This week, Merlin and John talk about:

The Problem: Left means wall, referring to people who grew up in wide-open countries not having a sense of left and right and getting out of the way, in contrast to the Czech Republic when the wall was still up where left meant something.

The show title refers to feeling you are at the lowest point, the nadir, but not remembering it when you are older, making it the nadir for now.

This is a recent unreleased episode, recorded on November 24, 2014, making it more like an episode 131a.

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 Please do not quote these texts directly without applying your own editing first!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 feeling sick again from the same sickness (RL140)

Merlin is tired. John is a little late because he had trouble getting his kid somewhere, but it is just normal human adulthood stuff. It takes longer all the time, you wake up in the morning and go: ”This is it, the nadir!” When you are young you think: ”It is one of these days, but it is all going to make sense eventually!”, but when you are old you don’t remember. It is the nadir for now. John is in his 40s and he is right in the middle of it and it is not going to get any different.

Merlin has been enjoying kid stuff a lot lately. It is a lot of grind. The basis for most male mid life crisis might come out of a perceived lack of gratitude. Not that he actually deserves it, but he notices himself thinking about it in his lower moments. For John a lot has to do with getting sick all the time, he got a sick on top of a sick and he is coughing heavily. It is the same sickness as a week ago and he got super-sick the exact same way, which is completely unacceptable! ”What the what?”

John continues to cough heavily and Merlin pities him and says he might have Mesothelioma, a thing he learned about on daytime TV. John has been exposed to so many bad ideas and they are making him sick. Merlin lives in an old house and his family keeps getting sick and it makes him wonder if there is something that is killing them in their house.

20 years ago when they moved in that was the last thing the world ever would have thought about. Merlin doesn’t think he has sick house syndrome because when he gets out of the house and walks around like a fucking gentleman and doesn’t lay there listening to podcasts for literally 8 hours he has a slightly better mood and breathes better. He doesn’t know why he keeps getting colds, he might live in a sick house with asbestos in their tubes after all.

The Meaning of Hitler (RL140)

John does not have a lot of gratitude for any God who would make the holocaust and make him sick twice in a row. He just read the book The Meaning of Hitler (by Raimund Pretze aka Sebastian Haffner) again. John got it from a German listener, it was originally published in German and a huge bestseller when it came out in 1979. It contains a lot of insight, explaining a lot about the psychology of Germany at the time and Hitler’s appeal, and in the second half it makes you realize that it was so much worse than you thought, even after a lifetime of studying him.

When John started talking about the book Merlin first thought of the book Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of His Evil (by Ron Rosenbaum) and had heard the author on NPR recently (probably on episode 88 of The Gist). It is a widely misunderstood book that has Hitler as a baby on the cover.

John has been thinking about Hitler and got really bummed by the tail-end of it. You would think reading a book about Hitler for the second time would make John walk out of his house with a spring in his step, nearly goose-stepping. John doesn’t usually read books multiple times, but this one you could read every few years. John would like to write books about things that everybody thinks they already know everything about, like a turns out book, and this is one of these books. Everybody thinks they already know everything there is to know about this story, and the author shows you why things are a certain way.

He show why for example Hitler’s evil that we all gloss over and move on as though we all agree, but let’s talk about what that means. John loves that stuff and would like to have the same kind of thought proficiency. If you just lump it on the relatively easy to understand pile called ”evil” you miss out how profoundly bad news it was. What the fuck does ”evil” even mean?

The job Merlin had for 5 years in the 1990s was about litigation and environmental assessments, involving lots of stuff like chemicals. If a giant company got sued by somebody and there was any chance in the world that this person had actually and honestly been injured, they would just write them a cheque. Eventually the companies couldn’t afford to do this forever, so we got the most cynical asinine ambulance-chasing cases and had to do a pigs and bunnies (idiom see RL72) puppet show of science to show how unlikely it was that what the customer claimed had happened could actually harm them. Merlin became very cynical about all that stuff. (Merlin forgot to make his point here)

Adding inertial relativity to Keep Moving and Get Out of the Way (RL140)

John wants to add an addenda to Keep Moving and Get Out of the Way. In its basic form it is a complete and holy edict that belongs carved into Lincoln’s nose on Mount Rushmore. The important thing is that it is not ”or”, but ”and” and you have to constantly do both. Merlin thinks that in 4th grade instead of State History, back in Ohio (the buckeye state) they made papier-mâché Indian Mounds, there should be a module on Keep Moving and Get Out of the Way at every level in primary education and they should continue teaching it to the point that you should have to recite it at the DMV.

John realized that there need to be a bill of rights or some articles that go along with it. We need to introduce the concept of positional relativity or inertial relativity, meaning that when you are in a crowd of people or on the highway moving, and you are all moving the same direction more or less, you might think that you are keeping moving and you are not in anybody’s way because you are moving together in the same direction, fulfilling the tenets, thinking you are fine and you can go back to sleep or look at your phone, but the reality is that you need to keep moving also relative to the other people who are moving around you, and be either passing or being passed.

If you are not being passed by other people, you should be passing other people. Do not ever allow yourself to become part of a block movement where everyone is moving at the same pace because that is the death of innovation. You are also not leaving space for someone who needs to go super-fast.

Moving sidewalks at the airport

Last week Merlin had to fly on United. John is still mad at them, which has really paid off for him, it keeps him warm all winter. The moving sidewalk in the airport portraits so much of how little America understands about getting anywhere. It is very narrow and therefore a heightened state where you must practice the ninja levels of keep moving and get out of the way. Some people don’t travel a lot and don’t know about moving to the right, which is a thing in San Francisco on the escalator. You can tell who is from out of town from Stockton because there is no right or left in Stockton, it is all just a flat plane.

Different behavior in Europe, Czech Republic

John was chatting with a woman from the Czech Republic last night and she asked him if he had ever been to The Ukraine which he hasn’t. Slovakia is all mountains and the thing about Ukraine or Russia is that you get out of the mountains of Slovakia or you get halfway through Poland and it is just a flat pan all the way to the Ural mountains, there is not another bump, the populated part of Russia is completely flat as a pancake, and she said that the people in those places don’t have any geographical features and they don’t feel hemmed in by geography. There is also no ocean there, there is no left and right, like Stockton, California: There is eternity in every direction and why would you move to the left and right for any reason?

She is from the Czech Republic which is all hills and dales. She was commenting on her fellow Eastern Block Slavic peoples. The Czech Republic is the California of Central Europe. If you were raised in the Czech Republic when the wall was there, left meant wall. She was trying to explain the mentality of the Ukrainians and Russians and it sounded exactly like how John would explain the mentality of someone from Nebraska or Montana or North Dakota. There is no left or right, it is all just open.

If you are in town for a week you will eventually get that you are supposed to move to the right like it says on the fucking sign, but at an airport it doesn’t happen, and it is the same reason the TSA line is so unbearable. It is literally like hell because it is the same thing over and over. Merlin accidentally tried to put water through it the other day, and he is a pro. The dangerous one is the pair of two meaty big beefy guys who are walking fast-ish down the middle of the moving sidewalk at a slightly above average pace because they think they have nailed it, they are both keeping moving and getting out of the way.

Merlin is on his way to somewhere and he needs to get somewhere, but he also wants to teach, he doesn’t want to be a dick about it, but no matter how fast you are going there is always somebody else who needs to go faster. You always got to make room for someone who is like a bullet going through there, and the bullet makes room for the next bullet. If we could all get that inertial relativity, so many things would be so much easier to deal with.

The left lane is the passing lane

In Europe they understand this concept much better. During the Carter administration they put up signs saying: ”Slower traffic move right!”, trying to teach us, and it was even one of the questions in John’s driver’s license exam. There was a time when the left-most line was literally called the passing lane, not the fast lane. This is the I5-problem. Around Sacramento you will encounter people who not only don’t know left from right, but they just came from a church in a mobile home and they believe they are doing God’s work by keeping the traffic tempo down.

In Europe you don’t only see it on the highways, but in public spaces, too: People understand to get out of the way of the bullet, and the bullet could be Hitler at any time and you do want to get out of the way of the bullet.

In Manhattan the rule is that if the nose of your car is one micrometer in front of the nose of the car next to you, then you have positional authority and you can do whatever you want and the other guy has to watch out. All of Manhattan traffic is looking forward, which is very different from somebody who is used to the on-ramp/off-ramp by the Walmart where we all wait politely to do the zipper thing. There is no merge-concept in New York. You just drive and you are looking forward and you assume that the people who are not in your peripheral vision are watching you because you are in front of them, and if you turn right then they get out of your way. It is genius! No-one ever hits their brakes, but you are all moving in symbiosis.

All central cities have their own tempo. You would think that Detroit got a Mid-Westy tempo, but because the car culture is so strong, going into Detroit feels like lining up to make a run at the Death Star. You strap in and here we go! It is the same in Boston, which has the additional advantage of not having any street signs.

Driving on the Autobahn in Europe, if you get over into the passing lane and you are going 190 km/h and you think to yourself you are hot shit and you think you can relax for a second, there will be a 500-class Mercedes in your rear-view mirror that was going 220 km/h and he is now metallurgically grafted to your rear bumper, flashing his brights in such an angry way because the flashing on a German car is just like: ”Achtung! Mach schnell! Mach schnell!”, it is designed to communicate anger. Of course that happens right at a place where there is a stack of trucks in the right-hand lane and there is no way for you to get out of the left lane and you feel like such a boob and you have become The Problem.

Merlin dating a girl from Passau

One time in 1999 Merlin dated a Bavarian gal from Passau, which is right at the border to the Czech Republic where there are hills and dales and she was more Czech than German in a lot of ways. Her childhood was super East German, her father was a surgeon and he got whatever the East German government felt like paying him for stuff. She was right on the line and Passau might have been in stripes for all Merlin knows. It has a cool-ass coat of arms with a griffin sticking his tongue out. They don’t have enough griffins in America. The girl Merlin was dating played basketball and was almost 6’ tall, it was a real outlier for him and was astonishing.

All these edicts are flexible, can have amendments to them, and grow with the times. There should not be Roderick on the Line originalists who are trying to imagine what the founders intended, but you also don’t want a lot of activism, people who are trying to legislate from the bench, but you do want the edicts to be improved upon by future generations because they have to adapt to a future time when everybody is going to be on hoverboards or in pneumatic tubes. Somebody from Stockton or from Kiev is not going to know how to choose the right tube because the last thing they saw that resembled a pneumatic tube was some cow chute.

Passau is a Bavarian town and no portion of Bavaria was in Eastern Europe, so her resemblance to a Czech or Eastern person was Merlin interpreting a universal Germanic severity. She had very blonde hair! There are a lot of Germans, and they are different from each other, which is the confusing part. Germany is not that big, you could put all of Germany in California, it has 80.6 million people. After the USA it is the second most popular migration destination in the world. They got a mythical creature on their coat of arms that is pretty handsome and a lot of them don’t think it is mythical.

Could Prague become the capital of Europe? (RL140)

For a while in the 1990s it was very fashionable for all the young people in the Czech Republic to learn English because that seems like the way we were going, but now everyone is learning German again for practical purposes. The Germans have basically anschlussed the Sudetenland again, but this time just with tourist caravans. John remembers being in Prague at a time when it felt a bit like an American colony because of the energy the young people had for the future.

If it hadn’t been for the wall Prague would probably have evolved to be the capital of Europe and it may one day. It had the disadvantage of for a long time being an Austrian colony, a second city in an Empire behind Vienna. Then there was a brief period between the wars where it seemed that there was a possibility for them, but then they were absorbed by the Nazis and then they became part of the Warsaw Pact, but they never had their moment in modern times. Prague itself and the Czech people are the best of Central Europe, but now it is has turned into a tourist shithole. It is a very feminine city, but in both ways because it is dangerous and it has claws.

They talk a bit about the Bundeswappen, the Weimar Eagle which the Federal Republic of Germany adapted as its symbol in 1950. Over time it has become less terrifying and now it looks more like an angry bird from the video game. The East German coat of arms always had a hammer and a compass because they were building a worker’s utopia. The eagle seemed pretty bad-ass and you don’t have to go back too far to see the Nazi eagle which does not make you feel warm and fuzzy. All the way back it looks like a freaking Death Buzzard, not like an eagle. They continue talking about the different iterations of the eagle.

There is a nascent tree worship going on in that country and in all of Central Europe. They are only Christian on the surface and beneath that they are still sacrificing lambs to the nature Gods. Germans love to camp, they love short pants, they like hiking up to the parking lot and hiking down to the parking lot on the other side, not to reveal too much about John’s book. They like to hike East, but they also hike West if they have to because they really want some Lebensraum. Merlin changes the topic abruptly at this point.

John being on a low-carb diet (RL140)

See story in RL79 from August of 2013!

Ever since John’s experiment in going sugar-free a year ago there has been terrible backsliding. When he first had sugar after having been sugar-free for a long time, when he even had a little bit of sugar it would immediately feel like poison, his mind would get crazy, and it also tastes weird. One bite of confection gives you everything that is good about it and everything that follows is just garbage. Merlin watched Henry V and ate a pint of ice cream

John’s gateway drug was gluten-free granola, which doesn’t seem possible, non-fat Greek yoghurt, and a 15-pound bag of blackberries, raspberries, blueberries, and strawberries all frozen and mixed together. If everyone in California has to die to keep those fruit factories producing cheap berries, that would be a trade-off John would be willing to consider.

Berries are one of the few things that have not gotten awful yet like tomatoes or peaches. We only have one kind of banana now! The other day John’s daughter had half a banana and she was applying it to her lips like lipstick, which was adorable, and she looked at John as if it couldn’t be more obvious what she was doing. A tasteless starchy modern banana does feel more like lip balm and less like food.

Los Angeles is going to end up devolving into water riots and terrible emigration with armies of thirsty people marching North in tattered clothes. It needs to be more like Dune or Mad Max, that is what we need right now! Fence off those berry fields, put guard towers around them, and let those LA people march to the see, but keep those berries coming.

John started making gluten-free granola with non-fat Greek yoghurt and frozen berries and he felt very virtuous because he was doing all the right things, but in reality he was making a giant parfait sundae. Once he had given himself a pass he did not impose any size restrictions on it and he was making a popcorn bowl of this stuff, it was incredible. It was like the secretary at the stock brokerage where he worked back when he was still drinking who he overheard one day saying to her desk partner: ”Have you ever tried these fat-free brownies?” - ”No!” - ”They are incredibly! I ate a whole pan of them! They are fat-free!”

Those parfaits were John’s gateway and pretty soon he realized that if he is going to be eating 4000 calories of non-fat yoghurt he might as well just eat Ben & Jerries. That is why he is sick, because he still has a distant memory of knowing how poison sugar is and now it is in his body again to the degree that he can’t sense it when he puts it in, and he has a baseline of sugar that makes him want more sugar, even if he is not conscious of it. Merlin also didn’t set out to eat all that ice cream yesterday, but all of a sudden it was gone while he was watching Henry V about Agincourt, and it the gentled his condition.

The 30-years war (RL140)

There was a time when John felt like the 30-years war was the key to understanding everything that happened subsequently in Europe. The problem is that there is no way to keep it in your mind, no central figure, no central battle, no central event, but it is an all-against-all chaos war that lasted for 30 years and the end-result was mostly that everyone was tired and all of the good things had been burned, it was the first total war where Armies would go through a town and when they came out the other side there would be nothing left.

John read several books about it and he had a very clear picture of Charles V and all these people who were the source material for all the stuff that came after, you couldn’t look at the American Revolution, Napoleon, or the French Revolution or anything that came later without understanding this cauldron of the 30-years war, but now half a dozen years after he read that book John couldn’t tell you anything about it, not just because he is old and his brain is a sieve, but even as he was reading books about it he noticed that the person writing this book did not understand the scope of what they are talking about.

There are too many factors going in and there were too many factors coming out the other side. King Gustav of Sweden is involved all of a sudden? Where did they come from? Today if anything happened between any two countries we would know about it the second it happened and everybody on the entire planet would have a theory about it. Back then it would be weeks before you heard about something. It wasn’t even like the 1940s where you could show a newsreel about Pearl Harbor and explain what we were fighting for, but it must have been much more localized.

There were surely a lot of events in the 30-years war where no witnesses survived from the other side of the story and you got only one side of the story. John often weeps for the lost human… we make so much progress and then we have a sweeping war and everything is ruined, the same way you weep for the Library of Alexandria. If only we had all those books there might not have been dark ages, but the more you study the more you realize it is just all construction paper and glue, we are all just Soylent Green, lining up to go into the grinders that are under every Taco Bell. Every third person who goes into a Taco Bell doesn’t come out, there is a reason all those birds hang out outside.

Merlin going on Daddy Daughter morning (RL140)

Merlin walked by the Taco Bell yesterday morning on the way to Daddy Daughter Dim Sum, and the guy who gets the free chicken at KFC was in there at 10:30am eating chicken. Merlin didn’t take a photo because he respects his dignity, but it is a real thing! She can put some Dim Sum away, although she is no John Roderick, but she can put a hurting on some Dim Sum, she eats as much as Merlin does, and just talking about it makes John sad that he is not sitting at Merlin’s kitchen table right now, eating four big hungry men’s portions of Dim Sum, slapping people’s hands as they are reaching for one little more thing.

The Dim Sum owner really loves Merlin’s daughter and is always asking about her and whenever they go there together he slashes the price in half, so they got 16 pieces of Dim Sum for $6 and went home and ate it. Then they went Downtown and had people literally stand in front of them on the escalator.

There are now for the first time T-shirts available.

Going to see a Judas Priest concert again (RL140)

John had a bit of a reality check a couple of days ago because he went to see Judas Priest in concert. The only one that was not in the band anymore was K. K. Downing, and the original drummer has been gone for 20 years, but there was Glenn Tipton on guitar and Rob Halford, the two stars of the band. They got a young guy in K. K. Downing’s position who is a great guitar player and fun to watch and John accepted him as a member of Judas Priest. John was a big fan of them all the way back to his youth, but he only ever got to see them twice, both times in the last 5-6 years.

The first time John saw Glen Tipton he was walking around the stage with a cane that had a skull as a head, and now he moves slowly and at the end of every song he disappears behind a curtain and gets a Vitamin B-12 shot and some cortisone in the knees and then comes back out. He is 67 years old, and Rob Halford is 63.

Even as a massive fan and even allowing for the fact that it was great, it was actually terrible. Metal is not a thing that you can inhabit at 67. If you see Pink Floyd, and those guys are 70, Dave Gilmour is still exactly as entertaining as he ever was, which is to say that he stands there and stares at his shoes while he plays fantastically. They never ran over and climbed up on the speaker stacks and said: ”Do you want to fuck?”, but they were all standing there and the light-show was doing the work. They can play until they are 95 and it will still be an amazing live show.

But in Metal you want to see some movement from the guitar player because each riff is an ax chop, the musical equivalent of swinging a battle ax at a mythical dwarf. Your guitar is a weapon, it is literally an ax, and you should be wielding it, but these guys are in their 60s and they have been playing this music for 40 years and you don’t get the sense anymore that they were connecting the dots. They were playing their music, but it felt like they were thinking about their house in Ibiza and how expensive it was to keep the swimming pool heated.

The concert was at the Tacoma Dome (see setlist here) and the Comedy Metal band Steel Panther opened, but looking around there were 10.000 people there and not a single one of them was concerned with ethics in gaming journalism. There was not a single person who cared about really any of the social evolution that seems to be gaining a lot of momentum. The average age was probably 40 and there were young people, too, who had just adopted whole-cloth the attitude and look of the 1980s.

It is still an active culture, drawing from the rural counties, and the unabashedness was really astonishing, of girls getting up on stage and flashing the audience and feeling like this is was the best day of their life, being on stage with Steele Panther and they wanted her to show her boobs and this was her fucking moment. Wow! It used to be a thing and it used to feel like the dominant culture, although it wasn’t because the dominant culture in Pop music was always Country and Western, we just didn’t know it because we were on one side of the Berlin Wall.

Now it is still a viable culture and John was astonished by it because he is now on the Internet and he is a member of Twitter and the world of people who are getting their list of concerns and their social cues from people who engage with one another on the Internet, and it starts to feel like that is reality and the dominant culture, but in fact it is just one of 20.000 simultaneous cultures and John was surprised of what an eye-opener it was.

John says he knows they are over an hour and he knows that Merlin is worried that John will start talking about social justice and derail this podcast and put it into the deep file. Merlin claims he is not worried.

There was all that astonishment when Bill Cosby was playing in Florida 5 days after all this stuff came out, and he was greeted to rapturous applause from a sold-out crowd and everybody on the Internet wondered how this was even possible because they had been talking about this for 5 days, and for 16 hours a day John has been agreeing with every single person in the universe that Bill Cosby needs to be sent to jail, and now he was getting a report on Buzzfeed that 1000 people went to his show and applauded and said: ”We love you, Bill Cosby!”

He made no reference to it and no-one stood up in the audience and drew Soy Bomb on their chest and said: ”Stop this madness!” or whatever! Imagine the balls it takes to just go out and do that, just be like: ”Nah, it won’t come up!”, and it actually worked. One person had a sign that said: ”Rape is not a joke!” and apart from that everybody else was pretty into it. Merlin is struggling because this is so awful and he can’t stop thinking about how much he loved Bill Cosby as a kid, he is struggling to square this information, but those people are fine, like: ”Hey, it is Dr. Huxtable! There is two sides to every story!”

Going to this Judas Priest concert was the same thing: John spent 16 hours a day living in a world where we are talking about gender politics and social politics as a fait accompli. We may not all agree with each other every time about everything, but we kind of agree on the basic rules of the game, and then there are 25 ladies who deliberately take their top off and show their boobs while a band called Steele Panther plays and think this is fucking amazing.

It felt like going to Thanksgiving dinner with your family and everybody wants to talk about Mitt Romney or something. There is a whole other universe happening. If that happened to John he would like his fellow Internet people feel the smug certainty that they were dinosaurs and: ”Fuck them!” and he would post ironic Instagram photos of his old relatives until he can get out of there, but to go to a Judas Priest concert and these people believe that they are the hardest core… They are older, but this is hardcore, it is the bleeding edge, they are in a league with Satan.

His range was shot, and there was quite a bit of help from the sound guy along the way with some reverb and long delay. There were maybe 5 moments in the concert where he had a signature piercing screams and John felt he was not only hearing additional reverb, but somebody might have been pushing a button on the Dr. Sample, adding in some prerecorded Halford to make those moments really blow, because there were lots of other moments where they didn’t do it and Rob was not making those other moments happen the same way.

He always has been a hell of a showman like old radio, old Hollywood, or like Bruce Dickinson (from Iron Maiden) and Klaus Meine (from Scorpions), he was working he crowd and he genuinely wants to know if you are ready to Rock’n’Roll. He still believes ”United, United, United we stand!” (from the song United), he believes that Metal is a community and like the Punk Rockers he believes that Metal saved his life.

Merlin ends the show as John wants to talk about what he thinks about Punk Rock.