Ep. 489: "Heroin Parties"
Hello.
Hi, John.
Hi, Merlin.
How's it going?
It's going great.
Great, great, great, great, great.
You're such a pro.
I'm a pro, too.
I know you are.
I mean, we both show up here.
That's right.
Week after week.
I'm in, you wouldn't know it because I am, as previously stipulated, a professional.
But I'm a little bit of disarray right now.
You know, I wouldn't be able to tell.
I wouldn't be able to tell.
Oh, my God.
Thank you.
Thank you.
The system works.
Yeah, I got a new microphone, and I was testing it out.
And as ever, it doesn't sound to me better than the microphone I've already got, which is pretty nice.
And it's, you know, there's two mics everybody uses for everything.
You use one.
I use the other.
Yeah.
And you use the Shure.
I use the EV, right?
The EV RE20.
RE20, that's right.
Ladies.
That's right.
So there's all of that.
It's a donkey dick.
Excuse me?
Say what?
Huh.
You know, I know this guy.
El Ricardo de Burro?
I know this guy, Marco, that might be able to help you find a good microphone for podcasting.
Uh-huh.
What about headphones?
Can you help me with headphones?
Uh-huh.
I think so.
I haven't read all of his stuff, but yeah, I think he could walk you through.
He doesn't publish as much anymore, so it's pretty easy to catch up.
The thing, you know what?
Hello.
You know what?
It's fine.
It's all fine.
I'm a little bit, I'm a little, you know what?
Monday mornings.
Monday morning coming down.
Monday morning coming down.
My cleanest dirty shirt, I call it.
You want to start the show?
Everything's discombobulated.
I'm checking my levels.
You got a new RE20 or you changed from the RE20?
No, no.
I got the RE20 a long time ago because everybody says that's a pretty standard.
You'll sound like John Dickerson if you use this mic.
That's what they said in my head.
You can put it right on a kick drum and it's going to sound fat.
It's going to sound warm and punchy.
Is that right?
Yeah, you just put it right on the kick drum.
Warm and punchy.
But you would pick a, you'd probably pick a less costly.
Sure.
Like if you needed to hammer nails, you would get a, you'd get that little guy.
Everybody uses the one that smells like beer.
Right, right, right.
Yeah, the SM57.
Yeah, the comedy.
You charge a little extra for that?
A lot of people have a comedy mustache.
There's a transition, right?
You start your comedy mustache.
You're like, ha, ha, ha, no.
I don't care anything else I had to say.
This is now the show.
You know what I'm talking about, though.
Yeah, you're going to do a thesaurus of pornstache.
Yeah, but then there's the turning point, right, where you're looking at it, you're looking at it in the mirror when nobody's looking at you, you're like, hmm, hmm.
And you're always thinking, like, at what point are people going to accept this as me, as part of me?
Can I bring in a word here that I really like?
I've been using a lot of verb.
How has the mustache been integrated?
Okay.
You know what I'm saying?
Yes, I do.
Because the thing is, it's one thing to put on, like I remember my friend Sam's dad, who was a man who was losing his hair in his 30s.
I like a lot of men in their 30s.
He had this funny comedy baseball cap where it looked like he had like a salt and pepper gray ponytail coming out.
Oh, that's funny.
That's hilarious.
Those are great at sports events.
Yeah, exactly.
There's a whole class.
You've got an invisible dog on leash.
You've got all these different things that really utilize the brokenness of the human mind for humor.
Coke bottle that had been stretched out so that it was really long and you could use it in a vase.
Yes.
Leonard Skinner Coke mirror.
There you go.
Here's a photo of me.
Oh, this is not a good photo of me.
My eyes are still red.
Doctor, my eyes.
The thing is, with a new mustache, you got to make a lot of other changes as part of the integration.
Oh, a mustache is about context.
Well, and the thing is, do your sunglasses work?
Do your old sunglasses work with your new mustache?
Oh, geez.
All right.
Look at you.
You get a mustache that's maybe a little bit too good for your sunglasses.
Yeah.
Well, yeah.
I mean, you know, maybe you were a Ray-Bans wayfarer guy before.
Does the mustache make you an aviator?
You know, are you going to have to go like who's Anthony Edwards is goose goose.
So you're talking about like, see, like there's that kind of mustache where like, depending on who's wearing what glasses that could be John Waters or that could be your boy goose.
Right.
Right.
Isn't that context clues?
Looking at you here, you're rocking a real undersea explorer look.
Oh, wow.
Really?
Uh-huh.
Uh-huh.
Do I look like Esteban in Life Aquatic?
That's kind of what I'm going for.
I'm going to say I like it.
I like it a lot.
It's a very quick snapshot, John.
Yeah, I see.
I see.
Well, so here, you've got a couple of things going on here, right?
You've got, um, you've got the, uh, the natural lines that go from your nose to your cheek.
You can also see where my CPAP mask dug in.
Right, right.
You've got, you've got some, um.
That gives me a certain Willem Dafoe kind of quality I like.
Then you've got the ends of your mouth, and you have done the thing where your mustache goes beyond the ends of your mouth, which is a style, right?
If you end your mustache right at the corners of your mouth, it's very different.
You're the evaluator here, but just to clarify, I'm not going to post this.
Just to clarify for our audience, it goes past my mouth both in terms of the widths.
Is that latitude?
Is that what that is?
Yeah, you got latitude and height.
And then it goes down a little bit, I think, because my kid thinks that's funny.
When it goes down a little bit.
But you haven't done the Tom of Finland, which goes down a long way or down to... That's a comedy mustache, right?
I know what you're saying.
You know what?
I actually have one of those because I used to like to take photos of myself when I was shaving for comedy effect.
You're talking about maybe a Castro in 18th.
Exactly.
A Castro in 18th.
And you're not doing that...
You're going, you're very seriously here, like somebody that might work for a law firm.
Yes.
I look like a guy who can't afford to retire, but wants to.
There it is.
Yeah, that's all there.
This is not a cop mustache.
It's an investigator mustache.
You say I could be like the chief inspector or something?
Well, yes, absolutely.
Yes.
You could be a political appointee.
Well, somebody owes me a favor?
Yeah, well, or a situation where it's like, did he work his way up to the State Department or did he get his job?
I've been walking the streets in Balmer for 20 years.
Exactly, in Balmer.
In Balmer, yeah.
I don't think this is a comedy mustache.
I think you got to let this go.
I think you got to let this fill in.
I will.
I will.
I don't keep track of these things.
um like i used to but you know i used to time was i could tell you that this was probably a week gonna have two weeks in yeah yeah and then this morning so what i did was i got up the one reason i'm discompopulated i'm sitting here in my underwear right now is i woke up this morning do do do do do and i i've decided for two days now i keep meaning to shave and trim it up a little bit because context you know it's like sean nelson says you know it's the notes you don't play
Well, so here's a couple of pieces of advice.
Oh my God, please, please, please.
When you trim a mustache, you always trim across the mustache.
You don't trim, you don't put the scissors perpendicular to your face and cut like...
snip snip snip like what am i what am i trying to say i think i know i think i know exactly what you're trying to say like to envision this imagine i've got more of like a paul von hinnenberg okay so right like a push broom yeah you know like the father in um in cloudy with a chance of meatballs yes you've got this mustache that comes imagine it comes out and it it terminates
at something that needs to be trimmed.
And so imagine like the way you trim the top of a bush, you're trimming the bottom of a bush.
Don't hold the scissors against your face because that's not how it grow, right?
You gotta go, you tell me, am I getting that right?
So next time I go in there with my special mustache scissors, I'm gonna wanna go like at the lip level and even.
Well, here's what you do though.
You point the tips of the scissors at the ceiling.
Point the tips?
You put the pointy part of the scissors at the ceiling and you cut across the mustache.
Okay.
So you move the tips from eye to eye, right?
You got to be careful not to poke yourself.
Okay.
And you're cutting down.
The mustache is, imagine it's growing straight out from your face and you're cutting it back.
Okay.
Whoa.
Okay, I got it way wrong.
Right?
Your mustache is not growing toward the floor.
It's growing straight out from your face.
So you're cutting it back toward your face, not up from the floor.
Okay.
Will I get to do that eventually?
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
That's coming.
And the thing is, you tilt it out so it's flanged a little bit.
It's a cantilever, John?
It's cantilevered, exactly.
And then the other thing I would recommend is, for irritation purposes...
To cause, deliberately cause irritation.
No, to remove irritation, you go into the corners where the hairs are starting to bother you.
They're right in the corners of the mouth, a little sensitive place.
That's the part that I feel like, you know what I do sometimes?
And I don't think I do this enough that it's kind of gross, but I do kind of do this.
And then I put the tip of my tongue there and I go, oh, there's some sharp boys down there.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
That's coming in thick.
Yeah.
It'll drive your tongue crazy, and then it's going to get red and inflamed over there.
So you can wear it off from the bottom, but push it back from the corners of your mouth.
You don't need it growing there.
You brush it back from the plate a little bit.
You just cut it real close there and brush it back.
Get it out of the corners of your mouth.
It's irritating there.
Yes.
And I feel like, here's the thing, is I was a late bloomer.
And I think you bloomed somewhat late.
And anyway, and I couldn't wait to shave, John.
I couldn't wait to have armpit hair.
I couldn't wait to have face hair.
And the thing is, a bad habit I accidentally picked up early on was, you know, it's like steak.
Yeah.
Quit touching it.
Quit screwing around with it.
Like, if you're not sure what to do, do nothing because that is the way that benefits.
Because then pretty soon you're getting cute about it and you look like you're that one guy in what?
Like in Backstreet Boys?
Like you've gotten a little bit cute.
Too much.
You look a little bit like two times one minus one, you know, from Mystery Show.
It's like I'm saying.
But, you know.
Two times one minus one, like I'm saying.
Indisputably-ish.
Understandishable.
Yeah.
I still say understandable probably four times a week.
The thing is, you can get a Wilford Brimley, but if you go under it.
If you go see a sex worker in New Orleans and you ask for that.
Give me a Wilford Brimley?
Yeah.
Well, let me ask you this.
My question is, what's a fellow going to pay for a Wilford Brimley here?
Well, and I think in New Orleans, a Wilford Brimley is you get a prostitute that's actually 30 but looks 60.
I heard if you do that in New Orleans, what you're going to get is a sex worker who's literally Wilford Brimley.
Literally Wilford Brimley.
Going to give you a little bit of sugar.
But you can get under there.
You can get under there.
You can trim it back from the corners and nobody's going to see it because the mustache then is going to come over the top.
That's what I'm saying.
It comes over the top.
I don't know fuck all about bone size, but my sense is that you're actively shaping in really kind of a really pretty dark way.
The way that that whole thing works is kind of crazy.
But there's times when you're shaping this, but
Let me put it this way.
I think my bad habits over the years, the things that made me look like a Backstreet Boy, was that I was trying to get into aesthetic finishing touches when I was really still in the business of tending my corn.
The corn was not done.
It's all about small moves.
Small moves.
Small, regular moves.
You can trim your mustache every day, but you're making tiny, tiny, tiny moves.
My dad probably trimmed his mustache, yeah, probably every day of his life.
But he was only taking, he was only cutting like four hairs.
Every time he walked past a mirror, he'd, he'd see one hair that he needed to take.
And it's fun.
He carried a little, he carried a little Swiss army knife that had a little pair of scissors.
I love that.
Did he still have the toothpick or had he lost it?
It had the toothpick.
No, and I still, you know, I pulled the toothpick out of mine the other day and my kid was sitting across the room and she was like,
What is that?
I know.
Oh, well, I was in a similar situation.
I had or seen pocket knives.
I did not know that it had tweezers, and I did not know that it had, what was the other one?
You get the metal tweezers, or you get a toothpick is another one.
That's right.
Or, no, you get them both on a small Swiss Army.
It depends.
It depends on which Victoria Knox you're patronizing.
I guess that's right.
But the toothpick, she came over, because we use toothpicks here in the house, and she was like, show me that.
And I was like, it's a plastic toothpick that fits in the pocket knife.
She thought it was most ingenious.
She thought it was like a James Bond car.
It had all this technology.
It's like when you learn John Lennon had a record player in his Rolls Royce.
You're like, why did anybody ever get a record player in their Rolls Royce?
That's such a good idea.
There was a, I think there was briefly a kind of car...
that had an american car that actually you could get a little like a mini record player in the in the radio um oh no kidding i don't know maybe that maybe i saw we were watching something the other night i forget what we were watching something and it had one of those old like i want to say it was ronko but there might have been a fancier version before but the one where it's the record plays vertically yeah like up and down yeah nakamichi
We had a Nakamichi receiver when I was in college.
The student body paid for it.
And that's why Ron DeSantis is changing the leadership now.
It's all our fault.
I love the new College of Florida being the thing that is in the news and somehow keeps being in the news.
Our friend Grant just... Grant's all over this.
He's on this beat.
He's on this beat.
I saw him, what, he filed some...
Uh, like, uh, not an injunction, but he and a group of students have written a new thesis or something.
It's got a lot of angles.
Yeah.
He's doing, he's doing the angle of the business community, like alums.
Uh, you know what?
This is not very interesting, but, but it's also interesting because like a guy, you know, it's just interesting.
Cause it's interesting.
Yeah, sure.
Do you think it's interesting?
Here's what's interesting about is like, as you know, we're the worst generation and we're what, Oh, wait a minute.
Hold on.
Okay.
I mean, excluding the middle ages.
Yeah.
Yeah.
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We didn't even have sexy Weimar fun.
We blew it all.
I don't know.
You know, as a late bloomer, my mustache, the problem with it was it started in the corners of my mouth, but it didn't connect under my nose.
Oh, that's the worst.
I know exactly.
Or for me, think about this one.
I had this one, the one where, you know, how the port stache is growing down.
But like there would be like, so what is a beard really?
I mean, you know, you have to talk to Leibniz about it.
But like you've got these parts where there's hair growing, but it's the contiguousness of facial hair that makes it into a certain kind of beard mustache.
Right.
And like I had the thing where it would never connect.
So yours won't connect in the middle.
Right.
So you look like it does now.
Yeah, but you'd look like you're in a Miyazaki anime, kind of like that weird pencil mustache thing.
Mine would never connect below the lip to the goatee area.
Oh, sure.
Until I was older, yeah.
Well, you know, when I talk to guys about their beards a lot, and you often get what's called beard envy, right?
People come up and go, I love your beard, I wish I could grow a beard.
And I go, well, why can't you grow a beard?
And they always say 100% of the time, oh, it's patchy.
It doesn't connect.
It's patchy.
You know what I think is patchy, you guys?
I think how it's patchy is your patience.
Oh, wow.
Well, I think it's a kind of dysphoria.
Guys look at their beard and they see Apache ugliness where other people do not.
Other people see like, oh, that's, I mean, beards are very individual to people.
And it's like, oh, that's your beard.
It looks great.
But when the person looks in the mirror, they think, oh, no, there's this hole over here.
And this part doesn't, you know, my beard has gone gray except for two brown patches.
Oh, I bet that makes you look like a supervillain.
Well, I wish it did.
I think about like, I want to say like Christopher Guest in Princess Bride, maybe.
You know that look, there's a certain kind of like, and really, maybe a Sheriff of Nottingham kind of vibe when you've got the John Peel sort of...
But what it is, it's not a Wolfman Jack.
What it is, is it at a distance.
Alan Watts a little bit, maybe?
I think it looks like my beard is tracing what my jowls would be if I had jowls.
So the brown part just draws jowls on me that I don't have.
And I look at it and I'm like, oh, that's terrible.
Is that slenderizing, John?
No, it's the opposite.
And so why doesn't the mustache go down into some cool, sinister dark instead of this little flippity-doo?
Well, it doesn't make me look alive, Giles.
I'm just imagining it.
Well, okay, so is that dysmorphia?
Dysmorph?
I gotta look him up every time.
Yeah, me too, me too.
But it's like, you know, it is, I mean, like, you know, getting into trouble here, like, yes, but like, we all have had that thing probably at some point in, like, youth.
Well, Liz, I'll speak for myself, where I've been like, oh, God, I'm so gross, I'm so drunk.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I've forgotten I'm weak and I'm then you look at pictures of yourself and you're like oh I'm so beautiful I was so young and beautiful oh my god I say that to my lady friend all the time who refuses to be photographed I'm like you know what every single picture you have with your goddamn kid you're gonna be grateful for someday
Yeah.
Yeah.
But that doesn't make the, I just got a lot, a lot of like kind of running in hands and it's, you know, it's a lot like, you know, snapshots, you know, you get like in Brooklyn in the thirties, stealing your soul.
Yeah.
Everybody's beautiful.
I was at a party one time.
I had some friends in the, in their very early twenties who had a kid.
And got married.
And at the time, that was very uncool, or at least no one else was doing it.
But were they famously had an early kid on purpose?
No, an accidental early kid.
And the thing was that they were in their early 20s, and they didn't want to stop partying.
They didn't want to go out.
They wanted to stay in.
And so what would happen is we'd have these... And our parties were...
rowdy isn't the word they were you know those parties were dark places something something could go a little bit wrong oh yeah people were on drugs and there were dogs in the house and it was a it was a the fire department kept coming like it was a
It was a, not a place for a child, but they insisted that they could have a child and keep partying.
And of course their little boy was colicky and did not want to be in this environment.
And, and the little boy kind of grew up in this house and you could see they were always, their jaws were always clenched because their kid was a drag and they didn't, they were young, right?
They didn't understand.
Like the thing was though, they, they were also a spiteful, not spiteful, but, um,
You know, like a mule where they were like they had sounds like they really made a decision about this and made a commitment that this was who they were going to be and they weren't about to back out.
Yeah, they were going to get they were going to keep getting wasted and and going to house shows and where everybody else was tripping.
And it was not, this was not going to defeat them.
This child was not going to defeat them.
And this was their life.
Could you tell at the parties, like, it was kind of stressing them out?
Oh, it was stressing everybody out.
Because it's like, well, hey, man, I'm really, really tweaking right now.
And there's a five-year-old staring at me.
And he's yelling at me.
Were they able to, like, break up?
Now it's your turn to watch for 15 minutes?
Or did they just let the kid, like, play with the bong?
No, it was maybe the last...
example of the 1970s alive in our times where the kid was was you know kind of left to his own devices except it wasn't the 70s experimenting with that from what you wouldn't see it as much but you know you think about like stuff that you wouldn't see as much today like a bunch of kids running around naked and swimming together kind of thing that was like totally normal when we were kids
Like there's also just this sort of like slightly free range young adulthood experiment that I knew people were trying in the 80s where they were like kind of adjacent to what you're saying, which is like not so much to say we can have it all in some kind of, you know.
you know, a magazine sense, but in the sense of like, well, again, integration.
Here's my friends.
Here's my, at our school, there would be a lot of people who graduated and were still around and had jobs and they would, but then they had a kid and they brought the kid along and like, it was always a little bit like, I felt bad for everybody, including me.
Yeah.
Well, and this was a, I wasn't mad about it, but I felt kind of like it didn't feel right.
There was a Gen X thing about this example where there was a lot of heroin
And there was early 90s, mid 90s, just very earliest 90s.
Right.
1991.
I think he was born and and and our attitude at the time was everything's fucked.
The world is coming to an end.
There's no reason for anything.
And and so and we're all losers.
So fuck it.
And I think my memory of their attitude was, we didn't ask for this kid.
God pushed it on us, and that's not going to change anything.
It was dark.
That kid now is 30, what?
Oh, no.
He ends like 34.
Huh?
Um, and he's a great dude and his parents have grown up.
I think they eventually, cause the other thing was they were going to stay together.
They were going to, they were going to, they weren't going to break up the two of them.
Sounds to me like in some ways, maybe they were going to show everybody.
They were.
And I think he, I think they ended up breaking up, but I saw his mom the other day.
She's a prominent local activist.
You know, she's like a lovely woman.
And the, and the boy ended up being like a great guy.
So who knows, right?
You roll the dice on anything and sometimes you get a great, you know, it all works out.
You never know, John.
And it's, there's like, it's, it's so frustrating.
It would be so, there's something, well,
The kind of thing I might have thought before I had a kid or before I was in a long-term relationship of this magnitude was that I might think something like, oh, well, you know, if you put in the garbage in, garbage out, of course these people have problems.
Like, ah, but if I have a good heart and good intentions, like things mostly have to turn out all right.
You know what I mean?
That kind of thing.
And you're like, well, no, you never really quite...
No, you know, I mean, well, you never know.
I mean, I always think about stuff like people our age who grew up like with the kind of parents that you can't tell these kids how people used to be.
Not that they should, but like you and I know what it was like.
You knew like the tyranny of adulthood when we were kids.
And, like, you at once were, like, repulsed by it and attracted by it.
But, like, I don't... I mean, is there anybody out there where you would put down a proposition bet, like, an over-under on how that person did, having known them at a certain age?
And with confidence, you'd know how things go now?
I mean, Jesus Christ, no.
Nobody has any ideas.
And, like, it certainly made me a little bit more open-minded about everything not having to be a rule.
Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
Well, you think about parents our age, there's so much...
You know, when my kid was three and a half, I read something that was like, well, when your kid is three, you got to play him Bach.
And I was like, she's three and a half.
It's too late.
You know, like.
Oh, yeah.
She lost her Bach window.
Yeah.
You carry around that feeling of like, oh, I didn't.
You know, there was at some certain point, like I didn't put the right vegetable into her smoothie.
And now she's never going to be Einstein.
Yeah.
And then you think back and you're like, well, wait a minute.
Uh, I used to, I used to take sips out of all the, uh, the half empty beer can.
And every once in a while I'd get one with a cigarette in it and I'm fine, you know, like, or at least mine ish.
I'm fine.
And when I, when I think about my friends and some of the things that they don't want to, trust me, you don't want to know how many cigarettes I've eaten.
You do nothing.
Yeah.
But, you know, I mean, God, Mike Squire is like the cops kicked down the door of his house more than once when he was a little kid.
And so you're like, well, maybe not playing their buck isn't actually going to.
That's not the deciding factor.
Right.
Yeah.
But this kid, this kid, this little kid that I, that I watched grow up that used to, the, what I was standing there, you know, like head lolling back, uh, insensibly on drugs.
And then I'd look over and there's this fiber.
I recognize that shape of a person.
And then I, then I looked over and I'm like, Oh, Hey, Hey kid, why don't you go here?
Here's a, here's a mission for you.
Why don't you run up the stairs, turn the bathtub on, and then wait for it to fill up.
And he would just stare at me, right?
But at one point, he was probably six years old.
I had sobered up.
Or right about that time.
Yeah.
And I was standing there and he was staring at me.
And, uh, and I said something to somebody else in the room, like, um, yeah, well, you know, as somebody with a mustache, I, uh, I, you know, I can't eat that.
I can't eat that moussaka because it, uh, I'll smell it the rest of the week.
You're about to take a bold political stance.
No.
No, no, it was something about the mustache.
And he's standing there staring at me and he goes, you don't have a mustache.
You have two mustaches.
And I was like, shut up, dude.
Damn it.
Yeah.
Like, get out of here.
You're blowing my cover, kid.
Because he was looking out of the mouths of babes, right?
He's looking and he's like, well, they don't connect in the middle.
So there's two of them.
That was, that was my role.
A lot of the time was to be that particular piece of shit.
Oh my God.
Well, I carried that around for 10 years where I was walking around like, uh, you know, I technically I have two mustaches.
Um,
And also, as we talked about, you have like your eyebrows are pretty blonde.
Your facial hair is pretty blonde.
You grow a lot of beard fast, historically, as far as I know.
Yeah, a lot of beard fast.
But the mustache, you know, it takes a little cultivation.
But whether or not that was true, you felt true.
You felt like you had two mustaches.
I did.
I felt like I had two mustaches.
Otherwise, it wouldn't have bothered you.
Felt like that's what everybody was saying.
I mean, it'll be like him coming up and saying, actually, you're an avocado.
And you go, I'm not an avocado.
I'm a grown-ass man.
Or, you know, you walk in and a guy elbows another guy and he goes, here comes two mustaches.
Here comes Stephen Jones.
You know, I can't have that.
No, no, no, no, no, no.
You know, so that's why I think for all those years, every time the Long Winters would have a photo session, I'd have had a beard for 18 months.
And they'd be like, okay, we're taking photos for the new record.
It's going to be like, we're going to spend all this money, get a professional photographer.
I'd shave my beard the night before.
Right.
And so in all of our promo photos, I look like a Ross gal.
And then I would immediately start growing my beard back like two days later.
And I look back at those pictures.
I'm like, that's not what I look like.
I don't look like I don't look like a guy that's that just got out of a steam.
I look like, you know, I look like a big furry fella.
But that's not.
But I was worried.
I was worried that the fans would be like, hey, why doesn't his mustache connect in the middle?
That's weird.
Is there something wrong with him?
Well, sure.
They would see that as some kind of appropriate character deficit, just as you have.
And that's what it is.
Right.
And I think a lot of guys think this about their beard, that it reflects their character.
What is it you used to say that everybody gets the beard, the beard they deserve?
Yeah.
Or the beard, you know, it is.
It's the beard that you you are the beard.
The beard is you.
Be the ball.
See the ball.
Be the ball.
Well, it's hard to see the ball when you keep talking.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You know, it's hard to get over how we are.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It is so hard to get over.
It's hard to get over how we are.
And I think sometimes we think that something's going to come along that's going to get us over how we are.
Absolutely.
And if we can just keep it going until then, I recently heard someone refer to this sort of living as living the provisional life.
Yeah, we talked about this a couple of episodes.
Yes, yes.
The idea that, like, I'm just going to keep faking it until my real life comes along.
Yeah.
But, like, yeah, I mean, you don't even have to be sort of magically real thinker that I am to, like, see something in that where you're like, well, there's more proof that I'm a piece of shit.
And now your fans know, too, because look at you, Johnny Two Mustache.
Yeah.
I was having a conversation about this yesterday because I'm trying really hard to find out who I am in terms of who I'm going to be now.
And we've talked about this quite a bit in the last few months.
And I think a lot of that comes down to
Uh, I, I, I have always gone on adventures.
I think of them as adventures.
A lot of the time at adventures are not as not meant to be fun necessarily.
They're not meant to be, they're not a vacation.
Um,
they are meant to be adventures.
And adventures have a lot of things that go along with them.
And some of that is discomfort.
Some of it is... It's discomfort.
It's inconvenience.
And I feel like a difference... I mean, I don't want to be too cute with words, but I think what you're describing is you are open to...
You perhaps even welcome to the idea that there are wrinkles in this that you can't prepare for and that will in some ways test who you are.
Yeah, exactly.
And what I realized is that over the last 10 years, although I continued having all kinds of adventures,
The actual discomfort of them was moderated all the time, because as I got older, I stayed in better hotels, I flew in better classes, and I ate better meals, and I still, on paper, was doing all kinds of interesting things, but...
It became more and more predictable, more and more regulated.
I had standards.
I expected it to turn out certain ways.
I turned down things that didn't pay well enough or didn't look tight.
It's almost like you developed some kind of dignity.
That's the thing, right?
I got older.
I know that's not a word people like to use.
I got more dignity.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, lovely, wholesome dignity.
They're like, you know what, I'm going to stop listening to the world that tells me that I have to always be unhappy, as unhappy as the unhappiest person they can imagine.
Right, right.
Well, so I was having dinner with my sister, and she was talking about Kathmandu and what a wonderful climate there is there.
And I said, well, isn't it really cold in the winter?
And she's like, no, the thing about Kathmandu is it's always about 70 degrees.
It's like, it's like a tropical latitude and it's not, you know, there's mountains all around it.
You can stand there and look up and you're looking.
Is that where that is?
Yeah.
Or Nepal.
Nepal.
Sorry.
Yeah.
Um, but she said, you know, Katmandu is actually like really, uh, it's really nice there.
Really nice climate.
And I'm all of a sudden I'm thinking like, oh, Katmandu, why have I never been there?
Like I should go to Katmandu.
And, uh, and I'm, and I say to her, well, is it, um, what did I say?
I said, is it modern modern?
And what I meant was, are there a nice hotel?
And can I go to Kathmandu without being in a situation where I can't drink the water or that I am going to be in a state of prolonged discomfort?
And she looked at me and she said, no.
No.
And what she meant was not that there's not a modern Kathmandu, but that, no, you cannot just go there.
What was it?
The expectations behind a question like that are not going to serve you well in Kathmandu?
Well, just that you cannot...
You cannot go to Kathmandu in the same way that you can go to Dallas or the same way you can even go to Athens and protect yourself entirely by way of making certain reservations and working with certain companies and paying extra money that you could insulate yourself from what is Nepal, what is Kathmandu.
And I realized that was never a question I ever would have asked.
In fact, I would have considered it beneath me to think that way, right?
What, you're going to go to Kathmandu and need a nice hotel?
But that was my first thought was like, I'd really like to go there, but does the hotel have...
Uh, bath.
I mean, I can have a bath in my room and she's like, what are you talking?
You know, like, and that's not, we never, neither of us ever thought that way.
And so in thinking about, and that was a, that was an eye opener for me because I, in trying to figure out like how, who I am now.
I'm having to make some choices, right?
Have I gotten to the point where if I want to go to Israel and want to actually see everything that I can't, because I'm not rich, right?
So it's never been the case that I could just buy my way out of discomfort.
I can't just have people show up the day before.
I get why you're saying that, but part of it also is like,
if it were me i would hear that maybe slightly differently i don't know i don't know it wasn't there but like i would hear that as um hey help set my expectations like on a range for what kind of stuff goes on there like you've traveled there i'd probably travel and stay in relatively similar accommodations like you know what i mean like isn't that kind of part of it we're trying to just set a level of what you could expect there or did it was it as sort of you're getting old as it sounds
I think what happens to a lot of people is they get into their 50s and they start drawing a line through certain ideas that they had that like, well, actually, I'm never going to do that.
I'm never going to go to a place where I am going to be
Uh, it, it, it, where I'm going to have to have a relationship with bugs again.
Right.
I'm never, I'm never going to go someplace where there's not, um, where I can't drink the water.
And, and that is just because, and, and that feels like to a lot of people growth and maturity.
Um, those are things that you do.
You explore the world that way when you're young and you don't know better, but after you get to a certain point, you don't have to do that anymore.
And you can go to only places that, that make you that where you're in a bubble.
But isn't there, I mean, there aren't a ton of, you know, the type of 60 year old that's out there with a backpack on.
is a small, small subset of traveling 60 years.
But isn't part of it also like when you're old enough, you've had enough miles on the tires to look at something and go, oh, that thing that's just been hanging around forever, certainly there's going to be things like, you know, Mike Swears could not join the Marines today.
He's too old.
Whereas there was a time in his life where that's something that probably seems like he could have done forever.
Right.
Because that's all in the future.
Anything can happen.
Oh, I still have time.
I could still, you know, go to Paris and do this.
I could still ride a boat in Venice, all that kind of stuff.
Isn't part of it also, though, like apart from those, there's the things where you're like making tough decisions about reality.
But isn't it also some of it just shedding stuff that you should have always known was kind of bullshit?
Like in my case, not you maybe, but me, I'm never going to walk across Europe.
And for me to still have that hanging around today wouldn't make me a stronger person.
It would just make me somebody who's dishonest with his particular self.
Well, and that may be what it is that I'm talking about because until very recently, in my head, I was still prepared to visit every corner of the world.
And I was not going to fly to Ho Chi Minh City and stay at the Hilton and take day trips out to to see, you know, a model village.
But I was going to fly and buy a Vespa that was made out of like stapled Coke cans.
And I was going to drive it online.
Hanoi.
You're Steve McQueen.
And you can't do that.
He would look so much like Steve McQueen.
You can't do it and also stay in nice hotels the whole time, right?
And have a kid in school.
And have a kid, right.
Have a kid in school.
And do your podcast every week with your friend.
And so, but I'm not prepared to
I'm not actually prepared to let that go yet.
I'm not prepared to say, wait, I can't, I never was going to do that because I actually, I actually was, I just didn't get around to it yet.
And you know, what kind of 70 year old do I want to be?
One that looks back at, at, uh, at 50 and thinks, oh, I thought I was so old then.
And I thought I was so incapable then of living in a state of discomfort.
But in fact, I was wrong.
I was beautiful then and I was young and I was tough and I could do things still.
And I, I think when I'm 70, I want to look back at 50 and think I knew then that I was still young and that I was still, I could still suffer and get stuff out of it and not just suffer and, and think like, why am I doing this?
I could be home.
I could, you know, I have literally, I have a bathtub in my house.
That's just sitting there vacant because I couldn't get around to Airbnb-ing my place while I went to Kathmandu.
But I don't know.
That's going to require that I achieve an escape velocity from gravity that's gotten stronger.
Gravity on my planet has gotten stronger.
because the empire aren't there ways to contextually adjust it i mean not everything has to be obviously all the way in all the way out it's not like you have to just suddenly reach some kind of a formal milestone where you say well i'm definitely not who i ever thought i would be i mean aren't there ways that you can narrow that focus and interest and kind of re-interrogate yourself about what you'd like to be doing with the body you're in now
Yeah.
Yeah.
I think that's what I'm doing.
You know, I think it's healthy.
I mean, I think, well, I think, right.
Instead of just saying like, well, this is what I'm doing now and this is doing, doing the opposite or, you know, it seems less healthy to me.
The whole, like, you know, I, I, yeah, I'm big, strong man.
I'm going to go join the proletariat or something like that.
And I'm going to go, you know, yeah.
I woke up this morning and my knees were swollen because sometimes I sleep and I lock my knees when I'm sleeping.
And then I'm like, yeah, well, yeah.
And that's in the nicest, most comfortable, most commodious, you know, accommodations one could have.
And I was uncomfortable as I stand in the shower thinking about my life.
But would you be okay with that approach of saying like, well, maybe it's time to like, you know, change the way I hold the scissors when I trim the mustache of my life?
I think it always boils down to, am I here because I made a positive choice to be here?
Or am I here because of a lack of choosing?
Am I living a life right now that is the result of coming to crossroads and not making a choice, but just sort of go?
And the thing is, I go.
I go with the flow.
And I'm proud of it.
But you can also go with the flow and just end up in a, you just end up in the shallows or you end up in an eddy.
And I look around and it's like.
Well, you end up like somebody in a Gus Van Zandt movie.
Like, you don't, I mean, you do know.
You mean a teenager living in a squat and having.
But less sexy.
I see.
Being some kind of like Portland tumbleweed.
Like that's a lot cooler when you look like, you know, Keanu Reeves in the 90s and a lot less fun when you look like Chet Baker in the 80s.
Ha ha ha.
No, he lost all his teeth.
Well, and I want to be, I also want to be reliable, which I never wanted to be before.
Like I do.
That doesn't seem very sexy when you're younger.
Right.
To be reliable.
Yeah.
Right.
And it does feel like that now it feels, it feels important to me that I'm reliable, that I'm accountable to you, that every week we're here and that I'm accountable to the people that rely on me.
And how do I not let that accountability be a boat anchor?
You just go be reliable in Kathmandu.
Be reliable and be in Kathmandu.
Can you do that?
I don't know.
It's your trip, man.
I know.
Bring everybody along.
Bring everybody along.
Maybe you'll be the dead weight.
You know what I'm saying?
If I bring everybody along?
I don't know.
Maybe you stay back in the room and watch your stories.
Watch your telenovelas and everybody else, and they go climb whatever, I guess.
Annapurna.
Annapurna.
I think that's a movie production team.
Now, where's Mount Everest?
Do we still call it Mount Everest?
I don't know.
It might have four names for all we know.
What did Denali used to be?
McKinley.
What's K2?
K2 still.
I'm sure K2 has a very long name that people call it, and I don't know what it is.
Well, we just want to let our audience know, John and I are going to start doing a land acknowledgement before we record, so you can all look forward to that.
I went to a thing the other day.
We feel bad about it, but we're keeping the land.
Next.
I went to a thing the other day, and it was a... Such a flex.
It was a private tour.
I got a private tour.
Somebody reached out to me.
They'd seen an Instagram post I did.
They said, hey, I'm a publicist for a local utility.
Will you come?
I'll give you a private tour of this retired industrial facility.
And I said, I would like that very much.
How many Ronkins does the meter go up to?
Well, I mean, and I love that.
Right.
Like, oh, wow.
Am I going to get am I going to meet the toxic Avenger?
Yes, I hope.
And and so I show up and I do.
I bring my little family because I'm like, hey, we're going to go down into the bowels of a thing and see a thing that used to run the electricity.
And you're coming because that's the kind of life we're leading.
And everybody was like, grouse, grumble, grouse.
But we got there and it's amazing, right?
It's amazing.
All these giant dials that were each one.
Was it like a power facility?
Yeah, like an old power plant.
Oh, that's cool.
And we're walking around.
And so there's a woman who's accompanying us, who is the official guide.
And we go out and we're looking at the power plant.
We're about to go in and she does a landing.
And it's just for the five of us.
And, uh, and we all nodded along.
Um, and then afterwards, uh, we were leaving the power facility and I realized that my friend who had converted an old gas station into an art gallery, uh,
And that art gallery was just across the tarmac area from this old power plant.
And he and I had gone over to the power plant a couple of times and peered at it through the fence and gone, wow, we should try and get in there.
And he had turned this gas station into an art gallery over the course of 20 years.
And he's a guy that's really good at writing grants.
So he just wrote grants.
Like an old timey gas station, like an old shelf filling station, two or four pumps, but not like a super America.
Yeah.
No, like a ding ding, like an old.
Like the place in town here that's like an oyster bar that used to be.
Exactly.
A place where people in paper hats would come running out and change.
I love stuff like that.
I love stuff like that.
So it's an art gallery now and I look and he's having an event.
There's people pouring in and out.
Uh, and there's art on the walls and there's music playing.
And so I'm like, Hey family, now we're going to go from that environment to this environment.
And they're all grouse, grouse, grouse.
We just want to get home and eat macaroni and cheese.
And I'm like, no, no, we're, you know, we're, I'm alive again and you're going to be alive with me.
And so we go to this art thing and it's great.
And my family's having fun.
And my daughter realizes that you can climb up on the roof of the gas station now, and there's a rain garden up there.
And so she's running around, and there are dogs and stuff.
And I'm standing, I'm talking to my friend and his girlfriend, who's a very accomplished person in another field.
And we're standing there, and I go, it's interesting.
I was just over at the thing, and the tour guide gave a land acknowledgement before we went into the power plant.
And both he and his girlfriend made no change in their affect.
And we had been having a conversation where we were each making a reference and the other one would go, ha ha, yeah, exactly.
And would you read from that?
Yeah, well, that's not so weird.
That happens all the time.
Well, I didn't know what to read.
And so it was the one time in our conversation where that where I very briefly just got blank affect from enough so that that later that night I sent him a text.
And I was like, hey, I made that reference to land acknowledgement and got a blank affect from you.
And I just want to check in with you and make sure I'm not sure what.
I'm not sure what I'm checking in with you.
But we've known each other a long time.
And I didn't mean anything.
I didn't want to put something in the room that didn't belong there.
And I don't know where you're.
like what your political predilection is or whatever in that space.
And he wrote back and said, oh, no, there was nothing in that.
It's just that everything I do now has a land acknowledgement at the beginning of it.
And I was coming at it from a place like— Now, that's interesting.
I don't get—I don't see that.
I hear about it.
I read about it on Twitter.
I talk about it with Sherman Alexie, the disgraced Native American writer that I— Oh, is he disgraced?
I think of him as being an NPR guy.
He was until he was— Was he a sex guy?
Well, he metooed, and then he got kicked out of all the places, but then—
But then that was really early on.
And now there's this.
Now people are starting to realize that maybe we go back and look at that.
But of course, they never want to go back.
And so he's in a he's in a liminal space where every time he releases a book, it still sells.
I get it.
The 300000 copies on Amazon in the first day.
But he also isn't invited to go to Sketch Fest.
And I had written.
I had texted Sherman a few days before because Omnibus was doing something about, and land acknowledgement came up there.
Oh, really?
Interesting.
Okay.
Wait, so you actually know this guy?
Oh, yeah, yeah.
Well, he's local, and we're about the same age, and he's from Spokane Reservation.
Yeah, we've known each other for a long time.
Banging around the same, yeah.
And then we got into one of those things where we would text each other some bit of news and then comment on it and laugh about it.
And, you know, he's got that reservation Indian attitude about city Indians, by which he means like people that didn't actually grow up on a res.
And so he's got a little bit of a sort of macho take on all the tribal stuff that happens up here.
And I texted him.
I was like, what do you think about land acknowledgement?
And he wrote back and was like, it's white people bullshit.
It makes, it's, there's nothing, it's all for white.
It doesn't have anything to do with us.
And I was like, oh, okay, interesting.
So anyway, what happened, what had happened was, when this woman did it, she said, it was very interesting wording.
She said, we are on the unceded land of the Duwamish.
Well,
What my family heard when we talked about it later, because the river is called the Duwamish River.
Unseated as in C-E-D-E-D.
We never gave this up.
The Duwamish never gave the land up.
Right, right.
My family heard the land acknowledgement as not referring to the tribe, but the river itself.
And they commented on it independently, saying, it was interesting that she said that the river had not given them permission to be there.
I only know Duwamish, of course, from Richard Hugo poems.
That's the name of a river and also the name of an indigenous tribe.
Right.
Except that in the local...
Native American tribal business around here, the established, the Duwamish got disestablished.
And the other tribe, and now the Duwamish are trying to get their tribal status recognized.
Well, the other tribes around here, a lot of them are against it.
And are not just publicly against it, but like in the court against it, saying the Duwamish aren't a real tribe.
This is a fake thing where the Duwamish were always part of a different tribe.
And now this is a group of white people who have 132nd Duwamish or 132nd Native American blood who are trying to establish themselves as a tribe in order to get federal land money or something.
They're trying to lick what?
To Jimmy Hendrix their way into some benefits.
Yeah, but all around the river, there's all this Duwamish tribal stuff, you know, like signs, and there's a long house, and there's tribal interpretation stuff.
But Sherman is against them.
He's like, there is no such thing as the Duwamish.
And I'm like, but you're from Spokane.
And he's like, no, no, no, no, no.
You don't understand.
So it's super, duper, duper, double, triple complicated.
Can you imagine what it's like for Grant, previously aforementioned Grant and like South Africa?
Oh, I know.
Like when I first, I'd always known Grant.
Grant is a dear friend from college that John knows and he's a really cool guy and he's a writer and he's really smart.
He's very smart.
He's from South Africa and his family was in the tabloid business.
So he was in the tabloid business.
He used to work at the Weekly World News.
He was an editor at the Weekly World News.
But anyway, and his father was a pretty famous tabloid guy.
A lot of the tabloid guys are from South Africa.
But I remember one time, like some kind of goddamn idiot, I was like, oh, yeah, so like Nosa Mandela, that must be pretty wild.
He's like, yeah, it's complicated.
And I'm like, yeah, really?
Yeah.
And it's like, you know, like I'd gone to see Winnie Mandela speak at USF and I'd listened to special AKA and I thought I was, you know, pretty caught up on everything.
And, but like really it's how crazy different is it from the troubles in Northern Ireland where it's like, yeah, everybody did some shit.
Like there's nobody who has entirely sort of clean hands in that operation.
And I'm not trying to do a good people on both sides thing.
But what I'm saying is like this, when you think, I think about the complexity of asking Grant.
Right.
what it's like to be from South Africa.
And of course, Grant is my African friend, where I'm always like, you know, listen, if you mean black person, is there a way that you could say that where you don't have to say African-American?
Because Grant's African-American and he has more translucent skin than I do.
And boy, though, is it ever complicated.
And the more you know, the more complicated it is.
I bet you're just...
I bet you're sticking your head in the tent and being like, whoa!
I bet there's a lot going on at a lot of levels in that scene.
Well, in the Pacific Northwest and in Alaska, these are some of the places where the Native Americans here were among the last to really be
uh, I mean, in a sense that the cities, all the Plains stuff, all the East coast stuff that had all, you know, the Plains stuff.
I mean, I'm not a historian of this in any sense, but I could see at least one potential difference being like, no, no, we got some pretty large ass tracts of land that we need to clear all the way from here to there.
So y'all got to move.
Right.
And whereas maybe not so much in somewhere like Spokane.
Well, in Alaska, uh,
There were whole communities still living completely subsistence lives until modern times.
And that was why the Alaska Native Claims Act was so revolutionary.
And because the Native American rights movement was happening at the same time that the pipeline was getting built.
Oh, gosh.
And the tribes up there were like, actually, you know what we're going to do?
We're going to use this opportunity to get...
Hundreds of millions of acres of land set aside for each of them.
Is that related to, like, the guys who took over Alcatraz?
Is that an allied... It was all a movement.
Yeah, I remember the occupation.
Yeah.
But that was... Was that part of an allied Native American rights movement?
Yeah.
It was part of... It was like a North American consciousness-raising era where...
where all of a sudden the rights of Native Americans were, this is what happened.
That woman that accepted the Oscar on behalf of, on behalf of Marlon Brando, it just came out not very long ago.
Did you read this?
Yeah.
She died and it turns out she wasn't Native American at all.
She was like not, she was like from New Mexico or something and just wore her hair and braid.
So, and Sherman's really conscious of all of that.
He's like all, in all of the literature programs and universities throughout the West that are like
this is our native American writing program.
He's like, none of them are natives.
They're all, they're all like one 27.
And I'm like, I don't know, man.
I, I might even fall in this between y'all, but it's, yeah, this is like almost uniquely the kind of thing I've learned to go, uh,
I want to hear all about this and I'm not going to say a word because, right?
So like, this is not my, um, this is not my area of expertise or passion or I don't know.
I don't think I'm really allowed to have that much of an opinion.
Well, and that's the thing.
Like, I, I don't know.
I don't think I have a strong opinion, but I also am interested enough in it that, uh, that it's the thing to talk about.
Right.
And that's, I guess, John, anything that's more complex than it seems is interesting.
Interesting.
Right.
Right.
And, and, and I think crucially interesting to talk about, which is a thing that we're, that this particular moment in time, now we don't feel like we can.
And that is the thing that I think a lot of us feel, wait a minute, of course we can.
Um, we're not, I'm not saying, I'm not, I'm not saying that you can't do a land acknowledgement, but I don't think, well, what's, what's really messed up is that I went home and I read the treaties and
I called them all up and I was like, let's actually see if this is the unceded land of the Duwamish, either the river or the tribe, let's see what the treaties were.
And you read about the treaties.
And of course, you can say what you want about treaties.
The U.S.
government didn't acknowledge or didn't do a good job.
But in Washington, what's crazy is the feds had to force the state of Washington to respect the treaties with the tribes.
It was the state of Washington.
that said, you can make whatever treaties you want with the federal government, but we're not going to acknowledge them.
And this went into the 1950s and 60s.
Oh my goodness.
Where the feds were like, actually state of Washington, you have to follow federal law.
And that's just blowing my mind.
I mean, sort of like Mississippi in the 60s?
Yeah, exactly that.
The state of Washington was like, well, yeah, I know that the tribes— Don't make me do a consent decree.
The tribes have a right to all the fish that were included in this, except if we ever catch them fishing on our beaches, we're going to arrest them.
And they did.
They were arresting local Indians for fishing—
It's assistance fishing?
Yeah, according to a federal tribal right, a treaty right.
And the state of Washington was like, yeah, but no.
And they did, I think.
They got a consent decree or the feds came in and said like, we're going to, I don't even know what you're going to send to the National Guard.
So lots to think about, uh, with those land acknowledgement conversations.
I don't, I still, that was the first one I'd actually experienced in person.
And I, I'm not, I, I kind of looked, I'm not sure what I looked at.
Did I look at my feet?
Did I look at the sky?
I, it kind of, uh, uh,
It was a curiosity, right?
It was not a moment of reflection.
Well, no, it was.
Well, I mean, I just wasn't reflecting on what I think it was meant to.
I was meant to reflect on the first one I ever heard was when I was in the room at a meeting.
And that was the first sort of get acquainted meeting.
And my kids then knew high school and they did it.
And that's when I turned to Madeline was like, what is this?
She's like, oh, no, they do this.
And you see they do this, like, I think before just pretty much every meeting.
So she had already experienced it.
Oh, a ton, a ton.
Yeah, yeah.
And I mean, in my head, it started, like, then I'd heard about it.
I'd seen other people.
And I was like, I'm not here.
I'm not bagging on this.
I really am not.
It just, it was a thought because I have a comic bone.
There's a part of me that thought it did feel like a flex.
Yeah.
where it was like, we just want to acknowledge we took this land and we also want to acknowledge you can't have it back.
Anyway, on with the meeting.
We just want to acknowledge that Europeans conquered almost every nation of the world.
Yeah.
Peace out.
Yeah, there's not that many.
But at the same time, like...
I mean, I would hate for anybody listening to this to walk away thinking that that means I'm like a heartless person who doesn't care about what the United States has done.
No, in fact, that sent me home to learn about the Ohlone tribe who was from like here to Monterey.
Like, it's crazy.
If you go look at the map for what they covered, they covered so much land here.
And what's partly so fascinating about it was it wasn't any kind of like a manifest destiny.
It was just little villages, village, village, village, village, village, like just, you know, little self-sustaining villages going all the way down, you know, the Pacific coast like that.
So I'm glad I did learn about that.
And, you know,
I don't know enough to say one way or another, and I don't want to be unkind to something that is a good and moral and up-to-date idea, but it feels a little bit like the perfunctoriness of how I would say grace, for example, when I was six.
Are you acknowledging the land acknowledgement right now?
I am.
I just want to say that where we are meeting today is a house that my landlord built in the 1990s with his brother.
Yeah.
His father has since passed on, and really everything I do here, I do it for you.
No.
No, no.
No, no, no.
You are... Okay, so where does that leave you with Kathmandu or similar?
How do you update your idea of who you are and what you're capable or likely to do?
I mean, that seems like a wise self-knowledge kind of thing to update.
Yeah.
What's insane is that late last night, I got a text from a friend that I'd done some traveling with over the years.
And the text said, hey, I got invited to a three-day seminar in Tel Aviv, and I don't want to go unless you come with
Tel Aviv is the capital?
It was the capital, not Jerusalem.
It was, and now it's Jerusalem.
Okay.
Although, you know, depending on how you want to read that story, let's not get into Jerusalem right now, you and me.
The complexity of all Abrahamic religions is slightly beyond the scope of this episode.
At least this episode, that's right.
Yeah.
So she says, I want you to go just because I would have way more fun in Israel if you were there and we were seeing things and you could tell me what I was looking at.
Yeah, sure.
And I've always wanted to go, of course.
And we actually have listeners there that I hear from periodically.
One in Tel Aviv and others sprinkled throughout the country.
Because as you know, this is an internationally popular podcast.
I do know that.
And I said, here's the thing.
I said, I want to go to
But it's going to require that I make some changes around here.
Because in order to go to Israel, I'm going to have to say, look.
You'd potentially miss at least one episode of this show.
I might, although I might do it from there.
In the middle of the night, I'll call you and we'll be like, hey, look at that.
International podcast.
Um, but I would, yeah, there are things I would be missing, right?
I might miss a, uh, like a softball game or I might miss president's day, but people here are going to say, wait a minute, where are you going for the last three years?
We have not done anything where we weren't all together.
And for you to go to Israel, a place that, you know, if I said we're all going to Israel, I would get a lot of grousing.
But for me to go to Israel on my own with a different friend on a mission, on an adventure—
would be not what we've been doing around here, which is making dinner and watching episodic television.
Oh, and so you're tying it all together.
You're tying together several weeks of our discussions here.
So you're also talking about the zones.
All the zones.
Right.
And one of the... Is that incredibly obvious?
I don't know if that was obvious.
No, I think you've done a wonderful job.
Because you're talking about different things here, but they're related things.
And one of the things is the who am I now thing, but also the getting out of the...
Not everything challenging is yellow, right?
Yeah, and not everything that feels like danger zone, a lot of it is just challenge zone.
And coming to the understanding of like, wait a minute, I also need to have a challenge zone that's separate from the challenge zone I'm trying to encourage my whole family to join me in.
Right?
Like a lot of just normal going to power plants.
That isn't really challenge zone to me.
That's just what I used to do.
Challenge zone is going to Tel Aviv.
And I want that.
I want that in my life, but I want to maintain my responsibilities.
I want to be the right person.
I get it.
And, and I used to feel very strongly that I am doing a better job on behalf of my relationship with my kid.
When I go do something like that, because she's modeling somebody that is, that's living their life.
Right.
And not modeling somebody that looks at parenting as a sacrifice they have to make.
Yeah.
And I'm not taking her to heroin parties and saying, you know, you just wander around and stare at these junkies while we get high.
I'm very much not doing that.
A talking junkie.
But I'm also not...
I'm also not saying, well, since I'm your dad, I can't do anything anymore.
And I just have to wait for you to grow up before I do anything interesting.
Yeah.
And so what do you want to do?
Which TV show do you want to watch?
Because I'm stuck here with you.
Yeah.
That's not a way to live either.
So all of this just all happened in the space of a weekend.
And now here you are, and now it's Monday.
And think about the land acknowledgments you have to make in Tel Aviv.
Jesus.
It's the land acknowledgments all the way down.
Oh, gosh.
Yeah, that whole area, that's going to be complicated.
I'd like to acknowledge the Sumerians.
And like, who's in a position to make the acknowledgement?
Because, you know, I mean, I'm not going to get weird, but like, so you got a lot to think about.
When I look at my ravine here, it is so...
steep and inhospitable.
And at no point in the last 10,000 years, would there have been any reason for anybody to come up here?
I look at it.
It's like Florida.
Exactly.
I think one time in the last 15,000 years, probably a young man,
Like a teenage boy whacked his way up this stream one time and got up here and was like, there's nothing up here and went back down to the water and was like, nope, we can keep moving.
We can move down to the next stream and let's see if there's anything good up there.
So when I look at this particular plot of land, I think it was always abandoned.
I think nobody ever wanted it.
Oh, so you can acknowledge whatever you want.
You can acknowledge like Paul Revere and the Raiders or something.
Like nobody's going to stop you.
Well, unfortunately, I have to acknowledge the people across the way who put rhododendrons over the property line.
Oh, see.
Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
Invasive, right?
Yeah, exactly.
Talk about invasive species.
White people.
Invasive species.
Mm-hmm.
Wait a minute, was that a Susie and the Banshees reference?
No, P-Funk.
Oh.
I have been listening to Susie and the Banshees really, really a lot.
I showed my daughter the Jeepers Creepers video.
Oh my God.
Because I was walking around going, Jeepers Creepers, where'd you get those peepers?
And instead of playing her the Cab Calloway version or whatever, I was like, no, no, no, let's just go right to the Susie and the Banshees.
The thing is, I knew that because that got play on, at that point, probably MTV, 120 Minutes.
And, of course, I knew, like, my favorite Susie and the Banshee song, I got in so late.
My favorite was a song called, a dance song called Cities and Dust.
You know that song?
Oh, your city lies in the... Oh, yeah.
Cool tune.
Oh, my goodness.
I've been listening to that Juju album, which I think I'd heard probably a little bit in college.
But it is... I said this the other night on the internet, but it's almost like everything that made New Wave feel exciting kind of passed through that album in some ways.
You can hear the Zenyatta Mandata guitar stab kind of stuff.
You can hear like what would become like New Order-ish things.
And it's like, God damn, England, man, they're weird.
But they knew good music to like.
The problem is now you can find all those pictures of Susie wearing a swastika armband from the old days.
And then you can't listen to that anymore.
She's canceled.
Is that right?
Well, it might start here.
It might start right now.
Did she do any land acknowledgments as far as you know?
No, I think it was ironic, but of course that's not an excuse.
Stay out of Poland, Susie.
What an episode!