, what's special about that truck?
And, you know, she wasn't wrong.
It was like a 97 Chevy step side pickup truck.
But the guy had lowered it a little and he put it had good paint.
He'd done paint.
And I was like, well, it's mainly paint that made it classic.
Yeah.
Isn't that like antiquing a stool, John?
That doesn't make it old.
Antique and antiqued are different things.
He has pride in his vehicle.
He spent money on it.
And so in his estimation, you know, it had like a tonneau cover that was body color.
He had put the time into it.
This car was, you know, it was one of those things where he was rolling the dice that it was going to be a classic.
that one day his 97 Chevy base model pickup was going to be the last one around.
This is the Subaru Brat that was almost used in Back to the Future.
And some of those cars end up, it ends up like a guy pulls a Honda Civic out of his garage.
It's got 40 miles on it.
And somebody's like, I'll give you 50 grand for that.
Are you kidding me?
It's cherry.
I'll put it in my living room.
But so the cars go by.
It's fun.
The thing is, it's one of these – it's a suburb.
It's an affluent suburb.
And so you got some crazy cars where you're like, what do you – you think that this car is in the parade?
Fine.
That's fine.
But this guy has got a 65 Ferrari.
Wow.
That he –
And a Ferrari from that era, you know, you could just see from the – it's got a gray-haired guy in it and just – the car looks like – Oh, but like Senor Ferrari might still have been alive at that time.
Oh, for sure.
And these cars are worth hundreds of thousands of dollars and this guy restored it nut and bolt in his garage over the – you know, he's driving it just like –
And the thing just sounds – even at idle, it just sounds – and then you've got like four other Ferraris that are like newer.
But it's a neighborhood where you're going to have – you're going to find four people that have Ferraris.
Like, okay.
But then there's also like a –
Like an 86 Ford van, but the guy's just like, doesn't have any rust on it.
I got to say, I think that was an exciting time for vans.
It was a good time.
When the Toyota, the Vanagon was VW, but what was the one, you know that one that looked like it was from the future?
Yeah, yeah.
And what was it called?
Mike Squires had one.
He believed.
That's great.
My friend Sam, their family had one.
It was tremendous.
He believed that that was going to be one of those things, that one day was going to be worth a lot of money.
Oh, I see.
Yeah, because it had a real point.
I feel like I might be just confusing and concatenating all of these, but Sam's family – God.
No, it was the Space Cruiser.
Was it a 4Runner?
Is that what it was called?
It was the Space Cruiser.
They're called the – The Toyota –
It's a space van.
I always called it the – because it looks like the van from the movie Moon Patrol.
So when Squires drove his around, I was like, what's up, Moon Patrol?
Is this the car from Pitfall?
Oh, wow.
Wow.
I bet he didn't like that.
He's a – you don't say former veteran.
He's got a – no, he's a former Marine.
He's a Marine for life.
But no, it's a it's a thing where it was a great van, except there was always like something.
Something was always sparking back there.
He had the engine cover off and it was there were like blue sparks.
I was like, that's not that's not stock.
Your motor shouldn't be sparking.
Was he doing like – what do you call it?
Like a thrush or cherry poppers or what was he – was he after marketing his exhaust or what?
What's happening?
Ding dong and he bought this thing and he didn't know how to fix it and he drove it.
Oh, and then he's just too proud to fix it.
Oh, but this is another thing that was in the parade yesterday.
One of those vixen –
rvs vixen there's an rv and it's got a bmw motor it was a it was a it was a brand new thing like a like it i don't know it didn't last very long it's like a gmc rv looking thing but it's really low to the ground and small so it
It feels sized kind of like just a delivery van, except it's long and looks like it's from the future.
Oh, it's like a Peter Jackson thing.
It looks like it should be bigger than it is.
Google it.
Just say BMW Vixen.
Oh, man.
V-I-X-E-N, Vixen.
Holy shit.
Oh, my God.
Okay, John, you were not kidding.
This actually does look like somebody did a Dr. Shrinker on a GMCRV a little bit.
It's exactly right.
Oh, and it's got a pop-up like all the great German buses.
It's got the pop-up like my VW bus used to have.
Oh, this is handsome.
It is like so strangely both big and small.
Giant windows look like it's kind of a little bit ahead of its time.
And this Vixen, the one in the Wikipedia picture, it's got real big windows.
I love that.
It's super duper cool.
And the thing is, it's so low that if I were standing next to it, I could talk to you over the roof.
Like, you look at it in the pictures and you're like, wow, that's a cool RV.
But it's like, no, no, no, you don't get it.
You could put that RV in an RV.
And yet, it's full.
It says here the Vixen was designed, this is the internet science site, it says the Vixen was designed as an answer to the GMC motorhome.
Designed to be stored in a typical garage, six feet high, shut your whore mouth.
Yeah.
John, I made a crack about Gandalf and Bobo, or whatever his name is.
But this really does look the size of your very old stinky GMC RV.
You're telling me it's smaller.
If I went to one of those internet websites to compare sizes, it would be in the shadow of the GMC.
And yet, I think maybe more practical and certainly more like you never see one.
I had never seen one.
I knew they were there.
I'd seen photos.
But then here was one in the parade.
Oh, man.
And I think it was one of those things where 99% of the people in the parade were like, why is this guy driving his van?
And I was just like – I had my nose to the glass.
Of course you were.
It would be like a Schreiner driving by except he's in an actual 1965 Ferrari.
Yeah.
Right?
I mean, like to get all that – oh, man.
You know I got a taste of this when we went to that parking.
I saw an article about this in the paper the other day.
There's a thing called AutoCamp that they have around California where they have a special relationship they've made with – I'm sure I sent you photos of this – where they have a special relationship with the Airstream company.
And you go somewhere, like in our case, we went to Yosemite, and you stay in a giant airstream.
Oh, glamping.
You're doing the glamping.
I guess so.
I guess so.
But it was, I see, now, understandably, these have been cherried out real nice.
So that it kind of, it looks like a nice hotel room, except without all the fucking noise.
You know, but like real, real nice.
Nicely finished.
A big round portrait of the moon in it.
The whole deal.
I see the appeal.
I definitely see these.
Everybody loves the moon.
I got to see these next to a GMC.
And so they're in the parade.
John, this seems like a very, I keep interrupting you, and for that I apologize.
But it seems to me like this is a very exciting yet egalitarian parade where you can just join parade, you walk right in, sit right down, you know, let your light shine through.
It's pretty darn fun.
That's nice.
The reason that we're in the parade, let's just cut to the chase, is that
It has what they call the children's bike parade parade.
After the fire trucks, all the kids can line up with their decorated bikes covered with the crepe paper and streamers.
Bunting.
Bike bunting.
Bunting.
And then they get to be in the parade.
I love that.
Oh, I love this.
And this is just in your little weird, the city of John Roderick area.
That's right.
That's right.
We're talking real regional, regional, sub-regional, nano-regional.
Sub-regional.
So basically what the parade does is it goes from the grade school to the city hall, which is not a short distance.
It winds its way through the town.
You go to civics with the city you've got.
You know what I mean?
And there's a tractor pulling a trailer with a bunch of hay bales and people sitting in it.
The Miss Teen Pierce County...
who is part of the Miss America organization, but like way, way down, like triple A ball.
Oh, it's like TEDx.
They're single A ball.
But she's Miss Teen Pierce County.
And of course, we're in King County.
So Miss Teen King County must have had a different parade.
But we got Miss Teen Pierce County, and she was riding on the back of a Corvette with Miss Preteen Pierce County.
Oh, dear.
Okay.
And what else were there?
There were a couple of guys on motorcycles.
There were – oh, boy.
Just a whole – oh, there were some guys driving tow trucks advertising their tow truck company.
But one of them was like a 67 tow truck that had been – I love how much this is barely a parade.
Because when I think of a parade – well, I think of lots of things.
I think of my poor dear late father who had PTSD and how he didn't love –
I mean, none of us love crowds, but he couldn't be around.
Like, loud noises, so fireworks were out.
You know, you think about going to those where you're cheek to jowl with everybody else.
Maybe you think about Macy's.
But when you think about, like, you think there's some kind of a theme.
Like, I marched in parades when I was in military school.
This sounds more like just a bunch of locals walking the same way.
Well, and...
That's exactly what it is.
There was no marching band.
Or in the case of the preteens, they ship them over from, they're adjudicated from Pierce to King County.
They probably have to get some special dispensation, like a visa, a parade visa.
My daughter's mother was very offended that there wasn't a marching band.
She said, look, there are marching bands everywhere.
Every high school's got a marching band.
Probably junior highs have them.
That's a load-bearing part of the parade is several marching bands.
You've got to have at least one.
You can't call it a parade unless somebody is playing.
You don't even need bells.
You just need a snare.
You need a bass drum.
Oh, really?
More like the three guys in the spirit of 76.
Yeah.
You could get an injured veteran, a fight player.
If you've got a firefighters band, you could have, I mean, there are all kinds of punk rock marching bands in Seattle.
That was a thing for a long time, punk rock marching bands.
Were they playing regular traditional instruments?
Yeah, but they were all super goth and playing like punk rock stuff.
It was fun.
It was like a thing that they would, you know, they'd come play your circus side.
But the great thing about the local parade is that most people just brought their lawn chairs down to the sidewalk in front of their house.
And so the audience is built in because you're going through a neighborhood.
So there's an audience the entire length of the parade because everybody comes down and it's like, whee!
So I'm marching in the parade, mostly in order to keep my daughter's mother from hovering because she's just entering that age where she's starting to be a little bit nervous.
A little helicopter-y?
Because her daughter is 10 and she can see her starting to grow and blossom and have independence.
It's so difficult.
You can't believe how fast it goes from we watch our kid from behind a tree when she's outside the house to like she walks to Golden Gate Park almost every day.
Right.
No, she literally, she walks.
That's quite a distance from your house.
Yeah, no, it's nuts.
She and her friends will just walk to Sutro Baths.
They will just walk to the Panhandle.
But just to be clear, sometimes she walks to Golden Gate Park because she wants a pretzel.
Huh.
And the reason I mentioned that here is it's so difficult at first.
You never in a million years, you know, I lost sight of my kid in my memory.
I lost sight of my kid exactly once, which was when we were at the big target downtown, uh, when she was probably five or six and she, I couldn't, I don't know how often you've had this.
Maybe we've talked about this, but the very first time that you think you should be able to see your kid and you don't see your kid, and then you can't see your kid.
There is a synaptic leap to a whole new level of scared.
And not even the whole, like, oh, she's in a white van helping a clown find his puppy.
But just more like, this is the first time I've ever not been able to instantly see my kid.
And it's such a panic, you know?
I don't know if you ever got that, but I imagine.
But it's so difficult when they're starting to go do their own thing.
Yeah, I had one not very long ago where we said, you can ride your bike between mama and daddy's house now.
Right, right.
You used to say that, yeah.
Yeah, and she was doing it.
But, you know, she's a lollygagger.
She stops and looks at birds' nests, just like her dad did.
And at one point, it had been too long since she'd left.
She doesn't have a phone, right?
No.
Okay.
And she hadn't arrived.
And I was like, you know, don't hover over her.
But after a while, after that, I said, I'm going to get in the car.
And I got in the car.
I'm just driving around.
Oh, hey, how's it going?
I drove the route, and I couldn't find her.
Oh, shit.
Oh, no.
And then all of a sudden,
I'm driving the route faster.
You know, I'm not just out for a drive.
I'm driving the route faster.
You're like a heartbeat starting to pick up.
Yeah, and I was just like, wait a minute.
You're scanning faster, yeah.
Scanning, scanning, scanning up this road.
What if she went down this way?
Well, she didn't.
Meanwhile, you keep telling yourself, this is insane.
She's totally fine.
Well, and meanwhile, she's sitting on her mother's couch going, do-do-do-do-do while I'm out, you know.
Oh.
Because she had gotten there by way of, you know, she'd gone.
Via the bird's nest.
There was one 30-second period where I looked down a street and didn't see her.
And then as I turned right, she turned left.
And you would have no way of knowing that you went right past her.
Exactly.
But in this situation, in the parade, she wanted to be in the parade.
And her mother, who was dressed in a very festive Fourth of July fashion.
Hot.
Entered into the parade in what I considered, what I thought, and I think a jury would agree, that...
She was too – she was blurring the line between are you in the kids' bike parade or are you back here with the stragglers and the – And even insofar as this is a folk event where people can just join in, we're not monsters here in our little – so you're in the adults area over here.
And can you imagine how bummed your daughter would be if she saw her like three paces behind her?
Well, so this is what happened.
So, you know, it's a ragtag fugitive fleet that's bringing up the rear.
Yeah.
And she's up like, I mean, almost putting suntan lotion on her nose as they are riding in this enormous parade.
And, you know, my daughter is one of these.
I brought you a hat.
I brought you another hat.
Yeah.
She's one of these kids that's like, I'm going to be in the front of the kids.
Yes.
Right.
There's the fire truck.
And then there's my daughter, the front tire of my daughter's bike.
Fire truck, bike parade, bring it up the rear.
Right behind the fire truck.
And if another kid, she's like a sled dog.
If another kid's tire got closer to the fire truck than hers, she would just, she would get closer and closer while never touching.
Right.
It would always just be half and half and half.
And her mom is just like up there just making sure.
And so I had to join the parade to say, hey, why don't you hang back here with me and we'll talk about stuff.
And I'm just going to give you something to think about where you're not thinking about the fact that you're perfectly fine.
Ten and a half year old daughter is only 150 yards ahead of us.
And you can see there she is again.
There she is.
So we're walking in the parade and she's very festive.
And it just so happened or it just so happens that I have a pair of Stars and Stripes Uncle Sam pants.
I've got an American flag.
It's good timing that you happen to wear those on the 4th of July.
Well, that's right.
I wear them all the time.
Of course you do.
You're a patriot.
Yeah.
And they basically make me look like I'm in the MC5.
Yeah.
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Kick out the jams, Mother Patriots.
Because they're pretty cool pants.
Oh, yeah.
Or like the guy from GBV.
Like, yeah, that's a great look.
You're not going to find these pants just on the racks.
No, no, no, no, no.
These aren't the cheesy, cheap ones.
These are not Pret-a-Porter Liberty pants.
No, these are full-on rock and roll flag pants.
John, is it the kind of thing Mike Mills might wear?
Well, you know, Mills has got... His would be silk, probably.
He's got his nudie suit thing happening.
I don't know if he still wears those, but...
But no, these are, you know, and the thing is like, I'm not, I'm not a, like what you would describe as like an overly slim guy, but these pants are very slimming.
You know, they're just, they have a rock cut without going over, without going over.
You know, they're not, they're not, they're not skinny.
They're not too tight.
Sure.
So we're walking in the parade and, uh, and I'm getting a lot of cat calls.
Ooh, nice pants.
Hey, nice pants.
I love your pants.
All the moms.
All the moms.
Oh, I see.
Love your pants.
That makes you a pilf.
Patriot that people would.
That's right.
And so my daughter's mother now has something to think about other than her daughter, which is all these beesies on either side who are yelling at my pants.
Yeah.
And so, you know, and I'm just exactly where I want to be.
Oh, you're, you know, man, you are right in the pocket.
Like you're in like the, in the eye of all the hurricanes.
You know what I mean?
King in the castle.
You're just, yeah.
Catbird seat.
What a great position to be in.
I hope you enjoyed that moment while it was happening.
It was wonderful.
You know, I'm behind the kids bike parade.
And you're keeping it together and you're being a good dad and you're being a good mother, lady, partner, partner.
Yep.
And I'm close enough to the end of the parade where it feels like if you're sitting there in a lawn chair watching the parade go by and you're like, gosh, I don't want this parade to end.
I bet it's like MTV where people were like, oh, you know, remember back in the day and you'd say, it's one more video, one more video.
This might be standing delivered by Adam and the Ants, which is the only show like once a week.
Here it comes.
Let's wait for one more.
Well, should we get going?
Beat the traffic?
You know, I want to see one more good thing.
Yeah, a lot of stragglers, but I'm the one more good thing.
And the thing is that because my daughter's mother, because she is an attractive woman and she's also in a very festive patriotic outfit, and it's a patriotic outfit that if she raises her hands too high in the air, it's going to show just a little teeny bit of her underpants.
So it's a little, it's very festive.
Feeling very liberated.
It's like, God bless America.
Yes.
And so we're walking.
Are those red, white, and blue too, if you can say?
No, no, no.
I never saw them personally, because if she ever had to read something high, she would have me do it.
Oh, I see.
Yeah, Hakuna Matata.
So it's just a suggestion.
It's like, if she had to read it, she's never going to do it.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
If you could see it, you don't need to imagine it.
And it's in the imagining is really where we live the dream.
That's exactly true.
So you're walking around, you're getting catcalls from the BBs about your pilf pants.
But what we are discovering, because we've been living in this neighborhood a couple of years, and it's very hard to know the neighborhood because everybody's got... Everybody's inside their house.
Yeah, they're inside their house.
And, you know, I read this article recently that was describing how...
In Los Angeles, you can gauge how wealthy a neighborhood is by how many trees are on the streets.
And it was a sort of pictorial representation.
You go out here and you can barely see the houses because of the trees.
And then you're in the poorer neighborhoods in LA and you can't see a tree.
You look every direction.
Is that in part because –
I went through this a lot in Sarasota where I had a friend who was an invasive exotic vandal, and he hated invasive exotics, and he would go on little ninja missions every night to the new developments to destroy the invasive exotics, sometimes at a cost of $5,000 to $20,000 per treat.
But like in Sarasota, I don't know if you know this, but like my mom, when she was still in her freestanding house, she would get offers all the time to buy her Sago palm.
Like people want to buy your palm trees because it's very costly.
I guess what I'm asking you, John, in the ninth interruption of your very good anecdote is do you get a lot of trees in Los Angeles because nobody's ever fucked with the neighborhood and their old growth?
Or is it because when it was built, you could afford to put in some nice mature trees?
Yeah.
Yeah, I think that's what it is.
If you go to Beverly Hills – Watts is not going to have a lot of live oaks.
Well, I think that it's all cleared and things are built right close to each other and nobody has the money to care for foliage.
And the utility service is not going to go out of their way to keep things nice.
I'll tell you what.
California and Southern California –
Those places are, naturally, what would be growing there are some agave cactuses.
Oh, yeah.
It's more like what you see in 29 Palms.
Yeah, some jumping rats or whatever.
It's not supposed to have anything there.
Well, it's reported by a friend of the show, Matt Pierce from the LA Times.
Every year, he collects a lot of images and video of palm trees that have been set ablaze by the snorks with their fireworks.
Yeah.
But you do also see those palm trees on trucks.
Like, people are buying them.
No, no.
I think they're – last I heard, they were $10,000 to $20,000.
But if you think about it, you look up at a palm tree.
You get that neural part that makes all the splinters.
You get it up, up, up, up, up.
At the very top, you got the palmy part.
Underneath the palmy part, you have so much dry shit just waiting to be on fire.
That's right.
And all you need is one bottle lock and you're done.
In the case of this neighborhood, it is that it was a forest –
And they came in and they cut out some areas for houses.
And they didn't take the forest.
I mean, they cut the forest down in 1910 like everybody here in the Northwest.
I mean, you had to log it once.
There's so much of it.
It's like bison.
And they may have logged it a second time because, you know, they go in.
They logged them in 1910.
They logged them in 1930.
They logged them in 1960.
They logged them in 1990.
Yeah.
But they didn't – after 1930, they didn't log it here again.
So a lot of these trees – you know, my mom went down and put a tape measure around some of the trees in my yard.
And she's like, this tree is 100 years old.
Shit, dog.
That's so cool.
A lot of trees.
There's a lot of trees.
But that means that we don't see our neighbors very often.
And you kind of – you know, you wave to people in the street, but it's sort of like, hi.
Hi.
And if you recall, when I would go to pick up my daughter at the elementary school here, I felt no commonality with the other people because of the Las Vegasization of America.
All these guys had backward baseball caps on.
And I was like, oh, man, I don't want to be your friend.
The only time you interact with people is like, you ever been in a hotel when the fire alarm goes off?
Yeah.
It's such a strange... It's happened to me a couple times, but it's really scary.
But you go outside, and, like, it's... And, of course, there's still... Increasingly, I feel like, you know, it used to be everybody pulled over for ambulances, and then sometimes people didn't pull over for ambulances.
I think today there are people who just ignore fire alarms, and that troubles me.
But you go outside, and suddenly you're like, oh, shit, who are all these people?
Oh, these are all the other people who are staying at the hotel that I'd never seen.
And I feel like what you're describing in most American...
Really, the way we live, not just in the suburbs, is a similar thing.
You don't have a reason to run into people at the post office.
You no longer have a reason to run into people dropping off and picking up at school.
Because you pull up, you stay in your car, you roll your window up or down, you go, mank, mank, that kind of thing.
You see more of them on Nextdoor or planning for the big box social at the school than you would actually interact with them person to person.
This is not a complaint or I'm not saying this is a blight, but I think it is real.
And then you realize it on a day like July 4th.
When you're in a hotel and there's anyone else in the elevator or anyone else in the hall where your room is, you're like, oh, hi, weird.
But then you realize there's a thousand people in this hotel.
There's a thousand people.
There's a person next to you, above you, behind you, beside you.
There could be somebody under the bed.
I went to a baseball game the other day because Ken Jennings was throwing out the first pitch.
And a big alarm went off in the stadium.
Because you brought so much heat?
And lights flashing.
And at first we thought it's one of the 10,000 stupid things that baseball does to get people out of their seats.
Like, come on, let's make some noise.
But after a while, it was like, oh, no, this is a real thing.
emergency alarm.
Womp, womp, white lights flashing.
That sounds like one of them that means business.
Yeah.
And so, you know, I looked around and said to my little family, we're just going to sit here.
Everything's fine.
And we're just going to stay in our seats because any other move you made right now would be the wrong move.
And it went an uncomfortably long time.
But everybody stayed in their seats.
There was no – because in a baseball park, you're like, being out here in my seat is absolutely the best move.
Because this alarm – the danger to me here is there are two potential dangers.
One is a 747.
has lost its engines, and it's going to crash right into the baseball field.
But they're not going to set the alarm off.
They're not going to have time to do that.
Oh, right.
And it wouldn't be Bane coming up through the floor.
No, probably, probably.
The other option would be that it was like a dog day afternoon or no.
What was the one where the guy was Sunday?
Yeah, Black Sunday where there's a sniper up in the thing.
A dog day afternoon would be even better.
That would be so much better if it was just like a bank robbery happening inside the stadium.
No, yeah, to pay for his boyfriend's surgery.
And then the alarm went off.
I love that movie so fucking much.
They came over to the thing and they were like, false alarm, everybody, it's fine.
Yeah.
And, you know, it was really like – I would have guessed small fire.
I would have guessed small regional fire.
I would have guessed maybe somebody sparking a dube in the men's room or something.
Yeah, or a grease fire at the Dintai Fund.
But they – it was definitely a situation that brought all 25,000 of us closer together for a brief moment.
Sure.
Well, now you're forced to really be, not to be corny, but you're all kind of forced to be in the same moment together and realize you're in the same moment together.
Yeah.
And in a situation like that, I am not going to die in a crowd crush.
I'm going to say that right now.
There are a lot of ways that I could die, but crowd crush is not going to be one of them because I'm not going to find myself accidentally in a crowd crush.
You and my cousins were at the Who concert.
No, were they really?
Yeah, my first cousins.
Well, because, you know, we lived in Cincinnati.
My aunt and uncle had a year earlier.
My aunt and uncle had been at the Beverly Hills Supper Club the night of the huge fire in 1970.
I want to say eight.
And then might have been the It's Hard Tour.
I want to say probably.
But yeah, yeah.
The thing at not Riverfront, but the the other one, the Coliseum.
Yeah.
Yeah.
They were there when people got crushed.
That was some badass planning.
And that's why doors open out now.
Yeah, well, there was another one, a soccer one in the UK that also had a – I'm terrified.
John, I joke about this mostly on other programs.
I joke about this.
But our front door opens inward and is at the bottom of a set of stairs.
And there's this area that's about, as you've seen, about four by four from the stair to the door.
So the door already barely opens.
And I feel like such a nut that I have to keep saying to my family, please –
Never put anything here that would keep the door from opening.
Because first of all, you know, there's going to be something someday at this house where we've got to get out.
And like, it's already going to be so hard for us to get down the steps and out a door that opens in.
Right.
In a panic at night, maybe with the lights off.
The last thing I want to have to think about is like what happens if like somebody falls down the steps?
What if I fall down?
I'm the fatty.
What if I fall down the steps and you can't move my fucking body?
Now you can't get out the door.
I think about it all the time.
Do you have a chain ladder?
No, I don't.
My same cousins, myself, same cousins who were at the Who concert and were in the trampling, they had chain ladders on their three-story house.
My uncle was very successful.
He was in Procter & Gamble.
He was a VP.
The thing is, we always had, whenever we lived in a two-story house.
That was a thing in the 70s.
You get a chain ladder.
Yeah, you had a chain ladder under your bed and you're ready to pull it out.
My mom would have us do drills.
There you go, chain ladder.
So I bet you if you went on your favorite local delivery service.
Oh, if I went to the Seattle Delivery Concern.
Yeah, Seattle Delivery Company.
They would send you a chain ladder and it would be there within maybe the hour.
We thought a lot about getting a zipline.
When my kid was little and ziplines figured heavily in her imagination and TV shows, I think specifically Diego from Dora had a zipline.
And we thought it would be really cool if our way out was going to be a zipline.
I did some research on zip lines because my neighborhood or my yard would be a killer zip line thing.
And I read this article written by a guy whose profession was to go around the world setting up the most cool, luxurious, awesome zip lines.
Dr. Antoine Zip.
Antoine Zip.
And he said, I have an enormous piece of property on a hill that
And I don't have a zipline in my own yard.
And here's why.
And he went down like 10 reasons why he didn't have his own zipline.
And I was like, thank you for convincing me not to put a zipline in mine.
I bet it's the vulnerability of that one point of attachment.
Well, what he said was, are you prepared to deal with your zipline every day?
Are you prepared to be out there keeping it clean and waxed?
You've got to maintain a zipline, he's saying.
Oh, because that little reel.
You don't want that gummed up or getting mildewy.
Oh, you've got to test it every day.
He said, are you prepared for every kid in your neighborhood to want to sneak onto your zipline at all times so that you are... That's what lawyers call an attractive nuisance, John.
Yeah, you're basically monitoring it 24 hours a day.
Are you prepared to have the insurance...
Unless you've got like a Jeffrey Epstein Island, it sounds like you should stay out of the zipline business.
Yeah.
And I was like, by the end of it, at the start of the article, I was like, I'm not, whatever you're saying, naysayer, I'm going to build 10 ziplines in my yard.
And by the end of it, I was like, whew, dodged a bullet there.
Sure did.
Oh, Chain Ladders, who concert?
Parade, pants, baby mama partner getting two coats.
Oh, you don't have to get me there.
I'm already there.
I'm walking through this parade and
And all of a sudden, for the first time, I see all my neighbors.
I see everybody that lives in this town.
And I realize that this little town, which I thought was just like a weird thing in the trees...
This neighborhood is incredibly diverse, not just in people, but in age.
Not just background, race, that kind of thing.
Yeah, but on Seattle's Capitol Hill, when you walk down – Well, that's what you would falsely assume.
But when you're in Capitol Hill and you're in a parade and you're walking down the street, if you see somebody over the age of 50 –
You're like, wow, old person, how'd you get here?
Visiting their gay daughter.
Because in the 50s and 60s, Capitol Hill was full of old people, but they all got driven out.
There's no reason for an old person to live on Capitol Hill.
No facilities for them at all.
The culture of the neighborhood changed.
is not really actually that diverse.
It's diverse in the sense that it's diverse relative to the rest of America.
Yes, compared to the rest of America.
Exactly.
It is the diversity of America.
Yeah, I think Castro is diverse or has been historically much the same way.
But yeah, when you're in Castro, it's a very homogenous culture, and that's true here.
And one of the things it doesn't allow is like regular old people who are still wearing hats –
But in this neighborhood, in every – in the front yard of each house, they could be 60.
They could be 80.
They could be 50.
They could be 30.
Wow.
There were kids that were 10.
There were kids that were five.
And it was – it had been a long time since I had seen a neighborhood where –
there were there were people from that many walk from that many times of life period it feels it feels strange now yeah yeah where it's like hey you're not just somebody's grandpa you live in this house and then next door to you are is this young couple that came down here and you know and there's a lot of different races of people and a lot you just clearly a lot of different culture
And I'm walking down the street and they're all like, nice pants.
And I'm like, thanks.
Thanks.
You know, it was just a coincidence.
I wore them today.
And my daughter's mother's like, God, you're insufferable.
But she's also, you know, she likes to be within.
Oh, she knows what she's doing.
Yeah.
There's a 15-foot glow around me.
She likes to be in it, but not too close, but not too far.
Yeah.
And suddenly I'm like, oh, it's not just a bunch of weird sports dads down here.
It's people that – and it's a parade, of course, so everybody's friendly, everybody's happy.
But I met or at least encountered a lot of delightful people and had to reevaluate my perception because it was skewed.
It was based on these –
This very small sample.
And another thing I realized was there are a ton of kids in this neighborhood, but they're all five years old and younger.
Because my generation, your generation— The parents moved there before they were born or when they were very young, probably?
No, it's the parents are 10 to 15 years younger than us.
Because we forget, I think, that nobody cares about Generation X because we don't exist.
I think people are having kids a little younger.
I think people are having kids a little younger now.
They are.
So there are these kind of affluent tech families—
And all their kids are young and mom and dad are young.
They're 35, 36.
And they're, you know, they're, they're sporty.
They're young.
Their kids are sporty and young.
And I'm walking in the parade, like, you know, 52 year old guy who's like, I'm Italian.
Chris Cornell said, he looked at me across a crowded steaming shit pile.
And he said, you're never going to,
be more than what you are something i forget the lyric but it was it meant something to us
And these guys are just like – Yeah, right, right, right.
Because they're millenniums and they are – it's their world.
It doesn't belong to me.
No, no.
So I realized, wait a minute.
I'm the outlier in this neighborhood.
There are a bunch of boomers.
You're the outlier.
There are a bunch of boomers who are driving their restored Ferraris and there are a bunch of young people that probably have six TVs in their house.
And I'm the guy in the MC5 pants who's like, where are my people?
They're not here, buddy.
I don't know where Generation X went.
It's just like tears and rain.
The smoke just kind of dissipated and –
You know, it's just kind of people... What did Generation X become?
I don't know.
I mean, I knew even at the time in microcosm... Okay, so I remember in college, you know...
It hadn't really dawned on me what an incredibly selfish, useless generation I was in.
Well, that I was really leading in some ways.
I was selfish.
I was selfish and useless.
But it became very, like, who knows?
It's just a moment snapped together like magnets.
But there's a guy that I actually – I rented a house from for a while and –
God, this guy was amazing.
He's the guy who had to celebrate the first Earth Day at New College as an officially sanctioned event.
He was just incredibly involved with grassroots environmental stuff.
He'd worked in PERG.
I guess he could afford to work in PERG.
But anyway, he'd done all this.
You're talking about the public interest research group?
Where I almost got a job in Boston for $14,000 a year.
Wow.
My first job nearly was working at Perg in Boston.
I don't believe anyone that's not Generation X have any idea what we were talking about.
Well, yeah, because you could be in the state one or like there was National.
I worked at the National in Washington, D.C.
Huh.
But go on.
No, I was just going to say my friend John, I was like, you know, this is what he's like.
I was like, you did this, right, in Boston.
He's like, yeah, yeah.
I was like, how did you, you know, I lived on this guy's couch.
And he said something – I should get this right because it had such a long-lasting effect on me.
He said, well, here's what you got to know is the only people who work at PERG are the people who can afford to work at PERG.
I found that too.
I was like, oh shit.
Like that's, you know, and I guess you could, you could put that in a much meaner way, but there were people who had some sorts of income in a safety net.
There were not many people thriving on that.
You know, like a town home that was being a town home with five people in it.
And they were all graduates of Cornell's hospitality program.
So they were living in DC and they were working at the, at the Watergate or whatever.
And I was friends with a guy.
And so I was sleeping there.
But I didn't have a mattress, so I was sleeping on the couch and working at US Berg until one morning I woke up and there was a note pinned to my shirt.
Oh my goodness.
That said, don't sleep on our couch anymore.
Oh, signed anonymous?
Signed anonymous.
And I was like, well, it could only have been written by one of five guys.
And so I had to move out.
But he was this guy, Brian, and he did all that.
Oh God, what else did he do?
He increased awareness of like Kristallnacht on campus.
He turned that into a thing.
And he was just part of this.
It was like the group that was coming in right around the time that I was graduating.
So my fourth year, their first year.
You could just feel a difference.
You could, I mean, maybe it's just me and my guilty conscience and like, oh, I thought punk rock was helping people.
But, you know, but it was, I remember feeling even at that time, even in 1989, 90, like, oh man.
uh, this is even before I had been introduced to the idea of, I don't want to say privilege, but introduce the idea that like to those to whom things are given things, you know, they owe things to others.
Like, I don't know, no bus oblige, whatever.
I didn't have any, you know what I'm saying?
Like I had not really, I'd lived in Florida and gone to four years of public college and,
I was not exactly like a road warrior existentially.
But I just remember feeling like, God, these kids are really better at life than we are.
And now I do continue to really feel that.
And I see it with kids my daughter's age and a little older.
We're like, what a different world.
Yeah, we were just...
We were bad at it, but you know, it was because we had our house keys around our neck on a piece of red yarn.
We're out there trying to conjure a fucking fireball.
Yeah, conjure an orb.
Did you know that the reason the Hollywood Supper Club was...
Was twice capacity on the night of the great fire.
I want to say Robert Goulet.
No, it was John Davidson.
That's it.
John Davidson.
My aunt and uncle had been there early in the evening, I believe.
And, oh my God, I don't know how much you know about the Beverly Hills story, but there was an episode of a podcast I like about it.
It was fucked up.
It was like the service, the lower level service folks were like, this is really not looking good.
And they were like, oh, they're there.
What?
Like get back to work.
And there was like so many red flags and there were some serious heroics coming from the like sub waiter level workers there that it could have been even worse, but they were just not listening.
Oh, Cincinnati.
No fire alarm.
You know, we used to play in Southgate all the time at the legendary Southgate house.
Southgate, what's that?
Southgate, well, Southgate, Kentucky is where the actual event happened because it's across the street.
It's very confusing because our airport is in Kentucky, CVG.
There's a lot of confusion going.
We talked about this.
We talked about the Brent Spence Bridge.
That's right.
That's right.
And the Southgate house was this old mansion up on a hill, which was like the cool indie rock...
venue for Cincinnati, you just had to go across the bridge.
That's also where you would get the Cincinnati chili.
The good chili was across the street.
The chili with the cinnamon.
There's a thing I used to say to my lady friend, and I was just kind of talking out of my ass, but it's something that I used to say that made sense to me, and now it totally makes sense to me, and I think might be one of the most profound things I've ever thought or said, which is this.
Oh, there.
Wow.
Hold on.
No, no.
We got a little kid.
We got a little kid in the 20s, in the 2020s, right?
Or in the 20-teens.
The 1920s?
Yeah, see?
Money machine, counterfeit money machine.
Spots bra.
Spots bra.
Lips and separates.
I have two anecdotes, but I'll only do one.
Well, the quick anecdote is that my wife is from Rhode Island, and she was raised a scant five miles from that link that I sent you.
A scant five miles from Bristol, Rhode Island.
From the oldest 4th of July parade in the country.
Purported to be the oldest 4th of July parade.
Their center line down the road is red, white, and blue.
It's really cool.
It's a really big deal.
And I mostly was just going to say some unkind things and laugh a little bit.
The bands that appeared at the 2021 Bristol 4th of July concert series, have you ever seen that meme where you'll see a Coachella poster?
It's like a parody of a Coachella poster where it's all fake band names.
Oh, yeah, that's fun.
But this is like the sort of regional Rhode Island version of that, where bands include Steve Smith and the Nakeds, The Accused, Back in the Day Band.
Wait a minute, not The Accused.
The Accused.
What, The Three, Four?
Seven Day Weekend, Crushed Velvet, Changes in Latitude.
I have a pretty good guess what kind of music they play.
Yeah, me too.
Country Wild Band, Colby James and the Ramblers.
I don't know if you ever caught them.
I bet you they're pretty good.
Barfly, and of course, the DMB Project.
A lot of bands from Geneseo, New York.
And the thing I used to say to my wife, changing topics here, is, you know, as people who did, we did attachment parenting, right?
We did the whole Dr. Sears thing.
We didn't do all the way to, like, we never set our kid down for two years.
But, you know, we believed in that.
And I'm really grateful that we went that route.
It worked out great.
But that made us sort of preternaturally predisposed to being helicopter-y.
You know, like she quit her job for five years.
And like, all of us, all three of us are so grateful that she made that sacrifice to like be with our kid all the time.
But that makes it, I think, arguably a little harder.
We've got an only child.
We're older than we were, would have been the previous couple generations.
You didn't have six kids, so you forget the name of the little one.
Well, that's exactly it, John, is that she was raised, you know, a scant five miles from Bristol, where, like, they weren't allowed to come in the house until the streetlights came on.
They were on a cul-de-sac by, you know, by, not Horseneck Beach, but they were basically near, I think it was maybe the Barrington River, but they had this impossibly large, like, almost like a dome of biomes to play in.
And, like, it was all entirely safe.
Everybody knew each other, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
It was at a time when dogs weren't allowed in the house either.
Well, these were different times when you would put the cat out.
Put the cat out, put the daughter out.
She's the youngest of seven, so she's already covered with mud all the time.
All the care was spent in the late 50s.
Um...
But when we very first started having these sort of tenuous experiments with, you know, let's let, well, then Eleanor.
Eleanor needs to go, you know, sometimes just be in the yard.
And that was hard.
But, like, when it got to where she would cross the street with our help, or eventually without our help, to go to the Confederate Soldier Park.
Right.
To dig around and see if she can find any hypodermic needle.
Yeah.
Mostly pop tops, but yes, it's not needle-less.
But the point being, I would say to her, I said, I think this is really important, just to state the obvious.
I said, I think this is really important because she's getting practice at being away from us.
Are you whispering this into your wife's ear as you both stare at her through the front window?
Oh, yeah.
But eventually, like I say, she would go in like dress as a woodland creature and hide behind a tree.
She would be like a regular Wes Anderson character.
But no, no, I don't need to over dramatize this because you can already guess what I'm going to say, which is this is important for her to rehearse not having us around in low stakes environments where something goes wrong.
We'll see if she can figure out how to handle that.
And if necessary, we can intervene.
This could not be any safer.
I said, but the other thing is, and this is the part you can guess, is like this is even better rehearsal for us.
Because even though, well, flash forward a little bit, she got a phone pretty early on.
She was reachable.
She was very compliant at like sticking with our rules as far as we could tell.
Or not rules, but you know, here's the way we want you to conduct yourself.
But...
The irony is that if your kid is good at that, your kid is responsible, your kid does have a phone, it's like Alan Watts says, it's the wisdom of insecurity.
You think the more you try to be secure, the less you're ultimately secure.
And if your kid, the phone suddenly died, how would you handle that, Dad?
Well, I might be utterly freaking out because you know what?
I haven't done enough of rehearsing uncertainty.
Yeah.
If I rehearsed more uncertainty, I wouldn't be flipping out every time I don't have total information.
And as a person with anxiety, it took me until the calendar year 2021 to realize that sometimes more information makes us neither safer nor happier.
Yes.
And you have to rehearse ambiguity.
You have to rehearse lack of information.
And that brings us back to, so what happened at the parade when your baby daughter, mother, partner, partner was getting too close and maybe going to put on some sunscreen?
How did it end up?
The parade's winding down.
You're wearing pilf pants.
How did it end up?
Well, so I did the thing.
Did you ever see that movie where Robert Redford was on a sailboat going around the world and his sailboat hit a thing in the water and, you know, spoiler alert, got a hole in it.
And it was an entire movie where Robert Redford was the only person on the screen.
Yeah, this is recent.
This is in the last 10 years.
Yeah, no, I didn't see it, but I know of it.
He never spoke a word or he barely said a word in a two-hour movie.
And I found it a very compelling film.
He's just there on a sailboat trying to keep it from sinking in the middle of the Indian Ocean.
Yeah.
and uh he's just it's kind of just sort of one thing after another and he just never says anything it's just an action movie but he's but the action is like how do how do i keep the water out of this boat and one of the things that he uses in the early part of the boat is is a sea anchor which is he pulls it out of a box and thankfully or i mean you know um
On behalf of the audience, it's nice that it says sea anchor on the side, so your mind is able to— Oh, I see.
So you wouldn't confuse it with an upside-down grappling hook.
Yeah, like, what the heck is this guy doing right now?
But a sea anchor is just a thing that you throw in the ocean.
It's like Wile E. Coyote.
But it doesn't—
You're in the middle of the ocean.
The anchor can't go down and grab the ground.
It's going to be hundreds of feet.
So it just sort of provides drag on the boat in the water.
And he uses the sea anchor to free himself from an obstacle.
Almost like flaps on a plane, kind of.
Like flaps on a plane.
And I was not aware of a sea anchor before watching this movie.
But after seeing it, I started to think of a sea anchor as a kind of
metaphor like i use a c anchor all the time like what it what it is is oh this is very i'm john i'm sorry i had to look this up it's not like a popeye tattoo anchor no it's essentially a parachute drag there you go okay this is not at all what i expected okay
And so what you're trying to do is, you know, your, your boat is out at sea and you don't want, I mean, maybe you want to take a nap and you don't want the boat to just go willy nilly and the sea anchor just kind of keeps it, it just drags behind and just kind of keeps it.
It slows it down.
I got it.
And so, you know, I used to say when it was time to get out of a party, you know, I would kind of like mime pulling the ripcord on my parachute and just sort of like foomp and goodbye.
Like if the party were a building falling through space and you just hit your ripcord and you would disappear, right?
You'd go right up through the ceiling and you'd be floating away and the party would keep falling.
Sounds like something Tom Cruise might do.
that's exactly right because tom cruise is the only person i know that would be in a party in a building that was falling everybody in the building doesn't realize it's falling within the building you're thinking and maybe maybe it's even part of the plan because you've got velcro on your shoes and so you don't you don't experience oh i see i see but so i started to throw a sea anchor out on myself when i felt like i was being swept into something or swept away but i didn't want to
Put an anchor.
I didn't want to get yanked.
I just wanted to see anchor to kind of pull me, give me just a little bit of— It's really subtle.
I know I don't think this can stop the boat from moving, but I do know that I can have some confidence that this at least slows things down, and it forces me to be in a different mode.
Yeah, right.
It's not two feet on dry ground.
Mm-mm.
But it's a little bit of – it's a little bit of something else.
And so what I was doing with my daughter's mother was acting as a sea anchor because as the parade – Oh, twist.
You're the sea anchor.
I was the sea anchor.
Oh, shit.
As the parade moved down the road, I just held her just slightly – I just slowed her down.
So at first, she was 20 feet from our daughter with two kinds of sun lotion in her hand –
And I was like, that sun lotion is really screwing up your whole like anchor dress vibe here with the red, white, and blue and the handkerchief.
You know, your hair tied up in a red ribbon.
Like, just slow it down.
You're with Mr. Nice Pants.
Like, let's just us.
We're our own thing now.
We had little flags.
And I was, you know, and I was kind of at the beginning of the day, I was like dadding up the whole flag etiquette thing.
Like, look, don't drag your flag.
Don't put your flag.
Don't point your flag, dad.
If it falls down, you got to burn it.
Yeah, right.
You know, here's the thing.
You only lower your flag if there's a funeral procession going by.
Like, get that flag up.
Excuse me, madam.
Is that a distress symbol?
And so we're waving our flags, mom and dad.
And little by little, that fire truck goes forward until you can only kind of just see the lights.
Yeah.
And I know our daughter is up there.
I know that her wheel is barely avoiding bumping the rear bumper of that thing.
She's like, you know, she's working her brakes.
I know exactly where she is, but we can't see her anymore.
And so –
But we have become part of the parade.
We're in the parade now.
This is like the mom and dad parade.
And we're meeting our neighbors.
We're seeing the young people.
We're seeing the older people.
A couple of people that I know shouted out, hey, John, how's it going?
And I'm like, I wear these pants all the time.
And everybody laughs.
And then, you know, the parade goes around a corner.
The parade goes down.
It goes around the corner.
We can't see the fire truck anymore.
We're just marching along.
But because I have created enough sea anchor style distractions, she has, you know, definitely not forgotten about our daughter and the fact that she needs suntan lotion.
And it turned out later she did need more suntan lotion because she got a little red on her nose.
Mm-hmm.
heaven forbid, that a kid would get a little red on their nose.
Emma got sunburned walking to the park two days ago.
But see, it's rehearsal.
It's good rehearsal.
But you're the sea anchor.
You're slowing things down a little bit.
We get to the end of the parade.
We know where it's ending.
We start to see the classic cars dispersing.
The guy in the El Ferrari goes this way, and the guy in the Vixen goes that way, and
And there's actually a horse trailer there for the horses that were pulling the – I forgot to tell you about the replica stagecoach.
Oh, shit.
Not a Conestoga, but like a Wells Fargo style.
It was exactly a Wells Fargo stagecoach.
I don't know where you find one of those or where you keep it the rest of the year.
Paul Allen, the late Paul Allen.
The late Paul Allen.
You're right.
He probably had 40 of them in an aircraft hangar.
Donner probably toured in that.
Yeah.
We get to O'Donner Party, the band.
The accused.
The accused UK.
But we get to the end of the parade and she's nowhere to be found.
And I know like how far down the list of things that could possibly have happened or be happening.
Would we have to go before we arrived at anything where she was in an unsafe situation?
Yeah, I mean, it's not going to be, I mean, I'm thinking of, for some reason, I'm thinking of that movie Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, where they're trying to figure out what happened.
I don't know if you saw it.
It's a really good movie.
They're trying to figure out what happened with the girl.
There's the photos from the windows.
And there's this extremely narrow...
series of circumstances and times that could explain where she might be and why she's gone.
That's not you.
You're not going to need Daniel Craig to forensic this shit up.
No.
Your kid's probably there and fine, and she's just beneath where you can see height-wise.
There would have to be, we would have to have gone past 5,000 more likely scenarios before some bad thing could have happened in the middle of a parade.
Yeah.
And so – but that doesn't keep mom from kind of like scanning, scanning, scanning.
And I'm like, look, she's – whatever she's doing right now, she has either found some friend or she's – and it turned out what she had found was what she described as a really cool playground.
You've got to come see it.
And she showed up.
She showed up out of the mists.
And the first thing she wanted to do was debrief.
She was like, listen, here are the people that I saw on the parade.
Here are the things that happened.
Oh, wow.
I need you to know about all the different.
I saw this girl from my school.
I saw that girl from my school.
That's so cool.
Oh, my God.
She must have been so, I don't want to say proud of herself, but it's exciting.
She gets to report back to you on something you didn't see.
That's right.
We weren't there.
That's exciting.
Yeah, she wasn't – we weren't – she wasn't getting suntan lotion so that when she saw the little girl that she knew from her school that was sitting on the side waving a flag, she could be in the parade and be like, oh, hi, wave her hand and not have to be like, yeah, I'm here at the end of a very short leash.
Yeah.
And so it all, you know, the parade ended up when I was a kid.
I don't know if this was true for you, but I was, I lived in these tiny little places sometimes, or it was 4th of July.
I would always be in these tiny towns, Kingston, Washington, Fort Yukon, Alaska.
And they all had these parades where, where basically a guy in a riding lawnmower came out.
And then, you know, in the Kingston, Washington parade in the 1970s, they actually had a Nike missile on the back of a trailer.
Because the Nike missile base was on the top of the hill.
No kidding.
Dang.
Yeah, the guys came down, the Air Force came down, and they were like, check it out.
That's cool.
Here's a missile.
Yeah, it was cool.
But everything else in the – it was the high school marching band, one fire truck, and a tractor pulling a hay bale.
And the girl from the next county over who was Miss Teen USA.
And then in Fort Yukon, my god, I mean –
I think in the Fort Yukon parade, they actually put face paint on me and said, you're the clown.
You're the clown.
You're the clown.
I was 13 and I was like, I'm the clown.
You woke up that morning not knowing that you would be declared the clown.
They had a foam nose and I ran around the parade throwing candy.
I was the clown.
It was maybe until I was the Red Robin.
It was the greatest day of my life.
That's fantastic.
But now, you know, we had a small town parade and
We had a silly ass small town parade.
And although I'd had my daughter in some major parades when she was little, this is the first parade she's going to remember.
Yeah.
Of course she will.
Did you get any photos?
I wouldn't let her mom get close enough to take a photo.
So, no, there were no photos of her in the parade.
It's a thing that will go undocumented even better.
It's so much better.
It's the Snapchat parade.
You need those things.
You need those things that go undocumented.
It's so important.
Yeah.
You've got to have room for your own memories.
I was in a parade, but, you know, I'll take my word for it.
I wouldn't mind seeing a photo of you as the clown.
Oh, I don't think that is.
No, no, just like I'd like to see the moment that you were first accosted by the clown declarers.
But then I also would like to see that kind of like she's all that kind of makeover scene where they made you the clown.
You know, we didn't have cameras then.
Oh, no.
Well, you had 110 cameras, which is like almost like not having a camera.
You might as well have daguerreotypes.
110 camera.
Oh, you just – 110, like the Instamatic.
Yeah.
You made my heart sing.
I had a 110 camera.
I have a couple of pictures right here.
Flash cubes.
And then they lose all the red in the photos.
I'm looking right now at a picture of Paul Bunyan and Babe the Blue Ox.
No kidding.
On the Oregon coast.
And I took it with a 110 camera.
And it's right here in my room.
Yeah.
Happy Independence Day.
Hey, God bless America.
And that's blue and a baby king.
Baby, baby, baby.