Ep. 575: "An Introverted Muppet"
I don't know.
I don't know.
I'm making a new noise because you didn't like the old noise.
Do you want a different way to start the show?
I didn't like the old noise.
Well, I don't think you treasured and honored it.
Well, I couldn't parse it.
It was hard to understand.
We found it unparsable.
A little bit.
I mean, not unparsable, but hard to parse.
No, I take it all back.
I kind of like this being the new way we start the show, which is this.
Hello?
Hello?
No, more Muppety.
A little more Muppety.
Don't really hang back.
Use the proximity effect.
Give me an introverted Muppet.
Yeah, that won't get tiresome.
Your favorite podcast hosted by two introverted Muppets.
Don't call them puppets.
Waka Waka.
Waka Waka.
Yeah.
Here we are.
Hi.
Hi.
How are you?
Hi.
Hi.
Hi there.
Hi.
Oh, hey.
How are you?
Oh, hey.
Okay.
Okay.
Okay.
It's like we've been to some kind of like an off-brand marriage counselors just in ways that we can zazz up there.
Oh.
Hello.
Oh, it's been too long.
I'm closer to you today.
That's probably why the vibe is different.
I'm a lot geographically closer.
I hope you're closer to me.
Oh, I see.
Geographically.
Okay.
Yeah, geographically.
No, I feel a lot closer to you today, too, Merlin, after all we've been through.
Oh.
Now I sound a little bit like Squiggy, a little bit.
Hello.
Hello.
I'll be your Lenny.
I'll be your Lenny.
I'll be your Lenny.
That sounds like a leading question.
John, where are you located geographically?
Oh, I'm in Oregon today.
Oregon.
Oregon, which is a great state.
Might be one of the great states in the United States.
Yeah, it's one of them.
I mean, it's one of the states, for sure.
It's one of the states?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Oh, hey, I'm turning it up.
I'm turning up the game here.
I can hear your input getting louder.
Yeah, how does that feel?
How does that feel?
It feels like a microaggression, if I'm being honest.
Now I'm kicking it with organ gas.
See, now I can go... That makes sense to me now.
Yep, yep, yep, yep.
Ah, telephone.
Um...
Two minutes and 40 seconds.
Hey, everybody.
Welcome to Roderick on the Line.
It's a weekly podcast.
It's a weekly call with one of the Johns and one of the Merlins.
Hello.
Yes, and I can do this.
I can do this.
I should be able to do the Capitol.
It's one of those tricky ones.
right it's it's a it's not the largest city but but but it's is it a tricky one no because banger is in maine and the fact is i barely even knew her let alone had her on maine on maine oh that was that was like that was a fred willard level of dumb jokes quickly
um but but you're right that there there is a connection between the oregon capital and colonial well what's the wrong with and there's a city in maine that's also i think is there is it that there's a it's not portland it's um ben no there's no city in that's capital of ben don't keep it to yourself salem salem is that new
Well, I mean, it's newer than Paris.
Can you imagine being in a company that makes cigarettes, and you're like, well, I'm not sure what to call our cigarette.
And they're like, well, where do we live?
We live in North Carolina.
Okay, what do we call these?
Let's call those Winstons.
Winston.
Which is what my parents smoked.
And you go, okay, but what about these sweet-ass menthols?
What are we going to call those?
And you're like, oh, those are Salem's.
Salem's.
Winston.
Winston-Salem.
Why is it?
Why is Winston-Salem Winston-Salem?
It's two towns, Winston and Salem.
Yeah, they use one for one and one for the other.
One dog goes one way and one goes the other way.
So what?
One goes east, one goes west.
I guess Minneapolis-St.
Paul, there's a hyphen there too, right?
I think so.
I think so.
And you don't want to get those folks started.
Oh, no, but, you know, those towns are very separate.
Are Winston and Salem very separate?
I don't know if Winston and Salem are prop Salem.
Takes me away to where I bet you that I'm going to stick with this because we're here.
We're in Oregon and we're used to it.
I'm just going to keep pursuing whatever it is that we're doing because I feel like this is going to go someplace eventually.
And the thing is, if it doesn't, there's no consequences.
Do you understand?
We don't have a net because we don't need a net.
You know, a lot of those podcasts are net-needers.
If you ask me, oh, everything's outlined in Friend of the Pod.
Oh, my God.
Friend of the Pod.
I haven't heard that term in a long time.
Friend of the Pod.
I listened to a podcast I enjoyed this morning, and it's hosts that I enjoy.
They had a guest that I love, but then the person said Friend of the Pod.
Oh.
Yeah.
Yeah.
um um you know dallas forthworth when you're at forthworth you're in dallas i think you got a bastig of potatoes you can't even seem forthworth from dallas it's all the way over there i mean are you sure you had dental surgery was it successful no no it has been largely in fact last night i mean not to because what's in the show is in the show yes yes yes last night i'm down here in oregon
And I went to the supermarket and I bought a pair of little scissors in the supermarket.
I got a pair of scissors in the part of the supermarket.
You got supermarket scissors?
What a cuck.
I got supermarket scissors in the makeup department and then I used them to take some of the stitches out of my gums.
Boy, you know, it's interesting.
We're not talking about what is happening and why you're in Oregon, which I enjoy so far because it's really raising a lot of questions.
Had you gone to the supermarket to get thithers for your stitches?
Is that why you went or did you go for, you got cosmetic scissors at like a Ralph's or something?
No, no, not a Ralph's at the Safeway, at the Faithway.
You remember, you know, there are Faithways there.
I'm stealing this joke from at least five people.
I want to just say upfront, but I do actually think it is legitimately really funny and cruel that the word lisp cannot be said by somebody who has a speech impediment.
It's terrible.
It's really funny.
It's mean, but, you know, nobody said English was going to be nice, especially to the natives.
Well, it's maybe an onomatopoeia.
Onomatopoeia.
Maybe one of those.
Onomatopoeia.
And that is when we have a word that makes a sound, the sound of what it's trying to describe, like boom.
Yeah.
Boom is a good example.
Or maybe lift.
Lift is at least, I think, self-referential.
Yeah.
It might be a Mandelbrot set, or as you say, Mandelbrot set.
Mandelbrot set.
Okay.
No, I bought the scissors at the grocery store because, you see, you don't wear a beard typically.
You don't know that.
I mean, I've seen you wear a scruff.
You like a scruff sometimes.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, I'd love to send you some photos because... I like to get photos from you.
This might seem like a slightly obscure reference.
I look a little bit like somebody in a Robert Eggers movie, specifically The Lighthouse.
I already look a little bit like a catcher's mitt and not like a nice catcher's mitt.
But when I grow a beard, and especially if my hair gets a little longer, it's definitely a situation.
It's a situation.
I don't think it's flattering.
It looks like somebody that comes into the Walgreens and then the security guard starts following him.
I just saw a photograph of the guy who's alleged to have attacked the governor's mansion in Pennsylvania.
Oh, yeah.
And I kind of feel like that's how I look sometimes, even though I don't think we look alike.
That's how I see myself.
He seems unhinged.
I have a kind of dithmorphia.
Now he's telling me we're from Castile.
but the thing about a beard yeah it makes you look lantern jawed john well yeah actually my kid saw a picture of me without the beard and she was like huh yeah where's the rest of your where's the rest of your head
Yeah, yeah.
But no, what happens with my mustache is that everything's fine, everything's fine, everything's fine, everything's fine, and then all of a sudden, my mustache is bugging me.
And honestly, I have it all the time.
It's not like I forget that I have it and it wasn't, you know, it's been bothering me, but I didn't notice.
See, the dumb example I was about to give is, that's like saying your eyebrows are bothering you, except that my eyebrows are bothering me.
I can feel them hitting my glasses.
Yes, they do.
Yeah, they start to, at a certain age, if you are a guy, your eyebrows start to be an issue.
And they get angry.
They get really dug in.
But I have had something like a mustache before.
And the thing that I sometimes have trouble acclimating to is how often I need to trim it to have it feel like I'm not eating it a little.
I don't like the way that feels.
I couldn't do a full Brimley.
And what happens with me is in the corners of my mouth, it starts to poke at me.
It starts to irritate me.
Yeah.
And it comes on all of a sudden.
It was fine one hour ago.
Uh-huh.
Yes, yes, yes.
Yes, yes.
And once it's an issue... John, but isn't that also how we've described how a cold sore works?
Where there's all of your life with no cold sore, and then a little while later you have a cold sore, and the time from no cold sore to cold sore is like the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.
And that's your mustache.
And so I'm like, oh, now I'm bothered by my mustache, and I won't be able to...
uh i won't be able to fully concentrate until i solve this problem and you need whatever it is that you're doing there you really wanted all of that focus for whatever it is you're working on for whatever it was okay and i have i many many times in life i have taken fingernail clippers and use them to trim my mustache rather than go another minute without or you know with this you don't bite it you don't bite the ends off well it's too there's too much there's too much i worry it accumulates like gum
Yeah.
I don't want tiny little hairs accumulating with all my gum that I've swallowed.
No.
Yeah.
No, no, exactly, right?
The gum has its own... I heard it stays in its stomach forever.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
My pyloric valve.
But then once I... Oh, hot dogs, ladies.
Ha!
You caught it.
I'm having a little bit of a time with that book again.
Are you?
Are you going back?
Because I read a review in the New Yorker or something that was reevaluating.
Oh, really?
Revaluating Confederacy of Dunces.
What was the feeling?
I read it in the 90s.
My bass player.
I didn't personally have a bass player.
The bass player in my band was like, I think you'd really like this book.
And I was like, I've heard of this book my whole adulthood, but I never read it.
And then I read it and I was like, I don't know where this book has been my whole life.
I'm talking about the book, A Confederacy of Denses by John Kennedy Toole, posthumously published via his mother.
His mother, the Walker Percy intro to it is wonderful.
She basically hooked up with an LSU professor.
Well, didn't hook up.
She got with Walker Percy and was like, you should check this out.
And they put it out and then it won the fucking Pulitzer Prize.
Not that that matters, except that it is one of the most entertaining pieces of fiction I've ever read in my life.
And I think about it constantly, and it's where all of my online names come from.
Well, the... Wow, wow.
Now I really want to say where... Sorry, New York Times.
New York Times.
That's where I really want to say where I read this review, but it was one of these like, let's go back and look at this again one time because... Right.
Don't do that with Ghostbusters because it's really not as good.
Oh, well, I wasn't going to.
And I wasn't planning on doing it with the Confederacy of Dunces, but this writer did.
And this writer said, in effect, well, what if we were all bamboozled by the story?
What if this is like a Nick Drake thing where we all were like, oh, this is great.
He died because he couldn't get his book published.
And then it turns out his diligent mother...
and so forth and so on.
So to say, in the absence of that now very famous, well, famous, well-known story as books like that go, in the absence of that story behind the book, is the actual text still good?
Is it a good book?
And the writer of this article said, I'm one of the people, probably the writer is exactly your and my age, because we are exactly the generation that was like...
Confederacy of Dunces.
I've told you this, haven't I?
That when I moved to Seattle, it was the first time I ever had my name in the phone book.
Oh, that's so... I remember that being so exciting.
It was such a big deal.
I was like, I'm in the phone book.
And they asked... I don't even remember how they did it.
It must have been a form you filled out.
And my name in the phone book in Seattle in 1991 was John Ignatius Roderick.
I... I...
I see some similarities in appearance somewhat.
Yeah, right, right.
And also really in some ways, not indirect, like, you know, not that you're writing in your whatever Big Chief notebook and talking about your pyloric valve, but also with a certain kind of, I just made a joke about this visually on the internet recently.
I could see you being what I call a credentialed medievalist.
I could see you having a POV about how Botheus' wheel goes around
You know, and that's that's that's how that I don't know.
I could see you being the person in a party goes, well, actually, I don't subscribe to these modern ideas.
Yeah, well, I used to write letters as we all did, but I used to write write letters to girls and I would I would call them minks with an exclamation point.
And I think she's kind of your type.
I knew a lot of minxes, and she was my type, and I would yell at various friends by calling them minx and tell them that they're doing it wrong, you know, in true form.
Absolutely.
I have a picture of myself with the statue of Ignatius J. Reilly that's in New Orleans.
Oh, that's so cool.
Anyway, so reading this thing, the writer was doing the thing.
I'm 55 now, and I'm going to reevaluate all of the things that I thought were good.
And there were interesting anecdotes, interesting insights in the article because the writer obviously could not go so far as to say, maybe this is Ghostbusters or whatever.
Maybe this isn't as funny as we thought it was.
Couldn't do that.
Couldn't do it.
It would have been like shooting their family dog.
Did they not find it entertaining on this read as well?
Yes, very much.
But they were culturally criticizing it.
Not from a like, oh, these are problematic.
But like a point of view, like a debate thing.
Like if I were going to make a case for this not being as good as I remember, what would I call out?
Yeah, exactly.
And one of the interesting things I thought very interesting...
was that this was not a case where he wrote it in isolation and nobody would look at it.
He was talking to an editor, you know, a prominent editor the whole time.
Yeah, a lot of problems.
That's what it boils down to.
It wasn't just that his record, he couldn't sell his book.
He had a lot of other things going on.
I think it was ahead of its time.
Another thing, at least to my head, makes it difficult to...
sort of recommend to people because you know this is this is the problem with spoilers this is the problem with recommendations it's like if you cared you'd already have read this if you care like i can i can try and sell this to you i can't sell you on reading slaughterhouse five unless you're 16 or 17 because that's when i read it like you know what i mean and and in this case it's made more difficult by the fact it was published in i think 1980 um
It was finished, I think.
At which point you were, what, 13, 14?
Yeah, yeah.
But I think it was finished at least a couple years before that.
But it's about the early 60s is another thing that's a little confusing.
Like when people see Animal House.
Like, does everybody understand?
It's about the time of Animal House, to be honest.
It's probably like, what, 62 or something like that?
In New Orleans.
But my God, even setting Ignatius aside, the other characters are so goddamn funny in this book.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Can I read you the first three sentences?
Oh, go ahead.
This is chapter one.
A green hunting cap squeezed the top of the fleshy balloon of a head.
The green ear flaps, full of large ears and uncut hair, and the fine bristles that grew in the ears themselves stuck out on either side like turn signals indicating two directions at once.
Full, pursed lips protruded beneath the bushy black mustache and at their corners...
sank into little folds filled with disapproval and potato chip crumbs.
That line has had a big impact on me from a poetic standpoint.
Oh, filled with disapproval.
I think he'd gone to town to get a new string for his lute.
Isn't that it?
Isn't that the conceit is he went to the department store, he's waiting for his mother?
Anyway.
Oh, his mother.
She's a grandma.
Okay.
Anyways.
All right.
You remember a time when we all read A Hundred Years of Solitude and we all, you know, the book would come and we all would read the book.
And is that still true?
I don't think it's still true.
You know what I remember?
I feel like, gosh, I barely remember, but let me...
Just from the time, I seem to remember that years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia would remember that distant afternoon that his father took him to discover ice.
I don't know what book that's from, but for some reason it sticks in my head.
Yeah.
It's a TV show now.
What is, 100 Years of Solitude?
Yeah, I'm scared to watch it, because I like the book a lot.
Well, I know, but also, that would be a very hard book, too.
I know!
You could do Love in the Time of Cholera much more easily.
I think it's got to be Dune-level unfilmable, which, I got to say, posposably, and people have been trying to... I heard, the last time I heard, this was a long time ago, there was the rights to filming, you know, whatever they call it, the movie rights, were with...
either Will Ferrell and or Drew Barrymore.
And the scuttlebutt that I heard was that he was- What?
Well, no, no, no, but he bought it production-wise.
But the scuttlebutt became that he was going to play Ignatius and that she was going to play- Oh, oh, oh.
I thought you were saying 100 Years of Solitude.
I was like, I do not see Will Ferrell and Drew Barrymore.
That would be muy, muy funny.
But yes, I can see Confederacy of Dunces.
That seems like right.
Tequila, tequila, tequila, tequila.
But so my fantasy casting was always PSH, Philip Seymour Hoffman.
Oh, sure.
It was always my pick for Ignatius.
Sure, sure, sure.
You could see that.
But I could see Will Ferrell chewing up the scenery as an Ignatius.
Well, and that's the thing.
You've got to be careful because, I mean, geez, why don't you just give it to, you know.
Jack Black.
No.
Right.
Even better.
I was going to say... Or Jack White.
Who's the guy... Oh, God.
Books and pens.
Who's the one that everyone compares me to?
Jim Carrey.
I could see somebody sliding in a Jim Carrey and going with trying to do that particular angle of it.
The podcast that I was listening to that I enjoyed was about Jurassic Park.
And they were talking about alternative casting ideas for Alan Grant, as played by the wonderful Sam Neill.
And no matter who you pick for that, you could A, see them as being... Harrison Ford.
Harrison Ford.
Or Kurt Russell, which would have been... Oh, but then it becomes a monster movie.
It becomes like a Carpenter movie.
But each of those could have been a really good movie, or if it had been directed by Joe Dante instead of Steven Spielberg and all those kinds of things.
Blank Check, with Sean Fennessey from The Big Picture on this week's Blank Check.
But I'm sorry.
What?
What?
Huh?
Who?
No, I feel like I've taken you so far away from so many things.
But it is interesting to go back.
I still think this is an extremely entertaining book.
And it gets my official okie-dokie.
Let's all say it.
Yeah, okay.
Well, if you haven't read it, and then also Love in the Time of Cholera, you should read.
And also, what's the one?
Cien Años de Soledad.
I'm thinking of, what was the one we all read about?
Oh, you know, nobody, what is it, nobody writes to the colonel anymore, or no, it's, what if it's, I'm talking about Marquez.
No, no, I'm talking about the books in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s that were the book du jour that we all, all of a sudden, everybody in the world that we knew all had read the same book.
Well, what's funny is these folks doing the show, whom I love, are not, I don't think, old enough to remember the Michael Crichton one that was everywhere before any of his, which was Coma.
I remember Koma, the novel, with that very provocative cover where people look like they're hanging from strings from the ceiling.
I remember that novel, like Jaws and Shogun, just being everywhere, like on supermarket checkout stands.
Yeah, right, right.
I mean, everybody read Koma back in the day.
And then Kongo's good.
It's very upsetting, but it's good.
He's a good writer than Michael Crichton.
He's a weirdo, but he's a good writer.
But you know what I mean.
Not the thrillers, but I'm talking about the... What was it?
I guess it was when people... Whoever it was that won the Nobel Prize... We'll figure it out.
Whoever it was that won the Nobel Prize...
that year for literature, we all then went and read those books, right?
Remember, it was just kind of a thing that seemed to be part of the culture.
You and I both grew up reading Time magazine, and just reading Time magazine, books were a big section of the magazine, right?
Books were like, you know, I'm not I'm not trying to be like I love books guy, but I am saying that as much as we see the for for people who are in, say, their 30s, you remember, oh, a lot of that movie poster or that ad, you know, or something like over and over.
And for a lot of us for a long time, it was it was books that were everywhere because that was one of the only nearly on demand things that existed was recorded music and written words.
Right, right, right.
And I kind of shared like, oh, now everybody has read Bonfire of the Vanities or whatever.
Yeah, or something like Valley of the Dolls or like, you know, those dishy Hollywood kind of books that people would read.
And, you know, celebrity biographies.
My God, that was such a huge deal.
Celebrity biographies, yes.
But I feel like, for instance, I would not have read Pasternak or Camus as part of exactly my field of study.
It wasn't stuff I read in college because I was taking a class on it, so much as it was that you read these books because you were making a survey.
You were reading a survey of Western Civ or something, and you had gone across some bridge where now it wasn't just that you were taking a class in Western Civ, but you were actually reading, you had to read Beckett or Solzhenitsyn or something in a way that...
That's actually a really good example.
People who claim to read, claim to have read all of the Gulag Archipelago, for example.
I have it.
Yeah.
I mean, I've got an e-book of it.
I haven't tucked into the whole thing.
I started a new, I started a quote unquote new Camus book last week and then bounced.
Because I didn't know what the myth of Sisyphus was about.
And I was like, maybe a different day.
Because I thought it was kind of going to be about Sisyphus and imagining him happy.
But no, it's about, you know, the big self-harm as we call it.
The big self-harm.
But you know what else is funny and kind of, to me, paradoxical, ironic something?
A lot of times it's the people who read the most or have read the most who carry around the most background shame about what they feel like.
It's just indecorous that they haven't read a given book or even a given author.
Like, I don't think there are not at my time.
I feel like I felt like that.
Oh, my God.
Like, I haven't read enough William Faulkner books.
I've probably read more than the average bear.
But, like, you know.
They're a lot of work.
That's a lot to eat.
I'm very busy.
My kid's super into Great Gatsby, so I'm rereading that.
You know, oh, I saw you posted something.
No, you didn't.
You're not on the internet.
I didn't post it to your Patreon.
You're right in the middle.
Oh, this is so... It was so tragic when I saw it because... Are you being serious?
You saw this on the internet?
Oh, fuck.
Somebody showed it to me.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Sure.
They showed it to you.
Sure, sure.
Somebody tapped me on the shoulder at the supermarket and said, did you see what Merlin posted?
I was like, wow.
But Christopher Frizzell, who does the marvelous book clubs that I did for a long time, is in the middle of a Gatsby book club.
And it's only two... Such a fun book.
It's only two... It's the shortest one he's ever done.
It's like we meet two times.
You read half the book, we meet and talk about it.
You read the other half, we meet and talk about it.
You're done.
And I saw that when it goes east, when it goes west.
So what?
You know, this would have been perfect for you guys to do this for Zell Book Club, just to be in a room with other people that love Gatsby.
Yeah, for sure.
Is there any Gatsby movie that you think is good?
Um, not, I would, if I could put it slightly differently, I can't think of a Gatsby movie that I could recommend for everybody.
Okay.
I still have not seen the 1974 one, which is kind of strange because A, my kid.
Is that Robert Redford?
Yeah.
And Mia Farrow and my late mother-in-law was an extra in it.
It was shot in Newport, Rhode Island.
How have you not seen it?
I don't know.
I don't know.
Seems strange to me that you haven't seen it.
You know, I sided with Woody Allen, and now it's really hard for me to watch anything with Mia Farrow in it.
I see.
You know, because I had to pick a side.
Yeah, you do.
You know, in this world, you really have to pick a team.
Oh, my God.
Are you kidding me?
You've got to show who you're repping.
Yeah.
Let's see.
You've got that one.
You've got the Baz Luhrmann one that my kid likes a little too much.
And you've got—what's the other one?
Isn't there another semi-recent one?
Bill Murray?
No.
No.
Cinderella story.
Tears in his eyes, I guess.
So is he playing Nick?
That would be funny.
Actually, it would be funny if Bill Murray played almost anyone in Great Gatsby.
Yeah, think about it.
Think about it for a second.
He'd be a funny Tom.
He'd be a funny Jay.
They're careless people, John.
That's what I'm saying.
Just do Gatsby, but with the cast of Saturday Night Live in 1977.
Okay.
But a serious rendition of Gatsby.
Yeah, I can see that.
Garrett Morris would be a great Jay Gatsby.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Let's see.
Our top story tonight.
See, I was going to go with fabulism.
Fabulism has been very, very good to me.
anyways so you cut your mustache huh are you gonna tell us why you're in oregon or is it kind of like is it music or what are you doing no no no no so you don't have to say it's spring break oh and uh and we're we're for you too well so so on on uh on friday night
I moderated, in big scare quotes, a big event at the Moore Theater, which is the second largest of the old theaters in Seattle, where Dan Carlin and I spent an evening together on stage in two big comfy chairs talking about World War I and AI and what the future has in store for us all.
Oh, dear.
Okay.
And it was, you know, it's very interesting.
Dan Carlin does that marvelous thing where he answers the question that he hears you ask rather than the question that you ask.
And it's a great thing.
I wish I could do it better.
If you can do it and make it seem like you're not doing it, it's such a gift.
It's really good.
John Dickerson is really great at that, too.
I really admire people who are able to do that.
So we had a great conversation.
And then as soon as I left the theater, we switched over into spring break mode.
And, you know, my daughter's 14.
And so how many spring breaks are there left?
A countable number of spring breaks where we go and do something where it's like, okay, we're all together.
And, of course, my mom will be 91 in a couple months.
That is a chronological needle to thread or at least consider.
Yeah.
You're not going to get that many kid and grandma things in another place.
If you got five more, you'd be really lucky.
Five more, you'd be really lucky.
Exactly.
I think about it more than it's wholesome.
So I said, well, let's go to Washington, D.C.,
Go to Washington, D.C.
You see all the books.
You go see George Washington's sword.
You walk around.
That's a great city.
And because these are tumultuous times, who knows what you'll see?
Maybe you'll walk by the White House and you'll see rats pouring out of the sewers because it's some kind of biblical event.
Oh, for sure.
Maybe the skies will be filled with the locusts.
Yeah, yeah.
And maybe not.
And maybe we'll just go over to Arlington and walk around.
Dude, you can just walk around the mall and it's just fun.
It's just fun.
But then my daughter's mother slash partner.
Partner, yeah.
As you know, she's in internet security, tech security, hardware supply chain security.
Okay.
Supply chain.
Supply chain, yeah.
She says, well, I have to be in Washington, D.C.
in June for this conference.
Okay.
And I said, that's fine.
And she said, but... That's fine.
She said, I don't want to go to Washington.
I can tell that's your partner.
Or she said, I don't want to go to Washington, D.C.
in April.
Oh, sure.
And then have to be back there in June.
And I said, well, we could go to Washington, D.C.
every month for the next year and not run out of things to see and do.
But she had already spoken.
And there was no amount of me, you know.
I think her point's not terrible.
It's not a terrible point.
I agree with both of you, but, you know, and so how did you end up in somewhere in Oregon?
So what happens is that the Oregon coast, specifically the town of Gearheart, Oregon,
is, um, it's only three hours from Seattle, which when you think about it, there are a lot of things.
Chicago is three hours from Seattle.
I mean, if you, if you don't count all the bullshit, right.
Um, Canada, you can be in Canada in three hours.
That's true.
But, but the Oregon coast is actually a marvelous place.
Like, like one of the marvelous places.
Is it kind of like a, do you feel like it's like an under known gem kind of thing?
so much that I don't even want to be saying this right now.
I know the feeling.
Most of the towns on the Oregon coast are still small, dumpy, depressed, like trashy kind of bunch of loggers and a bunch of grandchildren of loggers who still haven't figured out a way to make a living in the modern economy.
And so they're just passing the same ball of meth around.
For some reason, Grandchildren of Loggers sounds like, I don't know, like a Mekon song or something.
In a way, in a way, it's very... Ghosts of American Airmen, maybe that's what I'm thinking of.
But that's interesting.
They're still there, like, just banging around in Meemaw's house.
They really are.
Waiting for the logs to come back.
Yeah, they're smoking the wallpaper paste, and they're just, like, trying to decide.
But then you walk down to the ocean, and it has, in some ways...
all of the vibe of Big Sur, except if Big Sur had beaches that were 40 miles long and 40 miles deep.
That does sound like a gem.
Yeah.
When the tide goes out, you look out and you know that Big Sur mist where you're just kind of like the ocean and the air and the universe?
I'm so basic, John, that I will tell you of the three or four times I've been to Big Sur and spent any time there, I have trouble finding another word except magical.
Magical.
I mean, if you go to the right place in the right way, it really is pretty wild.
My friend Michael, who's like the ultimate, like, I don't know how he figures out how to get shit done guy.
There's a big park there in Big Sur on the one side of the road, on the side that's not where the water is.
The other side of the road, we call that.
Right, ask the chicken.
But it's really like cheek to jowl tent camping.
Yeah.
And then there's this secret place across the street that has, I think, two or possibly three incredibly isolated campsites overlooking that big rock, that big satellite rock.
Oh, that's a nice big rock.
And if you get in front of it and get it early enough, you can get that.
Michael got us that campsite in 1997, and we stayed there, and it was mind-boggling.
And I'm not even an outside guy, you know.
Right, right.
And you guys probably weren't even on weed.
Yeah.
No, I don't think so.
But I think I do know what you mean, that kind of like a mist that's not quite like a rainy mist, but more like just like kind of a moist presence.
Well, and it just sort of disappears.
Like on the Oregon coast, when the tide is out, you can stand like not just way up on the sandy beach, but on the part of the beach that's still wet from the ocean.
You can stand with your toes on that part of the beach and honestly not...
be able to see for sure where the ocean begins, like where the actual water begins.
If I could ask, this is going to sound like a strange question, but I think you'll get the mojo.
When you go to Big Sur, it really kind of feels like you're standing at, whoa, this is that place.
For that matter, the famous one to me was the most California experience I ever had on that same trip was driving down one.
You know, listening to, in that case, the new album.
By The Long Winters?
Yep, yep.
I Can Hear the Heart Beating is One by Yola Tango.
And that's where I really imprinted on that album was, if you imagine listening to that in a 1991 Civic driving down Pacific Coast Highway.
You know, like a sugar.
That's how great music is made to be listened to in a special place.
Absolutely.
But does it feel like you're in Oregon or does it feel like you're in Maine?
Does it really feel like?
For sure not like anywhere on the East Coast.
There's no place on the East Coast that comes anywhere close to it.
And there's no place in California either.
And it's not like Washington.
It's its own universe.
That's really cool.
That's so cool.
And what it is is that the beach is so flat that when the tide goes out, it literally goes out a half a mile.
And... Oh, which also means you can wade in pretty far, probably.
Yeah.
Well, and there's the undertoes.
It's weird.
The water's weird.
You have to watch out.
Because it can grab you.
We have that big time at Ocean Beach.
Yeah, it's tricky.
Yeah.
But... Nobody believes you until they're missing.
Until they're missing.
You understand?
Like the reason people keep showing you, like there's a sign at Ocean Beach that I can't put my hand to right now that says people have died here.
That's what the sign says.
The sign says people have died here.
It's not quite so bad, you know, like here it's not like, oh shit, people die here every day.
It's just like, I've definitely been grabbed by the water and felt like, how did I get here?
Yeah, yeah.
But there are also giant rocks here.
like those huge haystack rocks along the beach, except because the beach is so like massive, these rocks can be way off in the distance, but you can, it's not like that thing in California where you see a rock way off in the distance and you're like, oh, it's another land.
It's like the rock is in the distance, but you can walk to it from here.
It sounds like the rock is knowable.
it is a noble rock and you can spend that changes everything it does you can spend all afternoon walking toward this rock and it seems to be getting closer but it's kind of not and and yet it eventually you're there
I mean, it's wonderful.
And so we've been coming here since I was a little kid.
My mom was telling the story yesterday.
She was like, as soon as your dad could, as soon as I was no longer nursing you and your dad could put you under his arm and leave the house,
He would just take you on adventures.
And I was grateful because I, I mean, I didn't have to go anymore.
I didn't have to see his, his, his sister ever again.
I didn't have to deal with his family.
And as soon as you were.
That's the kinds of things you can't say when more people are alive.
Yeah.
That's right.
You get more honest when you get to 90-ish.
Yeah, they're all gone now.
Nobody can be offended.
And maybe their kids would be offended.
Nobody liked them.
Yeah, their kids don't listen to this show.
No.
But so, yeah, before I was even two...
My mom said, oh, well, your dad would just put you in the car, presumably with a seatbelt.
I slid across more bench seating than you've had hot meals.
Yeah, exactly.
So it takes a fast turn and you're just flying everywhere.
And the dashboard in our Pontiac was literally metal.
He might've put me in a hat box on the floor.
Like a little Moses.
But this was before my sister was born and he would drive me down to the Oregon coast.
Oh man, that's kind of cool that he did.
Yeah.
And he, and he would, um, and my mom said, you know, what was I going to do?
Deprive your father of, of his ability to show you off to his terrible family.
Yeah.
it's like i don't know mom but so she said she you know i've been coming down here since i was since basically i could get i could be taken from my mother and so we've always come here my cousins have a house here but we don't stay there um they have a house here and they rent it to people but we don't rent it from them we get a different house and
You don't even need to explain that to me.
I can think of three or four reasons without knowing any of the facts why that's probably better that way.
It's probably better.
It's just probably better.
And Gearheart is a weird little town.
It doesn't have, it's the kind of town that's only open in the summer.
And that means that there's like two restaurants, a place to get coffee, an ice cream shop, and a grocery store that sells like canned tomatoes.
But not scissors.
It's next to Seaside.
which is kind of... It's like a... Seaside Oregon is like a town that might be in an 80s vampire movie.
Yeah, like a Stephen King town.
Yeah, it's got like a video... It's got a pier.
It's got...
a bunch of touristy things.
It's got letters.
There's also a stream running through the town.
It's got a ton of restaurants.
It's got a lot of people with neck tattoos.
It's, you know, it's like a, it's a crazy space.
Gearheart is up the road and not like that.
So anyway, we come here, this is our spring break.
I'm going to spend a week walking up and down the beach with my, you know, with this coven that I'm the, I'm, I'm in service of.
Yeah.
And, uh, and so they said, well, are you going to talk to Merlin?
And I said, what do you mean?
I can put all my, I can put my entire podcast rig into a shopping bag.
John, I feel like in some ways, I don't want to open an old wound, but I feel like once it was passive aggressively, perhaps intransitively proven to you that your whole career fits into a drawer in a living room.
Yeah.
In a way that, that must, that must give you a kind of freedom now and how you think about what you do.
It does.
You're one drawer away from, from your whole job.
I was thinking that I should... You remember back... Remember back when listeners to this show often had their own blogs about podcasting?
That sounds familiar, yeah.
And they were always talking about what microphones were good.
Oh, yeah, I do remember that, yeah.
Remember that?
Those were the days, right?
I know who you're talking about.
Is this a good microphone?
Is that a good microphone?
What about these headphones?
Yeah.
And I think I settled at one point on just like, this is the... I'm also going to tell you when we're done here about the scissors that that guy recommended to me that changed my life.
Okay.
I'll put a pin in that.
Why wouldn't you tell our fans about it?
I don't know if they're pronounced Kai or K-A-I, but they're the sharpest scissors that I've ever had in my life.
And what Marco said to me was, you're going to get these scissors, and then just so you know, you will cut yourself.
And I said, oh, Marco...
You're so funny.
You're so funny.
You don't know me.
And within an hour of having them, I had cut myself.
Because even a glancing blow, you get anywhere nearby.
We're not even talking about grabbing a knife in the dish, in the sink.
We're talking about like, oh, this cut was so fine, I didn't even realize it.
And boy, is it ever good for cutting stuff like mustaches.
right you look you looked at them as you walk past and all of a sudden you're bleeding well this is the problem if all knives were equally sharp we wouldn't have problems it's a it's a it's a form of social justice having a dull knife it's the most dangerous knife you can have try cutting an onion with your walmart's walmart like little uh like paring knife that's some bullshit man fucking bullshit interesting they'll just slide right off the plate and just cut your hand open is it the type of thing where you can you can cut a tomato so that's wafer thin
Can I be honest with you?
I don't tell everybody this.
The knife I'm talking about, the scissors I'm talking about, it'll cut a tomato so thin that your in-laws will never come back.
And then it'll cut open an aluminum can like some kind of goat.
Because they had make special editions for cloven hoofs and for left hand left of TV was funny, but the This sounds great.
So today's your first day They said you you're gonna talk to Merlin and then you brought your drawer with you.
I brought my my my whole drawer I was thinking oh what I was saying about Marco.
Oh, sorry I was I was thinking that these days
We should probably get some kind of sponsorship from a podcast microphone company.
Yes.
And we should get like 50 microphones and just give microphones to everybody.
And just be like, hey, start a podcast.
Just start a podcast.
Just have a little goodie bag.
Like in a Bob Geldof way or a John Rockefeller way?
We would just like people we ran into, like Rockefeller used to give out dimes.
Are you thinking like we just run into people and go, hey, here's your road podcaster?
And I'm not saying road podcaster.
The door is wide open.
John stipulated he wanted a podcast microphone company.
I would take almost anything at this point.
Yeah, right, exactly.
Anybody that makes a podcast microphone.
Because I also want to help people.
I want to be Johnny Podcast Seed.
Yeah, Johnny Podcast Seed, exactly.
Everywhere you go, you just have... Did he wear a pan on his head?
I feel like he wore a pan on his head.
Am I remembering that wrong?
I feel like on the Disney album I had, he had a pan on his head.
Like, yeah, a pot as a head.
Well, like a sauce pan.
Johnny Appleseed.
Johnny Appleseed headgear.
Hat.
Which is a really good guy to buy Voices EP, by the way.
So make the free Johnny Appleseed hat.
There is a pot.
An upside-down pot is a Johnny Appleseed hat.
Do you think he cooks in it or just uses it exclusively for headwear?
Or for seeds, because he puts seeds in it, if you know what I mean.
I said Johnny Appleseed hat into the internet, and apparently making a Johnny Appleseed hat is a thing that kids do in kindergarten.
Oh, free Johnny Appleseed hat.
Yeah, make an apple seed hat.
John, every single thing I'm seeing here is something that a small red-haired child is supposed to make in school and cut out.
That's exactly it.
Probably with shitty fucking scissors.
John Dawson, a local newspaper editor and contemporary of Johnny Appleseed observed that his headgear was rarely ever alike for a long time.
More than once, Dawson saw Johnny Appleseed with a tin vessel.
That seems like the kind of expertise where you can make up a lot of stuff.
Yeah.
He used his hat to cook his frugal meals.
Frugal meals.
Frugal Meals.
Hey, let me real quick tell you about something I like.
It's called Frugal Meals.
Hey, are you sick of coming home and there's no food in the house?
What if you had even less food, but it wasn't expensive?
Hi.
Thanks, Frugal Meals, for sponsoring this episode.
Hello, my name is CGI Frugal Meals, and I hope that you will let me bring food to your home.
Is this your first time dining with us?
Terrible.
That's literally terrible.
Okay, here's the joke.
Okay, no, never mind.
It's too much to explain.
This is why we need an after show for members only.
You know, I just... Because sometimes we'll be watching something, and I'll go, man, that's a really good CGI dinosaur.
Or I'll say, like, oh, man, that's a pretty cool CGI lady pants or whatever.
And then, of course, nobody will say anything, and then I'll go...
Welcome to CGI Lady Pants.
Is this your first time dining with us?
And then I started to spin out this idea for a restaurant you might have.
Yeah.
It's ruining movies, CGI Lady Pants.
It works every time.
CGI Lady Pants.
Why did I come up with that?
I did a lot of dishes this morning.
Johnny Appleseed hat from Walmart.
Look at that.
It's a product on their site.
I do feel like Johnny Podcast Seed is a thing.
It's a thing.
What a terrible concept.
That maybe I want to start being.
I'm just going to carry.
And anytime somebody's like, da-da-da-da-da, I'm going to say, you know what?
That would make a great podcast.
I've done that with books.
I've done that with albums.
If there's a book, there's three or four books that I've enjoyed enough that I buy multiple copies and then give them out to people.
And this is exactly what I'm saying, because I bet you there's a podcast microphone that's about the price of a book now.
Sure.
Where you're instead of handing people Confederacy of Dunces and saying, hey, I think you really like this book or bringing it to any time.
Just give me 25 minutes to explain why I believe that.
Yeah, exactly.
But in this case, you just hand somebody a mic and they're like, oh, shit, dog.
Now I can podcast.
It's a USB microphone.
You don't even need any other thing.
Not even a computer.
You just plug it in the internet.
Could we also ask them the only codicil?
Well, we should probably come up with as many codicils as we feel like.
We don't have any way to enforce this, but we do ask that you not use the phrase friend of the pod.
Friend of the pod.
Yeah, I was talking to friend of the pod.
There's a chip in your mic and we'll know.
Now, wait a minute.
Let me ask you this about friend of the pod.
Because I used to do a podcast with a couple of ding-a-lings that use the term friend of the pod all the time.
Yeah, they're like third wavers.
But what's the difference between a fan, a friend, and a friend of the pod?
Do you really want to talk about this?
A little.
Okay.
Because it is a thing.
It's a coinage.
It's something that...
I've been doing podcasts in some form or another for a while, and it used to be, at least in my circles, that was a kind of just a jokey reference and a way to refer to somebody that you know a lot of your listeners are aware of.
I'm not doing that here, but if we were going to do that here, an example of that might be, and I think we probably actually said, I would have said friend of the podcast because I'm not a fucking monster, but Jason, I think would be considered a friend of the pod.
Yeah.
Oh, yeah.
I think your mom.
Tell her I said hi.
What about John Saracusa?
John Saracusa.
I don't know if he'd be a friend.
But yes, yes, yes, yes.
Absolutely.
And it would be kind of just a jokey way to say, well, and they've never been on the show or anything.
But like, oh, it's just a thing you say to like recognize.
I think, okay, here it is.
It's a hat tip.
Yes, I'm going to say exactly what it is.
I've never thought about it until now.
When you say friend of the podcast or friend of the show is what I used to say, friend of the show.
I think what you do when you're saying that is you are acknowledging somebody out there who other people listening to the show will know of.
Like Dan Carlin.
Or like a John Hodgman or a whoever.
You mentioned that.
Or Dan, yeah, Dan Harmon, of course.
Dan Harmon, yeah.
You know, I'm not asking you any questions about that, and I would just like credit for that.
Okay, good.
Isn't that the guy?
Which guy?
Is he all the great shows?
No, no, no.
Dan Carlin is Hardcore History.
Oh, Hardcore History.
I know that podcast.
He's a friend of the pod.
Oh, I was thinking of the guy that made Community.
No, that's the other guy.
And I definitely, oh my God, you're going to love this.
And I know you didn't ask.
No, I don't care.
Please.
I actually listened to the first bit of an episode of Hardcore History.
Yeah.
And the first bit of episodes, dude.
Is this your, is that your first experience with the show?
By far.
And also one of the first podcasts I've ever tried to listen to.
And when I say the first bit, I mean, I got 10 minutes in.
No, no, I, well, you got to at least get to the part where you can tell he's a little too excited about the torture stuff.
He's super excited.
He's really getting into it.
And the boulders were flaming as they flew toward the balustrade.
Yeah.
But what they didn't know was... I did it explicitly so that I wouldn't show up on stage with him and say, hey, big fan.
Oh, you know.
Fan of what?
Fan of what?
What exactly of my things do you like?
And I'd be like, oh.
All the great hardcore.
About the shows, you know.
So, yeah, anyway.
But so you were saying about... No, you were saying... No, but you were saying... Johnny Appleseed, podcast friend of the show.
Oh, and I think it was meant to be a way of doing a slightly cheesy, like, hey, I know somebody kind of famous thing.
Oh, it's like a... But you know, I know that person.
Well, kind of.
Like, I think that's the joke.
It would be to say, like, somebody who you're aware of is in my or our...
universe or retinue but then also I mean now god I could just turn this into like a five-page paper I guess but it can it can also be a way to to say something that's very silly so then if you've done that enough and you said friend of the show John Syracuse or you know friend of the show Jason then you could say something like friend of the show Michelle Obama and then that makes it kind of funny oh see that is funny
Yeah, I used to be funny.
I used to be a Merlin man.
I could do anything I wanted.
You did?
You used to talk into your shoe or your wallet or both?
My kid has prom, Gatsby-themed prom on Friday.
Is that why the Gatsby thing?
That's part of it.
No, but he just actually really likes Gatsby.
And he's also seated at a table with other gifted children that mainly talk about all the gay stuff in Gatsby.
And, you know, I think it becomes distracting.
Is there a lot of coding in Gatsby?
Well, young people see sex where they want it.
Boy, that's the truth.
I failed to see it where it was.
I failed to see it.
I felt like, you know, tracing shadows on the sidewalk, I can see where the sex was.
There was sex once.
I heard there was sex around here once.
Remember when they told us that we had missed all the sex?
I remember hearing that all the sex had already happened.
I think by the time the Beatles were kind of starting to fray, they were already at peak sex.
You know the phrase peak oil?
Over 50% in peak oil, and I think people have forgotten what these terms mean, but it was a very useful phrase.
Peak oil meant that more than 50% of the...
oil in this case that you can fairly easily get out of the ground has been gotten out which means a half the oil is gone here from here yes but a half this is what i think a lot of people kind of skate past in their desire to make a reference to something they don't understand is that means not only is 50 of the oil already out and gone forever until we get more dinosaurs can you tell i watched jurassic park history yes yes dinosaur i like it i like dinosaurs god that movie's perfect
But the other part is, guess what?
The 50% that's still in there is going to be fucking hard to get out.
Harder, at least, yeah.
You're not just going to go like, you know, stick your Daniel Plainview in the ground and have it gush up, you know?
No.
No, it's going to be something harder.
But we were talking about... They're going to have to frack.
You're on to something good, and I took you away with Johnny Appleseed.
What were you talking about?
Oh, well, you were just talking about Friend of the Pods.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And then it had morphed into some other stuff.
Oh, yeah, and you're going to give out Mike's, perhaps...
Remember we were going to sign bells?
Remember that idea?
That was a good idea.
Didn't we even get bells?
Well, yeah, here's the thing.
I was going through some of my disused bells that I bought for demos.
So now I have more bells than I need, and I'm going to be sending them to people.
Maybe that's another thing.
Maybe you keep one or two bells.
uh, bells in a small bag that you've packed.
And if you meet somebody who already has a podcast microphone and they're ready for it to go to the step two, you give them a bell.
Yeah.
But then you're walking around Johnny Jinglestick.
Everybody's like, why is your bag ringing, bro?
It's true.
When I was transporting these to the office, I finally, I stopped.
This is so mental.
And I grabbed paper towels, half a paper towel, and stuck one in each one of them because the ringing was really distracting.
And I sounded like, what was his name?
Mr. Jinglestick?
Johnny Jingle Bells.
Johnny Jinglestick.
Johnny Jinglestick, yeah.
That's me.
That's me all the time.
No, I do believe that we're not at peak podcast yet.
I think we're... I think a lot of people want to talk about, oh, it's peak podcast, but I don't think so.
Because if we were smart...
We would be running our Patreon like other podcasts do, like Chapo Jingle Stick does, where they have different tiers, and then people who sign up at the highest tier get a jingle stick or a microphone or something like that.
The problem is, though, John, we don't talk about this stuff on air, but then that makes you a store.
i don't want to i just i don't want to i just don't want to be a store because then also people say stuff oh yeah you know i upgraded to the jingle stick level and you didn't have an episode last week you know i'm not that's not a voice anybody uses but once you've made something into a store then people think they can bring the receipt and ask you to explain things to them yeah that's right or hug them in the rain in scotland where's my hassen where's my cook
Is that rabbit?
That's rabbit, right?
Because that's what they want the money for.
Yeah, that's right.
That's why they want the money.
Cook, where's my Haas and Pfeffer?
What?
Jesus Christ.
I need to purge my memory.
No, no, I don't.
I take it back.
I need to treasure my memory.
Yeah, keep it all.
I need to be out there distributing hats and seeds and bells, and I need to be standing in what's left of my truth.
Stand in the place where you live, Merlin.
Thank you.
And then face west.
Don't tell me what to do.
Okay.
I totally agree.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's a little bit like... Your feet are going to be, you understand, on the ground.
Sure.
In front of the show.
People don't understand.
Your feet are going to be on the ground.
Your head is there to move you around.
Um...
So what are you going to do?
What are you going to do?
You got anything fun planned for today?
Are you just going to go like sit and stare at the sea?
Oh, that's the other thing is I think The Cure accidentally sold some Camus novels also.
Oh, The Cure did.
They had that song that's kind of about the, how do you say it?
La Trangere?
The Stranger?
La Trangere.
No, you know, there's Lewis and Clark here.
Lewis and Clark.
They're problematic now, right?
Yeah.
I don't know.
I mean, they didn't help the Native Americans in the long run.
It's almost like they were from a different time.
From a different time, right?
They were doing a different thing.
A different thing in a different time.
Can you imagine what the future space judgments of us are going to be like?
Oh, it'll be the podcasters they come for first.
Oh, and I said nothing.
Yeah, that's right.
Because I wasn't an apple seed.
Because nobody gave me a microphone.
And then there was no one left to speak for me, and plus we were out of microphones.
Yeah, that's right.
I saw that on a poster in a bathroom once.
I had a friend who had that on a poster in his bathroom.
The nobody-came-for-me speech?
Was he a—probably a Lutheran, but he was some kind of a Protestant.
Was he a great man?
Can you land on a fraction?
Oh, man.
This is kind of a silly episode, isn't it?
Oh, this episode?
I don't know.
Is it okay?
I'm sitting in bed in Oregon.
Well, I'm sitting in my office looking at a red-haired child with a paper hat on his head you can buy at Walmart called Johnny Appleseed Hat.
And that's that's produced.
OK, this says really good stuff is the name of the brand name, which has a little bit of Chinese Amazon energy.
It says about this item, Johnny Appleseed hats, 12 hats, heavy stock handle size, six foot by two inch hat band size, 22 one size fits all.
I think these are like Johnny Appleseed party hats.
You buy these in sets of 12.
You get a dodeca apple hat.
Well, so this is my question.
Do we get those, put them in the Johnny podcast seed bag?
Would you wear it, sling it over a shoulder?
Maybe sling it over a shoulder?
Well, no, everybody gets a microphone, a bell, and a party hat that has Johnny Appleseed apple on it.
And it's paper, so you could probably make it for, ooh, or a balloon animal would be nice.
If you can make a Johnny Appleseed balloon hat.
Those are the bags we hand out.
These are the bags we hand out.
And this just becomes like a mission for us, is that right?
Like, let it begin with me.
I want people to benefit from the same benefits that I've benefited with.
Yeah, from the same benefits that I've benefited with.
Because you've got to figure, he's probably getting more tail than Sinatra.
Johnny Appleseed?
Sure.
He meets... Yeah, he's got a hobo vibe, which everybody thinks is pretty sexy.
Can I give you a note on that?
Yeah.
I think he's got a different vibe.
He's got a drifter vibe.
Drifter.
And as we know, and I know Mickey Rourke is a little problematic this week, but we know the power of the drifter.
Power of the Drifter.
Why is Mickey Rourke problematic this week?
I'm so excited to get to be the one that tells you this.
I'm going to try and say this phonetically.
Are you ready?
Yeah, I'm ready.
The actor Mickey Rourke, the once top of his game, Mickey Rourke, he's on Celebrity Big Brother, and he said something homophobic to Jojo Siwa.
Oh.
Oh.
You got all that, right?
Yeah, so far.
So you got, I think you probably missed Jojo Siwa.
I think Jojo Siwa was a lit, like, obviously Jojo Siwa's still around, but Jojo Siwa, I mean, let's be honest, was kind of a punchline in our house for a while with the side pony and everything.
But now she's on Big Brother and she's out and proud.
And apparently, you know,
Mickey Rourke said something mean.
And then they got thrown off the show, Celebrity Big Brother.
For saying something mean?
I didn't read.
I just read the headline.
But today I saw a different headline that says that he regrets what he did and he apologizes.
Oh.
Yeah.
I bet he could be pretty mean.
A lot of drifters are mean, but I think that's part of the appeal.
Let's say you're some kind of unsatisfied housewife type.
You know, the classic 80s, 90s movie housewife type who's like real pretty, considered plain in the community.
And she's got a husband.
What was I just watching that has this exact?
Oh, shit.
Last night's Righteous Gemstones was kind of like this.
What you've got, like the wife that everybody likes or at least feel sorry for.
And then the husband who might be a little bit of a drunk and might kind of, you know, be not very nice to her.
If Mickey Rourke comes to town wearing a paper hat that looks like a pan.
Mickey Rourke comes to town.
He's technically a pan man.
Technically a pan man.
Now what if, what if Guy Fieri, what if Guy Fieri, what if he comes to town and he's wearing a paper hat and handing out mics?
I like the drive-ins, but I hate the diners and dives.
Why is Mickey Rourke on Celebrity Apprentice?
I didn't even know that that was still a thing.
Cash flow?
I don't know.
Why is he doing it?
Well, I think he needs something to do.
He needs work.
He needs work.
I mean, you know, I could see him being a handful to work with.
Oh, for sure.
Well, this is back to the like, how do people earn money?
I totally, I ask myself all the time.
Or to quote a line that I'm pretty sure is from Glenn Gary, Glenn Ross.
I need to double check this because I do quote it a lot.
I think it might be, I feel like it might be Alan Arkin who says this.
What is this in service of?
I feel like that's a line in Glengarry Glen Ross, but it should be in any case, because I frequently find myself asking the following question, John.
What is this in service of?
What is it in service of?
Mickey Rourke appears with former child star Out and Proud Jojo Siwa on Big Brother, the reality show with cameras.
And what is that in service of?
It's in service of...
Well, making money, right?
It's got to be just about making money.
Oh, you think it's about grinding them bones?
It's about them bones.
Them bones, them beef bones.
Them dry bones.
But tell me, like, what amount?
Well, the moist cheeks collected to the moist lip and the moist lips attached to the shiny chin.
Mickey Ork is so shiny.
He's so moist.
He's dewy.
He's like a Big Sur morning, which is a terrific Joni Mitchell song.
Oh.
Oh.
Whoa.
I wish I had my Bell and my Johnny Appleseed hat.
So now that actually, if I could say, now that becomes a story, okay?
Like the fake story about, I started eBay so my supposed girlfriend could sell Pez dispensers, that kind of bullshit.
You come up with the fact, you get interviewed, you're on a Charlie Rose or whatever, and you can say, well, I was in Oregon at the sea, right?
With a gun on the beach, a gun in my hand.
You understand?
Yep.
Killing an arrow.
And now you didn't realize you didn't have a hat and you got your dick and your gun and your cure cassette in your hand.
And that's why there are now podcasts all across America.
And then Charlie Rose would say, that's how it started.
That's how it started.
I like line readings.
That's how it started, Charlie.
I like line readings.
You know, I had an Elon Musk conversation with Dan Carlin.
Dan Carlin said Elon Musk was a fan of his History Hardcore show.
That's cool.
And Elon Musk said, this is a story he didn't want to tell on stage, but he told it backstage, and now I'm telling it on stage.
Oh, dear.
Well, you are wearing the paper hats.
Yeah.
He said Elon Musk reached out to him and said, hey, man, I'm an expert on World War II airplanes.
You should have me on the show sometime.
I'll bet.
And Dan was like, and this is before Elon had become a divisive character.
And so he was like, yeah, well.
That's just when he was at PayPal and bald.
yeah like this is a guy who invented the internet or whatever and he knows everything about uh about uh world war ii airplanes i'll have him on the show and so he had uh elon musk uh show up to do some i'm an expert on world war ii airplanes and he said within minutes it was clear he knew nothing about world war ii airplanes
And so they fumbled their way.
He, you know, Dan was just looking for an exit.
But Dan would then also kind of have to serve.
Was he serving as the moderator and question asker too?
Yeah.
Just some sort of like, so tell us about, you know, airplanes.
That's also, that's kind of bad booking, but it's also kind of bad pre-production.
Yeah.
But, you know, it's one of these things that we all do where it's like, well, this guy's famous and rich, so he must be.
And also legendarily smart, so I'm having him on the show because he's an expert on this.
And they got to the end and Elon said, boy, I didn't sound very smart on that.
And Dan was like, yeah, well, you know, it might have helped if you had known...
uh, anything really about the thing that you claim to know about.
And he, and so the point, the point of the anecdote was, he said that was when he realized, really realized that these guys really do think they're experts and,
On everything.
And notwithstanding, and this is true for the other guy too, it's true for all these ding-a-lings, is the very ephemeral moment of slight ha-ha self-awareness is not indicative of much that's deeper than that.
Being good at one thing does not make you good at all the things.
And there are a lot of folks, though, who seem to believe that because they got lucky on one or two things, they now know all the things.
They know all the things.
There's a lot to know about planes.
See, I'm the type, though, I feel like I'm in the same position where I could say, again, I probably know more about that than some people.
But a lot of it is just me going, oh, yeah, the Spitfire.
Or, oh, yeah, that's right.
Oh, the Spitfire.
Yeah.
But no, no, no, but you know what I mean?
Where I could like nod along and that would connect two pieces of information that I don't nascently have in a network of information in my mind.
Like I could not, I watched a really good thing.
Oh, God.
I'm so unfuckable.
I watched a thing on a really good rigid air ship last night.
I think it's called the R101.
A dirigible.
Well, here's the thing.
You know, there's a difference.
Like, this one's not held up.
It's not, like, held open by the air.
It's got bags, air bags made out of cow intestines.
Mm-hmm.
Airbags made out of cow intestines.
Did you ever hear how all this got made?
Out of cow intestines?
60,000 cow intestines.
Part of the intestines of 60,000 steer, to be accurate.
Just the best part.
Women in England had to work in a big room full of meat.
to make these, to make the 15 airbags that you needed for one of these rigid dirigibles.
But it was totally fascinating.
And then as it turns out, I hate to spoil the end for you, but then when it did crash and burn at the end, the hulking remains were used partly to build the Hindenburg.
No, that's not true.
Really?
I don't know.
It's a guy called Engineer Guy, and I like his videos a lot.
Oh, Engineer Guy.
Engineer Guy, he did a great one on turbines, great one on how duct tape works.
It's like epic.
As you were telling the story, I was picturing the History Channel era, Time Life era.
Yes, yes, yes.
TV show that I thought you were watching.
But then, of course, it was a YouTube video with Engineering Guy.
Engineering Guy, yeah.
Yeah, and that's like such a weird world.
By my count, that's the second Engineering YouTube channel I've mentioned in as many weeks.
That's what I'm saying.
Last week I mentioned how to safely dig a hole.
Yeah.
That's what I'm saying.
We've turned the corner now because my daughter also only, she has no social media.
She just watches YouTube.
And all of her YouTube videos are like some kind of science or somebody like educating her.
This is what she thinks is fun.
And that's what you think is fun.
Well, I could make some pretty strong recommendations.
Well, that's what I'm, you know.
I mean, I have really good taste and very little tolerance for bullshit.
Yeah.
And I also love to celebrate the people that I love.
We watched one of my all-time favorite YouTube videos called Trash Theory.
I've sent you many videos from this English guy that does these great surveys of a certain kind of like indie rock.
And I said it again to Madeline on Sunday, yesterday.
I said, I'll say it again.
I can see every bit of work that this guy puts into this.
I can see every bit of effort that goes into this.
This is not a bunch of stock videos of planes landing or money being counted or shit like that.
This person actually puts effort into that.
That's how high my taste is.
So if she ever runs out of that dumb shit, like, you know, can you burn a milk carton or whatever?
I don't know.
So you're saying that it's...
More work than just sitting in a bed in a rental house on the beach with a Johnny Appleseed hat on, talking for an hour.
You're saying they put more work into it.
What do we mean by, why are we talking about work?
The value of work.
We're talking about Studs Terkel.
Are we talking about, like, what do people do all day?
We're talking about Richard Scarry.
What are we talking about here?
What do we mean when we talk about work?
This is what we talk about when we talk about Raymond Carver.
That's what it is.
We need a funny ding out, John.
The chicks can't hold the smoke.
The chicks can't hold the smoke.
The chicks.
That's what it is.
The chicks.
Did you write down K-A-I scissors?
K-A-I?
Can we write that down, please?
K-A-I?
That's like killed in action.
It's very close to that.
Killed action.
I think you're thinking of M-A-I.
I mean scissors.
K-A-I.
K-A-I.
They're costly, but they're good.
You can get them at Uline.
Oh, no, you can't.
Uline's just trying to be a top-level return on that scissors search.
Oh, I see.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Well, once you're back in Washington, look on Amazon.
Yeah, that's right.
They don't have that in Oregon.
Oh, I see what you're saying.
Yeah, these are $60-plus.
You know what you could do, though?
So right now, listen to this.
You ready for this?
I'm ready.
Oh, that's such a good sound.
These are the six-inch long ones.
These are huge.
I would suggest getting the small ones, which are just the sharp ones.
There's ones that are probably three, four inches long, and those are good.
Now, you're going to want to probably hide those.
If you've got a paper crafter or somebody who does things with cardboard, you might want to hide them.
Somebody wants to ruin them.
You're saying somebody's going to ruin them.
They'll ruin them fast as shit.
They don't care.
They don't fucking care.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Last Christmas, I gave you my heart.
But also, last Christmas.
It's been...
There's some things you just can't say.
You can't say what I want.
Nope.
You can't say it's been.
Nope.
You can't say last Christmas, apparently.
Yeah.
So it's the problem around here.
It must be the problem at your house, too, where people want to get you a Christmas present.
Uh-huh.
And it's like, I have everything that I don't want you to get me.
Oh, my friend, this is why you need the Amazon wishlist.
Every time you see something you want to buy for yourself, put it on your wishlist.
Okay, that's a good idea.
I've got some very, very costly things on mine.
But I don't think people will give it to me, but it's also my own personal wishlist.
I said last Christmas, I said, you know what I want?
I want some Japanese scissors.
I want some fancy Japanese scissors.
Come on.
And I got a pair of fancy Japanese scissors.
I don't even want to know what they cost.
Are those back in Seattle now?
Yeah, they're in Seattle.
I wish I could go look at them right now and tell you what they were.
No, you can do it.
You can do it later on.
Yeah.
But this is the type of thing that halfway through the year, I would see it and I'd go, wow, look at those scissors, but I can't afford that.
And then I would forget about it.
And then at Christmas, I'd be like, I don't care what I want.
And I get socks and- There's a phrase we use in the Dubai Friday universe.
We call it unconventional fancy.
Luxury doesn't have to be costly, let alone expensive.
Luxury can be lots of different things.
I have a brand of pencil that I like that costs a little more than a Ticonderoga, but I genuinely look forward to using that pencil.
That would count as unconventional fancy.
I think your scissors could be an unconventional fancy.
I have a lot of that.
Yes.
You don't have to go like, oh, I want the nicest boat or whatever, whatever people buy.
So now do you put your Amazon wish list online that people can go find it and buy you things?
Like an OnlyFans person?
Yes, very much.
Very much so.
That doesn't seem like you.
Yeah.
No, no.
I mean, it's just part of Amazon.
Nobody looks at it.
I don't advertise it.
But then my family's like, no.
But it's available.
You can see it if you say, like, Merlin Man's Amazon list.
Let's go look.
As long as we're doing a long episode.
Don't you have to go get with your family?
No.
Please don't search anything for me, please.
I'm going to go to Amazon.
I'm going to my list.
Oh, also, I hacked my Kindle, which I'm pretty excited about.
Comixology Merlin's.
Okay, top down.
Oh!
Ha, ha, ha, ha.
i'm so pleased to say i'm sending you a screenshot because i don't know if the i don't know if it will go through as a link please indicate what the top most thing on merlin's wish list currently is merlin's wish list the current top thing is diamond select toys marvel animated series night crawler statue
It's the little blue man.
It's the Wilberforce.
It's the naked blue man.
It's the little blue man.
In the Munich Circus, he was known as Nightcrawler.
So how do I get one of these?
You know, when I put things in my Amazon Bastic, it's always like Park Bench.
I see a park bench.
That's exactly what it's perfect for.
I want a park bench.
It doesn't need to be anything.
Here's one.
I am going to get this someday, probably after my family leaves me.
I'm going to get Lego... I'm going to read the whole thing.
Lego Marvel X-Men, the X-Mansion building set, Marvel collectible DIY, craft kit for adults, ages 18 plus, buildable, Xavier Institute with 10 minifigures, gift idea for superhero fans, 76294.
$329 American.
It's Professor Xavier's.
It's the X-Mansion.
And it's glorious.
And it comes with 10.
John, I don't know if you ever bought you some Lego sets.
This one comes with 10 minifigures, so you know it's good.
Including a Sentinel, which is nice.
Here's what's currently in my Amazon shopping cart.
I have a Diplomat Karakul Ostrakon fur hat.
That's $33.
I'm so glad you didn't have to write that down for someone.
I have.
I don't think they would have gotten it right.
They might have accidentally got you a Johnny Appleseed hat.
I have a park bench that converts into half of a picnic table.
I don't hate that.
I have a Proco rat distortion pedal.
Oh, shit.
I have something called a BioLite Alpenglow multicolor USB lantern.
Yeah.
Do you ever have ones you forget?
You ever go all the way down and find one of the stuff you forget about?
Oh, yeah.
I'm doing that right now.
Let's go to our oldest item.
I have a book called A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain, which now that I see it, I really want it.
I have some Chuck Taylors.
Okay.
I have a patch from Slovakia.
See, I think these are all really good uses of that list.
I just sent you this Dr. Zayas.
None of them are very expensive at all.
I sent you a Dr. Zayas I've had my eye on for like a year.
Oh, here's the thing I completely forgot I did.
So, you know, when I go swimming, I'm not very buoyant.
Really?
That surprises me a little.
Yeah, everybody around me is having fun.
They're like splash, splash, splash.
And I just feel like I'm... My mother-in-law could float anywhere.
Anywhere she could float.
Some people just float.
They float.
And I just feel like I am thrashing in the water, attracting sharks.
That's because you're so full of information.
Sinking, always sinking.
And I thought, wait a minute, you know those yellow foam belts that people wear when they're water skiing?
I do.
What if I just got one of those and I wore it to the beach?
I'm an old man now.
That would keep your abdomen above water.
You kind of really need it for your face, don't you?
You know, maybe like a neck brace, like somebody that- Are you avoiding water wings on purpose?
Because that's kind of what you really need.
I don't know if they make them big enough for me.
Okay, here's the thing.
You know how you can get a ruggedized baby carrier so you don't seem like a queer as a father?
You know all that rugged shit?
Yeah, sure, that looks tough.
Like, oh, for first responder sunglasses or whatever the fuck.
People who like to record videos in their car go to those websites.
I bet there's tactical water wings.
tactical water wings they're not called that what i want they're they're probably called like um death floaters or something like they're probably they probably got some kind of navy seal name i bet navy seals use them at least in training here is the thing about my amazon list that's the most merlin i have so many different kinds of surge protectors oh fuck yes extension cables
I have so many things in here that are for devices that don't exist anymore.
Chris Ware Lunchbox.
Yes, please.
The oldest thing in my thing right now is a set of matching marshmallow roasting sticks.
And do you remember, do you remember what you envisioned that being for?
I'm guessing marshmallows.
Did you remember like a time in your life where you're like, oh, this would be just the fit for thus and such?
Yeah.
Well, we were, we, you know, we used to go down to the beach to this fire pit and we would make s'mores.
And I was always sticking marshmallows on like sticks that washed up on the beach.
And I thought, there's gotta be a better way.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And I came home and sure enough, there's like this pouch of,
that has color-coded marshmallow roasting sticks.
It was only $13.
Oh, like fondue sticks.
I have no idea why I didn't buy it.
Yeah, exactly.
And then I could have showed up at the beach and voila, produced like a colored marshmallow stick for every kid there.
That would be so cool.
But for some reason, I didn't buy it.
And the last time I made s'mores, I think you get to a certain age, my daughter certainly did, where we look at each other and go, are s'mores good?
Like, they're good, I guess.
That's a very interesting question.
Because s'mores are almost undoubtedly fun.
In the sense that it's fun to look forward to.
I guess they're fun.
I don't find it fun to make personally.
But that is not, if I were going to pick something to eat at night around fire, it would not be chocolate graham crackers and marshmallows personally.
Melted or otherwise.
Especially if it needs equipment.
I looked at my daughter's mother slash partner at one point and said, can I just eat the candy bar?
Can I just have the Hershey bar?
I think some people have a stance on that.
Oh, they do.
I feel like, I feel like, I mean, it would like be like getting a package of uncle Ben's and just eating the flavor pack.
I think it would upset some people.
Well, now I'm going through my list and I'm deleting all these things.
That's what I do.
You got to go through them.
The oldest one on my list is from March 11th, 2001.
Oh,
No way.
There was Amazon then?
Yeah.
There was Amazon before you and I met?
I think the first thing I ever bought on Amazon was either a pavement shirt or a Weezer shirt.
Oh, actually, I know this.
I think it was in the first three.
I'm going to hit a ding pretty soon because it's getting late.
That's where I bought my copy of Confederacy of Dunces in the 90s.
I think it's one of the first things I ever bought.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Back when they were a bookstore.
Amazon.
I wasn't even on the, I didn't even have a computer.
I had a Mac Classic 2 in 1998.
Ooh, you write your papers on that?
Yeah, I did.
And they're still all on there because you can't get them off.
Nope.
Gotta get that big hard drive hooked up.
Oh, there's one of those on my Amazon wishlist too.
Big hard drive.
SS.
I also just want to say, like, this is not in any way.
I don't know how you say this without sounding like a weirdo.
I'm not asking people to give me presents, just to be clear.
I want to clarify that above all, the wish list is where I put stuff that I think would be fun to have in my life someday.
Secondarily, it is for if my family, like, we use this heavily.
Like, I don't know what to buy my wife for workout clothes, but she's happy to add things in the right size or shoes.
And, like, that's super handy.
How do you make this a public thing?
How do you do it?
I don't know.
What am I, Johnny Amazon?
Yeah, you are.
I got the hat.
Johnny Amazon.
You're going to go to, you know what?
It's amazon.com.
Mine is slash HZ slash wishlist.
I bet you find it under your settings if you go to lists, under your accounts and lists.
All right, all right, all right.
I'm going to do this.
I'm going to put stuff on it.
But I'm not – this is not a –
No, everybody knows that you and I particularly don't want anything from anybody.
I'll say what everybody knows is fucking nothing.
There's nothing that everybody knows.
I guess you're right.
Information is not well distributed.
What are you going to do today?
Are you going to go down in the water?
Are you having fun?
You need some corn dogs, make some s'mores.
You know this stuff.
It's all about, like, what are we going to eat next?
Oh, that's the only way to stay sane with family, is planning meals.
Planning and having meals is the only... That is my bulwark against madness.
Is today the day that we have scabetti?
Is today the day that we have mama tacos?
Is today the day that we go see the Lewis and Clark Fort?
Mama tacos?
Mama tacos.
That sounds like a sweet in-house thing, but it's...
Quite a vivid image.
Who's hungry for mama tacos?
Mama tacos.
Yeah.
They made them at home.
We decided a long time ago, this was, oh, this is, talk about getting angry letters.
Yeah.
When we got back, when we were in Italy,
We were sitting having our 700th pasta with egg.
And we looked at each other and we were like, you know, Italian food, it's really good.
This is very delicious.
You can really taste the love.
All of this pasta was made with love.
As long as you were there, you were family.
But I really prefer the scabetti that Mama makes at home with pasta sauce out of a jar and some hamburger and some pasta that she got at the supermarket.
Nothing tastes better than familiarity.
And everybody around the table, we all looked at each other and we were like, yeah, exactly.
You can't say that to the Italians, though.
You wouldn't even say it on an internet if you were on the internet.
That's an old good bus.
And mama tacos are not, they do not try to approximate any kind of Mexican food.
No.
But it's a whole process.
When you sit down to a table of mama tacos, there are like 19 dishes of little ingredients on the table.
Oh, my God.
That's like how we do like pho and stuff like that.
Oh, my God.
I love a make your own meal.
I have something I do call potato night where we have baked potatoes and you make your own.
It's like a little potato bar right in our kitchen.
Potato bar.
So it's exactly that.
It's not only say it's easy.
There's a lot of little like, you know, mise en place at prep, but then you get to make your own potato and go to bed.
Yeah, because baby likes a little of this and I like a little of that.
Baby like a potato?
Daddy like a mama taco?
Yeah, you're a little chicken.
And so mama tacos, it's a whole thing.
You have to plan it in advance.
Well, I wouldn't do that while I'm on vacation because you're going to need ramekins and a sharp knife.
But that's the thing about Airbnb.
Yeah.
I can tell you don't listen to my other podcast because, oh, God, have I got things to say about knives in particular and Airbnbs.
John Syracuse and I have our own knives that we bring to Airbnbs.
you do yeah i mean you might as well just keep in a storage shed if there's a place you go a lot you get out like the good your good soap that you like you know all that is this like a is this a keep a small bag pack thing where you have a bag that you take to air i'm really not at liberty to say i don't like to travel but if i do i'm not going to use a fucking walmart paring knife i'm supposed to be grateful for that and what's in this lock what's in this locked closet by the way
Could I figure out the combination?
There's one of those in this room right here.
I can always figure out the combination.
Want to tip?
It's the same as the gate code.
It's always the same as the gate code.
Not always.
It might be backwards.
What do you find in people's closets?
Usually cleaning supplies.
Yeah, exactly.
But I always kind of wonder, of course I wonder, could this be not a portal, not exactly a monk hole, but could the owner be in there?
Could the owner be in there?
This Airbnb we're staying in right now is one of those that has no sign that it's ever been lived in by real people.
It looks like a real estate staging.
I know.
I know.
I know exactly.
That was the one we stayed at in Hawaii where I was like, eh, it's fine.
But like, I don't think anybody, but you're saying, so just so we're clear to the audience, and just so I'm clear with you, it's one thing to say, this hotel room, for example,
is so clean it looks like nobody has ever stayed in here well a that's how every hotel room should look and b you expect that hopefully out of a hotel room the problem is the one the ones that we stay at sometimes i'll be like the one in hawaii when we stayed at mendocino it was amazing but the last one we stayed at in hawaii months ago whenever we went to hawaii last summer or whatever that was um no it was like nobody had ever lived there
As in, no one could conduct a life with the way that this house is configured.
This is not a house meant for people to live in.
It's meant for a house for people to stay in for a few days and have no way to complain about it.
Right.
No way to complain about it.
Do you know what I'm talking about?
Like the way things are set up and like the just there's there's just so many things where you're like, has anybody ever successfully used this TV on the first try?
Like it's not set up right.
This cable's unplugged.
It's got all kinds of weird shit in it.
And like fucking people shouldn't travel.
Except Johnny Appleseed out there helping people make podcasts.
This one, every light switch in the house is labeled.
Was it like a little label maker?
Like a little label maker, and it says bathroom mirror lights.
Okay, that seems that's probably a slightly tightly wound person.
Yeah.
How long a note did you get about what to do with the place?
Did you get...
Basically, the way I described it, and I had a fun, okay, enough time.
I don't like going places.
I really fell in love with a cat in Hawaii.
But apart from that, oh, my God, I met the nicest cat, outside cat, nice cat.
But what I said was, hey, how about, here's my new business model.
You pay me $1,500 and then clean my house for a day.
Because that's what it feels like.
And they make it real clear, like a lot of them.
Because I don't know.
I guess they have spring breakers, which I guess technically you are.
John, you got it.
Wait a minute.
I'm a spring breaker.
You're a spring breaker.
Everybody in the pool.
I don't pay any attention.
I am not the person in the family that does anything to do with the Airbnb.
What I do is I load the vehicle, I unload the vehicle, I load the vehicle, I unload the vehicle.
Interesting.
I pay for all the things.
But in terms of what the code is or what the Wi-Fi password is or...
what the cleaning rules are.
Nobody bothers to give you that information.
Are you allowed to cook?
Are you allowed to microwave popcorn?
If you actually go through, usually there's a tome somewhere, often in one of those weird plexiglass holders of all the stuff you're supposed to read.
The shuttle comes at 7, and meat moop, and the password is password, and don't touch anything, and...
Yeah, if any of that information was shared with me.
That's not your bailiwick.
If I even knew that information was there, just you telling me that there's a binder in this house that has that in it, it's now worse than when I didn't know that that was there.
I feel so bad.
Will you be able to recover and enjoy the rest of your spring break?
Because the thing is, as you know, I'll forget about it in 11 minutes because it's not because nobody has handed it to me and is forcing me to look at it.
And so one of the nice things that my council of elders here does is they say, you know what?
He doesn't need to know where the, where the, um,
Oh, I am actively kept ignorant about so many things right now.
I'm not allowed to know when people are coming home.
They just don't tell me things anymore.
I'm like, is anybody going to eat today?
I'm like, I don't know.
I've got a track.
I was like, yeah, but you're going to yell at me at 6.31 if there's not piping hot food on the table.
The thing about my kid, though, now is she doesn't know what those rules are.
So I was sitting in the living room yesterday, and she's in the kitchen banging doors, and she's telling me...
there's no pantry space in this kitchen.
And I'm like, your daughter noticed this.
And she's like, where, where would, if you tried to live here, where would you put the food?
Exactly.
It's no one's ever lived there.
Yeah.
And she's opening the cupboards and she's like in this cupboard, they have this in this cupboard.
They have this, where's the cupboard for the food.
It's like housing for rich college students.
And I think maybe her mother came in and was like, don't talk to your dad about stuff like that.
Because then he's going to be.
Oh, no, that's going to distract him.
Well, or that or he's going to rearrange the kitchen.
Yeah.
Or it's going to it's going to confuse him because dads know that when it's time for action, whether it's called for or not.
If you get him up out of that chair, then he's going to start searching this house.
He's going to search this house for where the food goes, and then he's going to start designing a system to help everybody.
And she's like, don't do it.
He's going to be out here with a tape measure.
Don't do it.
Just shush.
That's smart.
But my kid is like, oh, this is fun.
I get to watch dad.
I'm going to wind him up, and then he's going to be in the attic.
like laying down bats of insulation because he's turning it into a pantry.
Yeah.
And then she'll comfort you like she does, but she hasn't had that many opportunities to see you break down out of town.
No, that's true.
She brought me coffee this morning.
Aww.
Yeah.
Well, happy mama tacos or whatever you do next.
Yeah, thanks.
I'm probably going to make them go to the Lewis and Clark Fort, and they're going to walk around and be so bored.
And I'm going to say, you know, this is where they slept that first winter.
They hired Sacagawea to be their guide.
You can sing in that little song.
Elbow room, elbow room.
Got to get us some elbow room.
What's the land or bus in God we trust?
There's a new world out there.
Right?
Oh, my God, Merlin.
Thank you for that.
Except you should always refer to it as Liebensraum.
Elbow room.
You don't want to say Lieben's round.
East young man.
Stop it.
That bell's not working.
All right.
Fucking hour and a half.
Elbow room.
Hey, that's the longest podcast we've ever done without talking about religion.
Hey, that's right.
And we didn't have to cancel any of it.
Here's two for us.
Ding ding.