This week, Merlin and John talk about:

The Problem: How do you think big in 1960, referring to the question what you would do if you could time travel back to 1960 like in the movie 11.22.63 that is about going back and saving Kennedy.

The show title refers to John dreaming of finding a duffel bag of money, but he wants it to be Euro because they have 500 Eur bills and you could fit a lot more into a single bag than if it were dollars, and how you would store your weird money.

Raw notes
The segments below are raw notes that have not been edited for language, structure, references, or readability. Please do not quote these texts directly without applying your own editing first! These notes were not planned to be released in this form, but time constraints have caused a shift in priorities and have delayed editing draft-quality versions to a later point.

John not finding his keys and having them in his pocket all along (RL191)

John couldn’t find his keys this morning, so he picked up his other keys and when he got to the office his fab didn’t work and then he reach into his pocket and his first set of keys was right there in his pocket although he had looked there 16 times. Gremlins? Gnomes? Not finding your keys when looking 16 times is a form of banner blindness, excluding magic.

Banner ads (RL191)

It is like on the Internet where there used to be banner ads and then people developed banner blindness and where your mind unconsciously skipped past this certain size ad unit. John does this both unconsciously and consciously. These days the problem is the pop-over JavaScript window takeover thing that wants you to get the app or the newsletter. Merlin also can’t see Forbes anymore, they don’t let him look at their website.

The venerable Time Magazine has become a clickbait bullshit party. Merlin is writing that down, but no longer on a card, but he has gone totally digital now, and when he wants to leave a note in his daughter’s lunchbox he does it on a brand-new iPhone 6s Plus, she knows the code. He doesn’t have a scrap of paper in his office anymore, John has been there (three months prior, see RL182), all he has is Marvel dolls with dead dark eyes and a computer.

Science Fiction vs Fantasy (RL191)

Yesterday on the way to the new animated Disney movie (probably Zootopia) Merlin explained the difference between science fiction and fantasy to his daughter. In Science Fiction everything that is happening inside of that universe is explainable, even if not by the kind of science we have today, but it is internally consistent, but in Fantasy all that shit goes out the window and there is fuck-tons of magic.

There is not a lot of science in Lord of the Rings, just a lot of walking around. What about the movie Avatar? Within the setup it is Science Fiction because the premise of being able to inhabit a creature is explained, but within the actual film it is really a Fantasy movie because there is a lot of magic. It is Science Fiction Fantasy!

Merlin’s family being bad at searching for things they can’t find, Merlin’s daughter keeps losing her stuff (RL191)

Merlin struggles with his family. They get along mostly pretty well, but it drives him a little bit crazy that they don’t understand the basic innovations required to find something that they can’t find. They keep looking by this one lamp because that is where the light is much better, like in the famous Mutt and Jeff comic. Every morning she can’t find her hairbrush although they have 5 of them now and Merlin had deployed them tactically around the house and the law of averages indicate that it would just turn up. But like scissors and Scotch Tape it disappears in some black hole, presumably in her room.

John’s life hack for this is to put it on a chain like at a bank, except do it like a Midwestern gas station and attach it to an old license plate. It is not going to get lost and it clangs when she is brushing her hair. Kids love that!

There is no point in Merlin saying this to her daughter, but he says that there are a couple of facts and evidence, and it is the same facts and evidence that they talk about every day. She has 5 of these, and she is literally the only person in the house who uses them, which means that she is the only person who has any agency over what hole it gets dropped into. Merlin’s wife and daughter are like a confused Roomba, they tend to circle in the same areas while Merlin is under the coffee table, under the dining room table, and behind the cat box because they have already looked at the places where it should be.

Merlin is a cat owner now and they have two cat boxes.

Then people keep saying that it always is in the last place you look because usually people keep looking for 15 more minutes after they found something. Merlin just sounded like Eugene Mirman. John doesn’t watch Bob’s Burgers, he doesn’t have a TV.

John is all about life hacks and solving problems. He is one of our great nation’s foremost progenitors of life hackery. Merlin is actually pot-committed to raising his daughter as a nerd. When she was 18 months old she was already wearing Spider-Man pajamas and John looked at her with confusion, but don’t call her Spider-Girl, because she is Spider-Man!

John wonders why Merlin hasn’t introduced the fanny pack into her universe. It is where the hair brush, the iPhone, and the tiger balm goes, the keys to the house, the keys to the barn. She sounds like quite a catch! It could be made out of goatskin, so that she looks like she is homeschooled, and she will know the difference between Science Fiction and Fantasy at that point because people on the bus will want to talk to her about that. She will be part of a guild without Merlin having to do anything.

Everybody else in Merlin’s family does everything else so much better than him that he can’t piss from the high ground about the hair brushes and he literally bought 3 more, they keep them in the closet but don’t tell her.

Boxes (RL191)

Merlin feels that in the absence of organization one of the worst things you can do is introduce more containers. John objects! The other day he bought some Prada sunglasses and somebody asked him if he wanted the box. Of course he wants the box! You can use it for so many things like for sunglasses, regular glasses, and pins. John was at the store where there was a little ”buy it now” next to the cash register that usually has candy bars and thumb drives in it, and this one had little American Flag pins and John bought two. Merlin thinks John should buy a full box of those and put them next to his tiny presidents.

One time Merlin bought a whole box of Carmex so that he could have the box. He used to have a Carmex problem like most Americans. The other item he bought a whole box of was the trees you put on your mirror so your car doesn’t smell. In the late 1980s he was pretty into those and they came on a really cool completely vintage retro cardboard stand that looked like they hadn’t updated it in years. When he was in the store there were 5 of them left and he asked the kid if he can also take the stand if he would buy those 5.

Merlin tries to pop the stack, which is a John Siracusa term.

Having a key bowl in the hallway, thing you carry every day (RL191)

Merlin’s life changed when he introduced the technology of a bowl into their house that they liked a lot, but it had a crack in it and did not longer have the performance characteristics of an eating bowl and so it became the ”stuff from your pockets” bowl that is always in the same place. Merlin will take off his Carhartt hat and stick his wallet, passport, notebook, headphones, pen, keys and anything else into the hat and the hat goes into the dish.

John has several coffee mugs that have either broken their handles or have cracks in them that make them unusable and they are all filled with different collections of vintage promotional ballpoint pens, like Al’s Defunct Auto Supply Place or Barney’s Typewriter Repair Shop, but he doesn’t have any funny pens like Merlin’s daughter’s orthodontist gives out. Keep your fucking funny pens! John should be part of a network and somebody else in the world has a collection of funny pens and they could trade pens with each other. It would be a nice new version of The Blacklist (see GMC RV), a way to share the dumb shit you have that somebody else would want.

John has a silver bowl full of keys and a long thin Sushi plate that is meant to have a Rainbow Roll on it, you can find those that are gorgeous, it has dimples, the glaze is intentionally uneven, it has a little Wabi-sabi. It is a much longer plate than the silver bowl where his active keys go, and the Wabi-sabi plate is for inactive keys, like the two Vespa keys which he is not currently driving because it is winter and they are also not running, but they are the only two keys to those two Vespas that exist in the world and John has never had duplicates made in owning those things for 35 years and he cannot loose them!

Then there are the spare keys for the RV and the spare keys for the house and a couple of heirloom keys. John has a latchkey kid and he wore a house key around his neck on a red piece of yarn. He still has the key on the yarn and keeps it in his inactive key plate just because. When John goes in the door his keys go with a satisfying clink in the silver bowl.

John’s pitcher for receipts and mail (RL191)

Here is another life hack: In the 1970s there were the Tupperware plastic pitchers with a turny top that they would use to make Kool-Aid, or you would plop in a container of frozen orange juice concentrate and add three cups of water. John has a pitcher of that exact size and shape, but made out of translucent blue glass, sitting right next to his front door, and into that goes every receipt that he has accumulated during the day without making any attempt to organize them, and all mail that he doesn’t want to open right that second.

He has made himself an inbox in a beautiful blue vase that is just tinted enough that you can’t tell that it is full of envelopes and receipts. It is decorative! It is also small enough that when it has 11 envelopes in it you have to do something about it. That is one system. John’s system for his wallet is to leave it in yesterday’s pants because today he is not so far from yesterday that he can’t remember yesterday’s pants. Merlin thinks that one of the problems is that it can fall out, but John’s wallet can’t fall out because he has a big wallet and he is a big man who wears tight pants.

Merlin thinks that the big life hack is that if it works for you, go with it! John counters that if it works for you but it is wrong, then don’t do it.

Different styles of utility belts (RL191)

Merlin sounds like he is carrying a utility belt worth of stuff, his wallet and his flashlight and his multitool, his Blackberry, his nose clippers, his mini Nunchaku, his sunglasses, his slightly less tinted sunglasses, his normal glasses, hairbows, and he is unloading his pockets every day and John wonders why Merlin is not using a fanny pack or an utility belt.

What about a police utility belt? Merlin sees this with the cops near his house and he admires it because you can take that off and everything is in there. Imagine showing up at some software devcon in a utility belt that has a holster for everything, but not a jokey ”look at me I’m Batman!” belt, but it is a grown man’s utility belt. You would look like a cross between a comic book nerd and Cyclops from the X-Men comics.

Some superheroes have supernatural powers that they get from UFOs or mutants or magic, while others have technology-assisted superpowers, they are disturbed billionaires who have a lab, like Doc Ock. They have their robot arms and they are fighting somebody with magical UFO power and somehow they are evenly matched enough that the comic book never ends with the gruesome death with one or the other.

Merlin is not going to become a mutant in a useful way, but he could still be a crazy scientist superhero, and that starts with a utility belt because the rejection of your peers is a nice way to get you good and angry about using your science. Merlin could do that to his daughter, like A Boy Named Sue type situation. He will make her horrible and completely objectionable. The key thing is to make somebody the kind of nerd that even nerds don’t like.

What about the story with the green onion? The guy who puts his ring in the onion, fists the lantern, and that gives him onion powers, the one who is riding a green hoverboard, he is green and mean and has a long chin. It is the guy who is in Deadpool now (Ryan Reynolds), he played the Green Onion a few years ago (actually Green Lantern). He is a mutant who also uses technology, which is a totally separate category. Being gifted with space powers is an interesting edge case.

Merlin thinks of it in layers or concentric circles. There is the stuff that you always have to have on you. Right before they started recording he had to run home to pick up something that Amazon had left and he didn’t even bring his usual go pack. He brought his phone with his headphones on because he was listening to a podcast, he brought his golden lasso, and he brought his keys, because that is really all he needed to cover that small distance. Normally he has all the things on his body that he described earlier that he stores in his hat at home. Merlin has about 8 Carhartt caps, one going at a time.

The problem is when somebody starts with the idea of wanting to be organized because most people think of organization of taking all the unnecessary shit in their house, roughly sorting it into piles, and then buying new clear-plastic boxes to stick it in. That is not organization! John puts his stuff in vintage cigar boxes, which is different! Before you organize you have to throw out and give away! You should only keep things that are very valuable to you, but in John’s case it is all valuable. When he is organizing stuff in his house he has no intention to work more efficiently or to have things be more useful, but he is organizing them for the pure joy of the act of sorting things into boxes, it is like Sudoku for pens.

When John first started playing Sudoku, a good friend of him, Chris Carniglia looked over his shoulder for a while and said that it is like doing the dishes, it is a pointless chore, but you don’t even have clean dishes at the end.

What about a Chewbacca style utility belt? Merlin was talking about Cyclops before, the guy from the X-Men who shoots a beam out of his sunglasses, not the Cyclops that turns your wife into a pillar of salt if she looks back as she is running away from your burning town (that was in the book Genesis in the Bible and she looked back at the town of Sodom). He lives on the Isle of Rhodes in a giant maze constructed to hide the snake hair lady (Medusa), and if you can answer the riddle they get you a fanny pack of gold and they leave a dollar pill under your pillow.

Merlin was confused and thought John was talking about the Neil Gaiman book New Gods. The guy Rob Liefeld who invented Deadpool can’t draw feet to save his life, he also did a reboot of Cyclops in the 1990s where he has many pouches and the question is what he has in all of those pouches, but his musculature is impossible because his wrists have a greater circumference than his knees. John would send him back to drawer’s school! Merlin says that Rob Liefeld has done some very special things with the human anatomy. His people look like oil barrels with oak trees for arms and little ballet feet because goes out of his way to not draw feet.

Cyclops has to wear his sunglasses to control his laser beam that otherwise would just shoot off with maximum power. It has always been a confusing thing for John. He is called Cyclops, but he has two eyes and the Cyclops refers to the sunglasses that Professor X made him. He works at a school near where Marco Arment lives in Westchester County. There are a lot of problems to it, for example their basketball court has a giant jet under it and you would notice a giant black jet flying out of somebody’s tennis court.

Who do you think they are fooling? It is pure Vanity that Merlin doesn’t wear a Chewbacca style belt, but not the Vanity who recently died who played with Prince. It was Vanity, not Apollonia (Kotero) who died. Sheila E. (?) favored one of Merlin’s tweets one time, which was confusing. Lil B The BasedGod follows John on Twitter. The other day Merlin got followed by an actress whose adult work he had seen before, but he wouldn’t say. It was not Annie Sprinkle. She has become a renowned academic now! This was the first time in their friendship that Merlin has admitted that he even knows what adult material is. There used to be news stands out on the sidewalk that would sell adult material in addition to the Washington Post.

Merlin had stuff that was not far off from a Chewbacca style belt. Before he got old and his back hurt he would have a messenger bag, which is a terrible design for walking around the city. All you have to do is put one cellphone case and one beeper case on the strap of your messenger bag and you are basically a Chewbacca!

Merlin’s job at the library, shelving books (RL191)

In his first semester in college Merlin had a work-steady job at the library. He worked at the desk, which was super-easy and he enjoyed shelving books. Sometimes it is nice to do something a little bit mind-numbing, which brings it back to (Mihaly) Csikszentmihalyi (pronounced chick sent me high) and the graph about the challenge vs the skill. He thoroughly enjoyed arriving there in the evening and a professional librarian had already prepared a large cart full of books that had to go on the shelves and he loved the ritual of it.

You can pick up a book and look at it for a second. This is not complicated work and as long as you don’t throw the books away you are not going to get in trouble and you can take as long as you want. You open it up, look at the card to see when it first arrived. He stole a card from a book once, The Collected Poems of A. E. Housman, that had been checked out by his best friend’s dad in 1966. You don’t get that kind of history anymore. Sometimes John will buy books at remainder sales that still have the card in them, books that have been checked out 7 times between 1953-56, and then it wasn’t checked out again until 1978. Why was this book so popular for 3 years in the 1950s and then sat on the shelves for 25 years?

It is a job that anybody could do, but not everybody wants to do. All it requires is that you know the alphabet, but it is job that is so specific and weird that it is not only a major, but you can get advanced degrees. Librarians are the best! Merlin thinks that librarians and project managers should run everything because they are so smart! John is continually surprised by how many librarians he knows because he doesn’t actively go to librarian events, he doesn’t sit on library steps and asks people what time it is, but they are all around him. He knows so many librarians but not a single rifleman.

Merlin has a life-hack for the library: When you get a book off the shelf and you don’t know yet if you are going to want it, then you turn the book directly to the right of that book down on its spine and you look at the book you want to look at and you know where it goes back on the shelf. It is the simplest life hack in the world, but they don’t teach that in schools anymore. You should do that in bookstores, too! Where is Jesus’ Son again (by Denis Johnson)? It is a pretty small book with big books all around it. It is not by Christopher Lamb, it is not the one about Brazil and Jesus doesn’t even appear in it really. The guy from Almost Famous (Billy Crudup) was in the film adaptation. The book is by Denis Leary (no, it is not), but not the guy from the TV show or the guy Dennis Leary they know who owns the restaurant. It is by Roman Johnson (no, it is not).

Dennis Leary is a nice guy and he owns some nice restaurants, and once you own 5 restaurants, what do you have to be mad about anymore? With one restaurants you are mad all the time, with two restaurants you are even madder, with three restaurants there is so much to be mad about that you can’t be that mad. It is like drug habits or children: Once you got enough of them, it all evens out. With 5 restaurants in you are just sitting on a porch somewhere.

Bags full of bags, a bag full of money (RL191)

One time John was at Merlin’s house and here was a Timbuk2 messenger bag. They have a whole contractor bag full of Timbuk2 bags, a bag full of bags. John has a closet full of bags full of bags. A Closet full of Closets is Merlin’s favorite Pink Floyd album. John’s dream is a basement full of closets full of bags full of bags. That would be fucking killer! John was looking at a real estate listing the other day that had a big basement and he thought that if he owned that he would immediately build closets and those closets would have shelves full of bags with bags inside.

John spends a lot of time thinking about what he would do if he suddenly had $5 million in Euros, a duffle bag in a tree (see Money from a drug deal gone wrong). Euros come in larger denominations, there are 500 Euro notes in regular circulation and nobody blinks an eye if you pull one out in Europe. They have been talking about getting rid of the $100 in America, which is insane. They have pennies, but they want to get rid of the $100 which is a fantastic bill. They should make a $500. In gangster movies where people have briefcases full of money, they open it up and it is a bunch of $100, if you were doing that in Euros that bag could contain 5 times as much money, you could have one bag really full of a lot of money.

Also, Euros are worth more than US Dollars. John was just in Canada and their dollars have fallen through the floor. First time Merlin went to Canada in 2001 it was CA$1.60 to the US Dollar and they were living large and for a long time they had the US beat bad. They were at parity and were looking down over their Northern border at them. It was wonderful for them, they were so glad that they were a real country now, but now their dollar is just back down to being the Australian dollar, no offense. John is not going to get that Headphoney after saying that!

John is always thinking about storage container facilities, because when you have a ton of Euro in duffle bags, what are you going to do? Put them in your house? No! It is too much matter to put in a safe deposit box, but you can’t put them in a bank because you don’t have receipts for it and there are ax implications of suddenly having that much money, which is why there is such a thing as money laundering. What if a billionaire has given it to you because he credits your podcast with having given him the strength to become a billionaire. If he is listening to the right podcast he is having Filson luggage full of Euros.

What John wants (they make the reference to The Godfather again: ”What I want… is a guarantee… no more attempts on my father’s life!”) Merlin always makes a reference when he says ”Once again… I salute my Imperator Furiosa” (from Mad Max: Fury Road)

John wants a storage facility where he has ready access to his weird money, but where it is secure. You make some deal with Genie where you say you want to live forever, but she cuts off your arms and legs, and you don’t want to have all the money in the world, but then your glasses broke and you are all alone. Maybe that duffle bag was in the tree because they thought that was a pretty canny place to store some Euros? You want to hide in plain sight!

The terrible thing about the bag of Euros is that if you had a Timbuk2 bag full of Euros that was in your house right now, you would feel pretty stressed out about it! You feel that you have to move the money and you don’t feel comfortable about that and you get the money somewhere. If you can see it and can check in on it, it is not really safe because it is too close, but if you put it somewhere where you don’t see it where it really is safe and it is obscured from where you can see it, now you feel unsafe because you can’t check on it.

Maybe you are going to the storage space and the two guys who are parking cars in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off are working there and they are like: ”What country do you think this is?” and then you go away and they realize there is a lot of money in it. Where is it safe? You become a weird person despite this great bounty, your wonderful money that is supposed to make you free. Maybe you should go to the Batman bank or have the joker watch it for you, but how did that turn out? There was a movie where they put all their money in the banks in Panama and then Johnny Depp all of a sudden didn’t have his money anymore (the movie is called Blow) because one day Noriega just nationalized the banks.

John has come to the conclusion that you should never have more money than you can carry in a Chewbacca bandolier. It is like sowing Krugerrands into your vest, but what i you have to cross a river? It is like a biblical story where you drown because you don’t want to take your Krugerrand vest off. The only true wealth is property. John was saying the exact same thing on his drive into the office this morning.

Time travel movies, what would you do if you could go back to 1960? (RL191)

Merlin talks about the James Franco Go Back and Save Kennedy show (called 11.22.63), but John hasn’t seen it because James Franco is a personal bug bear for him, like one hair in a delicious desert. Tom Hardy is a desert with no hair. Even if the rest of the movie is fucking shambles, Tom Hardy stands in the center of it and he is John’s Scarlett Johansson. James Franco is winking all the time and John doesn’t want to get winked at by somebody!

That show is about time travel and both Merlin and John love anything related to time travel. John hasn’t seen Predestination because he doesn’t have a TV. Merlin might send him one of his daughter’s phones. They talk some more about the premise of 11.22.63. John Siracusa can surely find many problems with this, but Merlin thoroughly enjoyed it. The story feels to John like that movie where Matthew McConaughey throws books off a shelf (Interstellar) and he throws the sand on the floor. Of all the things you tell your daughter that you miss her? Fuck you, screenwriters! Fuck you up your nose! Pure Garbage!

If you can go back to 1960s, your friends, the 5 guys that you knew in Vietnam is the extend of your vision and you are going to go back to make sure Vietnam never happens? You are not doing true time-travel thinking! Merlin asks John what he would do if he could go back, he could bring his phone, but he wouldn’t get a connection, he could bring money that would work at the time, he could bring maps, or printouts of the Internet. Also there is one guy who says: ”You don’t belong here! Fingertips! I hear the wind blow. Please pass he milk! Something got ahold of my hand” (find quote) You could put that album on shuffle and a 7-second song would come on. ”Leave me alone! Down dark in corridors!” (lyrics from the album Miscellaneous from They Might be Giants, TMBG)

In 1960s you could stop Pol Pot, but if you wanted to stop the whole Vietnam war you would have to go back further than 1960s. They were already in Vietnam and even if Kennedy wasn’t assassinated they were still going deep in Vietnam. He was banging cocktail waitresses two at a time. ”Where is the soup?”, ”You don’t hit my brother, you understand!”, ”You Italians are all the same!”, ”I’ll buy you out!”, ”I was making my (inaudible) when you were still in diapers”, ”You don’t talk to a man like Moe Greene like that!”, ”I didn’t ask who gave the order, because it had noting to do with business.” (random quotes from The Godfather and The Godfather II)

There are many things you could do in 1960, but you could not stop the Vietnam War. You could maybe alter the course of it, hopefully to save your 5 friends that are outside of Da Nang. Merlin wonders if you wouldn’t focus on fixing everything that is wrong in your family and be rich forever, but there is no way you could fix John’s family if you went back to 1960, you would have to go back to 1760 and just stop the whole thing, grab somebody and throw them down a well.

So munch energy and resources were wasted during the Cold War, but the question is if it was the lesser of evils. Whatever the teleplay between Capitalism and Collectivism we have been trying to work out for the last 150 years or longer, was the Cold War a lot better than the other options? It is the butterfly-flaps-its-wings problem: You get in there in 1960 and you solve the Cold War, but then you incite a nuclear war.

There is a movie called The Final Countdown where an aircraft carrier goes back to Pearl Harbor day with Katherine Ross, Kirk Douglas, Martin Sheen, and James Farentino. They had five T-6 Texans that they painted like Zeros and they tried to make those 5 planes look like 700 Zeros by flying them back and forth. It is like with the Sleestaks: How many Sleestaks can you show at once? The Final Countdown is an early version of addressing some of the time travel quandaries. If you can go back to 1960 with an iPhone and it worked, or with a sports almanack, you would have to be really dumb to not get rich, but you are also flapping your butterfly wings and all of a sudden Nancy Reagan got two heads.

John thinks about this all the time: Being transported back to 1972, in which world you are already alive, but the only people your present you know in this world are your parents and your family. What are you going to do? Are you going to pretend that your whole family isn’t there and you are just going to live in a townhouse somewhere and make sports bets? No! How would you introduce yourself to your own mother, prove that you were you, given that she would almost certainly recognize you in the sense that she would recognize something about you.

You would say that you are a relative and tease your way into the house by saying that you are the son of aunt Maisie Glotz, and she is going to know who Maisie Glotz is and go: ”Oh, really?” Then you are invited into the house and you go: ”You know, funny… do you believe in mysteries? Have you ever seen a movie about time travel?” You don’t want to come off as a scam artist because the only person who would do this is somebody who was trying to rip your parents off.

John’s mom was always into science fiction all the way back and John has an in on this idea when he is eventually transported back in time that he can tell her: ”Look, I am the grandson of Henry Priddy!” - ”Really? I think know all the grandsons of Henry Priddy!” - ”Well, I am a long-lost grandson!” and she would see in his face a resemblance enough to her people that some bullshit story like that would get John in the door. Then he could say: ”I know you like science fiction, don’t ask me how, but let’s imagine a fantasy science fiction scenario where time travel was possible! Are you with me so far?”

John would be in her head already and use her own tendencies to make the case that he was her own son appearing back in time, and he would use family secrets to prove his case. It would be massively creepy and at any moment she could stand up and go: ”Who are you? My God! Get out of my house! I am calling the police!” at which point it is over and you are never going to get back in. In every screenplay you will always be transported back in time on some momentous day or the day before, and you can either stop it or use it to prove that you are from the future.

John has spent a lot of time, mental energy, and bushels of food to give him the strength and power to think about time travel scenarios where he will reintroduce himself to his mom. What possible good can come off that? Why did Jesus make him this way? What are we doing here on this planet if this is the ouroboros that occupies John’s days. He could be out building habitats for humanity. Instead he does this, and he doesn’t even have a utility belt!

John could also ask his mom from the present to give him a family secret that he could then use if he would ever go back in time, get her to figure out how little Marcia would do it. John is wondering if there is still stuff that his mom is willing to tell him that she hasn’t told him yet. His dad was never going to tell him the Phi Gamma Delta secret handshake, not even if John would have tortured him with a branding iron, and not because anybody gives a shit, but because he had decided that he would take the Phi Gamma Delta handshake to his death.

John knows a lot of secrets about his mom that he could use, but the only way you could prove it is to tell them a story about something that happened to them when they were all by themselves that you can guess they have never told anybody or so few people that it couldn’t possibly be a thing that you knew. In the film Looper there was something Merlin had never seen before that involves things that happened in the past that then become part of the present, so they torture the guy in the past and the results of that are happening to the guy in the present.

The other question is: What could somebody tell you if a beautiful middle-aged woman shows up and says that they are your daughter from the future. How would she prove that to you? Merlin would ask: ”Where is your hair brush?” - ”I don’t know!” - ”I love you, honey!”… Yes, and…