Ep. 560: "In My Ravine"
Hello?
Record to this computer.
Hi, John.
Hi, Merlin.
How's it going?
Ah, it's early.
Oh, it is a little early, yeah.
Bomb cyclone.
We're having the bomb.
You guys had the bomb cyclone.
Did you have the atmospheric rivers and the bomb cyclone?
Oh, we had two bomb cyclones.
I heard it was bad up there.
Oh, it was bad.
Well, what was crazy was it did the old hookaroo.
No.
It did the hookaroonie.
How'd that happen?
It went somewhere and came back?
well it did it it basically went completely around where i am and did uh it knocked out the power here but i think it knocked out the power here because it blew up the east side of town it didn't even i mean there was like one branch that fell was it was it primarily a wind event
Wind and rain yeah But on the east side it knocked down all these massive trees.
They're still people without power I had about 20 hours without power, but it's not enough that any of the things in the fridge went bad Yeah, but on the east side.
I think there's that we're going on day five Thousands of there half a million people that didn't have power my mom
I mean, completely unrelated and yet somehow related.
My mom on the west coast of Florida, like, you know, really went through it with those two hurricanes.
And like, it's I'm like, basically, she lost her car.
Her car was just like subsumed in water.
That's gone now.
You know, it was I mean, it was still parked there.
Apparently it was quite disturbing to go down and the ground was just a little bit wet, but basically all the cars had been like submerged for a while.
And then the trees, the place where she stayed during the hurricane, they had 60 trees go down on their property.
Yeah.
And like, I don't know.
You see now we're officially becoming old men because I'm like, I don't remember stuff like that happening that many times a year when I was a kid.
We would have like 1974 in Southern Ohio, especially in Xenia, Ohio, but even in Cincinnati.
Like we had this crazy tornado in 1974 that we talked about my entire childhood.
And now it feels like that happens four times a year.
Weather talk.
yeah weather talk when i was growing up i just like saying bomb cyclone is the thing there was always thanksgiving day or no i'm sorry a valentine's day windstorm in anchorage for some reason it always happened on valentine's day huh and it came and the wind would come through the town and it would pick up mobile homes and just dash them against the sides of mountains it was like giants came
And and it was always very like terrifying, you know, terrifying.
But yeah, it happened.
It happened once a year.
It didn't happen like once every six weeks.
And this this bomb cyclone, because this is the here's the thing.
We had never heard the term.
They love this.
They did this 20 years ago.
They've got the El Nino.
You've got the La De Recha.
Is that the opposite of an El Nino?
No, that's an El Nono.
No, it's a Los Niños.
La Niña.
La Niña.
Which is the opposite of an El Niño.
And then Atmospheric River.
I've never heard of that either.
Anyway...
A Yolotango.
I got it.
I got it.
He screams.
So, no, I'd never heard any of those terms.
And the first time I heard of a bomb cyclone.
Yolotango.
That's what I'm going to start calling.
You know what?
It's a goddamn Yolotango.
We should spitball four or five new names for weather phenomena.
I don't, I have an idea what they might be for, but I think we just submit those to whatever's left of the weather service.
Yeah, the Yokiero Taco Bell that comes in.
Okay, I got that one.
Now, would the dog be in that?
He's probably passed, but he might have lineage.
Yokiero Taco Bell.
Well, you know, sure, who was the Budweiser dog?
I bet there's been 15 of those.
Spuds McKenzie.
Spuds.
Spuds, yeah.
Yeah, he was a terrier.
I think he was a bull terrier.
Yo, Chiaro.
Yo, La Tango.
These are good.
I'm going to keep capturing those.
But, you know, the bomb cyclone had a second bomb cyclone.
And that's that little hook.
He did a hook on you.
Yeah, and they swung around.
I have no idea how...
How I avoided getting hit.
Because I've got trees all around me that just want to crash down.
That's where all your cameras are.
Well, that and there's like owls living in them.
All of my neighbors have at least one tree that they point at and go, that tree of yours.
Yeah, it's like a bullet with your name on it.
That tree that belongs to you is going to fall on me.
And I go, look, man.
I didn't make the rap.
God made the rap.
Syracuse has sent me the most amazing video a couple years ago that he got from his uncle.
Just real quick.
And it was his uncle out in his yard shooting video of a guy on the next lot, very far away, cutting down a tree.
And perhaps you could guess what happened.
It was, like, comically far away, but a very tall tree, and it totally fell on John's uncle's house.
Wow.
It's like we're all that close.
Now, this might be lore, but I remember hearing as a kid, and I don't want to pass on lore that's not scientific, that's not the kind of program that we do.
But what I remember, and specifically, again, if you go look up Xenia, X-E-N-I-A, Xenia, Ohio, 1974...
What I remember about that was my first big memorable tornado.
My mom and I were, as people say, hunkered down.
Horrible phrase.
We were in the basement of the house waiting for my dad to get home from work.
And he had seen the funnel like over the big Holiday Inn on 75.
Like he's he saw the giant like 90s You know blockbuster movie style tornado, but what I remember a violent F5 tornado is that right?
Is that a big one?
Oh my god Merlin not only did it destroy a large portion of Xenia, but it destroyed Wilberforce, Ohio Wilberforce for my benefit is that real?
Wilberforce, Ohio.
It hit Wilberforce, of all things.
It did, of all the places.
Don't you have a signed copy of Wilberforce No.
1?
You know, I have a little Wilberforce right here.
He's looking down on the little blue naked man and naked girl.
What I remember about that was, here's the thing about a tornado.
It starts fat at the top and skinny at the bottom, like an old man's body.
Fat at the top, skinny at the bottom.
But that little point at the end, it can just, think of it almost like the goldfinger laser beam.
Like, it's just going to slice through wherever that little point at the bottom hits.
And...
I don't think this is merely lore, but it is bananas.
The extent to which one house, where once you often like what we could quote one side of the street, although it doesn't move in lines.
Where one's children play with one's toys.
Where one's children.
Yes.
In one's house.
Yes.
Yes.
And I blame Frank for that.
Well, ultimately I blame Fredo, but.
Of course, it's always on Fredo.
But do you remember that feeling of like, and that's.
He wanted something of his own.
He got stepped over.
And you got Frank Pantangeli over here.
They got him waiting in the lobby.
Cheech.
Aparta.
I just remember that.
You don't come to Las Vegas.
And talk to a man.
Like Mo Green.
Young kid.
Went out.
Las Vegas.
I didn't ask who gave the oda.
I'm going to take a nap when I come out.
So it slices through houses like a laser beam.
And I was thinking about this a lot because I was, just to make it about me, as usual, very stressed out about for my 90-year-old mother.
And, like, she lives very close to the Gulf of Mexico on the west coast of Florida.
And she's in, like, the, I don't know, second zone.
Like, you know, there's the don't even bother.
You're probably already dead.
But, you know, she did bug out.
And, like, the elevator, and so she's a 90-year-old person in a, it's not an old people home, but an ACLF, like it's an old people building.
And the elevator just didn't work for a couple, three weeks.
Yeah.
So, like, I don't know how many 90-year-old people you have in your life, but, like... Just the one.
Just the one?
Now, she's pretty robust, but going up and down steps with, say, groceries when you don't have a car, because, oh, did I mention your car got flooded?
You know, it's terrible, but that's what I kept thinking about, was that little pointy end of the tornado and the way that it can so randomly, like, stochastically attack an area in a way that makes you feel like God is mad at particular people.
Yeah.
Isn't that crazy?
It is crazy because you think about stuff like you look at like, oh man, there was a really good Japanese movie, not a documentary, but kind of almost like a horror, not a horror movie, but like a disaster movie about Fukushima.
It was pretty well done.
Do you know much about Fukushima?
Well, yeah, because... It was pretty fucked up.
It was pretty fucked up, yeah.
I didn't realize how fucked up it was.
Really?
Well, because here's the thing.
But here's what you think of.
You think of the typhoons or tsunamis or any of that stuff.
And what do you think of?
I think of like, oh boy, everybody who's within this many meters of the water is probably, at least their property is pretty fucked up.
You know when you're from Florida you get used to like yeah Well, Sanibel Island never does very well with those things.
You know, I mean everybody's got those areas You've got a million islands up there that probably get flooding, you know Yeah, fairly regularly people who live on we do 1 million flooded islands.
We have them 1 million flooded islands, huh?
They were a great band from Canada I wasn't gonna make the joke because I thought I was too close to imagine dragons and I pulled it but but
What was my point?
What was I talking about?
Weather?
Oh, you were talking about weather.
Yeah, yeah.
And it'll just wipe a person out.
But you're used to like, okay, there's the big waves coming in and everybody here.
But you know what I think I'm going to remember, I kind of feel like, is the effects of a Gulf of Mexico-based hurricane having such an effect on western North Carolina.
Yeah.
Because I think in ways that, I don't know, we have such a short memory for these things, but like, West or like Asheville, that area, have you ever been to Asheville?
I've heard it's amazing.
I've not only been, but played there, and also... I heard the people there are really cool.
I have a really good friend that's lived there for 30, well, no, but she's been there for...
Well, a long time.
And she teaches school there and... But it's not exactly like a hippie community, but it's... It's pretty hippie.
But yeah, right.
It's very artsy, right?
And stuff like that.
Well, you know, just to state the kind of obvious here, you can go look at a map on your computer.
How far away is Asheville, North Carolina from even, you know, the panhandle of Florida?
And it's like that kind of water rain event is just...
Yeah.
It's because God doesn't like.
I thought it was because of vote.
Oh, it's some get out the vote thing, you mean?
Well, I don't know how much you read.
I know you read the same books and magazines I do, but were you aware that they have a machine for sending the weather to what we call red districts?
Did you know that?
Yeah, well, I don't, you know, I don't talk about that publicly because as a member of the liberal elite.
As a member of the igloominati.
We keep that in the newsletter.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
That stays in meeting.
Yeah, the snorks don't.
Chatham House rule.
Yeah.
Chatham House does rule.
i know about fukushima because uh my daughter was in situ she was still in the womb literally in the glass yeah uh and and was due that week and the the the fukushima blew up and then we watched the radioactive cloud come across the pacific
And they were like, and now it's here, and now it's here, and now it's here.
Oh, was your daughter's mother slash partner freaking out?
Well, we have this little baby that's about to be born.
Well, no, and again, you're at that point where I almost feel like there's a curve in some ways of the middle part is the most annoying, but when you're first pregnant and when you're about to give birth, it seems like it's a time when you feel especially vulnerable.
You're so big, and your back hurts so much, and you can't sleep, and you're hoping your kid's not going to, you know...
out weird you know it's such an anxious thing maybe you know you haven't had sushi and wine in months and then on top of it all oh by the way hon you might want to stay in one of the middle rooms because there's let me just double check my notes here a radioactive cloud coming from Japan active cloud what is this 1958 what are we doing here that's crazy the thing about the thing about this one my daughter's mother slash partner is that she has the Bellingham
Which is that Everything's fine all the time every everything all things are fine.
I didn't know how close Bellingham is to Canada.
It's very close.
It's right next door Syracuse and made me watch a video series on a guy who buys a sailboat yacht from 1910 This very long yacht and fixes it up and he's up he's up in Washington And that's where I learned you can stand in places and you can see Canada from a mountain.
It's just right there You can it almost it's like it's touching it in some ways
I mean, Blaine is the one that's right next to Canada.
That's a terrible name.
It's a crazy little place.
Okay.
But so she put on her little pinstripe business suit and went to work.
And went to work.
I must have told you this.
Whilst pregnant?
Well, this final week.
And she was at the office.
And some older woman at her office said, how are you doing?
And she was like, oh, fine.
Just a little bit.
Yeah.
She was like, well, what kind of meh?
Because it's an older woman.
And the reason that we have older women is because they know things.
Let me guess.
You know she's going to say something concerning, but she wants to be as specific as possible in the very concerning that she says to a woman who's about to have a baby.
Because that's what they love to do.
They love that.
She's just like, you know, like digging in a little bit like, so what exactly?
And Ari says, well, you know, I'm having these false contractions or whatever.
Braxton Hicks.
She says, describe them.
Yeah.
And we'd been to all the parenting classes.
And she's like, it's a Braxton Hicks.
And the woman says, describe them exactly.
And she does.
And the woman says, you're in labor.
Those aren't Braxton Hicks contractions.
You're in labor.
That's a twist.
You need to go home.
Wow.
And so she called me and she said, eh, they say I'm in labor.
Does she always take the advice of the first person who tells her something?
Exactly.
And I said, well, you should start smoking.
She was like, well, I've got two more meetings.
I'll make it.
I'll be home by three or whatever.
Ha!
And so she did not, you know, and meanwhile, Radioactive Cloud, apparently, you know, like subsuming us all under its Godzilla-making abilities.
Whoa!
And in fact, yeah, my daughter does.
She can breathe fire and she can breathe underwater.
Does she produce the fire or is she just able to, in an environment of fire, she's able to keep alive by aspirating fire?
We can never be entirely sure.
I know, because the problem is she's just at the age, if I could say, with all respect, she's right at the age where a lot of mutants start showing their powers.
You take somebody like Pyro.
Now, Pyro, there's a reason he's always playing with a Zippo, and that's because he can manipulate flame, but he can't create it.
You understand?
I do.
You got Johnny Storm, and he turns into a bunch of fire, and then I guess he can fly.
My little one hasn't killed anybody yet accidentally.
As far as you know.
So, in that sense, you know, knock on wood, I hope that she does have the ability to... You don't get to pick these things.
You get what you get and you don't get upset.
I'm trying to find a picture of the radioactive cloud and so far all I see are radar...
Radar things well, you know, I'm a big watch videos of Tsunami sky.
I'll just watch videos of tsunamis all day and as my sister likes to It's like Russian isn't kind of like watching Russian dash cam videos.
We were like this is yeah, I just know this is gonna be so fucking crazy Yeah, somebody's gonna go end over end as over tea kettle, but my sister likes to say there were a bunch of tsunami videos that were on line
In the four days after The event and this is true of both the the Japanese tsunami and the Southeast Asian tsunami She says now you can't find those videos anymore the best.
No, no, no, please John.
No, no, no Wait, you're not going where I think you're going.
Are you well?
No, I was just going there and then I stopped does she think it's a conspiracy?
Well, you know what?
These days, Merlin.
Oh, shit.
These days.
These days.
These days.
These days.
These days.
You know, two things you can't trust are your eyes.
And the thing is, normally I don't buy into all that.
But then I am like, where's that video?
I watched it.
I know what I saw.
I saw the video.
Where is it?
And I look and look and look and look, and there's all these lesser videos.
There's lesser ones.
So you're saying tsunami videos exist...
But these tsunami videos no longer is.
It's like that Sinbad movie nobody remembers.
Somebody called the Mandela effect.
The Berenstain Bears.
Yeah, some of them have been erased from memory, and I don't know why.
Memory hold is what Winston Smith would call it.
that's not like they had it's not like it was some kind it's not that they were especially like any more graphic than the ones you do see right but they were like the good ones the ones where you know where the you remember the the ones with the sirens are like oh no i know i know what i'm talking about and when i think of these kinds of videos and sometimes they're in compilations weather fails yeah weather fails i'm gonna write that down that's really that's really upsetting
Fail.
I always think of like, it's a bunch of people like on the beach and they're like, oh, you guys should really probably be inside and like stay behind the seawall.
And I'm thinking of like when you see a wave of water that not only complete, suddenly one wave of water, right?
Which completely subsumes where those people are and beyond the seawall.
Yeah.
Like a big dragon going chomp.
Yep.
Once it gets over the seawall, that's when you know you're in trouble.
Then once it takes a fishing boat over the seawall, you're like, hmm, they're not going to be able to clean that up.
I don't think they're licensed for that.
You know, that was kind of happening in Tampa because they built this giant, you know what?
I'm sorry.
Oh, I saw that.
I saw that.
There was an ocean in the roads.
Ocean in the roads.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, I think we're prepared for it, though.
We're prepared for it.
And, you know, we're all singing from the same hymnal.
Well, we've got it all figured out.
Sure, sure, sure.
Well, over here in my ravine, you know, I don't want to jinx it.
Don't you?
But there's a particular tree.
There's a big leaf maple over here that wants to fall down.
It's old.
It's tired.
It's tired, John.
It's been oaken.
How long has it been oaken?
It's probably been oaken over 50 years.
It's been oaken longer than that.
It's been oaken 100 years.
It's done oaken for the most part.
And I've had arborists look at it and go, it's got a little bit more oaken in it.
I don't think that's a job.
And I go, yeah, I know.
And they are suspicious, arborists.
I mean, it's like when somebody says they're a, I was just reading about the cast of Oliver, the 1968 movie.
And the kid, you know, please sir, could I have more?
That kid, he became an osteopath and chiropractor.
He went to osteopath school.
Also not a thing.
Well, that's what I'm saying.
I've written it right under arborist.
The arborists, they show up, and anybody with a hard hat, especially a specialty hard hat, that can get up a tree that fast, I'm like, okay, whatever you say, if you can get up, if you're a man, not a boy, you're a man, and you can get to the top of a tree that fast, you can do whatever you want.
You listen to a person like that.
Yeah, I'm not going to micromanage you.
No, no, no, no, no.
But this particular big leaf maple,
is done mapling, and it wants to fall down.
Now, there's a couple of different ways it could fall down.
Looking at it, you go, oh boy.
Well, I would say... Has it grown?
Does it make those little helicopters that fall down?
It does.
Oh, man.
We had one of those in our yard in Cincinnati.
I think it is 70 feet tall.
Oh, that's considerable.
Yeah, it's big.
And looking at it, you go...
Because that's the thing about a tree.
You can never know what it's going to do.
You know what?
That's the thing.
Ultimately, a horse's head is unknowable to me.
And I feel the same way about a lot of trees.
They've got that whole system of what's called flotsam and jetsam.
It's got the jetsons.
It's got the system for sending the juice up and down the tree.
And it's got a root network like mushrooms where it can talk to other trees.
There's a lot of shit going on in your yard that you need to keep a fucking eye on.
It's true.
It's like that English show called The Arborist.
and this one has a crazy there's this crazy tree disease that is out here where it looks like the tree has black um like
Insulating foam, but dark black, squeezing out of all its little pores.
I've seen that in white.
It looks almost like somebody's got, what's that dog disease where you bite people?
Rabies.
Like it's foaming at the tree?
You're talking about, it's like a fine foam?
But it's hard.
It looks like... Oh, I see what you mean.
The kind of insulation you squirt.
Yeah, do you remember the little snakes that you'd get on 4th of July and you'd light them and it would go... Love those.
And it would make black snakes.
Make a big black ash.
Those are awesome.
It looks like that all over the tree, except it's hard.
Like little poops.
Like it's crunchy, but big.
Not little, big.
Extruded.
And it comes out of everywhere.
And I've talked to these, again, arborists, osteopaths of trees.
And I've said, what the hell is that?
And they're like, oh, it's this disease.
And, you know, eventually it'll kill it.
But that tree's been mapling for 100 years.
So that's just how it goes.
So the tree is one of the ways it could go if there were, for instance, a bomb cyclone that zigged instead of zagged.
And just for me and our audience, the 70-foot... Thank you for your service, Maple.
It's been around a long time.
It's close enough that if it fell in the right-slash-wrong way, it would land on part of your house, potentially?
That's the thing.
Another thing that has been mapling for about 70 years and is tired and wants to be done.
No, it's my kitchen.
Oh, because I look at my kitchen and you know, I've been tucking away a little bit of money.
I've been putting a little bit of like every time I get any money, I put a little bit of it away because I do the same thing except I spend it.
See, that's another option.
Just a little bit at a time.
But I sneak it in there because I have this kitchen repair fund.
Because I need to redo the kitchen, but I don't have any money.
Right.
I understand that's expensive, it's costly, and it tends to go on longer than anybody thinks, including everyone involved.
that's right and so what i started doing is this thing this thing i can't recommend highly enough which is tricking oneself into saving money by putting it in a savings situation okay on a regular basis in and then when you see that money every once in a while out of the corner of your eye you go oh no that isn't real money that is saved money
for something, for instance, like a kitchen that I would one day need to do.
And then I look out at this maple and I'm like, but if you fell,
directly on the kitchen when i wasn't in there you'd have to fix the kitchen that's right and nobody was in there let's just stipulate maple that in the storm i'm going to stay out of the kitchen and i'm going to keep everybody out of the kitchen during a bomb cyclone smart you decided to fall right on top of it and i would then there would be like now i have to fix the kitchen
And there'd be maybe insurance money.
Yeah, I was going to say, just to present the corollary of that, how heartbreaking would it be if you spent, I don't know, $5,000 on a kitchen redo and then a tree fell on it?
Wouldn't that be a bummer?
And that must in some ways mitigate the speed of your savings spending is knowing that at any time somebody could maple on your oven.
You don't want to wash your car right before a rainstorm.
And you don't want to... You don't spit into the wind.
That's right.
You don't want to pull the tail of the old Lone Ranger.
You don't pull the tail on the Lone Ranger.
Yep.
And you don't mess around with this fixing up your kitchen.
And I think it's going to be more than $5,000.
I think these days you could spend $5,000 on a refrigerator that doesn't do anything other than refrigerate.
My people are very simple.
Well, I know, but even simple refrigerators.
Even simple people need kitchens.
That's what Marcus Aurelius said.
And I don't think, you know, like John Hodgman had a house in Maine that had an oven that was always on.
It was some kind of French oven.
The guy fixing the boat has an angle grinder.
You'd love this series, by the way.
You absolutely love this series and this guy.
You have an angle grinder where the power button broke off, so they put two labels on it.
There's one right under where the angle grinder is that says, do not plug in, always on.
And they put another label on the end by the plug.
There's no power button, always on.
This is an angle grinder that is cutting through keel bolts on a hundred-year-old ship.
You don't want that thing just flying around in your back.
So he has it in his hand and then plugs it in and then it works because it's better than going and getting a new one.
You have to satisfy about so much stuff in life, John.
It drives people crazy that we got to satisfy, but sometimes you just got to deal.
You do have to deal.
You do have to.
Like this morning, the reason that I'm a little bit groggy is that somewhere in this forest, in addition to all the owls, and the owls have started, because I'm in the forest sometimes at dusk, and the owls have started revealing themselves to me.
They come and land on the branch of my head.
I cannot imagine a better time for owls or crows.
Because the crows are thinking about going back to the place where you don't know where they live.
That's exciting.
They're talking to each other.
They're doing a standing meeting at the end of the day.
And I have to imagine that's when the owls start considering revealing themselves.
They do.
And there are two now.
And I think they're a mating pair.
And they will sit on a branch above my head.
And they do this thing where they don't look at me.
Like a border collie trying to make friends with a kitten.
You look the other way, but you can tell with the eyes.
I've got a great video.
Do you like it when dogs meet kittens?
I do.
Oh, I have the single greatest one ever.
Oh, Japanese.
First of all, it's Japanese, so it's automatically great.
Of course.
It's a border collie, which is the smartest breed of dog in the world.
Don't email me.
They have capybaras in cafes.
They have cafes where you can go just hang out with capybaras.
Can I literally beg you not to get me started on capybaras?
I will send you a photo of my YouTube history, how many capybara videos I've watched just since this weekend.
They're big.
Oh, they're so big, and they're chill.
And copybara will, obviously, famously, one of my favorite tumblers used to be copybaras with things sitting on them.
Yeah, alligators.
They're very good-natured.
They like to nustle.
Don't look at the teeth, because you'll realize they really are a very, very, very large rat.
Yeah, they're a rat or a beaver, one of those.
Don't look at a beaver's teeth.
Well, you know, I didn't want to say I don't want to trigger anybody, but what they're really close to is Nutrias, which are worse than beavers.
Nutrias.
They're the worst.
Well, you know, and you can eat them.
There was a campaign.
Do you know how we got so many Nutrias?
Nutrias, do you know the story?
Yeah, they brought them up to, what, for pelts or something?
Yeah, in the 20s, there was no way to, there was a...
This is what I've heard, and I'm not going to look it up, but what I heard was, you know, beaver coats, like those big coats that, like, if you're like a rah-rah-siss-boom-bah frat guy with one of the straw boater, you remember one of those big, like, monkey-looking coats?
Yeah, you try to get into a phone booth or sit on top of a telephone pole.
Yeah, yeah, stand on a flagpole with your phone.
Yeah.
Same idea here.
They couldn't make enough pelt for all the freshmen.
So they started getting nutrias.
Nutrias are a lot like a beaver, but kind of close to a rat.
And apparently, you can guess where this is going.
This was during a driving tour of New Orleans in probably 1989 that I got this information.
And Kirsten said, yeah.
And the thing is then, nobody wanted beaver coats anymore.
And they definitely didn't want nutria coats.
So they just opened the doors and let them go.
And they bred, in the words of Dr. Strangelove, they bred prodigiously.
Prodigiously.
They're everywhere.
Because here's what had happened.
What had happened was we're driving around New Orleans.
And it's kind of like a boulevard where there's a grassy part in the middle.
And I said, Kirsten, with respect, what the fuck is that?
And she goes, oh, that's just a nutria.
So imagine like an urban beaver, except it's got big orange teeth.
And if you get close to it, you want to hear the noise it makes?
It goes like this.
Isn't that horrible?
Yeah, that's not a good noise.
You ever seen the teeth on a nutria?
yeah well they're all of them i took i took a millennium girlfriend down to the harbor here because i wanted to show her the beavers and i was like oh you'll love the beavers they're they're so cute and uh then we got down there and there were the beavers and they came over and they were like bah and she was like they're terrible
Oh, I have a friend in I think he's in Phoenix and he's supposed to ring doorbell footage of the the literal warthogs that walk around where he lives.
I couldn't get with that in England.
They got foxes, which I think I could really enjoy.
Oh, they have the little hedgehogs, too, which are hedgehogs.
Yeah, I have a friend who's a hedgehog helper in England.
But what happens here now, this is just recently... Is this related to the weather, John, or merely with the wildlife?
Well, it's a little bit... It's all related because it's an ecosystem, right?
Yeah, it's part of what I'm hoping when the bomb cyclone comes into my forest, eventually, what it's going to straighten out.
And one of them is that there's a flicker, one particular flicker, who has decided...
that what he wants to do is at dawn every day, he wants to come and woodpeck on the side of my house.
Okay.
And he doesn't want to woodpeck.
With respect, is he pecking your wood?
he he is he is he's uh the the uh the northern flicker seems a little bold which is the kind that we have here um he is a uh he's a house uh he's a house pecker oh and fuck i didn't even know great now that's another thing that's going to go in my fiend folio
and what he does what he does is he he doesn't want uh he doesn't do the thing when they when they do it on the trees they go you know but they're not like super fast woodpeckers they're like but when he does it on the side of my house he does it like this talk talk talk
Like like probably like 80 60 to 80 beats a minute and real He's not like he's not nailing it.
He's not actually there's no because I think when they go fast on a tree It's because they already found a yummy bug and now they're just going nuts on it I bet he's in exploratory mode, but also John if I understand correctly I don't know a lot about music I have to imagine that a bird banging its head against your home your home becomes something like a drum
Does have doesn't it like have a like I bet it's got a bigger slightly boomier Present sound then like a tap tap tap on the door Yeah, and I'm you know as you know, I'm a highly sensitive person HSP and so I wake up yeah To this sound because I'm not capable of sleeping through something going talk talk talk on the side of my house And so then I bang on the wall boom boom boom
Like with a broom if the people upstairs are being too loud?
Yeah, but I do it with my hand.
I'm in bed.
I'm not saying you're being irrational.
I kind of sit up and I bang the wall right above my bed.
So he hears it and he stops.
And then we're in a place.
He is somewhere on the outside of the house.
And I'm in my bed.
And we're both thinking about the other thing.
And I know what he is.
He's thinking, what was that?
Will it happen again?
Is this something I need to worry about?
Because I'd like to get back to pecking this fucker's house.
Exactly.
And I'm not sure what he thinks I am.
Right.
But I echo him.
So if he goes talk, talk, talk, I go boom, boom, boom.
And then he thinks about it.
And sometimes he thinks about it and just stops and goes away.
But other times, he waits just enough time for me to settle back down, bluff my pillow, pull the blanket back up over my ears, and then he goes, talk, talk, talk, talk, talk.
And I go, God damn you, and I go, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.
And then he really thinks about it.
And most of the time after that, he decides to go.
Maybe this house is getting serious, it's thinking.
Yeah, the house is talking back to me.
It's the house, yeah.
And if it's another flicker, it's a much bigger flicker than I, is I think what he's thinking.
Well, that's just self-preservation.
That makes sense.
But this morning, he just kept at it.
Tuck, tuck, tuck.
Tuck, tuck.
Maybe his wife yelled at him.
Something.
Like, you're not coming home without that carton of cigarettes.
Yeah, keep talking.
Keep talking.
I love that band.
You ever listen to that band, Talk Talk?
Oh, Keep Talking.
They're surprisingly good.
All they do to me is talk.
All they ever do is talk talk.
Do you remember when it came up on MTV and it was the first video I ever saw where the song, the album, and the band were all the same thing?
I know.
It would say talk, talk, talk, talk, talk, talk.
I was in Europe at one point when Talk Talk was...
was doing their thing and uh and the posters all said talk talk on the on the street signs and i was like i really want to go see them and then they came out with that color of spring record which is like one of the great records of all time they're one of those bands yeah we should talk about this those those sleeper bands that like oh it's a one-hit wonder you're like no they're actually there were bands like like them and like to some extent i want to say scriti-politi but there were those bands that were like that had a longer and more interesting career than people know
Yeah, yeah.
And the lead guy in Talk Talk, he wrote, or there's a book about him.
His name's Robert Talk.
Robert Talk from Talk Talk on the album Talk Talk on the song Talk Talk.
Let's start over.
Let's start the show over.
But anyway, so this morning, the flicker made me do what I don't like to do, which is get all the way out of bed, go over and open the window and confront him.
And I say, get out of here, you son of a bitch.
I bet what you say is similar, I'm guessing, to what you say to a crow.
I see you flicker.
Well, yeah, but the flicker doesn't hang around.
As soon as I open the window, he bolts.
Fucking coward.
Because he's not like a crow who will stand there and be like, um.
No, no, no.
A crow is just there.
And the more you do, the more information it gathers.
And people don't know that.
That's exactly right.
Because it's a Democrat.
It's more than happy to spend a day there.
It's going to learn a lot.
And then you know what?
It's going to call some people.
It's one of those libertarian Democrats is what a crow is.
Okay.
And so, you know, they walk around, and it's like, are you part of QAnon, or are you hiding tsunami videos, or are you part of what brought the rain of fire down on Asheville?
Like, we can't tell what you're doing.
What part are you?
I'm going to be pecking on your fucking house.
But so then, and my face is out the window, and the cold wind is blowing, and I'm yelling at birds, and I'm like, goddammit, here I am again.
Oh!
On your own.
How did I get like this?
There are plenty of people around here that aren't yelling birds.
And now to quote, I want to say John Lennon.
And now it's all this.
And now it is all this.
This is what I've come to.
And I don't know when this bomb cyclone comes through here, the Flickers are just going to do what they do.
They're going to hunker down.
Oh, they'll be fine.
Oh, I'm sure they'll be fine.
And maybe he, I know you don't like hunkering, but that's what they do, too.
I think it's an ugly, overused word, but I'll allow it.
Yeah.
You don't seem like a hunkerer.
Well, this morning I was trying to make a... I've seen you grab a chunk of cheese.
Yeah, I do grab a... A slab, a slice, a hunker.
I hanker for it is what I do.
You hunker for a hanker cheese.
Yeah.
Bless you.
This morning I was trying to say something to the effect...
Something was something and the only word to use was arguably and I'm tired of the word arguably I don't want to say arguably it was the blood.
It's a word that you can abuse in like three different ways It's a very abuse a lazy if you're not careful It's a lazy and very it can be very confusing and stupid word It's a stupid word, but I didn't and I think what the key was was I didn't want to argue
Because I was making like a sweeping statement that I wanted to make, but I also didn't want somebody to go, actually.
Oh, I know.
Do you want to be helped?
Do you want to be heard?
Or do you want to be hugged?
Yeah.
And so I ended up having to say something to the effect of arguably, even though.
I didn't want it at all.
And, you know, because there aren't a ton of synonyms, you can say, you know.
Other ones I use that are not much better, depending on the context and what works better, theoretically, nominally.
Nominally is really good because it means, like, in name.
Yeah.
Right.
Killing in the name of.
Wait, I know this.
I know this.
It's that band, that mad, angry band from L.A.
They're mad, they're angry.
Oh, it's because of the machine, right?
It's the machine.
It's the machine they're mad about, right?
They're going to publish zines.
They're going to rage against machine.
Look at you from the bridge.
You did it.
You should tell a story about when you learned to play bass in one day.
You want to do an ad?
Oh, yeah, let's do that.
Let's talk about it.
I'm not going to fucking edit this.
This episode of Roderick Online is... Hello.
John, we've got merchandise and people care.
We do.
This episode of Roderick on the Line is brought to you by Roderick on the Line.
And what we have done is we have made T-shirts and hoodies and jackets and hats.
And what had happened was years ago, I went to my good friend, Sean Wolfe.
who did the cover art for the second Longwinters record.
When I Pretend to Fall, the one with the rainbow?
When I Pretend to Fall, the one with the rainbow.
And I said, hey, why don't you make some Roderick on the Line designs?
And he made this design, which looks, his original design looked like a weathered patch that you might find on a trucker hat.
I felt like I'd seen this before.
It's kind of, it's a weird, wild, fun look.
And I don't know what happened at the time that we didn't use it, but I went to our good friends at Cotton Bureau, and I said, how hard would it be to make this patch?
So you're asking them to make...
Sean made a graphic that looks like just to be clear and I'm sorry I don't I don't need to be all fucking Derrida here But yeah, he made a graphic on a computer that looks like a weathered patch Yes, so now what we're saying is can you make something that looks like a weathered patch?
That maybe isn't a patch that is a weathered patch and our friend Nathan It is a weathered patch
Said I can do this and he went and made patches and then we affixed by sewing we sewed the patches actually sewed them on trucker hats and And work shirts and hoodies
And then we took the image of the patch and then we printed that on t-shirts.
So it's a t-shirt with a picture of a patch.
That's pretty goddamn clever.
Yeah.
And so you can buy the patch.
You can buy the hat with the patch.
You can buy the hoodie with the patch.
And you can buy t-shirts that look like the patch.
And if you go on the Cotton Bureau page, it looks like the only color that we offer is black.
But that's not true.
There are lots of colors if you click through.
And...
Oh, and the thing about these merch types is that it's a limited time offer.
Yeah, remember, you usually get two weeks.
Yeah, but in this case, the campaign started last week, and I forgot to mention it.
Because I don't know, you know this, but I have attention deficit disorder, and I forget things if they're not.
I know.
I forget things if they're not immediately in front of me.
So I was talking to Nathan the night before, and he was like, all right, the campaign's live.
And I was like, awesome, great.
And then I talked to you about, I don't know, rubber bands or swimming pools or something.
Yeah, just to be perfectly clear, what had happened was, life for 57 years happened.
And then you said, oh, hey, what's up?
We've got merchandise and it's already on sale.
And I said, I didn't know that.
I know.
Oh, that was the other thing.
I didn't tell you about it.
That was the other thing.
What I got from you was a request to, quote, tag it on Blue Sky, whatever the fuck that means.
Ha, ha, ha.
I didn't tell you about it.
That's like me telling somebody what to do with their carburetor.
Yeah, I said, Merlin doesn't want to know about this.
The more that he knows about this, it's just going to be... It'll just eat out.
It's just one more thing for him to think about, and that's not what he's asking for.
I do appreciate that.
And so I went through this whole process, and then the problem was I always had in mind that I was going to tell you about it in advance of it.
And in this case, it had already gone live, and I was like, oh, damn it, I forgot to mention it, and also forgot even to mention it.
Yeah, and you only have so much time.
So now there's only a week left to the campaign.
I think at some point we should mention where people can buy this.
Okay, so go ahead.
Do you know?
It's a cotton bureau.
It's your project.
I see cotton bureau slash people slash Roderick dash on dash the dash line.
I will put a link to this and perhaps a graph.
I don't want to commit, but I'll probably put an image of some kind to clarify what it is.
I did last week's week's notes.
I'll do it in this week's notes and I'll say, hey, here's a place where you can buy.
So what they got like a week now they got to go fast, right?
Yeah.
And so we did.
I got to get this shit up.
Fuck, fucking fast.
We haven't made any merch in a long time, and some of our past merch was some of the best merch that ever.
Oh, yeah, it was ever.
Oh, and somebody wrote me and was like, you know, it's easier on some of our skin.
I know you're like some Mr. Cotton guy, but it's easier for some people's skin.
That's my father.
If you have polyester blend because it's easier for our skin conditions or whatever.
And the work shirt is a 50-50.
So easy on the skin and easy on the eyes.
And it makes you look like somebody that's keeping moving and also getting out of the way.
I watched my favorite movie last night.
I watched the 2011 movie Drive last night.
This looks like something you wear when you work for Bryan Cranston.
Yep.
Yep.
Yep.
Yep.
Yep.
Yep.
Yep.
Yep.
Yep.
All of it.
I'm very proud of it.
And the, oh, and this is the other thing.
I had a prototype of one of the hats and I was at a party at Chris Ballou's house.
Oh, I only have two emails right now.
I love that guy.
He's such a nice guy.
Singer of the the presidents of the United States of America and also Roderick on the line I hope he's a listener.
I'm sorry.
I'm gonna email you literally today if you hear this I promise and I I took the prototype hat to him
Because he likes baseball hats.
And I was like, here, you can have this.
He's got a great shaped head.
Great shaped head.
It's the first and only Roderick on the line baseball cap.
And he put it on and it's in his rotation.
I think he's had a hard time not posting pictures of it because he didn't want you to see it.
Oh, because he thought it would hurt my feelings?
Well, no, because I was like, well, Merlin doesn't know about this yet.
And so it's a surprise, so don't wear it yet.
And he was like, okay, okay.
The point is that it's got just the right sync.
It's got just the right bounce.
All you got to do is look at show notes in your podcast player.
I'm not going to promise this.
I might try to make a better URL, but I don't feel like buying another domain.
But you'll find it.
It's going to be in the show notes for this.
Look for a thing that says Roderick on the line, which is the name of this program.
And if you click on that, it'll take you to a page on your home computer where you can be able to peruse these items.
And if it meets your needs, pick up some Roderick on the line of merchandise.
It helps us.
We make money from it.
So thank you.
That's right.
And it will be, it's one of these things where it'll be available before the holidays or it will arrive in time for it to go under the tree.
Oh, so you can get one for your fiance.
Yeah.
And you know, Hanukkah this year is occurring perfectly in the week between.
And so it can appear under your menorah.
And then it can also appear under your Kwanzaa bear.
You're listening to the Wikipedia holiday song.
Uh-huh.
What's the song called?
What is it called?
Wikipedia Hanukkah.
What some of you may not know is that Jonathan Coulton and Jonathan Roderick did a holiday album a few years ago, a Christmas album.
But they did a song.
We got to do a song about Hanukkah, but we don't know anything about it.
So they wrote a song about Hanukkah based on the Wikipedia article.
Yeah, I learned a lot about Hanukkah.
I'm just saying, we put that ornament on the tree every year.
And I got my signed copy.
You know, I bought the Rain Man suite when you put that out.
You know that, right?
So I got the Christmas ornament.
And it goes on our tree, right near where Don Corleone is.
And...
You can help us out, and you can get great stuff.
We're not going to talk about this all day.
CottonBureau.com slash people slash RoderickOnTheLine with dashes, but easiest way is to just click on the link that'll be in the show notes for this episode.
And although I'm not actively on a lot of social media right now, I'll tag it on Mastodon.
Would that work for you?
Oh, yeah.
Mastodon is like Twitter, but everybody's mad at their computer.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Okay, so you're not on Blue Sky.
I am on Blue Sky.
I posted something last week to make sure I still know my password.
What I said was, I just tried to stand in my power, but I got dizzy, so I sat down again.
That's the kind of thing you get from me on the internet.
That kind of, like, at first it seems like a dumb joke, but then you think about it and you realize it's a really dumb joke.
Right.
But here I'm talking about merchants.
I'm not going to put on Blue Sky because I don't want to promote something there.
I'm not using it enough.
That's gross.
I will put on Mastodon.
I'll probably use the embroider.
The embroider patch is pretty handsome.
Oh, it's very handsome.
I didn't know we had a way to do that.
Yeah, you can buy multiples of them and put them on, I don't know, everything.
You can sew them on your bag.
Well, depending on where you live, you can put it on other people.
Sure.
Well, I mean, in Trump's America, you can sew it on whatever the hell you want.
You can sew it right on your... You go to cottonbureau.com slash people slash Roderick's album.
And that'll be in show notes for this episode.
Our thanks to Roderick on the Line for supporting Roderick on the Line and all the great shows.
Peace!
You know, I don't know if you know this because you don't listen to the show, but when we used to have ads on here, I used two different snorts of yours.
There's one snort that introduces the ad, and there's another snort at the end of the ad.
Are you saying that I snort?
Go to CottonBureau.com.
Slash what all did I write down?
Here's what I've written down osteopath house pecker John is a higher so many things.
I don't know about myself.
Oh, you know I went to sing a show last night Yeah, I went over to bash on island to open the show for Kathleen Edwards I like my great friend and one of the great songwriters of all time.
Mm-hmm
And so I played a show at a community theater on Vashon Island.
And, you know, I learned a lot about myself.
I learned a lot about the audience.
How's she doing?
Is she good?
About Vashon.
She's doing good.
Her new songs are good.
She's charming.
Oh, really?
Is it up?
Is her record up?
No, she's in the process of making it.
And it is apparently being produced by Jason Isbell.
Oh, that guy's famous as shit.
Yeah, and so and he you know is a great admirer I knew that she hurt that she was recently the ex of business his name Bon Iver
Oh, yeah, Bon Iver.
I know he's really super famous.
All I know him from is one Kanye West song, which I'm guessing, I don't know if that's like the rest of his work.
But I'm telling you, Kathleen, she's got long arms.
Like, she reaches a lot of people in this world.
Now, Jason Isbell, is he like a surfy Jack Jones kind of guy?
What is Jason Isbell?
I know he seems to be a liberal poster.
He is a liberal poster in both senses.
He posts all the time, and then he also is politically liberal.
Yeah.
Oh, well done.
Yeah, thank you.
Thank you for that.
But Jason, you know, when I first met him, he was the guitar player in the drive-by truckers.
What?
Are you fucking kidding me?
I'm not.
They were great.
Yeah, they were.
They did that concept album that Sean Nelson told me about.
that uh remember that record of theirs that what was it called that was fucking great it they're they're a wonderful band and i had been uh i'd been uh drive by truckers uh fan since they played in seattle the first time and there were 44 people there and he had some stuffed animal on his microphone and it was one of those shows where there were 44 people there but one of them was peter buck one was isaac brock one was
Only 44 people ever saw that show, but every single one of them used to be in a band.
Yeah, they used to be in a band where they ran out and started four bands right away.
But then Jason joined the Drive-By Truckers, and he was like the young, fresh-faced, hot guitar player in the band.
And Jason is from Alabama, like Muscle Shoals.
Yeah, look at that.
And when you talk to him, he's as Alabama as there is.
And so in the American sense, our Australian listeners will probably understand this.
It's like if a bogan was some kind of progressive politically.
From an American standpoint, when you hear his accent, we just automatically think, oh, Alabama accent, then he must be...
politically conservative but but it's very charming he has a he has a delightful way of talking but then he left the truckers after five or six years and then he went out and did that whole circuit again playing these really small shows and i would go to see the shows oh that's neat he would come through town and i'd say jason hey and he'd be like oh john how you doing and that's terrible alabama
But then he built up a fan base on his own.
Football.
Is that how they talk?
How do they talk?
Football.
Football.
Football.
Hey, you.
Get over here.
That ain't how we talk.
All I can do is Walton Goggins.
I can do is Walton Goggins, which I think is South Carolina.
Here's my Walton Goggins.
Go on now, boy.
No, that's not how they do in Alabama.
It's something else.
It's a lot.
There's a lilt to it.
It's very charming.
But so Jason now, he's got Will Johnson from Centromatic playing in the band.
Wow, they're a good band, Centromatic.
They're amazing.
And Jason said to Will, hey, I want you to play in the 400 unit, which is his band.
And Will said, well, you're already a great band.
You don't need me.
I'm not, I wouldn't do anything.
And Jason said, or he said, what do you want me to do?
And Jason said, well, here's what I'll do.
I'll put a drum kit back there and I'll put amplifiers and guitars and a gong and all this stuff.
And you can play whatever you want.
And Will was like, I'm just doing, and he was like, I don't care.
It's like a Neil Peart fantasy camp.
Yeah.
Like you'll be back there and you can do, you can play whatever you can play on anything or not play or whatever.
You're just in the band.
Yeah.
And so the first time I saw him go through, Will was back there, and it was clear that he was trying to figure out what his job was.
And now he's back there.
He's playing all kinds of things.
He hits the gong at some point in the show.
Every band has always wanted to hit a gong, and he's the gong hitter now.
That's pretty big.
That's always been big among bands from Alabama.
Yeah.
Yeah, that's right.
They always have a gong.
They love a gong.
Football's in gong.
That's what they love.
And I don't understand it, because Patterson Hood from the Drive-By Truckers is also one of the sweetest guys.
He's just, everybody loves him.
He's a great dude.
And now Jason is, you know, is like a real nice fella.
And so he's producing Kathleen's record.
She's also a real nice fella.
She's a real nice fella.
I'm only bragging on this because I briefly got to meet her through you and I really liked her.
I highly recommend that.
There's a video.
There's a video Scott Simpson shot.
That you may or may not know about and all it is is it's you in so your old house in that kind of back room Like where the other bathroom is and it's you playing guitar Kathleen, I think just playing guitars and there's another woman there who I didn't recognize Laura Meyer Ratkin
Okay, and Dave Bazan from Page of the Lion on drums.
That's right.
And it's just you guys rehearsing.
It's like 20 seconds of you guys rehearsing one of our songs, and it's one of my favorite things in the world.
I could listen to Dave Bazan harmonize with people all day long.
Yeah, we were briefly a super group, the four of us, and we should have just kept doing that.
What's the name of that song?
Her song that we were recording, I don't know.
I haven't seen that video in 15 years.
Okay, I'll think of it.
Go ahead.
But yeah, she sings on my song, Not Moving to Portland.
Right.
And the story of that was there was an advertising agency that contacted me here in Seattle, like a young, hip advertising agency that had a loft office that had four floors and a pickleball court.
Oh, that's nice.
You don't even have to go home for your pickleball.
Yeah, it was just like they were just living, you know, and they said, we want to get into making music videos and we'll make a music video for you.
But but what's the song?
And I was in between records, you know, and by that, I mean, I hadn't put out a record at that time in five years.
Now it's been 15 years.
Uh, but I had this song, not moving to Portland kind of half written and they paid for us to go into the studio.
Kathleen happened to be visiting.
So she sang on it and then they made a music video of it.
I don't know if, if most of our listeners have seen it, but there's a music video made by a company called creature creature, uh, of my song, not moving to Portland.
Well, the show that the Long Winters are playing this Wednesday, the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, at the Crocodile Cafe, the opening band for that show is a band called Byland.
And the lead singer of Byland, the band, is she's from Taos, New Mexico.
Taos, New Mexico.
Oh, no, no, no, no, no.
Albuquerque, Albuquerque, Albuquerque.
I think that's still on Route 66, though, isn't it?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, sure.
I know Towers, New Mexico is.
And so her name is Allie.
Allie.
And Allie from the band Byland came into our rehearsals because we asked her to come in.
Hey, do you want to sing on anything?
uh because you're like on the show so why don't you come up on stage with us and sing and she said i really want to sing on not moving to portland oh wow well not moving to portland is not in our set the other guys in the band are like it's too complicated we don't want to learn it
And so she came in and was like, well, that's what I want to do because I listened to your song, Not Moving to Portland, and it was very emotional for me, and it brought me to tears.
Oh, isn't that wonderful to hear?
It's wonderful because no one has ever said that about that song.
And I think it's a very moving song, but it's one of these songs where nobody has ever said like, oh, that just killed me.
I think of it as like your They Might Be Giants cover where it's like you might hear it on a compilation.
Which record is that on?
Well, it isn't on one.
Is it on that Barsouk thing from this year?
Oh, it might be.
That's a good record, by the way.
Rarity's one.
Yeah, it's good.
Anyway, so she came in, and everybody else turned off their drums or whatever, and it was just the two of us singing it, and she did a marvelous job.
So we're going to do that at the show.
Oh, you must be looking forward to that.
That's awesome.
People will love that.
I am looking forward to it.
I mean, I'm looking forward to it in the sense that I know this is true of you, too.
When I agreed to do the show, I was very excited about it.
And then there were weeks and weeks where I just pretended it wasn't happening.
It certainly wasn't on your calendar.
It wasn't on my calendar.
Maybe months that I pretended it wasn't happening.
Because it doesn't go on the calendar ever.
But if it did, it would only go on like the day before, right?
For organizational reasons.
Now we're three days away from it.
And we've been rehearsing because the guys that are in my band are not like me.
and they do put things on calendars and we had a couple of rehearsals and then at one point mike squires said to me john we all know your songs
you need to also know your songs.
Oh, that's true, Roderick.
Why do I view people?
Because if us knowing your song is important enough to us to know your songs, it also has to be important enough to you to know them.
And I was like, yeah, yeah, yeah, all right.
So I played the show with Kathleen last night, and I mostly know the songs.
And but by Wednesday, I'm for sure going to know them all.
And it's going to be like one of these things where I really don't want to do it the closer and closer I get to it.
But then after I do it, I'm psyched that I did it.
So that's pretty self-aware.
Yeah, but I don't anymore.
I'm not even sure that self-awareness is even useful.
I don't know how much and in which context self-awareness helps anymore.
Yeah.
I feel like I'm getting better at identifying lots of places where it's a mixed blessing.
Especially if you have ADHD or something like that.
Like, yeah, I don't need another thing to think about at this juncture.
I have nothing to think about, which is more than enough for me to think about.
That fills my day is what I have to think about that I don't need to think about.
In my case, like last night, I had a very funny exchange with Kathleen where I was like, so everybody's got neurodiversity now.
Do you have any neurodiversity?
And she said, no.
I was like, well, I mean, any like neurodiversity.
She's Canadian.
Yeah, well.
And she said no.
She missed a big one.
And then she said, I mean, you know, like after my long struggle with depression, when I realized that I had adult female ADHD, which she absolutely said is different than male-y.
She has AFADHD?
Yeah.
Holy shit, that's good.
She said, other than that, I don't.
And that's not anything.
That's just whatever.
And I was like, see, that's how we are.
Other than that, how do you enjoy the play, Ms.
Edwards?
That's how I was for all these years, where I was like, well, I don't have any weird things.
I just have bipolar disorder and ADHD, and they go together so handsomely.
Mm-hmm.
And so we had a long talk about it and marveled at it, and then we both arrived at the same conclusion, which is, well, there it is.
What good does all that do?
We had a fun time laughing about it, but still you have to, as I say to my daughter, by the end of this year, you will know algebra.
whether you want to or not that's terrifying gosh what a what a threatening thing to say whether whether we you make you i mean like like it's like to make a really dumb obvious example it would be like saying to a three-year-old the boogeyman is real and he's coming
You're going to learn some fucking algebra.
I don't care how much you don't want to.
It's going in your face.
Well, the problem is, I don't actually really care if she learns algebra, but in order to leave this school, they are going to require that you... No, I'm joking with you, but of course I understand.
Our kid was a very, very, very late talker, and my wife in particular was very, very worried about that, and I was like...
I think like, I think our kid is okay.
And I think our kid will eventually talk, but you know, it is when you got a kid and you worry and you're like, Oh God, am I doing anything wrong?
Am I, have I done something to like, was the dryer sound too loud?
And now my kid is enabled.
It's going to miss that window, you know?
And, but I just kept saying, like, think about all the people that, you know, well, maybe it's survivorship bias.
Maybe you don't know the people who can't talk because you can't hear from them.
That's true.
That's true.
I hadn't thought of that.
Shame on me.
Well, you know, I try not to tell my daughter too much about how many times I, you know, woke up like in a motel on the edge of town.
But I often think about... All the times you were like a Mickey Rourke playing Chris Christopherson character.
Exactly.
I was like, wait a minute, wait a minute, jail again?
Peace for all my friends.
But I often think about the time sitting in my apartment in the early 90s where there were nine of us sitting in a room all smoking cigarettes.
And you couldn't see across the room.
It was not a big room.
And we were all smoking weed.
And I said in my stoned, like, nobody asked kind of way that I was famous for, that I'm still famous for.
Nobody asked.
But I said, wouldn't it be funny if all the cigarettes we were all going to smoke in our whole lives were just here in the room right now, like big, big stacks of hardens?
Whoa, reality bomb.
And then we realized that we just had to start at the top and just get busy smoking all these cigarettes because we knew that this would be the amount we were going to smoke.
For a variety of reasons, you don't know how many cigarettes you're going to smoke.
The obvious person, the basic person would say, yeah, well, maybe you won't keep smoking or maybe you'll quit.
up you know bob seeger bob seeger used to say i used to smoke five packs of cigarettes a day it was the hardest thing to put them away what if you become a five packer what if you're what if you're uh what do they call it uh sienna cigarillos where you get a hundred cigarettes a hundred years of solitude cigarettes um by the way by the way i checked and i figured it out for the record i only wanted to sing songs
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
That's a lovely.
I texted Simpson.
I'll see if I can find the video.
She has so many wonderful songs.
And her new songs are awesome.
She's very talented.
You know, the Canadians have a lot of longevity.
Oh, you mean they live a long time?
I think they live a long time.
I can't tell.
They're a lot like, what do you call your birds?
Slinkies?
Dickers?
Flickers?
Flickers?
Oh, Flickers.
You don't know.
Or like, you know, the crows at night that your mom and you used to chase.
You know?
They're very mysterious, a lot of them.
In evening.
Evening crows.
That's when they're really... Evening crows?
What's all this thing?
Hello.
Hello, hello, hello.
What are you doing in my maple tree?
Can I ding us out?
Oh yeah, please.
Hey everybody, buy a shirt.
Buy it, buy it.
I think that'll work for the people that listen to our show.
I only wanted to sing songs.
Hey, hang me out upon your cross.
For the record, I only wanted to sing songs.
Hey, hang me up on your cross.
For the record, I only wanted to sing so.
Hey, hang me up on your cross.
For the record, I only wanted to sing songs Hey, hang me up on your cross For the record, I only wanted to sing songs
Oprah.