Ep. 452: "Among the Scumbags"
Hello.
Hi, John.
Hey, Merlin.
How's it going?
Good.
I had a little hot plug situation there.
Hot plug.
Did you get it fixed, do you feel like?
I did.
I hot plugged it.
I hot unplugged it and I hot plugged it.
Oof.
You never know, though.
You never know.
And this is how you know it's OCD.
It's because then you go and you think the thing worked.
And then later on, of course, you find out it didn't work too late.
Oh, boy.
Yeah, I got a message about that the other day.
But just checking on it, you know.
Somebody said...
The files didn't come through, and I was like, oh, I didn't want to hear that.
Know what I mean?
Oh, it happened to me last week.
It happened to me.
I stand here a mute witness to the problems of technology.
I mute because I don't have any files to upload.
Get over here, you.
You know what I think it is?
I think it's a Damon.
It's running scripts in the background.
Oh, you think it might be some script kitties running some Israeli Stuxnet?
Stuxnet?
That's what I think it is.
Baby Massad.
What are you eating or drinking?
You're making a sound right exactly between eating and drinking, which makes it worse.
What is that?
It's coffee.
The most delicious thing to eat and drink.
My sleep's all screwed up again, but only last night.
Only last night.
Just to review, could you review, please, just quickly, because I know we're getting new listeners literally every day.
I read the trades.
John, you have a long history of having a, shall we say, a problematic... I hate the fucking word.
Your sleep has sucked for years and been erratic and strange, and you felt bad about it, which is what we in Buddhism call the second arrow.
Then, I don't want to say out of nowhere, but recently you turned a corner...
Start there.
What happened when you turned a corner recently, Sean?
Turned a corner, boy.
I started sleeping like a regular person, and it was, you know, I think I was always afraid.
The other day, against all better judgment, I was on Facebook because I had a- Come on, we've talked about this!
I know, but I had a friend die.
A local guy- My friend died, too.
Good for you.
Oh, yeah.
It's going around.
Uh, people who listen, uh, over time might have heard, might remember, uh, punk rock Davey, punk rock Davey died.
Oh shit.
I'm sorry.
And, uh, you know, that's the thing though.
If, if punk rock Davey was here on the program, he would say, I never thought I'd live to be 52 or whatever.
And I would go, you're right, Davey.
You never did.
When Davey was 19, he said, I'm going to die when I'm 40.
So he outlived his, he outlived it, you know?
So I went on Facebook because some friend of mine, I hadn't heard from in 25 years, uh,
wrote me through LinkedIn.
You know you're not supposed to do that.
I was reading just today on the internet that that is considered, especially when you're contacting a reporter or a source, Visa or Versa, that is considered the rudest way to contact somebody, worse than a phone call.
Email is okay.
I read this today.
Yeah, Jamel Bowie retweeted this on the internet.
I'm not actively on LinkedIn, but sometimes you're saying you've got to get in through the cracks like a little water bug.
It's a thing where I'm going down my emails.
I'm doing the Merlin man.
I'm 53 foldering.
I'm zeroing it out.
And they have to disconnect the call.
Tau, tau, tau.
You know, just deleting all those.
Oh, that's another junk mail from Wayfair, even though I've unsubscribed 40 times.
John, they've got just what you need.
Yeah?
Huh.
Wayfair.
And then there's one from LinkedIn.
And I'm like, I know I have set up every filter against LinkedIn.
Good luck.
And I'm like, how did this little snail get through here?
Fuck you.
And I'm about to ping it.
And it has a guy's name that isn't the name I knew him by back in the old days.
Oh, this is like suddenly when a Tony becomes an Anthony.
Well, but this was a guy I knew as Jeff, but now it's Paul Jeff.
I didn't know there was a Paul at the front of Jeff.
No.
Oh, no.
He didn't take his wife's Paul?
He was always P. Jeff.
But we didn't call him that.
They didn't get in Deutschland.
We just said Jeff.
And so I see this name, and I'm like, because it's a distinctive enough last name.
And I'm like, I feel like I know this guy.
And it says it's a male.
And oh, I hate going to LinkedIn.
Oh.
But I clicked on it like, nah.
You know, is this going to send me to something where it's like, hey, welcome back.
Here's seven friends that we're going to make it seem like.
I would just expect, I'm going to find out.
I mean, let's be honest.
People have been trying to contact me for weeks to tell me that, let's say, for example, my mom died.
I always just expect it's going to be something fairly outlandish where people are – I can't tell you how I've gotten yelled at.
Actually, technically, it was the weed delivery guy.
I always tell the weed delivery guy that – I always tell them, look, it's a whole company.
And I say, look, I have lots of levels of filtering on my phone.
So it's okay.
Just send it through the dingus.
But if you call me, I'm probably not going to get it.
And if I do get it, I won't get it immediately.
And I got a stern lecture from a weed delivery man.
We've been trying to call you for half an hour.
Oh, tsk, tsk.
Well, I've been here the whole time.
And what else is there to say?
Well, be there with your weed?
What are you going to do?
No, you need confirmation, Merlin.
You need confirmation.
No, it's two-factor authentication.
Oh, I see.
I've got to run my dongus.
And I have to explain.
Well, here's how it works.
I live in a part of town where all the streets, I'm going to listen very closely.
Have no name?
Well, it's worse than that.
Every street is named alphabetically.
Okay.
And now here's where it gets fun.
It's a little bit like a little Manhattan.
And then what I want you to understand is all the avenues are named.
Are you ready for this?
Write this down numerically.
Yeah, I know that too.
I know you know.
And you're at the corner of number and lettered name.
Well, you're already saying too much, but it's true.
It is accurate.
Let's say I live at the corner of, I'll make this up.
Let's say Anza Balboba.
That's not a thing.
That's a T.
Al Bobo, that's the guy that goes on the quest from the Shire.
Yeah, but they had to change the name of Al Bobo because it's San Francisco.
It is.
Another person named Al Bobo.
A different guy named Al Bobo had created a whole bunch of missions.
Yeah, yeah.
And I say, now here's the trick.
I'm just giving you a good hint.
I'm going to throw it back to you here.
Is that there's numbers and letters, but then it gets even better because all of the buildings have numbers on them.
And if you follow those, here's the neat part is they go sequentially.
I understand it would be confusing if the building numbers were non-sequential.
Yeah, but you're talking to a weed guy.
It's a weed company.
The weed company, man.
They're not bound by your numbers and letters, bro.
Oh, shit, man.
He's landed on a thousand fractions or more.
Or maybe 10,000 fractions.
10,000 fractions, I loved their original sound.
Let's turn that to here.
You're saying you get a LinkedIn email to aware you, because now I'm going to start using words transit, to aware you that you need to go to the LinkedIn, I guess, .io website, and there you will find a note from somebody.
Yep.
At this point, what's your emotional composure?
Yeah.
Uh, well, I'm just trying to avoid your filters.
No, no, no.
I'm just trying to avoid LinkedIn knowing anything about me or ever contacting me again.
But this is a, this is a, this is a male and I'm thinking, is this a solicitation?
It's the only thing I can think of coming through LinkedIn.
Right.
You know, they're going to offer me a great job in the mining industry or something.
Oh, special offers.
I click on it.
Here's Paul Jeff.
He's like, hey, man, I haven't talked to you in a long time, which is true.
Oh, shit.
He's got a new job.
And he's one of these fellas that I thought would never have a straight job ever, ever, ever in the world.
He had sideburns that had 17 layers.
Like, this guy was never going to have a job.
And I look at him.
He built up like a scorpion.
No, no, no.
He's like slicing them and dicing them with little, you know, he was like.
Oh, he was listening to Skinny Puppy when the rest of us were not even, didn't even know Skinny Puppy existed.
I get it.
He's a rare person that actually likes Ministries new stuff back then.
He had a utility belt, like full on.
And one of the things in it was this thing that looked like a flashlight, but then he would whack it.
Does he have a Paul Jeffering?
It was a baton, and it came out like – A telescoping cop baton?
Yeah, and it came out like – I've always wanted one of those.
I know.
It was really cool.
And the way he deployed it, he would just pull it out and like – I could address a lot of fucking justice if I had a telescoping cop baton.
People in Seattle like to talk about, oh, we had such a nice city and now it's all gone to shit.
But the thing was in the early 90s, Seattle was a shitty, shitty, shitty, scary place.
It's like Portland without strippers.
It didn't have strippers.
And it was worse than Portland.
Portland couldn't muster the danger that we had.
And Jeff was not, let's say, he's not the tallest dude.
But he was a formidable guy.
And he had this baton.
He had a flashlight.
I think he had, I don't know what else, a flask.
Oh, hang on.
Okay, let me make this easier for anybody who ever went to the cowhouse in Tallahassee, Florida.
This is the guy who, he seems like he might be either the doorman or the stage tech, but maybe is neither.
He was the head bartender.
And he's got – I'm guessing he's got Sharpies.
He's got probably a maglite or similar.
He's – maybe have a roll of tape.
Does he – so his belt supports his work lifestyle, right, where he's like – he's the bartender guy, but he might have to pull out his maglite and check the tap.
Anything.
You know, and he – well, but by the time –
So, you know, I used to go in and after after I got fired from the job where we work together, where I wasn't drinking, I was off ramp.
Yes.
There was a time when I was where I decided that alcohol was bad for me, but the drugs were not the drugs still had lots to offer me.
And I quit drinking for 18 months and just pursued drugs.
And it was a very fruitful time.
But at the end of it, I had gone from being addicted to alcohol and dabbling in drugs to being addicted to drugs.
And then I was like – Because you don't always know that.
At first, every time God closes a door, he opens a little bag of drugs.
That's right.
And then you think, oh, I have so much to learn over here.
It's becoming so clear that alcohol was the problem.
And at the end of that, I was on drugs and I was like, why am I just on drugs?
I could be on alcohol too.
It's a lot cheaper.
Yeah.
And I went back to drinking.
And I'd been fired from the off ramp for a year at this point.
And I started showing up in the bar.
And Jeff and I were friends from the beginning.
And he was like, what the hell are you doing here?
And I was like, serve him up.
And he was like, oh, no, come on, this is bad.
And I was like, it is bad.
Because now you're a lifestyle Mickey Rourke.
Yeah, this was the times, you know, and the bar was a zoo.
When you're young, you don't always make good decisions.
It's not that being old guarantees good decisions.
But I have, when one considers oneself average to above average intelligence, you'll sometimes give yourself a lot of extra points for something that seems not obvious.
And there's a reason it's not obvious, which is it's stupid.
The pivot, the pivot.
Right?
I mean, in time, in the fullness of time, you realize, whoa, pump the brakes, fella.
Maybe neither of these is a good idea, which is an option I hadn't always completely considered.
Didn't consider that at all.
And this is, you know, I was much older now and wiser.
I was 23, 24, 25.
Ages that you think of as being like, now I really understand.
But so I would drink in there and then one day he ran this credit card that I was using at a bank that was sending me very many letters to different addresses that I didn't live at anymore.
This is a code we've never seen before, John.
He came out.
That says to put you in a small cage.
And he wore a pork pie hat with the brim turned up, and he had the whole thing.
What was his facial hair at the time?
He's got 17 levels of sideburns.
Did he have any fun Al Jorgensen-style mustache beard?
Well, for sure.
He had a long sole patch that went all the way down and might have even had a rubber band in it at some point.
That's terrific.
There was a lot going on.
Anyway, he comes out and he snips the credit card in half.
Oh.
In front of the whole bar.
He's like, hey, Roderick, snip.
I was like, oh, that's the end of that.
That was the last money I ever was going to see.
And I owe it to U.S.
Bank now.
And the U.S.
Bank pursued me for 15 years for those drinks that I got.
Anyway, so then I would come in and I'd sit at the bar and I'd be like, come on, come on.
It's me, your old pal.
And he would...
He would give me a drink.
But then he would at some point – you know, the bar is just steaming.
Everybody is in there.
At some point he would come and he would get the gun and he would – the soda gun, you know, the – Oh, the – Yeah, the pop gun.
Yeah.
And he would – he'd lean over like he wanted to talk to me and then he would hit me right in the face with soda out of gun.
Soda water.
Psh.
And that was the cost of me every once in a while getting a free drink from him was that every once in a while he got to hit me in the face with soda.
Everybody in the bar liked it.
I loved it.
It's hilarious.
He had irrepressible clown traits.
That's right.
refreshing.
Was that club soda or seltzer?
If he could have done it out of a flower on his lapel, it wouldn't have even done it.
And then eventually, I started doing, I started, well, I'd been doing meth, but then I started to freebase it, and then I started to
Then the guys that were running the meth in the town were also in the bar.
And it started to get really seedy in there because the meth guys started to take over.
I bet they – when you think about the element they bring with them, I bet it – to the typical employee or patron, it's not improving the clientele when they – what they drag in with them.
No, and I was exacerbating it because I was like, you know, one of the guys in the bar, and then I'm over in this shady situation with these shady dudes.
And I didn't have any money, of course, so it was even shadier.
What the hell?
What the hell?
You got paid in clown insults.
It's just bad.
bad and jeff is the one kind of bartender and they're and this is how you are head bartender who just wasn't gonna have it so then he you know out came the baton and he was like all y'all go and i was like but not me right and he was like you too fucker oh man and then i was out shit and i didn't see jeff for a long time and i thought you know oh and then he opened his own bar i knew that
So at this point, what you're describing here, if I'm getting the chronology right, this is going to be early-ish.
Because you were at the off-ramp in the Pearl Jam days.
Is this what, maybe 93, 94, 95?
Yeah, you got it.
Right in there.
93, 94.
And that's the last time you saw him on the reg?
Well, I ran into him.
But yeah, this was the last time that we were like – because he – He started a bar.
Were you diswelcomed from the new bar as well?
Oh, no, because then I was sober.
And all of this was a long time before I became a known – I mean I was a well-known person among the scumbags.
It was a long time before I was a known commodity in Seattle.
And when that happened, I felt he was cheering me on from behind his bar.
I felt like we were still –
He would still open the paper and see my picture in there and go, ha ha, there he is.
Look at that.
Look at this asshole.
He'd probably pick it up and show it to Punk Rock Davey, who was sitting at the end of his bar, holding his shit together enough to not get the soda in the face.
So I click on it.
There he is.
Hey, man, I haven't seen you in a long time.
I look over on the side, and he's got a real – it's a restaurant job, but it's a GM.
He's a GM of a big restaurant.
That's a lot of responsibility.
It is, and I never thought – and then all of a sudden I could picture it.
Of course he's the GM of a big restaurant.
Of course he is.
And he says –
Davey didn't make it, you know, or he says something that's not, he doesn't say Davey died.
He just says Davey didn't make it.
And, uh, we're going to have a thing for him at some point.
Cause somebody that knew him said, somebody that knew him called Val and said, uh, you know, all the people that knew Davey, we put something together.
Val doesn't know when, but maybe Sue will be there.
And I was like, wow, Sue will be there.
Okay.
Well, so I'm communicating with him through LinkedIn and
Which is, I mean, I don't know.
I feel like I still have his number in my phone if I'm looking for it.
Yeah.
But then I'm like, ah, Davey.
And you hadn't seen Davey.
I know, I do remember that name.
You hadn't seen Davey in a while, though.
Well, but Davey had, so when I started doing Roderick's Rendezvous,
at the rendezvous.
This is where you go and do live sort of improv-y stories to the audience and stuff, right?
Yeah, do an hour a week, but I would always have a guest.
I tried to do some music.
We had bits.
You know, we read reader mail, but I always tried to have a guest.
And over the years, you know, or over the, I'm sorry, the year that we did it, you know, like Hodgman came on.
I mean, everybody that came through town, I tried to put them up on there.
But
When I first showed up at the rendezvous to start doing the show as I'm walking through the bar I hear And I look and it's punk rock Davey and the rendezvous is his bar now His place where he the place that he claims as his bar.
Yeah, this is you know, he sits he sits down at the end, you know And so I hadn't seen Davey in a long time.
And so all of a sudden we see each other every week.
We're reacquainted we sit and talk and
You know, I love, I always loved Davey and we're having a good old time.
And at some point halfway through the year, I'm like, Davey, I want you to be the guest tonight on Roderick's rendezvous.
And it's not even because I didn't have anybody else.
It's because I want to talk to you.
And so he came up and Davey always should have been famous.
He had a lot of charisma.
And so he came up, he did a, you know, he was the guest on the program.
We talked about some stuff.
He, he had a lot of wisdom to impart to everybody.
And so I had had that time with him in recent years, you know, not super recently, but, but I mean, when I saw him at the rendezvous, I was like, whoa, Davey, you made it like you're, you're, you're 40, you're 42.
And he was like, ha ha, woo.
Finger guns.
Because at that point, it seems like you've gotten, well, I can't speak for everybody, but you do reach a certain point and different people reach this at different ages and then re-reach it at later ages.
But you get to a point where you're like, I think I made it through that one.
I've crawled out of the various crucibles into which I've thrown myself over the years.
And it seems like I'm probably pretty good from here.
Yeah, I cleared the bar, right?
Yes, I know what you mean.
Yeah, Fosbury flop with the building.
I get it.
If you read about, well, not Bing Crosby, Fred Astaire.
Fred Astaire had a whole career with his sister in vaudeville.
He and his sister were a dancing team all the way in the vaudeville years before movies.
Yeah.
And they were massively famous in vaudeville.
Ditto the Marx Brothers.
They had a whole career before the fame that we know them for.
Whole career.
And they were Broadway superstars.
So much so that his sister retired and married...
A duke, an English lord.
She did kind of like the live theater version of A Princess Grace.
Yeah, she was 35 or something.
That's a good gig.
She'd had 20 years dancing on Broadway, you know, the toast of the town.
And her brother was like, well, I want to go into pictures or somebody asked him to go into pictures.
And there was this moment where I was like, we can't keep dancing with your sister in romantic films.
Right.
And she said, you know what?
I'm out.
And she goes and marries this Duke.
And I was reading about the Duke.
And he was one of these guys that died of alcoholism at 35 or something.
I think they used to make it stronger.
Was this before the Depression?
Probably.
This was pre-Depression, yeah.
Because that's the thing that Groucho lost.
I mean, I don't mean to keep bringing it back to him.
This has been true for lots of people.
For example, everybody knows there's this new book out by Dana Stevens where you can learn about Buster Keaton and how his family used to throw him around on stage.
That was the whole bit.
They'd throw Buster Keaton as practically a toddler.
They would throw him on stage.
The Marx Brothers were ridiculously rich, but then he lost it all in October, November of 29.
Oh, no kidding.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Groucho lost it all.
Yeah, he had to start over.
And they started over and look what happened.
Yeah, you get to the big circus.
Yeah.
Yeah, and then all of a sudden Dick Cavett is sitting there reading aloud from your day planner in the 1970s.
A lot of people know that was Dick Cavett's first word.
Julius Marks.
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And all the great shows.
So all of this draws me then to Facebook because I know on Facebook there's a Facebook page for the off-ramp in the early 90s.
So that all the people that worked at the off-ramp in the early 90s can go on there and share their blurry photos taken with disposable cameras of one another –
like totally shit-faced falling down and uh and it's just for the staff uh and you know so it's like a it's not again i'm just gonna say this phonetically that's what they would call like a private group like somebody administers that and then they decide they literally as with a doorman will decide who's allowed in you pass muster as somebody who used to work here you can come into the uh
Well, maybe or maybe no one would care.
Who else would care?
Other than those people, right?
But it does feel like a high school reunion page a little bit.
Although there were probably only, what, 35 of us who ever worked there.
It's always the same people.
But Davey had been before Davey arrived at his new place where he has a seat at the end.
He was back when you were at the off ramp.
Was he coming to the off ramp when you worked there?
Yeah.
Oh, well, so when I got the job at the off-ramp, the first straight person to get a job at the off-ramp was Sue.
Before that, it was a gay bar.
Oh, that sounds like a gay bar.
Yeah, the off-ramp.
It was right by an off-ramp.
And Lee Ray decided, hey, this grunge thing is happening.
And I want to start.
I have a big theater here.
And all I'm doing is drag shows.
And every Wednesday is lesbian night.
And then the leather community comes in on Saturdays.
But the other clubs in town are selling out with this crazy rock music.
I'm going to start having rock music here.
Our new wave nights in Florida were usually at gay bars.
There it is.
Right.
You could like, you could like take a night, especially like a Tuesday night, Tuesday nights where I leave memory serves pretty prime.
Like you come out and you can like listen to sisters of mercy and the house Martins or whatever.
Cause that wasn't a big, uh, you know, that wasn't a big with the usual clientele.
Well, and what he's, you know, his initial idea was like, well, Tuesdays are always hard to fill.
We'll put this rock music in.
Sure.
And then he, he had a few bands on a Tuesday night and they sold 600 tickets and
and $10,000 worth of booze.
And he was like, maybe we should have this on Thursday, too.
This might be worth trying a second time.
He said to me one time, he was like, here's the thing about Lesbian Night.
We get 1,000 people here, but they all nurse one drink all night long.
And then they're all married and living together the next day.
Here's the thing about Grunge Rock Night.
More drinks get spilled than we sell...
More people buy a drink, turn away from the bar and drop it and have to turn around and get another one than we sell in, you know, all the lesbian nights in a month.
Thank God for the poor coordination of Mookie Blaylock.
It's exactly right.
So by the time I got hired.
He was like, look, I got to get some straight kids in here.
I don't know what this is all about and I just need – I need staff and I need them to be whatever these kids are.
And he interviewed me and he was like, okay.
Have you ever worked in a bar before?
No.
Have you ever – do you know how to do anything?
No.
How did – do you have a home?
No.
I had just arrived in Seattle.
I didn't know anything.
The way I got the job was my high school girlfriend's sister –
was spending a year and a half as a lesbian and had gotten a job.
Kelly's sister was testing the waters.
Kelly's sister Peggy was very lesbian in 1990, 91, and she was leaving Seattle and moving back to Anchorage, and I was in touch with her, and she was like, oh, you should call my boss Lee Ray because he wants to hire a straight guy.
And I was like, sold.
So I was the second one.
Well, the third person hired was Davey.
Damn.
And Davey shows up and Davey's like from San Diego and he wears tight denim.
Very cute.
Everybody fell in love with him immediately, including me.
Davey worked there for four months before Lee Ray asked him for his ID and it turned out he was 20.
Wow.
That's a good story.
And so then Davey had to sit in the restaurant for a month and a half.
Aging like a wine or a cheese?
He couldn't work, but he didn't have anywhere else to go.
Oh, God, that's funny.
He would come in for his shift time, and he would be made to sit in the restaurant with a black X on his hand for a month and a half.
And the day he turned 21, he was rehired and went back to doing his job, his old job.
That's Davey's story.
And by the time Davey got rehired, the staff was 90% straight grunger staff.
And only like the last – like the real diehard 10% of the staff was still from the old days.
Damn.
So I go on the Facebook page and I'm looking at all the pictures and a lot of the pictures from – on this page were taken right after I was fired.
Yeah.
Oh, that's such a strange feeling.
It's like when you see somebody you think of as an ex, and then you see them and they look happy and have a different haircut.
It's a really strange feeling.
And this was all the people I knew and worked with, all of my friends, all the people I met when I first came to Seattle.
Wow.
And they're all doing stuff with each other.
You know, laughing and somebody, you know, Robert is holding Davey up and Davey's pretending to bonk him on the head.
And Jeff is there with a pork pie hat and elaborate sideburns.
And I'm not in any of them.
Sue is there.
Not me.
sage and the thing is i think they hired sage to replace me so sage is in every picture how long was sage there well i think sage was there for like six years wow and then sage went to work at the rock candy and he was there for six years wow and the last oh the last time i saw sage in person i was at val's bar because val so val was from bulgaria
And Val showed up at the off ramp, didn't speak a word of English, had had left Bulgaria with his best friend.
They were in a rock band in Bulgaria and they were leaving Bulgaria and they they wanted to go to Germany.
So Val learned German and his friend Bobby learned English just in case.
just in case they weren't allowed into germany somehow they made it to america all the way to seattle they showed up at the bar val spoke not a word of english bobby was the one that had been that that had learned english for this job but bobby spoke three words of english and they showed up together as a team and at this point i was assistant manager of the bar
And they were like, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, snuba, dooba, dooba.
And I was like, I don't know, man.
You know, you guys don't speak any English at all.
And Lee Ray on his way past me was like, hire him.
And so I hired him.
And I think Bobby became a bar back.
Val became something else in three years time.
Val was managing the bar.
Spoke fluent English.
I do apologize.
There's so many names here.
Val is one of the two Bulgarians.
Val is one of the two Bulgarians.
Bobby ended up getting – Well, we're talking about an American success – or in this case, a Bulgarian success story.
Good for them.
They arrive with like three words of English between them, and this is terrific.
Yeah.
And then Bobby gets a job as a graphic artist at Starbucks, and now I think he's vice president of graphic arts at Starbucks and lives in a helicopter.
Oh, that's amazing.
Lives in a helicopter that's hovering over Sweden somewhere.
Huh.
So those two guys, you know, but anyway, so Val went on to own his own bar.
I was at Val's bar one time.
Sage walks in.
This is just a few years ago.
It's a birthday party for kind of a high mucky muck in Seattle.
And Sage has been hired as the magician.
And Sage does 40 minutes of comedy.
That's a long set of magic.
40 minutes of comedy and magic.
Not funny or magical.
Yeah, that's kind of what magic is.
Sage is a beloved character in Seattle.
And so everybody, you know.
Yeah, sure, sure, sure.
And it was a birthday party.
What are you going to do?
Yeah.
So I'm on the Facebook.
And then I think, well, since I'm here.
Am I right?
Since I'm here.
Why not?
Why not go over and look and see what people are saying?
Right.
At this point, you've been, the phrase I would use in my ADHD addled mind is the hook is in.
I have to be very careful in life about what the hook, whether I even realize there is a hook.
And then I often, I mean, I realize until it's too late that the hook is in.
See also tagging MP3s.
We go like, oh, shit.
I guess the tag got in a couple hours ago and I never bothered.
In this case, it's clear it's becoming – not clear to you, but there's a path now to something.
If that particular morning someone had said, hey, John, are you going to be bouncing around the islands of social media today?
You'd be like, fuck off.
But you ended up – now there's an attractive nuisance and you want to learn more about the fate of Punk Rock Davey maybe.
Wow.
Well, so Punk Rock Davey, like, that's a benign search.
But once I'm in Facebook— So you can reconnect with your old pals.
You can see the Bulgarians, you know?
The thing is, we're going to have a ceremony.
We're all going to be there.
Mm-hmm.
You know, we're all going to pour one out.
You can do some magic.
I don't know any—Sage might—
But Sue might be there.
It's going to be – it's very exciting.
You love reconnecting.
I mean, if I may say, it strikes me that you – especially you like reconnecting when you're not sure how it ended or why.
But I think in general, you're somebody who enjoys reconnecting and you enjoy the delta, whereas I fear the delta between, say, high school in 1985 and now.
You seem very attracted to the like, oh my gosh, look, we're all here and we've all changed.
What's different now?
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's catnip for you in some ways, right?
I love it.
I love it.
And here we all are.
And the thing is, this is the thing I learned when I first went to a high school reunion.
Even though I haven't seen you for 30 years, we've known each other for 30 years.
Like, just because we haven't seen each other doesn't mean we haven't known each other for 30 years.
True.
It's been 30 years.
Or in the case of high school people, it's been 35 years.
It's the essential version of compound interest in some ways.
Exactly.
And you do know them.
You know them intimately, right?
Yeah.
Now, I don't think Richard is going to come, but maybe...
Who knows?
Yeah.
Anyway.
Oh, and then the other Richard, of course, died a long time ago.
So I'm on there.
Well, it's because he's only known as other Richard.
He was really, you know, it's what they call it, the nomenclature fatalism or whatever, like when you name your daughter Jeeves.
You know what I'm saying?
Yeah.
Right.
He was the other Richard, although he was the first guy to stick his tongue up my nose.
Is that right?
Is there a plaque there, like a blue plaque there now?
No.
You go from email to LinkedIn to now, and there's so many people on events.
At this point, you're attracted, you're about to go, and you still have a Facebook account.
At this point, you're about to go check out.
And is it the off-ramp group in particular you're going to check out?
No, I've already been there, and I'm done.
But I'm looking up at the top bar, you know, and they tell you,
Oh, you've got a bunch of people have contacted you.
There's a bunch of times when you've been mentioned nightmare, all these things.
And I'm there in these little red, these little red things up there flashing their look, they're calling me.
And I'm like, I'm going to do this.
And so I go and I look, you know, and it's always a risk.
It's always a risk.
But I go, I look, and I end up at Gary's van.
Okay.
The Facebook fan group where our friends, you know, they collect.
Oh, is this going to make me sad, John?
No, I don't think so.
Is it going to make you sad?
Well, you never know.
Oh, come on.
This is a good one.
Don't hurt me.
Don't hurt me.
The thing is that at Gary's Van, here's one of the things that defines that group is that they speak truth to power.
The kids at Gary's Van don't mess around.
If you say something or I say something they don't like, they're just going to call it out.
They're going to say, no, no, no, no.
They're going to say, my friend told me to go to rehab and I said, no.
Oh, I see.
They tried to make them.
I see.
Yeah, Dan said this.
John said this.
Okay, okay, okay.
This is really just as minimal of this part as possible.
Okay, so Gary's Van, which is a group of power.
So I'm reading over there, and it's dangerous because there are people over there I consider friends and longtime supporters, and sometimes they can say things that hurt my feelings.
But somebody in the comments of some post somewhere says, you know, John didn't want to...
Start sleeping better because he was afraid that normal sleep would make him normal.
And I was like, you know, that's a very concise way of putting it.
You know, like if I were to sleep normally, then I would become a normal.
And I have been normal.
For the last month and a half, and it's been awesome.
Wait, was that all to get to that poll quote?
Yeah.
Okay.
I've just been normal, but so normal.
I can't decide if I envy your mind or hate it.
Okay.
All right.
Catching up.
So last night, I'm here at the house.
Uh-huh.
I put my little girl to sleep.
We've been hanging out.
We went down to the beach.
We've been playing cards.
I'm not saying you're leaving.
I hate it when people tell somebody whether they're telling a story wrong.
I think the critical part of this to walk away with is that after over a decade of doing this podcast where there's been so many things that –
I think one of your bets noir has been sleep.
Like you think about aliens, you think about your pillows turning into owls, or in fact, you believe in your heart of hearts that your pillows did turn into owls on some level.
But sleep has been a tough thing for you.
In some ways, even when you're sleeping with somebody you like, they touch your feet and it freaks you out.
There's an opossum in the walls.
It's so many things.
Oh, my God, that story.
But it strikes me that in this calendar year so far, probably, maybe earlier, but it sounds like in this calendar year is for the first time in a very, very, very long time, several of those challenges for you seem to be moving in a different direction.
And I mean lots of them because it's fun to go on Facebook and diagnose somebody whose voice you've heard.
But what I can tell you that I know about you is it's not one thing.
It's not just fear of being normal.
It's also that, like, goddamn, man, that's the time of night when the demon dogs come.
And, like, one feels like they need to challenge them to get through it.
I don't want to go be alone in bed.
I don't want to deal with this.
But I want to be a person who gets up.
But the crazy part, as you've described it anyway, is that not only were you sleeping better, arguably the most insane part from my POV, you were going to bed like a person before midnight.
I was going to bed like a person.
Is that accurate?
And you were like getting sleep like a person and getting up in the morning?
If anybody who's struggled with sleep will recognize that that is so not any one thing.
No, I was getting all the sleep.
You can get to sleep at seven o'clock.
I took a nap at six the other night.
Six.
6 p.m.
That was me for two years.
6 p.m.
nap.
That might mean I get up.
What is early and late at that point?
I mean, you're so off of the cycle.
It doesn't seem reasonable.
But the remarkable part that you've shared with us in the last few weeks is that you've been maybe top line.
You've been sleeping on something closer to a normal schedule.
You've been going to bed earlier than you ever would on the reg and getting up regularly.
And then perhaps... Way earlier.
And the cherry on top was that you liked it and you felt good about being up in the morning, for example, and not being dogged in the middle of the night by playing threes or something.
Absolutely correct.
I just want to make sure people are up to speed on that.
But last night...
You know, my daughter's bedtime is probably later than it should be.
It's 9.30.
I don't know what time bedtime was at your house.
My kid, I think because they would like some time with their phone, is my kid goes to bed generally at 7.30 or 8 and spins in a chair and looks at their phone.
And looks at the phone for an hour.
I don't track it.
I mean, it's not my thing for a 14-year-old.
I'm not the sleep cop.
You know, my kid needs to figure out when they fuck up.
So that's, you know, I'm not there to be the headmaster with the Yahtzee hat.
La, la, la.
But anyhow, I think that's fine.
And you're, wait, I got to remember, what's the difference between our kids 14 and 10?
She's almost 11.
She'll be 11 in a month.
I know.
I know.
Anyway.
Yes.
Here comes.
And so when it gets to be 9 or 9.15 out of curiosity, do you start gently hurting?
Do you start saying time to brush teeth, get jammies?
Do you start hurting at 9?
She's really good when the hammer comes down.
I let her go right to 9.30.
Kind of like you getting on a plane.
I love this.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
She's running around.
She's got a cloak on and is casting spells.
And at 9.30, I'm like, it's 9.30, baby.
And she doesn't put up a fight.
She goes right to the bathroom, brushes her teeth, into bed, lights off.
And if she sits there and stares at the ceiling in the dark, that's fine.
But she typically doesn't.
She goes to sleep.
Right.
Yeah.
Well, what I've realized, though, is that there's only, if I'm a normal man, there's only, what, an hour before I need to start feathering my nest.
Right, right, right.
So in my case, and I've been trying to go to bed earlier as well with varying levels of success, but I feel what you mean.
You really feel that when you've got a fresh baby.
And like, on the one hand, you never know at any second you could be called into something that you have to deal with for 30 seconds or seven hours.
You never know.
You don't know how long the kid is going to sleep, right?
You don't know if it's going to be one minute or 15 hours, that kind of thing.
But like eventually you get to this, like, okay, I,
For now, anyway, there's a period of like one to three hours where I get to do all the other things I need to do that aren't actively taking care of the kid.
But now your window is the downside, you're saying.
Your window is now narrowed a bit.
Well, it's so small.
And I've got to hit that.
I've got to hit that target.
And I was doing some laundry downstairs.
You need to be as ready as she is, right?
And here's what I did.
I ate two.
Uh-huh.
Dark chocolate peanut butter cups from Trader Joe's.
Dark chocolate peanut butter.
Oh, you mean like a Reese's, like a personal sized?
Just little, two little personal sized dark chocolate.
You're talking about like an inch across or an inch and a half across?
No, no.
Well, yeah, the little ones.
The little ones that look like.
Was it actually a pie, John?
Be honest.
You know what they are?
No, they're the little ones that if you put them on top of a Barbie, they would look like a little chocolate crown.
You know, they're sized for a Barbie head.
I know, but it's dark chocolate.
And so then I'm like, oh, time for bed.
I'll read a little David Copperfield.
I go lay down.
It's a reasonable hour.
It's like 1045.
I'm like, I have the virtue of a prince.
Look at me reading in bed like somebody in a movie.
Here I am.
I'm reading in bed.
I'm not looking at my phone.
I'm reading.
I read a little bit.
And then I'm like, well, I'll just look at my phone for a second.
Yeah.
Then I look up, it's one o'clock in the morning.
Is it fair to infer that that was filled with phone times?
Oh, no.
There were no fun times.
Phone times.
Phone times.
That you basically found yourself disappearing into your fucking phone.
What I did was, you know, I'm now on this whole Wordle thing where it's not just Wordle and guess my word.
It's all the adjunct and subsidiary Wordles.
Randall Monroe sent Ken Jennings a link to a... I'm in the control group.
uh the control group i'm sorry oh my god are we talking about two literally two different randall monroe things from last week no it's the same one holy shit that's so fucking funny i i know i laughed and i laughed and i'm trying not to be a dick about things that make other people happy i'm trying not to yuck on a yum but i love that so randall posts it's two stick figures one of them says are you playing wordle and the other one says i'm in the control group and he says and then what was what was the line underneath the cartoon
I don't remember.
It's something like, you know, what would I say whenever somebody asks me about something popular?
You say, I don't even have a TV?
Is this something I would need a television to know about?
Or is this something I would need a television to understand, which works in a lot of situations?
Sorry, I hosted your joke.
It's just that was my favorite joke last week.
No, sometimes you also say, I'm a ceramicist.
I say that if somebody pretends that they want to know what I do, but actually find out, try to guess how much money I make.
Oh, is that?
Oh, that's the thing.
Well, no, that's where it started.
It started with meeting other parents who go like, where are you applying for this?
Or blah, blah, blah, blah.
Or like, you know, something as simple as, yeah, we do fluff and fold.
Oh, really?
Well, where do you do fluff and fold?
It's like, fuck off.
You don't care.
Why don't I just like give you a spreadsheet?
You know, I'm a ceramicist.
You do fluff and fold.
Wow.
Wow.
We can't have 220.
What Randall sent was a thing called wikitrivia.tomjwatson.com.
And it's a thing where they throw up a picture of something in history, and you're just supposed to drag it onto the timeline.
Is this before or after?
Oh, I've seen this.
John Kimball from Election Profit Makers does this with trying to – oh, God, why am I telling you about this?
Where you look at a picture and you have to identify where it is?
No, I used to play that, and that drove me absolutely crazy because – John Kimball got pretty addicted to it.
I was too.
98% of the pictures of the world are a dirt road in the middle of nowhere.
This is someplace where my feet hurt.
And you're like, wow.
Okay.
And so you start driving up the road and pretty soon you can, oh, and they blur out all the signs that would tell you where you are.
So you're just looking at businesses and you're like, oh, I guess that looks like Thai.
So I guess I'm in Thailand and
and now i have to put a dot on the map of the world where i think i am i loved that game i would play it for hours no this is this is different because some of them are really easy it's like well was queen victoria born before or after the council of trent and you're like yeah yeah i get it oh i see but then they then they start throwing these things in which is just like the seventh duke of edinburgh and you're like who right or like the you know the marmalucks and it
And so it's really hard to get a – the goal is to get an uninterrupted string of right answers.
And I maxed out at 21.
That's the 21.
That seems extraordinary.
It beats both Ken and Randall's top score, which infuriates them both.
So I'm doing that.
Tell him I said hi.
I really enjoy his work.
You can tell both of them that.
But I have some of his books and I really enjoy his work.
No, he's wonderful.
Yeah.
So I don't –
look at the time and then it's one o'clock in the morning and i go i i'm like oh i no no no i had a very narrow window i had to i had to stick but like like it almost seems unfair we were like shit i was doing so good it's one thing to have a 21 answer streak in this in this game for pointy-headed dorks but like i had another streak going on and i've lost i i lost my presence of mind for a minute
And then, well, yes, I did.
And then the worst was, oh, wait, it's one o'clock in the morning.
I can do the next day's Wordle.
Oh, because it starts over every day.
It starts over every day.
And then it was like, well, I might as well do the guess my word.
And of course, it's one o'clock in the morning, so I got my worst scorn either.
Anyway, the point is, I lay down, turn off the light, I lay down in bed, and then those peanut butter cups have got my foot going.
And I'm like, enough, stop it.
Stop it.
Just a little bit, the sugar affects you.
Do your normal sleep routine where you imagine all the members of the Bush administration buried in the desert in a shipping container where you're in there, you know, just like slightly gaslighting them by changing the walls.
Right.
You can just barely hear Dick Cheney quack.
It puts me to sleep every night, you know, because what's wonderful is there's always somebody new that can be introduced to the gang, right?
There's always like, hey, everybody, Tucker Carlson is joining us.
Yeah, but then part of the gaslighting is they're not sure.
Like, was that Charlie Manson?
And you're like, maybe.
Right.
Right, and they only glimpse him through their windows.
It's going to be like, again, like Death of Stalin, where you're going to see a lot of people dying, a lot of people moving through the hallway, and you're going to be, you know, oh my God, was that Glenn Gould?
It's like, no, he's been dead for a while, but good guess.
Good guess.
Right, because you give everybody, during the induction process, you give everybody a funny haircut.
So it's like, I don't know.
Yeah, I mean, I've been watching a lot of Hitler things lately, and they were talking about- We should talk about that.
We should circle back to that.
Oh, you don't even want to know.
I'm so deep.
I watched, I've watched five Bands of Brothers episodes.
I get rewatched, rewatched.
But I also, I'm rewatching World at War.
But anyway, I was thinking, you know, when in 40, I want to say three, when Tom Cruise tried to blow up Hitler, but the oak table saved him, you know?
Yeah.
43 or so.
Right.
Um, and I was just thinking like how he got so paranoid and he's all gacked out on, uh, on Hitler pills and like, it'd be kind of fun if they started doing a thing where you'd show up somewhere and it would be like the casting call and the producers.
And there was just like dozens of Hitlers, many of whom were obviously fake.
Um,
i think in your project i don't take you off your thing here but you should show up and there should be like 15 glenn goulds there like guys like canadians in gloves with donald caps wandering around like as we know hitler hated goldbergs but the point being i think that would be a lot of fun for a dick cheney that would be a nice way to lighten things up is he sees 13 of himself in the mess hall see i love that i you
Make him wonder.
Make him wonder.
If you went to Vegas and you got like an Elvis impersonator and a Kurt Cobain impersonator, and you just let Dick Cheney get a glimpse, and he's not in his jumpsuit.
He's in the same prison outfit that Cheney's in, but it's Elvis.
Maybe it's him from different times.
Maybe he also sees himself from the 60s or something, or he sees himself from the Gerald Ford years.
He sees Ronald Reagan and he turns and kind of waves at him on his way to the electric chair.
It's actually a Frankie Goes to Hollywood video.
I love this.
Capture that.
That's good.
Anyway, you're up now.
Your foot is twitching because of dark chocolate Reese.
At this point, I'm listening to the advice of my psychologist, which is, if you can't sleep, don't stay in bed.
Get up.
That's what they say.
I get up.
I'm wandering around the house.
I'm too tired to do anything, but my foot is bouncing.
I can't go to sleep.
Long story short,
I didn't get a lot of sleep last night.
Do you feel like... Well, I know, like all of my friends, you don't like being encouraged by me.
I hope, secondarily, that what I suspect, which is that you're not going to let this screw up everything.
No, no, no.
You're going to have bad nights.
You've had bad nights a lot in your life, and you've come back to where you want it to be.
Yeah.
How do you feel about it?
I'm going to learn my lesson.
I'm going to learn my lesson.
I am.
I am.
When that window opens, when that 930 to 1030 window is there, I'm going to be like, you know what I'm doing?
I'm putting these – I'm going to put the files back in the file cabinet.
I'm going to put the dishes in the dishwasher.
I'm going to go around the house.
I'm going to turn off all the lights that my daughter turned on.
Ritual can be very useful.
Yes.
Ritual, you know, that has a lot of valence to it as a word.
But the wind down ritual, the closing the blinds ritual, the like brush your teeth, wash your hands, wash your face, like developing that kind of ritual I think can be extremely powerful.
And I think that, you know, the science types say so as well.
So you're not giving up on yourself, right?
No.
No, no, Merlin.
I gained too much ground, and I'm not going to lose it to something.
The thing is, what I would lose it to is not last night's lack of sleep.
What I would lose it to is despair.
I would get sad that I had screwed up, and then that would propel me into further screw-ups, and I'm not going to let it happen.
I got a busy day today.
I'm going to stay up.
I'm going to try and stay up all day, and then I'm going to go to bed every reason.
Oh, man.
Yeah, yeah, I know.
It's a lot to deal with.
The feeling bad about it is real.
I mean, I'm not kidding.
Like, this is what, again, the term in Buddhism is the second arrow.
It's so much worse, the pain that we see in a lot of people.
It's like people who say, I have to work.
I got a mortgage.
And you're like, well, yeah, you chose the mortgage, idiot.
But the way one beats up on oneself, that's the second arrow.
Yeah.
Pain and disappointment and bummers are just part of life.
It's just that especially people, when we regard ourselves as smart, there are so many things we stop believing are optional.
And there's so many things we start feeling have to be the way they are, either because they've always been that way,
Whatever.
I'm just here to say it.
And people bristle at this.
I feel like people bristle at this, and that's a bummer, is that you would be shocked to learn how much in life is optional.
And that's why, again, in my little document I'm writing, when people say things like when they excuse away the shit in their life, the trouble they cause themselves, the trouble they cause others, all of this trauma and agony in life because of things they, quote, unquote, have to do.
And I'm always like, you don't have to do anything but die.
Like everything else is optional.
And even if you just imagine that that's true, how transformative could it be in your life?
I'm not trying to be fucking all, you know, Eckhart Tolle, Tony Robbins.
I'm just saying like if you just for a moment, for a weekend, assume that more shit in your life was actually optional, you would be horrified, terrified, and maybe eventually a little bit inspired.
Do you want to know something?
Yes.
Yes, you there.
Yes, you there.
I turned a corner this week.
This weekend.
Yesterday.
Sunday, February 6th.
I'll put it on my calendar.
Sunday in the middle of the afternoon.
I went to town.
I hitched up the horses to the wagon.
Oh.
And I took the Surrey into town.
Yep.
Fringe on top, Old Town Road.
Yep, yep, yep.
And I spent the day on Capitol Hill.
Your old haunt.
That's my old haunt.
I know every inch of it.
Walked around.
I saw Jason Finn, Seattle's luminary Gen X drummer, walking around.
We hung out a little bit.
I was with my little girl.
We watched a softball game.
We went to a rock concert featuring one of her little friends, a little school of rock show.
that was specifically on Capitol Hill to give the kids a taste of what rock is really all about.
Primarily, Capitol Hill is a sort of, in terms of cognates, that's kind of your Castro, right?
Yes, absolutely.
It was.
An upscale gay neighborhood at one time?
At one time, it was the arts neighborhood.
So it was the gay neighborhood, but also the rock neighborhood and the theater neighborhood.
And walking around and I'm looking at the people that live there and the things that they're up to.
And I'm getting a vibe.
You know, I'm like looking at, I'm waving, I'm smiling at people.
I'm hello.
It's, you know, da, da, da.
And I have that thing of like, this was my neighborhood.
And now it's your neighborhood.
And that's the way of nature, you know, and, oh, I could bore the shit out of you with what this Kentucky Fried Chicken used to be, but, or what, you know, and it's not even a Kentucky Fried Chicken anymore.
It was a Kentucky Fried Chicken in between what it used to be and what it is now.
Whoa.
Ah, ba-da-ba-da, and this and that, and boy, this used to be a muddy feeling.
Is she having fun?
Is she enjoying what you're doing?
Oh, no, I'm not doing that to her, because she would just be... Oh, but I mean, like, is she enjoying the trip out?
Is she seeing the sights?
Would she rather be doing something else?
No, she saw her friends, and that was important.
Oh, of course you said as much.
Yeah, yeah, my lady friend and my daughter went to see her friend dance in a Chinese parade.
You gotta support your friend's band.
Gotta go support the band.
Yeah, yeah, it's important.
But we're walking around and I have a few interactions with people and in general, you know, the – just the vibe, the general vibe.
And I'm thinking the thoughts that, you know, kind of similar to the ones you were just expressing, which were thoughts that I have all the time, which is like, you know, it could be a lot easier if –
There were just – you know, there was just a couple of generally accepted revelations or realizations about how to get along with other people or what the world is like or, you know, just like endure a little bit of suffering before you write a letter.
You know, like all this kind of thing, all these thoughts.
And I had this sudden – and it's the first time it's ever happened to me.
This sudden feeling of like, you know what?
Maybe it's time for a war.
Maybe a geopolitical bellicose saber-rattle fight or your war.
Yeah.
Maybe it's time.
Maybe it's time.
You know, like every – Since then to go to the mattresses, time to clear the air a little bit.
Every six years.
I was all real proud of you, Mikey.
Yeah.
Like, everybody up here feels like they want a war.
They feel like they're squaring off for a war.
And I've spent my, like, the last 20 years going, no, no, no, that's not what you want.
Like, hey, it's simple.
Yeah, yeah, Uncle and Grandpa Uncle Joe just, well, at much cost, got us out of the whole thing with Afghanistan.
Maybe it's time to pick a new one, you know, a fresh start, new war.
Well, no, but I mean, maybe it's time for a war here.
Oh, you mean literally, okay, literally a figurative war in Capitol Hill.
no a literal war and not just a neighborhood stick fight no the vibe is so strong and i feel it all the way across the country where it's like oh everybody thinks they want a war like a real war did capitol hill i'm sorry my brain is so corroded did they have one of those george floyd square style things a while back they had one of the number one ones yeah tell me about that that's the kind of thing you're talking about that's what you're talking about here right
We're walking through the chop.
It's no longer the chop.
It's back to being a baseball field.
But this was the place where they actually drove the police out of the East Precinct building and established an autonomous...
zone in the center of the town where the cops weren't allowed and it was like a free marketplace of ideas.
But it becomes like a Capitol Hill checkpoint, Charlie.
That's right.
You defend it.
That's right.
You had to go through the barricades and it was a free speech zone and it lasted about as long as you would expect before it became...
like a, like a hazardous, uh, and dangerous sort of, you know, cause eventually that might start out with the grandest.
This is just, I'm not criticizing anybody here, but it strikes me.
Well, but it strikes me that something like that.
Cause I've been pseudo semi involved with things.
Not unlike that.
It starts out with the highest intentions and the best, the, the finest people doing their best, but like eventually it tends to get a little, a little frayed.
Yeah.
The second string comes in, and maybe they're not quite as restrained.
That's the problem.
It was like me with the meth guys at Jeff's bar.
It was all fun and games, and I was getting some spritz in there until pretty soon the meth guys are there, and then pretty soon I'm part of the problem.
I mean, I guess I was always part of the problem.
It's just the problem got more serious.
But the cops got out of East Precinct, and then it was like – they did, of course, that chicken shit crybaby cop thing.
Oh, I know.
Oh, you don't want to be policed?
Well, fine.
Then we won't even – They'll never shout here, Harold, again.
Like, okay, we get it.
We get it.
Don't hand me the fifth me.
But I don't know –
It feels like all the people on Capitol Hill want a war, but they think they're going to war with Arkansas.
And I was in Arkansas recently, and it felt like they wanted a war, but they thought they were going to war with Capitol Hill and Seattle, and that's not how it's going to play out.
The people in Capitol Hill are going to go to war with each other, and the people in Arkansas are going to go to war with each other.
But we're getting closer and closer because just the vibe on the street.
It's like a sunny day.
We got upscale restaurants all around us, and everybody here is traipsing around in their pink roller skates, and we're having a day.
But there is –
There is like a blanket of negativity that feels violent.
Like just on the side.
I've gotten a little taste of this.
I've talked to this about a few people recently.
I was talking to Alex about this on Dubai Friday.
I feel like people are getting a little bit weird.
I think I think it's not you cannot write it down to one thing.
It's not just that we forgot how to interact with other people during the pandemic.
But like, I just feel like even like when the what's our local football team 49ers played last week and like just walking past the bars where all the thumbs are out screaming at each other.
Like there is a very I imagine this is a little bit what 1968 felt like.
I believe you're right.
Where there's just something that's not quite right, and this could break bad any time.
Except 1968, and maybe we weren't there, so we don't know.
But in retrospect, the boomers made it seem like that it was a hopeful time.
Tell it to people in Czechoslovakia.
Right, but I mean, you know, it seemed like it was exciting because the institutions were this, and the enemy was clear, and now it just feels like
uh, all against all.
And it doesn't, I'm sure that to the people that are like, that are man in the barricades, it doesn't feel like that because to them, the enemy is clear.
But to me, it's like, Oh, I don't think that's how it's going to play out.
I think like, I think it's, this is closer to French revolution where the end result is going to be Robespierre or Napoleon ultimately, but year, but we're going to have 20 years of this.
Or 10.
Who knows?
But, you know, five years ago I was like, no, no, no, look, punching Nazis is wrong.
That's their language.
You need to talk to them in our language, the language of liberal humanism.
Yeah, put this daisy in the rifle barrel.
And a lot of people were like, fuck you, man, punching Nazis.
Yeah.
And I was like, wow, that's really not what I'm into.
Probably because a lot of Nazis are better at punching than we are.
Exactly my point, right?
If you punch them, they got all the reason to punch you and they are the nuts, right?
They're the ones that are hoarding guns and shit.
Yeah.
And then over time I was like, okay, whatever.
Fucking punch Nazis, fine.
And now I'm like –
it was about the first time i ever felt this way i was just like you know what fuck it like i don't care anymore it's not that i don't care i deeply care yeah it's that i feel like every once in a while there needs to like you say go to the mattresses like these days are real rain today's the day i settled all our family affairs you know like schlatsy
So don't tell me you're innocent.
Don't tell me.
No, no.
Then he kicks out that windshield.
So I feel like... Oh, Jesus.
I'm walking around.
I'm like... You guinea brat.
Because people don't remember the last time blood was spilled.
Everybody's got a plan until they get punched in the nose.
And here it comes.
And I'm like...
wow, the first time I ever – it's not that I feel hopeless.
It's that I feel like, may you live in interesting times.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
We're going to have to check back in.
You're going to stay up.
I'm going the distance.
And then try and get back to it.
You don't care for advice, and I love giving it, which is a problem.
No, I love advice.
I love your advice.
No, no.
All I'm going to say is, and I know I'm going to stop talking and just talk now.
Go easy on yourself.
There's not that much to be gained by punishing yourself.
I would say try and, if you can, try to adopt a lightness about this.
You're going to be fine.
You know what?
You could do three more of these.
You could fuck it up three more times, and you can still bounce back.
Yeah.
Just don't feel like you need to drive that second arrow in because that makes it worse.
I'm trying real hard.
I think the thing that's motivating me is I was thinking about it the other day.
What I got was not – there was no thing where some door opened and like –
And happiness and light flooded in.
What happened was I was removing suffering.
All these things that were causing me suffering, I was eliminating.
And so I was in a state not of like newfound happiness and enthusiasm and, you know, like I wasn't out.
Oh, that kind of like the fake new age.
Like I'm going to fake it till I make it and act like a manic person, even though I'm riddled with sadness.
Yeah, I didn't do that.
I didn't go sign up for a gym and like, I'm going to exercise two hours a day.
Like I didn't do any of that.
But what I did was, in the space of a couple of weeks, eliminate four of the main things that caused me massive grief.
And all of a sudden, they weren't there.
And so there was a lightness.
And to comment directly in the Gary's Van lexicon, there was a normalness.
that I had not experienced that I did not find was objectionable.
I wasn't like, Oh no, I'm normal.
Um,
I was like, oh, this is what it feels like to not look at the dishes in your sink.
Whatever muscle you exercise will get stronger.
That's the problem in life.
And if the muscle that one exercises, and again, not a PE person, but if the muscle that you exercise is the one that I'm constantly disappointing myself, and that becomes its own kind of tragic thing.
source of regularity and continuity.
Like if you're used to, like when I used to get cold sores a lot, I would actually feel kind of relieved when I got a cold sore because that meant that now the thing I was thinking about all the time finally happened and I could actually relax for a minute.
Even though I was unhappy, I was unhappy in a way that I could understand.
Yeah, right.
You let the pressure off.
Yeah.
All right.
I don't want to lecture you.
No, no, no.
But I think you got this.
You got this as they say.
See, I would...
I was about to say that I would listen to a Buddhist podcast with you and Dan.
The truth is I wouldn't.
No.
But I would be glad it was there.
Oh, that's very nice.
That's nice.
Because it would be like a cold sore.
It would let the steam off for everybody, right?
All of your fans, they'd be like, thank God it's there.
We were waiting for it.
kind of like the beatles podcast that we keep promising people or hitler or hitler podcast yeah i'll start preparing a curriculum not that we have to not to which we must hue but just to cover a lot of what i've been watching because i have been watching a good deal of hitler you know i've been watching is that um i finally broke down um because netflix i i guess i'm out of bolivian murder shows because it kept bringing me that world war ii in color series oh i see i haven't watched it yet because
Well, the footage is great.
Are there P-40 Thunderbolts blowing up trains?
I love to see an airplane shoot a train.
I don't know the names of things, but I do know that especially late in the war, you know what I'm going to say for you, the Stalingrad episode is really choice.
In color?
Well, it's been, as we used to say in the 80s, colorized, but it's pretty, it looks terrific.
But that's a story I knew roughly, but I didn't know.
I had no idea how fucking...
how crazy and resistant such a small group of Soviets were.
I mean, obviously, on the one hand, Stalin says, hey, you know, you don't take a single step back.
But just basically, they're just huddled by the Volga River for months.
Spoiler alert, building up to what will be probably the second most mind-blowing surprise attack of World War II.
Yeah, I watched that Jude Law movie.
Which one is that?
What's it called?
Is it about Songrad?
It's Enemy of the Gates.
Oh, shit.
Okay.
All right.
Oh, fuck.
A lot of people hate it on it, but it's got Ed Begley Jr.
or whatever.
I said P-40.
It's a P-47.
That's okay.
That's fine.
That's fine.
No, but the whole like hitting the supply lines and basically Stalin saying – and they said the thing that I'd suspected too, which is like one reason Hitler had it such a hard-on for Stalingrad was he thought that would be personally – Yeah, it had his name right on it.
Exactly right.
Exactly right.
He needed – yeah.
Then they got the pincer.
The fucking pincer.
You never see the pincer.
And that guy, whose name escapes me now, the general guy, they say he's more of a back room than front line general guy and how fucked he is.
And of course, at this point, Hitler's crazy on the Hitler pills.
You should read a book called Blitzed.
It's all about Hitler and drugs.
I don't know.
And, um, anyway, that's all really good.
What a fucking story.
Um, and then what was the other thing I was going to mention?
I watched that.
Oh, the Holocaust or the, uh, rather the, um, uh, not Treblinka, but the, the, yeah, liberating one of the labor camps one.
It's pretty rough.
Actually, that episode of Band of Brothers is pretty rough too.
Yikes.
It is.
That show's so good, John.
I haven't watched it in a long time because I feel like I'm saving it.
It came out two days before 9-11.
We started watching it on a Sunday night, and then Tuesday came, and suddenly it was as much as I love, I love that show.
I love especially the first episode of that show.
So good.
David Schwimmer's surprisingly good in that.
Yeah, yeah.
Simon Pegg, like all the great shows.
Dexter Gordon, God, he looks like he's so young in that.
Anyway, hey, if y'all haven't checked it out, check out Band of Brothers.
It's really good.
You know, I was on an international flight, some 10-hour, 12-hour flight or something.
I'm looking at the back of the seat, flipping through things, and I come upon the first episode of Band of Brothers.
I'd never seen it, and I didn't even think – I hadn't even thought to see it.
Classic.
And I'm like, no, shit, I'll watch it.
And I watched like six –
episodes of it back to back on this flight so you got up you got up to like the ardenne like i was like this is the greatest experience of my life oh my god and your heart breaks every single person that dies is like oh my fucking god i can't believe oh and how great was donnie walberg as lipton he's so good in that oh yeah it's it's impeccable it's like if you took if you took saving private ryan and you took out the kind of dumb parts
And you added in like 15 more people you cared about.
And then you can hang out.
And I'm still saving this one for a second full.
Well, not that.
This is my at least third or fourth rewatch.
But I'm saving episode 10.
The part where they show you who's who.
The people who've been talking the whole time.
Oh, yeah.
You get to see them in their real selves.
That's that's that right there.
That's that.
That's Dick.
That's Captain.
Here's what I didn't understand.
Why is the Pacific so not as good?
I don't know.
I've heard it's good.
I have not watched it, but it's the same team.
It's the still same Tom Hanks team, right?
And it's only just good.
It's not great.
You watch it and you're like, well, this is just as interesting.
Interesting war.
Hope to shout.
I mean, the brutality in so many ways for the actual soldiers.
Pound for pound.
But somehow not as good of a TV show.
That's good to know.
I'm aware of it, but I've never watched it.
And the fact that I haven't watched it is crazy to me.
Fucking Michael Fassbender.
Fucking Tom Hardy.
Tom Hardy looks like 12.
Fucking, fucking, fucking, it is Tom Hardy.
Fucking, you know, I'm just saying.
God damn it.
How is it not the greatest?
So here's the thing.
I think the thing is you go in not thinking it's going to be the greatest TV and maybe it's great.
Oh, I love stuff like that.
That was me in the movie The Suicide Squad.
I did not know what, I didn't think it was going to be good and then I loved it.
Turns out.
The one, the recent one?
Yeah, the better one.
With Angelina Jolie?
Oh, shit.
No, that's Eternals.
Don't watch that.
Oh, that's Eternals.
Yeah.
No, no.
The Suicide Squad that has the kid who's the Joker.
The Suicide Squad.
I'm trying not to say too much to people about this because part of the fun is having low expectations.
But I'll just say that Sylvester Stallone plays a shark that thinks he's smart and isn't.
A fish?
Well, it's a mammal, technically, I think.
Isn't it?
Don't they know it's too young?
Am I thinking of platypuses?
It's a platypus.
No, a shark is a fish.
Oh, it's a big fish.
You know me.
You know what I do for a living.
That's right.
I'll catch that fish for you.
Catch that bird.
You know how I catch a fish?
I say, you know how I catch a fish?
I caught a fish.
No one else did.
You know what you do?
I say a rosary every time.
Ha ha ha ha!
He was all real proud of you, John.
All right, that'll do, pig.