This week, Merlin and John talk about:

The Problem: He’s a grownup skater, Alaska-style, referring to some guy from High School John was seeing on Facebook.

The show title refers to how people now talk about tech for its own sake and how tech has evolved from a blue collar job of a repair guy with a van with a ladder on top to being the conversation of the day.

John started the show singing Merlin’s name in the usual way and Merlin responds with ”John, Ahaaa” to the cadence of ”Saviors of the universe”

Raw notes
The segments below are raw notes that have not been edited for language, structure, references, or readability. Please do not quote these texts directly without applying your own editing first! These notes were not planned to be released in this form, but time constraints have caused a shift in priorities and have delayed editing draft-quality versions to a later point.

Reddit (RL127)

A giant meteor is going to wipe us out, so how good can we really feel? Merlin didn’t know about that, but if he were on Reddit he would know. John has never been on Reddit. Merlin follows a Tumblr site that puts up pictures of cute animals from reddit, but that is about it. Every once in a while someone says John should do an AMA on Reddit, but he doesn’t understand the interface, it looks like an organizational chart or like an outline for a term paper, it has a tree format.

John first got on the Internet in 1997 and he would look over people’s shoulder while they were on news groups and ask why they were doing this and what it was about, and they would try to explain it to him, like over here was a guy who tells you how to build a Ham radio. It never appealed to him, partly because he didn't like the way that it looked and the way it was shaped, and Reddit is like that. Merlin sometimes feel like you can break it down into these two general levels of interest. It is like Meta Filter, which is similar in some ways, where some percentage of the time Merlin is most interested in what people have to say about the link, but a lot of times he is really most interested in the link.

What makes the Internet hard for Merlin to understand sometimes is that there are a lot of people who are way more interested in the comments than the link, they see the link as a jumping-off point for providing opinion and having witty repartee, but Melin tends to be more interested in ruminating on the link by himself in solitude.

John’s briefcase being full of cables, how our lives are full of gizmos (RL127)

As John loaded up his briefcase today to come down to his office, he was thinking that his dad put nothing electrical in his briefcase with the exception perhaps of a micro cassette recorder to dictate. There was no cabling of any kind, he didn't have to plug anything in when he got to work. When he was at an airport he never plugged a single thing in in his life. When John was loading up his briefcase just to come down here to talk to Merlin he had to get that other cable and the cable for that other thing and pretty soon his briefcase is just a spaghetti of different wires.

It caused John to think that into the 1990s, if your work entailed that you were using electrical gizmos, it was 99% chance that you were a technician, that you were a blue collar person and you had a briefcase full of gizmos because your job involved you doing some monitoring of some HVAC equipment. Now it is completely flipped and everybody is carrying around electronic equipment all the time. In fact, your status is measured by how much gizmology you have in your bag, not how little. John’s dad and no-one he knew ever had a single Gizmo.

When John is describing somebody who dealt with gizmos for a living Merlin is thinking about a phone repair person, with a hard shell case and a goddamn van with a ladder on the top. The culture could have gone a lot of different ways, like that famous R. Crumb drawing of progress (called A Short History of America, see RW196): First it is a horse-drawn carriage, then it is a locomotive, and then it is phone wires and El Caminos and more and more of the landscape is filled up with phone wires and encroaching technology.

The lesser known coda to that drawing were that his three possible versions of the future, one of them was hover cars and Jetsons houses, and one of them was a completely blown out landscape of dystopia and the third was an ecotopia of yurts and tall forest and a community of people living in a natural hippie style, which seems to John that R. Crumb would have desired that the future looked like everyone was wearing spats and straw boaters and playing the Banjo, which is actually how the future turned out. We are living in an R. Crumb dream future that even he didn't envision.

John’s best friend in High School, his father was an early adopter and he owned an Osborne Computer, which was the first briefcase computer that was bigger than a tower computer, but much smaller than the mainframe or mini computers that we thought of as being a computer at the time, and the entire screen was about the size of an iPhone, there were two disk drives, and John’s friend brought it over to John’s house sometimes and they played games on the Osborne. To think that that is in a Museum now… there are a lot of ways John could go with that, but he got tired of hearing himself talk.

Most of the people Merlin knows have a smartphone of some kind, but in his neighborhood, which is mostly people from Asia, a lot of Chinese people, so many people still have a flip phone, and now he is going to get all Erma Bombeck again, he gets a new phone every 2-3 years, you got to get the right charging cables and you got to get it all synced up. These folks have roughly the same phone that Merlin had before he got an iPhone, a mid-2000s level phone that looks like it has been at the bottom of a fish tank for six years. They have that phone for phone things and they talk on it sometimes and then they close it up and put in their pocket and sit on MUNI like they are asleep. This wasn’t as insightful as John’s Osborne anecdote.

Why do we need more than three TV channels? What is the deal? You got three VHF channels, you got two UHF channels, what more could people do? You could only watch one at a time! What is the matter?

Merlin doesn’t think like things have gotten that much easier because by the time that all the bugs have been worked out of whatever iOS or S10 or whatever there is a new one and then he sits on that for a while. Are my backups still working? Is this thing still… Merlin’s wife for the last three years has had 14 copies of every contact. Once a year he goes in and he has a built-to-purpose program that will help him locate and delete duplicate contacts. Her contacts now are so screwed up that she mostly has 14 copies of the same contact, so she has something like 5000 contacts. In some cases she has a contact that has 35 email addresses from different people associated with it. They should just burn it down, take a piece of paper, write down the phone numbers and email addresses of five people that you really need, and start over!

Merlin gets notes from people that he not only hasn’t talked to in 15 years, but he hasn’t thought of them in 15 years, maybe he had one interaction with them during the Clinton administration, and every year or two he gets an email from them with their updated contact details. ”Here is my new email address!” Who changes email addresses? It is the march of time!

Talking about tech for its own sake (RL127)

We use the word tech and we talk about tech now like it is a new realm, like the tech economy. We think of tech as a thing that has only been around for 15 years. In fact, just since the Industrial Revolution there have been innumerable periods where the culture at the time was fascinated by the new technology, the cotton gin or the machine-rolled cigarette or the automobile, for Christ's sake. The technology of the moment is super-fascinating to people and seems like it has revolutionized the way people conduct their lives and then the dust settles and that technology becomes commonplace and people stop talking about it. They go back to the more important or more interesting business of talking about ideas or politics, even.

We are living in an extended period where we are talking about tech and interacting with tech as though that is in itself culture. In a way, certainly in the little ghetto that John and Merlin live in, tech is the topic. When John was younger and he used to prognosticate about tech, it was always that tech was going to facilitate the conversation, and that is part of the conversation we are having now, but tech is facilitation a conversation about tech and John couldn't be less interested over time. It is an unpopular point of view, Merlin is glad they have a podcast to talk about this, but he is not putting this out!

John keeps waiting for tech to stop being the topic because ultimately it lowers the quality of the dialogue. John is talking to a bunch of people with the cables in their vans all the time, but those people are presenting themselves and imagine themselves to be part of the real thinking level. They are Fermi in a van with a ladder on the top. John had the terrible realization the other day that he and Merlin have prepared their long lives to be prognosticators and thinkers and hosts and toasters, they imagined when they were young that there was a very important job in the world which was hard to get and really a prize when you got it, which was that you were a person with some thoughts about things that people wanted to hear. You were the voice, you were the thinker, the public person, a citizen artist.

Everybody having an opinion about everything now, pundits no longer needed (RL127)

John had a terrible moment when he was reflecting back on the 1980s and remembered the spotted owl controversy in the Northwest, and he was trying to tease out all the different sides of it when it was really embroiled and realizing that the answer was that it wasn't possible to save all the lumberjack jobs. The Lumberjacks were protesting on the streets of Packwood or wherever the hell they lived and they were saying: ”We are losing our jobs to this bird!”, but what it really was was that we were shipping all of their jobs over to Asia. We were putting the raw logs on boats and sending them to Asia rather than milling them here, but the owl was a scapegoat.

They were marching and saying: ”We are losing our jobs!” and they presented it as: ”We can't lose our job, so you have to find another solution!” and John was having the insight that these jobs are gone and there won't be these lumberjack jobs. The sad truth and the truth that no politician has the guts to stand up and say is like: ”No, it has already happened!” It was the same with the auto workers in Detroit about the same time: ”We are losing our jobs, and these are good Union jobs that were paying $150.000 a year for us to lean on a broom and smoke cigarettes and we can't lose these jobs!” - ”In fact, they are already gone, and you made a bad choice by leaning on a broom and smoking a cigarette. It worked for a while, but now it is over!”

Watching those groups of workers have the slow, dreadful realization that it wasn't just a matter of going over and getting another job across the street, that the whole thing was done, and the ones that could adapt did, and the ones that couldn't are on Social Security right now and are yelling about Obama. This realization that John and Merlin maybe have prepared their whole lives, imagining that what they do and what they can do was some kind of rare talent that the world desperately craved, and now we have arrived at precisely the moment when it is hardest, which is to say middle age, and John is realizing: Maybe their jobs are starting to be outsourced in the sense that every teenager has an opinion and values it equally with theirs.

The role of college having changed since Merlin was in college (RL127)

In one of the many lost episodes that people won't hear they talked about College, in particular in the context of you were going to go to College and every decision that you made on the way to going to College was primarily an opportunity to screw up your chance to go to College. They both shared the sense that every known or unknown thing that was on the path for them was for one thing, the one path, you are going to fucking go to College, and you going out and drinking that beer is not just about you breaking the rule about drinking a beer when you are underage, it is about the fact that that could really screw up your one opportunity to be something nowadays.

Not that many people are really excited to go to College for the sake of going to College. It has become so rote and so costly! Once Merlin was in College he was really into it because on some level he thought of himself as a future Dick Cavett, but he also was really open to the idea that there was so much stuff that he knew the name of, but he didn't know anything about it, and how about after you talked about these novels and these great works and these classics, now you are going to read those. You are going to go see all these paintings that have been name-checked and we are going to talk about them in context. There was at least some part of him that was really open to being a vessel for a while, and he was not unique at that time, but people like him were pretty hungry to go somewhere to be open to the idea that there was shit-tons of stuff that you didn't even know you needed to know, and then once you had that you would be in a better position to conduct yourself as an adult. Is that still as pressing a feeling as it is today?

John does not think people still have that same feeling of: ”I am going to go out today and learn what I might be wrong about and figure out ways that somebody could set me straight a little bit!”, there is no more sense that you can be wrong about a thing. The idea that you could be wrong or rather that you could be more right was predicated on an understanding that there was a limited amount of knowledge. There was a Canon, you went to College and there were still more books than you could possibly read in a lifetime, but you could read 10% of the books and from that 10% get a pretty good picture of what the common understanding of truth was.

That is completely blown out of the water now. Everybody has their own micro truth and in that sense College is over, it is another timber business where the it is already over and people are still going because of inertia. Merlin heard a thing on Planet Money where they were talking about the jobs that have the highest and lowest average incomes. For example, if you know what a Petroleum engineer can make, you can go to College and say: ”I am going to become a Petroleum engineer because there is a pretty good chance that for at least the next 5-10 years that is still going to be a pretty good gig and I know I am going to start in the six figures the day I step out of that program!”

As difficult as that work is, as smart as you have to be to do it, as hard as you are going to have to work to get through that, that is oddly similar to the same kind of vocational training that Merlin was completely not interested in when he was a kid. He did not want to fix air conditioners, he did not want to fix cash registers, that was not work of the mind, and a Petroleum engineer spends a lot of time looking at graphs, looking at printouts, they are setting off charges or sending sound waves into the Earth and watching it bounce off different layers of shist or feldspar (see RL126) and then they are interpreting charts in the same way that a radio repairman is, and John is not even sure if it is more complicated than tuning a Crystal set.

But it doesn't feel like upper campus. At the University of Washington the lower campus is where all the new buildings are, it is where all the excitement is happening, you walk into these old buildings that have been rehabilitated, and every wall has a little cluster of AV adapters, little hookups and USB Port, all purpose-built for what people in 2009 imagined the modern classroom was going to be. We were all going to PowerPoint one another, books were gone, and science, science, science, science! The upper campus is getting smaller and smaller, and it is an area up there where people are still studying poetry. Can you think of a more irrelevant thing than studying poetry? Art history?

When John was entering College those were precisely the things that interested him. Art history was one of four possible majors for him: English, philosophy, history, art. Entering freshman at the University of Washington now, even in 1985 not that many of them majored in the humanities, but certainly a lot a larger percentage than are doing it now.

When Merlin was a kid they had a music class. There was a gymnasium that you go to to do gym things. There were all of these things that were not strictly the academic stuff, but you learned to play a little bit of an instrument and learned about rhythm and learned about George Gershwin and all that kind of stuff. Now you got fewer and fewer people who are getting that every day, not just middle-class kids, but there are a lot of kids that would not learn about that stuff at home, they are not going to be listening to their parents 8-track of The Planets or something like that.

On the other hand, think about where the money comes from at a University, not just the tuition, but the grants. That is not going to be coming from the National Endowment for the Humanities, it is going to be coming from Exxon and increasingly universities get a lot of money from the patents that they develop.

John on the Music Commission talking about an arts curriculum for Seattle public schools (RL127)

John just had a very interesting meeting of the Music Commission he is on, they had a joint meeting with the Arts Commission and they were pie in the skying because those commissions are doing a really good job in Seattle now and people are excited about them and companies are coming around and the proposal was: If we were going to envision a forward looking arts curriculum for Seattle public schools and we felt like we could present it to the world and take money from people and actually build it, not just build a curriculum, but build an Academy of the arts, a physical structure that has drinking fountains and classrooms and is a place that people go, what would it look like?

The people at the Commission are all in a super-altruistic mindset, nobody is there to personally profit, it is a lot of work to be on one of those commissions and they are trying to make the city better, but every single idea was like: ”Well, you know what we need? We need a classroom on video game design, and we need a classroom on graphic art design, all this sort of design and electronic music implementation classes where we have to teach them how to use the tools, the pro tools and the art tools so that they can go out and make commerce!” Without anybody saying it, it is driven by the idea of a market.

The ”commerce” word never got used because nobody wants to say: ”Every single kid should be forced to learn the clarinet!”, but everybody wants to be contemporary, they want to have a curriculum that kids are interested in, they want to be ahead of the game, ahead of their parents, and not force the clarinet on a bunch of kids that are using their iPhones to make music. But in doing that, the whole curriculum as initially envisioned was dependent on companies interacting with the schools and predicated on the idea that we were giving them real skills and not a bunch of nothing.

In order to attract that kind of interest, by which we mean corporate money, it has to appear very modern and very practical and that way Microsoft maybe will come in and give us 5000 Zunes or something. It came around the table to John and he said: ”We have the opportunity to develop an Arts curriculum with a capital A and I don't think that that is technology dependent. It is important that we do have a room somewhere where we can learn how to use pro tools and it is important to have a room somewhere where we can learn how to use Photoshop, tech rooms are important for sure, but talking about art is already a mysterious project, it is already complicated and difficult!”

We can't seed that ground to dusty history. We can't say: ”Provocative art is just a thing that has been colonized by Russian mobsters and it is all just Damien Hirst garbage now!” We have to continue to have a language of art, and we have to continue to provide the opportunity for people to challenge us through art. John reflects back on the Jesse Helms anti NEA hearings of the fucking 1980s (National Endowment for the Arts, see here).

This whole business of ”What is art?”, and actually sitting at a table where John might have some small voice in determining some aspect of an arts curriculum in Seattle, realizing that he is swimming against the tide, even to suggest that the arts are in some way anything but a trade, that the arts are something that transcend training and become a theory and practice that requires difficulty and requires that people be trusted and really turn them loose. If all they had were clarinets they would make something amazing with clarinets. It doesn't matter that the tools be Avantgarde.

Letting your kid discover art by themselves (RL127)

Merlin’s kid is right now pretty obsessed with making stuff all the time. Their house is upside down, there is glue everywhere, there is glitter glue, there is origami paper on fucking everything. She is teaching herself, she likes fancy writing more than regular writing, so now she is tracing things in cursive and trying to teach herself cursive because she just likes the way that it looks. She writes letters to herself in cursive and then she illuminates them with stamps and things that she has cut out of magazines. She walks around with a legal pad and a pen when they walk around the park and draws stuff all the time.

How long is she going to have that urge to just move your hand and make stuff appear on a page? Merlin is torn on the technology issue because he does think of it as a class thing in a lot of ways. If you have an iPad in the house, if you have a Mac in the house, there are plenty of resources, you can learn to do GarageBand on an iPad, you don’t need a track for that necessarily, but there are a lot of kids that don't have that, and you don't want to just put them on some 20 year old PC with some busted ass program that crashes all the time. All those things do work together, and like so many problems we fall short when we get too reductive about trying to focus on one aspect of it.

Jesse Helms did that by looking at bullips (?) in a man's ass and saying: ”Ergo, we should not fund art!” You are throwing out all these other things that are really valuable. But even when we teach things, you have to understand that every little kid has a natural urge to make cool, stupid stuff. Sometimes it is about race cars, sometimes it is about aliens, sometimes it is about Disney princesses, but they have almost a compulsion to make that stuff.

This is why John is terrified of Minecraft. he doesn’t understand it. Merlin is scared of Minecraft, too and has kept her away from it because just on the basis of the elementary school and what T-shirts kids wear, it seems to become an entire lifestyle to a lot of girls, but especially every little boy around six seems to be getting absorbed into Minecraft.

The language that adults are using, the articles that John reads about it in Wired and everywhere, are all really at pains to talk about how creative it is and collaborative. He read an article not very long ago that said that Minecraft actually increases literacy because kids are going on Minecraft hack blogs and reading above their reading level because they are passionate about it and their passion is causing them to teach themselves to read on blogs. Seriously? Is this the point in the conversation where John feels like raising his hand and saying: ”Maybe the fact that Johnny can't read is the thing to address, not to clap and praise Minecraft for giving kids a reason to learn to read!”

Merlin is keeping his powder dry on this one. It is a new thing, and whenever something is new and we are not familiar with it, we see the worst aspects of it, which is the same thing that happened when people want to make computer games. Why don't you go do your math homework? Why are you doing all these computer games? In a way it is kind of math homework. Merlin’s daughter is much more interested in reading something if she likes what she is going to read, and that started with them reading comics before she could talk, and now she will sit there with a comic book and it is one thing that Merlin accidentally got right, was the comic books, because a good comic book has great sequential art and you can suss out a basic story and then when you learn a little bit more about reading, you can figure out some of the words and then if you don't know the word you can try to figure out the rest of it in context.

The argument is the same as often gets used with musical instruments. John sat down with a piano teacher from 1977 to 1981 and in the course of that four years of weekly piano lessons he learned nothing because he had no interest in any of it and the argument that somebody should have sat down with him and gone like: ”Here is how to basically play this Elton John song!” and give him a song and just start there would have been a better method because it is not what happened. John didn't like playing the piano and he didn't learn how to play the piano despite throwing tons of artillery at the problem. He never took the beach, but if his teacher had been a long hair who had been like: ”Here is how to play Elton John, man! Get with the times!”

He can picture himself going: ”Yeah!” Actually the way he learned was that he got hired in Harvey Danger, and that is not going to work for everybody. Eventually he came back to the piano on his own and he sat down at it and started picking away at it because he needed to and now he does play the piano, but he has no depth or breadth at the thing.

His mom by contrast can sit down and sight-read and play, she was taught piano in the 1930s back in the sticks in where the teacher sat on a tall stool and hit you with a rod. She characterizes herself as having no gift, and she can sit down and play Tchaikovsky, and John looks at it and says: ”Mom, that is incredible, that is amazing!” and she just dismisses it with a wave of her hand: ”Well, I am a poor musician and I was forced to acquire this habit!” and when she sits down she does play that music for pleasure, she likes to hear it and she likes to feel her fingers figure out the patterns again, but her take on it is almost completely absent of art.

She just learned a thing by rote and now she can do it, she sees the black dots on a piece of paper and she knows that that means: ”Push down this key!” To John’s ear it sounds beautiful, he wouldn't say that it was artful, but she is playing this beautiful music from the page and if she and he were both invited into a hotel lobby and someone said: ”Would someone like to sit at the piano and entertain us?”, what his mom can do is 1000 times more useful in that situation than what he can do. He can play The Commander Thinks Aloud! Twice!

You catch more flies with honey than vinegar, and idea that the only way to teach people is by appealing to their interests suggests that the earlier step of establishing their interests was super-duper important and a lot of times that got established when mom and dad were like: ”Just go play with the fucking iPad while Mommy and Daddy talk!” Most people don't take the care that Merlin took to say: ”I want you to get into this! I want to show you this!", but most adults that John meets that talk about their kids talk about the iPad like they are a little guilty about it: ”Yeah, we give them the iPad for sure, usually just to give us some space or some time to think!”

That is Omaha Beach in this kid's mind. Here it is! Four years from now we are going to talk about: ”The only way we can get Johnny to learn to read is by putting him on Minecraft blogs because that is where his interests are!” It all seems very passive. We are just reacting. All Johnny wants to do is strum his guitar, so we are trying to teach him English by having him learn songs in English, or something.

As a grown up when you got a little kid you got all these ideas like: ”You need to go take karate or you need to go to soccer because there is character things and you will get exercise!” There are 100 different reasons why you would send your kid to soccer, or why you would say: ”I want you to take piano lessons!” As a parent you see this in such a vastly different way. You think maybe this could be the next Glenn Gould or you wished you had learned how to play piano or any of the dozens of other reasons why it seems like a great idea to force a kid into learning a musical instrument or learning any kind of crafty thing.

Merlin’s daughter is not sitting around thinking about making great sequential art. She just likes the way it feels to draw on the page, she likes smooshing her hands around in the glue, she likes the way that feels, and it is important to give opportunities for people to play like that. Merlin can play the Wolverine chord, right where he holds his Pinky with his thumb and he plays triads with his three middle fingers. Snicked! Wilberforce! That is how he learned. He learned because he just thought that was fun, he would sit around at downtime at Church events, try to figure out how to play songs on the piano just because it was fun, it felt good, it sounded good, you could play loud, you could bang on it. It was play much more than it was learning.

Merlin also sees this in his daughter: He finally brought his acoustic guitar home, it has been at the office forever, and it is fun to just play around. A long time ago he thought they will play songs and sing together, but she likes walking up to it and banging on the strings, standing over it on the stand almost like it is a cello. He has shown her how to do two chords that she can mostly replicate. The one she is best at is an A5, that was the easiest chord he could think of in terms of the strings aren't too hard to press down, the two middle strings at the second fret.

After that he showed her an E minor and she is not great at it, but she will stand in front of the guitar, facing the guitar and with the totally wrong fingers push down on mostly the right places, right on the fret, which drives him crazy because it buzzes, but she sits there and she plays these little chords really shitty and then she goes into a crazy DeBoon thing (?) where she just keeps going up and down. Merlin put it out of his mind, the strings are going to break, the guitar might break, but she has so much fun just banging around on that, playing like Stanley Clarke. He should start teaching her songs!

Merlin is trying to remember how fun it is to just fuck around and have nobody sitting there correcting you. If she wants to bang around on that guitar, go ahead, go nuts! Sometimes he will ask: ”Hey, you want to see this other chord? Do you want to see this other thing?” Maybe he will get a guitar for her birthday, she didn't love the piano they got her, but she is going to play, and it will be fun, and there is not going to be any pressure for her to become (Andrés) Segovia by the time she is eight. It is probably more fun for her to play on Daddy's guitar than to have one of her own.

So much of making art is reinventing the wheel. You can sit there and shape their little hands and teach art as a thing that can be known, and that is an important part of the process, but at a certain point, and the jury is out where that point is, you have to reinvent it somehow, you have to act as though it is beyond Thunderdome and you are a tribe of kids living in a little valley that is separated by a great desert, and it is the dying time, and you are inventing your culture with just the faintest memory of what came before you.

You can see the kids in Rock’n’Roll, the kids in their 20s now whose parents put them in Nirvana T-shirts when they were three years old 18 years ago. There are a couple of kids in John’s daughter's preschool who have mullets, their parents are trying to push them toward being cool from a very young age in the hopes that if they are cool, that they won't have heartbreak or they won't have problems growing up. The solution to so many problems is to just be one of the cool ones. It is so different from John’s approach, which is to say: ”You are going to be a nerd. I am going to force you to be one. It is going to suck, and through those many, many hard years, you are going to grow up to really appreciate how fun it is to be an adult and not have your dad forcing you to take Taekwondo lessons. Ultimately she is going to decide and she has already decided that she is going to be a princess and that is wonderful because they make a lot of money.

John reading the news on Twitter again, finding a thing that makes him mad 2 minutes later (RL127)

The other day John somehow got on Facebook again. He is really trying to curate his feed, he is not reading the news on Twitter anymore, but he signed on to the Internet and decided to go over to Twitter and read the news, he hadn’t done it in a couple of weeks, he was just going to read his news feed and see what he comes up with. He read a couple of things about the Ukraine that were interesting, he saw a couple of things about this and that that were pretty interesting, and then he clicked on a retweet of somebody and he read somebody's blog post that was in response to another blog post about the Dave Chappelle thing. That person's writing was really great, it was a fascinating and gutsy conversation, but it got into a little bit where his stomach was starting to get butterflies because he was like: ”Well, I don't know! I don't have a comment here! I am just reading the news!”, and he very studiously did not read the comments on either blog, he just stayed away from it.

Then he saw Hodgman post a little link to his Tumblr and it was a graph of all the Johns that have influenced each other and all the Johns that make a very interesting little cluster of Johns, and it said Flansburgh, Linnell, Stewart, Hodgman, Coulton and John was just innocently looking at the fucking news for 2 seconds and he clicked on a friend's link, which was a link that somebody made and he was retweeting it, he didn't do that himself, and he was only on the news site of this thing for honestly two minutes and he felt bad. He just closed it all down and was just like: ”Why did I go and read the news on Twitter?” He is trying to not have those feelings and the internet provides so many opportunities, but as he closed down Twitter he went over to Facebook because he had not had enough.

John looking at a Facebook profile of a colleague from High School who has a simple life with no self-doubt (RL127)

The Facebook alchemy of: ”What would you like to see today?” is the room temperature dessert of your online meal, and today it presented John with the profile of some guy he went to High School with who was a bro back then and is an Alaska bro now, a 45 year old man with a chin goatee, not even a mustache, and John hadn’t thought of him in years.

It was picture after picture of him wakeboarding, doing some more wakeboarding, holding a giant salmon, him with his arm around his embarrassingly much younger wife, and him with his two adorable little kindergarten-age kids, both of whom have super-cool dude haircuts. He had a permanent sneer all through High School and College, the smug sneer of somebody that had been born with money, and he has grown from being a skinny kid into being a pan man, a grown-up skater Alaska style.

He probably works in the financial sector or maybe he sells bulldozers, but he is doing well, he is a successful guy, and every aspect of his life looks amazing if you are judging your adult life on the strength of the aesthetics of a Bones Brigade VHS tape from 1984. John's head was just spinning while looking at this alternate history of his own life. He knew this guy, he hadn’t seen him in 15 years, but they grew up together, and looking at this guy's life caused his stomach to churn, and he felt lightheaded, wondering if he would have been happier if he had just gotten really into wakeboarding.

All the successful kids in Alaska seemed to have incredibly simple ambitions. There is no neuroticism in the life of a guy who goes from wakeboard adventure to wakeboard adventure. Laird Hamilton mourns the death of his friends who were killed by a big wave, but you presume that Laird Hamilton does not wonder about his purpose or whether he is doing a good job. That neuroticism is what John wants to exorcise from his own life, it is the thing that he is the least interested in anymore about himself.

Nothing about this guy's actual existence intrigued John except the perceived simple monoculture of it: Jet ski, Jet ski, Toke, Toke, TV show, TV show, and now he got kids which adds hockey practice, hockey practice. His new project is to make his kids really good hockey players and really cool kids in High School, there is no neuroticism! He never second-guesses himself and he never wonders if he is doing the right thing.

When his kid comes home and says: ”Dad, there was this kid on the playground who is a real fag and I told him to fuck off!” - ”Yeah! That's right!” He is never ever going to say: ”Well son, maybe you should walk a mile in that kid's shoes!” John finds that simplicity so ugly and so dark, but his own darkness is such a drag. You could not go on John’s Facebook profile and perceive that he had no self-doubt. What good is it? What is the evolutionary advantage of it? John doesn’t know!

John went down the rabbit hole of talking about this guy despite trying to make it one of his core competencies to have empathy for bros. They are human beings, they are not monsters, and this guy was never a friend, but if John ran into him in a bar in Anchorage he would be glad to see him. John got a little shitty about it while describing his experience of watching this guy's Facebook profile, although his experience was 100% internal and had nothing to do with the guy. Who knows what his life is like! John doesn’t even know what his life was like when he was 16 years old!

John wandered through their idealized presentation of their life, seeing nothing of interest, only things to critique and judge and ultimately critique and judge himself against. In a way John has always preferred his worldview or methodology to those old friends of Alaska. It is why he left, it is why he never felt like he truly belonged to that culture. He was incredulously critiquing himself against that, but it is a valid way of living and when that guy gets to the end and looks back at his life, he is not going to burden his kids on his deathbed with a lot of talk about all the things he wishes he had done.

As John gets to be a middle aged person his great fear is that he will start saying things to his kid like: ”We could have lived in Hawaii, but it didn't work out that way. There was a time I thought maybe I would make a television show, but it didn't…!” As his dad got older they had a lot of these conversations: ”I should have been a Senator!” - ”Dad, stop it! Shut up! What are you talking about? You lived an amazing life!”

John does not want niggling regrets like that, but he is still grateful for his self-doubt because it made him into the person that he is and it contributed to him being thoughtful, although now he is fucking done with it! Please! He would like to just act and eat and poop and live and not brood, because the rate of return on brooding is now at zilch. Maybe he needs to just start banging a tambourine?

It really is a fantastic time for technology! The Internet brings the world right to our doorstep and allows us to find new ways to be completely riddled with self doubt. No longer watching his Twitter feed and taking Facebook off his phone has made John happier, no question about it. It is like stopping eating sugar, but then on Friday night you have an ice cream because you feel like you deserve it and then you are back on the sugar train and the various feeds out there, trying to pitch lives to you, are just mind sugar, which is so antithetical to the story that we are being told by tech, that these things are connecting us and making us closer to other people. A lot of times it is making us further from ourselves!

he simple life of an alcoholic like Skeeter (RL127)

See Gary and Skeeter!

Kids in Alaska getting cool cars from their rich parents (RL127)

Some of the guys at John’s High School had brand new Chevy step-side pickups when they were 16 years old. One kid drove a 1957 Corvette to school with a personalized license plate that said "THX DAD" (see RL24). His dad had bought him the Corvette and then got him the plates: ”Here is my son and I am going to make him simultaneously the coolest kid on campus and also the world's biggest fucking chode! You are always going to be under my thumb, kid. Never forget it!” Maybe it is an Oedipus thing (not Agamemnon) where you just keep your son down because you are afraid he is going to kill you and have sex with your wife?

People curating their story on social media, Merlin's daughter's 4th birthday (RL127)

Merlin has heard the phrase: ”If you want to learn what somebody fears losing, watch what they photograph!”, which is really true. The things that people put on social media might be the thing they most fear losing, or sometimes it is the thing they fear may not love them as much as they love it, or the thing that they have equivocal or complex feelings about. A photograph that you put online or a succession of photographs of your absolutely perfect vacation cements in your mind that this went a certain way and meets a certain story. The pictures of his kid that Merlin puts somewhere feel emblematic of what he thinks was happening, whether it really was happening that way or not.

Increasingly we take photos or put things on social media because we are telling ourselves a story that helps make our life make more sense. Not many people primarily put up photos of their kids being unhappy or sullen because that is not the story that you want on the books. The story that you want on the books is that: ”We had a birthday party, and it went okay, at least in this one photo!”

Merlin had a blowout birthday party for his daughter’s fourth birthday at the park, and she was crying and running away from the group the entire time. That is honestly how the birthday went, and then he got a funny picture of her dressed as Spiderman because it was a cool costume she got. All that shit in life is so much more complicated than you can put into a Facebook post that is going to get a lot of thumbs. It is a new way of telling a story about ourselves.

It used to be a really big deal to get your picture in the paper, it seemed like the biggest thing in the world. When Merlin was about six years old he was photographed at a library, and it was the coolest thing in the world because it showed people: ”Look, I am important! I am in the paper, here is me reading a microfiche!”

Everybody struggles with this stuff! Everybody looks at other people's stuff, not purely in the sense of envy or jealousy, or: ”Boy, that guy is a tool. How is his life so together?” That is the version that you print because it expresses hope about how the world can be. You have to take all that stuff with a tremendous grain of salt because people tend to be super-duper positive about lots of stuff in public until they get really scared, and when they get scared in life is the time they tend to be most honest or most forthcoming about what they really worry about. Most of the time you will do anything you can to not have to talk about that, and that is what those pictures are. That is what those Boogie boards and haircuts are. It is an opportunity to say: ”Look, this is the world as I hope it is!”

John getting a Sonos home speaker system, having 7 versions of the same Duran Duran song (RL127)

For instance John just got a Sonos home speaker thing and he spent a whole day setting it up in his house. He is not somebody that listens to a lot of music around the house but all of a sudden he got like this really interactive stereo system and he had a really nice weekend at the house because there was music playing in every room all of a sudden where that had never been possible. This was very interesting, a new take on this and unfortunately he only has four albums on his iPad and he is just listening to these four albums over and over.

He got the box set of the early Duran Duran records and unfortunately that meant there are seven different versions of Hungry Like The Wolf and somehow he couldn't figure out how to arrange the queue so that it wasn't playing things in alphabetical order so just played Hungry Like The Wolf seven times in every room, but it was really exciting and right away he started thinking maybe he should download one of those apps that allows him to raise and lower his garage door opener from his phone and then he was like: ”I don't have a garage, first of all. And second of all: No! Stop! Stop it! Leave it! Do not hook up your security system and your house lights to the internet! Don't! That technology is still in beta and you are not an early adopter of that shit! Leave it!”

”I am not German and your skin is so tight!” (misheard lyrics from Hungry Like The Wolf by Duran Duran)