This week, Merlin and John talk about:

The Problem: There are so many half-built pyramids, referring to the term John’s daughter’s mother uses for John’s unfinished projects around the house.

The show title refers to the different kinds of wizards in Lord of the Rings and Merlin uses it to suggest that the different kinds of people in an Apple Store should wear differently colored T-shirts

The episode starts with a 2-second clip of the song Just What I Needed by The Cars. In this episode Merlin uses the phrase ”… I have a family” many times in the sense of ”Don’t harm me, I have a family”

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 Please do not quote these texts directly without applying your own editing first!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 upgrading his operating system (RL413)

Again John’s audio interface is not working at the beginning of the episode, but this time he didn’t have to hot-plug. He upgraded his operating system, although he has always been very reluctant to do so because he didn’t want to brick his computer. Every time you look online if this operating system will brick your computer you will find a number of blogs that will tell you about all kinds of problems. This time people were recommending to go to Big Sur because it is incredible, but John thought there was no way that Big Sur was going to run on his laptop because it needs a new Capital One chip or an M225 or whatever.

John is not a conspiracy theorist, more a conspiracy reporter, but there were no blogs and John had to really dig to find one guy who said it is going to brick your computer, which means that Apple has probably murdered all the people who wrote blogs that said: ”Don’t do it!” and now all the blogs are saying: ”It is amazing!” They probably sent out the iForce, an organization with different levels of operatives. They continue spitballing how iForce works. John finally found a guy who said that if you are worried about Big Sur, why don’t you just upgrade to Catalina and see how it goes? You assume that just like the sheets of a New York hotel room they have shaken the bugs out.

Not many years ago John’s MacBook Pro shit the bed and John called the Apple and they said it looks like it is the motherboard. John knows a lot of people at Apple, but he also knows a couple of people at the Apple Store, he has a dude. John also used to know high-ranking people at Twitter and at Patreon and he had some questions for them a couple of weeks ago, but couldn’t get anybody on the phone. It was like when he tried to call SnapChat on the phone (see RL275) because he wanted a refund on his Millennial Girlfriend. It was like that scene in Animal House where they kept bringing him back to the same couch.

Merlin driving in New Zealand (RL413)

British people and Japanese people drive on the other side of the road. Merlin did that in Wellington, New Zealand. One night he went to McDonalds, which was the best McDonalds he ever had, and he drove on the wrong side of the road and he felt really bad about it.

Merlin's two pets, the cat and the lizard (RL413)

Merlin has two animals, neither of which he actively chose to have. He is not against their cat, but the way it was introduced to his life feels a little passive-aggressive. The lizard is the best! Now Merlin is dog-shopping a little bit, like shopping for a couch when you just go 10 years saying that these couches are too expensive and and bad, but you are still shopping. A-B-C: Always be couching!

Merlin returning his computer at the Apple Store (RL413)

Recently Merlin had a spate of returns, although he is not a returner and he just lives with the fact that he is paying rent to store cubic-inches of something that he has relegated to this area instead of returning it, but this was a costly computer and it was the wrong computer. He did have to go to the Apple Store in the mall near his house. He always buys the Apple Care Pro, he made an appointment, dropped off his wrong computer, and it was amazing because they still have lots of people running around on top of the fact that they have closed a whole bunch of stores because of the pandemic. It was very organized, there were lines, he met a really nice dog twice.

Compare that to how things used to be before: Every time he would go to an Apple Store with an appointment they would put him at a table for an hour and then you get handed off to no fewer than 3 people. They write down what you wear so they can identify you in the crowd. They pass you off, you are always dealing with 3 people at once, there is no continuity of care, it is madness, and along side that they are trying to sell bluetooth speakers and iPhone cases and are trying to help the sweet old lady who forgot her iCloud password and now can’t get to the pictures of her grandchildren, and every time they have to say dozens of time that they literally cannot help them with that and that is the point of the way they deal with security.

They discuss that the people in the Apple Store should have differently colored T-shirts depending on what position they are working in and you could try to reach maybe not the white wizard, but the brown wizard, which sounds like something from Urban Dictionary, but is actually a thing in Lord of the Rings and John continues to explain the different types to Merlin.

Merlin used to know somebody at his Apple Store named Max, a handsome man in a Utilikilt, but they moved him to a different division where he is doing marketing on the peninsula. He always handled Merlin very gently and with a smile, back in the time when people ”knew him” from things and Max knew Merlin from a Macintosh podcast that he had been on and they had a great relationship until the disappeared him to ”marketing on the peninsula” and Merlin no longer had a dude or dudette and nobody knows him now, but that is probably better in an long of ways. That was a fun time, Merlin is glad he had it.

Merlin did something really bone-headed twice within a month and in both cases it was very embarrassing. He needed a new computer. He always has a lot of projects going on and he was dipping his toe into a new world of computing with the new Apple Macintoshes that are extremely cool and powerful (the ones with the M1 chip). Merlin bought a new laptop on apple.com and he thought that the top left one was the fancy one because you don’t put the fancy one way down. He ended up ordering the wrong computer and he didn’t notice until he had already configured it, although it had Catalina on it instead of Big Sur that is required for the new computers.

Merlin is covered with shame that he made such a dumb mistake and that he didn’t realize the mistake. There was this dawning realization when you go ”Huh?”. When he went to the Apple Store he met a really cool dog twice. Corgis always look like Corgis, but dressed up as other dogs. He said to the lady ”Your dog rules!” - ”Thanks!” and later he approached her about it. This Corgi looked like he was wearing a Collie suit and it was super-fat and low to the ground and had a very sweet long face. Merlin loves a Corgi! He also like Bulldogs and the other day he met a Bulldog with a head like a Mastiff, which was incredible, like something from a dream. Bulldogs fart a lot.

People who want others to owe them a favor (RL413)

In life you have to be careful who you allow yourself to owe a favor to. There are people whose MO is to do your a favor you never asked for and then that hangs there and they are deliberately exercising a remote control over you.

John can’t speak as candidly as he wants to about this particular situation because it is one of these situations. His mom will end a friendship if she feels like the person is doing favors in order to have leverage. She hates it more than any other thing and she even says that she wished she didn’t have such a strong reaction to this, but even if it is a good friend and there is ever that intimation of: ”I invited you over for dinner!” it makes he feel like…

It reminds Merlin of his friend Dennis. Whenever they went out to dinner one person paid each time and it worked out fine and they never had to talk about it. On the other side there are people like Merlin’s friend Bob from back in Tallahassee who used to give all his friends his broken equipment and it all came with a story. One time he gave Merlin a tabletop radio that he claimed his father and he listened to as a child, but it didn’t work. Merlin didn’t know what he was supposed to do with it, but given that it came with a story about his dead father?

Merlin cannot get with the status-climby people who are trying to create levels of familiarity that are not really existing. He is Holden Caulfield (a fictional character in author J. D. Salinger’s 1951 novel The Catcher in the Rye) and he doesn’t want to deal with a bunch of phoneys. He doesn’t want to be a dick about it and that is part of the problem and he is left to be the person to say: ”Let’s talk about what is really happening here!”

John giving his Siracusa-customized iMac to his daughter for school (RL413)

A couple years ago John reached out to a mutual friend by the name of John Siracusa who sent him the specs and John ordered a custom configuration that he couldn’t return because it was special-made for him. John loved the idea until he realized he had prematurely bought this computer and the he sold his house and he put all his stuff in storage and this brand-new computer sat unopened for a year and a half. Eventually when his daughter was going on online school her mother said: ”Don’t you have some hot dog computer somewhere?” and John hooked up this computer that John Siracusa made so that you could put a man on the moon for his daughter who is now using MacPaint to draw smiley-faces on it. That is how it goes! Time is a flat circle!

There are so many bad things (RL413)

John has been looking at light fixtures and it is amazing how many bad things there are. We all know that most people are living in a world that is contemporaneous with ours and they are buying the many things that are bad. Not only are they buying things that are bad, but they are reading things that are bad and watching things that are bad, they are talking about things that are bad, and a lot of them don’t even realize that they are doing that. Merlin calls it context-free living. Traditionally you would want to know what the best one was and then you would buy the one that was slightly less good than that, and that is true of books, too! You don’t want to read the best books!

Buck Owens, The Cars (RL413)

John has two Telecasters and he is making Bakersfield sounds. Merlin will still sometimes have a Buck Owens phase and he will go back. His partner Don Rich rules! The Buck Owens sound is the reason The Cars are so good. All the guitar parts in Cars records are all chicken picking Buck Ownes riffs, like the solo in Just What I Needed. You never think about why there is a Country Western guitar player in The Cars who are a Boston New Wave band. You want to think you would know his face everywhere (Elliot Easton), but there are so many distinctive looking people in The Cars and he is the one person that you wouldn’t recognize if he was sitting next to you on the subway.

Benjamin Orr on the other hand is the most identifiable person in the universe, he is so handsome that the whole room gets a little moist. Their keyboard player is just holding down one finger on a Prophet-5, although he does a little bit of portamento and slide. Merlin vocalizes one of the songs that is a brilliant fucking song and everything about it is basically flawless, starting with the weird off-count. He used to cover it in a New Wave cover band called Parachute Pants and the hardest part was learning the beat where it comes in. In the last verse they change it up a little bit, which is a thing that Wheezer picked up from them.

John wanting to get a Digital Audio Workstation (RL413)

In line of John’s new Patreon he is trying to live up to the initial promise that he wasn’t going to go on the Internet, but that he was going to do stuff now, make stuff, read stuff, and then he realized the old thing that he doesn’t have the right tools. He could just be scratching it into a piece of sandstone with a pocket knife, but he needs some new tools.

He realized that he does not have a Digital Audio Workstation (DAW), he never had one, he just plugs in his USB mic and pretends he is a professional studio musician and then it is not in sync because he has the time signature wrong. He has been talking about it for years, John Siracusa designed a computer for him for precisely this reason, he has files upon files upon files, but then he is back on the Internet, searching ”What is the best Digital Audio Workstation?” and he is reading and watching videos. Maybe he should get an Akai MPC and then he could do beats like Kanye.

This entire time, for a decade, John should have been running Logic, the Apple professional-grade music recording system. He should have had Logic Pro before it even had the word Pro in it! Eric Corson started using Logic back when he worked at the Apple Store. John has used Garage Band and Logic is just Garage Band with all the features that Garage Band doesn’t have, which are the features that he wants.

Merlin was using a copy of Garage Band from 2013 up until this year when he started editing their podcast in a different app. The reason he never upgraded was that he needed to keep using the version of Garage Band that is very old and looks like somebody’s den because that one supports podcasts and is easy. Logic is like having to learn how to drive a Space Shuttle to go to the Little General and he doesn’t need any of that.

That is what John thought for a long time, but he does need that stuff to make the music that is one of the things he was going to do for his Patreon and that he was put on this Earth at least in part to do because he keeps doing it. John had promised to give Merlin some of his My Bloody Valentine exercises, but Merlin never heard it. John wants to get Logic, he doesn’t want ProTools because it has an eel now and they don’t want to sell it to you, they want to rent it to you.

Jonathan Coulton recommended Ableton, but those are the people who wear hoodies and chain balls, which is cool and John loves those people and wished he was one of them, but he is not. Then John realized that he is running a version of the OS that is named after a kitty cat and he has to have one that is named after some beautiful place in California where he can’t afford to live, like Stockton or Bakersfield.

Logic has just recently recognized that Ableton was a problem because it had all this cool workflow, it was like the scented candle, but it also put nuts in their cookies and raisins in the sallad and sea-salt and all these things, and then Logic did the thing that Instagram did to SnapChat, which was to copy the cool features and all of a sudden the new Logic can do all these amazing things like beat mapping.

John realized that he could get an Akai keyboard that had the function of an MPC, but they are integrated with Logic using Logic’s new Ableton-like features so that John could be sitting with his My Bloody Valentine guitar tracks that he recorded into his Boss RC-50 Loop Station, import those into Logic and he could be playing along with himself in a way that would have been more difficult before. All the people on his Patreon are going to say that they are glad they subscribed, not ”Aw, man! I am going to take this money and give it to Mike Doughty!”

The new Logic and the Akai will run on Catalina, but not on whatever Snow Leopard he was running, and he wouldn’t need to go all the way to Big Sur.

John thinking he might have ADHD in addition to Bipolar (RL413)

After the first week of the Patreon John got a lot of nice letters from people, like: ”I am donating to your thing and I also want you to know that you don’t need to post all the time, we all know that you are going to get burned out, we all know that your number one problem is not that you aren’t happy to be excited about things, but the problem is sustaining that excitement!”, which has been so incredible about this group of 1500 people. They all know him! He got more than one letter that said: ”Listen! We are here because we love you, and you don’t have to dance around like a monkey with a tambourine! Go back to what you were doing, we are fine, we are just happy to be here! Don’t drive yourself up a tree, trying to please us because we know what your problem is. You are going to burn out, you are going to hate this, and then it is going to suck for you!”

Back in the late 1980s John went to a psychiatrist that told him he had ADD. They sat him in front of the computer where they would flash colors at you and there was a ping pong ball and sounds and they were sure he had it, but this was also when people told him that he probably had Bipolar and John dismissed it. Over the years they kept saying about the Bipolar, but also about the ADD and they changed it to ADHD and John would still blow them off.

Merlin’s journey with ADHD

John was following Merlin’s journey with ADHD for many years. He went to a Russian Doctor Lady who told him that he should drink more water and learn to meditate, but the whole Internet knew he had ADHD. It took him a long time to find somebody who was willing to look that fact and was not just some Hillbilly who was trying to get meth. John pictures Merlin clinging to the curtains halfway up the floor. His whole relationship with these people is an ongoing bad trip where he is screaming and climbing the walls and they are just: ”Have a fucking orange slice!”

The first time John said that he drank a case of beer a day and that might be the problem, but the doctor said that John was self-medicating and he had this ADHD that is causing him problems in life and he might be using drugs and alcohol to mitigate those problems. They gave John a prescription for Ritalin (Methylphenidate), which they had already done when he was 8 years old and his mom didn’t give it to him because she said that her kid doesn’t need drugs, but that could also be a sign that people have known for a long time that John had ADHD. Merlin says that John has eaten more Ritalin than they have had hot meals, which is a reference to RL260 when John said: ”I touched more dicks than you’ve had hot dinners!”.

Merlin heard for years that if you actually had ADHD it would have been discovered in his childhood and there are no adults who have ADHD suddenly out of nowhere. Merlin didn’t reject the idea that he always had it or that he even self-medicated it. He had so much Trucker Speed (Ephedrine) to get to the calmness that he needs where he produces enough dopamine to not feel like a fucking cat in a room full of rocking chairs.

John rejected it all those years, but now he is in his early 50s and he has a friend the same age who is living in the straight world and is some kind of lawyer and has wife and kids. Not very long ago they were hanging out around the campfire and his wife said: ”I think our marriage was about over if he hadn’t gotten help!” He just shrugged and said: ”Yeah, they think I have ADHD” He is a successful and handsome guy, she is very dramatic, but dropping that kind of bomb on a small campfire is way outside of normal. She kind of abuses him, but he kind of likes it.

He had been to the doctor and they said he had ADHD and they were giving him the Adderall that Merlin loves and misses every day because he got a lot of focus with that, but it also made him aggressive and angry. John and his daughter’s mother looked at each other and thought that both he and his wife could go see a doctor. He sent John the list of things about ADHD and it was just like when they had sent him the list of things about Bipolar because he thought that everybody has these things and this was normal, but it was not.

John’s daughter’s mother pointing out all the unfinished projects

John showed the list to his daughter’s mother who said: ”Everybody who knows you knows that you have ADHD, why do you not accept it?” - ”I already have a problem, it is Bipolar. I have the one problem, I take the medicine for that and I am better from that!” The Bipolar used to plague him and he was sometimes catatonic and other times he would drive out into the desert, run out of gas and take off all his clothes and run.

Merlin describes it as having way too much granular focus in the absence of a broader focus, which makes it the most boring garden-variety ADHD. How can he be completely focused on tagging MP3s for 3 hours or looking at Google Earth for 8 hours, but in the absence of a broader executive function that tells him that maybe 30 minutes of MP3 would be good for today and then he should broaden his focus and work on other things.

John’s daughter’s mother swept her hand across the room and said: ”Behold all the started, but unfinished projects, not just didn’t go to college, not just didn’t finish your book! Look at the little dish with nuts and bolts from the thing that you started to disassemble but not only didn’t reassemble, but didn’t even finish disassembling! How can you even navigate the world? There are so many half-built pyramids in your desert here and everywhere you look, not only is there an unfinished project, but it is also throbbing and beaming thoughts into your mind, like: You never finished me, you never finished me!” There are also all the things that go along with that, like the inability to do anything and all the bad feelings.

Merlin doesn’t think you can put anxiety up as a DSM thing (The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) on its own, but it comes along with a lot of different conditions. Merlin used to think there was no way he had mild depression because he is anxious all the time. If he were depressed, wouldn’t he just be sad and listen to Sisters of Mercy and Cocteau Twins? Anxiety comes with a lot of different things and you can’t just think about treating anxiety. It also comes with ADHD because the lack of dopamin is making your brain struggle with what to do until something terrible is about to happen when your dopamin goes up and you get enough focus to finally fucking do something! It is Anna Karenina: Everybody’s anxiety is different and comes with different things.

A lot of people close to John are often waiting for him to show a chink in the armor where he says: ”Maybe I am kind of an asshole!” and then they think they have a moment and they can get in and say the things that they can’t normally say to him. What took Merlin 13 years to realize is that if a person shows you a vulnerability or admits to something that is a little embarrassing, that is never the opportunity to say: ”I told you so!” and it is a great minute to not offer any fucking advice and not to do anything where the result would be: ”Wow, I am sure as shit show that person a lot less vulnerability because they always use it as an opportunity to tell me why I am an asshole!”

There were a lot of things about the BeanDad incident where John noticed he did some things that are things that he does and this was a moment when he saw that this went out into the world and there was a certain amount that reflected back on him that made him think that he needs to think hard about the way he reacts to things. He happened to be scrolling through a folder with text threads from 2015 that he remembers very distinctly and where he at the time felt that the person was gaslighting him, but reading it back he realized he was a total asshole. If he was in a text thread and somebody didn’t reply for 20 minutes he would be: ”What the fuck are you doing!”

Acknowledging that he might have both Bipolar and ADHD

Let’s say it is possible for John to have two fairly semi-fashionable mental problems:

• Bipolar disorder which he has come to understand and he admits that it is an actual thing that he had a medicine for that has made a difference, and
• ADHD which he has listened to Merlin talk about for many years and that he believes is actually a thing.

Merlin says that a phrase applies that he likes very much, which is that John is trying on ideas like a suit, in this case the idea that he could have both of those things, and importantly months later you can find yourself saying: ”I guess that explains a lot!” and this was not just some cover story for who wants to put pills in his face.

Even now after several years of being treated for Bipolar John still creates tremendous late-night drama in his life, here comes the 7-sided lighthouse made of dreams, like when some girl in Ljubljana is not replying and he asks himself all the time: ”What am I doing?” It is not even the symptoms of ADHD that makes John think he might have it, but the list of problems that ADHD causes in a person’s life. There is not even one where he can say: ”I don’t have that!”, but he has all of them exactly as enumerated, it is a list of the Top 10 worst things about his life!

This is not just a list of bad things that could be true of everybody’s life, but this is a list of things that are the worst things about John’s life that no-one else in his life has other than he and Merlin and a couple of other randos. John can’t take Adderall or Speed, he is a drug addict. If he takes a thing and it is good he is going to Chris Cornell the shit out of it and he will better take two. It started with friend of the show, the late great Leslie Harpold giving Merlin two Adderall and saying: ”You know you totally have ADHD!” - ”Whatever!”, he took one, and he had clarity like he never had before, but it also gave him a fun feeling of lots of speed.

Merlin’s self test how to find out if you have ADHD

The test is: Do you find yourself becoming really hyper or do you find yourself strangely calm? Merlin passed that test and got strangely calm and wrote 5000 words that day that were in him somewhere the whole time, but he had trouble putting his hands on it until that day. The other question is: Would you take this recreationally if it wouldn’t give you that effect, and that is where the abuse part can come in. Of course he would take this all the time. When it comes to Lamictal Merlin’s shrink says that his emotions are like a gelatin and you don’t want everything moving to one side just because you took a slight left turn. The question is if John could take something else than speed to take the edge off.

Possible medications that would work for John

Merlin will pick up off the shelf Prêt à Porter Claritin regular for his wife and behind the counter Claritin D for himself because he wants the real shit, he wants the energy, but he also wants to be able to breathe. Any time you have allergies in Germany and you go to a pharmacy and ask for Pseudoephedrine they will look at you like you asked for a bindle of coke, but he has tried any kind of drug to clear his nose and this one is the only one that works. They will give you some freaking tincture that is just some piece of parsley.

John remembers when Merlin sent him a bottle of real Ephedrine as big as a 4-pound box i M&Ms, and that was before they started putting Guaifenesin in it to fuck with you. Talk about gaslighting! Don’t fuck with the trucker speed! When Merlin started in 1988 you could buy a jar of 50 for $5.99, he still has the spreadsheet where he followed the increase in price over time. He would go to the pharmacy in Florida and get a Magnum Malt Liquor and a bunch of trucker speed, which does weird stuff to your penis. It was amazing!

John doesn’t want to go to the doctor, have the doctor say that he has ADHD but they can’t give him speed because he is an addict and so they will give him parsley instead, but not the good kind, the Italian kind, but the stuff they put on your plate at Frisch’s that doesn’t really do anything and they reuse it sometimes like Endive, the stuff that you buy in a little can from the spice rack that has been sitting there for 15 years and is so dried out.

Merlin’s family hates dried spices. He has Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme and he keeps them in that order because who wouldn’t (because that is the name of an album by Simon & Garfunkel) Italian parsley wilts very fast, buy Merlin loves it and he uses it as a garnish. John got Merlin on noodles for steak, and Merlin will use some butter and when he serves it he will put a little fresh Italian parsley on top. The two that John uses are garlic salt and onion powder, he puts that in everything, not garlic powder and onion salt and if you put a little fresh parsley on top it is like living in a palace.

Part of the problem is: John has a Patreon, people told him he doesn’t have to post all the time, he needed to upgrade his operating system in order to buy the new Logic in order to trigger the new Akai MPC imitating keyboard that he bought in order to take the Grunge songs that he has been writing for the last 10 years and turn them into songs that he can post to the people who tell him that he doesn’t have to post all the time. He has an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly type situation (children’s rhyme). All around him there are unfinished pyramids,

Now he is going to go to some virtual Russian doctor who is going to tell him to have an orange slice because she can’t prescribe him drugs, and also the last time any of them were in a room together was 1.5 years ago? Where does it end?

Merlin got off the Adderall and eventually the Lamictal, which you have to taper off very slowly, because he doesn’t want to be 80 years old and having to carry a physical prescription into a drug store every month for the rest of his life so that he can get his speed and the thing that makes him not as speedy.

John not being able to remember to remember

John cannot fill prescriptions. Every month he gets to the last set of pills and then he thinks he should deal with this and the next day he doesn’t have any pills, so there are always 4 days at the end of every month where he doesn’t have any pills and he wonders why he is so sad. Like Saint Stephen’s Imaginarium where you get the crazy death rash from the movie St Elmo’s Fire, and John doesn’t want that, and he will wake up and will be halfway to Spokane in Moses Lake and he wonders how he got there.

John cannot manage the simple thing of getting the medicine, and when he talked to his daughter’s mother about it she went to her computer and after a few minutes she told him that it is going to come in the mail from now on, which is a thing you can do. You can buy a thermostat where you turn the power on in your house from your phone, you can be like Matt Haughey sitting out in the driveway and his garage door doesn’t open. This means that John is not going to get St. Elmo’s rash, but it does not help him with the question if the whole problem is ADHD? If he had been taking Ritalin when he was 8 years old, what would he be now? Would he be some physicist working at Cern, or he could be the Russian doctor! He had so much potential! Was it all just this?

Now Merlin takes some ADHD medicine that is not Adderall, and it is working, but as with Lamictal you don’t know if it is working until you stop taking it. He can’t get it fixed permanently, but at least it takes the edge off, which means that you don’t have to spend as much of your day fighting yourself. You may not be perfect, but you know you can do this and when the edge is taken off you have hope.

IBM’s motto internally for their team was: ”Think!” which led them to make the ThinkPad which was originally a paper notebook and then they reused the name for a computer with a little red nipple. What if you had the ability to remember to remember? It is not that you don’t remember, but you don’t remember to remember. When Merlin needs to remember at the higher level, especially with the work he does, he should have the ability to focus on the most valuable thing he needs to do today or he should be able to put things out of his mind that he can’t do anything about right now, including made-up anxieties that are three orders of reality away. Wouldn’t it be nice if he could set that aside for a little while and then he gets to be the captain, as the guy in the Tom Hanks movie says.

Then there is that higher level of focus when you are thinking what the things are that you ought to be doing and within that, how to get the focus to finish the one thing, but then always remember to remember, pop up two levels, move out, glance at what else is going on, rather than glancing what else is going on and then spending 9 hours on Twitter. That is not good executive function. The times when it works for Merlin he does more often remember to remember and he does more often catch himself running down an unnecessary rabbit hole about which kind of Lightning cable will work with him Akai Prophet-5. If he gets the hook in to writing a little bit today on this project, then that is good because the hook is in and now that is what we are doing, rather than letting the hook get in to where you are going to spend the day being mad about it taking 22 minutes for somebody to respond to a text.

John spends 4 hours a day playing Tetris and he used to spend 4 hours a day playing Minesweeper, the most basic of all games. As Chris Carniglia used to say: These games are just like doing the dishes, why don’t you just do the dishes? It is the same thing!

Part of the problem with the Bipolar was that he walked around with that jacket on for 16 years, thinking that this jacket fits great, but you have to make an appointment to see somebody. John didn’t know how to make an appointment to see a psychiatrist, he lives out in the mid-century modern suburbs now and there are probably psychiatrists all around him, that is where they live! They are probably wearing white turtlenecks and brown corduroy jackets and they are sitting in their Eames chairs and going: ”I wonder where my next patient is going to come from!” and John is two doors down with peanut butter jars full of colored pencils and pens and he has 60 cigar boxes full of ticket stubs.

Boxes inside of boxes, a good box

John wonders if a stack of cigar boxes is a sign that you have ADHD. Do you buy boxes and do you put boxes in boxes. Merlin does have a lot of cigar boxes and he does buy banker’s boxes and he has a phrase: ”You have to keep this, it is a good box!” (see RL179) Merlin buys banker’s boxes because he wants an ad-hoc way to quickly create something to hold a bunch of stuff that isn’t where it needs to be.

When John’s storage space got broken into that one time where all they took was a piano and a couple of switch blades, what saved him was that they kept opening boxes and found that the boxes were full of boxes and when they opened the boxes inside the boxes there were smaller boxes and sometimes they opened the third level of boxes and they found that this was just a box of boxes with nothing in the inner box, but John just had boxes and didn’t know where else to put them. Then there were other boxes and they opened a second set of boxes with boxes inside and they opened those boxes and there were All-Time Quarterback tickets in there and they didn’t know what to do with this and then voice of John came in and said: ”Put them in with the Ben Gibbard ones!”