This week, Merlin and John talk about:

The Problem: The French call him, ‘the Hoseur.’, referring to a guy with a hose spraying chicken nuggets parts into a hole in the floor above the machine that makes chicken nuggets.

The show title refers to garbagemen all having a collection of homemade porn on Polaroids that should be in the Library of Congress or in the Museo De Garbagemen because it documents the history of Polaroid porn.

John starts the call with singing Merlin’s name in the usual way.

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 Please do not quote these texts directly without applying your own editing first!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.

Merlin’s new workflow of eating a second dinner at 10:20pm (RL129)

John made the mistake this morning of getting a Quad Americano, which is too much because you start the day on a Jeep ride down a Costa Rican mountain road and now he is sitting here and is simultaneously agitated and excited, but also cramping and one foot is going. If he were still eating the gluten, imagine how much worse that would be! It is a lot to ask your body to deal with. Last night, the last thing he ate before he went to bed was a bunch of Indian food.

Merlin had a good night's sleep. He got up and his part two is that he had two small cups of espresso that were pretty intense.

Merlin has a new workflow that is really a bad idea. He will have his first dinner at night and with his family and then they go off to sleep and he is sitting there and he watches whatever is on his version of TV, for example Homeland. At 10:20pm all he has had was first dinner and he owes himself a little snack. Part of the workflow is deceiving himself into thinking maybe he will have half a piece of fruit or maybe he could have something that would be very simple and wouldn't make dishes, and then he sees the collection of Wolf Brand canned chili staring him in the face and about 118 seconds later he is literally eating a can of chili at 10:20pm, and he can eat the whole thing! If there is leftover rice, leftover noodles, leftover anything, he will put it over leftover chili, he doesn't fucking care! That is part one. Part two is then gettin up in the morning and having two espressos.

It is almost like a little kid science class where you first make the baking soda volcanoes: You eat the baking soda before bed and then a nice big cup of vinegar in the morning, and suddenly he is on Crackatoa.

Pump chili, canned chili (RL129)

At a certain point in the pump chili years (see RL13) John got very suspicious of what was in canned chili, even though in the course of a typical day in modern life there are 25 different things you put in your body where you cannot possibly know what has gone on and definitely some portion of this has been extruded from an extruder. He would stand in the grocery store chili aisle, look at the cans of chili, reading the back, searching the label for clues, and he started to feel like with this particular product it would be too easy to sneak 20% rodent hair into it as they are cooking up this chili for everything to be in it.

John got scared and freaked out about it, you get a little thing on the horizon, a little spot on the vanishing point like somebody is standing there with a mirror in the hot sun and you are like: ”What is that?” - FLASH! John started going to the hippie store and buying vegan chili, which is terrible and awful, but it is a chili base with beans and vegetables in it and some fake meat in the form of soy, and then he throws a couple of pounds of hamburger that he has sourced, and he feels like he has made a workable compromise, but it means that chili is now an involved process. A can of this vegan stuff, if you just pop it open at 10:20pm and throw it over some leftover rice, you are really sad. You might as well go make a beef Wellington!

John got Merlin into the idea of canned chili a few years ago and he has been exploring it quietly on his own, based on what is easy to get. He doesn’t want to go on anything too complicated, obviously, he doesn’t want to go down the vegan chili route and he doesn’t want to be browning meat at 10:30pm. You could brown that and have in your freezer, sure.

John likes Wolf Brand chili in concept, but the name is a little bit on the nose. If you are endorsing Wolf Brand chili and you feel like they are high quality ingredients and a workable percentage of mice and rats that have fallen into the machines, then yes, John will try it. Merlin doesn’t think they deliberately put a lot in. He was just reading about different kinds of canned chilies and he learned that he could get the Wolf chili, which is a fake cult food, like: ”You can't get this outside of Texas!”, but Smokey and the Bandit blew the doors open and because of distribution improvements and the Internet you can get Wolf chili places now like California.

If you think about the idea of a cow eating grass and at some point that cow’s muscles get sliced up into different kinds of cuts, and you say: ”This is a filet. This is a flat iron steak.” There is probably not a surpassing number of sewing needles and rat poop in this, but as it gets further and further down the line it has been sluiced more and more ways and pretty soon you got stuff like Chicken Nuggets, which are made out of all the parts of chicken that we couldn't just serve as a piece of chicken, but we don't want to throw it away. There is a guy in NiiHAi boots with a hose spraying Chicken Nuggets parts into a hole in the floor and then underneath that hole in the floor there is some machine that is making Chicken Nuggets. The French call that role ’the hoseur.’ John draws the line at that guy.

Then you got variety meats, you can get the hooves of the pig, you can get the snout of the pig, and a lot of folks in Merlin’s neighborhood are making that into food for their family and that is totally a normal thing. Chile is the result of a board meeting. Somebody said they got all of this Grade D meat that they are not sure what to do with. How could we use not too much of that plus flavors to put stuff in a can? You start from the concept as chili, not as this great frontier food with farm to table beef, and if you start to reverse engineer your chili you realize there is a lot of stuff in there that is based on financial expediency.

It is very hard for John, living in an industrial society, to know where to draw the line. In the Northwest they have a thing called Taco Time, which is a nice chain and when he described it as fast food to his mom the other day she was offended: ”Taco Time is not fast food!” It is like an In-N-Out Burger, a higher cut of fast food. They have got 25 locations, they are not petting and cooing to their cows and calling them by name as they lead them into a lavender-scented abattoir. They are buying beef on the market and you are dependent on somebody up the food chain that you never met, that guy in the boots with the hose. Do we throw the eyelashes away or do we put them in the hamburger?

In his experimenting with these different chilis Merlin is a little bit of a label reader. He hasn’t had a dog in a pretty long time, and he is thinking of 1970s dog food and might already be on the wrong page, but if you dumped out dog food and then even premium canned chili next to it, he wonders how different they look. There aren’t beans in the dog food, though. The other brand Merlin has been getting is Stagg, which is fine, but the first ingredient is water, and the meat doesn't show up. The first ingredient on the Wolf Chili is meat, it got chunks and it got ground and the process of making that is surely horrific, but he is enjoying it, it is good. It is canned chili, what do you expect?

A lot of their listeners are in foreign like Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom. Although their neighbors to the north in Canada, they share a culture with them, Canadians have Great Plains, they have Cowboys, they have chili, but John wonders if canned chili is a thing that they have in Germany or the United Kingdom. People may be listening to this program, scratching their heads, wondering: ”They talk about chili an awful lot!”

Chili definitely seems like a Southwestern regional version of goulash that you can get in lots of places. The addition of beans is the thing. If you put beans in goulash in Hungary, they would be upset, they would be mad.

John suggested to Merlin the other day that they do a reader mail, but then they would have to have email. Merlin suggests he will go into the content management system and make it very easy for people to contact John via email. People will find a way to contact you no matter what, but when you ask them to contact you, they will surely contact you! John has so many things to ask of their listeners, but he never does. They should just ask rhetorical questions and then answer them.

Merlin was looking at the ingredients for Stagg and for Wolf, and they are both pretty good. The ingredients go in the order of what there is the most of in it by mass, and a lot of times that is sugar or water. For the Stagg Chili it is water, beef, tomatoes, beans, kidney beans, tomato paste, dehydrated onions. Not too bad! All the way down the line you end up with bell peppers and spices. Wolf Chili: Meat ingredients (beef, pork), diced tomatoes and juice, prepared pink beans, beef stock, green bell peppers, tomato puree, onions, soy flour, salt, flavoring, sugar. First ingredient meat is pretty good!

Kurt Timmermeister farm to table dinners, not being against pink slime (RL129)

John had a very interesting conversation about a year and a half ago with his good friend Kurt Timmermeister (see RL266, RL424, RW152). He is a man of a certain age and he used to own a cafe in Seattle called the Café Septieme, which was French food done in the style of the early 1990s, which is to say he had Chilaquiles on his menu, it wasn't authentically French, it was French-ish food. That was a cafe that John spent sometimes five days a week in. He would just go, sit at a table in the back, smoke and drink coffee, and then he would have food and people would come visit with him, his friends were there, he would sometimes get mail there. It was his little home pad.

There was no alcohol-drinking, it was post alcohol times, but all day long you could sit in there and the constituency would turn over a couple of times. In the morning you would have your morning friends, and then the afternoon friends would come in, and then you could even take it into the evening friends just in this one place. At a certain point in the end of the 1990s Kurt Timmermeister decided that he was fed up with running a café, fed up with Broadway, and he sold his business, he took the money, he took the ferry boat over to Vashon Island, which is the hippie island off the coast of Seattle here, and he bought himself 50 or 100 acres of farm. There was a little old cabin on it and he got a couple of cows, he got a couple of pigs, he got some chickens, and he started to be a gentleman farmer.

At a certain point he started having a dinner at his house where the premise was that he invited the first group of people to the dinner and for the subsequent dinner you had to be either a member of that first group or recommended by somebody in the first group, it became a pyramid scheme of guests where you had to be somehow connected to somebody who had already been at the dinner and you had to actually come with them. Everything at the dinner Kurt grew on his own property, except for the coffee, the sugar, the salt and the wheat, and he tried to source those things from within 30 miles of Vashon Island.

It became a very early one of these, it was one of the first of these events where everything that we are eating at the table at this communal style meal actually grassed here on this farm, so we know everything that these cows have ever eaten and the milk and the cheese were all from these same cows, et cetera, et cetera. It became, as you can imagine, a really hot ticket and at a certain point it got out of control, and Kurt started making people write essays. He would announce a dinner there were 50 seats at the table, and there would be 5000 people wanting to go. It became a lot of work and eventually he stopped doing that. Now he is just making artisanal cheeses and he is opening a little store in Seattle where he just sells his artisanal cheese.

John was on a radio program at one point about a year and a half ago, and they were talking about pink slime that was a cause célèbre a year or two ago. It was public radio, but not Luke Burbank, he is hardly public radio, but actual public radio where the public has a component in it, and the host says: ”Boy, pink slime, am I right? Nobody likes pink slime. It is the worst! Let's go to you, Kurt Timmermeister, gentlemen farmer, legendary epicurean and natural food advocate. How do you feel about pink slime? Pretty bad, right?”

And Kurt Timmermeister said: ”Actually, if I had the technology to create pink slime on our farm, I would do it in a second!” And you could hear across Seattle the collective gasp of all the people who were like: ”What? Our hero? Kurt Timmermeister? Pink slime?” - ”Listen, there is nothing about pink slime that you are not eating already. It is just all the parts of the cow that you can't scrape off. If I could sit with an X-acto knife and scrape all the little bits of beef out of all the little corners, it is just the beef that was right next to the beef that we cut off with a knife!”

They boil the cow or somehow they get those little bits out and they mush it all together and it becomes a toothpaste of beef. But Kurt, a guy that John would expect if he had real issues with pink slime, he would be all over it, it was a softball pitch to him, and he was like: ”Listen, as a farmer, as somebody who routinely butchers a cow and feels pretty bad about all of the stuff that just goes into dog food, if I could scrape all that stuff off and put it in chili, I would do it. And it is not bad for you, it just gets bad when you start bleaching it and coloring it!”

The main beef with pink slide would be that you are not sure what parts it came from, what all is in there, and you get into the mad cow thing where if you got a whole bunch of different cows from different places, imagine to make pink slime with economies of scale, you are going to have to have cows from strangers, and there is going to be brains in there and eyelashes.

Root beer in the United Kingdom tasting like sough syrup (RL129)

The first time John went to the United Kingdom and ordered a root beer a long time ago nobody knew what he was talking about. Finally some guy leaned over and he was like: ”Listen, mate, root beer is a North American thing. We don't have it here. We think it tastes gross. It tastes like medicine!” - ”Root beer is amazing! Are you kidding me?” This was back when you couldn't find a Taco in all of Europe. It is like fish and chips, it is the weird export, and no-one in the United Kingdom liked it. Fast forward several years John was there on tour and he was staying with a good friend who lives there and he said as they were driving back to his house: ”Listen, mate, I got a big surprise for you! I got you some root beer. I know how much you like it!” and John actually was excited. He did have root beer, it was honestly called something like American Root Beer, USA Style, and it tasted like cough syrup, it was terrible!

What is the matter with those guys? English people have been to America, they surely have had a Hires Root Beer, it is just a simple can, they can ship it to England if they are too confused, and John never had a decent root beer in Europe in all the years. Maybe that has changed in the last four years, and maybe there has been a root beer revolution and everybody that is listening to this podcast that is 25 years old is like: ”What are you talking about, mate? Root beer? Are you kidding me? We have always had it!”, but the truth is: ”No, they have no root beer there. And John can't even imagine what is going on in Australia. They probably flavor it with Scorpions or something!

Bacon in New Zealand (RL129)

When Merlin was in New Zealand it changed the way he thinks about bacon. They call the American kind streaky bacon because their bacon is like ham and it is really good. Merlin likes Irish bacon, too, but the bacon that he got in New Zealand, when he wasn't eating at McDonald's, where they had the best McDonald's in the world that was seriously a cut above the McDonald's in other countries, he was eating bacon. Streaky bacon is the junk they eat in America, and even the halfway decent bacon is just a big piece of fat. Is that that much higher up the food chain than a Wolf Chili?

In Romania when you get bacon it is just fat, just the rind, and they eat it raw-ish, not really cooked down because if you cook the rind down, you cook it down to nothing. You will show up at somebody's house and they will give you a little appetizer or you go into a restaurant and bacon is on the menu and you order it and it is just the fatty rind that you are meant to sit and chew on. At one point John was asking a guy about it because if they just move the knife over a little bit, they would get some meat on there, and he thought about it for a little while and he said: ”American pigs have meat on their bacon, but Romanian pigs don't!” He was a poet and not a butcher and he did not understand that Romanian pigs also had meat. He was expressing a collective inferiority complex of his nation that he was sure that the answer to John’s question was that Romanian pigs didn't have as much meat because they were lesser pigs.

Wolf Chili having had a Model T with a can of chili on top and a wolf in a cage behind, wolves vs bears vs coyotes (RL129)

Merlin was reading up on Wikipedia, learning about Wolf Chili. They used to have a Model T like the Wienermobile before with a big can of chili and right behind the big can they had a wolf in a cage. They would drive around in a Model T with a fake can of chili and a wolf. It is little bit on the nose, but pretty amusing. That would knock them dead at the a county fair. The thing about a wolf, speaking of somebody who has been proximate to some wolves, even wolves in cages that are chained to a cement floor in a Cal Worthington Ford auto dealership, and they are terrifying and energies are being communicated to you and your body that are prehistoric.

You know in your adult mind that the wolf cannot get you, but you are never ever so aware of being prey. If you are standing near a wild bear, if a bear is chained to a concrete floor and he could escape his chains all of a sudden he would plow through some people, but his main goal would be to get out. John has encountered quite a few bears in nature and unless the bear has no other option they just turn and run, even big bears. The bears that attack people in Alaska are almost always a case where somebody is down at a salmon-choked fishing stream and they are plowing through head high brush and they come in between a bear and something else.

Even people who are aware of all the dangers, they go: ”Oh, shit, I forgot my tool kit back in the truck. I'll be right back!” and they forget their precautions, they don't make enough noise, they don't ring a bell or whatever. John has run into bears on a trail, and a porcupine in that situation will stand its ground and force you to move off the trail while the porcupine walks along. It will face you down, while a bear will turn and split. But a wolf in a place like that with it broke its chains? It just gives you the feeling that it would go around and personally shred each person in the place on his way to the door.

Wolves seem to always have a plan for maximum destruction. One glancing blow from a bear could knock your car over, but they just want to get on with their thing, they want to get out of Cal Worthington's Ford dealership and get back to their honey or whatever. Not a Wolf! The Wolf is going to take out as many people as he can, he is like a CIA agent! Driving around in a Model T that is shaped like a can of chili, pulling a wolf in a cage, every time you pull over to get gas you are going to sit in the cab of that car and you are going to be like: ”Okay, I am getting out now and I am going to go back and I am going to put gas in the car and the wolf is going to be right there, and he is going to be staring at me!”

The wolf had a lot of time to think, he had a lot of time to work the angles, to test the tensile strength of the cage, to look at that farcical lock you have with a bread tie holding it on, he is sitting in there staring at you while you are pumping gas, thinking to himself: ”One day, motherfucker! One day you are going to forget to put that lock back on!” How did Hannibal Lecter do it? The guy reached in for the keys and all of a sudden he is flayed and hanging up inside the cage, and Hannibal Lecter is wearing his skin, and the Wolf is thinking that exact same shit.

This is historically based! There are wolves that literally wear sheep's clothing! Didn't you ever see the Bugs Bunny cartoon? Merlin watched the first Chronicles of Narnia movie last night and it rejuvenated his extreme fear of wolves. They are really scary and there are a lot of places you get the coyotes, there are coyotes in Golden Gate Park and in John’s neighborhood, he can see them all the time. There is a lot of difference. A coyote looks like a wild dog and there is always a double take, triple take thing where you are like: ”That is a weird dog!”

Dogs (RL129)

The thing about dogs is that we have bred them into all these breeds for our peculiar needs and for our friendship and whatever other myths we are telling ourselves about dogs, but if you take some dogs, let's say you take a miniature Bulldog and a Sharpe and a Great Dane and a Husky, and you let them run free and they mate with each other, that first generation of dogs will be pretty weird looking and then the second generation of dogs will start to look like all the same kind of general dog and then by the third generation they will all have immediately reverted to that kind of East African dog.

You google Ethiopian Dog or something and you are going to get a yellow dog with big ears and long legs that looks like an ur-dog. If you leave dogs alone and let them mate with each other and don't monkey with them, it takes only a few generations before all that specialized breeding is just wiped out and they are back to ur-dog. A coyote is at least a variation on the ur-dog, even maybe a little bit smaller than an Ethiopian ur-dog. Merlin found an infographic discussing the differences between the wolf and the coyote, and it is pretty clear. When John sees coyotes in his own neighborhood he always catches his breath and goes: ”Oh, wow, look at that!” Wild animals move differently. A dog is going to just be acting like a fucking dog and running around being stupid, but a coyote or even a raccoon freezes and looks at you, and the way they scurry away is so chilling.

When John goes out for late night walks in his neighborhood where he expects to be covering some ground so he doesn't bring a scimitar, but he does have his walking staff, and he is mindful because he is much more worried that some asshole’s Rottweiler is going to get out he will need to be prepared to use a combination of his staff and his wits and his SAS dagger to dispatch this dog. But no coyote would ever attack him but he wants to be prepared for what if he will twist an ankle and fall down a slope and there are coyotes around and all of a sudden you are late night chili.

Merlin is fascinated by semi-domestic animals that really probably are a bad idea to have around. Obviously, sometimes it is tragic what can happen when you get the wrong kind of dog around the wrong kind of people, for example big dogs are not freaked out by a child, but little dogs are very freaked out by a child, they are very intimidated by something that is their size, and that is when you get bitten and stuff. Big dogs don’t give a fuck. You could ride them, they don't care!

Merlin being spooked by crows (RL129)

Merlin has been having a lot of crows lately, and he is really trying to keep his cool about it, he is trying to stay inside and keep his face where they can't see it, and he has been worried that they were building a nest in their chimney. His daughter knows how freaked out he is by crows, she has been provoking him, saying: ”Look, that one recognizes you!” - ”That is not even funny! Don't even joke! This is like a phobia for me!” John goes out and routinely says: ”I see you, crow! I see you!” Merlin doesn’t know how much they have seen of him that he is not even aware of, and he doesn’t want to seem duplicitous, he doesn’t want to be like Paul Reiser in Aliens kind where they see him as having a two-face, somebody who on the one hand is respectful, other times is not respectful to crows. He tries to always be respectful, but mainly he stays out of their way. First there is no crows and then suddenly there is lots of crows.

John woke up this morning, opened his curtains, looked out the window at the two crows that were having a conversation on the wire out front of his window, both turned their attention to him and he said to each of them in turn: ”I see you, crow! I see you, crow!” and they saw him and they understood each other. You have to do that over and over again because the memo does go out and they know a lot more about you than you would be comfortable with.

There has been a lot of crows at Merlin’s house. He will walk his daughter home from school and there will be six crows just sitting on top of their house where they could very easily nest. About 4-5 Saturday mornings ago he woke up and heard a bird’s sound. There is the kind of sound where you think that could be far away or close, but there is also the kind of sound where you go: ”I am hearing that signal directly!” and then he is hearing the plate reverb version of that come back outside. The chirp is coming from inside the house! He was slaying in bed thinking, no big deal, and then he heard a crash and another bird sound, and he was positive that there was a bird that had gone through their chimney and landed where the fire goes. It took him two weeks to have the guts to go look, and there was actually a dead bird that had come down their chimney.

A Savannah cat in the tree in Merlin’s backyard (RL129)

Merlin was at the office while he was recording with John a few weeks ago and his wife sent him a photo, going: "Wow, there are a lot of crows outside!” and there were literally over a dozen crows swarming in their backyard. It was something from the Old Testament. There was a fuck ton of crows and they were squawking and they were mad. Trigger warning! Can you just not send me a bunch of Crows in the backyard? She sent him another photo and said: ”Do you see a cat in the tree?”

While he was trying to have a conversation with John he zoomed in and, hand to God, there was a really super funky looking cat in the tree in their backyard that was being menaced by the crows. He then got another message when that cat apparently just went fucking hammering tongs on a nest full of baby crows, it had crow guts on its face, it was licking itself, and the crows are losing it. He shared this with the Internet and found out it is one of these monster cats that is a cross between a wild cat called a Serval, and a domestic cat, called a Savannah cat. They cost $1800-22.000!

John had a friend that had a Savannah cat, they are very freaky cats. Merlin got a little bit obsessed with them. It climbed up a tree and was pretty calm about it. It was just okay being in a tree and being photographed, and then it ate some crows and it went down the tree. It did need a fireman. It was fine. It is like a fucking jungle cat. This is a worthy adversary for the crows because a $22.000 house cat knows its name, it will come when it is called, and you can walk it on a leash.

The first time John was in Tellyuride Colorado there was a woman calmly as could be walking down the street with a Mountain Lion on a leash, it was a real eye opener. It was as big as a golden retriever. John can't imagine it was domesticated, but this woman was wearing a Navajo coat and a wide brim outback-style hat with a bunch of buckles on it. She had obviously a pretty high opinion of herself, and she had a Mountain Lion on a leash. John crossed to the other side of the street. She was a legendary character in Telluride for a while. As you move higher up the cat ladder, you get some smart-ass cats, and the first word that he does not want to use in describing a cat is ”tall”. He doesn't want to hear about a tall cat. Those cats walk in and they have got coyote legs!

You can tell when an animal is a domestic animal because it looks stupid and it looks like it wants to make you happy for no particular reason or it looks logy, you can see the dull wittedness in it. You pull out the laser pointer or a funny little mouse on a magic wand and make it entertain you for a while. The way that we have cats in our house that don't kill us first chance they get is that we keep them infantilized. You keep a cat a kitten. If you never let a kitten get beyond kittenness, it will mostly be okay and not kill you in your sleep.

If you get an outdoor cat it can burn off a lot of that wild animal energy and then it brings home a rat, but mostly with cats and dogs it is a combination of breeding and then continuing to treat them like somebody who always knows where their next meal is coming from and never has any challenges like that. Although this fat golden cat that has been living in John’s backyard for the last couple of years has an outdoor cat savvy.

Outdoor cats that have some natural savvy and possums have a professional courtesy for one another, they will eat out of the same bowl at the same time and when they encounter each other in the wild or in the wild of John’s backyard, they just tip their hats to one another and say: ”Counselor!” - ”Counselor!” They got projects, the cat is trying to eat moles and shrews and the Possum is trying to eat crickets and slugs and maybe also shrews, there is a little bit of overlap.

A possum living under John’s house, having rats in the attic from the previous owners (RL129)

This is the precursor to The Burglary where John could hear the burglars and thought they were the possum.

There is a possum living under John’s house and he is not 100% thrilled about it and the other day he was lying in bed and heard the possum in the wall and he was like: ”Okay, all right! We got to get you out of here!”, so he looked online and there are all kinds of possum protection societies who say things like: ”Don't hurt the possum or scare it or even trap it or anything!” You just want to wait until the possum comes out, which it will surely do at night, and then in the middle of the night you should go out and seal up all the entrances to your house under the house where the possum gets in and then the possum will just find somewhere else to be. That sounds like somebody who came up with that and has never actually tried it.

When John realized the possum was going in and out of this hole under his house he of course turned off all the lights and sat in a chair, facing the hole, he let his eyes accustom to the dark. The first night he sat where he could look through a glass door at the hole, and then the second night he opened the door so that he had a clear view, still sitting inside in the dark facing the hole through the open door until a friend came and asked: ”Are you just trying to get the possum to come in the house?” - ”No, if the possum entered the house I would stand up and make it aware of me!” Then along came the fat cat that lives in his backyard and sets up station, sitting on a picnic bench outside, staring at the hole, too!

They sat there in silence, the cat was not aware that John was there, and they were waiting for the freaking thing to arrive. John was offended because he had been a generous host to this cat. He allowed him to sit in his backyard, he never once gotten the wrist rocket out and sent a marble up his butt, and now here he is, waiting for his friend to show up? The cat should have kept to the possum from living under John’s house!

When John first bought the house, the people that lived in the house before him had allowed rats to invade the roof and one of the first things he had to do was put on a hazmat suit and go up into the attic with a shop vac, the loudest thing that man has ever invented, a shop vac is louder than an F-15, and he was in a hot and sweaty crawl space with a hazmat suit on and a shop vac and he was shop-vacing up all of the rat detritus and got 25 bags of insulation out of the roof of his house that he felt had been contaminated by rats. He put it out to the curb and the garbage man came by, John was standing there next to this stuff, saying: ”I got a little bit over the one can / one bag limit here. I got 25 bags full of this garbage. What do we got to do? How do we work this out?” - ”You got $20?” - ”I got $20!” It was an amazing deal and then the garbage went away.

If you go and you read the manual, it says that every extra bag over your one bag is $20 and John was looking at $600 when all was said and done to take this stuff to the dump and this is totally gross stuff, but he is a garbage man, it is all gross stuff, he doesn’t want to look at anybody's garbage, except if it is full of vintage Polaroids.

John made the house rat-proof for the most part at the time, and he added to the mix a couple of cats. His dad's cat, Puppy, was living with him at the time, and Puppy was a long haired white cat who actually was a ferocious ratter, and then he had his young cat, Louis, who was learning how to rat from Puppy. They cleaned out all the rat stuff, but then there were some rats that still thought that this was their turf, and the two cats really cleaned up Dodge City and there were no rats around. For about six months seven years ago John would see some dead rats out in the street because Puppy didn't even allow rats to die on his property. The job is not done until the rat is off the property!

John no rats for many years. Puppy is gone, and Louis is gone, but this red cat has inherited the responsibility. Then John saw this hole under the house. There had been a hole before that he had filled, but it was a new hole that was bigger than a rat and he thought that the red cat was using the hole and he actually saw the red cat go in the hole one time, this was a cat-hole, the cat is under the house and is is taking care of it, and John doesn’t mind a cat under the house as long as it is not climbing the walls or peeing on everything.

Now it turns out it is a possum hole and the cat is sitting out in the backyard watching the possum hole with him. Eventually, before the possum arrived this particular night John couldn't keep it inside anymore and he said: ”Hey!” and the cat startled, looked over at him, and John said: ”What the fuck? Seriously! What are you doing? I put a lot of trust in you!” and the cat is really eyeballing him now because cats don't like when you are sitting, staring at a hole with them for 15 minutes and they are not aware you are there. John gave him a good talking to: ”I entrust you to keep Marsupials out of the basement, and now you are just sitting here, waiting for them to show up, and you guys are going to get a milkshake or something?” Eventually the cat couldn't take the heat and split and John never did see the possum that night.

Now John is worried that the possum is the boss now, because top dog in his backyard is not a possum, and it is not a cat anymore, the cat has been demoted! Merlin starts talking about the different types of Savannah cats from F1-F5, depending on how much Serval is in them.

The garbage man with a Polaroid collection, thinking about opening a museum with vintage porn (RL129)

John had a friend who was a garbage man for a while (see RW81), and he said that the old garbage men, the guys that have been doing it for a long time, they all had photo albums full of homemade porn. It is a garbage man thing that you are looking for Polaroids of people in there altogether doing weird things because before digital cameras it was the only way you could do it because you wouldn't have to have it processed.

Out there somewhere there are all these 65 year old garbage men and they all have somewhere in their crawlspace multiple photo albums full of what is essentially the history of Polaroid porn. It should be in the Library of fucking Congress, this stuff, but no one is even aware that it exists, no one has gone around and surveyed all the old garbage men around the country and said: ”Listen, we know you got some freaky shit. We would like it all in one place at the Museo de Garbagemen, come on, come out of the woodwork!” They would need an army of interns to be cataloging and scanning this in.

Think of the resource that a website with all the garbage man porn from around the world would be! Think about the porn that German garbage men have, literally covered with shit!” Their shoes, the televisions in the background, out the window you see the Berlin Wall coming down, there is a lot of history that is just being wasted, squandered. Those guys are dying, their wives are finding that stuff, and they are throwing them into the garbage, but modern garbagemen are probably not searching the garbage for porn like old ones did.

Being consistent with what you are repping as a person, having exotic animals (RL129)

In John’s neighborhood if he started walking around with a long legged cat, basically a tall cat on a leash, he had better also be wearing a fur Hamberg (?), he is not going to have a tall cat on a leash and just be wearing some Filson jacket because you got to be repping a certain lifestyle and a fur Hamberg (?) is the minimum of how fly you would have to be to be pulling off a tall cat. What if he had two Savannah cats on leashes walking around? It would be worth the $50.000 because you would be legendary, you would need an ankle length fur coat, a fur Hamberg (?), two Savannah cats on a leash, and a diamond-tipped walking stick sword cane. That would be Dynamite! Seattle would not be big enough to hold him at that point!

You couldn't rock that look in a place like Los Angeles. You would have to move to Jackson Hole, Wyoming. If you are going to wear an ankle length fur coat and have two Savannah cats on a leash, you are going to need to live in a resort town. Telluride, Jackson Hole. Merlin is thinking of comics like Saga or The Watchman where there is a great tradition of scary dudes with giant fucking cats.

Sometimes in John’s neighborhood you will go by somebody's house and they will have a really expensive car and the house is nothing. When you are in the car and you are rolling around, you are repping a certain high style, but you better not ever bring anybody home. You put all your ducks in one car basket. Everything that you rep at every level has to be commensurate with all the other things that you are repping. You can't be off the scale in one department and then let everything slack.

If you go into Aimee Mann's house, going up the stairs there are 25 Santa Claus dolls from the 19th century that are all made of Bone China and super creepy, but in Michael Penn and Aimee Mann's house of course there are creepy Santas everywhere. In the kitchen there are a bunch of paintings of US presidents, and if you comment on them you realize that Aimee has painted all of those. She is very good, she just picks a President and paints the President and it goes up on the kitchen wall. These people are living a very high level of meeting expectations: ”I am going to Aimee Mann's and Michael Penn's house. What is it going to be like? I hope it is not a tract house out in Pasadena!”

Then you realize that it is a tutor home and John said to them that the only thing that this house is missing are some feathered Napoleon hats and Michael Penn stands up, grabs John’s hand, leads him into the next room, and points up to the top of the bookshelf where there are ten feathered Napoleon hats. Game, set, match! They are living commensurate with expectations, they do not disappoint. And if you come into John’s house and you look around, he has just not lived long enough or vibrantly enough to have ten Napoleon hats, but if you see the things that are in his house and then you think to yourself: ”I hope that the owner of these things has some opinions about things. I would hate it if this guy would have no opinions about anything!”, then you will find that the opinions John has about things match the number of cookie globes that are under his piano.

Going back a few episodes (see RL120)to the guy who puts all the meat stickers in his diary: You don't want to become an intellectual fetishist or a cultural fetishist. You don't want to become just the one person who is covered with tattoos, that is not that interesting, you don't want to become the one person who just has a room in their house dedicated to Elvis. It doesn't seem well rounded. It doesn't seem actually all that interesting and artistic. There should be a leveling among all your quirkiness that supports a larger personality.

John once met a guy that had a bunch of tattoos and they were going on a beer run and went out to his car and it was a two wheel drive Toyota pickup: ”You are repping a whole thing here and the absolute minimum car I was expecting you to drive would be a 1972 El Camino, but I really expected a 1965 GTO, and you are telling me this is a 2-wheel drive Toyota King Cab pickup? No, sir! No, sir! Shame, shame, shame!” If you have crossed checkered flags on a circle of fire tattooed on your forearm, you don't drive a Toyota of any kind. It just doesn't square!

Each of us have to measure the degree of commitment that we have to who we are and then make sure that everything lines up. Also, you have to wonder about any solution or perceived solution to a problem that involves adding more animals because that doesn't always end well. It would be one thing to borrow a litter of vicious cats for a little while, but you don't have to be taking care of those cats because then the dander gets into your system and pretty soon you are not thinking straight.

This is where the Chinchilla is the real super hack because a) a Chinchilla is hypoallergenic, it does not have dander, it is not an allergic animal, it looks like a small rabbit that is actually a mouse, it is very fuzzy, it got short, manageable hair because the nicest fur jacket you can buy is a Chinchilla and this is a live one of those. They are incredibly chill little dudes, easy to own, not expensive to care for, and yet it is a Chinchilla, not a guinea pig or a mouse or something. It fights at a much higher weight because it is technically an exotic thing. You can be a Kook, own a Chinchilla, but the Chinchilla itself is very manageable and the word is not out on Chinchilla ownership.

Then you put it in your arms and it is improbably soft, you cannot maintain a bad mood while you are holding a Chinchilla and you are never going to sneeze either. It is the best of all possible worlds. Imagine walking down the street with a couple of big Chinchillas on a leash! They have pretty small legs, it wouldn't be a long walk. You could be just carrying it like a supervillain, petting your Chinchilla, wearing a white suit, but you are going to want an extra hand for your staff, that is the problem. You would be sitting behind a desk, in a big chair in a darkened room, and you would just be petting a Chinchilla and people would be coming and asking you for favors on the day of your daughter's wedding (reference to The Godfather).