This week, Merlin and John talk about:

• The Thompson Twins, Jane Wiedlin (Movies)
• U2, Bono at Red Rocks (Music)
• John being photographed by Paparazzi (Stories)
• Meeting the Olsen Twins at the Chateau Marmont (Stories)
• Wearing mismatched socks, letting your kid chose their own outfit (Style)
• Ted Leo being a very strict vegan (Food and Drink)
• Merlin being tempted by Soylent (Merlin Mann)
• Getting the day to fit together when you have a small child, John’s daughter asking what beauty is (Daughter)
• Merlin comparing different Salisbury steaks (Food and Drink.
• John not being able to eat pasta anymore because he is gluten free (Gluten-free)
• Merlin buying pre-boiled and pre-peeled eggs at Costco (Merlin Mann)
• Merlin's dad having PTSD from fighting in Korea and not being able to eat chicken and rice (Merlin Mann)
• John learning to eat hard boiled eggs on his walk across Europe (The Big Walk)
• Gary's van has been moved (Gary and Skeeter)
• John's mom turning his room into a guest-room the day he moved to his dad (Parents)
• Merlin and his daughter joking about trees on the street on their way home from preschool (Merlin Mann)
• John finding an $800 alligator belt at the thrift store for $3.99 (Style)

The Problem: You need the belt to see the belt, referring to John finding an alligator belt at a thrift store and then looking for another one and also finding another one, but not knowing what an alligator belt communicates.

The show title refers to John still being gluten-free and some voice in his head commanding him to find the starch in the refrigerator, but there is no starch.

Cards Against Humanity asked Marian Call to say Hi to John: ”It is Roderick, Roderick, Roderick time! John Roderick 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 Please do not quote these texts directly without applying your own editing first!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.

The Thompson Twins, Jane Wiedlin (RL148)

Merlin sings the same theme to John when he answers the phone and John finds it a good theme! Merlin talks about other artists who have done these and John asks Merlin to put it on a cassette for him. He wouldn’t use The Cloud for that. John just hooked up his thermostat and his garage door opener to the cloud and every time it gets below 84 degrees (29 °C) in his kitchen his garage door opener goes off, playing to beat from In the Name of Love by the Thompson Twins.

John has been listening to the Thompson Twins a lot lately on vinyl, and a lot of that is really inexcusable. Merlin was a fan. John was a fan, too, and is still, but there are some inexcusable drum machines in particular. They really needed to give Alannah (Currie) something to do sometimes. She had the Davy Jones problem, not that she wasn't contributing. They gave her that hat to wear and she had the funny haircut. There was the other guy (Joe Leeway) who played keyboards and the main guy (Tom Bailey) and Alannah. The main guy went out with Jane Wiedlin, right.

Didn't they write Our Lips Are Sealed together? It was originally a Fun Boy Three song, which is a good version as well. No, it was written by Jane Wiedlin and Terry Hall, the guy from The Specials. The Fun Boy Three guy was in The Specials, not the Fun Boy Three guy was in the Thompson Twins. John had that problem even then, it is hard to keep up and he is not reading NME every week anymore. When John worked at Steve's Broadway News he would read NME and Melody Maker.

U2, Bono at Red Rocks (RL148)

It was a perfect example of how the UK exists in a mirror universe because Merlin would read it and know the names of the artists, but he couldn't understand a word anyone was saying. He didn't understand the sense of humor, especially. It was very different from US magazines. They are so excited when they were excited and then two weeks later so dismissive when they are dismissive. Merlin bought a copy around the time when he was getting into U2 more, around 1983/84, and The Waterboys were opening up for them and they love The Waterboys, but they just did not have enough terrible things to say about U2.

When they came out with Boy, nobody had a bad thing to say about them. Everybody loved them! Once he started waving flags… Merlin thinks he shouldn't have taken his shirt off at Red Rocks (U2 Live at Red Rocks: Under a Blood Red Sky), it was problematic. He had a handsome U2 War Tour T-shirt, he is not afraid to wear his own shirt on stage. Merlin has been wearing the Roderick on the Line hoodie a lot, he has been that guy for two weeks. It is very comfy! Merlin informs John that they sold shirts a while back (see ad in the show notes of episode 140).

John has been living in a swag economy for so long, he doesn’t even remember what it was like to go buy a thing. People run up to me and hand him gift bags, but that can't last forever.

John is trying to get a mental picture of a young Bono with his shirt off at Red Rocks. Merlin might be misremembering. He remembers the video for New Year's Day that got a lot of play, but Merlin was a bigger fan of Sunday Bloody Sunday. Merlin is going to google for ”Bono shirtless”. There are some shots of him milling around in some Dick Nixon shorts, hanging out at the beach, photographed by Paparazzi.

John being photographed by Paparazzi (RL148)

One time John was photographed by Paparazzi. He was staying at the Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles, California, and they were making a pilot of a television show, and one of their guests was a French Chanteuse, a woman in her early 20s from France, a great singer-songwriter. There were a lot of people, TV cameras, people with headset microphones walking around. She and John sat down on the couch after her segment and started talking and they became fast friends, they had an immediate rapport, if you will.

The evening wore on and then it was late, and she was like: ”I am afraid I must bed you adieu!” - ”Oh, alas! I will walk you to the car!” - ”I have a car coming!” and they went down together in the elevator and walked out of the front of the Chateau Marmont. The ingress and egress of that hotel is very strange, they changed it at some point and now you leave through a basement driveway. They walked down together, and John was putting her in a town car and they get to the end of the drive, and she says: ”It has been such a pleasure to get to know you this little bit!” - ”The pleasure has been all mine, Mademoiselle!”

She presents herself for a Euro-style kiss and then the other kiss and then the third kiss and John leaned in and gave her the first of what will be three kisses and all of a sudden it was like the Som, flashbulbs from everywhere, and John had a second before been convinced that they were alone, they were talking to each softly, like: ”Farewell! This has been one of those meetings in life where you just encounter someone in the afternoon and by the end of the day you know that you have really lived! For only these few hours, we have really lived!”

They were both startled and terrified, and they turned and the bushes were full of photographers because the Olsen Twins were in the Chateau and because it was a Saturday night there might also have been a whole Rat King of celebrities in the lobby where they were all doing cocaine and playing piano and so forth. These photographers had no idea who they were, but because they looked chic and were behaving in a chic fashion and they may have overheard her French accent, they were like: ”We better get this for safety!”

John went into a combat crouch because of his training, he pulled out his Marine Corps survival knife, hustled her into the car, pounded on the trunk: ”Go! Go!” and then he collected four scalps. John had just a momentary sense of what a nightmare it must be to just leave the Rat King for a second as a celebrity and a) walk outside for a cigarette, b) to put a French girl in a car, c) to run across the street for a pack of cigarettes, maybe they have people for that. That would intrude on something about Merlin that he does not want to intruded upon. He is a very sociable person, but he wouldn't want to be Flashbulb-popped at the Marmont.

All those shots of celebrities where they are winding up to punch a photographer and the photographer gets that classic shot of Sean Penn with his shirt off and his fist up in the air, the celebs in question never look good in those shots, but you can empathize with them. It helps when you see video of that, because when you see how aggressive multiple people are being, they are in your face, they are following you, they are running after you, they are provoking the subject. The bigger you get, the more you are supposed to just think that that is okay, Merlin is totally sympathetic to punching some of those guys.

Meeting the Olsen Twins at the Chateau Marmont (RL148)

November 2000, Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen released a film called Our Lips Are Sealed. Turns out it is all connected!

John sat in the lobby of that hotel one time when Mary Kate and Ashley were there (see OM297). It was a real eye opener, particularly to the effect of how boring it is to be a young celebrity. They are still young people and instead of sitting in the non-alcohol serving basement club in a college dorm, trying to pretend that they are having a really good time, they were in an extremely glamorous hotel and people were giving them every single kind of intoxicant that they could possibly want, and yet they were still just young people pretending that they are having a really good time. They know people are watching them and they don't want to seem like they are not having fun. The forced laughter, the young men that are around them…

They are 27 now, according to Wikipedia, born in 1987. John’s socks are 27! The thing about socks is that some of them blow out right away, and some of them are there for the duration.

Wearing mismatched socks, letting your kid chose their own outfit (RL148)

Merlin only buys one kind of sock, and then he just keeps replenishing them and when they get dirty he throws them out, the white crew gold toes, he usually has a pretty good supply on hand and when they have all been washed after a purchase it fills an entire drawer. This is the kind of thing Merlin doesn’t want to have to think about.

Jesse Thorne, wearing a gentleman country outfit with Jodhpurs on, dressed as the blue boy from the painting, his hand jauntily acock, there might be a couple of Irish Wolfhound standing behind him, is going to ask: ”Do you really only have white socks?” Jesse got kids now and Merlin has done the fun thing and bought his daughter different pairs of socks, but he has now officially reached the end of his fucking rope with the socks. They literally have one of 14 different pairs of socks! They need to get this kid on the Gold Toe program, and get her one kind of sock and once a month have Amazon give them six new pairs of socks. One pink Hello Kitty, one blue Captain America. They got all these great single socks and that is all they got.

Back when John was beginning his child rearing a journey they were very strongly influenced by his friend Dave Bazan and his wife, who have a very excellent parenting style that brooks no baloney from the youngsters. Dad has one outfit, a red hoodie sweatshirt, black T-shirt, jeans. He solved that problem for himself many years ago, but his wife had a whole policy of: ”One of the big problems with raising kids is that at a certain point they want to start dressing themselves and then every morning you sit around for 45 minutes while the kid rejects 25 different outfits and it always descends into a screaming nightmare match!” Her genius plan was that on Sunday night they put together a whole week's worth of outfits, then they put those outfits each one in a big Ziploc bag and every morning the kid gets to pick the outfit. The illusion of choice! Brilliant! Boom!

The child has already participated in the picking some time before, so if they suddenly have a problem with it: ”You picked this! You cannot argue! This is the bag! Pick whatever bag! You open the bag, that is what you get. Don't be upset!” The thing about the socks: They have just entered into a new realm with their daughter where she is starting to pick her own clothes, but she has decided she prefers mismatched socks.

In the last episode (see RL147) John mentioned her name several times and he likes to thank everyone who is concerned about the privacy issues of him say his daughter's name four times and then mentioning it on the Internet. Thank you for that! Thanks everyone for pointing that out! John got 200 concerned letters and he does appreciate it, he tried for a long time not to do it. Merlin doesn’t know how he spaced it. Halfway through that podcast John wondered if he accidentally said her name at some point, and the answer was: ”No!”, so he relaxed his vigilance and then proceeded to say her name four times.

She wears one of each kind and she gets to let her freak flag fly in her shoes. John likes to combine multiple patterns and that is in her, too, but her mother is much more like: ”Wait a minute, you can't go out of the house like that!” Merlin thinks that attractive people are like that, they are always trying to change where the bar is and they get away with it, which is super frustrating. But the baby can have whatever socks she wants inside of her little boots. That outfit in a bag thing could be a hack even for grown-ups, and for Merlin that starts tomorrow and he is going to text his wife right after this and say: ”Here is the plan!”

This morning they had a nice morning. His wife is finally over the flu after her two weeks with the flu, she is feeling better. They were getting ready for school today, and Merlin’s wife directed the first part of the outfit: ”Here is a cool dress that you like!” It is a good dress, she can move around in it, a cool kid dress, they added some leggings that were a completely different color, possibly striped, she has a new set of lace up Vans that have a blue galaxy on them with stars like a Milky Way and to that she came in with one of Merlin’s belts and decided she was going to wear that. Merlin punched a hole in it for her so she could actually wear it to school and it looks like she has a sword, it looks really cool, but Merlin’s wife spoiled it by tucking it in a little bit at the end, but it was a sharp look with those galaxy shoes! It is the stone soup of fashion.

John has never actually employed the bag technique, but it is one of several examples of how the Bazan family has really pioneered a lot of thought technologies that John has employed in the raising of their own child. Merlin will cut this out, but if and when they do that special other project they were talking about doing he has to be involved, he has a lot to share with people, he has a lot of thought technologies that people don't even… he is a songwriter, so he still believes in the power of song, unlike some of us who have abandoned the ship. Dave still believes that he can say everything he needs to say in his music, but he has a lot to share that he would be able to share with his words if they could just get him to use his words.

Most people who think they have a lot to share don't actually have that much to share and run out of ideas pretty quickly. They need to start tapping into people who don't know how much they know and they need to drain that shit and get the knowledge from the people who don't think they are thought leaders. That is where the real knowledge resides!

Ted Leo being a very strict vegan (RL148)

Hutch Harris of The Thermals is a young man from Portland, Oregon and John thinks he has a lot to share, actually. Hutch & Kathy together are like beans and rice, they form a whole protein. Ted Leo has a lot of information that could help people. Merlin is still thinking about Teo Leo, he knew that guy would be smart, but he had no idea how smart he would be. He has a lot of back catalogue. He is a very slender man, he always wears nice shoes, and he showed remarkable restraint at the Windjammer (restaurant on the JoCo Cruise).

He would eat a lady meal, like a normal human being would eat instead of gorging everything with sauces and gravy because of 30 years of vegan. Was there anything in the Windjammer he could eat?Even the fruit had pork in it! At a certain point they put hollandaise sauce on the carrots, but if you got in there before they put the sauce on. When he shows up backstage at a show and they have one of those hospitality trays that is just celery and humus and the rest of them go: ”Nawwwww” Ted Leo goes: ”Yay!” because that is as good as it is going to get. What a world! Merlin has a hard time imagining going places and not be able to even have any animal in it? That must be so challenging!

John feels like sugar is poison, but he also feels a compulsion to go toward the sugar in every case. He MC:ed a fundraising event the other night, there were 400 desserts at this thing, and he couldn’t be in this room and not have a cookie, and he had to be in this room, so I had to have a cookie. It wouldn't be charitable! He had some cookies after four months (he mentioned being gluten free already around Halloween in RL131) with no voluntary sugar intake, and the next day he was having a hot fudge Sunday at 2am and they he thought: ”Isn’t there a candied Apple around here somewhere?”

It is not like Ted Leo walks along and is just like: ”I am playing this benefit for the Bacon Council and I should just have a bacon!” and then he has a bacon and the next day he is ordering the five meat platter at Jack's BBQ. Instead, it is like Dave Bazan’s outfit: Ted Leo has solved the food problem because there are only seven foods.

Merlin being tempted by Soylent (RL148)

Merlin found himself on the website for Soylent, he paused, he hovered over the ”try it out for $85 version” because a part of him that thinks that if he could get this dicked he could get a lot of stuff done, but he just couldn't pull the trigger. John has a friend who ordered it. Merlin has friends who swear by it like Brett Terpstra. John’s pal said that he ordered it and the rule is if you are already on the Soylent train, then it is just flowing like the spice, but if you are new to the Soylent train you got to wait in the station and they send you emails that you have to wait five more weeks. It is a supply and demand problem and they are scaling up. They have version numbers on their food and Brett is very excited about the new version 1.4.

Merlin should get the $400+ version so he doesn’t have money anymore and has to eat it, he should force himself to eat it for a month. John is very curious about it! It sounds miserable, like punishment, but it is like going on a diet or a purge or a cruise, something you would really regret, but you got to really go all balls in.

John derives a lot of pleasure from punishment. Suffering is not punishment! All these deprivation diets where for the next three days all you get to drink is hot lemon juice and then you get to put a little gave in your hot lemon juice: ”No!” It is driving him crazy, he doesn’t like it! But if the diet was that every day you drink one mug of cement mix and then in the afternoon another mug of cement mix where your stomach was just full of concrete made of nuts, or whatever that stuff is. They go to a laboratory store and buy magnesium, potassium, aluminum flakes, and put some oil in it. That is what Soylent is!

Merlin is the eater in the family, the one of the three of them who likes to have a meal on a plate with parts. Steak and noodles still counts as a meal, but he wants to serve it at the same time, he wants it on a plate, he wants it to be hot, and he wants to use a fork, he wants to be seated, he doesn't want to be eating it over the sink, he will sit and watch TV while he eats, he is not an animal, but he is the only one in the house that cares one iota, one whit about that. His daughter would be fine as soon as the rice is done, as soon as the noodles are done, she is ready for dinner. No, it is not food yet! That is just one constituent!

Merlin is the only person who cares about that, the one who is going to have to make that happen because they are both perfectly happy. He can give his daughter noodles, carrots and cucumbers, and that is almost a meal. She is happy with that.

Getting the day to fit together when you have a small child, John’s daughter asking what beauty is (RL148)

Is there a window of time during which dinner has to happen for Merlin? Not really. The only thing to that point is that he tends to forget to eat. For John sometimes dinner happens at 9pm, at 4pm, or at 1am. For Merlin there is a certain order to things. If you want to have enough time for stories at bedtime, you got to get the bath by a certain time. To have a bath by a certain time, we need to have homework done and food and all that. If you do have dinner at 7pm it screws up everything!

Last night John tucked his daughter into bed, he had laid down on her bed to say Goodnight to her, and I sang Frère Jacques to her, and after that she wants you to sing it in English, she is not satisfied if you just sing it in English. She wants it in French first and then in English. She is a tiny little Quebec, angry at everyone. Sacré bleu! John was lying there, and as he does at the end of every day with her he said: ”Do you have any other questions?”, and she does always have other questions. She is a little bit of a Thumbsucker and she knows that Daddy will not answer a question that is asked past a thumb.

She takes her thumb out of her mouth, she looks at him seriously, and she says: ”Daddy, what is beauty?” and he gave a basic careful once-over through beauty. There is a lot of stuff that you have to be careful of your language and then your meta- language and your pre-language, but you also have to watch how long you pause to think about it. The longer you wait to compose a good answer the more it is going to feel like bullshit and kids, even young kids, have enough intrinsic logic to know that an answer along the lines of: ”Well, beauty is what you make it!” or ”Beauty is different for everybody!” is also kind of a lie.

It is true and you need to communicate the concept that beauty is relative, but if that were true then we wouldn't talk about it all the time and there wouldn't be a word for it. John gave an answer, she had a couple of follow up questions. He said that some people think that a bunch of sailboats on a lake on a sunny day is very beautiful, to see the sailboats all together on the lake, while other people don't feel that emotion when they see a bunch of sailboats. They just see boats. They don't see the beauty. And she said: ”My eyes are beautiful!” because everybody says that to her, so she is trying to fit that in.

She was asking him: ”What is beauty?” because she doesn’t know what she is supposed to do with this when everybody says her eyes are beautiful. ”What does that mean? What are they saying? What do I do with it? What is my takeaway?” - ”I don't think that there is anybody that would disagree that your eyes are beautiful!” She finally had some food for thought. John said: ”Do you remember the James Bond movie where Roger Moore gets on a circus train? That is universally regarded as not beautiful by everybody!” - ”I agree with that. I know what you mean now!” John got out of her room, closed the door, said: ”Good night, sweetheart!”, looks up at the clock, and it was 10pm. How did this happen? How did I get to 10pm here? There was dinner and there was some story telling, and then pajamas got on and it is 10pm? Jesus!

For Merlin every night at a different time, at some point between usually about 4:15pm and 6:45pm an hour disappears. There is an hour he cannot account for every night. What the fuck? How is it 6:30pm? Those hours are going back to 1997, trying to rebuild the missing 1997 (see RL147). They are like collecting people in a Brazilian dump, trying to get some milk cartons and make a year out of it.

This is the thing about multiverses and the thing about what happens if you go into the black hole and you are in the room of all the times and you start knocking books off a shelf (like in the movie Interstellar, see RL146): Pretty soon you are going to make a year somewhere or you are going to take a year away. They need to get Neil deGrasse Tyson on here, he is going to have his whole blah, blah, blah theories about it, and then they will need to get Ted Cruz and he can give them his theories.

Merlin comparing different Salisbury steaks (RL148).

Merlin was trying some different Salisbury steaks and did a Salisbury steak comparison test. Apparently one night a few nights ago he cooked two different brands of Salisbury steak to do a side by side test. After his family goes to bed is when he does most of his science because it is just easier, it is a cleaner environment, less talk of beauty. He cooked it up and he knew the winner going into it. You can tell the winner just by looking at the ingredients. Merlin could not find the boil-in-bag anymore, you can only find that on eBay nowadays and it breaks his heart. He did get a nicely pared Stouffer’s Salisbury steak with macaroni and cheese and he got some weird off-brand cafeteria food one to compare it with. The Stouffer’s was much, much better. It was good while the other one was categorically not good, it had an elementary school cafeteria hamburger feel to it.

If the second or third ingredient is dog food, you know that is the one to leave behind. It is funny because the first ingredient is gravy. It is gravy first and the Salisbury steak by weight. The stuff is pretty good and Merlin is going to stick with it and he is going to go through all the ones they have at the store. He is going to try them all, but he is not going to write it up because he is not a blogger, he is not an animal.

John not being able to eat pasta anymore because he is gluten free (RL148)

John’s hack is that you always make a little pot of egg noodles, which doubles the experience because then the gravy has got somewhere to go and you get a little noodle with every bite. John’s advice is also to always make the whole thing. He will even cook the whole package of wide egg noodles from the grocery store he always cooks the whole thing. Merlin does that now and then puts the leftovers in a Ziploc bag, and then he can have what they in Lord of the Rings call second dinner that night after everyone has gone to bed and he is done with his science.

John’s problem is that because of his gluten relationship, his number one favorite food of all foods, which is yesterday's egg noodles and butter in a Ziploc bag, he can no longer indulge in those and he does not want to eat corn pasta or rice pasta, so he has to forego what basically had formerly been the Chinese Junk that ferried him across the sea, basically a boat made out of egg noodles. When they took him down to the Nile and they put him in a raft made of reeds, that raft was made of noodles.

If John ever wanted to have a Viking funeral Merlin would find a way to put him on a boat made of egg noodles and fucking set it on fire! That is why they are friends!

Merlin thought that John had officially given up on being gluten-free. John has to avoid them because they are poisons. He gave them up and then he was sad and now he cannot be sad, it is not a state that he prefers, but now he has seen the other side, he has been to the edge and looked down, and he does not want them, Sam, I am. He used to make an entire bag of noodles, and then you got leftover noodles in the fridge and you can throw a handful of already cooked noodles into pretty much anything.

You got some chili? Throw a little handful of yesterday's noodles on there! You got some Salisbury steak? If you have a bean burrito, maybe don't throw a handful of noodles on it, but maybe do? John can't do that anymore and now he looks in his refrigerator, and some voice in his head goes: ”Find the starch!”, but there is no starch and he can't find the starch and he just has his miserable little cheese wad, a thing of lettuce and you put a cheese in it.

Merlin buying pre-boiled and pre-peeled eggs at Costco (RL148)

Merlin recommends Costco boiled peeled eggs. For $11 you get 24 boiled peeled eggs in little packages. You have eggs anytime you want! You just open it up and eat an egg! If you don't know what to do, eat a fucking egg! Merlin has done it three times now, he has killed a lot of chickens, and they are really good and super-convenient. An egg is a perfect little dollop and if you got some frozen bacon you got some breakfast on the go!

John has a very complicated relationship with hard-boiled eggs because they smell like feet and they are both spongy-slimy and also chalky-mealy. You bite through the spongy-slimy part to get to the chalky-mealy part and for years John didn't want anything to do with a hard boiled egg until he learned to like them on his walk across Europe. But he is afraid that he is going to open up that bag of 25 eggs and that smell of feet is going to come out of there and he is going to have to go into an isolation tank. You can always whip them at people. You could throw them at Gary!

Merlin's dad having PTSD from fighting in Korea and not being able to eat chicken and rice (RL148)

In an enlightened age Merlin’s late father would probably have been diagnosed with PTSD from fighting in Korea as an infantry guy. It was really rough and when he came back he couldn't be around fireworks and he did not ever want to see chicken and rice again. You walk around Korea and you kill a bunch of fucking chickens and eat some rice and that is what they did all the time while they were miserable. Even for a man in his 20s that had enough of imprint on chicken as bad news.

John learning to eat hard boiled eggs on his walk across Europe (RL148)

See The Big Walk!

Gary and Skeeter, the van has been moved (RL148)

See Gary and Skeeter!

John's mom turning his room into a guest-room the day he moved to his dad (RL148)

When John was a teenager his mom said one day: ”You are a bad kid! Go live with your father!” and John went and lived with his dad. When he came back over to visit his mom had already turned his bedroom into a guest room, basically a guest room for Elijah, because no-one was ever going to stay there! She took all of John’s paintings and stuff down off the wall and put a flower bed-spread on the bed and now it was the guest room.

For a couple of months John lived with his dad, which was basically intolerable because his dad was a busy body. Staying with mom was a prize he had to re-earn and he was going to do that immediately! You can't just give him a red ribbon and put the blue ribbon up on a shelf, he was going to go for the blue ribbon! John started going over to his mom's house, he would sneak in and end up spending the night in the guest room, but he never fully re-joined that room or that house for three more years, he never really put his paintings back up on the wall, it was still a little bit of the guest room until he graduated from High School and moved out.

For the first time right this moment John has no idea how he got on that topic! He was pivoting from Gary in the van.

Merlin and his daughter joking about trees on the street on their way home from preschool (RL148)

When Merlin used to pick his daughter up from her preschool they would walk the same route every day to walk from her school to the train to go home. During January you would start seeing trees on the street, even in February sometimes you see a tree or two on the street, but there was one house that they passed every day and it became a running joke because even in March and April there was still a tree on the street and he would say: ”Do you think the tree is going to be there today?” and she would say usually: ”Yeah, I think it will still be there!” and then one day the tree was gone and they never found out why it had been there until springtime.

John finding an $800 alligator belt at the thrift store for $3.99 (RL148)

The other day John was at a thrift store, as he still does despite having talked many times about how he needed to stop going to thrift store. You never know what you are looking for and this time he decided to look at belts. There was a total fucking… that looks like the cabling at a server farm, except it was human belts, a human belt Rat King. John was flipping through these 300 belts, it was all garbage, a belt said Boy Toy, belts with little sailboats on them.

John was flipping through and flipping through, and he got used to in thrift stores that the tips of his fingers can feel when something is of a different grade. There were probably 300 belts and he touched one with a different feel and he noticed the front of the belt was alligator. He put it on and it fit him, he liked the feel, he had never owned an alligator belt because his standard for belts has always been hippie big buckle, Rock’n’Roll belt, he has a lot of Rock’n’Roll belts, but now he wants a nice belt all of a sudden, he never had a nice belt.

The belt had all different stamps and impressions on the back that tell information about it, which seems promising because the more information that an item has on it, the more you are able to research it. John took out his phone, started putting in all this data from the back of this belt, and it turns out it was an $800 alligator belt. A lot of belts have no information on them. And then the first piece of information that you will find on a belt is the size. If a company is making a belt and they think highly enough of themselves that they put their name on the belt, then that is a step up and you get those belts that are Dolce & Gabbana or something, but this was a belt that had a cursive stamp that said ”Handmade in America” and it had the name of the alligator and all this stuff, all embossed.

John had already been through the process of deciding that he liked the feel of it, figuring out it fits, so now he is realizing that it is a very expensive belt, which basically ignites the bonfire chain on top of the mountains that signal the Riders of Rohan to ride to the cash register, but John was thinking to himself: ”Is an alligator belt really where I am headed in life? Is that my direction?” An alligator belt communicates that you are either the worst kind of lawyer or someone who lives on a boat or an alligator hunter, but then that alligator belt would be like something that you had made.

John bought this belt and he wore it the next day, and he felt that weird thing that you feel when you are a thrift shopper and you have found a little treasure. You wear it around and it is like their daughters with their mismatched socks, that little bit of: ”I have a secret! My belt cost $800! My belt formerly cost $800 that someone else paid for it one time, and now it is mine for $3.99!” The next day he was driving around town in his alligator belt, feeling strong, and he started to feel that Vegas thing. How many of these alligator belts are out there? He wasn't even aware!

John headed to a thrift store, walked over to the belts, started flipping through the belts at a different thrift store, the next day, wearing his alligator belt, and he found another alligator belt by the same maker at a different thrift store, and now he got two alligator belts. This is the Baader-Mainhof syndrome! (see OM311) He didn’t know alligator belts existed and now he see them all the time! What else is going to happen right now? These alligator belts are very expensive items. Whatever it is that these alligator belts communicate, they only communicate that thing to people John will never meet or that he hardly ever meets. It is almost like a challenge coin. To really get the significance of it, you got to get the significance of it.

It is like a hanky code (see OM274) he doesn’t know, or a black box pinging on the bottom of the South Pacific that no one will ever hear. He is walking around sending off this powerful belt message, a belt boner, and it is falling on deaf ears because everyone around him is deaf to the fact that you could even communicate something like this with a belt. Merlin suggests that once you slip one of these on, you suddenly start seeing more of this kind of belt. You need a belt to see the belt. It is like when you are playing Slug Bug and all of a sudden there are Volkswagen Bugs everywhere.

John is in a multiverse now. Where did that come from? What was the prime moving belt? How is it he got that belt enough that now he found a second belt? Now that he is aware of this of course he is going to go right to the belts every time he walks into a thrift store, but what happens if he finds a third one? Does it a) mean that alligator belts are thick on the ground and that there are so many of these? That doesn't make sense!

Merlin thinks it might be a Brigadoon type situation where once a year one of these belts makes itself apparent. Maybe John’s job now is to help the right people find one of these belts, too, like a belt spirit guide. These belts are very pleasing, they are very soft, he feels bad that an alligator had to die, but if something is going to have to die, an alligator is pretty close to the top rank of things that he doesn't care whether it dies or not. He got no feelings about them! Merlin doesn’t think this happens by accident, maybe those are the UFOs and maybe they give John an offering?

Last night John was driving home, wearing his second alligator belt, driving past the airport, and because of a trick of the perspective a big military jet has taken off from Boeing Field but it appears to be hovering there because it is so big that it is not disappearing very fast and it is night time and John can only see its lights and it is hovering over the road as he was driving and he was reminded that of course if the UFOs here on a regular basis, that is how they would disguise themselves, they would disguise themselves as military jets. This thing is hovering there over the road and John is driving along, he got his alligator belt on, watching this airplane, and he is thinking: ”Is this it? Is this the moment when all of a sudden… ”

They might have tried lots of times and the conditions just weren't right, maybe John wasn’t where he needed to be to be looking for the right kind of thing. It is not going to just be an obvious thing. People are not just going to show up with a cake! You need the belt to see the belt! ”Om!” Merlin is going to cut all of that out.