Ep. 478: "Government and Girlfriends"
Hello.
Hi, John.
Hi, Marilyn.
How's it going?
Good.
This is the kind of opening that they're talking about when everybody's talking about how bad podcasts are.
Hmm.
You know?
Do you really think so?
Ha ha ha.
Two guys.
They don't talk about enough that I work all day.
Ha ha.
Oh, yeah.
You know those ones.
Play a guitar on the MTV.
Hey, I got a question for you.
Okay.
I, yeah.
I'm not one equal time on that, but I'll put a pin in it.
No, no, no.
You go.
You go.
No, you go.
John, I think we need more of this.
More?
Oh, yeah.
More, yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
No, I think we're doing the right thing here.
I think if anything, we're keeping with you beginning and brushing across the windscreen and clearing your throat and doing some other, you know, I think years from now, people are going to be faking that because they want that Roderick sound.
Yeah.
Or that Roderick feeling.
Yeah, the vibe.
It's vibe.
You're not going to get that on NPR, my friend.
That's so validating.
Thank you.
I hope so.
I know you don't like a compliment.
You can't accept a compliment.
Of the many things that you store in cigar boxes, I don't think compliments are one of them.
It's tears and rain.
But at the same time, I think it's vital.
And I don't want you to get, as you say, over your skis about this.
And I don't want you to do it more.
Or worse.
No, right, right, right.
No, it's all right.
Just because stuff like that, we all have a lot of fun here.
But I got to make this into a thing that, you know, where I won't get complaints.
Oh, I know.
You're going to get complaints.
I'll get complaints, but I won't see them because I don't have a way to see those.
Fortunately, no.
I'm grateful.
This is why we should get a Discord.
A Discord.
Oh, sure.
I can hang out there all day and just wait for people to be disappointed in me.
Wait, isn't there one already?
Do we need to get one?
Again, I wouldn't know.
This is a term you're probably familiar with.
Air-gapped.
I'm air-gapped.
Everything I own is air-gapped.
Oh, right.
So you don't get Stuxnet.
No, can't get Stuxnet.
You're not going to disrupt my nuclear facility, if you know what I mean.
I've squirted hot glue into every port.
Well, let's start over.
Okay.
None of my USB.
If I find a USB Dongus at the Fred Meyer or something, I'm not going to plug it in.
I can't plug it in.
There's literally hot glue in my ports.
hey that was me that was me here we go yeah that was me sorry that's a good idea you know my daughter's mother slash partner yes whom you love i do she has now transitioned in her security uh internet security life to being a firmware security uh person that's that's big stuff john yeah and we talk about it we're talking brain brainstem type stuff here
We're like, so I say, what if I plug this USB in?
And she goes, no.
I go, what about this USB?
She's like, no.
Yeah, ask her about zero days.
Zero days?
Oh, okay.
I mean, that sounds like a day when you wake up, well, every day.
You wake up, you feel kind of sad or depressed.
I mean, nice.
But ask her about Zero Days.
You don't want that.
Okay.
All right.
I will.
I will.
Zero Days.
To say I have a crush on her would be not a thing that I would say publicly, but I think she's a very interesting person.
I've enjoyed all my interactions with her.
Yeah, no, no.
She's very interesting.
She's good at all things.
She's hopelessly charismatic.
Yeah.
No, you're probably immune to that now because of your role with the mother and the partnering, but she's extremely charismatic.
Yeah, well, I don't.
I don't think she can stop it.
I don't notice anybody else's charisma.
It's all right.
I mean, it's something you feel.
If somebody compliments you on yours, where do you put that?
You got a box for that?
Forgive my asking?
No, I'm looking across the room right now at a stack of cigar boxes, and I'm thinking, what's in there?
And it's like concert tickets, backstage passes.
What's in that one?
Old driver's licenses.
That one's got love letters that are very aggressive.
Then the next one is love letters that are sweet.
Love letters, comma, aggressive.
There's a little one that's got... How does that fall?
If you can say, I don't want you to risk your OPSEC here, but love letters, comma, aggressive.
Is that a baseline or is that a floor or a ceiling, John?
Well, what I mean is, you know...
I, I, I, I used to get a lot of angry letters.
I remember you put them on your, in your record.
Oh yeah.
That, those.
And, um, but you know, back when people wrote letters, you sit down, you think about it, you know, you put it on scented paper.
Oh, I put it on scented paper.
I draw in the margins.
I would do doodles.
I would, I would, I would write in the margins like it was a James Joyce novel.
Oh, God, and I did so many doodles.
God, it's so embarrassing.
I'm glad that most of them probably ended up in a fire.
But a lot of the ones that were the most like
fuck you, were actually love letters.
And so I kept them.
A lot of people in America get confused because they think everything related to love should feel like love.
A lot of stuff related to love feels like not related to love.
That's what makes it love.
Do you remember a time in life realizing the difference between falling in love and being infatuated with someone?
That was a terrible moment.
Yeah, I had to change.
Let's just say I had to change the margin notes in a lot of my dictionaries.
Because I realized I'd been in a lot of infatuation and not enough, according to Hoyle Love.
Yeah, but then I worked off of that for a while, and that didn't help me either.
Okay.
Uh, you know what I mean?
Like, uh, like, oh, right.
That was just infatuation.
That wasn't love.
I'm seeking love.
And then it's like, oh no, maybe not.
No, maybe I'm, what if you're not?
Yeah, exactly.
What if I'm not?
I'm sorry.
I didn't mean to take you off your boxes, but you keep those letters and, uh, well, you know what?
I don't want to know, but some of them are pretty old, huh?
Oh yeah.
They're old.
Who was that?
No, no.
You know what?
That's why I didn't want to ask.
Cause if one of them was from last week, that causes all kinds of complications.
No, I do know someone who writes letters and mails them to me in the mail.
And they're long and they're a little bit TLDR sometimes.
Is this from Captain Marm?
No, no, no, no.
Captain Marm has never sent me a letter as far as I know.
It's from a, well, we don't say retired.
It's like being a Marine.
From a paramour?
Yeah, from a lady friend.
Lady friend paramour.
And she keeps up the old ways.
She keeps you up to date on how she feels now.
Yes.
And the thing is that she also emails and texts, but every once in a while, I'll go down to the mailbox and I'll open up the mailbox and there's an envelope or an envelope.
Yeah.
And inside it is sometimes a multi-page letter.
Oh, it's like when you get – they always say when you're trying to apply to colleges, you get the skinny envelope.
That's probably not good news.
You get the thick envelope.
That tends to be better news.
But I think when it comes from the government and girlfriends –
You usually want the thin envelope.
I got a letter from a girlfriend the other day.
I opened it and read it and said that they were suckers.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, yeah, it's hard.
It depends.
It depends on where, you know, where she is.
Right.
Sometimes a long letter is just like, like the letters that, that my mom used to get from her grandmother.
Right.
Which were often very long.
And it was like, well.
Like updates on corn.
Yeah.
The horse had a nail in its hoof.
And then the next day it was cloudy.
And, you know, these kind of letters.
Sure.
My mom did this terrible thing.
She threw all those letters away 15 years ago.
And I was like, I wanted those farm report letters.
And she said, really, you didn't.
and i said they belong in the history books and she said really eldritch secrets about the family hidden amongst the corn report i don't think so i but i had some of those slip in late in my grandmother's life she would slip in like real low-key because she had the alzheimer's and one of the very interesting performance characteristics of alzheimer's i'm not making fun it was fucked up but you know i you ever read that you
I mean, you know what?
I'm going to be real for a second.
Read that book, 36 Hour Day.
If you have somebody in your life with dementia, it's really helpful.
It helps you really understand that what you're doing is not helping.
But when my grandmother had dementia and was going, there's one of the great frustrations of that is that you feel...
Like, you know, week over week, month over month, you feel, obviously, a general decline in cognitive abilities.
But then, number two, that's kind of salt and peppered with occasional moments of what feel like extreme clarity.
Yeah.
But then third, you wonder, well, is that because the person has dementia?
Yeah.
But, like, my grandma dropped some truth bombs on us alongside the Corn Report late in life, where my mom and I were kind of just left staring into the middle distance going, what happened in 1917?
Whoa.
It's like...
Cause like, and this is one of those, this is very, gosh, I'm glad I went to college.
This is such a fucking William Faulkner experience where you've heard this one story a certain way, right?
You've heard, oh, you can hear somebody else's version of that story.
And then you're like, no, actually my uncle came and kind of rescued us from the house and we were raised by him.
And my sister and I were separated for all these years and like implying there was maybe some kind of like something hinky going on.
And you're like, wait a minute, wait, we won't be,
Why am I hearing about this in the 90s?
Hmm.
But that's what happens.
Sometimes you get a corn report and you realize Uncle Bascom's in there.
Uncle Bascom's in the corn, you discover.
Oh, Uncle Bascom.
Now that's on you.
You figure that.
You put that in a cigar box and figure it out.
I'll be dead soon.
You all figure it out.
I just had one of these.
I was in Alaska this last weekend.
Really?
Yeah, because we were having Uncle Jack's funeral.
Wait.
Although Uncle Jack died two years ago.
Oh, because COVID.
It was COVID times.
They gave him an Alaskan funeral.
So, yeah.
Don't look that up on Urban Dictionary.
Alaskan funeral?
No.
Do not look it up.
This Alaskan funeral was at a Unitarian Universalist.
There you go.
Thank you.
I was trying to explain the acceptable Christian religions to my kid, and that one came up.
Unitarian Universalist Church, which I learned has a song by my cousin, Libby Roderick, in its- In the liturgy.
Hymnal.
Yeah.
Hymnal.
Hymnal.
Hymnal.
Anyway, so- I say hernal.
Hymnal.
Oh, you say hernal?
I say- I don't even know.
I don't even know where to go with that joke.
Can you stand by for just a second, please?
Hi, everybody.
Please listen closely because your life may depend on it.
Roderick on the Line is an important program about civics, uniforms, eels, the Balkans, forcing teens to work in national parks, the non-existence of the year 1997, and that one time John's dad totally shot a Japanese zero out of the sky with a pistol.
Roderick on the Line is not funded by the government, it is not controlled by the oligarchs, and it is not some bullshit public radio knockoff where a tryhard nerd reads a weird story about old people over a fucking trip-hop music bed.
No, I don't think so.
Jesus fucking Christ, people.
Just go to patreon.com slash roderick on the line right now and help support the only voices who aren't afraid of big tech, small plates, or computer trade schools.
Now more than ever, your monthly gift ensures that new thought technologies will continue to harden our youth and upset our clergy.
Once again, that's Patreon.com slash Roderick on the line or GiveRoderickYourMoney.com because America is super fucked and pump chili ain't free.
And if you think Supertrain will give two wet shits about the marks it leaves on your lawn, son, you are about to get schooled.
Anyway, so... As my three-year-old kid used to say, that's not funny.
That's not even a joke.
How would your three-year-old kid know?
I don't know.
Kids are stupid.
And they're garbage.
Really, kids are garbage.
Okay, sorry.
Libby, who we've learned previously, I don't know if Libby's primary liturgical nature, but Libby does kind of folk, I want to say?
Well, I don't know that much about the Unitarian Universalist Church, but her service sits right in.
It's basically like if you want church to be more like a Subaru ad.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, and this is Alaska, too.
Lesbians and dogs welcome.
Yeah.
There's a very active Democratic Party in Alaska, and it's hippie.
Even stretching out all the tendrils to all the old-school Democrats, they're all hippies up there.
You can't help but be it.
And so it was one of those.
It was a church service.
It was a legitimate service, but there was some acoustic guitar playing.
And there were a lot of speeches on behalf of my uncle that
I think if Uncle Jack had died eight years ago, ten years ago, it would have been, in Anchorage at least, a public event.
It would have been a big event.
You lose.
It's like the World War.
Well, it used to be World War I, then World War II, and eventually Vietnam.
Like, you lose so many veterans every day.
And was it Jack who wanted to write it all down?
He did.
He did write it all down.
All right.
And it's all down now, and we talked about that a lot.
But, you know, most of his cadre are gone.
There was only one of that group, the amazing Vic Fisher, who was 98, I think, came to the funeral.
Whoa.
He wins the, what's it called, the Tauntaun Makut?
What's it called?
What's the thing when you split the jackpot, like Mr. Burns?
Oh, right.
Yeah, there was no bottle of champagne.
But he was, Vic Fisher was...
a lion in Alaska, Alaska politics.
And he's, he was my uncle Jack's best friend and he got up with his, his wife.
She was 98.
Yeah.
And his wife's younger.
So she was, you know, still vivacious.
And she said, Vic, you know, doesn't want to talk, uh,
because he doesn't want to get emotional, but I'm going to talk for him.
And they stood up there, and she kind of gave a wonderful speech on his behalf.
But the crazy thing about that generation, of course, is that they didn't think they were going to get old.
And at least in my experience, they're all kind of mad.
They were like, how the hell did I get here?
And Vic actually said, through his lovely wife, he was like,
this isn't, you know, I've watched every single person I know died.
This isn't fair.
And I was like, Oh, I know it's uncle Jack felt the same way, but anyway, so listening.
Yeah.
Listening to all the speeches of all the different people that knew him, you get that experience of like, wait a minute.
What?
Like, how come I never heard that story before?
Who are you even?
I don't even know who you're the son of a guy that my dad knew.
And you know, a story about my uncle that I had never heard before.
So pretty, pretty, uh,
Yeah, it was eyeopening weekend.
Family all came together and.
And the former governor was there and gave a long speech about Jack.
That's wonderful.
I'm sorry to speak in band.
I just sent you an image.
Is that the Victor Fisher we're talking about?
Victor Fisher.
Yep, that's him.
Oh, my goodness.
So this guy goes back.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Well, all of them, you know, they all— But he was kind of a big man on Alaska.
Yeah, and Barney Gottstein was the third one of the little crowd, and Barney's two kids were there, and—
The thing is, everybody in this event, they only my dad, too.
Because I gave a little talk.
Everybody else had prepared notes.
And I got up and I said, look, I love that everyone here has written a speech.
But in the spirit of my uncle and my father, I'm going to extemporize because that's what they would have done.
You all know them.
The two of them never had paired notes in their lives and neither am I. And then, you know, then I talked for 45 minutes and rambled off about the war and.
how I shot down a zero.
No, I didn't.
I gave it concise.
Yeah, you played basketball with those Japanese guys.
They were great basketball.
You take your plane to be serviced, that one place in Nevada.
But afterwards, you know, as we moved into a reception, you know, it was the same thing at my dad's funeral.
All these...
Middle-aged guys come over and kind of, you know, and at one point it was like a merch table.
Middle-aged as in approximately your age.
Oh, no, no, no.
A little older.
Okay.
But middle-aged between me, a young person.
Oh, and Victor Fisher.
And Rick Fisher, who's old.
But it felt like a merch table.
for a minute because there was a line of guys who had stacked up that wanted to say something to me and each one of them was one of these characters that was like hey your uncle and your dad really saved my life i just wanted to tell you how grateful i am i miss him every day we still talk about him
And I was like, thank you, you know, thank you for coming and thank you for saying so.
And then the guy would move on and the next guy would step up.
Hey, I just wanted to tell you, your uncle and your dad really helped me in.
Wow, that's so lovely that people do that.
Yeah.
I mean, setting aside even the whole like, oh my gosh, that's such a nice story.
It makes me feel good.
John, it's so good for everybody to have that opportunity to exchange that particular thick envelope.
Yeah.
Isn't it good for everybody?
That must feel so good to get to say on a day that it matters.
And you just experienced that on so many difficult levels.
It's wonderful.
And, you know, they saw this in the newspaper that this event was going to happen and they came, you know, they spent their Saturday coming to this thing.
But you get that electric moment when you realize this is a person who knew my dad and
Really well, like saw him everywhere.
When he was your dad before he was your dad.
Well, and also when he was my dad.
You know, these are guys that went to a Thursday night meeting with him.
Sure, sure, sure.
And so saw him every week, which is more than, you know, a lot of people in his family can say.
And heard him speak candidly about his life and went out to coffee with them afterwards.
And the number of those people that are out there still, you know, there's people I don't know about, I never think about, but that...
That he's living on in conversations that people are having, like, remember what Dave Roderick said?
Oh, yeah, you know, he really blah, blah, blah, blah.
It's all out there still.
And I have the natural, you know, chauvinism to say, like, well, nobody knew him better than me.
But that's...
that's only partly true.
You know, they know, they knew him a completely different way.
That's, that's why I, I didn't mean to interrupt you.
That's why I put it that particular way.
Cause I always feel like it's so like when we think of somebody who's older, right.
Or somebody who's a, let's just say a senior, right.
Like a lot of times there's things about getting older where you get, you get how you are.
Maybe you're a little bit less open to vulnerability or, you know, sometimes, you know what I mean?
Like all the ways that you'd like toughen up or soften up and,
It's so interesting to know somebody who was instrumental in your life before they were in your life, like when you go back.
And then, on top of it all, got to see how they changed over time, and they both changed.
And that's why I see that it's such a complicated human experience to come and tell a story like that at the funeral of a friend.
Yeah.
Funeral for a friend, rather.
My mom and I did it once.
She had a boyfriend that...
that played a really large role in our little cosmology.
After she got divorced, she dated this guy, Bobby.
And Bobby, she dated him, what, for three years, maybe, during a period.
And I mean, I've got half and half in the fridge that's three years old.
But that three years was the period when I was...
what four to seven or something or five five some years are bigger years than other years yeah and and you know i had a dad i knew who my dad was my sister my my my folks got divorced when susan was under two oh god yes so she never knew her dad yeah
And Bobby was this, he was a lovely man.
And he filled this role in her life, this, you know, warm and giving guy.
that gave Susan a lot of just, you know, he was old school.
He had kind of- Having a good step-parent is a little bit like a successful adoption in some ways where you're like, this person, if this person's, and I've had several of these steps in my family, several very much not, but that person wants you.
That person wants to be close to you.
In the same way that, like, when you say to a kid who's adopted, well, yeah, but, like, we fought for you.
We spent money on you.
And in the case of a stepfather, a stepmother, a step anybody can be so huge because they kind of parachute in from outside your world and, like, provide a new area and level of context for relationships that can be deeply meaningful at times in your life.
It was.
And, you know, my mom, his presence really calmed her.
And he was... Because she's still kind of going through it, right?
Oh, and she, you know, naturally anxious.
And a single mother in the early 70s, you know, and in a world that was not very accepting of single mothers.
And so she was, you know, working, whatever, 70 hours a week.
Anyway, Bobby was a guy, he was a blue-collar guy.
He'd kind of grown up as a street kid.
And then...
Through having invented a turbo encabulator that fit on top of a carburetor for boat motors or something, he became a very successful, ultimately a millionaire.
Okay.
But at the time, he was this guy, his, you know, he had like three brothers.
He hadn't achieved that yet when they met.
No, no.
Okay.
But although he was just a working guy, you know, he worked hard and he had three brothers that lived in the bilge of a boat.
You know, he was just this nut.
But such a gentle guy.
And my mom said that as I was learning to read, I would sit with Bobby, and Bobby was ostensibly helping me learn to read, but mom realized he was learning to read with me.
So he was functional, minimally, but wasn't... It was at a time when you didn't need to be literate to be a mechanical...
Right.
I mean, and just to be clear, literacy, I mean, that can also mean, like, you can read signs and maybe sign your name, but, like, there's a lot of people who are, like I say, not going to be picking up James Joyce.
Well, and this was early days of Sesame Street, and we would sit together and sound out the words, and we would, you know, and so she just realized... Stories like that never don't get me.
Right?
I mean, that's amazing.
Whether it's Game of Thrones or Hunt for the Wilderpeople or your stepdad, like, that step person, that...
That's a hell of a story.
So he was a big element at a crucial time.
And I loved him, of course.
But as I say, I also knew who my dad was and loved my dad.
And he was never a dad.
But for Susan, he really was.
Anyway, later on, he lived a full life.
He became a successful man.
And we read that he had died in the newspaper.
And so my mom and I said, well, we should go to his funeral.
And so we go to the funeral.
Here we are.
Two people show up.
And it's a fairly intimate event.
There are
maybe 25 people there.
I'm just curious, did you know, so their relationship ended by the mid-70s?
Yeah, 70s.
Without spoiling it here, did you have updates on what the rest of his life was, his future lives were like?
Not really.
So you didn't really know what you were getting into there?
No, I think my mom kind of, maybe they periodically had exchanged letters.
I mean, I think the breakup was
Honestly, to hear my mom tell it, she realized many years later that she... This is such a... This is a callback to earlier in the show.
She realized... Well, not realized.
She loved him too much...
and wasn't comfortable loving somebody that much, and so broke up with him.
Yeah.
Because the alternative, which was to actually figure out how to be in love and to love, was impossibly daunting, right?
Yeah.
Relative to like... Especially when there's other shit to do, and you're feeling pretty burned about how the last one ended.
Oh, no, no.
I don't think it had anything to do with that.
I think it was 100% like, how does one...
How does one love?
Do you, are you infatuated or do you love?
And neither thing is, you don't know how to do either thing.
Right.
Right.
So, and I, and I used to do that too.
Like, well, I could, I could learn to be fully human here, but that is way harder than to just lose you forever.
But so we go to this funeral and we're standing there and we're getting a legit side eye from people and
And eventually, you know, a woman comes over and she's like, hi, who are you?
And it's his daughter, one of several that he had with the wife that he was married to for 35 years.
After your mom.
After, yeah.
And we're like, oh, we're, you know, because he was what?
He was 35 or something at the time.
We're like, oh, we just knew Bobby many years ago, 35 years, 39 years ago.
And she's like, oh, how?
And it's like, oh, shit.
Well, you know, and it's just, it was weird.
It was weird and we got out of there.
We were like, he's out.
Well, and at that point, putting together that your, it's just my read of this, but like maybe your mom came up about as often in their world as he did in yours, maybe less.
Like it sounds like she was not like a known quantity from the early 70s.
No, I don't think they had ever heard of him or heard of us or my mom.
And consequently, that life that he had for those years.
Exactly, right?
You meet somebody, your life begins with them immediately.
You don't think, oh, he would have dated people that cared about him.
And those people would have showed up at his funeral.
Like...
Like, what's Marlo going to do when she's a fully grown woman and somebody reaches out to her and is like, I loved your dad from 10 years before you were born.
She'll have to take both those calls.
One of them was from a cop.
I loved your daddy.
It's not from me.
Just spoiler alert.
Now, I have a question that I need.
Oh, jeez.
You're not done with that.
You're not done with that.
Oh, oh, oh.
Are you?
Well, I'm just looking at Victor Fisher here.
He's our show art this week, just so you all know.
Yeah, please ask.
Ask away.
Vic Fisher, still alive, still a giant of Alaskan democracy.
Yeah, I love his eyes.
He has lively eyes.
This is a big moment for democracy in Alaska.
Because, you know, Sarah Palin is running.
Oh, that's right, yeah.
For Congress.
For Congress or Senate, what's she running for?
Do we know?
Congress?
Senate?
I'm so out of Alaska.
Why are we still talking about her?
I know.
Well, there's always the chance that she'll win and she'll be back in the spotlight.
She'll be up there with...
With the other two.
Yeah.
Ranting and raving.
Uncle Ted looking down and smiling.
Oh, my God.
You know, there's a statue of Ted now at the Ted Stevens International Airport.
And he's sitting.
How's the internet there?
It's a life-size bronze of Ted.
And he's wearing cowboy boots.
And he's got a flight jacket on.
And he's sitting on a bench.
And he's got his hand out like, shake my hand.
And it's a little temple to him.
There's signs all around it.
That's one of those Mayor Daley-style populist sculptures, it sounds like.
Yeah, yeah.
Show what a down-to-earth character this person was.
Or like Huey Long.
Oh, Huey Long, look at him.
He was really a person of the people.
Oh, yeah.
The generals used to do the can-can for old Uncle Ted and Marlow.
He'd bring the tubes to your bridge.
Yeah, that's how it all worked, right?
Yeah, right, yeah.
So she had not, um, she's known about Ted because this is the other thing.
Ted and my uncle Jack were law partners.
Right.
And so we're having this uncle Jack week and then we're sitting in the airport waiting for the flight and here's uncle Ted on the bench and she's reading all the signs and she's like, well, that doesn't talk about uncle Jack anywhere here.
And I was like, yeah, well, it's not going to.
Like, Uncle Jack did not figure as prominently in Ted Stevens' life as, say, the pipeline.
But I watched her sit on the bench with Senator Ted and have a moment with him.
You know, I'm sitting across, and she sits down, and she's looking at this lifestyle statue of this guy and kind of like trying to
It was a moment where this was a guy I knew.
He's now been enshrined.
He's dead.
He's now the name of the airport.
He's been at least two different memes that the youth might know.
He's a series of tubes, and he's bridged to nowhere.
That's right.
Although he was not Mr. Bridged to Nowhere, but that got tagged on me.
I feel like I associate that with him.
I know.
Everybody does, but it was a different Alaska politician.
He just got smeared with it.
Hmm.
But so, he's not been dead from, you know, from where I sit.
Well, Ted just died a few years ago, and I realize it was probably 10 years ago.
Well, I mean, let's do the freshman math of just saying, well, if there's a meme about it, if he has two memes about him, it couldn't have been that long ago.
Oh, right, because he was even talking about the internet.
Yeah.
Oh, you put Senator Ted in and guess what comes up?
Oh, no.
It's not our kid, Ted.
No, it's Ted Cruz.
Oh, shit.
So he died in 2010.
You know what?
They need to raise that jersey up to the rafters.
No more Senators Ted.
We're done now.
Although, you know, Senator Ted Kennedy.
Yeah.
Senator Ted Stevens, he was longer.
He was in there longer.
But it was this weird moment of like, she was born.
Talking about your kid.
Yeah, my daughter was born after he died, right?
Just within a year after he died.
Really?
Okay, that is longer than I thought.
Right?
Yeah.
And so it's this, and Uncle Jack just died, but that was two years ago, and now we're having a funeral for him.
And it really was like, oh, this generation, particularly of Alaskans, they are going on a boat over the sea.
And...
And their jerseys are being lifted up, right?
These are going to become, I went through a box of my uncle's papers with my cousin this weekend, and we were really sorting things out like, this should go in the garbage.
This should go into a file to give to cousin Paige.
This should go to the University of Alaska.
Mm-hmm.
And, you know, like they're – To like where the papers and stuff go?
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
Because he – my uncle gave his papers to the University of Alaska.
He just was like my dad.
We were sorting through this box and was like –
Electricity bill, takeout menu.
This old, yes, of course.
Oh, here's their marriage certificate.
Famously, I feel like you've described your father as keeping what seemed to be almost everything, but having this uncanny ability to save something that a future generation would find less than garbage alongside, like underneath that, you move down three papers and it's like the most important heirloom thrown into this box.
Yeah.
And then there's a copy of the Magna Carta next to this receipt from Esso.
Like, uh, like my cousin pulled out a thing and she was like, I didn't know he had an honorary doctorate from the university of Pennsylvania.
And I was like, well, I didn't either.
Yeah.
Right.
And who, and who knows when that happened?
None of us have ever heard of it.
Um,
And so it was just like, well, what pile do you put that in?
Like, I'm not going to hang it on my wall.
She's not going to hang it on hers.
You're going to need a bigger cigar box.
You're going to need a new boat.
And we found a bunch of papers in my grandfather's hand.
Really?
That I have right here.
Talking about his... How's his handwriting?
Was it good?
It's very elegant.
And all of the manila envelopes have this beautiful foxing because they're from 1929.
That's what people cared about, manila envelopes.
It really is.
But yeah, so watching my kids sit and touch this statue and feel like... As people are walking past us in the airport, and it's like everybody knows Senator Ted, but she almost...
knows senator ted but but doesn't and he's historic does he still come up
All the time.
I mean, when Uncle Jack was still alive... If you're driving around and stuff, I've been on your... Gosh, I've been on your waterfront tour, which I can recommend to anybody who's in the area.
John's personal tour of the... What would you call it?
The port?
The Seattle waterfront.
Boy, you're good.
I bet it's hard for you to go to a jack-in-the-box without mentioning a couple historical characters.
Oh, and of course, my child, my port child.
Yeah.
She's only just now entering...
the worst 10 years of her life, it measured in terms of her father going— Oh, she's going to get so much data.
You know, this building over here, look up there.
You see on the top of the— Gal that used to work here with a lazy eye was in my wedding.
That's right.
Now look over now to the left.
All right, so that right there.
I had a hat that had a name.
It's just like, oh my God.
This fella used to sell vests and only vests.
I was the only one who would come in here and he had a chair he'd say for me.
And the sign was right outside.
The worst, I did this to her on this trip.
We're walking by David Green's Master Furrier's.
And I said, have you ever been into a furrier?
And she said, no, it's a furrier.
And I said, well, let's go into David Green's master furriers.
And so we walk in.
To me, furrier is just an adjective for somebody who's a little more of a furry.
Yeah.
But furriers and furriers, you don't hear about furs and hoofs as much as you used to.
It's true.
And David Green, master furrier, is probably one of the premier... I want him to be a mind reader, too.
One of the premier...
furriers in the world today.
If you want a floor-length mink coat, you're going to find a greater selection of those at David Green Master Furrier in Anchorage than anywhere else.
Just so you all know, I'm sorry, I don't like to talk to the audience.
That's not a paid advertisement.
No, not at all.
Not at all.
And when I was a kid, so David Green founded it, his son Perry Green was a really good friend of my dad's.
And so my dad and I would go into David Green's master furriers and we would go upstairs where there was a long, long line of sewing machines.
And people making fur coats.
And then dad and Perry would go into some back room and I, ha, ha, ha, you know, back there.
And I would be left to sit on a pile of furs.
Yeah, a pile of furs.
Unprocessed fur.
Just sitting on top of a bunch of foxes and watching the sewing machines go.
And you remember, it was back when nobody cared.
This is like if Marcel Proust wrote for Pornhub.
Yeah.
And I spent so much time sitting in the top, you know, in the attic, basically, of this furrier, just watching him put wolf coats together.
And the ladies were all really nice to me.
And there was a secretary that brought me, you know, warm biscuits and all this type of thing.
And then they would come out and Perry would walk us through.
They have a huge vault behind a giant... Because those places also are places where you store furs.
I know that from 1930s movies.
Yeah.
Yep, yep, yep.
Or from like when Lucille Bluth wants to hide her fur coats.
There were places that were like, and listen, I don't want you to get a lot of email about this.
I know we don't kill animals for fur, but we didn't always have REI such as it is.
There was a time when you had to have clothes made from animals, so just relax for a minute.
And this is one of those Alaska things?
You couldn't have warm clothes that didn't come from animals.
And there is still a yearly festival, which I've talked about on the show, the Fur Rendezvous in Alaska, where all the trappers come in with their furs, and they sell them, and then there's a big dance, and they have car races.
That sounds like fun.
Oh, the Fur Rendezvous is amazing.
Fur Rendezvous.
And it's when they start the sled dog races.
So the sled dog races start right down the middle of 4th Avenue in downtown Anchorage, and they start during Fur Rondi.
So it's a constant every day, just like dogs and sleds just racing down the center of town.
And the whole town goes bonkers during Fur Roundy.
And David Green Master Furriers is right there on 4th Avenue.
David Green Master Furriers.
And this is, during Fur Rendezvous, you see guys who are walking around and they have a hat that's literally made out of a wolf's head.
I bet they have fun with it.
They do.
They really, the trappers, they're a fun bunch.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But, you know, my sister and I had matching rabbit fur coats growing up, and they were always from David Green Master Furriers.
And it was Perry.
It was Perry that was the— It's like my friend Patricia Frew, who was only ever called Patty Frew.
Patty Frew.
Nobody ever called her Patty.
Nobody called her Frew.
Everybody called her Patty Frew.
Because why would you not?
If your name was Patty Frew, everybody called you Patty Frew.
David Green Master Furriers, you always say the whole thing.
And it says—and the logo in the coat says David Green Master Furriers.
Yeah.
So we go in and my daughter's looking around and she just can't believe her eyes.
Fur coats of every size and kind.
And these days, of course, they dye fur.
So there are purple fur coats and fur coats that look like they're made of leopards and fur coats that are actually bombardier jackets and vintage furs.
Coats, you know, like a coat made out of a wolf where the entire, you know, their people.
They used every part of the wolf.
They used every part of the wolf.
I admire that.
It's astonishing to be in the place.
And so she's walking around and she's like, oh, wow.
Because she's fashion.
Yeah.
This is like when I would go with my, my dad was a big hunter and fisherman and was not only friends with a lot of guys who did really high end taxidermy, but you know, of course he had a lot of his stuff taxidermied, a concept that I really did not understand what taxidermy is until later in my life.
And then it was even more confusing.
When you say they stuffed a fish, I thought they meant they put like styrofoam peanuts in a dead fish.
I didn't realize it was an art project from the beginning, but it was, I don't know if you've ever spent a lot of time around like high end taxidermy guys.
It's a hell of a scene.
to be around i mean it really it's a little bit like like if roger corman like had a week to make a make a horror movie like you would do it there's eyeballs there's you see how they paint the gills there's large large large bears of course they got their stuff on display in this case and we know furriers we know that people like the david green master for people have fun with it so that must have been a little overwhelming for her
Well, so growing up there, everybody had taxidermy.
There was taxidermy everywhere, in every restaurant, in everybody's house.
We had the taxidermied doll sheep head above the top of it.
Doll sheep head?
Yes.
Is that a fish?
D-A-L-L, doll sheep head.
And I wasn't a hunter, but my mom dated a guy who was a hunter, and he gave us a doll sheep that hung above the, and it's a large animal that you have to look at every day.
I'm going to have to look that up.
Is that a wild, like a ram?
yeah like it's got a big and he had he had oh shit this thing yeah yeah yeah whoa what a majestic creature and the and the head of this doll sheep with his horns it was it was much larger it was as big as a chair you know it was a big thing to have on the wall and my mom's not a big deal about how bears always have big heads this thing's got a big fucking head not including the horns which are crazy yeah
They're big.
Oh, and we also had moose antlers out on the cache in the backyard.
I mean, Alaska's all about that, right?
Anyway, we're walking around.
Well, the woman that is working the counter at David Green's Master Furriers, she comes forward and sees in my daughter's eyes a certain look, and she goes, young lady, may I bring you a fur?
And she just starts putting her in furs.
One fur after another.
And until, you know, until my daughter's head is spinning, like, because they all feel incredible.
They're incredibly beautiful, glamorous.
And the woman just knows exactly.
They feel luxe.
They do.
You know what I mean?
There's something that feels kind of like, ooh, you didn't have to tell me this is fancy.
This is fancy.
She's putting her in motorcycle jackets that are made of fur, except purple, you know, stuff that.
Not for me, but I really hope you got some photos of some of these.
That's amazing.
It's pretty incredible.
Yeah.
And she's just like, tell me more, you know, and the woman is saying like, well, now this is this kind.
And yeah, my daughter is not a, I love to kill animals person by any means.
She is super sad if she sees a, if she sees a pigeon limping.
But if you put her in a mink coat, all of a sudden it becomes an abstraction, right?
And so we're going and we spend, so pretty soon we've been in there an hour.
And the woman's putting me in fur coats.
Well, these fur coats are $6,000.
Whoa.
So it's a lot of work.
Yeah.
And, you know, they're having a big sale right now.
I mean, there must be stuff that, whether or not, how hard to get, how difficult the animal is to get, how difficult it is to, like, process, I'm guessing.
Because then there's certain kinds of animals where it's like you're not going to get, like a bearskin rug.
I don't know a lot about bearskin rugs, but it strikes me that's a contiguous bear.
Yeah.
Yes.
And you don't always get that with every fur, right?
It's not stitched together.
If you're making a coat out of monkeys, you're going to need a lot of monkeys.
If you buy a mink coat, those minks are farmed, but it takes a lot of minks.
Also, minks are really mean.
If you buy a wolf coat, wolves are not farmed.
That wolf had to be... That's a free-range wolf.
Free-range wolf.
It had to be godded, either by a trapper using a terrible, terrible trap or a hunter using a terrible, terrible gun.
Anyway...
So I'm like, definitely like, look, I'm not even paying $2,500.
I know that's a great deal and it's $2,500, but I'm not going to buy her a $2,500 purple fur motorcycle jacket.
Wait, was this even a consideration at this point?
No, I don't know how I got here.
You know, I was just like, let's go see Perry Green, who's, you know, who's 95.
That's a progeny of David, the master furrier.
Yeah, Perry is a son.
And so she says, would you like to see the vault?
And I said, I used to go into the vault when I was a little boy.
And so she takes my daughter and she walks her back into the vault, which is even bigger than I remember.
Now, that's rare.
That is rare.
Massive.
Behind this giant steel door.
And then you go in and then there's another giant vault door.
And there's a room with a thousand doors.
jackets, you know, mink coats, floor length mink coats going down the whole wall.
It's like temperature controlled and it keeps out the critters that would eat them and stuff.
Yeah.
And it keeps out all the bandits, I guess, that are stealing $10,000 coats.
It's a vault in every sense.
It's a vault in every sense.
And so we go down and, you know, and she's walking down the road, just touching every jacket.
And the lady is just so happy because I realized at that point,
Oh, she, the woman here is no dummy.
She knows I'm not buying up the $6,000 coat today, but she is putting fur coat into the language now.
Yeah.
And fur coat exists in my daughter's mind.
Well, we come out of the vault and I'm doing the like, well, this has been amazing.
And thank you so much.
And then this guy comes out from the back, shakes hands.
And he's, he's my age.
And I talked to him for a second, and I'm like, wait a minute.
You're not a Green.
And he says, David Green III.
Nice to meet you.
Third of his name?
And I was like, David Green.
Oh, David Green, Master Furrier.
He's like, I am David Green, Master Furrier.
Thank you.
And I said, you're not Perry, son.
He said, Perry's my uncle.
Yeah.
I said, how old are you?
You didn't.
Yeah.
And he said, 52.
Oh.
And I said, where did you go to high school?
And he said, East High.
I said, East High?
I went to East High.
And he said, what class were you in?
I said, 86.
And he said, my sister, Sarah Green, was in the class of 86 at East High.
And I said, Sarah Green was in the class of 86?
I know Sarah Green.
I didn't know she was related to David Green, Master Furrier.
How did that escape your notice?
No one ever told me.
No one ever told me.
Well, I mean, not to recycle a joke here, but, like, if you met a Joe Kennedy, your first question might be, is that Chappaquiddick?
Like, a name like Kennedy, you know, in Massachusetts.
So Green almost rises to that level in Anchorage.
Except there was a girl a year older than me named Christy Green who had— What color was her hair?
Red.
Fuck.
Christy Green had maybe the brightest red hair of anybody I'd ever seen.
More than your girlfriend.
But my girlfriend had auburn hair.
Oh.
But Christy Green had red hair and she was beautiful.
Oh.
And Christy Green actually came over to my house one night with Jim McNeil and the three of us sat there with a bottle of 10 high whiskey.
and drank and i could i knew she wasn't there because she liked jim mcneil because that would have been an impossibility but i she was a senior i was a junior i was like is christy green here because she likes me
Does Christy Green like me?
I love Christy Green.
Whenever I was in a situation like that, despite every part of me going like, I deserve this, I'm worthy of a red-haired girl who's a year older than me being here and drinking whiskey, there's always that part of me that goes, I wonder if there's a last-minute change to plants, and that's why they're here.
Yeah, right.
People don't cancel stuff to drink whiskey with me.
And the problem is at that point, then I'm like, what the fuck is Jim McNeil doing here?
Hey, Jim, get out of here.
But Jim's like, you know, right, right, right.
And so, so eventually, you know, everybody went home to their respective, because I was terrible at knowing what was happening.
Sure.
And then later on, I ran into Christy Green and I was like, you know, like I'm talking about after high school.
Yeah.
And I was like, Christy Green, God, good to see you.
And she was like, have you heard about Jesus?
And I was like, oh, dang.
Oh, no, she got you.
Dang, Jesus.
I have heard of him.
That's dirty pool.
It was a little dirty pool.
I don't think she was about Jesus that night.
I think she was there to drink 10 high whiskey with me, and Jim McNeil was just a- Maybe it was a test.
It might have been a test.
Yeah, it might have been.
She never brought up Jesus during high school.
Anyway, so the Greens, so now he's got me.
Now I'm like, wait a minute, is this some sort of faded thing where the Greens and the Rodericks have some down the road kind of thing where it all comes back together?
Because I instinctively liked David Green, the younger master furrier.
Well, we walk out of there.
We finally got out of there.
And the entire rest of the time we were in Alaska, my daughter said, when are we going back to the furrier?
Oh, boy.
The system worked.
I said, sweetie.
They got a live one.
Sweetie, those jackets cost more than a Dodge Dart, which is one homeowner monetary unit, which is more than I'm going to spend on a coat for you ever.
And she was like, well, can we just go back to the furrier?
I mean, I really want to talk to the lady again.
I want to see.
And I was like, we're not of all the places we have to go in the Anchorage.
The David Green Master furrier is a one time only stop.
So anyway, I'm never going back to it.
You should tell her you got to keep it special.
Every time I take her back to Alaska, she's going to want to go buy a David Green master fur.
And one day, I don't know, I don't know if she's going to talk me into a fur jacket.
It's a lot of money, more money than I'm going to spend on a jacket unless I hit the numbers.
But it's also, it's so smart in that, in the event of like what they're doing there is so smart because without respect to what the garment of clothing is and what it's made of, they know how to, they know how to like provide like a high touch memorable experience.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And I think maybe— That would have been true for, like, if that had been saddle shoes or African spears or, like, whatever it was, you could very easily have, you know, no matter what, you might have heard that when we go on back to the saddle shoe store.
Right.
Well, I think Perry might have been laying the ground for that back in 1977 when he was like, why don't you go play in the vault?
Because I've been saying David Green Master Furrier ever since that day.
Of course.
And now I feel like maybe buying my daughter a purple fur motorcycle jacket is some kind of family legacy.
Right.
Interesting.
So I have no idea.
There's no room in my life right now for a coat.
Should we maybe go fund me this?
I bet people would be super into it.
I don't know.
Buy a John's daughter a costly fur.
People are going to throw mashed potatoes on it, and they're going to say, you know about climate change, right?
Oh, I see.
Must be nice.
Yeah, they're going to put mashed potatoes on our motorcycle jacket.
Actually, I was wearing a Pendleton jacket, and the woman at one point came over and said, you know, I could put a shearling collar on this.
Oh, man, ABC, always be closing.
That would be killer.
That would be killer.
That would be a pretty good, a shearling color.
So, like the kind of thing that you'd see Robert, mustachioed Robert Redford wearing in a production still from Jeremiah Johnson.
Yes.
Precisement.
Precisement.
Precisement.
So you can get a Levi's jacket with shearling, but I got a feeling the shearling you get from this place is not going to be like the shearling you get from any off-the-rack garment.
No.
At one point, she walked over and was holding a jacket for me, and I was like, I don't know.
And she was like, put it on.
And it was a gray jacket.
It was gray sheep leather.
And I was like, that's kind of not my thing.
And she said, put it on.
And I put it on.
And it was a shearling jacket with the shearling inside.
Oh, that sounds cozy.
The outside was gray.
And it was designed around a 30s German motorcycle post office delivery jacket.
Wow.
That's a lot to process, John.
And I put it on and I was like, I immediately felt like Baron von Richthofen.
Is it single-breasted?
It was single-breasted.
Sounds kind of like the Rocketeer.
Sounds kind of like a kind of jacket I've heard referred to as a jerkin.
You are not wrong about the Rocketeer reference.
And I was like, this is a jacket I would not have pulled off the rack.
I would not have looked at.
Seems like it would be pretty form-fitting and short.
It was form-fitting, but it was pocket length.
Okay.
And she put it on me and I'm looking at it then and I'm like, oh my God, she's got my number.
Yeah.
She's got my number.
She was like, it's based on an old German pattern.
And I was like, oh, I can tell it is.
Yeah.
And then, you know, and then I looked down at him.
Madam, I'll thank you not to speak down to me.
I was like, oh, only $3,000.
Well, boy, I don't know.
It does have that amazing David Green Master Furrier's logo.
Yeah.
Well, I really have this question I need to ask you.
Oh, gosh, of course.
Yeah.
When I got home, there was a little package in the mailbox, and it was one of those little padded envelopes that's just about the size of a paperback book, you know, just a little.
Yeah, with a bubble wrap kind of thing.
Bubble wrap on the inside.
And the return address had been ripped off, so I couldn't tell who it was from.
Okay.
I hadn't ordered anything.
I wasn't expecting anything from anywhere.
So I bring it in the house.
I open it up.
And there's like a lightsaber handle in it that's the size of a small lightsaber.
It looks like a lightsaber.
It's made out of machined stainless steel.
How much could you tell about the kyber crystals?
Well, that was my first thought.
Yeah, I figured, yeah.
And...
And then there was a very cheap-looking made-in-China battery charger and a single battery, a rechargeable battery.
That's a return address being torn off.
It's still dogging me.
Right.
So I put the battery in it.
The battery has no charge.
So I – naturally –
Although, if this was Ukraine, maybe I wouldn't do this.
But, you know, I feel like, what's the worst that can happen?
I plug it into the wall.
I don't feel like this is a firmware issue yet.
Because plugging the battery charger into the wall.
Oh, you want to make sure there's not a zero day on lightsaber.
Yeah.
Is this, like, going to blow up?
Which is one of my favorite, Godspeed, you Black Emperor records.
So, I put it in.
It charges overnight.
I woke up this morning.
The battery was charged.
I put it into the lightsaber.
Okay.
No, I've searched the lightsaber, right?
There's no logo on it.
There's no identifying marks of any kind.
I've looked inside and out.
Does it appear that it could be from the future or the past?
Let me put it differently.
Does it appear that it could be from the future?
There is a sticker on it that says, danger.
Is it a professionally printed sticker?
Yeah.
It says, avoid... So it wasn't like a scroll.
Not a scroll.
Okay.
It says, avoid... All this stuff matters, John.
I mean, when you're trying to put this together, you've got a lot of mysterious pieces to fit together here, and every detail tells.
Okay.
Every detail tells.
Yes.
So it says, danger, avoid exposure laser.
Light is emitted from this aperture.
Laser radiation...
Um, output power...
Output power 200 megawatts.
Just remember, their English is better than your Mandarin.
Yeah, wavelength.
That's what I always tell myself.
532 nanometers.
Okay, all right, that sounds about right.
Class 11B laser product.
Anyway, so I know that it is a laser of some kind.
Well, I put the battery in it.
I'm sorry, John, but a lot of people would assume that's a laser pointer.
It seems to me that just because it's laser doesn't make a pointer.
Right.
Thank you.
And I feel the same way because... You don't want to accidentally do some kind of like a Cyclops thing where it fires off a mirror and now your house has been sliced in half.
That's not what I want.
You don't want that.
And I feel like a laser pointer is built to look like a pencil so that you can, when you're doing your PowerPoint, as you're reading the slide that you just put up, as you're reading it into a microphone, you can actually use the laser pointer to bounce from word to word so everybody sitting in the meeting who could have read that slide in one and a half seconds
knows that you're really going word to word.
That's the best use case for a laser pointer.
But so I put it in and I click the button and out of the top, I'm pointing it at the ceiling, right?
Out of the top comes a green laser light, but it is refracted through a prism so that on the ceiling it creates...
a, uh, like a matrix of little refracted lights.
And then the tip I can rotate and it will, the prisms change so that the little
refracted lasers spin around and create this sounds like something for a cat it's so much something for a cat except it never reduces down to a single point it's always because i'm trying to think of where who who looks good with uh with a lightsaber uh laser pointer and i'm going to say maybe one person vic fisher it'd be fun if if vic fisher pulled that out and
Because he's 98.
But almost everybody else, like if you're doing a TEDx talk, it's not going to help a ton.
And it's also just kind of one joke.
But a cat.
If it was a cat TEDx talk.
What's nuts about it is that it's laser.
So the lights are really strong.
So then I pointed it down the hall.
And, you know, my house has one long hall.
And it's long.
Shotgun shack, yeah.
It's a shotgun shack.
And I pointed it down the hall.
Well, the light is just as bright all the way down the hall as it is right in front of you.
And so it created, it turned the entire hall into a very disorienting thing.
like light show that kind of felt like a, like a, like a early, boom, boom, boom, boom.
Cause I associate like almost equals equals.
I associate light shows or in some, there's a point in my life, if I'm being honest, where lasers were synonymous with Pink Floyd.
Yes.
Right.
Um,
And what was that one, what was the one, was it the Who?
Laser music video is what I'm going to put in here.
Oh, you're talking about a video with lasers in it.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
There's one where, oh, 1999 by Prince, I think, had lasers.
No, before that, I think.
Okay.
Let's see, so there's one where, like, I remember one where, like, or maybe a Bowie video, but I remember one where, like, a...
How do you describe this?
Like a layer of lasers?
Like a line of lasers making a plane comes down?
Yes, and I'm thinking, it wasn't the band Triumph.
It had to be somebody that could afford to make a video with lasers.
It feels like 1999, but... I think there's one from the 80s.
There's one from the 80s, the first time I ever saw it.
I don't know what that effect is called, but it's pretty incredible.
I didn't even need a fog machine in the house.
And my fog machine's offline because I was out of town.
Well, a lot of people it causes breathing problems.
So you basically turned your shotgun shack into a little planetarium.
It was super.
I mean, I turned it on.
Isn't it nice to know you've got that?
It'll get a little me time.
I was listening to King Crimson this morning.
I could see myself dropping the needle on a King Crimson record and just rocking out with my hand laser.
What was nuts is, as I walked down the hall, um...
You know, my mother said, no, as I walked on down the hall.
Because you just blinded your aging mother.
With my light going in front of me.
With lasers.
It was disorienting.
It turned the hall into a space station.
It absolutely did.
Okay.
All right.
Now it's like I've got a VR headset on and I'm floating through some green Matrix universe.
Oh, I think that's so much more fun than VR.
Well, what isn't?
But yeah, the Oculus made me get a meta account the other day, and I was like, I'll throw this thing into a fireplace before I get a meta account.
Yeah, I've heard about this.
My friend Alex is very into AR VR and is very frustrated with the Facebook angle.
Also, shareholders are kind of mad about how much money they're spending on that, I heard.
Yeah, all the poor shareholders.
Well, here's my question to you.
Yes, yes.
Where did this freaking thing come from?
Who is sending me laser... John, I'm like a dog with a bone.
I keep coming back to the... I don't know if you're... I can't tell if this was OPSEC or you're just fucking with me, but why would something that arrived at your house in the USPS not have... Why would it have had a return label and then had it removed unless...
They were reusing an envelope.
Does this feel aftermarket?
Do you think this was a personal gift or was this ordered from one of those made up names on Amazon?
I think that this, I don't know.
The whole way the package looked, it looked like something that someone sent from China with a message that said, please help me escape this prison.
Okay, Nigerian Prince.
I'll bet, I've heard there's all kinds of interesting new emerging Amazon scams that I've been learning about lately.
That could definitely be one of them.
May I ask, if you can say, if you're comfortable saying legally and in terms of operational security, to whom was it addressed and how?
It was addressed to me at my home address.
John M. Roderick.
Is that the name?
Who's the name to?
Well, no, because I don't think this is revealing OPSEC problems, but my mom doesn't want things mailed to her own condo.
So when she orders things online, she has them sent to my house under the name John Morgan Roderick.
If it has my middle name, Morgan, that means it belongs to my mom and I don't need to worry about it.
It's like the way you use dots in a Gmail address.
Right.
So this... I get it.
You're going to have to explain that to me.
No, no.
I'm saying, for example... Okay, let me give you an example.
When I got my first Macintosh in 1988...
Um, long story short, um, I was making a database and I realized the database, um, would be really good for this project I've been wanting to do, which was to send away to, um, this is in the days, like, maybe around the time of research, but imagine it preceding research, but like where we first learn about the Metzgers and all the nuts in America.
And I learned about, it might've been research, learned about Chick publications in detail.
And I started sending off to all of these different wackadoo places to see what they'd send me for free.
Okay.
And what I did was, and in retrospect, this feels a little clever, the database that I kept was not simply the name of writing to, is Terry Metzger a pro wrestler or a racist?
That's a racist, right?
You know what I mean, the Northwest guys?
Oh, the Metzgers.
Yeah, they were white supremacists.
Yeah, okay, good.
And so I would have the address of the person to whom I'd sent it, but then also I had a field, because it was a database, John, and the field was the name that I used for who it would be sent to.
And I think I might have invented this in 1988 because then what does that do?
On the one hand, I can see where this came from.
And on the other hand, I could see if my information was being reused for something else because it would be to a different name.
So, for example, I'll give people love the tips and tricks on here.
Let's say your name is Thor Stenson Finn Lanson.
Yes.
I used to get stuff from Thornstonston.
I shouldn't even have said that for OPSEC reasons, because that is one of my fake names.
I'll probably cut that out.
Let's say you want to get information and your Gmail address is josephkennedy at gmail.com.
Some people will know that you can, when you write to somebody, you can say from josephkennedy plus metzger at gmail.com.
And it will still, you can still send and receive email at that address.
It's just now, like when you sign up for something that seems like it might be bogus, you'll know if it came from that address.
The plus, you can say, I could say.
Plus is totally legit.
And you can also, the periods mean nothing.
You can put periods anywhere.
So if you wanted to say, like your particular Gmail address and move the period between the C and the K, I'm pretty sure that works too.
Really?
And then when they sell it to the Democratic Party and you keep getting messages from Al Franken.
Can I please have $15?
Yeah.
Hi, I'm doing a survey.
But that's what I did in 1988 and I invented that.
So that's all I really want to be remembered for is one thing.
And that's probably it.
But what I'm saying to you here is...
And I obviously, just to step outside the bit, I can't really tell exactly what this bit is about or what actually happened, but I'm going to continue to play with you in the space.
Your mom is smart like that.
She's used the tip that I invented in the 80s, and she wants to keep her operations secure.
Yes.
So now you're a P.O.
box and sign.
But this was just to John Roderick, not to John Morgan Roderick.
Also, I should now mention that I have started moving the laser thing around in circles.
It's been on this entire time that I've been talking.
I'm moving it around.
Okay, that explains a lot.
It is now working as a kind of spirograph.
But like a million-point spirograph.
I don't hate any of this.
I think I would really enjoy it.
If I'm being honest, I would watch a lot less Hitler stuff at night if I had a laser pointer.
If you shake it really fast, side to side, it looks like an oscillograph.
Really?
A billion of them.
It's like scribbling, and then I'm... Oh, like when the hammers are walking in the wall.
Real immersive.
I'm looking at a lamp across the room.
Okay.
As I spin, the lamp looks like an Eddie Van Halen guitar, because it's only picking up...
You enjoy mushrooms.
I was on mushrooms right now.
This would be the greatest, except you have to remember not to look at it because it's a laser.
You can't look at it, right?
Yeah, I'm always amazed when I see those out in the wild, and I'm like, I can't believe you're just allowed to walk around with one of those.
You can point them at an airplane.
Can you imagine?
It's like giving children a Gamja bar.
Like, are you sure that's a good idea for them to have?
How many people, that seems like a thing to Google.
How many people a year lose their sights to like cheap lasers that they bought at a drugstore?
Well, you shoot them up at the, I'm not recommending this.
I'm saying quite the opposite.
Please don't do this.
People point them up at pilots because they're mischievous.
Well, and then they get a knock on the door, right?
Because they usually figure out where it came from somehow.
Well, because, you know, they go back, they go down the laser.
It's not that you're not enjoying the lightsaber.
I mean, you didn't make it yourself with your own kyber crystals, which I think is a pretty big deal.
Yeah, I don't know if I can claim it.
But, you know, the guy, the robot with asthma, he's got like four lightsabers, and he doesn't seem like the sharpest tool in the drawer.
Who sent me this thing?
Who has a heart just hanging there like that?
That's so weird.
Who knows my address and would anonymously send me a lightsaber that was also an Eddie Van Halen spirograph generator?
It's a cool thing.
Who would do that?
And what does it mean?
And by that, I mean, and this is kind of why I asked whether it's from the future.
I corrected myself, because obviously saying something's from the past is ridiculous.
Everything's from the past.
Thank you.
Right?
It's like Criswell says, you know, the future in which we will all spend the rest of our lives.
But if it's from the future, or maybe somebody's part of your mission, it could be.
right oh interesting like who knows okay you think about and forgive me um but you've got the head you know of the spear where the light's gonna go through it and point you know what i mean down yeah right you know like it could be something where like you're gonna turn that on and then um and uh oh wait a minute you also wait a minute you also had an opportunity to try on a german jacket this week i did
It's kind of interesting.
It sounds like you might be on your way to some kind of Indiana Jones adventure is what I'm saying.
What I'm curious about is it's green.
Right.
And it feels a little bit like that is... Green is, when I know this, green is... Like a basic laser.
Obi-Wan's green?
Yeah.
Obi-Wan is green.
Isn't Luke green?
I thought Luke was blue.
Oh, maybe Luke, did Luke get Obi-Wan's lightsaber?
Well, he got his father's lightsaber.
Oh, right.
You know, it's a more dignified weapon from a simpler time.
I'm literally doing all of this just to make John Syracuse lose his mind.
But what happens when Luke gets his hand cut off and the lightsaber falls down to the bottom of the waste paper basket and then flies out into Cloud City?
Right, right, right, right, right.
Well, it's like Michael Stipe said, right?
When you throw a lightsaber away, where is the way?
Well, thank you.
Yeah, right.
If there's somebody on the... So are there villages on the ground in Cloud City?
I don't think so.
That would be a hat on a hat.
I think to have a city with villages in it.
Now you got Endor.
Endor, I think we're talking about villages.
Yeah.
Yub Nub.
Yub Nub.
Yeah, Yub Nub.
But what happens on the ground in Cloud City, like down under the clouds?
I bet it's like, yes, an amusement park ride, but even more so like a carnival ride, where they stick you in one of those things and you fly around, there's centripetal force and all that stuff, and then like your eyeglasses go flying away.
At the end of the day...
Somebody gets to really go collect some goodies.
All the stuff that's fallen off people who are there having fun.
I imagine at the bottom of the Clown City trash can, there's probably a lot of stuff that's fallen down.
I mean, if Darth Vader hadn't had his harmonica connected to his face, that might have fallen off.
But luckily he had it right there.
He's more machine than Syracuse now.
I don't know, man.
And then the question becomes, John, is this just the first?
And by that I mean, obviously, well, will there be more things sent to you?
But is it possible there are other previous things that have already been sent to you, and only now are you beginning to discern a pattern?
These are clues, John, is what I'm saying.
I have no idea how long ago I lost John.
Huh.