This week, Merlin and John talk about:

• John having trouble sleeping (Sleep)
• John calling his neighbor because Gary has become a problem (Gary and Skeeter)
• Merlin’s official adoptive homeless person (Merlin Mann)
• John’s mom helping homeless people to get in touch with their family (Parents)
• John’s relationship with his neighborhood (Neighborhood)
• Problems that no amount of help can solve (Humanities)
• Tipping your hat at people (Humanities)
• Kids having an innate sense of justice, doing good for the right reason (Children)
• John not understanding Harry Nilsson, Music documentaries, Randy Newman (Music)

The Problem: Gary’s gotta go, referring to John’s neighbor living in his van in the front yard across the street and having become a problem over time.

The show title refers to John walking past a guy in the night at a spooky place who decided to look at John and John tipped his hat to him, gestures that are in the arsenal of civilization.

John had a pretty good New Year time.

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 Please do not quote these texts directly without applying your own editing first!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 having trouble sleeping (RL137)

John has not been sleeping enough. He stays up late and wakes up early, which is a bad combo and leads to 5 hours of sleep several days in a row and then he wonders why he feels like killing people. The reason he is not sleeping is that he sits up until 5am, looking at eBay on his phone, and his neighbor Gary in his van screaming at his ex-wife isn’t helping.

John calling his neighbor because Gary has become a problem (RL137)

See Gary and Skeeter!

Merlin’s official adoptive homeless person (RL137)

There is one guy in Merlin’s neighborhood, not the chicken-eating rice-throwing guy, who he almost came to blows with 3 years ago. He is deeply schizophrenic, he sleeps in doorways, and we would just randomly yell things at people. Merlin has a thick skin for city stuff, but on one occasion this guy got close enough and loud enough when Merlin was with his kid that he stepped to him a little bit, which is unusual for him. After that happened he would avoid him and did not like the guy, although a small part of him felt bad for him.

A year later it looked like he got picked up and put somewhere for a while, he probably got medicated, but he was still sitting in front of the Walgreens with his hand out, in the same clothes for months, covered in stuff, and just filthy. Eventually he would started talking to Merlin, saying: ”Any chance you could help me out today?” - ”Sorry man, not today!” and he would hear him having conversations with people. He still sounded like a crank, but he wasn’t dangerous anymore, and Merlin felt terrible about it because he can’t do that much to help this guy, but he is his official adoptive homeless guy.

His policy in giving money to homeless people is that he will pick exactly one person and every time he sees them he will give them $5. Merlin has adopted this guy for 1.5 years now. Every part of that makes Merlin feel like shit: That he got emotional with him, that he is a schizophrenic man living on the streets, but Merlin is living in the outside lands, and it is nothing like what you get in The Castro. It makes him more filled with self-doubt, in the same way that he would be reluctant to call out Gary.

There is an old adage: ”Any man who is not a Liberal at young age is hard-hearted, and any man who is not a Conservative by the time they are 40 is soft-headed”, which has been attributed to Churchill. When you are a young person your sympathy is abound and you want to live in a world where it is not possible for people to fall through the cracks like that, you feel very invested in the social compact: ”Why can’t this man be helped?” and as you get older and older, you are more like: ”Get the hell off my lawn!” John has slept on park benches quite a bit as a young person.

John’s mom helping homeless people to get in touch with their family (RL137)

Some of those problems are intractable, the social compact is not air-tight, and these problems do not have simple solutions. John’s mom spent years walking around town, adopting homeless people to the point where she would bring them home with her and re-establish contact with their families, go through elaborate processes to get them on their medication and find them work. The transformation was incredible, but 9 months later he might decide on his own volition to stop taking his medication and he would lose his job and a few months later he is living under the Freeway again.

Not only was it a year’s worth of work to end up right where he started, but there is also the emotional journey. She would come out of those experiences not knowing anymore how to help. Giving the guy $5 for a bottle of wine is one form of it, getting him in touch with his family back in Ohio is another form of it, but ultimately the thing that most people do is respond with: ”Sorry, man!”. The solution is not easy, in particular with John’s neighbors.

John’s relationship with his neighborhood (RL137)

see Neighborhood!

Problems that no amount of help can solve (RL137)

Merlin talks about the broken windows theorem. What you put up with becomes okay, and once it is okay more stuff that is not so great becomes okay as well. Look no further than the place where you walk in and put your mail down. What used to be a working surface is a week later just covered with mail. John’s dad used to call that table the magic table because if you put something down on the top of it, within a couple of weeks it would be at the bottom of the pile, which seemed magic to him. Whenever the pile was teetering he would sweep it all into a cardboard box and put it in the bottom of a closet, wait 30 years, and die, which is how John got it.

There are a lot of families who quietly have somebody in their family who is in and out of the system, on and off the streets, for decades, you don’t have to poke around very far, and there is no amount of helping them that would fix the problem. It is like in The Wire when Bubbles goes to his sister’s house and says: ”I cleaned up! Here is a key! You can go in the basement! I don’t ever want to see you!” Eventually the tie comes off and you are back under the bridge. Homelessness if of course an economic issue, but there is a lot more to it than that.

Not only mental illness, homelessness, and drug abuse can be intractable problems, but there can be simple things like trying to explain to someone that living paycheck-to-paycheck is a risky proposition when the person doesn’t want to hear it. They keep spending every money they get and they keep having financial crisis and they keep acting like it is a mystery and as if there is something unfair about it. Whenever we take this up the level of a society or culture it becomes much harder to say that some problems are unsolvable because we have such faith in ourselves, in technology, and in our thought technology.

Particularly in the 19th and 20th centuries we thought that we can solve all problems and it is just a matter of applying the right theory and the right engine. Things become politicized and it is not just that there is a problem with drug abuse, but also the other political party has the wrong attitude about it. It turns into a battle and the implication is that if the other side of the coin wouldn’t be resisting the reforms that we have in mind we would have solved this problem a long time ago. Every time a new Congress gets elected we apply all the new reforms that the last party was standing in the way of, and the problem never gets solved. It is very difficult to say as a society: ”All we can do is manage this problem! Not every problem can get solved!”

Some years ago Seattle built a hotel for chronic alcoholics where they gave them an allotment of booze every day. These people get transported to the emergency room in an ambulance 3 times a month and each one of these times costs $8000 and then they spend the night in the hospital which costs another $8000, while we could put them in a hotel and give them a liter of alcohol every day and that would just cost us $2000 a month and they would be happy.

The problem is that the activist classes don’t know what to do with that information because on one hand it is much more humane, but on the other hand it seems like management. No-one is suggesting that these people are going to get better. There is nothing pretty about it, and the question is: ”How far from animals are we really?” Merlin says that any solution that is uncomplicated is probably not true and not real. Everything in life is an engineering problem and there are at least three different vectors to everything. Ask yourself if you are solving the right problem at the right level for the right reasons!

These questions energize the whole political machine in America. If we call a problem solved, then the fundraising engine dries up and the outrage engine dries up. People’s lives are pitted against one another to keep this big machine of the chattering and legislating classes employed. What is amazing about the Congress is that they find a way to every year make a bunch of new laws. There are a lot of laws already, the question is so infrequently that we need a new law, and making a new law should be a last resort. There is a lot of work the Congress can do, and the big glamorous work is make a new law and we just keep making new laws while the old laws are like skin flakes carpeting the bed where the Congress lays.

We are not very reflective as a people and we don’t look back at our legacy or recent history and use the power of metaphor and ask ourselves if those attempts 25-50 years ago were successful and it what ways. Also: In what ways were the utter failures and why would we go down that road 100 more times? We are imperfect and unlikable little fucking pig-bugs, God-dammit! John is looking out the window right now at the freeway on-ramp: ”God damn you! Pig bugs!”

Tipping your hat at people (RL137)

Several episodes ago they talked about the importance of tipping your hat (find reference!!!). In the daily grind of the city John had neglected to tip his hat all the time, but he was just doing it when he was opening the door for somebody at a hotel. After they talked about it John went out into the world and started tipping his hat to people and it is amazing how much better it makes him feel! You get the smiles from people. At 2am he was walking on a deserted street, like when you are walking along in a neighborhood and all of a sudden there are trees all around and they have grown over the street and you can’t see any lights and you wonder what neighborhood you are in, like in a scary book.

There came a long a guy in a hoodie all over-shrouding his eyes and they were going to cross paths are the most brambly spooky little part of this spooky little 200 yards, he got his hands jammed in his pockets, and you could see from his body language that he was toughening up for this encounter. He was taller than John and he was a black guy and he was getting ready for this pass, and John felt getting himself getting ready. As they got closer within eye-contact of each other he made the choice to look at John, to experiment, to send his eye-beams out from under his hood, and John tipped his hat to him and they both stood up a little straighter and got big smiles across their face and both go on with their day.

This could have gone on 20 different levels, and on 18 of them they would have just passed in the night this encounter would have reinforced some pre-belief about how things are. Instead they both were goofy dorks, which is what we all want to be. Nobody was watching anyway! They got a little moment. Him looking at John was brave and John’s tip of the cap was a gesture in the arsenal of civilization that acknowledges and honors the gesture of looking. He probably thought to himself: ”John Roderick seems so much nicer than I would have expected!” or: ”Wait a minute! Isn’t that the guy on the music council?”

Kids having an innate sense of justice, doing good for the right reason (RL137)

Being a parent, watching a child navigate their first real human interactions… John’s daughter now has interactions at school that he recognizes as human interactions, and those are her first encounter of this thing that she will encounter thousands of times throughout her life, but now she is still wondering what is going on here and John wishes he could tell her, but the reality is that John is still in the same situation as she is and he still doesn’t know how to deal with it. There is so much stuff in life that is simply not fair, and every little kid has an innate sense of justice, it is why they call the goat ”Nature’s President” (reference to a clip from Mr. Show).

It is the core of civilization! That internal governing is the basis of the idea that we should all be philosopher kings who don’t need restrictive laws. There are versions of that on both sides of the political spectrum that presume the best in people and a lot more energy used to be devoted to that idea in our culture, where we told one another: ”This is not what we do! We are not not committing a crime because we are afraid of getting caught or because there is a video camera watching us, but we don’t do it because we do not commit crimes!”

It is the problem with the whole Bush/Cheney torture doctrine in American politics: We squandered that on a global political level! 60 years of all of our good deeds and measure of a moral authority, just went out the window. Every time we built a well or rebuilt something we blew up all went away when people saw how full of shit we were! The same is true on a microlevel too all around us every day: ”Don’t take your shoes off on an airplane, don’t wear your Fedora into a restaurant, don’t stand there with your earphones in and piss on my shoes!”, not because it is illegal, but if you don’t maintain high standards, then you are living in a world where if it is not illegal it is going to get done, and how would you like it if your neighbors felt that way, too?

We are descending culturally, we have lost a lot, and we have also gained a lot in the last 30 years. What greater kindness could there be in the world than to Keep moving and get out of the way? Slower traffic moves right, not because there is a sign, but because you are looking in your mirrors, conscious that there are other people on the road, and you are trying to get out of the way of somebody who has a different tempo. That is called curtesy!

We cannot perfectly understand ourselves, but the banner is still flown by so many people that we are completely makable by culture. Things like the differences between the genders: People claim that all the characteristic differences that people exhibit are inculturated in us, like male violence and female helplessness. They say that if we could perfectly engineer our culture and if we could eradicate these systems from our culture, we would be able to achieve the end-goal of perfect equality. But then you watch little kids and you realize that there is nothing engineered about it. So many of our human trades are innate in us!

A lot of those trades we attribute to gender and they aren’t even, they are just human trades across a wide spectrum that are impossible to codify or engineer either in or out. All you can do is create reciprocating cultures of shame and unhappiness and dissatisfaction by getting in there and monkeying and trying to intervene. Little kids hit each other and you can’t let them do it. You say: ”We can’t hit each other in here!” and they look at you like an idiot because of course you can hit each other, they just did it, they just showed you how to hit somebody and it worked great! But we can’t allow it because otherwise we would be in a state of perpetual violence with each other because we all feel that way, wishing we could hit other people, except we don’t want to be hit ourselves.

Lions and Orang Utans understand the concept of: ”Don’t just bite your friend because he is going to bite you!”, it is a pretty simple idea, but the human idea extends this to: ”We are all going to agree that it is not fair for the big kid to get his way more often than the little kid!” and that is a thing the animals don’t share with us, it is the beginning of society, and so much stuff follows from the fact that we are going to intervene in that situation. The little kid has traditionally developed strategies to deal with being swatted by the big kid, he has developed other skills, and those skills are part of how culture is built.

Merlin says that in some cases doing this kind of behavior instead of another kind of behavior is something a child will instantly understand, like if you say ”Please!” and ”Thank you!” you will make people happy and get away with stuff, but the fact that your parents can watch TV after your bed time and can use their iPad whenever they want while you can’t seems completely unfair from your point of view. It is really hypocritical on the face of it, and there are times when the thing that seems really natural is actually the opposite of what you are supposed to do and you just need to memorize that.

John’s instinct is to extrapolate this experience to adults because 99% of adult interactions are kid-interactions that are just extrapolated to a place where you have the arrogance to think that just because you have been alive for 25 more years you understand things any better. John also believes that the big kid shouldn’t be able to hit the little kid, it is an evolution. That rule is true in America, Denmark, Germany, and other certain places in the world, but it is not necessarily true in Russia, Ukraine (John said The Ukraine again), or Serbia now, let alone places that John hasn’t been but has suspicions about.

It is not a natural law at all, it is a thought technology, and 100 years ago we still recognized it as such in America and we were proud of having invented this idea. Part of our legacy of Western Europe was that we had honor, you didn’t hurt the little guy, and women and children first off the boat. We were justifiably proud of that we had invented these concepts and there is nothing natural about them. If you let human beings go even a little bit, even in modern cultures, you see that those rules are pretty far down the road. The big man still is in charge in most of the world. We all share the same Internet, but that doesn’t change the fact that you walk into a village somewhere and you see that the big guy is in charge and whacks the little guy.

By making those cultural advances we have expanded the idea of fairness, but we also stopped recognizing that those are thought technologies and started talking about them as though they were natural rights. If you start making policy and live your own life according to the expanded idea of natural rights, it causes a tremendous amount of confusion and outrage because you are standing there, saying: ”How dare you!” because you believe that the intrinsic level of justice is a lot higher than it is, and you are not giving credit to all the work that went into establishing that Bollwerk against a Hobbesian world.

All that work is our legacy! Culturally we spend a lot of effort to tear down the Western European colonial idea that civilization came from the English courts, but in stripping away all of that and deciding to incorporate the traditions of every culture and by not wanting to live in this dominant mode anymore, we forget that some of those traditions of chivalry and English law that were novel and only occurred in one place are now widely adopted and are ultimately an artificial overlay that if we want them we need to protect, which begins with understanding that it is like air conditioning: We invented it, it demonstrably makes life better, but if we don’t maintain it it will stop working again, and then it doesn’t do any good to sit in a hot room and scream, but you have to get up and fix it, and that is true of a system of justice, too!

John not understanding Harry Nilsson, Music documentaries, Randy Newman (RL137)

John does not understand Harry Nilsson. He obviously loves his voice and his hits, but everybody talks about his miraculous songwriting that seems to John he is just lyrically and melodically meandering down a path, singing some thoughts with a sing-song melody and at the end of the song you think: ”Sure! I like that! That was good!”, but John does not have the feeling that he is at the dawn of a certain kind of Pop that didn’t exist before.

Merlin thinks that part of it is the rise of the documentary that will almost certainly feature Chuck Klosterman, Thurston Moore and Flea as well as Dave Grohl because in the days after 9/11 a law has quietly been passed that they have to be in every music documentary. Last night Merlin was watching the documentary on Nas and the making of Illmatic (probably called Nas Time Is Illmatic), which he has listened to 2-3 times, mostly because of Jay Z and their feud. Merlin can’t rap it the way he could rap a Public Enemy record, but it was really well done and beautifully made! If John had known he had the option to let Merlin rap him Public Enemy records he would have asked for it a lot sooner. Merlin starts rapping Fight the Power by Public Enemy.

There are heavily lauded recent documentaries that are good like the Twenty Feet from Stardom about background singers, there is the one on Muscle Shoals, or about Daniel Johnston (The Devil and Daniel Johnston). There are a lot of high-profile non-Netflix created documentaries that aren’t about weed or food. Even if you don’t know anything about that person, once somebody makes a well-made documentary about you, you can’t help buy disappear into that artist even if you never heard them before.

John understands the resurgence because people are looking back in time and doing a Northern Soul thing, except with our own culture and wondering what the great songwriters were that we never heard of, but in 1970 Randy Newman and Brian Wilson, they all love Nilsson. Merlin thinks of him as a Nick Drake or to a certain extend Jimmy Webb, characters that were very unusual for their time. Nick Drake has two records, he had one sound, that was all he needed to do! He perfected a sound and then he could get on the boat and go across the water. With Nilsson every song is different and it is not clear what the connection is. He didn’t invent a sound, he just has that great voice.

Merlin asks what John thinks of John Deck (?) or Scott Walker, there is a documentary on him that you need to see (called Scott Walker: 30 Century Man), he has a lot of fucking balls in the air. Merlin explains his career as shown in the documentary in short terms. John gets the feeling he needs to watch some more music documentaries. Merlin thinks they should make this music month and John agrees. As John is thinking about starting to rejoin the songwriting game and wondering what his place in it is and what he has to contribute to the songwriting pile, and he is watching these guys and gals who do it successfully and find their own way through.

John doesn’t understand Joni Mitchell either, but he definitely understands that without her there would be no Sheryl Crow without Sheryl Crow where would we be? Randy Newman gets up every morning and writes a song! He has a cup of coffee and a bagel and he goes down to the studio and writes songs until it is quitting time. Merlin imitates Randy Newman’s voice: ”Went to bed late, now I am feeling kind of foul. I am going to get up and move my bowels!” and then the whistle goes off (There is an actual train whistle in the audio) and then he meets the sheep dog at the punch-out machine: ”Hey Frank! Hey George!” - ”Hey Randy!”