This week, Merlin and John talk about:
- 2015-April: Easter Weekend (Currents)
- Cooking Chicken (Food and Drink)
- John running for office
The problem: John has a little bit of hair anxiety, referring to John cutting his own hair at 2am at night and being a bit anxious about it the next day when he has to go out on his campaign.
The show title refers to John having tried to learn humility for a long time and now having the opportunity to show humility every day in his interactions with the people he is going to meet on his campaign.
It is already late when they record the show and the sun is in the sky, not like otherwise when that the sun is just peeping up over the horizon, mocking their existence.
Happy Easter!
Draft version
The segments below are drafts that will be incorporated into the rest of the Wiki as time permits.
2015-April: Easter (RL149)
Easter is not one of the main holidays in John's culture and tradition. When his sister was a little girl they had their own bedrooms, but they also had a bunkbed which they would sometimes put in John’s room and sometimes in her room. When the bunkbed was in John’s room, she would never come in and sleep in John’s room, but when it was in her room, sometimes he would go and sleep in her room, just to comfort her. One Easter morning, as they were sitting on the top bunk together looking out the window, she swore she saw the Easter Bunny in the backyard. She was probably 4 or 5, but she swears to it to this day. John’s memories if he had seen it as well are unclear. Maybe he, in a big-brotherly fashion, just enforced that she had seen the Easter Bunny? It was a long time ago.
Merlin says that Easter is all about candy and everything in his daughter’s life is about candy. John’s child is fortunately still pre-candy, but that won’t last forever. John hasn’t seen her today, because she went to Bellingham where her grandparents live. They are having a full day where they Easter-dress at church and all the wonderful American holiday traditions.
Cooking chicken (RL149)
With John running for office, they are going to talk about some weird stuff on this podcast, but John is not going to monopolize the concept that we love so dearly. This is John’s commitment to Merlin! This podcast cannot be only about making Seattle a better place to live, but it has to make the world a better place to live. John would like to close out the announcement episode with Merlin’s new thought technology about cooking chicken.
A lot of people like to eat chicken. Merlin read about this in a book. He doesn’t feel to talk about chicken now and it is anyway too easy of a recipe.
John running for office (RL149)
John has been running around like a crazy person over the past couple of days, because he has a surprise to reveal to their listeners and to Merlin, his close personal friend:
Tomorrow I am declaring my candidacy for Seattle City Council
There is a lot to talk about in this context and now that John is a politico, he needs to go right to the brass tax. He needs to learn how to give a concise interview, and he needs to describe his policies and plans in a very short, truncated, soundbitey way, which is intrinsically a method of speaking that he distrusts, yet it is the way this business is conducted. Merlin started a new list called ”John’s opportunities for growth” and the first item is ”Concise interviews”
The first milestone of this campaign is going to be the primary election in August. In some ways August seems a million miles a way, but of course John will do lots and lots of going to barbecues, kissing babies and describing his ideas over and over. There will be plenty of opportunities until then to get his ideas out there and his challenge is to not tell everybody all his ideas the first time he meets them. Also, John is running on a premise that he is listening to your ideas, you citizens of Seattle! He wants to hear other people’s ideas. Being on City Council is not about your ideas, but about the city’s ideas. This job is a lot about getting down into the details of how the city really functions, like millage, zoning, and parking and John is fascinated about all of those things. He loves infrastructure, he loves the ins and outs and ups and downs, he loves the things that are under manhole covers and on top of telephone poles. The job is ideal for him, he will relish it and he will relish sitting at a dais and listening to people talk about zoning.
An artist running for city council
The challenge in getting there is the concept we have in our country about who is getting to occupy these roles. People in government are a certain kind of person and we typically think of them as either lawyers or people who have been professional activists their whole career. They kind of earn the job this way and they think of themselves as professional legislators. John is an actual democrat in the sense that he thinks that citizens should be involved in government. Farmers used to be in office just for a while before they would go back to farming, or figuring out how to push books off a shelf, or going into a tesseract through a black hole. John is trying to convince the city of Seattle not only that he will be a great person on the city council, but also that it is not dangerous to elect somebody who is talking about art as a civic virtue.
Because Seattle is a liberal utopia, every city council person in Seattle has generally the same ideas. They all think there should be more transit and they all think there should be affordable housing. There is nobody running for city council who thinks that the Earth was created in 7 days and who wants a blood wave to sweep away same-sex marriage. At least it would be very unusual. Everybody is a liberal, which is a wonderful opportunity. John’s challenge is that he is going to go in front of the city saying that there has never been an artist in city government and it is precisely what we need and it is precisely where we will go next. It is time to take a big leap forward, and part of that big leap forward is to stretch our imagination. We should not keep putting people in positions of power in city government who are down in the weeds, because there is no reason to think that they are going to stay in the weeds.
Convincing the gatekeepers
The only way for the gatekeepers between John and the citizens of Seattle to compare candidates against one another is the model of ”Your opponent says that there should be more busses and trains, what do you say?” - ”I also think there should be more busses and trains” - ”How is that different from you opponent?” - ”Frankly, it is practically not different, because the truth is that we need more busses and trains, and why would anybody have a different attitude?” How will they be able to differentiate between the candidates? It becomes a question of who can tell the story to the citizens of Seattle and who can get people invested in doing what is ultimately the hard work of building a better place. John just has to do that for the next six month. At the end there is a popularity contest where people decide which candidate appeals to them more.
A lot of voters pick the one who’s hair looks better and John happens to have good hair. Last night as he was writing his platform speech, he decided he needed to give himself a haircut. At 2am he was standing in the mirror cutting his hair while one of the clearest voices in his head was shouting ”Idiot! Do not cut your hair right now!” Luckily he did a good job and his hair looks pretty good, but when he walked out the door the next morning, he was not full of hair confidence and had a little bit of hair anxiety, because he cut it in the middle of the night with a pair of construction paper scissors and now he is walking out in front of the city saying ”I am an American and also someone who is not a lunatic. I propose to represent you well and effectively in city government and I cut my hair last night. Hello! For those of you who don’t know me, I am John Roderick, your next city councilman!”
One of the challenges for John is that he cannot imagine sacrificing this podcast. None of the other candidates have a similar podcast to compare to and there is no precedent of someone proposing to be in government who also once a week talks to his friend with the utmost candor about what is happening in their lives. We talk about politicians in a certain way, we want them to be in a certain way, but the only people who run for office are people with unrealistic hair. Some of them have unbelievable hair and they convince us that they actually do have a fool-proof plan. The only people who really believe they have a fool-proof plan are either fools who don’t have enough information to know how wrong they are or sociopaths.
The reality is that when you enter public office, you should first and foremost say ”I am going into this job to listen to people and to hear every side. Somebody then has to chose and that is why you elect people to office to chose on your behalf.” What makes a person a good choser is that they don’t go into office already with an unshakable faith in their own ideas. What makes them a good choser is that they are good listeners, that they are thoughtful, and that they have a breadth of knowledge. You empower that person to chose for you because you have faith in them and you trust that they are going to chose based on what they have learned, not based on what they already know, or based on what they think they know, or based on what they have known since they were 5 because everything they ever needed to know they learned in Kindergarten.
We are on the cusp of something great
John does not hate bureaucracy and he does not consider bureaucracy to be a bad word in the sense of busy work or a pushback to make government opaque. He earlier talked about Romania where they don’t have much of a bureaucracy. You would be driving on a street and there would be a sewer lid missing for months. It is the bureaucracy that enables you to have that sort of stuff happen and having the right people make the decisions to make sure that the sewer lids are in place. An effective bureaucracy is an incredibly civilizing technology. Bureaucracy is a thought technology and it is our invention. If it works well you have some place to go to file a complaint and somebody will take your complaint and then something changes! Think about that! John loves that function of local government.
Right now there is a tremendous nationwide frustration about government. You hear young people say all the time that nothing is working and it has never been worse than it is now. Because things like Ferguson are happening, because there is a greater wealth inequality than it has ever been in people’s immediate lifetimes, they feel like these problems are insurmountable. They are being cynic and think there is no chance for us, but in fact, things have never been better than they are now. There has never been more justice. There has never been more equality. We have succeeded so much and now we are on the cusp of making a giant stride. We have the technology to do it and we have the consensus, at least in our cities.
Seattle is a giant city where a pretty radical liberal consensus has settled into place over the course of decades. Even the chamber of commerce in Seattle is deeply liberal. This in an incredible opportunity! The thing about liberals is that they have always felt persecuted by the FBI and the police. The FBI was wiretapping Martin Luther King. Liberals are used to being in the opposition and in a city like Seattle it is very hard for the them to recognize that they are in charge. Seattle is a liberal utopia that is on the cusp of happening and they just have to recognize that they are the establishment now. We can make a radical liberal agenda happen, we just have to recognize that we are not proposing a violent revolution against ourselves, because we are the establishment and we can simply put our policies into place.
John really does believe more than ever before that we are on the verge of a technology revolution. In the next five years, we are going to see technology transform cities. The promise of the internet! We laugh at Matt Haughey who is sitting in his driveway, trying to get his garage door to open from his phone, but the reality is that this is the way it is going and it is going to transform our urban life. That is incredibly exciting! Nobody in city government in Seattle, in San Francisco or really anywhere is trying to say ”In the next 10 years, a lot of these 20th century problems are going to change radically”. Seattle is still trying to build a highway tunnel under the city to solve a 20th century traffic problem while the 21st century solution is almost here. We can’t quite see it yet because Elon Musk is developing it in his garage, but it is actually real and we are going to have a real switcheroo in terms of what our urban toolbox is. In Seattle we have a general liberal consensus and we are on the cusp of this technology wave. Like San Francisco, we also have this prosperity wave! There is so much money and it is just time to turn that money into cool city things.
Not seeing the rich as our enemy
The reason we have such a struggle with people who hold public office is that every single situation involves somebody making a compromise. We keep electing people who are dishonest about that and who say that we can have our cake and eat it too and everybody wins. Making sacrifices isn’t bad, it is part of living in a city or of living as part of a family. You make sacrifices and there is something incredibly noble about that. The problem with our culture is that we are afraid to say that, we keep lying about it, and when the sacrifices come, people feel betrayed. What we need are people who go up to public office and say that everybody needs to pitch in there, which is a wonderful business. For the people who have the prosperity to pitch in a little bit more, here is how and we welcome their contribution! Income inequality is an intolerable thing, but what it means for many people on the left is that the rich are their enemy and the only way to redistribute wealth is to go to war with the rich. This is very galvanizing and it makes people feel that you have a plan and we are going to take some action. You are also not afraid to tell people the exciting thing they already thought.
It is very different to say that the most rich and famous people in Seattle turned an idea into a business and American capitalism took that business and turned it into an enormous pile of money. They are not our enemy! They are people who need to be encouraged by our culture and by selective judicious application of our laws and regulations, but also by a community commitment, like ”Hi! You are super-rich and you live in this town and we know you want to help. Here is how you can help: We are doing a public-private partnership that funds the construction of rail which is going to go right through the neighborhoods where you build your business, so it is going to serve you and your companies, but we need a little help in the form of your contribution, because when you built this business here, you stressed the infrastructure of the city. That is great, that is growth and that is how it works and now it is time to give back, but not just by paying your income tax, but by recognizing that you need to step up and actually be a corporate citizen who takes some responsibility” Did you move to Seattle because you got a really high-paying tech job and now you are living in a cool loft Downtown, you have a BMW 740i, the biggest TV you can buy and you still have money that you don’t know what to do with? Great! Here is an opportunity to be part of civic life and put a little bit of that money into making the city a better place for people who are not making that kind of cash.
This conversation is not about passing laws, but more about saying ”In cities like Seattle we are doing business a different way and we are not just going to default to Wall Street values or Cupertino tech bro values, but we are going to assert our progressive urbanist values. Doing business in Seattle has a lot of incentives, but it also comes with an additional opportunity to put your money where your mouth is." Jeff Bezos is a liberal and he wants to do a good job. Bill Gates was the richest man in the world for 15 years and he never gave away a penny until Warren Buffet called him and told him that he is the richest man in the world and he needs to have a foundation to give part of his money away because not doing it is an embarrassment. Bill Gates heard it and started the Gates foundation which is an incredible asset to the world. Nobody passed a law that forced Bill Gates to redistribute his income, but somebody called him and said ”Hey guy! You want to do a better job than this!” and Bill Gates was a human being and heard that message. It is not naive to talk about this from the standpoint of somebody running for office. You can’t go through life saying that everybody who has more money than you is morally suspect. The real job is to say that we are all in this together, it is hard on everybody and ”Don’t you want to help?” It applies to people who are making $50.000, too! We want to make the city a better place and everybody needs to pick up a shovel.
John is not running for office with a 3-point plan to pass laws to penalize developers. Every one of those laws you pass creates a cascading wave of problems you didn’t anticipate. You need to pass laws pretty judiciously and you need to think about all the potential problems. We have seen this countless times and every year we pass a new law that creates 1000 new problems. It is not naive for somebody on a city council having the purview to say ”Hey, hello, Seattle! We have to evolve a different way of doing business here!” That can be exciting for us and it is absolutely the way this conversation should happen. ”Jeff Bezos, if you are listening, this is a fantastic opportunity! John has some ideas about affordable housing to build down in the neighborhood around Amazon and he has some clear ideas about transit to get those many workers in and out of your campus. In the long run, it is really not going to cost that much!”
Interlude
This is not April 1st. John is really going to do this! It is unusual for somebody like John to run for public office and people will ask if that can be real. Merlin throws out there Peter Garrett, Jello Biafra, Tom Ammiano and all kinds of people from the arts who have moved into politics. Ronald Reagan moved the arts into politics and brought his classic artistic sensibility into the conduct of his office, both as governor of California and as president of the United States. He is the one who defunded art in America, because Robert Maple Thorp had some naked pictures and that is a legacy we are still suffering from.
There will be plenty of time to hear about John’s platform. Merlin has been hearing it during a good part of 3 years, the Supertrain platform.
Running for office is like releasing a new record album
In the run-up to his campaign, John talked to a lot of people in the professional political class who all gave him really good advice. Over the course of several weeks of thinking about it, all that advice caused a lot of anxiety in John, because people in the professional political class imagine that somebody running for office has a plan and a certain way of doing things. It is very analogous to how a brand-new band is trying to put a record out. Everybody you talk to in the music industry has a very clear idea about what you need to do next and they are more than happy to tell you what you need to do. All that is true until a band comes along that didn't do any of those things and still becomes the biggest band in the world. When John joined the music business, people told him not to go on the Internet and talk to his fans, because he needed to maintain an air of mystique, because that is just Rock ’n’ Roll. Don’t waste your money releasing vinyl, because nobody buys vinyl anymore! Save that money to spend on opening weekend to get your record in the Top 10. Everybody knew exactly what you were supposed to do until the game changed.
People tried to put John into a box where he was supposed to be claiming to be a social activist, or that music had been his hobby while he really had been a secret politician the whole time. At a certain point a few weeks ago, John told those advisors that this was causing him a lot of stress because he is neither of those things. He is an artist, he made a life for himself as an artist and he believes in the transformative power of art. John will run with that, because he believes that art is one of the pillars of civilization. If the only way he can get elected is by pretending that he has been a housing activist this entire time or by portraying himself as a legal expert on local government, then there is no point. There is no point in lying to people, because every other candidate is portraying themselves in a certain light and John has to just be himself. He does believe that he can get elected by doing that, but it requires that we change people’s expectations. That is what caused John the most stress and it is maybe going to be the most difficult.
How it is going to affect John's every-day routines
John relishes his free time and the fact that he doesn’t have to wake up at the crack of dawn. His campaign is going to require him to change that about himself, but that is very doable because those are just luxuries that he afforded himself. When you are 45 years old there is a tremendous pull to set your aspirations for yourself right about where you are at and to just keep burbling along like you are doing. It is scary to be 45 and throw yourself into a place where you don’t know what is going to happen next. It is much better to know the bands you like, to go to the pub where they know you by name and you will be doing pretty good. For John this isn’t enough and it never has been. Does he have to get up in the morning in order to do this? Yes, he absolutely does! Does he have to learn to love it? He is not sure if that is possible, but he is galvanized by a desire to do something and to take the privilege that Seattle has afforded him and turn that back into sacrifice.
This is absolutely going to change his parenting. He had the opportunity to spend the first 4 years in his daughter’s life with her at his leisure and now he will have to do what every parent has to do, which is learn how to budget his time better in a way that the last thing that suffers is his daughter, which is going to require a lot of additional effort and thinking on his part to make sure that she doesn’t see less of him. John is also going to be doing all this new and additional work. The work he does now is real work, although it often looks like dreaming or like sitting and staring at the wall, but that is real creative work. The thing about this new undertaking is that the work he needs to do often just looks like being there. It means getting up, getting in the car and being there on time. Listening to people takes a lot of time. John has to be there in a way.
People will treat you differently as a candidate
John was doing a photo shoot Downtown to get some pictures up for the launch. As he was standing there on the street corner, a group of women came by and said ”Hey! You are John Roderick! Why are you standing here getting your picture taken?” and he told them that he going to run for city council. They found it fantastic, they talked about the city for a minute and they told him what they perceived are the problems in the city. They were very content to say ”Fantastic! We are so glad you are running! You have our vote!” and they all took a picture together. People want to talk to a candidate in a different way. If he were standing there thinking and talking about some songs, they could have stayed there together talking for 1,5 hours, but there is something in being a candidate for political office where normal people go ”Great! Let’s get a picture! You have our vote! Good bye!” This wonderful experience with these people was interesting because they knew him as a musician, but when he said he was running for office, they all of a sudden had a very different conversation. They were excited he was running and they offered their support.
John walked half a block down the street and another group was standing there, a couple of families with a couple of little kids. They were like ”Hey, you are John Roderick!”, which was interesting because all of a sudden everybody in the world knew who he is. It is very unusual to see somebody standing there getting their picture taken on the sidewalk, they had just overheard John talking to those other people and they wondered if that was what it was. They talked for a few minutes, they told John what they thought needed to happen in the city and they said that John has their vote, they took a picture and Good Bye!
As soon as you are a candidate, people are talking to your differently. It is about being there and talking to people, but it is also a completely different conversation than when people are talking to their favorite musician. John was energized by both exchanges! He knows that someone is going to want to talk about chemtrails for 1,5 hours, but little do they know that he is an expert on chemtrails. John already has a campaign manager who is going to stand next to him with his large phone and who is going to lean in and tell John that they have to go and John will have to table this until they see each other next. He will not be lying, but he will be able to get away, because he has somebody who’s job it is to recognize the tin foil hats, even when they are under a different kind of hat. John’s life is going to change and a lot of it is going to be availability and accessibility to people.
Not running a negative campaign against your opponents
John doesn’t want to run against the other people who are campaigning for this seat. He has absolutely nothing against his opponent and has tremendous respect for anybody who runs for office. It is excruciatingly difficult and it is a sacrifice. We thank people for their service who have served in the military, but many of them don’t like that, because they literally risked their life for several years and then you get to congratulate yourself because you thanked them for their service. It can feel a little condescending. The reality is that public service takes a lot of forms and one of these forms is participating in your government. John has no desire to run for this office by denigrating his opponents telling them ”You sir are no Jack Kennedy!” or whatever. Merlin offered to help coming up with zingers like that, but John already has Lloyd Bentsen on his speed dial.
At some point in this election, somebody will surely say something really nasty about him and as people who spend time on the Internet, we know that we do not want people to yell at us. Part of this job is putting yourself out there and afford the people who want to yell at you the opportunity. That will require some humility and John has been trying to learn and embrace humility for a long time, gearing up to run for office. The humility opportunities will present themselves every day on a big platter and running for office full of arrogance would be a gross misapprehension of what the job is about. John has been practicing the humility of standing there, let people take shots at you, keep standing and keep talking about what you think matters for a long time. Nobody looks forward to that. John's daughter can’t read the newspapers yet, but one day she will be sitting in the library stacks, looking at the microfish and reading the newspaper accounts. Even though the internet is going to transform urban life, students will still read microfish, and there will be some newspaper article saying ”Have you ever really listened to the Supertrain episode or their podcast?” Merlin thinks that this one is a romp and will actually bring a lot of people into John’s big tent. It brings all the boys to the yard! Merlin is not going to help the competition by picking out problematic episodes.
Fundraising
Then there is fundraising, a whole game of asking people for money, a thing that we all hate to do. You ask them for money, they will go ”Okay, I surely will support you!” You ask them again and remind them to give you the money and they will be ”Okay, we sure will! Thanks for calling agin!” When you check again you see they didn’t give you the money yet and you have to call them again. It is the worst! You do that until they either give you the money or tell you to never call them again, and even then you have to call them again. In Seattle, the maximum anybody can donate to you is $700. At least there is a ceiling and if anybody has given you $700, you just can’t take any more money from them. There are a lot of ethics rules about that, for example if everybody who works for Paul Allen will give you $700, the ethics committee is going to take some of these people aside and ask them if Paul Allen made them do this, and if they say ”Yeah, he kind of did!”, that will be a super-violation. If somebody gives you $700 and also gives you a silver candlestick to use for your election, the value of that candlestick has to be computed into the amount they have given you and if they already have given you $700, they can’t also give you the candlestick and you have to give it back. The thing is that John loves candlesticks and if you run a campaign you do want a big table and some candlesticks on it.
Merlin listened to an episode of Fresh Air (released 2015-03-31) the other day, which is where he learns everything. It was hosted by David Bianculli who was in for Dave Davis who was in for Terry Gross who apparently was away and it was a great interview with the judge Sue Bell Cobb, the former chief justice of Alabama. Now that she is out of office, she is advocating for the idea that judges should not be elected positions, which internationally is very unusual. There are not many first-world countries where you elect judges and the whole idea of having to do elections as a judge and having to see people come before you is unseemly. She is really honest about it and Merlin felt her discomfort about the basic process where she had to get somebody on the phone and ask them for money, and she could not have been elected if she hadn’t done that. Everything she did was ethical and nobody did anything wrong, except that the institution that makes these kinds of things legal is difficult for everybody.
The problem is that people only give you money with an inherent expectation. John has a tremendous advantage in that he is not beholden to anybody. He did not come up through the unions or the prosecutor’s office, but he is a completely free agent who also knows every nook and cranny of Seattle. John goes into this clean, he has a moral compass and he is not liable to anybody sidling up to him with a briefcase. John had a long meeting with the Seattle ethics office where all of that was talked about and there are clear rules for everything. If you take money from somebody, you have to have their name and address and phone number. If somebody gives you $700 in a paper bag, you have to give it back or have them fill out a form. Fundraising is going to be a big part of what John will do over the next few months. Getting money from other people shows that you are serious. The early money you get is like yeast: As soon as you start getting that, people want to give you more. It is the way to communicate to the professional political class and to the journalists that you are a contender. This is why we end up with millionaires running for office. They will just use their own money. We take these people seriously because they have money, but that doesn’t mean that they are actually serious people or good people, it just means that they start out with the advantage of having the money to run a campaign.
John’s Internet advantages
John is not struggling for name recognition and there is nobody else running for city office who lives on the Internet the way John does. He has never asked the Internet for anything, but all he does is give to the internet. He slaves and works his fingers, and he says ”Internet, here, take it all!” John is basically The Giving Tree of the Internet and although he has been chopped down he got up again. The guys from Chumbawamba are an anarchist collective. Peter Garrett, the guy from Midnight Oil was a very effective politician and a hell of a dancer, too. In Australia he is held in fairly high regard. Australia has an unusual way of doing national elections where an outsider can actually have a chance. They put a marble in a Conch Shell and put the Conch shell at the bottom of a reef. Then they give each candidate a knife that they have to carry in their mouth and they ask them ”Is that a knife?” They do things very differently there. In New Zealand you just go on top of a volcano, throw somebody in and the name they scream on their way down is the name of the winner. They are also very sensitive that you don’t confuse it with the Australian way of doing elections.
Not thinking about what you are going to miss
John will miss having his time be his own, but he stands at the threshold of something and he cannot take a step forward if he is consumed of thinking about what he is going to miss. He doesn’t know ANYTHING about what the future holds, what his life is going to look, or what is going to happen next, which is thrilling! He just has to step into that. Before his daughter was born, people asked him if he wouldn’t miss his freedom, but John has had a lot of freedom and had been to a lot of plays, dance recitals, bars and Rock shows before. For many years he would go to three or four Rock shows a night. He has lived and he has sucked the marrow out of life. Once his daughter was born, he realized that whatever he no longer could do because of his daughter did not feel like a sacrifice at all. He couldn’t go out and see Rock shows anymore because he was at home with his beautiful daughter! Looking into her eyes is a kind of drug he never knew existed. Only somebody who doesn’t have a kid would ask you if you worry about losing your freedom, because when you lose your freedom, you do it voluntarily, at least John did. He doesn’t need to see Spoon tonight, although he wants to, because he is here with his daughter, which is something he wants to do more.
Running for office is very different from holding office. John can only hope and expect that the sacrifice of giving up his ability to go down to Portland this afternoon to talk to somebody over a hamburger and jump up at their show and play a guitar solo, because he has an appointment the following morning where he has to hear about how they are going to redo our sewer system to accommodate wet wipes, will be so invigorating that he won’t look at it as a sacrifice. He can’t imagine looking at the next 40-50 years of his life on this planet and thinking about it in any terms other than having to keep stepping through that door every time, because the alternative is to come to that doorway one day and say that it is one doorway too many and you are not going to step through this one. This is not what John has been working towards! Hopefully he won’t come to some doorway and have somebody tell him that there is either a lion or a beautiful princess, which door do you want to open? John will open both doors at the same time because he has long arms.
Closing remarks
John and Merlin will keep doing this show and their schedule will hopefully not become too erratic, but it is a little out of their control and it would be bad to overcommit. This show is also their commitment to one another. If it were not for Merlin, John would be less of a man than what he is today. Merlin has made John more of an adult, he was the little pill flavored like a turkey dinner that has enabled the space program to make the mission to Mars a success. This podcast has been the wall 5 inches away from John’s face, as he goes into defcon, hurdling into space. It has been the Whopper which both starts a global thermonuclear war and also recognizes that the only winning move is not to play.
It is going to be fun! John hopes everybody is following along! [www.voteroderick.com] is the website where you can donate, but you cannot give money if you do not live in America, but you can donate from anywhere in America, because Seattle is one of America’s top cities and if Seattle goes, so too does America go. As Seattle moves, America moves, and so it is not unreasonable to think that people who live elsewhere want to see Seattle move. That is the opportunity! Ultimately, to spread to word where this candidacy is recognized as representing all of us, ICYMI (in case you missed it).