This week, Merlin and John talk about:

• Being active at different times of day, second sleep, sleep hacking (Sleep)
• People trying to tell other people how to lead their life (Attitude and Opinion)
• Getting in hot water about contemporary culture (Attitude and Opinion)
• Making the decision to not compromise with the rest of the world (Attitude and Opinion)
• John being offered a training program at the stock brokerage (Employment History)
• John trying to reach those who are like him, telling them that they are not alone with their views (Podcasting)
• Expecting that part of your audience doesn’t like you, the index cards on stage at the SF Sketchfest (Shows and Events)
• Being comfortable on stage (Personality)
• John on USO tour in Africa, visiting Djibouti, publicly displayed gallows (Shows and Events)
• Death penalty (Attitude and Opinion)
• John being a guest on Back to Work, paywalled articles of the New York Times (Podcasting)
• Merlin getting a no-pledge feed for an NPR radio station that he listens to (Podcasting)

The Problem: Everything’s gonna be fine, referring to the assumption that as soon as you have made your big decision and went onto your path everything from there on out is going to be fine and in the movie about your life the credits roll.

The show title refers to the location of a party at the stock brokerage that offered John a stock broker training program.

As John drove into town he passed a lot of trucks that were busy facilitating commerce, there were people walking around, waving at each other, it feels super-real out there.

John and Merlin had a little visit recently.

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 Please do not quote these texts directly without applying your own editing first!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

Being active at different times of day, second sleep, sleep hacking (RL141)

John is still drinking coffee at 8pm, which is a bad policy, but between 8-11pm he can handle whatever you throw at him, that is his power-time of day. Nowadays he starts to taper off around 2am, but he used to taper off around 4am. 10am is not an optimal time, but John feels that he can’t say that. Today they are recording a little later than usual because Merlin had a call at 8:30am. There was absolutely a time when he could go up at 4-5am and be ready to go, but now he is trying to sleep more and 8:30am is not the power-stroke time for him.

John likes to sleep for sure, but this morning he realized that more than anything he likes to snuggle back in the covers after he should already be awake. It is the greatest feeling in the world and he will just burrow back down in there, not even really trying to go back to sleep, but just trying to avoid the shit-wave of the day, even if the day is going to be filled with great things. Merlin likes his bed more than ever and he wonders if he has some kind of depressive thing.

So many people think that sleep is a maladaptation because you loose a third of your day to it every single day of your life, and if you look at your life as a limited amount of time it can be frustrating that one third of it gets just burned on some baloney, but for those of us who feel they are a) going to live forever, or b) are going to be bio-engineered by UFOs to live forever, it feels like that third of your life that you are spending powering down is absolutely a necessity and some of the greatest times.

In the last 10 years Merlin has seen a lot of interest in sleep hacking, and people are saying that until the 1800s second sleep was a thing (see OM93). In a time before electricity you would go to bed when the sun went down and some time in the middle of the night you wake up refreshed and you have an interregnum between maybe 11pm-3am, you go out visit with your neighbors, you can have your sexual intercourse then, it is a hot time.

If John were truly living in a second sleep culture, then he would rule the second sleep hours, he would really be on fire during that time. You are probably not roaming around town, but you would be confined to your neighborhood, but that is when you really get to know your core people. John would not be visiting with Gary (the guy across the street living in his van) or talking to Patrick (his next-door neighbor who works in the sewage department), but he would be out firehosing Gary. Throughout his whole life precisely those hours were his roaming times when he was out screaming around, peering over fences, and learning about the world.

Merlin’s time in college and just after college were his peak doing-stuff years and he was always doing something and going somewhere. He would go two places in a day like it wasn’t anything! He was the Dread Pirate Roberts (people said that Merlin looks like him) and had things to accomplish. People would take a Disco Nap, which means lay down at 6-7pm, sleep for 1-3 hours, hopefully wake up refreshed, and then go out and tear the whole house down.

When John first went to Spain in the 1980s it completely shut down in the afternoon because everybody partied until 4am and then got up and opened their shops in the morning. Now they feel a lot of pressure from the rest of the European community to standardize their practices.

People trying to tell other people how to lead their life (RL141)

So many people are trying to find out the truth about how we should be living. Merlin read the Paleo book and he counted 10 chapters before they told you what you should buy at the grocery store because they had to walk you through all the ”science” about caves and fire and light and they really felt like they had to set this up, not unlike the Atkins Diet, which are two lifestyles that go into your sleep, exercise, what you eat and why, which is how our Paleolithic ancestors supposedly lived.

If you have never been without a certain kind of malady, you might not see it as a malady, but as a condition of life. If you never had great vision, you might think your vision is good enough, but then you experience glasses and you an see things now and it is amazing! Merlin is a sleep-obsessive and he often wonders how many people have never actually gotten the benefits of getting a decent amount of sleep and have just grown accustomed to being constantly shagged out.

There is nobody in the world who loves constructing a theory based on two books he read and an intro to anthropology class he took in the 1980s more than John. He loves that shit! He loves to walk in the forest, see a rock and say: ”You know, that rock probably <insert bullshit theory here>” On one hand, all those movement, the Paleo movement, the heritage chicken crowd, there are chickens in Portland that look like sheep dogs, bear oil,…

In a way John supports the premise, the idea that humans have been around only so long and we spent 99% of that time adapting to a certain kind of world, and then in recent memory we completely invented a whole new way of living and now we expect ourselves to live in this new way. But the problem is when somebody starts being proscriptive and prescriptive about what time to wake up in the morning and what combinations of foods to eat because that veers into pseudo-science.

They used a spectrograph in identify the contents of the stomach of the Austrian mummy that they found in a glacier, whose name is Ötzi (John doesn’t remember the name), and it contained 5 different kinds of millet and some shoe leather, and they go: ”Shit, we should be eating shoe leather!” The question is where the line is between Merlin and John advising people to think outside their box and the point where somebody offers them a book deal to put all of their ideas into a life system, at which point they would be obligated to talk about this stuff as though they really had a plan.

Everybody got their reasons for everything, and it is funny to Merlin how few people are content to just shrug and go: ”Meh, it is a thing I do, I like it! It is just a thing I am doing!” When Merlin gets more sleep and he tries to get 10.000 steps a day and he avoids eating massive amounts of bread and drinking huge beers, he doesn’t need a scientist to tell him that this makes him feel a little better and he doesn’t need a persuasive theory or a paper to prove it.

That other program that John has been on… they talked about it that the way we expose ourselves to light can have a big impact. Merlin likes the room to be really dark, and he tries to minimize the amount of bright blue light that he gets before bedtime because that is telling his brain to be awake. There is probably tons of science on that, but it works out well for him.

In this program they both have discussed some large quantity of the ins and outs of their lives so that it can no long be claimed that John is a secret from the world, but there are still a lot of things that he keeps quiet about because to even say them out loud is to suggest that you are advancing a theory when in fact John just likes to say ideas out loud and see what happens.

For example he discovered 7 years ago that he can’t have a TV, which is not a moral problem that he has with other people, although it ends up being one because the TV vs non-TV people are at such great odds with each other and the TV people are the majority and they are really defensive. Merlin says that you for example also never should post a screenshot of your iPhone home screen because you are going to hear from every single person in the world about what an idiot you are, but people who follow John enough to look at a picture of his home screen would realize that he was completely unreceptive to that talk.

The think that makes social media ”social” rather than just ”media” is that it is really about what other people have to say about you, and any utterance becomes grist for any weird axe to grind and it immediately becomes a toxic game of telephone where all of a sudden you are being a counter-revolutionary because you have two calendar apps.

Often enough people who haven’t read the thing you wrote but only read the comments that other people had on it are making assessments on what you said and what you mean and who you are. John gets that a lot on Twitter: People who don’t follow him and have obviously not read the thing that other people are yelling at him about, and they just pile on, and they are always the amplifiers.

Merlin’s friend Stephen Frank is a developer who got frustrated with the comments on his pretty popular blog, so he added a test where you have to correctly identify which two of the following five sentences appeared in his article in order to post a comment. That should be a blanket test on the Internet!

Getting in hot water about contemporary culture (RL141)

John gets in a lot of hot water about our contemporary culture. He obviously loves it and is participating in it, but he has thresholds and is only willing to go so far, and sometimes it feels like he is secretly practicing a Quaker religion or a sect of Quakerdom, and to say even the most mundane thing about he actually lives is to be judging and criticizing the way everyone else agrees is the proper way to live.

John once wrote an article about not being a fan, and the number of replies he got where the gist of the reply was: ”You are an un-fun person, you don’t know how to have fun, and I feel sorry for you for not being able to have fun!” was one of the top five thematic comments that came up a lot of times.

John wrote an article one time about how people think that Rock musicians get laid all the time and are sex feen, but in fact here is what an actual day looks like for a Rock musician, and there is not really a lot of time to do drugs and have intercourse. At 2am you are schlepping your gear out to a cold van and thinking about where the Motel is you are going to stay. He got a lot of great replies from other Rock musicians, saying: ”Thank you, my God, thank you for saying what we all know but no-one believes!”, but he also got a ton of replies from people who said: ”You just obviously don’t know how to close the deal!”

When you say something like: ”Here are my 10 favorite songs of the year, and I am full of joy!”, most of your comments will begin with: ”You forgot…” - ”No, I didn’t forget it, I didn’t put it on there because it is my list! These are 10 things I like, is that problematic?” When people ask him things like: ”Why didn’t you use this particular application?” or ”Why didn’t you become a video blogger?”, his standard-response is: ”I don’t know! Why am I not a potted fern?”

A big part of the enthusiasm John has for interacting with the culture comes out of deep memory of feeling outside and wrong and out of step with his peers for many years. John has never found his place, and that is not typical of people. They play team sports and go on the Internet to talk about their favorite TV shows with each other.

When John bought his Suburban (see RL130) he was on the Chevy truck blogs, trying to figure out what kind of differential oil he wanted to use, and the guys who are posting 40 times a day on there about what kind of torque wrench you want to use have found their duck, they have a tremendous knowledge of how to rebuild the undercarriage of a vintage truck and they are there all day and have all the time in the world to talk about this stuff.

Making the decision to not compromise with the rest of the world (RL141)

There were a lot of times in the course of John’s life where he was at a crossroads and it was very clear to him that he could go the wrong way and be a permanent drug addict, a dead person, or a bitter guy who had made just a few small compromises, but that could have resulted in him doing something that he didn’t want to do the rest of his life and he is now bound by commitments and chains that prohibit him from doing anything to change his life except make an incredibly dramatic gesture.

John’s grandfather made multiple incredibly dramatic gestures to the effect of going out for a pack of cigarettes and not coming back, and every time he opens the newspaper and there is a story about someone who committed a murder suicide and killed their 4 kids and their wife, they obviously didn’t see that there was some other thing they could have done.

There were so many times along the way where John was out of step with the world and the choice eventually was to either say that the world is right and he has to die a little and be part of the world, or to say every time, as exhausting as it is, as much as this feels like punishment, go up and follow his own instinct against the world.

To make even the initial compromise to allow yourself be yourself and be in the world is to just go with the world, to decide the world is right, and somewhere within the world you can carve out some little cubby for yourself, and if you are made a certain way you can’t. You have to just say: ”No, in this situation I am not going to presume that I am right and the world is wrong, but just presume that the world is on a parallel track and I have to honor my instincts because I did work hard to train myself and educate myself and now it is telling me to go this way and I have to honor that!”

John does consider that a success because he is here now, despite all the frustration and the bitterness he has he can still reflect and imagine what it would have been like if at 32 years old he had said: ”Well, I have to give up playing Rock music because it is not working out!”, or: ”I should marry this girl!”, or: ”I am given an opportunity to train to be a stock broker, and this is an opportunity that I would be a fool to turn down!” The opportunity to join the military when you are young: ”Do you have money for college? Do you want to be a success in life or do you want to be some flop?” For a lot of people that is very seductive!

John being offered a training program at the stock brokerage (RL141)

John’s stock broker training program: He was working as a clerk in a stock brokerage firm called Piper Jaffray, the place where they kept all the documents on the best floor (see RL105), and they kept giving him more and more responsibility until pretty soon he was taking $14 million worth of bearer bonds down to the bank and he had relationships with all these people, like the people at the financial desk at the bank and with some of their clients.

John was drinking and on drugs and very much living in that world in the sense of: ”I am just working on my novel, man! I am doing this work, but I am just watching you people who actually work here!” John was 25 years old and had all the arrogance of a 25-year old, like: ”You work at an office, I come to an office to gather material!” But then they told him that he was great at this and they asked him if he had ever considered being a broker. John had considered doing every job and because he was going to live forever of course he was going to be a stock broker at some point.

They said that they did have a stock broker training program and that John did have a leg up and could walk right into this, which seemed like an exciting turn of events. As part of the enticement they invited him to a little party on Al’s yacht the upcoming weekend, Al being one of the older established brokers, and John dressed for success and went down to Al’s yacht and walked down the pier, and it was a big boat, but not really a yacht. You don’t get to decide if your boat is a yacht, but you have to let other people call it that.

John was talking to these guys at this party and there was a lot of gel in their hair, even the older ones, and he realized that being a broker is a job in sales, it involves a lot of cold calling, and it involves telling people that they really need this financial instrument, otherwise they are not going to be able to provide for their kids, and you need to say that whether you believe it or not. This was not the place for John! He went immediately over to the bar, drank 14 Gin & Tonics and fell asleep on the deck of the boat in his suit in such a way that everybody on the boat had to step over him, and he pretty much intentionally torpedoed his broker training.

On the way to the boat and in the first hour on the boat he felt a lot of pressure to not make the wrong decision because this could make his life and he could be a very different guy, you could make a lot of money and be a member of the right clubs. Was this it? Was this the thing he wanted? Was this the moment when he arrived and in the TV movie about his life the credits roll because the decision-making portion of your life is over and you are just doing the thing. You met the girl, you got married, you got the good job at her father’s company, and the credits literally roll because nobody cares about the next 50 years of your life. Everything is going to be find and it is happily ever after.

John trying to reach those who are like him, telling them that they are not alone with their views (RL141)

John continues to have to make those kind of choices all the time. He is in a place right now where he is asked by people if he wanted to do this interesting thing where money might rain down from the sky, all it involves is that he will change everything that he is doing and redirect all of his energy in this other direction. They promise him that there are machines in their office with Skittles and he would have one of the top 4-5 biggest desks. It is wild, particularly given that when he looks at his end-of-year statements every year and eked by again by the hair of his chin.

When John is writing articles, talking on this podcast, or prescribing to the world, he is not writing to dedicated television watchers, telling them that they are bad for watching television, he doesn’t have any interest in doing that and any interest in them at all, they are doing their thing and they are on a parallel track and they are happy friends, but with everything he says or writes he is trying to reach the people that were or are like him, and he is trying to tell them that there is someone out there who is also not a fan of stuff, so don’t feel like not being a fan of stuff makes you an alien!

There is somebody who doesn’t like Punk Rockers, and don’t feel like you are a dummy for not liking them. It is not a question of: If you don’t like Punk, then you might as well be a Christian Republican living in Oklahoma who sucks and is part of the problem. It is possible to be cool and Rock’n’Roll as John is, and also call ”Bullshit!” on some of the received wisdom of those cultures. John can be an active enthusiastic participant in a thing although some of the fundamental premises of it don’t reflect his views and he doesn’t feel it, although he intellectually gets it.

So many of the things that we as American culture talk about as being the things that feel the best don’t always feel natural to John, and he is reaching out over and over to those people because they matter to him, the people who are trying to make their way in this world feeling outside, but not so outside that they are going to join the church of Satan, just enough outside that they wonder every day if they compromise today and go with the flow, or if they should dig their heels in a little bit on this and say: ”No!” to this little thing.

John wants to support those people because those may be the ones that have something extra special and we will benefit from them being a little bolder. When John was coming up he never felt he had very many role models because the role models are always like John Doe or Thurston Moore, a smart, handsome, and good guy who everybody agrees on. John likes them and thinks they are good guys, they were doing it differently and making their own way in the world, but then he would read an interview with them where they talk about their record collections and John does not want to look at the world through his record collection. That is the responsibility John feels.

The problem is that whenever he writes an article or makes a statement in the world he has to hear back from the 80% of people who think he is yelling at them, but he is not, he is whispering to the people that are his kin. Merlin has an element of that, too, but he is much better at helping people who are not like him and don’t resemble him. One of his girlfriends would tell him pretty often that she really wanted to help him, but she was not sure he can be helped, and that always gave him pause and sometimes made him angry. She was right.

On one hand we are all so much alike, but there is also a part of all of us that is broken in a different way and we are ashamed of things in different ways, and it took Merlin a while to get over the frustration that he felt he wasn’t helping people, which eventually let him to not do his website anymore because he was basically paddling out to the life raft and giving people salt water. It is not so different from alcoholism, where you are giving something palliative that is actually making it worse.

Merlin has things to say that can help somebody to think about something differently, and for most smart people that is a lot when we realize how much of our problems come from destructive or not very useful forms of thinking. Just learn how to reframe something and look at it from a different angle can be life-changing, but it is not anything you could have a TV-show about without it being stupid and at odds with the basic idea, which is that you are looking at the one part of this wrong. Merlin also likes to be disagreeable because it always depends!

There was a time when Merlin would fit most handily in Self-help or Productivity, but that is a party he does not want to go to. He does not want to hang out with those people because they are in the existential porn business, the business of vending you something you are always going to need more of, and it takes you further away from the stuff that you actually need to fucking do, which is to sit down and do you whatever the thing is.

No matter what you say on the Internet, pretty much everybody will find a way to make it about them and will think that you are talking to them and maybe even attacking them. If you say something really nice about the world, the kind John’s sister says on Twitter, everybody is going to think: ”Oh, that is nice!”, but if you say that you wish people would keep moving and get out of the way they think you are attacking them in particular, and in that case they actually are!

The first shock of John’s Punk Rock article was that he was writing it for the people who wrote the Seattle Weekly, people within a 10 mile radius of where he was standing, and he was stunned at how angry it made people in Florida, and people he he likes, respects, and admires came out publicly against him and were mad at him.

Expecting that part of your audience doesn’t like you, the index cards on stage at the SF Sketchfest (RL141)

Merlin and John just did a live Roderick on the Line show (at the SF Sketchfest, see SFS2015) in California, and it was very fun and they had a very good time. When they took the stage, a room full of people were applauding. As a Rock musician John got used to the idea that he was going to walk out on a stage and the most he could hope for was that half the audience was on his side, while some musicians like Jonathan Coulton walk out of stage and don’t even think about the possibility that there is someone in the audience who doesn’t like him. They are all on a cruise that is named after him!

The guys in Death Cab for Cutie and in Keane are also like this. If you are used to playing sold-out shows everywhere you go, the presumption is that every person there had to make a special effort to get into your show that costs a lot of money, and they are all massive fans. But even during the heyday of John’s band there was a palpable sense that they were a bands that hipster were go to see and stand in the back and go: ”Okay, Long Winters, I have heard of you. Show me something!”

That was the level of Indie Rock they were at. They weren’t selling 1000 tickets in every town, they were 350-500 tickets, and a certain percentage of their audience was absolutely capable of coming away from that show, going: ”What? I don’t see why people like them so much!” They were there out of curiosity, whereas with Keane there was a pretty good chance they have heard a Keane song and they are there because they want to hear the song. The people who go: ”I have heard about this band and I go to see 5 shows a week and I am going to check them out!” typically don’t go to see Kean or Death Cab for Cutie, but they do go to see bands like The Long Winters.

After The Long Winters stopped playing and John started going out as a solo acoustic artist, opening for other people, the percentage of people who were like: ”Who is this guy?” went way up, and his performance style evolved in the last 7 years. In the Long Winters he wasn’t flipping everybody of and was more like: ”Hi friends!”, but now he evolved a performance style where he is walking out on stage, ”Hi, I am John Roderick, and I am a massive person and to you right now I am nobody, I am a weird bearded guy with an acoustic guitar and I haven’t played a moment of music yet, but I cannot walk out here and just be like: ’Hi guys’ and start playing my songs, but I have to get this room right first!” and that involves telling them not only who he is, but also who they are, and how this is going to go if they like it and if they don’t like it: ”Listen man, this is only going to get worse! Have you seen the box? Do you want to go in the box? You don’t want to go in the box!”

But when they walked out on stage in San Francisco it was a very nice theater and a nice full room of people, and John wasn’t prepared for the feeling that everybody wanted to be here right now and he didn’t have to prepare this room, which was a very comfortable feeling. And then he looked down at the foot of the stage and there was a stack of 3x5 cards that some fan had written some Roderick on the Line based memes on, and then had put them on the stage, they had gone to some work and then put them on the stage in expectation of something, presumably that they pick them up and go through them.

John thought to himself in an instant that someone has placed an expectation on the stage and that is not within the bounds of how this is going to work because this was his and Merlin’s stage and he rejected their expectations, so John picked up the stack of 3x5 cards and hurled them into the crowd, which was greeted by a lot of laughter. Everybody in the room understood what that transaction just was, that someone in their enthusiasm for the show had made a thing, and by putting it on the stage had crossed a hubris-border and John pushed them back over the border, and everybody agreed that that was in fact the introduction to the program they were doing. It was in character of Roderick on the Line and it was the message of the show.

John didn’t think of those cards again and at the end of the night some people were picking them up as souvenirs, and a young woman came by as John was standing there, talking to people, and she was picking up the cards with a particular energy. She was not an employee of the venue who was picking up the cards to clean the space for the next show, but she was the one who made the cards. John asked her if she had made those and she said: ”Yes!” with a look on her face that made him realize that everybody in the room thought that was hilarious except for one person.

John has no idea what was intended, but he ran with it, and here was this person who had facilitated this because they were in different handwriting and maybe she had gone around and asked everybody in the room beforehand to write something on a 3x5 card. John told her that he actually liked to read those cards and he was sorry he threw them over the room in a theatrical moment, and she didn’t say anything, she just nodded and smiled and gave him the cards.

The cards were an exhaustive collection of memes and themes that they had talked about over the years, like Hitlersplaining and ”3x5 card” crossed out. The top one was a Merlin specific joke about a photo where he had written ”index card” on an index card, or one time he wrote ”Jeff Goldblum” on a page that he found later and he had absolutely no idea why he had written down ”Jeff Goldblum”. John’s favorite was a picture of Merlin in front of a whiteboard where he had written a ”<break>” tag at his 1.0 conference in his garage with him as the only attendant, which was back when he was writing computer maths for the early Internet.

John did feel in that moment that even in their inner circle of people that are 100% onboard and part of their culture, there is a lot of variation in expectation and what people are taking away from what they do, which he also sees all the time in the replies they get to the show. Even on their own show that they created they can still feel like an outsider. John felt terrible because on one level somebody worked on this, and on another level it is completely in character of the show and of John that you don’t put something on his stage, particularly not something where the only thing it is doing there is saying: ”Interact with me!”

She smiled and bowed a little bit and gave him the cards, like: ”Mr. Roderick!” and then disappeared in a smoke bomb and was gone, and John had to go to another show immediately and he had to greet the people who had stayed to say: ”Hello!”, so he wasn’t able to chase after her. After he had thrown those cards out there he did not think of it again until he saw the maker of the cards. He does respect and honor people making things, and there is some amazing fan-art that has been created, like the one drawing of John walking a cat dressed as a pimp.

Everybody has that feeling, that no-one totally gets them, even their closest people. Knowing where the borderlands are, where to dig a trench and make a stand, and where you just say: ”This is not a battle ground, this is just a village!”, it takes a village, and John is just a villager and he is feeling like he is writing lyrics to his new record right now. The backstage area looked a lot like a gallows with these windy steps. It was a fun show and they had a blast doing it. They never really used the bell, although they were trying to work it in.

John had the nerd show with the nerd guys, he did Roderick on the Line, and he got to meet H. Jon Benjamin who hosted the show where John was the musical guest and it was revealed that he was a long-time Long Winters fan. He also listens to a friend of Merlin’s podcast, he is a media consumer! From the moment you meet him you can see in his face and in his eyes that he is one of the good ones, and his comedy and sense of humor comports with John’s own.

John took a shot at Bob’s Burgers, but then the following day he was on a show with two of the guys from Bob’s Burgers. Eugene Mirman was there and H. Jon Benjamin.

All of the shows at Sketchfest were great and John had a wonderful time and met a lot of amazing people. In the past his problem had always been that he was left standing on the corner at some point by a driver who had never been to San Francisco before, but this time it was completely well-organized and perfect the entire time, there were only a couple of little problems like they didn’t put him in the hotel he wanted, which made him mad and he voiced his anger to everybody and they all tut-tut-ed and told him they were really sorry and he was not mollified, but he just did go with the flow.

At the very end John was standing in front of his hotel, waiting for his ride to the airport, and the guy texted him: ”On my way, I’ll be there in 5!” - ”Okay, we are getting down to the wire!” - ”Alright, I am pulling up out front!” and John was standing there with his guitar case in front of the hotel, looking up and down the completely abandoned street, and the driver had gone to the hotel that John wanted to be in and that he should have been at.

John grabbed the first cab he saw, which in the culture of San Francisco was the wrong move because it infuriated all the other cabs that were parked on the side of this empty street which wasn’t actually empty, but there had been 5 cabs and some guy zipped up and jumped the cab line, and all the cabbies got really mad and honked their horns. They are getting their clock cleaned right now by Uber. Uber drivers make on average $10 an hour more, and a number of people who moved from cab drivers to Uber and it is dramatic.

Merlin has an app called Curb for getting a cab and that is supposed to be their answer to Uber and he tried it 3 times and each time he waited 10 minutes and has never gotten a cab, whereas Uber is there in seconds. The cab that he took to the airport seemed like they had taken out the entire rear suspension and replaced it with a railroad tie, it was not safe to drive.

John had a great time in San Francisco and he did not make the mistake this time of buying anything while he was there. He did not go back demanding satisfaction from the suit people (see RL108). He thought about it as he was walking in that neighborhood and he thought about it how true it is that the guy made a couple hundred bucks off of John this one time, but if John had had a successful experience in this place, the way he practices loyalty, he would have bought something in his store every time he went to San Francisco for the next 25 years.

It was what John was looking for: He wanted what people used to have, a suit maker, a tailor, and all the things that John’s dad had from that store that were made for him by this guy’s dad had created a fantasy in John’s head that he was going to have a San Francisco haberdasher, but for a couple hundred bucks this guy lost tens of thousands of dollars in patronage, and that feels like punishment enough. Also, John has a podcast where he refers to him periodically and his presumption is that if you live in San Francisco you will not patronize Cable Car Clothiers out of loyalty to Roderick on the Line.

Being comfortable on stage (RL141)

There is a rich tradition of writing and recording music that people listen to, and a rich tradition of live shows that have a distinctly different energy. Joe Jackson put out a record in 1986 (probably the one called Live 1980/86) that was recorded live and everybody in the audience had to be really quiet because he didn’t want any audience participation on it at all. It was really weird! Stephin Merritt said after the first song at his Rock concert: ”Your applause hurts my ears!” He probably smells like cigarettes.

Merlin has never done anything podcast-y that was easy to do live and have it have the same flavor and brio as what they are doing right now. The best thing they ever did was to stop trying to have it have the precise energy as the recorded show. Don’t try and make it sound like the record, that is not what people are there for, and and if they are there for that, then they should go and listen to the record.

Standing on a stage is where John is the most comfortable, he has spent his whole professional life standing in front of a room full of people. Merlin hasn’t had anything like actual stage fright in years. For an ADD adult mind, being stuck on stage in a position that other people perceive as pressure, he doesn’t have to think anything but this right now. He could be in the worst state of mine, but he would be totally fine on stage. John also can’t imagine a mood that wouldn’t be improved by somebody pushing him out on stage and telling him: ”You are responsible for 30 minutes!” - ”Well, I was just about to hang myself from a door knob, but now I am going to do 30 minutes on that and it is going to be so fun!”

John on USO tour in Africa, visiting Djibouti, publicly displayed gallows (RL141)

John was in Djibouti recently (see his USO tour in Shows and Events, see BW205) and they had a late night smoking cigars with the Master Chiefs, which are the highest level enlisted people in the Navy. The Command Master Chief at this base is the highest ranking Chief and he was a very capable and a very clearly in-command person. He invited them to his private lair where they sat around, smoking what could only be described as illegal cigars, having a good time, talking to the Chiefs.

John went around and asked the guys what they did and one of them said he was a parachute packer, but who in the Navy ever gets under a parachute, which means he was one of the SEALs.

John asked the Command Master Chief why this base was on lockdown and he rolled his eyes and said that 9 months ago somebody blew themselves up in a club Downtown Djibouti and now nobody here is allowed liberty to go into the town. John felt that was antithetical to the idea of having a military base in a foreign country. The young guys in the Navy need to go into the town and the people in the town need to have the young guys in the Navy come in, it is the symbiosis of being deployed overseas, and to have a base there where the sailors can’t leave the base is just the wrong mentality.

The Command Master Chief agreed 100%, but his hands were tied because the order came down from US AFRICOM, which was a bummer because John really wanted to see Djibouti, and after a while the Chief promised John that he will make it happen. The next day some Lieutenant showed up in an SUV and they all went out through the seven layers of hardened security gates and spent an afternoon driving around Djibouti town.

Death penalty (RL141)

As they were leaving the base he pointed to the side and said very matter-of-factly: ”There are the old gallows from when the French ran this place!” and it was like Kalvari Mount: There was literally a hill and a giant gallows where they hung whoever they felt needed hanging, built in a way that you could not escape seeing it from miles around, an emblem of colonial authority and injustice, the Điện Biên Phủ of Djibouti. John has been chewing on that gallows ever since, it was some heavy shit and it has been a long time since there has been a visible gallows in the United States.

Why haven’t they taken it down? It would be so easy to blow it up! But there are a lot of countries where capital punishment is still practiced in public. The French did public executions until the end of the 20th century, Merlin has seen photos of some pretty modern-looking guillotines. The guillotine is very efficient and very sanitary, which is what you want. Everything goes into the basket, although a basket is a terrible thing to collect blood in.

Merlin is not a huge fan of the death penalty and these guys could fuck up a steel trap! There was the one dude and how long it took him in the condition. They keep trying to make it humane and then you realize that killing people is not humane, no matter how you think of to do it. The most monstrous-seeming methods from centuries ago are a lot cleaner than having a guy dressed up like a doctor go in and poke you with poison. That is actually not as reliable!

Merlin is fascinated with anesthesiologists, it is the toughest gig in that room and it is so difficult to get right and you still hear stories of people who were knocked out enough to not be able to say anything, but they could still feel it, or the people who just die on the operating table because they were having a mole removed, which is why John is the emissary: They are going to fix those moles.

If we are going to have capital punishment it needs to happen in a central location, presumably somewhere in Kansas because it is the center of the country, there will be a Soylent Green factory, and we are going to take all the people we have decided we are going to legally kill, and we will just put them in a hopper and down through the grinder. It is going to be quick and there is no amount of ”We didn’t get it right the first time, we have to go back!”, and we can use it as fish food or fertilizer or Squeezies for kids or whatever you want to use it for.

John being a guest on Back to Work, paywalled articles of the New York Times (RL141)

Based on the Dan Benjamin program that John has only recently become aware of (John was a guest on BW205)… Merlin asks if it has been completed or if it is still recording. John lays in bed with his iPad as he is going to sleep, skypeing with Dan on the other side and they are just looking at each other.

John said on that program that he laughs a bitter laugh every time the New York Times paywalls him because as a musician he always finds it really charming when people tell him that their content is worth money while he has spent the last 10 years being told that his content isn’t worth money or it is worth a fraction of a fraction of a cent, and he got a tweet from the managing editor of the New York Times who listens to Back to Work and he said that he has been a Long Winters fan since before the podcast era and he has bought all of John’s records, meaning they are in an economy with one another.

This is what it takes: ”You pay us, we pay you!” - ”Yes, but you bought my records because you chose to, and the way that this economy works now is that John’s content in particular is supposed free. The equivalent would be that Spotify came along and were to publish all the newspaper content in the world and is going to pay the various writers based on how many people read their articles based on math they devise for themselves!” - ”Looking in my iTunes at what I have actually bought I am a bit embarrassed!”, and to his credit he reflected on the fact and he even told John that the content they promote via social media is paywall-free. You can also get in via Google News. Now John feels like he has the Napster for the news.

Merlin getting a no-pledge feed for an NPR radio station that he listens to (RL141)

Merlin got a nice email this morning from somebody from a public radio station he listens to and he sent him the link to the feed where you don’t have to listen to pledge stuff, which you get once you pledge, and now Merlin feels like he has arrived, although Merlin hasn’t pledged yet, but he fronted him on the strength, as they say. Talk about privilege! What could be any whiter and more privileged than giving a link to listen to NPR without the pledge. Merlin is officially the whitest person on the planet!