Ep. 562: "Squat Influencer"
Hi, Marilyn.
Hi, John.
How are you?
God damn it.
I'm exhausted already.
I know.
I was waiting for the host to start the meeting.
I turned that off.
I told it to stop doing that.
i was like i was waiting and waiting i swear to god this guy i'm sorry i'm sorry listeners hello happy holidays then there was somebody playing a saxophone solo and i was like really saxophone huh yeah that's what happens when you wait when you wait too long oh god how you feeling you doing okay big day already i know i'm tired i'm tired yeah
You know, it disrupts you.
If you don't sleep that well, then the next day you're a little screwed up.
That's why I needed to just lay in bed a little longer, and that's why I made a sleep.
Yeah, you know, a lot of the people that I watch on Instagram now say that if you don't sleep, you're going to get Alzheimer's and die and also die.
Really?
Yeah, it's the thing about sleep.
Huh.
They say that on Instagram?
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, pretty much everybody on Instagram agrees on one thing, and that's that you need a good eight hours of sleep.
i mean at least once a day yeah i watched a lady this morning tell me that uh what i needed to do was 30 squats okay the exercise yeah and i was i was laying in bed and i was watching her tell me i needed to do 30 squats and i thought you know i haven't done a squat in i don't know how long you really should limber up before you do that
I don't know if I could do one squat.
So unlike 99% of the things I see on the internet, in this case, when I was making my coffee, I had by this time gotten up.
I said, let's see about this squat.
No kidding.
And I did one.
And I was like, I mean, the thing is, I'm not new.
I know how to do one properly.
I know how to do a lot of stuff.
I did a proper one.
And I was like, what do you know about that?
I wonder if I can do 10.
Oh, jeez.
And the coffee machine is percolating.
And I did 10.
Did you do 10 good ones?
10 good, solid squats that any Marine Corps drill sergeant would approve of.
Although they wouldn't have you doing squats, surely.
And then I was like, that's harder than it seems.
I wonder if I can go 15.
And then I did.
And the coffee is going and the trumpets are sounding.
And I did 30.
squats, proper squats, right there in the kitchen, and it was hard.
Uh-huh.
But at the end, Merlin, I really felt like that woman on Instagram had, I don't know, she'd given me a gift.
Is she more of a squat influencer or a sleep influencer?
No.
I think, you know, what she was, oh, it was one of these.
Oh, so you see them so much now.
These content creators with their content.
I know.
She was taught.
She started out her video.
They just keep creating it.
It goes on and on.
They do.
She started out her video.
How about one hot tip?
Here's a hot tip.
Do a squat.
Later.
Do a squat.
No.
No, no, no.
Her video started with her saying... It's not a system.
She said, my mother has Alzheimer's.
Because she didn't squat.
Mama didn't squat.
Well, she said, it's the worst... Mama didn't squat.
Daddy never sleeps at night.
Oh, ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba.
I cannot compete with you, Jolene.
No, she said, you know, so I'm riveted now because we're dealing with a little bit of adult dementia over here in this quadrant, not in my immediate...
people that anyone on the show has heard of, but there are people that I'm now dealing with on a regular.
Is it Jason?
It's Jason Finn is starting to not remember me.
And I have to say, I said, Daddy, come with me.
And he's like, ah.
Daddy didn't squat either.
Call the fire department.
And so I'm like, wow, Alzheimer's.
And she says, the reason that the number one reason that people have Alzheimer's, and I was like, oh boy, here we go.
she said, is metabolic imbalance because of blood sugar.
Wow.
And I was like, okay, okay, go on, tell me about that.
Because you don't want that, right?
I mean, you don't need to be told too much about that.
You're close enough in your quadrant.
You don't want that.
The thing is, my blood sugar probably would melt through steel beams.
Okay.
Oh, is that right?
By jet fuel.
Yeah, that's the thing.
They don't know about 9-11.
They can't tell which one of those people in there, in any one of those airplanes, had blood sugar like mine that burns at 1,000 million degrees.
Yeah, it's really hard to screen for that.
Yeah, they can't tell that at TSA.
Yeah, you got the xenomorph, and you got John Roderick.
Do not fly.
Now she's hooked me twice.
She's got the Alzheimer's story and the blood sugar story, and I'm like, tell me more.
Is this someone you chose to follow on purpose?
No, no, no.
I opened my thing, and I'm just looking for my usual videos where somebody falls off a skateboard on their nuts, or somebody's trimming a cow hoof, or somebody's talking about Jimi Hendrix.
But Instagram, because it's being run by the Chinese mafia, is throwing this stuff at me.
They're like, oh, are you sure you don't want to talk about blood sugar?
Okay, so then, but the girl then...
after this so i'm thinking this is a serious road we're on then she invents a second character or rather she introduces a second character now me maybe on if you're if you've been following her for a year you know her second character already oh this is my introduction to her she's got different characters to tell to make the same point or to make different points
This is the thing about content, Merlin, that you and I will never understand.
I'll never understand it, John.
Is that the camera then switches to a different view of the same girl.
Okay.
And then she says in a southern accent, now I'm not going to have to change how I eat, am I?
Oh, that's you.
That's you responding.
She's having fun with the way the audience says it.
Exactly.
I guess that's what it is.
Mama want her snickerdoodles.
I ain't going to squat on nothing.
I thought maybe it was her grandmother or somebody, but you're absolutely right.
It is the viewer.
She's personifying the viewer.
and then i was like oh this is funny i didn't know we were having fun i thought i thought grandma was dying of alzheimer's because of her blood sugar and she's like now what am i supposed to do now and then back to her and then and then back and forth and and i'm like i don't i really can't judge the the temperature of the room now eventually she got to the 30 squats
And I was like, I did not see 30 squats coming.
Right.
I don't know what part of it got me to actually do 30 squats this morning.
See, that's what they're counting on.
My thing is, like, I think sometimes I'm obviously very simple-minded about things.
I think, oh, you do X because you want me to buy Y.
Or whatever.
But I wonder, are they just really trying to soften you up for some kind of a much larger enterprise, do you think?
What if they find out you're the only one who's done 30 squats?
And now, like, maybe you're invited.
Maybe now you get to join their downline.
What is it she wants for you, for people in general and you in particular, do you think?
Hmm.
Well, all those, I'm sure you watched that movie about where the person went around and they were like, all these little mountain villages around the world have people that live to be 105.
I think you're talking about a Yoplait commercial from 1979.
It's a Yoplait commercial from, that's right, it was a Benetton ass when we were in high school.
No, all those Georgian women that looked like a Baba Yaga.
And they'd say like, oh, this guy, he's really super, he's 80-something years old and he's doing great because he eats yogurt every day.
And then, you remember this one, and then,
Here's his mother, who's still alive too.
Oh, his mother.
I do remember that.
Well, this was a documentary.
George is always on my mind.
Where somebody identified that all the people in this one Japanese village and all these people in Sardinia and all these people in these little villages around the world, they all lived to be 110.
Because they're doing a special thing like Mediterranean diet type situation.
There's that.
So they come up with that.
And then they also, I think they all have to climb hills.
In Japan, all these 105-year-olds are squatting down and I don't know what, sorting through seeds on the floor or whatever it is that people do.
I haven't been able to squat since I was five years old.
But this woman seems to indicate she's bringing you people who've discovered something that you didn't even know was relevant to your health and well-being.
Is that right?
Well, here's the crazy thing, Marlon.
I think that this documentary, if I recall correctly, was made by a man.
Thank you.
Oh, that's not what you thought, right?
What?
No, I didn't think it either.
I know.
A man.
Believe it or not.
Anyway, so this documentary.
Do you think it's different from the yogurt commercial?
I think it's all part of the same story.
It's all part of the same.
It's all part of the same.
The rich history of Western and Eastern, in some ways, cultures.
But they bring that to you, and they're able to say, like, oh, this is very exotic, and look what they do.
And you don't want to be, you know... Here's what you need to do.
You just need to eat, I don't know what, feta cheese and tomatoes every day and squat 500 times.
Yeah.
This was one of these documentaries that was really popular during the pandemic, and then there was all this...
there was all this like not exactly blowback but a little bit of i'm sure you know what this is it's some kind of heuristic where the the the airplanes that got shut down in world war ii it seemed like survivorship bias survivorship bias there was something like that going on
Where it turned out that, you know.
Of course, we interviewed them.
They must be alive.
They're all old.
But no, I think it was the flip side, which was somebody came out with a research paper that said, actually, the one commonality that all these people had was that they were all lying.
They were all lying about how old they were.
Did she say that or did she just imply that?
Because it sounds to me like you may have just gotten the ultimate life hack.
It seemed like a real life hack.
I'm going to do this.
I'm not even on Instagram.
I'm going to learn this.
None of them actually were born when they thought or none of them.
There are no records.
All the records were lost in a fire.
It was weird when I first heard about it, but then I tried it.
Yeah.
You tried what?
Oh, I do everything.
Whatever a conventionally attractive white woman on Instagram tells me to do, I do.
Yeah, I do it.
But I do feel like being able to get down...
And stay down.
And then get down.
Were you about to do the Commodores?
Be honest.
I was a little bit about to.
Get down.
Get down.
So I do think that being able to get down, stay down, and then get back up.
Uh-huh.
That's big in terms of being able to do things.
That's called the unified Chumbawamba theory.
That's right.
If you can't get down, stay down, and then get back up.
You've got to get back up again.
Nothing's ever going to keep you down.
You've got to have all three of those things.
All of them.
Because a lot of people can get down and stay down, but they can't get back up.
How many of these have you watched?
I don't want you to reveal who this person is, but have you gone further down their particular rabbit hole of health and wellness?
Is it also stuff like how to make delicious leftovers, or is it all things about squatting and health?
So I only was introduced to this person 10 minutes ago.
Suddenly I really want a squat influencer.
I only did those squats five minutes ago, so I have no idea.
Oh, God.
No wonder you're so full of beans.
You got blood coursing through your veins.
I do.
I do.
It's full of... Well, because what she was saying is the sugar...
then goes into the muscles and your, what is it, your spleen?
What is it that has to, no, it's your liver.
No, what is it that does the- It's one of those filter ones.
Yeah, the metabolicking.
Yeah, yeah, one of the filter ones.
I mean, they're all fairly roughly the same.
You got your side colon, you got your- Your main colon.
Well, you got your left liver.
Left liver.
So those things don't have to deal with the sugar because the sugar goes into the muscles because you were doing the squats.
The sugar goes in metabolically.
Yeah, it's metabolical.
Is it building the muscles or impeding them?
Do you have a sense?
Because it sounds like you got a great big squirt of energy.
It sounds like you had some donuts or what have you.
You did some squats and now that went straight into your thighs.
I've heard people say that it goes straight to my thighs.
I didn't know they meant it.
Yeah, it's the, I don't know, sugar is the muscle building metallicals of the Metabolus.
You're saying your saddlebags are a Jellicle cat?
I'm a little confused.
Well, so I am too.
Okay.
I am too.
But I'm trying everything.
Saddlebags.
Because it's not the getting down, it's the getting back up.
And I think this is the sleep too.
I think you might be an influencer.
Yeah, well.
No, I think you've picked something up.
I mean, I'm not saying you're copying her content.
I'm saying you're emulate.
You're in the great tradition.
Let's put it this way.
You're in the great tradition of people helping people.
You know, you're out there and you're like, you can't.
Like my grandma used to say, don't keep your candle under a bushel basket.
You're out there saying enough with this bushel basket.
Everybody needs to see my candle.
Please remember to like and subscribe.
It really helps the show.
What happened to me?
What happened was.
You know, I started talking.
I realized the other day that this conversation about attention deficit disorder and hyperactivity disorder, which is what you have.
Stop saying that.
Stop drawing me into your projects.
I realize that of all the things— You never ask me ahead of time, would you like to be drawn into one of my projects?
I just find that there's a project, and then you tell me that I'm in it.
Yeah, you've been in it the whole time.
Maybe you're influencing me that way.
It's been like that the whole time since the afternoon with the gun.
Look how it's coming from inside the musician.
So this conversation that really for me only started a couple of years ago, because up until then I had been very contemptuous of the whole conversation around it, even though it's, you know, anyway, talking about it has made more of a difference in the, in my life, in the practical, like, uh, performance of my daily duties than really anything else in, in,
that I've ever talked about.
Like, just in terms of being able to, like, the bipolar medicine really, really helped me.
Thinking about myself as an introvert really, really helped me.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But in terms of... I'm sorry, I see what you're saying.
It's a somewhat controversial thing to say, I feel like, and so I try not to say it too much because I never want to hurt anybody's feelings about this or whatever, but...
I think when you have... I mean, my whole life is about finding frames.
It's about trying to find a way to understand something that seems inscrutable to me, sometimes through analogy and things like that.
I think those kinds of things, at least for me, can be really helpful, at least a fairly high level.
But it's not like you're walking around looking for a skeleton key, but now you have a name for certain things...
I don't know.
I do think that's extremely powerful.
God, I was thinking about this just this morning, about the things where you don't have a name, you don't have a frame, you don't have any of those things for something, and it can be such a lonely enterprise to not know why it is that you don't seem to be thriving at the same things in the same way as other people and to not know why.
Yeah.
It's exactly right, what you just said.
What that conversation has done, it hasn't given me an out.
It hasn't given me really any, there's no 30 squats a day that really are going to change it.
I'm not trying to change it even.
I just see it now and look back at the course of my life and can go, oh, oh, now I understand.
And I understand why I've always been at odds.
I understand why I'm still at odds.
You know, I don't have... I didn't have any real... Well, I just have total time blindness and always did.
And when I was 15 years old, I was 15 minutes late to everything.
And when I'm 56 years old, I'm 15 minutes late to everything.
And it's for the exact same reason.
And there was no... You don't write things down.
Well, that's right.
I don't have a list.
I don't have a calendar on the... Should I start an Instagram?
Hey fam.
This one goes out to my pal John.
The shame around it in 1984 is the same as the shame around it now.
Nobody wants you to be 15 minutes late and nobody cares why you are.
There could be a thousand reasons, but nobody cares because 15 minutes late is rude and the assumption is always that you don't value my time, that you think you're more important than me.
And that was true when I was 12, and that was true when I was 22, 32, 42, and now 56 is still the same.
And being able to look at it and say— It would mean a lot to me if you would point out that I'm not the only person in the world who thinks that, please.
You are not the only person in the world who thinks that.
Thank you.
And it's certainly not directed specifically—
at you, although it could be, but, but there's, there, there are so many of these kinds of things where you just, let me give you a dumb example that something I have to keep an eye on as I get older, which is a caffeine intake where like, you know, I have, anyway, I don't want to get into the whole thing, but like I have all kinds of things going on with me.
And one of those things is like a kind of pill that I take that barely fucking helps me with my ADHD also makes me very susceptible to nausea and vomiting.
Um,
So like if I get up too early, you ever feel like nauseous in the morning?
It's nauseated.
Sorry.
Sorry, strung away.
Nauseated in the morning where you're like that feeling of like, oh, you got to get up early for a flight.
And you feel like a little bit like a little bit like blurpy, you know, all those kinds of things come together.
But here's just a real simple one that'll work for almost anybody, I think, which is that like if you keep having trouble getting to sleep at night or you're feeling...
particularly like crashy and cranky and stuff like that.
I mean, it's not meant as an insult to say, is there any chance you might be drinking?
You might be having too much caffeine too late in the day.
Right.
It was like pretty straightforward way to look at it.
But like if nobody ever told you to watch out for that, you wouldn't even know.
I know it's different, but you could change one aspect of your life.
For most people, I think within two days, definitely within five days, you could change your life by finding a way to address that.
Maybe you could stop coffee or you could just like have just half a cup in the morning or whatever it is.
But I'm trying to say, John, see if you agree.
Like your whole life you walk around going like, why am I always so like fucked up?
And then people are like, yeah, well, you're really sensitive to caffeine and you didn't know it.
And you're like, oh.
Mm-hmm.
That's something that is a thought technology that I now have in my tool belt.
That's something that I can keep an eye on.
And that's why, like so many families in America, we have that thing on our refrigerator that says, have you gotten a hug?
Have you had water?
Have you had food?
Have you had sex?
Have you had a shit?
Like all those things that we forget to ask ourselves.
And as dumb as it is, you can walk around a lot of the time.
You don't get to fix something from 2 p.m.
at 2 a.m.
it's already too late.
But that does become something.
Is that making sense as a pseudo analogy?
Like if you know that like, well, ADHD is the way that presents is the way I put it.
And I'm not a physician.
I'm not even a PhD.
The way I put it is that my body is not good at handling dopamine.
And that can mean in lots of different ways, lots of different things.
But like knowing that what that means and what the impact of that is,
It gives me more of a role than I would have had just going, oh, I don't know.
I guess I'll just always be like this.
At least you have a way.
I'm not saying it's an excuse.
I am saying that it's a form of mindfulness to have a new thing to at least be a little bit aware of and to operationalize in an ongoing way.
You know, it's funny because I think one of the ways that our two ADHDs are different in the sense that I have AD and you have HD.
You've got to stop this.
How many times do I have to tell you?
I don't have HD.
I have trouble focusing on the thing that I would like to focus on or should focus on.
You think I just run in circles?
I need the treadmill for two hours.
I have almost zero sense of an hour from now and none at all of a day from now.
And so the idea of like strategizing at 2 p.m.
for something about 2 a.m.
is completely, it just sounds like music in the distance, like music in the fog.
Well, it's like meeting those people who buy Christmas gifts all year long.
Oh, aren't they lovely?
Well, no, I'm not trying to be cute about it, but there is a phrase that I really dislike this time of year, which is, at any point in the month of December, we're referring to any shopping as last-minute Christmas shopping.
Yeah.
Like, fuck you.
You've got to be kidding me.
What kind of weird?
But like, you know, or the kind of people who could get their papers in on time and then use that time for other things like right.
That kind of thing where you're like, because also Christmas morning is last minute Christmas shopping.
Let me tell you, I've been there.
Yeah, where you print it out and put it in a card.
Christmas morning at the airport.
With a paper bag.
There's a Golden Gate Bridge tumbler coming your way.
I'm not sure what the point of that is.
But you're saying that, but isn't it also part of that, and forgive me for making it about my pet project, about shame a little bit, where I feel like I and so many other people are raised in a probably unintentional environment of shame.
Like there's so much you're doing wrong all the time as a kid and as a teen, as a whatever.
And like, you know, all the ways that people want to help you is mostly by yelling at you, which can be useful, I guess, in some context.
But it doesn't really fix the problems.
It's just in the same way that like kids learn to like just hide things from their parents that they can't accept.
Do you know what I mean?
Like it's just because like now it's still ultimately up to you and me and whomever to...
try to disassemble the pieces of this into something that I have the tools to fix, or at least ameliorate.
I was talking to my mom about it, and I've asked her this over the years a few different times and ways.
When I was 14, I'd been...
diagnosed with at that time add and had been diagnosed a long time prior to that with whatever they called it before then which was morbid hyper verbosity there was a funny name for it some 1970s name and i was i got my first diagnosis of it in the in the mid 70s because they were like this kid is really disruptive in school what is going on with him subject him to a battery of tests
Oh, he has this thing, this hyper something.
But he's not stupid and didn't eat lead paint, so we're out of ideas.
Well, and no, they had... All of our usual rubrics for this aren't working on this kid.
What's the problem?
No, they had speed then.
That's true.
In 1977, the doctor prescribed me the speed, and I think I've told the story a thousand times.
My mom said, I'm not going to give my child speed, and grabbed me by the hand and stomped out.
And so by the time I was 14, you know, I'd been to plenty of doctors, I'd been prescribed speed, I'd been diagnosed with this, it was very clear.
And so I've said to her, like, at that point in time, when I was getting D's and F's in school,
And I was a problem for everybody.
And I was disruptive.
I was unmanageable, et cetera, et cetera.
But I was not disobedient or obstinate.
i had never had a beer or smoked a cigarette or kissed a girl i didn't run away i didn't so you weren't doing all like you weren't shoplifting you weren't stealing money from your parents you weren't like that kind of like i was extremely compliant i wanted to be friends with everybody i wanted to please the adults i wanted to accept their rubric of the world
I wanted to be a grown-up.
You know, I wanted to be a real human boy.
One of the only things that made me happy was excelling.
Right, right.
I mean, that's what I wanted to do.
I couldn't be happy just being a person.
I had to be happy by, like, overcoming what a piece of shit I was to, like, do better than they expected on this thing.
I wanted to rule, you know, and I said to her, why is it?
in that moment in time, 1982, that with all of the combined brainpower of all these different psychologists that had seen me, all these school counselors, all these boomer teachers that were up on the latest books, you know, my parents who were both intelligent, everybody in this story is upper middle class, everybody's got the resources of the world.
And you all knew that I had a medical slash syndromic slash some kind of, I had a thing that was a thing.
It wasn't just a behavioral problem.
I wasn't just defiant.
Yeah, you weren't being obdurate or difficult to deal with on purpose.
You could put a battery of tests in front of me.
Quite the opposite.
I would do anything to make people love me.
I would do anything.
The way I thought they would love me is if I made a funny joke and ran in a circle.
Well, or whatever, you know, who knows?
Well, I know, I would do anything to be loved.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I said, why in that case, when we decide, when you as parents decided not to give me speed, which I accept, I accept that decision, that seems reasonable, why was it then that everyone was out of ideas?
And the psychologists and the schools and the magazines and the conversation and you as parents, without the medication, it was like, well, then we just have to be tougher on it.
Revealing what now feels like just a national incuriosity about children.
Yeah, well, that's exactly right.
Like, was there no... You recognized it was a condition.
You knew it required medication.
But if you didn't take the medication, then it was just boot camp for the kid.
Like, I couldn't tell you... At one level, you know, adult sense of time never made any sense to me.
I always was in this kind of four-dimensional fantasy space of, like, time's all around us.
Like, this is due tomorrow.
Maybe it's due a thousand years from now.
Maybe it was already done.
You know, like, I never had any...
I never made a single list.
So you also, like, perhaps another way we're different is, like, I have a pretty good sense of time in the sense of, like, I do generally, like, kind of roughly know what time it is, which sounds weird because I've met people who don't generally know what time it is.
Maybe this is, like, imagining the apple.
I have no idea what time it is.
Okay.
But that's always been a thing for you.
Or, like, maybe even further than that.
I'm not trying to psychoanalyze here, but to go even further than that, it was like you missed that day.
Of like how to know time as something.
Because other people have such a good sense of putting their hands around it.
The only way I'm good at time, if I ever am good at time, is just by having to create all these compensatory muscles around my failing limbs.
You know what I mean?
It's only because I've had to come up with all these, not now, I think fairly sane systems.
But you can't make yourself understand something.
You can't just by fiat say, from now on, I'm going to understand.
injustice let alone time it's very difficult to just go like oh well I'm going to read an article about this and now I understand it's all better well and in a weird way like if you said take me to March 1807
and take me around the world in March of 18, the spring of 1807, and tell me what's going on in all of the major civilizations of the world in 1807.
Even at 16 years old, I would be like, oh, oh, okay, all right, so let's start.
I bet you could at least situate stuff as this happened before or after, roughly, that time.
Oh, for sure.
I'm thinking Napoleon.
That might be a little late for Napoleon.
No, no, no, no, not late at all.
Um...
and so that is not a thing that anybody in my that any of my teachers or psychologists or whatever could account for right it's like anytime you have a gift people think oh well that's easy for you right right right and and they don't think of it as like oh maybe that's why that part of why people have never been anything but conventionally attractive
Like they could guess what it's like and they certainly have their own pains and things like that.
But like a lot of this does in some ways, though, come back to norms, normative behavior, normative expectations and shame, though, because like because like so many things you just we're talking about right now basically come down to this.
OK, you've got this weird thing about you.
You need to do X. Why do you do X?
It's like so you're more manageable.
OK, well, I don't want to have my kid do X. You're like, well, then I guess you're unmanageable and I can't I can't help you.
Yeah.
Because like everybody else doesn't have a problem with that.
There's nobody else that's struggling like this, except that obviously there was.
Well, and I still experience it.
I still experience it honestly in all my interaction.
It's just you noticing it more, maybe?
Well, no, I've always noticed it.
It's just always been covered in shame.
It's just been like a punch in the face every day of my life.
That is a shame punch.
It's like not understanding gravity or something.
Everybody around you is like, you don't understand?
You drop a shoe, it hits the ground.
Do you not understand that?
And you're like, well, I understand gravity.
But with time stuff, it's like, no, it doesn't fit together in order in the same way that it does for you.
One hour here and one hour there probably all feel the same for you.
But for somebody who does struggle with that...
And I'm not saying it's just ADHD, although I think that's pretty common.
But like there's all kinds of ways where like, you know, I'm not doing this to be a dick.
I'm just realizing that I'm different.
And I'm wondering if anybody can maybe cut me some slack with figuring out how to get better at it.
And the problem with that slack is it just doesn't exist.
And what's been exciting for me lately is because of this conversation.
You know, the reason I get these Instagram videos now that are like woo, self-help, you know.
Did Susan borrow your computer or something?
How many squats or whatever.
No, it's that Instagram allows you to send videos back and forth.
And both Susan and Ariella started watching videos about attention deficit disorder.
And then sending them to me through the Instagram secret mail app or whatever, or a secret mail DM.
And then I'm watching these things.
And honestly, it's had more of an effect on me that they are watching them.
than to watch them myself.
Because for me to watch them, it's just like, oh, yep.
Except half the time, they're describing something that I'm like, nope, I'm not like that at all.
But the ones that are like me, it's like, oh, right.
I don't need a thousand of those a day to validate myself.
They got a demo of that that did not come from you.
They've seen it now and it wasn't just from the way you behave.
Yeah, they discovered it and they're like, oh my God, this is you.
And I'm like, yeah, that's right.
And it's great that you see, in a way it's like, oh, now you see me and you understand from this other person talking about it.
Now you see how I am and, and you have compassion for it, or it seems real.
Or at least recognition.
Yeah.
A recognition, but, but there is compassion because what I've noticed is that the people that are closest to me are starting to, um, uh, starting to accommodate small people.
things that they would have used to have gone oh my god stomp and now they go oh oh right i understand like you i i saw that video i understand why you are not standing over here where you should be standing but you're standing over there and you're looking out the window like i get i get why that is
And it's been a great, oh, my God, a huge relief to me because for the first time, nobody is saying, like, you know what would help you?
If the night before you put all this stuff in a box on top of the refrigerator with the thing that – a lot of that has stopped and a lot more of, like, just – I'm visible now.
In a way that that the I feel the shame going away for a lot of things.
And the funny thing is, you know, this recent spate of long winter shows in a band.
There's a huge difference between being a journeyman who plays in a lot of bands, who learns a lot of tunes, who knows music really well, who can kick it out, who can practice four times and learn a whole set.
There's a huge difference between being that kind of musician and me, who doesn't know anybody else's songs, who barely knows his own 30 songs that he wrote in the course of his entire career.
that couldn't tell you really very much about the chords.
You know, a lot of the chords that I use in my songs, I just moved my fingers around the neck until they stuck.
And I was like, that's the chord.
And I wrote the melody to go with it.
And so you put a musician like me in a room with musicians like my band,
And there's an enormous, we're doing the same thing.
We're playing the long winters music in front of a crowd in 10 days, but we couldn't be from more different worlds.
And you know, their idea of professional ism, their idea of, you know, being good, uh, their idea of the show that's coming up and what we need to do between now and then is
utterly alien to me.
I have never ever sat down with a recording and learned a song and then practiced it 10 times.
No.
How did you learn like Def Leppard and ZZ Top songs?
I don't know any of those.
Really?
I can play Bad Moon Rising.
I can play, but only up until the solo.
That's like a DNA energy.
Yeah.
I can play, you know, those songs that I have covered over the years, mostly any song that The Long Winter's covered, Eric Corson learned it and then showed it to me.
He's a neurotypical musician.
Well, no, I mean, he's, he's got his own thing, but, but he's a musician, right?
I mean, somebody that, and so going into the studio or into the practice space, I was often the person in the room who knew my songs the least well.
And it was frustrating because these three guys would say, no, no, no.
Then it goes to the A7.
And I'm standing there looking at the guitar going, there's no A7 in this song.
And they're like, yeah, it's A7.
It goes to A7.
And then I realized, oh, I made a chord shape.
that only my mind remembers.
But you don't recognize it as that.
You might just recognize that as I started playing this song in E, and then I made this little thing across those three strings, and then I realized it'd be cool if right before the end I dropped that middle string a little bit, right?
Exactly.
We were like, oh.
It's funny, because I was about to say, how did you learn bringing on the heartbreak?
But learning the similarities in my brain, anyway, between things.
I used to do a medley on acoustic of photograph and working for The Weeknd,
And these songs where I realized accidentally, because that's how I learned, I mean, moving my hands around on the fretboard.
I learned bass chords and then just moved my hands around on the fretboard.
And I just learned there's these things that you can do around the seventh fret, around E and B and those things that are like really exciting and they fit together.
And it's like, but there's not a course for that.
no it's a lot of there's that's where all the jangle is right that's where i think so because you're ringing out those yeah you're ringing them out baby you're ringing you're ringing out the heartbreak yeah but so we would we there were a couple of moments between me and one particular person in the band who because but what ends up happening is that it falls into a it almost takes on a kind of class dynamic
Where it's like, well, we're over here working, and what are you doing?
Yeah, you're not being, it's not, it's, how do you say this?
But you're not as professional as they are in that sense.
And the implication, of course, being that I think I'm too good, I think I'm too highfalutin to learn my own music.
And this is the kind of logic that people have used on me my whole life.
Well, you've done it in the past, though, right?
You've learned your songs in the past.
Well, I know my songs.
I wrote them.
I just have to tap into whatever combination of memory and feel and love.
But my whole life, people have been saying, well, you didn't do this.
And the fact that you didn't do it is disrespectful.
The fact that you...
The fact that you didn't turn in your assignment, the fact that you were late to this event, the fact that you didn't remember my birthday, the fact that I told you to be here at this, but you were there a week later, whatever.
The shame component is that people assume, because that's not what they would have done, that the only explanation is that I don't give a shit about them.
And, you know, in the case of my band, like one of the band members like unplugged his instrument and was ready to storm out because he had had enough.
And I was like, I just... And what I said to my mom, kind of when I fantasized about going back to 1982 and sitting in a room with all these adults and saying, just think for a second.
I'm going to assume that you all are in good faith trying to do what's best for me.
Do you really think that I...
want to be at war with everyone?
Do you really think I'm... Do you think I enjoy being disappointing?
Am I having fun?
Is this good?
Am I getting high off of this?
I really want you to run down all the things that you think you're punishing me for.
And think about how any of it makes sense.
Like I'm in this practice studio with these guys.
We're all in our 50s.
Do you really think I'm coming here unprepared because what?
I'm smoking opium?
Right, right, right.
Am I coming unprepared because I don't give a fuck about this show of my band where all my friends are here?
No, I'm coming here because the idea, I'm coming here with what I have.
Because the idea of sitting down and even finding a speaker, even figuring out how to find my own music on my own phone,
causes me to enter a fugue state where all of a sudden I've changed all the lampshades in my house.
And I can't explain it and I don't want it.
I wouldn't have it if I had a list of traits to choose from.
Do you get panicky in a case like that?
There is nothing I want to do less than listen to a podcast except learn my own music.
Mm-hmm.
I don't want to ever hear a podcast.
I don't want to ever hear my own songs recorded again.
I don't want to, you know, I don't, I don't, I will do anything to not have to do it.
Wow.
Okay.
But when the doors of the venue open at 6 30 p.m.,
From that moment until I have signed the last poster for the last person in the room, when the staff of the venue is pushing them out with a broom, from 6.30 to 11.30...
There's nobody that can do what I do in those hours.
And you can't practice it.
It's not about being professional.
It's not anything to do with... It's not the...
They're all backstage having champagne or whatever, and I'm out listening to each person at the merch table tell me the story about how their cousin introduced them to the Longwinners in 2004, and then their cousin died, and the last thing that their cousin wanted to hear on their way out was they wanted to hear Cinnamon as they lay dying, and would I autograph this poster to their son?
And I'm just like, absolutely.
Whatever that job is,
it's not a job that anybody can do and there are a lot of people that do it I'm sure Dave Grohl is also good at it or whatever but there are an awful lot of people in my line of work who whatever hang themselves on doorknobs too so all of this is all this has just been like
The idea that at 14 years old, my parents would have put me on double secret lockdown restriction because I didn't get my English paper in on time, even though they knew I had a condition, that the test to determine it was, can he get his English paper in on time?
No.
Then he has this.
But the only option is medicate him or punish him.
And then to fast forward to being 56 years old and be living the life of a creative person and in a recording studio with people who are also musicians and being treated basically the same way.
That I'm a bad boy, that I'm disrespectful, that I'm rude, inconsiderate.
And realizing that I'm exactly the same person that I was when I was 14.
And I don't mean anybody any harm.
The last thing I want to do is disrespect anybody.
I just want everybody to like me and I want to be helpful, like we keep saying.
I just want to stand at that merch table and hear that story.
And the one that's right, you know, the person behind them is trying to push them out of the way so they can tell their story about their cousin.
Maybe you could have a separate line for people that all their family members are alive.
No, it's just it is the whole line.
I mean, I see what you're saying.
The part about what you only you can do in that sense is like you are.
Yeah.
And I think I think I get what you're saying that like you can't send in a session.
You can send in a session bass player, but you can't send in a session John Roderick.
For the poster signing and the listening and the being there and the fact that people were all sharing with one another our lives with each other.
In some ways, really, you're saying you didn't know it, but you've been a part of my life for 20 years.
But you've said this a million times and it's absolutely true that that work, the work that I do when I get up on stage and I'm the front man of the band, when I talk to people after the show, when I'm, you know, from 6.30 to 11.30 when I'm the star.
That seems easy.
That doesn't look like work.
That to most people appears to be its own reward.
Well, you don't have cycles to think about your lampshade.
Like you've got shit to do right now.
That's completely, that's one.
I mean, there's a reason people like to perform in part.
Like there's, you know what I mean?
Like it's, it's, it's,
Some of us are just really much better suited for some things than other things.
And we try to change it.
We try to get better.
We try to come up with systems.
We try to, like, get help with all those different kinds of things.
But I don't know.
It's just there are some things that are going to just always be difficult.
And there are other things that are just always going to be nearly impossible for somebody else to understand.
I mean, that's just such a brutal fact of life.
In addition to people being uninterested in how you or I or whomever feels, there's just also this sense of, yeah, okay, yeah, yeah, yeah.
I know people like you.
Okay.
Get back in line.
The thing about work is that work looks like work.
And there's a lot of stuff that doesn't look like work.
People don't...
do not want to credit the things that i do that look easy as work they want that to be they want to in a way dismiss it as fun oh well that's fun for you like
You don't get credit for standing up there having fun.
That's what you should consider.
This is the whole thing about music.
Like, oh, music is fun.
You should do it for free because you're having so much fun.
Everybody loves you.
Isn't that fun?
That's the thing.
That's your pay.
And what they say is, and that's what makes you think you're too big to carry these suitcases.
because that's what work is.
Carrying suitcases is work.
Nobody likes it.
Yeah, I mean, just to possibly, I don't know.
I agree with you that this is how people behave about lots of things, even things that don't have anything to do with us.
But if it's something that I can imagine liking doing, it's not work.
Personally, like, no, no, I'm just saying like the person who's looking at from the outside going, wow, must be nice.
You'd be like, if that's something I can imagine, this goes straight back to our backyard pilot.
You know, oh, you're so lucky you get to go around in a van and you get to like, you know, play your music and like, you know, money must be like the last thing on your mind.
It's like, well, except for the fact I have to pay all these people.
But yeah, I see what you're saying.
But if anybody can imagine something,
being fun, then that's absolutely not work in the usual sense.
And then everything else may fall short of work because it still doesn't fit, again, in the rubric of what you consider.
A lot of people think it's not work if you're not unhappy.
You know, the other day, well, two days ago.
Two days ago?
Two days ago.
You know, I live in a kind of a chaos, right?
Like I have a lot of pieces of junk that I bought over the years at junk shops knowing it was junk because I liked the shape of it or the look of it.
And I put them all in boxes where they're all organized with each other.
And because I started doing this a long time ago, a lot of the things that used to be junk now are like barely sort of not junk.
Like I have an entire box of Ray-Ban Wayfarers from the 60s.
I have 30 pairs of them.
And when I bought them, I bought them for a dollar.
Because it would be in a big bin of glasses frames at a cash register in a thrift store.
And I would sort through it and I'd go, oh, these are actually Wayfarers from the 60s.
And everybody around me would be like, who cares?
And I would take them home and I'd put them in the box of other Wayfarers of the 60s.
Now, right now on eBay, I could sell 60s Wayfarers for some amount of money, some hundreds of dollars where it makes it seem like I was smart the whole time.
Oh, look at you.
You're smart.
You're squirreling those away.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But that's not at all why I bought them.
It's not.
And I'm not really interested in selling them.
That's a post hoc explanation from a person who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.
And I still pick them up and I still look at them and put my fingers on them and go, wow.
you know, like these Ray-Bans, like imagine what they've seen, imagine where they've been, like, and, and a big part of like kind of the fun I have, some of my whatever world is based around these little things that, that, but there's too many of them and they clutter up my life.
And part of it is that in my mind, I have a cataloging of them all and that, and they're cataloged according to the
date of manufacture date i bought them date that i actually wore them to a thing where it was appropriate you know like in my mind there's all these matrices that connect everything in this house um and everything that i own like i look up here at my bookshelf and it's like oh you know that's i get that more than you might suspect oh i know you do i know yeah
But it becomes unmanageable.
Because, you know, like you don't get to pick the connections in life.
You make connections between things.
Or in your case, you might have knowledge or expertise that surprises somebody to go like, there's no way you remember that that's that specific pair any more than you would know that this is that Les Paul custom or whatever, right?
But I think I get that.
And now people go, ooh, now you could sell those, right?
Because now they see value in it.
But for me, a lot of my, I don't know, unhappiness disorder, like the kind of woundedness that's in me is that I can't get it all straight.
And I can't figure out.
There is no system.
I can't figure out why I have it all and what it all means.
And is it meant to just be?
Nobody wants it.
You know, for years, I would justify it by saying, like, my son.
will wear this tuxedo and in the end that's not true you know my daughter does not want any of this stuff she doesn't want any of it she wants to live in a modern clean house where the furniture is white
And there's not, when I look around and I'm like, you could have anything.
She's like, could I have it all be gone?
And this house be replaced with a new house?
And I'm like, yeah, I mean, you can actually have that.
But so, so I, lately this last couple of years, I've been asking the people around me for help.
What do I do?
Can you help me?
And they really want to.
But nobody knows what to do.
Right?
Because nobody understands.
They don't understand the system.
They don't understand the suffering.
They don't understand that I just can't keep anything.
Every time I set out to change any one thing in this house, I open the little box of Ray-Bans and I pull them out and I'm like, okay, today's the day.
I'm going to deal with this.
I'm either going to sell these or I'm going to give them away or I'm going to organize them.
And then...
An hour later, I left my coffee cup on top of the closet because I decided that I was going to put all my globes in a, you know, there's, you know, nothing ever gets resolved.
And a couple of days ago, Susan, my darling sister said, I'm going to come over and I'm going to organize your basement.
Okay.
And let me just say that my basement was just cardboard boxes stacked to the ceiling as far as the eye could see, covered with dust.
No, there's no place.
It was a non-place.
It was just, uh, just a dumping ground.
Just like a junk drawer almost.
But an enormous one.
Just boxes.
She said, I'm going to organize the basement, but here's our deal.
I don't care what you think.
I'm not doing it according to your rules.
In fact, I don't want you anywhere around.
And I said, but, but, but, but, and she said, no, I'm going to organize your basement the way I want it.
Now, as soon as I leave, you can do whatever you want.
I'm just going to organize it the way I want to organize it.
And then if you like it, you can keep it.
If you don't like it, you can change it.
If you hate it, you can completely change it.
But this is my gift to you.
How'd you respond?
Well, I said, oh, I don't know.
Well, no, because the thing is, anything is better than what is there.
And here's the key.
Susan is the first one who ever said this and did not say... And here's what else she said.
She said, I'm not going to throw anything away.
The point of me doing this is not to clear out the garbage or to get rid of stuff.
I'm not getting rid of anything.
What she's putting on this is her idea of what would make this organized.
It's not...
organized in situ, like there's no additions, no removals, as opposed to I'm going to make value judgments about what's worth keeping.
That's right.
And I think my greatest resistance at first was to that.
I was like, well, we got to get rid of a bunch of stuff.
There's too much stuff.
Because I had internalized this.
We got to get rid of stuff.
And she was like, no, that's not my job.
I'm not going to do that.
I'm not going to get rid of anything.
I'm not going to make a judgment about anything.
I'm going to just put it together.
And so on Saturday, I sat up here on my couch and she went downstairs and
She had me set up all the different, I had all these lawyer bookcases and stuff that I had decided didn't fit into my house.
Those ones with like a glass door that goes up?
Glass door, yeah.
And I found those at junk shops for years where I was like, you can't possibly be selling this barrister bookcase for only $50.
And the guy's like, get out of here, kid.
I'm like, well, I will buy these and I am a barrister.
Yeah.
Okay.
Fine.
You know, like, so, and they're all, they're all banged up and they all used to be in, you know, some ROTC office.
They've all got paint on them or whatever.
And they, they fit in perfectly at my old farm, but I moved into this modern house and I didn't know what to do with them.
They were just stacked in the corners.
So she said, you just have to help me move the heavy things.
And she had me moving stuff around and you know, that voice in my head was like, well, this doesn't go there.
That's not going to work.
This isn't going to, but I just stayed quiet.
And as soon as she had me move all the stuff, she was like, now Amscray.
Well, I came down at the end of the day, and she had basically, and this is going to, I don't know how you're going to take this, but she had organized, she had put every book I own,
on these barrister bookcases, which she had arranged asymmetrically so that it was a wall of asymmetry, of shelves...
And on top of the shelves, she had arranged all this framed art and all these tchotchkes to fill the wall space as the shelves went up and down.
She described it as a Harry Potter library, which I didn't understand and I still don't, but I was like, okay.
And then she arranged all the books by color and by size.
Wow.
Wow.
So that in each shelf, the books in that shelf were all the same color or, you know, same hues.
And they went from tall on the left to short on the right.
And this is not a thing I ever would have done.
I, I don't, I did not realize that books were different colors until a few years ago when I saw this in a magazine that somebody arranged their books by color.
And then I went to Jonathan Colton's house and his wife, Christine had changed their bookshelf so that it was arranged by color.
Yeah.
And she was so proud of it, and I could just see that Jonathan was like—he was making bleeding in his hand from clenching his fingernails against his balls.
There's a certain kind of personality type that—let me just be clear.
I live in utter chaos.
I don't have a system for books.
I have in the past.
But just to be clear, I don't know if this means anything to you, but—
One way in which I suspect Jonathan Colton and I are the same is like just about the second to the last way in the world I would want to see my books organized is by color.
The other one would be where you do that thing where you just see the pages going out.
You can't even see the spine.
But that's it.
But what do those have in common?
They both seem like a prank for somebody who actually likes to read.
But here's the thing.
I came down and I was initially like...
Appalled.
That's a lot.
I mean, you're describing, even in that brief description, you're describing a lot of, I mean, admittedly kind of aesthetically pleasing change, but that's a lot of change to take in one gander.
It was.
It was overwhelming.
In particular because this world, this represents...
there's 20 different, um, smaller collections that have been dispersed into this, into this basement that she created where all the tabletops are,
Like there's a big table that I inherited from a law firm that had been covered six feet deep in crap.
And the table was clear.
I could sit and I could practice law there.
You can really spread out.
That must be nice.
All the things.
And then I realized the crazy thing is that whatever my certain kind of attention is.
I was able to look at these bookshelves, this huge wall of books now, organized by color, and I could see every book, and I knew where they all were.
If you give yourself a little quiz, there's a book that I would like to find right now, and it could be you found it by color, because you know what the color is, but a situation whereas on Friday, it would have been a lot more challenging for you to put your hand to a given book, and now it was...
It actually probably encouraged your interaction, right?
Like now you want to go look at your books.
Well, yeah.
And weirdly, like, you know, I would have said like, well, here's the thing about, you know, about Plato.
It actually would belong over here with Augustine.
And and that all is going to be kind of in the same shelf here.
Still following the rules, though.
The rules were she makes it the way that she wants and then you can change it or do whatever.
That's right.
And what I realized is, well, Plato is way over here and Augustine's way over there.
But I see them both.
I know where they both are.
There's Frederick Exley's fans notes, which I know Merlin has read.
You haven't lost anything.
Not anything.
And in fact, I realized in that moment, oh, being snobby about organizing it by color is like a book snob thing, but it actually is just as practical a way of organizing books as whatever fucking system of dates and memories it was that I had.
I've been meaning to go Library of Congress for years and I just can't commit.
I know, but my own system, my own filing system was at least 30% emotional filing.
Well, my main filing system is, is there room for me to jam this into the bookshelf as the main system?
But so all day yesterday, I went down my stairs and I looked in my basement and I couldn't, I didn't recognize it as my house.
It was all my stuff.
Yeah.
Unless it felt like a dream a little bit.
It did.
I did not know where this space came from.
It's like a nice room.
And you could go down there and sit and do stuff.
Yeah, like a person.
Yeah.
Like a person.
You could invite somebody down there.
You wouldn't feel like you need to explain yourself.
I could invite somebody down there, and I wouldn't have to explain myself.
That's exactly right.
One of these days I got to get organized.
I wouldn't have to say, oh, well, see this over here.
You see this rotting sheep carcass?
Well, that's from Afghanistan, and I brought it back.
You ever see that movie Top Gun?
You know those wafer sunglasses?
Let me show you something.
God damn it.
I know it's there somewhere.
And to whatever degree that I was able to turn...
over to trust my sister and just say, you know what?
I'm not trusting you to do it right.
I'm not trusting you to change my life.
I'm not trusting this.
You have not just put in a system that I need to follow in order to be a better person.
You're not judging any of this stuff.
She just said, I'm going to do it how I want to do it.
Because it's fun for me, because she also, she has ADD, ADHD, like you, not like me.
Jesus Christ.
She's like, this is fun for me.
This better be a bit, John.
This really better be a bit.
For me, for Susan, this is just her sorting things into shapes and colors.
Yeah.
Which is, of course, the greatest thing to do if you're not invested in anything.
Yeah.
She's like, I'm just going to do this for fun, shapes and colors.
And then I'm going to leave you with a room instead of a junk pile.
And then you can do whatever you want.
It was the craziest little moment.
And I don't think any of it would have happened.
if it weren't for instagram videos of girls speaking in fake southern accents going you know what my adhd tells me do 30 squats that could be your new squat room
I could fucking go down there right now and squat, Merlin.
You could make it a dervish room.
You could just spin down there.
I'm going to go.
I'm going to christen that room.
I'm going to christen it by doing 30 squats down there today.
And that's how I'm going to take ownership of the space.
Wow.
Well, what's the... So you're okay with what she's done, to say the least, yes?
Yes.
Are you happy, grateful, weirded out?
Give me your emotional beat on it.
Well, I'm super grateful.
You know, the devastating thing of the last, I don't know, five years, when I go out into the country and you see one of those antique barns and the family's like, let's go into the antique barn.
And we pull over and you go in and it's one of those big kind of barn spaces where each little room is a different cellar.
That's how I got that, just for what it's worth.
I've struggled to explain this before, but that desk, well, technically it's a desk.
The table that we've got in our hallway, it's like every table you've ever had in chemistry class that two people sit at with the black top and the wooden legs.
The wooden, you know, the weighs a million pounds that you dissect a frog on.
Yeah, it's a slate.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
That's that in one of those in Tallahassee.
That's where we bought.
Same thing.
Just a big room with like not even stalls, really.
Just like, you know, here's like, you know, the type like, oh, these are all like vintage Coca-Cola signs.
That's my deal.
My deal is vintage Coca-Cola.
Or somebody over here who's like, these are like lamps that are like Tiffany lamps, but aren't as nice.
Or here's like bears.
Yeah.
Salt and pepper shakers that are little pigs dancing.
Um, and the problem is the last few years when I go into those spaces and walk around and it's like, here is seller 275.
It's all NASCAR stuff.
Like, okay, here's seller signs.
Yeah.
Here's seller 276.
Oh, it's.
vintage Ray-Bans from the sixties, uh, German beer steins from occupied Europe, uh, and like mid-century modern clocks made out of Kennedy silver dollars.
And I'm like, oh shit, this is me.
This booth 275 is the remnants of a man's life.
And that man is me.
Oh no.
And now this stuff is $7.
Did you just see your own estate sale, John?
That's what I saw.
oh and i went i know when you weren't expecting it just kind of popped up on you it's just you're like oh nascar oh this guy's got a million smurf mugs oh this is this guy's collects lawnmowers great and then it's like oh globes and sunglasses and trick handcuffs and uh and like
Drip pottery, urns full of old matchbooks.
Here I am, and I didn't want to see this today.
No.
That's not something that a vulnerable person should go see.
No, I don't want to be booth 275.
Vulnerable also in terms of like, hey, I need a new vintage Santa Coke sign, but also just of like, hey, look, stop reminding me of my life.
No, no.
And I don't want, and the thing is my daughter is not going to want, she's not going to run booth 275.
If you ask her if she wants the tuxedo, because I think you're going to find out pretty quickly, you can just let that one go.
My high school girlfriend wrote me about five years ago and she was like, do you still have your tuxedo from our junior prom?
Kelly?
Kelly.
And I said, of course.
Mine went back to Cicino and Son on Sunday morning.
Well, because my tuxedo from our junior prom was the suit that her father had been married in.
Roy Cohn was buried in that suit.
And she and I went to the fabric store and bought a bunch of pink leopard spot taffeta.
Oh, I remember this.
Yes, of course.
Yes, this is a classic look.
We got a photo of this, if memory serves.
We did, yeah, our junior prom photo.
Her mother made her dress, and she made that tuxedo for me from her father's wedding suit.
And she said, I still have my dress.
You still have the tuxedo.
My son is going to his junior prom.
Oh, my gosh.
Will you send your tuxedo back to us in New Hampshire so that my kid can wear the tuxedo and his date can wear the dress?
That's so fun.
And I said, I absolutely will do that.
And I put the suit in a box and I sent it back to her.
And, you know, a little while went by, a little while went by.
And I wrote her and I was like, so how'd the prom go?
You know, like dying to see the picture.
And she said, well, your suit got here and I got the dress out and the kids tried them on and the kids thought they were lame and they went and got regular clothes.
And so anyway, here's the tuxedo back.
And it came back in the mail.
And I think both Kelly and I,
separated by the entire United States.
Both were sitting in our little sad chairs going, well, that's not how we thought life was supposed to be.
When we were 16, I know we both looked at each other on junior prom night and said, our kids are going to wear these one day.
Because that was just, I think, the way we thought and how we thought life was.
Like, I'm wearing your dad's wedding suit.
Oh, of course, because you seemed so interesting at the time.
Yeah, like, this is going to be incredible.
Our kids are going to wear these.
With Converse, man?
You've got to be kidding me.
Converse and sunglasses and cigarettes.
What?
Oh, come on.
And her kids were like, lame.
Yeah.
This would make us look weird.
You've got to be careful not to wear clothes that are a lot more interesting than you are.
And in the case of my own daughter, all the time I'm like, hey, check this out.
You know what this is.
Just to be clear in passing, you've totally supported, you know, I'm not saying anything about anybody, but I applaud your supporting her weird outfits.
I do, I do 100%.
I love the weird outfits.
You'll figure it out, you'll figure it out.
There's nothing, I don't need to punish you for being unusual.
You'll figure out, you'll find your own level with these things, but if you want to mix plaids, Hakuna Matata, go nuts.
I'm 100% behind it, but I also have, like I have no opinion about her choices.
I just want to add cool things.
Like this is a bowling shirt from the Cyndi Lauper tour of 1985.
If you put a belt around it, it would be, and she'd like, out.
I'm like, but, but, but, but, but, but, you know what this is?
This is a pillbox hat.
You might not even know what a leopard skin pillbox hat is.
And here's a copy of Blonde Non Blonde.
It has a song about that.
And also here's, dad, I gotta go.
The door slowly closing in my face.
Okay, I'm going to close this and you keep organizing.
I'm like, but, but, but, but all of this stuff, it's all for you.
I got it all for you.
For you, Damien.
Does she even try to cushion the blow?
No.
Mine either.
Not interested in my feelings is, I think, the big takeaway.
Not interested in my feelings.
Not interested in your feelings.
But now you have something that's an action item for you.
It's something for you to be aware of.
Nobody cares about John.
Now you're aware of that.
Well, I always knew that.
I always knew that.
But now it's really reinforced.
it's the new generation it's one thing that it's one thing that really brings her and her mother and my sister uh together is the fact that none of them care about that is so sweet