Ep. 440: "Sur La Sac"
Hello.
Hi, John.
Hi, Merlin.
Sound good.
Well, it's early.
How'd you sleep last night?
I got some sleep.
Today is the day that my sleep oxygenation mission is scheduled up in Issaquah.
Is this where you... It's early.
You finally got the right thing scheduled with the right people at the right time for the right thing?
Apparently, apparently.
Let's see.
This is without respect to the Craigslist black market items.
Nope, nope.
This is a 3 p.m.
appointment today.
I'm headed up there.
I was just sitting here reading an article in Psychology Today that someone sent me about
Highly sensitive people.
Were they trying to help?
Oh, yeah.
Was it a commentary?
Everybody's trying to help.
And I'm wearing a sweatshirt, a zip-up hoodie, but without a shirt on underneath it, which is completely unprecedented.
Why are you doing that, John?
Well, you know, I looked in the closet.
You know, we're in a transition period right now, of course, because it's... Because of the seasons?
The seasons are changing, yeah.
Yeah, yep, yep.
They're always changing.
I took the short-sleeved shirts out of the closet and put them in a bag.
And so it's just long-sleeved shirts now.
Hmm.
But there's part of me that's just not ready.
I'm just not ready to go into long-sleeved shirts.
And so this felt like a compromise, and I don't know why.
I don't know why it felt like it's not a compromise.
We have a lot of actual things to talk about here, so I don't want to open up a new thread.
But at some point, I would like to discuss, for me personally, the importance of personal climactic and environmental management.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Oh, yeah.
And I feel like the long sleeve shirt is a big piece of that.
I think we should each, you know, you know what they say on the planes.
What they used to say is put on your own mask, you know, before you help anybody else.
Oh, of course.
Of course.
And I think a long sleeve shirt.
Like the American planes.
Oh, you mean like where the deer and the antelope play?
Yeah.
Is that a thing that they said out on the planes?
Put on your own mask first.
Put on your own mask.
Yep.
Eddie Fisher used to be out there.
I was like, wow.
What an ancient phrase.
I guess I don't know how they meant it.
It can mean a lot of things.
Yes, transition.
Yes.
No so far to Craigslist.
No so far.
Was there any special prep?
Did you have to, like, you know, sometimes when they check your butt, you got to drink something or you got to not have breakfast?
Apart from appearing shirtless under a sweatshirt, is there any other prep for your 3 p.m.
appointment?
Well, you know, the last time I had an appointment,
I followed all their protocol.
They sent me an email, check into your appointment now.
And I was like, okay.
You know, I did all the stuff.
Go to your MyChart.
Okie dokie.
And this time when I started getting those emails...
Sign in for your appointment.
I was like, fuck you.
And so now, you know, because they lost my trust, Marlon.
They lost your trust.
The people in my chart lost your trust.
Yeah.
Yeah.
The good people in my chart lost my trust.
And so now here we are.
Maybe better if they just called it their chart.
Yeah, that's how I feel at it.
I feel it's their chart or my chart.
Yeah.
You can call it my chart all day, but that doesn't make it my chart.
I mean, it sounds to me like basically you've agreed that if I agree to the terms and conditions of the EULA, then I'm allowed to, you will lend me your chart.
But I don't get to like have my own chart.
Really, it's the chart you feel like giving me this week.
That's right.
If it was truly my chart, we would have started way back upstream.
But also if it were my chart, it would be incomplete.
And it wouldn't.
Yeah, but that's part of it being your chart.
I mean, if somebody handed you your Subway card and it was already all punched, then it wouldn't be a card.
It would just be a free sandwich.
Free sandwich.
It's your journey.
And it should be your chart.
I don't, I'm sorry.
I don't mean to derail this.
No, no, no.
It's okay.
Let's go.
Okay, so they're not going to put the wires on you.
This is the preliminary pre-check-in where somebody strokes their beard and asks you questions about your sleep patterns.
Do you know?
What do you anticipate happening at 3?
I'm going to drive up to Issaquah.
Mm-hmm.
Issaquah used to be a charming little mountain town about, what is it, 45 minutes to the east, right in the foot of the mountains.
It was a cowboy town, and then it became a bedroom community for Microsoft employees.
And so it ended up being like those towns up there north of Sausalito where it's like, this looks like a little town, except, boy, there's a lot of money here.
There's no money in a little town.
No money in a little town.
And then there were all these crazy housing developments where they took a bunch of forest and they chopped it all down and they built McMansions right close to each other.
It's the whole, it's the American story.
And this is Redmond adjacent?
No, it's further up.
There you go.
Maybe it's sort of similar, and I'm not going to try to drop too many names because you're way better at it than I am, but there's a thing that happens in the Bay Area or has happened, as you can imagine, for some time, which is these charming small towns or these growing mid-sized towns or whatever suddenly get this influx of people because for this month anyway, they could afford a house there.
Mm-hmm.
or a rental there.
Like there were cases, there was an article in the paper 20 years ago about a janitor at Stanford who lived in like, I want to say like Contra Costa County, but, but also that could go for, I mean, you know, like San Jose, that used to be a nice little quiet, quiet town.
No, not so much.
So it's called Issaquah, is that right?
Issaquah, yeah.
I feel like the area around the bay there, the city that rocks, the city that never stops, the city by the bay,
the city that you literally built on rock and roll did you know that originally that song was about los angeles whoa i mean they're kind of from the marina journey yeah yeah but uh or pack heights maybe but uh no they're mostly an la band and you know the original lyric i'm gonna blow your mind ready
When the lights go down in the city and the sun shines on L.A.
Oh, dear.
How about that?
How do you feel about that?
It's terrible, but I was actually referencing the song by Jefferson, Starship, or I'm sorry.
Well, you were later, but at first you were talking about the city by the bay.
Oh, the city by the bay.
Yeah, that's the city that rocks and that never stops.
Talking about Cleveland?
Yeah.
That's also a city that rocks that they built on rock and roll.
But no, I'm talking about your own city.
The city was gone.
It was.
That's a different city.
No, that's true.
That's the same.
No, it's a different.
Boy, it's really hard to tell what she's talking about there.
I mean, they should be clearer about all this stuff.
But you're not going there to meet Steve Perry, I think.
Does he have the Dennis DeYoung thing where he's afraid of lights?
What's the thing where they had to get the Filipina fella to come in and be Steve Perry?
Didn't they have to do a little switch him up?
Because Dennis DeYoung's the one who's scared of lights, right?
I thought Dennis DeYoung got kicked out of Styx because he was too difficult to work.
He was their Peter Cetera.
That was part of the problem.
Yeah, he was just a bad, I thought he was a bad bandmate.
If you don't know who the Cetera in the room is, it's definitely you.
Ooh, God, what a curse.
Well, let me talk to Pete.
You know what I'm saying?
I feel like the thing about Steve Perry was just that, as happens to all of us, he couldn't hit the notes anymore.
Oh, is that right?
He didn't want to go out and transpose all the songs down a step and a half.
He had his millions and he wanted to just go gently.
So he'll always have Oh Sherry.
You can't sing that stuff when you're 70 years old.
It's too high.
Yeah, it's too high.
I'm doing the head voice thing where you switch to a falsetto.
Steve Perry didn't used to always have to do that.
He had that cool sleeveless shirt with like a tiger pattern on it.
That was a good time for them.
I never liked him as a thing to watch, but I did like him as a thing to listen to.
They had that one record, a couple records where they crossed over.
I think by the time they got to Escape, things were getting a little bit silly.
But they had that period where they go from, I don't know the names of them.
It's like, you know, they all have a name.
The names are always like a noun, right?
You know, my deep, deep knowledge of journey is not that deep.
I go, I go sort of, I, I, you know, I love the singles.
I love the singles.
Oh, I'm telling you, man, you could go, you could go and put on one of those late seventies, early, early eighties.
You could go, uh, let's see.
No, what's the good one?
What's the good one?
What's the escape is the escape is the pretty good one.
That's the one with open arms.
But before that you got when Greg Raleigh still thought he was the singer.
And so they do that one, two punch of, um, of any time.
And, uh, what are the two songs?
Yeah.
They do the two songs.
I got no, I honestly have the zero, zero.
I'm sorry.
I'm sorry.
I'm sorry.
I brought it up.
I just, I had a terrible night's sleep, John.
I'm drinking three.
No, no, no, no.
Oh, that explains so much.
The very wholesome topic.
You wanted to talk about the sleep study and it's you you want to talk about.
It was a backdoor topic.
Oh, tell me about your night of sleep.
No, it's okay.
It's just that.
Did a lizard crawl on you?
Did somebody drop a pan in the kitchen?
No, no, no.
That only dropped a pan.
Only British people can fly.
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Um, here's the thing.
Hot tub's too hot.
It's not funny.
It's not funny when the hot tub's too hot.
He's got this little chair for you.
Mm-hmm.
Go on.
All this wicker.
God damn it.
Nice pull.
I didn't think you liked comedy.
Um, no, it's just that the last two nights I've been having the dream, uh, the kind of, uh, there's, most of my dreams are pretty, and don't worry, I'm not going to tell you my dream.
Um, it's, uh, it's, uh, well, I,
Well, I'm always happy to share my dreams, but there's a kind of creative dream that's fun where something happens.
But then there's a kind of what I want to call a functional dream where even as I'm stuck in the functional dream and it's usually the latter part of the night, I could tell because my sleep app tells me how badly I'm sleeping at this time.
And I'm not getting any deep sleep.
And I know it's because I'm having a functional dream and a functional dream.
Hang on just a second.
Does the sleep app cause you, does the sleep app contribute to your, your anxiety about sleep?
No.
Are you performing for your sleep app?
No, it doesn't.
I think that is, it's a very good question.
I think it absolutely can cause anxiety, especially for people who like come in, the snorks who come in and are like, ah, I'm pretty sure my sleep is terrible.
I should get an app.
And then they obsess over the app.
They can, they may choose to maybe unintentionally.
I've been doing this for years and it just runs.
So I mainly use it as a way to like, before I even look at it, I say to myself, I say, huh, I wonder how I slept last night.
And I make a guess.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Oh, good.
Oh, good.
That seems fun.
And that can confirm that.
But anyway, you had a maintenance dream.
Oh, functional.
I had a maintenance dream.
It was very functional.
And that's the kind of dream where even as I'm in it and I can't get out of it, I have to do something impossible that's impossible in an impossible way.
And it's impossible for me to do.
Hmm.
I don't know if you ever have these, but like a puzzle or, or like, Hey, carry this, uh, that's very large, uh, engine block up a hill or what?
Yeah, it sure could be.
But like, no, the problem is like, even if I explain it to you, you're either going to get it or you're not going to get it.
Sure.
Or, you know, once you know, you know, you know.
Yeah.
And so night before last, for example, I had a classic, which is that, uh, I had to, um, Oh wait, I think I might've actually written this down.
You may be,
You may get the bad fortune of me actually having written this one down.
Okay.
Wait, do you keep a dream journal?
Oh, yeah.
I write down.
Anytime I have a dream that I can remember, I write it down.
Yeah.
Oh, interesting.
And then when you go back and read about them, does it all sound like gibberish or do you go, oh, right.
Oh, no.
Well, I would love to talk about this because my thing is, and a friend of the show, John Syracuse, said it's just brain garbage when you have a dream.
I accept that a dream is brain garbage, but I think the way it made us feel, even though it's brain garbage, is important.
And I think what we take away from a dream...
You know, okay, so here's a dream.
Let's see.
This was, oh, yeah.
Okay, so, yeah, this was the 10-3, so Sunday morning I wrote this down.
Ready?
Were you coming down?
Sunday morning coming down, clean his dirty shirt.
Yep, yep, yep, yep, yep.
Professional poster printing apparatus is sharp, hot, and way too heavy to take on a plane, plus the posters have to always be sung in odd numbers, and the printer itself can't print posters without also printing all printers themselves, and this cannot be turned off.
The Paris airport pretzels giggle and the ATM's giving you the stink eye.
You've been on the flight since at least yesterday.
That's the dream.
Wow, there's a lot going on.
There's a lot going on there.
I'll tell you why I think me writing my dreams down is special.
If you listen to you, you out there, the listener, the global you, you tell me a dream with too much of a story and I say, fuck.
I say that's a story.
That's you putting together a thing that you could tell as a story.
If it makes too much sense, it's not a real dream.
For it to be a real dream, you have to lean into, you can't say stuff like it's your house, but it's not your house.
You got to say what it was in the dream as closely as you can.
And the less it makes sense, the more likely I am to believe that it's a dream.
Now, in this case, you could tell somewhere in there, and it's a loop.
I've been on the plane since at least yesterday.
There's a professional poster printing apparatus, and it's sharp, hot, and way too heavy to get on a plane.
Now, you can't print the posters without also printing all the printers.
Yeah, I heard that.
And you can't turn it off.
That's very good.
So that does not make any sense.
Here's the thing, though.
What you're doing to me, though, what it sounds like to me is not informational.
It's all language.
You came up with five incredibly...
uh, like, like visceral, profound images there.
They don't need to be connected to one another for them to, I mean, they're wonderful lyrics.
And that's what makes it art.
If I'm being honest.
Yeah.
Here, read your, read your, read your, read your dream thing again.
And I'm just going to give you like, yeah, I'm just going to say it's a little bit like you look at like a German expressionist.
You look at a, look at an Edvard Munch's The Scream.
I think he might be Swiss.
You look at a Munch.
And, like, that evokes a very strong feeling, even though it's really just a bunch of marks on paper.
Do you know what I'm saying?
So here we go.
Ready?
Well, my name is Poster, and I'm here.
You're going to read your dream.
Professional poster printing app.
Okay.
Professional poster.
No, no.
No, you can drop a sick beat if you want.
Uh, professional poster printing apparatus is sharp, hot, and way too heavy to take on a plane.
Plus the posters have to always be sung in odd numbers and the picture itself can't print.
I don't know why you're not putting out records, John.
Hmm.
Can't print posters without also printing all printers themselves.
This cannot be turned off.
That's the main meat of it, yeah.
Yeah, but there was a... Yeah, I mean, it's like... Oh, Paris Airport pretzels giggle?
Yeah, there you go.
Well, yeah, the Charles de Gaulle Airport figures have... I've never been there, but if that...
Wait, you're communicating truths about the pretzels at the Charles Cagall Airport and you've never even been there?
No, God no.
I think you need to read this Psychology Today article on highly sensitive pizza.
Send it to me, FedEx it to me.
But the thing is, here's the thing, is I have classes of dreams.
I've always had classes of dreams.
I have the new college dream.
I have the military school dream.
I have the airport dream.
I have the museum dream.
And in the last couple of years, the airport dream and the museum dreams,
have been uh much to my chagrin joining forces so you go into a mall you start out in the good mall you walk a little bit and then you're in the old mall you take a right and you enter a museum because there's a museum you walk into that museum and it will not surprise you to know there's a increasingly smaller malls and musea the deeper in you go and then you're in an airport and then you're in a hovercraft no then you're in a dark ride like the uh like like it's a small world
Oh, now, did you ever go through a long period where you didn't remember your dreams or have you always been able to take 10% of your dreams and, and, and remember them well enough to put them down?
It's a very good question.
When I was a younger person, I feel like I remembered them pretty well.
And let's be honest, they were closer to stories anyway.
I think as I got older, I remembered fewer dreams.
I'm not sure exactly why, but the ones I do remember usually have some flashbulb moments, uh,
And there's recurring themes.
A rectangle in the middle of the frame appears a lot.
Sometimes that's a dorm room in Sarasota.
Sometimes that's a painting inside the museum mall.
But a centered rectangle, almost like, but like, you know, with right angles.
It's not like a Wes Anderson movie.
It's not like a 40 millimeter, you know, that I'm looking at.
Anyways, that happens.
Now, do you feel that having recorded your dreams and thought about them has improved your ability to remember your dreams?
No.
Oh, really?
I don't... It's not a thing you've practiced and now can do?
Well, I don't... I mean, it would be like... I think if you were to meet a real fortune teller... That's probably racist.
If you were to meet a real teller of fortunes or some media...
you know, and they're too specific.
Well, then that's probably just a core.
A teller of media?
Is that what you meant?
Well, a media.
When you get more than one medium, I think that's media.
Oh, I get what you're saying.
Like if you go to the mall, like a comic book store that I used to love, Two Cats Comics, 320 West Portal Avenue, has turned into a medium.
Oh.
So no more Fantastic Four, just tall, dark strangers.
Do you, and I don't, you know, this may be a sensitive topic, but do you have bad dreams?
No, no, no, I'm an open book, you hope.
Do you have dreams where they're,
where they trend into bad and then how bad do they trend?
You mean in terms of like danger and fear and something bad's going to happen?
Yeah.
Um, yeah, no, no.
I'm pursued a lot in dreams.
Um, you know,
I mean, I guess like anybody, probably I get some of the classic, like I couldn't make a fist or I tried to scream and that kind of stuff.
But it's more like last week there was one where a strong and persistent person kept poking me in the ear in a way that was painful and I couldn't get away from them.
They poked me in the ear.
Oh, poked in the ear.
Mm hmm.
here's a good one this one this one's one of my favorites i return to this one a lot this is from a couple years ago um let's see this is from actually this is from um march 12 2017 and i this is a rerun for some of you but this one's one of my favorites all the rage was the scarlett johansson branded protective helmet it's a colorful helmet and it is a planner with 11 specific draining holes and it's an important crucible for ideas we met at a media event held at a junior high scarlett was polite but perfunctory
Then there was a small hotel room with glass walls and doors stocked with herbal bourbons.
Ice machine didn't work.
Scarlett said, no way am I drinking that shit.
She was serious and smart.
It might have been Las Vegas.
Almost certainly was Las Vegas.
That's exactly where I was transported.
11 specific training holes.
I have Las Vegas streams.
Now the Las Vegas streams heavily track.
Las Vegas streams are almost always in a counterclockwise circle.
Um, as though I were going through like, you know, like if you're in Las Vegas and you go to like one of those, uh,
You know, it's like a Caesar's Palace.
You can kind of do like a loop.
Yeah, they're made to be a loop.
Yeah, but there's also art there.
So that could be the museum dream and the mall dream, because let's be honest, Las Vegas is really just, it's a mall.
It's a mall for losing money.
Yeah, it's an Ouroboros.
It's a Mobius strip.
It's an Ouroboros eating its own tail, for sure.
So now you say some people might have heard about this before.
Are you saying that there are other shows that you do where you talk about your dreams?
Because you've never done it here.
No, I've done it other places.
I do it mostly to provoke John Syracuse because I knowing I think it makes his logic, his logic bolt that the Jawas put on him.
Yeah, stressed out.
Meat moop.
Can't understand meat moop.
How much of your how much of your show with John Syracuse is is you provoking him?
Oh, ironically enough, it's very much the opposite.
Oh, he provokes you.
Oh, he pretends like he doesn't, and that's what makes the gaslighting so effective.
He has all these flying monkeys that are always happy to congratulate him on how right he is about everything.
And you know I love him.
He's one of my dearest and worst friends.
But yeah, people love to agree with John Syracuse.
If you can't find a personality, you could do that.
But the CPAP thing is what's come up now, I believe, in at least three different places.
Because of our discussions here, this is really catching fire in the community.
I'm hearing a lot from friends of mine.
I've heard from Matt Howey, of all things.
He couldn't get his garage door open because of his snoring.
is this one of these things where then pretty soon people are going to be like, Oh, all the great shows.
And they're going to like copyright it and make it into the brand of their network.
And I'm going to be like, yeah, it's going to be like Griffin McElroy eating a banana sideways all over again.
So, um, so, uh, uh,
I remember when I first started doing a, or I was about to start doing a podcast with Dan and you said, oh, this is going to be great because you're going to challenge Dan every time he says something about vitamins or about radio waves or whatever.
Radio waves.
Yeah, exactly.
Or like anything basically like, you know, the queen is stealing his thoughts through the radio.
Right.
Through Wi-Fi, radio.
What it turned out was that the dynamic on that show is when Dan starts talking about that stuff, I just, like, put on a green visor and listened very patiently and attentively to his theory.
So it did not turn out that I was the necessary corrective that brought fun into it.
To Dan, I'm just like the rest of us, just buckled in for the ride.
Exactly.
Would you rather listen to two middle-aged men argue or would you like to hear them, you know, hear each other out?
And you've got the visor on.
You're the existential accountant.
Well, this was the problem.
You know, I think back to that time when you wanted...
uh, John and me to, uh, to be on a podcast together.
And then he spent the whole show telling me that Lamborghinis were better than whatever, you know, he had some thing that he was mad about.
He was mad at me about.
Yeah.
Would you take a McLaren over that?
No, but also he was mad that I thought that I didn't understand evolution or whatever it was.
And I look back at that moment and I feel like, oh, that was a missed opportunity for me.
I should have listened more patiently.
He could have explained things to me.
And instead, it's not like I argued with him, but I was definitely like...
Oh, but you got to be careful.
I don't think I'm a very defensive manly man about these things, but I do believe in self-preservation.
So like opening the door to something as seemingly innocuous as pasta as a food that people eat and enjoy.
I got to even after he'd beaten me into the ground after two weeks about how I pasta wrong in every way.
It's still continued week after week for almost two months.
He pummeled me about the right way to put sauce on pasta.
And no matter what, it's like it's like being in French class.
No matter how you pronounce it, it's wrong.
No, no, no, no.
I got two months.
I got two months of I'm saucing the pasta wrong.
Is this a thing where he, where you put the pasta, where you do the Sopranos thing and you make the pasta in the water and stuff, but you put pasta sauce in the thing and stir it up?
You put pasta in the water.
Pasta sauce into the water.
And then you filter the water out somehow and the sauce is thicker.
Paul, he didn't move fast.
He didn't have to move at all.
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You know, summer or otherwise, I've got to be honest with you guys.
I'm probably the biggest fan in the world of Mack Weldon, and yet I'm desperately not very active.
I know you're more active than me, so you'll benefit from this.
Me, I love stuff like their long-sleeve T-shirt.
I have a bunch of those.
I do like their underpants.
I have their fleece vest.
I have all the things, you guys.
I wear it every day.
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And don't you want to be there for that?
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I made it happen.
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Do it.
Thanks to Mack Weldon for supporting Roderick on the Line and all the great shows.
You never know when you're going to have to feed a lot of guys.
So here, watch me make the gravy or whatever.
He's a, you know, he's an Italian, right?
So doesn't he know?
I mean, I don't, I might be making the pasta wrong.
I'm almost certainly making it.
Are you making the pasta category here?
I make the pasta so wrong.
I don't think that, I think it's indefensible how I make the pasta.
I made some last night.
I think it was indefensible.
But, okay, here's the difficult part of this.
And I don't want to say that John is like a crazy person who corners you on a long subway ride.
You've said that exact thing to me many times.
Well, I don't mean to imply that he is a crazy person on the subway.
But John cares.
And I guess we probably all have these things.
Bless us, everyone.
But he has things that he cares about so intensely that I could not care any less about.
He might be a highly sensitive person.
This article in Psychology Today.
Is that an HSP?
Is that what that's called?
About, yeah, highly sensitive people.
It sounds like he's got some of the traits.
He's a super taster.
Does that count?
Well, it's right in there.
It's like, do you have intensity?
Do you have intensity?
Do you feel like other people?
I kind of want to talk about this article now.
You might be a highly sensitive person.
The reason I ask is because somehow things that happen on this program with our 17 to 35 listeners, it does catch fire in certain communities.
It's a lot like what Brian Nino said about the Velvet Underground.
They're not as good as everybody says.
But the...
Only 10,000 people ever threw this album away.
The second album's so much better.
He made the trains run on time.
That was the thing.
Brian Eno, he couldn't even get his haircut to run on time.
What are you talking about?
Looks like he got shot with a bald eagle gun.
That's a famous quote.
The thing is, though, we like the Velvet Underground.
Well, I mean, I don't know if we like them, but as with them.
Sure.
You better watch your step.
I'm kidding.
I love that band.
I just like the second and third albums a lot better.
Cheryl, you've always been a Doug Ewell fan.
You talk about him.
Doug Ewell.
Yes.
Underappreciated Doug Ewell.
Who loves the sun?
I love the sun.
Yeah.
Okay.
Now, actually, that movie does look pretty good on Apple.
The Capulets are hunter-gatherers.
Oh, I see.
And what are those, the Romulans?
It's the Romulans versus the Capulets.
The Romulans versus the Capulets.
The one of them are the hunter-gatherers.
The other one are the-
Russians.
Yeah.
Where I fear to tread.
That's exactly it.
You got it.
Teaspoon.
You say it different.
The spoon is different.
The tea is different every time.
Every time.
How's that feel?
You like that getting thrown in your face?
You like having a super fan on your fucking podcast?
Okay.
Okay.
Yeah, no, no, no.
But in our Velvet Underground community, things do spread.
And I just want to tell you that, you know, I'm still fighting the good fight.
And I mean, I would be willing to be the one who buys the black market CPAP.
But to a person, like almost everybody is saying the same kind of shit.
Which is like, oh, like my beloved wife, whom I love.
It's like, oh, you have good insurance now.
You should go to the doctor.
And I says to her, she says, you don't listen to my podcast, do you?
And she says, of course I don't.
I said, well, if you did, and I'm glad you don't.
But if you did, you'd have heard the saga of one John Roderick spending two years trying to utilize the medical system.
Mm-hmm.
And sometimes a fella thinks maybe I should go up to Puala, or whatever the fuck it's called, and buy a dead man's dick meningitis infested CPAP.
And so on the one hand, everybody goes, oh, just go through the, oh, don't be a maverick about medicine.
Go get in the system and let them tell you when to schedule things.
And then the other thing I hear from people, John, is at least to dear friends,
have told me that I am absolutely going to die if I use a black market CPAP, that I will suffocate to death in my bed the first night.
Oh, my goodness.
I have always felt and still feel, we've been doing this show for 10 years, and I still feel like there is a fan community or rather a large group of people that listen to this show and then talk to you on LiveJournal about it.
People text me, John.
People text me.
And when I say, what is happening?
You say, like you did that one time when I said,
People are talking about me on LiveJournal.
Well, what are they saying?
And you said that's between me and the LiveJournal community, and it would be a betrayal of their trust for me to tell you what we're talking about on LiveJournal.
What do you suppose Dave with the brother in the book in Marin?
What's his name?
Dave 826.
What's his name?
Dave Eggers.
Dave Eggers.
Now, what would Dave Eggers say to you in that situation?
What would he say?
Oh, would he say you should know what they're talking about you on LiveJournal about?
I think he'd say that's not for you.
Well, I don't think Dave Eggers is aware that there ever was a LiveJournal.
But he has a little bit of a... Well, he's got a surprise coming his way.
Well, he's got a little bit of a Wes Anderson-ness about him where he's like, you know, LiveJournal.
But the thing is that I do absolutely, even when you don't tell me about it, we'll talk about something on the show and then...
And then I eventually hear about the conversation that's happening because somebody will reference somebody else's reference about a conversation that has been going on for a long time about something we said.
And I'm like, where are these conversations happening?
And I guess you're all on a text thread with each other or it's all happening somewhere.
No, I mean, it's very much, I don't know.
Did you ever read The Fan of Tollbooth?
Yeah.
I love that book.
I don't know which side of anything to look at, protested Milo.
That's how I feel a lot of the time.
I feel like Milo.
I feel like, I'm not even sure what I'm supposed to be confused about anymore.
And then I found myself going, was that a reference?
Because I feel like I'm losing my goddamn mind.
But, you know, we have a high level of engagement with an, like the Velvet Underground, we have a high level of engagement with an extremely deranged number of people.
Yeah.
Last night, I went to the grocery store, and there's a big freezer there.
I got three drinks, John.
No, no, no, no.
There's a big freezer, and they've got a new thing.
It's a new thing.
It's a new one of these fancy grocery store things where somebody has made beef bourguignon.
Beef.
Beef.
Beef bourguignon.
Beef.
And put it in a bag.
No, no, no.
No, no.
It's Bouff Bourguignon in a bag.
Uh-huh.
Oh.
And for $9 or $8.50 or whatever, you can buy... Surlesac.
It's Bouff Bourguignon Surlesac.
Surlesac.
Mm-hmm.
And you take it home, and it's just like a... It's just like a... It's just... It's just like a sack.
And you empty it into a skillet.
You put a lid on it.
You cook it for nine minutes, and then it's better... It's better quality.
It's better tasting.
It's better food.
Okay.
then you would get from Stouffer's or whoever you're... If you told me you could go to the Wegmans and buy a bag of beef, I would be skeptical.
But what I'm hearing from you is, word on the street is, boeuf bourguignon sur le sac is a good bag of meat.
Well, so this is what I didn't know, because I've seen it in the grocery store a few times, and it's one of those things that has an installation at the grocery store.
It has its own freezer, and there is... Like a Paul Allen style in-house.
This is the first thing that I, the first time I've ever seen it, it had its own accompanying video system where someone was on a screen going, you're going to love our Beef Borgie Young.
Oh my goodness.
And I, and I walked past it for, for a few weeks, you know, I would look at it and go, hmm, I'm not so sure.
I don't know.
Right.
Yeah.
But then the last time, last night I was there and I was like, all right, okay.
Let's, you know, let's look, let's try it.
And I got it, and I came home.
I threw it in a skillet.
I cooked it for nine minutes.
But, of course, I made pasta to go with it because everything is made better with a little egg noodle.
Wide noodles.
Get your paparadal or whatever it's called.
Get some big-ass wide egg noodles.
Wide noodles.
You get them.
You put me on to that, and I never look back, John.
Well, that's the thing.
I was talking to a friend about this camping trip we're going to go on, and I was like, look, here's the only...
The only caveats are I don't eat potatoes, I don't eat olives, and I want egg noodles with every meal.
So as long as you can, you know, facilitate that up at 10,000 feet or whatever, then, you know, we're fine.
I love that you've made that so clear.
No, no, no, I'm dead serious.
And also you should probably also don't touch my feet.
But in that instance, you say to somebody, hey, look, here's the deal.
And this is non-negotiable.
But, like, this is the way that this is going to go.
If you can meet my terms on this, I will trek to 10,000 feet.
Yeah.
Here we go.
Like I'm off.
Like we'll, we'll go to the end of the earth.
You can carry egg noodles.
But so, so I make the perfurgeon.
I got the egg noodles.
I drained the noodles.
I got them in the pot.
I got the beef perfurgeon in the skillet.
I look at the two of them and what I hadn't considered was how do I plate this meal?
And so what I did was I just poured the skillet into the pot.
And then I stirred it, and then I poured the whole thing into a bowl.
This is after you drained the noodles.
I drained the noodles.
I didn't pour the skillet into the water.
You're probably going to get a note about how you're saucing it wrong, just FYI.
Well, so that's what I'm wondering.
I know I did that wrong.
Oh, dear.
This is terrible.
And as I was eating it, I was like, there's a lot of ways I could have done this better than just put it in a mixing bowl and eat it with a salad fork.
And so you'd have a giant spoon.
I thought about saying that I ate it with the actual super large fork that I did eat it with, but that sounded crazy.
So I changed it.
I changed it in the moment because if you'd seen it in reality, it would have been a, it would have been a bridge too far and people would stop.
Imagine a bite sounds like this.
Like a python.
Yeah.
And that ding-dong Mike Squires was in Seattle for some reason I can't understand.
And he was like, I'm on my way to the airport.
I'm coming by your house.
And I was like, how are you even in Seattle?
He was here.
I was only here for 24 hours.
So then he's sitting in the chair watching me eat my beef bourguignon out of a mixing bowl.
Hey, listen, if you don't call ahead, you get what you get and don't get upset.
That's right.
And I said, do you want some beef bourguignon?
He was like, I just ate.
Do you want some burf and a salad pork?
He said, I just ate my weight in barbecue.
And I was like, and you're getting on an overnight flight?
Yikes.
Have some consideration for others.
I would want to follow that up with like maybe a cake dusted with Imodium.
Anyway, so now you have been warned by all of your people not to get a used CPAP machine, but nobody's warning me.
All of these people are, you know, I'm going to get dick meningitis and then I'm going to die.
And you're going to get a thousand texts about it where people are like, oh, he should have listened to me when I said that.
I'll get a lot of texts.
It'll be nice stuff.
It'll be like, how are you doing?
Like, oh, I heard John's dick got meningitis.
So, well, no, it's in his spine, like all meningitis.
He got it through his dick.
Through his dick.
Because a dead man fucked his CPAP up in Puala or whatever it's called.
I'm going to go today, and they're going to put some thing on me, and I'm going to come home, and I'm going to try to—I'm going to have a thing.
I don't know what it is.
Some kind of—it's like one of those little black boxes that Jewish people wear when they go to the whaling wall.
Oh, I know what you're talking about.
It's called Tevye, I think.
There you go.
No.
What's his name?
Zero Mostel.
Yeah, it's called Zero Mostel.
And then I'm going to try to pretend.
Yes.
Because the thing is, how does the box work if problem number one is that I don't want to go to sleep and I don't want to go to sleep.
And maybe the feeling, if I read this highly sensitive people article and I really think about my feelings, maybe it is that I'm afraid to go to sleep.
I don't want to go to sleep because I'm afraid to go to sleep.
Oh, do you think this is a MacGuffin, John?
Well, I don't know.
I don't know why I'm afraid to go to sleep.
It's like a Solomon-type thing.
Sorry to go Old Testament, but some kind of thing where there's a MacGuffin.
We're like, there's a thing, and I want to convince you that this is the thing and why we're doing the thing.
And I get you to buy into that.
This happens a lot in those placebo kind of mix-em-up 60s, 70s experiments.
In this case, what if we find out that just because John has Tevye on his head, that's when he finally realizes...
You know, it was the friends you made along the way.
You're scared to sleep.
And it wasn't until you got a head box that you were forced to confront that.
Is that a possible thing they're trying to prove?
Well, I don't think they're trying to prove it because I think that I've just stepped in.
I've got a toe into the medical industrial complex and they don't know anything about me or care anything about me.
They're just running me through.
But I'm wondering to myself, because I definitely have sleep apnea, because when I lay down on the couch to go to take a five minute nap,
I do this thing where I'm like, and I wake up and I have a, you know, half a second of panic.
And then I'm like, come on, all you're trying to do is take a five minute nap, please.
You hate that, John.
You don't want to suffocate.
I don't want to, I don't want to trigger you.
But like, there's a whole bunch of notional anecdotes you've offered about things you don't want.
You don't want to be in a hole.
You don't want to be in the back of a police car.
You definitely don't want to go.
Yeah.
No, I don't want any of those things because they're all in the same family.
You're right to have identified those as in the same family.
I don't want to back on my head.
I don't want to be in the trunk of a car.
I don't want to be in a hole.
And, um, and so, but, but I think the fear of going to sleep is a different thing because I don't have nightmares.
I'm not afraid to go to sleep because they're, because Freddy Krueger is in there waiting for me.
And I'm not, I'm not afraid to go to sleep because I, because I'm afraid of suffocating or anything like that.
I have no fear.
I have no, I have no top level fear about going to sleep.
I look at the bed and it's not like I go, Oh, it's just that I look at the bed and go, not yet.
And then I go the other way.
I go over here.
I sit and I have a mason jar full of rusty nails that I need to sort or whatever.
And it's like, oh, all these photographs.
Right now, my dining room table is covered with light bulbs.
I've been going through a de-rusting and polishing phase.
Oh, isn't that fun?
I've discovered de-rusting and polishing.
So I de-rust and then I have Brasso and I have a set of rigid brushes and that's how I unwind at night.
Oh, that's nice.
It's so nice.
John, I found, we live in an old house.
There's a bunch of weird shit in the garage.
I found a bunch of old like brass screws.
I found, I found a, um, a thing of, I found a box, a metal box that used to have cocoa in it for probably the thirties or forties.
Smell like cocoa.
No, it smells like, I don't know what they put in it.
There's a lot of macabre shit going on at our house.
But no, I discovered a good de-ruster because I was watching, you ever watch that guy on YouTube that like fixes up old tools?
He gets like a butcher cleaver that's totally rusted through and then he makes it nice.
No, but I did find a show about a guy who goes around the Midwest and finds tractors that are like in fallen down barns.
You know how you drive around the Midwest and you're like, look at that rusty old tractor.
It's like David Reese in tape recorders.
Like some people like fixing up nasty stuff.
But this guy, it's a great show because he wanders into the barn.
The farmer comes out.
He's like, yeah, hasn't run in a long time.
Don't help her stick in that hole.
Don't talk to my daughter.
Yeah.
And the guy like goes and he, you know, he pops open the thing.
He looks at the thing.
He throws, you know, he shoots a little bit of this into that.
He blows on the, on the spark plug.
And then he gets these things, that kind of thing.
Well, I don't, he just sort of got to be heavier stuff.
Right.
I mean, these motors are, are built.
I mean, you could crawl inside these motors and he's like,
Gets it going.
And the tractor hasn't run in 30 years and he got it going.
I mean, it's a show.
Magic.
So it looks like it took him five minutes.
Sure.
Yeah.
But it seemed, I mean, he did it.
How long would it take you or me to get a whole tractor running?
All the time, all the time ever.
That's right.
And he's just like, and then all of a sudden you got it.
You got a tractor.
The tractor's back.
You got it.
Even if you're just improving, I've often said that sometimes when I feel like I, I can't exactly say we all have these moments where we need to like get centered.
And my, the super pattern for that for me is what I would call controlling a small space.
And often that means cleaning something or cleaning a small area or it could be, you know, whatever it is.
It doesn't have to be your whole house.
Maybe you dye your hair, but you want to control a small area.
I cut my hair in the middle of the night.
Three o'clock in the morning, I'm always in there cutting my hair.
You got to get on this machine, John.
I'm telling you.
It's a tiny little thing I can do.
It's okay.
Oh, this little hair.
Oh, even it out.
I love my last haircut, but my kid says I'm not allowed to have short hair anymore and I'm hating it.
I've been saying the same thing.
I'm not going to have short hair anymore.
I said to my kid, because, you know, she let me cut her hair.
It's so itchy.
It's so itchy.
I hate it.
Well, I said, I'm going to grow my hair longer.
She said, no, don't do it.
And I was like, as long as you're growing your hair, I'm growing my hair.
So you keep telling me that you're going to grow your hair down to your waist.
Well, what if I join you and we both have
hair down to her waist and i really got to her she that i could hear the gears metal band in 1985 well she was like i she because she's thinking to herself i was going to grow my hair down to my waist because that was going to be my gesture and now he is taking my gesture and turning it into something terrible so you swiped her gesture well and she now it's
Does she want to be responsible?
Because I'm going to be the embarrassing dad with long hair.
And it's like, I'm just going to say, well, that was your choice.
It was your choice that my hair grew long.
You fucked up, honey.
Oh, yeah.
So she's really thinking about it now.
I don't know what she's going to do.
It's her decision, though.
It's going to take us four years for it to play out.
You're going to come home with Tevye on your head.
I think we should think about putting out a sleep appliance called the MacGuffin.
What do I do if my real problem, because I have a secondary problem where I need a CPAP machine, and it's going to put oxygen into me in the night, and I'm going to wake up, and I'm going to feel strong, and I'm not going to have ennui anymore, and I'm not going to have angst.
You're going to wake up with a light heart like you've always wanted.
I'm going to have a light heart.
But also, why do I not...
In the morning, all I want to do is stay in bed.
So in the night, why don't I rush to bed?
It's one of my favorite places to be in the morning.
Oh, I see.
Something happens in the nighttime hours.
At first, you're reluctant to go to bed, but then at some point, I guess you nod off.
And boy, in my case, like today, I really needed to capture some bonus sleep.
So I got a little bit of light double bonus sleep that I definitely needed.
But of course, I sleep in my wife's office.
It is known.
So I got to get out of there for meetings and stuff.
Yeah.
Your wife's office used to be my bedroom.
Let's see.
This gets confusing because you're usually in the middle bedroom.
You're on the one with the taco.
Yeah.
Anyways.
No, tell me this, because right now, as soon as we get off this show.
You sure?
Because I feel like you're close to realizing something.
You want to keep going.
I feel like you're about to really realize something.
Well, you know, I need a little hand-holding here.
That's fine.
When we get off this show, I will have to struggle not to walk down the hall and go immediately back to bed.
I would love to do it.
You know, like the bed is calling me even right now.
Come back.
You don't like going to bed.
You like going back to bed.
Yeah.
If it was three o'clock in the morning right now and I was, and I was struggling to keep my eyes open, the bed would be back there and I would be like, no, thanks.
You know, Hey friends.
Crack open a new Brasso.
Yeah.
But I'm going to go, that's right.
I'm going to go polish some, some nails or I'm going to go downstairs and sort through 35 years of rock posters that I have all stacked in a, you know, in a, like a ziggurat of memories.
Yeah.
Oh, you just stepped on a roller skate, didn't you?
Ziggurat, I don't even know how to spell that.
Ziggurat of memories.
And that might go down in the books up there with Seven Sighted Light.
I mean, what do I do with these rock posters?
That's another thing.
I've got so many rock posters.
I could wallpaper the house in rock posters.
And what am I supposed to do with them?
They're not small.
I'll do one better.
I've got a poster signed by the 2003 Long Winters.
I've got a pretend-to-fall poster.
And I got to find a place for it.
What are you going to do with it?
I mean, you know... I'm going to frame it and put it up.
I don't want it to get all... All of our Fillmore posters got, like, bleached by sunlight.
And I'm not sure I really want to go into, like, polarized.
But I've got a... Right here next to me, I've got a This American Life poster signed by Sarah Vowell.
I've got a...
They got a lot of Wilberforce.
But I treasured that.
I treasured that Long Winners one.
I've got the copy of the Seattle Times from 1969 that says, Man Walks on Moon.
And it's sitting right here.
It's on the table.
And...
I looked into putting it in a frame, and I went on all those archivist sites where people are like, how do I put a newspaper in a frame?
And all of the consensus is, no matter what you do, a newspaper is going to fall apart as soon as you expose it to the light.
Yeah, my John Lennon paper, my St.
Petersburg Times from December of 1980 was pretty yellow by the time I graduated high school.
Yeah.
And so what they say is make a photocopy of it and put that in a frame and put the paper itself in a bag and put it in the bottom of your closet.
And I'm like, that's kind of not the point.
I could go to a poster shop and buy a poster of Man Walks on Moon.
Let's go look at the Xerox of your wife.
I mean, it's not really exactly the same.
I mean, the ways in which it is exactly the same are not the ways that are important.
Okay.
Sure, that's her, but that's a mimeograph of my lady.
If you smell a Xerox, it smells like a Xerox.
It doesn't smell like a newspaper.
Take one, pass it back.
That's what they say.
I mean, half of it is smell, right?
If somebody put a blindfold on you and said, here, smell these five women, you'd be able to pick your wife out of the lineup.
Would they all definitely be women?
Or would they try and McGuffin me up a little bit?
They might fake you out.
They might put another person and give that person your wife soap.
Interesting.
Somebody recently, before my wife had surgery, she had to do special ablutions and she got some dial.
I had not used dial since college.
Dial's the soap I would steal from my friends in college.
Because you hadn't afforded?
Well, no, I couldn't.
I used to wash my dishes.
That was 15 cents.
What are you talking about?
Well, I used to wash my dishes with laundry detergent and that caused me to have a lot of cognitive problems for a while.
I think so.
But I was in the liberal arts and nobody noticed.
I, uh, my, uh, my, uh, daughter's, uh, mother partner.
Who?
I showed up yesterday.
And, you know, if you read this article on highly sensitive people.
You gotta send this to me.
It says a lot about, uh, it says a lot about, uh, sensitivity to light, sound, smells.
Oh, like Dennis DeYoung.
Well, yeah, or Steve Perry, depending.
But, you know, for me, not to say that I that reading this article that, you know, that there was anything in it that I was like, hmm.
But, you know, I like sight sounds like I love big, loud noises, fireworks and and hot rod cars and rock and roll.
But I don't want them all the time.
I just want them in short bursts, and then I want it to be very, very quiet and no other sounds.
No noises, right?
No alarms and no surprises.
And it's the same with food.
Like, sometimes I want beef bourguignon in a pot, and sometimes I want not that.
And so she walked in the door, and from the door, I was like, are you wearing men's aftershave?
Really?
And she said...
No, but I have this new deodorant and I wonder if it's too much.
And she came over and I was like, whoa, whoa, whoa.
You know, like I've been in truck stops that smell less than.
Send me some of her clothes.
I want to see what it's like.
And so and she was like, oh, I'll send you some of my wife's clothes.
But like, you know, just on the DL, just dude to dude.
Yeah.
You know, I'd like to see what other people smell like.
I'm never going to get that again, John.
Yeah.
Well, sometimes we get sponsorships from companies that have scented man products.
Well, but what about a box service that sends you just, not in a creepy way, but sends you a woman's clothes?
Not women's clothing, but the clothes of a given woman.
And I'm not talking about that girl who sells her bathwater.
Isn't that 15% of the Japanese economy?
Yeah.
Hi.
Hi.
One time I had a girl left a sweatshirt or not a sweatshirt, a flannel shirt in a car.
And I used to have very mixed feelings about Jovan Musk.
But after after I smelled that shirt, the feelings all like like all like poles on a magnet all started pointing the same way.
And that was up.
Well, you know, Maureen Irwin used to wear a CK1, but she really lathered it on.
Well, I think sometimes... I can't even smell that stuff, you know, from across the street.
My primary college girlfriend was an Obsession user, and that's not my favorite scent, but that Marlboros will always remind me of Orientation Week.
But see, this is the point of our service, John, MacGuffin Box, which is we're going to send you something, and you don't know what it's going to be.
It might help you sleep.
It might be something that smells like a pretty lady, or it could be neither because it really is our service.
If I can go to sleep...
Yeah.
And so the box isn't going to tell them anything.
What does the box say?
The box is going to sit there, you know, strapped to my head and it's going to say, well, you didn't go to sleep.
And they're going to go, maybe it's malfunctioning.
You need to go to sleep in order for this to work.
Oh, I see.
All right.
Well, then I got to wear this box for 48 hours because, you know, like I'm going to sleep when I'm, I'm going to sleep when I finally.
So we can offer a third box.
Now I would prefer just to get the ones that smell like a pretty woman.
And I don't mean Julia Roberts.
Or do I?
Hi.
Let me just tell you a little bit.
Be sure to use that offer code.
Smelly lady.
I'm going to put this box on my... I'm going to put this box on me.
Strap it on.
Strap on your prayer box.
If it touches my feet, I'm going to be like, get out.
You know, you should write down all your demands for the trip.
Make sure people really understand.
Because I want to just say once again that I think it's very admirable that you tell your family the importance of your ziggurat of noodles.
I think you need to make sure that they super understand and that you will not be afraid to bring the hammer down if they try to cut corners.
So here's the thing.
I buried the lead a little bit.
go my uh my friends my motorcycle friends have reached out and you know after the last time i did that that last motorcycle trip yeah i really spent a lot of time kind of sitting uh sitting on my couch having made it back alive
And I said, all right, you're a man in your 50s.
You never rode dirt bikes before.
Now you've gone on two week-long dirt bike expeditions over mountains and in the snow and across logging roads.
And you have fulfilled that.
And now you don't need to do it anymore because you are...
Because you have done it and you don't have to become it because it just seems like, you know, on the plus side, it's seven days where you are really living in the moment because on a motorcycle, you cannot not be in the moment at any given moment.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
That doesn't need to become who you are.
To paraphrase, I think it was Pima Chodron, you're the sky and not the weather.
Well, yeah, because the entire time it's like seven straight days where I am just on the absolute, like, bleeding edge of total terror at all times.
Because you're, I mean, just to be clear here, also, you're saying something that I think might go by too fast that I think is important.
And I'll tell you why this is important.
My lady friend just got into a car and caused it to move for the first time in a month because she's been recovering from her knee surgery.
But everything you do in a situation like that is double exhausting because you're not only doing a thing, but you're having to think a lot about the thing.
Walking is difficult because you have to walk with a purposefulness, mindfulness awareness, not to put, you know what I'm saying?
Don't put any weight on that knee.
In your case, John, the way you've described this.
You're doing lots of those crazy turns, like those crotch rocket turns.
You don't just unwind and amble down the blue highways, as Billy Idol would say.
You have to actively think about what you're doing.
Plus, you're basically riding a horse, which is exhausting.
Yeah, right.
The thing itself is exhausting.
And then in my mind, there is this like, don't fuck up, don't fuck up, don't fuck up, don't fuck up.
Just like a constant... Mm-hmm.
But...
So, you know, Ben King, architect Ben King, friend of the show, and Gregor, who Gregor has decided that he's going to now, he's done enough of these long rides that he's going to convert and turn this into a job.
He's going to start leading adventure bike tours of the wilds of Oregon.
That's fun.
And he's going to do it a little bit better.
He's going to have a sprinter chase vehicle that meets us on the plier or up in the trees.
Like if you carry your bags or your turkey or whatever?
Well, and then he's going to make gourmet meals.
I love this.
Eat with bourguignons.
So the sack.
And hand, or, you know, wood-fired pizzas and stuff.
Oh, hand-turned noodles.
Hand-turned noodles.
And there's going to be, like, these deluxe cabins up there.
It's so stupid.
hot, hot springs.
There's going to be, you know, he's, he's doing a whole thing.
Wow.
And, uh, and then, and then there's the adventure bikes and off we go, you know, and, uh, and over the mountains.
And it's, and so this year, so they write me and they say, look, Gregor's going to do this.
And I, you know, and the thing is they don't, they, when they were seven years old, they were throwing 125 Kawasaki's around flat tracks that they built themselves.
Yeah.
And they're like, you know, uh,
Oh, this is just as, you know, all you have to do is just get on it and ride.
And I'm like, yeah, except you guys don't have like 700 buffalo right behind you trying to gore you like I do.
And they're like, ah, we all have buffalo.
Oh, everybody's got their buffalo.
I don't think so.
I don't think you're buffalo.
What's your buffalo?
Buffalo, buffalo, buffalo.
The back tire of my motorcycle is six inches from the horn of the first buffalo.
Okay.
And so they're like, no, no, no, you got to do this.
They don't say you got to do it because they're not that kind of guys.
No, that's the whole point.
The point is you got to want to do it.
It's like being a Marine.
But they're like, here, you know, Gregor's starting this new business.
This is his trial run.
He wants to make the pizzas.
He wants to make the B4 unions.
We're going to go out.
We're going to try this out.
Gregor, it's a new role for Gregor.
He's going to try very hard not to break his motorcycle.
So for real, what do they call that when you take out a ship for the first time?
Not breaking it in.
What do they call that?
There's a term for that.
So this is not a dry run exactly, but this is one of his early, let's see how this would go if I made this into a business.
What could I learn from my dumb friends if we did this?
Right.
And one of the things I think he learned in talking to people was typically most of your clients are not going to necessarily have been throwing 125 Kawasaki's around a track from the time they were six years old.
They're going to be closer to John Roderick in terms of tone and temperature.
Time and temperature.
And so maybe like chill out a little bit on the single track ride through shale over like a cliff that falls in.
Yeah, the vetting process for deciding, what are we talking about?
Like probably five, maybe five people on one of these trips?
Yeah, five, seven probably.
But like, boy, you really, you're the John Roderick of this trip and you're very concerned that the buffalo are going to get you.
Like, I imagine your friend, what's his name?
Gregor.
Gregor.
Gregor.
that he's going to want to do some serious vetting and maybe even like a competence test to know, like, can you get out of a slide and stuff like that?
Well, in the past, I think all of the, everybody else on the motorcycle trip is like there because they're being sponsored by a motorcycle company or whatever.
They're just like, you know, like, Hey, you know, we're on the third floor of the hotel.
Why don't I just wheelie up the stairs?
And I'm out there like, yeah.
And I'm trying to get, I have to try six times to get the kickstand down.
And it's like, all right, all right, okay.
And I'm just, I've always felt like a drag on everybody because, because, you know, I'm just like granny-ing.
I mean, you know, I'm not granny-ing.
We're still on logging roads, but I'm just like on my, I'm on my path, right?
I'm doing my thing.
But now I feel like maybe this time I'm actually, I'm going to be the tentpole because everybody's going to be going, well, now what is Roderick one?
No kidding.
You're the tentpole.
How about that?
I don't know yet.
I don't know.
I think they're going to forget about that.
But you're ready for that if you're called tracking around.
Anyway, I agreed to do it.
Okay.
And so.
And that's where the noodles come in.
So I'm leaving on Saturday.
Okay.
For, for nine days of going down to like where.
Hold the phone.
You're doing a sleep thing on Monday.
Yeah.
Or Tuesday.
Or no, Monday.
Going on a sleep thing on Monday.
Okay.
The people from the King Conservation District are coming to kill all the laurels and hollies in my ravine on Wednesday.
Oh.
And then I'm going to drive down and get on a motorcycle...
And then I'm on a hovercraft.
But then we're going down to where Eamon Bundy thinks that his sheep should be able to graze.
Oh, yeah.
He just wants grazing rights.
Yeah.
And then there was a big fire down there, too.
But, you know, that eastern—southeastern Oregon is just a crazy universe.
When they were trying to do the moon landing, I think they went out there and said—
This is as close on Earth as you can get to the moon, but there are other places that are like, oh, these canyons and all this stuff.
So we're going down there, and I'm, you know, and I'm not in good shape right now, Merlin.
I'm a big chubbins.
Well, you're not going to sleep as you'd like.
Don't say things like that.
Well, you know, all I have to do is— You should get one of those fat guy motorcycles with three wheels.
If I get—when I get up from this couch right now and go and limp down the hall to go back to sleep,
You would be able to hear my muscles strain just like, oh, okay, here I go.
Well, make sure you allow time to get to your appointment.
Well, yeah, but how am I going to, I'm going to climb on a motorcycle.
I'm going to be on this giant horse and I'm going to be like, you know, and it would be, it would be hard for me to walk from the motorcycle to the hut.
Oh, you need a second smaller motorcycle, more of an assistive device.
Yeah, I need a second smaller motorcycle.
You need a ruggedized rascal.
Yeah, a ruggedized rascal.
Now, that could be three reels, and that would be kind of cool, you know?
So here we go, right?
It's another one of these things where it's like, all right, well...
Because it always boils down to the question of, what are you going to do?
Not do it?
Well, what are you going to do?
What are you going to do?
Not do it?
Well, I wouldn't know.
Gregor wants to make wood-fired pizza for you out on the playa.
And all you have to do is ride a motorcycle for nine days.
What are you going to do?
Keep an eye on that guy when he wakes up in the morning, by the way.
Okay.
Don't break a leg.
Don't die.
Don't suffocate on a motorcycle.
This is one of these don't break a leg moments.
No, well, this is definitely going to be one of those fill out your card because how does John perish by October 11th?
No.
No, no, no.
Well, it could be a buffalo, buffalo, buffalo.
They're right behind you.
Buffalo.
They're right behind you.
You know?
Anyway.
Well, stay safe.
don't fuck up don't fuck up don't fuck up don't fuck up