Ep. 432: "Water Taxi Party"
Hello.
Hi, John.
Hi, Merlin.
How's it going?
It's going pretty darn good, actually.
Yeah?
I've got some allergies.
Oh, no.
Oh, no.
It's fine.
That's the time.
I think I'm a little swollen.
You could stand to be a little swollen.
Oh, thank you.
Yeah, you know, my weight stays mostly the same, but it shifts.
And I don't love that.
Goes from your ears to your toes, right?
Yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep.
Where is it right now?
Where's your weight right now?
Oh, man.
Well, John, I don't want to get into it.
To start with, I have a short rise, as you know.
Yes, I do know that.
And when you're a man with a short rise, you know, the world's out to get you with all these comedy pants sizes.
Ha!
You know, I think I mentioned you, I tried.
Hanging down, right?
Well, yeah, I'm hanging.
Yes, yes.
There's been a shift and I'm getting kind of that bifurcated gut thing, you know.
I'm still, you know, what am I right now?
I think I'm about, I haven't weighed recently because we have a box on the scale right now.
155.
No, no.
Well, no.
That's kind of my normal low.
I'd say I'm 168 right now, which I can live with.
Yeah, sure.
That's a fine weight.
Sure.
Yeah.
I sent a photo to John Siracusa of me in high school when my Levi's size was 2932.
Oh, that's insane.
Let me send it to you.
It was very slender.
Yeah, I'd like to see that.
You know, my Levi's haven't been – I haven't had a 29-inch waist since sixth grade, fifth grade maybe.
Oh, now when was it that Sears would have called you Husky?
Was that a little earlier?
No, that started later.
No, I was a trim person.
trim little sporto until fifth grade.
I went to live with my dad.
My dad just kept bowls of M&Ms lying around the house.
He didn't know how to make your eggs the way you wanted.
No.
But he did have hand snacks.
Yeah.
And he liked, you know, dad liked desserts and he didn't understand nutrition.
And he and I went from, yeah, from being a kid, you know, my mom and my sister and I would
uh share a single box of craft dinner as the canadians say yeah macaroni and cheese yeah yeah i'm familiar yeah and then my dad would just give me the whole box of macaroni and cheese and that was the beginning of the husky phase that lasted until this day john i don't want to be a historical but could that also be in an archway archway i think is a cookie in a rather arch way uh would that also be the beginning of always always cook all the bacon
I don't think I invented that, but I have inhabited that.
Here's the thing, John, and I'm sorry, I don't want to talk about it.
Is this awkward and triggery?
Are we talking about disordered eating, which is very difficult to say?
Say disordered eating.
Say it.
I can't.
I can't say it.
No, I don't want to say it.
Disordered eating.
Disordered eating.
No.
But I feel like, and I go through this with my daughter's mother, because she's a saver, you know?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And so she makes an amount of food that she thinks a normal person would make.
And so, listen, I'm not going to cast an aspersion, but I'm just going to use I statements.
If I have a pound of bacon or whatever, a pack, a rasher of bacon.
Okay, rasher.
Just to cover for our new listeners, welcome.
And so the thing is, let's call it a pound, just for fun.
Pound of bacon.
Yep.
None dare call it treason.
You got a stick of butter.
Stick of butter.
Yeah.
Telephone.
Telephone.
Where's my bell?
I think I'm a little swollen.
But the point of the story is that, okay, here's the thing.
What are you going to do?
You're going to save two strips of uncooked bacon?
When are you going to say – Unless you're my daughter's mother slash partner.
Oh, no, no, no.
She'll put two slices of uncooked bacon back in the – Oh, John Roderick.
I'll see your daughter's mother and raise you a daughter's mother.
How about you save four cents of food and you put that in a 20-cent bag?
And now you're paying rent to store garbage.
Here's one.
Do you have anybody in your household that will leave between 18 and 25 spaghettis in a spaghetti bag?
No, in a spaghetti bastic.
Because they're just – they're tithing it, I guess, to the ghosts.
Yeah.
You saved that for Elijah.
That's Elijah's spaghetti.
Elijah's dry spaghetti.
Yep, yep, yep, yep, yep.
Get the bitter herbs.
Make a pesto.
Yeah.
But no, John, from your mouth to, you know, Yahweh's ear, it's madness.
Why would you?
And then, okay, but like, oh God, it's so early and I'm swollen.
There's so many angles in which this makes zero sense.
And here's what I'm going to encourage amongst our listeners.
And this is the second time I think I've ever addressed our listeners.
I apologize.
But ask yourself, ask yourself, for what is this being saved?
What is this in service of?
Oh, what is it in service of?
Oh, you know what, tomorrow I'm thinking I might wake up and I'll want like half of a cooked chicken thigh.
Either eat it or don't eat it.
There is no try.
Well, you know, I feel like the cooking is the, that's the hard part.
The cooking is the hard part.
The cooking is the hard part.
Yeah, the buying isn't the hard part.
The, you know, the owning the food isn't the hard part.
And the eating isn't the hard part.
It's the cooking that's the hard part.
So I feel like once I'm cooking...
Once I'm in there, I've got my chef's hat on.
Oh, at this point, John, if I may say, you're in a cooking mode.
There I am.
I got my Mickey Mouse gloves on.
Yes.
I've got, you know, I've got... Oh, the white ones with the black seams on the back?
Yeah, that's right.
Okay.
I turn my radio to the, you know, to the oldie station.
I got my spatula in one hand, my other spatula in the other hand.
Oh, I...
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That's right.
You're jamming some in the mood.
You got Mickey Mouse gloves on.
You're apparently Ernest Borgnine in Escape from New York.
I got my spatulas.
Yep.
Yep.
And then it's like, all right, bring out all the food that needs to get cooked.
Let's cook it all.
Let's cook it all at once.
Get the food cooked.
Cook it all at once.
And then you've got all the – then you've got – and the thing is, cooked food is easy to deal with.
You put it into the little snap-tight thing.
You put it in the fridge.
You put it in the freezer.
John, you love leftovers.
I love them.
You know, lately, because I'm splitting my time now between two and six houses.
Okay.
There's food all the time.
Everybody's making food.
Nobody eats all the food.
I've encouraged everybody to make all the food, but no one eats all the food.
So there's always some extra food, too much to throw away, too little for anybody to pick it for themselves.
You know, if we were good at portion control, we would look at these little bits, these little containers with, you know, like you're saying, one chicken thigh.
We would go, oh, that's a perfect snack.
But nobody thinks that way.
We're always like, ah, that's not a perfect snack.
A perfect snack is three times that big.
But then I do the thing – and I used to do this at my own house.
But now I'm responsible for multiple households where I come, I open the fridge, I take out all the little –
All the little half a chicken thigh, some rice over here.
Yes.
Taco meat.
You've got a little bit of pad thai.
Let's just point out, John, all foods that were never intended for anything in particular, especially they were never intended by design, that's not like Thanksgiving.
Those are not necessarily a traditionally complimentary thing.
uh, uh, uh, those are not, those materiel are not, we're never designed to be eaten together, but you're going in there and it's like a public library, but with food, you're just grabbing a bunch of good books.
Yeah.
Here's the latest innovation.
Okay.
If you can't, if you can't explicitly tell me that for, for, for a reason that you will elucidate, uh,
That that particular small ramekin of food does not belong in chili?
Mm-hmm.
I will put it in chili.
You've said it before, John, every country, well, let's be honest, every culture has a goulash.
Every culture has goulash.
Isn't that how you put it, John?
I don't want to misstate that, but I feel like you've said you got your chilies, right?
You got your stews, that this is a rustic connection to our Neolithic past, is that making a whole bunch of stuff, and there's no fucking reason that everything can't be a chili.
Right.
Except where forbidden specifically by regional laws and codicils, anything can be a chili.
If you chop up pad thai fine enough, it goes in chili.
Whoa.
As long as the pad thai is not the majority of the chili, as long as there's a big thing of chili...
You know, a lot of people have one of those Le Creuset pots because it's kind of like – do you remember when everybody wanted one of those?
It's the official wedding gift.
Yeah, exactly.
Or the blender where it sits with the rotating – the blender rotates itself.
The blender rotates itself.
The blender rotates itself.
You know what I'm talking about.
You're talking about like a Vitamix type situation?
No, no, no.
The ones that are colored – it's a wedding present.
Well –
The colored blender with the stainless steel bowl.
I think you say blenders of color now.
Oh, I see.
You know what I'm talking about.
I do.
You know what I'm talking about.
I do.
But you're talking about like a food processor?
It's a mix master of some kind.
Mix master, right.
Blender, colors.
So all of those things.
You got those things sitting around.
Yes.
And the Le Creuset pot.
is one of those where, Oh God, you want one.
You get it for a wedding.
You want one in your house.
There's such beautiful things.
It makes you feel like you're a,
French mom.
A French mom or maybe you're participating in the GI Bill.
Like, maybe it's 1950, you know, and you set up a house in Levittown near John Satacusa's family, and you're white, and you want something like, you know, it's got that look.
It's got that luxe sort of, you know, googly sort of look.
It's the KitchenAid is what I was thinking of.
The Mixmaster.
The KitchenAid...
Artisan Series 5-Quart Tilt Head Stand Mixer in Blue Velvet.
Oh, damn.
I see it right here, but there's also the Professional 600 6-Quart Bowl Lift Stand Mixer in Blue Velvet.
They both are beautiful.
Our mutual friend Leslie Harpold, who is always so exceedingly generous, a legit RIP, still miss her every day.
Leslie Harpole, when my lady and I got married, she got us not only a really nice wedding present, but I suspect in some ways she was always giving gifts I feel in some way she could ill afford.
Like, she spent too much on nice things.
She got us a stand mixer for our wedding.
Oh, that's beautiful.
We eloped, John.
We got married at City Hall, and she still gave us a stand mixer that we used.
Every time we make a cookie, we think of your friend Eric.
No, we think of Leslie Harpold.
Yeah, that's nice.
Those are nice, but you know, a lot of that stuff doesn't get used.
There's some stuff from a wedding-type gifting situation.
What you're telling me is this is a time where you're basically, I don't know if you're Rommel or Patton, you're somebody, and you're calling upon all of the resources.
Maybe you're Ike.
Maybe you're the Ike of the kitchen.
You're marshalling all the resources and getting ready to land on a beach.
But the problem is that a lot of those things, a lot of the things like a KitchenAid Artisan Series 5-Quart Tilt Professional 600 mixer, or a Le Creuset, like, Coco Vin pot, there are other things that you can...
have to you know like basically you could throw everything in one pot and it's done in 20 minutes but the le crusade i have to say is a very good for uh you make some beef make a pound of beef talking about ground beef like a thawed ground beef yeah those you throw some ground beef you make it you make it in there
You got a ground beef slurry started.
Yeah, you put a little onion in there probably.
And then you throw in a can of vegetarian chili because you don't want to eat their meat because their meat came out of a tube.
You've got your good meat here.
Put in the vegetarian chili.
A cow is just out.
Today's the greatest hits.
A cow is just out in the field.
And then you start going through the refrigerator.
You go, oh, what's this in here?
Okay, in the chili.
Oh, so Terminator heard the heads-up display.
You start scanning, scanning.
Fuck you, asshole.
Fuck you.
in the chili and the other day I was making and I was this was extremely successful and I had never tried this before are you ready refried beans right in the chili stirs right up you don't even notice that's one of those ones were on the face of it a lot of people are going to reject that out of hand I'm telling you you talk about something that's going to blend nice woof
It's gone.
It's gone.
And it's a nice thickener.
It's a lot of flavor, too.
A lot of flavor.
A lot of flavor.
The beans just turn into, you know, well, there's already beans in the chili.
It's just more beans.
It's invisible beans is what it is.
It's invisible beans.
And then other kinds of rice.
And then I found a thing of basmati rice right in the chili.
That's our standard rice.
Oh, yeah, absolutely.
I would put that in later.
You don't want to get it too smooshed.
Oh, no, you want it smoosh because everything's going to smoosh.
He's saying it's going to, oh, and it absorbs some of the bean and meat and onion slurry.
And by the way, beef and onion, those are friends, you know, they haven't met yet.
You put those two together, you got a buddy comedy.
That's beef and onion together, maybe a little bit of garlic.
It goes a long way.
Nice.
And then everybody else is along for the ride.
They're in those flat pickup truck style boats with Tom Hanks and the flap goes down and then they're running onto the beach toward the machine gun nest.
Oh, and then you look over and the guy's face is blown off.
Oh, I hate that so much.
What are those big things on the tank things?
Check stars?
What are those called?
What are those giant asterisks on the beach?
What are those called?
Oh, they're tank stoppers.
Tank stoppers.
Okay.
Good old tank stoppers.
I thought there was a cute name like Czech Bulldogs or something.
Yeah, Czech Bulldogs.
That's what they call them.
Okay.
It says right on them.
It's copyright.
Yep, yep, yep.
Except it was in German.
A lot of people feel like that represents Slovak erasure, as with the quote-unquote Czech new wave.
But I'm just saying, you know, there's not going to be tanks coming out of the water, but the face thing really upsets me, John.
Everybody's wearing their little poncho.
You know, that scene is still very upsetting.
Do you ever go back and watch that?
I mean, that's the thing.
That movie's still right up there.
Right in the pantheon.
It's totally right up there.
What else did you have in there, John?
It was the first movie we watched for the Friendly Fire podcast.
Now that's RIP.
We're talking about RIPs.
She's talking about RIPs.
What I understand you're saying here is you go into it.
Your Weltanschauung is a notion of a new chili.
You tell me.
You prove to me that this doesn't belong in chili or it's going in the chili.
Oh, you get no objection for it.
You know, a chicken thigh, a lonely chicken thigh?
Peel it off, put it in.
But you're just going to say you're not going in there.
You don't have an idea in mind of what the chili will be.
You don't go to chili with the ingredients you would prefer.
It's whatever's in there.
It's a regular Rumsfeld situation.
Macaroni and cheese?
You just made a chili, man.
I just wrote this down.
I have a macaroni and cheese anecdote that is exactly up to Sally.
Yeah.
Okay.
Okay.
You're going up the chili alley.
So anyway, then you put cheese on top of it and it's been cooking all afternoon.
I made a mistake.
I made a, I made a category error the other day.
Okay.
I put hot Italian sausage in the chili.
which might have not been bad except the hot italian sausage somebody had made it a long time ago and put it in the fridge and it got pushed to the back oh so the hot italian sausage had been sitting in the back until it took on a more a texture that was just a little bit stiffer
than A, hot Italian sausage should ever be, and B, than anything else in the chili.
So in our forces analogy, this probably should have been a 4F.
You should have caught this earlier.
Well, that, or it should have been a special force, right?
Oh, I see.
You get transferred over to a different section with different materiel and mission, let's be honest.
I don't believe that this hot Italian sausage was...
bad, whatever that word means.
But I think if you had made... Hannah Arendt calls it the banality of hot sausage.
Yeah, it's the banality of hot sausage.
It wasn't bad.
I didn't have to scrape any mold off of it.
No, it's not a cheese.
I think if I had chopped it up one more time and put it in a spaghetti sauce, you wouldn't have noticed it.
But in the chili, it did read as a foreign object.
Everything else in there, and I have to say it was a kitchen sink, it was perfect.
It all blended beautifully.
It was the nations of the world, basically.
Oh, you're saying it's like Epcot for your mouth.
Now, that's something mainly for you, right?
That's not something you would serve to your daughter's mother's daughter.
No, I would not serve it, and anyone that knew how it was made would not want it.
It's like laws.
But I believe...
That the children are our future, and I believe that I can eat, A, anything, and B, that I can enjoy anything, because what is it really?
You know, there's all these people who are like, I don't like this, I don't like that.
And it's like, what is it really?
What is it really?
What are you, six?
Come on.
You can eat it, I can eat it.
It's all, it's just, what is it?
It's spices.
How many spices are there?
A million.
Yeah.
But they all go together, right?
Except for olives.
Yeah.
Oh, also panados.
Well, you can put a panado.
You don't want to – you can put a panado in things.
You would not put a secret panado in your own goulash, though, would you?
Oh, yeah.
It's for you.
I don't know.
I would do that.
I'll eat your panados.
I'll eat your patatas fritas.
Really?
Yeah, because once it's in the chili –
Huh.
Kaboom.
You can cut up French fries and put it in there.
That is a very progressive approach, given what I know about your comportment regarding potatoes.
I'm surprised you would do that to yourself.
I... The one... So...
Panatoes and potatoes are different.
Okay.
Oh.
Yeah.
Panatoes are tomatoes.
Is it like a sweet potato versus yam type situation?
Like one's African or something?
No, no, no.
I will eat...
So there's a restaurant in town here that makes a good pot roast.
It's rare to find a diner that'll make a pot roast.
And it comes every time with mashed potatoes, and I eat them.
And the reason I eat them is they have gravy on them.
And what I'm really eating is the gravy.
And the potatoes are just like a gravy-support
I mean, it's a gravy delivery device.
A lot of my food is a device for either delivery of a sauce or salt.
And we've talked about this a lot, but a lot of people eat potatoes or... Panados.
Panados.
A lot of them will eat them as a butter delivery device.
Oh, I got like a new potatoes.
You get a dish and it's got panados with butter and maybe some Italian parsley.
I won't eat them as a grease delivery device or a salt delivery device.
I don't need them.
I don't need them because I have other things to do that work in the form of noodles.
Oh, you taught me about noodles.
I won't look back at this point.
Noodles are my go-to for all my protein-heavy dishes at this point.
I'll put anything on noodles.
I'll put chili on noodles.
I'll put... Of course you will.
...happily.
But if it comes to the table and it's already...
gravy on mashed potatoes i will eat that's the one instance where i will eat potatoes except i was on a ferry boat the other day and someone someone had a half a bag of potato chips and then it was a third of a bag and then it was a quarter of a bag and i was just sitting there there were no chips for me you know where are my chips there are no chips for me and and everyone had devoured this bag of potato chips and i was sitting there kind of staring out the window looking for an orca
just trying to salve my wound.
And I said, give me that back.
And I ate some...
bottom-of-the-bag potato chip fragments.
And I had to say, like, you know, a couple, like a couple, a few of them, it's not so bad.
I don't know, man.
Eating those after you've eaten full-size chips is one thing, but eating just pineto nubbins, I don't know.
That seems kind of unsatisfying.
You handled it, okay.
The thing, it wasn't actually a ferry boat.
Oh.
Is this OPSEC?
My daughter – no, I don't think so.
My daughter is at camp, and this is the first time she's ever gone to sleepaway camp.
Oh, my goodness.
Oh, my goodness.
And sleepaway camp is on the very northern tip of an island in the San Juan Islands archipelago in northwestern Washington, very close to Canada.
You can see Canada from there.
And getting her there is increasingly getting to the San Juan Islands is very difficult because it depends on the Washington State Ferry system.
And the Washington State Ferry System is overtaxed right now.
You know, the Washington State Ferry System is the largest ferry system in the United States.
I just watched an episode of Grey's Anatomy last week, which takes place in Seattle, Washington.
And there was a terrible, terrible accident involving a ferry.
So now I'm really nervous about this.
You know, there was one time many years ago, this is in the 1980s, there was a rock concert, a punk rock concert.
Oh.
uh, of the band, the accused, uh, and the accused were a wonderful, wonderful Seattle band.
And the accused played a, they played a rock concert, I think over in Bremerton.
And after the show, there was a riot of,
on one of the ferry boats, bringing the punk rock crowd back to Seattle.
Well, it sounds like an episode of Quincy.
It's basically, it's known as the Kitsap County Ferry Riot of 1980-whatever.
and uh and it's oh and gbh also was on the bill i saw gbh with agnostic front in 1986 see now that would have been right about this same time gbh and the accused scared the of all the punk rock shows i went to that was the scariest punk rock show i've ever been to i know they were very scary you know the deeply deeply violent fan base the cows scared me pretty badly at a show and it wasn't even such a cute name though
it was they were cute it was not that they were exactly so scary as that they scared me scared me you know because i was right up on the wall and and they were doing their rock show and i was like oh wait a minute there's something none of us are safe i mean and i don't mean just the people in this show none of us are safe like society especially yeah
But the ferries, it used to be that this was a sleepy little region.
You take your little ferry boat.
You put your car on the ferry boat.
You take it over to the county.
You drive around.
You live in a little hut.
Who cared, right?
Simpler times.
Yeah.
Nowadays, the ferry boats are all, you know, the line to get on the ferry is like,
Seven hours long.
You got to have a reservation.
It costs all this money.
The idea of getting a reservation on a Washington State Fair.
You know, the day I left the hospital as an infant child, the day, whenever that was.
1968.
1968.
After they kept me in quarantine for a week like they used to do with babies.
We drove immediately to the ferry dock.
And the first thing I ever did that wasn't just be born did and get in a car was get on a Washington State ferry.
Oh, it's in your blood.
It is.
We lived in a house that overlooked the Kingston ferry terminal.
So for the first three years of my life...
The comings and goings of the Washington State Ferry were – they set the clock of my life.
The ferry horn would go off and I would wake up from my nap.
The ferry horn would go off and it would be time for my snack.
And the ferries used to – they had different one long, two short type of things to indicate what they were doing.
before radar so so you could tell what the ferry was oh that's the that's the boat's way of saying taking it off boss that's right here i come here i go and as a kid i knew what they all were and we would all you know that's cool ferries coming me um yeah and there are pictures of me kind of you know all those pictures that you have of yourself when you're a little kid and there's always some ferry in the background because we our house was on a cliff and the ferry terminal was just right there it was just like what we looked at
But now getting our daughter to camp required all this insanity, this ferry boat insanity.
One of the problems is that the ferries go across Puget Sound and they all go east-west.
There's only one north-south ferry.
And it goes to Victoria, Canada, and nobody's using that right now.
Well, there's the one from – yeah, they all go to Victoria.
Nobody wants – you're not even allowed to – It's too hot up there.
Well, it's just – Nobody goes anymore.
It's just Canada, you know.
They won't let you come.
Well, okay.
All right.
You look at it.
I like British Columbia.
It's right there.
Yeah, we could go up there.
Shoes are cheaper.
Mm-hmm.
You know, they have that very famous Canadian cuisine –
All the wonderful Canadian food, like.
I had a First Nations meal in Vancouver.
Oh, you did?
Yeah.
At one point, our waitress, a line has become canonical.
Our waitress said to me, said to my wife and me, we're sitting on the floor in this like lodge type situation.
And she goes, I said, well, what's that?
What's that?
What are all these drawings?
She says, oh.
That's the raven.
I said, oh, cool.
She goes, the raven is a trickster.
Oh, dear.
I still think about that a lot.
It's the only time I've ever been eating anywhere in the continental America is that someone at Waitron has said to me that the raven is a trickster.
The raven is a trickster.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
So, you've got to get her to camp.
Right.
Not Canada.
Right.
Not Canada, but very close.
You can see it from there.
And there are some other parents that are like, well, maybe we should coordinate.
But the camp is like, no, because of COVID, we're not allowing anyone to coordinate anything.
Oh, jeez.
And eventually it boils down to the only ferry reservation from Anacortes...
to orcas island that is still available is at seven in the morning how long does it take you to get to the uh the the i didn't catch all those those wonderful names for you to get to where you have to be to um uh to push off for the trip how long is the trip from where you are exclusive of getting ready getting in the car put your shoes on how long does it take you from the time you leave the driveway till you get to where you're about to walk on the boat
Oh, you have hit the nail on the head, Merlin, because it is an hour and a half from here to Anacortes.
As the raven flies.
As the raven flies.
And that's accounting for some traffic around here, right?
And so there's no way that we're getting up at five in the morning to take our sweet-natured little child up to this ferry terminal.
And so we start thinking because we're resourceful people.
Oh, maybe you get a hotel room or something.
Well, there's a lot of that talk.
There's a lot of who do you know that has a place on blankety blank?
Because there are a lot of islands up there and we know a lot of people.
There's Doe Bay.
I called Joe at Doe Bay.
I was like, what if I came up there?
And he was like, we're all sold out.
I could probably figure out a way to get you a cabin if you wanted to come for a week and do an artist's residency.
Yeah.
And I was like, ah, that's a lot.
It's a lot of work to get a kid to camp.
It's a lot of work to get a kid to camp.
If I wanted to do an artist residency, I think I would arrange it in a different way than like, hey, have you got a place for us to crash?
Also, you'll have to play at this shopping center.
There's a guy, like a friend, a guy who is a listener.
Who is also like a rich person who has a very large house on San Juan Island.
He said, hey, you can use my house anytime.
But it was one of those like – Did Matt Howie get a second house?
No, this is one of those though.
It's like somebody who said, well, you know, all you need to do is just call my helicopter pilot and –
And just pick which wing of the house you want to stay in.
But it felt like too much.
It felt like that's calling in too much.
You know, I understand.
I understand.
Now it's turning into a whole thing.
It's too much of a thing.
And so I started to say, well, look, all these islands out here, they've all got all these people.
You know, Oprah bought a house out on them.
The devil you say.
There's an Oprah house out there.
There's an island that's owned by the Hemingway family.
Like the San Juan Islands are one of the nicest places in America.
Don't tell anybody.
Okay.
I'm going to look it up, but I won't tell anybody.
San Juan Islands?
San Juan Islands.
I know a rich guy in Washington.
He's a real rich guy and tells everybody so.
And he lives in, oh, damn it.
What's another famous rich guy island up there?
Well, there's Mercer Island.
There's Bainbridge Island.
There's Vashon Island.
There's Whidbey Island.
I'll find it.
I'll find it.
Orcas Island.
Oh, my God.
This looks like Iceland or something, John.
This is beautiful.
San Juan Islands.
It's so beautiful.
And, you know, there are whales and they have these wonderful spot prawns that are about the size of...
You know, a spot prawn from that waterway is the size of a chihuahua.
They're so big, and they're very delicious.
It's a chihuahua-sized prawn?
Yeah, yeah.
Or you might say that the chihuahua is prawn-sized, given how big those prawns are.
No, no, I understand.
It's the reflexive quality of... That's really upsetting.
I would not want to run into that.
I've seen that when I watch my YouTube videos at night to wind down, and I watch Asian street food videos.
Sometimes you'll see some... I would say I've seen some prawns that are almost kitten-sized.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
These prongs— They have faces with expressions, basically.
They're basically—yeah, they're bigger than a crawdad.
They're essentially like a small lobster.
A fisherman can make a living just catching five of them a year.
Okay.
Spot prawn.
Spot prawn.
Okay.
So I'm thinking, look, the Washington State Fair.
Gig Harbor.
The rich guy lives in Gig Harbor.
Oh, see?
Gig Harbor.
Is that rich?
That's pretty rich, right?
It's a nice, rich neighborhood.
It's down by Tacoma, which we don't think of as the nice, rich town, but it's the rich part of Tacoma.
Is Tacoma Seattle's Oakland?
Yeah, that's exactly right.
And they will consequently be just as angry about me saying that as somebody will understandably be angry about me saying that about Oakland.
By which I mean, if Oakland was anywhere else except next to fucking San Francisco, everybody would go, this is the most boss city ever.
Tacoma is a killer little town, but it was always much more of a timber town.
Seattle had a lot of other things going on.
Tacoma was like Weyerhaeuser, factory town kind of thing.
Got it.
Okay.
And it didn't... That took you a long way from Chile, didn't I?
Well, no, we're fine.
Tacoma has a wonderful port.
And when the port of Seattle was being all fussy and full of itself, the port of Tacoma was like, hey, you know what?
We're just right down here.
We're just a few miles south and we're not fussy at all.
We'll take all your container.
Real down to earth as ports go.
And the ships that had come from freaking China, who had been on the ocean for a month and a half, to them, the extra 40 minutes to get to Tacoma was negligible.
You know, they just put the transmission in neutral and the boats kept going.
And so all of a sudden the Port of Tacoma was just schooling the Port of Seattle.
And the Port of Seattle couldn't believe it.
They were like, Tacoma?
Tacoma?
But by then it was too late.
And now – New York City.
Ten years ago, 12 years ago, you could go down to Tacoma.
You could buy a 15-room mansion with a ballroom and a water slide for $250,000.
I would love that.
I think I would buy it for the water slide, but I would really use it for the ballroom.
For the ballroom, right.
A ballroom can be so – it's not just – don't always associate it with Bobby Kennedy.
There's a lot of things you could do in a ballroom.
Sure, you could throw a ball.
You could have a ball.
But boy, just think if you needed to like collate a mailing or something.
Wouldn't it be nice to have a ballroom?
Just put up some tables.
Exactly right.
Yeah.
But you could also have a roller skating party.
I would totally do that.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Breakdancing contest.
Everybody's figured it out.
Tacoma is just another one of these places that everybody's figured out.
And now houses are expensive.
I wonder if that's a thing sort of like with San Francisco and like what happened with Tahoe during like a ton of people were like, oh, shit, that's right.
I do have a job I can do from anywhere.
Maybe I'll just go buy all the houses in Lake Tahoe.
John, you taught us so much about geography and what it has to do with industry, culture, and society.
People are going to go somewhere that has a more welcome harbor.
Yeah, that's right.
It's the Tacoma-ing of the Pacific Northwest, really.
I just asked my mom earlier, what ferry boat do you think we rode on when I came home from the hospital?
And she just sent me a text that said that...
the lineup of fairies that were in action at the time were the Nisqually, the Clahani, the San Mateo.
I swear to God, you live in a Richard Hugo poem.
You have the best names for everything.
The Colocan and the Leshi.
And mom said, I remember all these fairies, but I bet you it was the Nisqually.
That's the one that I came home on from being born-ded.
But anyway, so I'm talking to...
my daughter's mother slash partner and she is saying well you know we're not we're not going to be able to get up there and we're going to have to do this that and i was like listen i know the pacific northwest
Let me just lay it out here for you.
I'm just curious, though, in terms of intentionality and, if you like, velocity, did your daughter's mother partner come into this with a certain implicit velocity for what she would prefer?
Yes.
Now, she, I think, was employing parental anxiety as a method of figuring out a way to get me to find her a vacation home where she could stay for a week and
This is one of the defining characteristics of our relationship is that I provide access to things.
And so I become fairly superfluous after I have secured access to a thing.
Like after I've gotten her backstage passes to a concert, she doesn't care if I go or not.
After I've found her house on San Juan Island, she doesn't care if I'm there or not.
You're almost like a concierge.
I'm a little bit of a concierge.
And so she was trying to work me
To see exactly how deep my Rolodex is.
Just to pivot this into an event, not just like a thing you have to just pass through.
It'd be nice to pivot to nano-vacation.
And I've got other things to do right now besides sit in a borrowed house on San Juan Island looking out at the whales.
Right.
This is hot time for me to be...
Or hanging up streamers.
I don't know what I'm doing.
No, no, no.
Well, you have to service your Patreon, for one thing.
You have an audience that is hanging on your next thing.
And you can't do that if you're up there in Snohomish Boma or whatever, like on the island.
Well, I mean, it's going to be harder to post.
I bet you've got slow Wi-Fi.
You're going to get partial uploads.
But you would get good new photos for the Insta.
You're absolutely, well, I'm not on the Insta.
You're not on the Insta.
You're absolutely right, though, that I don't quite feel like I deserve a vacation.
What have I done to deserve a vacation?
I feel the same way.
It's going to take a lot for me to, yeah, and yet, and yet, and yet, and yet I am compelled to go places.
I'm basically, it's a forced vacation.
It's the same with me, but I can, you know, I stand to thwart vacation yelling stop.
Yeah.
And so what I realized was the economy of the Northwest, and in particular Puget Sound, until very recently, until the addition of all these billions of dollars, was largely an aluminum motorcraft economy.
There are so many...
So many people out on Puget Sound with a 150 Evinrude going... 150 is kind of on the small side?
Well, no.
It depends on how big your boat is.
150 will get you going if you're in just some little... That's a good point.
And so all these people, the spot prawn fishermen and the whale watchers and all these hee-haws, it's basically...
it's basically like having a motorbike and there's there, there are families up in these places that have been running these little mosquito fleet boats for 10 generations.
And there are just as many, maybe not just as many, but all these guys that have, uh, that have pilots licenses and they have one 70, you know, one 72s or one eighties that they're just putting around and
All these people will get you where you're going in the San Juan Islands for $70.
I guarantee it.
This is me talking to my daughter's mother partner.
To get from where we are to where we need to go is just a matter of opening the phone book.
First of all, finding a phone book.
Oh, that's true.
Opening it.
You're saying this is more than long lines.
This is not like a destination vacation.
We're talking more about it's like a commodity here.
Yeah.
Well, and it's and it's the you know what?
It's the getting there.
That's the fun part.
This is the adventure.
The adventure is not it's not even the camp, but it's certainly not me sitting cool in my heels in some vacation home.
Okay.
It is.
Let's let us treat this as though we are from here.
And rather than line up in a ferry terminal with a bunch of snorks, let's figure this out as though we're not noobs.
One of the key components, as you say, one of the key components of a successful adventure like this, whether you're talking about going to a Disney property or Snohomish Island or whatever, is that the planning ahead is a huge part.
Because everything you experience, what I like to call compression, that's compression in price, it's compression in time.
If you do that ahead of time remotely and in your repose, you get a lot more interesting and desirable options than trying to jam it all up, making a pay phone call from the road.
You're smart to think ahead is what I'm saying.
And what we discovered with absolutely zero effort...
Or rather 2% effort is that while there were people like signing up for these 7 a.m.
ferry boat rides because – oh, because the thing is the reservations for the ferries, it's one of these things where it's like they go on sail at 7 in the morning.
Two weeks from the sailing date.
I think that's still how they do it with Alcatraz.
First come, first serve, but you should have been first come two weeks ago.
And that's it.
It goes live at 7 a.m.
And by 7.05, it's like Bruce Springsteen tickets or whatever.
By 7.05, every single desirable slot has been grabbed up by whoever the monsters are that are up at 7.
It's like Southwest Airlines.
Hard pass.
And so I said, you know, listen, that's not how we do because come on.
And we find this guy with a, you know, we find this and it's not a guy.
It's just like a little guide company that will take you out and look for orcas.
And we're like, hey, how much to go up to, you know, to camp whatchamacallit up at the top of this?
And they're like, uh, 60 bucks?
Hmm.
And, you know, it's $70 to ride the Washington State Ferry now.
Hmm.
wow so we drive up there and instead of going right at the ferry terminal to wait in line with all of the you know just like a thousand cars piled up we go left and there's a guy with like a you know it's not an open boat it's got a it's got a cabin it's it could probably it could probably carry 10 people and he's like
let's go and cast off.
And he's like, and the whole, and we go up, we're weaving in between these tiny little islands.
He's like over there, you'll see that place was this and that.
And over here, this little Harbor.
And if you look up there, you can just see the, you know, that type of thing.
And we're standing out on the deck with the wind in our hair.
It's a beautiful day.
And he drives us right up on the beach at the camp.
Oh, wow.
What?
And all the campers are like... That must have looked so cool.
So cool.
All the buses are coming in.
I think it would be if you water skied in and kicked off your skis and took off your scuba suit and you had a James Bond tuxedo under it.
It was basically parachuting naked into a World Series game.
That's very cool.
And the counselors...
Who are all resolutely positive young people.
They were, you know, we kind of walk up and they're like, whoa, whoa, whoa.
Like, where did you come from type of thing?
And like I was, we walked on the beach and at first they were like, how did parents get this far down into the camp?
I'm like, well, we came from the beach.
And they, instead of going like, that's not allowed, they were all like, whoa.
Got to keep an eye on this one.
That's right.
So we dropped her off with the people.
Everybody, you know, they were all like high five.
And then we get back on the landing craft.
And the guy was like, we got to go around north of the island because I told some campers I was going to pick them up.
And then we went up around the top of the island and stopped on some little – like tiny little island where this couple had pitched their tent for the weekend.
And we landed craft on that beach and they're like, hey, that was great.
Thanks.
And I realized, oh, this is actually – it's not just – this isn't an innovation.
This is a universe.
You can –
There are all these people that are signing up to go truck camping in some campground where you're right next door to a Winnebago where they're playing reggae music.
Freedom Rock.
And instead, you can go have this guy for $70 take you up and put you on abandoned islands.
A different state of mind.
I think I understand what you're saying now about the getting there.
And this is more like, I don't know, for some reason I think of Jaws and Amity Island and you got the little, like the inconvenience of like this won't run all the time can be really countered by your boy with his Evinrude who will water ski right up to wherever you want to go without regard to, you know, whether you slept in a tin can the night before.
It's basically, it's a camp taxi life, sort of.
Camp taxi life is exactly right.
Like how have I not been this entire time?
Changes the way you think.
Like, this guy should be on my speed dial.
Absolutely.
Like, hey, what are we doing this weekend?
What other places do you go?
Let me just put this in the Rolodex.
Yeah, we drive up there.
We get in the thing.
And it's like, I mean, you could literally say to this guy, take us somewhere cool.
Oh, like when you go to a Chinese restaurant and you just say, I want something spicy with seafood, like a spot prawn.
I love this idea.
This guy's a problem solver, John.
Well, the whole thing is it's like problem solved because the San Juans have felt more and more like, oh, God, getting up there is such a pain in the neck.
I don't want us to get stuck in traffic.
I don't want to deal with it.
Let's just forget it exists.
Did your daughter's mother feel that she did not get the experience for which she had hoped?
Or did she realize the glory of the camp water taxi?
There is nothing that would – I mean, I'm not going to with a simple water taxi party –
I'm not going to like paper over the idea that I could have found.
You kind of walked straight past what she implied that she wanted.
But what I did, you know, it's a little bit of a Jedi mind track.
But what I did was then introduced the new idea.
Oh, you know what?
Like up here.
This is this undiscovered paradise.
We could be up here all the time.
Think about that for a minute.
Oh, I love that.
I love this idea.
So now start planning what you're going to put in the cooler.
You're doing a dry run for a future trip.
That's right, a dry run.
Well, not that dry because you are, you know.
It's a wet run.
It's a wet run.
Yeah, it's a full wet run.
Mm-hmm.
I'm sorry.
I like to speak for the audience even though I don't address them.
How did your daughter's mother's daughter feel about the little packet trip?
Was she cool with it?
Was she self-conscious because she's getting to that age where you don't want to be seen doing something, anything that other people haven't already doing and are doing?
What's interesting about her life, of course, as is probably true of, you know, any kid that kind of grows up in unconventional circumstances.
At this point, just go easy.
Go easy.
We don't want to revisit the January project.
Did you make her swim to the shore, John?
She does not, for a long time, and I think I talked about this, you know, she was in multiple parades every summer until by the age of six or seven, she felt, I mean, she actually asked me,
you know, when's our next parade?
And she only thought of parades as things that you are in.
Like, you are always riding in the back of a car.
When she says, where's my parade?
She means, where's the parade in which I will participate?
Right, because she was a young kid during the time that I was on the music council.
I was...
Oh, of course.
I was running for office.
You were King Neptune, if memory serves.
Yes.
So every summer, and you know, King Neptune was in five different parades.
When I ran for office, we were in every parade in the city, you know, like seven parades.
Heavy's the head that wears the Neptune.
That's right.
She either walked with, well, she started every parade on foot and she ended every parade on my shoulders.
Yep.
So she was very used to waving and throwing candy out to kids.
Like that was her position.
And she did not think there was anything unusual about it because that was her life.
But the first time she watched a parade and wasn't in it, she didn't have trouble understanding it.
But it was a new experience.
She'd been to 40 parades, but she'd never sat and watched one.
And, you know, watching a parade has its own advantages because the things go by, you know, when you're in a parade.
But if you only ever, that's so unusual.
You don't encounter that many people.
I'm not judging.
I think it's super interesting.
You don't meet that many people who have been in way more parades than they've ever seen, especially at a tender age.
Right, right.
By the age of eight, she had only.
She's had more parades than most kids have had hot meals.
That's right.
I said that to her the other day, and she said, you know what?
I've had a lot of hot meals.
Well, thanks to your dad.
I was like, well, that's exactly right.
Shit, dog.
You think you're going to beat me at this?
I'm the Chili Meister.
You have not been in more airplanes than I've had hot meals.
And I was like, oh, you're kind of right.
Have you ever thrown flaming paper off a moving train?
Have you ever ridden proudly on the prow of the train throwing firecrackers?
Not yet.
Not yet she hasn't.
But so arriving by boat at her camp—
It absolutely comports with her experience as the daughter of someone who makes things like that happen more easily than it might seem.
And so she's not yet like, Dad, can I just ride the bus?
But what she did do when we brought her to her camp, which was Camp Chinook, she sat down in a circle with all the other...
The other girls that were going to be in her cabin.
And she'd kind of run ahead.
And I came kind of tromping along.
And I was like, is this Camp Chinook?
Is this the Chinook cabin?
You know, just as my dad would have done.
Hello.
Counselor.
Literally.
Are any of you at voting age?
No, you can say it now.
They are counselors.
And she...
She fixed me in her gaze, and she made a sweep, sweep motion with her hand.
Oh, gosh.
She gave you the Frenchman's wave.
She did.
She was sweeping dandruff off of an imaginary person's shoulder, and she was like, move along.
That cuts so deep.
And I said out loud, I was like, are you waving?
Are you waving to me that I should come over and kiss you goodbye?
Or are you telling me to split?
Oh, did you want more hijinks, honey?
And she was like.
Let me just do a little dance here.
Hey, let me get every one of your dances.
Anybody here got a piccolo?
Can anybody here give me an animal?
Give me an animal.
I'm going to need a pizza topping.
And she was like, hit the bricks, buddy.
yeah and it was it was maybe the first time i'd really gotten the the full uh your services are no longer needed here it hurts it hurts so much you know it's coming but it hurts well but then i you know i assuaged my pain by getting back on my personal landing craft like freaking macarthur
And say, I shall return in one week to pick you up.
And all the counselors applauded.
And then I took a big bite of a spot prawn.
There goes Boat and John.
You know, I was loving it.
I should have worn my King Neptune outfit.
You absolutely should.
Well, you're entitled.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
There are no former Mike Squires or King's Neptune.
That's right.
Neptune for life.
That's what your tattoo says.
There are still probably 40 living King Neptunes.
Can that be true?
No.
I bet you the number of living King Neptunes is a knowable number.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
I might have to go research that just to see exactly how – Has it been around a long time?
Well, yeah.
I bet you there's 20.
I bet you there's 20 living King Neptunes.
48 or something.
You think 20 living King Neptunes?
I mean as a King Neptune, you probably live pretty hard.
There's always the concerns about Trident wounds.
You are, I think, 100% correct that not everyone survives being King Neptune.
Wait a minute, was Meg Ryan in Top Gun?
I think she was.
I think of her as being in When Harry Met Sally.
Wait.
No, wait.
What was it?
Kelly McGillis.
Kelly McGillis was the star, but Meg Ryan was the wife of one of the other dudes.
Oh, Tomcat or Jazz Dog or one of those guys.
The reason that I wondered is that another former King Neptune, Tom Skerritt.
Shut your mouth from MASH and from Alien.
That's right.
He's still alive.
Love that guy.
He's lived a lot.
He's lived a life.
He's called Commander Mike something, it looks like.
He's in the dead zone.
Look at that guy.
He's the same age as my mom.
Look at that.
I'll be hornswoggled.
I loved him in M.A.S.H.
Yeah, although, you know, Mashed, very problematic.
Oh, because of the nudity?
No, it's rapey.
Is it?
Well, I mean, they made the shower fall down while Hot Lips was in it.
That wasn't very nice.
I watched it, again, with the Dearly Departed Friendly Fire podcast, and the age difference between me and my younger co-host.
Oh, my gosh.
Yeah.
They did not, and in particular, the youngest, the littlest midshipman, did not understand...
I know.
You know, I totally I totally get that, you know, but like it's Robert Altman.
There's a lot of talking.
There's talking over talking.
I like, you know, you know, of course, you know, I'm a stan for McLean Stevenson.
But the guy whose name I know who played the guy who played Colonel Blake in this, that guy, that character actor.
He was terrific.
And you know, Radar played Radar, Gary Berghoff.
He's the only one.
But it's very difficult.
My friend Todd and I, we could talk about MASH all day long.
We'll talk about MASH DVDs, Laugh Track, No Laugh Track.
We go deep on MASH, but people just even a few years younger, they got no MASH.
So they couldn't overlook the shittiness of what happens to people in the movie.
Also, let's be honest, Mashed the book and Mashed the movie and Mashed the TV show, it was really a way of talking, as you know.
Different Mashes.
Well, and also it was a way of talking about Vietnam without talking about Vietnam.
I wonder...
I wonder if you went – I mean we have – here we have within our listenership and I know we never address them directly.
I know you don't like to talk about them as they even exist.
But it's a test case, right?
Who – because I don't think – I think you can love MASH, you can hate MASH or never have heard of MASH.
Oh, for sure.
Or have no awareness of MASH.
And it'd be very interesting to see, you know, if everybody was given a matchstick or a marble or whatever, which pile they would put it in.
Oh, interesting.
You know, like love mash, hate mash, never heard of mash.
Ditto for like, what movie do you most associate with Kevin Bacon?
Set aside the memes from your personal experience.
What is the movie you most associate Kevin Bacon with?
And that could be, you know, that could be when he's a Nazi in the X-Men movie.
It could be Animal House.
There's a lot of movies, but there are these sorts of tests that you could give to people.
You know, another one I'm looking at right here from the movie Top Cruise.
Tom Cruise from Top Cruise.
Yeah, from Top Cruise.
Yeah, like, do you think of Edge of Tomorrow?
Do you think of Risky Business?
Yeah.
I could not see Kevin Bacon for decades without imagining him going, all is well.
I know.
I know.
And I don't think I have another movie.
I mean, I know he was in other movies.
He's been in a few movies.
Hey, do you have a Bacon number?
Do you know?
Oh, you know what?
If I do have a bacon number, I haven't revisited it recently.
And the thing is that for the civilian bacon number, you need to just know something.
It's not like an industry.
It started as the industry bacon number, which is how many steps...
from any given actor to kevin bacon right yeah for a civilian it's do you know somebody that's been in a movie with kevin bacon is that the idea well but i don't think there is i think there's either a bacon number or there's not one because anybody can say uh oh i know a guy who knows a guy that's not a thing
Um, you have to have a, you have to, you have to be in a movie that has somebody.
I could, I could boil it down to a handful of people.
Obviously somebody like John Hodgman comes to mind, somebody who's been in lots of things or like maybe, maybe Rob Corddry.
I bet there's people who are a scant leap away that, that I have been familiar with.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, I have a big enough.
You have a Bacon number, and that means you know somebody who's been in a movie with Kevin Bacon.
No, it means I was in a movie with somebody that was in a movie with Kevin Bacon.
Ioni Sky.
You cannot know that.
Oh, wow, it hadn't even occurred to me.
No, there is an actual website called the Oracle of Bacon.
Yeah, Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon.
This is one of the pre-memes from the Neolithic internet.
Yeah, it's a pre-meme.
Pre-meme.
And see, this is the thing that I didn't realize it.
until i i did an omnibus about this the other day about the about bacon numbers urdosh numbers sabbath numbers oh and apparently i was in a movie i oh oh wait like you mean like a flea chuck claustrum and sort of like the the no way scene was blowing up you could interview for a documentary type situation that's exactly right what the hell documentary were you in why haven't i seen it it's a documentary called lennon or mccartney
And it was like a feature-length film.
Was Chuck Losterman in it?
I bet Chuck Losterman was in it.
I'm sure he was.
Flea's in everything.
Flea's even in the fucking Sparks movie.
I bet Dave Grohl was in it, too.
Dave Grohl, yeah.
according to the Oracle of Bacon, is through Rob Zombie.
Oh, more human than human.
Yeah, the closest connection was Rob Zombie was in Lennon or McCartney with me, and then he was in a movie called Super with Kevin Bacon.
So I have a Bacon number of two.
A very low bacon number.
That's a low bacon number.
I always make all the Kevin Bacon.
Yeah.
Oh, that's right.
No, I don't think I'm in here.
I was in a documentary once, but no.
What was it about?
Well, you don't want to know.
What was I going to say to you, chili?
It doesn't matter, but I agree with you.
So I've been doing a thing where I do sort of a turbocharged mac and cheese.
Go on.
No, it's the worst, cheatiest kind of mac and cheese.
I bought on a lark, I bought some Costco mac and cheese because I'd also gotten some Costco meats.
Tell me about that because I see it and I look at it when I'm at Costco.
I go, look, it's right there.
It looks like a big thing.
It's huge.
It's not that costly.
So what I do is, first of all, just as a way of getting to this, is that I get Costco meats, and then what I do is I get the big ones.
I'll get like a big, like a filet-like loin, and then I'll cut it.
I'm sorry to interrupt you, but I have to know, do you ever get the prime beef?
Sometimes.
It's a very expensive investment.
Well, but the prime you get from Costco, I don't know, man.
It's like, quote, unquote, log you.
I don't know.
The choice is mostly fine.
I'm going to sous vide it.
Sous vide is so forgiving.
Anyway, so I portion all those up into food saver bags and suck all the air out and I freeze them in portion sizes.
John, I don't have time to get to all my notes from today that I've already just notes on what you said today.
Okay.
One thing in passing, let me just say.
If you're anybody but you.
Yeah.
if you're not somebody who's naturally drawn to leftovers, can I just say, don't put anything into the fridge unless you have a John who will come in and like some character from Dune, just like Hoover up all the leftovers.
It needs to be put into a desirable package and there must be a plan.
Yeah.
Right?
So, like, if you're going around with a friend of the show, John Cercuso, about this, like, if you're going to spend the 20 cents for a... I get nice bags.
If you're going to put that in there, have a plan.
So, what I'll do is I'll, like, arrange a plate.
Like a Thanksgiving leftover type plate.
I don't want... I don't want to see... Keep them separate.
Keep them separated.
I don't want to see... Here's what I don't want, John.
What I... And this is an old analogy from my former...
days is like, don't put compost in your crisper.
You can write that down.
Don't put compost in your crisper.
Don't put, as soon as you put anything that you don't value into that giant area in the middle of the fridge, now you're just making a pile of garbage for which you pay rent to store.
Okay.
There has to be a plan.
So the plan is, okay, you've saved half of a chicken thigh.
And I love a chicken thigh.
It's arguably my favorite piece.
I'm not going to wake up the next day and go, I want half a chicken thigh.
What's your plan, madam?
What is the plan for this?
So if we've got leftover rice, okay, maybe I'm going to make fried rice the next day because you've got to use day-old rice.
Or I'll freeze it in a food saver bag and then my kid can have a tasty treat in two minutes.
There has to be a plan.
You'll put it in a food saver bag and your kid will have a tasty treat.
My kid loves just sometimes to have some rice.
Sometimes the meal can be undone because there's the wrong kind of rice.
My daughter's having a salmon phase.
We had salmon the other night, but she didn't want teriyaki salmon unless it was with white rice.
She didn't want regular salmon.
If it was regular salmon, she'd like a wild rice.
And I feel very much the same way.
But the thing is, are you just going to save a big mastiff's head of white rice for no reason?
Who is that for?
That's all I wanted to say about that.
You can disagree, but I'm just saying in my household—
In this economy, you need to have a plan.
Also, any leftovers.
This is a new technology.
It's already a game changer.
I'm here.
I'm here.
Okay, it's really easy to overthink this.
My overthinking of this is I try to label things clearly, even if it's obvious what it is.
Never trust your brain.
Don't use your brain for an alarm clock.
Don't use your brain for a whiteboard.
Don't trust your brain.
Don't trust your brain.
You think you're going to remember things, but you're not going to remember things, and why the hell would you?
If you've just frozen some lovely Costco filet mignon, right filet mignon, and then just put 7 slash 21.
That way I know it's from July.
If it's four years from now, I may not want that, although I should have eaten it.
Wait, you're dating your food.
You're going to that trouble.
You are...
Well, let me give you a real practical example.
Sometimes when I do sous vide some of these things, and that's the hot water bath, you cook it up good.
All right.
Well, let's even say there's leftovers.
Cook it up good.
Ready for this?
You ready for this?
Let's say you got a leftover half of a chicken thigh and like some kind of goddamn monster, you want to save it.
Okay.
Let me ask exactly one thing of you.
When you put it into the bag, I don't know if it's always 20 cents, but you put it into the bag.
Can I ask you to do this?
Write the current day of the week.
On the bag.
Oh, okay.
If you put that in there, I want you to write Sunday on there.
Okay.
Can you just sit with that for a second?
What does that mean?
That means if it is...
Saturday.
Yeah.
If it's Saturday.
Or if it's Sunday and you don't remember.
Uh-huh.
You didn't do it today.
It's exactly right.
What that means is like if, first of all, first time you pick that up, you go and it's like fucking Wednesday, you're going to be like, holy shit, this has been in here since Sunday.
Yeah.
And if you're not going to eat it, then throw it away.
You never should have saved it.
You never should have saved it.
But if you're going to eat it, now you know, and as you've gotten to the hack inside the hack, which is if you don't know what Sunday it's from,
It's too many Sundays ago.
Too many Sundays.
Out it goes.
Shouldn't have saved it.
Learn from this.
And this is also what we can learn about meetings.
If your meetings are always running long, it means either you're scheduling poorly or you're planning badly.
If your meetings run too long, learn from that.
If you constantly run into leftovers and you don't know what week it's from, learn from that.
That's what I'm saying.
But what I do is, a la the chili, my angle is, so I made this dressed up Costco mac and cheese.
How did you dress it up?
Well, what I'll do sometimes is, like, you know, we're not really like a Kraft dinner family.
Oh, you're not?
Well, you know, there's like a local place that actually serves that as their mac and cheese, which I think is kind of inexcusable.
I mean, it's good as a dorm food, you know?
And as you know, I'm a high-end ramen guy.
I can go on all day about high-end ramen.
Yeah, oh, yeah, yeah.
So I got the meat.
The beef is coming.
The beef is coming.
And so I said, you know what?
Also throw in one of those giant tubs of mac and cheese.
So here's what I do.
And they say they have a very strange instruction on them in very tiny writing.
And the instruction is something like cook it for 40 to 90 minutes until it's 160.
But what I do is I cook it for a while to reheat it.
And then I add, because it's already got cheese in it, and it's got a little bit of grated kind of shitty cheddar on top.
What I do is then on top of that, then I augment that.
Okay, okay, okay.
I grind some salt.
I grind some pepper.
I put that on top.
Then I put a metric shit ton of extra sharp cheddar on top.
Yep, yep, yep.
And then I do a sprinkle.
I do a sprinkle of Progresso, and I do a sprinkle of Panko.
I put some breadcrumbs on top.
Cook it on the top rack, 450.
Okay.
And when that's done, you don't even need to put it in the broiler.
So our heat comes from the bottom because we live in a hovel.
Yeah, our heat comes from the bottom.
But it's going to reflect off the top.
When boring, it's a bank shot.
Heat comes down.
Now you've got melty and you've got crunch because it's got two kinds of breadcrumbs on there.
It's always two kinds of breadcrumbs with me.
And now you've got a delicious treat.
When it's done, you let it set.
Not sit.
Like we say in the South, you let it set for a while.
And guess what?
Now you can cut that up like a lasagna.
And now I will spend a bag on that because guess what?
Now there's a portion size.
A quarter of this or an eighth of this pan of mac and cheese is now a food that people can eat.
And then I write sundae on it.
And then when I reheat it, I'll throw in with other leftovers because guess what?
Anything can be a chili.
Are people in New York going to tell you that that's not a macaroni and cheese, but it's a lasagna?
No.
Oh, right.
Is this one of those New York Chicago things?
Is it a burrito, a hot dog?
Yeah, where they're like, nah, that's not a... Oh, right.
We can't get the same water.
Hey, that's crazy.
You don't want that.
Macaroni and cheese.
You can only get it from one place.
You want authentic primary Joes, too.
You know, the one over on...
Avenue somewhere.
See, I dress up everything this way that you're talking about, like a DiGiorno's pizza.
A DiGiorno's pizza is just a white canvas.
It's got phony bologna stuff on the front.
It's got a plate and it's got cilantro and it says serving suggestion.
John, everything is a serving suggestion.
Thank you.
It's everything.
It's like, you know, do you just buy a canvas and hang it on the wall?
You could, but like you could also turn it into a chili because even a canvas could be a chili.
You had the right stuff in.
I know somebody that has just a blank canvas hanging on the wall and it looks great.
No, wait, let me do this.
I can do this.
Jason Finn.
No, his canvases are all covered with paint by crazy people.
Although we don't say crazy anymore.
We say, no, no, no, no, no, no.
Artists.
Colorful hobos.
Artists.
Artists.
No, you've got to be really good to put a blank canvas on your wall and have it be meaningful and not just look like a blank canvas.
But I know one artist that can do it.
Yeah, Marcel Duchamp called.
He wants his 1920s back.
Boom.
You know what I'm saying?
I do.
How's Jason doing?
Is Jason good?
This is not a pipe.
No.
You want to see a pipe?
This is a pipe.
Ha ha ha ha ha ha.