RL425 - The Car Bar

This week, Merlin and John talk about:

The Problem: It’s definitely weathered, referring to some Broyhill Brasilia chairs that were not yet refinished but definitely weathered.

The show title refers to test driving an expensive Lincoln car to set the bar and see what he can expect.

John is recording from his new house, he is looking out the window at the trees and bushes.

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 Please do not quote these texts directly without applying your own editing first!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 having trouble with his audio interface again (RL425)

John has problems with his audio interface again and answered the phone with the built-in microphone. When he was on iHeart Radio they tried to give them a bunch of gear and gave John an Apogee Quartet that turns voice into computer and has 4 XLR-inputs, so he could basically record a drum take on this, he could be like a regular Steve Albini, get in a wet room, have several sets of mics, and make some very disparaging comments about your band and the music industry in general.

Merlin still remembers how he once called an album ”a pinch loaf one-off” (actually: ”A patchwork pinch loaf from a band who at their top dollar best are blandly entertaining college rock. Their willingness to be ’guided’ by their manager, their record company and their producers is unparalleled. Never have I seen four cows more anxious to be led around by their nose rings.”, see here about the Pixies). John remembers that he called In Utero (by Nirvana) a mediocre band making a mediocre album.

John stopped using the Apogee Quartet and switched over to the little red box (Focusrite Scarlett 2i2, as Merlin) because he was doing a lot of traveling and the little red box was easier to carry in a bag. Also, the Apogee does not have discrete buttons for things like an old mixing console, but wants to direct you to its computer interface. Merlin compares it to a digital watch in the 1970s that only has 2 buttons and you can’t even play Frogger on it. They played Electronic Quarterback (handheld game by Coleco) for hours in 7th grade. Kevin Horning had one.

When he plugged it in it threw a popup menu that the Apogee software wasn’t updated to the thingamabob and he spent a little time looking into that and ended up on a message board that said that it always says that and it is a bug. It is making John’s life 100% easier. He stopped using it because he doesn’t like the interface at all, it seemed shabby, trying to emulate a rack, but it doesn’t do it well.

John having bought a new car (RL425)

John has finally purchased a motor vehicle that was made in the 21st century, which sounds very futuristic like a hovering car, but we are 21 years into the 21st century and the car is not necessarily a new car. His old car, a GMC Suburban, was made in 1979 right in the heart of the 20th century, but the problem was that the headlights would sometimes turn off in the middle of the night when he was driving along.

His truck having a quirk to get it started

He already had the issue that he had to pull his gear lever back and to the right and reach over with his other hand to turn the key and start the truck, otherwise the starter would not even click. He was sitting at the side of the road. On a rainy December night right around Christmas John and his daughter went Downtown to pick up a Christmas present. Her mother and John’s mother will both tell you the present they want because they know that surprises never produce the desired result.

When they came back to the truck it wouldn’t start. It had been playing around with not starting for several months and John had always managed to jiggle the key and turn the radio on an off and kick the tire and it would start. But this time it would not. John’s little girl really believes that things should go a certain way and she already did not believe that dad’s old green truck was the way that things should go because she had enough experiences in cars with windows that rolled down at all, not even necessarily electric, she knew that dad’s truck had a tendency to catch on fire and that it was also very noisy in there and it smelled like motor oil and mold and she was over it.

John’s daughter’s mother is a little fancy and she likes a sinister looking car that looks dangerous and bad and sophisticated. Her step-father raised Lancia cars and do rally races and they liked old vintage cars and she drives a car that when it pulls into the scene looks like Something Wicked This Way Comes (novel by Ray Bradbury). It is not ostentatious to the degree that would pull in to pick up your child at elementary school and everybody would go ”Ewwww”, it is not the 7 or 8, but the 5, which is sinister and fast and cool, but not the ”what an asshole!”

John’s daughter is well enough versed in the world to know that in some cars you can talk to the steering wheel and it will call your mom, some cars have a little map that shows up on the screen, some cars the locks go on and off, and there is only one car that any of her friends have every seen that has an AM radio that only gets KIXI, you need to put the lever back and to the left just to get it to start, and it sometimes catches on fire.

That night in December John was trying to get the truck to start and she was extremely dissatisfied and very frustrated with him and very vocal about her frustration. She had told him for a long time to get a new car. She was mad and John was stressed out and the sun was getting down and the last thing he wanted to do was getting a tow truck to Pike Place Market because tow truck companies probably won’t even go down there.

John tried different things like hitting the dashboard with his fist, turning the windshield wipers on and off, getting out, open the hood, and look at the alternator, jiggle the wires that appear to go from the battery and the alternator to other things, but none of it worked. He even checked the oil. She sat there and was screaming bloody murder at him, but that was not helping him getting the truck started. Eventually in the process of jiggling everything he pulled the gear shift lever back and all of a sudden it started, so he said: ”See, Daddy figured it out!”, but internally he was thinking that this was the most random shit he had ever heard and ”Thank God!” that this truck started because they were just about to reach crisis level.

The headlights going off randomly

Now the truck had a new quirk and no-one could ever steal it because you had to do three things, but about a month and a half ago he was driving along in the dark on a rural road and the headlights went off and this was not up to code. One of the first times it caught on fire it was when he turned the aftermarket fog lights on and it suffered a short and cooked the wires and the headlights went off. A the time he was in Missouri and had to pull over and get a tow because on the Interstate in Missouri you can’t just drive along with the headlights off and it turned out it had cooked the wiring harness and he had a lot of it replaced just to keep on keeping on.

This time the headlines went off and it could have been 1000 things, but what happened was that he had moved his left foot on the carpet. It was not touching a button and it was not on the brake, and in an automatic transmission car your left foot should never have to do anything. Sometimes you can set the parking brake or the high beams if they have a floor button like the 1979 GMC Suburban. John had moved his left foot slightly and the headlights went back on. He hadn’t stomped the floor, he just moved it. After he drove along for a while the headlines went off again and he moved his foot and they went back on and it was something he couldn’t even explain.

It was in some ways the truly final straw because what happens the day when the headlights don’t go on when he moves his foot and he is out looking for abandoned gold mines and the headlines go off? For 14 years people have been rattling his cage, telling him that he needed to buy a car. There is a general sense that as a 52-year old man you need a car to live in the world, he has a daughter that used to go to things like ballet, and you go to the store, to your dentist appointment, and it has been very cute and quaint that he had chosen an old-fashioned car, but a 1979 car is actually a 42 year old car. If you did that in 1979 you would be driving a 1937 car with an ”aoooga” horn. His dad’s first car was a Model A and he was 16 in 1937.

The time when the GMC RV caught on fire

John tells this story in RL183

The GMC RV had caught fire outside of Mount Shasta and John had his daughter, her mother and his mother in the RV with him at the time, and they were in a place North of Weireka where there was no cell-phone service and John had to climb up to the top of a thing and call AAA and they spent all day because they didn’t have a tow truck that could carry an RV, although it was not an RV, but a GMC RV, and it is different and you can hook it up to any big tow rig, but they didn’t believe him and they had to get a special guy and it turned out it was like a (Ford) Torino.

John’s family lost faith in him. He did get them out of there, but as they were sitting next to the road with the smoke pouring out of the RV all of the bears came out of the forest to watch and they were wondering what happened to this guy. The family would have cowered inside, except it was full of smoke and it was one of the events where the running commentary was: ”You and your car thing and your Vespa thing, it is all very precious and it was super-cute when you could walk to the store when your truck caught on fire!”

Having never really bought a car

John had never purchased a car before the Suburban. He bought cars over the years when someone sold a Volkswagen Bus in the Spokane The Spokesman-Review for $700 and that bus also caught on fire. Then John bought that Ford F-250 with the Chevy motor when he had to come down from Alaska because his dad’s stupid camper thing caught on fire (see RL183), but then for a long time he inherited his dad’s Audi that did not catch on fire, but it did stop running, his dad had a Chrysler thing John was driving, his mom’s Chrysler, he was just inheriting cars for a long time.

John’s family stopped thinking it was cute and then his Suburban caught on fire when he was on his way to pick up his daughter from school and he had to call and say he couldn’t make it because he was on the side of the road and his truck was on fire (see RL270) and his credibility has been in the tank since then, 3 years ago, and John has just been limping along. He was thinking that one of these days he was going to fix it up, but that was never going to happen, or if he was he would have to tear this thing down to the hubs to fix this electrical problem.

Trying not to say something negative about yourself

The other day John went to a baseball game with his friend George Meyer (writer of The Simpsons) and they were talking about their lives. George is a little older and he was saying that he was trying to not say anything bad about himself and if he caught himself in the day he would note it and try not to do it. John doesn’t think he could go a week without saying something bad about himself. For a long time he thought it was a way to disarm other people, like: ”Don’t expect too much because I am a professional disappointer!”, which was funny-tragic 20 years ago, but now it is just tragic because it is all he does.

George has been through a lot, he is a very smart, wonderful, and extremely sensitive person and he is susceptible to the same internal narrative. he recommended John to try for a week not to say something bad about himself to himself because even if you are on top of it, thinking it is ironic, your animal brain hears it as an attack and has an actual attack response to it. It has been a struggle to John even to know what constitutes something bad because he says so many bad things about himself that he can’t even discern… Merlin thinks it is like something telling him to start breathing through his butt, because that is not historically how he has done this.

George is a hero to John because he is very sensitive, but also an angry guy who is trying to deal with his anger and he is still a work in progress and he is telling John that he needs to retrain himself, although he is already trying to retrain himself in so many different ways. It is a thing you can’t argue with and 10 years ago John would have argued with you and said that you have to say something negative about yourself because that is the truth. John has a lot of funny people in his life, but there are the ones that are funny and then switch gears like Merlin.

Being indecisive, but needing to buy a car

Finally John was told that he needed to buy a car and he was really having to confront the fact that he suffers from tremendous indecisiveness, which is a real handicap, and he doesn’t know if by saying that he is saying something negative about himself. It is like their worst friend John Siracusa and there is a very fun episode of Reconcilable Differences where he is talking about having to buy a replacement refrigerator and everything that is involved in that. John is a ruminator and he wants the right one.

John has been looking for a car for 4 years since it caught on fire (that was in December of 2017) and somehow he limped back into life by taking it up to his mechanic. Any normal person would have taken it to the insurance company and said: ”I have this thing insured and it caught on fire and now it is a wreck”, but he went to a wrench-turner friend who said: ”No matter what I do this thing is never going to be the same again and it is going to be a constant rat king of gremlins”.

Also the speedometer doesn’t work, the gear shift lever no longer has an indicator and you need to feel what gear it is in because the little pointer fell off at some point, it has no heater or air conditioner anymore, the windows don’t roll down for a variety of reasons, the windshield wipers are always on and when it is not raining he opens the hood and disconnects the motor from the power and drives around without windshield wipers on and when it starts to rain he can drive for a while, but then he will have to pull over in the rain and reconnect the windshield wipers as his daughters scowls at him and complaining and the motor is running.

Wanting to buy a mid-century modern dinner table with chairs

The indecisiveness: John needs a table for him to sit and eat food and where his children can play with their toys, and he has been looking for a table for 2 years. Merlin’s wife just bought a round table without consulting him. John can eat dinner every night by sitting cross-legged on the floor, eating out of a plate that is on his lap and he has been doing that for a long time and it is time to get a table. Yesterday he was at the store, the people who run the store have become friends because he is in the store a lot, waiting to find a table that speaks to him.

They had a walnut table that was the first in a long time that he liked. It has been refinished, but he prefers that because the original finish on these tables tend to be a little green over time. It is part of the Broyhill Brasilia line that was debuted at the Seattle World’s Fair in 1962. It is a style that is based on the city of Brasilia that was designed by the architect Oscar Niemeyer and it looks like Futuretown, a completely planned capital city unlike Washington DC or Greek Classical, but it is the city of the future, and the world’s fair of 1962 used a lot of those elements.

John has never been very interested in the furniture because it had a green tint, and he didn’t like mid-century anything because it seemed so kitschy. When it came to his house he was very deliberate as well and he wanted all original, but you are going to ruin a kitchen table anyway and he is going to have to strip this table a couple of times, so let’s stop pretending and it was much cheaper because it had been refinished. It was the first table in a long time that he liked and it is very reasonably priced and he was going to buy it right now.

As he was sitting on the floor with his daughter criss-cross-applesauce she said that she wants to live in this house, but she cannot because the house is not ready for her and she said she will live in this house with him when he is ready. Her bedroom is ready and she comes over and plays in her bedroom, but when it is dinner time she would like to have dinner in a house with a table.

When John wanted to buy the table the woman said that it had 6 matching chairs where they took the upholstery off because they also needed to be refinished and underneath was the original upholstry that had gold with eagles on it. It is beautiful! The chairs haven’t been refinished, but they are nice and weathered and worn and the original upholstery is definitely used, but the whole thing appealed to him and buying something like that new would cost 3 times as much.

She has dealt with John many times when he came in, touched everything in the store and then left. Her brother is about John’s age and John likes him very much, he is a John Siracusa type and he had an apartment in California one time where he lived for two years without a bed because he couldn’t choose a bed and he slept in a sleeping bag on the floor. John was so ready to buy this table and chairs right now and he called his daughter over and asked her to sit down in the chair and with no ceremony she said: ”It is too hard!” Her mother came over, sat down in it and said: ”Mmmmm, it is a little uncomfortable, but it is your decision!”, which is some super-code for: ”No!” John was right there, standing with his feet over the edge, and now he got feedback that he couldn’t account for.

They went over to some other chairs and said those were comfortable, but they were $2700 because they were Herman Miller or something. John did not buy anything, he came home, and he was sitting criss-cross-applesauce on the floor, looking at the spot where the table and chairs would have been if he had purchased them, and he doesn’t know if he did the right thing, but he also doesn’t want to get the wrong one!

The used car market being expensive because of the chip shortage

When it comes to buying a car there is the chip shortage at the moment and car dealers are no longer incentivized to sell used cars at a great discount because there are no new cars and because people are buying used cars sight unseen. Over the course of several weeks his sister and his mom were involved in this and tell him that he has to solved this problem, but the car dealers just say that if he won’t buy it then somebody else will.

John doesn’t like car dealers, he just wants to buy a thing that is the price that it is, he doesn’t want to buy a carpet. He was dragging his family all around the city, they were test-driving cars, all 5 of them were climbing in to see how it feels in the back there, and every car has so many different options and trim packages. In the old days when you chose between trim packages the heart of it was the motor. You had the 6-cylinder at the bottom, the hotted-up 6-cylinder, the small displacement V8, the middle one, the hotted up one, and the really blown-out one.

They even drove out to the Lincoln dealer to try the nice Continental one although he was never going to buy it and he was looking for the Fords. All cars now are black, grey, or white, and John doesn’t want that, a black car looks like it is for hire, a white car looks like a real estate agent, and in the grey cars are the people who couldn’t decide. There was a baby-blue sparkle Lincoln SUV with blue leather interior with white piping and the guy at the dealership asked John if he was sure he wanted this because it was like a basketball-player’s car, but that is all he ever wanted! Seattle doesn’t even have an NBA team anymore because the Super Sonics got sold to Oklahoma City.

John took it for a drive and was thinking what world you have to live in where you get to drive a powder blue Lincoln with blue leather interior. It had everything and it was a new car for $110.000 and John wanted to see what it was like to get a high benchmark that he could measure everything else against. The guy at the dealership was checking John out and although he had a Filson jacket for $300, the person that buys a car like that doesn’t even need to test drive it, but just puts down a bag of money, they are not comparison-shopping because there is no comparison.

After that John was in trouble because there was no other powder blue car. His standard says that he can only afford a used vehicle and financing on a $110.000 car would be thousands of dollars and more than rent and John is not going to do that. He doesn’t even want to go shopping for cars in the first place!

John’s family making him buy a car the same day

One day the word comes down from on high from the Coven that runs his existence that he was going to buy a car today, even though he was not ready because he has been looking for 4 years and they said he knew what he wanted and he had narrowed it down.

John called up a dealership that had one that was intriguing, but they had sold it 2 hours ago and the Coven that runs his life said that if he wanted it then he would have bought it yesterday, and there will be another one out there. They were going to solve his issue of over-deliberation with a hard line and making the decision for him. They drove the sinister car to a used car lot that specialized is herp-a-derp 4-wheelers and this car was an anomaly on the lot because it was not hopped up, and the problem was that it was grey, but it was a cool gun-metal grey, an attractive looking vehicle, he drove it, it drove well, and it had a trim package that he wasn’t aware of.

John was standing there at 7pm when the dealership was about to close and he got an elbow in the ribs that said: ”Buy it!” There are hundreds of thousands of people who have bought a car and who just see a car that they like and have bought it, and he sees those cars on the road and wonders who would buy that, but apparently lots of people do and there was not much sympathy for John past the 4-year line.

John bought the car (probably a Ford Expedition) and he felt awful. He sat in a chair where a guy with a too-short haircut and a Polo-shirt asked how much he was willing to pay for it, but John didn’t want to talk to him, he didn’t want a deal that was not a deal, he didn’t want him to act like he was trying to help. Just make this quick! But it wasn’t quick, they were talking about financing option and all of that and at one point the ladies said that it looked like John got it all in hand and they got in their car and left and the dealership turned off the lights, with John sitting in a cubicle in the back of the dealership with the finance guy and everyone else was gone.

John drove this car home and everybody else wanted to know the next day if he was excited, but he wasn’t. He thought that maybe he did the wrong thing and this wasn’t the one he wanted and he had the terrible experience that people who know him are baffled by, which is that something exciting happens and he is just ”Meh” about it. It took him about a week of driving until he eventually wanted to look up what that trim package was and it turned out to be not a trim package, but an option package with a lot of cool stuff.

It turned out that all the off-roaders who were driving around in jacked-up herp-a-derp pickup trucks wanted the herp-a-derp package on the SUV and it has the FX4 package, which is the off-road equipment package on the SUV while most of the other packages for the SUV are about how many television screens you want in the back. It has limited slip differential, jacked-up shocks, a big radiator, skid plates, a tow package, and it wasn’t even an option package John was aware of, and all of a sudden John was driving the coolest one of these from the standpoint of himself who wants a bunch of stuff that is not just televisions.

All these trucks have the exact same engine all the way up to the Lincoln. There aren’t 10 engines anymore like there were in 1971, but one of them sells for $50.000 and one of them sells for $110.000. This truck that John accidentally bought had all this rough-and-tough stuff that he will probably never use, except he will drive this up logging roads, he will do wheelies in it, he will stand it up in a sand dune. After a week of driving it he gets in and thinks: ”Hmm, FX4! What do you say about that?” and he is a little anxious how this could turn out kind of okay.

John has to take it to the dealer again because it is at a mileage where it needs service, but they told him that just the manager at the dealership drove this around and the dealership was the only owner, but the screen had 42 different people’s cell phones saved and he is anxious because he is going to take it into the new dealer to get it serviced and to ask if this thing has been thrashed.

John probably dodged a bullet because he now has a car that doesn’t catch on fire and that has a very subtle little badge on it that differentiates it from all the other ones that are just different levels of television, and the windows roll up and down. Merlin wonders if John gets any credit from his coven or if they immediately moved on to a new issue to bug him about, and they immediately moved on telling him that the Broyhill Brasilia chairs weren’t comfortable on their precious little bottoms.

Merlin needs to go and get his drain snaked.

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