Ep. 476: "It Starts with Lava"
Hello.
Hi, John.
Hi, Merlin.
How's it going?
Oh, you sound jolly.
Oh, jolly.
How are you feeling?
Oh, no.
Who am I talking to?
Who is this?
Oh, no.
Oh, no.
Are you feeling better last week?
You're feeling a little under the weather.
Okay.
And you had some, you know, you shared some concerns that I think our audience enjoyed.
I know I enjoyed your sharing of concerns about, you know, the sick and sick and fear of getting sick.
How you sound better.
You feel better?
Yeah.
Yeah, I do.
Who is that?
I like that voice.
Is that a fretful aunt?
Who is that?
Hmm.
I went on a road trip.
Where'd you go?
If you can say.
My mom, she's 88, and she wanted to go on a road trip for her birthday.
And so we went around Washington.
Basically did a tour of all of the dams of Washington.
The dams of Washington?
Yeah.
Yeah, we went up and we saw the Diablo Canyon Dam and the Ross Lake Dam, and then we went to Gringo.
That's so basic.
That gives me chills a little bit, John.
Yeah.
Just knowing you've mapped it out, you got a triptych or similar, never take the same route twice, but you knew there were dams, at least by your telling and the plural, more than one dam.
Lots of dams.
Lots of dams.
So many dams.
We went to the Grand Coulee Dam, which is the largest dam.
I don't think we say that anymore.
The Grand Coulee fam?
Sorry.
That's one of those words you hear, you know, and like a coulee.
It's one of those words like, you know, the people used to use disparaging.
They're not referring to any ethnic group.
Sure, sure, sure.
No, this is a coulee.
C-O-U-L-E-E is also a Western term for a canyon.
Ooh, okay.
A canyon.
That's different from a gorge, right?
Well, it is different from a gorge.
I'm not sure.
Well, a coulee is wider than a gorge.
I'm so sorry I took you off your story.
It's early and I've had some coffee.
Your blessed mother who's still kicking.
You were right in the center of the story talking about the couleys.
I feel bad.
The couleys, yeah.
I mean, you know, there's just those things, you know, you got to...
They don't have hats, these coolies.
Okay, and they didn't build the railroads.
But this is why we don't use words—I can't even use the adverb that we can't use anymore.
We can't even say the word that's not as bad as that word, which is slavishly.
I get a lot of people— Let alone inwardly.
I get a lot of people writing me telling me that you can't use the, we can't use that word anymore phrase anymore.
Okay.
Oh, is that, what is that?
Is that insensitive?
Merlin keeps saying that he can't use that word anymore and he can't use that phrase anymore.
I can't use that phrase in discussing that we can't use that phrase?
Yeah, and so I go- Is that like a FISA order, John?
Is that like where you can't even mention that you got the order?
Listen, I'm going to say it one more time so everybody hears.
I don't control Merlin.
Oh, geez.
Well, welcome to the club.
There's a phrase that's – actually, you were only – I was only 15 years old.
Well, you're only supposed to blow the bloody doors off.
I have a phrase I've started to use on another program, which is I don't like being pressed into being any of my friends' penis lawyer.
And by that, I mean, sometimes it's about penises, but often it's just about, like, I'm supposed to know everything that everybody does, and I'm supposed to have a strong opinion about it, and then I'm supposed to post about it.
And I will on occasion be more than happy to be someone's pro bono penis lawyer, but I do not think of myself as being in the business of having to explain my other friends.
A phrase that we used to use in my life, a phrase that's come up a lot, it's not my day to watch him.
Oh, not my day to watch him.
What a great phrase.
I'm sorry.
I hope I haven't.
I hope I honestly hope I haven't hurt anybody with that.
But generally, I'm having fun with the idea that, you know, words are, you know, words are it's like that wordy rapping hood song by the Tom Tom Club.
You know, words are they're stupid things, you know, that might have been Edgar Rice Burroughs said that.
Was that the guy that was addicted to heroin in the movie?
What's his name?
Who's the guy?
William Henry Harrison.
William Henry Harrison.
You know who I mean.
Harrison.
Henry Harrison.
Heron House.
William Henry Heron House.
They say it's cursed.
You cross through its gates.
Like the guy in Naked Lunch.
You know what I'm talking about?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Harvey Herbinston.
Hey, everybody.
Hello, friend.
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Okay, that's one.
He was one of the beats.
You know, he was one of the beats.
He was the guy who talked like this.
Yeah, he was putting down what they were putting up.
Yeah.
He was played by Robocop in that weird movie.
Yeah, it was Stephen Jesse Bernstein.
Stephen Jesse Bernstein was the poet who talked like, oh, he was very Burroughs, wasn't he?
Now, was he from Seattle, John?
He was, he was.
He used to have spoken word things they'd play on our indie rock college station.
He did.
He would open rock shows with his Burroughs-esque poems.
Yeah.
And I liked him very much.
I have all his books.
I enjoyed him a lot.
He's interesting.
I know this is a little bit of Monday morning quarterbacking, but he's definitely in that weird rat king, to me, of people like, I don't know, just those characters where you're like, I hope that guy sticks around, because he seems like he's kind of swinging for the fences.
Well, here's what happens to Stephen Jesse Bernstein.
Like a Vic Chestnut, maybe.
Maybe like a Gigi Allen.
Maybe like a David Yao.
Yes, although of all of those, only David Yao survives.
Did we decide that he was being ironic?
David Yao?
I hope not.
I based my whole life on his... He's Jesus Lizard, right?
Yeah, on his onstage performances.
No, Steven Jesse Bernstein pioneered a method that we now call the Elliot Smith, which is he stabbed himself repeatedly to death.
But I think he stabbed himself like...
90 times or something or 100,000 times?
Yeah.
Boy, really something.
You really got to want it.
But that's also a style.
I don't know why.
It's a mood.
I want to talk about these goddamn dams.
It's a vibe.
It's definitely a feels.
I'm sorry to our listeners.
I'm not being ironic, sorry.
Like, I'm not doing that to be hurtful.
No.
Because I think words are funny things.
And I think it is funny that there are, in particular, I know we're not supposed to say this anymore, there are homonyms.
Hmm.
And words sound like other words, and sometimes when we say a word, you know, we're not saying that actual word.
You know what I'm saying?
Oh.
You know what I'm saying, right?
Oh, well, see, I know what you're saying.
But this is also, if I could just pivot to— You're not talking to me.
I am.
Now I am.
I'm pivoting to— Literally, you are.
Now, literally, I'm pivoting to verse, and the idea that there are magical ways that the sounds of a given language, in our case, the English language, there are various ways that you can align the sounds in the English language to have something, I don't know if we say gestalt anymore, but like, there's something bigger than the sum of its parts.
And I love that, and it still moves me.
Wow.
I mean, not a lot by that many people, but, and it's not, I'm not talking about, you know, not all lyrics are poems and not all verse are poems.
All the poets, they studied rules of verse and the ladies, you know, heard them say, sweet Jane.
Sweet, sweet, sweet Jane.
Now he said, all the colored girls go doo-doo-doo-doo-doo.
I just listened to the Cowboy Junkies yesterday.
Can you believe that?
Wait a minute.
Wait a minute.
Wait a minute.
That's the lady.
Oh, shoot.
I'm having a brain fart because I was listening to, sorry, Afghan Whigs this weekend.
And there's that one song on Gentleman where he sings with, is it Hope Sandoval?
Is that her name?
What's her name?
Hope Sandoval.
Is that Cowboy Junkie?
Hope Sandoval is the woman from Mazzy Star.
She's from Mazzy Star.
No, they covered Sweet Jane.
Mazzy Star did?
Who covered Sweet Jane?
Is that Cowboy Junkies?
The Cowboy Junkies did.
None of these have anything to do with Lone Justice.
That's when the knife feels like justice.
Is that right?
See, and that's the thing.
And you're thinking of Margot Timmons from Cowboy Junkies.
I might be thinking of Margot Kidder.
But Lone Justice.
That's Maria McKee.
I want to say Maria McKee.
Did I ever tell you about the time we almost opened for Lone Justice?
No, but I'm writing it down right under dams.
Yeah.
One time.
Lone Justice.
I had their cassette in 1986.
Yeah.
Yeah.
They were so amazing.
They were going to be the next big.
thing they were going to be the next big thing now they were in a different rat king they were in the rat king of not country rock but they like zeitgeist slash the reavers like a certain amount of even john cougar mellencamp there was that kind of turn to country-ish rock you get like a guadalcanal diary cow punk
Cow Punk.
Yes, probably.
Now, what about You Got Me Tied Down in Battleship Chains?
That band, what are they called?
Remember that band?
You Got Me Tied Down in Battleship Chains.
Remember them?
They were kind of cow punks.
Oh, what a good place to be.
Don't believe it.
I think that... I sometimes wonder why I can't sleep at night.
You?
No.
Her?
One of the differences between... Well, the difference between a chicken is one leg both the same, but the difference between a coolie and a canyon...
up here is that they're all made of everything up here on the eastern side of washington is made of lava it's all made of lava you see it starts with lava it's like everybody was making sourdough during the pandemic you're saying it all starts with the lava and the spiders come later it goes back it goes back way you set the way back machine to way back and you go back to when yellowstone was a mega volcano okay and it just kept it just kept sending more and more lava we were like we got enough
Lava, turn it off.
And then it just kept coming.
Lava, lava, lava.
So everything on the eastern side of the state is you start with lava and then mega floods.
So you put mega flood on top of lava and that's how you get eastern Washington.
That's where they grow the hops now.
That's where they grow the hops.
Yeah.
They grow the hops on top of the lava that has been mega flooded.
Hops on top.
Hop on top.
Mm-hmm.
And also sweet onions.
Hops and sweet onions.
Sweet onions.
Mm-hmm.
So that's what we did.
We drove over there.
Did you start out with a route, or as you say, a route?
A route?
You guys say route, don't you?
What would I?
No, I think I would say route.
I think you and your mom say route, don't you?
Maybe she says route.
I say route.
Did you start out with something in mind?
Was it going to be like, we need to hit these points at a certain time?
Was it relaxed?
What was the feeling going on?
And also, was it just the two of you?
Yeah.
No, it was me, mom, and my daughter and my daughter's mother slash partner.
Oh, that sounds nice.
And I had the high points, right?
I knew that I wanted, because there's a highway called Highway 20.
And it's maybe not intuitive because Highway 20 is north of Highway 2, right?
You didn't see that coming, did you?
No, I've seen, I saw a CGP Grave video about how they numbered highways.
And like with so many of the great classic CGP Grave videos, there's like, he explains something that like over, at least over 80, maybe over 90% makes a thousand percent sense, except for the ways that then it doesn't do that.
And that's how you end up with multiple routes and things.
And you get the East and the West and the zeros and the ones.
Yeah.
Yes, the zeros are the ones.
Right, because zeros are east-west—wait, sorry, even are east-west and odd are north-south usually, right?
Yeah, but there's lots of—they start counting them different ways.
What we have here is we have a U.S.
Highway 2, which is a United States road.
And then we have a State Route 20, which is north of U.S.
2.
And State Route 20 closes every winter at the end of October, and it doesn't open up again until spring.
Like the Overlook Hotel.
Exactly.
Exactly.
And the only way you can get there is Scatman Carothers drives you up there.
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And a snowcat.
You want some ice cream?
You want some ice cream, Doc?
But what that means is we have to go through Winthrop and we'll see.
So we went up and we saw Diablo.
We actually drove across Diablo Canyon Dam.
There's not even a gate.
It was just like, oh, I guess they just leave this dam unattended.
We were like, yes, I'll drive out on it.
And my daughter was like, don't you drive out on that dam.
And I was like, listen, there's not even a sign that says don't drive on the dam.
And you can't turn around on the dam.
And if a car was coming the other way, there's not room for two cars.
It's a very tall dam.
Drove right on out on it.
Wow.
Anyway, then we went to Twisp.
And they were having a little farmer's market.
I was going to ask you if you went to Twisp.
We did.
We did.
We went to Twisp.
That's the place where you were going to potentially be the sheriff.
Yep.
And there's actually an election happening right now for sheriff.
And I got the lay of the land of my two opponents.
They both are a lot more sheriff-y than me.
Yeah, but that might be just the opening for you.
See, that's what I'm thinking.
Because there are a lot more hippies up there than there ever were before.
Because it's now, like for every horse cowboy that used to be up there, there are two mountain bikers and one marathon runner.
Oh, interesting.
Yeah, so they're all moving up there and they're buying like Aptrix.
That's expensive.
Aptrix.
Yeah, they're buying all that really expensive running gear.
So I was like, huh, it might be time for a new sheriff in town.
But then, you know, Grant Cooley, that's a big dam.
Is that a New Deal dam?
That's a New Deal dam.
That's a Roosevelt dam.
That's, you know, we don't build things in this country anymore.
Merlin, did you?
I mean, I went to see, our family went to see a, um, at the, at the local, uh, at the local MoMA.
At the SF MoMA, there's a big, um, Diego Rivera, um,
Like really, really, really lots of Diego Rivera.
And he's not my favorite, but it does remind me of what happened in the 30s when we gave people jobs to do things that we needed.
And I think it's kind of a good idea.
A lot of people didn't like Roosevelt for that.
I think it was a good idea.
You can call it a make work project.
People are still mad.
But if we're making work that does good things, look at those posters.
You ever seen any of those WPA posters?
They're beautiful.
They sure have.
They are.
They're beautiful.
And you know, one of the things we did this weekend was we went down to the Mary Hill Art Museum, which was built by Sam Hill, the nutty millionaire railroad baron.
who was like this guy that is this incredible person that knew all the royal families of Europe, but he lived in Seattle and he really, he really wanted to,
to pave the roads.
That was his big thing.
He was like... This sounds like a movie that Christopher Nolan would want to make but never get around to.
This sounds like one of those stories that needs to be told.
It would be such a great movie starring...
could it be michael shannon i'd like to see michael shannon let's put michael shannon in the role there you go love that guy it's the movie's cast it's written in cast okay anyway at a certain point he was like uh friends with a woman who was friends with rodan and he bought a bunch of rodan drawings and sculptures and now they're all for the internet john way before
I mean, the people, the way that people knew each other is so strange and the way that royalty got to be royalty.
Boy, talk about strange bedfellows.
My goodness.
That's right.
It was.
And at that time, of course, that that part of the country was seen as like beyond the sticks.
I mean, I just I was watching a documentary about movies the last few weeks and.
One of the things they highlight that everybody always highlights is that one of the reasons Hollywood happened, yes, because of the weather, you know, but a big part of it was that Edison and other film people were very litigious, and that by going to Los Angeles, essentially, starting in Los Angeles, they could steer clear of a lot of those, you know, the attorneys that would be pursuing them if they were in, say, New Jersey.
Interesting.
So do weirdos, weirdos come west?
Yeah.
Weirdos come west.
That's right.
And I was looking at these Rodans.
Have you been to the Rodan Museum in Paris?
No, I've never been to Paris.
It's really lovely.
I mean, not lovely.
It's astonishing and terrifying.
Like a sculpture garden or something that's famous?
Yeah.
I mean, Paris is lovely and terrifying, but this sculpture garden is especially...
yeah i'm a i'm a big fan and his work really like seeing it in person just it's just it blows your mind that's the thing about art you gotta see it in person you gotta see it in person it sounds nuts but it really does make a difference but so the the rodan the rodaniana
That was at this, at the Maryhill Museum.
And oh, and Sam Hill was also the guy that built a replica of Stonehenge here.
No kidding.
That's a passion project, huh?
Yeah, he built it as a memorial to World War I veterans.
But he built it, stick with me, he built it as though it had never fallen.
So he built like a brand new Stonehenge.
As if.
That's so, like, this is what it would look like.
It would be like, I don't know.
I mean, like, I've always wondered, like, for real, what the actual hanging gardens of Babylon would look like.
Because the drawings are just bananas.
In that case, he's saying this is what it looks like.
These guys, this is when it was still fresh.
You can still smell the fresh Stonehenge paint on it.
That's, I guess, where he was coming from, yeah.
You know, if I were Elon Musk, I would get off Twitter...
And I would build a replica of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon.
What the heck?
And it's funny you should say that because a thing that I wrote down a second ago, when you were talking about railroad barons, I was thinking, this is not a topic, this is just a fly-by comment.
I wonder if part of the thing with people, maybe not like Elon Musk exactly, but definitely some of the crypto guys and the disruptive thought leader guys, I wonder if there's some part of their brain that really wants to be the equivalent of a railroad baron.
That they want to have been there making the transformative thing happen.
And even amongst other people, well, back to gauges again, right?
That you could muscle other people to license your gauge or whatever.
That's kind of like, at least in not modern times, but in the American era, that's the railroad guys.
That was the oil guys.
Those are the barons, baby.
This guy, Sam Hill, in 1900, he made 20 trips to Japan.
in the space of his lifetime, and he lived pre-airplane.
So when he trips to Japan, he was in Europe,
Uh, you know, 50 times he knew all of the heads of state and it was, and he was, he wasn't just, he wasn't a dilettante.
He was over there, you know, like.
He's staying in the mix.
Fixing up the countries after the war and, and, and spending a lot of money, you know, really trying to pave those roads.
Oh, yeah.
Oh, but the thing about the Rodin stuff is I saw Diego Rivera so strongly in Rodin's
sculptures from 30 years prior and it was just one of those ways like that you see like saison turn into cubism like one of the you know i mean like one of those like you're like oh like saison's little huts really presage the idea of what we would think of as brock and you know picasso cubism yeah all that all that 30s socialist realism i i had never connected it to
to anything kind of you know like as kinetic as as rodan and all of a sudden i saw it so clearly and i was like whoa whoa that was there all the time and i didn't you know because he of course his sculpture was all uh
It was controversial, and the French were like, what is this?
It's not even finished.
This is all lumpy and kind of like us.
Yeah, I mean, I wasn't going to say anything, but just because I'm lumpy doesn't mean not art.
Yeah, right.
Talk about a T-shirt.
But that, you know, how do you know when something's finished?
Shut up, Frenchie.
You know when it's finished.
The artist knows when it's finished.
Yes, and then it belongs to the world.
But it doesn't belong to the world until Rodin's done with the lumps.
So deal with it.
Like it or lump it.
The lumps.
I don't know how to say that.
Your lady lumps.
Oh, my lovely lady lumps.
Brings all the boys to the Rodan Garden.
How do you guys like road trips?
Is it a thing that you like?
Gosh, it's really been a while.
We don't usually have road trips quite...
wah road trips in the sense of like, okay, this is an adventure to just be the journey.
Like longer trips we've taken in California include things like, you know, going, I mean, to be honest, like, you know, because we lost two years there.
But back before then, it was to like go to Legoland or go to Disneyland or, you know, those kinds of driving trips.
The closest thing we have to a regular driving trip outside the exact Bay Area, although people could quibble, is
It's like going to Santa Cruz, where my wife went to college.
And they've also, my kid really likes, kind of wants to go to college there too.
And they've got a really good, I think really good theme park, or not theme park, the boardwalk, right?
They've got like roller coasters and stuff.
That's the closest thing we have.
We have not gone on a lot of like ambles in the way the Roderick family does.
Doesn't that boardwalk have a vampire problem?
Yeah.
Like in terms of too many or too few?
Well, I think too many.
It's not a haunting then.
It's a different kind of phenomenon.
Yeah.
It's like a, oh, what happens?
A Dracula infestation.
Yeah.
The freaks come out at night.
Oh, I believe that.
I know there's no parking on the dance floor.
There's a beach right there.
I like the roller coasters.
So I'll be disclosing for a moment.
The times that we have gone there.
We mostly split up for part of the trip because daddy liked a roller coaster, nobody else liked a roller coaster.
So I buy the Rain Man Pass that lets me cut line, and then I ride roller coasters for a couple hours, and then we meet back up and have an orange whip.
I also like roller coasters, and I also live in a family where no one else likes roller coasters.
I'm not mad about it, because I'm happy that they seed me that.
Yeah.
But, like, it is one of those things where, like, the same way I can't get my goddamn kid to watch anything new that's exciting, mostly.
Like, I'm always like, oh, I just wish I could share this with you, because roller coasters are really fun.
But Santa Cruz is interesting.
They got a lot of deer there.
It's a lot of hippies.
Hippies.
Hippies.
It's a pretty good school.
But you... Okay, so when did you... If I could ask, for your damned sojourn, when did y'all start?
Friday, maybe?
Take off Friday?
Beat the traffic?
Well, it was crazy because...
My daughter's mother was in Florida.
And she was in Florida.
What?
And she texted me and she was like, there's a hurricane coming.
Should I get out of Florida?
Because she had another meeting in New York.
I didn't even need the first part of that compound sentence.
Yeah, this was two weeks ago.
Just cross out the whole first part, and I'll answer yes, you should get out of there.
I'm in Florida.
Should I get out?
Should I get out?
Because there's a hurricane coming.
And of course, of course, I said, no, if you got a chance to ride out a hurricane, you should.
And she was like, I don't know.
And I said, you know, this is one of those things where, you know, it's like, oh, if I were there, I would just totally be like, gotta stay.
And then she wrote me and she was like, I think I'm going to leave.
And I said, well, you know, okay, that's, you know, that's all right.
You do you.
And then like one day later, all the airports were closed.
It was everything.
It happened.
Somebody with a close family member in Florida, I can tell you it went from, I don't want to say zero to a hundred, but it feels like it went from 20 to 80.
Yeah.
Really like overnight.
And so I texted her and I was like, you were right.
And I was wrong.
Well played a little friend.
Cause nicely done.
And then, you know, and then the, and that wasn't even the beginning, but then she was in New York.
And she was New York ended up.
And I said, well, you know, we were going to do this road trip.
And she was like, well, I get back Friday at 2.
And I said, why don't I pitch this at you?
I pick you up at the airport.
We go get our kid out of school.
And we just leave.
Oh, now you just made this trip even better for me.
I love the disruption of everyday stuff.
Boom.
That was what I lived for as a kid.
And live for disruption.
You know, I even lived for, like, the teachers hungover, let's show a movie.
You know, assembly.
Like, anything that broke up the tedium of me watching that clock tick, tick, tick.
Fire drill, nuclear weapons drill.
That's right.
You get under, we used to do that for tornadoes back in Ohio.
Stop, drop, and roll.
Yeah.
Well, so the thing is, if I went in and said, hi, teacher, hey, you know, come on, baby, we're leaving.
She would be like, blah, blah, blah, blah.
But she hadn't seen her mom in 10 days or two weeks.
Oh, my goodness.
So I was like, so she's been out doing work.
Yeah, she was all around America making America safe, like George Herbert Walker Bush.
No, I'm sorry.
Like George W. Bush.
He did in the 70s when he was in the CIA.
Yeah, and then there was the other Bush, the last Bush.
Well, the second Bush.
We don't know.
We're not done yet.
But then there was the third Bush.
Anyway, they all liked keeping America safe.
Yes.
And so does my daughter's mother.
But so I said, here's how this is going to go.
I'm going to pick you up at the airport.
You already got your stuff in the suitcase.
Whether it's clean or not doesn't matter.
No excuse.
Then we're going to get my mom.
Then we're going to go to the school and you're going to go in.
So it's going to be like one of those.
It's going to be like Ferris Bueller.
Yeah, or like a video where a guy comes back from the war in Ukraine and surprises his kid in the school or something, and everybody's like, oh, my God.
And maybe they brought along his dog that recognizes him.
They brought the dog, exactly.
I said, you're going to go in the school, and then by the time she's in the car, then she's going to be like, wait a minute, what are we doing?
And it's like, road trip, woo!
Yeah, she'll never know what hit her.
And so pulled it all off.
And then got out of town before Friday afternoon traffic and made it up to Diablo Dam before the sun went down.
So pretty much nailed every step of it.
That must have felt good.
That's a good start.
I mean, so often we begin these.
I feel like we begin any kind of trip like down in the count.
We're running late.
Things didn't fit in the car.
I probably forgot something.
But you went into that full bore.
You're ready to see some goddamn dams.
Well, and part of it, you know, I'm taking this adamoxetine.
Yeah, I found all my friend Alex is taking it too.
Yeah, adamoxetine.
Adamoxetine.
And one of the things it has done is it's made me, I don't drum my fingers as much, which is weird.
Hmm.
But also, I put all this plan together and then also cleaned the truck and made a sack lunch for everybody and
Before picking her up at the airport.
But in the absence of what we used to, I know we don't use this word anymore, but in the absence of what we used to call mania?
Yeah, well, what I normally would have done was half clean the car, half make a sack lunch.
Think about chili, making chili.
Yeah, and then say, well, I'll just get her at the airport.
We'll come home real fast, and then we'll go do all this.
And then we would leave at 530, and it would all have been a disaster.
I can't credit the Adam Oxetine yet.
Let's see.
We'll wait and see.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But so, yeah, it was like a two and a half.
We got back last night, and so we left on Friday afternoon.
Is it crass of me to ask the really dumb, obvious question as a damn outsider, a goddamn outsider, is that how many dams did you keep track of how many you saw?
Was there any kind of a mission to what you were doing?
Was it just to see the best ones, you could see the coolie?
Now, where's Hoover doing?
Where's that?
Yeah.
Hoover Dam, that's down by you.
That's over by Las Vegas.
Oh, that's down by me.
Las Vegas.
Yeah.
San Francisco.
I call it lost wages.
Lost wages.
Yeah.
San Francisco lost wages.
They're real close to each other.
They're right down there in the south.
Go through pavement country.
Southwest corner of America.
Right.
Yep.
Yep.
Yep.
Yeah.
And that's a beautiful dam.
Make no mistake.
And Grant Cooley, I don't think you look at it and you think, wow, that's a beautiful dam.
It's just a very impressive dam.
I think every dam is impressive.
This one's a mile across.
Oh, my God.
You know what?
I'm sorry.
I don't want to play into our weaknesses or our strengths, but God damn it, John.
Do we remember how to make things anymore?
Does anybody remember laughter?
Right?
See, that's what I'm saying.
And you look at it everywhere you go.
You look at the two big bridges that are kind of famous.
That go from, you know, well, depending on how you look at it.
Well, I don't want to say from San Francisco, but that joined San Francisco to, you know.
The world.
The world.
And they both opened up, if memory serves, in 1935.
They made those bridges.
Those bridges were made in the 30s and the Depression.
You ever watch a video about the making of the Empire State Building?
Hmm.
Boy, believe me, you don't want to know what they got done in the amount of time that they got it done.
It's crazy.
And can I also just mention it's in the middle of Manhattan and they're building up.
They don't have places to put their tools.
It's crazy.
That's why they're always eating lunch on beams in those Life magazine photographs.
Yeah.
Lunch on beams.
Lunch on beams.
Yeah.
That's what they would call.
Lunch on beams.
Lunch on beams.
I couldn't agree more.
You know, in the early 1930s, we were flying in biplanes made out of balsa wood, and by the end of World War II, we were soaring through the skies in aluminum jet aircraft.
That's how fast times change.
with their greater technology in what they call them U-boats.
But you're absolutely right.
As you know, John, I watch a lot of documentaries about wars.
I know.
And it is mind-boggling.
You've got to do it a little bit on a sliding scale, but you basically look at the state of what air flight, air combat was, because it was brand new in World War I. I'm sorry, I won't carry on.
But it's crazy that you got to the point of having those...
Those unbelievable array.
Oh, the tanks?
The tanks, John.
Oh, the tanks.
The tanks.
What they did with tanks over a few years?
Crazy.
Now, let me just set the Wayback Machine to 2010 and think about what technology was like in 2010.
And then come fast forward 12 years to now...
right you know my my when i was outside the house my internet was a little slower what yeah you know i i got i got uh i got convinced to switch to t-mobile and sometimes when i was down in a coolie yeah i couldn't get any signal and then my daughter's mother uh slash partner would wave her non-t-mobile phone in my face and go ding ding ding ding five bars or whatever and i'm like i you know we're all just living in a cell phone i
Definitely Internet's like ATMs, where it's like, you know, there's going to be one or there's not.
Like, there's a lot of places.
I don't know.
It's not exactly the same thing.
But there are places like Starbucks or ATMs where there's going to be so many.
And as it happens, that's the kind of places where I am mostly.
There's not that many places where there's no ATMs at all.
But, like, you know, you're not just suddenly, like, you're going to see clusters in the big population areas and maybe not so much in the dam.
Right.
Right downtown in Walla Walla, Washington, there's a Starbucks.
But let me tell you where there's not a Starbucks, Okanagan, Washington.
Okanagan.
Can't find a Starbucks in Okanagan.
I wonder even, I don't even think you can find one in OMAC.
Really?
What about Twisp?
Definitely not.
I don't want to leave the impression that I'm in the bag for Starbucks.
I don't really have a strong feeling one way or another.
I'm mainly trying to, and I apologize if I'm saying anything we don't say anymore, but I'm mainly trying to highlight that there's a certain kind of ubiquity that is, oh, poor thing, that really does go with a certain time and, yes, a certain place.
T-Mobile is the pink one.
Sorry, magenta one.
Yeah, it's pink.
That's right.
They own the baseball stadium downtown now.
What's it called?
T-Mobile Stadium?
It's better in crypto, I guess.
I don't remember.
But yeah, I look at all these Bureau of Reclamation and Works Progress Administration things that, you know, they really built a lot of them in the West.
Yeah.
Because this is what we were doing out here.
And you think, wow, they really, because it's not just the dam and all the power.
You have to get all the stuff here.
Well, that, but also then they built an irrigation system that encompasses the whole state and the whole region that then allowed them to grow crops to sow the seed that then nature would grow.
And then we would eat.
Yeah.
Repeat.
And so you go out there because one of the things, one of the reasons my mom wanted to do this is that when my dad and my mom were first dating, my dad in his 1950s glamour.
Had a Jaguar.
He had a Jaguar?
A 1950s Jaguar.
And he, on weekends, would take my mom, who had come out west from Ohio, and they would drive around the state.
Oh, I love this.
And her hair would be in a handkerchief, and he would have his Ray-Ban sunglasses on, and they would motor around Washington and see all these things.
Well, so she was seeing all of Washington at a time before there was an understanding of plate tectonics, before anybody knew about mega volcanoes and mega floods.
It was 30 years before Mount St.
Helens.
30 years before Mount St.
Helens.
It was before anybody knew how long...
Uh, humanids had been in, uh, the Americas.
It was, uh, there's so much we've learned in that 60 years.
And so they were out driving around all these places and speculating, how do you think this got here?
Why would this be like this?
Like, this is so crazy.
This, you know, they understood that glaciers had shaped the world, but none of those coolies were made by glaciers, clearly.
Hmm.
And so they would drive around it.
There was a time when we just didn't know certain things, and it was hard to find out.
We didn't know.
We don't have that anymore, John.
In some ways, it is.
I'm not going on a thing here, but that is something that we have lost, is the idea of not knowing things.
We've lost the right dynamics on the new frontier.
Oh, my God.
Nice pull.
Are you the night fly?
Yeah.
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No, but you're listening to Night Flight.
Ruby, Ruby, Ruby, baby.
So it was cool to drive around with her because she was also remembering a time when nobody knew what this was.
And she was like, oh, well, we guessed it was this.
And then we would go someplace and she'd say, oh, this doesn't look anything like it used to because now it's all verdant and green and it used to all be tumbleweed scabland.
And so it was like, you know, and a lot of those towns that are now like, oh, there's mountain bikers wheeling down Main Street.
And it was like, no, this was just a bunch of old drunk cowboys.
And so it was it was that was neat, too, because she wanted to see it.
But also she was there to kind of give us a glimpse of how much it changed.
The West.
The West.
Did she enjoy it, if you can say?
She did.
Good.
I mean, it's hard for me to know what people enjoy.
I know.
I know.
You do your best.
As I like to put, I think I might even mention this last week.
It's difficult to make people do things.
It's difficult to force things to happen.
The only option that most of us really have, if we're being honest, is to create a certain set of conditions.
So you can't make people have fun.
All you can do is do your darndest, and really, like, not just what you want, but try to create the conditions for fun for other people.
You can't make people have fun at a party, but you can create the right conditions for a party to be fun.
You know what I'm saying?
I think that goes for a lot in life, is you create the right conditions.
And, you know, I bet your mom had fun with she sitting up front.
Well, she... Does anybody get carsick?
I bet carsick figures into it.
No, carsick is... Everybody's pretty good with carsick.
There's a little bit of a... My daughter's mother slash partner is very... She's very interested in rank in a certain way, which is to say that she is...
the mom she is she is top mom if she can get away with it in any circumstance and so top mom sits in the front but you can't top mom when my mom is there on a birthday on her birthday especially tread lightly you know but then my mom is one of those oh i don't need the front seat i'll sit in the back she's riding the boot she's a tough lady and so me over you know over uh driving because it's my truck yeah
I stay out of that problem.
Like the, the ladies can decide who sits where and who is holding.
That's a, that's a y'all and Paul type situation.
That's right.
That's, you know, and everybody's got a job and that just all gets decided.
And I'm just driving.
I'm just the, I'm the pilot.
You are, you're the pilot.
You're the captain now, but let's quote the guy in the meeting with George Costanza.
We only wake you for the important meetings.
Exactly.
Exactly.
Which I like fine.
So they actually, they traded off.
And fortunately for everybody in the vehicle, I didn't really need a navigator because I can find my way around Washington state.
And if I couldn't, I should go drown myself.
Really?
Because it's like, look, this is Washington.
They should print that on the money.
This is Washington.
And God damn it, I know where I am.
So I don't need anybody telling me that I need to turn around because the taco restaurant was two turn-offs back.
No, no, no.
Or me, when I'm playing Navigator, I'm like, hey, you just passed the good Popeyes.
Oh!
When you're going up toward Vallejo, you have your choice of Popeyes.
But I do look at the Yelp reviews, which I think some of which are pretty racist.
But you look at that two-star one.
That's the three-star one.
So what would make a Popeyes fall below the level...
of like where because i've eaten at the popeyes in the in the airport in atlanta the atlanta airport popeyes i can't recommend it yeah i mean even if it's there's the irony is that a lot of airports like to make a show of like the local cuisine kind of stuff so there's probably like i'm guessing i haven't been there in a while obviously but in atlanta probably lots of like coca-cola stuff and things like that but like i've had a chicago dog at the chicago airport and it was not the best chicago dog i've ever had oh that's
You know what I'm saying?
That's for tourists.
They also sold Trump hats at the Washington airport, which I found a little concerning.
If you get a Starbucks at the Seattle airport, it's going to be a Starbucks.
That's their whole stocking trade, though, right?
What was your question?
What were we talking about?
Oh.
Oh, how do you know a good – well, what's – not how do you know, but what's the difference between a good Popeye's?
Well, it's interesting.
I was watching – I'm kind of a little obsessed with this one guy's videos on YouTube right now, this guy who does these, like, really digestible things about maths.
And he was talking about – he has a really good one on survivorship bias, and there was a really good one on basically using online reviews as a way to understand sort of, like, holes in the data.
Yeah.
Like, you know, like, you know, there's survivorship bias.
One I hadn't heard is voluntary bias, which is like, if you take a poll, like, and we all know how painful that can be to steal from David Lutterman.
We polled 100 people.
No, but where you were like, okay, yeah, but like, these are the people who would answer the phone.
These are the people who would return the da-da-da-da.
And in the case that he highlights there, spoiler alert, like when we use the places that planes in World War II...
that were shot returned home.
Well, what that tells us is where planes can get shot and survive.
It doesn't tell us where planes that we never got back, you know, were sent down.
And he says that this is a similar thing with online reviews, which I told immediately, at least comported with my own grokking of that, which is like,
There's only two times people leave reviews, generally, unless they're trying to build a brand and use Yelp as a blog, which is either like it was... Lol.
Lol.
It's either like, you know, some percent of these are, assuming it's real, are like, this is the best meal I've ever had.
But a vast majority are like, they forgot my...
Barbecue sauce again, right?
You don't get that many super good three and a half star reviews.
So you have to take that with a grain of salt.
But all I'm saying is I'm a bad navigator and I leverage the fact that we're on the road to try to force my family to buy Popeye's, which I'm the only one that likes it.
They think it's unhealthy.
And also Vallejo, you know, they got a lot of problems.
It's kind of unhealthy, am I right?
It's pretty unhealthy, like no matter how you slice it, but it hasn't stopped me yet.
Right.
Um, were you, was it during, was it one day or did you, did you do a big, long one day round trip?
Or did you, if I could ask, did you do any stopping overnight along the way?
Well, it was a three-day trip.
And did you already have reservations, places you knew you were going to go, or were you free-balling?
Well, this is another thing that one of the great divisions of labor that we have in our family.
Oh, I can already feel it coming.
There's somebody who's a little bit more of a project manager than you, maybe.
Oh, yes.
Somebody who maybe prefers a nice accommodation that's knowable a little bit more than you, maybe.
Well, see, when we were on tour in the long winters, for all those early years— We had a level floor to sleep on we were happy.
When Sean and Eric were, you know, and Michael Schilling, when that was the brain trust, nobody in that group liked to be—
Uh, anywhere, you know, they, none of them wanted to be more than 50 feet from a parking meter.
And so when we first head out across the America, pioneer spirit.
Yeah.
They were just like, Oh, I can't see a building.
And it was like, guess what?
That's that 80 more miles till the next building.
And they didn't know like how to do it.
And I didn't know how to do it with other people.
You know, I, I think I've told you the story of the first Western state tour when we went to South by Southwest and we were driving along and it was getting late and I pulled over in a rest area and I was like, well, let's unroll our sleeping bags.
Oh, and this is like when you learned that without every, you guys had not discussed specifics of like how fancy things would be and who would pay for things and that kind of thing.
Yeah, and they were like, what are you talking about?
We're going to stay in a hotel, right?
And I was like, a hotel?
Who has the money for that?
Well, by the time I was in the long winters, I understood that we needed a hotel.
But I would just drive and drive because I have bipolar disorder.
I would just drive and drive and drive, drive and drive.
And it would be 3 o'clock in the morning and everybody would be passed out.
And finally, I would pull over at a Super 8.
Yeah.
Well, that was basically how we lived.
Like, and I can't, when I look back at it, I can't believe that I had, that anybody would stay in a band with me.
And Eric Corson is really the only one that did.
And Eric, it's because he's a trooper.
Like Eric is a freaking soldier.
Yeah.
And then gradually became a colonel.
of the world, right?
But very much, he really feels like a, apart from being like a really smart, funny, kind guy, I think he's very amiable, but not in an annoying way.
Well, and like Ira from...
from not a surf Eric's a professional he's a professional like you say like this is the deal it's raining outside and we have to sleep in a mailbox and he's like alright you don't have a big debate about it or something no and then the next day it's like hey we each get a king bed in you know in a downtown hotel and he's like great
Like it's not, he can, he can handle it.
Right.
Which is not true.
It's also like a guy who lives in the moment and doesn't carry a grudge in a way that is easy to do on a adventure like that.
But when Nabeel joined the band, Oh boy.
Nabeel dealt with that for about two nights.
And on the third night, he said from the, from the backseat, Hey, do you mind if I get us a hotel tonight?
And I said, well, I don't know.
We don't really know where we're going to sleep because we're just going to be driving and going through the night.
And he was like, well, tell you what, what if we just got a hotel in the town?
And I was like, well, but then, you know, we're not going to get all those late night hours of driving after the show.
And he's like, yeah, well, how about if we just, how about if I just get us one in the town?
And I was like, boy.
You can tell he's made for management in the best possible way.
And I was like, okay, well, we'll give this.
Very focused on what seems like a very specific, easy outcome, but actually the implications of what are happening, what you're arguing with, I think, are more of the implications of the like, somebody else has taken this over and like, I like to drive until I'm exhausted.
And he's like, well, what if I get this over?
What if I get us a hotel in the town?
Very focused.
We showed up at the town before the show.
And he was like, let's just go to the hotel first.
And I'm like, well, but I mean, we should probably go sit in the parking lot of the venue.
We get stressed out.
Yeah.
Like we got some cigarettes to smoke.
And he's like, well, why don't we just swing by the hotel before the show?
Yeah.
And so we get there and it's a downtown hotel called the, you know, the posh and we load all our stuff in.
He was on – this was back in the days of Priceline.
And he had gotten us each a room in a downtown hotel.
What?
And the beds had like six pillows each.
Wait, got you – there were four rooms, four members?
Four rooms.
Oh, my God.
For what?
We would have paid for two rooms at a hotel on the edge of town at 3 o'clock in the morning.
Oh, my God.
And I was like, hmm –
Well, you got lucky the first time.
And then after the show, we just went back to the hotel where all of our luggage already was.
And we parked in the parking and then went upstairs and we're like, I guess we'll see in the morning.
And then in the morning, he got up and went to the gym.
Oh, come on.
All right.
Fun's fun.
Well, wait, wait, wait.
Eric saw him do it.
And then Eric was like, can I go to the gym with you in the morning?
And I imagine Eric looking like Jackie Earl Haley in Breaking Away.
I imagine having like a very Cutter's equivalent of workout clothes that are probably like gym shorts and like Converse.
And I imagine him literally smoking a cigarette on a treadmill.
Eric continued to smoke cigarettes and also work out and get buff on those tours.
He's practically, he used, I don't know what he is now, but hi, Eric, if you want to hear this, but he used to be practically a professional smoker.
He could have gone pro.
Yeah, me too.
Well, we all did.
We got the photo of me smoking cigars in the backyard and Eric's enjoying a cigarette.
You can tell he looks good.
He looks good doing it.
Well, so then we get in the van in the morning and we drive to the next show.
And Nabil's like, how about if I get a hotel for tonight?
And of course, you know, the other two guys are like, yes!
And I realized that I had in just one very smooth, effortless sort of like...
But a judo motion, I was no longer responsible for hotels or anything to do with... How did you... But, like, the... Okay, so... And it wasn't my intention.
No, no, I know, but, like, the thing that the... Okay, so setting aside all of the, like, who's the captain of this ship thing, there is the money issue...
So had that unintentionally made a case for, well, a little bit of planning actually gets us more for our dollar?
Yes.
So he was going to be the manager of this, but also he'd shown you something you hadn't been aware of.
Yes.
Now see, John, that's good project management.
Yes.
Good project management is, here's what I think we should do, and I'll take care of it.
And that's exactly what it was.
He was the first person I was ever in business with who said, I'm going to do this so you don't have to.
Which is reasonable given all the things that you are trying to do.
Like, like Nabil didn't say, oh God, do I have to do this?
He said, well, look, you're driving singing and managing.
And also everybody wants to talk to you everywhere we go and they don't want to talk to us.
So here's what I'm going to do.
I'm going to take these things off your plate, but also I'm going to save you money and
And also you're going to get three more hours of sleep a night.
That's a win, win, win.
It was just, and I was like, that was, that was, those were the best years for me when Nabil was in the band.
So anyway, my daughter's mother slash partner also.
She Nabil'd the situation.
She also loves to do that stuff.
She's like, well, here's what I'm going to do.
I'm going to get the hotels.
But she figured out that.
In order to appease me, and Nabeel did this too, in order to appease my sense of like, but what if, but what if?
Oh God, that's me.
That's my job in the family.
Nobody asked for that job to be filled.
They learned to say, I'll get the hotel in the morning of the day.
So I don't need to get it four days in advance, although that would make sense.
It does, but that would set off an alarm bell for you about constraints.
Yes.
Right.
But what if, but what if, but what if?
So they're like, don't worry.
In the morning, when you know where we're going and when we're going to get there, that's when I will go to work.
And so that's what she did.
She found us a place outside of Twisp.
She found us a place in Walla Walla.
And then all I had to do was get us to those places.
What a dignified state.
Really?
You know?
No, I mean the names.
The names are a little silly sometimes.
And listen, I know we're not supposed to say that anymore, because they're probably based in something, you know, what's the phrase?
Endogenous.
But some of them are funny.
Like Walla Walla is funny.
Walla Walla is funny.
And apparently, I say it, as I've always said it, Walla Walla.
Walla Walla.
But...
When I say it that way, people go, why do you say it that way?
Oh, because I think I say it the other way.
It's Walla Walla.
I put stress in the third syllable.
Walla Walla.
Or Walla Walla.
I say Walla Walla.
Walla!
Kind of like I say Eugene.
Everybody from Eugene is so mad that I say Eugene, because they say Eugene.
Yeah, see, this is Rhode Island all over again.
No matter what you say, you're saying it wrong.
I told you, didn't I, that I say twat wrong?
Hmm.
No, I don't think you did, but you do the American pronunciation, and so the Brits run it with pasta, right?
Well, yeah, so I was with these British guys, and I was like, you know, don't be a twat, and they were like, what is it, what?
And then the other one said, he's saying twat.
And the guy said, are you trying to say twat?
And I said, yeah, twat.
And he was like... They're uptight and conceited even in their obscenities.
Yeah, and then they spent 20 minutes razzing me about it, like...
Like, that isn't even the word, or that word isn't even a word.
Like, twa.
It's a different country, John.
The educational system's different.
You know, the governance, just everything's so different there.
They have different ways of naming their highways and stuff.
It's really confusing.
Show me one dam that's a mile across.
Oh, no, no, that would have to extend into another country.
Yeah, basically, it would have to go to Scotland.
It would have to go to, at least, like, it would at least, you know, a kiss on whales.
They'd call it Hadrian's Wall.
Hadrian's Walla.
Hadrian's Walla Walla.
No, that's not funny.
That's not a joke.
No, it's not.
I'm sorry.
But you did it.
That's really cool.
Oh, John, I'm so sorry.
It's just, well, I guess the whole... You did this all while you were sick.
The whole point, I guess the question... Yeah.
Which is a point, but which is also, my daughter at one point, she was in the backseat going, ugh, ugh, ugh.
And we got out of town and I was like, what's the matter with you?
You know, I said to the other ladies, I was like, you guys go, you know, find a restaurant.
We're just going to sit here and talk for a second.
I was like, what is, I said, what is going on?
She was like, I don't want to, I just, and I said, what?
I've had that conversation.
Yeah.
And she was like, well, I just don't, I don't like road trips.
I just want to be home.
I just, this is all.
And I said, well, here's the thing.
We're on a road trip now.
And so there's no amount of grunting that's going to cause us to turn around.
We're not going to.
The vehicle is not going to aspirate and appear back at home.
Right.
You're not going to grunt us into stopping.
Yeah.
You have to either.
I mean, but I want you to be aware of the fact that you are trying to.
You're not just protesting.
You're trying to.
effect to the outcome, right?
All of the noise you're making and all of the dissatisfaction and the pouting, you're trying to change something fundamental, which is that you want us to stop liking to go on road trips.
You want us to
take your feelings into account, and you're going to try and actually change how this family approaches these things.
At the very least, and I'm an outsider here just looking in, but at the very least, this is a person who wishes this hadn't begun, that it had not happened.
We are where we are, but you can't change the fact that you're always where you are.
here we are right exactly and in a perfect world we would all only wake up in the morning only to eat pizza and ice cream and then go and then read and go back to bed that would be the ideal life for us all i think i would do that or or in my case scabetti instead of pizza wake up stay in bed until the scabetti is ready
Get up, eat the scabetti, then follow with some ice cream, then read, then go back to bed.
Yep.
But since we're not— I did very, very close to that yesterday.
Well, see, and every once in a while you should get that day.
I like to get up, have lunch or breakfast—well, let's be honest, lunch—with my kid on a Sunday, and then I go, ugh!
We'll watch a little bit like a Flight of the Conchords or a Community, and then I go back to bed.
Yes!
See?
You get one of those every once in a while.
Second sleep!
But then you also have to go on road trips where your father talks about dams and irrigation for three straight days.
And you're not allowed to be mad about it.
Or you can be mad, but you cannot inflict it on us without at least being aware that this is not a passive thing you're doing.
This is an active attempt to do something.
Your sighs are audible.
Yeah.
You are trying to change the vibe.
And I said, here's the thing.
You live in a family where everybody wants to go on adventures.
Right.
And it's okay to be the one that doesn't.
Yeah.
But you also, I want you to think about what it would take to get everybody else to not want to do this.
And I don't think you want to invest that much of your precious food.
Well, and another thing, I agree with every single word you said.
Another part of it is that, and I know this, because I'm the person in my house who most wants to not do things.
And not doing things has a blanket problem.
approach to life will almost always be beat out by anything anybody wants to do like it's not a really effective approach in life to just say i just don't want to do stuff although i think that is in some ways my default reaction at least at first almost everything and like you gotta and again your kid's younger i it's i'm a grown-ass man and i'm still like that but like that that's there is a go along get along aspect to it does the kid look is the kid looking at a phone or something at this point
Nope, nope, nope.
Coloring?
There's some coloring, there's some reading.
I taught her a game that I used to play on long road trips, which is that you look out the window and you imagine, I used to imagine, in the style of Roger Moore...
James Bond movies that the car was being pursued by, uh, riders in black helmets, uh, that are riding dirt bikes.
Oh boy.
So as we're driving through the, through whatever environment it is, these dirt bikes, uh,
with black-helmeted riders come up on our side, and they have submachine guns.
That's right.
They're like, and then all the little stuff that happens, all the little culverts.
The only thing that could make it better is if everybody was on skis.
And in the snow, sometimes they're pulling skiers.
They love to make Roger Moore or his double ski.
you know and and so the motorcycle helmets are scary though though like they are the anonymity of the pursuers well and then they would hit stuff you know they'd hit trees they would hit they'd crash and but there would always be another one that would kind of come out from behind like motorbike hydra yeah and i would just sit and entertain myself with this you know this imagination game of like
We're being chased by motorcycles.
And to an adult, it just looked like I was looking out over the fields and just daydreaming.
That's why they call it an interior world.
It's just that we were being pursued by motorcycle commandos.
So I told her about this game.
And she said, well, do I have to have motorcycles?
And I was like, sweetie, you do not.
You can populate your imaginative world with whatever you like.
And she said, I'm going to have Star Wars Landspeeders chasing us.
And I said, I think that's entirely appropriate.
And then for hours, every once in a while, she would pop up and say, you'll never guess what just happened.
And I'm like, what?
Well, a landspeeder, blah, blah, blah.
And then she would talk about some aspect of these landspeeders that were chasing her.
But in her version, they were our friends.
They were more like an escort.
They were an escort.
And they were flying around us.
And they were interacting with each other.
And they were protecting us.
I love that.
Pronoia.
Yeah.
But she got it, and I think registering that she wasn't just grunting because she was protesting, but understanding that she was actually trying to accomplish something that she was never going to accomplish, which was to make the rest of us say, okay, let's go home.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
When I did that as a kid, which I did like probably way more than your kid ever did.
I was a real, I was a piece of shit as a kid.
And like, but I would, it would also be, I think if I'm being honest, part of it was also, I want to make this less fun for everybody.
I want them to be unhappy too.
Yeah.
And I, and I think part of our conversation standing on the streets, standing on a street corner in Okanagan is,
was like, you are not going to successfully make this bad for us because we're just too interested in what we're doing.
So all that's going to happen is that we are going to become more and more
unreceptive to your sounds.
You can't say that a key skill in life is pretending to have fun until you eventually kind of are.
Oh, and she said, like, oh, I don't want to pretend to be having fun.
I said, nobody's asking you to.
Although.
But do not, you know, like, do not think that you're going to rob us of fun.
Did she feel bad about it?
No, no, no, no.
Because we work a lot on, like, this is not about you feeling bad about it.
Right.
Like this is where I'm not trying to make you feel bad.
I'm not trying to motivate you by, by guilt or by making you feel bad.
Good.
Good.
I'm just laying out.
But you are giving a useful note that may not be obvious to this person.
Yeah.
Just, just like, you know, don't, you are not a passive actor.
Right.
in a situation where you're trying to affect the outcome.
You're active, and let's look at what you're doing.
Because at first it was like, ah!
And now look at all the land speeders.
That's because of you we got these land speeders.
Land speeders.
But at the end of the weekend, I looked at my 88-year-old mother and my daughter and her mother and myself, and I was like, a three-day road trip is a lot more work now than it was before.
Oh, yeah.
And it's a lot more of, it's not just an investment.
It's like that.
I don't want to say that I got to the end and was like, whew, thank goodness I don't have to do one of those again.
Because there's still that part of me that's like, no, no, no, I'll always be on a road trip.
Mm-hmm.
But I definitely was like, oh, you know, get that pot of spaghetti going and maybe tomorrow I can just go back to bed.
You've earned it, man.
Also, you know, not all... I'm not trying to say that you should make things unpleasant for people, but there are things in life where it ends up being kind of an interesting memory.
I guess this is the equivalent of when people say, well, I'm having a bad day, but someday it'll make a good story, which I think is actually kind of true a lot of the time.
And I think it's actually... What that is is a...
very mature 50,000 foot way to look at your life is that like whatever's happening today, like as long as I'm around, like there'll be other days and some will be good and some will be bad and most will be just days.
But like I have such what ended up becoming sort of warm, nostalgic memories of things that weren't very fun at the time.
Yeah.
Well, and that's, and how do you, how do you say that?
You can't.
There's no point.
You sound insane.
And saying to her, like, what I said, what was your favorite part?
It's like I'm saying, I'm glad you got a splinter.
It would be a weird thing to say.
Yeah, exactly.
Right.
I'm, you know, you'll remember this broken wrist.
But like, I asked them.
My summer in a cast.
What was your favorite part of the trip?
And, you know, and I think my mom said, well, Palouse Falls.
I never saw Palouse Falls.
And I was like, Palouse Falls is pretty amazing.
And I think, you know, there was a vote for Walla Walla, which is a very cute little town.
And there's a lot to recommend about it.
Yeah, yeah.
And my kid said, Grand Cooley Dam.
And I said, Grand Cooley Dam.
I didn't, you know, we spent a lot of time talking about it while we were there, but I didn't expect that.
And she was like, it was just so...
It was just so big, and we went to the museum, and I kind of understand how it works.
Did that surprise you, John?
Well, it did, and I just feel like, oh.
Right.
I, you know, you can't dance around and try and entertain a kid and say like, no, look over here.
It's, you know, look at, it's the, it's the new Kraken mascot global or global or whatever.
Like, Hey, Hey, Hey, Hey, look, look, look, look.
Yeah.
Um, because they're looking, they're looking around and she came away after all the stuff and is still thinking about that.
Damn.
Which, you know, uh,
well, that's what I would have done, you know?
And so... Wow.
The apple doesn't fall far from the dam.
I don't know.
Me neither.
A lot of apples out there, you know, they grow them with the water that they get from the dam.
I think there's probably a name for this, but there's that way of looking at the world.
Well, I'll just say, I'll make this up and I'll claim it.
The way that you try to show places on a placemat that's a map and there's symbols, like an orange is Florida.
I think of apples as being Washington on placemats.
That's what we do.
We grow apples here.
And sweet onions.
Sweet onions.
And dams.
And dams.
Okay.
I think that's it, right?
I think so.
Okay.
Do you have anything funny you want to say before we go out?
Oh, John.
That'll do, pig.