This week, Merlin and John talk about:
The Problem: He just needs to broom it off, referring to the cracky guy who washes windows in the neighborhood and who cleaned John's daughter's mother's porch in a sloppy way and claimed that he just needed to broom it off.
The show title refers to John’s #Beandad incident in January.
They start the show making funny voices.
Happy Belated Father’s Day! Many blessings to those who celebrate. Merlin is thinking about becoming a guy who says shit like that, and even though he is not Jewish he is going to start saying Mazel a lot online. John is not online, so he doesn’t know how people do it. He is not sneaking, but he has all the apps still installed, it is like a cigarette on a doorway lalala. He has a folder on his phone called Social Dump and he dumped all his social in there as part of John’s January Project (see Beandad).
There is nothing to be gained by John going on the Internet because there is nothing there that is going to make him feel better than not.
Raw notes
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John’s mom wanting to buy an apartment in Burien (RL429)
John's mom has been living on Capitol Hill this whole time, but the rest of the family all moved to the suburbs and she is not conveniently located. About an hour before dusk, which right now is 9:45pm but in the winter is 4pm she wants to get home because she doesn’t like driving after dark. There is no chance of having dinner together or similar.
During the 11 years when John lived at his farm his family started to orient themselves toward the South end of Seattle, which is typically not where they were oriented. When he bought the farm he was driving through neighborhoods that he had never been to, and he didn’t think there would be any.
For many years John’s mom was the one who was directing the energy toward the great town of Burien Washington which is not what you would have ever called a great town, it was just a town with a hardware store, a drug store, a little store that sold model trains, an inaccessible library, and a couple of grocery stores. Now the inaccessible libraries have either all been torn down and been replaced with very accessible ones, except the Carnegie libraries that are now legacy libraries that are grandfathered in.
They had to put in a really janky aftermarket lift at the KFC near Merlin’s house where all the pigeons are, but there is no way someone is going to get up these 8-10 steps to get inside. It looks almost like a vertical dishwasher.
John should probably do an [[[Omnibus]] entry on Carnegie. He believed you can make a better world by educating people, which we no longer believe because we have seen over and over that it doesn’t work.
Burien has one family-run Italian restaurant that has no super-good food, but everybody still goes there, and a competing one that the older people don’t want to go to. Neither of them are good. Merlin also has a lot of overpriced Italian restaurants in his neighborhood that suck, but everybody goes there.
John’s mom was the one who was pioneering even thinking about Burien as a place. John didn’t care about it. There was a Fred Meyer and a Value Village, but why would you get off 1st Avenue? When John’s mom sold her house on Capitol Hill she bought a condo two blocks away although she was talking about Burien the whole time and the rest of the family had all moved down there. Now Capitol Hill is a nuclear free zone and like the center of every American city it is now a republic onto itself, and she had to walk through tear gas on her way to the grocery store.
The other day she called and said she found an apartment in Burien that she really wanted, but the banks wouldn’t give a 30-year mortgage to an 87-year old and John needed to be the person on the loan because he is the only one with a foot in life. Now he was in a real estate transaction, but the banks don’t like John either and want him to demonstrate his income, which is more like a story, but that is not how that works, it has to be on paper. At some point the phrase ”It is like radio, but on the Internet” will be used.
John is confident that in the next day or two this real estate transaction is going to come to a conclusion and he wishes he could say: ”Hold my beer while I solve this real estate problem!”, but without his mom he wouldn’t even know what a 1099 was. Ken Jennings has been great because he has a folder where he puts papers and he says things like: ”I sent you that email on Tuesday!”
Demonstrating that Omnibus was actually a business, demonstrating that Dan Benjamin is in business in some way that is definable has all been a real challenge. Merlin has had the same problem since the 1990s.
Banks are trying to manage their risk by not just looking at what you made last year because that could be anything, you could have sold anything you own and be a millionaire, but they look at your tax returns for the last 3 years. John was in a financial panic John in 2018 because Omnibus and Friendly Fire weren’t making any money, Roderick on the Line is not putting anybody into a house, and does anybody listen to Road Work? If you are out there, blink once! Merlin doesn’t even want to know the stats of any of this stuff.
The last few years have been a real rollercoaster for John! In 2018 he was having anxiety attacks, turtles, he was seeking Aloha, he was yelling at Jesse Thorn on the phone all the time and in 2019 all of a sudden Friendly Fire and Omnibus were making money a little bit, the turtles were swimming with him, and all he had to do was just yell at people on the phone for a solid year and breathe into a paper bag every evening. In the end Friendly Fire was a job and then it was fucking gone and then the Patreon showed up over here.
The guy wanted to see John’s tax returns from 2018, and although those were not representative of what had happened since then he didn’t care. John had been through 7 financial realities since then and is now a stable individual who is making a reliable and stable income so that he can sign on this loan for his 87-year old mother to live in Burien literally across the street from the lesser of the two Italian restaurants. She can sit on her balcony and watch the 4th of July parade, and she can see the accessible library to the left.
It is a 1-bedroom apartment on the top floor with an elevator, you can see the airport and watch the airplanes land, and you can see the mid-century modern furniture store. They are really hoping that this is all going to happen! The bank person came back and said that the underwriters can’t do it and John said: ”You are a mortgage broker which implies that you broker mortgage!”, but since the financial crisis of 2008 they are not allowed to do anything fun anymore!”
When John got his mortgage in 2007 he walked into the guy’s office with a sheath of papers, but the guy said he didn’t need to see those papers. Because John had a song on The OC, another song in a FIAT ad, that one for Miller Beer where they gave him the money and went all the way through production, but then they decided to go in a different direction, contributed that he could make a 20% downpayment on a $400.000 house. They guy even recommended John to buy a house twice as expensive with only 5% down. A year later he would not have been able to buy the farm or any house for any amount of money, not even if he had cash because it got tight for people with internet radio shows.
John getting a $5 pizza at Sorrento’s when he was in 5th grade (RL429)
In Anchorage John was a Sorrento’s guy and other families were Romano’s people. John only ate Romano’s a couple of times in his whole life because it felt like cheating on your girlfriend. They still go to Sorento’s at least once whenever they go back to Alaska.
When John was in 5th grade his dad would sometimes say: ”I got a thing, you will be fine, I’ll be home at some point!” - ”Okay, alright!” It was at a time when nobody gave kids anything to do in the summer and John was out in his cut-off shorts, collecting pollywogs and shooting off bottle rockets, whatever kids do in the summer and he knew his dad wasn’t going to come home because he had a thing with some guys, he might even have gotten into an airplane and gone somewhere. At a certain point John needed to fix dinner and he really wanted a pizza.
John turned over his piggy bank and a big pile of dollar bills and change and he put it all into a leather poke and he walked up Fireweed Lane and Sorrento’s was right across from the Fireweed Theater, and John was in the city now, carrying his poke of gold. The sun was still in the sky, which could have been very late in Alaska, John walked in and there was a bar inside the door, this was before they expanded and was just a one-storefront-width place. Sitting at the bar there were 5 Italian guys with big mustaches, the kind from a poster from the 1950s.
There was a woman at the cash register and John asked her how much a small pepperoni pizza was. She said $5 or whatever it was in 1978 and John was counting his quarters and he had $4.50 and he was short. This was no small amount, he felt very independent and this was maybe the first meal he was trying to buy himself in a restaurant. He read in books that you could offer to wash the dishes, but he was not sure he was ready to go all the way in.
A guy at the end of the bar, a 35-year old with black hair slicked back, said: ”How much is the kiddo short?” and the lady said: ”$0.50” - ”It is on me!” and he came over, put his hand in John’s hair, ruffs it up: ”You are a good kid!” and John was so thrilled, he was flying! Those were ethnic guys who were from the world and this might have been Mr. Sorrento or his son. They made him the pizza, put a small pepperoni in a box, and Jon walked home and ate that pizza in triumph and he has never intentionally ordered a pizza from any other restaurant in Anchorage since then. It was where they went for his birthday, when he came home from college, if he was a good boy it was the reward.
The restaurant still exists and John went there when they were in Alaska in January. At some point they went two widths and they painted a Trompe-l’œil on the wall with hanging grapes and some scenes from Vesuvius. This is not where pizza for the table as a power move originated, but this is where John’s family developed ”everybody wants pizza, so we get a pizza and then you order your entree”. No-one ever threw a left-over pizza away. Pizza for the table has been a life-changing technology for Merlin.
John’s dad was always a half-and-half guy at Sorrento’s, he never had a slice of pizza in his life, that was for whomever, but not for him. Half-and-half is half ravioli half spaghetti and meat sauce, which is just what you say in an old-style Italian restaurant and the woman licks the end of her pencil and writes it down on a pad. As a side you get a quarter of a head of lettuce with blue cheese dressing and bacon and you grow to be 6’4”.
The guy going around the neighborhood washing windows and driveways (RL429)
John’s family was down in Oregon over the weekend and came home last night. There was a guy who came around John’s daughter’s mother’s house, knocked on the door during COVID and asked if she needed her windows washed, and he was pretty cracky, but she is a soft ouch and she did need her windows washed and all of a sudden they had a junky washing the windows while John was sitting on the couch, doing a crossword puzzle. He would come around every once in a while, he is an industrious cracky who has a habit, but he is making money and is not burglaring.
Merlin has discovered YouTube pressure washer videos and he wanted to talk about lead blowers and pressure washers. There is a Polish man cleaning rugs. John knew a couple women who would watch pimple popping videos.
Unfortunately he came by at some point, asking to pressure wash her walk, and then he disappeared for 6 days and they never heard from him, and when they were in Oregon he showed up unannounced at her house, John’s sister was staying at the house, he did the cracked-out pressure wash, and when they came home there was an invoice on the table in his cracky scribble and it was $400, he left his number, and said he needed to be paid immediately and it was very important.
If John had been the first one in the door and had seen this invoice he would have waited for the guy to call him, but of course his daughter’s mother at 10pm on a Sunday texted him immediately and told him she would get it to him tomorrow. If John had known he would have told her to text him tomorrow because: ”Never create a situation with a junkie after dark”. He replied immediately and wanted to come over 10 minutes later. John is living in his own house now and was on the way out the door to go home and he is only vaguely aware of this guy.
John went out and looked at the patio and saw that it was a junkie job where he did buy a pressure washer at a thrift store, this was not a $400 job, not even a $200 job, he came when they weren’t home and worked for a couple of hours on this and now he is invoicing $400 because he feels like he has a live one. He even left the pressure washer in the back yard half-way across he patio where he had stopped working at some point, he didn’t even finish the job. She wrote him a check, but John told her to just go in and let him deal with this, and John sat on the front steps, a guy drove up and got out of the car in the dark.
If he had owed money to somebody violent he would have pawned his pressure washer a long time ago. He is just trying to get cash money so that he and his girlfriend can get high and this was the plan. You can’t argue with a junkie because they are in the business of arguing and they are constantly rationalizing to everybody: ”I didn’t steal your lamp, I just borrowed it!” The problem with being in recovery is that you know too much and John can’t save him at 10:30pm when he shows up at his daughter’s mother’s house demanding money for a job nobody asked him to do that he did while they were gone and there was no oversight and John was looking at i with the flashlight of his phone.
A union carpenter in Seattle makes $25 an hour and would have to work on this project for 2 straight business days to have it be worth $400, but this guy with his 1-horsepower pressure washer is not going to get $80 for the 3 hours he spent on this. John told him that he was going to give him $200 in cash and he is not ever going to come back here, not offer to wash the windows, not have contact with the house anymore or come to the neighborhood anymore because this situation where he did this job without a bid or prior authorization and then invoice for $400 for a $120 job is not going to happen again and he is not going to come around here at 10pm.
He then said that he just needed to broom it off and he was trying to grab for a broom, but John told him that it was 10:30pm on a Sunday and he was not going to just broom it off now. John wanted to give him the $200, but he was arguing and going this way and that way. It is the same with the lady behind him who will argue that she has never thrown a single thing over the fence into John’s yard until she dies from choking on the garbage. People are crazy and people on drugs are crazy. John was doing the thing where he was guiding him up the stairs and repeated that he wanted him out of there.
In a completely different set of conditions John could sit with this exact same guy and say: ”Listen man, the day you quit drugs is the hardest day, but the next day you will feel slightly saner. You are a young guy still, it feels hopeless now, but through a program of recovery…”but now John was not going to talk about any of that because this was not an argument or a negotiation and off he went full of conviction that he put in 16 hours of work on this thing. Then John’s daughter’s mother told John he couldn’t go home to his house tonight, because what if he came back, and in order to make everybody feel comfortable John spent the night there at the house in what had formerly been his bedroom and is now the mid-century sparsely decorated guest bedroom. John was doing some perimeter checks every time there was a bump.
A tree from John’s property falling onto the street (RL429)
This morning at 7am John’s mom called him and asked him where he was and John said he spent the night for reasons he wouldn’t get into, and she told him that a giant tree from John’s property fell this night in the middle of the street and is now blocking the main road of the town. John drove home and sure enough, there was this tree that John had talked about with the city and his neighbors, it was leaning, it looked like it was going to take out the power lines, and every time a box truck went by too fast they would break through some branches. It was a 40-foot tall tree that was really in trouble above John’s pay-grade, but by a quirk of zoning fate the city when they laid out the plaits laid it out with rights of way that are much wider than the roads and the right of way encompassed the tree.
There was a whole city crew and John asked the foreman when the tree fell and he said the first call he got about it was 1am, but he wasn’t going to do anything about it and he sent somebody out to put some caution tape around it and everybody in he neighborhood could just go around it, he was not going to have 8 guys with chainsaws out at 1am. If John was in the house he would probably have heard it, but he probably wouldn’t have gone out either. The city arborist was there and they were wondering what tree that was, maybe a Willow, he had leather chaps like a cowboy and a hard hat.
John was watching the city produce larger and larger chain saws as the day wore on. A month ago there was a guy in a reflective vest with Oakley blades on, standing out in front of John’s house, looking at something with a clipboard, and John went out and made him aware of this tree, as long as you are here, let’s talk about that, and he looked up and down of it and said: ”Well, I guess we will have to wait and see!” That guy was back at the party this morning, it was very exciting.
At 7:20am John was standing there with his beer mug full of coffee, supervising this situation. The tree missed the power lines, missed the neighbor’s mailbox, missed the neighbor’s flower bed. All the neighbors were standing around. Somehow this giant tree perfectly placed itself in its final swan dive right up the middle of the street where it blocked all traffic but hit nothing and John stood there marveling and they were all thinking that it couldn’t have gotten better.
The guy asked John if he wanted the log for firewood or something, but John didn’t think so. It was 15 feet long by 5 feet in diameter. They had an industrial wood chipper where you could throw a log the size of a mailbox in. John thinks they take those big logs in the city and put it in a bog somewhere as an insect habitat or something. The guy with the chaps had a Mr. Hooper beard (Matt Hooper from the movie Jaws). ”Listen, this is no boat accident!” - ”A whaaaat?”