Ep. 518: "Aspics of Me"
Bye.
Do-do-do.
Do-do-do.
Do-do-do.
Do-do-do.
Should we do it as sort of a round, like a row-row-row-your-boat?
Yeah.
Do-do-do-do.
Do-do-do.
Do-do-do.
Do-do-do.
Do-do-do.
Yeah.
That might be enough of that.
Blue suede shoes?
Hmm.
Hi, Merlin.
Hang on.
Let me get reset here.
John motherfucking Roderick, I've missed you, you fucking piece of shit.
It's been too goddamn long, and I'm not just saying that for clapping.
Oh, it really is.
It has been too long.
I think I need this.
I need this more than I think.
I only have a handful of people I've really, really learned in the last week or so.
There are only a handful of people in life who get me or get an aspect of me.
And boy, you miss it when you don't have it.
Or an aspic of you.
Yes.
Well, we're all in a jelly, aren't we?
Yeah, where else are you going to be the cuckoo bird that you really are?
Oh, Jiminy Christmas.
I actually do have something to share with you offline.
But there's a point in a very tumultuous last week that I had that I finally said to Madeline, I pulled her aside and I looked her in the eyes and gave her that look of like, I'm going to tell you something now.
And I said, you know, I'm going to tell you something.
Uh-huh.
And it's something that I've realized that I think is vital to share with you.
And I think it's the kind of thing you're probably going to say, well, you never realized that, but I'm going to say it.
I said, I've come to realize that there are things that make a lot of sense in my head.
Nay, make all the sense in the world in my head.
And then when I talk about that with other people...
I often sound crazy, and I do a terrible job of trying to give context for why I have a strong feeling about something.
And I said, I just want you to know, A, I've realized that's the case, and B, I don't know what I would do about it, but I think it'll help for me to know.
I just turned 57.
Yeah, I mean, don't you think it is 8% to 10% of this show?
Well, I got to tell you, John, man, there's like three podcasts I do, and those are different aspects of me, title.
Yeah, yeah.
Different, right?
I get to like go, you understand what I'm saying, right?
And you're like, what are you talking about?
Of course I understand.
And the rest of the world is like, what are you talking about?
Yeah.
You're the only person in the world that is weird about this.
You're the only person in the world that has questions and hangups about this.
Do you feel that way sometimes?
Yeah.
Oh, well, who, me?
Well, you are someone you know.
So, about you or about me?
I'll take anything.
I was asking specifically about you.
Specifically?
Yeah, but like, I don't know, I guess I'm looking for common cause here, John Roderick.
No, no, no, I get asked this every once in a while, like, who's your, the group that you really feel understands you?
And I'm like, the group that understands me?
You mean in my personal life?
Like the crew you run with?
I'm like, there is none.
Every person that I know understands me.
something about me, but there's, there's no one.
Everybody's got to reckon for sure.
But like, I do think there is a, perhaps again, this makes sense in my head, but I'm going to say it.
I think there's a subtle distinction to be teased out of this, which is, it's one thing to be aware of, Oh, you know, that guy, I love him, but you know, he's kind of this particular way to go like, yeah, there, this person has these things that everybody agrees is kind of weird.
It has another person who goes, yeah, but,
I not only get that, but I have something like that.
And there is common cause in wondering why I feel like the only person in the whole fucking world that sees something or feels something that nobody else seems to see or feel.
Or perhaps struggle with is another way to put it.
I have been wandering the Merlinverse now.
Oh, no, don't do that.
Oh, is that why you were on time?
With the bag over my shoulder.
Is that why you were on time?
And you're not supposed to walk with rhythm because the worms will come.
Yeah, you've got to do the crip walk.
Crip walk in a still suit, my favorite God of My Voices EP.
He tucks it into his boots.
Nobody taught him to do that.
Tucks him into his boots.
Exactly.
He thought that up himself.
No, if you've ever watched Adventure Time all the way through.
You realize after the fifth or sixth watch of Adventure Time all the way through that now you understand enough of the language that, you know, like a Krampus with a fish head can show up.
And you go, oh, yeah, right, of course, the Krampus with the fish head.
Yeah.
That's, I'm not sure, even now I'm not sure what it symbolizes, but I recognize it.
I printed out a 3D, do you know the wonderful character played by Kumail Nanjiani, Prismo?
Prismo.
I printed out a Prismo, and my poor wife, I love her so much, she goes, what's that, lemon crab?
And I said...
Oh, snap.
It's fine.
It's fine.
She makes up for it in so many other ways.
I said, that's Prismo.
And I was like, do you remember the character of Kumail Nanjian?
He kind of just looks like a shadow.
And he's in this box.
And she's like, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Maybe he's God.
Yeah, but he's also got to deal with that other guy.
And like, yeah, there's a lot of lore you don't need to know for Adventure Time.
He's Q from Star Trek.
Oh, I hate that guy.
You like Q, right?
I never like Q. He's fine.
I don't like Star Trek.
No, that's just not accurate.
I know.
I know.
You have song lyrics about Star Trek.
You made fun of Romulan haircuts in the early 2000s.
It's true.
It's true.
Don't let anybody know.
Don't tell anybody.
It's a private show.
No, Merlin, I do know exactly what you mean.
And I also feel crazy all the time.
But then, you know, lately I've been saying my new mantra, it's not aloha, this mantra.
Oh, okay.
I'm sorry.
I'm going to slow down.
This feels important.
It's different.
Okay.
I'm not sure whether it's even maybe a little anti-aloha.
Or at least it's not sharing the same thing.
Are you familiar with the Seinfeld reference if I say Serenity Now?
Are you familiar with that reference?
I know you don't own a TV.
Serenity Now.
Yeah, it was a bit in the late 90s.
There's an episode of Seinfeld where Kramer has been advised to start calming himself down and dealing with life by repeating the phrase Serenity Now.
Oh, Serenity Now, yeah.
And everybody's pointing out to him, you know, that's not going to change anything.
You just, you do just like sound crazy.
But like Serenity Now is his thing of like, okay, okay, Serenity Now, Serenity Now.
And then most people like, and then of course, Jerry Stiller, the wonderful Jerry Stiller is like screaming at Serenity Now, Serenity Now.
And like, because you found a new way to knock down a non-existent door.
Yes.
And with Aloha, you can't make yourself Aloha any more than, if I could say, well, not you, I'm not criticizing you, but one can't make oneself adopt Aloha any more than you can make yourself go to sleep.
Well, right.
You can't grip your steering wheel and shout aloha at yourself.
But taking the approach of trying to make yourself, sorry guys, wake up, so to speak.
You can't make yourself, are you kidding me?
Am I right?
You can't make yourself go to sleep and getting madder about it, I can almost promise you is not going to help.
It's the opposite direction of going to sleep.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Is Aloha kind of like that, where it oughtn't be a thing that you try to bolt on to things where there's no context or infrastructure?
How does it work?
You know when you're driving in a car through the forest?
Your mom is driving, and you're sitting in the passenger seat or the backseat looking out at the forest, the big forest.
Mm-hmm.
And you realize that you can unfocus your eyes a little or focus them in the distance.
You can focus your eyes in the distance and suddenly you can see through the forest where before it was just a wall of fast moving trees.
Yeah, you recognize, if I could say, the negative space of that and realize that the trees are only there because there's also nothing there, sort of.
Yeah.
Yeah, and so if you focus your eyes in the distance, then all of a sudden the ground is moving very slowly past you.
It's not like you're not just seeing a blur.
It's like your personal parallax effect.
Yes, right.
And you can see then all the ferns, and you can see the whole, and then all of a sudden everything makes sense, and then that's when you see the Bigfoot.
But that's also... You were missing it before.
You were missing it.
But that's where, when I say to myself, aloha, I'm just trying to see into the forest...
I just am focusing from the whir of trees going by, and I just focus my eyes in the distance, and then I can see the ferns.
That's how I think you should walk on a sidewalk.
I've always said when you're walking in a city on a sidewalk, it makes sense to stare at your feet because you don't want to fall down.
If you've ever had to walk through Chinatown, you need to be looking sort of over people's heads.
in the same way that as a driver, you need to be not just staring at the tags, like you need to be, right?
Isn't that part of it?
It's not as simple as a broader view, but that's kind of part of it, is you need to see the way the trees are moving, even though it's you that's moving.
Well, and, you know, in Serenity Now terms,
Like, if you focus your eyes at a different, you know, at 100 yards, at 1,000 yards, there's serenity somewhere.
You know, there's always aloha somewhere.
And you'll never solve the problem by trying to look at only one tree because it's already gone.
Exactly.
You cannot see the trees that are next to the road.
You can only see the trees that are 300 yards away.
Whoa.
My brain's going to dine out on this for a week.
Yeah.
Well, so lately, because I've been slings and arrows, outrageous fortunes around here.
Oh, tell me about it.
And so the other day, I was walking through the house, and I was just all like, oh, no, not again.
Not like anxiety, but just like, oh, God, do I have to go through all this dumb American stuff again?
Just every year, there's just something, you know, banks and the neighbors.
And this voice...
in my head said, living well is the best revenge.
And I said, now wait a minute.
Revenge is not aloha.
Just intrinsically not aloha.
You're not trying to revenge.
Might be the best resolution.
And the voice said, living well is the best revenge.
Oh, it's sticking with it.
Yeah, and I said, no, no, no, no, no.
We're not out for revenge here.
We're just trying to live well.
Yeah.
And the voice again, living well is the best revenge.
And so, but it actually calmed me down.
Not because I thought that I was living well, but because it was offering, it was suggesting a path.
And I was like, hmm, I'm not sure.
That seems like a dangerous path.
Living well is the best revenge.
I'm having this conversation with myself halfway in, halfway out of the bathroom.
Well, who else are you going to have it with?
Exactly.
Especially if it's your mind that's leading the conversation.
Yeah, so now... You can put a USB cable in there.
When I walk around the house and I start to think like, oh my God, the goddamn...
internal revenue service or whatever yeah yeah then i just hear this and i'm not saying it to myself it's some it's some ding dong up there it's central casting or whatever in hr going living well is the best revenge just like leaning into a microphone touching a button on the desk living well is the best revenge and uh so i don't know what to make of it but it has been uh it has had a calming effect uh
in a way that I needed it at that moment.
If I can take the edge off and make that moment feel less present and hot, sometimes we need that.
The thing equals you becomes the feeling.
The feeling says, okay, this is who we are now.
What just happened is who we are now.
And there has to be expansiveness and distance from that or you'll lose it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So I was at the guitar store the other day, leaning on the counter.
Yeah.
And looking around, and it's just the regular guys standing around the guitar store.
And I didn't need anything.
I didn't need to buy anything.
I shouldn't have even been looking at things because it's dangerous.
You know, you're like, oh, I need that.
Angers of the blood.
I don't need it.
I don't need any of it.
I have at all.
I have so many of them.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And I'm leaning on the counter and everybody's just, you know, just shucking a jive and everybody's, you know, people come in there, they bring a guitar, they open it up.
There's five guys standing there and we all go, oh, and then, you know, you get to show your expertise.
And I looked around in a quiet moment and I said, you know, I'm just here for the male companionship.
There's no other reason for me to be here.
And that's what you all are here for.
You had the guts to say it.
Yeah.
And everybody kind of looked up at the ceiling for a second.
They were like, huh.
I was like, yeah, this is just like going to the hardware store used to be.
Like, we're just standing around talking about hammers.
I don't need a new hammer.
I just come here.
This is your version of the Turkish guys drinking coffee on the doorstep and bullshitting.
Yeah.
Well, I have all this knowledge about these dumb tools, and I want to be in a room where a bunch of other people have esoteric knowledge about dumb tools.
It's like going to the barbershop.
I was going to say that.
I mean, I don't know if that's just a TV thing, but it's my understanding that in the African-American male community, that's a source of community for a lot of people.
Well, I think it used to be, because people, it used to be culturally very broad that men got their haircut every week.
Do you remember how often Andy Griffith got a haircut?
Must have been all the time.
I mean, he.
How do you keep so high and tight?
I think it.
Yeah, that's true.
I think also it was an opportunity to deploy Floyd.
Oh, he was a very good kid.
Oh, like Floyd, Floyd, the barber.
But but like, you know what I mean?
Like that's it's.
But I think I seems like he got a haircut every few days.
Just just a little snip, snip, snip.
I was having coffee a couple of days ago at a little outdoor coffee shop.
It was kind of raining, but it's Seattle.
And there was a fancy, fancy little hipster salon where one of the barbers had a handlebar mustache and another one was wearing a bow tie.
And a guy comes in.
The dream of the 90s is alive in Seattle.
It really is.
A guy walked into the salon and I was sitting there with a mutual friend and I said, what is this guy doing at the barbershop?
Because his hair looked impeccable.
And he sat down in the chair and there was no hair.
It was like, what are you going to do?
The barber starts cutting the hair.
It's like the guy who had to cut Andy Warhol's wig.
Yeah, what are you doing?
Just make snip snip noises.
It's not growing.
This guy had no, there was no need for a haircut.
Anyway, the barber starts working on it.
Yeah.
And after five or ten minutes, I was like, he's ruined it.
Now the guy looks like a dumbass.
Like he took a great haircut and now he looks like an idiot.
He crushed the bunny.
And then we watched as the barber then transformed that idiotic haircut into, I have to confess, an even better haircut.
And I was like, this is something.
This guy has to get his haircut every week because there was only a week's worth of haircut.
And yet he does, I admit, look even more amazing.
I wonder if that differs from person to person and haircut to haircut.
My mom going to the, as we used to say, beauty parlor every week to get a little bit of a cut, wash and set was about this larger project than cutting hair.
But like men's haircuts, traditional men's haircuts, if you don't have, I guess, like cornrows or something, you know, it's pretty manageable just going to get a haircut.
I've realized that I like my hair to be a little longer.
Oh, interesting.
And over the years of learning to cut my own hair, I was almost invariably have it perfect at 3 o'clock in the morning after two days of working on it.
But then this happened every time.
The third day, I would go in to just make one little adjustment.
And by the end of that period, I would have ruined it completely.
Because I would just get to this point where it's like, well, I should just cut it real short on the sides.
Haircuts and edibles are two things where you should really sit with it for a while before you decide you need more of it.
That's right.
That's exactly right.
Don't...
When the acid doesn't come on in the first half hour, do not take another tab.
The funny part with things like edibles is that it sometimes seems like the longer, even if it's one you're familiar with, the longer it takes to kick in sometimes, the more it pounds you when it does.
And that's true for haircuts too, I think.
Are you getting your haircut professionally, are you telling me?
No, no, no, no.
I was just watching this from outside.
Your own cut, you're adopting to a new approach, a new aesthetic of letting it get a little bit longer.
And that's a different kind of haircutting, I imagine.
Well, part of it is leaving it alone.
So I just when I give up, sometimes I'm at the end of my rope because of COVID.
We learned how to use the clippers for our cat for me to cut my hair.
And I can just I can do a three all over pretty well, not excluding the trimming of the areas that need like a little more care.
But I can do a three all over in probably no more than eight minutes.
And you look amazing.
Thank you.
You know, your hair used to be famous on the Internet.
It was.
And you have a nicely shaped head.
You have a great head of hair.
That's a great episode.
I love this episode.
You can cut it however you want, and you look amazing.
Thank you.
But me, you know, I'm big and sort of misshapen.
It all has to – I mean, there's only a very narrow window where I look –
uh interesting and the rest of the time i look frightening or you're not gonna believe this but last night we were watching i was watching youtube and an episode of 13 songs oh yeah that web series with you came up yeah and it was from your long hair and missing tooth period oh yeah and i i had to i had to just kind of like teehee to myself a little bit because you look you look pretty um you look pretty rugged yeah
And you're not talking about that long where it could almost be in a ponytail, right?
Yeah.
There was a period there where it was pretty long.
Oh, it was super long.
But I mean, like right now, what's – is there a – Oh, no, no.
I'm just saying a little bit over the ear.
All right.
Okay.
Just let it go a little bit over the ear.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Not too much.
More and more, I'm realizing the less fight I put up, I guess the more aloha I am.
And it's very hard for me to not put up a fight.
Dear me.
You know, I wish I could talk to you right now about this thing.
I know exactly what you mean, because the resistance that my mind offers to what is happening based on my past experience and what I feel and what I believe is in a moment.
So overwhelming.
I imagine this is what it's like to be an angry person.
Like angry people are just kind of angry all the time because that's like their default, you know, emotion at a given time.
But I totally, I totally agree with you.
And it's so, you know, the Long Winters played.
Oh, yeah.
It's been so long.
You did.
Not even.
I can't say the Long Winters played because there was only one person in the band that had ever been in the Long Winters before, which is Mike Squires.
And I got some concerned emails from people in the music business saying Megan Jasper of Sub Pop sent out a big email.
saying that she had played some role in reforming the Long Winters for this big concert.
And these people were like, this email went out widely to all of the movers and shakers.
It's understandable how one might put it that way, but in terms of how that will be consumed by the people who care, it sends probably an inaccurate message.
Yes.
So I heard from some New York people, for instance, saying... What did you tell me?
Well, or they understood what it was, and they said, John, this is bad brand management on your heart.
Oh, no, you hate that.
And I was like, what did I do?
Two weeks ago, I was just sitting on my couch with no plan.
And then this happened, and now I'm bad brand manager?
Everything turns into a thing.
But so the whole way that that thing went off,
And Mike Squires kind of took over the role of music director.
And at every step of the way, I realized, here's the thing, I realized that it was a choice.
If I put up a fight about anything, I was giving myself more work to do.
Really?
And if I didn't put up a fight, then I had less work and stress.
That's a good insight.
And so as we were going along during the practices and Mike would say something like, I think that it should go like this or be like this.
And then everybody would look at me.
I would go, yeah.
Yeah.
even even though i was thinking because because ordinarily you fight it on principle well or just he said mike said i think we should open with commander oh that's a bold choice and i said in my head no because the first song is always like a sound check basically for the band to figure out how to play together
And that's not where you want to be halfway through Commander.
I might go with Scared Straight.
Right.
There's a lot of songs where you just jump in and kick ass and get out.
But the nature of the song, it's got the parts that are great for starting out with that organ at the beginning.
And people hear it and go, oh, that's that one song I love.
I love that with the horns.
Drums come in.
And so everybody looks at me.
And Mike very quickly got...
that there was something, something afoot with me.
Because then he looks at me and he's like, what do you say to that?
And I said, great.
And he was like, are you... That squeaking noise you hear is John growing.
He said... He's a screw.
Are you, um, are you doing what I'm telling you?
And I was like, I'm, I'm just doing what you tell me.
And so then through the whole process...
I just said, hey, I'm just, there's nobody here but us little mice here.
We're all following Mike and me too.
And we went through the whole.
That must have made everything so much easier.
Well, it just, yeah, it just floated along.
And people would look to me and say like, what chord is that?
Or they would say, what's the rhythm of that?
But other than that, I was not dictating anything.
Right.
And we get to the show and Mike says, look, it's a tight 30-minute set.
We've got seven songs.
There's just, you just can't banter.
And I said, I can't banter.
And he said, he said, no banter.
There's not time.
If you start talking, we're going to go, it's going to be a 45 minute show.
Tell an Aquaman you can't swim.
Can't swim, Aquaman.
Yeah.
And I said, keep it dry.
We got a tight 30.
I said, no banter.
And of course, everybody's standing around and now they're all looking at me.
Yeah.
No banter.
And I said, okay, no banter.
and we got up on stage and did a 30-minute set and i didn't say a word was the response from the audience cool well the response was great everybody loved the show but afterwards as i was walking through the room people would grab me and say you didn't you didn't say anything you didn't do any banter you'd expect by like after the second song
Probably after the second song you could get in a good couple minutes of banner you pick on one person in the audience Call them a hockey puck or whatever.
Yeah, well, you know John Richard put a skate on your head and skate John Richards the program director of the KEXP channel Got up to introduce the band.
That's cool.
I like and he told an anecdote about a time
20 years ago at some music festival where he had introduced the long winters it was a big outdoor stage and then he said he had to go take his child to the dentist or something and he left the stage and he could be seen walking along the you know in the dirt out by the back fence headed toward the exit and he said as he was heading to the exit
The entire way, I up on the stage now, you know, 300 yards from him was going, where do you think you're going?
Hey, hey, John Richards.
Hey, pretty boy.
Yeah.
Give me a 180.
You headed to the exit for some reason?
And, you know, and my voice is echoing across.
Did you have to solve crime in Metropolis?
What's happening?
John Richards.
And he said he left the venue because he had this thing to do.
And as he was walking through the streets, he could still hear me.
Saying like, well, John Richards, I guess, you know, he supports the local music scene, but he's got other things to do.
He's got to go, I guess, somewhere, go and get some college credit or maybe.
And so he tells this story by way of introducing the band.
And then he throws to me, I'm standing there by the microphone, and everybody in the room turns to me to hear what I have to say about that story.
And I just smiled like a fatted calf.
Things were going pretty good.
I was just like India's sacred cow.
And then one, two, three, and then we launched into the set.
And I think there were a lot of people in the room that felt like maybe I was ill or
or something had had their... Right, that you were like in some kind of Warren's Eve on stage.
Yeah, yeah, or like pod people had gotten to me.
And we got to the end, and Mike said, I can't believe that you did that.
And I said, well, you told me.
You told me that I couldn't talk, so I didn't.
That must be really overwhelming for him.
That's a lot of process.
So everybody, and everybody keeps, even now, two weeks later, everybody's like waiting for the other shoe to fall.
Like, you're not seriously just...
doing what people tell you and i'm like i don't know maybe living well is the best revenge living well is yeah the revenge part obviously is the tricky one but yeah revenge against who i don't want revenge against anybody there are a couple of people there are a couple of people there they're there they're a handful of people i wish that often what the way i put it personally and even this makes some people very angry it's like i don't
God, I got yelled at so bad on an internet site about this not long ago.
I don't specifically sit around rubbing my hands and hoping the Trump family goes to jail.
I just hope that Jared Kushner's never happy again.
Oh, I doubt he is.
I would like him to get a stress bump that almost goes away but doesn't for the rest of his life.
And that's my sentence.
Judge Merlin says, you're just never going to experience unalloyed simple joy again.
Yeah, most of my— But don't you want him to go to jail?
Sure.
I mean, yeah, let's just send everybody we don't like to jail.
Let's all just yell about it.
Yeah, we got to pay taxes on those jails.
Yeah, somebody's got to pay them.
Unless we follow the Republicans and we privatize all the jails.
And then we have a jail industrial complex.
Did you know that in some prisons, if you want mail, you have to pay a third party to scan it and provide it electronically?
Oh, wow.
So that's what we're looking at.
Yeah, prison.
It's no good.
Yeah, yeah.
We finally read all that Shakespeare.
There it is.
Although I took all my Shakespeare to the used bookstore not that long ago.
Wall of Books.
that I had never read, that I was keeping for when I go to prison.
And they were like, oh yeah, this is a beautiful set.
Wow, we haven't seen one of these in forever.
$23.
Whoa.
Yeah.
And I was like, $23, you say.
$23.
Okay.
Well, I'll take it.
There's the rub.
Sorry.
I didn't mean to elbow you with that.
That's good.
No, that's good.
And I said, you know, because what I want is this to find a new home.
I want a high school senior who wants to major in English to find this.
And you're going to sell it to them for $44, and that's great.
And good luck.
God bless.
But I think – I'm sorry.
I always think of – what is it, Blue Diamonds?
Yes.
Yeah.
And it's like that's the first time I ever heard – if I ever heard that phrase put that way was in Blue Diamonds.
And then when you say it, I'm like, you just said the thing.
Yeah.
Washington's on the one.
What does that mean?
Every once in a while, you've got to clothe yourself.
You do.
You're a tastemaker, practically.
I was thinking about Sky King the other day.
You remember Sky King.
Was that about a dog?
No, Sky King.
We talked about him.
He was the kid that stole the airplane.
Remind our audience and me what Sky King is.
Well, there's a whole episode where we spent a little bit of time.
On the VOR episode?
No, it was here on this program.
Oh, I was there.
Yeah, you were here.
Okay.
And it was the fellow that stole the airplane here at SeaTac and then went out and did a loop-de-loop out over the Sound and flew around Mount Rainier and then crashed into an island.
How old?
That was a 2018 episode.
How old?
How old was the Sky King?
Oh, Sky King was in his 30s, I think.
He worked at the airport as some kind of ground support guy, and he taught himself how to fly airplanes on video games.
It's kind of impressive.
It was amazing, and it was a heartfelt, it was a weird moment.
It was one of those weird moments where there were a lot of people that were like, that was really bad.
You shouldn't hijack airplanes and fly them around and crash them.
And then there were people that were like, that's a perfect example of white privilege or whatever it was that the Internet said in 2018.
Yeah.
And then there was my reaction to it was somewhat different that that I that I was somewhat emotional about this guy.
But I think about him all the time.
I mean, he's a kind of Icarus.
He was very much an Icarus.
And he did the loop-de-loop not thinking he would survive it, and then I think was amazed that he had actually done it, and he didn't have a plan after that.
First time he ever tried it, he managed to do a loop-de-loop without eating it?
With a passenger, in a passenger aircraft.
A commercial jet?
Not a jet, but a commercial turboprop.
That's crazy.
Yeah, and I don't think... Well, and that's not like... I don't think... I mean, they might be rated for that, but I don't think they're made for that.
They're not made for it.
They didn't know Spitfire.
But this isn't like when Tex Johnson rolled his 707 over Lake Washington, because a plane can roll...
And it doesn't add any additional stress to the air.
Is it roll side to side?
Yeah.
What's yaw?
Is yaw the other way?
Well, there's yaw on pitch, and that's like nose up, nose down, tail left, tail right.
It's probably easier to flip it wings over wings rather than trying to do a forward somersault.
I'm guessing that's hard with a plane.
Well, a somersault would be really hard, but you know, like a loop is like going up like a roller coaster, like all the way up over the top and down.
And that's a, you know, that's a real, that's a move because on the way down, that's a lot of G-forces.
Yeah, I've seen Dunkirk.
He could have passed out.
Could have passed out, but he didn't and I think once it happened he you could just hear him on the radio like Wow, you know what you'd be he probably said but he had never flown an airplane at all Jiminy it's not like he it's not like he so those stories are true People really do mostly learn and then they said this about the 9-11 guys too But like you can learn a lot about flying a plane from like Microsoft flight simulator simulator.
Yeah
Yeah, you can't know what it feels like, but you can really, yeah, you learn all your ground control.
It never puts you in the simulator where it makes constant errors, so you might have some pretty good beginner's luck.
And I think there are, of course, those simulators that the big boys use where they actually black you out and move it around.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I've seen it.
It looks terrifying, yeah.
But so when I think of revenge, I never think of Jared Kushner.
I never think of national figures.
I had no interest in Henry Kissinger tripping on the sidewalk.
If it had happened, I would have shrugged.
If it didn't, obviously, I shrugged.
But every once in a while, I think, you know, Sky King, I admire everything that you did.
In a way, I'm also I'm also appalled by it.
Well, of course, this is the problem.
There's no context anymore.
I mean, yes, I could give you seven minutes of prologue on how this was a bad idea and people shouldn't do it.
But that doesn't erase the fact that what he did is kind of amazing.
Well, we don't have room for that kind of remark anymore.
Yeah, I feel like I flew along with him for a while is the thing.
You know, because I was... Like the day that llama got away.
Remember how the internet came together when there was like a llama wandering around?
A llama running around.
That was very nice.
Or the horse that jumped out with the bicyclists in France and he ran alongside him for a while.
Or that neighborhood that's overrun by capybaras.
I love those videos.
The capybara neighborhood.
Capybara, capybara, capybara.
Capybara, capybara.
But but every once in a while, I think Sky King, you know, everything you did was amazing.
But at the end, you just nosedived into a kind of like sparsely populated island.
When you really could have nosedived into a couple of people I know that could have really gotten sky kinged in that moment.
And it was a missed opportunity in terms of if I'm thinking about revenge.
Talk about two birds with one stone.
I know.
There are just a couple of places where I feel like if he had just sky kinged over there, people would say, oh, what a tragedy, these innocent people.
But I would know.
No.
No.
They were not interested.
Oh, they know what they did.
Yeah, they got Sky Kinged for a reason.
But you're probably not the only one celebrating Sky King's victory in that instance.
You cannot call upon Sky King.
People are not just assholes to one person.
That's right.
Oh, that's exactly right.
There would be people all over town I would never know about that would also rejoice because hardly anybody is ever just an asshole.
It seems like poor taste, though, to jump onto that, probably.
Well, and the problem is, as I've said to myself... You're talking about somebody at a bagel place?
No, no, no.
No innocence.
I mean, I'm just talking about, like, let's say, for instance.
Somebody's a piece of shit.
A serial piece of shit.
Somebody's standing out in a field, right?
I'm not saying, like, I want Sky King to hit a mall just to get one person that works at a Benetton.
You're different from Israel.
Continue.
But what I want, the problem is I do not have the ability to call people
sky kings down upon people and and i wish i could you know but but i but i've realized if you could just use mind bullets
um people would be doing it all the time like there are people who have made whole careers like mine beanbags well nobody wants that but like what just but like you're not talking about just like setting somebody straight like a like a christmas carol uh type thing you're talking about like you're talking about extreme yeah you're talking about extreme prejudice i just mean if you could do that yeah then uh then all the ministers that are claiming that they can do it would
be a lot more rich and famous than they are like everybody have a lot more credibility for sure yeah i mean they're constantly saying this hurricane is because of gay marriage and it's like nope it ended up hitting uh your church lol uh but but i i do feel just shows that god sees and remembers us we're in his thoughts it's such a weird thing that particular church well it's it's so weird to think that i do though
It's maybe one of the ways I practice religion.
I do sometimes call upon religion.
Obviously not my turtles.
I'm not saying, hey, turtles, take a break from letting the waves wash you across this mossy rock to deliver great vengeance upon my enemies.
You're on holy army of the night.
Yeah, like which Krampus.
We'll need to start early.
We're going on foot.
Which Krampuses do I also have in my...
A pantheon that I'm talking to in the night, right?
Like, I'm trying to remind myself, do not call Sky Kings down upon people.
Let Sky King... And you're presenting this here, just to be clear, this is an addendum or clarification about what we mean by revenge.
Yes, I do still...
sometimes go into the woods and pray to the german gods the old gods the old gods yeah and that i don't think is good i don't think it was good back then do you find it unwholesome i just feel something in me that's being fed that i should be not feeding
right like some kind of it's not like a it's not like uh what's the what's the bad uh grouch that lives under um jabba the hut oh the um the um uh the it's not a krampus but it's close yeah it's a grumpus and then the guy gets sad it's a oh i'm so sorry everyone he gets sad when his grumpus is killed the um
Not Ragnarok, but it's got a K sound.
It's a Ragnarok.
It's a Ragnarok?
Mm-hmm.
It's Ragnarok.
I'm going to yell it in a second.
In The Mandalorian, then they realize that it's... Rancor.
Rancor.
It's a Rancor.
They realize that one of the people is like a Rancor whisperer or something?
Well, that poor guy, that English character actor from Lair of the White Worm.
Yeah, he's the Rancor wrangler.
And then it breaks his heart when something happens.
Yeah, that's so sad.
The thing about a rancor is you do have to feed a rancor.
That's true.
Right?
Because a rancor is a living guy.
You promised you'd take care of it.
Yeah, he needs to eat, right?
You've got to find donkeys for him or something or throw Luke Skywalker's at him every once in a while.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But the beast that I'm talking about that you shouldn't feed is more like a...
like a mold or like a like like uh what like an anthrax like there are some kind of some kind of a dnd monster manual thing where you're calling out some like the creeping mist or something like that yeah exactly don't call the creeping mist not feeding it doesn't like it hurts you more than you realize when you call out the creeping that's right that's right and it does sometimes backfire sometimes you home alone yourself and that's something to keep in mind
Did you see the script for the movie of Home Alone in the era of cell phones?
No, but it's certainly something I've thought about.
Yeah, he realizes it's all alone.
Up to and through the Matrix, the ability to talk to people anytime you wanted, once you got that, it scotched a lot of pretty good plots.
Oh, I mean, 80% of all movies and novels.
I mean, you know, Catherine O'Hara is obviously very worked up and sad about it, but the amount of effort that actually went into that was pretty weird.
I guess they had a lot of kids to watch in Paris.
Oh.
A lot of kids, and she had a lot to do.
But, you know, if he had had a cell phone, he would have said, hey, Mom, I'm home alone.
And she would have said, oh.
Go to the neighbors.
Like, not that neighbor.
Go to the other one.
I'm on my way to Paris, but I'll be back.
I'll get on the next flight.
It's kind of a flimsy plot, but I like it.
Keep the change, you filthy animal.
So what if you – I know you can't say.
Yeah.
I know you can't say, but –
But everything good?
You just had a birthday?
You're getting up there.
Yeah, yeah, I am.
But, I mean, it's better than the other one.
It is better than the other one.
You know what I'm saying?
I do.
That when people are like, you're getting old.
And I'm like, uh-huh.
And that's a problem how?
Oh, I see.
You're still laboring on the end of the illusion that you're young.
That you don't get old.
Yeah.
Sherman Alexie posted a thing today saying that he is now the same age that his father was when his father appeared in the movie Smoke Signals.
And he posted a picture and you look at it and it's like, oh, his dad looks like an older man in the movie.
Right.
I think those are things that really get to a person, especially starting in your 40s.
Like I remember very clearly entering my 40, what would become my 45th year and thinking this is the year I officially live longer than my dad.
Yeah.
I mean, I remember I sent you that spreadsheet a long time ago for Google that lets you put in the names of people and dates.
I made that spreadsheet for like seeing when somebody in your family was the same age as somebody else in your family.
I do remember that.
I still return to that pretty frequently.
And it's actually something I'm going to build a chat GPT thing for.
But it's still like I pulled one up the other day and it was like, oh, my God, right now I'm the same age.
as my mother-in-law was on my birthday in 1982.
Which is not, you know, you're supposed to go like, oh my God, I can't believe how old I am.
I just mainly think it's really intriguing.
It is.
The chat GPT part makes it fun because then you can say stuff like what was a popular song the month my kid was born.
Yeah, that's fun.
And it says crank that soldier boy.
Crank that soldier boy?
Crank that soldier boy.
Oh, soldier boy.
Yeah, yeah.
But, I mean, I find stuff like that fascinating.
I am obsessed with, like, how tall celebrities are and when things happened.
And, like, and seeing timelines of that and visualizations of that stuff.
It just really is, it scratches something in my brain.
But it's also just really illuminating.
Yeah.
To just be able to see that, like, I'm well and truly into the part where I get that there are young people and there are old people, but they're all people that used to be young and sometimes get old.
And I think there's a lot of people under 40 who understand that abstractly and purely abstractly.
Oh, yeah.
Including, I think.
I'm being kind to say that.
Isn't that kind of true?
Oh, it's absolutely true.
I took my daughter to a powwow.
This weekend.
Can we say that?
Is that all right?
Powwow?
Yeah.
I mean, I don't know if there's another way to say it.
In Scouts, they have the jamboree.
Oh, no, but I mean, it's a powwow like the Muckleshoot tribe.
Whoa.
Has a few powwows a year.
There's a summer powwow.
This was the winter powwow.
What's analogous to a powwow for me and you?
I mean, it's like a meeting, a performance.
In 2023, what is a powwow for that group of folks?
Well, so in this instance, it's groups come from all, not all, but a lot of neighboring tribes.
And by that, I mean the whole region, like as far away as Idaho.
And they bring dancers and drummers.
It's like a hip hop Chautauqua.
It's a big Chautauqua, that's right.
And so, you know, so what happens is there's a big ceremony where kind of everybody's drumming and all the dancers are kind of doing a big circuit together, young and old.
It's wonderful.
And they're singing and a lot of the music...
is kind of like, it's like when I went to the Exit Inn in Nashville, and there were 60 people there just jamming with each other, and they all knew all the songs.
So somebody would be like, you know, chicken in the mouse pen, and everybody's like... That's my broom or something.
Yeah, they all know all the turns, because that's kind of the Nashville thing.
And this was a thing where, you know, it's just drumming, there's no other instrument.
Oh, drumming and bells.
Whoa, that sounds a little hypnotic.
It's extremely hypnotic.
When you say bells, I don't know why the addition of the word bells makes me think that's something I could really vibe on.
Well, and the bells are incorporated into the costumes of the dancers.
You should do that with your jingle stick.
I know I should.
Life's a powwow.
You have to have pretty good rhythm.
But so, so, so my daughter and I went and, and, and it's in a big community center and, you know, we're sitting up in the stands and it's really, it's an, it's a gathering that is not meant, it's not like outward facing, right?
It's not like, although they do have a sort of come one, come all attitude about it, not very many people outside the community go, right?
Oh, really?
So it's not a performance for the world.
It's largely unspoiled by people like us.
Well, or what it is, is you're also witnessing not just all the stuff, but also it's just a form of communication within the group.
and different so each tribe has a group of drummers and they each get a focus where they do a drum performance and then the next group does and then the dancing is broken out by age and by style of costume so there are actually dances called like
Okay, and now we're going to do teen girls fancy.
And then they come out and do a fancy thing.
This kind of sounds like the world's coolest county fair.
For me, it was always clogging.
But in this instance, I would love to see that.
It's clogging.
Very similar, I think, and cultural role, too.
Similar cultural role.
And they also play just the drum part for Cotton-Eyed Joe.
There it is.
And to me, as a musician and as a listener, because the drumming is, there's one big drum and there's between three and nine people sitting in a circle around the drum and they're all hitting the same drum.
And so it's extremely, it can be extremely moving in this hypnotic way that you're saying, you know, where you're just like, okay, this is hitting me somewhere more deeply.
Especially if you've got ADHD, I mean, this sounds dumb to say, but especially if you've got ADHD, that sort of like stimulation enables you to focus on other things than whatever the bagatelle in your mind is.
And it's kind of, can be a little bit intoxicating.
Yeah.
Super intoxicant.
And then the other thing is everyone is so beautiful.
And so I'm just looking at people's faces as they go by, looking at people as they move through the room and just like – and the drums and I'm just like really in a fugue state.
And of course my daughter is a teenager so she's like –
uh needs a little so i had to kind of direct her sometimes like look at that what's happening over there like what is this you know what's your favorite one of these and you just kind of keep her in the game but what was really interesting was that this is an event where there are very young middle aged and old people all together all in the same all participating in the same exchange which happens less than we probably think
And in our world, yours and mine?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
You know, unless we're interacting with our parents, when was the last time you sat down to dinner with an 80-year-old?
Yeah, yeah, I know what you mean.
When was the last time you danced with an 80-year-old or saw an 80-year-old dance?
Let alone in the same room at the same moment that a three-year-old is in.
He's still got moves, Peepaw.
Still got – and so it's going through, you know, and you see the young kids who are just sort of learning the dances.
And then you see the teens where you're like, oh, these teens – They've been doing this for a while.
Yeah, they start to think like they really know what they're doing.
And then you get into the adults –
And you're like, whoa, holy shit, there's a whole other language that you could not know as a teen, right?
It's not just you haven't learned it.
You couldn't know it.
Right.
Oh, that's interesting.
Right?
It's not just that you're... It's not just that you learn the movements correctly.
There's something deeper to what's going on.
Something else, right.
Expertise that exposure to that brings out something that's demonstrably different feeling.
And it's very athletic, right?
At that point, it's like there's an athleticism.
Those bells aren't going to ring themselves.
But then you watch the old people, and it's like, oh.
Oh, I bet that one's good.
Well, that's the thing.
Oh, even when you're a grown-ass man.
I bet they look very determined when they're doing it.
Well, or just it's an entire language, right?
Where even a 40-year-old can know –
His part in it, but cannot know, cannot do that as a as a 70 year old can't.
There's just you couldn't do it.
Because it's a place where your combined life experience can actually be expressed in a way that's visible, right?
And it becomes such a raw display in the best way.
A raw display of both the kind of culture that we all do hand-wavy talk about and a kind of culture you're seeing something very directly.
And the fact that it's physical and auditory and all of those things...
It's almost impossible not to be moved from at least some part of that.
And what's exceptional is we're in a room full of people who are all really paying attention to what the old people are doing.
How often does that happen?
Yeah, and recognizing that what they're doing is at a level that we all can only aspire to do.
And to think about me in my daily culture walking around where I'm just like, all right, old people, out of the way.
Coming through.
Young people and old.
The coupons are expired.
Stop trying to use the expired coupons.
And then they break into a dance and I start crying.
People 10 or 15 years younger than us are like, out of the way, old people.
Because, because, let's just say it, once a year, I like to say this on every podcast, because like everyone, I grew up believing there's something wrong with old people.
That they got the way they are.
You obviously get older, you're not an idiot, you understand age, but something about like, if that guy pisses himself and can't control it, he must have done something bad and weird.
That's right.
He's reached the age where now he's lost control and his sins are on full display.
It really is practically medieval.
Yeah, he's getting Sky King because he is a bad person somewhere.
How are you still alive, dude?
I know.
Well, the reason we're alive is that you can't Sky King other people.
Only Sky King.
You can't Sky King other people.
You cannot.
Okay.
If you could, it'd be happening all the time.
That's why you don't call it your crampuses.
Planes would be falling out of the sky.
You know what I mean?
Yeah, I mean, it would certainly be a wrinkle in the system.
It would.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
We can only take so many Sky Kings.
It's like people who run red lights.
You can only have so many of those before you start having problems.
Yeah, why do we even have red lights at that point?
Yeah, exactly.
Free speech.
It's one of the great things about God that God is not paying attention to what you're asking.
You're so lucky God is not paying attention.
Yeah, God is like, nope.
He's like 90%, 99% of the time,
God is noping everybody.
He's been around a long time.
He knows how the system works.
He knows how to do teen boys fancy.
He knows how to do... Oh, I see.
He knows how to do like a middle-aged stompy.
He can run all the dances.
Yeah.
Oh, and the other thing is, you know, the old people are not trying to do the moves.
Yeah.
Of the young adults.
That's admirable.
Although, you know, they once did.
Wasn't a lady there with a little bit too much makeup doing like a torch song?
No, no, no.
There was no one.
At no point did I see anyone.
Nobody got up there and did like a really slow Le'Veon Rose.
There was not.
There were no Christmas carols.
Not at all in this season of lights.
No, not a one.
That's good because that means you didn't have to hear that song, the bell song.
Didn't have to hear it.
Yeah, that triggers me.
That makes me go completely Manchurian Candidate.
That one is the one of all the terrible Christmas songs.
I have strong feelings about Christmas.
Ring Christmas barrels, merrily ring.
It sounds like madness.
It's like listening to an A.C.
Newman song.
It sounds like you're losing your goddamn mind.
Well, think about how much that sounds like my slow descent into alcoholism.
You sound crazy.
You're right.
Every single one of those melodies is badans.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
You're not allowed to leave sometimes.
We went to a Christmas market yesterday.
Oh, I didn't go.
Last night, there was one out on Street Terrible Street.
They did like a five-block thing.
It was banging, man.
Really fun.
They had a great time.
Yeah, although I don't know how you are at these things, but when you're walking through like a market...
Where people are selling their handmade goods.
Everything smells like lavender.
There's a lot of lavender.
There's a lot of homemade jewelry.
My problem is I have some kind of remedial synesthesia where I...
I taste lavender very strong when I smell it.
So places that have an excess of homemade soap, sometimes I enjoy it.
I'll go, I'll buy some fresh shrimp or something, or a cozy.
But there's a lot of...
Wait, please continue.
But how do you feel in those spaces?
Are you comfortable?
I'm pretty comfortable.
Sometimes I feel a little bit overstimulated by just everything that's going on and what I have to pay attention to because that's just how I am.
But no, I enjoy the moseying around.
I enjoy visiting with people.
And I'm that kind of white guy who says things like, I love supporting local businesses because I do.
So sometimes I just buy stuff because the people seem cool.
So you can go up.
See, my problem is.
Yeah, what?
It's very hard for me to go up to a local artisan and spend the time looking at the thing the way I want to look at it while they're looking at me.
Yeah.
No.
Okay.
Yeah.
And I've gotten bitten.
Oh, my family got bitten hard at one of those.
Because you go up there and you feel kind of weird and maybe not bad exactly, but it's kind of odd.
We went to one of those in Marin probably, I don't know, at this point it's been years and years ago.
But I wanted to go because Todd Rundgren was going to be playing there.
And so we got to see Todd Rundgren and we got a turkey leg and stuff.
But at one point, the kid and mom go off on their own and come back with a photo print.
Oh, a photo print.
Yeah, it's a photo print of a cat.
It's pretty much like a cat you'd see on Instagram.
And they went, we bought this big photo of a cat.
I was like, huh.
I think it was $100.
Oh, yeah.
I was like, huh, all right.
And they didn't need to explain anything.
I could very much see myself walking away, maybe just end the conversation a little sooner.
But I could see myself buying an Instagram cat print.
$100 was a little steep, but it was a large format photo.
That's what happens to me.
I get there.
Do you feel bad not buying something?
Yeah.
The person is looking at me and what I feel is like they're so proud of their wares.
I think sometimes they seem really beaten down by life.
Well, that too, right?
You get this like, oh my God, you just do this all the time and you look so bummed.
Not mad, but like... I want to support every local artist.
I've got to talk to the snorks about my... Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I want to give them all $200.
Yeah, I know who Brancusi is too.
Buy it.
Yeah, I don't need any turquoise...
earrings or rings or turquoise i don't want to get over my skis john but that's one part of getting old i plan to actively avoid is turquoise oh really oh well you you look great with turquoise especially with your skin tone yeah but like i you're welcome but i i i just i i i feel like turquoise is one of those things like so many things i won't even go into examples but you know what i mean like once you get one of these pretty soon you're gonna have seven of these
You're going to have a neck mess, and that's not what I want.
You're going to have a turquoise.
And so you have the really oversized one with the big blue stone on it that you use for your bolo tie.
Yeah, and then there's the one on the front of your bow diddly hat.
Oh, that's a strong look.
But then you start getting into the rings.
And now you're a guy who wears several turquoise rings.
If you have a turquoise thumb ring, God bless your heart.
I remember reading some article about Jack Nicholson in the 1980s and that he carried around a wad of $100 bills and he just gave them as tips to everybody.
Like a guy parks his car, somebody holds the door.
That's kind of badass.
I would love to be able to do that.
That's exactly right.
I can't afford doing that for very long.
No.
Like less than an afternoon.
But it was good.
I don't even know.
I mean, I'm sure Jack Nicholson could afford to do it.
Yeah, but see, here's the thing.
I'm not good at that.
In the same way that think about like, it's a longstanding joke.
Again, a Seinfeld thing could be anything thing.
Trying to bribe someone is a hilarious situation if you don't know how to do it.
And because you must think of it as a bribe.
You just, you must think of it as like, this is how the business works.
And you do it in a way that that person understands.
You know what I mean?
And like, you get good at it.
But like, I could get good at giving away $100 bills.
But at first, it would be extremely awkward.
Yeah, well, I feel like a $20 bill is where, when Hodgman was having success,
I feel like he started giving $20 bills to every buddy, you know, every valet parker.
And $20 bills is like more than they're going to get from 99% of the people.
That's exactly the sweet spot for, wow, thanks, sir.
Hey, thanks, man.
$20 bill, like to the maitre d'.
And I remember watching him do it.
And this was at a time when I had just evolved to leaving $5 in a hotel room for the cleaners.
For the entire stay.
Yeah.
And just like for $5 a night when I was really feeling hot.
But like, you know, I'm not just leaving a hotel room with nothing on the table anymore.
Like I'm going to put down five or ten.
It feels good for everybody.
You get to do a thing where you feel like I'm doing in the same way that like there's a time where you're like, I really, gosh, when you go to the Met or something, one of those places where it's technically a donation, it feels good to just put in more than you need to and go, we're good.
It's nice.
And it's easy to tip 25% on stuff.
But to hand $20 to everybody that carries your bags from the curb to the front desk is a nice feeling.
And I've never been able to afford to do it.
But to give $100, that $100 bill is a thing that even if you're used to getting big tips –
Nobody's given anybody a hundred dollar bill unless they're really big Roller and a hundred dollar bill from Jack Nicholson half the people I bet put it in a frame on the wall Absolutely until a week later, but yeah that absolutely yeah, and so that Becomes the standard in the back of my head I wonder what amount you choose to give to someone to have them not spend it a five probably I bet somebody frame a five
If somebody gave you a Woodrow Wilson with $100,000 on it, you're probably going to go put that in an account somewhere.
I think if you carried around silver dollars – I got dollars.
Oh, you're talking about – you're talking about Kennedy's.
Or no, no.
Those are half dollars.
I'm talking about those Eisenhower silver dollars.
They're so big.
They're like skipping stones.
Yeah.
If you started handing those out to people –
If they were younger than 50, they'd be like, what the fuck is this?
You get an assistant with a fanny pack or a special bespoke, you know, the change things.
You get a special bespoke, oversized, comically large, maybe steampunk, $1 coin dispenser, and you just start giving that to everybody.
I think you get almost the same amount of thrill from that.
You got a tip.
It's a novelty coin.
Yes.
I think that's lovely.
John, maybe we should do that.
Here's the thing.
I think you could go down to your local numismatist.
Well done.
He might also be a philatelist.
He's probably a philatelist.
We have one nearby.
We have one nearby.
It's closed now.
But I used to take photos.
He had a sign outside that said he will not open the door for you unless you spend $50.
And I always admired that.
I admired his candor.
The place was a death trap.
But I think you could go into one of those places and buy...
Some kind of crazy souvenir coins.
Because you know people come in there with a fucking fuck ton of coins, almost all of which are worthless, and they go, wheat pennies, yay.
I don't know what the value of a normal, regular wheat penny is, but I bet it's not huge.
Not huge.
But what does that mean?
That means he's got a bunch of coins that aren't on display because they're kind of garbage coins.
Mm.
but still cool still cool does he go to the coin star or does he keep him under the desk so so when high rollers come in he can sell them a big roll of uh a big roll of eisenhower's but it seems like i i could be the type of older man who carries around a bunch of wheat pennies and then every time he meets a kid he's like hey kid come here
You know, this will stick to your forehead.
And then look at this.
You see what this is?
You'll never see one of these again.
This is a wheat penny.
You like bread?
You like bread?
You know, every once in a while, one of those kids looks at it and it changes their life forever.
This is RG, mister.
RG, mister.
What is this?
And then if it was an animated thing, their head would have a big rainbow coming out of it.
There'd be stars all around.
Oh, they'd get those emoji eyes with lots of extra white spots.
Like what good Finn gets really excited about Peabum's, and he gets those extra white circles in his eyes.
Exactly.
Yes.
Oh, and very emotional all of a sudden.
Absolutely.
Or get even nicer ones like Real Silver.
Half dollars.
Who knows?
You know, you can get them for 20 bucks, I bet.
You can get them for the weight of the silver.
Don't worry.
I'm going to be looking into this.
And then hand them out like this is not nothing.
This is a Ben Franklin half dollar.
It's so nice because it's not as douchey as a business card.
It's not as super douchey as some challenge coins.
Like you get to go out there instead of being like, well, you know, I was in the underground evacuation unit for six weeks and I have a challenge coin for you.
You can put it on that thing behind your desk if you're the president.
But like, man, I'm telling you also, can I just say, I haven't touched an Eisenhower dollar in a real long time, but I remember them feeling great and I remember them sounding awesome.
Really good, right?
You get a higher end ting sound from those old coins.
Well, I mean, like if you drop it, if you dropped it on some marble, it would make a really satisfying high end thing kind of noise.
So right here, I'm seeing Morgan silver dollars here at the at some of these places.
And, you know, you can get a Morgan dollar for.
for the about the same amount that you would give somebody as a really good tip to uh so two questions um um what is the amount that would cost and what is a morgan dollar actually the first one for will you take the second second question first what is a morgan dollar a morgan dollar is a dollar with a picture of uh like a bust of liberty uh the the female personification of liberty just so you know i'm gonna go on the internet
Morgan silver dollars were made from the late 1800s to the early 1900s.
Oh, this is a tremendous looking coin.
And you can get them for, you know, between $20 and $30.
If they're not, you know, you're not getting them so that they're at collector rate.
I get it.
You give them a dollar and they go, gee, thanks, mister.
But then they get home and Google it and find out it's worth a, you know, pretty good DoorDash meal.
Yeah, this one is, you know, I mean, and that's the thing.
People think of collector coins as being like, oh, this has value as a collector thing.
But there's so many Morgan dollars that are so worn.
The whole basis of buying that way, which I do understand because it's about money.
The whole basis of that is buying something for a certain amount and then being able to sell it for more later, but not having some aesthetic value at the core.
But it's ultimately about what you bought it for and what you sold it for.
Yeah, and in this case, a lot of these are only worth their weight in silver.
So they've become, they're worn enough and they're not rare enough that they're just, whatever the spot price of silver is today, $17.
They haven't been kept in like a plastic slab for 50 years or something.
No, but that's what's wonderful about them.
You look at them and you're like, this was carried in the pocket.
John, people use this as money.
In 1901.
Somebody had this in their pocket.
The one I'm looking on the internet science page is from 1879.
Can you imagine walking around with an 1879?
My dad carried a silver dollar that was like his, what do you call it, a rubbing stone?
Yeah.
It would wear down over time.
Yeah, his little worry stone.
But that was a thing people used to do.
You just carry around a really cool coin.
So if you think about a coin that was minted in 1885, a Morgan dollar,
What it has been through on its path to your pocket in 2021.
All of those years.
2023.
There might have been 25 years where it was just sitting in a drawer in Poughkeepsie.
Well, until until World War Two was probably money.
And then it sat in a drawer and then it was in a plastic case probably for a while.
Or who knows?
Maybe it only just reappeared when Grandpa died.
Yeah.
So I just sitting in a jar until he passed.
I feel like when you look at a $20 bill and you think of what a $20 bill can buy that you could carry and give to people that was something better than $20.
Right.
I mean, and the problem is you don't want to give that to somebody that parked your car.
Like a USB cable adapter or something.
Yeah.
I mean, they're going to look at it and be like, come on, man.
Don't you have any money?
But there are those people.
Like if you were to give somebody a challenge coin that would cost you $20 to make and instead hand them a Morgan dollar and go, you know, but slip it to them like a challenge coin.
Like, hey, man, nice to meet you.
Like, it just seems like a better way to go.
I appreciate the fact that we're working.
You know, Kurt Vonnegut might call it a caress.
I feel like we're working in the same direction here.
I just wanted to give you this.
Yes.
That's a lovely gesture.
Yeah, yeah.
And once you start thinking, oh, Morgan Silver Dollar, it's like made to be in your pants.
It's like made to be carried around.
It was built to do that.
That would not fit in like my grandfather's coin purse.
My grandfather had one of those leather sphincters where you squeeze the size and you put your coins in it.
And then you can put that in your hip pocket.
They're kind of heavy to carry around.
You'd have to want it.
And how many, how many of those you suppose, so you're going to go out, you're going to go to, I don't know what kind of, I don't know your life, but you're going to, let's say you're just going to go to the grocery.
Like how many, how many Morgans are you rolling with?
I think you only have to carry one.
One and done.
Yeah.
How many people are you going to meet in a day that you're going to want to give a silver dollar to?
You're going to carry that around for a month.
That takes self-knowledge.
Rather than thinking like, I'm going to go out there and be like, you remember, I remember reading in perhaps Guinness that John Rockefeller sometimes would stand in front of his building and hand out shiny new dimes.
Back when a dime could buy two bags of candy.
You kidding me?
You could retire on that.
See?
I love this idea.
That's the thing about the boomers, right?
They all retired on silver dimes.
I'm not against challenge coins, but it's just part of this whole rat king of how security guards dress like cops and cops dress like SWAT people and SWAT people dress like they're in the military.
It's all part of this weird first responder public servant idea.
inflation that we've had it's a militarization of our culture it is that's not good where are the poets i want to i want to have a bake sale to buy a jet merlin and have the government fund our teachers visualize world peas oh
Yeah, you got any others?
Do you remember how long that – I think that was the longest bumper sticker that a lot of people had.
Was that quote?
No, no, no, no.
Oh, I want to make sales.
I think it was supposedly said by a Native American.
But it was something like, it'll be a great day when schools have all the money – I'm totally paraphrasing off.
I love it, though.
Do you remember how long it was?
It was difficult to read without corrective lenses.
It would say something like, it would be a great day when schools can have all the money they need and the Air Force has to hold a bake sale to buy a bomber or whatever.
And you had to really sit and chew on it like, oh, right, bake sales.
Yeah.
Are helped by schools.
You have to really think about why it is that liberals in particular are so bad at communicating ideas to other people.
Moral majority is neither.
Okay.
The moral majority is neither.
Let me think about that for a second.
Okay.
Moral majority is neither.
Sea Rock City.
Hmm.