This week, Merlin and John talk about:

The Problem: Do you want to be right, or do you want to be happy?, referring to Merlin living with two fact-checkers, but if you know what he is trying to say you don’t need to make it into a whole thing!

The show title refers to something Merlin says in connection with not putting any quarters into the outrage machine anymore.

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 Please do not quote these texts directly without applying your own editing first!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

Names (RL428)

John was never sad that he isn’t a Jonathan because those are completely other and he doesn’t know a single Jonathan who prefers to be called John. John had a Jonathan in his band (Jonathan Rothman), and it was not at all difficult to distinguish between them. Jon Stewart the TV man is a Jonathan, not a John, and he had to change it at Ellis Island because it was Jonathan Stuart Leibowitz, but if you got serious with him he would surely admit that he would have preferred his show to be called Late Night with Jonathan Stuart (The show was called The Daily Show).

Merlin’s first pick for the name of his child was one that would give her the most options, with is Elizabeth. You can call a girl anything with the letter ”i” in the middle of two consonants and says that it is a diminutive of Elizabeth, like Dib, Pin, or Tit. John has a couple of Elizabeths in his family. Eventually it was kiboshed by the child’s mother because she got bullied by a Liz. John dated a preppy red-headed Elizabeth in college and she was called Liz when she was being a tough girl, but her real name was Bibit. John’s cousin is Libby and they have never called her Elizabeth ever since she was born. Merlin suggests that as a double-diminutive she could be Bibi-Tit, but that is terrible.

John calls Merlin Merl as one of the exactly two people who do, and who could refuse to do that? There is no other diminutive to Merlin. Gratefully nobody has ever called him Merly. Merlin often mistypes his name as Melrin [sic] and had to create an autocorrect for that. Marco Arment calls it a snap-to-grid name and both Merlin and his wife have one, which means that you are already familiar with someone who has a more popular name close to your name, like Madeleine was often called Nathalie, Marco gets often called Marcus, and Merlin becomes Marvin.

People often switch the vowel at the end of John’s daughter’s name (Marlo) because if it was a Latin name it would suggest that it was a Man’s name, and she gets an ”a” transposed over the ”o” all the time, but just shrugs it off. Of all the things that she will tear you a new one about, that one she is just: ”Whatever, let them have it!” It is an uncommon enough name that has six potential spellings and they all sound the same. You can keep putting ”w” and ”e” at the end of it all day long. If your name is Melrin [sic], don’t brow-beat the person at Starbucks because they spelled your name Merlin, you know whom it is for, just get it, no-one cares. Merlin wishes it went without saying.

Merlin living with two fact-checkers (RL428)

Merlin lives with two fact-checkers, everything is always getting fact-checked all the time, and sometimes he will tell them: Do you want to be right or do you want to be happy? If you know what it is that he is saying or trying to say, we don’t need to make this into a whole thing! John asked someone yesterday if they were LARPing and they didn’t know what it was and he realized that he has lived in such a small world for the last 10 years that he hadn’t met anybody who didn’t know what LARPing was. Merlin has come to a point where he won’t even let on that he doesn’t understand because he so dreads the explanation. Urban Dictionary explains it all and then you can go to icanhazcheeseburger.com

The bakery that wasn’t allowed to cut John’s sandwich in half, Susan handling a guy who cut the line (RL428)

Yesterday John had a ”Do you want to be happy or do you want to be right?” moment. They were at a fancy bakery in his part of town where people line up out front to get super-sweet bread and in John’s case to get abused by the manager because he one time asked them to cut his French-bread sandwich in 3 pieces because he had a broken tooth and couldn’t really bite into it unless it was in smaller pieces and the woman behind the counter went on to do it, but then her manager came in swooping and said that they were not allowed to cut the sandwiches this way, although they already do cut them in half. They also couldn’t hand him the knife and let him do it, so John left with no sandwich and ultimately he was the one who suffered.

They went there yesterday and he said that he wouldn’t go in there, but if they came out with a sandwich then he could pretend that it came from somewhere else and he wouldn’t have to violate his ”I don’t patronize this business” rule. Because they only let 4 people in at once there is still a COVID line out front of Seattleites in the rain with their masks on and John is well away, overlooking model trains in the window of some shop, but apparently some guy in a leather vest wearing a T-shirt that said: ”I do not comply!” and with no mask walked past the line of 10 people in front of the store, opened the door, went in, and went up to the register and was about to order.

Someone in the line said: ”That guy just cut in front of everybody!” and John’s sister was in the line who hadn’t noticed that because she was talking to their child, and she looked in and saw this guy and said to the woman who had called it out: ”Do you want me to handle it?” - ”I am normally really good at these things!” - ”I’ll do it!” and she went into the store, the staff of the bakery are 8 people back there, every one of them saw this guy in the ”I do not comply!” T-shirt and none of them knew what to do. It is Seattle and there were all-together probably 30 people who were just paralyzed.

John was only hearing this second hand, but he can picture the scene. Susan said to the guy: ”Hi, excuse me, but perhaps you didn’t notice that there is a line!” - ”No, I didn’t notice!” - ”Well, it is a self-evident line!” and everybody in the place is looking at him, including the four people who were allowed to be in the store and who were also in a line. ”How was I supposed to know!” - ”Why don’t you come with me outside and I will show you everyone else who is waiting outside” - ”Well, I am in here now!” - ”Yes, but you are at the end of the line!” and somehow she with her firm politeness moved him back out the door, there was this line of people and she said: ”Here is the line!” - ”How was I supposed to know this…” - ”As you can see, it is obviously a line!” He wanted to argue with her now ”I thought these people were just waiting for their order number to be called!”

As always when he hears a story like this John was marking what Susan did against what he would have done. Already she has done 4 things that he wouldn’t have done, including the first line to the guy. John would have opened with ”Hey, buddy!” and it would have already been over. At this point the guy told her that it didn’t appear to be a line to him and she says: ”Well, now you know!” and then it was over. She managed to get him out of the store, deescalated, and she does an ”End scene” because at that moment she does not need to be right. He just wanted to fight, Susan didn’t, and John would have. It would have been important enough to be right that he wouldn’t have been happy, and his mission would have been to straighten this guy out.

The only other option to John if he was in a good mood would have been to say: ”Well, that guy is an asshole, I am not going to make a big deal out of it!” and to passively join the Seattle crowd and let the guy go to the front, but that leaves you with a shitty taste in your mouth. John doesn’t have the third mode which is ”firm but polite” When Susan gets in confrontations with John she was to right and will take him to the carpet. It is in her! Their whole Road Rage podcast is about her on the Highway living like The Humungus: She got 5 bullets in a box and all she wants is the oil.

They guy certainly went into that situation, hoping that somebody would confront him because he wasn’t wearing a mask either and then he was going to get to yell about somebody about COVID and he just made the mistake of cutting in line and he didn’t get his COVID fight, but his polite Animal House ushered back to the couch. As they were walking back into John’s house, all carrying French bread, John was marveling at his sister and she said: ”Do you want to be happy or do you want to be right?” - ”Well, unfortunately I want to be right so much more! I don’t even know how to be happy!” and his daughter leaned over to him and said: ”I also want to be right! I don’t care about being happy!”

Knowing that about yourself does not appear to be sufficient, and if you say that you want to be right there is no second mantra. The saying appears to be self-evident. The implication is that being right is what is going to make you happy, but John has never thought that, he always felt it as a duty and a responsibility to be right.

Points of view (RL428)

Confidence in your PoV is one thing, but the path from where we are now to a place where that point of view is actualized and everyone is happy and the world is running smoothly is the part where John stubs his toe or gets deep into the bushes, not knowing what the next move is. It is one of the central frustrations of living in the world for John, and right now it feels like an epidemic: There are a lot of points of view and there is world and no-one seems to be able to peacefully transfer a very self-explanatory point of view to the actual world where everyone agrees and we are all behaving accordingly.

You can’t live in a world where there are 50 complete systems of management. John always thinks of himself as being a little outside his time, but he is not. In the great arc of time nobody looks back at 1547 and says: ”Well, but there was that one guy who was really thinking outside the box!” We are all haggling over our different points of view, but that isn’t really it. We all have a point of view, but when the rubber meets the road all of our points of views collapse to one because they are all more or less the same. It is the integration that is the key.

They guy in the ”I will not comply!” T-Shirt thinks he is right and he wants to be right and with far more bravery than John would he is going out into Seattle, trying to strike up a confrontation with people where he knows he is a fish out of water because he is that confident that he is right. It would be like John going to a small red-state town with a mask and a shield on and a T-shirt that says: ”Trans-rights now!” and going to a monster truck rally and standing in the middle with both his fists up.

Susan absolutely has a point of view that she believes is right: All she wanted in that one situation was peace in the valley and somehow she knows how. She was doing civilization-building, enforcing base norms, she was not trying to say anything about being right, but: ”Here are some norms!” She didn’t make it about him per se or about herself, and as a Democrat, as somebody who wants there to be civilization, as somebody who thinks that we should wear shoes on airplanes, John always turns it into a confrontation between himself and that person, between justice and injustice. You can’t tell those people without shoes on airplanes anything, John is getting letters every time he is mentioning it on this show.

When then somebody in the line goes: ”Okay, whatever” and they turn on John he will say: ”What are you talking about? We need to fight this guy in the leather vest! Otherwise everyone will have a leather vest on!” and then he is a freaking guy, standing up on an airplane, throwing yoghurt. ”Go Eagles!” and when he comes home he will feel worse than if he had just watched the guy and choked on his own indignation. The third path for John right now has been to not go into French bakeries.

Avoiding things that provoke you (RL428)

John is right now living in a period of real avoidance. If he reads a magazine article and someone in the article starts to ”go there”, wherever ”there is, he will put the magazine down. Merlin agrees. Setting aside minimizing his online media interaction because when he gets back in he gets extremely sad extremely fast, but sometimes he will be drawn in by a smart headline and he can feel that this is that kind of piece that is the same kind of bullshit of a grinding position paper that represents so much of our interaction nowadays.

He can’t watch as much news anymore, not because he can’t deal with it, but it is: ”What are you going to do now?” There are so many people pumping quarters into the outrage machine and he is philosophically opposed to making that a lot of the spoons that build his particular pyramid. It is not wholesome or nutritional, but it is ugly and there are not a lot of action items for him in being provoked into feeling strongly about something.

John just subscribed to The New Yorker again after 5 years. Merlin mentions that he often hasn’t read the one before when they send him the new one and he describes this week’s cover, but that is because he doesn’t take enough baths. It is very easy to scan and say that right now you won’t read any article that tries to provoke you in the headline or the first sentence.

John doesn’t need a spoon pyramid, and it is related to this third path: John has had enough times in this French bakery where some kind of confrontation has happened either between him and a woman who won’t cut his sandwich or a guy in a leather vest that won’t comply, so John is just not going to go to this bakery again. He can get regular bread a pour sugar on it before he needs to even tempt fate to get sweet bread at this place.

He is halfway into an article about a cat on a skateboard and it is amazing! They also mention something about a monkey that clips the ends off of green beans. There is also a monkey mom who methodically takes all the strings off of the banana. Merlin finds so much consolation in animals now, like Donald Rumsfeld said: ”Look for the helpers…” (actually Fred Rogers: ”Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.”)

It is so not John’s way that he ever thought he would be. There were always bakeries that he wouldn’t go in, but there is so much media now that you can read 10 hours a day and never read anything that you were supposed to read. In the old days there was only so much to read. There was the newspaper, the other newspaper, three magazines, and the news. and if you were reading you had to read it. There was also golf digest, cigar aficionado and dirty diaper man, the things John had at his newsstand (see story where someone asked John if he had magazines with dirty diapers)

John is just opening closed doors, looking inside, and going: ”Nope!”, and the noping is way better than he thought it would be. Merlin used to have news and social media as a joy in his life, but becoming more blindingly emotional about something is not the path forward for anybody, call it clickbait or whatever you want, but it is not as fulfilling as it feels. It is not the ”Nope!” of ”I don’t care about this topic!”, but of ”I got all the information mostly up to date that I need to do my day today!”

There are no new ideas anymore in the present time, just trenches (RL428)

During the last 200 years of history, there were things like the era of discovery or the era of industrialization, and even in our own lives we have seen the tone of the time or the focus change enough under our feet, but you are never able in your own moment to say that this is the age of exploration. In the 1960s we worked real hard to get to the moon, but there was also the civil rights movement and the war in Vietnam, but right now we have come out of 10 years where the vibe in the room was that this was an era of a lot of personal growth. People were reevaluation, and there was a lot of personal reflection with the potential to pay big dividends culturally.

But now we are in a period where there is no new information and nothing that is written or spoken aloud is new or exciting, there are no new ideas, but there is a lot of shouting of ideas that we all know. We used to imagine that the way to raise a child was to give them the whole palette of ideas and they will pick their course, but in today’s world there are a billion ideas and there is really only one right one. There is a lot less false equivalency or there is a lot less of equivalency in general. No child in Oklahoma is being raised that there are other options either. There is a calcifying and hardening off, but it is not based on new info, it is based on new trenches.

We haven’t made it to the moon, we haven’t reorganized the banks, this isn’t a time of exploration or rebuilding, but it is a time of trench-digging, like the dystopian movies from 40 years ago where we were all going to be fighting for the Nike swoosh one day, or the Nike swoosh against the Adidas stripes and they are going to have real armies, and it snug in on us in a different way, it was not Nike vs Adidas, but the guy with the car and this other bank and the other bank. A good friend of John’s said the other day: ”I guess I have to get a Tesla!”, which was the weirdest thing John had ever heard, and he went to the Tesla dealership, but all of the sales people are 25 years olds with PhDs who decided they weren’t going to work in electrical engineering, but they are going to sell cars because they believe in the dream.

The current era doesn’t feel like somebody is going to flip a match and the whole thing is going to go up, exactly like it did 6 months ago or 10 months ago, but it doesn’t feel like a time where John needs to read that much about current events, even trusted sources. John had a couple of websites that he went to all the time where the curator was really smart about politics and culture. They read 50 articles today and present you with the 5 interesting ones.

Right now we have more information than ever before, but fewer choices in terms of politics and culture. We are increasingly all falling into a consensus bog where it is established what the consensus is and here is your shovel, get busy working on the trench! A couple of those curator/Aggregators who have been really good voices for John over the years have now a tone creeping in, even into Time Magazine that says: ”We all know what to think now, get busy digging your trench!” and here are the things to read to reinforce your viewpoint, and John had to close the notebook and unfollow a couple of people that he really loved because he doesn’t need another voice telling him where to dig his trench.

Not taking the confrontation anymore (RL428)

John’s decision is increasingly to not go into the French bakery because the sweet bread is not worth the potential of getting into whatever throw-down this place inspires, and he doesn’t go to this website anymore and he is not listening to that person anymore, and all around him all of his trusted voices and all of the culture that he has invested in is disappointing him over and over, but by closing all those closet doors, what is he doing? How is he making the world a better place?

Merlin says that Donald Ducks says that your health is like the three sides of an equilateral triangle: your mental, emotional, and physical health, and if one of them gets short it affects the other ones. Merlin needs to have his own emotional health in check, he needed just 3% more mindfulness to get him to where he can realize or remember obvious things because otherwise his brain goes tearing ass in some direction, which he doesn’t like feeling and which is not making him a better person. Letting the world recalibrate your emotions in a way that you are tearing ass in ways that you are not even aware of will not go great for 300 million people.

When John was 25 and saw 35 year old guys hanging around the Rock scene, he was always thinking: ”Oh you guys, you poor guys at 35!”, but when he was 35 he felt like they were the actual heart and center of the Indie Rock scene and they were, but now at 52 he is definitely not hanging out at the Rock clubs with blue… and no shade to John Vanderslice, but that is not John’s job in the world. He starts to be very aware of the fact that it is precisely at middle age that you decide there is no good new music and no good new his and that, even if it is no politically fraught culture, even you just hunker down and leave it to the kids, how far away is that from moving to a planned community in Florida and driving around in a golf cart? That is not what he ever wanted!

John definitely didn’t want to be somebody who says: ”I am just going to take responsibility for this one community garden and that is the way I will give back!”, that was never the aspiration for himself either. Now he walks around in his ravine in his smoking jacket, swinging his now long-unused sword, and it is clear he is not going to run for office, it is clear that he is now going to get a byline in the local alternative paper because there is no local alternative paper, he is not online anymore swinging his flaming sword and any conversation he would get into online he would be pre-frustrated and it was just down to digging trenches again.

John is also not ready to get really involved in the PTA, he is not ready to close it all down and just be somebody who is really worried about who has paid their dues at the local swim club. He doesn’t want a little fiefdom. Thank God for podcasts!

Merlin started recording music again and he got a new cheap bass and nothing makes him happier than plugging this thing in. He got the AmpliTube package for Garage Band with Brian May and Kirk Hammett sounds, and just fucking fiddling with this Squire bass makes him so happy. He is making it for himself. He has just restarted a video series, and his last goal is to sit there and watch the site meter to see how popular this thing is. Whatever he is going is what he is doing. Being online and getting mad about your trench is not wholesome and doesn’t feel good.

13 songs in a day (RL428)

John was talking to Dan last week, telling the story about writing 13 songs with Ben and Eric (see RW224), where they were each going to write 20 songs in a day and then get together and play all 20 songs that they wrote. They each wrote 13 songs in that day and somehow he had never told this story before. For the last two days John has been sitting there with his finger poised over the SEND button to put two of those demos that were each written in record in half an hours on his Patreon, but he is so scared to do it. However much ego he has wrapped up in songs, these things it is hard to even claim ownership over them. They were just bringing songs down out of the sky.

The only reason why John would feel comfortable about posting those is to show how amazing this process was. The Patreon is a walled garden and these are the people who care, the ones that aren’t going to put this on Buzzfeed and laugh at it, but of course there are going to be people who go: ”It would have been better if you had…” or ”I am not so sure about…” and somebody wants the drums louder and it is always Josh Rosenfeldt.

Hearing Merlin saying that he got a bass and that this is going to be where he will put his energy, John keeps coming back to: ”What am I here to do?” - ”It is that!” His music was never political.

This happened 4 years ago, two days before Millennial Girlfriend left him and a lot of the songs are about that, he could see the future. John never wrote songs about what was going on in the world, but about why the hell Millennial Girlfriend was leaving him and he doesn’t need to be reading people’s blogs to write songs, but he wrote those 13 songs because they fell from the sky and every songwriter ultimately has to acknowledge that and talking to Merlin about this now he is realizing that this is why and there are no trenches there. He can always choose to put the shovel down and fill in the trench that you dug.

Merlin really likes playing guitar, he likes fiddling with equipment, he enjoys projects, and the idea that when you are a little kid you are not making a house out of blocks because you want to get into a good school, but you like doing shit with blocks because blocks are fun. There is no need to explain it if you enjoy doing it and if you go out and share it, it might be something that somebody else likes, but then you are moving on to the next thing because it is all just fun. We grind ourselves into believing that everything has to have some practical economic component to it or brand building component.

John is going to put two songs up as an act against his own ego, as an act of freedom, although he is terrified to post anything because it feels so out of control, but it is going to be a step for him. John has a cart table in his front yard and a sign that says: ”Yard sale today 3-6pm” and he needs to start putting these songs and a lot of songs out there and every song is going to be marked ”$1 o.b.o.” and then somebody comes by and says: ”and yet you participate in commerce. Interesting!”