This week, Merlin and John talk about:

The Problem: John always felt like he should turn the taciturninity out at the world, referring to John’s dad not being very taciturn, but he himself wanting to leave others wanting more and wondering.

The show title refers to John’s cousin Alfie who is a cement contractor who works alone and he doesn’t do the prep work and that is why John had to do the raking. Merlin was also saying that he would rather rake the sand box at the Coop preschool than make them a website and he would rake with Alfie because they have a lot in common.

The audio starts with 3 seconds of the theme from Mystery Science Theater 3000.

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 Please do not quote these texts directly without applying your own editing first!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

Being taciturn and talking less (RL422)

John answers the phone in a very low-key voice although he doesn’t feel especially low key. Merlin has tried being a soft-spoken person who is slow in his speaking manner, one version of it was telling himself: ”Stop talking so much, and maybe: Stop talking!”, especially on the YLNT program where his mind races even faster than on this program. If he does that he will get a little bit of Robin Williams. There is a clip of him on Carson with Jonathan Winters and he is so thirsty, the same as Merlin is who wants to impress the Jonathan Winters in his life.

John has noticed that soft-spoken people like Cowboys who hardly say anything because they are out there on the race with their little doggies and they just tell them to get along. Merlin says that if you want somebody to listen to you you should speak quietly, although that can be psycho. So many times in his life if John had just talked less it may have all turned out differently. Merlin also thinks that he doesn’t say everything all the time. He recommends the syllable ”Hm”, which is very effective.

Merlin watched the TV Show BoJack Horseman and there was a flashback to his dad, or if you look at the dad in Goodfellas, setting aside the hitting the child with the belt there is always this taciturn cowboy dad, but that is not Merlin. He is not stern or taciturn, but he delivers sick burns. Maybe he should try it again?

John’s dad wasn’t very taciturn, but John always felt like he should turn the taciturninity out at the world. Here in their little bubble they can be chatty and light on their loafers, but out in the world you should be flinty and have a Cheroot and leave them wanting more. Let them wonder! Someone said: ”Better to be silent and be thought a fool than to speak and and remove all doubt!” and when John read that quote for the first time it had never occurred to him to be silent before. If you look around the room and don’t see the fool, is it you?

Merlin thinks people are scared of dead air, especially men in fear of being unappreciated and alone. Merlin has seen John go ”Hmm” in a transaction with his contractor’s contractor once that still makes him shit himself at night before he opened both barrels and Sean Nelson was hiding behind a tire because they were so scared. Merlin is much less comfortable with dead air than John. John likes to let other people hoist themselves by their own petard if possible, he would even lend them a petard, but Merlin has the YLNT thing where they all become a comet arcing across the sky and there is no dead air and nobody can get in there.

Poor Adam who is the cowboy, he beings the motherfucking ruckus because he comes in through the side door with a package that nobody ordered and everything just changed. He is the George Harrison of the group. Scott might be the Paul and Merlin might be the John. The Ringo is BMO - ”Oh, oh, BMO, how’d you get so pregnant?” (reference to Adventure Time) John told Merlin to leave it!, but Merlin didn’t. Maybe he should try it again, although that might not make for a very good podcast because what is in the show is in the show.

Last week’s episode was one of the occasional 2-3 times a year episodes that Merlin treasures because it was in hard more. They had a lot of fun, some alternative titles were: ”The Chekhov teen years”, ”Wyatt Earping it”, ”Tut-tutting” and ”Passeë” and ”Aftermarket alligators” They covered a lot of territory and helped a lot of people. They are exploring their friendship, their masculinity, their voices. They have both voices that are capable of different registers and tonalities.

If you listen to some of the great singers, they are not putting it all out there, they have so much in the fridge that they even need to have a chest freezer in the garage, and they take out just enough to beat you. Meanwhile John is over here, stacking palettes of Tab in your trunk. ”24 more tab” - ”taking it off here, boss! putting it in, boss!” (reference to the movie Cool Hand Luke with Paul Newman) Why doesn’t John have a chest freezer of hard frozen SunnyD? SunnyD is disgusting! John could just speak gently and didn’t have to bring all the rest of it in every day.

Merlin thinks that most podcasts today is people reading stuff with music and then you can speak softly, but if he and John did this all the time they would probably have even fewer listeners. Merlin wishes he could whistle well. He lost a lot of his plasticity. A lot of references he makes go back to the movie MASH and people don’t recognize them, one of them is the way Captain ”Hawkeye” Pierce whistles, like: ”Oh buddy!” and the other one is the Pros from Dover (outside consultants who are brought into a business to troubleshoot and solve problems).

John is wondering if talking softly is a male equivalent of vocal fry. Merlin wonders what kind of show would be good for this kind of speaking. Maybe Men’s Health issues? Growing up, John and his sister had to have certain conversations in this tone of voice because of the people around them. Recently people have called them out on the fact that when they are standing together in a room full of people they are going back into this mode. They are not telling secrets, they just go into private mode, and it is infuriating to other people they know: ”What are you talking about?” because it sounds like they are talking about them.

Merlin was thinking about Jon and Daeny, but he didn’t like that season (Jon Snow and Daenerys Targaryen from Game of Thrones). ”Get the Golden AN and give it to Stan and put it in the van” (reference to the police officer Stan in Sesame Street, actually: ”I take the Golden AN and put it in the tan van, give it to Dan, who takes it to Fran.”) It makes things right with The Onion Knight (Davos Seaworth from Game of Thrones) They call him the bannerman. Merlin wishes he had bannerman, but he doesn’t have the banner day (?) like some people have. They keep showing up, but John thinks Merlin just doesn’t want to accept them. They declared him King of the North and they have supported his house for thousands of years. He might call upon them because it is not about these petty squabbles anymore.

Microphones do all the heavy lifting. There is the Proximity Effect, but even without that, most people are listening on headphones. There are a few people who listen while they are doing the dishes and they are not into this. Merlin thinks that fact checking and quiet speaking are killing podcasts and it has to stop!

Being not right, but also not wrong (RL422)

A long time before podcasting John understood, as his friend Jesse used to say: ”She is often not right, but she is never wrong” and in his circle of friends it was understood that he didn’t have to be right in order for him to not be wrong, and that was very liberating for both him and his friends because they didn’t need to correct him.

On this show John has always been in a RotL bubble because their listeners recognize that they are often not right, but they are very seldom wrong. Now John does a show where the whole premise is that they are both right and not wrong, and yet he is often not right and he is covered in a teflon of never being wrong even if he is totally not right and it has been great! (John probably means his podcast Road Rage with his sister).

A problem with the Internet and the lack of context is that the BarcaLounger commentators can come dive-bombing in and find something on Wikia and set you straight because the idea of being right is so important to them that they potentially get close to being a little bit wrong. They can even be right, but be completely wrong. People are writing John all the time and they are right, but they are wrong.

Merlin says that the following words do not mean precisely the same thing: ”Yes!”, ”correct!”, ”affirmative!”, ”roger!”, or ”I think so!”. A nerd might say ”correct!”, but it doesn’t mean ”I agree with you!”. John might say ”Right!” and it means that you understand what they are saying, but John has not signed off on anything they are saying.

Merlin is watching a court case happening in Minnesota with interest (probably about the George Floyd murder), and a million years ago his job was prepping people for making appearances in court, and the most basic training is: Show up clean, don’t be goofy, speak clearly and when people ask you a question you answer audibly with a word. Merlin explains how the expert witnesses on this case express themselves. They squint their eyes and they chew on their Cheroot. Acknowledging that the person said a thing that is true doesn’t mean you agree with it.

”Some truths are bigger than others”, like Morrissey says (actually some girls are bigger than others by The Smiths). John answers with ”Lalalala” in reference to Merlin's "girlfriend in a coma" bit (see also RL420).

John’s cousin Alfie the cement contractor pouring John's patio (RL422)

We all have different roles to play and John’s role in situations with other people has never been to call them out when they are wrong. He will listen to somebody say very terrible things in a public context and he will go: ”Mmm, aha” His cousin Alfie is a cement contractor in Kitsap County (see RL421) and not very long ago he came over. He is the cousin that is the closest to John in age, about six months younger. His mother Mary Ellen was John’s dad’s cousin, so Alfie is John’s second cousin, but he qualifies as a cousin in his family.

There are pictures of them in 1970 with the two of them in a kiddie pool. His mother was the ultimate black sheep of the family. She was living in Idyllwild California, but she had to escape to Loreto Mexico, she lived in Baja, and she had a rule that kids under 10 shouldn’t wear clothes (see OM247). She was very troubling and a difficult lady, but in the 1960s and early 1970s John and Alfie had a lot of time being little kids together.

Alfie visited John’s new house and told him that John needed a patio and because he is a cement contractor he could just come over one day and pour one and all John had to do was dig up the ground. It is very hard for John to pick tile, but it very easy for him to dig and rake and compulsively re-rake for weeks at a time a 30x15 foot piece of dirt. John sat out there with his rake, making perfect rake lines.

Dan Benjamin says that 15% of John is always meditating, which makes it impossible for him to do the other 85% of meditating. If John could do any project, like making a record album, finishing his house, writing a book of poetry, if all it took was just to get up at dawn and walk back and forth with a rake and did it in rain or shine for 12 hours, then he would be an incredibly successful person. John was having the time of his life, raking this ground.

Alfie came one day, he brought his boards, and he is one of the few cement contractors who works alone. John plans to have Alfie on his podcast over on his Patreon. Merlin didn’t know about that because he muted all notifications from Patreon, but he now wants to listen to it. When Alfie was 14 years old, he was living along in Puerto Vallarta Mexico, working as a bar tender. At a certain point one of his brothers came along and told him he was on his way back to the US, opening a windsurfing shop in Olympia Washington and he asked if Alfie wanted to come with him, which he did, but then he was wondering where all the bars were.

Alfie started cement contracting when some guy came into the restaurant where he was bussing tables and said: ”I have been watching you, kid. I got a job for you!” At some point along the way he realized that other people just make this harder and he went out on his own and became the most jamming kick-ass ninja cement contractor guy.

When Merlin’s kid was in preschool at a Coop they wanted him to make them a website, which you can do very easily with for example Squarespace he didn’t want to do it because he was happy to just go out and do some San Francisco version of hard labor. He can clean filthy toys or rake the sand box - anything where he can just put on headphones and not have to talk to somebody. He will do a really good job at it and stay late and help clean up after all the normies leave, which he learned at church:

You stay extra long and help the people who are helping, which makes you a helper and a better person. He does not want to find the password for the ftp site they haven’t opened in several years and he doesn’t really want to have a conversation because in San Francisco even if they are nice and go to a Coop preschool, they are still going to ask him a lot of questions that come down to status and money. Merlin would rather listen to a podcast and rake. John agrees.

John loves Alfie and has always… he has lived 1000 lives before he was 25 years old. Mary Ellen and her husband Bill Dubey were married by Timothy Leary and their wedding was in Life magazine (see OM247). Alfie’s universe, just when you think it is safe to go back in the water all of a sudden he got some other story. Merlin would rake with Alfie, but he doesn’t rake. He told John he would do the cement, but he doesn’t prep because he works alone and that is because John was raking. Alfie just does a really nice broom finish if you ask him for that.

Alfie and John were standing there, Alfie set up his forms and he said that a guy from the concrete company is going to come in a concrete truck, which John has seen as a kid and he always wanted an interaction with one of those. The other person that was coming was the concrete pumper because of course the concrete truck doesn’t pump it. The pumper is the key to the whole operation. Alfie is not normally doing business in Seattle and he called a reputable local concrete company, they are on the surface all the same, but he was not going to just use some local pumper from here, but he was having his guy come over from Kitsap county.

Up rolled a rattle trap truck and a guy jumped out. He had a lot of charisma, long hair on the top and back, but shaved on the sides, an early 1990s industrial look with a little bit of man-bun, and he got this truck with a diesel motor on it that looked like it was coming from a submarine, he started it up, he had hoses all over, and while he was working he was talking what comes to mind. At a certain point they came over into the territory if Coronavirus is real or a thing that got made by the CIA and the Chinese and the Marsians.

In cases like this John just goes: ”Right… Right… Ahaa… Tell me more!” because he is loving it and he has zero dog in the race and he gains nothing by taking any side in this. He is going to pump this concrete, they are going to shake hands, and that is it. Alfie is John’s age and he does the thing where he in very measured tones explains to this guy who Coronavirus is real and why his attitude is dangerous, not in a way that is off-putting, the guy clearly respects Alfie. Alfie told an anecdote about a fireman he met who thought Coronavirus was fake and how he thought that was a very dangerous position for a fireman to take.

Trying to convince others that they are wrong (RL422)

Alfie did the thing that John never does: Address the concrete-pumper’s bonkers soliloquy and straighten him out. At the end all the concrete pumper can do is back out of the room: ”Anyway, I am not saying… have you seen the big game last night?” and in that same situation if Alfie had not been there, just like in the old days when a Hare Krishna came up in the airport, John would always stop and let them talk until they expired, but they never expired, they always found more air. John would spend an hour and a half, listening to somebody talk to him about Hare Rama, he had nowhere to be, there was nobody coming to pick him up and at a certain point he would have to find a bus, so why not stand and talk to them?

So many people in that situation would start arguing with the guy, but like the flat earthers, they know more about the fake thing than you know about the real thing. It was amazing to watch Alfie do the thing that John was never able to do, which is to just in a very friendly way and not pedantically, he does not put on airs, he didn’t go to college, he was working in the bars of Puerto Vallarta when he was 14, he is not trying to tell you that he has got more education than you do, but he thinks there is a world of truth and there are things that aren’t true, but it is not connected to an opinion about himself.

He doesn’t have to be right and you don’t have to be wrong, there is true and there is not. This guy probably came out of that conversation feeling that he wasn’t wrong, but at the next job site he probably told some of the things that Alfie said. Alfie was not an agent of an idea, but he was just a vessel, and he works in the trades in the county, in the fucking Kitsap county, which is where Ben Sheppard comes from, the bass player of Soundgarden. He is the most advanced life form that ever came out of Kitsap county.

Alfie must every day show up at a job site where there is somebody who is trying to tell him that the Earth is hollow and he is just methodical about it. He might not ever have said ”No!” and John was sitting there, going: ”Right… right… so you are saying some things point to that the Coronavirus was created by…” It is the classic adage: They less you know, the less you know what you don’t know, and the pumper, from the moment he got out of his car John knew he got something because John has been around enough that when he meets an assistant manager of a Popeyes Chicken who is clearly the center of his world, even if it is a small world.

This guy really had that vibe and John instantly liked him, he had a lot of charisma and a big guy energy and you could absolutely see him after work sitting around on some bean bag chairs with the Popeyes Chicken people and he is holding court, he is talking about the four horsemen of the apocalypse (from the book of Revelation in the Bible), how no-one has ever seen in the same room at the same time, and people are like: ”Wow, this guy is blowing my mind!”

The goal of education is that you come out with more questions than you went in with (RL422)

There are worlds where the most educated person in the room doesn’t have to be that educated! You can be the smartest guy who has read the most books and still not be tapped into what the CDC’s latest story is. John often finds himself in worlds where everybody in the room is so ”educated” that no-one in the room has any sense of what reality is. They assimilated things that they read to the point that their attitudes and world-views have become free of all self-doubt and you have a final answer for anything.

Merlin has been reading a book called High Conflict (High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out
by Amanda Ripley) that talks about the idea that in a high conflict situation you develop contempt and scorn for people and the only thing you do is embarrass them and maybe that is not a great way to run anything, including a country.

One of the best part of John’s college education was the governing principle: He had been soaking in Comparative History of Ideas for a long time and he was not one of those 4-years-straight-through-college people, but he came and went, there were different people in charge, academic fashions came and went, to be an undergraduate in 1987 and to be an undergraduate in 2004 are completely different universes of college, so much has changed and there was a whole generation of students that became teachers in that time.

What seemed really novel in 1990 seemed corny in 2000, but really novel again in 2010 when it was coming in under a new wrapper and always a new set of authorities, but a lot of the work is based on the work that came before. As John was taking more of a leadership role in the department, still as an undergraduate, but as an old man, he was 35 years old and was still standing around as a senior and they were saying: ”Since you are standing around, will you grade these papers?”

John realized that the goal of college as the leaders of Comparative History of Ideas at the time saw it, Jim Clowes (not spelled Jim Claus) and John Toews, was that a student left with more questions than they had when they came and left with less certitude and less of a sense that they had the full picture. Every quarter at the end of the big class you would see students line up and say: ”Wait, that’s it? For the last month I have been waiting for you to tie it up and you never did and you just laid out more and more loose threads right up until the last day and then you close the book and say: Have a nice summer?” Some were really disturbed, including John, until they understood that this was the point of it.

More than anything else he learned in college, that was what had the most impact: Understanding that he was not here to come out the other side with an understanding. If you go to college and you get something tacitly or formally presented as a truth for all times, that is a crime. Merlin talks about how certain concepts just end the conversation, like accusing someone for hypocrisy and the other one is spraying your science sauce over whatever the topic is. There are so many levels to that approach that are not nearly as effective as they seem because you are flashing a badge, saying that you speak for science, but the most important idea of science is that we might not even have our ladder against the right wall and we don’t even understand the scope of the problem. Science does not mean that something is true forever.

As a liberal artist John is now more or less completely convinced that the liberal arts are not sciences. He would rather give the hat tip to computer maths (that John claimed previously is not science, but a trade). There is a very good Christmas-related episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000 where Joel is asking the robots what they want for Christmas and everybody talks about what they want from the catalog and the Crow T. Robot says: ”I want to decide who lives and who dies!” and Joel goes: ”Oh, I don’t know!”

Somewhere along the lines both John and Merlin lost their low energy. John didn’t need to put 1/10th the amount of physical energy into the show than he did. He could have done this whole show in a low voice and it wouldn’t have taken him anything, he would have been the Aimee Mann of this show, standing there in a 3-piece suit, not sweating a bit, just letting the microphone do the work. She is in a 3-piece suit, and John is her in a 3-piece suit in her in a 3-piece suit. Merlin replies with: ”Oh, I don’t know!”