This week, Merlin and John talk about:

• John doing a Neil Young benefit show (Shows and Events)
• The history of John’s neighborhood (Normandy Park)
• John playing the harmonica for the turkeys in the neighborhood (Normandy Park)
• John finding a wallet in the street (Currents)
• John visiting city hall with a land use question (Normandy Park)

The Problem: There was a fantasy map, referring to John’s new neighborhood being planned right before the great depression, but then the market crashed and there was World War II and it was just empty and nobody bought property there, but they already had a fantasy map of what it was supposed to be.

The show title refers to John wandering around the neighborhood in the middle of the night, practicing the harmonica, playing only one song.

The show was opened by Merlin’s daughter Eleanor (John calls her Emma). It is really early and John has been awake for two minutes. It is jubilee and Merlin has some disruptions to his schedule because his daughter is home. John’s daughter is in school this week as usual until Thursday (Thanksgiving). In Merlin’s life things mostly just happen to him and he doesn’t have a lot of agency in things. He finds out about things sometimes.

John was talking to some people last night about how a lot of them lived their 20s that way: ”I don’t know, I guess! Oh, are we dating now? Okay! Sure! Is this where I work?” There was not a ton of planning or feeling of agency, but now in the 50s this is coming back again: ”I guess I am going to the doctor?” Merlin is envious of people who kind of had a plan and any of it worked, although he finds it difficult to believe. ”This days, amirite? In this economy?”

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 Please do not quote these texts directly without applying your own editing first!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 doing a Neil Young benefit show (RL362)

John was at a thing last night and he was the last one to leave, which he never is, but he was having a good time and he was having good conversations, there were 100 people in the room, then 50, then 20, and John was still there, chatting it up with everybody, talking with some of the last people there. Then a staff person of the place joined the conversation and the people John knew left and John was talking to the staff person, then the people who came to clean made a comment, like ”Excuse me!” and pretty soon the last person on the staff was gone and John was standing there talking to the people who were cleaning up the buffet. He looked down at the buffet and asked what was going to happen with these cookies and they got John a container to take what he wanted. Now John is sitting there with a chocolate chunk macadamia nut cookie that he would never have for breakfast under normal circumstances.

John was the one to first introduce Merlin to the idea of being a blended version of an introvert and extrovert, where he is spending more energy than he is getting from being around people, which Merlin definitely has. Sometimes you have a good night, you are the anchorman, you are there for the duration, but he is not going into it that he will be the one who leaves with the cookies.

The event was the one with the harmonica, the Neil Young night. It was a big theater with close to 50 people in the show, all the musicians, the band and the staff are all people John knows, the people who put on the event, the people who run the theater, the people who run the non-profit that the show was a benefit for, and all the musicians. Even though this is an event and John by definition dreaded it and was going for weeks: ”I got to go do that thing, why did I say Yes?”, as soon as he got there he was meeting all the people he knew and they are all wonderful, people John worked with in every different way and who knew him before he had anything, who saw him every step of the way, and here we all are!

Merlin never went to High School reunions, but he regrets not going because people always say that it is so much better than you expect and very low key. You are expecting those 30 year old beefs still being around and nobody cares, but once you are there you are glad you went and it feels like a different thing that what you dreaded. John went to his High School reunion and it was exactly like that: ”Oh, it’s you! It’s you!” John broke Frank Kufal’s heart.

It was one of the rare events where John felt like he also knew half of the audience in this 2000 people venue because the people who would go to a thing like this are also the people John would know. There was a girl that John went to High School with in Anchorage. She was two years younger and she lived two doors down from where they lived in Anchorage, she came from a big Catholic family and they were very conservative and very established. Anchorage had a real feeling of establishment. The whole feeling of it seems like now like a thing from 1000 years ago, a lot of conformity, even though we think about Alaska as this Wild West, which it was, but there was a lot of conformity like in those Wild West movies with the mayor and the sheriff and there are expectations.

Anchorage was a small town and when John was a teenager it had just become a big town, or at least it thought so, owing to the pipeline and the money. The transformation happened when John was a kid, but it was still 250.000 people, but they were cosmopolitans, LOL.

This girl came forward, surrounded by a group of women her age, like: ”It’s me!” and John immediately recognized her. There were so many people that John recognized, but could not tell where he knew them from or what their name was, ”John!” - ”Hey, councillor! There he is!”, but this girl stepped forward and John hadn’t seen her in 20-30 years and He knew immediately: Mary Dietrich (check with yearbook!) She was very prominent in her class, maybe she was class president, she was central to the good girls and she was a law establisher within her gang that was two years younger than John’s. She is extremely smart and she was extremely suspicious of John in High School, like: ”What are you up to, John Roderick?”

There was some amount of surprise from her group of women: ”You know him?” and they all started to talk about Mary, like she is the craziest one, she is so nutty, which John did not expect. She said that nobody knew what to do with John Roderick because he was such a nut and really a non-conformist which wasn’t acceptable in Anchorage at the time. It was like a little High School reunion. She ended up becoming an econoclast in her life and her world. All of her friends think she is the nut of the group. They had only 5-10 minutes talking to each other, but it was delightful.

The problem with an event like that is that John played one song and then was in the finale, like everybody else. They were all backstage, you get all ramped up, you get out, do your bit, come back, nobody wants to leave, but you have built up so much energy and what are you going to do with it? There are an awful lot of introverts at shows like that, people who are like: ”Yeah, I made it! People know me because of my music and I would rather be home, but here I am!” and then they realize they know everybody, too. Afterwards you have to do something with that energy. It was the same even with Merlin’s rinky-dink band.

John was playing Heart of Gold, which is a pretty dang good song, and John had chosen to add to this the challenge of putting on the Anakin Skywalker harmonica thing and was going to learn harmonica as well as singing and playing guitar. For the last two weeks John has been walking around the neighborhood in middle of the night, playing the harmonica, amidst the dogs and men alike, and all the neighbors are wondering now why there was a Hobo in the neighborhood all of a sudden who seems to only know the one song, like the ghost of a Hobo.

John finding a wallet in the street (RL362)

One time John found a wallet on the street, lying in the middle of the road, and it was full money and had this guy’s ID, and it was clear from the stuff in the wallet that the owner was the owner of a landscaping company that was in this neighborhood to care for the yards because there is a lot of that, a lot of hedges that are carefully trimmed, always trucks full of people with hedge-trimming stuff driving around, taking care of stuff. John went online, trying to find the phone number of the company, but it turned out to be an LLC that was under an umbrella company owned by his sister and they live in Tacoma, he found a phone number that was out of service…

John really tried to bring this wallet home because he had things in his life that went away and then spoke to him from a distance from a trunk, and also he had people find a thing and get it back to him, like last night at the show one of the stage hands came to John and said: ”You seem to know everybody, I found this iPad, how do I find the owner of this?” and it was a first-gen iPad with some identifying marks on it and John got really involved in finding the owner of this iPad. His first thought was Chris Ballew because there was a backstage pass on it from a long-ago show that said: ”Pres”, meaning it was from a Presidents show. It wasn’t his, but he thought it might be Craig Montgomery, the long-time sound-man for Nirvana who then became the house sound-man at the Triple Door and he would have an iPad like that as part of his system for running sound. It wasn’t his either, but they found the owner and it was nobody they would have expected.

John found this wallet in the street, put it in his car and planned on driving around until he would find a Normandy Park police person, and as an experiment he wanted to see how long it would take him. He wanted to see some police power in action because he couldn’t use his limited skills to hack the encryption, but he wanted to see this cop get into his Lexus Nexus and put this wallet in the person’s hands. He eventually found a policeman in his car, they were both not speeding, John was behind him, and he was turning left, so John was also turning left, but he didn’t want to honk the horn in the middle of this maneuver. Merlin is always worried about spooking the police and causing an outsized reaction, but part of exercising his privilege John always assumes that the police are happy to see him. They both turn and John gets behind him and honks the horn.

The police pulls over, gets out of the car, and as part of police etiquette John doesn’t just leap out of the car but lets him establish the ownership of the space, and then John gets out of the car and tells him that he found this wallet, tried to find this guy, but was unsuccessful. He was a younger cop and stood there, actually scratching his head, saying: ”One thing you could try…” - ”Huh?” and he thought that the police could find the owner and not give John a suggestion because he had a wallet with $500 in it and had been working on this project already

The cop had a computer in his truck. He reluctantly took the wallet, opened the trunk of his truck and put it in some evidence bucket: ”I will take it to city hall!” - ”He has a driver’s license in there, couldn’t you just type in this person’s name and find it right now. If you got him on the phone I would take it to him!” - ”No, it has got to go into evidence” or something. He had sun glasses on top of his head, he was strong, the whole cop thing. That is the one Normandy Park policeman that John now knows by name. They parted on friendly terms, but John didn’t get a case number and he doesn’t know if he really took care of it.