This week, Merlin and John talk about:

The Problem: John can’t change Memorial Day, referring to him being double-booked for going to a baseball game with George Meyer from The Simpsons and not being able to take the second option which is Memorial day where he thought to be out on the open road in his RV.

The show title refers to John playing the boss with the cowboy hat on in the middle of Harvey Danger’s music video to Sad Sweetheart of the Rodeo.

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 Please do not quote these texts directly without applying your own editing first!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

Mediate by INXS, World Party, The Waterboys, The Tourists, Annie Lennox (RL201)

John was just watching the music video to INXS’s Mediate which won the MTV Music Video Award back in the old times. It is the one where they just say words that rhyme with ”Mediate” all along. The video is them standing in an industrial area doing the Bob Dylan ”Don’t Look Back” thing, like a subterranean We Didn’t Start The Fire type situation. This was the era where they were wearing jeans with strategically ripped knees and little round glasses and the 1960s were going to..., it was so awful! This is what passed for culture when John and Merlin were just at the dawn of their lives, wondering what was going to happen to them.

Merlin guesses some: Watergate: no! Cheesegrate: no! John reads: hallucinate, desegregate, mediate, alleviate. When John heard this song for the first time he could get behind segregate and mediate, but the 5th lyrics is ”try not to hate” and that doesn’t really rhyme with mediate, ”Love your mate”, ”Don’t suffocate on your own hate!”, but they had already used ”hate” in ”try not to hate”. ”Designate your love as fate” is some Australian shit right there. ”A one-world state as human freight. The number eight” and it goes downhill from there.

John was hoping it to say: ”innovate” because he is looking for every opportunity he can to get in on the innovation sphere and he wanted it to say innovate so that he could repurpose the song as a pane to innovation. They go on reading through the lyrics, expressing their disapproval about them. Merlin wonders what the message of the song is. It is one of the Right Now Van Halen type songs where it feels like shit is real and things are happening. It is political without saying what should be different, let alone what already is there.

A couple of years ago John and Jonathan Coulton made a Christmas album. Merlin bought the box and he has one of the few ornaments that didn’t break in shipping. They needed a Hanukkah song and they wrote Wikipedia Chanukah, which is John reading the Wikipedia entry for Chanukah over a funky jam and he thought that in the spirit of INXS’s Mediate this was going to be a smash-hit, but people accused him of phoning it in on that song. That was the joke and John spend a lot of time learning how to pronounce those biblical era names of different tribes, it is not that he just pulled it up in a browser in the studio and started reading it!

John is a little mad that INXS has 1.5 million views of this song. They all got various denims on and he got glasses like Karl Wallinger from the band World Party. That guy is great, he was in The Waterboys with Mike Scott and Merlin loves them. John had no idea that the other guy from The Waterboys was the guy from World Party, the guy with the INXS glasses. He thought World Party had come out of nowhere. Merlin thinks The Whole of the Moon (by The Waterboys) is one of the great songs. There is a lot of jingle-jangle in that.

John is an INXS defender, but he is also one of the big time INXS haters. Merlin is not a huge fan. For years John was rocking his ”I am not a fan of things” thing and now he is a fan of everything, the tides have turned, and Merlin is the old crotchety guy who doesn’t like things while John loves everything. Merlin sold his combs, Captain America Superstar! Merlin likes almost half a half a dozen of their songs, and then he doesn’t like a bunch of them, and they talked about it one time and it got a little ugly.

Merlin likes the song about dream on white boy and black girl (Original Sin) a lot, which has a different title because it was the 1980s and you give the song a title that isn’t in the song. He didn’t like the Soup and Sallad Bar era (Suicide Blonde). John thinks Never Tear Us Apart is a great song from their later period. Like with R.E.M. you want to say that all the shit in the early days was good and all the later stuff is bad, but that does not work with INXS because there is garbage in and garbage out, there are terrible songs at the beginning and at the end, but then how do you account for the great songs at the beginning and the great songs at the end?

John’s impression of INXS is that they wrote democratically. It is all of the bros the entire time and nobody stepped ever forward, saying that they were the genius here. Andrew Farriss is a member of the band, but he is not the singer, that is Michael Hutchence. You got the impression that they really worked as a band. Merlin likes Don’t Change and John agrees that it is one of the great songs. In the music video they had a really good idea that they were going to get into the back of a pickup truck and drive away while still playing the song, but what do you do with the drummer? He was still drumming at the side of the truck, buy you could still hear the kick drum and it didn’t work, John wasn’t convinced. Merlin doesn’t like non-eidetic music, but when it is on the screen you should be able to hear it and vice versa.

Merlin doesn’t like Precious Heart, it is gross. There is so much bad stuff, like New Sensation is terrible, or Devil Inside. If you are putting the R.E.M. overlay on INXS what you need would be Orange Crush (song by R.E.M.), the first sign that the worm has turned, but not in a Shakespearean sense, but in a Tequila sense. It has not turned on you, it has turned into a bad worm. Some people say that What You Need is the beginning of bad INXS, but both good and bad INXS have been there all along and What You Need is in the good INXS camp.

Merlin likes the INXS when they are in his head are trying to sound like Hoodoo Gurus and then is the INXS where they are singing too low and it is too much ”bam bam” and Merlin doesn’t like that stuff. Eurythmics Missionary Man has almost exactly the same amount of ”bam bam” as INXS What You Need and they are contemporaneous and Missionary Man actually won an MTV music video award. That is a killer jam and the guy in the music video looks exactly like the guy from World Party, it might even be the guy.

The previous band of Annie Lennox and Dave Stewart (from Eurythmics) was The Tourists, a New Wave Power Pop band, who did a cover of I Only Want To Be With You that is one of the great things. The Tourist is a 2010 film by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, which sounds like a Kraftwerk coverband, and Angelina Jolie is in it.

Merlin prints a lot and he scans a lot. He started printing out photos. He also prints out all his emails and puts them in a file cabinet, it is the only way he can get Inbox Zero. How many folders does he have? Let me guess! (Merlin’s website was called 43folders). Merlin almost went full-on Rosco on John when he teased him about that (Sheriff Rosco Coltrane from The Dukes of Hazard). They gave him a little hound dog called Flash because they couldn’t add a kid to the show. He is proto-Bob Odenkirk who is doing Rosco Coltrane in 1/3rd of his characters.

The original MTV-style video of The Tourist seems to not be available. It used to be everywhere and it is a really cool 1980s video. John is looking at images of The Tourists and he didn’t even think to google ”young Annie Lennox”, that is how far off he was. She is probably approaching 70 years old and she still looks amazing today. In Eurythmics she was in her 30s. Merlin is looking at a video where she is wearing a little skirt and there is New Wave going on and it has a white background with them standing on pedestals like a classic 1980s video.

John clicked on The Tourists and got a bunch of images of Fleetwood Mac in the studio and he is not sorry about that either! Google learns from you! George Meyer’s life mate’s father is Lorenzo Semple, Jr., the creator of Batman alongside William Dozier. This explains so much! He also write the screenplay for Three Days of the Condor. John loves that movie! He is pretty good friends with Maria who is the bestselling author of Where’d You Go, Bernadette about being in Seattle. She taught fiction writing at the Richard Hugo house in Seattle, next to which John’s band used to practice (see RW207). He is basically the founder of the Richard Hugo house.

Annie Lennox of The Tourists, photographed in 1980 in some little pear-beaded sleeveless blue gogo dress is really wonderful. Those were the times! Dave is not that skinny anymore today, which happens to us, and he is a ginger, too!

Merlin tried to open a video, but it was blocked because it contains content from SMI, whatever that is. This is what it feels like to be Canadian, you just don’t get stuff.

Merlin’s daughter crafting a posterboard about Amelia Earhart (RL201)

Merlin sent John an image of a posterboard that his daughter created. She did every stitch of it herself, it said ”Facts about -> Amelia Earhart” When she was a teen she cut her hair inch by inch so her mom didn’t notice. Merlin’s daughter had to do a posterboard about somebody who was important to her and she did it on Amelia Earhart, Merlin just helped her with finding some photos and stuff. Slightly right of center she taped the first page of Amelia Earhart’s Wikipedia entry. She did some original scholarship, they watched some documentaries, she drew clouds, she drew the island Rikki-Tikki-Tavi near Hawaii that looks like a steak.

When Merlin prints he always forgets about comments and about footnotes. He is going to print a recipe and thinks it is 3-4 pages, but he forgets about the comments. In this case he forgot about the footnotes and printed out the 58 pages of her Wikipedia entry just so they could refer to it and fact-check. John doesn’t print, he doesn’t fax, he doesn’t print, sign and fax back, he doesn’t collate, he doesn’t staple.

The music video to Sad Sweetheart of the Rodeo by Harvey Danger (RL201)

Yesterday Merlin watched Harvey Danger’s Sad Sweetheart of the Rodeo featuring a young John Roderick, a fun video that cost $500.000 because it was at the very tail-end of a time when you would spend that kind of money on a music video. They hired Hollywood actress Ione Skye, current wife of Ben Lee and daughter of Donovan to be in it, with whom John is friends on Facebook although he hasn’t seen her in a long time since she tied him up in this music video. He gets tied up in Blue Diamonds (by The Long Winters), too and that should have been a theme running through all his videos and now he is embarrassed that he didn’t think of that.

The narrative is about a woman who is daydreaming about having a more interesting life than the one she had, and in the center of it there is a moment when she opens the door to her boss’ office and she is walking in to deliver some papers to her boss, but instead of her boss’ office it is a long dirt walk across a rodeo field and her boss is sitting at his desk wearing a cowboy hat. She makes the walk and puts the papers on his desk in a key moment of establishing the character of the boss. John is that cowboy boss, but you would never know it because the show was made from 80 feet away and you don’t make a connection of the boss in the middle of the film and the guy getting tied up in the end who just seems like a co-worker.

John suggested to them to have a close-up shot to establish what is happening here because it is going to be a call-back later and you want to make it clear whom she is tying up at the end. You can’t even really see John’s face at the end either, it doesn’t read as John Roderick and it doesn’t read as cowboy-hat boss. The guy who made the music video who was about 11 hours older than John had it all figured out, he was a big-time Hollywood music video director, getting paid $500.000 and John was the keyboard player in the band, so nobody took his note.

When the video came out it was: ”Good job, there is no story here! You had a story, but now it is just a bunch of collected images piled on top of each other.” If she is just tying up some co-worker who is standing in front of the copy machine then she is a lunatic and this video was a tragedy, whereas if you had established the boss character then this video would have been a revenge fantasy with her as the triumphant hero.

Mike Squires is in that music video and he got a nice antagonistic moment. Merlin asks how many takes it took, but he is just digging up old wounds. He gives her a covetous glance as they pass in the copy room, he is a lascivious co-worker who looks at her salaciously, getting a little star turn, but in place of John you could have had a paper doll, which is a damn shame! You have to really scrubble to really see him.

John being double-booked with George Meyer and Andy Fitz (RL201)

After that Merlin watched the weirdest line-up of John and his guys, hugging some lady, it was for a Seattle TV show, with John, Sean, Michael on drums and Handsome Guy on bass. It is the redux from a couple of years ago from 2013 and there is no Eric. The bass player is very handsome and Merlin never remembers his name, which is Andy Fitz (maybe Andrew Bird?), one of the great musicians of Seattle who has played on a lot of records. John is meeting him later today, as a matter of fact!

Last night John got an email from his friend George Meyer, founder of The Simpsons, asking if John wanted to go to a baseball game, which he would do any day this week, and George promised to come back to John when he had a look at the schedule. Then John got a message from his friend Andy Fitz who said he was going through a thing and wanted to get together for a little something something, and of course John wants to be there for his friend Andy and meet up for a bowl of Pho, so they agreed to meet up tomorrow.

Immediately John got an email from George offering him the baseball game tomorrow night. John didn’t have anything to do all week, but he just made a plan to hang out with his friend who is going through a patch and now that is the exact time George wants to go to the baseball game and you don’t call your friend and ask him if you can postpone his hard time, and if you tell George the truth it sounds like you want to get out of it. The second option was Friday night, the beginning of Memorial Day, and John didn’t even think Friday was included when he said: ”Any day this week” because he is going to be in the RV on the open road.

John can’t cancel on Andy and he can’t change Memorial Day and he went from walking around on his tippi-toes, singing to himself: ”I am going to the baseball game with George!” to ”Here I am again on my own, going down the only road I have ever known!”, which is the road of sorrow.

Alcoholics Anonymous (RL201)

Mr. Show is finally on the HBO streaming channel again and Merlin started watching it, it is still a delight. It comes up a lot in this program and people probably don’t get all of their Mr. Show jokes. The other day John was talking to a close friend of some component of the alcohol recovery movement and he realized that she really didn’t have an encyclopedic knowledge of addiction dependency culture and literature. In the late 1980s / early 1990 there was a giant self-help boom and in the book store was an entire section of pink books out of nowhere because it was mainly marketed at women who love pink and they would call it ”in recovery”, which they still say today.

AA has helped a lot of people but the template was then applied to Narcotics Anonymous, then it became a lot about recovery from an abusive childhood and it got to a point where it was promoted that you could use the tenets of AA to address almost any issue, even if you were in recovery from overwatching television, which was the point when John got off the train. It was about anything that was traumatic, difficult, compulsive, or anything that preoccupied your mind. It became a punchline.

The person John was talking to was a Millennial and they will make Generation Y look like the Greatest Generation, more like Generation Why Not. They came up in post-recovery irony era and John was talking about the 12-step-ism that is just in the water where he lives and it is almost reset where the Millennials think that alcoholics are people who live under bridges. They had spent years trying to take away the stigma and now they didn’t tend that garden for a little while and the Millennials go: ”Alcoholics? That is gross!”

John getting a video greeting from Dave Stewart (RL201)

One time John got texted a video from Dave Stewart (producer of Eurythmics). John had a friend who was working in the studio in Nashville with Dave Stewart when he was producing. John is a bit of a superfan of him, he was a major influence on him and is truly one of the greats. The person he was talking to was a Millennial and didn’t know who he was, but he offered to say ”Hi!” to him for John, which John agreed.

Later that night John got a video of Dave Stewart very close to the camera and a little souced, saying: ”Hello John! Keep being great! Whatever! Cheers, mate!” and then he turns around, maybe he was also wearing a top-hat and was carrying a briefcase that was possibly handcuffed to his wrist and he walked slowly down the hall all the way to the end, stopped, turned to the left, and proceeded off-screen. Wow! That just made his night!

Merlin is happy that she got the whole thing on video because normally today you just get 2 seconds of video of anything. In the age of the Handycam they learned that you got to stay on a thing for while. This wasn’t a SnapChat, it was film that she was making just for John and she understood that it was one old person communicating through the Internet tubes to another old person. She was just an intermediary who was not going to impose her Millennial aesthetic on it because she knew that this old person was going to continue to perform all the way down the hall and that the old person on the other end was going to keep watching this video, even if he walked to infinity.

Linda Ronstadt on her 1976 album being the feminine ideal for John (RL201)

The other day John was in a thrift-store with a friend and she brought over a copy of the Linda Ronstadt album from 1976 where she is actually on roller skates (Back in the USA) and she has a satin jacket and satin gym trunks. John is not even sure he has ever been with a woman who is wearing terry cloth shorts with little white bunting, but that imprinted on John in 1976 as the feminine ideal and he doesn’t know why he hasn’t ever acted that play out.

John realized that there is a huge difference for him between pre-perm Linda Ronstadt and post-perm and he was anti-perm the entire time when perms were a thing. Merlin’s best friend got an afro-perm as a 14-year old boy. Eric Clapton all through Cream had a giant perm! What is happening?

Selling T-shirts (RL201)

People who were buying their shirts in other countries and had to pay extra money for customs. Merlin feels bad about that! Commerce is a shit show! They are trying with these duties to protect themselves against something and rather than tax oil appropriately or people who are making billions they are adding a 19% VAT to a single T-shirt that you are ordering from some dingelings in America. Most of the time they are just doing it because America has done a similar thing. You talked about free trade, Bill Clinton! Free! Free to trade! People have purchased 1257 Roderick on the Line T-shirts.

One time Merlin wanted to sell the idea of T-shirts to John and said that it was free money, but John countered that there is no such thing as free money. Everybody who ordered a Roderick on the Line T-shirt got great T-Shirt value for their money and now they are going to be able to wear those shirts out, it is going to improve their chances of mating, someone is going to look at them from across a crowded dance floor, and they are going to say: ”There is a Roderick on the Line listener, just like me! Let’s make whoopie!”

There is a lot of finger banging based on just this one shirt. A lot of their listeners are Millennials and they have all kinds of weird sex with each other. John has told this twice already to Merlin and he has been thinking about it a lot because it is a new age now. Think about all the virgins out there! These kids are really sophisticated, but they are still virgins and they are butt-banging, but they are virgins. Butt-banging Virgins sounds like an INXS record.

Hoodoo Gurus, Billy Squire (RL201)

Hoodoo Gurus were an Australian band, one of the proto-bands from the rootys era like Zeitgeist / The Reivers and all those bands who are doing a rootsy thing like Lone Justice. She is something (Maria McKee), they have talked about her! Merlin is just a couple of years older than John and Hoodoo Gurus is just in that little keyhole where he listened to them, but John didn’t. He was already digging into Let’s Active (band by Mitch Easter) at a time when John was still… Merlin was an R.E.M. fanatic and was seeking out everything that was related to them, everything that starts with Peter Buck wearing a Hüsker Dü shirt, to Michael Stipe singing on the album by the Indigo Girls.

John was all over the Indigo Girls like some wet cellophane, but he was also still listening to Billy Squire at this point who was well and truly into his silly dance fruity stage. Have you really watched Rock Me Tonight? Merlin cannot believe this video ever existed. It is so much worse than he remembered. Billy Squire was very problematic for John because he really liked those first two records and then it started to get really strange and the Rock Me Tonight video ruined his career. It was from the Signs of Life album from 1984. Not only that, but he started appearing with a signature-model guitar which was a pastel colored modified Telecaster that also was not very Hard Rock.

Merlin thinks Fender should have hired him to use a Squire Tele. Merlin loved his song In The Dark. Emotions in Motion is a great tune and that record with the same name John thinks is bulletproof. Merlin’s girlfriend at the time and his first serious partner downstairs, there were two men that she regarded at the height of sexy, and that was Billy Idol and Billy Squire. They were both named Billy, which is also some cockney slang for penis. Billy Corgan //(from Smashing Pumpkins) just means Penis. John sees him all the time because they are both members of the secret chemtrail organisation. He, John Meyer and John sometimes drive out to the desert.

Children born in the summer having disadvantages later in life (RL201)

The other day John read that kids born during the summer typically are significantly less likely to become CEOs, which is the American standard of achievement, because they are the youngest kid in their grade. If you are born in July then you are much younger than kids that are born in April. If you are born during the school year you get to have normal birthday parties, whereas with a summer birthday what are you going to do? John was born in September and he was 4 when he started kindergarten. Talk about less likely to be a CEO! You could not be more disadvantaged than John was, a kid born two days later would have been held back a year and John should have been held back.

John deciding to be Big Man on Campus, choosing Kelly Kiefer as his girlfriend (RL201)

In 1992 a guy from Anchorage whom John went to High School with, his name was David, came down and was living in the house that John was already crashing in. He was one of those ”keep your friends close and your enemies closer” guys and they both had the exact same birthday, but David was a Junior when John was a Senior, he was very old for his grade and John was very young for his grade. He was very handsome, like a young Tom Selleck with super-dimples. He cute and he was GQ.

In High School John had never had a girlfriend and he was succeeding in High School in the sense that he was making a name for himself as an anti-authoritarian clown Blutarsky (the main protagonist of National Lampoon’s Animal House), but he was not succeeding on High School terms. At the very beginning of his Junior year he decided he was not going to go through High School being a dork, but he was going to do something about it. His mom bought him a desk blotter with a calendar, which were cool, but as 10th-grader John was destined to be a dork all through High School.

He was sitting there with his desk blotter before Junior year started and he was blotting how he was going to overcome. He was sitting in the back of the class, covered in dandruff, he didn’t chew tobacco, he had never kissed a girl, he was a year younger than everybody else, he was shaped like a log of cookie dough, and he smelled like one as well because when he came home from school he would eat half a log of cookie dough uncooked because it is the greatest thing in history. He was the worst!

John’s dad was born in 1921 and he used a lexicon that even in the early 1980s was no longer being used, and John wrote down Big Man on Campus (BMOC) on the top of his desk blotter, he studied the words, and he thought how one could become one of those. His dad would talk about how he was in the fraternities in 1938, he was the BMOC who tied a crew sweater around his neck, swung a tennis racket everywhere he went, he was a member of the crew team, and he drove a (Ford) Model A jalopy with a raccoon tail hanging from the antenna. He would cram a bunch of undergraduates into a phone booth, he was the guy! Swallow a gold fish, that kind of thing.

John was just studying the words and one of the things was that he had to get a girlfriend, but he had no earthly idea how one does get a girlfriend. Girls terrified him and he didn’t know how to go about it. Maybe he had to exercise? He went to school at the beginning of his Junior year and you could tell by the way people treated him that he was definitely on a track to be excluded.

He already preferred to be in the band room for lunch, so he was headed there hard. His preference was to ally himself with his peers who were people that sat in the band room at lunch and practiced the clarinet, or sat in the darkroom of the student newspaper. John was friends with one of the photographers of the student newspaper who would take surreptitious photos of the cheerleaders and develop them. John doesn’t know what he would do with them, they weren’t up-skirt shorts or anything, but he was a weirdo.

John needed a girlfriend and when he got to school at the beginning of Junior year he was thinking about who was going to be the lucky girl who was going to be his girlfriend, and he picked Kelly Kiefer, the class president and John chased her relentlessly. Eventually he won her affections and they were a couple. She was a big wheel and he was Big Man on Campus all of a sudden, largely because he had coupled with this very accomplished lady.

He genuinely loved her, she was in his thoughts all the time, but she was totally out of his league and she had said so multiple times in notes that she would pass him, like: ”I am out of your league! Stop harassing me, you dander-covered log!” - ”I know that this is just a code for how much you love and adore me!” - ”You are a log! I am a very important woman, I have important business to attend to which includes getting good grades and being popular and just the fact that I am passing you these notes is diminishing my statue!” - ”I love you too, baby!” (see RL63)

John and Kelly Kiefer broke up during the summer between Junior and Senior year, largely because after they were in a relationship she told him how relationships look like and John didn’t understand that and still doesn’t. They would have to spend all their time together, just the two of them? That is what boys and girls do when they become into a relationship, but John thought you would go out and do crimes, be leaders of a gang. Wouldn’t she be the Pinky Tuscadero to his Fonzie (from Happy Days)? They didn’t just hold up all the time and watch Ferrie Bueller’s Day Off on VHS, but they were hanging with their respective gangs. Her gang had pink satin jackets, his gang was apparently Richie and Potsie (also from Happy Days), which was weird.

They broke up during the summer and at the beginning of Senior year Kelly started going out with David, the guy who had the same birthday, but was a year younger in school and was super-fashionable with his Guess watch and his Guess clothes, his hair all perfect. John used to sow how own alligator on things (see RL320), even an extra alligator humping the one alligator (see RL231) because he was living out some movie that he was writing as he went. John was appalled that she was debasing herself by going out with this child, but he was really handsome.

Years later David moved into the same house that John was living in Seattle. John wasn’t paying rent but was just sleeping on the couch, but David moved in, was actually paying rent and took one of the rooms and his status in this Grunge house was higher than John’s. He even got a shelf in the cupboard for his canned food and John was the couch boy and he was the dander log again, stealing cans of ravioli out of the kitchen that don’t even belong to him, and even if he could have been able to afford a can of ravioli he wouldn’t have had a shelf for it.

She is a doctor now, but they have talked about this one time and then a kid on the Internet chastised him because he had said three times where she worked (see RL63) and now he can barely bring himself to utter her name. She got her revenge on John for sure, not just for dating David. One time she came to visit John in college at his weird Northwestern Catholic School (Gonzaga University). He had taken a year off befor he went to college, so he was now a grade under her, he was a Freshman and she was a Sophomore at a big-time East Coast university, and she came to his college and waltzed around the dorm, basically looking in doors: ”What do you kids do in here?” and John has not had the ability to call girls on their game until just recently when he was 41.

John had been studying it for 26 years and maybe at age 41 he had a new desk blotter and he had written at the top of it some other acronym and thought he was not going to make it in this life if he let girls play games on him and keeps take them at their word. He finally was able to say: ”What is your game?” and it was very effective because he had never done it before. You don’t even need to know what their game is, you just call them out on it and they will know the jig is up!

Kelly gamed the shit out of John, not only because she was a year older than him, although she would not say that she was. Merlin thinks she was doing it because she could. John feels like he had no chance against her and he feels this is true of all humans. On one level John says: ”Destroy all humanoids!” and on another level he loves all people, which is very challenging for people to understand, but it is not incompatible. Like (Robert) McNamara said: ”Sometimes you have to destroy humanity to save it!” John loves humans so much and he believes in humans, but he also believes they should be destroyed at all costs because they are a plague.

What if it rained for 40 days and nights everywhere on the entire Earth? After the first days they would be happy for the rain after a drought, imagine Los Angeles if it rained for 8 straight days! They are desperate for rain! Right away the Weather Channel is going to note this because normally if it is raining in one place it is not raining in the other place, and it is meteorologically impossible that it rains literally everywhere. Merlin would love to see Peter Jennings doing 40 days of rain coverage, it is like a reverse Ted Koppel.

Peter Jennings during the 9/11 attacks (RL210)

John remembers Peter Jennings from 9/11 coverage. He was very calm, centered, and solemn, but he wasn’t overly dramatic and he wasn’t full of shit like everyone else was. He was the greatest American although he is a Canadian. By 10am PST that morning it felt like literally anything could happen. Merlin’s boss called him at 7am because he was working from home back then, unlike now when he has an office where he is ”working”.

John slept until 10am that morning and he woke up to his mom sitting on his bed with her hand on his knee, which never happened. Who knows what would prompt her to a) wake him up, b) by sitting on his bed, and c) touching his knee. What was going on? She said she had bad news, that somebody flew two planes into the World Trade Center and blew them up. John had just returned from New York, he had been on top of the World Trade Center on August 30th and had been back for a week. She turned on the TV and there was one tower smoking and one tower standing and they were replaying that footage over and over again.

She already spoiler alerted John before he actually saw it, he didn’t see it in real time, but he got the CliffsNotes. At one point Peter Jennings said that President Bush and his entourage were mysteriously flying in circles around America and he got visibly frustrated on air and said: ”When will the president make a statement or in some way take charge of the situation? The president has to appear now! It has been hours and hours! The vice president is in an undisclosed location, but the president is just flying around in the sky, making no public statement!”

It was shocking how visibly frustrated he was and how much he was speaking the truth from in his own voice on the air. It was the moment John realized that George W. Bush was a chicken shit and that everything he did subsequent to that moment was a chicken shit move, and he should never have been elected president and he should never have been survived his teen years and John still has a space for him down in the vault, he has a bed, three squares and a chair for GW because we are going to find out the depth of his chicken shittedness.

This was a reference to John’s shipping container in the desert where he will keep Dick Cheney and give him LSD.

Merlin says he owns undisclosedlocation.com.