Ep. 457: "Hard Pants"
Hello.
Hi, John.
Hi, Merlin.
Wow, something's weird on your end.
Yeah, like what?
I might sound a little hoarse.
It's so quiet I don't hear any jackhammers.
I know.
Oh, God, when they...
I tried not to get over my skis, but first they poured the concrete.
Then they repainted the crosswalks.
And I dared myself.
I dared to dream and dream.
Yeah.
You said they're done.
And I think they're done with my area for now.
Yeah.
Done with my area.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
It was really... It was getting kind of distracting.
But, you know, I think people really enjoyed it.
I think it brought a lot of...
It brought people together.
It's like when Howard Hughes says, you know, you can't see how fast the planes are going, so we've got to have clouds behind them.
You know what I'm saying?
Oh, sure, sure.
You know what I mean?
Big, big breasts full of milk.
And in this instance, I think it really helps people to have some contrast, you know, via the Bang Bangs machine.
So you're saying that you didn't get, you weren't wrong when you thought that they were done.
You think they're done.
Well, I think they're a big asterisk.
But welcome to Municipal Corner.
I love a big asterisk.
This is going to be a big process over a long period of time.
Okay.
Because, gosh, why would you have done this during COVID when nobody was using public transit?
Oh, interesting.
Whatever.
You know, dude, I just realized, oh, so the reason I was texting you earlier and talking about time stuff, this is Jubilee week.
You know, this is one of our families call it Jubilee.
Yeah.
Because it's spring break.
Oh, it is.
And what are you doing for Jubilee?
Well, at our behest, we have granted mom a couple days away because she had some work to do, and she could frankly really use the break.
How fun.
Yeah, so it's going to be me and the kid.
Well, mostly the kid, because the kid is now at an age where there's not so much dad needed.
But Jubilee.
But you know what's crazy about this?
And this is why I have so many...
As my pal Max used to say, flashbulb moments of the early days of COVID.
One of them was that I think you'd grabbed a pontoon on the last cruise ship, one of the last cruise ships leaving port.
Mm-hmm.
The other flashbulb memory, as I've said to you, was when there was that weird period between, hey, this COVID thing's really going places, and the lockdown, where we were like, ha, ha, ha, we don't need to cancel our trip to Disneyland.
Right.
Right.
I mean, first week of March, you're thinking, I think the phrase we used with some chuckles was, maybe we'll have the place to ourselves.
Ha ha, chuckle, chuckle.
So it's this jubilee.
I guess it's the two years part that's blowing my mind.
I said this to the kid this morning.
Can you believe it's been two years...
Since we were, it's not the Disneyland part of it that's important, but we had a Disneyland trip planned and we had to cancel it because of COVID.
It's just weird.
That two years really landed on me today for some reason.
It's been seven hours and 16 days.
Oh, I thought you were going to do it.
It's been two years since we wanted to go to Disneyland.
You know, I think I've talked about Disneyland and what a bad job I've done as a man.
That I have not taken my child to Disneyland.
She's 11 now.
And has never been.
Oh, and now she also, without to interrupt, but she also does have an interest in things like Dark Vader.
So much.
And that picture of you in the teacups on the cover of your first album is that's at...
Disneyland.
Disneyland, the land of Disney.
The Anaheim inferior version of Disney World.
I don't know if I would say that, although I've never been to Disney World, so I don't have a way to... Typical West Coast bravado from John Morgan Roderick.
Disneyland, the original place where Walter Disney came up with the idea and perfected it.
Walter Elias Disney.
Before he turned it into a water bug thing.
back in water bug land no i have not taken her and i and i feel like i missed the six-year-old window when she would have been amazed by the princesses i missed the eight-year-old window when she would have been you know gobsmacked by the
The gobsmackery.
Yeah.
And this is why we waited.
Our first park was Legoland, Blockoland, which was perfect.
A perfect entree because you don't take a, I mean, this is, I'm just saying, you realize these things too late as a parent.
You don't take a three-year-old or you don't take anybody who still needs a nap.
to a theme park an all-day theme park that's number one right changing diapers they're probably not going to have the bio available fun to really appreciate it all it takes is like one freak out on the man or monorail or one upsetting big head character and now you're out three hundred dollars yeah yeah see i didn't want that nope but now you missed your window you feel like well i missed i missed my window because
What happened in the last two years is I don't want to do anything.
I don't want to go to places.
I don't want to fly somewhere where there's thousands of people and walk around with them.
So many good jokes last night from Amy Schumer at the Academy Awards.
The one that really landed on me.
The only thing better than this would be for me to be at my house, at home, where all my pills are.
That's exactly how I feel.
I now refer to blue jeans as hard pants.
She just had her birthday.
It was her 11-year-old birthday.
And she wanted to go to a place...
It's one of those places out in the industrial area of town where they've taken a huge warehouse and they've put trampolines in it.
Oh, and not just super bouncy castle, but actual trampolines.
Trampolines, there's a whole section of the floor where it's just trampolines and you can bounce real high.
Is it called arm breakington?
It really is.
It's super duper, duper, duper, duper dangerous.
Yes.
And it's in a place, it's in a manufacturing facility, right?
A building that was built with no...
Um, no qualities at all.
It's a, it's a, it's a four story tall.
It's probably a retrofit.
Like they could get, get a deal on rent.
They had some trampolines and they, they hired some, some shyster lawyer to come up with a standard form to sign.
Right.
That.
And they're also, you know, there's like, I'm sure they're right now somewhere.
They're probably listening to this show is somebody with gel in their hair.
That's a trampoline facilities designer.
Yeah.
Is that a trade?
Like computer mats?
Yeah.
And so they come up with some follies.
Oh, and there's ball pits or foam pits.
So you jump on the trampoline, you go on the foam pit.
It's kind of like a steam.
You take a steam, you jump in the pool, and then you go in the sauna, that kind of situation.
Yeah, except for 10-year-olds.
And it's a super spreader event.
It's in a building...
Let me put it this way.
If I walked into that building and on the day that they leased it, they walked in and it was empty and it had no heat and it had no light and
And it was just a cavern.
And someone walked in there and they had a vision like, I'm going to fill this place with trampolines and children.
I've been waiting my whole life to apply my skills.
And this opportunity has finally presented itself.
This is going to be my dream.
That's right.
If I had been there in that building with them at that moment, just being in that space, I already would have been emotionally overwhelmed.
Okay.
Why?
Because it is just a, you know, it's, have you ever been into a giant abandoned warehouse?
It's just a lot.
There's a lot of energy in those places.
And the less stuff there is, the more the energy is there.
Yeah, for sure.
Yeah.
So, and, you know, so I already, so starting out overwhelmed now to take that space and transform it.
I bet it's haunted.
It's probably haunted.
Haunted with a thousand genera t-shirt cranes.
Because I'm sure it was a t-shirt warehouse.
All those places were t-shirts or tea or coffee.
Something was moved in and out of there.
Artisanal candles, that kind of thing.
Now fill it with 600 trampolines and then put what?
2,500 kids between the ages of five and I would say 13 and then crank the
techno music in an environment where the only thing that can make its way across the room is not the bass but the treble because of the speakers bouncing off the walls yeah but leave all the warehouse style arc lighting like blinding high blue temperature fluorescent lights yeah the kind of thing you want to avoid in an office
The kind of thing you want to avoid in any human environment.
And then you put the parents, you sequester them to some very dirty tables where people have changed diapers and barfed and no one is making an attempt.
Oh, it's basically like an airplane tray table, just covered with poop and spit and stuff like that.
But it hasn't even been, there hasn't even been a courtesy wipe down.
Oh, Jesus.
And this is where my dad.
Oh, and then, of course, it's also a super spreader event.
So this is where my daughter wants to spend her 11th birthday.
Okay.
And as a doting father, I said, yes, of course.
Of course, my love.
I will go sit in this environment.
And what I should have done is.
Special bouncy princess.
What I should have done is drop them off like any sane person.
Like when we were kids at 11 years old.
Neither of my parents would have spent more than a fraction of a second in a building like that.
Remember sitting in the car when your parents would go somewhere?
When my beloved late mother-in-law would go to the grocery store, she would stick my then-toddler-aged wife into the little gross seat of a cart and leave her by the front door while she's shot.
Mm-hmm.
It was a different time.
Yeah.
I mean, I could have, if I were a drinking man, I could have gone across the street to the, to the bar that serves the warehouse.
I just go and have one to take the edge off a little bit.
Or I could have gone to a thrift store or I could have gone to the mall or I could have just driven around with the radio playing soft jazz.
But instead I was like, no, no, no, I'm a good father and I'm going to tough it out.
And I sat there, I sat there in that chair at that dirty table for the three hours of
that this whole thing went down and it got to the point where we, then we had a party room and I was, and we had presents and cake and she had invited eight of her closest friends or whatever.
And by the time we got to the party room, I was ready to explode.
And I was like,
I served the kids all of their garbage pizza.
I walked around, I put some Fritos on everybody's plate.
I asked them if they, you know, ladies, would you?
I'm sorry, did you run this by yourself?
No, no, no.
Okay.
There were, my daughter's mother was there and she's, as you know, very non-plusable.
And then there were two other moms.
And at one point, one of the moms said,
in the joking voice, started to, leaning against the wall, started to tell me that I was doing it wrong.
What?
She's just telling me I was doing it wrong.
No, you know, that's, oh, ha ha, look, he's doing it that way.
That's not how you do it.
And then at one point,
She said, oh, well, I told him he was doing it wrong, and now he's going to just keep doing it that way because he's a guy, and that's what guys do.
Oh, jeez.
And I said... That's not classy.
No.
And she came over at one point.
I was lighting the cake.
She came over, and she was like, you're going to light the... You need to take it out of the box first.
You're going to light the box on fire.
And I turned, and I said, back the fuck off.
Oh, boy.
And she was like...
I was just teasing, and I was like, seriously, back the fuck off.
Yeah, but if she was not picking up on what you were putting down, the time comes to just say, sort of voce, back the fuck off.
Back the fuck off.
And of course, I said it very low.
No one heard it, none of the kids, not even my daughter's mother.
But I had arrived at a place, at a bouncy place,
where I had to use the word fuck to communicate to another parent in not a conspiratorial way, like you and me against the world, am I right?
But like, you are now part of the problem for me.
And I realized I had gone wrong.
I'd gone too far.
I should have left a long time before.
I should have gone and driven around.
Maybe I should have started drinking again.
And, of course, it created a minor international incident because we're living in a world now, unlike before.
Now we live in a world.
We're back in the world now.
So it involved a lot of workshopping.
Via text message and, you know, and everybody.
In terms of like mending the relationship?
Well, she, well, she wanted, so she talked to her husband and he wanted to talk to me about it.
Oh boy.
And I said, why don't we workshop this?
You know, this is a great opportunity for all of us.
And, of course, I'm running this script in my head all the time now.
Like, am I the baddie?
You know, I've got the little skull pin on my jacket.
Like, is it me?
Am I the baddie?
I know.
I do, too.
I do, too.
I'm in these situations all the time, it seems like, with my neighbors and so forth and various people walking down the street.
I was walking down the street yesterday, and a woman was taking her Christmas lights down.
And I said, ha, if you'd left them up a little longer, they could have been Easter lights.
And she, you know, she gave me a very pinched smile.
And I was like, oh, that was ha ha.
You know, I feel a little bit like Tina Fey.
You almost need like an emoticon.
Like back in the day, you do an emoticon.
You could say smiley or winky.
Like that was, that was, that doesn't, it sounded like this when you read it as a sentence, but then the winky lets you know that like, believe me, I get it.
Yeah.
And then, oh, and I was also, I was on the same exact walk and I'm at a crosswalk and a guy pulls up to the crosswalk and he's in, he's in this really super customized Nissan 300 ZX, but it's in the middle of being customized.
So it's got these crazy wide body panels.
Like it's twice as wide as a stock one.
But it's primer colored, and he doesn't have all the bumper components bolted on yet.
He's kind of winging it.
He's sort of in the middle.
You can see what he's going for.
Sure.
This is going to be a Fast and Furious 15 kind of scene.
When he gets it all done, it's probably going to have that paint where if you're over here, it looks orange, and if you're over there, it looks green.
Oh, like an iridescent pimp color.
Yeah, yeah.
He's going to have that.
He's got...
But what he does, what the first thing he bought was one of those trap kit, uh, exhausts.
That's the size of a mortar shell.
And so he pulls up in the car.
Is it like a thrush or a cherry bomb thing?
Yeah.
Something.
Yeah.
So he pulls up to the, the, the stoplight and I see his car and I, you know, and, and I, I see what he's going for, right?
Like to the casual observer, you look at and you go, it's a junk hoopty.
But I see what this kid is hoping this thing is.
When he looks at it, I see kind of what he sees.
And I give him the shaka bra sign.
You know, I give him a little shaka.
A little hang loose.
Yeah, a little hang loose Hawaii.
Shaka bra.
Shaka bra.
And he's so pleased.
Yeah, it's like, I see you.
Yeah, somebody gave him a little shaka.
He gave a little shaka back.
And then, of course, he's like,
check me out.
And he, and he guns it, you know, and up the, up the road, he goes, he's showing off.
He got a little, he got a little praise.
I wanted to, I wanted to, I wanted to say like, man, I believe, I believe that you have the $30,000 to finish this project or you're going to come up with it.
And when you do this car, man, it's, this is going to everybody at the
at the South Seattle Community College parking lot is going to be blown away by this thing.
Sure.
Well, he tears ass up the road.
Well, the next person coming down the sidewalk toward me is a lady walking her small dog.
And she gave me a very disapproving look because she saw that I had shockered
Our friend.
Oh, who was being a social offender.
And then the friend was a social offender.
And so she saw me as an enabler.
You're part of the problem.
And so as we pass, I said, that's quite a muffler, wouldn't you say?
And she glowered at me and said, he's going too fast, exceeding the speed limit.
And I said, and I said... Did you look really pinched and have, like, granny glasses, like in a 70s movie?
And her dog was obviously, like, 29 years old and was struggling to take a poop right at that moment, just really accentuating the moment between us, because she had to stop, because the dog was trying to squeeze something out.
Oh, a dog that age, you can't control the gaskets like you used to.
Yes, yes, yes, yes.
And I said, again, in the same, like, they could be Easter lights voice...
I said, well, you know, the whole thing about a loud muffler is it only really matters if you're going over the speed limit.
I'm just trying to, you know, like maybe that makes sense.
Maybe that doesn't.
Well, you're doing a thing here that if I could say it's something that I do, which is at a point when I'm publicly called upon to take a strong position about something, sometimes I'll just say a true thing, like a fact.
Yeah.
There is.
But then the thing is then, and the reason I should stop doing that is then that is regarded as because they were so anticipating a strong opinion, either, you know, assent or dissent.
Right.
Are you, are you with me or again me?
Right.
Then that gets interpreted as, as then they have to like decide how to parse that.
Like, are you, are you trying to, are you, are you having a laugh as they say?
Are you having a laugh?
Exactly.
Yeah.
And, uh, and so fact, you know,
I'm just stating, in fact, there would hardly be a point in having a muffler like that if you didn't also intend to exceed the speed limit.
Like the thing, their hand in glove.
And I actually used the phrase hand in glove.
Hand in glove.
Their hand in glove.
And she gave me, she, you know, she gave me the like eye roll, but the eye roll that's not funny.
The eye roll that's like.
that's like a spit on the, on the bar.
Oh, like a, like a Jada, a Pinkett Smith kind of eye roll.
Oh, maybe, maybe.
I don't know about her eye rolls, but I bet you there.
Right before her husband hit Chris Rock last night, she did a tremendous eye roll.
Oh, big eye.
Which one was she eye rolling at?
She's eye rolling at Chris Rock.
And then Will Smith went up and hit him in the face.
If you don't know about this, you're so lucky.
No, no, unfortunately I do.
And,
But I'm with you, John.
Just before we were recording, I was listening to a podcast, a New Yorker radio hour, and the guest was somebody that I love, which is the writer, who is, the writer Jill Lepore, who writes about history.
And she's also just, I'm sorry, I don't want to sound sexist.
She's charming.
Like, she's really, really smart, but she's also really funny.
She's got a great laugh.
She was talking about basically looking at parental backlash in schools in the context of something like the Scopes Monkey Trial.
I only mention this because she's talking—she made this really interesting point that—
really resonated with me where she said well you know a lot of parents right now well first of all i just want to say let me stipulate for the record i think people are getting fucking weird it's an ongoing conversation i'm having with a handful of friends where i think empirically people have gotten weird oh people are getting not just the thumb-headed you know chuds in target parking lots with oakley's making videos in their car i think everybody's gotten fucking weird because they don't know how to be around people anymore right not americans were never great at standing in line but
She made a really interesting point to me, which is like every parent feels pretty terrible about what their kid's life has been like for two years.
And whenever we feel powerless is when we get mad and weird.
And that maybe some aspect of, I think I'm just interpreting what she said here, but the whole like, oh, you can't teach about racist babies in school, Ted Cruz says, all this bullshit.
It's partly because parents do feel so helpless, so out of the loop.
And then you add to that, you don't know how to be around people anymore.
I think people have gotten very touchy.
Isn't that kind of what you're describing?
A whole, like, a whole bastic of touchiness.
Okay.
Well, and I don't want to, I don't want to be the touchy one.
No, I don't think you're being the touchy one.
You're the one who gets dragged, you're like, you're like the, out of the Charlie Chaplin or the Buster Keaton, you're the one getting dragged into this with other people's touchiness.
You're just trying to eat your shoe.
Well, yeah, but at the same time, you know, like, like,
I am the touchy one.
I mean, you missed your chance, kid.
You think too much of me.
I'm the touchy one.
Oh, you're the haunted one.
And I mean, you know, over the course of the years.
You'll steam.
I'll steam.
Yeah, steam and John.
Yeah, and somebody goes, somebody says, and I'm like, and then, you know.
What do you mean by that?
And it's on.
And you know how much I'm not going to give a perfunctory apology to somebody that
I'm not going to say I'm sorry just to smooth things over.
If I'm not really sorry, all that stuff that doesn't serve a man in his fifties very well.
Like, well, you know, like I'll tell you what I'm saw.
I'm not sorry.
You know, like I don't, I don't remember that time when we did the, uh, the, the, uh, the big show and the friends.
Yeah.
And, um, and afterwards, uh, Hodgman and I had a big fight.
You did?
Oh, because of the way he hijacked.
Yeah, he crossed the line on that one a little bit.
He hijacked, and then I was mad, and then I wasn't going to let him off the hook for it.
And he was in a phase of his life where he was really flying high.
He was hijacking everything.
He was trying some things out.
He was already well into the mustache period that I have some feelings about.
He changed a little bit when he got the mustache and started wearing the hood.
And I was, uh, I was like, no, you screwed up a big time and this is going to be on you.
And then we were in this long protracted fight.
And, uh, and of course, you know, and then, and then, uh, Scott Simpson is just a
Jonathan Colton, a conflict-averse person who just... He's like the dictionary drawing of a fetal position.
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He turned into a little mushroom and every once in a while the little head would lift up and then it would go back down.
This isn't safe yet.
And at one point, John and I were, we were still in this deep, protracted argument.
And it was, and it looked like it was going to be the end.
Or, you know, this was, we could not resolve this.
Yeah.
And it was happening now across the country because he went back to New York and I was in Seattle and we were having these long distance fights.
And at one point he said, I just want you to say, you're sorry that I feel bad.
And I was like, I'm not sorry.
And he was like, no, no, no, not sorry.
I don't, I don't want you to be sorry about what you did.
I want you to be sorry that I am sad.
He's pivoting the framing with all respect.
He's pivoting the framing from the implicit idea that you've wronged him to switching into friend mode.
And like, I need you to comfort me about how I feel.
Yeah.
And it was, and at the time it was new.
Now I feel like that is a, that's really.
Oh yeah.
Yeah.
It predominates almost in disputes.
It's a practice, not just for John, for lots of people.
But at the time, I'd never heard of it.
And I was like, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.
You don't want to talk anymore about the night, about the event, about the aftermath.
We're on to something now where you just want me to express that I feel bad, that you feel bad.
And he was like, yes.
And I mean, this is all very emotional.
We're having this conversation.
Yeah, feelings are raw.
Yeah.
Feelings are real.
And everything.
And I was like, well, I do.
I do feel bad that you are feeling bad.
Yeah, but it's not my day to watch him.
But he was like, that was it.
That was all he needed.
He was like, oh, thank goodness.
And I was like, well, of course I feel bad that you feel bad.
I feel bad that I feel bad.
And he was like, I just needed you to say it.
And it was like, whoa, whoa, I'm really ill-equipped to know that or like ill-equipped to understand it because I assume in my own sensitivity that we all know that we love each other and feel bad when we're feeling bad.
but I also want to get to the bottom of the problem or, you know, whatever.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But as far as he was concerned, it was over.
We were done.
We were back to, we were back to friends.
And, and, and I feel that in the world, I'm all the time now, like, wait a minute, am I the baddie?
Because I'm, because I'm trying to solve.
Am I the baddie?
Because I'm trying to resolve and not just trying to heal.
Right.
I mean, you're not a comfort animal, John.
No.
We don't exist.
I mean, I use that phrase, which is a snarky thing.
I try not to say too much anymore.
When somebody says, hey, what's the deal with blah, blah, blah?
And I say, it's not my day to watch him.
And I'm not sure where I got that from.
And I know it's snarky.
But the thing is, I'm not your emotional Sherpa.
I can't make you feel any way.
you know what i mean this is this is a thing that runs through a lot of that whole like wisdom project thing i'm working on which is like kindness matters and like being decent matters but like also just this there's just so there's just such a culture of entitled this is not going to be about what you think it's about probably there's such a culture of entitled um
you made me feel a way and that's your fault.
And now you need to be my buddy.
And basically by apologizing for how I feel bad, you're also kind of implicitly admitting that it's everybody but my fault.
Right.
But there's no fault.
Feelings are a thing you feel.
It is not my day to watch you.
And I am not in the bit.
The thing I said to my kid all the time now is like, I'm out of the guarantee business.
I'm out of the business of guaranteeing you what time the delivery food will be here.
And to a large extent, I'm out of the assurance business.
I'm tired of being asked to assure people about things, which is odd because I like being assured about things.
And I try to not pull that arrow out of my quiver too much.
But like, what could be more needy than a bunch of angry, entitled people wandering around expecting?
It's like Popeye's, or it's like Olive Oil's father in the movie Popeye.
You owe me an apology.
That's such a great, you owe me an apology.
The entire, everybody owes him an apology for something.
And it's like, it's just a whole fucking spectacle.
It just never ends.
Everybody wants you to apologize for how they feel.
Yeah, and you know me.
I do.
I don't respect people that can't endure a little discomfort.
But at the same time, Merlin, my experience of the last year was that the world had changed.
And that there were new rules, and those new rules were real, because rules are real if everybody agrees they are.
Oh, yeah, just like Twitter.
As long as everybody thinks it's real, it's like the donut boy in Simpsons, you know?
That's exactly right.
That's where it happened to me, right?
Like a year ago, I realized, oh, the rules are different, but my old rules aren't the real rules compared to these new rules.
These new rules are the real rules because everybody agrees that these are the rules.
And my superseding indictment for your rules.
We got we got earlier rules.
Now, the secret rule, you didn't know rules.
Well, yeah.
And and and and my complicity in it was that I watched the new rules get written.
I was standing there.
I was very online as those rules were getting made.
Yeah.
And I watched them all get stacked up.
And like a lot of people, our generation at first, I was like, you can't be serious.
And then as those rules got stacked on top of each other and became a new canon, I was like, well, yeah.
And one might decide to sort of quietly opt out of those rules.
Yeah, but you can't stay in and quietly opt out at the same time, right?
If you quietly opt out of those rules... It's not your game.
You got to opt out.
And you can't stay in and be like, no, no, no, I'm living by my own rules.
You have to...
If you're in, you got to live by the rules or at least take the consequences.
And that's what happened to me.
I took the consequences of trying to live according to my rules in a world where the rules were new.
Oh, it's like high stakes truth or dare.
Right.
And I could have kept living.
There are plenty of people out there on Twitter right now who are living according to the old rules.
And they just it just hasn't.
And it probably never will.
It never will come home to roost.
It just happened to do that that day for me.
But I'm realizing now maybe it's true all around everywhere that the rules are different and it no longer matters that we're ever going to try and get to the bottom of an issue and everybody gets better and we shake on it.
Now it's not about that anymore.
It's about how my neighbors feel.
It's about whether I took their feelings into consideration.
Do you remember what you did with that yard and the father's memory?
Do you remember that?
Oh, the father's memory, right.
I mean, that's exactly right.
Remember the animals that kept dying?
The animals.
What's my connection to the land, you know?
And I'm going, I don't... Like last night, so...
I'm back online, Merlin.
No, no, no, John.
You told me you were off.
I was.
I was.
But they pulled me back in.
Just when you think you're out.
Because the war in Ukraine is so right in the middle of everything that I know and want to be a part of.
And I just got asked to come to the Army War College in June.
Finally, Colonel Matt.
Finally.
Well, it's Colonel Ed.
Oh, sorry.
Matt was Lieutenant Colonel Matt.
This is this is Fulberg Colonel Ed retired.
Oh, and I've been trying to go to this thing.
He asked me to it three, four years ago for maybe five years ago.
For a couple of years, my my application was was rejected.
Because I wasn't enough of a community leader.
And then I was accepted.
Oh, it's like getting a Wikipedia page, huh?
It's like getting a Wikipedia page.
You got to be significant.
Yeah, the guys that are behind the scenes there in the comments going like, he's never done enough to, what are you talking about?
Show me the talk page.
And then they asked me, but it was the pandemic.
And they were like, we're going to do it virtually.
And I politely declined because I did not want to virtually.
Oh, I remember this.
Right?
I was like, I don't want to do this.
And I applied again.
And I got invited.
And I'm going.
I'm going in June.
And it's the most exciting thing because I'm going to spend a week at the Army War College in the midst of the largest European war since World War II.
Right?
It's the most exciting time to be sitting in that room.
That's your shit, man.
These newly minted generals.
And we're all going to be talking about everything.
We're going to be talking about everything.
Everything's on the table.
everything, the whole everybody, all this stuff, all of the like, whoa, wait a minute.
Holy cow.
Like it's, I guess my, my mind is already swirling.
I've got a stack of books a mile high because, and also my friend Trevor for a long time was cherry picking Twitter threads by all these kooks out there because this is your friend who keeps you up to date.
Yeah.
And this, and this war has brought out all of the people on the spectrum of
Full stop.
But also all the people on the military hardware fascination spectrum and the global geopolitics spectrum, like all of the people that are like, actually, I happen to be an expert.
Oh, there's newly minted experts in everything every day.
And it's incredible.
And I'd never get tired of them because I'm like, well, absolutely.
And then I'm like, no, you couldn't be wronger.
But I'm not commenting because I'm not on the Internet.
No.
But then it's a slippery slope, and then you're on it.
And you're like, oh, well, let's see what that, you know, let's see over here.
And then pretty soon it's like, well, maybe I'll go look at my mentions just in case.
And then it's like, oh, well, since I'm there, I'll just look at my old feed.
And it's like, oh, Gray Delisle is trying to date.
And, oh, look at this.
You know what that is?
That's a cigar box, John.
Yeah.
Oh, yeah.
Don't you think like your ticket stubs and your backstage passes?
Yep.
There's a cigar box you haven't opened in a while because it's full of pain and terrible things.
And then you open it up and it's Pandora's Cigar Box.
But then there's Soul Brother.
He's there doing some bits, you know, and then it's a bad banana is still around every once in a while.
Yep, yep, yep.
And I actually did.
I went down and I unfollowed some people because I saw their, you know, their super thirst trap tweets about their, you know...
Like I had to unfollow Jesse Thorne.
I had to unfollow Paul Saborin.
It was like, no, you guys, nope, nope, nope.
Don't need you anymore.
But I'm on.
I'm on there.
And then pretty soon...
Merlin, last night, lying on the couch, long past my bedtime.
Oh, no.
It's like the old times.
I'm just doom scrolling.
Not even about the war in Ukraine anymore.
Just scrolling as Andy.
That was the fish food, but now you're fully in the tank.
And I'm there scrolling.
Andy Levy is talking about.
And then there was this moment where everybody on Twitter was like, did that just happen?
Oh, my family thought it was fake, and I was like, no, no, that was totally real.
Did that just happen?
And I'm reading these tweets, and I'm like, did what just happen?
Because I wasn't aware that the Oscars were happening.
I was like, was it a nukes?
What happened?
What?
And it's just one after another.
I can't believe that.
Did that just happen?
Am I seeing this?
And I'm like, what?
What?
What?
And of course, then you're in.
You're in.
Well, now you've got to find out what it is.
And I watched the slap on Japanese television 15 times.
And like everybody else, I was like, no, no, no, cut back to Jada Pinkett Smith so I can see what her facial expression is.
Because there's this moment where it's like, wait a minute, they were all laughing and now they're not.
And where was the change?
And then all of the commentary, all the people that are like, what?
And then the people are like, well, you don't know.
And then the people are like, you have no right to tell me I don't know.
There's a lot of slap experts out there now.
Oh, and it's just, oh, well, slap and hair and race and blah, blah, blah, blah.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Everything.
And I'm reading it all, and I'm like— Alopecia, they call it.
You know, and ableism.
And I'm like, I'm not counting.
I'm not commenting.
I'm not even here.
I'm not here.
But I was there.
Yeah.
And then, like, somebody said something, Soul Brother or somebody, and I faved.
And it was the first time I'd faved in 14 months.
Oh, boy.
I pushed the little heart button.
Mm-hmm.
And then there were a couple of other people that seemed like they didn't know what was happening.
And, you know, like Maggie Vale was talking about how drugs kill people in rock, which is a Taylor Hawkins conversation.
And I faved a tweet of hers.
I was like, drugs do kill.
And then it was 2 a.m.
Oh, John, no.
And I was like, I... It's like the last 14 months never happened.
I was... The crack pipe was burning my hand.
It was so hot.
And it takes only that.
Only that.
To fall.
Because it's not... I don't give a fucking shit.
Yeah.
Pardon my French.
No, no.
But...
But I do care about the war in Ukraine, and Twitter, above all else, is great for that.
Oh, it makes—it's still—more than ever, it makes regular news, even, like, the 24-7, like, CNN stuff seem ancient.
Like, if you look at that Ukraine list that I pointed you to— Yeah.
I mean, I'm not—again, I can't vouch for everything that's on there, but, like—
you're you're getting it's like reading it's like starting with the footnotes and then reading uh infinite jest like you're getting you're getting the you're getting the uncut shit yeah in feeds like that where then they go oh well you know the russians are stalled at blah blah blah and you're like dude come on give me something i can use well and the guys that are just like there's the one guy that that he's got a whole thread where he's like the thing about it is the truck tires you gotta have truck tires
And you have to do regular maintenance.
And here's the difference between if you take the trucks out, if when the trucks are in storage, before you start a war of adventure, if you take them out every month and drive them around the parking lot, it keeps the tires supple.
You're dealing with the Russian and the Ukrainian mud.
That's a lot of what ended the Nazis, if I can say.
Yeah, it's what ended the Nazis.
That's right.
But also, apparently, you have to drive the trucks around.
And if you just leave the trucks parked in the depot— You've got to keep them supple.
You've got to keep them supple.
Supple.
And then you drive them out, and you drive them on these unsupple tires.
Well, sure.
And then there are all the people that are like, Chinese tires.
And then there are the guys that are like, they make fine tires.
Yeah.
But, but, but I was like, truck tire supple ability, supple supplebleness is a thing that I wish that I had known about.
And now I do.
And I don't.
And so when I go to the army war college, I'm gonna be like, what about them supple tires?
Am I right?
Absolutely.
Just all this stuff of like, what would make you think a 40, you know, I'm one of those weirdos that was like, I kind of wish they'd taken advantage of this.
40 miles of trucks on like a barely one lane road.
Is that really a good idea?
You have to keep all of those trucks gassed up so that people could stay warm and you spend over a week
Just exposed on a road.
It's just like shooting womp rats back home.
Yeah, exactly.
With a T-16.
Pew, pew, pew, pew, pew.
They're much longer than two meters.
Anyway, so then there's the one guy that's giving these 200 tweet threads about...
wars in the caucuses dating back to 900 AD.
And he's like the thing about the tartars.
And I'm like, I'm, I am your audience.
I, you know, I don't know.
You've got 300 faves for this tweet and 290 of them are me.
Yeah.
Yeah.
We finally found each other.
Yeah.
Hello.
Where were you this whole time?
Why was I following comedians when you were out here writing about Crimean tartars and
And, and, and this person's also like, I used to be the biggest nerd on campus.
No one cared.
And now I'm the, I'm a hero.
Oh, it's such a great time to be alive, but also immediately such an awful time to be alive.
And you can't have one without the other.
Yeah.
I mean, that list, whoever put that list together, for better or for worse, did a pretty good job of all the lists I've looked at about things in the discourse.
That one is...
I mean, because the things like on my political Twitter list, one reason I like my political Twitter list is like, I like that David's golf is like making jokes about, well, he's more entertainment, but you know, I like the stuff that's not just what they do for a living, but the focus on that Ukraine and Russia list is extremely focused.
You don't see a lot of shucking and jiving and like sirens, personal news shit.
Like it's, it's a lot of like just boom, boom, boom, you know, getting the stuff out.
Yeah.
But no, to your point, I'm sorry, I got off track.
But you're absolutely right.
You can't, I mean, it's almost like, what is it like?
It's like a, you get a big old, let's say you get like a gallon bag of jelly bellies.
And if you're like me, if I'm going to have a jelly belly, I tend to like...
I'm pretty normie.
I like the tangy ones.
Now, how do I know if this one's tangy?
Well, I got to pull out the chart.
Oh no, that's actually cheesecake.
That's not actually white lemon or whatever.
I don't know.
But the point is you're going to have to sift through a giant fucking bag of candy and then test.
You can't just say there's no longer an option to just say, just give me the tangy ones.
And with Twitter, yeah, yeah, it pulls you in, and then now you're going to spend the rest of your day, like, spitting out half of a jelly belly over and over again.
And it reminds me all of the, like, the slap heard around the world, and then all of the initial commentary, all of the subsequent commentary, all of the clapping back on the second tier of commentary.
Mm-hmm.
Like, I had this feeling as I was doom scrolling.
Like, I wanted, in one way or another, for better or for worse, to be part of that world for 10 years.
To be part of, at the top level, Hollywood.
And at the next level, the commentariat on Hollywood.
Yeah.
Like, I never expected to be sitting in that room getting an Oscar, but I did hope to be sitting behind a microphone.
I never hoped to host it either, but I hoped to host some channel's Oscar night show.
Yeah, but it's something where, like, I mean, like, I'm not into sports.
Well, I mean, I watch Warriors games, but, like, I'm not into sports.
I don't follow sports.
But there aren't that many occasions anymore, as is widely documented.
There aren't that many shared...
occasions anymore so first of all to come across a shared occasion of any kind is kind of cool sometimes it's terrifying because it's a news event but when it's a shared event about a thing that really interests you and you care what the people there are saying maybe even more or like in the case of your ukraine guy like i had no idea who that you existed and now you have no idea how much this is my shit but those together that becomes very powerful partly because it's so rare
But this is a slightly different thing.
There was a time when you were part of the cultural commentariat, and then you made a conscious and very ultimate decision that you didn't want to be a part of it.
You wanted to have a walled garden, you wanted to do your thing, and you did not want to be part of the...
celebrity.
And I didn't want to be, I didn't want to have to, like, if I put it in today's terms, which would be very different than when I first busted a gut about that, I don't want to have to go out, first of all, I don't want anyone to tell me about this shit.
Like, I can't get my friend Alex to stop telling me about the woman who farts on rose petals and then sells them, because they really love telling me about it.
But it's also that, like, look, I never want to have to look up
I get the feeling this is kind of about a couple and they're popular on YouTube and one of them fucks somebody else who I don't know.
And like, I'm not going to search that.
There's no answer to that that will make my life better.
And I need to step away from the dopamine and adrenaline rush that comes from feeling included in something and taking the trivial and blowing it up big, which is a big part of what fun can be.
I don't want to be part of that.
But, like, you don't get to always opt out of the things you want to opt out of.
But, yeah, to your point, yes, I did.
I very much said, like, look, I'm not going to worship a poster of Barack Obama.
I'm not going to go pick a side in every fight.
And I'm not going to spend my days being theoretically mad about strangers.
It's just, that's not who I want to be.
For my part...
I, you know, I was, I'm not a standup comedian and I never was.
And when I was in high school, I thought maybe I wanted to be one, but that's not the direction life took.
You know, like I did not, when I picked up a guitar, I was Paul F. Tompkins and I had a pretty contentious dinner at one point that I might've talked about where he had transitioned into this long form storytelling style of doing comedy.
And I,
And I really admired it.
I thought it was very funny.
And he came to Seattle.
He was doing a show.
It was Comedy Bang Bang.
And he had invited me to be a guest on the show.
And we went out to dinner beforehand.
And we were friends at this point.
Enough that he invited me to do the show and that we went out to dinner.
And we're sitting at dinner and I, and I said, you know, like, I really love your long form stuff.
And that's kind of something that I do too, like tell long form stories.
And I really feel like, you know, that would be a fun thing for me to try as a style of, of creativity.
Like a, like a, like to do long form.
Yeah.
Try, try your hand at it.
Comedy storytelling.
And he got very upset.
Hmm.
And he said, I've been doing stand-up since I was 16.
He and I are exactly the same age.
We're within a few weeks of each other.
Okay.
And he said, I've been doing this.
I didn't go to college.
I've been doing this since I was a teenager.
This is all I ever wanted to do.
This is all I've ever done.
And you play guitar or sing or whatever it is that you've always done.
And now you're saying that you can just come over and do this thing that I've, that I do.
Hmm.
And I was like, whoa, whoa, whoa.
No, I'm not saying I'm anywhere like in your league or anything.
I'm just saying like, I was just the thing I want to try.
And it was a, and something I had flipped a switch in him and he got, he got upset, upset.
The implication, I think, he thought was that I was saying, and I feel like comedians feel like this, is that people say.
Oh, like, yeah, my frat buddies think I'm funny.
I could do that.
Exactly, right?
Way more than people come up and say, like, I play guitar.
I should be in a big band.
Everybody thinks they can be a comedian.
I mean, it's a trope.
Everybody's a comedian.
Absolutely, yeah.
And he was saying, like, and I said to him, like, well, now, wait a minute.
It's not like I just stepped out of a frat.
Like I've been on stage a lot.
Like I've stood on stage a lot.
I'm not a noob.
Like I've stood on stage and I've done a lot of different kinds of shows.
It's not like I'm just stepping out of my job as a manager of a, of a quickie mart.
Yeah.
But I, but, but the switch was flipped.
And from that moment, really his and my relationship changed and, and we were,
we were never friends again.
Oh, geez.
You know, and I wrote him and I was like, hey, you know, and he wrote back a kind of thing that was like, well, I'm not upset.
I don't know what you're talking about.
And I was like, well, I just wanted to talk about it.
And he's like, well, now you're making it a thing.
And it was like, ah!
But honestly, for the last 10 years, I wanted to be, Twitter did this to me.
It made me feel
Like I was part of the comedy commentariat and I never cared about the Oscars or movie people or celebrities, but I wanted to be on the panel with Michael Showalter.
Yeah.
Like I wanted to be invited to be in the, in the mix.
It was what I, it was not what, there was no passion in it for me to talk about celebrities or to be next to Michael Showalter.
but it seemed fun and it felt amazing.
easy and natural and i do have stage time so i'm not uncomfortable yeah right you can push me out on stage with with paul f tompkins and i'm not uncomfortable i don't feel you're also very good you're very good at laying back you gotta lay back no i'm saying like you're really good at like just uh like like a jack benny or a johnny carson you do a good like just you you don't maybe change your face too much and that's what makes it funny i just want to compliment you i think you're good at that thank you thank you
You're not out there saying waka, waka, waka every time.
No, you step forward, you make a little thing, and then you step back and you let them go with it.
I feel like there's a place for me.
But stepping back in and watching this whole thing go down, not just the slap, but the first line of reply, the second line of reply, I remember not just watching that happen at Bean Dad, but
Where it's like, there's a first line of reply.
Holy cow.
Now they're replying to the replies.
Oh, now it's not about me at all.
Now it's about, you know.
It's a toxic game of telephone.
Now it's about people's hair or something.
It doesn't, you know, like, I didn't say anything about that.
But also remembering me being in that and feeling as this was going by, like, oh, wow, would I have stayed out of this?
I don't think I would have.
I think I would have been in there.
I think I would have, you know, that whole, like, do we punch Nazis or not thing?
I was all over that dancing around that grave.
And people are writing me like, you have no idea, you know, here, out here in Manchester, we punch Nazis.
And I was like, in Manchester, maybe.
You know, but it's not, it's bad.
Just that, just the visual, that guy with the, with the face mask and the hoodie on coming out of nowhere, sucker punching this ding dong in a, in a bow tie.
I don't think that's a good look.
I don't think it, I don't think it elevates the discourse.
Yeah.
Tell me how it turns out.
Great.
You know, it's not a both sides issue.
It's like, that's just low.
That's low.
Yeah.
And, and getting up at like, it's just, but I had something to say about it.
And then I become a guy.
I become like, oh, he's on the side of.
not punching Nazis or, or look at you, Neville Chamberlain in this, in this paper, I hold my surrender.
Now he's a Nazi, right?
By, by, by association.
And, and so I'm, I'm laying, I'm laying on the couch two 30 in the morning.
And I'm like, Oh, Oh, everything is, this is all bad.
And the culture's bad and the people are bad.
Everybody's bad.
And everyone's crazy, and it's not just the meatheads.
I read a thing that said that one in five people believe in QAnon, and 90% of them do not have a high school education or something like that, or beyond a high school education.
And I was like, oh, wow, cool.
But also, they're not the ones that I feel like are off the rails.
They're just doing what they do, right?
They're just swamping.
They've been swamping this whole time.
It's just that we're asking them questions now, which we never used to do.
No, it's like my people.
It's like the world.
It's like the people that are on stage with Michael Showalter.
They've lost their minds.
Yeah, I don't disagree.
And I wanted to be there, Merlin.
I wanted to be there so much for so long.
And now I don't.
And I'm grateful to not.
But the crack, I felt the crack.
I touched my lips to the pipe just because it was New Year's Eve and I wanted to see.
I just want to keep my hands warm.
I wanted to show myself that I wasn't on crack anymore.
I just wanted to take one little hit to show that I wasn't a drug addict.
And now I have to go for a long walk today.
And I have to ask myself if I can be trusted with a phone.
Oh, yeah.
And I'm out walking and it's just like, hey, Easter lights.
And it's like, oh, it's not just on Twitter.
It's not just on Twitter.
No.
And I don't know what, I don't, maybe I need to live in a van.
Down by the river?
Yeah.
I mean, you know, well, it would be nice for you to find a Slack somewhere with like-minded people where you could hang out and say terrible things.
That's something that I treasure.
I've never been on a Slack.
Somebody asked me the other day.
I'm just basically, I mean, just substitute text thread, like somewhere where you can like.
That's what a Slack is.
Well, no, I just, in terms of the functional thing of what I'm suggesting and, you know, I know you understand that this exists in the world, but I treasure my little text channels with my friends.
Where like I can, I can, you know, like, like, and then sometimes it'll leak out, you know, like, like, like the other day when I posted a photo of Justice Clarence Thomas.
And I said to a loved one, he's become a full time lifestyle Eddie Murphy character.
Now, I would not say that.
on Twitter, but I'll post a photo of the thing I said on Twitter.
That's all the insight you're going to get into the thing where people say, but here's the problem, is that everybody has that, everybody does that, everybody's got stuff.
God, I hope that everybody listening out there has a place where you can talk to people and say the thoughts that you can't say in public.
The real problem with all of that is that
We think that we think we, I don't know, but it's, there's so few things that we keep to ourselves anymore.
There's so many things that aren't private anymore.
And like I said, in that, in the, in the wisdom project, keep some things that are just for you.
Otherwise, if you're only, if your only secrets are secrets that are shameful, you will come to despise your own company.
You've got to have things that are just for you, or in some instances, just for a small group of people.
And which on the face of you, oh, yeah, well, that makes sense.
Like there's things you would only say to your family or you'd only say to your best friend.
And it's just like, but the problem is we're all supposed to pretend that nobody.
I don't mean to invoke Orwell here, but it's just that we're supposed to all act like we just don't have an interior world anymore.
Like we popped out of some distended vulva being fully formed with all the correct opinions for all times and everything we think should be said because it's the thing that needs to be said.
And it's like, well, no, there's really not that many things that have to be said.
And there's a lot of stuff where...
I would be... Let me put it this way.
To try and not sound 85 years old.
It would bum me out if 20 years from now, this got worse more than better, which I think is what's going to happen.
Oh, wow.
You do?
Worse in the sense that...
the most bad faith interpretation of anything that anybody says or does gets amplified to represent their entire life.
You probably don't have any familiarity with that kind of thing happening.
But, you know, we should be allowed to have different kinds of days
To, again, to quote somebody else I heard recently on a wonderful podcast episode about returning to work, going back to the office and what it means to be a black person going back to the office.
And this person said something like, you know, we're used to, we're like everywhere we go, we're surveilled.
We get microaggressions.
People want to touch our hair, all this kind of bullshit.
And this guy said, and when it comes to something along the lines of, I'm providing context here.
When I go back to the office, here's one thing I know.
Black people are not allowed to have a bad day.
Because now you represent every black person if you're having a bad day.
If you look like you're, you know, you got resting bitch face or, you know, you're wearing some weird African top or like your hair doesn't, you know what I mean?
All the kinds of things that we just don't do that much with other people that we do with black people.
It's, there's not, black people are not allowed to have a bad, I don't think anybody's allowed to have a bad day anymore.
And I think in fact, if we're honest, people are not even allowed to have a normal day anymore.
And a normal day is where you have lots of conflicting thoughts and motivations in your head that are difficult to distill into two sentences.
Because that's what it means to be a human being.
And when we try to shave off every conceivable edge or splinter from that,
What we get is not people.
We get people who are pretending to be something that they're not, which is, I don't think, a wholesome way to live.
My daughter found the first book, The Colin Malloy,
his first book that he wrote and his wife Carson did the illustration.
Oh, a kid's book, right?
A kid's book or YA book.
And one of the characters in the book, you know, kind of a, uh, like a character they encounter along the way is named Jock Roderick.
And, and, uh, Carson actually sent me the original illustration, you know, like, um, as a, as a nice gesture.
And, uh,
So my kid has found the book on the shelf and started reading it and read it all the way through.
And then I had the other ones.
And so she's reading the book.
So I sent him a text.
I took a picture of the book and I was like, hey, you know, my kid is reading your books and I think that that's fun and funny.
And we had a brief back and forth.
And in the course of it, he made a comment that wouldn't have...
played if he'd made it on twitter let's call it that sure he just made it he just used a used a word or two yes yes between friends that would not have that he would not want introduced into the everything that you put out in public needs to be something that will could eventually stand for your entire career and life
And it felt like a gesture of friendship.
Yeah.
Intimacy.
Right.
A little intimacy.
Like, yes, here we are.
We know what this means.
We know what you mean by that.
That's not, you know, you don't mean what you, what, what that word says.
You are making a joke.
It's a joke.
And it was a little gesture.
You know, he and I've had our ups and downs over the years.
Sure.
Sure.
Sure.
But it was a little, just a little like a fist bump because we hadn't talked in a while and little, little, just like, Hey man.
And it was, it was gentle and it felt,
It felt just exactly like you're saying that he didn't feel like he needed to pretend that he wasn't a human being with me.
Mm hmm.
And what's interesting is my kid is at the age where she's having opinions now.
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She gets in the car and she says, this is what happened at school today.
And this is what they told us.
And I disagree with,
Oh, you mean like as in like a party line?
Yeah.
She says this is what, you know, this is what.
Was it a piece of education or learnings that included a word like always?
It was.
Right?
When this happens, that always means this.
It was definitely a thing where she said, you know, this person I feel like overreacted to a thing that was a lot simpler than it ended up being.
Okay.
And I thought about her classmates going home and saying that to their parents and what her classmates' parents might say to them about it.
And knowing adults as I do and knowing people my own age as I do and having friends with kids as I do, I could hear them say,
The parents telling their kids how to respond to having their own opinions in a way that was like, well, that's not how we talk anymore.
That's not who we are.
That's not who we are.
Or here's the correct opinion to have about this.
And there's only one.
And here's and that coming from a place of the parents fear.
The parents very real fear that their kid is going to say something in school that's going to get them in trouble.
You're way ahead of me.
The problem is not that the kid learned something wrong.
The problem is that if your kid were to say that at the school, a parent might worry, you're going to make me look bad.
Yeah.
Like, like I finally got to a point where I said, look, it's San Francisco.
You need to wear a jacket.
You need to wear layers.
There's a reason that is a cliche, because you're going to turn a corner in the Castro to catch your bus.
And you're going to be you're going to be carried away like the fucking Wizard of Oz.
You need to wear a jacket by 15 degrees.
Yes.
And then finally, and especially, you know, in the mission, it's so sunny.
It's a nice mission in Castro.
And like, but I was like, but here's the other thing.
And I'm going to be honest with you.
A man in my position cannot afford to be made to look ridiculous.
I'm like Mr. Waltz.
And I'm like, look, you're not allowed to go out without a jacket in San Francisco.
Because every parent has told their kid exactly the same thing, which is what I'm telling you right now.
And, you know, if I'm being honest, a majority of the reason I'm telling you this, because I don't want you to be uncomfortable or to...
you know, what's the ultimate thing a parent thinks?
Like, I don't want you to experience unnecessary privation.
You have a jacket, bring it with you.
Um, but it's also that like you, you're going to make, if you go out there and you're dirty and you stink and you don't wear a jacket, you make us look bad.
I can't tolerate that.
Back the fuck off.
Well, but there's also the other thing, which is that the that we have decided as a as a group of people.
And by that, I mean, college educated generation X and and adjacent people.
We have decided and we decided a long time ago that the way to make a better world is to get into our children's brains.
And tell them what to think and how to think and what the correct thing to think is.
And then those kids will go out.
Or like even like, like as I'm about to do right now, to correct their language in a way that makes the point you think they need to make.
Right.
And then we won't have racism and we won't have sexism and we won't have a patriarchy.
Thank you.
Because we got to our kids before because, because.
Well, because now my kid says unhoused.
Instead of homeless, they're not monsters.
Because the argument always is that the reason things are bad is that we learned it in childhood, right?
The reason that there's a patriarchy is that I learned it in childhood because my own second-generation feminist mother somehow didn't know enough.
I'm racist because my parents were racist.
I lived in a racist community, that kind of thing.
That whole logic means that I think my generation of parents are portraying themselves to their own children falsely.
And they're teaching their children to be false.
How to be fake realistically.
Yeah, how to be fake realistically, right.
Here are the correct opinions.
Here's how to do it.
Now, whether or not you feel that way or whether or not I personally feel that way, you'll never know.
Because I'm not going to do what Colin Malloy did to me, which is to give my kid a shibboleth between us where they feel safe being themselves.
And so when my daughter says, I think that's
baloney, she and I have started to have the conversation where I say, there are tiers of safety
in expressing ideas.
Yes.
And you and I can talk about anything, any way you want to talk about it.
Yeah.
And then you're going to have to learn a little bit of tiered code switching.
Yeah.
And then here are there.
Then there are things you can say at school.
There are things you can say if you phrase it as a question, but there are things you cannot say phrased as a question because people will see through that.
There are, and I'm saying all this to her and she's just, she's,
listening and i know she at a i know even that in her 11 year old mind she knows what i'm talking about because she's already been in the school she's probably having a shamalan moment where a lot of stuff suddenly makes at least a little bit more sense yeah because she's sitting in class and going wait a minute why are we all sit well this is an emperor and has no clothes situation why are we all saying this
This is demonstrably untrue, or at least it isn't the story.
It's not the whole story.
This dovetails with, well, one talk I've had for a long time and another talk I had just this past week.
Talk I've had for a long time that I try not to say this too often because these words are so useful, you need to only hear them at the times when you will really pick up what I'm trying to tell you.
So when I say to you, you know, that project you're working on is bullshit,
And we both know it, but there's a lot of stuff you got to do in life that is bullshit.
And here's the part that really sucks is your teachers know it's bullshit too.
You know it's bullshit.
They know it's bullshit.
But unfortunately, that does not absolve you of having to do a good job at it and to do it to the way that it's been requested.
But the other part of that, the new part of that speech is stuff like,
never talk to a cop.
Never answer a cop's questions.
Tell them immediately to call us, to call a lawyer.
Just remember this.
There's going to be times, and I'm just here to tell you, I know that sounds crazy.
Now here's the code switch part.
If your teacher says, is the cop your friend?
Eh, that's fine.
Because a lot of stuff is bullshit, and you still got to do it, because even though it's bullshit, or especially because it's bullshit.
But what I'm telling you person to person, until you get better advice, never talk to a cop.
Which is, I mean, that's a lot of conflicting messages, but like your sweet precious child, I think my kid knows exactly what I'm talking about.
Which is that in that instance, you know what these Hollywood big shots don't want to tell you?
There's people out there whose whole job in life is to fuck you up and get you in trouble and to work a corrupt system that is undermining our entire society.
I need you to know about that.
And when they say, would you like a juice box?
You say, where's my lawyer?
Ha ha ha ha.
Right?
That sounds nuts.
Well, why do you tell your kid that when they're 19?
Because I'd rather tell my kid that when they're 13 or 14, and I want them to now have the ears to hear the times that somebody who pretends to be on their side is actually making a career out of fucking with people who can convince people that they're friends.
And what's crazy is I remember when your child was born and in the early years of their life, you were so excited to introduce them to music and film.
You know, like you had this- You like pixies, right?
Come on.
You had this list of stuff that you were going to share with them.
I know, inculcated.
I was going to basically get a giant novelty-sized syringe and put all of this culture into my kid's stupid brain.
Yeah.
And I was like, you know, your child is three and Sloan-
Is like, yeah.
Yeah.
And you were like, no, no, no, no, no.
They've been listening to Sloan since they were in the womb.
Yeah.
And I remember feeling like, you know, that was like such a download, right?
That you were like, this is the good shit.
Yeah.
Yeah.
We're going to watch movies.
It's not that you're not allowed to watch movies.
You're just not allowed to watch shitty movies, especially repeatedly.
And you were, and part of what was motivating you was that you had, all of that was hard won, right?
Right.
You had fought to acquire that knowledge.
I achieved escape velocity from Florida.
Please learn from my past.
You did.
And you had a cannon that you'd built and this was, and this had been, and this, and you felt like it had built you or that, you know, that this was it.
Right.
It's totally fair.
Yeah.
And what I am realizing growing up, I did not growing up.
My mom was,
Had a language that we used at home and a language that we used in public.
Yeah.
And it was because she was incredibly introverted.
And she said, I do not want the world.
Because, you know, my mom believed that aliens had been on Earth and had interfered with.
evolution over the course of hundreds of thousands of years as part of a giant Petri dish experiment.
And she devised this theory.
That's so cool.
She devised it in the mid 50s.
So this is even before like Chariot of the God stuff?
This is early to mid 50s.
She was reading science fiction and she just came up with this whole like, wait a minute.
There's only one thing that makes sense.
And that is that we are a Petri dish place where
Every once in a while, you know, for the most part, they're hands off, but every once in a while they come down and they just slightly switch if things are moving in the wrong direction.
So there and when what she was trying to describe at the time in the early 50s or mid 50s was what's the missing link?
Why is there where why are there these gaps where all of us where there's nothing and all of a sudden.
a higher, somehow through natural selection, although there's no evidence of the interstitial stuff, all of a sudden the new thing is there that's more evolved.
And that could be technological, it could be cultural, but there's some kind of a leap that doesn't, that seems bigger than a leap that could really be accomplished.
But she's going way back.
She's like, well, wait a minute.
First it's like cells in the ocean and then all of a sudden there's crabs walking on the, like what happened there?
Yeah.
Why is there no... And this was at a time, I think... Seems like there'd be a lot of failed crabs on the beach.
Yeah.
Archaeologically, whenever they discovered Lucy in Ethiopia, it was like, okay, there's Lucy, but wouldn't there also be hundreds of thousands of sets of remains...
taking us from lucy to australopithecus or whatever she's like where are all those and she's like ah it's the ufos that come down and they do a little they just move the bar a little bit in one direction instead of the other because they're like no we don't want big eared things that's the wrong direction we're just gonna nudge it and so when i was a little kid that was what we talked about at home wow
But we went to Methodist church on Sundays because my mom liked the hymns.
Or Lucy just didn't come up that much.
It didn't come up.
Mom liked the hymns.
Singing in church is beautiful.
It can be really nice.
It's nice, right?
And the Methodist hymns are nice.
And she was like, in order to be a member of society, you have to have some experience of American Protestantism.
I think the Methodists have the best hymns, so we're going to go there and you're going to learn the story of Jesus.
But also, never forget that the UFOs live under the ocean and every once in a while they come move the slider a little bit in order to favor— We're not going to leave our Lucy at the door.
Lucy's in my mind, if not in my mouth.
So I always grew up with a private language and a public language.
And of course, my dad was a politician.
He never had a thought he didn't say.
Well, but also at home, we could criticize the Democrats.
We could say, that guy's got sausages for brains.
Right.
But then when we went to the Rotary Club meeting, we said, our candidate has got the, you know, like there was a, there's a very clear distinction between what you say among Democrats and what you say to the world on behalf of Democrats.
Yeah.
So there was never a time in my life where I didn't have multiple layers of what we can say.
And I'm communicating.
That's so interesting to think.
I'm sorry, but real quick, that's totally interesting to me.
How long have you, I mean, have you realized that you realized that for your whole life?
What happened was.
Did you like, okay, okay.
What happened was my senior year in high school, I got my, I started to get in the newspaper.
That there were some reporters who decided they were going to... Ed Kufel was very disappointed.
It was a thing where the reporters were going to follow us, our senior class, all the way through.
They were going to write a series of articles about our senior class using, you know, 10 students as their... They were going to follow us through our senior year.
And, you know, over the course of the year.
And I was one of the kids that they were following.
And the articles were just Sunday puff pieces.
They didn't get deep down into our hearts and souls.
But
But the whole business about whether or not I was going to graduate or not.
And that the other kids in the student body were taking bets.
You know, money was being exchanged whether or not I was going to graduate.
And it wasn't clear until graduation day.
It wasn't until it was clear that the teachers didn't want you around anymore, that you were...
They had promoted, right.
They had that conference and they took the eraser out and they changed that, that F into a one or whatever.
F to a B. And when I, when I walked across the stage at graduation, like the, you know, the, the, uh, the gymnasium went crazy and there were, you know, uh, air horns and the whole thing, you know, and this all was in the newspaper and my mom was furious and
Oh, because it had left the building.
Because I had my shit out in public.
Okay.
And that was the... That's not what private people do.
No, that was going to affect her reputation at work.
Okay.
Because it was in the newspaper.
And her co-workers, her employees were going to... She felt like she was going to walk across her floor toward her office...
And that she was going to hear buzz, buzz, buzz, buzz, buzz as people looked up from their newspapers.
And I was like, Mom, that's a delusion.
Like, no one cares.
And she was like, you know, adamant.
You know, this is unacceptable.
And I said, Mom, because I was, whatever, 17.
Mm-hmm.
Mom, I'm going to have my name in the newspaper for the rest of my life.
Oh, wow.
And in the context of like, hey, get used to it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I was like, you know me now.
My name will be in the newspaper over and over and over.
And we had this like this moment.
And she, you know, she stormed off.
And she went up to her rooftop area.
In the veil.
She shone the mercy of light at the clouds.
The moon door.
And she came back down, you know, having sat with that and realized it was true.
And realized that there was nothing that she could do.
That must have made her feel so off balance.
Except the only thing she could do is accept it and reorder her own needs.
Wow.
And she came down and she was like, I know that's true.
I know you will.
And I wish you the best.
And I was like, good.
And we had to deal with it a few more times in life.
There were a few times when shit got into the newspaper and she was like, this is beyond the pale.
Like I can't have my life known.
And I was like, mom, I will have my whole life known.
And when we started podcasting and started talking about stuff, you know, she, she listened, she would come to me and say, that's not how it happened.
And I would say, mom, that's how it happened.
As far as history knows, because I told it and not you.
Yes.
And each one of those has been hard, but it's been, you know, and I'm sure my daughter's good for her.
I mean, that's, Oh, that's a, that's a load bearing, uh, thought technology.
I mean, I think her grandfather, just the fact that he stood out on the street corner drinking a Dr. Pepper, the fact that everyone in the town knew he liked Dr. Pepper might have been as much as he ever revealed.
What does he do at 10, 2, and 4?
Yeah.
Dr. Pepper, you say?
And, you know, and that was in a town where he had lived and his father had lived and his grandfather had lived since 1802.
My father was a pepper.
My grandfather was a pepper.