Ep. 439: "Dick Meningitis"
Hello.
Hi, John.
Oh, hi.
Hi, Merlin.
Oh, how are you?
Good.
You sound good.
I sound really good.
Yeah, you sound good.
You sound very Merlin-y.
Oh, thank you.
Yeah, of course.
You know...
You know me, right?
Uh-huh.
Uh-huh.
You know, I don't like to talk about the show on the show.
You know, I don't like to flirt too heavily with the notion of continuity between our episodes.
And I don't want to reopen a wound, although I think the wound never closed.
Can we talk more about Dropping the Thread?
Oh, let's talk more about dropping the thread.
Well, I got lots of other things too.
But you've got some thoughts.
What are your thoughts?
I watched a documentary last night about Nirvana influencing Britain and Britain influencing Nirvana.
I could talk about music, but the thread thing has been dogging me.
Oh, really?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, it's Eric all over again.
Now you got me thinking about it.
And I mean, it's not like I didn't notice before, but now I'm taking, what I'm talking about here is on a previous episode of this program, I don't want to speak for you, jump in, but you said something along the lines, you confessed that you have a situation you're dealing with where you find that
or discover that you've lost a thread.
Lost a thread, yeah.
That you forgot, in the instance of this program, that from time to time, you start telling an anecdote, you pivot, and let's be honest, we pivot hard.
You pivot, and then some amount of time later, you kind of feel like you forgot why you started talking about something.
Is that close?
Well, it's not from time to time.
It's only just recently, and it's...
It's now.
It's happening now.
But you're aware of it happening often enough that it's become a pattern you're aware of.
Well, because thanks to you, honestly, I podcast.
I podcast.
I podcast.
I'm so sorry.
Thanks to you, I podcast.
I've been thinking about this a lot because I've dug back into the book about the long walk.
And I'm working on the book a little bit.
I've got a friend of the show, actually, who's helping me.
And in going back, a lot of the book...
I've got, it's a long time before podcasting was invented.
You did The Walk in 1999.
1999.
And you'd written a bunch, I feel like, by the mid-2000s.
At one point you had said, and I'm not trying to out you here, but it won't because Madeline, I think you gave Madeline some of it to read.
She really wanted to read it.
And you said basically there's this one mystery section about, I want to say, Romania that was your, a new phrase of the month, your Eminence Grease.
This is the thing that was dogging you.
Now, where are you with that now, now that you've gotten help?
You've got your 20 years.
I'm still dogged.
I'm still dogged.
There's a lot of dogs in this race.
I'm trying to finish it, but I also had a lot of hot takes.
This is before anybody else had hot takes.
Didn't have podcasts.
You didn't have blogs.
Nope.
You didn't have social media.
A hot take was something that you would maybe say to an innkeeper over a bit of sausage.
That's right.
And this is a... You know, I'll talk a little bit.
I'll be like...
I was walking and there's a bird and then there's some rocks and I saw a tree and then... Plants, birds, rocks, things.
Hot take.
Lay it on me.
Lay on a hot take.
And then I'd have to talk about the hot take for a while.
Was the hot take occurring to you on the walk or was it later on, on reflection, your take became warmer?
Oh, I think that most of the takes...
were written at night in the journal, you know, the, the, the, the, the start of the take.
And then later on 2003, I went back and I fleshed out some of the takes.
So, you know, hot takes, sides, pivoting, that's all very key.
It's really, like, central to what we do here, to the content, you know, to the product.
Yeah.
The product that we're making for consumers.
We're packaging takes.
And, well, no, we're not one of those podcasts that packages takes.
Thank you.
Packages takes.
No.
But, you know, it is crucial that if I leave the trail, that I get back to the trail.
And so, no, it hasn't been happening so much.
It's just that when it does happen...
It's like, what else am I here for if not to stick the landing?
I can't.
I can't.
Because the thing is, the difference between our show, where you can range far afield and always come back to camp, there's always a fire burning, right?
We'll leave the light on for you.
Yes, yes.
If I can't get us back or if I can't do that, then what are we?
We're just one of 100,000 podcasts where people are rambling and talking over each other and don't remember what they're saying.
Oh, we don't want to do that.
No, no, we can't.
We can't do that.
Well, it's a phrase I feel like you used maybe even before.
It might have been in the famous Backyard interview that was our backdoor prequel to this, our backdoor pilot, as you say.
But you were talking about bullshit at one point and talking about that book on bullshit and bullshitting.
And you said you're talking about the different kinds of bullshit.
I think specifically you were talking about dealing with concert promoters with their cigar and their roll of bills, maybe.
But you had said something.
There's a certain kind of, I think you described it as inert bullshit.
See, this I can remember.
Inert bullshit, which is like two guys in Greece or wherever sitting on a stoop drinking coffee and bullshitting.
Yeah.
So there's nothing that's inert bullshit.
But if that becomes us...
You know what I'm saying?
There's a certain number of people that will tune in.
How do we get back to camp?
They'll tune in to you and me just wandering in the woods, you know, but that's not, but we're not there yet.
Talking about pie we had, you know.
We're not there yet, Merlin.
That's for, you know, let our fans age with us.
So so it's but I've had a lot of feedback from people, as you can imagine, talking about it, because what I didn't want to do is pretend.
Right.
This is the thing like I always I've always believed firmly that if you confess to everything, then the KGB has nothing to use anymore.
to turn you into a double agent.
He can't cheat a transparent man.
Exactly.
If they come to Mr. X over here and they say, oh, we know you're cheating on your wife.
You better give us those files.
Mr. X, he's in deep shit.
It requires an insight into, you know, is that word I like, integrity.
It requires insight into someone's integrity, meaning not the integrity as in like they're wuffy, but their integrity as in their sense of self.
And if you can leverage something that damages, especially publicly damages somebody's sense of self, then you use that against them.
So if you know they're doing some drugs,
or they're either human trafficking or cheating on their wife, Mr. X comes in, says, Nostravia, give me the files.
That's right.
That's how they get you.
That's how they get you.
But in this case, right, I did not want to, I didn't want to pretend, right?
I didn't want to sit with you and say, oh, and so then I, right, I needed to get- You didn't want to just play it off legit, as they say.
Okay.
I'm not living like that.
I'm not trying to put one over on anybody.
Okay.
But having said it now, you know, of course, it sparked a dialogue.
And as you know, I'm hardly online at all.
But the very small degree to which I am online, I got a lot of feedback from people suggesting that, yes, it was probably my sleep.
It was probably...
Oh, you're getting a new kind of, you call them fans.
Some people call them listeners.
People are piping in to say, you tell me, because I do want to hear this feedback.
Is it people saying, yeah, I did notice you're getting a little bit dim?
Nope.
Or people saying, here's what's probably causing it.
Yeah, it's your sleep.
You got to get one of those machines like my friend Nelson has.
That's right.
That's right.
No one has ever said, and this is probably why I wanted to preempt it by saying it as it was happening, but also it was scary.
And I like to talk about what's happening in my life, and if something's scaring me, if I'm anxious about something, I want to talk to all my friends or listeners, as you would say.
Yeah.
And so, yeah, a lot of people were like, oh, these are the symptoms of sleep deprivation.
These are the symptoms of bad sleep.
And I'm in that phase of this current iteration of a midlife crisis.
I like to have one every three years.
Mm-hmm.
I'm not eating right.
I'm not sleeping well.
I'm not exercising.
It could be different things or even a combination of little things.
Right.
I'm in between.
I'm still in between.
If you're eating chili that you just made, because it might be bad chili.
There's no bad chili.
It's like there's no bad words or bad dogs.
But off chili, if you're having off chili at four in the morning...
Right.
That's that's that's that could be telling.
Well, I'm trying not to do that.
You know, like like there have been many points in my life where I would sit and have a huge bowl of chili at 4 a.m.
And the other the other day I came into the kitchen.
I took all the ingredients out, not for chili, but for, you know, one of one of daddy's special goulashes.
Your rest of goulash.
And I'm and I'm putting it all together and I'm looking and I look over at the clock and I'm like.
No, no, no.
This is not what you want at 3 a.m.
This is not what a normal person eats at 3 a.m.
What you should do is put this all back in the refrigerator and go to sleep.
Leave it.
Leave it.
Go to sleep.
Not back to sleep.
Go to sleep.
Um, but so I had this sleep clinic thing.
Did you do it?
Well, so, so it was one of these things where they're sending me, uh, they're sending me like, oh, fill out this form, you know, your appointments tomorrow, check in online.
There's this thing.
I don't know if you have it, but all the hospitals up here have, have pivoted, which is the term of art to a thing called my chart.
Do you use my chart?
Yeah.
Um, I don't acknowledge medical professionals, but I'm sure it's something my wife would know about both because of her profession and because of her bizarre desire to be treated by medical professionals.
And she's also really good at dealing with bureaucracy.
So she's probably already mastered my chart.
Yeah, my chart is some kind of a software package people buy to service their listeners.
That's right.
It's a thing where doctors... Should we get one of those for us?
Should we get a MyChart for the show?
Just log on to MyChart.
Everything's there.
No, it's called Patreon.com slash John Rotter.
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The thing about my chart is it's really, really good.
Really there to help you, Merlin, the consumer, the patient, the listener, the fan.
It's there to help you, us, you slash us.
Okay.
Interface with the medical profession.
They're available online 24 hours a day.
You can write your doctor and say, you know, the pharmacy...
So, so, so, you know, I'm having an ache and pain or whatever, and there are, you know, the nurses, they're all available to you.
When in reality, what it is, is it's an app.
Uh-huh.
And I don't know if you have a lot of experience.
I just went to MyChart, MyChart.
Well, I know that making techs and tech and makes, I went to MyChart Powered by Epic, and I'm drilling down, and I'm seeing if I have, here's the thing, I might have a MyChart, and I don't know it.
Mm-hmm.
Right?
Isn't that possible?
That was me.
For many moons, I had a MyChart, and I couldn't tell you where it was.
I couldn't have logged into it if you'd begged me to.
Had no idea what was on there.
Turns out it's all on there because the medical profession is just shoveling stuff on there.
You go on there and you're like, oh, shit.
There are notes in here from a doctor's appointment I had in 2000.
Oh, Jiminy.
Okay.
But the thing is now they want to – like every app –
They just want to shovel you over there.
Like, oh, go over to MyChart and do it.
Go over to, you know, log in.
It'd be really convenient for us if you would use this and don't call or anything.
Don't call and don't, and, you know, and somebody will reply.
So just go over there and confirm your appointment.
So I was doing all that at MyChart, sending me all this stuff and, you know, confirm and take this quiz and, you know, and how would you like, you know, you could win a free trip and all this.
Oh, cool.
Get an iPod.
And so then I'm waiting.
So it's a Zoom meeting and waiting for my doctor.
Now, I should say, I've been trying for two years to go to a sleep clinic.
And for two years, you said it last week.
You said, and I didn't even understand quite what you were saying when you said it, but now I do.
You said...
Why can't I just go get one of these machines?
It's not like I'm going to abuse it.
I know.
I know I need it.
Let me just go get one.
My wife did something she only does every few months.
She yelled at me last night because I was snoring, which is entirely understandable.
And yet...
It's completely just.
I don't know that I'm snoring.
I don't know how to stop snoring.
I've tried appliances.
I put the equivalent of like a football mouth guard in that makes my jaw jut out, my lower jaw.
I do the breathe rights.
I try it all.
It's like, you know what it is, John?
It's like before I discovered ephedrine and I would take shit like ginseng.
Just give me the real stuff.
I want to breathe and I need dancing medicine.
That's what I used to call it.
But this is like, who are we kidding?
What hoops do I have to jump through?
What stern lectures do I have to receive before you go, look, obviously, you're going to need one of those nose air pushers.
Just sell it to me.
So I'm talking to a different doctor.
Because, you know, Merlin, three years ago, I didn't have a single doctor.
What was that, four years ago?
How long ago was that?
No, five.
However many years ago it was that I ran for city council.
I remember that.
I didn't have.
Well, that was, gosh, Merlin, that was six years ago.
No, come on.
No, it was 2015.
2015, Merlin.
Jiminy Christmas.
Anyway, back then, I didn't have a doctor.
I didn't have any doctors.
And I was happy.
The only thing I had was a dentist, and that made me unhappy.
If I had not had a dentist, I probably wouldn't be happy.
If my memory serves, this is back.
And I mean, partly I'm doing this based upon your own statements at the time.
But this is back when you were pushing back against a lot of medical professionals.
Mm-hmm.
Telling you what you had to do about your hands or your knees or your brain parts.
And you would say, yeah.
Yeah.
When I say that I didn't have any doctors and I was happy, what I mean is I was catastrophically depressed, but I was.
Yeah, sure.
Sure, sure.
I didn't know it or I know I knew it, but I didn't know.
Well, what it was was I kept breaking bones and not getting them fixed.
And that I was happy.
Hmm.
So I'm talking to my psychiatrist doctor, and I said, I just want to sleep.
I want to go to sleep.
And he was like, sounds like you've got sleep problems.
And I was like, yeah, yeah, yeah, I do.
And he said, well, here's the thing.
Back in the old days, back in the old days doesn't mean that long ago.
Somebody had a sleep problem.
We sent them to a sleep clinic.
They watched you sleep.
They wire you up with a bunch of wires that are going to make it virtually impossible to sleep.
And then you sit there and they look at you and they say, okay, go to sleep.
Yeah, they watch you through a one-way glass.
Yeah, yeah.
Go do sleep, you know, in this environment.
You know, it'll be fine.
They probably account for that.
And he said the insurance companies didn't like it that doctors sent everybody to these sleep clinics because it's expensive or something.
Okay.
And so the insurance companies said, well, you can't just send people to a sleep clinic.
The first thing they have to do is go to a consultation.
Oh, boy.
To see if they need to get a home sleep monitoring kit.
And they'll take the home sleep monitoring kit home.
And then the results of the home sleep monitoring will determine whether or not they actually need to go to the sleep in the, you know... Because heaven for fin, they just take care of the problem.
First, you have to prove that you need help and that they can provide the help with the means under which your insurance or your physician...
staff decides that it's okay.
You're being vetted.
And my psychiatrist is saying this, you know, with a little bit of an eye roll attached.
And he says, the thing is, like you were saying about the machine, no one goes to a sleep.
No one says, I can't sleep.
And it's killing me enough that I'm talking to a doctor about it in order to get prescribed a CPAP machine to get high.
Absolutely.
It's like you don't even have any fun side effects.
No, there's zero fraud in this game.
By the time you say... I scammed him good.
Yeah, it's just like, oh, damn, I need a place to sleep.
Maybe I'll get a sleep clinic.
I've joined the ranks of the elderly unfuckable.
I'll ask.
I know.
I know.
What I'm really into is machines that help you breathe.
William Shatner has one.
What happens is that 98% of the people end up getting all the way through to a sleep study because this isn't a thing that anybody's trying to scam anybody about.
And so what he said, what the insurance companies thought they were doing is saving themselves money.
And what they've really done is cost everybody.
Now you have to go to three different things, have three different things that stand in the way between you and coming out the other side with somebody saying yes.
It's almost like it's almost like a knight is trying to decide if this person deserves to be their squire.
Like I'm going to put you on.
I can't think of examples.
I mean, there's a million examples probably from movies and TV of like, oh, you know, I'm going to I'm going to refuse you and make you feel little and inadequate.
And you know what?
Maybe how about how about a men in black?
A men in black.
Like you bring the guys into a room and you discover who the real chosen one is.
Who's going to be the Dalai Lama of the flashy gun?
And did you pick the right thing off the sheet?
That kind of thing.
And you're like, okay, well, you've shown yourself to be worthy of medical care.
For now, for this.
I feel like Meatloaf standing on the front porch with Edward Norton screaming at me that I'm too fat and I need to go home.
That's what I feel.
You could just look at him and go like, you know, well, he's having a side effect.
Is that a thing that we should deal with?
You know, he's doing a lot of hugging.
So after what you said, oh, so I go online.
It's a Zoom call.
I'm meeting with the doctor.
I sit with Zoom open, spinning beach ball.
Half an hour goes by.
I'm sitting there looking at Zoom.
And I start to get that feeling like, am I doing something wrong?
Am I doing this wrong?
Zoom, just for what it's worth, I mean, not to talk about podcasts on a podcast, but Zoom is peculiarly terrible about this.
We're like, at least with Skype, I go and I see your face and whether you're here and then I can click and we can talk.
With Zoom, you get like a meeting and you got to open the meeting and it better be the right meeting.
But neither you and this is this happens to us almost every week with another podcast I do called Dubai Friday, where I have to text my co-host and say, I think I'm in the right place.
Do you see me?
because I have no way of knowing.
It's like, you know, like Stephen Covey says, is your ladder against the right wall?
Is all this patients going to be in the service of me being a good podcast boy?
I don't even know who's here.
What are you going to do?
You're going to go, oh, do you need permission to text your doctor to find out if you're in the right link?
So this is me, right?
Sorry.
It's also frustrating, John.
My God.
It's 100%.
What happened to me, I'm sitting there and I'm like,
Okay, so it was in my calendar.
And all of this is, I remember back before I had an iPhone and I had a Macintosh laptop.
Yes.
And I had some kind of BlackBerry or flip phone or something.
And I remember it being a thing we all talked about, which was I can't get my brand new iPhone.
Uh, I, for the first time in my life, I can look at emails on my phone, which at the time seemed like something I really wanted to do.
I had no idea that it would one day become a nightmare.
And then I get on my computer and I also have emails there.
How do I get these two things to integrate Merlin?
Do you remember that?
Wasn't that an exciting time?
I remember even earlier trying to get my contacts on there.
You get a new phone, who dis?
You know what I'm saying?
Who dis?
You got no way to make all those things talk to each other.
It was incredibly frustrating.
We forget that solving the problem of syncing has made life a lot better for a lot of us.
In a lot of ways.
In a lot of ways, right?
Where am I?
What am I doing here?
What's happening?
Why can't I sleep?
How did I get here?
And so they're syncing, right?
The syncing is happening.
My calendar is telling me I got an appointment.
The MyChart is sending me updates.
But I don't have any real confidence that a living human being on the other end has any awareness.
I mean, they've got a MyChart.
Something's sending them, pinging them, too.
Oh, they check it when they need to.
But, you know, it's like they say about the pig and the chicken.
You know what I'm saying?
Yeah.
The chicken is involved, but the pig is committed.
The chicken is involved, but the pig is committed.
They say, see, the pig goes to the chicken.
This is quick.
The pig goes to the chicken.
He says, you know what?
We are beloved characters when it comes to the breakfast space.
Why don't we go start our, sorry, the chicken.
The chicken goes to the pig.
It says, well, let's start this new business.
The pig says, no way.
No way I'm not going to do that.
Chicken says, well, what's your problem?
He says, well, you're involved, but I'm committed.
Yeah, that's right.
That's right.
The pig doesn't just move on, right?
It's like a bumblebee, right?
He's going to lose his stinger, you know?
So I look up the phone number of the sleep clinic, and I call them to see if my Zoom call, if I'm in the right place.
Was your call very important to them?
It was.
And they had a phone tree.
And the way they designed their phone tree, it was playing some classical music.
It was playing some Mahler or something on a very tight one-minute loop.
And every 30 seconds, and I timed it.
Just the way Mahler intended it.
I timed it.
Every 30 seconds, the music stopped, and a voice said...
Your call is very important to us.
If you want to leave a message and have us call you back, press one.
Otherwise, stay on the line.
And then back to the music.
And then 30 seconds later.
So every 30 seconds.
So somebody in this organization, I don't know who it is at a hospital that makes this decision,
But somebody said, although this is a sleep clinic, it is, you know, sleep is a mental health issue, and we're going to push you over the edge.
Because I can't, as somebody who had sleep deprivation and who was watching a spinning beach ball on Zoom, tell me the host hasn't yet started the meeting.
Yeah.
You're in the waiting room.
You wait, you wait, you wait, you wait.
20 minutes.
Watching the Zoom call.
That would be funny.
They should play Fugazi while you're waiting.
And the voice keeps coming back in.
Your call is very important to us.
If you'd like to leave a message...
press one otherwise stay on the line and the next available and so i sit and sit and sit finally someone answers the phone and i said can i help you yes i hope you can help me i'm in this zoom waiting room i've been here now 40 minutes or however long um am i in the right place and she goes and she says oh no um you have the wrong kind of appointments
You are in the Zoom call waiting for a consultation, but you already had a consultation appointment back in...
Whenever, because I've been trying to do this for two years.
You fucking idiot.
What you needed was a different kind of appointment where you come in and get the home sleep study.
And I said, okay, my mistake, I can be at your office at 15 minutes.
And she went, no, no, no, no.
That's the people that are... My sweet summer child.
You don't really understand anything about this, do you?
No, this is a thing where you have to now get a new appointment for this other... And I said, well, I have this appointment and Zoom... And you've been sending... Your office has been sending me...
Like emails confirming this appointment, logging into this appointment.
You know, yesterday I sent you a thing.
You sent me a form to fill out.
So somebody knew that I had this appointment this whole time, and now you're telling me it's the wrong appointment.
I'm sleeping three hours a night.
I just desperately need you to...
Help me get this thing.
Can you mail it to me?
No, you have to come in because we have to show you how to use it.
Can I just come in and you can send somebody out to the parking lot to show me how to use it?
You know, I promise I won't, you know, I'll come at 501 and you can just right at the end of the day.
No, no, I'm afraid none of that is possible.
You're headed out to your car.
Can't you just have the kid roll it out and you put it in the back of your truck and they go, well, you touch this to your face?
That's the thing.
That's the thing.
It's not even a face thing.
It's just something you clamp on your finger, right?
Oh, I mean, but pulse oximeter, I think, is a big part of this.
It's one of those.
The thing is...
Any kid can drive a Honda Civic, right?
This is the amazing thing.
Driving a car seems like it should be very difficult.
But as you know, millions and millions of dumb fucks are able to do it.
They get in.
You tell them, okay, this gas makes you go.
Brake makes you stop.
Steering wheel is kind of self-evident.
Pull it this way.
You go that way.
And so dumb fucks all around the world are driving cars.
are driving cars that are increasingly complicated.
They have map programs.
Somehow they manage.
But I can't home monitor.
I can't put a thing on my finger and clamp it down unless I have 20 minutes of instruction from a qualified professional.
And in order to do that, I have to have the, not an appointment, the right kind of appointment.
So the only time I can do this, Merlin, she, the only time she could fit me and she was going to squeeze me and she was really working with me here.
And, and of course there were a couple of asides where she did what you just implied, which is she kind of appointment shamed me because to her, obviously this is the wrong kind of appointment.
Yeah, Mr. Guy comes rolling in.
He obviously doesn't understand anything about how the office works.
You probably called the wrong number and got the wrong person to find out you have the wrong appointment because you're a fucking idiot.
Because I'm an idiot.
Yeah, you're an idiot.
Because it's like something that only makes sense to them.
She deals with it 40 times a day.
So, of course, it's self-explanatory.
But I'm like, I didn't call you up and say, I want appointment number four.
I am just doing what you're telling me.
And so somebody made a mistake.
And she's like, well, you should have done this back in June.
And I'm like, I didn't know that.
Yeah, you should have been a pair of scuttling.
She's going to get me in on October 5th.
Okay.
But I have to drive up to Issaquah.
So what I did, your voice ringing in my ears, I said, why the fuck do I have to go through all this to get one of these machines that I don't even want?
I'm going to go online.
Yeah.
And I went online.
You're going to try and get a rogue machine?
And I Googled black market CPAP machine.
Shit dog.
By the way, out of curiosity, did you read that article or that blog post my friend wrote?
I did.
It's pretty good, huh?
It is.
Didn't it make you want to do it?
Well, that's the thing.
He very specifically in his article said, I tried some CPAP machines and this one's the best one.
Exactly.
He lays the whole thing out for you.
Lays it out.
And so I went online.
No phone calls.
No phone calls.
Just send me the good one.
Black market this particular CPAP mission.
Okay.
And it was one of those things.
You see these now.
You know, I've become pretty adept at knowing when the Russians are behind them.
A post on Facebook.
Sometimes you'll see a tell.
There's some tells.
And in this case, there is some search engine optimization happening.
Oh, boy.
That's called SEO.
SEO.
SEO.
Search engine optimization, I think, or optimization.
Yeah.
And that is a thing where the people in the CPAP game, the big players,
have crowded out any mention of CPAP.
that's off-license.
No kidding.
By putting multiple blog posts in the space with the headline, how to get an off-market CPAP machine, how to get a black market CPAP machine.
I've seen this.
You'll see this all the time where you're like, oh, what about there's some bullshit product?
I want to go see what the bullshit is about this.
And you'll find a page that says something like, you know, why not to...
Why to never buy a blah, blah, blah model CPAP machine?
And then you go there and it turns out to mostly be an ad for a CPAP machine.
And it says, please contact your MyChart to get the right appointment.
You know what I'm saying?
We're like, oh, you got me.
You got me because I thought this was going to be negative and instead is negatively positive.
And now I'm back where I started and I'm listening to Mahler.
You don't talk about extreme bullshit, man.
It's exactly what's happening here.
It's all these articles are like, you know, best way to get a, you know, a off off brand CPAP machine.
And then you go and you read the article and it's like, the last thing you want to do is get an off brand CPAP machine, contact your doctor and, uh, paid for by the American CPAP machine foundation.
Right.
And so they're all and and but but it's a racket because there isn't actually a reason that you and I couldn't buy one of these at the gas station.
But so what they have to tell you, they have to scare you and say, oh, it needs to be calibrated.
It needs to be.
Oh, if you don't get John, if you don't get calibrated.
It'll actually make it worse.
It could make it worse.
It could make it worse.
It could make it worse if it's not calibrated.
The doctor has to monitor it.
The doctor has to.
Oh, sure.
The doctor.
Otherwise, you know, it could kill you.
Wow.
Well, if you go on YouTube, there are 4,000 videos of guys, you know, like Beardo guys going, here's how you calibrate your CPAP machine.
And, you know, what is it?
It's a knob.
Like, if a 16-year-old kid can drive a Honda Civic, I think I can figure out how to calibrate a one-knob CPAP machine.
From your mouth to God's ear, John.
Like... But all of the blogs are devoted to... All of the fake blogs are out there to tell you that if you don't get... It's a prescription-only thing.
If you don't get a prescription, if your doctor isn't monitoring it, you're going to die.
And probably you're...
Probably your kids are going to die, too.
And so I kept digging.
I kept digging.
Because this infuriated me.
This, like, you know, smoking doesn't cause cancer brought to you by... Mm-hmm.
Philip Morris.
Altria.
So... So I find...
So I go on Craigslist.
No way.
Oh, that's a den of scum and villainy.
You need to be real careful on the list.
When you're hitting the list, you got to be real careful.
Well, I know.
You're going to end up in a bathtub, you know, with ice, packed with ice.
No, I don't, you know, and I don't want like, I don't want a nice lady to bring me the CPAP machine and show me how to work it.
Because I don't want to end up dead in a bathtub.
It's going to be kind of hot.
It's a little hot.
It's a little hot, although looking at the CPAP machines, there's nothing hot about it.
This is absolutely something that you only do.
You look kind of like an electronic elephant.
You look like those people in Dune.
You look like Max von Sydow.
You do.
Or no, like the floaty guy, the one with all the pimples.
Oh, you're talking about Baron Harkonnen.
Baron Harkonnen.
You're saying the sleep must flow.
The sleep must flow is exactly right.
And so, but you don't even get a sting.
You don't even get a bunch of old naked boys.
Yes.
Okay.
All right.
This is all taking sense.
So I go on there, and within, you know, within a three-hour drive, because, of course, all the CPAP machines, there are none of them in an urban environment.
They're all out.
Oh, that's so interesting.
Do you suppose it's sort of like that Hemingway, you know, six-word story?
Could be like CPAP machine for sale, CPAP machine, daddy's dead?
Yeah.
CPAP is not a thing that people that go dancing—
Very often.
G-Pap died with this on.
Pop-pop.
Pop-pop died with this on his elephant nose.
It really is.
They all say, like, only 400 hours.
Oh.
Because apparently you can lock some mega hours on a CPAP machine in not very long, right?
If you're sleeping eight hours a night.
Oh, because it's transformative is what you're saying.
Oh.
All of a sudden you're sleeping, you're sleeping, you're sleeping, you know, the sleep of the dune.
Okay.
What they say is if you need it, once you get it, you never want to be without.
I totally believe that.
It's like my mother-in-law's Ambien.
One doesn't want to say addiction, but my mother-in-law was super on Ambien.
And, you know, she would get real upset if she even ran low on Ambien.
Yeah.
Right?
Where at first you go like, oh, I don't know if I want to take Ambien.
Then pretty soon you're like Johnny Ambien.
You're saying here, like with Peepaw, like Peepaw never had, he hasn't had sleep like this since the war.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Or something.
I don't want it, you know, like I so don't want it, but I also don't want to, I just don't want what I have.
So I'm on there, and now—so here we are on the phone.
I have not gone and bought a CPAP machine on the black market from a 75-year-old man in Enumclaw, but I'm— I think it would be part of the estate sale.
Now, that would be fun for you.
You like an estate sale.
I do.
I do.
I'm not quite there yet because—
uh because the blogs because the brought to you by philip morris blogs are so emphatic yeah you will get uh you'll get a paralyzing case of meningitis if you even touch someone else's cpap machine wow these ones you know these ones for sale on craigslist they have the instruction manual they've you know they've been they've been fully sterilized and the thing is that that that the blogs will tell you oh you can never sterilize one
But then if you go to the next page of the blog, it's like detailed instructions on how to sterilize your CPAP machine because you have to do it.
Well, this is how I learned about William Shatner.
William Shatner has an advertisement where he talks about, hey, you probably don't know this about me, but I'm a CPAP man.
And he talks about how important it is to get the right kind of cleaner for your CPAP.
So you can actually, I don't know if it has his face on it, if it's like a Bruce Jenner Wheaties thing.
Um, but like, you know what I'm saying?
Like you would go and you say, Oh, give me the one that, uh, that the captain cleans with.
Uh huh.
I mean, well, I mean, otherwise what?
Otherwise you would just throw it out after one use.
I bet it's got snot in it.
That's the problem.
It has snot and meningitis probably.
Yeah.
It's filtering through your, through the parts of your body that are at least one guy is at least one guy has probably tried to fuck it.
Oh, for sure.
I mean, I don't know how, but for sure.
I mean, like that's, you know, you hear a lot of emergency room stories.
In this case, you're going to jerk it real good and maybe get meningitis in your dick hole.
There's such a great...
potential to use the CPAP machine in a kind of blue velvet way.
Oh, a hundred percent.
You just, you wear it.
But with that aspect of like a guy in an iron lung thing, like, well, I got to really listen to this guy.
He's, he's, I don't know how long he's going to be around, but he's, you know, you never meet in a movie.
You never meet somebody super nice.
Usually who's in an iron lung.
They usually got a chip on their shoulder, if you can see their shoulder.
But unfortunately, they're in this large water heater-looking motherfucker.
But in this case, that would be terrific for you.
And I think, unlike the oxygen my grandfather was on when we'd go out for Chinese food, I don't think you can roll around with your CPAP on a little trolley.
You can go to the store.
Eh.
That'd be kind of cool.
Like in case you want to just take a quick nap while your family's buying food.
I feel like the CPAP machine is small enough.
It's mobile enough that I could actually, you know, I could actually say like, here, you, here, just use, you move over here.
I'm going to have the CPAP machine.
I'm going to put it, you know, I'm going to put it on a, maybe I'll have it on a plane.
Wouldn't that be great for a long flight?
Uh-huh.
So it's your comfort machine.
Yeah.
So what,
What I want is to sleep for eight hours a night.
I don't want, nor should I, take medicine.
I don't want to, nor should I, take medicine to sleep.
That is a bad precedent for me.
Bad precedent, yeah.
But I will against...
Every fiber of my being that still sees myself as somebody that could sleep on a freight train at any given moment.
Every little corpuscle.
You never see a hobo with a CPAP.
That's right.
Or maybe you do these days.
Who knows?
But, you know, every time I walk out of the house, there's a part of me that says, be prepared to run.
Right.
Oh, absolutely.
Oh, I had this conversation literally this morning with my kid.
She makes announcements like, oh, I don't like eating.
I don't want to bring food to school.
Like, look, honey, you know, my biggest thing in life is to try to not give you an eating disorder.
But like, but like, you know, I have to run down this list of things because she comes home on a bus.
And I'm like, here's the problem.
I said, honey, and I'll keep this short, but I said, honey, my problem is that as with the five or even let's say 11 years that we went through, always have a jacket with you.
I'm going to tell you the same thing I said then, which is you're not putting a jacket on because you're wet and cold now.
You're bringing a jacket because you might be wet and cold later.
And I said, if I could say, I think my problem is you currently leave the house as though you're just stepping out for a little while when you need to be prepared for a mission that you don't even know about yet.
You're going to need, you should have a key, you should have money, you should probably have a multi-tool and maybe a towel.
Bring all these things along because there are missions out there.
You just don't know what the mission is that it exists.
You won't know until you go, oh shit, I should have brought a jacket and a CPAP.
You know what I mean?
That's, I learned this from you and it's huge for me.
That's why I carry this giant ass backpack around.
It's like, who knows, who knows what mission is waiting for me, you know?
And I mean, like a nice high heel might be very slenderizing, but what if I need to climb a fence?
When Harrison Ford left the office that day, he did not expect his wife to be killed by a one-armed man.
Yep.
And he did not expect that he was going to have to jump off of a dam in order to escape Tommy Lee Jones.
Yeah.
Tommy Lee Jones is a machine, man.
You know he's ready.
He's ready.
So this is the whole philosophy behind keep a small bag packed.
Like, I am always ready.
I'm always checking my six.
And when I see two guys, one of whom looks like Tommy Lee Jones in black suits, I put the truck in the maximum overdrive.
Get the hell out of there.
And that, and I used to feel that way even before I had a truck, but now I have a, keep a small backpack and then another small bag for my fucking CPAP machine.
What kind of, you know, like how gently am I going to go into this?
But you do usually bring a jacket, right?
You don't bring an umbrella cause you're from Seattle and you're not a monster, but you do bring a jacket when you go, right?
I don't bring an umbrella because Seattleites don't carry umbrellas.
They don't do that.
But like, you're going to go get in that truck.
And like I say, I'm just saying.
There's always a jacket in the truck.
It doesn't matter.
It could be 95 degrees.
There's a jacket in the truck.
Multi-tool duct tape.
I like to have Ziploc bags.
You know, I always carry a tennis racket.
Mm-hmm.
In case you want to act like you're in the kinks?
Well, no.
You never know when somebody's going to invite you to a game.
You know, you pull up at a thing.
Oh, so somebody says, tennis, anyone?
And you say, please and thank you.
I'm like, well, oh, well, so in the truck, I always have a tennis racket.
I always have a baseball mitt.
Um, I was at a frisbee and it's not because I'm Joe jock sporto guy, but if I'm out, if I'm out in the world, I leave the house.
Right.
I'm not good.
I don't want to say like, Oh, let me run back and get my baseball glove.
If you run into Bobby Riggs, who I assume is still alive, and he wants to throw a Frisbee around, what are you going to say?
And he'll probably want to bet you about it.
What are you going to say?
I can't.
No Frisbee.
The whole reason that Nabeel Ayers ended up being the drummer in The Long Winters is we were auditioning drummers.
We played with a bunch of different guys.
We narrowed it down to a few people.
And we were using John Auer's practice space, John Auer from the Poseys.
And John, we showed up to practice.
John was in there and it was one of those things where we knocked on the door and he opened it like just a crack.
And it wasn't clear whether he had any clothes on or not.
He could smell the gas.
And we were like, hey, we were supposed to practice.
And he was like, oh, give me 45 minutes or whatever.
And we're like, okay.
Okay.
Okay.
So we are out in the parking lot, and I had a Frisbee in the car.
And I was like, pulled the Frisbee out, tossed the Frisbee to Nabil across the parking lot.
Now you're making a friend.
Nabil caught the Frisbee, and he threw it back to me in such a way that I knew...
He was communicating to me.
He is the Kwisatz Saderach.
The thing is, you can communicate with a Frisbee.
And this happened with Reggie Watts, too.
Reggie and I were out.
This is years ago, 20 years ago.
No, fuck, 25 years ago.
We were out in a park and somebody threw a frisbee.
We were walking.
Somebody threw a frisbee.
I caught it.
I threw it to Reggie.
Reggie threw it to the guy.
And then all of a sudden, nobody said anything.
You got invited into the frisbee circle?
We just immediately, the three of us just immediately formed a giant triangle in the park.
Oh, man.
And started throwing... I don't know where we were headed.
We had a mission, but that mission was...
was suddenly over and we were 25 years old what fucking possible mission could we have had that mattered more than a frisbee game yeah and reggie reggie among his many many other talents is great with a frisbee i love to hear that i could i could totally see that extremely communicative with the frisbee very receptive to what you're saying with a frisbee a good good partner
Yeah, he gives as good as he gets.
And we were lucky that this third stranger that didn't know either of us also was very eloquent with a Frisbee.
So we're out in the parking lot and Nabeel just has so much to say with a Frisbee.
And of course, if you're very eloquent with a Frisbee, you don't have to announce it.
You're not flashy.
Yeah.
No, I think a big skill of frisbee is adjusting whatever your approach is to that of the other person.
So you could throw a frisbee with John Roderick or with a fairly young child or with a golfman, like some kind of like one of those ultimate guys.
And you could be, it's like improv.
It's exactly like improv.
And you're talking the whole time.
You're like, so anyway, what are you doing later?
Toss.
But what you're talking about is happening at one level, but what you're talking about with the Frisbee is happening at another level.
And at the end of this parking lot Frisbee game, I was like, look, Nabil's the drummer.
He's the guy.
He's so charming.
He really is charming.
We don't need to audition anybody else.
We don't need to run him a third time.
Like, he knows what I'm saying.
And, uh, and he, you know, I don't think we ever, I don't think we ever then or since have said the word frisbee.
It was just a, it was just like, and then my little arrow came out from behind and went and shot through like 11.
Oh, like a yondu.
Okay.
Yes.
I could, I could totally see that.
I found him.
I thought he was a nice, just for what it's worth.
Uh, I thought he was a nice addition to the band.
He's a very, very nice man.
Does he still run that record label with Pixies?
Yeah, he does.
He has that record label.
I guess someday I've got to figure out how he got that job.
That's so weird.
He was at a cocktail party.
He has conversations where he just talks about this mortal coil with people?
Yeah.
Yeah, no, he was standing around.
No, it's not just that.
He meets him.
He flies to London and meets him for coffee.
He meets the coil.
He goes to Scotland and meets the coil.
He meets the coil.
No, he was at a cocktail party standing around with a drink in his hand and somebody was like...
And he was like, yeah, right.
And they're like, oh, you run a record label?
And he's like, among other things.
And by the end of the night, they're like, here's my card.
Call me tomorrow and you're going to run 4AD.
And he was like, oh, all right, well, I'll move to New York.
I tried to have a little quick flex with that because, you know, I still listen to Pixies a lot.
And what was I, not Mountain Goats, but there was something, oh, you know what it was.
I actually did pull up the Cocteau Twins.
I pulled up Wax and Wayne.
I was thinking, oh, you know, my kid's a little bit gothy emo.
Like maybe I can, maybe there's an angle on getting her into 4AD bands.
And she's heard Pixies in the background since she was a kid, but not the gothy stuff.
And I ended up, as the sentence was forming in my head, I realized I should just abort.
But I said, you know, the guy who used to play drums with John's band, I think runs the American label that puts this out.
And she looked at me like I had just tried to describe, I don't know, some kind of alien food process or something.
And she's like, what are you talking about?
Who cares?
What a weird thing to say.
Yeah.
No, it's like when my dad would say, you know, when I first flew over Iwo Jima, I could see the Mount Suribachi.
And I was like, oh, God.
Fuck off.
You're such an idiot.
Whatever.
And so Nabil was in, but then he had to go run the music label.
But that's good stuff to have around because, and again, if there's one thing I could get across to you, the listener today, not as a fan, but as a friend, is that there are missions out there.
You don't know what the mission is.
You think you know what the mission is, but you don't know what the mission is until the mission has already become something that you're involved with.
But what I'm terrified of is that now in the back of my super cool truck, I've got a tennis racket.
I've got... Actually, at a certain point last... Your favorite chair, your paddle ball game.
Last summer, one of my tennis partners showed up with new tennis shoes.
God, I love to see you playing tennis.
She said, these aren't tenny runners.
These are tennis shoes.
They're shoes for tennis shoes.
And I was like, I looked down and I was playing with boat shoes and no socks.
And I said, well.
He used to be a Stan Smith man.
I was, and I've got some old Stan Smiths around here because I did that Chris Walla thing where I bought three pairs in 1994, and I'm still working through my second pair.
So smart.
But so I think at some point last summer, I bought a pair of shoes that were specifically for tennis.
So I have a tennis racket and shoes in a bag.
I've got a Frisbee.
I've got a baseball glove.
And apparently now...
A black market CPAP machine starting in a week when I can't stand it anymore because I slept three hours last night.
Wait a minute.
First of all, great job picking up the thread.
Are you going to be in receipt of a black market CPAP machine?
Can you say?
So here's my thinking.
Okay.
Even if I go through the rigmarole, I go to Issaquah on October 5th, there's going to be two weeks before they figure out what my little...
Oxygenator told them.
Then they're going to schedule a follow-up appointment for a sleep clinic.
The soonest they're going to be able to get me into that is Thanksgiving.
I was going to say, you're looking at the holiday season.
Then I'm going to do that.
If it happens.
If they decide that you could pull the sword from the stone and are worthy of the elephant strap-on.
Exactly.
If that happens.
And then after I do the sleep clinic, there's going to be another two months where they're in their MyChart.
You're like looking at each other, laughing, going, I wonder how much longer this guy can go without sleep before he dies.
Let's see if we can get him right to the edge.
And I'm not even... You know, there are people that are dying from lack of sleep.
I'm just...
I mean, it sounds like we're both inconvenienced by this.
It's past that.
Do you think you have sleep apnea?
Do you think you have the thing where you actually stop breathing?
I do.
I mean, I don't do it all the time, but I've had plenty of lady friends say, you stopped breathing a few times last night.
And I would go, really?
They're like, yeah, it's pretty – it's startling enough that it's something I noticed.
It's not like, oh, he's a snorer.
It's like – There's a thing where you go like – Did he just stop reading?
Yeah, I think John's dying.
Yeah, just like –
Gone.
What are you supposed to do in that?
You should probably have something that you're wearing in jammy jams with like a little note to let people know.
You know, like people put outside the bodega, the cat's not stuck.
The cat just likes being in this one really weird spot.
You need that, but for your lack of breathing.
And unfortunately for me... Also, don't touch my feet.
Because I'm a man in my 50s now, there's already a predisposition on the part of my lady friends to say, to make old man jokes and to say, like, should I call an ambulance?
There's already a should I call an ambulance kind of theme that runs through some of my relationships, which is it's good.
It's a it's a it's nice for laughs.
It's like, you know, ha ha.
Yeah.
Call an ambulance.
But then there's actually there.
There are these situations where they're like, no, seriously, should I call an ambulance?
And I don't want to be, you know, I've already got a great beer.
I look older than I am.
You're generating a lot.
In my case, I always feel like for myself anyway, I always feel like I'm generating because I don't even know what people say when I'm not around.
And just to be super clear, I do not want to know what people say when I'm not around.
As Dave Edgar said to you once very famously, that's not for you.
I don't want to know, but I imagine there have been some near ambulance calls in life.
Or a thing I've started doing sometimes is what I'm calling a reverse intervention.
What I will say is, I'll say, could you guys please come in here?
Because I have to tell you something.
And so I do an intervention on myself sometimes where I say, oh, here's a thing that I really got wrong.
You know what I mean?
That kind of thing.
But that does not mean I have all knowledge of the things.
But what you're talking about, if I understand, is you're saying even if that thing runs like a top – or sorry, even if the process runs like a top, which you know it won't, you're looking at sometime after turkey day to finally be able to sleep.
What harm is there, apart from meningitis and dick meningitis, what harm is there in going up to – I got Bellingham on the mind because of that nirvana thing.
But –
No, no, no.
Yeah, sorry.
No, no, I'm confusing my documentaries.
There's also, Bellingham is also involved in the multiple personality disorder guy and his brother trying to get him out of the country and into Canada.
That's what I was thinking of.
Oh, yeah.
It's a gateway to literally a gateway drug to Canada.
It's like an apology gateway.
Yeah, that's right.
They apologize as they send you over to Canada where they're really going to apologize.
It's like when you go up in a spaceship to meet the Cylons and you just sit at that desk waiting for something to happen.
Cylon warriors.
I'm sorry.
Sorry.
My feeling about going out to Puyallup and getting a used CPAP machine is that when I finally get my actual good CPAP machine, if I haven't contracted
meningitis from not having... Or dick meningitis.
Or dick meningitis for having not sterilized this thing properly.
Then what am I going to have?
Two CPAP machines.
Oh, who's the patient now?
That's right.
How is that ever going to be a bad thing?
I'm going to have a home CPAP machine and I'm going to have a truck CPAP machine.
You're like the Warriors.
You got different shirts depending on where you're playing.
You got a home CPAP and an away CPAP.
There it is.
You put it in your trolley.
You could go get some hot Sam's at the mall, roll it along with you.
You want to have eight or nine pretzels and a nap in front of the casual corner.
That's totally doable.
The next time I audition a drummer, I'm going to run out to the truck.
I'm going to bring in my CPAP machine.
And I'm going to be like, how's it going?
Sure.
And depending on his reaction, that's going to determine his or her reaction.
That's going to determine whether or not they're the drummer.
I totally agree.
I mean, I realize you can't really say, but hypothetically, you think you're going to do this?
Well, what's crazy is reading your friend's blog post and reading about it and reading about the people who say,
I put this thing on.
I didn't like it.
I didn't want to wear it.
I mean, there's no one... If there was anyone in the world who was like, I can't wait to wear this apparatus while I sleep.
Like, what a psycho, right?
Nobody wants this.
It's just like...
But it's like lamentable, where it's like, I didn't realize it was doing anything until I stopped doing it.
And in this case, that's what it sounds like, because people are like, I've never slept this well in my life.
And if I don't have it, I immediately relapse back into this state that I didn't realize was so miserable for my life.
When my daughter was little, two and three and four, she would stop breathing in the night.
Oh, no.
I've woken our baby up so many times when she was a baby.
We shake the baby.
Yeah, it was terrible.
When our cat was dying a couple weeks ago, we were dealing with the cat, too.
I'd shake the cat to make sure.
Yeah.
And then she'd move a little bit.
I'd say, the cat's not dead yet.
Did you ever pick the cat up and go, Gupta?
No.
I don't know that.
Is that a thing?
The queen is coming.
Yeah.
She's going to have to look that up.
I feel really bad.
Gupta.
Anyway, she would stop breathing, you say.
And so I spent, as is true for, I think, a lot of new parents, but for four years, I would go in and sit next to her bed while she slept in the dark and watch her stop breathing.
And so stressful.
It's so stressful.
Don't you feel crazy?
I mean, I felt.
But she was legitimately not breathing.
She would stop breathing and then gasp, you know.
So we took her to the doctor and the doctor looked inside of her eyes, ears, nose and throat.
And the doctor laughed audibly, laughed out loud.
And I was like, what?
Was it a crayon?
No, she said, this child has the largest adenoids I've ever seen.
And the adenoids, of course, are like a tonsil-like thing.
Isn't that the thing that makes you sound like Jerry Lewis?
Oh, he's adenoidal.
Yeah, I think.
Whatever it is, it's some little flap.
It's some unnecessary flap.
You sounded a little like Miles Davis, but I'll allow it.
It's a flap.
It's a flap.
It's a flap.
You don't need the flap, and she had really big adenoids.
Well, the thing is, you know, if you go, anybody who's very interested can go look at a picture of me online, and you will notice that I do not have a large nose.
And when I was little, when I was a little kid, it's very cute for a kid to have a little pug nose, a little turned up nose.
Oh, like you're a Persian cat.
Well, it's not like a pug nose, but it's a little nose.
That's good.
I had a cute little nose.
And when I was a kid, I had ash blonde hair and I had freckles and a cute little nose.
And I should have been on television instead of that kid with the big Coke bottle glasses that was the new kid on Eight is Enough or whatever.
Yeah.
Oh, I think you're confusing Jonathan Lipnicki with probably Mason Reese and Adam.
What's his name?
Adam Driver?
Was that the kid on It Is Enough?
I think it was his name.
No, I forget who that is.
Mason Reese is who I was thinking of.
He's Borgesmord.
I should have been Mason Reese.
Borgesmord.
Because, you know, we're the same age.
It would have been first.
You would have been so cute.
I would love to see you have a guest.
Or Robbie Rist, I think you think of.
Maybe Robbie Rist later doing a punk rock thing.
Robbie Rist, Cousin Oliver.
You're right.
It's cousin Oliver is who I'm talking about.
I would have been a perfect cousin.
Exactly.
Oh boy.
Little, little pug nose.
But then you get to be a full grown person.
A little pug nose is no longer an advantage.
And even if I just sit here trying to breathe through my nose, you know, it's, it's, I'm sure I've never gone to a doctor and asked, but I'm sure I have my daughter's adenoids.
Oh, no.
She doesn't need them.
I'm going to put on a Breathe Right strip right now.
We took her down to the hospital and got her tonsils out and her head in one big fell swoop.
Oh, my gosh.
It was a very stressful event for us.
She was four years old.
They got to put her under, right?
They put her under.
They gave her her little anesthesia mask, and she still has it or had it until three days ago.
And every once in a while, she will pick it up and do a blue velvet.
She'll go and breathe through her anesthesia mask.
Oh, my God, yes.
And the other day, I found it in her room, and, you know, the plastic is starting to get kind of gummy.
And so I took it in the garbage.
Those are probably not archival quality.
No, no, no.
It had started to be gross.
And as you know, kids don't notice groans.
But we got that stuff taken out of her body.
And, you know, I've got some wonderful recordings of her as a four-year-old going, ah.
With her little tonsillitis voice.
But now she can breathe and she's never stopped breathing in the night since then.
You know, I still go in and sit and watch her sleep, but for other reasons.
I'm not worried that she's going to die.
And I'm realizing, oh, I should have had my tonsils and adenoids out when I was five years old.
It was really hot.
You remember?
Like, there's always these flavor of the month things.
And for a while, it was everybody had to add their tonsils out.
And you get to eat all the ice cream you want.
And, like, that was the racket back then.
1977, everybody got their tonsils out.
And I didn't because my mom didn't believe in doctors.
Good for her.
That's Ohio smart.
You know, she believes in vaccines.
She just doesn't believe in doctors.
So here I am.
I line up the same way.
I've never been able to breathe.
My whole life I haven't been able to breathe.
I still can't breathe.
The thing is, if you get a tonsillectomy when you're 55 years old, it takes six months to recuperate.
It's one of those things like chicken pox where it's worse as you get older.
You get older.
You don't want a surgery inside your throat.
No.
No.
That's your instrument, John.
So they say they put the CPAP on you and it forces air in.
Whether you want it or not, you're going to get air.
Yep, yep, yep.
And then everybody says, I woke up the next day and the first thing I did, I walked out on the front porch and I lift a car off of a trapped child.
Yes.
And then after that, I threw a javelin 150 meters.
Couldn't do it before.
Couldn't do it before.
And I gave sex to my wife.
You can give sex now because the blood is being invigorated with this new introduction of oxygen.
That's right.
And there's a lot of blood in me.
I'm like one of those, you know, when you take a big truck to the oil change place and you have to pay like a surcharge because your truck takes two quarts of oil more than a regular truck.
Oh, because you're sanguine.
I get it.
And they're like, oh yeah, it's a $35 oil change except for your truck.
It's a $50 oil change.
And I'm the same way.
You know, there's probably two extra pints of blood in me.
So that might mean, if I understand what you're saying, I'm not a scientician, but what you're saying is, like, if you get the same amount of oxygen as everybody else, God willing, that's still not enough because you've got to oxygenate so much more blood than your garden variety breather.
That's right.
And the only reason that I'm probably not dead, the only reason that some girlfriend hasn't had to actually call an ambulance is because I've got extra blood.
So the ultimate amount of oxygen is sufficient.
But imagine.
You might become a superhero.
Imagine if I had oxygen in my blood.
Bullshit in the magazines about you only use, you know, 5% of your brain, which of course is bullshit.
But in this case, what if you're only using 5% of your blood?
Yeah.
Right.
I mean, you can give so much sex.
Think about how many digressions I could go on in the course of a day.
You know, we got to both, we got to both get this.
And I think this show, I mean, it's been a modest success for somebody, I assume.
Can you,
fucking imagine we would be like you know dick cavett take a dirt road we would be blowing shit up if we could fully if we had fully addressable oxygen blood introduction and i i would i would do that i cannot wait to hear how this goes let me ask you this do you in the course of your normal life
Do you get accused by the people close to you that sometimes you are podcasting at them?
Just in the just in the scent here at the grocery.
Oh, you know what?
I don't think.
No, I don't think people say that.
But there is a lot of eye rolling about the sort of discourse that other people appreciate.
And my family does not.
Yeah.
Yeah.
For several years there.
Do you get that?
Several years in the mid-2010s, there were a few people close to me that every once in a while would look up from their book and say, stop tweeting at me.
Because I would say things to them and they would say, that's not a thing that you're saying to me, that's a tweet.
Oh, you can see some like, now do Donald Trump Jr.
And you make that noise.
Yeah, we're driving down the street and I'm like, oh, turns out, you know, seven out of 10 dentists.
And they're like, stop tweeting at me.
Yeah, if this is 30 years, you haven't been paying attention, merp.
The thing about the thing about the way that I digress, you know, my daughter and I.
have a relationship that is increasingly, uh, based on her, um, like contempt for me.
Yes.
You mentioned this last week that basically it's, it's something she doesn't even try to cover up anymore.
Yeah.
She's become, she's become radically candid.
She has a, she, she has not yet figured out that what she, what the devastating thing she's going to say to me one day is stop podcasting at me.
Because she'll say, she'll ask a simple question, you know, what?
Like, why don't you get a new mailbox?
Because your mailbox is rusty and falling down.
And I'll say, in 1874.
Yeah.
A man by the name of, and she, so one day she's going to say.
But you always proceed by saying, I want to tell you a little bit about NatureBox.
Let me tell you a little bit.
Or about Rocket Mortgage?
You can do Rocket Mortgage, you know?
Let's get the encyclopedia down and we'll look up mortgages.
Ugh.
Tom Selleck says if this was something that was going to take, he's got a whole new series.
He said for two years he's had these ads where he's incredibly frustrated.
He's so tired of having to explain to elderly people that a reverse mortgage is not a way to take away your home.
I saw a new one today that recently came out, and he's losing his fucking mind.
He's so goddamn angry that he has to explain this to you.
Tom Selleck?
Yes.
Well, it's like, you know what?
I always thought the worst job in some ways would be being in TSA.
And like we got to keep saying no three ounces of water and somebody brings a bazooka through and a gallon of water.
And no matter how many times you say that, you're still going to have one out of 10 people forget about it, including me, if I'm being honest.
That's right.
Tom Selleck has had it with that.
And so but whatever it is that you can look, the thing is getting capturing the youth market is very valuable to people.
If you could do a bespoke job.
uh, intra podcast in your house to your kid.
And if it wasn't even recorded, but she would still go and use this very special offer code at checkout.
Selick, Selick 21.
Uh huh.
Uh huh.
Don't podcast at me.
My family, my family's worthless.
I'm very, I'm very interested in people like Tom Selick.
Like if you were, if you were George Clooney,
Okay.
And you're rich and you're living in Lake Cuomo and you've got a lovely family.
He's got that cool house.
Yeah, he's got a famously cool house.
And you say, why would George Clooney ever work again?
And then you realize... Yeah, him and Danny DeVito are in those coffee ads.
It's strange.
Yeah, but you know, George Clooney, a job for George Clooney is he puts on a tuxedo and he stands there and he's George Clooney and people throw money at him.
He's George Clooney.
That's his job.
But Tom Selleck also probably has enough money to live just fine for the rest of his life.
I guess.
But he's out there...
Super angry about reverse mortgages?
He's so mad about reverse mortgages.
Why do that to yourself?
I'll go look on iSpot.
There's a really good website where you can go.
And, you know, a lot of these folks, they put them on YouTube now, too.
Like yesterday, I found an ad for DoorDash that has a basset hound in it.
And I've had a hankering for a basset hound for a while.
Don't at me.
And so I sent that to the family.
And I said, what I always say, I said, bring me this dog.
And that's because you can find these advertisements.
I will find the Tom Selleck advertisement for you.
He's fucking mad.
Basset hound will stand right on top of its own ears.
Right on top of its own ears.
A basset hound.
Oh, my God.
Stand on its ears.
All I know is I want a dog with short legs and big feet.
I want a big-footed dog.
Maybe a black toenail dog.
I want, like, a big-footed dog.
You know what I'm saying?
What's going to happen, though?
What's going to happen is that you, that I'm going to get a black market CPAP machine.
And I'm going to sit on it.
And then you and I are going to do a show.
And you're going to say, what happened to you?
I can't keep up.
You're so on fire.
All of a sudden, your voice has gone up an octave.
And you are talking about crazy shit right now.
And I'm like, that's right, Merlin.
That's right.
And guess why?
Because I bought a CPAP machine on Craigslist in Puyallup.
I didn't die.
Now I'm alive.
I'm finally alive.
And then you're going to go get... You're going to go out to East Bay somewhere.
You're going to go out to Maple Valley.
I'll go out to Gold Country.
I'll do a Contra Costa.
I'll do somewhere east of Sacto.
I'm pretty sure there's going to be some decedent
CPAP machines out there.
I might just get a whole bunch of them, try different ones, because guess what?
You can just sell it again.
You go into San Francisco, you're going to get a good rate for it.
Here it is.
You sterilize it.
You sell it to some software guy who's embarrassed to even need a CPAP machine, kind of like me.
That's right.
He's not having sex anyway.
Well, here's what happened this morning.
And this is what really, the moments before I came to my private office to talk to you, what I had done was I have two different pairs of shoes that in these COVID times, I think my feet have gotten broad.
I don't want to say fat because we don't say that anymore.
I think my feet have gotten broad.
So both my, you know, those, you know, those cool suede pumas she can get?
You know, the plastic with the white, white pumas swoosh.
And I also got a pair of shoes from Adams, which is a company that makes purportedly comfortable shoes.
And so what I did was on my left foot, I put the blue Puma and the right foot, I put the Adams shoe.
It wasn't until I went down to the, and I walked around all morning doing my morning chores, took my kid to school and stuff.
And then I looked down when I was going to step onto my scooter and I realized I still had two different shoes on.
Now, that's, I mean, that's not, it's a kind of humorous anecdote, but that's what I'm dealing with.
The Breathe Right strips are not doing it for me.
I think I need to go to gold country.
I need to go pick up a CPAP.
And John, can I even do this show with you?
Is it, I mean.
No, because you're going to need one too.
We're not going to be able to.
That's what I'm saying.
It's going to be like if you went and did an exhibition, again, back to Bobby Riggs and Billie Jean King.
We're out there doing exhibition matches.
Or maybe it's Jimmy Conner and Nancy Lopez, who I think is a golfer.
But in any case, I'm not going to be able to keep up with you.
You're going to be so fucking oxygenated.
You're just going to leave me in the dirt.
You'll probably take pity on me and slow it down.
If I don't get a gold country CPAP, I don't know how I'm going to do my programs, let alone have my shoes match.
One of the things I think that our listeners slash friends slash fans slash... Supporters?
Supporters.
What were the other ones?
I don't remember.
Our people... Yeah.
Yeah.
One of the things that they're probably saying right now is how could these two guys put more information into an hour?
There's already so much.
And they're right.
Well, sometimes we just get a longer hour.
But what happens when we double the amount of content because we're both so oxygenated?
We're going to have to have, there's going to be overflow.
We're going to have more energy.
Can I point out that this is where we hit our first major scale problem?
There's a small scale problem of we both need to get a CPAP machine, but are sick of kowtowing to the fucking man.
But in the event that we do both get CPAPs before Thanksgiving, you know, Dianu, like, but then guess what?
There's like at least 78 people who listen to this show.
Now what's going to happen to our, as you say, listeners?
Yeah.
Are they going to need to get a CPAP to get oxygenated enough to keep up with what John is sharing?
The problem is, if we are responsible for one death from a black market CPAP machine, it's going to feel to me like the Who in 1980 or whatever.
But we're going to hear a report of a beloved family.
Maybe one of those people who's like, why don't you start a Patreon?
We'll be like, I don't know.
And then you find out they got dick meningitis and died because they fucked up Gold Country CPAP.
Fuck.
I don't know if I can live with that, but also, conversely, I can't live without it.
So, this is the thing, right?
Your mileage may vary, as the internet says, YMMV.
YMMV.
But also, we are not saying that you should go buy it.
Don't fucking use medical appliance unless it's been cleared by your MyChart.
And I did sign up for MyChart, so I'm in.
You did.
Okay, good, good.
You're going to be very surprised.
I did it without an activation code.
So it sent me through a truly hilarious series of questions powered by Experian.
And so I had to do that thing where it goes like, oh, which of this array is this piece of information we're not supposed to know that we know?
One of them was whether I had that I had purchased pet insurance in the past and for which one of these animals names.
And I wish I'd screenshotted this, but it was like, you know, Coco and Jim Jack and, you know, Pleasance.
And I was like, no, none of these.
So, you know, you pick number five and you say like none of these because it's using it's powered by experience.
Have you purchased pet insurance?
No.
And I haven't gotten a mortgage.
I shouldn't say, you know what?
I'm not going to say anything more because you could go steal my, steal my identity on my chart.
But yeah, I did do one screen grab.
The first one it gave me though, I'll send this to you.
It's just one of those things where you're like, I, this is like that.
Yeah.
Okay.
So here's one.
The first one I hit, this is called the precise ID system powered by Experian.
Using your date of birth, please select your astrological sun sign of the Zodiac from the following choices.
Astrological sun sign of the zodiac.
Yeah, which sounds like it's been Google translated, but it gives you me four of the constellations.
And then the fifth choice is none of the above slash does not apply.
But, you know, it's sort of like IQ tests where it's like, well, don't we know that IQ tests are very biased towards certain kinds of cultural backgrounds and then biased against others.
And in this case, like, I don't believe in the Zodiac.
Is this going to go back?
Is this going to go on my record as somebody who knows that he's an Aries or what have you?
Right, right.
Now you've outed yourself as someone who knows he's an Aries.
That's the way the KGB works.
You feed them this information, you know?
So I don't know, but do you have a rough time frame?
When did you quit beating your wife, Marilyn?
I don't know.
It does not apply.
Okay.
okay listen though seriously we're not done hour and 16 minutes here's the thing what yeah what's your time frame for this just so i know because i'm gonna as soon as we're done here i'm gonna edit this uh or this episode and put it up for our listeners yeah but then i'm gonna go i don't know if i want to go on craigslist but i might try and find some other back alleys sure sure sure i have family in gold country so maybe that's a place that i could could go out and try it um what's your rough time frame if this does happen privately what's your rough time frame really a couple weeks
Well, so I got to go to a baseball game today.
It's the end of the season.
The Mariners are doing well.
All my baseball friends, you know, my baseball friends, they, uh, in the, in this, the, uh, the summer that was supposed to be the summer that COVID was over, uh, one of the ways that my friends got, got, um, got the gangs back together.
They all, independent of one another, these separate little gangs were like, hey, why don't we go to a baseball game?
And so I ended up going to, you know, probably, what, 10 baseball games this summer.
Oh, that's so funny.
Because, you know, I got this little gang that want to go to a baseball game.
And then two days later, this little gang wants to go to a baseball game.
Is that like a Jason Finn kind of thing?
Yeah, you know, you got Ben and Chad over here.
Ben likes it.
Yeah, okay.
You know, you got George Meyer over here.
Oh, George Meyer, tell him I said hi.
I enjoy his work.
Ken Jennings threw out a first pitch at a game.
Okay, tell everyone but Ken Jennings that I said hi.
I'll say hi.
I'm just kidding.
Tell Ken Jennings I said hi, too.
Yeah, tell Ben.
Ask if he remembers meeting my daughter when she was a toddler.
I bet he does.
I will.
I'll throw that out.
That might have been the night that you spent on the streetcar.
No, no, no.
Never say that.
Never say that.
Oh, sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry.
The night you met MC Hammer's mom.
The night I met MC Hammer's mom.
It was literally Hammer time.
So you're going to a baseball game and then you're going to have a CPAP machine.
So I can't do it tonight because I'm going to a baseball game and I can't do it tomorrow because I'm going to a baseball game.
If only, John, if only you had your second CPAP machine to take to the game.
This is what I'm saying.
On Wednesday, it is— Now I want oxygen, too.
It's not inconceivable that on Wednesday, I will drive down to Spanaway or out to Lakewood and pick up a black market CPAP machine.
Black market CPAP machine.
Okay.
And then I'm going to go on YouTube, and I'm going to watch a bunch of different guys tell me how easy it is to sterilize and calibrate—
After I read the blogs that tell me it's impossible to sterilize or calibrate without a doctor's help.
Yeah.
And I'm just going to go rogue.
I'm going to go rogue.
You might become the most oxygenated man in Washington.
That's not out of the question at this point.
I wonder how much oxygen you can really take.
There must be a point of, no, there's a word for this, hypooxygenated.
I don't know.
I'm going to guess from the Latin.
But are you saying you could be too oxygenated?
What if improbably, heaven forfend, you accidentally get too much oxygen, even given your sanguine nature, and you over-oxygenate the huge amount of blood you have?
That's going to be a very costly oil change, let's be honest.
Well, here's the thing.
When your grandpa goes to like a long junk Silvers and he's carrying his oxygen tank.
On his trolley.
That thing is actually full of oxygen.
Whereas a CPAP machine isn't putting oxygen in you.
It's just putting air in you.
Oh.
So I don't think you can get over-oxidated.
It's not like a vape?
You can't get different flavors?
No.
Well, there's a little tank that has water if you get the one that has the humidifier.
But, like, what if you could just patch in just a little bit of nitrous oxide?
Not a lot.
Your dreams would be so amazing.
Oh, my God.
What if vape, but too much?
You know what I'm saying?
This is the—wait a minute.
Can you vape nitrous oxide?
I'll find out.
That would change the game for me.
If you want a gold country, I'm going to go fuck a Juul.
I have to say, since 1994, since December of 1994, I have not had any drugs or alcohol.
It's been since December 10th, 1994.
No drugs and no alcohol.
Yeah.
You don't even want my cold medicine I try to give you.
I won't take cold medicine.
Leave it.
Leave it.
I don't want anything to do with it.
When I get injured and they give me pain medicine, I don't take it.
You said give me a belt to bite.
I'll bite the belt.
You know what?
I'll, I'll strap, I'll strap two fingers together with a pair of chopsticks and I'll be fine.
But, and this is a, this is a terrible admission and I might get, I might get some letters.
Oh boy.
When someone is making an ice cream sundae at the house and they get to the end of the whipped cream and it goes, I take the can and I say, okay, everyone, you know, back down to the TV room.
And they all go down to the TV room with their bowls of ice cream.
And then I look, I look left and I look right.
And if nobody's watching, I go.