This week, Merlin and John talk about:

The Problem: John is Mr. Tweaky Back, referring to him tweaking his back when pulling a log down into his ravine.

The show title refers to Merlin making a metaphor of John going off on a non-sequitur thread like throwing a vase into the air and always remembering that it was there and catching it again, but lately John had some memory trouble and he would forget what they were talking about before.

The audio starts with 3 seconds from the middle of the song She Blinded Me With Science by Thomas Dolby.

John said he was ready for Merlin to call him, but it turned out he wasn’t ready.

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 Please do not quote these texts directly without applying your own editing first!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 making a sound like his dad (RL438)

The other day he made a sound that sounded just like his dad, without having planned for it, but just being his normal self. It was a guttural utterance when someone threw him a ball, and he realized he is on the way to being his own father. Merlin gives an example of a sound that his late mother in law used to do a lot and now it is a one-syllable code in his family for grandma Stinus. Sometimes when people get older and their hearing is less good they make certain noises. Merlin had a lady friend whose grandfather would do that a lot when they were driving him around Tallahassee, he would make it before he would read a sign, like: ”Huh, Chinese Buffet”, or ”Huh, All State Insurance”

Merlin has a lot of ticks, but he doesn’t mind it. John started to say: ”Oh boy…”, which works for a lot of things. His daughter is in a spongey age and she is starting to throw his own mannerisms back at him unconsciously, but also mockingly, and he is starting to see his own patterns, wondering why he is filling the space with sound when he could just drive in silence. Merlin doesn’t think younger people do this nearly as much. He decided to start writing his ticks down, like ”Huh…” They both use that one on the show a lot, but Merlin doesn’t want to talk on the show about the show.

Merlin not feeling well after having back pain and staying up late watching Rome (RL438)

Merlin’s health is not good right now, he screwed up yesterday and something happened. He noticed the middle part of his back hurt, not the lower part, so he either has lung cancer or he slept wrong or both. By early evening it turned into him making noises like you wouldn’t believe because every shift was painful. His daughter thought that was funny and she has come to an age where she makes visual memes about him and what an old man he is, which are pretty funny.

Every time John gets up after his daughter asked him to come look at a thing he makes a certain sound when he gets up from the chair. Merlin was prepared for being someone who makes a noise when they stand up, but he was a little surprised when he started making a similar noise when he sits down.

Merlin made a punch of poor decisions yesterday and he took a pain pill from his wife’s leftover medication from a dental thing. He doesn’t like taking a lot of stuff like that because it makes him not sleep very well and last night he slept 4 hours which is not enough for him. He had watched 6 episodes of Rome which kept him up quite late. It is a wonderful TV show and everyone should see it, John has seen it when he was in New York in the mid-2000s.

Merlin started last week and he is already halfway through the second season. Merlin loves the guy a lot who is in the Thor movies. There is Dr. Trainspotting from Grey’s Anatomy (Kevin McKidd) who is sniffing his own farts, and then there is the dude who is getting whipped at the beginning (probably Ray Stevenson).

Ira Elliot of Nada Surf being able to sleep on the floor (RL438)

In The Long Winters they have a famous story with Nada Surf’s drummer Ira Elliot: The two bands were playing in Toronto (see RW6, where John said they were in Ontario) and they got separated so that half of The Long Winters and half of Nada Surf were over here in this part of town and the other halves were over there in the other part, their phones didn’t work in Canada at the time, and at the end of the day it ended up that they were staying in two separate hotels and Ira was going to stay with John’s band and whoever was with the other ground would stay with Nada Surf. They only had one hotel room for John, Eric Corson and Ira.

John was thinking that Ira would get one of the beds and he was trying to decide who got the other bed because he and Eric were too big to share a bed at that point, but until he made up his mind Ira had already laid down on the floor in the entry way of the room and pulled his coat up over him and said: ”If you can just throw me a pillow!” John told him that he was their guest and wouldn’t have to sleep in the door, but Ira waved him off and said: ”What are you talking about! I am a professional!” and he was asleep before they had time to think about it.

John trying to move to New York to live with Nada Surf’s drummer Ira in the mid-2000s (RL438)

During the mid-2000s John was depressed and he had grown his beard very long. He wasn’t confident that The Long Winters had any future, he tried to make that Ultimatuum record and couldn’t finish it, he went around and around with Tucker, trying to get it nailed down, and he spent 6 months in bed back when he had the old purple mattress, but it was still perfectly serviceable at the time, it was probably only 5-10 years old! By the time he talked about it with Merlin it was another 10 years and it had become a biome.

When John is in trouble creatively or emotionally he reaches out to people looking for solutions, but it is very hard for him to go the next step, which is to accept the help. It was in 2005 or something, long before he met John Hodgman or any of those guys. He was talking to Nada Surf drummer Ira Elliot on the phone and he said that he shared an apartment with their bass player Daniel Lorca in Williamsburg (New York) that was down a street that was just abattoirs 25 years ago and now it was all bars with neon under the tables.

The apartment was called The Sitcom because it was a sitcom-worthy apartment, a loft in a warehouse. Daniel was going to go back to Spain for 9 months and Ira offered John to move to New York and live in Daniel’s room and get his shit together out there because you can’t be depressed in New York. Both times when John moved to New York he threw a bunch of stuff in a bag and said: ”You know what, Seattle? Up yours!” It was winter, which is the most cheerful time in New York, and when John came to The Sitcom Daniel came out from around the corner, going: ”Hallo John, how are you?” in his Spanish accent.

When Daniel asked how long John was going to be here he realized that Ira hadn’t told Daniel about his offer and John was trying to get around an answer by saying he will be there for some amount of time and they made a bed for him on the couch. It was very awkward and John didn’t know how their communication was like, they had been in a band for 20 years and had been roommates all this time. Ira is a beautiful and charming man and over the years he had floated over the surface of the world without knowing really how much he gets away with. He also does the Water Off a Duck’s Back thing that John wishes he could do, but it includes a lot of conflict avoidance.

John was standing in the living room with his two suitcases and for Daniel it was perfectly natural that John would just walk into the door of his apartment and say: ”Hey Daniel!” - ”Hey!”, which was super-cool, but also clearly no-one had discussed that John was moving there. He was going to use that apartment as a jumping-off point to get his own place and become a New Yorker. This was a big move, they had talked on the phone a bunch about it, and John had been meaning to do this and go back for the last 4 years since he had left New York in 2001.

Daniel left for a few days and Ira told John that the bedroom was open and John slept in Daniel’s room for a couple of nights, but did definitely not unpack there and three nights later Daniel showed back up and John was back on the couch. Daniel talked like he was looking forward to to spring in New York, clearly indicating he was not going to leave to Spain, and Ira was just sitting there, looking at his fingernails. John stayed there on the couch for another 4 days, just spiraling, being depressed, sleeping until 3pm, so now these two guys had a guy on their couch who was sleeping until the middle of the day and the vibe was pretty much: ”When is this guy going to leave?”

One day John was walking down Lower East Side when it was raining and he realized he didn’t have to be here and he could go back to Seattle, and so he went back to The Sitcom, got his bags and went more or less immediately to the airport. John is still a little bit stressed about this situation, he wasn’t very good either at saying: ”Hey, let’s talk turkey here, fellows!” because he is so used to feeling like he is to blame. In a situation like that more assertive person like his sister would have said in the first night: ”Oh hey, we should have a family conference here because Ira said I could come here and live in your room, Daniel!”

Instead he didn’t want to out Ira, he accepted sleeping on the couch and thought it will all work out, and he felt like the intruder and he hoped they would just not notice him. He was even questioning if he had misunderstood Ira and he always came back to thinking it was his own fault.

John having trouble remembering why he was telling a story, having memory loss problems (RL438)

For the last couple of weeks it happened twice with Dan and now it happened again with Merlin that John has been losing the thread of what they were talking about, which was never a thing before. The anecdote of moving to New York is a non-sequitur that is only useful in the context of the whole thread and John doesn’t remember why he was telling this story. He was putting down a marker, he was going to jump off into this new thread that had something to do what Merlin was saying just prior, he was throwing the vase in the air and he tends to trust himself that he will catch it and won’t forget that there is a vase in the air.

John doesn’t want to make the story the story, or the fact that he is forgetting the story, but this is uncharted waters for him. It happened with Dan a couple of times and it already scared him then, but now there is no denying it and he is foregrounding it because he doesn’t want to sit on this show and be living in a world that is only 3 minuted on either side of the present moment and he is concerned about what this augurs about him and the state of his mind. He has no context for not being able to remember where he is. These are the metal studs behind the walls, it is the architecture that allows him to be confident in many things. When someone says: ”That is not what I said!” - ”Oh yeah, that is what you said!”

John’s psychiatrist is prescribing him all these memories and he told him that he had a little memory blip, which is probably scary for a psychiatrist to hear. Maybe John is gradually entering into a period in his life where his cares wash away because he just can’t remember them, which would make it a blessing? Merlin related this again to his ex-girlfriend’s grandfather. It happens to him all the time as well and he will often write things down when he doesn’t want to interrupt to make sure he won’t forget what he was talking about.

Earlier today John was talking to a friend of the show who is suffering from depression right now and John said: ”It is the change of the seasons, they had months of happy weather, and all of a sudden it is standing in bold relief, the leaves are changing, the sun is going down in the sky, it is getting cold, and all of a sudden the passage of time seems very real, all of your unfinished plans and your broken dreams are very foregrounded because there is all this evidence that time is passing!”

The way the mind works is that you can always find a reason that your bad images are just reflections of the truth. There are always 50 things that are full of shit, but September comes and it is very easy to attach that melancholy to whatever unwritten emails you have and when your mind tries to challenge it you ensure it that you really do have those unwritten emails. At the same time autumn is beautiful and you want to lean into it and you want to luxuriate in the melancholy.

All we have to assess how well our minds are doing is our minds and John has the problem currently with the gaps in his mind. On Thursday he is going to a sleep study to try and address the sleep. Is he just scatterbrained because of a lack of sleep? John has always addressed that in terms of mood and emotion because those were the unreliable things, but this time it is not emotional, it is a matter of fact, and he doesn’t know whether he had too much or too little coffee or whether he has Bovine Spongoformitis. What is the first moment that you go: ”Oh no! I have holes in my mind!”

It is not John’s memory, it is just his extremely short-term memory, like what happened 2 minutes ago. At what point is he going to need to be in a home and will he know he is in the home or will he think that he is still piloting his aircraft carrier, or will he think he is and aircraft carrier? The other day he was wondering what would happen if you become a very cheerful person who only lives in the present? There are worse things that can happen, as long as you don’t leave the stove on. You can’t afford a live-in helper… Merlin would love someone who sits around and feeds him soup while he stares into the middle distance… getting old is very expensive if you want to do it in an environment that doesn’t smell like pee.

John remembers trodding his dad around to all these different places who had a spot for him for only $6000 a month, they couldn’t even afford the place down the street that was only $3000 a month. John is not in any condition to hire somebody to help him, but you wouldn’t know because he gets along fine. What he needs is somebody to help him tell stories.

For example the lady in the Thomas Dolby video She Blinded Me With Science, if she were here living with John, and he would started telling a story about going to New York or about flying an aircraft carrier and if his eyes started to spin, he would look over to her and she would instinctively know that he was in trouble and she would tell him what he was talking about. And if her science would generate more income than his story telling, then why the hell would she care if he is landing his stories or not? Maybe John’s stories are her science? He is hoping that her science involves her helping him.

John has to embrace it. ”You can’t fight City Hall, you can’t fight entropy, you can’t land on a fraction!” (quote from the movie Apocalypse Now) ”He is not a blind man!” Merlin turns everyone into either Jerry Lewis or Popeye.

If John can’t remember where he was by the time he gets to the end of the anecdote, then Roderick on the Line has going to become a new thing. Merlin thinks John is fine and their show will be fine! If you stress out about it it is not going to get better. You can’t do anything about it anyway, but John doesn’t even remember the beginning of this show.

Merlin was writing it down to the fact that he had begun taking edibles some time around the beginning of COVID and he figured that is why he had gotten stupid and flighty. Stoner ones, not CBD, but they are very mild. He would like to think it helps that he pays attention, although he goes ”Hmm” sometimes, and sometimes his talking is very annoying, and other times it jogs your memory. Sometimes when he sits down with a piece of paper, wanting to write down what he was just doing a minute ago he realized that there were 6 different things he had started to do and he had fallen from one to the other without completing any of them. That does not feel wholesome, but he is not over-worried about it although he tries to be aware of it and he calls it ”Remembering to remember”, which is a very Thinking Fast and Slow (by Daniel Kahneman) thing.

We are all obsessed with the future, especially Merlin’s wife, or stuck in the past, and the current moment can sometimes be pretty illusive because you are thinking about getting to the next thing and obsess about the next thing rather than the current thing. This is straight up 20th century psychology stuff: I just want to remember this is life, ”the one you get to go and have it all!”, as Ms. Romano says. Merlin used to love Schneider! (reference to the TV show One Day at a Time)

John hurting his back when carrying a log in his ravine (RL438)

The other day John hurt his back in the creek. Last winter he was out of town, and he had been working on the creek all last year. There was an enormous flooding event that washed out all the hard work John had put into the creek. What he did was violating the Clean Water Act provisions that say: ”Don’t mess around in creeks!”, the whole city of Normandy Park got involved, John was in trouble with them all the time, then he started working with the county, got some people in there, sent letters back and forth for a year, and recently it all got approved.

A whole team of people was going to come into his ravine and they got the permits from the city, they paid the fees and the fines, everybody was working together now, some engineering firm had written a letter saying that not only do they approve this, but it was amazing that a citizen would care about these issues enough to initiate this process on their own. John got a civic blue ribbon and he wanted to print that letter out and frame it. For months John had gone down, looked around at the wreckage of all the things he had built, and it has been sad and he didn’t have the heart to do it all over again and he was technically not supposed to, although he had read all the papers and knew 65% of what a professional hydrological engineer would do, and the 35% he doesn’t know, the engineering, come on, how hard could it be!

Yesterday he thought about this whole team coming in surveying the creek and there were some things that he had to get done before they would come, like for example if he wanted to drag this log that was up on the hillside down into the creek. John had been looking at that log and that space in the creek for 9 months and he thought that if it had been there then all of that stuff wouldn’t have washed away, and he decided: ”Fuck it!” and he pulled this enormous log down the hill, he set it up that the water goes around it and creates a nice little riffle and cleans the gravel in the little waterfall, but in the course of pulling the log down he tweaked his back a little bit and now he is Mr. Tweaky Back.

That is just old man stuff and when he was 25 he could have carried that log all the way into Seattle and wouldn’t have gotten hurt, even when he was 40, but now he is 53 and he doesn’t stretch out and he shouldn’t be carrying logs.