Ep. 464: “In a Morbid Suit”
Ready?
Ready.
Hi, John.
Hi, Merlin.
How's it going?
Oh, great.
Great.
How are you?
I was hoisted on my own valor.
Yes.
Yes.
I bid you good Memorial Day.
Good morrow.
And all the rest of the day to you.
Hmm.
Well, I guess that'll do it for this week on Roderick on the Line.
That's right.
We honored the fallen and then we got out.
I like that.
I like that tune.
I like that melody a lot.
Well, it's a good piece of songwriting.
It really lends itself well to... Have we talked about this, John?
Hmm.
How the lead, the song, I don't know if Gene Greenwood wrote the song that made the whole world cringe, but I think the, I think that song is good at what it is.
And I think, I think the chorus is unbelievably restrained.
They didn't do a truck driver key change.
They didn't do anything cute.
It's very restrained.
Well, I was, I was about to say that I think it, it worked very well in its time, right?
As, as what it was intended to do.
Reagan era pap.
It's a, it's a, um,
It's pre-rigging, though, right?
I don't know.
I'm not applauding the lyrics.
Well, this is what I mean.
It works great at a first level, and then you could not write a song that works better at an ironic level.
Right.
Like it also, you, we sing it all the time.
Almost like a parody, like a, like a sort of like a parody of a sort of like Frank Capra, or I guess famously, I don't like when people knock on Norman Rockwell, but a kind of idyllic yearning for a past that never existed, at least for black people.
It's a perfect song.
It's, it's, it's one of the songs or it's one of the culture items that, that presage the death of irony because you couldn't parody it.
It's already a perfect parody of itself.
And, uh, and you'll know, you know this because now third generation parody, right?
Like third wave, third wave parody.
Um, you can, you can actually say third wave.
You're saying there's a third way, third, third wave irony.
Yeah.
Okay.
Which is irony.
All right.
Which is, which is post gen X irony now filtered.
That turns into fourth wave sarcasm.
Exactly.
Okay.
It, um, you can sing the song absolutely all the way through just using the lyrics, her and der.
And everybody knows exactly, you know, it's like a herpaderp.
He didn't even need to write lyrics.
That's your version of scrambled eggs.
Yeah.
Herp-a-derp.
I was herp-a-derp and derp-a-derp.
But only if a thing is herp-derp, right?
You can't herp-derp something.
Oh, you can't fake it.
It's like if too many people say rhubarb and it sounds like they're all saying rhubarb, it doesn't sound like a real room full of people.
Mm-hmm, mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
There's a limited license herp-a-derp that should and must only be applied to a true song that is herp and derp.
That's right.
A thing has to be herp in order for herp-a-derp to work.
You can't just put herp-derp on anything because a lot of things aren't herp and they're not derp.
Herp-a-derp, herp-a-derp.
You're right.
Yeah, no, it doesn't work.
A thing has to have intrinsic herp.
I don't like to say this, especially to you, but this conversation is becoming a little bit European, perhaps even a little bit French.
It is a little French.
It is a little French.
We're talking about the semiotics of herp and derp.
Absolutely.
The difference.
so so uh so today is memorial day and i i can say that on this show because you consistently publish the show the day we record it often within an hour i try and uh and so if all the technology lines up and i don't have to lay a wreath if you know what i mean i'll be fine
By the way, thank you for quoting that new phrase in my pantheon.
I don't like to... I've been admonished by a friend of the show, John Syracuse, to never mention anything anyone else says in texting, which I honor.
But you did... I'll be right back after I later read it.
I'm glad that gave you pleasure on the other end.
Okay.
Anyway, yes, I try.
I like to turn it around.
And I feel like, you know, content.
Oh, God.
Now they got me doing it.
Content?
Fuck.
I, for now on, I'm going to mentally substitute stuff.
I just need, and like, so like when people say that somebody is a creative, you can't be an adjective, um, but a creative or somebody who makes stuff, I feel like stuff that wreath starts wilting fairly quickly after it has been, um, produced.
And so like, you gotta get it, you gotta, you gotta get it out fast.
Like a wreath.
Well, you know, the, uh, the other shows I do, uh, now, um,
So Omnibus, we are recording shows now that will come out in August.
Is Ken secretly joining the space program or something?
You know, because he sometimes has to go.
He has to go down to Los Angeles, but also we like to keep a comfortable...
A comfortable pad.
It was true of Friendly Fire.
We had months and months in the can.
One of the tragedies of Friendly Fires.
Just to be clear here, apart from probably some references, the idea is they're meant to be, as a wreath, would be evergreen.
Evergreen, yeah.
You could put it out now, or you could lay that wreath in a month or two, and it wouldn't.
Sure, you should be able to listen to it any time.
Okay.
There are probably three months' worth of recorded Friendly Fire episodes.
That are just in limbo forever.
Oh, Tears and Rain.
Yeah, they're just out there.
Talking about French.
Like, do they exist?
Some of the great ones.
Some of the great ones.
I don't even remember.
Maybe the greatest ones.
If you hadn't apologized wrong, would people be out there in the world right now?
I think I apologized right.
It was just that... It's the world that was wrong.
It was the herpaderp.
That's right.
It went to herpaderp.
It's the herpaderps that got small, like Gloria Swanson says.
Yeah.
um and then with dan of course when you record a show i don't know this is probably not true of the show that you do with dan but when i record a show with dan i have no idea when it's going to come out could come out that afternoon could come out six weeks later i don't know it's become a little puzzling how the whole process works yeah no i'm i have zero insight into it but with you i know i can make a topical reference i can say today is thanksgiving
And listeners who are Johnny on the spot will be like, it is Thanksgiving.
I see.
You can make like a Paul Pelosi DUI reference and it would kill for another hour.
So let's try and wrap this up soon.
Yeah.
Well, but the thing is that then people listen to Roderick on the line four or five times all the way through the whole catalog.
Oh, right.
And they get to say, oh, I remember that Memorial Day.
Oh, you know what's funny about that?
And I have, I have suffered from this.
I mean, there's the one kind of reference that dies really quickly.
Like, for example, I, I don't have anything against COVID, you know, but like the shows, you say both sides.
Yeah.
Well, I think there's good people on both novel coronaviruses.
For example, there's a whole season of the terrible TV show Grey's Anatomy that my family and I continue to watch.
It's a terrible show.
But they did this whole season that was done during COVID, and they had this whole throat clearing about, this season's a very special season.
It's going to address COVID.
And then I think what they did was they threw up a slide, an intertitle, at the beginning of the next season and just said, for now on, we're going to act like that season doesn't exist.
Because, like, nobody wants to hear a thing about COVID.
And, like, you just turn on, you say, oh, I'm going to have my relaxing time.
I'm going to watch Tim Gunn, Tim and Heidi talk about fashion stuff.
It's like, we're here in our villas because of COVID.
We're here in our villas because of COVID.
Look at work.
Shoot an arrow like Cupid.
Use a word that don't mean nothing like Loopted.
Make it work.
There's that kind of reference that's hopelessly dated.
For example, in a relatively well-known talk that I did at the company Google, when trying to refer to a juggernaut, this one will always stick in my crop, is that I'm trying to refer to a juggernaut of a social media site that, just for the sake of argument, I'm going to say a name here, and everybody will know, ooh, yeah, that thing, that'll always be huge.
And that was MySpace.
Oh, I've heard of it.
Right.
And if I'd waited, if that had not waited, but if that had been a few months later, you know, it probably would have been Facebook.
There's a, there's a funny bit in the, my brother, my brother and me TV show where Griffin talks about the water bottle thing where you throw the water bottle and it tries to land.
And he's like, God, I wish it had been, I wish it had been like a month later and I could have said fidget spinners and it would have sounded more contemporary.
Yeah.
So there's the kind of reference, like a Paul Pelosi reference, that is going to be a lot, it's not funny now, and it'll be even less funny next week.
But there's the unintentional ones, where you go, oh, that's when John was running for public office.
So I can, you know what I mean?
I can date that to a certain time.
There's the kind that just died because it was too old Quran at the time, you didn't realize it.
And there's the kind that you kind of can't help but get away from.
Yeah.
You refer to, like, somebody having a baby versus having a teen.
That kind of thing.
I think that's nice, personally.
I do, too.
I'm mad at me.
You know, like they say, like the lady says on The Gilded Age, I don't hate you, I hate my life.
So, right?
She's a very good character.
She's from Harlem.
Yes.
But I don't love that about myself and saying MySpace, but I think that's all fine.
It's just that if you do a topical show, the wreath you place in your bowl will last longer.
The thing about you and the thing about me... I don't talk about me so much.
Am I dying?
Be honest.
No, no, no, no.
Merlin, you have many, many great years.
Jesus Christ, John, what's happening?
Who is this?
How did you get this number?
No, no, no, you're fine.
No, your heart is fine.
It's still, you have full capacity, both chambers of your heart, both four chambers of your heart.
My knees are really—I hurt my—a couple months ago, I got myself an ankle injury sleeping, and now I've got two knee injuries from sleeping.
Oh, poor baby.
What?
You don't sleep?
It's hard.
No, it's hard.
You're an active sleeper.
You can injure your ankles.
I like to just stay in shape.
Just sleeping.
Oh, I'm filling my keys.
The thing is, you know, you like memes.
You're a meme.
You like memes.
I like memes.
What the fuck are you talking about?
You mean like where cats go, nyam, nyam, nyam, that kind of thing?
That kind of meme?
No, no, no.
Big memes.
Big memes.
He's like Washington.
I'm not talking about yeet.
I'm talking about...
I was talking about long memes.
Oh, I see.
Democracy is a meme.
You know, memes, thought technology.
So my heart's, I'm sorry, I interrupted you.
My heart's in the right place, but my knees are bad.
Your knees are bad.
My knees are not great.
But no, we like memes, but what's great is that we don't spend too much time on memes, small memes.
I brought this up with you recently, that there's things we think about for the future, and it's always a concern of mine, in a way that I would never say publicly, that we keep everything in the canon.
Or as you like to say, everything that's in the show is in the show, right?
Whatever stays in the show stays in the show.
I don't even remember what our own phrase is, and frankly, I don't care.
Because if you sit too long on a toadstool, eventually your ass will touch the ground.
Did anyone ever ice you?
Did you ever get iced?
Did you ever get iced?
2004?
2006?
Did you get iced?
Oh, no, no, no, no.
No, no.
Ice bucket challenge.
No!
No, I also didn't milk crate walk.
Well, no.
There was ice bucket challenge, but then there was getting iced, which was a thing that went around the festival circuit and
One summer where if somebody walked up to you, knelt on the ground in front of you and held up a Michelob ice and you didn't have some kind of challenge coin or you weren't able to spin around before and put your finger through the through the keyhole.
This is like playing werewolf or something like you need to keep your hand on a swivel because somebody might ice you on bend to me.
That's right.
And if you turn around and somebody standing there holding a Michelob ice and they're standing and they're on one knee.
You had to drink it.
There's such a thing as Michelobis.
I don't even remember.
I think so.
Michelobis.
And part of the meme, part of the third generation irony was that nobody liked Michelobis.
It was a thing that shouldn't have existed.
Weekends were made for Michelobis.
And, uh, and, and the, but this is the thing during that entire time.
Well, wait, we weren't recording this show yet.
Well, it was seven years before, but I take your point.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
We never ice bucket challenge each other because you walk over somebody backstage with a big orange igloo tube of ice water, like one would pour on a coach's head.
Yeah.
And then you're not proposing marriage.
You're proposing ice.
Yeah.
I got ice bucket challenged by Nick Hammer of Death Cab for Cutie during a time when things that happened on Twitter were very serious.
If somebody like if somebody was like, here you go, like I'm passing the baton to you.
It's like, oh, you know what?
Sorry, you're taking me back.
That was a big part of this.
And I am a little bit, as you say, allergic to those like you just got tagged.
It's how Snapchat is ruining children.
Well, I reject it.
It's how Snapchat is.
First of all, I did not know I'd been tagged, and I'm rejected.
I reject your tag.
One may not arbitrarily tag me and induce me to be obliged to do something.
What do you think is this email?
It was a thing, and I got tagged.
I remember.
It's for ALS.
It's the luckiest man, man, man.
On the face of the earth.
Oh, too soon.
Ha ha!
Ha ha!
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That's a meme!
No, but it was the first time.
What was it called?
The Iron Giant?
What was his name?
Is that Cal Ripken?
No, he's the Iron Man.
No, who am I thinking of?
The Iron Giant was a, you know, I cried.
No, it's Lou Geary.
And what was his name?
Yankee Clipper.
Yankee Clipper, or is that Joe DiMaggio?
I think that's Jolton Joe.
Fuck!
Where has he gone?
Huh.
What was that?
Oh, I saw a picture.
I follow Richard Nixon on Twitter.
Yeah, that's a great account.
He really nails a 1976 in his repose, walking the beach in big shorts, Richard Nixon.
Yeah, you can hear it in his voice.
It's really clever and also smart.
But he posted a picture of Yogi Berra screaming at an umpire as Jackie Robinson stole home in the 53 series or whatever.
And it was the, you know, it was one of those pictures that like, I want to give it a Pulitzer Prize now.
I want to give it a retroactive.
Like high speed photo that really captures like a moment.
One of those, one of those, like you'd see in time and like a life magazine coffee table book when we were kids.
One of those photos where you're like, you know.
And you know it was taken with a large format camera, and you could probably zoom in and go right up his nose because the picture is so just beautiful.
Just beautiful.
Right, right, right.
So Yogi Berra, and that was... It's not the Iron Giant.
What's he called?
You know...
I wish I knew more baseball ball lore cause I like going to baseball games.
Like the last, the last decade I've gone to more, I've gone to more Mariners games than any other sporting event in my life.
You know, I go to 10 of them a year.
Well, cause you have rock and roll baseball friends and they keep you honest, right?
They get your seat.
I have zero and I, and I love all the bunting and I love the like, Oh, the history.
I love small ball.
Normally I make sports jokes and I don't really know what the term means, but I like it when I like, well, I don't know the technical term for what small ball equals, except I know it to mean you're not swinging it for the fences, as we say, you're trying to get on base.
And it's the same reason I like watching Bastik ball.
I like watching Bastik ball because it is, in the words of sports commentators, very athletic.
There's a lot of athleticism.
There's a lot of athleticism out there on the boards.
Yeah, you like Ichiro baseball, which is hit those infield, you know, and make them hard to catch.
I won't turn away a dinger, but I also like a bouncing bounce.
Well, sure.
You get it between that guy and that other guy, and you get this guy over here and can't get the ball?
Exactly.
You put it right between those guys.
There's like three guys, four guys.
This ball's also nice because you don't have to pay attention.
Well, it's very unlikely something's going to happen that you won't be able to catch up on.
You can eat two or three times in the space of what is often an eight hour game.
You could stare like what I like to do when I get hot dogs.
Like, for example, I'm speaking here about hot dogs.
Yeah.
But like when we go to the movies or we go to the ballpark, I've never bought one hot dog for anybody.
No.
And I definitely buy two hot dogs for myself, sometimes more.
You know what I do when I go to that little stand?
I squirt up my hot dogs differently.
And so I'll break some rules.
I'll put my finger in the eye of Yogi Berra.
I'll do usually a straight mustard.
I'll do some of the ones with those little bunions and relish.
I'll put up that on.
I'll have two different hot dogs.
And the time it takes me for me to ruminate on two $11 hot dogs and decide which one to pick, even if I hear...
And the ball goes somewhere.
I'll be...
I'll be able to catch up.
Yeah.
You get back and you're like, what happened?
What happened?
With basketball, like when we're watching like right now, you know, there's a local team that's doing, that does well.
And we, and you know, it's something my, my, my lady friend and I enjoy watching and not, I mean, I don't follow sports, but, but one way, I mean, just in passing one way, I think we differ a little bit.
It's impossible not to notice that Madeline really wants the Warriors to win.
Yes.
She wants the Warriors to be ahead in a game.
Which often does not happen in the first or second quarter because they're famously a third and fourth quarter team.
But it was so fun to watch this series that just concluded with the Mavericks because both teams are great.
And you know one reason they're great is there's not just one good guy.
You could argue that's slightly true.
Nah, it's not fair.
The Mavericks have one guy who's just a fucking juggernaut and then some other guys that are really good.
I mentioned him.
He's the guy I mentioned who I said looks like he's about to get fired from a Home Depot.
But it's so fun to watch two teams where there's a bunch of people who are good, and even the, what do they call it in England, the back bench.
You bring in the second string.
Those guys are great.
These young kids.
You get this Jordan Poole kid.
What the fuck's this guy doing?
If I tried to ponder my hot dogs now, title, if I tried to ponder my hot dogs while Steph is passing to Klay, Klay gets behind his back.
Well, who's this coming up the middle?
Fucking Draymond Green.
Draymond's got five fouls in the first quarter, and he's already going, uh, dunk, dunk.
And I go, and I got my hot dog in my hand.
Whereas with Bastik Ball, there is no time to wait.
And then I go, and we watch it again.
I'm like, I scream from the other room.
I say, get in here.
Clay Thompson just hit, you know, he hit a swisher.
He hit a three-pointer from like Connecticut.
That's exciting.
Whereas baseball, you have time to visit with your friends, you know, and talk about 5-4 time and whatnot.
The thing about basketball, in my experience, is that, yes, all of that is true, but also really the only thing that matters in basketball is the last three minutes of the game because they're always more or less time.
The last three minutes of the game takes 45 minutes.
Yeah, more or less tied right up until the end, and you could just, I don't remember which comedian had said it, but you could just watch the last three minutes.
Oh, it's 1,000% true.
Basketball games should only be three minutes long.
Also, because you're burning off, like you've been holding your timeouts to use advantageously, right?
If somebody gets, see, personally, I don't believe in heat.
I understand the idea of heat.
You don't believe in heat?
Well, sometimes it, you know, I don't think you're supposed to talk about, this is like saying the Scottish play, I don't think you're supposed to talk about heat.
or time travel but uh heat is something where you'll go like jesus christ clay thompson was out for so long and now he's back and he was like he's got heat well but now he's back to being he's back to being one of the splash brothers this guy can can can throw some dingers you know and uh i'm gonna play he can play small ball big big hands small hearts can't lose i think we should start a new show that's just sports we just do sports sports with john and merlin
We just talked about... It's got a real Marshall... No Beatles, no Beatles.
Big Wiggles.
No, it would be exactly this and it's just sports.
Thing is, so yes, you're going to use your timeouts judiciously because, okay, so heat.
Heat is this idea that like a hot streak.
Separate from yeet.
It's not.
I don't understand that.
Yeet and sus are so confusing to me.
I feel like I'm doing a hate crime on somebody whenever I, okay, so here's the thing.
I'm ready.
You think you're getting hot.
John.
Pop quiz, hotshot.
How does one determine whether one is hot right now?
Oh, are they on a streak?
Doing a heat check.
No, you start out on a streak, and then you do a heat check.
You do a heat check.
Is there, like, a meter at the bottom of the screen that kind of, like, goes up?
The roar of the crowd, if you could consider that a meter.
Heat check.
If you think round is funny.
But when you're hot, when you're really producing, literally...
visible heat like stink lines oh wait wait wait do they do they have oh why do they not have this where they where they have a infrared camera on the on the game and they show which player is the hottest yeah see i was gonna say it's a heat check where you try some completely bananas shot when you haven't really set up you know what i mean you're off balance and you somehow get a three-pointer and then and but then that yes of course oh you did it but then we
free hot dogs for everybody we have we have detected heat heat check heat yeet um you uh oh sorry go ahead i have so much i've written down things to talk to you about which i normally don't do oh i feel like i'm taking this off this is like you getting me off paulin and kiss did you ever get you end up watching the video
The Paul Lynn and Kiss video?
The Detroit Rock City on the Paul Lynn Halloween special.
Oh, you know— Was that this show?
I feel like it was.
It was.
You posted it, and then there were a bunch of people on my Patreon site that were talking about the video, and I read their comments—
It's kind of like I don't go to see the movies, but I do read the reviews.
Oh, I understand completely.
Yeah.
But I never actually watch it.
I'm a huge Paul Lin fan.
It's just that Kiss has a way.
His face is on my desk right this second.
Paul Lin.
Paul Lin.
I'll send it to you.
I have a hardware device on my desk that has a picture of Paul Lin on it, and I'll send it to you.
Go ahead.
Please continue.
So anyway, there was that.
Oh, no, but you have things written down, and I always love, you know, people ask me all the time, what do you guys prepare?
And I say, I don't.
Yeah, it's called life.
Look it up.
It doesn't seem like Merlin does, but sometimes it sounds like maybe he does.
Well, you should never know.
I mean, you know.
Right, right, right.
Well, you're great at that.
You're great at, I don't know.
You're great at me not knowing.
I swear to Christ, if I'm dying and you didn't tell me, I'm going to be so frustrated with you.
Because it sounds like you might be doing some kind of, I feel like I might be dying.
I got these knees, and you're being nice to me.
I don't know why.
No, no, it's congestive heart failure is the thing we have to worry about.
Congestive heart failure.
Oh, the other kind's okay.
Because the problem is you can't tell.
You can't tell until you're out of breath, and you're like, why am I out of breath?
You can't tell until you're out of breath.
No, wait, do you know about this?
Is this a thing?
Yeah, it's a thing.
Is this a Dick Cheney thing?
Is this when you get the cheese in your lungs or whatever, where your heart can't move?
Yeah, I think it is.
Oh, shit, I don't want that.
Is it occluded, John?
Is it occluded?
I think, you know, it's blockage.
There's always, there's some blockage, but then your heart gets... And then you can't even lay a wreath anymore.
The wall of your heart gets too thick.
Oh, no.
And then it can't work because it's too thick.
The wall's too thick.
Huh.
You know, the hot tub's too hot.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
The chair's too small and the wall is too thick.
You don't like to color your mini golf balls?
Yeah.
So that's, in my family, there's no, we don't have cancer, we don't have dementia, but our hearts, it's our hearts that are the issue.
Now you sound like a parody.
Of a jingoistic song, which would be Okie from Muskogee by the great Merle Haggard.
Now, a lot of people thought that Okie from Muskogee was an anti-hippie song, when in fact, it was basically a before-its-time parody of anti-hippie songs.
When he says, we don't smoke marijuana in Muskogee.
But of course he was smoking marijuana.
Of course, he's fucking Merle Haggard.
He's one of the outlaws.
Wasn't he an outlaw?
He was an outlaw, right?
He was.
He was an outlaw.
All right, I'm going to send you this picture of Paul Lin, but please continue.
Talk about whatever you want.
I don't know what I'm doing here.
I'm probably dying.
You know, it's Memorial Day, and I don't know if I told you.
Did I tell you that my dad's grave has a headstone now?
Well, to respond to a slightly different question, I was not aware that your wonderful late father, who I treasured my time with, I was not aware that he did not have one.
He's a veteran.
My dad was a veteran.
He got a headstone.
He was just a corporal.
Your dad literally shot a Japanese Zero out of the sky with a sidearm.
That's right.
So I imagine he would have gotten, I have to imagine, I don't mean any disrespect to those who served.
And the blue or the gray.
But it seems to me that the more things like shooting a Japanese Zero, you eventually get like a Chinese family or Jewish family sized, hilariously large, approaching mausoleum, Stanley Kubrick style gravestone that like sings and like reaches up into the sky.
My dad's looks like a cafeteria tray.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, you know, we don't live in Brooklyn, so we don't have a cemetery here.
We don't live in Brooklyn in Muscogee.
Ha ha ha.
New York City.
San Antonio.
Here in Seattle, there are some old cemeteries.
There used to be a cemetery down on Denny Street.
But then when they decided to lower all the hills in Seattle using high pressure water in order to make Seattle more friendly to business back in 1910, they had to move that center.
This is an instance of like, I'm sorry, I was looking at Paul Lind, something that was like regarded as blight or an impediment to growth.
Was it leveled?
What is it, high-speed water?
What is it?
Seattle originally had seven hills like Rome, and they built up on these hills, like San Francisco.
Yeah, I think we might have something like seven hills here.
Yeah, there were cable cars in Seattle, the whole nine.
And then right around the turn of the century, it was a thing where the city boosters.
Seattle has always had a kind of inferiority complex because it positioned itself
I don't know if you know this, but before the great fire of San Francisco, San Francisco was basically built out of logs and coal came from Seattle.
It's the whole reason we were here.
I totally didn't know that.
We were here to send raw materials to San Francisco to help you build it.
And then you set it on fire.
And then you had to rebuild it.
And I think all those... The real money was in milk and beds, as you know.
It's like being one of those guys with the cigar and the $100 bills.
You know what I'm saying?
The thing is, if you don't know who the prospector in the room is, it's probably you.
Well, that's how Dawson City got built.
But if you think of all those...
Dawson City!
If you think about your house, your house is made of wood.
Pick up the piece.
Where'd that wood come from?
There's no freaking wood.
Oh my God, it's like I'm a 14-year-old boy again.
Okay.
There's no wood in California.
You can't land on a fraction.
Yeah, that's right.
Okay.
So you guys, you're saying that you're Weyerhaeusers up there.
I think that's how you pronounce it.
You say Weyerhaeuser?
Yeah, Weyerhaeuser.
You Weyerhaeusers and whatnot, and all of you Bellinghams up there, you guys are selling us Morning Wood, and then we're putting it in the service of panning.
Yeah, you're making the stuff.
There's no San Francisco without really, really hateful Catholics and Seattle is what you're saying, or PNW writ large.
True.
Everything you say is true.
Oh, we are.
We only had logs and coal until somebody discovered that the ocean was full of fish.
But that that came later.
And I think we learned that from the Native Americans.
They were like, you know, there's fish in these them oceans.
OK.
And we were like, oh, what do you know?
It was just a way to take coal to San Francisco.
But so the oldest graveyard, the oldest graveyard that still exists in Seattle is a lake is called Lakeview Cemetery.
It's a big graveyard.
It's where Bruce Lee is buried.
Oh, wow.
And Brandon Lee.
And all the founders of Seattle, they all have obelisks up there, and it's right by Volunteer Park, and it was right, basically, kitty-corner from the house my dad grew up in.
So you know San Francisco, for example.
One of the wackadoo things about San Francisco is that we do not today have this...
Basically, San Francisco decided a long time ago for reasons that there was not going to be burials.
I'm not going to say graveyards or cemeteries.
You're not going to have burials in the city limits.
And some still exist, you know, again, like the Hateful Catholics.
There's a few of those, but that's all down in Harold and Maude country.
That all happens down in like Daly City, Colma, that area, right?
And they even went so far as, you know, they dug up a bunch of graves and like moved them, right?
That's not yeet.
That is yeet.
Oh, sus.
Yeet.
Sus.
And my question to you is this, like, did you have, so did it start out, oh God, we got to talk about the thing I sent you, strong counts.
But so it starts out as like, there's a graveyard over here, right?
Yeah.
And like, did you guys have like a graveyard district?
Well, they had to move a couple of graveyards because they tore the hills down.
The high speed water.
Yeah.
The city boosters were like, we're never going to grow and become a new capital of the West.
It's like a parking lot before there were cars.
Like when you and Jesus Christ, you don't want to talk to me this week about about stuff with that book.
This book has like infected my fucking brain.
And now you're like, oh my God, you want to go replace this area with like this, this block sized area, which currently produces, uh, or nobody likes it because all the stores are little and it could be a goldfish store or a vape shop.
Ooh, we don't like that.
Taxable revenue on that a lot higher than this fucking one month old big box store that nobody wants with enough parking for a fucking Disney park and parking lots.
As, as my, my strong towns, people say parking lots do not provide jobs.
No, all those little stores could all be guitar stores, Merlin.
Every little town in America.
And didn't suck like most cities.
And you know what you're going to love about this book, John?
It's all about zoning and how zoning is the problem.
I was going to do a TV show.
We'll talk about that in a second.
I was going to do a TV show that had that same plot.
And maybe I'll call these people and we'll start a TV show.
But a parking lot was a graveyard.
Wait, first it's a parking lot, now it's a 7-Eleven, chocolate chip cookies, paved paradise, and made a graveyard.
The unusefulness of a parking lot is perhaps analogous to, it was meant as a question but sounds like a comment, in early days of Seattle and growing beyond the ramshackle huts.
If you think about did a graveyard become like the equivalent of like, holy shit, I can't know.
We don't have cars to park here.
We're parking.
But it's a parking lot for dead people.
It wasn't that it was, you know, like the founders all had to be buried somewhere or their or their kids that died of typhus.
Oh, not outside of church.
Oh, I don't know, maybe at the very beginning, but the church is all burned down because, you know, that's what happens.
But if you think about Brooklyn, New York, it's one fifth grade graveyards.
Brooklyn, New York's got all those.
You can just walk up and go see Alexander Hamilton's grave.
I think he's outside of church.
Yeah, it's all those mafia graveyards where they're all standing around and it's, you know.
You know, Pauly didn't move fast.
He didn't have to move for anybody.
Yeah.
But in Seattle, they moved the old graveyards.
So there's two graveyards up on Capitol Hill.
One of them is a Civil War graveyard.
That people don't really know about.
And it's full of Confederate veterans of the war.
Wait, you guys fought on Confederate side?
No, we didn't.
Oh, but they had to bury them somewhere.
We weren't a state at the time.
But a lot of Confederate veterans moved west after the war and came here.
And so they all died of old age.
But there's a Confederate graveyard here that recently, nobody even knew it was there.
It was just a place to walk your dog.
Uh, because it didn't have a fence around and it was just kind of in the middle of a neighborhood.
Yeah.
There's a point where the people really drop off on the maintenance of things like that.
It's like, you know what I mean?
It's like the, you reach a point.
Yeah.
The last great grandmother dies and then somebody mows it.
There's a, there's a, there's a, there's a, uh, some.
There's one proud boy.
There's a hundred dollars.
Proud boy with a Mike Brady mower.
It goes up there.
Yeah.
Probably somebody put some money into an endowment to maintain it.
And it probably has $50 million in it right now.
But there's only one law firm that administers it.
And the lawyer is 89 years old.
We're alive and he could make that movie.
He could find out like, you know, and I'm not saying like he plays a little boy, but it would be a little bit like the toy or something like that, where then he would become the, oh, you know what he is?
He's the lawn guy.
He's the caretaker.
Yeah.
Yeah, he's like the Chance the Gardener guy.
He comes out, and then they discover, we don't know who else to give this money to.
And he's like, well, I guess I could take it wherever you want it to go.
And you're like, no, no, sir, you don't understand.
I'm the executor of the Confederacy, and now you own the most valuable graveyard in the Pacific Northwest.
Well, the graveyard that was, I mean, for the 30 years I've lived in Seattle, it was completely ignored.
Yeah.
And then in the last, whatever, four years, somebody discovered it was there.
And then it became a cause celeb.
Like, how dare they?
And somebody spray painted the.
Oh, because it's our history or because it's Confederate.
It's not a statue of Robert E. Lee either.
It's just some, it's just an obelisk.
I don't even remember.
I've been there a thousand times.
It's what remains of people who've been dead for a hundred years.
Yeah.
And it's not even, well, no, a hundred.
Yeah.
A hundred or more.
And it's not even a Confederate graveyard.
It's got both, it's got both sides, Merlin.
The graveyards.
celebrates both sides there's good good good remains on both sides but anyway so in the great in the big graveyard near next door uh so my family has a plot there that they've had since 18 what not seven and uh
And it's got all my ancestors buried in it, all these people.
And then my aunt and her husband bought the adjoining grave plot and all of that.
They're all buried there.
And then they were like, oh, well, we're going to erect a big stone.
And then my uncle was like, well, we're going to put in a bench.
And it, you know, it became a whole park.
Okay.
And my dad, being the oldest son of the, you know, and the patriarch for the last 20 years of his life, he said, well, you know, I want to be buried in the goddamn place.
Save your bench.
But because the piece of paper of the grave, and I've seen the old book where everything's written in
drawn in in quill ink and it says right there you know it's written in until you put a body there you're just buying land really well yeah but you have the plot book that lays out i remember this with my dad again with my dad's uh uh grave yeah yeah but like you so like you so you come in and like you're gonna say oh in that fancy nice area over there where there's some bodies buried and you buy like a certain number of spots you buy like a rectangle of land inside that for your people is that how it worked well yeah and the old ones were like
They were meant to have two coffins in them, side by side, mom and dad.
But after everybody started getting cremated, they were like, well, actually, you can put 16 people in it if you're cremated.
Oh, it's just envelopes.
You can pile them up.
Yeah.
So it's all these people.
Well, but the piece of paper or something, it fell to my uncle or my second cousin once removed who was my dad's cousin.
And he's, no, Junius.
Junius, sorry.
And Junius just sort of made it hard on dad.
And dad was like, his attitude about all that stuff was always like, fuck it.
And so Junius said something like, well, I don't know.
Maybe, you know, my second, 40 years from now, one of my grandkids is going to want to bury their dog there.
And so I'm not so sure about, and my dad was like, fuck it.
You know what?
Fuck it.
And he went to the graveyard and he said, got any other spots?
And they were like, Oh, he like, he did a, he did a Kobayashi Maru kind of.
Yeah.
And they were like, well, Bruce Lee is buried here.
It's the cemetery has been full since 19, whatever.
But you know, there's a new, we got a new thing.
These, uh, this area that wasn't, that was originally planted as an alley, which we never used as an alley.
It's just grass.
And it's right by your family plot.
Not exactly by it.
This is like a Stephen King level coincidence.
It's two graves over.
So here's your thing.
Here's your other thing.
And then there's like the Johnsons and the Smiths have a grave here and then a grave here.
Not a full-size one either, just a little one.
And then here's the alley, which we have vacated and will sell you a part of the alley.
And my dad was like, fine, I'll get it.
I'll take it.
And so when he went, when, when he died and I had his little urn, I went out there and they had, they had dug a hole and I showed up with the urn and nobody else was there.
My, my, none of my family came and I'm standing there and it's two guys leaning on shovels, literally leaning on shovels and the funeral director guy in a, in a morbid suit.
And I walk over and I'm holding this urn.
It's kind of a blustery day.
And I look at them and they're looking at me.
And I kneel down and I put the urn in the ground.
And then they stand there like, are you going to say a few words?
And I was like, I don't know if you know about my family, but I am not going to fucking say a few words in front of you guys.
And I actually said, would you guys go, you know, like run around or something?
Get out of here for a minute.
I don't want you here.
I'm going to say, I'm going to, I'm going to tell him like, this is the fucking end.
So anyway, you know, back on Dios.
Right.
Cause I put his pilot's license and some chocolate bars.
In that instance, you strike me as, I mean, the exception that proves the rule, I guess that like you are not the kind of guy who's going to do a speech for clapping in front of three employees.
No, I'm not going to say one Corinthians 13, you know?
And, and so, uh, so they kind of like, I don't know, politely turned their back and I, I put it in the ground and I was, and I kind of, I gave him like a, like a, I'll be back later to talk about this.
You know, uh, you know, like a goat God.
And, and they were surprised that I had no, that I had nothing prepared.
And it wasn't a thing.
I didn't expect anybody to come.
This was just a thing, you know, every Susan was in Indonesia.
It's also just weird.
I'm feeling a little bit shivery about this because it's one of those things where you circle back around to something that started as a real thing, became a metaphor, and then circles back.
You're burying your father.
Well, but people say like, I got to go back to, you know, I got to go back to Saskatchewan to bury my father.
Well, like you were literally burying your father.
Except not entirely because he, in the later years of his life.
Just save some for sourdough.
He said, here's what I want.
I want you to take some of my ashes out to the middle of Lake Washington.
It's like you and no potatoes.
And I was like, all right, in the middle of Lake Washington, what's that about?
Are you writing this down?
One time I swam across Lake Washington and Uncle Jack was in a boat.
And I swam the whole way and I want my ashes in the middle.
And I was like, all right, in the middle of Lake Washington.
And I want some more of my ashes up on the top of Mount Alyeska.
All right, Mount Alyeska, got it.
I'm going to take some up in a little jar up into the wind.
And some under the holly tree were great granddad.
Okay.
The holly tree.
I know where that is.
And in the graveyard.
So I had his ashes and I was sitting at the dining room table all alone.
And I had gone and bought an urn, but a small urn.
And I'm there like a cup measure going like, oh God.
All right, dad.
Let's see.
I got...
the middle of Lake Washington, the Holly tree, the top of Mount Alieska.
And at one point he was like, and I want you to fly over Susitna and put the, and I was like, I'm not flying over Susitna.
You have no really Susitna.
It's a, it's a mountain that he could see from his office.
And throw some at the fella in Nevada who used to take care of my plane.
Exactly.
I'm not going to put some over your cat's grave.
We laugh, but that must have been... Think about that moment where you start to say something like, here's where I want my ashes to be, and then you start revisiting all the precious places in your mind.
That must be... We kid, but that must have been a very...
Heavy moment for him.
Oh, and the thing is, he had a vision.
He did not want his ashes just all together.
He wanted to be spread into the wind.
And I understand that.
My mom has decided she wants to have a cherry tree planted in her head.
And I'm like, where, where?
And then the, the other day she was like, she hasn't already planted it herself.
She's very assertive about making sure things, it strikes me.
She's very assertive about making sure that everything is done correctly, let alone things that are important to her.
Well now, okay.
I'll, I'll get to this in a second.
Okay.
Sorry.
So, so, so, so, so the funeral director says to me, now, listen,
This is an endowment cemetery, which means that when you buy a headstone of
The cost of maintaining it is folded into the cost of the headstone.
So now... That you pay to whom?
That you pay to the graveyard people?
Yes, and that is... Is the equivalent of an annuity or a maintenance fee that like... Exactly.
Oh, I see.
Did you say endowment?
Is that what you said?
An endowment.
Yeah, exactly what it is.
So here is... We're going to open a new bank account with this much money in it that will cover the anticipatable...
costs of taking care of this in perpetuity.
Forever.
Exactly.
So, buying the plot is one thing, but then you pay this endowment on the headstone, and that's why they mow it.
So, what they did was they put a temporary stone there in advance of me building a novelist.
It's like your temporary tabs, almost.
So, at the time, I was, you know, this is like late, long winter's period, but I hadn't yet gotten any money, and I wrote all the relatives, and I said...
all right uh we gotta put get a headstone orders of magnitude idea like without is it like five figures like how much are we talking about oh yeah yeah yeah so like more more than you would have just like sitting on a cigar box yeah or or medium to high four depending on on what you want right i get it okay and i wrote everybody and i was like look some of you are rich some of you are old who wants to who's the old rich person that wants to help me do this and of course everybody was like i'll help
But I'm really bad at, you know, I went and looked at 7,000 gravestones and I was like, well, you know, I could have one with an eagle or I could have a humble one that just has an eternal flame.
And nobody wanted to jump in and actually help me do it.
And so the years went by and the groundskeepers.
He's not going anywhere.
Well, but the groundskeepers unendowed.
did not maintain the stone, and it grew over.
They're checking a clipboard of who's in doubt and who are the sad bastards that are not in doubt.
And if anybody did come to go visit that site, they'd be like, oh my God, what is happening at, in this case, Dave's grave.
Well, so they didn't weed whack it, and the ground grew over it, and then it was lost.
It was lost.
What?
They mislaid where he was?
Well, I mislaid where he was.
Don't they have surveyors?
Well, except it's all, it's in this alley where there was no other grave.
So it's just a long green.
So we would go, we go to the cemetery all the time because our whole family's buried there.
We have events there, you know, and so we're, we're there every year.
A couple of times, all of us, you know, 20 people standing around.
And, uh, and then I would walk everybody over kind of 15 feet up and, and four feet to the left.
And I would go, it's around here somewhere.
Yeah.
And we would stand there and kick the grass and talk about dad.
And, and it felt somewhat appropriate that he was over here somewhere.
Well, so a decade goes by and several times people have said to me, whoa, what are you going to do with the, with the headstone?
And I was like, ah, I got this eternal flame, but then this other one in black marble that has Dennis the Menace on it.
And there was a guy for a while that was building him out of Lucite I thought might be cool.
Nothing happened.
You mean like an award you'd give to a salesperson?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Like the MTV Music Video Award.
Yeah, like for Best Kiss or whatever.
Yeah, okay.
Well, so earlier this year...
I'm sorry.
It would be kind of funny to see.
I mean, obviously, it would be funny to see a far from the most expensive bowling trophy.
But one that was like, you know, not a showy bowling trophy, but if there was a bowling trophy that just had Dave on it.
But also, I do like the idea of one of those, like, Lucite Cable Ace Awards.
That'd be amazing, right?
With like a little Model T on the top that rotated?
Definitely shotgun a zero with a 45.
Anyway, earlier this year, my brother Bart, who has just retired, he writes me and he goes, I want to put a gravestone up for dad.
It's something I want to do.
And I was like, oh, yeah, that would be great.
Well, within a week, he has sent me a gravestone that he's designed.
Whoa.
And it's very tasteful.
And he goes, what do you think about this?
And I was like, uh, that's amazing.
I mean, it's been now, uh, 16 years since dad died.
16 years.
Is that a fact?
Yeah.
And I lost the, uh, I lost the girl 15 years.
I lost the gravestone many years ago.
Um, or his temporary one.
And, um,
And what is happening?
And he was asking me, like, is this okay?
And I was like, well, yeah, but the eternal flame.
And he was like, no, no, no, screw you.
I'm just going to, this is going to be real cut and dry.
Bart's taking over.
He's taking over.
And I was like, yeah, but I mean, what if we wanted to, Corinthians?
Yeah, right.
And he was like, nope.
And so he had this stone done.
And he was like, I'm going to put the Navy, I'm going to put the seal of the Department of the Navy on it.
Because dad loved that he flew for the Navy.
And I was like, do it.
He was like, I'm doing it.
Has Bart always been this on point?
No, absolutely not.
Wasn't he sort of like in the missing rhetoric generation?
Yeah, Bart was a rock musician.
And Bart was the guy that would come over to your house for a half an hour to drop something off.
And then he would call you two hours later and go, I think I left my wallet there.
And now he's like the fucking project guy.
Yeah.
That's cool.
Good for him.
So boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, the gravestone appears.
And so I had gone and talked, and I'd forgotten about this.
I had talked to the funeral director at some point a decade ago, and he said, well, the thing is that because the stone, because your dad's gravesite is in the alley, the stone has to face the
And I said, every other stone in the grave, every other stone in the graveyard faces east.
So when you walk into the graveyard.
Because sun?
I have no idea.
That's how they built it.
Okay.
So when you walk in, you stand there.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
I'm just thinking, okay, I'm sorry.
It's more like, so it's not so much about a sun thing.
It's not like the way Mark Twain liked to sleep, that kind of thing.
It's more like, have you ever been to a graveyard where they're all cattywampus?
They're always facing the same way, like books on a normal person's shelf.
You pick a way and you face them that way.
And maybe someone listening is like, all gravestones face to the east.
Yeah, but I mean, that's very much one of those major twice, cut once.
Because once you have, it strikes me that once you have two of those there, it's going to be a big project to change directions.
Can't change direction, except in this case, because it's in the alley.
Alley.
Dad's stone has to face west.
And I said, well, that's patently ridiculous because every stone, it's going to be bizarre to have one grave in the entire cemetery facing the opposite way.
And they said, no, no, no.
We don't want to confuse the people that are here because they're going to think that his stone, if it faces east, they're going to think he's part of the Smith family.
And I'm like, no one is going to think that.
It doesn't say Smith on it.
It says Roderick and it's over here.
I do understand that everybody's, there are people who care about everything, but who that cares about that that's in one of those families would misunderstand that.
It's not that.
It's the two people that work in the graveyard office that have the big book that's written in quill pen.
Yeah.
Get it in their head, got it in their head 50 years ago that the alley faced the other way.
And although they have never sold a grave in the alley, there are no other graves in their minds.
And it's institutional.
So when you talk about it, they all are just like, yes, but this one goes to 11.
And it's like, no, no, no, you're not listening to me.
It doesn't have to.
There's zero reason for it.
And they're like, but it does.
It's right here in the book.
And so I was ready to burn the whole place down.
And Bart, in his super chill, where's my wallet way, was like, doesn't matter.
It doesn't matter to me.
It doesn't matter to anybody but you.
You're the only one that cares.
And I'm like, I'm not the only one that cares.
God cares.
And he's like, doesn't matter.
And so I show up at the cemetery a month ago, and there's a stone for dad.
It says David Roderick.
It has a big Navy seal on it.
And then my Bart engraved, the sky is open.
What?
On it.
Which is.
Well, I know that phrase from something extremely specific to you.
It's the title of a song by the Long Winters about my dad that Bart was like, I always thought that represented him well.
The sky is open.
Oh, my Bart.
Bart is an MVP.
Yeah.
But the stone is the only—this graveyard has 2,000 people in it, including Bruce Lee, if I mentioned.
Yes.
And my dad's stone is the only one in the whole place that faces West.
An American original.
So there was a big event.
All my family was there.
They must be so pissed.
Yeah.
Well, so, and you know, there are a lot of people in my family that are conventional and several that are not.
We're all, there are 25 of us standing there.
We all go to the regular grave site where everybody is.
And then it's like, well, let's go, let's go see the new stone for dad.
And it immediately became the new place that we all go.
Oh, my God.
Nobody wanted to be over at the other place with the bench and the stones and all that.
You guys had the coolest stone in the graveyard.
They wanted to stand around this bass-ackward stone over in the alley.
I mean, there's like that scene in Duck Soup where Harpo walks in backwards with the deerstalker hat and it's got the fake beard and the glasses on it on the back of his head.
Yeah.
Maybe you could make a separate, oh, in comics, you might call this like an alternate cover or like, you know what I mean?
Like a fan pressing.
Maybe on the other side, there could be something different, like Harpo's head.
Well, that's what the cemetery guy said.
He said, you can put whatever you want on the other side of the stone.
A whiteboard?
Yeah.
I was like, isn't that going to confuse the shit out of the Smith family?
Like, what the fuck are the Smiths going to think?
Dad's leaving him.
But no, so we're standing there and, you know, it's a flat stone.
And I could just hear, my dad's just like, ha, ha, ha, ha.
I was going to, I didn't want to be mawkish, but how do you think your dad, like, you know, well, maybe not at the time before he passed, but like, the nominal mawkish looking down.
Do you think he'd get a kick out of that?
Oh, he thinks it's hilarious.
And he'd love the Navy SEAL, right?
Oh, he loves it.
He loves it.
And he likes that there's a lyric on it.
But the thing is, I know, I absolutely 100% know that when he bought that plot, he had no idea it faced West.
He was just like, whatever.
And they were like, well, you know, he's face West and he's like, ah, it doesn't matter.
But so we're standing there and my mom who divorced my dad in 1971 or 72, who, uh, who hates my dad's family or always did.
Yeah.
Who wanted to be buried with a cherry tree in her.
She still talks about getting on an ice floe.
She's like, I don't know, I feel a little peckish.
Maybe I should just go get on an ice floe.
I don't want to say something culturally or religiously insensitive, but there's nobody of my personal acquaintance in my lifetime who's more deserving of a Viking funeral.
She wants a Viking funeral.
She should go out.
You could go over to REI.
You could probably fit this right into your large car.
Go over, get her some kind of canoe, and just set her out there and have one of your bowmen.
Oh, well, this is the other.
She, I think, wants to still be alive and standing, holding onto the mast, looking back.
Oh, so however she goes to sea, be it on a flow or on a boat, she's standing there with head held high.
Yeah.
What a fucking great way for your, I mean, well, I don't want, well, you know what I'm saying?
I'm not going to say the words, but God, what a great way to go.
Yeah.
That's how she, that's how she envisaged it.
But we're standing there.
We're looking at my dad's back.
That's like me dying of shame about something that never happened.
I mean, it was so perfect that like, you know what I mean?
Like, like the same way we should, maybe we should have a bespoke death that encompasses the life that we lived.
And in your mom's case, fucking A. And she could be out there making improvements to the flow as it's going out.
As it goes out, as it slowly melts around her.
Painting some rows.
Putting some rows of flowers in.
Yeah.
Well, no.
So she looks at me.
She looks down at Dad Stone and she goes, why don't we buy all these plots here in the alley and we'll just start a new thing and I'd like to have a stone here too.
Wait a minute.
So she's setting for a moment.
Well, the thing is, if you buy it, you have the option.
Yeah.
Right?
So she wants to... Her main idea is still the cherry tree, but this would be her plan B?
I don't think she... No, I don't think she wants any of her remains there at all.
Okay.
She just said, I want a stone in this cemetery so that when everybody comes here, there's a place.
Yeah.
Because...
Because a hundred years from now, you know, if there's a cherry tree, it's not going to have a sign on it, but there's going to be a little stone here.
And I said, wait a minute, you want a stone next to dad?
And she was like, yeah, who cares?
What the fuck?
Why not?
And so all of a sudden I'm talking to the cemetery people and I'm like, well, you haven't sold any of these other alley plots.
You're ordering a, ordering a dinner to take home.
Hey, as long as I'm here, could you get that clipboard out?
Goddamn alley.
You can have a whole back, you can have a backwards plot.
You can have a backwards cemetery in the middle of the cemetery.
Speaking of the French, that is a very crazy structuralist deconstruction sort of idea.
You could have infinite Roderick graveyards.
300 years from now, people are going to be like, well, on your tour of Seattle, you've got to see the backward graveyard.
You're going to be a bumper sticker like Sea Rock City or, you know, Oregon's Gorges or like you're going to be one of those.
One of those like the mystery spot.
Holy shit.
Start printing up the bumper sticker.
Go to the Roderick graveyard.
Why is it there?
Who were they?
Are we standing in the wrong place?
Yes, you're always standing in the wrong.
There's no right place to stand.
That's what's made the infinite recursion Roderick graveyard so fascinating to dozens of tourists over time.
Yeah, look, the car is rolling uphill.
Do you guys sell fudge?
All right.