Ep. 479: "Personal Forklift"
Hello.
Hi, John.
Hi, Merlin.
Happy Halloween.
Yay.
Yeah.
How you doing?
You sure?
You sure?
You can't stop the Skype jam.
How'd you sleep last night?
Oh, you know.
Mm-hmm.
Um, yeah, it was a combination.
It was a combination.
Oh, a little bit of, a little bit of staying up too late.
Then a little bit of what seemed like pretty good sleep.
Then some, you know, a little tossing and turning.
Some fairly realistic dreams.
Really?
And then I didn't want to get up.
Yeah, really?
Wanted to roll back over and go back to sleep.
So, one of those.
Yeah.
It was raining here.
I think I've resigned myself to Sunday being a day where, what's the Lord's Day?
Yeah, sure.
So, you know, I don't light a fire.
I don't roll on Shabbos.
But I resign myself to that being a day where I not only sleep a little late, like till 10 or maybe sometimes 11.
I get up.
I'm usually hungry on a Sunday morning.
And I'll get food.
My kid and I will eat food.
And then I go back to bed for a while.
Yes.
And I'm coming clean.
I'm coming clean with it.
That's it.
Yeah, yesterday.
But I've had two good nights of sleep in a row, and I'm trying to stop myself from overanalyzing.
Well, no, no.
Hang on.
Let me put this differently.
Let me put this.
Can I?
Let's rewind.
Well, can I bring some subtlety and context?
Yeah, I'd appreciate it if you would.
Well, you know, because with Twitter and everything, we lose a lot of context.
Here's the thing.
There's a thing I say a lot, and I'm sorry I do say it a lot, but I believe in it.
I believe it's one thing to feel bad, and it's another thing to feel bad about feeling bad.
To use my word of the year, that's become instrumental for me, is realizing everybody feels bad, but feeling bad about feeling bad is ultimately optional.
I talked to my daughter about this all the time.
Okay, would you put a pin in that?
Because I'd love to talk about it if you're interested.
Yeah, yeah, sure.
So what should I write that down as?
Feeling bad about feeling bad?
Feeling bad about feeling bad, yeah.
Writing it down on paper.
Feeling bad about feeling bad.
And I keep saying that because it's become important for me.
And I think it's important to remind myself and others that that's always an option.
So one thing that's been key in my journey with sleep is that whether or not I'm having the sleep that I would like, I'm trying to make an effort to not...
assign too much generally especially bad feeling about that which has been really really helpful because what's the worst thing is trying to sleep you can't sleep you don't sleep well you wake up all the you know the seven dwarfs of bad sleep right um but so that's helped a lot but but i do still get curious about like well i even when i don't sleep well sometimes i can wake up and go that's okay
That's okay, I say to myself.
And maybe, as you say, whistling past the graveyard, but I say to myself, I say, you know, that's okay.
If you didn't sleep, you know what?
The thing that's not going to help is feeling bad about it, and then not sleeping more, you know?
Yes, yes.
I don't like to cut right to the chase, but I think the downside of that is that when you are hard on yourself about that, and I'm not trying to be helpful here, but when you are hard on yourself about that, I think it makes everything a lot worse.
If you're interested in this topic, listen to everything else that I do.
But then I am also on the other side of that.
Now I say to myself, I say, well, like, you know, should I have no feeling about that?
I'm not sure I should have no feeling about that, but I think it's okay for me being how I am, and you know how I am, to err on the side of feeling less bad about things, and that helps.
But with all of that said...
Sometimes I still want to figure out what I do.
Is there a skeleton key?
Is there a magic formula?
Is there something?
Because I feel like I have some idea about the things that make sleep not so good, and I try to work on those.
But is there anything that actually makes your sleep good that's not drugs?
Kind of.
Eat less and exercise.
You say eat less and exercise more.
Do you have a favorite form of exercise, John?
Oh, walking has always been my thing.
You're a walker.
You're a walker.
You walk.
Brisk walk.
Out for a walk.
Long walk.
Do you ever take a night walk before bed?
That can be really nice.
A lot of them.
The other day I was out for a night walk.
But I don't walk as much.
I don't walk enough.
Not living in the city, I don't walk like I did when I lived in the city.
I think if I lived in New York, I would be...
I'd be two inches taller, and I'd weigh 100 pounds less, and I would be able to shoot crossbow bolts from under my fingernails because I would walk everywhere.
Does it have to be Manhattan, or could it be one of the boroughs?
Oh, it'd have to be Manhattan.
Yeah.
You wouldn't want to be out in the boroughs.
You don't get crossbow fingers on Strong Island.
No, and the thing about living in Brooklyn is you can walk...
for a while, but then you hit one of those parts of Brooklyn that, in order to walk across it, you're basically walking in a no-man's land for an hour to get to another part of Brooklyn.
I feel like people speak in code about this, I feel like, because I don't know anything.
Well, if I'm honest, I don't know fuck all about Brooklyn.
It's basically what I know about Portland.
It's what I know from TV parodies.
But I have heard people say, and I noticed that especially, let's just be honest, white people...
Kind of treat this kind of lightly, but there's this sense of like, well, you can walk here, but you maybe shouldn't walk there.
Oh, it's more to do with... Just like Billy Joel walking through Bedford style, huh?
No, no.
It's about the fact that Brooklyn was an industrial... First of all, geographically, Brooklyn's a bunch of hills, and it's a bunch of bumps.
And then there was... It was industrial in so many different ways.
Like there's the Gowanus Canal, there's the old Navy Yard...
And all these areas have been kind of partly – well, I mean, they're being colonized, right?
They're all getting turned into places.
But it's not a natural – if you're in Williamsburg and you want to walk to Park Slope, you have to go through 14 different environments.
And it's not that any of them are especially scary, except one time I was walking –
down a street and a Hasidic guy on a forklift was coming down the sidewalk.
And I was like, we were the only two guys on the street.
Like, there were no cars.
There were no other people.
Is that in Leviticus?
I don't think so.
And he was coming down the sidewalk.
He could have been in the street.
I was on the sidewalk.
Those little ones, like a bobcat-sized one?
Yeah, right.
But medium enough that it was taken up.
Yeah, like a personal forklift.
A personal forklift.
And he was hauling ass.
And I was like, he was a big enough forklift that there was no way I could stay on the sidewalk.
And he was in transit, right?
He wasn't like going from one place on this block to another place on this block.
He came onto the block on the sidewalk.
He went directly at me until I had to, you know, like, oh, I guess I'm on the side.
So you had to sort of, it's his neighborhood.
You step aside and you provide a means of egress.
Yeah.
Exactly.
His neighbor is what, is what that whole forklift was trying to tell me, but it was, it was an, it was an intermediate space.
It was like, it was not a, it wasn't this neighborhood.
It wasn't that neighborhood.
It was, it was like a liminal, liminal neighborhood was.
Yeah.
Another time I was walking kind of not in that exact neighborhood, but down because I used to try and do this.
I was like, well, I'm in this neighborhood.
I'm going to walk to that neighborhood.
Not realizing that like, well, nobody does that.
So good luck.
I was out walking and there's like, I don't know if you've ever seen a group of Hasidic men who travel together and they walk extremely close to one another.
Like it's a scrum.
And they're wearing colors, right?
They're like a gang.
But there's like nine to 12 of them and they're so close together and they're moving as a single organism.
And I did the thing, which apparently you do not do, which is address them.
Hi.
Hey, can you help me for a second?
Oh, I still get that here.
I still talk to people that I guess I'm not supposed to talk to.
You see two Chinese ladies walk in with their bucket hats?
Oh, my gosh.
Who knows why?
I mean, I don't want to be aggressive with people, but you start to realize there are groups in America.
Oh, there are groups.
So they travel and pack, they go single file to hide their numbers?
Well, no, not single file, right?
It's a clump.
It's like they're four abreast and five deep.
And they stopped, and they literally pushed one guy forward.
Like, you talk to him.
Or the guy kind of moved out.
Oh, it was his night in the barrel.
Exactly.
And he said...
Yeah, may I help you?
And he, and he, and I, and it was this huge explosion going off in my mind.
Like, oh, these guys are all born in America.
they are Americans and yet they don't speak English very well.
And this guy, they pushed him forward because he is the one that speaks English.
You're going to get that in a, um, in a, like, for example, you with like, say like, you know, friends or, or Mennonites, right.
You get that sort of like, we hang with our own kind, mostly keep to ourselves kind of thing.
Yeah.
And they speak Yiddish and, or, you know, and there, these are the Lubavitchers or whatever.
And he, and he comes and he's got that incredibly like,
it's condescending right they have the cool hat oh they all have the things everything because most of what i know about this such as it is comes from the netflix tv show um i think it's called unorthodox yes same same and that's that's where i learned about the large hats but i said i said oh well i'm here i kind of know where i am but i'm sort of trying to get to downtown brooklyn and
And they laughed.
And they said, oh, there's no way to get there from here.
And I said, no, I know there is.
The streets connect.
And they were like, well, and it was clear they'd never been.
I don't know.
They didn't know how to get there.
It was the same thing you get everywhere you ask a local, how do I get to the next town?
And they're like, oh, I don't think you can.
You have to go back up to the highway.
Yeah, yeah.
So anyway, that's what I mean when I say I need to live in Manhattan, because if I start walking, if I'm down on 10th Avenue and I want to walk to 125th, I want to be able to just keep going.
I don't want to have to go through some Navy yard.
Yeah.
This is a fraught time in America with the way that, well, there's just a lot.
Well, it feels like there's more anti-Semitism than usual, so I want to be careful about this.
How much have you thought about the forklift?
Because I would still be thinking about that.
Well, a lot, but one time.
He was wearing the outfit, right?
Yeah, well, but without the jacket, he's had the vest on because he's working.
Oh, and he didn't have, you know, he didn't, he had a, he had a yarmulke.
He didn't have like, he had, he was working.
He was a working guy.
Okay.
This was during a time when there used to be guys who would station themselves on the corners in Williamsburg and they would, uh, they would point point at people, got other men walking down the street and they'd go, Hey, are you Jewish?
And you'd stop and go, uh, and you know, and I had, and have a lot of Jewish friends who would grab me by the shirt collar and go, just keep walking.
And what they were doing was trying to get hipster
Jewish hipsters to become more conservative, to join them.
Oh, so it's a form of, like, at least sort of proselytizing is probably the wrong word.
Yeah, but close.
Yeah, but, like, you want to, like, say, hey, look, you know, you gotta get right with... I've been watching a lot of Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm, so this does sort of overlap, because they have a lot of fun.
Return to the fold.
Return to the fold.
Yeah, right, exactly.
Like, what are you doing?
You know, who doesn't want to wear the ribbon?
Well, so we were... So Ira...
So handsome.
He's so handsome.
Very handsome.
And Jewish.
And we were out walking one night.
A Jewish guy named Ira.
Walking in the night in this environment.
And I think I might have told this story before.
We come upon, again, it's a nondescript block.
It's not a neighborhood that you would look at and go like, oh, there's a little cafe over here.
It's just warehouses.
Warehouses as far as you can see.
We come upon this scene.
Where it is, it's the most incredible thing I ever saw.
The streets.
And it's the middle of the night.
Streets are full of people just decked out.
Like, not the normal fedora.
You know, because the fedora and the beaver hat, they all signify different things.
Different degrees of are you married or not.
No kidding.
If you're unmarried, you can wear a certain kind of thing.
But then when you are married, then the hat changes.
Yeah.
And then if you're like, but I mean, like not to blow the story here, but I mean, part of it is like, not only are you part of a tribe and you're repping that, but a tribe, well, not tribe in that sense, but you know what I mean, right?
Like tribe in the, in the, in the wider, like Freudian sense, like you're, you're part of a tribe.
Yay ruins everything.
We call him yay now.
I thought it was ye.
Oh, ye.
Oh, I thought it was like, yay.
Yay.
Oh, we're talking about the same guy, right?
Well, he's he's the guy.
He did that that record.
I like a lot with the Nicki Minaj rap on it.
But he's the one that has like daylighted anti-Semitism.
Oh, he's speaking truth.
He's speaking a lot of truth to a lot of power right now.
I call him Yee.
If I can get a correction, if he's Yee, then that changes.
Well, I think you should call people what they want to be called.
But, you know, that's kind of how we know him.
And it's going to take a while.
We went through this with Prince.
But you're saying you're part of the tribe.
But so much so are you saying you're part of the tribe.
It's not just like a gang where you get a tattoo or whatever.
It's like part of that tribe is like – and I'm wearing the –
Oh, what's that phrase?
Oh, you've got to always remind me of this.
When you're a general and you've got all the ribbons, they call that something salad?
What do they call that?
Scrambled eggs.
Scrambled eggs.
Yeah, there you go.
You've got all your hat stuff.
But you're saying, I'm part of this tribe, but I'm so much a part of this tribe that I'm also repping the equivalent of – not the equivalent, but analogous to rank and ribbons.
And it seems like kind of what they're saying is, hey –
is part of it let me ask it as a question it's part of it to say ira you're obviously very handsome and a very gifted drummer but what what makes you so scared to be part of our tribe and rep that oh this isn't anything to do with ira now i'm talking about uh these guys are all together with themselves they're not this is a they saw larry david walking by they might be like where's your cool hat well no they're not interested in that at this moment because it becomes very clear that this is a wedding
Oh, a wedding.
It's the middle of the night.
Night wedding.
It's a night wedding, and there are hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people in the street.
And we walk into the midst of the group, and there are ambulances there, except they are specifically Hasidic ambulances.
And there are cops there, but they are Hasidic cops.
And we're walking through, and we're just stunned.
And, you know, of course, we're objects.
of at least a little bit of interest because we're the only two people in the whole environment that aren't Hasidic because we're not, we were just walking in the night through some warehouses.
You're almost like an NPC or something.
You're like, you're not part of the, and you go, I felt that in neighborhoods in San Francisco where like, I feel like people don't, even though I really don't fit in and a tourist might feel a little bit harried here.
Like, I feel like they don't even, people don't even see me.
Oh,
Well, in this case, they definitely saw us.
There was a natural curiosity.
And this was at a time in my life when there was no party that I wouldn't go into, right?
There was no wedding I wouldn't go stick my nose in, at least.
I think that's a core competency of yours.
I think you've indicated you show up and you act like you run the place.
You belong there more than they do.
And in this case, it was clear I did not.
But both Ira and I, I think, had...
I had a beard, certainly, and Ira had, you know, a mustache and a little thing.
So we were, you know, at least we weren't, like, there, like, with a face like a baby's bottom.
You know, we were, like, men.
And so I walk, the two of us, and the thing about Ira is he's fun.
He's ready to go.
And he's like, let's go.
So that's pretty tall, if memory serves.
He's tall.
And so we walk over to a policeman and...
And he's standing there and we look past him and there's this, we look into the warehouse and it's a warehouse that is a square block.
full of people it has that there were so many people in there that you could see ozone but it wasn't the kind of ozone that they pump into a judas priest concert it was literal ozone of humanity what was it you talking about like like wavy lines yeah where the where the air has i've seen that in a couple punk rock shows where there's just too many people and like moisture starts like running down the walls
Yeah, the air becomes its own kind of mass.
And I said to the policeman, what is going on here?
And he said, it's a wedding.
It's a wedding between the chief rabbi of the literature set and
sect and the, uh, and a, and a different, and the daughter of, no, it's a, it's the son of the chief rabbi of the one sect and the daughter of the rabbi of the other sect.
And they're getting married.
Oh, you got a couple, a couple of gentlemen of Verona type situation.
Yeah.
And the two, and the two, the two young, youngs are getting married and this is the event and everybody's here because this is, you know, Oh, this is the event of the season.
Yeah.
And I said, of course, to the policeman, can we go in?
And he said, it's a wedding.
Everyone is welcome.
Do they issue you a hat?
No.
Okay.
I mean, I'm not taking the piss.
Oh, you're talking about a yarmulke.
Yeah, you're supposed to have your head covered when you go into something like that, I'm guessing, right?
Well, except it wasn't... It wasn't in, like, a facility.
I'm going to stop interrupting you now.
You and Ira, who's Ira's ready to go, and you say, can we go to your wedding, please?
Or, yeah, can we?
Is it okay?
Yeah.
He said, he did the famous shrug and said, it's a wedding and everything.
He's like, what are you going to do, shrug?
Well, yeah, but there was something, I think he actually specified, it is intrinsic to a wedding in this culture that everyone is welcome.
Okay.
Oh, look, you can ask Don Corleone for any favor, because his daughter's getting married.
It's not just like... Tradition.
Tradition!
It's like, actually, yes, you can come.
And so I look at Ira, and he looks at me, and we're like, of course we're going to go in.
And we wait in, and it's really waiting, and we're both tall, so we can kind of see over everybody, and...
It was one of the most incredible events I've ever been to.
And, of course, once we're in there, then we are figures of tremendous fascination because there's that whole, why are you here?
But it's not hostile.
It's just like, why are you here?
It would be like being at a wedding and a guy comes in in complete...
You know, like, like it would be like being at a Presbyterian wedding and a guy comes in dressed in Kente cloth, right?
Where you're just like, hello, like, welcome to the wedding.
How can I get you something to drink?
You know?
You look a little maybe like you mosey in like you're from the big tribal meeting in Black Panther.
You come in and you would really stick out.
You've got a garb of your own and didn't realize it.
And you're tall and they're not mad, but they want to know, so what brings you here tonight?
Well, and we have the beards.
So there's a little bit of that.
Like, did you guys, are you guys a member of the tribe?
And this is your first event.
Is this your first day?
In which case you didn't get the dress code, but sure.
Like, welcome.
But also, like, how may we help you?
And it was such a crowd and such a – it was maybe one of the only instances where I felt comfortable in a group of people that there could be a stampede.
You know, generally, if I get in an environment where you look around and you're like, when the stampede starts –
Where do I go?
And there are times in stampede situations where you are suddenly like, it's too late.
Like you're getting carried along and there's no going against it.
And I have worked so hard to never, ever, ever be in that situation.
It helps a lot to locate, as I say, to repeat that phrase, means of egress.
There was a club in Tallahassee that used to be pretty famous for like, I don't know.
I learned from my friend Dave, when you go into this club, the first thing to do is locate the exits because you just never know.
And I think that's a good habit to develop because also you might want to leave early like me.
You don't want to get in a great white situation.
You don't want to get in a who situation.
A who situation.
My cousins were at that concert.
No, they weren't.
They were at Cincinnati in 1979.
Yeah.
You don't want to be on a bridge in Cambodia.
You don't want to be at a football game in Leeds or wherever that happened.
You could do that joke I don't understand about a hovercraft.
Pearl Jam.
Yeah, the one about a hovercraft.
So I don't let myself get into those, but this was a situation where it wasn't like I got swept along.
It was too juicy.
I needed to get closer.
Yeah.
And we got in there, and then it was evident that, I mean, this was a huge building.
There was a whole section over to one side where the women were.
And there was no intermixing.
The women were over here, and then the vast majority were men.
And then at the far end, there were some very steep bleachers.
where all the old guard were sitting and they were sitting in these bleachers.
So they were kind of so steep.
They were just right on top of each other.
And they had these fur hats that were, that were, I mean, each fur hat was its own, uh,
They're really, really, they're big.
It seems like that would be the limiting factor in how many elders you could fit in a bleacher.
You've got to account for width of hat.
Yeah, and can you see over?
Maybe that's why they're so steep.
You've got to see over the hat in front of you.
Sure.
And then there was this whole wedding ceremony, none of which I understood, a lot of dancing.
And, you know, he and I stayed there.
Really, through the whole thing, and the party went on all night, and it was – I mean, it was in the United States of America, but it was more of a culture –
experience than I've had in most places not in the United States of America.
It was like going to a different country.
I love that that still exists in America.
I love that, you know, even as we've sort of, you know, rounded off our edges as a country, we've lost some of our accents, you revert to the mean.
I love that there's still cells
of completely, like, intact experiences that can be so foreign to another person who's from, you're both from the same country, but you can still go into something that feels so, not foreign, but just outside your own world, you know?
You're living inside somebody else's culture, which, as a member of the dominant, several dominant groups of the culture, is exciting to me.
The thing was that Ira was raised in the religion, right?
And he had never seen anything like it.
His family was observant and everything?
You know, observant in the assimilated American sense of going to synagogue.
But they weren't orthodox.
They didn't have separate plates or anything.
But he is familiar with all of the...
All of the things that would make this the same as for me going to an AME church in South Carolina, that would be an American cultural exchange for me, like going to a different place.
But it would be very American.
It would be very recognizably like all of this is happening within my American context.
He had all of the context of the religion and still had no idea what planet we were on, and he was just like, this was the most amazing.
If you talk to him about it today, he would have the whole story just on his fingertips because it was so otherworldly, and it was also in America.
Also, everybody here is American.
Yeah.
And again, in that part of Brooklyn that is, as you like to say, interstitial between two universes of Brooklyn.
So it's a place in Brooklyn.
Oh, it's a kind of civic, like a civic connective tissue.
Yes.
And there are places in that same area that are very Puerto Rican where you're like, oh, now I'm in a Dominican neighborhood.
Now I'm in a Puerto Rican neighborhood.
Yeah, got it.
But this is even separate from that.
It was just – I actually think about it all the time.
I don't blame you.
I feel fairly positive I've told you this story before.
But in mentioning in passing that the part about being an NPC, when I was first fixing to move out here for work and whatnot, I would stay with my friend Michael, who lived in Western Edition.
And –
I think I told you the story about the one day I just moseyed myself down to Fillmore, walked through the Fillmore and decided to get a haircut.
Did I ever tell you this story?
I think I did.
I don't know.
I'm pretty sure I told that wedding story, but, you know, we've been doing this show a long time.
I don't remember it.
I appreciate you telling it because I don't remember it.
But no, one day I thought, you know, oh, I'm enjoying this shorter hair and I'm having a new life and whatnot.
And I go mosey through my soon-to-be new city of San Francisco.
Oh, this was back in the Merlin haircut days where every one of your haircuts was like a social event.
Oh, you feel like that, huh?
Yeah, you would post pictures of your haircuts.
Oh, this is actually 1999.
This is even before there were photographs on the internet.
Back then it was just a pure text medium.
But yeah, no, I have a lot of problems with my hair.
My hair and my rise are two of my rise.
Your hair seems to respond to scissors in a way that other people's hair...
Like if you looked at your hair, you would go, oh, it's normal hair, and you would just use scissors on it.
But then when scissors are used on your hair, like unpredictable results.
It liberates a lot of chaos energy, especially given that I have very – I was once told, and I've actually been told several times, I have a lot of hair, but my hair is very fine.
I have dense, fine hair.
Do you understand?
No, I have that too, dense, fine hair.
All right, maybe I'm a scallop and don't know it.
I'm a lifestyle scallop.
I mosey down, whatever it was, Michael, was it like, actually, kind of near, well, it doesn't matter.
It's a part of San Francisco that probably doesn't exist anymore because it was once a thing.
Well, and this is, I think, I don't know, you probably know, you've forgotten more about San Francisco than I've ever known.
Historically, I have a handful of factoids I've learned from shows on MTV over the years.
People call it Frisco.
It's like, it's,
Yeah, or San Fran, either one.
We love both.
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Please, won't you care?
But I said to myself, I said, you know what?
I'd like to go get a haircut, and I want to go start acquainting myself with the neighborhood.
I knew there was a Popeyes near there that I liked to go to, and I moseyed down the street.
Local place, Popeyes.
And I'm enough of a person that I've heard, oh, you know, in the African-American community, and if it's not, let me just say, this is a very African-American neighborhood.
Oh, one more point.
We don't have time to get into this, but it's a fascinating neighborhood as a –
Well, let's just say this.
This is within the city.
Yeah, but Western Edition used to be a Japanese neighborhood.
Yes, it did.
And then, you know, there was World War II and we took their houses away and put them in camps.
And what did we do?
We moved in a lot of African-American people into their houses so that they could build ships.
And then once that was over, it wasn't so great for them either.
And it became a pretty tricky neighborhood.
So I'm going down.
There were some interesting riots in that place during World War II where you wouldn't expect it.
Huh.
Well, you – I always tell it's weird also.
If you're going to put people in camps, why don't you put them in camps in another state?
That's so weird.
Yeah.
Or out in the – way out in the desert.
Why do you send people like – anyway.
Angel Island.
Look it up.
We – I'm moseying down the street and I says to myself, I've heard so much about the importance of certain aspects of African-American culture that, you know, the barbershop.
I think there's a film about this.
Maybe a film series.
But you hear about barbershops.
I thought, I'm going to go into an African-American barbershop.
I'm going to get me a haircut.
Yeah.
Oh, how exciting.
It was very exciting for me.
Because my hair was already pretty short, but I thought, you know, I'll get a haircut.
It'll be like, you know, I used to like that Andy Griffith would go to Floyd the Barber just to like get a little trim.
Were you thinking you were going to get a fade or did you know that that was not going to be possible?
Oh, John.
John, there's so much that can be published on what I didn't know.
But it begins with me walking in.
Memory serves.
They got the spinny red and blue pole thing and everything.
And I walk in and there's two guys at chairs and some guys waiting.
It's a barbershop.
They got magazines.
But as soon as I opened the door and the little bell rang, I mean, in my memory of it, you could literally hear a record scratch.
Probably like a, you know, might be a John Hooker record.
But it would be like... No, like... I walk in, and everybody looks over and immediately gains their composure.
Go back to cutting.
But I immediately felt like, oh, this is kind of weird.
But that's okay.
I'm going to cross the line on this because I'm a great... I'm reaching out to the different cultures.
Like, long story short, I go in there, I wait my turn.
And I sit down in the chair, and this poor man was cutting my hair so slowly.
Did you say, I want to look like Patrick Ewing?
Don't think I said that.
If I had a jersey number, I might want it on my head hair.
No, no.
But at a certain point, we were talking a little bit.
And I was, I don't know.
You know how I am.
I'm no you, but you know how I am.
Sure.
You're like you are.
Yeah.
But I want to participate fully in this experience.
I sit down and eventually at one point.
I, uh, it was, it, this haircut took probably maybe an hour, hour and a half.
Wow.
He was really giving it his full attention.
And it, it didn't seem, he didn't have the same brio as he did with all the other fellas who were getting their haircut.
I see.
And at a certain point I said something to, you know, to, I don't know, uh, some kind of rainbow coalition, uh, bullshit off the dome where I was like, yeah, I guess all hair is the same.
Right.
And he goes, oh no hair, all hair is not the same.
Uh,
I said, oh, really?
That's interesting.
I'd love to hear more about that.
And he goes, you're the first white person whose hair I've ever cut.
Yep.
And I thought, well, good for me is the first thing I thought.
Oh, you were like, wow.
Guess who's... Wow.
Yeah, guess who's... Wow, must be nice to go to a white barber.
Wow.
Yeah, who's Mr. Multicultural now?
Well, I was not Mr. Multicultural because it had never occurred to me that black people have completely different hair and different hair cutting needs.
It's a real different, and I was not like the young Malcolm X. I was not wearing what they used to call a conk.
This was my actual hair, and he was cutting it.
And it turned out that I was the first white person whose hair he'd ever cut.
I popped his hair cherry.
Yes.
But that's why the guy was going so slow.
And when he was done, I mean, it was...
Because he was trying to use scissors instead of just clippers.
And anyway, by the end of the thing, I felt like such an idiot because I had an okay, good haircut.
It was basically the equivalent of if I had said to somebody at a white person barbershop, give me a little bit of a one all over.
Uh-huh.
It was pretty tight.
Yeah.
Because he's used to taking the clippers and cutting hair the way people want, and I have fine white-ass Ohio hair.
Right.
You thought maybe you were going to get a kid-and-play, but you got a... Oh, we're talking about rolling with kid-and-play.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You got more of a, like, just join the Marine Corps?
A little bit high, a little bit tight.
And by the way, I watched Stripes this weekend, and it occurs to me that Stripes came out before Full Metal Jackets, so that haircutting scene where John Candy gets his hair cut off...
That was like six years before Full Metal Jacket.
Yeah, Stripes really started a lot.
You know, that's where the GMC RV made its television debut.
Oh, right, the Urban Assault Vehicle.
Yeah, that's a GMC RV.
Only slightly modified.
I feel like you told me that.
All in the service of saying, there are—I think, I suspect—
And it's very important that I really, really lean on the word suspect because I don't know.
But I suspect that when dumb, well-meaning white people say bullshit like I don't even see color, I think one of the myriad, myriad reasons that that's a really annoying and kind of offensive thing to say is like, well, it's...
There are cells of culture.
They're just not cells of culture that work in the way you saw on Dateline or whatever.
But there are groups.
There are tribes.
And I was not part of that tribe.
And this poor man, I tipped him.
Of course, I tipped him well because I'm that guy.
But, like, it's real.
There are tribes in America where it's not that you're not welcome, but it's that, you know, you...
Well, part of what has made this special in its way is the ability to over-serve a certain kind of cultural interest, very much at the cost of other cultural interests, because that's how it works in a tribe.
And I don't know, I'm glad that that exists.
If that man's out there and he's listening right now, I'm really sorry.
I mean, he's probably in his 40s or 50s now.
I felt like an idiot.
Yeah.
Oh, you know, I think that there was this wonderful time.
It was well-meaning, John.
It was well-meaning.
This all happened during a period where we were in the United States culturally all kind of talking about what does post-racial society look like?
What is America going to look like when—
Right on the precipice of a post-racial society.
We're still a little racial, but post-racial was obviously right around the corner.
This was right around the corner, and we were all kind of – TLC was huge.
White people love TLC.
By all, I mean the middle, right?
Kind of discussing what's it going to look like.
What's it going to look like?
Uh, you know, on friendly fire, we used to talk about it all the time because there were a lot of Denzel Washington movies during that period where he was the protagonist of the film, but his race was never mentioned.
And it's, it's, it's, and, and he never, although he was completely Denzel, he was not like, he was not fronting.
He was Denzel all the way.
He was in that Malcolm X movie, if memory serves.
No one, but these were all movies where Denzel was the cop or Denzel was.
No, I know exactly what you mean.
Like, it's one thing to say, okay, there's a gay person in our movie, but it's like, yeah, but did they die in the first act?
Or are they merely there to be the fat friend or whatever?
But when you can finally get somebody, it's almost like a Bechdel test thing in some ways where the main thrust of this movie is not that you're the black guy who proved that it could be done.
You're just the guy.
You're just an extremely competent guy who's here at the middle of the movie, right?
Who's at the center of the film.
And it's not like he goes at some scene in the movie and hangs out with his black friends and they all talk about what it's really like.
It was just like Denzel is just the star.
And there were lots of things like that in the culture where I was like, well, this is how this is now.
And we're all it's all.
And this was, you know, this was a very white person perspective.
No, not necessarily.
This was the middle of the of the culture.
And and we were we were all kind of navigating like, well, what happens if Martin Luther King's have a dream actually becomes reality?
What is that?
What is that?
And.
you know, and of course that was also coinciding with the rise of public enemy and a very, and an attitude from the black community that rejected the possibility, right.
Or rejected that it was going to be so simple.
And so it was a very, you know, there was still a lot of tension, but it was not, um, it, it didn't seem like it was going to be impossible.
Right.
And, you know, and, and it's the rise of cell phones, I think, or cell phone cameras that, that
sort of change the dynamic for white people about what some of the obstacles really were.
Oh, say more about that.
Well, just that
white america could not comprehend what police brutality really looked like oh yes yes yes great point you know and could not comprehend just exactly in the absence of cell phone video we we as a culture would come up with all the reasons it's the equivalent of like how are you dressed yeah it was exactly that right like well you must have done something to provoke our first responders that we love so much
So that, I think, was the beginning of what became a cultural wave of people going, well, wait a minute.
It isn't just that teenagers who aren't doing anything are getting shot by the police.
It's actually just regular people who are driving in a car who get pulled over for nothing, and then they get shot by the police.
And that was the beginning of the – you don't understand the – because the idea of white privilege goes back 120 years.
The W.E.D.
Dubois saying, look –
you have no idea the, uh, the wealth you have, the basic wealth you have just being white in terms of walking into a store and not getting the stink eye.
Right.
But all that started with the, with the fact that we could see for the first time in me, in the middle, the mainstream culture could see for the first time in reality, like, Oh no, no, no, this isn't, it's not just a De La Soul video.
There are real obstacles that,
It's not because there was, in what you're describing, which I think is mostly a good hearted, good natured approach, but it was the, at least from my POV, it was this whole like, well, everybody, all the white people are finally coming around to my idea that we're all just brothers.
But that's not the only complication.
I mean, just because there's not as much KKK activity does not mean that we were ready to, because we were still the ones that were kind of defining what that would mean.
But I mean, even that, I think, is a white perspective that's not entirely accurate because there are a lot of black Republicans.
There are a lot of middle class blacks that also wanted that same thing.
You see that in the Latin American community.
I mean, look at Florida and how many people are so conservative.
And once you get beyond the basic critical mass, you start having, guess what?
They're people like anybody else.
And they want different things just like white people want different things.
But you got, you know, you got Bill Cosby, who now is like understood to be a terrible rapist, but he was advocating in very, very much in the center of mainstream black culture.
Like why, you know, pull up your pants, your pants.
Yeah.
Right.
And so and of course, a lot of those a lot of that mentality was discredited.
because bill cosby across the board was discredited and he was and he was getting yelled at in his time but he wasn't even when he was started doing that i mean i think a lot of people were like whoa pump the brakes like oh i know but but you know but that whole like he's an uncle tom or whatever that wasn't necessarily true right i mean there was there's a mass mass in america today every time i see a hot rod show
Because you see the hot rods first.
And it's like, oh, hot rods.
And then you go over and you realize this is an African-American hot rod show.
Like these are the same.
That sounds really cool.
It's the best, right?
These are the same goddamn GTOs that you see all these old fat white dudes.
Except these are old fat black dudes who love those cars just as goddamn much, right?
And they are hot rodding them.
And they're not low riding them, right?
They're hot rodding them.
And there are black motorcycle dudes and all, you know, it's just like goddamn America, right?
Yeah.
And they are self-segregating in the same way that white dudes do because it's America.
And there's that desire to segregate that isn't always because it's being –
Right.
It is often a self-selection, like you were saying earlier about tribalism, but God, the, the number of people out there and when the middle gets derided so much right now, and it's so bullshit because there are the middle people.
Is the vast majority of people that are just like, I'm not trying to get along.
I'm trying to succeed.
I'm not trying to just get, get, uh, I'm not trying to get suppressed here.
I'm trying to, to make a good life for myself and, and there are obstacles and we all have them.
And not everybody is a revolutionary, and it's not just that they're working against their own class interests.
There are a lot of people who have a very good sense of American politics across all racist cultures that are like, this is still the best country in the world, and I have more opportunity here than I would anywhere else.
Mm-hmm.
So, yeah, you going in to get a kid and play haircut is hilarious, but it also is kind of sweet, you know?
It is sweet, but in retrospect, I'm not mad at myself about it, but at the same time, it did reveal a certain kind of...
Ignorance is probably too strong of a word.
Yeah, I think it is.
But just in the sense of, like, I don't know.
I don't want to make a big deal about it, but I should have known that I have different hair than black people.
Now, that's the thing.
But the thing is, you were coming from a place where you didn't.
I was coming from a place, literally, and I'm really not trying to drag...
Florida in this instance, or Tallahassee.
Hey, let's keep it friendly.
Talk about a foreign country.
Well, yeah.
On Saturday Night Live this weekend, there was a bit where they were making fun of Carrie Lake, that horrible person in Arizona, saying, you know, in Arizona, the Florida of the West.
And I'm like, whoa, that is kind of true.
It has kind of become that.
But I... Yeah, I don't know.
I don't know.
I...
It's a good country.
In 2008, during the election where it was, I think, clear to us that Obama was going to win, there was a big party at the showbox downtown where all of the white liberals were congregating to watch the election results.
And they were the hipsters, and they were the gays, and it was going to be the big melting pot.
People were very excited.
You remember the posters?
People were very excited about Obama.
But here was the thing.
This party at the showbox did not have any black people.
Right.
Oh.
And I had just then moved to a majority black neighborhood.
Now, my zip code at that point in time, I think I've said before, was the most diverse zip code in America.
Yes.
Oh, so this is when you moved to your farmhouse.
I moved to my farm.
And I had just done it.
I had just moved.
And it was, and so I was all of a sudden living in a much more diverse neighborhood than I had at any time in Seattle.
And I said, wait, I don't want to go downtown and watch this election in a room full of all of my friends.
I want to go to, in the same way that you wanted to go to a black barbershop and just be like, hey, we're all the same.
I wanted to go to a San Francisco barbershop in a black neighborhood.
Right.
You know, that I wanted to start, like, sucking the marrow out of this goddamn godforsaken city.
And I wanted to go and watch this in a black bar.
Oh, the energy of that is very attractive.
Well, so I go to this bar, and I walk in, and there's somebody sitting at the door.
And I was like, what's the cover?
And he said, well, this is a private club.
It's members only.
Which was not a lie.
I learned later that this has been a historically private club, members only.
You pay a yearly fee, and it's like an Eagle's Hall, except based around a kind of— A fraternal organization.
Yeah, but it isn't actually like a—it is actually like a speakeasy kind of jazz scene—
And what, and the model that the business model they had was, this is a, this is a club.
This is like joining the tennis club, except in this neighbor.
And I stood there kind of dumbfounded.
And the guy said, but you know what?
Tonight, come on in.
And I was like, oh, great.
Thank you.
And I came in and I walked around into the bar area and I was the only white guy, but everybody was very welcoming and
And I kind of sat at a table by myself, and we all watched the election returns.
Now, I wasn't at a table by myself where everybody was looking over at side-eye and whispering.
They weren't focused on me at all.
We were all watching the election return.
And when it was clear that Obama won the presidency, there was a lot of elation, but it was very subdued.
There wasn't a...
And later on, I saw the footage of the of the party of the white kids downtown and they were losing their shit.
Just, you know, just freaking out, jumping up and down, throwing their cups in the air.
The party spilled out into the street.
There was, you know, the music was cranked.
It was like and I was in this scene and these were mostly middle aged people.
and the reaction was very much like handshakes and a little more dignified very much more and like buy a round of drinks for the room it was not it was not performative right it was personal in this bar yeah and i was there not at all participating in the sense of like
In the sense of what I... You weren't trying to get the wave going or anything?
No.
And also, as a person who loves to walk into a room and make it all about myself, there was no way.
There was no room for me to make it.
I was not at the center, nor was I really in the first or second ring.
I was just a guy sitting at a table.
And not unwelcome, but also I was a witness.
I was 100% witness.
And it was a wonderful thing.
And I did not feel, and at no point did I feel swept up in the moment in a way that made this a post-racial society, right?
There was no point in that room where suddenly none of us saw color.
It was clear that this was a moment that hit differently.
And, you know, at that time, my across-the-street neighbor was— Oh, this is the woman with the van.
Yeah, this was the woman who eventually— Where Gary lived in a van?
Yeah, where Skeeter was her boyfriend.
At that time, her husband was still alive.
And he was a kind of legendary local jazz organ player who had played with all the hip— And he got cancer about a year after I moved in.
And died really quickly.
And that was when she got cast adrift.
And she was a very open-hearted woman.
And she started taking in strays.
And she started making her out.
Because she was, you know, she'd been married all those years.
She was a vocalist.
He was a jazz guy.
It's hard when you, well...
Well, to say it frankly, it's hard when you don't have something to love anymore.
It was very hard for her.
And she was a very loving person.
And he was kind of a stern man.
But we liked each other right away out of musician love.
And I saw them the next day out in front of the mailboxes.
And, you know, we'd been fast friends and I walked over and was like, Hey, you know, I just want to say like, this is the, this is a, uh, a watershed moment or shadowing moment.
I just wanted to say like, congratulations.
And what a wonderful event in our culture.
And he got a look on his face and he was like, well, he's the wrong guy.
You know, I'm happy for there to be a black president one day, but not this one.
And I was like, oh, tell me more.
And he said, well, I just, I feel like he's not qualified.
And kind of turned on his heel.
And she kind of gave me a sympathetic look.
And then they went back into the house.
And I was like, oh, wait a minute.
This isn't a universal, right?
Like my white and gay friends downtown are losing their shit still.
that this is the dawning of a new America.
And that isn't even true in my own neighborhood.
Wow.
And it isn't even true among musicians.
Like he just, he was sitting in there fuming about it.
Wow.
And, and I don't know what, you know, I never actually, he got sick right after that.
He and I never really sat down and, and he never explained his politics to me, but I was like,
Oh, I, and I, I didn't know why.
Well, like I said, I still don't, I still don't know where he's coming from.
Right.
If he'd lived two more years, we would have had, we would have hashed it out.
And I think, and I think I'd have a better story to tell.
That's still, it's still a good story, but you know, I mean, everybody's there's facets to all of us.
And, um, yeah,
I don't know.
There's something – I happen to be one of those liberals or progressives or whatever you call it who's like, hey, Democratic Party, could you – the white person version of this might be when something catastrophic happens involving something like Roe and then our friends in the Democratic Party come out and go, oh, yeah, well, make sure to vote and be sure to send us $15.
And you're like, dude, we already elected you.
We elected you and you squandered these last two years –
And, like, I guess there's the part of me that's like, hey, you know, maybe one part of this would be, like, start noticing black people at other times apart from the month before a tight election.
You know, like, we're constantly intoning this, like, well, you know, we've got to make sure we've got to really, like, hustle and organize.
We've got to get – because, you know, black voters – you look at someone like Georgia, that's a huge deal, obviously.
But, like, you know, it's like we –
One part of this great post-racial world that we live in, one frustrating part of this post-racial world is like, well, yeah, we only really notice you when we need you.
I don't think that's true.
Yeah?
Yeah.
I mean, I just think... You don't think a Democratic Party could do a better job of that?
I don't think that's really the thing.
You know, I just, I feel like the Twitter politics right now and the, and the bubble that, you know, we always, we, we knew, we knew 10 years ago that social media was going to put us in a bubble.
We knew that 15 years ago.
That social media's whole goal was to put us in a bubble.
And we are so good right now at looking at our enemies and seeing how in a bubble they are.
But we're really bad at looking at ourselves and seeing what a bubble we're in.
It's just really hard to do.
And I think we are in a sick, sick bubble.
And I'm not both sidesying because I think they are abominables.
But it's versions of the same problem, though.
There's versions of the same problem of, like...
I say this without capitulating to the implicit idea that Twitter's where I get all my news, but I do get what you're saying, which is that, like, we are – yeah, you nailed it.
We're great at finding other people inside of a bubble and saying, well, when will you finally realize how corrupt this thing is and blah, blah, blah.
But, like, I'm just as frustrated with all the, like, all the pussy hat stuff on our side.
You know, there's something about it that's so tone deaf toward understanding the facets of other people.
And I'll tell you where this really lands for me is I keep mentioning this TV series I watched that had a big impact on me, that Hulu series, Dope Sick.
About the Sacklers and Oxy and how it affects affected communities in Appalachia.
And I, I, I will pretty freely admit that like, I don't know.
I mean, it's kind of, it's kind of like making fun of Irish people.
We're like, well, that's, that's what I am.
I, I,
I don't know if I'm entitled to do that, but like Appalachia is like where my people are from.
Well, mostly, but, but, you know, I was the kind of person with the same as anybody other white person looked down your nose and go like, Oh, you're, you're on drugs because you're weak.
And maybe this is a slightly extreme example, but looking at what happened with the way they apparently deliberately marketed Oxy to be something that was going to go into these communities on purpose, based on research.
Where do people have lots of chronic injuries?
Where is this something that we can start prescribing a lot of this?
Where can we have influence upon the medical community?
Like, what's the biggest bang for our buck in trying to market this post-Valium disease?
You know, Sackler needs another big hit.
So what's it going to be?
And they went to the miners of West Virginia who all had chronic pain.
Yeah, in the series, which I really do recommend.
It's got that wonderful Caitlin Deaver.
Caitlin Deaver is a young woman who works in the mine with her father and she gets injured really badly.
And it's that story, you know, if you really just scratch the surface a little and hear about all these, what they call it, you know, disparagingly called, you know, hillbilly heroin.
Well, a lot of times you have an injury, and if you go to some doctor who basically wants to jam a bunch of pills down your throat, you're about a week and a half to two weeks away from being addicted to opioids.
It's that easy for it to happen to anybody.
And guess what?
You smart white person who's not in Appalachia, you just happen to be in a community that was not being heavily targeted for opioid opioids.
And when stuff like that comes along, I don't want to say I have sympathy, well, sympathy, understanding, because I don't like terrible rednecks any more than anybody.
But I do understand at least that feeling of like, we used to be the dominant.
Well, I don't even want to say that.
Like, my dad had a good job as a coal miner.
Why can't I have a good job as a coal miner?
Well, sit down and bring a sandwich, because there's a million reasons that that's not going to work out.
As you say, it's a go-forward strategy.
But what it does do, though, is allow you... Does it take a TV show for me to, like, be able to see somebody as being more than just the sum of my cliches?
Yeah, it does sometimes, I think.
Sometimes it does, yeah.
That's why TV shows are good, and that's why...
That's why documentaries are good.
I mean, how many documentaries have I seen where I came away going, oh, whoa.
And that's, you know, like we, I think we're so down on ourselves and so quick to say like, huh, I'm such an idiot that a documentary would teach me something.
It's like, what the fuck universe?
Like, yes, a documentary is supposed to teach us something.
I mean, we didn't really talk about my war college experience, but it was profound to me because my whole life from the time I was in ninth grade,
I made huge presumptions about the values that your average American soldier had.
Were they mostly not too generous?
Well, yeah.
You want to just make these sweeping generalizations.
Well, they're all conservative.
They're all...
violent they're all kind of ignorant they're all even the officers and it's and i wasn't i was always a military i was always fascinated by it i would say you were a buff i was a buff yeah but i also carried those liberal presumptions about what the army culture was and i was afraid of them i was afraid of the role the army was playing in american life i thought it was a grift i thought that it was
I thought it was part of American exceptionalism and adventurous.
I mean, you remember, we used to talk about it all the time.
That was how I met those guys was I made those comments about how drone warfare was going to make blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
I just had so much to say about it.
Right.
And I started to get some of our listeners who were military officers emailing me,
behind the scenes like, hey, I was really interested in what you were saying, and I just had a little bit of feedback.
And you remember the first time I got that from from Matt Martin, you know, I wrote him back and I was like, yeah, thanks, kid.
And he was like, actually, no, I'm an Air Force lieutenant colonel.
I wrote the book on drone warfare.
Here's a copy.
And I was like, oh, and then and then it happened again where some, you know, where a guy emailed me out of the blue, like somebody who wrote a book knows more than than me and my my hot takes.
Yeah, right.
And the next guy wrote me and I was like, yeah, thanks, you know, thanks for your unsolicited opinion.
And he was like, actually, I'm the Dean of the History Department at the Air Force Academy.
And he's the guy that now is the Dean at the Army War College at Kaplan.
And he was the one that invited me there, right?
So I get to the War College and I spend a week with these Army officers and I walk away feeling like this is not necessarily a politically conservative organization.
But at the very least, it's not a monoculture.
Absolutely not.
There are people in the Army culture who are watching Fox News.
There are absolutely people who are staunch Democrats.
But there are people like Francis who never want people to touch his stuff.
No, they get him out.
They get him out pretty fast.
Oh, yeah, they weed him out.
I think the vast majority of Army officers that I met were politically—
They took the army's neutrality very seriously, and that meant in some cases that they tried to remain ignorant of politics, but their nature was pro-democracy, pro the idea that America was the best country in the world.
Pro-duty.
Pro-duty, pro-service, and generally what we think of as politics.
middle america they believed in capitalism but not corporate capitalism they believe in the police but not police that have been militarized they believed in the army but they were critical of it when it when it failed and i came away just feeling like what a fascinating uh slap in the face for me who presumed for decades
That your average person in the army was one of these kids that was listening to death metal out on the front line in Afghanistan and was going to come back and buy a F-350 and wear a MAGA hat.
It just isn't what the army actually is.
And I think about it all the time.
And I think about it particularly, it's particularly worrisome to me.
when liberals, and by that I mean myself and our cadre.
Yeah.
It's okay.
You can include me.
That when we presume that the army is not, we make this weird double presumption, which is that, yes, when the cultural schism happens, the army will side with us because we are pro-democracy.
But at the same time, we're
We also like and fave and retweet all the tweets that go, the Constitution is intrinsically a white supremacist document and needs to be completely rewritten according to the principles set by diversity administrators at Dartmouth.
And it's like, well, no, wait a minute, hold on.
The Army's not going to side with you if you abandon the Constitution.
Because the Army swears a lie.
an oath to the constitution.
So if democracy belongs to us, then the constitution does too.
We cannot turn our flags upside down, right?
We are obligated.
And this is this, I've been saying this since the beginning, right?
We are obligated to run for office.
We are obligated to take the intellectual property of the United States of America and own it.
And not say, oh, well, the flag belongs to MAGA hats.
It doesn't.
They have some other flag that is blue with black stripes or something.
Yeah, it's got Mr. Trump photoshopped to look like he's really buff.
Yeah, let them have the Confederate flag.
Just so you all know, that's not on the regular flag yet.
Not the Trump picture.
No, it's not actually on the flag.
The flag belongs to me.
And the flag belongs to you.
And the Constitution does too.
I love this.
No, it does.
No, I'm not being condescending.
No, fuck you.
I'm totally agreeing with you, you piece of shit.
I totally agree.
I know you do, God damn it.
Generation X. You know what?
I used to hate the boomers so much.
And then I realized that the millennials were the worst generation in history.
And then I realized that the fucking, the generation X has a lot to atone for.
Oh, brother.
We really, we really, we, we, we, we clapped out of everything.
Jesus Christ.
We thought we were losers and we losered our way into like, huh?
Huh?
We lose our way into being so dumb.
I've read the first paragraph of so many Wikipedia articles.
I was listening to a podcast this morning, and I might get this slightly wrong, but a podcast I love, Blank Check, and the guest on that show used a phrase, I hope I'm quoting this right, he said, the hot take industrial complex.
Yep, I know what you mean.
I know what you mean.
I know what you mean.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
No, I've read the first paragraph of that.