Ep. 506: "The Shame Police"
hello hi john ha ha there he is counselor how are you your honor your honor ah i'll allow it it's early yeah i'm still getting over the thing oh wow it's uh it's troubling
It's dragging you down, is it?
No, it's boring to talk about, but I'm kind of like, whoa.
I'm just kind of out of it.
No, I think it's important to talk about.
No, it's boring.
Why is it boring?
No, we oughtn't talk about these things.
No, it's, oh, is this one of these waspy things where you're not supposed to talk about your health or your finances?
Yes.
No, no, it's important that everyone know about it.
Why?
Well, people aren't aware that this is a very dangerous virus, this coronavirus.
It's going around.
Yeah, it's, you know, people should be aware that.
I think I saw a piece in The Economist about it.
It's definitely out there, you know, so hey, everybody, you know, let's be safe out there.
It's out there is right.
It's right.
And it's attacking my immune system.
So I'm like, I'm a little bit like multi-organ wrecked right now.
oh no no it's fine no no no listen listen when it happens to a baby it's sad when it happens to a senior man yeah yeah it's okay it'll be all right wait a minute were you are you the senior man in this story i think so oh when you said senior man i of course oh you mean senior senior man
No, not a senior.
Well, yeah, yes, a senior.
But also, I was picturing a guy in a golf cart in the villages who had a garage band.
Actually, we haven't talked in a while.
I should tell you some updates.
Broadcasting live from my carport here in the villages where I am assistant mayor.
Now you've given me coronavirus.
Through the whole thing.
It's beautiful down here.
It's sunny and warm all the time.
We have golf cart races.
Now, do you think that you have long corona?
Well, I've heard things.
Sure, I mean.
I always assume people are just being nice.
No, I don't think so.
It's probably just, you know, it's, I don't know.
One thing led to another.
I imagine, like, think about some kind of like a Forged in Fire thing where you hammer something flat.
I'm imagining that I have, yeah, I imagine I have a Corona that's been hammered kind of flat.
So I didn't get it all in one big thunk.
Right.
It's it's metered out kind of like drip by drip.
But anyway, it'll be fine.
I'm just really sick of my snot.
I don't want to I don't want to give too much away and private correspondence here on the program.
But but you said you had a stress bump.
Is that right?
I did.
No, I talked about this another program.
Yeah.
Yeah, I did.
I got it.
I got a stress bump.
And I think it was mentioned on this show that we will be doing a very special episode, maybe with video.
Of just stress bumps through the ages?
Well, I mean, I think, you know, the thing is, don't become a doctor if you don't want to fill up a cadaver.
That's what Heraclitus says.
I haven't gotten to that chapter, but yeah.
Yeah, well, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep.
Hippocrates said that in the New Testament.
Hippocrates?
Hippocrates.
They have a good statue of him at UC.
Yeah.
Uh, I... Yes, I did, but that's mostly gone, you know, still abundance of caution.
I'm sorry, I don't mean to bitch and moan.
It's so unseemly, but... No, I'm probing you for this.
You're not bitching and moaning.
No, I'm very interested.
Oh, thank you.
Yes, please proceed any way you want, John.
I'm just happy to be here.
I'm somebody that has what you're describing, which is that no matter what the illness...
I will always go through seven stages of it, right?
Yeah, you got like a Kubler-Ross thing going on.
Yeah.
There are those people that are like, oh, I got a sniffle and like two days later, they're fine.
Yeah.
You know, my daughter's mother slash partner, she got COVID and she was in a hotel in Portland and I think she stayed an extra night.
And then was like, I'm fine.
Yeah.
And came home.
Whereas if I get an allergy to a grass, it's probably, I'm on a three-week journey.
Yeah.
You know what?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Three-week journey, it's going to go up into the sinuses, down into the lungs.
I feel like all that stuff is so different for everybody.
Yeah.
Yeah, I mean, yeah, I feel you.
And like you, you're somebody like, in some ways you're a little bit like my lady friend, where I think when you go down, you go hard.
Yes.
Yeah.
down yeah she's either like you know running a lot like actually like she goes out and she runs whenever I say that I imagine it sounds like she's insane she's running she's just screaming with her arms flailing I'm gonna go run for a while now I'll just wear what I wore to work
Again, like lemon grub.
But I... Yeah, with me, it's weird.
It's weird.
My body's strange, John.
It's strange what has little... It's always been sort of odd to me in my adult life, which kinds of things.
And this is all just in my perception.
Things that have more effect on me than other people and things that have less effect on me than other people.
We don't have time to go into trauma today.
But just as far as like...
There's just some kinds of stuff where I think I'm just much less susceptible.
Also, for example.
Por ejemplo.
Por ejemplo.
Por ejemplo.
Oh, oh, oh, sorry.
Lo siento.
Por ejemplo, I can drink and drink and drink and drink and drink.
But if I eat marijuana, I get real high.
Like, unconscionably high.
That's just how my system works.
Another example, you and I both enjoy coffee.
I've enjoyed coffee since college and enjoyed coffee and had a lot of coffee and drank unconscionable amounts of coffee in my 20s when I was still kind of struggling to get up and go to my job where you wear a tie.
Yeah, coffee is great.
Yeah, we drink a pot of coffee in the morning.
And now I have reached that age.
And forgive me, I've really moved into the worst kind of bitching, which is not really bitching.
It's just John's probing.
Now I have to think, I've got to be careful about how much caffeine I drink.
Oh, afternoon.
Oh, aren't you cute?
I don't even know.
I'm not even precisely sure what time it is because I thought I was safe having...
Oh, the other thing I should mention is that also, like, my wife and I are both very – we drink low-acid coffee because it makes me feel a little bit gross in the morning.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So I mostly moved to iced tea.
Even with the iced tea, the other Friday, I was like, oh, 3.35.
Better not top that off.
You know, my dad would say – the server would come over and say, can I top off your coffee or whatever?
Yeah.
And my dad would put his hand over the cup and he'd go,
Can you, you know, give me your phone number.
And the guy would go, give me your phone number.
And my dad would say, yeah, because I'm going to call you at two in the morning if this isn't decaf.
Oh.
Wow.
Is there such a thing as pickup lines but for waiters?
Because that's pretty good.
Yeah.
Not a pickup line, but like the equivalent of a clever line for somebody that isn't necessarily somebody you want to donk.
Like, you know what I mean?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Oh, he had a million of them.
Hey, you got a long ride.
Do you want to use the restroom?
Now you're talking.
That's the kind of thing I would say because I am an old man.
Yeah, now you're talking.
Now you're talking.
Give me your phone number.
That's your catchphrase.
Give me your phone number so I'm going to call you at 2 in the morning.
Was he half and half an hour?
I made him sound a little aggressive.
He wasn't.
He was kidding.
No, no, no.
I caught that that was, he was doing a little.
But he was also not kidding.
Don't you put real coffee in there after whatever hour.
I don't know.
Was he like, I remember when I was a waiter, there were people who, and we did try to honor this.
I didn't want to make anybody sick.
The orange one was decaf and the brown one was regular, but a lot of people liked, um, they might have one cup of coffee.
Then they go with a half and half.
Well, that is to say, you know, half Sanka or whatever.
Yeah.
It's a, you know, you don't want to be too high maintenance, but at the same time, you don't want to be up at three o'clock in the morning.
Yeah.
So instead you make your waiter carry two pots of coffee.
Yeah.
Now, let me just go back to the drinking and pot thing.
When you were a drinking man, were you a blackouter or a passouter?
That's such a good question.
In the same way that you introduced me, I don't think I was over much, but in the same way that you introduced me to a new way of thinking about introversion and extroversion, I think I never really understood what it means to be a blackout drunk.
I thought that meant
Because I've been acquainted.
I've had dear friends who like, they're just like in the corner at the party, like gone.
I didn't know that it meant you keep acting like a mostly normal way, but maybe a little drunk.
You just don't sort of remember anything that happened.
How do you define blackout drunk?
Well, no, that took me a while.
I always thought, oh, you drink until you black out and you fall on the floor and then you're out cold.
But then you meet people who are like, oh, no, I started drinking and I just don't remember anything past six o'clock.
Right, right, right.
And it's like, well, we were with each other talking and partying all night long.
And it's like, yeah, but I just don't remember.
And when I learned that people were like that, oh, it was terrifying.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
How would you ever have a drink again if you lost six hours of your memory?
And they just shrug it off.
Yeah, yeah.
But, you know, I've known chronic drinkers who would lose three days.
Because they'd start drinking and then they'd follow the party to something else and they'd take some drugs.
That's so interesting.
Again, so interesting you should say that.
I had one of my crazy dreams last night.
That's too much to go into.
But one of the parts of the dreams that I remember is having this thought...
Like a thing that used to happen on a Mac and, you know, this, I don't know if this is exactly a thousand percent technically correct, but like a thing that would happen on old hard drives, old hard drives, we called them, um, on old hard drives was that your stuff would be there, but the index for your stuff got, uh, damaged, which so, I mean, like to me, like, let me just say the thing I want to say, which is, so imagine a library, uh,
a very, very, very large library and the card catalog was all, the books were out of order and the card catalog didn't work.
All the books are there, but they're very difficult to find.
Did you need a defrag?
Kind of, yeah, like run Norton Utilities on it.
But I was thinking that's an interesting thing about lots of memory things, whether it's tip of the tongue phenomenon or whether it's in this instance blackout drinking.
I mean, I know they're different things, but like, because if you've been blackout drunk,
You know that thing where somebody goes, oh, man, do you remember what you did?
And you're like, oh, I think so.
And you're like, oh, don't you remember you dropped your pants and sang a Mariah Carey song on the table?
And you're like, oh, yeah, I think I do kind of remember that.
And you know what I'm saying, though?
It's like there's something in there.
There's something residual.
And I thought about this in the context of occasionally not being able to remember a dream, but only being able to remember parts of it.
And I wonder sometimes as you get older, is my index broken?
Like I know, and you know what I mean about your tip of the tongue phenomenon?
Obviously, you know what that means.
It's where the classic example is you forget the name of an actor, but you remember their last name starts with a T or a D. Yeah.
Right?
You've got this, like, it's right on the tip of my tongue.
So you know it's in there, but you don't have access to it.
And if you wanted to get really fruity about it, you could go into my former occupation, my former career, and say, well, I think it's also true for habits and thinking.
Remembering to remember.
Remembering to think.
Remembering to do the right thing.
The kind of, you know, thinking fast and slow sort of idea of, like, remembering to think.
And I don't know.
The brain's a fucked up thing, John.
Oh, boy.
Have you ever broken your index?
And your memory, and I think you said on here, I don't think I'm talking out of school, you said on here that at a time when you were drinking a lot, one thing that was paradoxical, ironic, strange, sad, was that you always remembered everything.
Remembered every single thing.
Is that really, that's true?
Yeah, I, you know, I was like a marathon drinker, but also just a heavy volume drinker.
I could process a lot of booze through my...
through my function machine.
Yeah.
And, you know, I would just drink what – if I would like name the quantities now, it would seem like the kind of like exaggeration that people do when they're like, oh, I used to drink 50 beers.
The way people talk about weightlifting or something.
Yeah, just sort of like, well, that's – yeah, okay, sure, Mr. Hyperbole.
But I would drink a lot of booze just in quantity and I would never pass out and I would never –
not remember and so that involves now a lot of memories that i wish i could just be like well you know that was probably not my finest hour yeah your index is too good but then i would wake up you know uh
Because that booze, you know, there's all that sugar in it.
So I would, you know, I'd eventually go to sleep and then I would pop awake four hours later.
Yeah.
Two or three in the morning, you can really have an unexpected.
And for some folks, for like, I don't know if you still use a, I forget, I don't know what your CPAP status or your apnea status is, but it's something where like those things really do kind of work together where like you think you're asleep, but you're not really asleep.
You're sleeping cold.
And then you're right, though.
Sometimes it's almost like somebody gave you a shot of adrenaline.
Like you wake up like bolt upright and a little bit groggy because of all that sugar.
All those mornings where I would be walk of shaming through the town from some far flung location.
And it's the time of morning where all the normals are going to work.
And so I'd be coming back through the city and all the suits and people in there.
You're like Waylon Spender's coughing and cigarette butts come out.
Yeah, just like, ah!
And I'm only 24, right?
But I still am basically like Dan Aykroyd in Trading Places with a half a salmon inside my fur coat.
Ah!
Ah!
He starts eating it and the beard's in it.
It's funny.
I remember really feeling like, oh, sure, this other world, I keep forgetting it's here.
It's the world of people who are going to appointments on time and who have jobs.
And it's easy to forget that it's there until you have that.
Oh my God, it's 6 a.m.
and everybody around me, you know, I'm nudging people like, are you alive?
Are you alive?
Yeah, they're all alive.
So I'm going to get out.
Kind of like your own personal version of 28 Days Later.
Like you wake up in the hospital and start wondering, and you're like, what happened?
Oh, it's really weird out here.
Oh, it's the day.
Yeah.
So fortunately, those years are...
Long long behind but I'm but there's still I think part of it is that my memory of it is so good.
It really helps with the Keep the alcoholics anonymous of it, you know, like yeah people come to me all the time and they're like, oh I'm at this stage of wretchedness and I go yeah, yeah, yeah Although it's been many years
I recall that stage of wretchedness quite well.
You know, it always feels very present to me as an option, right?
So that's helpful.
Yeah.
I mean, you know, I think this is a big challenge for everybody.
I don't know, probably everywhere, but it's such a facile thing, but it's something I think about a lot.
You know, we tend to be much more sympathetic to the things, problems from which we suffer.
You know, where if it's something that we've, you think about things with regard to money or status or like all these different kinds of things, we all have touchstones in our life.
There's probably a lot of us, if we're being honest, we've been on both sides of a lot of that stuff.
But like you remember that so clearly.
And I wonder sometimes, though, if it makes people a little bit unsympathetic to the stuff that they don't consider a problem they've had.
I think very much so.
This is now practically the subject of the show, really, is the like, hey, you think I like being like this?
Not necessarily the alcohol part.
I do like alcohol.
But the part of like, well, you know, just the utter incuriosity of somebody who's not broken in the same way that you are.
You asked about the CPAP.
And, you know, I was this time last year.
I was having such awful sleep, so little of it.
And the sleep I did have was so awful and it was affecting my life in such a profound way.
And I could look back over the course of my life and see that, you know, periods of sketchy sleep and
I went and had all the sleep testing done and they said, you know, you do have apnea, although it's at the low end of the spectrum.
I think I told you, you know, they said you had six instances last night.
And so that, that qualifies you.
And I was like, wow, is that a lot?
And they were like, well, no, some people have 200 instances.
And I was like, oh, so it seems I'm at the really low end.
And they said, yeah, basically you, uh,
are just qualified.
And I was like, so the range is somewhere between six and more than 200.
That seems like a pretty wide range, but I got the CPAP machine and I tried it for weeks and it just compounded my problem in the sense that my problem is I don't want to go to sleep.
Right.
You're resistant when you're awake, right?
You're sort of like resistant.
Maybe in the way of like, it reminds me of like how I was, again, somebody who was terminally late for everything.
I wasn't late for school that much, but I had a pretty good idea like, hey, it's 6.15, the alarm went off.
I know I have to be inside the school in one hour.
I have a sense of an hour even at 14, but I knew at a certain point that I was pushing it, pushing it, pushing it, but I kept going anyway because I was so resistant to giving in.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And I do it.
I do it every night of my life, right?
Like last night, I'm laying in the bathtub.
It's three o'clock in the morning.
And I'm saying to myself, at two o'clock in the morning, you said to yourself, and I quote, time to get out of the bath.
should be asleep you you want to be asleep your body your eyelids are closing you want to be asleep they're basically getting a lecture from daytime you kind of yeah like that was an hour ago and you have burned another hour of what would be sleep you have to get up at nine you know marlo has a swim meet right right right and so
So the CPAP machine just made that harder.
I'm laying in bed.
Cause you, cause you didn't want to use it.
I'm not, well, I have it on and I'm going and I'm like, well, I don't want to go to sleep already.
Now I really don't want to go to sleep because I feel like this, um, monster is going to strangle me in the night.
Right.
But during that period and you, you remember a year ago, I had all this new sympathy for
uh people with sleep apnea because i had it right and i suddenly and this is also where we get into the well as a as a father of a daughter type stuff right exactly and when oh yeah i i shouldn't have done that when i was having anxiety attacks during the uh trying to be aloha era of this program i all of a sudden had a very new take
On people who reported anxiety and particularly debilitating anxiety because I was like, oh, oh, I know what a panic attack is now.
And that that's bad.
And it's not something you think your way out of.
It's not something that you just will away.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
It's not a willpower issue.
It's not, you're not like a, you're not weak.
And like so many things that you can't think your way out of, it feels like something you can think your way out of.
Right.
Right.
You're like, okay, nope.
Nope.
Yeah.
And then it's like, oh geez.
But, but over the, so what happened, what had happened was when I resolved the lawsuit with my neighbors, which I did in February of this year,
I resolved it in a way like all great lawsuit resolutions where neither party was satisfied, but we signed a binding resolution and so we were fixed in our state of dissatisfaction.
And immediately I had a good night's sleep.
Oh, wow.
And ever since then, although I fight sleep...
As soon as I go to sleep, I sleep just like a bear until I am made to wake up, right?
And I, all of a sudden, although sleep apnea, it turns out, was less of a problem for me, what I suddenly had great sympathy for was how much stress can impact sleep.
your well-being from top to bottom.
I wonder if a lot of people have thought about this as much as I have.
I'll just share this idea.
Almost certainly no.
Almost certainly no.
I hope not.
Thinking less, guys.
Check it out.
It's a good idea.
Just do it.
Just will yourself to think less, Merlin.
Why don't you just think less?
Have you thought about this, Merlin?
Try melatonin.
Go for a walk.
Just go out.
Really, it's so good.
Touch grass, pal.
Oh, fuck me gently.
The thing is that... What was I talking about?
Oh, you were talking about something that you think about more than other people.
Yeah.
Something I think about more than other people is that...
Well, for one thing, contra what your brain tells you, the sort of what I've called the mean dad voice yelling at you is maybe not always the best approach, although that seems to be one of your go-tos is kind of yelling at yourself.
I can't change that.
But a thing that it took me a long time to realize, I don't know, I'm not a true Hobbesian.
I don't think about everything in terms of predator prey and, you know,
Not everything.
You know, man against man or whatever.
Not everything.
I mean, trips to the Walgreens, yes.
Well, just things involving other people and things.
But it's difficult with, again, sounds so facile, but it's really difficult.
Let's start here.
It's difficult to relax if you don't feel safe.
So, like, if you are, you know, sort of pinned down in Stalingrad and trying to stay alive, well, obviously, it's probably going to be a little bit difficult to adjust, you know, but it's true every night you go to sleep.
If you never thought about this, stop listening right now.
But if you have trouble going to sleep, if you think about like all the things with stress and maybe heartbeat or any of that kind of stuff or racing thoughts, monkey mind, as the Buddhists call it, you know, all that kind of stuff.
There's some aspect to that in my estimation that comes down to not feeling safe.
Right.
And you can't... I mean, if you're a deer taking care of baby deers and it's time to go to the water, you're going to keep your head on a swivel because there could be lions and stuff running at you.
But to get to sleep at night, I think that's a thought technology that can be useful.
I don't want to cause anybody to sleep poorly as a result of realizing they don't feel safe.
But if you're having trouble falling asleep...
There are environmental things.
Everybody tells you, right?
Make it dark.
Don't look at your phone, all this stuff.
Fine.
If it works, that's great.
But I feel like step zero in some ways is to realize whether or not you feel safe right now and what you could do to make yourself feel either a little more safe or a little less endangered.
Because it's a slightly different process from just putting your phone down and yelling at yourself.
Your brain's telling you it's not safe right now.
Don't go to sleep because you're not safe.
Why am I not safe?
Well, I'm not safe because there's all these million things I haven't done or whatever, that kind of thing.
Yeah, but I think my problem is that the yelling at myself voice, often because I was raised by people who were immediately post-Victorian,
Immediately as in like just chronologically after Victorians?
Yeah, my grandmother was born still during the reign of Queen Victoria.
So a lot of her and my grandfather on all sides.
So a lot of the manners and mannerisms and habits of thought did not change.
I mean, you know, I follow one of these Seattle in Ye Olden Times
Um, Instagram accounts and people posting, you know, old, old photos.
And I, I see these photos of, um, you know, Seattle in 1908 and I go, uh, and you just marvel at the fact that like there are elephants in the streets and
And then I go, wait a minute.
Really?
You know, just like, you know, it's just like the town is pre-automobile for the most part.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
And I go, and I think like, oh, ye olden times.
And then I go, wait a minute.
My grandmother was 20, right?
Like she was, she is one of these people in this photograph in these giant hats, right?
But, but so that voice in my head that way before, if, if the idea came into my head, well, wait a minute, maybe you're not sleeping because you're not safe.
The idea of me being affected by a feeling is already suspect, right?
There's already a voice in my head.
That's like, you don't feel safe, right?
Let me tell you who's not safe.
You know, like your great grandfather was, was fighting tigers.
And it's like, well, A, my great-grandfather was not fighting tigers.
No.
But that's the, why don't you straighten out because you're not special.
You don't have something, you know, you're not, you don't have anything.
It's like the way, the mean way we talk to kids, you know, where we think that we can, I don't know.
I don't know if parents realize how often they're unintentionally probably using shame to motivate a child.
Yeah.
I think my dad was taught by his elders that,
through the mechanism of shame, almost entirely.
Well, and the church stuff doesn't hurt.
There's some pretty powerful one-two punches that exist.
I don't know when I talk about this now fairly frequently, and I mean, not to say too much, but we don't believe in trying to motivate a person with shame.
And you still do it because it's in your bones when you hear that voice in your head that sounds like five different people in your family.
But it is a powerful motivator.
And unfortunately, over time, it evolves to where the things you try to shame somebody about become more and more overt until it eventually becomes like, look what you're doing to your father.
You're killing your father kind of stuff.
Or it could be the shame of like, how can you sit in Sunday school class with...
you know, dress like that or whatever it is.
But that, that we try, but here's the thing, and this is true for procrastination as well.
That is, that seems like it makes sense to people who don't have that problem.
If you don't, if one doesn't care about this, well, that's a bummer.
That's kind of a crummy way to be, but that's not, not on me, but like what you don't, what one doesn't realize is that things like shame and things like fear are, you know,
in my opinion, not great motivators in the long run.
You see how often that comes down to, well, such and such happened, and look at me, I turned out great, kind of stuff.
You're like, well, if you think you turned out great, you did not turn out great.
But that sort of shame, well, that leads us right up to stuff like, why are you having trouble sleeping?
I don't know.
I just feel like I've got a lot of stuff to do.
Well, it's because the shame police have been hanging over your head your whole life and telling you there's things you forgot to feel bad about right now.
Yeah, my dad, if you, I don't know if I've ever told this story, but he came down.
My great aunt was dying and she had kind of half raised him because his own mother was busy playing piano at some cocktail party.
And so my great aunt, Marguerite.
was somewhat responsible for co-raising the kids.
And she taught my Aunt Julie Lee all the finer things about lace on the back of the couch.
She learned about lace, bunting.
She sent her to finishing school, the idea being that you live in a white-glove world.
And that that is, you know, and that complicated economy where my grandmother didn't have any money, but because she was a member of the social world of the prominent social world, somehow private school for my aunt was paid for by a rich friend.
Okay.
And do you suppose there was anywhere in that implicit thing you hear about of like, well, you'll never get a man if you don't know how to hold a teacup?
Oh, it wasn't that you'll never get a man.
It was, here's how you get the best man.
Right.
So that was pretty much on the table as part of why we're doing this, right?
Oh, in 1935?
Yeah.
I just want to clarify, because I think a lot of folks would look at something like that and go like, oh, arranged marriage or something like that.
It's like, no, it's not as simple as that.
It's...
No, she went to the University of Washington.
She went to a fraternity mixer.
She found the guy who was standing in the corner who looked like he was going to make a million dollars in his life.
And she went over and said, you seem like you're going to make a million dollars.
Here's the deal.
And he said, oh, OK, if that's the deal, I'll follow you anywhere.
You know, it was the it was the old style.
Um, but I, uh, we went to see her in the nursing home and it was a, you know, a nice nursing home.
She's lying, withering away in her nineties in a hospital bed.
And my dad and I walk into the room and she, and my dad was her favorite cause he was everybody's favorite.
And he walked in and she, my dad's in his seventies at this point and she's in her late nineties.
He walks in the room with me in tow and she looks up from her bed and goes, oh, David, why don't you ever come see me?
He lives in Alaska.
Yeah.
And you can immediately see him just melt like, oh, darling, I'm sorry.
You know, I've been trying to get down here.
And she's like, oh, I languish here waiting to see your, oh, your face.
And, you know, there's this three-minute preamble about David.
And she's expressing how glad she is to see him by just burdening him with this.
So good.
Terrible.
But oh, boy, is that ever a good example of something?
Oh, my God.
Yes.
Yeah.
And that's her.
That's her way of saying I love you and I miss you.
And can I just say another thing before your kid runs out the door?
No shade.
No lemonade.
Be careful.
Oh.
Be careful.
Why don't you might as well say, I curse you.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
And so that's how I was raised.
Not quite so Victorian, like nobody was clutching a handkerchief in my life.
But my dad didn't know another way to show love except to obligate you somehow.
And so you carry that obligation and it's just this sort of diffuse sense of obligation.
It's not connected to anything except when you feel bad and you go, why do I feel bad?
The only thing I can do is look around and attach it to all of the people I've let down, all of the... You never opted into that.
Not at all.
You were never given some kind of a standardized test and then an option.
That's what it was.
And also, as you get older, it starts to feel kind of, I don't know, this is probably how unwholesome I am, how care dependent I am.
But there's never a good day to start telling somebody they were kind of a piece of shit with you.
That is overridden by a thought technology of mine that I'm happy to stand alone with, which is whether you like it or not, whether you realize it or not, everybody is doing the best they can today.
Yeah, that's absolutely true.
I think about that with my mom before I ever want to say it.
I just, I slapped the words out of my whore mouth before I say anything about the way my mom did anything when I think about what she went through.
But no, but I mean, you don't want to say you didn't opt in or you didn't choose to have that as your upbringing.
It's – I think it's a kind of thing you kind of – what do they say on those forums?
You can't unsee it.
Like you – that's part of who you are.
I think one reason people are so hard on people who were raised in a church, like don't understand, you can make a willful effort to undo some of that.
And I'm not by any means saying all church stuff is bad, not by a long shot.
But it's just if you didn't go to church –
Singing's nice.
The crafts are nice.
We made a lot of good ashtrays But but if you have weren't raised in that you've probably begin by looking down your nose at and going what's wrong with those simple simple folk Shouldn't they be out making baskets and chairs or something?
But like you don't realize that everybody's got that Probably Bob and Bob's mom had that raised in a bookcase You know you get this you there's this and you
You unintentionally, it's viral almost, the way we pass on this kind of disordered affection.
It is, but, you know, there's a, I don't know, a thought technology I've been working on recently personally about thought technologies.
Oh, boy.
Bring it.
It's thought technologies all the way down, which is that there are a lot of things about the world we're living in presently
A lot of things.
One might argue the entire matrix of thought technologies that we are living in right now, including psychology, psychiatry, psychoactive medication, but also feminism, gay rights, civil rights,
All of these technologies are 60 to 70 years old in the course of a human history that is 250,000 years old.
And we are applying these thought technologies as a matrix, right?
You cannot separate its intersectionality, right?
You cannot separate feminism from racism, from psychology.
And all of these are brand new ideas.
And they are almost entirely untested in the grand scope of things, right?
It's almost like there's never been a major case to adjudicate that thought technology.
We just don't have the data.
There hasn't been enough.
If you're talking about generational trauma, you are talking about it as a thing that we just invented.
And all we can do to prove it or not even prove, but just to examine the idea, all we can do is do this kind of Mormon thing of going back in generations, reading 200-year-old novels and looking at historical scope, but always retroactively.
Yeah.
And then we look forward to now and go, well, it's proved by what we assume was true in 1850 or 1650.
But we don't have 200 years of looking at generational trauma from the standpoint of someone who had already thought of the idea, right?
And it's true across the whole spectrum.
So I do this too.
You and I sit and we talk in these contemporary terms.
about trauma and shame and all these things that feel extremely real to us because it's in the breakfast cereal that we've been eating our whole lives.
And we're soaking in a culture that's very different from a Jason Aldean version of that.
The same culture.
We're all eating at the same... Cereal bar?
Yeah, right.
It's all the same General Mills cereal that Jason Aldean is eating and that you and I are eating.
But we're living in a world of very different thought technologies.
And...
I just remember sitting at my dad's bedside as he lay dying and thinking about how I had judged him and his decisions in his life according to my terms, which were extremely different in 2007 than they are now, let alone when I was judging him in my terms, in my 1992 terms.
When he was just trying to get gas in his Audi 5000.
And I was like, gasoline?
You know, in 92.
And I remember sitting next to his bed and watching him in those final hours.
Where he was resolute in his worldview.
He did not have a come to Jesus moment.
At any point, not where he met Jesus, but also not where he accepted 2007 values.
And I remember watching him and feeling that judgment of him fall away because I saw him in his life and realized he lived his life not only the best he could according to the thought technologies he had, but he did it with integrity.
Mm-hmm and I've been sitting here saying like oh well you're just some dinosaur that doesn't know about about post structuralism And sitting there with him.
I was like, oh that was all bullshit None of that mattered in terms of his life and my life in relation to his life It had its own terms and
And I was bringing all this, you know, all these University of Washington packets into my relationship with him.
Dad, I printed some stuff out for you.
Yeah, exactly.
Like, oh, I didn't buy this.
I bought this book used at the bookstore.
And it was, Dad, it was written in 97.
So this is pretty accepted, you know, the terms that I'm describing here.
This was written all the way back in 1968 in France.
And it just – I reflect on it all the time because I'm using partly that Victorian mind to judge myself according to psychological terms that have, what, 11 years of just –
Like, what's the sample size?
It's like all those things you read where it says, oh, well, if you eat M&Ms, you're 10 times more likely to die based on an experiment that was accidentally conducted in the course of another experiment that involved 400 people.
And you go, oh, well, that doesn't add up to anything when I read it.
Right, right.
So, I don't know.
I mean, we live in a world where almost – where I look at my little girl and I go, am I defining you by what I perceive to be your trauma?
Or by the time you're 25, is the conception of what your trauma is going to be markedly different?
Yeah, it is.
Right.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And I can't predict it and –
i look at myself and i'm like well is my trauma based in 1920 1968 19 not not the trump not the injury itself but the sense of what the injury has done to me right like like yeah watching that with my my great aunt saying that to my dad i had tremendous sympathy for him but in by 1925 standards
That was probably, I'm not going to say progressive, but modern.
But any observations you have about that are perhaps, not perhaps, extremely understandably like tears in rain.
Trying to talk about that with somebody else.
I don't know why.
I keep thinking of this really dumb example where like, you know...
This is admittedly very silly, but imagine somebody who's, I don't know, a 10 or 11-year-old who's pretty smart and reads the paper and goes, why haven't you always used Bitcoin for everything?
And you go, well, Bitcoin's a pretty new idea, and it's not... For whatever Bitcoin has going for it, it doesn't really make a...
It's got a lot of downsides in terms of like how it works as against, you know, cash and those institutions we don't like and stuff like that.
But yeah, but like, it's obviously, it's sickening to me how much of your life you walked around.
It's so gross to me, like how much you walked around spending green paper, like some kind of cuck.
And you're like, dude, Bitcoin didn't exist.
So like when I say something that sounds like I'm deliberately being unkind by using the word that everybody used that I am apps just just it's it seems so confused to me the way people get quite as worked up as they do.
I'm honest.
I'm not saying that.
to be hurtful.
Quite the opposite.
What I'm saying is, thank whatever, God, or what have you, that we've progressed to where we don't use that kind of ugliness on the reg.
You and I both have words that we have...
driven that we've stopped using because they're hurtful and unkind and didn't really add a lot.
But, you know, I mean, again, I realize I sound like an old man because I am an old man.
It's just that you can't, like I said in the thing I'm writing, you know, I think it's difficult to have a big impact on the world.
by not speaking and not using words.
But I think you can have an impact on the world by thinking a little bit more clearly and using less incendiary words in some cases.
But, like, if all you're staring at my finger and I'm trying to show you the moon and you keep looking at my forefinger, what I'm trying to say is, like, everybody was always, whether you like it or not, I've always got to say that.
That's a...
That's a dependent clause that's really critical in this case.
Whether you like it or not, everybody has always been doing the best they can every day.
Show me the lie.
Right.
If you could have done better, you would have, but you didn't.
Maybe you'll do better tomorrow, and maybe you won't.
But the standard that we hold the world to...
I mean, that's a standard that can keep you up at night.
If you think that the standard to which you hold the world is also one you hold yourself to.
And like without ever really interrogating the deeper issues of like, yeah, but have you done that with kindness?
Have you done that with situational awareness?
Have you done that with context?
All those kinds of things, you know, that I consider really valuable.
I don't know.
I just, the older I get, the less I feel very confident yelling at anybody about anything.
Yeah.
Yeah, well, I just realized a real mental health breakthrough for me recently was realizing, first of all, that I don't believe I have ever gone into anyone else's feed anymore.
whether a Twitter feed or a Facebook feed or an Instagram feed.
I have never gone into someone else's feed, whether they are someone I know or don't know, especially don't know, and corrected them.
It's not my impulse at all.
I went into social media thinking primarily it was a writer's medium and then ultimately like a philosopher's medium.
I did not think it was a courtroom or a, uh, a platform of argument at all.
And so,
It was very confusing to me when people started coming into my feeds and trying to argue with me.
Yeah, for a period of several months, most of those interactions, the first part would be somebody coming in and saying something.
Again, you spelled Wookiee wrong.
I didn't spell Wookiee wrong.
That's actually how you spell Wookiee.
But there was something I did several times and I always had to stop myself from doing was simply typing the words, have we met?
Yeah, exactly.
Exactly.
Who the fuck are you?
How did you get this number?
But that's the thing.
And in 2015, I was super furious when a 20-year-old started to try and lecture me about capitalism.
And I fought a lot.
Chinaman, actually, dude, Chinaman is not the preferred nomenclature.
It's not.
You know what?
We're eliminating that, right?
No, I know, I know, no, I know.
But then... But somebody comes in, it's like, hey, what about the color of my crystal?
Yeah.
Have you accounted for all the ways that I, a stranger whom you don't know, might need to have you do that all completely differently?
And the thing about, you know, the thing that should have taught me forever...
was the way Bean Dad was adjudicated in the court of popular opinion.
Yeah.
That it was like, well, 200,000 people misunderstand and that become, and each one of them misunderstanding in their own peculiar way.
And it becomes a thing that you cannot, there's really, you can't argue with.
It's just like, well, there's 200,000 misunderstandings and one person that wrote it.
So, but what I've noticed lately is
I sit on still, I'm somewhat, slightly on Facebook and Instagram.
I hate it more and more all the time.
But their every day is not every day somebody comes into my thread and argues with me about a thing they didn't read.
I see it much more with other people.
It's very much still a thing.
But it's super duper a thing.
Like, A, who the fuck are you?
And B, you didn't read my thing.
And C, you certainly didn't read it with the context of knowing me and my sense of humor.
And the fact that I still think of this as a writer's medium.
And I think I read a lot of posts from people that are talking about their cancer or talking about their pain because that's how they use social media.
And when I go online and say, you know, the fucking squirrels around here keep stealing my, you know, my peanuts.
Yeah.
And then 15 comments later, there's a person that says, well, did you ever think that maybe you're living on squirrel land?
Did you ever think of that?
And it's like, wait a minute.
A, who the fuck are you?
Who the fuck are you?
And B, you don't get it, man.
You don't get at all how I'm using this medium.
I'm not here talking about my cancer.
I'm still joking around.
Oh, I know.
I've been having a two-day prog thing.
It's like a flu.
And you know it's reached...
Yes, I have been listening to The Heart of the Sunrise a lot.
But like, yeah, I'm out there just talking about Chris Squire's bass tone on Fragile.
And like, you're not going to get me to make jokes about the letter X. It's not funny and it's sad.
Well, and somebody's going to argue with you about Chris Squire.
Yeah.
It happens.
I don't know what has blessed me that I don't get that as much as other people.
Oh, because you made it very clear, Merlin, several years ago, do not fucking email me.
No, I'm not that bad.
No, you did.
I'm not that bad.
You did.
You said very clearly over and over, do not contact me.
Unless you have something.
Yeah, but again, everybody's... It helps.
Sauce for the goose, sauce for the gander.
Those folks are doing their best, too.
And the very first line... I'm always talking about this document.
I'll never finish this writing project.
The very first thing in the Wisdom project, the very first line is, sometimes an email is just a way to say I love you.
And like so many of the things, A, it's something I had to learn.
All the things are things I need to learn.
But B, that goes for so many kinds of things.
There are people...
God, I can't say this, but sometimes it really helps to just assume that... How can I put this?
When you don't understand how someone is acting, sometimes it's useful as a thought technology to just assume maybe them or maybe both of you are not communicating well emotionally.
I'm speaking in code here.
I understand what you are saying.
Like, if you've had a dear friend or family member, as I have had friends and family members, who have that constellation of sort of, I feel like, a spectrum of emotional things, you don't yell at that person because you mispronounced something in the Norse mythology mythos.
I mean, they might do that, but that's...
That's how they're interacting with you.
And if you I don't know, that sounds it sounds so mean.
And I wish I could say this, but I think it really does help in some.
Here's another way.
Here's a more Edgar a guest way to put it, which is just assume that everybody you're dealing with is having the worst day of their life.
Not that it excuses them, not anything, but like instead of firing back every single time you go, oh, oh.
Who the fuck are you?
Like, really, we end up just creating, I'm taking you off your topic, but it just ends up creating so much acrimony, and it makes me small.
I don't want to be any smaller.
I'm already as small as I want to be.
Yeah, and I don't think it's taking me off the topic.
I think you're dead on.
And what I've realized recently is that
The posts that come through in my feed.
Feed.
Because Instagram and Facebook now are very, very.
We put it that way.
It doesn't really sound like you're strapping a bag to a horse's long face.
Their whole idea, their business model now is let's put as much.
garbage in front of people as we can it's not related to who they follow it's not anything about if they if you watch one instance of a guy on a skateboard getting his nuts up like wanged on a as he tries to rail slide down just wants to keep up with the discourse you just watch one then then they both those both those uh
iterations of one single company.
And then you just start getting nothing but videos of people having fights in parking lots.
Yeah, they're going to do, they're going to show you guys getting kicked in the nuts.
Who is this for?
I said the word, I was talking to my sister and I said, I was talking about chupacabras.
And she said, chupacabras?
You should talk to Grant.
Grant knows a lot about chupacabras.
Well, yeah, I know he does.
But Susan said, chupacabras, you mean the giant guinea pigs that live in South America?
And I said, no, those are capybaras.
I love capybaras.
They let other animals just sit on them.
I know.
And so I said, a capybara is a giant guinea pig that sits on crocodiles.
And a chupacabra is a monster that lives in Central America that sucks goat blood.
And she was like, I don't understand what you're saying right now.
And so I found on Instagram a chupacabra.
No, I'm sorry, a capybara with like an eagle and a turtle sitting on its back.
Yeah.
So, of course, Susan was like, oh, my God, these are incredible.
We used to have one in our zoo.
I love this.
Have you ever seen the one that's the Japanese account where the capybaras have a spa day?
Have you ever seen that?
Yes.
Oh, that will.
Merlin, I've seen every capybara video in the world.
Is there any chance that it's because you showed Susan that one thing?
I showed her one thing, and now my feed is 80%.
I like her chupacabra fights now.
80% bumfights, but 20% capybaras.
And then, you know, and they're starting to squeeze out all of the Japanese owl cafes, where there are cafes you can go to in Japan where it's full of owls.
It's like a cat book store.
I found a place in Japan that's a cat cafe, plus it has one capybara.
Oh, my God.
Wouldn't that be heaven?
But what I've noticed in these feeds... Feeds?
is that it's exactly what we predicted 20 years ago, where news would become completely balkanized and all the internet would feed you is the news that you wanted, right?
That you would no longer see news that challenged you.
It would just be- You end up in what some people call a bubble.
A bubble.
And I strive to not be in a bubble, except that my social media diet-
Only understands trying to put me in a bubble.
Right.
Right.
And I see these people that I don't know come into my Facebook feed and what they're doing is they're not even saying anything.
They're retweeting some very preachy statement.
Right.
about human rights or You know always in the context of being very opposed to because you've got to consider the starving African child There's always a starving African child but also just like, you know Listen if if trans bathrooms bother you so much.
Why don't you go back to your caveman blah blah blah, you know and almost everyone Who the fuck are you?
Every one of these
retweeted screen capped posts and the and the comment is also either by somebody i don't know or it's by george carlin or it's by you know i don't know ann rice who knows who it is every one of them on the surface i agree i agree with i agree with that statement yeah
But the tone of them is always smug and argumentative.
Yours is full of context and theirs is full of vinegar.
And I don't want it.
I do not want to log on to Facebook and be preached too righteously about a topic that A, I agree, but also B, that is a very boring, un-nuanced, kind of garbage take on it.
And so I've just...
It's like you used to mute people on Twitter anytime that somebody was like, Merlin, you're doing Tumblr wrong.
You're like, mute.
Mute.
I have started just muting those things as we did on Twitter as an act of response.
It's not I don't want to see these.
It's that rather than argue with this, muting it feels like an action.
Right.
Right.
That is better than going, you know what?
You know, like joining in the conversation or whatever.
The last thing I want to do anymore.
I got no interest in your conversation.
I mean, like, I don't need.
I feel like now we're just bitching about social media.
But I don't need.
We could go back to bitching about our health.
That's fine.
I don't even remember what we talked about.
I've got warts all over my hand.
No, really?
No, I don't.
Oh.
I don't.
I did in sixth grade.
But just this, there's, and I don't know, I mean, everything varies.
It's hard to know what's what anymore, but I have a lot of thoughts about this.
Boy, that's the truth.
Well, you know, okay, here's my favorite stupid fucking thing I've started saying in the last six months.
Who the fuck are you?
Who the fuck are you?
Who the fuck are you?
Wait a minute.
Who the fuck are you?
How did you get in here?
Everything is not everything.
Yes, I know that is one of your mantra.
Everything is not everything.
And, you know, it's and maybe this is just me being like some kind of perceived fancy lad about like, well, let's just let's hang on.
Let's pump the brakes and let's.
Is that a Chewbacca or a Chupacabra Chewbacca?
It's a Chewbacacabra.
Actually, that's not canonical.
Who the fuck are you?
Get out of my Tumblr.
Somewhere between an invitation to bicker or in some cases a demand to bicker.
Yes.
And it's like, no, no.
I mean, you can go bicker on your thing, but that's not what we're doing here.
Yeah, you go bicker on your thing.
Believe me, you'll find plenty of people.
If that pleases you, go bicker.
Here's the problem.
You have 40 people over on your thing.
Yeah.
You want to come bicker over on my thing because there's more than 40 people.
Yeah, I don't know.
It's just – mainly it's just all of these things to me are like just a bummer.
Just kind of a bummer that there's just so much of what – So much we could have done?
Yes, but also just that there's – I think there's a lot of people with a very good heart operating in bad faith and thinking that they're doing God's work.
Yeah.
Yeah, that's right.
And that's frustrating because like, look, I mean, I'm not any kind of champion debater.
In fact, I really despise that kind of thing.
Personally, I enjoy watching it.
But like, two people who are really able, like going at it over a topic is great.
But like,
That's not fair.
That's not cricket.
You don't get to define the terms.
You don't get to come over to my house, take a shit on my couch, and then demand that I argue with you about it.
You know what I mean?
And that's what it feels like to me.
Now, I could be wrong, and maybe I need power spoken to me because I'm power.
Yes, you are power.
I need truth spoken to me.
Look at that power.
You know that Merlin?
You're thinking about him.
That guy is power.
You look at him.
Smoking.
He's got a lot of snot.
Smoking.
I posted a thing about traffic in the city.
Oh, John, don't you know people need to get to work?
And I said, you know, managing traffic in the city.
I'm that guy now.
It's an art, right?
But cities are trying to be everything to everybody.
And there are a lot of people that believe cities should be one thing.
There are a lot of people that believe cities should be another thing.
The people that believe cities should be this thing have all this stuff.
Climate change science to refer to.
These people have commerce to refer to.
Everybody's arguing.
The cities are the places where they're arguing.
And also, you know, it's all the people that are poor, all the people that are rich, all the people that can, all the people that can't.
All the people who've never been there.
It's all happening in the titular city, right?
Or, you know, it's the rhetorical city that we're talking about.
Yeah.
Everything's up to date against the city.
I'm sorry, that might be the title.
What was it?
You just said the regional, what did you say?
The rhetorical city.
That's it, the rhetorical city.
Thank you.
But there are people who have been following your and my work for more than 10 years, 12 years, 13 years, 12 years.
And they know that I've been talking about cities for a lot of that time.
and all these different mechanics.
And so I'm talking about cities and I use the word flow.
I say, listen, they're, you know, uh,
There's not very much flow now, but one day the flow will return.
And I'm saying that with an awareness that the internal combustion engine is on its way out, that cars are not going to be the future for very much longer, that cities are going to be transformed by cars.
dimensions of transit and transportation that we think we can foresee, but we can't.
I'm very excited about this time, about reclaiming public space.
There are also a lot of dangers that we talked about last week, about cities, you know, about the Salesforce headquarters.
A lot of dangers to half-assing any of that in a way that fucks something up semi-permanently.
But somewhere, and so a lot of the comments under my post about... Is this in your feed?
This is my feed.
There are a bunch of people that are like, you know what, we need gondolas.
And I'm like, yes, thank you, you know, fave, because they're having fun.
That's all I could do 90 seconds ago to not bring up verniculars, because they are a very good idea.
Funiculars, moving sidewalks, gondolas.
There are people out there following me.
I'm going to tell these kids what I tell all my kids.
I'm not anti-car.
I'm pro options.
Pro options.
And there are people having fun with me.
Sure.
They're playing with you in the space.
Absolutely.
Seven years ago, I ran for city council on a transit platform.
Yeah.
And then somebody in there.
Somebody I don't know.
How the fuck did you get in here?
Yep.
He says, what do you have to say about this at fuckface?
Oh, the narcs have arrived.
Oh, geez.
And then fuckface 27 comes in.
And let me guess, they got shtick.
Well, no, it's not shtick.
The word flow is a trigger word for a certain kind of
Cities need to be only bike lanes and hang glider lanes.
And there should be vines.
Oh, so you unintentionally use something that somebody regards as a term of art?
That's right.
There should only be vines for Tarzans.
Okay.
And people that are fixated on flow.
Oh, that's code for we want cars everywhere?
Yes.
Apparently, the people that are like, why can't cars get from one end of the city to the other are flow people.
And so this guy comes in, he doesn't know me.
He's been, he's been, I've been narked on by, by, uh, you know, like dick wad one 10 and fuck face 12 is here saying flow is what, you know, assholes have been saying and they've ruined the world and that's why the ice caps are melting and that's why my children will never own a home.
And I started to compose a thing where I was like, who the fuck are you?
And also your little friend who invited you in here.
Who the fuck are you?
Yeah, it reminds me of Christmas Story.
It's like that little creepy little guy with Scott Farkas.
What a rotten name.
scud farkus he had yellow eyes but he but i i composed a response who the fuck are you and then i was like why am i in this and then i left it alone and then about a half hour later i was like you know what and i and i wrote a like a fuck you again and then i deleted the second fuck you just like i delete all the emails i write at two in the morning where i'm like the problem with you
And then I realized, oh, what I just want is these two fuck faces out of my feed.
And I went delete comment, delete comment.
Yeah.
And there was no reply from me.
And fuck face 12 is off in his world yelling about flow to somebody else.
And the instigator.
I don't know where he is.
I don't know whether he's like, what happened to my brilliant comment?
I don't know who he is.
I don't care.
Right?
He could be listening to the program right now and going, wait a minute.
Am I dickhead 112?
Yeah, right.
You are, sir.
But I...
I'm trying to manage my – I do not want someone – I don't want anybody in my feed unless they're there to play.
Yeah.
And that's my – Read the room.
That's my right as a human being that is using this like soul-sucking platform to connect with my friends.
Yeah.
It bums me out.
It really, really bums me out.
Yeah.
Oh, don't let it bum you out, Merlin.
Okay.
Well, you know, I'm just looking over COVID.
I think you should go to stressbumps.com slash Merlin man.
Yeah.
Be sure to use our very special offer code.
Dot R U. Dot R U. No, that's a casino site.
Don't do it.
I just found a good photo of Scott Farkas.