RL131 - Subsequious

This week, Merlin and John talk about:

The Problem: ‘Platter’ came with a bucket of potatoes, referring to John ordering a platter for 4 people in a fancy artisanal restaurant, but it turned out that half of the food was potatoes and the rest was just right for 2 people.

The show title refers to a word that John made up when he meant to say either obsequious submissive

The audio starts with a short clip from a 1981 ad for Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, saying ”You put your chocolate in my peanut butter” - ”You put peanut butter on my chocolate!” - ”What?”

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 Please do not quote these texts directly without applying your own editing first!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

John being sick (RL131)

John sounds very nasal as he was answering the phone and he says that he is only a little sick and was exaggerating, but Merlin knows that John has never been a little sick. The problem is that all colds end up in the same place, no matter what he does. Even if goes to lay in bed for 3 days with a warm blanket the moment he feels sick, he is still going to get just as sick as if he went running naked in the cold rain. There is nothing he can do once he is on the path, like Rutger Hauer with an upper respiratory infection. ”Tears in Rain!” (Reference to Blade Runner).

This time when he started feeling sick he decided to power through it, go out in the cold, not wear a scarf, but just go for it, and now he is 3 days in and he is just as sick as he would be if he were in a bath right now. Cutting out the gluten has help his overall health immeasurably, albeit he is not maintaining a perfect adherence and unfortunately this cold coincides perfectly with Halloween. During Halloween John has given himself a buy on Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups and the sugar makes him feel bad anyway in addition of the cold.

Getting old (RL131)

It sounds like old men talking about their colons, but Merlin has so much to discuss, including his colon. Nothing could be more boring than somebody realizing they are getting old. Everybody is going to do it and no-one cares. When you are younger and more elastic you can do things that make a difference in your life, like you can get a little more sleep, you drink a little bit less, you eat some carrots, and within a day or two you notice a difference.

When you are an old person with a broken hip it takes a really long time to heal and it is an immobility sentence, if not a death sentence. When Merlin’s grandmother got old enough she broke her Femur, which might be the biggest bone in the body. She was sitting on Merlin’s stoner cousin’s slippery bed spread and she very slowly slid off the bed, landed on her knee, and broke her Femur, which has a finality to it.

John once went through a phase where he researched Spontaneous Human Combustion (SHC), so did Merlin. Of the many Sasquatches and Yetis out there, this is the one he thought a lot about.

John making exceptions from his gluten-free diet for Halloween (RL131)

John enjoys a chocolate candy, particularly one where the chocolate has gotten in someone else’s peanut butter, or conversely if your peanut butter gets in someone else’s chocolate (reference to an 1981 ad for Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups). Those are situations he relishes, when you are walking along with a chocolate bar and you bump into a pretty girl who has an open jar of peanut butter. What is nice about the small size Halloween candies now is that he can have a little mini buffet because John likes a sample platter.

The other day John went to a fancy restaurant where everybody had mustaches. On the menu there was stuff about kale, eyelashes and all this bullshit, but at the bottom there was a platter for 4, 6 or 8 people. There were only going to be two people in John’s company, the other person hadn’t arrived yet, and the waitress said that the platter for 4 was a lot of food, but even after thinking about it again John still wanted the platter. It was very normative of her to tell John how much he should be eating, but what she should have said was that it comes with a bucket of potatoes because when the platter got there the vegetables and meat portions were perfectly fine for two people.

Last night John sat down at the kitchen table after everybody had gone to bed. He had one little Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup, one little Butterfinger, one little Hershey’s Krackel, one little Mr. Goodbar, and one little Hershey Bar with Almonds, an amount of candy that wouldn’t even come close to the amount of garbage that is in a single small Blizzard from Dairy Queen!

After John had a little bit of each candy he walked around the house the rest of the night in a state of total craving, but at the same time he knew he had had one of every possible kind of little treat and there was not a second one that was going to help him. In principle he is opposed to those mini bars, though! Merlin did full-size bars this years.

Merlin sometimes falls back on convenience food and thinks he is going to treat himself, and the fucking KFC / Taco Bell near his house is always there. He rolls KFC, generally, because the Taco Bell menu is so overwhelming, given the footprint of this place. He has never gone to KFC and not regretted it, and he knows that he is going to regret it, but he is short on time, it is 3pm and he hasn’t eaten, and if he goes home not having eaten he will be cranky.

He should have eaten some beef jerky two hours earlier, but he tells himself that he will just go in and get this little thing, but the effect that that food has on him, setting aside anything it does to his gastro-intestinal system, takes him out and he needs a 2-hour nap after he eats that food. Sometimes he will get chicken strips, or the 10-pack of the bites, something small that he can eat while he is literally walking to his house.

Yesterday Merlin saw a movie with his daughter. He got a platter with curly fries and chicken strips and he sat in the movie theater eating the entire thing. Every single bite filled him with self-loathing because he knew what was going to happen and as he came home he slept for an hour and a half in the middle of leaving Daylight Savings Time. As it was practically dark he was still laying on the bed groaning. His recoveries are not what they used to be!

John is not depressed anymore because of the gluten (see RL120, probably earlier). He would be in a fog and he couldn’t see to the end of his hand, and he would find himself eating a very large bowl of something, perhaps even in the middle of the night, just to keep the barking down. Now that it has been a long time since he has been in a deep depression it has revealed his latent normal level of constant depression to be his old friend, walking hand in hand with his pal Normal Depression.

John getting Details Magazine in the mail (RL131)

John is getting Details Magazine in the mail now because somebody signed him up for it as a prank, and it has 5 perfume samples in it and you can see the fumes coming out of the mailbox and he wonders who buys this stuff. On the cover of the current issue (November 2014) is a picture of Brad Pitt. He is older than John, but he is still a really good-looking guy! John was standing there with a lady friend and he showed it to her and her response was: ”You know he dyes his beard, right?” It is all full of Just For Men (Beard & Mustache Color). It did look a little suspect, like James Lipton’s beard. He dyes his hair, too!

Merlin thinks Brad Pitt seems down to earth, although he has made a lot of questionable decisions, but his handsomeness alone would get him an audience with John would like to sit down with him and could learn a lot from him.

Merlin was watching the Captain America movie (Captain America: The Winter Soldier) and he told his daughter that Robert Redford has been the most handsome man in the world at one point, but that was not going to make any sense at all to his daughter because even at that point he was very rugged-looking and was one of those stars that would not have come up in the HD era, like Robert Redford, Edward James Olmos, Cameron Diaz, where HD is not surpassingly kind to them.

John reads every Magazine from front to back. When he was a little kid his mom had a subscription to Time Magazine and her instruction to him at first was that he doesn’t have to read every article, but just the things that are interesting to him. At the time it was just page after page of Henry Kissinger talking to McGeorge Bundy, but then there would be a picture of somebody on a motorcycle or of some Black September terrorists leaning over a balcony in the Olympic Village.

John started reading just the articles that interested him, but then he remembered feeling a real sense of accomplishment when he began reading it from front to back without regard whether or not the article seemed interesting. That was when he really started learning about interest rates. Now when John gets a copy of Details he does not prejudice the feature article and he does not presume that any of the stuff on the front of the book is not interesting to him, but he just reads it all the way through, which takes about 10 minutes.

The latest copy of Wired also has perfume samples in it, and John felt like writing a letter to them because of all the Magazines in the world this one has to be the most chemically sensitive audience. It was some Axe Body Spray because they are trying to appeal to bros because bros are who make up San Francisco now. There was a fantastic editorial in the latest Wired about how machines should be free of pre-programmed government spyware. There is a lot of good stuff in there, it is how John finds common ground with Wil Wheaton. That and cats.

Merlin doesn’t like tech news or any kind of news, but he has heard that Elon Musk is concerned that the AI is going to take over. Currently every device has a built-in flaw which is that the copyright protectors don’t want us to listen to music so they build in a way to keep us from doing that, and the cops don’t want us to make 3D guns with our 3D printers and Apple is not going to help the FBI to break into our phones.

As we seed more and more control to our machines, if we continue to allow higher level backdoor permissions that are granted to someone else besides us the owners, then you got AI things running all around and you don’t know whom they are answering to. It was really food for thought and that is why there are no computers in his new Suburban (see RL130).

John also got an AM radio and can listen to Frank Sinatra on the single speaker all the time because Frank Sinatra is the king of AM radio, and he is learning a lot about him. John cannot understand that Sinatra was a sex symbol and that people wanted to kiss this baby Skeletor. Even when he was really young he was super-skinny and freakish looking. John is not body-normative, but at the same time Sinatra is a Rodentine creep. Dean Martin was a sexy guy, and even Jerry Lewis presumable would have a certain amount of enthusiasm in bed.

Reading the Naval Aviators magazine, nobody cares about those old veterans or about John, getting old (RL131)

Last night John was reading Wings of Gold, the magazine of Naval Aviators that he still gets because his dad was a lifetime member of the Association of Naval Aviators and when somebody dies they don’t take their name off the subscription list but keep sending you the magazine (see RL289) and John enjoys getting it because it tells him all about the latest technologies. They are firing HARP missiles from C-130’s now, which is very exciting.

One of John’s favorite things about this magazines are the reminiscences told by 80-90 year old guys about the time they downed 5 zeroes in one day or shot a zero out of the sky with a .45 (as John’s dad allegedly did, see RL34) or strafed some locomotives outside of Inchon or whatever else they were doing back in the old days when they were flying mechanical airplanes with machine guns and they had to actually see the thing they were shooting, it wasn’t just some dot on a screen.

These people lived extraordinary lives in their youths! Imagine being in 50 dogfights before you are 30. The world’s oldest Naval Aviator is 103 years old and he retired from the Navy as a Rear Admiral in 1958, 10 years before John was born, and he is still alive. People still call him Admiral and he has been alive longer after he retired from the Navy than before. Yet, who gives a fuck? Nobody has ever heard of this guy! Who cares about anything!

John can feel his prostate enlarging, it is not impacting him yet, but he can feel it! Who cares? Who gives a shit? Who cares about John? What if he got diagnosed with cancer tomorrow and had only a month to live. Would he hire somebody to sit and transcribe all of his theories so that the world could benefit from them before he went? Who gives a shit! Nobody cares about what he thinks and who cares what happens to people. Even if his theories are super-good, who gives a shit!

John got out of his car today in front of a café and an attractive young woman was walking past and they looked at each other and for whatever reason they didn’t break eye contact and then she said: ”Nice hat!” - ”Wow! Thank you!”, but it happened so fast that John couldn’t get back to her with something like: ”I like your scarf!” John thought about filing a harassment suit, but more importantly: Who cares? She won’t remember him even now. Merlin remarks that when you are getting older you become a noncombatant in the sexual revolution. Nobody cares!

John has a grey beard and some people who walk past him probably think: ”He looks great for a 60-year old!” Ultimately they are right! There is no difference between John and a 60-year old. 10% more vitality? Merlin has reached a point where it is really dispiriting. Part of him thinks he should make a bunch of changes and have a personal mental/physical/emotional/spiritual revolution and start it all over, but now you are just a pathetic nut because you can’t change it! The only reboot that is going to work is if the aliens have TSA back-scatter technology to fix all your cells and make them plumb again.

Getting fixed up by the UFOs (RL131)

When our alien overlords finally make themselves known by coming to John first and telling him that they need him to talk to the other humans on their behalf (see Being the anchorman for the UFOs in RL10 or RL83), the first thing he is going to ask of them is to put him in one of those TSA scanners and figure out everything that is wrong with him.

There are all the torn ligaments, all the scarred tissue, all the moles, the enlarged prostate, all the sickness, and what is presumably 1000 dormant viruses that are sitting around the lunch table, taking turns deciding which one is going to give him a cold. John doesn’t want Bitcoin from them, he doesn’t even know what a universal space chip will buy, probably just shit at the company store, but if they can make John’s cells fat and plump again?

He is not even sure what the aliens want from us. They are not here to take all 6 billion of us with them. If they are going to take any of us and put us through the plumber, you are going to end up being a pet somewhere, it is not going to end well. Merlin is fascinated when technology evolves so that we can measure and have a name for a thing that we didn’t have before, and maybe there are things that the aliens can measure and have a name for that we don’t even know about, including our natural resources. There might be resources that they can measure and have a name for that we aren’t even aware of and that will serve them well in another galaxy.

The mayor of the small Montana town in Red Dawn is a minor character played by Lane Smith. He is just trying to help, the Cubans are the new boss of the town, he is just trying to keep a lid on everything, he is still the mayor, they didn’t just take him out to shoot him, but they are still dealing with him contemptuously as they conduct their own project, a bit like a Judenrat, he is subseqious (John probably meant to say obsequious), although you sense that he has some altruistic goals in mind and wants to help the citizens of his town by liaising with his new masters, but he ends up on the wrong side because he is Vichy.

John doesn’t want to be Vichy and he doesn’t understand their thought technologies enough to know whether they would recognize that trait in him and let him believe that he had complete autonomy in decision making. You usurp all international television broadcast and you say: ”Hello! I have been empowered by our new alien masters to explain to you what is going on. I am a human like you and I am not under their thought control, I am just here as a translator and intermediary to speak human language to you!”, but who knows if they got a finger and they are tickling your prostate that you don’t even know about.

Jodie Foster in the movie Contact is up in imaginary space and she is talking to the ghost of her dad. Maybe they will remove this mole from your back and plumb your cells up, while they are mining the molten gold of the core of the Earth. Nobody offers you money for something unless they think they are going to get more value out of it, and it is a good idea to be a bit suspicious, but not let them know that you are suspicious.

It seems very unlikely that they want us for food because food is a simple problem to solve, it seems like a uniquely Earth problem.

Meeting up in Kansas City, eating Soylent, not having to think about food (RL131)

When John was in Kansas City (on his road trip, see RL130) he went to Oklahoma Joe’s BBQ (now called Joe’s Kansas City Bar-B-Que) and he had a tweet-up with some very nice people, one of them a young man in glasses and a baseball hat who works in tech, a nice and intelligent guy, and halfway through John’s brisket meal he asked him if he wanted some BBQ, but he replied that he mostly eats Soylent. They have been standing there talking for 20 minutes and only now he tells him that?

Soylent is another San Francisco hippie bro technology that contains all the nutrients that you need that they buy raw from chemical companies and combine them in a grey Metamucil style shake, and you can mostly just eat this paste. You have solved the food problem so you can spend more time coding dating apps. You can spend $154.62 per month for a diet of 11.000 KJ (2600 kcal) per day. As much of an Epicurean as John is, a person who truly lives and sucks the marrow out of life, it appeals to him to wake up every morning and drink a shake with all of his kilojoules in it.

Merlin says that 10 years ago he would have said ”maybe” to that because there is something appealing about it. He is tired of thinking about food, buying food, preparing food, cleaning up after he has made the food, and throwing out leftover food, and even if it is food that makes him happy it doesn’t make him that happy.

Merlin has done a lot of cooky fad diets in the past and 1992/93 he had been at a job for a couple years, and he is 5’9” (175 cm) and when he was in college he was 149 pounds (68 kg), so he was pretty skinny, but not super-skinny, but when he had a job for a couple years, coinciding with the fact that he was now in his 20 and officially going downhill, he got up to maybe 165 pounds (75 kg). He wasn’t heavy, but still…

This is one of the principle problems of modernity: Back when we were at the dawn of the modern age someone devised the theory that what we lacked was enough time. We were wasting time doing labor-intensive things, and we needed to free up time so that we could read poetry and philosophize on a mountain top and we would live in a culture that was flowering art and music and dance. The whole project of the last 200 years has been to free up this crucial time that we somehow had lost as we moved into the machine age.

With every new device that supposed saved us time, we realized that we need to fill all this time and in the past we would have filled this time from dawn to dusk laboring and now we don’t have anything to do and don’t have the necessary imaginations to flower. During and before the times when we were laboring all day we also had to worry about being destroyed by our environment and we had a legitimate reason to be anxious all the time. We were literally being chased by wolves. Not demon dogs, but actual wolves.

So you take away food and when you are 24 years old and all you are eating is Taco Bell anyway you might as well drink Soylent and get nutrition, but for those of us in middle age, thinking about food, preparing it, eating it, and worrying about it is 60% of how we fill out time! Take that away and what do you fill it with? More episodic television? More Dan Harmon fan worship? No! Do not take my food, even though I hate it and despise everything about it! Merlin does enjoy the idea of some food, but a lot of effort goes into the proposition to have his daughter push around a little noodles and then ask for desert.

Think about how much effort it would be if you had to make your own clothes! Merlin wears the same thing literally every day as it is. If he had to make those clothes himself it would take him 3 years, but he would feel good about them and wear them with pride. Imagine making clothes for your daughter and how frustrating it would be every 6 months when you had to make her new clothes because the little beast kept growing? Back in Ohio in the 1940s John’s mom used to detail her week and she would devote an entire day just to ironing. They were thinking: ”Boy, I wish there was some kind of Soylent that would allow us to be free of this labor!”

Merlin says that once we had all those devices helping us with our daily chores, then the standards went up and now people are expecting their clothes to be done really quickly. On the other side clothes suck now and are now made by little brown hands in Malaysia, they are all garbage and when we have worn a shirt 15 times we throw it away because it is old. Only the appearance of standards have up while actual standards have declined everywhere. They are helping a lot of people this week!

John is sitting here, stinking this whole house with farts because all he eats is Landjäger and Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups. That is no way to live! How can a man his age survive on that? His emissions are evidence that there is something deeply wrong inside of him, and that is why he is sick, and he needs to get on a new plan. If an alien scanned him right now, they would find a ball the size of a new-born calf made up of peanut butter and Landjäger inside of him and they would not have any way to save him and would go somewhere else and hire another guy to be the spokesperson.

Merlin had chicken-fingers and some curly fries.

On his drive across America John stopped at a Taco Bell for the first time in a dozen years, but he was on a road trip and he was too busy to stop at a Perkins and he certainly doesn’t want to go into a Bob Evans because last time he had the pot roast and it was watery and he decided he was not going to get fooled again. John went to a Taco Bell drive through and got the old standby that he would get when he would go to Taco Bell all the time when he was a young person, which is 5 tacos, which used to be $0.89.

He sat in his truck with the engine running and he scarfed down 5 tacos, and he was thinking that this was sub-pump-chili (see RL13), this was meat that was coming out of a Coke machine. They have to add texture to this to make it seem like ground beef. Every employee in this Taco Bell in the middle of the country was a High School girl, he got 5 tacos handed to him by a girls with a jaunty pony tail, he scarfed them down in the parking lot, and he thought that this was reality in a way that he protects himself from usually.

Merlin feels like a meat machine that has to feed other meat into the meat machine to create his rudimentary past and take a nap. It is disgusting! Maybe he should look into Soylent! It is open source, he could commit some code.

John’s daughter is a happy carnivore, but he shutters to think about the conversations he is going to have explaining to her that we eat aminals. We don’t have to, but we do it on purpose. He has already had some conversations with her that her meat comes from a cow, but they didn’t really get into it. There is a lot of planning and infrastructure involved in getting those 5 tacos into John’s lap.

The farm is a motive that we talk about a lot to kids, with chickens and pigs and goats, and we take kids to farms, and they get it, but then you have to ask: ”You know what the farm is? It is a fucking holocaust! Everybody here dies by getting lured into a stainless steal room where a German-looking woman in a smock is waiting and then it is all over, curtains for you!” That is not a conversation that John is looking forward to having with her, he can barely justify it to himself.

All they need to do is make Soylent taste like Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups and we could take a step back from the factory killing machine that our culture is, and John is saying that as someone who has already eaten a sausage today and has chewed on the little nubbins that are in every sausage and thought about that this was once a part of a thing that was out in the field not very long ago. It was just a dumb cow, not thinking, John is not sorry about his thoughts, fuck him!

They discuss how Soylent comes in containers that are like the food in air raid shelters and you just add water to it. You can probably google ”Soylent hack” and find people who are hacking their Soylent with Acacia Berries, or they somehow make it taste like coffee or peanut butter. Merlin finds this stuff depressing! Everything in it is grey or beige. We are made from the ashes and we go back to the ashes. Mazel Tov! Sometimes he is really hungry after they record, but not today!

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