This week, Merlin and John talk about:

The Problem: It scares the biomes, referring to John’s new Mack Weldon underwear that has silver threads that is antimicrobial and scares the biomes.

The show title refers to John asking the captain of the JoCo Cruise if he had seen any UFOs and his crew getting really uncomfortable about the question, possibly because of some Omertà of the sea.

It is going great for both of them, so they have nothing to talk about on their complaining-about-stuff podcast. It would be funny if they just had a week where everything was okay, everybody was driving fine, and didn’t think about Hitler once.

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 Please do not quote these texts directly without applying your own editing first!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

Getting pulled over in a lime-green Lamborghini Diablo (RL190)

One the way in today there was a small traffic jam, not one that John was upset about, because the source of it was that a cop had pulled over a lime-green Lamborghini Diablo and everybody had to slow down to see it. The person who paid for that car probably had many colors to chose from, but they picked lime-green. Talk about a ”Fuck you!” to everybody! In a car like this John can’t imagine that you would ever get out of first gear in town, why would you even drive it around town?

You drive it on the Starnberger See, the Rennsteig, the Rheingold, the Ringscheiße, the Nürburgring. Merlin has a couple of friends who have driven on the Nürburgring (see RL106), like his friend Marco Arment when he got his BMW M5 delivered. Merlin has never been in that car and wouldn’t even know how to dress for that, maybe you need inside-out sweatpants that wouldn’t mar the seats, maybe with a sheep-skin ass-chap. Everybody talks about assless chaps, but what about just the missing part of a set of chaps, just an ass and front pelt? They continue to discuss how those chaps would look like. You got Marco Arment over here: ”Honka Honka Honka! No soup!”

John doing a lot of traveling (RL190)

John has done a lot of traveling, but he is not done yet because the life of an artist is the life of eternal vacation. He has just been on two major warm-weather-vacations and now he is going on a lengthy ski trip and he can’t defend it because he is not producing anything for the world during those trips. He is like a game designer, but he doesn’t even design games. Merlin’s daughter’s favorite video game right now is one where you stare at the same area of a backyard of a house and you try to make cats come into the yard. Your reward is the opportunity to buy virtual goods that enable you to attract more cats.

Bird watchers (RL190)

John has always been very curious about bird watchers, but the more he looks into it the more it seems they are just out watching birds and gathering the experience of having watched different birds like Spotted Throated Warbler. That is very interesting to John. The bird watchers and the bird photographers are different people, too, they are not even collecting haven taken a picture of a thing. As Merlin gets older it is not that he can’t imagine why someone would go bird watching, but it seems a little obscure.

Existential euphemisms (RL190)

As you get older you become aware of euphemisms, for example existential euphemisms. For Merlin’s wife going to the gym or going to yoga is very much about going to the gym and going to yoga, but it is also about having an hour or two to herself. Dad saying: ”We are out of milk? I am happy to go to the store and get some milk!” means that you get a second to yourself and you can smoke a cigarette. Like John’s grandfather said that he would go out for a pack of cigarettes and he didn’t come back for 15 years (find reference!).

Quicksand, gorilla suits, clowns, conspiracy theories (RL190)

Gorilla costumes and quick sand in the 1970s came up so often that even as weird as it was you were wondering if there really was that much quicksand in the world. Merlin heard a podcast a few years ago: ”What happened to quicksand?” (probably Radiolab) because quicksand was everywhere! John was terrified of it, it seemed like it lurked around every corner! There was a period where Merlin would avoid sand altogether, and also people in gorilla suits and birthday party clowns. Merlin still hasn’t met anybody who actually looks forward to meeting a clown, but they were led to believe that there is a clown culture out there that anybody liked.

John doesn’t mind clowns, but he had a traumatic clown experience as a child. How does quicksand fit into the Bermuda Triangle, Bigfoot, Loch Ness Monster troika, the In Search of… (TV show) era. It seems contemporaneous! Maybe it was post-hippie pre-new-age America was very interested in all kinds of wackadoodle concepts. There was a Time Life set of books, there was interest in aliens, like ET is coming to visit us, secret Nazi weapons, underground or underwater kingdoms, the Sasquatch, the Bigfoot, Loch Ness Monster, it was everywhere. It was part of the appeal of the original Indiana Jones movie. Quicksand is also a fetish for some people. It also features prominently in The Princess Bride.

John visiting the bridge on the JoCo Cruise, asking the captain if he had seen UFOs (RL190)

They were invited to visit the bridge which John had never been to before. It is not just a computer, but there are sailors up there in various uniforms and a ship captain from Winnipeg, which right away should ring some alarm bells. Normally they are either from the Netherlands or from the Netherlands or from Greece. The Netherlanders grow up knee-deep in water and they become ship captains because it is the only way they can keep their feet dry.

Canada has a lot of sailors, but they usually are not from Winnipeg. Their Navy is very important because they need to protect the Arctic seaways. As the ice recedes there might be alien civilizations, Bermuda Triangles, Bigfoots, Mayan Temples, quick ice, it could all be up there! The coast line of Canada is the longest in the world. All the nations of the world are now trying to scoot in and out of these Canadian areas because the sea ice has receded and there is oil up there and Canada has a whole Navy that is worried about that. They are not worried about pot smuggling anymore because it is all coming from Canada.

John got to tour the bridge because the 65 year old captain is an enormous Wil Wheaton fan and when he heard Wil Wheaton was on his boat he wanted to meet him. Of course Wil was on the Star Trek in the 1980s and has the communicator sound on his phone. The first thing he said when they came onto the bridge was that he pointed to his captain’s chair and said: ”We had that modeled off of the Enterprise!” and they all did a curtesy-chuckle. He was a super-nice guy, he walked them around, Wil’s phone periodically made the communicator sound as he got a text and the captain would giggle.

He was 280 pounds sea captain and all of his staff, hundreds of sailors, when he walked by they all cower, not because he is mean, but because that is the law of the sea. There is a button in some of the public bathrooms that says: ”In an event of emergency push this button, but don’t push it frivolously because it rings on the bridge and we will come rescue you hard!” It is their way of saying: ”If you have an emergency it better fucking be an emergency!” They were a very small group and they were asking polite question like: ”What does this knob do?”, nobody knows what to say to a sea captain, and so John asked what the weirdest thing was that he had ever seen come out of the sea.

He replied that he saw a sun fish, an enormous perfectly round fish that floats on the surface of the sea, they are very rare, nobody ever sees them, but he saw one and didn’t know what it was and it freaked him out because it was enormous. Later he saw a second one and by that point he knew what it was and he marveled at it. Then John asked if in all those years of staring out at the see he had seen any UFOs and at that moment all of his crew stared at their shoes and the captain said he had seen unexplained lights over the Bahamas that behaved unlike a ship or a plane.

John asked if he had ever seen a rogue wave and he said that he has not, but he has talked to other captains who have. It is a massive wave out of nowhere on a calm sea that is improbably high. The last question John asked was about the tallest sea he ever saw, and he said he was captaining a freighter out of Newfoundland and he was south of Greenland during the famous 1991 Perfect Storm from the movie. The bridge on that ship was 50ft off the sea and he had to lean forward and look up out the window to see the crest of the waves.

That was a good story! John was warming up to him and he wanted to sit on the bridge and ask him more and more questions, but they shuffled the rest of them away and Wil Wheaton stayed behind. John stood in the door to watch their exchange and the captain asked: ”What was it like to be in Stand By Me?” He was just a super-fan! Wil is amazing at those exchanges.

They were actually in the Bermuda Triangle when they were having this conversation. All of his staff got really uncomfortable when John started talking about UFOs. Maybe the sea captain isn’t supposed to let there be anything that he doesn’t control? Merlin thinks that it might have been something everybody saw and agreed, but you don’t talk about it because of Omertà, or the other are pretty sure he didn’t see that but he keeps talking about it a lot. John doesn’t think the latter was true, but there might be an Omertà of the Sea, like: ”First rule of sea captaining is: Don’t talk about sea captaining!”

John is sure the captain saw fucking sea UFOs. Merlin thinks he doesn’t tell everybody that story. As John left he couldn’t think of any more questions that he wanted to have an answer from a sea captain about. He did ask if he had ever picked someone up who was floating on a Rikki-Tikki-Tavi and he said that they pick people up all the time. He also asked if there are dark ships, boats without a call sign and without running lights, danger boats, and he said that the only boats they see that are like that are Coast Guard, boats that are out there lurking.

When they try to hail them they go: ”Shhh! Knock it off!” and they will tease them by getting on the radio: ”Aloha!” - ”X-ney! X-ney!” because they are lurking around these islands trying to find fast boats. John tried to dig in a little deeper, but it is always the Coast Guard that is running around without their running lights. They were pretty chummy at that point and John was leaning in a little bit: ”Come on! Come on! Who is out here?” and he didn’t blow it off in that way that they usually do when they are not supposed to talk about it, but they give you a little hint. Merlin thinks the captain is protecting John because John is not ready to hear this yet.

He thinks that there are microphones on the bridge of the Freedom of the Seas, or maybe he knows.

John thinks that captain would have given him a little wink if he knew something. He is from fucking Winnipeg! What is he going back to! Goes home and feeds his sled dog? ”Only you understand me! You know my secrets of the sea!”

John being on the JoCo Cruise again (RL190)

They didn’t go to Haiti this time and John stayed off of Saint Thomas because he had a bad experience the last time, nothing terrible, he just had an unenjoyable time. He did go to Saint Martin, which he likes a lot and he had a very nice time, although his daughter barfed. John had brought his family, the whole gang! John has his room that is provided for him by the JoCo Cruise where he ensconces himself, and the others had normal cabins for normal people. He brought all the women in he could think of, a total of 5 family ladies.

It would be a hell of a weird cruise if every person on the cruise was a woman you have wronged, but if there was a code of conduct that everybody had to agree to, maybe it could be a fun cruise? Although knowing the people that he has known they would all agree to the code of conduct with no intention of upholding it. There would be the ones who would bump into each other on the deck and go: ”Oh my God, you look exactly like me! What does that say?” - ”No, that is a total coincidence!” They would have the Doc Martens break-out room, and they would all have Roadrunner tattoos: ”He made you get one, too?”

There were enough family members so that they could entertain themselves and John’s daughter was old enough to what she mispronounced as The Aquanuts, a preschool daycare fun place for kids. She knew all about the soft serve machine long before they got on the boat. That was a destination for Merlin last year when he was on the cruise. John only went there once this time, and he never went to Johnny Rockets a single time, he basically just sat on his balcony and calculated trajectories for 12 pound canon balls for everything they passed. ”Could I hit that with a 12 pound canon ball?”

Next year the cruise is going to take over an entire boat and they are going to leave from San Diego and it is going to be totally crazy. They have discussed at length different stratagems to prohibit sea monkeys from turning it into a clothing-optional cruise because there are at least 150 of them that would take off all their clothes the moment they got on the boat, it is part of the sex-positivity of the overarching doctrine of nerdism, which says: ”What is the matter? Don’t body-shame me! I want to be naked right now!”

They started talking 2 years ago about taking over a whole boat, and John was like: ”Fucking nerd sex cruise! Watch out!” and they all started talking about what they were going to do if this turns into a total pig pile or a sex pyramid. How is that going to over? There are kids on the boat! There is a game room, but what if everybody was naked in the game room, sticking 20-sided die up one another. They have covered that now and have discussed it somewhat openly with everybody, decided it is a family cruise and you can be naked in your room, but you could always have done that.

The final iteration of the JoCo Cruise is going to be where Jonathan has become a Colonel Sanders and has gone into the illustration of himself and he is just a hologram.

There are a lot of talented people on that cruise all together and there is a lot of collaboration, but there is also: ”Who is going to sit at the head table next to Jonathan? Whom is Paul F. Tompkins going to chose to sit with?” To greater and lesser degrees people don’t care about it, but you will notice that people do care about it because they are first in the dining room to make sure they secure their seat in the right spot. There are times when John can be high above that and marvel and laugh and enjoy the way people are, the social craziness, but there are other times where he would like to sit next to that person and chat, and instead he is sitting over here and he feels along.

John banning Elmo and Dora from his house (RL190)

In the late 1970s / early 1980s Ronald McDonald suddenly looked like a woman. Merlin has seen the hot female Japanese version of Ronald McDonald. Is it like Mr. Noodle where suddenly it was Kristin Chenoweth. John didn’t get that reference, but it is a segment from Elmo’s World in Sesame Street. At first it was Bill Irwin, the wonderful actor and mime guy, and at some point the brought in Ms. Noodle who was Kristin Chenoweth. John has no idea what any of those words mean.

Before his daughter was born John had one exposure to Elmo and he was like: ”No, no, no, no, no!” He would always sing a song at the end to the tune of Jingle Bells, and when Merlin’s daughter saw something red she would go: ”Ha ha ha”, which was really cute. Also, to describe something as little she would cough two times. John has kept Elmo as he kept Dora: Completely at bay. They both are in a category of thing that he never lets pass the threshold. Their little whiny voices and their massively pedantic version of how to communicate with kids, John does not have it in!

This morning John came downstairs and his daughter was sitting at the table all by herself, reading aloud from her Dick and Jane book that John had bought. There are all these ”Learn your kids to read” apps, but John has learned to read with Dick and Jane as his mother and father before him and so will his daughter. She will be fine now, she doesn’t need anything else!

She knows what an Elmo or a Dora is, she has seem them in the wild, like when she was walking through a Target because Daddy needs a spatula. Merlin doesn’t call it ”Target” in a French pronunciation anymore, he did that in 1992 and it was funny for an hour. It is like your friend’s mom who always says: ”Thank you!” Stop doing that! ”Oh, I don’t really like Kim Kardashian that much!” - ”Thank you!” as an affirmative. In the mid-1980s all of a sudden everybody was saying: ”Yeah it is!” Merlin still has a lot of those ticks that he hasn’t gotten rid of and he doesn’t want to delve into it too far. Like the sniffing? John has done 190 episodes of this show and he still doesn’t clear his throat before he picks up the phone. What would that even entail?

Boys clothes and girls clothes at Target (RL190)

Merlin loves Target, they went the other day and came home with so much good stuff! All the boy clothes and the girl clothes are completely sequestered from each other and you don’t not want to get Merlin fucking started on this. The boy clothes have cool cars and rocket ships and skulls and crossbones and the girl clothes are just ”Ugh” Merlin’s kid leaves things on the playground, she forgets her jackets and her water bottles, but they are working on this and she is great otherwise. Merlin is getting her inexpensive jackets because he is not going to give her an heirloom jacket. In the girl section everything is pink and it is all shit, except they have cool belts and some cool underwear, but otherwise you have to go to the boy’s are. They assume that every girl is going to dress like somebody who falls down a well and waits to be rescued.

He went on Amazon to get a Minecraft hoodie, a hoodie from the cat game, or a Pusheen hoodie for her. In the search results you see men’s clothes, women’s clothes, and boys’ clothes unless you search for something really insipid and fucking pink and then you get girls’ clothes. The other day to go to Target she wore horizontal striped leggings with a lufa skirt (?) and a Captain America shirt and a headband with ears. She rules whatever the fuck she feels like and it is unerringly hilarious. Rarely does she want to look like somebody from Frozen.

John had been walking across the room and he accidentally unplugged his headphones and when he came back in Merlin had completely changed the topic so fast that it felt like they have been talking about Target the entire time. They got his daughter some clothes and a little terrarium. Merlin ended up spending $400, they got a lot of stuff.

Star Wars, The Force Awakens (RL190)

Try to go to Target and find a Ray character from Star Wars! You can get three different fucking storm troopers, but there is no Rey. It was truly a cultural moment! ”Oh, we didn’t want to put Rey characters out there because we didn’t want to spoil the surprise!” There is a hilarious set of The Force Awakens with 12” size characters that has Finn, Poe, the Han Solo son (Kylo Ren), two anonymous Stormtroopers, but there is no Rey in there. Rey is one of John’s favorite characters in contemporary cinema, she perfectly embodies what that movie needed to be and it would not have been the same movie without her.

John had an interesting insight into the film. He hesitated to criticize the Star Wars movie at all because as much as he likes getting letters he did not want to get any letters about this, but as he was walking along an acorn fell on he head and said: ”Wait a minute! Why didn’t they do it that way?” The Han Solo son (Kylo Ren), his first appearance in the film is in his guise and you see him and he appears and you think: ”Here is the new bad guy!”

As the film progresses you see that he is not fully in his powers. When Darth Vader has encounters with high-ranking soldiers you see that they are terrified of him, whereas Kylo Ren (John doesn’t remember his name and calls him the Paco Rabanne character) does not have very much authority and the general is openly contemptuous of him, but he is in this amazing gas mask costume. As the film unfolds the mask comes off and you see that he is just a callow male model. Darth Vader wore the mask because he was hideously disfigured and he needed the mask for breathing. The Stormtroopers wore masks because it wasn’t clear at first if they were robots or not.

As the film progresses Kylo Ren uses his mask less and less until he just seems like a teenager running around, very petulant, he just wears it when he feels like it, and it is never explained what the purpose of it is, except that it is an affectation. Why didn’t they start the movie with him without his mask, walking around in a cape, and that is why nobody respects him yet, he is obviously force-sensitive, but he is inexperienced and not a Jedi. The generals are contemptuous of him because he can’t just lift them off the ground and make them choke yet. He is being groomed by the new emperor, but he is still a callow teenager and that is why nobody takes him seriously, and then over the course of the film he inherits the helmet because… something!

Merlin talked with Siracusa about how the first Star Wars movie is like Fury Road in some way: Very little is done to explain what everything means. There is pure action and exposition based on what you are looking at right now. There are these robots, that is all the time we have to explain because there is so much story to get through here. There are so many things that people spent years wondering about. They didn’t understand what Darth Vader was or how he was, and they certainly didn’t understand what the force was, they didn’t know how powerful Darth Vader could be or what his weaknesses were. The less we knew the more interesting he was.

John being allergic to his own skin oil (RL190)

John has sensitive skin and both his head and his face are both allergic to themselves and he cannot abide any kind of real perfume and he cannot use normal soap. If he washes his clothes in normal laundry detergent he will get an enormous complete-body heat rash that sometimes swells his skin up so that it is an inch puffier than it normally is, which is terrible. If somebody else washes his clothes he has to wash them again. It is swollen and burns and doesn’t go away and he has to lay naked on a cool sheet and fan himself with a magazine. He doesn’t get Dwell anymore because he felt burned by them and it seemed they were just taking pictures of the same house from different angles.

John gets at Target the laundry detergent Cheer Free that has no stuff in it. It is probably a couple of guys who go over a barb wire fence to the dumpster outside of a liposuction facility and they get some bags of human fat and they render it with lye and that is what Cheer Free is. Your clothes don’t smell like any kind of perfume and it doesn’t make John’s body attack itself. ”Cheer Free - Get some skin in the game!” It introduces an anti-body.

This might be homeopathy, it might take a bit of human skin to make his skin not be bothered, but it is at such a micro-dose that it literally can’t do anything useful. Maybe it is microdosing John with LSD and he just doesn’t realize that his skin is hurting. Maybe he is in Dick Cheney’s bunker? He and Fred Durst are just sparking a doobie. Ever since they have mentioned that the last time (see RL189) John has had more Fred Durst mentions in his Twitter mentions than he ever wanted and he doesn’t want to think about him. You never know what is going to endure. As a Headphoney award winning podcast there is a lot of responsibility.

The dermatologist told John that he is allergic to himself, which is a terrible thing to say to somebody because John doesn’t want to be a Boy In The Bubble, but then the doctor said it is only his skin oil and he can’t let it sit on his skin because then his body will go after it. John goes to Target for that and for spatulas.

John having to go down every aisle whenever he goes to a store (RL190)

When John goes into a store he has to go up and down every aisle. It is not OCD-ish, he just wants to walk down every aisle and see what is there. How do you live with yourself if you go out of the store and you didn’t walk down the one aisle that had something? Whenever John goes to Costco with anyone who knows him they will tell him: ”Please don’t go up and down every aisle, we are just here for the 75-pound bag of peanut brittle!”

At Costco the shelves are very tall, so you can’t just look at eye level and it is always a long day. ”Do I need 47 Sharpies? No!” The last thing he thought he needed was a ladder that folds into a scaffold, an origami ladder. Or maybe he needs a juicer that goes at 5000 rpm that will turn bricks into a juice. He ends up getting the same thing: Spaghetti sauce and peanut brittle, but he still has to go down every aisle.

John got all his underwear at Costco until very recently when he started getting underwear from this fancy place (Mack Weldon, probably sponsor of Road Work at the time) that is knitted with microfibers of silver which is antimicrobial and scares the biomes and they get out of your underwear. It feels just like normal underwear, but it creates an inhospitable environment for all the things that might get into your underwear, but John doesn’t know how they get in there. It is an extra layer of protection, it is a little secret, and they are very comfortable. Maybe they protect his nether regions from harmful rays?

Believing that something malicious wants to come after you, paranoid schizophrenia (RL190)

Merlin is acquainted with someone who is having problems with things like worrying about rays and he is trying to learn more about it than just ”Haha, chemtrails!” It is super-tough and also super-interesting and very complicated. We make jokes about this stuff, but some people believe in those things more than anything in the entire world. There is so much thought now about rays and about electricity, but what did people worry about before the age of electricity? Spiritualism was a big thing, sorcery, or daemons. Merlin continues trying to explain paranoid schizophrenia.

It involves somebody with malicious ill-will who is after you, they are organized and they are doing it remotely through some means of obfuscation. It is the core of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. People have always attributed that kind of malicious intent to the Jews, they were a convenient scape-goat for all that kind of paranoia for everyone in Europe for hundreds of years. You still see paranoiacs everywhere attributing all that mind control to the Bilderberg Group.

Chemtrails are so mockable because it seems more like a conspiracy that isn’t founded in actual mental illness, but in the pervasive American tendency that the most ignorant people are the most certain about their believes. People all across the country are absolutely sure that Obama is trying to take their guns, or whatever the fuck their current thing is, and Chemtrails are just a part of that. They are so profoundly ignorant of how things work and so supremely confident that their interpretation or the interpretation of the radio shock jock that they listen to.

What would be required to have Chemtrails be a project as big as they say and to keep it all a secret? It is just hilarious! And what is the benefit? There is so much mind control already, you are holding it in your hand, you are soaking in it, it is right in front of you. Nobody is trying to do it in secret and nobody is controlling it!

There seems to be some connection between drugs, guns, and inner city violence that was seeded with unintentional results on that scale, but the way the CIA was drug-running and paying for Nicaraguan cocaine, enough stuff has been documented and the narrative that Black Power was real, it was having a transformative effect, and then it was completely wiped off the face of the Earth by a blood wave of drugs that came into the inner cities, and the CIA is meanwhile dealing drugs to fund their covert operations? There is too much going on to dismiss it wholeheartedly!

You can picture five people in a meeting room where they close the door and they flip some switch and the cone of silence comes down and they go: ”Okay, here is what we are going to do!”, but you can’t picture five people in a room imagining the scope of: ”We are going to turn Columbian cocaine into a weapon to destabilize the Black Power movement!” There are too many things that have to happen where the logical explanation is much simpler. There is a simpler, more cost-effective and more secretive way to do it that didn’t require all those contortions. Is seeding Contrails with Chemicals the best way to do whatever it is that you think those people are trying to accomplish? That is bananas!

The story of the Columbian drug cartels where they came up organically and found a market for this product. We know that the CIA interacted with them, but it is much more plausible that that was just Capitalism working than that anyone in the CIA had a big plan. Soldiers came back from Vietnam and they had gotten hooked on heroin in Asia, that seems much more organic and natural and plausible than that they were intentionally hooked on drugs by the CIA trying to ruin the inner city. There are too many step in a lot of those conspiracies for it to be believable that five guys in a cone of silence had the wisdom to foresee all of this stuff and keep it a secret.

There is a guy with a mustache in a short-sleeved white shirt smoking a cigarette and he has an idea, but he never has the authority or the budget to pull off a big idea. No-one could ever say Chemtrails and then have access to the black budget to create it. That is the main stumbling block with most of those conspiracies: There is no organization in the world where the guy in a short-sleeve shirt that had the diabolical idea get a PowerPoint demonstration up and they will give him the $600 million to pull off his scheme and nobody finds out. The chief of staff of the armed forces and the director of the CIA might have access to this money, but they don’t just sweep into a room and say: ”Here is the plan!” They are bureaucracies! 99% of conspiracy theories would require a Blofeld (James Bond villain), and there just aren’t any Blofelds that we know of.

The chorus of voices in John’s head (RL190)

Merlin reads from Wikipedia that James Tilly Matthews was the first documented case of paranoid schizophrenia in 1797. John Haslam tended to him and wrote a book about what happened with Matthews and what he believed tormented him. The book is called Illustrations of Madness (original title: Illustrations of Madness: Exhibiting a Singular Case of Insanity, And a No Less Remarkable Difference in Medical Opinions: Developing the Nature of An Assailment, And the Manner of Working Events; with a Description of Tortures Experienced by Bomb-Bursting, Lobster-Cracking and Lengthening the Brain. Embellished with a Curious Plate)

John loves the word Assailment. Merlin continues to read about the Air Loom, the device that allegedly tormented Matthews, and he describes his imaginary persecutors that acquits nicely with how John would describe some of the cast of voices in his own head, points of view that have distinct personalities from one another. You are walking along in a quietude and some voice says: ”It is imperative that we do the following thing!” and some other voice says: ”What? That is the dumbest idea we have ever had!” and after a while you have to acknowledge that they have separate viewpoints and personalities enough to express them. But John does not locate those things outside his body, and whatever their torment just seems like a heated discussion.

It still feels like consciousness and personality are on a continuum or some sort of bell curve where the vast majority of people are not aware of a chorus of voices and as you trail off to a leading edge there are people who are aware of them but are managing them, and at a certain point those voices become distinct enough that they feel distinct from yourself. On the other end there are people who have a very dramatically singular voice that they are aware of as themselves and there is no disagreement within their own mind. John’s confusing is that he doesn’t know whether that unity of self-perspective is at the peak of the bell curve and that is the majority, or whether that unity of self is also a pathology at the other far end of the scale.

The mass of people, the Normal, involves some internal deliberation, but not enough where there are distinctive personalities that are arguing, but more like the devil and the angel on your shoulder. John’s mind has between 6-12 voices, depending on how quiet he is. Maybe your normal is two: good and evil, and the other end of it is a hyper-confidence in a certitude of one’s own mind. John doesn’t know enough about it and he is not sure that it has ever been discussed or investigated in those terms. Listening to a lot of schizophrenic descriptions John feels a kinship with the words they use, he just doesn’t know what it would be like to externalize that and be victimized by it and to actually hear voices.

Every once in a while when it is dark at night John might be in the basement of a strange house, he will have headphones on, and he will be playing the guitar into some amp, making Rock music, and he will hear: ”John!” from right behind him and he will flip off his headphones, leap across the room spinning in mid-air in total combat pose and he is all alone. That has happened a few times, and every time he flees the basement, goes upstairs panting, ”What the fuck? Why do you keep doing that, weird voice? Why do you keep shouting at me when I am having fun playing the guitar?”

Nobody has ever gone: ”Faster, pussycat! Kill! Kill!” and he wouldn’t know what to do if that ever happened, but he is long past the point where you would have an onset of that kind of mental illness. John is wrestling with what he has got, his cards have been dealt, and it is absolutely manageable, it is just curious to him.

For several years John would look at a situation and think that there was absolutely no despair inherent in this situation, but he was bringing despair into mundane situations. If he is in his own kitchen, making a cup of tea, there is no despair, but it is all in himself. The way that paranoia factors into it is that he is sympathetic to situations where you are socializing with other people and you are bringing despair because the tension when somebody else doesn’t understand you, the feeling of isolation from other people, the feeling that other people are sharing love with each other and you are excluded from that, it all makes sense.

Even if that is not true, John gets pulled into that all the time: When there are 5 people in a room there are always going to be moments where he feels that they are all sharing in something that he is excluded from. That is not always true, sometimes he feels like he is in the center of this friendship, but he is always vulnerable to getting pulled out of it. But if you are just walking in the forest, looking at the moss, and you feel that isolation and that sense of not belonging, that is the bell-ringer that this is a disease of the mind.

Sailing out of Saint Thomas and feeling no connection with the fantasy of living on a tropical island (RL190)

On this particular cruise he had a moment when they were sailing out of a port of a Caribbean Island that he won’t name except to say that it is Saint Thomas, that he already had a bad experience of and he didn’t go to shore, he was on his boat and he was lobbing 12-pound cannon balls at the port all afternoon, and as they were sailing out the sun had gone down and they were sailing past Saint Thomas, a beautiful island to appraise from 1/4 mile and the harbor Amelie is a perfect harbor, the most gorgeous place you have ever seen, and surely this town is a tropical paradise, but when you get to shore they just want to sell you Tanzanite. There is nothing there!

As they were sailing out and John was looking at the sunset at the side of the hill and he was seeing all these Caribbean houses perched on the side in a wooded canopy on this beautiful island, he realized that for a certain number of people this is their home, they are born there and they never knew anything else, but for a lot of people this is their fantasy, this is how they express their success in life, their ambition, they worked all those years in Winnipeg in order to afford to come to this island and live in that house.

The distance John felt from those people while looking at this hillside where thousands of people’s fantasies were expressed in all those vacation homes, he felt no kinship with them, that is not his fantasy nor his ambition. Different strokes for different folks, but John felt so different from them that he had a sudden feeling of tremendous loneliness. How can he be so detached from that whole idea to one day end up in a home on Saint Thomas where there is nothing to do but sit on the porch under a slowly turning fan and drink Gin Fizzes? Nothing about that appeals to him!

Watching that whole island throb he felt so profoundly alone that he had stop looking at it, put on his shorts, get out of his cabin, find some people, go up to Sprinkles and get an ice cream cone because he felt such a distance from humanity. Is that a sane reaction or an imbalanced one? It feels crazy in the moment, but he also can’t find fault with it when he tries to explain it. He finds no pleasure there. John saw an archipelago of these places stretching to infinity: This is one of the top human fantasies, to retire to a tropical island, but he would rather live in a shipping container buried under the sand in the desert with Fred Durst and Dick Cheney (see RL189).

And one of the voices will of course say: ”What is wrong with you, dummy! Why can’t you enjoy a tropical island like everybody else?” John loves the JoCo Cruise because his friends are there and they are making fun and the Sea Monkeys are great, but to be on that exact same cruise ship going to that exact same itinerary where there were not Sea Monkeys and he would not be with his friends would be his worst nightmare. How can the same cruise be so fun and so potentially miserable at the same time? Instead John wants to sit in a café somewhere and drink little teeny cups of coffee and read little histories of things and people’s film reviews. What is that?

Whenever Merlin goes somewhere that is primarily a place to go for fun an relaxation that is different from the everyday he always feels like he is doing it wrong and it always takes him an improbably long time to get into the spirit of whatever it is and not just be someone rolling their eyes on the sidelines. He can’t even go anywhere once and be good at it, but he has to go there three times to understand how to be somewhere and what expectations to have.

Ted Leo reading The Silmarillion (RL190)

One thing that happened on last year’s cruise where Merlin was there happened again this year: Ted Leo was reading aloud from The Silmarillion (by J. R. R. Tolkien). He did it on the first cruise and John was there sitting at his feet because he wanted to understand what Ted Leo was getting out of it, and it turns out that he is a very articulate reader and he knows how to pronounce Elfish names and reads them without any hesitation. He has an East Coast accent and sounds like a Connecticut person, but not a fancy one, and as he was reading John was transported, like a child being read to. He knew enough of this story that he was floating away on it while Ted Leo was reading from it with such care and such conviction.

The cast of people who showed up to that reading were the cooler people on the boat. Ted Leo was utterly sincere, read this book aloud as though he had read it aloud every day of his life, breezed through that Tolkieneese old testament style of writing and made the story come alive. This year when he said he was going to do it he was no longer doing it up in the cool bar, but he was down in a conference room off the side of the game room in a totally windowless place, and the only reason you would ever go there is because you were on the cruise with a midwestern Sales Force and this is where they had their PowerPoint demonstration.

At this point almost everybody in the room is not a cool person who is there to see Ted Leo do something slummy, but it is a bunch of people wanting to hear The Silmarillion read aloud. You could hear a pin drop in there, and Ted Leo reads so artfully from this book, telling the story that otherwise can be impenetrable, but now you can feel the tragedy in it and he never makes a mistake and starts a sentence over again, but he is gifted at this. It was a beautiful moment! Those are all the touch stones of the JoCo Cruise for John: When he is with a group of people who are enthusiasts about a thing and then he realizes that they are sharing a moment of human beauty that has nothing to do with the medium, but it is ultimately the message.