This week, Merlin and John talk about:
- John’s sleep cycle being longer than 24 hours (Sleep)
- Getting coffee from 7-Eleven (Food and Drink)
- Merlin going to daddy-daughter breakfast (Merlin Mann)
- Christmas porn, dirty little elves (Christmas)
- Portland vs Seattle vs San Francisco (Geography)
- Portland vs Seattle stripper culture (Geography)
- Strip clubs in Alaska, Salmon fishery (Early Days)
- The Story of Lola (Early Days)
- Merlin and John visiting a strip club (Stories)
- Drinking coffee from beer steins (Food and Drink)
- John's current daily food routine (Food and Drink)
- Supermarket clerks, taxi drivers and dentists talking too much (Attitude and Opinion)
- Peeing in bottles (Attitude and Opinion)
- Dasani water (Food and Drink)
- John throwing jugs of pee at the police station (Stories)
The Problem: Patiently spanking a long line of dirty little elves, referring to John being dressed up as Santa every year and there being girls that are a mixture of Burlesque and Elvendom, meaning they are tattooed chunky girls with pointy ears who want to sit on his lap and also want him to give them a little paddling.
The show title refers to the story of a dancer in a strip club by the name of Lola that everybody chanted for.
It is early.
John made a noise that sounded like he was passing something through his bowels and Merlin wondered if he was in a different room, but he was in the same great room on his rocking red leather swivel chair on wheels, sitting at a table he found on the street. John is nothing if not eclectic!
Sometimes John does record in his altogether, for example right now. It is a warm and beautiful morning and John is not even bothering with a sheet or a towel. There is nothing that his natural form likes more than a little bit of warm leather. In the winter John will be bundled up in a parka, which is also leather, but a leather parka is only 2 miles away from an 1980s Metal band. John sounds like the late Red Barber on morning edition.
Draft version
The segments below are drafts that will be incorporated into the rest of the Wiki as time permits.
John’s sleep cycle being longer than 24 hours (RL44)
John is a late riser and a late go-to-sleeper. Going to sleep is not a thing on his todo-list and he doesn't like it, but he gets busy when night comes and he often doesn't realize before the morning that he had forgotten to do something, which is go to sleep. John comes alive after the sun goes down and he works on any of his little projects around the house. Once he is asleep he really doesn’t want to get up and often morning will turn to day, afternoon, or evening and John will roll over in bed and wonder if he forgot to do something, which is to wake up.
The problem is that the Earth is on a 24 hour cycle while John is on a 27.5 hour cycle. One reason why we are all screwed up is that some people are on a slightly different clock. We have to do all kinds of things with light, food and consistency, which are John’s accountants, but that sounds like an awfully caucasian set of accountants. They are all Norwegians!
If in addition to the 24 hours John was allotted each day he had 4 more hours that he could do with what he wanted, he would have no problem interacting with the rest of the world and he would get up, go out in a button-down shirt and do multilevel marketing or whatever normal people do. With multi-level marketing you have to be really committed because you get out of it what you put into it!
John has been awake for 20 hours and he feels good, but now he needs 8 hours of sleep. Merlin doesn’t want to work ping pong, but it is like John has been gypped, or Roma-ed. He gives John a Halfhearted Bell and Josh just signed them. Merlin read a really good article about Social Sleep Debt and there are all kinds of problems.
We sit in the dark all day and we are not getting enough of the sunlight that tells our body that it is time to go to sleep or wake up, which is called a vicious circle in psychology and neuroscience. In German it is Vicious Circle Scheissen. The problem why people go into a dungeon and get sad in the winter is called Seasonal Affective Disorder.
Some people go into dungeons and don’t come out because their Austrian father takes them down there and seals the door because daddy is a bad man. "Daddy has to keep you clean and the world is dirty! Time to read The Bible! Daddy is going to come down and visit you, but he is not going to let you out!" Can I introduce you to Uncle Licky?
By changing your eating and lighting before a flight a little bit you can also avoid jet lag. Eating is also a big part of it. One problem with jet lag is that it is a multi-faceted problem that involves several parts of your brain, like the part that sees light or the one that knows how long it has been since you have eaten. Jet lag comes from the dissonance between all of the different forces fighting with each other. Your body may be in France while your liver is still over the Atlantic and your bed is back there in Seattle.
John makes his peanut butter and jelly sandwich with raspberry jelly, he will use a jam, but he doesn’t do marmalade because he doesn’t want orange in his sandwich. Leave the orange in the orange and don’t take the orange out of an orange and put it on a cake! Orange juice is just orange that has been turned into juice. Merlin has a strong position on mixing two good things into something fucked-up, like Christmas Porn. Leave Christmas alone and leave porn alone!
Getting coffee from 7-Eleven (RL44)
Yesterday John had one entire Mr. Coffee style 10-cup pot of coffee and a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. They discuss how coffee gets burned if it sits too long. John has had gas station coffees in the American desert of the South West and he knows from coffee that has been sitting there for 4 days. Merlin is strangely a fan of the entire 7-Eleven coffee experience.
John’s dad called putting flavored creamers in coffee for sissy coffee. At a certain point someone introduced him to International Coffee, little cans of Swiss-flavored coffee with chocolate, and every once in a while when friends would come over he would make them some sissy coffee. It was before he became an old man when he still had a full voice.
Merlin is a big creamer and he gets a larger coffee that he needs and then tops it off, like a "real blonde no sugar". He sometimes gets a Stok, which is like a cream bullet, but instead of cream there is a shot of caffeine in it. They warn you right on there not to use more than one of these a day. At a 7-Eleven you don’t even have to pay for them, but they are sitting there right by the coffee. If a 7-Eleven is busy then it is good, like a McDonalds.
When Merlin gets coffee from 7-Eleven he sniffs each one of the pots and if it is too acrid and bitter he turns it away, Leave it!, but then he grabs a Stok and he drops it in to top it off. They still have the pump chili (see RL13) and the cheese pump. It has been a long time since John has been to a 7-Eleven. All the 7-Eleven in Seattle are owned by Seaks (?) now and John loves and appreciates the Seak people, it is different from the Sufies (?) John got off the slurpy train at a certain point and hasn’t got back on it.
Merlin going to daddy-daughter breakfast (RL44)
Every Sunday Merlin goes for daddy-daughter breakfast and he gets a donut for his daughter and a giant-ass coffee at 7-Eleven because he doesn’t like the coffee at the place where they eat breakfast called Irish Breakfast. The last time Merlin got a mixed grill, which is a potato and a fist fight. It is a pork chop, liver, Irish bacon, Irish sausage, two eggs, potatoes, a grilled tomato and grilled mushrooms. Their Irish breakfast roll is regular food, but they put ”Irish” in front of it. Irish Coffee is a whole different thing and John can’t have that!
Merlin brings a lot of their own stuff. He doesn’t like their silverware, their coffee or their water, and they will go in there with a bag and bring a large coffee from 7-Eleven, a donut for her, a Leather-man because he doesn’t like their knives, bendy straws for her, they bring the whole package! He doesn’t like anything about it except the mixed grill. Merlin put up a photo of him and his daughter at this place the other day, drawing X-men logos.
Christmas porn, dirty little elves (RL44)
John thinks Christmas porn is great and playing Santa Claus every year enables him to get into the character of Christmas porn. There is one particular photo of him with two desperately cute girls sitting on his lap (see pictures here) that used to be on his mom’s refrigerator. There are many photos of John dressed as Santa Claus with desperately cute girls sitting on his lap and when he sees Christmas porn he can identify with it. Unlike most porn he might not have a beer can cock, but he can really put himself literally in that position.
Because it is the Northwest there is a group of girls in Seattle who are a mix between burlesque and elvendom, tattooed chunky girls with pointy ears, and when John plays Santa at Christmas time they will be his dirty little elves, often 8-12 of them! The gig is that people come and sit on his lap and have their picture taken while the dirty little elves gather around.
At Indie Rock events people are shy to sit on John’s lap and they will stand over there with their Creeper Lagoon T-Shirt on and their little tattoo of a bird and they want to sit on John’s lap, but they don’t know if it is cool. In that moment when people are making up their mind the dirty little elves will take their turn sitting on John’s lap and having their picture taken and invariably they want to bend over Santa’s lap to have him give them a paddling (spanking) and it goes from there. John is getting in the holiday spirit right now just sitting there (naked) on his red leather chair.
There is a handsome gay couple who is now married and who met for the first time sitting on John’s lap when he was dressed as Santas. He has been doing this for many years and every year he puts on his Santa costume that looks like the one that Dan Aykroyd wore in Trading Places, there is actually a salmon in it, and he shows up at the bar, the place is full of people, there are 8-12 dirty little elves, and invariably the delightful young gay couple is there who was meeting on John’s lap and John feels like: ”Ha, Santa’s home! Hello everyone!”
Portland vs Seattle vs San Francisco (RL44)
One of the things about Portland, Seattle and San Francisco that people who live elsewhere may not realize is that until very recently, within living memory, all three of those cities were disgusting seaports full of human flotsam, rats, piled-up garbage, the last dregs of hippie culture, rednecks and sailors from Indonesia who got Shanghaied and kicked off the boat on the West Coast.
Those were blue-collar towns, there was no computer industry, the arts were much more regional. All three of these cities made a living primarily from the ocean and to a lesser degree from forests and the surrounding farms. Seattle had Boeing, San Francisco had a more vibrant economy, but Portland had nothing but lumber mills. Not only when John was a kid, but up until his teen-years and early 20s all three of these cities were unsafe, unfriendly, uncool, dangerous, scary, and murdering shit holes purged at the edge of the world and nobody thought that the West Coast was a good place to be. Los Angeles was its own version of it, except instead of trees it was prostitution and Judaism.
In the last 20 years all three of these cities have reformed. Seattle has cleaned up incredibly and you wouldn’t recognize it at all because it has become a giant mall. They pushed everything bad out and replaced it with the most banal cotton-candy culture. The same has also happened in San Francisco, although The Mission continues to be disgusting. There is no longer a Mission in Seattle as there once was.
Portland has maintained a darkness at its core and all the new condo buildings and all the young people moving there to start techno bands cannot displace the fact that at the center of the heart of Portland there is a greasy bald man with a comb-over paying for sex with a 15-year old runaway. All the firehoses in the world can’t push those two into the river. They are there and John doesn’t know what it would take to exorcise that from Portland’s heart.
Portland vs Seattle stripper culture (RL44)
Burlesque girls come in many shapes and sizes and they are all wonderful. Portland has a much larger stripper culture because they have strip clubs where Seattle really doesn’t and the burlesque girls there are coming at it from a very different place. It feels much more professional down there! In Seattle the burlesques are enthusiasts, often girls who have never stripped and are not coming at it from: ”This is my gig!”, but they are coming at it from: ”OMG, I made this great costume and now I am going to take half of it off!” This is a wonderful time to be alive and John supports this 100%.
Merlin loves an enthusiastic amateur and he wonders if stripper culture in Portland is a means of women empowerment, a way to make a buck, or if they are playing Hevis da Betsi (?? 21:13) while they are dancing. John’s survey of the strippers of Portland is incomplete, but when he sees anyone engaged in sex games there, burlesque or stripping or anything involving women dancing for money, it is always more professional, harder-edged, darker and based on an ”I ran away from my stepfather and I ended up here” vibe whereas a lot of that is gone from Seattle because of their paternalistic city culture.
You can’t drink in a strip club in Seattle, but you have to buy a $10 Coke and it is a $20 cover to get in the door. By imposing these rules they have pushed every strip club out of town and the 3 or 4 that are left are just for those guys who are: ”Come on! I’ll pay! I’ll buy a $20 Coke! I just want to see some girl’s boobs!” They don’t have that ruckus spirit.
Strip clubs in Alaska, Salmon fishery (RL44)
When John was a teenager around 1984/85 the doormen at strip clubs in Alaska were checking IDs, but their real job as the city saw it was to keep the Russians sailors from invading. John and his friend Kjell (?) would sit at home and try on different trucker caps to find the one that made them look 18 and a half. They would get the right costumes on that made them look like working guys and they would go downtown and cruise the strip clubs. It was more of an education in human nature than anything John has ever done! There is so much crazy money in Alaska in the hands of people who in most cases didn’t have an education. The strippers come from around the world and there are guys throwing down $5000-6000.
There was a Chuck-E Cheese for oil men and there were a trillion places to spend the money, but here is a 24 year old guy from Oklahoma who never got a High School diploma, he started working on oil rigs in the gulf and he got contracted to come work on the pipeline. They were paying him four times the money he was making in Oklahoma! If he was married he didn’t bring his wife and kids, but chances are that he wasn’t married because he was working 18 hour days and they were paying him in cash. When he got out he did not go to the performing arts center to watch the Nutcracker, but he was going to buy some cocaine and some booze, go to a strip club, go to a hotel, and repeat that until his money was gone.
The 1980s were also the peak of the salmon fishery and guys would go out for 3 months on a fishing boat and come home with $50.000-60.000 in cash. John’s friend Kjell was one of them and he made $50.000 on fishing salmon for 3 years running and spent it all on champagne and hookers. Then the bottom fell out of the fishing economy and the price of salmon plummeted. The government put up restrictions so you couldn’t just go out and take as much salmon as you wanted anymore, and all these guys were making $8000 in 3 months where they were once making $50.000.
When Kjell was 23 years old the IRS contacted him because he owed them $116.000 in unpaid taxes. Now he was making $30.000 a year instead of $170.000 and he had to pay the IRS back for a decade and a half. Fishing salmon is hard work, but when you are 20 years old, what else are you going to do? You are working 18 hour days and you feel like you are going to be able to do it forever.
In strip clubs now there are policies like: ”Don’t touch the girls!”, ”You have to sit back here!” and there are big thug-y guys walking around the bar, making sure nothing gets out of hand, but everybody knows those rules and everybody plays by them. In the 1980s in Alaska it was literally a situation where the girl was dancing on the bar and guys were grabbing her ankles and John cannot imagine that she was not a little bit afraid, but she was projecting a confidence like: ”That’s right, boys! Give me your best shot! If you can grab it you can have it!” The bartender was standing right behind her slinging bottles at these guys with a derringer in his shirt pocket and a shotgun on the bar.
Everybody knew the rules then, too, but there were just two: ”If you put your finger in the girl’s poopie, he is going to shoot you with the shotgun!”, and ”If you pull out a gun he is going to shoot you with he shotgun!” Those were the two rules, don’t you pull out a gun and don’t touch her in the beer handle place. Otherwise it was a free-for-all! In a lot of cases there was no lighting, but just fluorescent lights hanging down from the ceiling because they had turned a bingo parlor into a strip club and there were 800 guys in a space that should have had 60 guys.
In every case the woman was in charge of the room! There were one or two visible women in the room and they were absolutely in charge. If she pointed to a guy and yelled: ”You! Get out of here!”, or ”You! Take a step back!” the guy would absolutely do what she said because all the other guys in the room, the patrons, would enforce the woman’s dictum. If she said: ”Get this guy away from me!” then 6 guys would grab him and he would be gone in an instant. It was an animal culture where all the other guys were like: ”I’ll do that for you, lady!”, a very Old West kind of vibe.
John was a big kid, but he was terrified in those places. You walk around and you see these kids with the tattoos on their faces now, people who look tough, but there is nothing to compare to a guy who has been working on the North Slope of Alaska or out in the Ocean and to the kind of toughness or scariness that they possessed. Of course John would go right to the front because that is how he does, but they were terrifying and he just squared his shoulders off, like: ”Haha, I am another man here, just having some lady times!”
After he moved to Seattle it took John a couple of years to moderate his voice and his expectations of other people. He would walk into a party and be: ”Is this party going to go off or what?” and he would grab the host’s father’s beer stein and throw it through the front window and everybody would be: ”Ahem…” The guy would come up and say: ”That was my dad’s beer stein and you owe me $1500!” and John would be: ”Oh, this party sucks!” It took John a while to reign it in.
A lot of guys came out of Alaska down to the states and couldn't reign it in or didn't want to and they turned around and headed right back up. To keep that kind of energy going down in America you have to be digging into prison culture or something and you have to go into bars where everybody has recently been paroled. Up there that is the vibe at a much larger cross-section of bars, although there are fern bars in Alaska, too.
It sounds like a still-in-Saigon kind of vibe where you are still reaching for your rifle in the middle of the night, like that scene in Deer Hunter where he goes back to Vietnam and finds Christopher Walken playing Russian Roulette in the DD Mau. Merlin is a legitimate old-school pussy and he is so uncomfortable in a place like that.
The Story of Lola (RL44)
One time John and his friend Kjell were at a strip club in Anchorage Alaska and they had pushed themselves through the crowd and had come up to the front to sit at the table where the girl was dancing on. It was quite an accomplishment to be up there sitting in chairs and there were guys falling over them from behind, pushing in between, but they scrunched together and had established a little block where they felt mostly safe.
The girls were dancing on the table and the guys were throwing money at them and every time a girl was done dancing and it was time for the next girl to come out, every guy in the bar started chanting ”Lola! Lola! Lola!” The next girl would come out and say: ”I’m not Lola, but this is what you get!” and she danced and everybody threw money at her and she would leave and everybody would go ”Lola! Lola! Lola!” again and the next girl would come out and say: ”Fuck you! I’m not Lola, but here I am! Take a look at my pussy! Whooo!”
John and Kjell were sitting there wondering who this Lola was and they just had to see her because she was the one. As the evening wore on they had been chugging beers and John had to go to the bathroom, but he stayed on his chair until he really had to go to the bathroom because he didn’t want to get up and lose his chair. Also, he was 16 and he didn't want to get up and turn around and have somebody in the bar look at him and say: ”Who is that kid? Get him out of here!”
After a while he couldn’t hold it anymore! They were serving Mickey’s beer in the bar which came in a big-mouth bottle, called Mickey’s Big Mouth, and is a malt liqueur and a fortified beverage. Kjell suggested John to pee in a Mickey’s bottle and John put the Mickey’s bottle under the table, unzipped his fly and peed in the Mickey’s bottle.
There was a girl stripping right in front of him, he was surrounded by guys, and he couldn't say whether he was the only guy with his dick out in the bar, but he was definitely the only one peeing in a Mickey’s bottle, at least what he could see. He was trying to pull it off and he filled this Mickey’s bottle up to the very rim, but there was not enough room in the bottle for all of the pee. Also: ”Fuck! What do I do with this Mickey’s bottle?” The bar was covered with empty bottles everywhere because there was no buzzer.
At that point the girl got off the stage and Lola came out. John was sitting there with his penis out with a bottle full to the rim of pee under the table and he still had to pee and he was pinched, but here came Lola and as see strode out on the stage the place went bonkers. She was a pretty lean dark-haired girl with a huge gap between her front teeth and she was not a Buxom girl, but she was a little scrapper, a terrier, and she absolutely owned the room, marching back and forth, shouting at people, pointing at guys, and she knew guys by name.
The bar went bananas and John was getting pushed from behind, so he did not put the Mickey’s Big Mouth bottle full of pee on the floor, which he should have done, but he pulled it up and set it next to him on the bar and grabbed another bottle, made it half-full of pee, put that on the bar, zipped up his pants and he was done, he was out of it! His bottle had disappeared into a whole collection of bottles on the stage and John was now able to focus on Lola 100%.
Kjell and John were watching Lola, trying to figure out why this woman was such an icon to these guys, which was obvious because she was the most Rock’n’Roll person any of them had ever seen. She was owning the room that there was just no comparison! She was a lean boyish gal with sexual charisma. Kjell and John were leaning on the bar watching her and John felt a tap on his shoulder.
He turned around and it was a sailor in US Navy uniform, pie-eyed drunk, who pointed to John’s pee and asked: ”Is that your beer?” and John said: ”No!” The guy looked around, slyly grabbed the steaming hot pee and took a big draft off of it. Kjell went: ”That’s it! We are out of here!” and the two of them pushed their way through the crowd and left the scene in their rear-view mirror and they got out of that bar and ran and ran and ran!
The guy hadn't immediately flinched, but he had figured that somebody had abandoned a beer and it got warm. In his drunken US Navy dumbass state of Lola intoxication he took a big healthy drink of John’s pee right off the bar and John was paralyzed and absolutely certain he was going to break that bottle across John’s face. John had not attempted to warn him, but when he asked him if that was his beer, he was just: ”No!” He wasn’t going to go: ”Hey bro, just between dudes: That is pee!”
There was no good answer and it wasn’t John’s beer. If he was in the same situation today, he would say: ”Hey, just between you and me… don’t drink that *wink*” and he would move on, but he was 16 and didn’t have the confidence to do a thing like that. When he got tapped on the shoulder he was sure it was somebody to tell them they were kids and they had to get out of there.
It was a low moment and John can still touch the fear that he had. He can still reach out and remember the pure terror and yet he and Kjell did go to these strip bars again and again. John doesn’t even like strip bars because the idea of paying somebody to dance naked for you is not appealing, but it seemed like the place where people were the most alive that he had ever seen in his life. A lot of conflicting emotion was bound to have an impact on him because he was also looking at the women and saying: ”I should learn to like this!” He needed to learn to appreciate this because this was attractive and sexiness.
At one point John found a stack of Iron Horse magazines out in the woods, an old magazine for renegade bikers. They always had a centerfold of a biker chick who was naked and draped across somebody’s custom Harley. Those girls were always like Lola. You could see how fierce they were and they weren’t strictly beautiful, but they were hardcore. John had that to go on because, going to strip clubs when you are 16, what else had he seen where people were in a mob-scene like that? A High School football game or an all-school dance just can’t compare.
Merlin and John visiting a strip club (RL44)
This story is also mentioned in RL217 and RL306.
One time Merlin was in a strip club together with John and they were both really uncomfortable. Merlin was weirded out because it was really not his scene and he was also taken aback with how extremely comfortable and enthusiastic several of their friends were. Merlin had seen these people looking awkward in a food court, but they fit right into this environment and they understood everything, like they were just going to Cheers.
John and Merlin and their group of friends looked like a bunch of nerdy tech guys with too-short pants, they were hanging out, it was getting late and they were wondering what they were going to do and a few of the other guys suggested to go to a strip club. John was playing host and when they first said it John thought they were joking and being facetious.
Merlin felt exactly the same than what he would have when he was 16, 19, or 25: He was not sure if he was okay with this politically and he knew he was going to be uncomfortable. He could get comfortable with it, but there was something about it that was like going somewhere dirty, a dirty place, except places in Alaska, they are a little too clean and they smell a little too much like Pine-Sol. There is something about it that is almost like a well-kept slaughterhouse. These guys have done a great job, it is obviously humane and artisanal, but clearly some bad shit goes down here.
So they walked into this strip club in Seattle, walked up some steps, paid $20 cover and bought a $10 Coke and their friends couldn’t slap that $20 down fast enough and they were in there. They were not standing there to get the lay of the land, but they knew the floor plan and were disappearing into banquettes in the back, like fucking Mission Impossible. One of them was like: ”I like Chinese girls! Give me that Chinese girl!”, and the other one was: ”I like Hispanic girls, come over here, missy!” They were in charge! The girls came up and talked to them, it was really weird. John and Merlin were standing at the front, still looking wistfully at their $20 bills, and they didn’t really want to pay $20 for this.
The door opened and out came a local impresario and future mayoral candidate in Seattle who was like: ”Oh hey John! How are you buddy!” with a big backslap ”I didn’t know you came here! Come with me!” and he wrapped his arm around John’s shoulder and guided him through the bar to the back: ”There is somebody I want you to see!” He pushed John all the way to an area in the back where they had twin-beds covered in velvet, curtained off with lacy curtain, and he pulled the curtain back and there was a friend of John’s, a local club booker, with two girls on him. The guy had his arms around John, like: ”Jump in there! I had paid for these girls! Jump on him!” John didn’t want to jump on him, he didn’t even want to be there, and it was disgusting!
John’s friend the booker was shit-faced and his lap-dance was just about to turn into a nap-dance. John just wanted out! He extricated himself from that bacchanalia and found Merlin sitting near the stage, paying politely as often as he thought he needed to to not stand out. If a girls comes up and talks to you, you are going to sound like a dick if you reply: ”I don’t really want to be here, I am not comfortable with this!” because this was her work, this is what she does, and you are in there to give her money so she pretends to like you! It would be like going to McDonalds and complaining about beef, it is not going to stack up. Merlin doesn’t want to encourage it, it would be like hand-feeding goats at the petting zoo.
The girls were trying to convince them to give them $40 for a personal dance, which their friends were happily doing on either side! That is not how John’s sexuality manifests itself. Merlin wished he could have walked out of that situation feeling great about himself instead of just feeling like he was a home-made pussy. John claims Merlin wished he could have walked out of there with a girl on each arm, wearing a fur top hat, and climb into a white Bentley with a woman holding his dick and Rick James driving it. That is what we all wish! Instead they slouched out of there in their dockers and went back to the hotel paid for by the conference.
Drinking coffee from beer steins (RL44)
Regular coffee cups are not big enough for John and he doesn’t want to go the route of a big coffee cup that looks like a cereal bowl with a handle. In the 1990s, before the culture universally decided that a coffee cup was too hot to hold unless you had a paper diaper for it, John used to drink his coffee out of a pint glass. Before 1996 people could hold a warm beverage without having a diaper on it and without a prosthetic device. Pint glasses get very hot and they are serious glasses that don’t shatter from the heat, but filled with coffee they are inherently unstable because they are smaller at the bottom than they are at the top.
At one point John remembered the two-liter beer steins from Bierhaus in München in Bavaria. They are not made for coffee but they are made for beer, they are a foot high, made from grey ceramic with a "2 liter" symbol punched into them, and if it comes from a particular Bierstube they have their coat of arms on them. As John travelled through life he made a point to collect these things that old men collect and display next to their wife’s Menagerie of Hummel figurines, spoons or little bells.
John started buying them and he has a collection of beer steins that hold two liters of coffee. They are insulated to keep your beer cold and they also hold the coffee warm perfectly! Merlin can’t believe that the Germans drink beer two liters at a time! The girls at the Hofbräuhaus in Munich come with 70 beer steins in each hand, they are amazing powerful ladies.
John's current daily food routine (RL44)
Today John drank his coffee out of a beer stein, he had a peanut butter sandwich, and he took a bath. He corrects himself that those beer steins are 1.5 liters, but that is still a fuck-ton of coffee. He puts cream in there even though the sultan said that putting cream in coffee ruins both things. Now they are back at the Christmas Porn.
For lunch John had home-made Macaroni and Cheese with hamburger in it because Macaroni and Cheese is only improved by adding hamburger or sausage. He does brown the meat and mixes it up with the Kraft dinner. Sometimes he might put a little garlic or a little onion in there, which is very good and not very expensive. This is different from chili mac and John is not a big fan of chili mac. Later in the day he had two chocolate chip cookies and two Life Savers, and at 1am he had two hot dogs covered with some cheese and a can of Stagg Chili, turning them into two chili dogs. Eventually he went to bed at 4am and now he is talking to Merlin and it is very early.
John likes hot dog buns, but if he buys a package of hot dog buns he will eat two of them and the rest will sit in the refrigerator until they get moldy. It is not a good investment! John has a package of corn tortillas in his refrigerator that he is only still keeping to see if his heirs will inherit this package of corn tortillas and still find them tasty whenever he dies. They appear to last forever and John has never seen one go bad, but a hot dog bun will go bad in the blink of an eye.
Stagg has a whole selection of different flavors of chili and John buys a bunch of vegetarian chili and a few cans of Stagg for when it is 1am and he makes 5 pounds of hamburger and pours 15 cans of vegetarian chili in it. Sometimes he is wearing just an apron with nothing else, but buying canned chili at a supermarket has the pump chili problem (see RL13): At one point there was a cow eating grass and somehow the cow became pump chili, but everything in between the cow eating the grass and the cow being in a bag in a pump is stuff John doesn’t want to know about. John tries to buy organic hamburger from a local guy he knows in order to control his hamburger supply to a degree.
Merlin will pick up a ribeye at a supermarket, but he is getting a little antsy about ground beef. Cheap chicken and cheap ground beef are starting to really worry him. There is nothing good about the process by which a Tyson’s Chicken is made, from the time the egg comes out of a chicken that is owned by Tyson to the time that chicken tender is going through your gut. Every step of the way something evil has happened.
The amount of time spent by a typical federal chicken inspector on a bird is apparently 1/3 second. Typical Federal Chicken Inspector is also a Bare Naked Ladies song. The inspection process for fucking chicken is to look at three chicken per second. There was something during the Clinton years (1997-1999) when Tyson had given him a lot of money where they had locked the doors at the place and there was a big slurry of chicken water and shit (they continued to dump their contaminated water even after two search warrants by the EPA had been carried out).
John takes the vegetarian chili and by definition just by selling something like that you are a hippie. He feels very confident that when he buys a can that says ”organic vegetarian chili” the chances of there being any hate in that can are very small. Does John buy anything more masculine to offset the appearance that he is a giant faggot? No, he doesn’t care what people in supermarkets think of him.
Supermarket clerks, taxi drivers and dentists talking too much (RL44)
Merlin doesn’t like talking about his groceries. There used to be a hyper-bibulous lady at his Safeway and if you think that Merlin talks a lot, she is just a solid streak of nothing and she is commenting on everything. She clearly needs some of Merlin’s medicine because she is out of control and she talks about every single item. At Williams-Sonoma they are instructed to complement you to act on your decisions and they talk about interesting things you can do with it, which also drives Merlin crazy. Even when he buys soda streams and hands in his old soda streams they have to make a remark about it: ”Do you like to make this with the mix?” - ”No, I like you to take my money and let me leave the fucking mall!”
The same is true with taxi drivers where Merlin wants to say: ”Turn off your music, throw away your air freshener and for the love of God, stop talking to me!” At John's dentist’s office, particularly at the orthodontist where they are used to talking to 10-year olds, the girl will lean over and open her mouth and say: ”Hi! How are you today!”, farting rainbows in John’s mouth, and he is thinking: ”Fuck off! I don’t want to talk to you! Fix my god-damn teeth!” Merlin doesn’t want anybody to tell him how to improve his dental health! "Fucking A! Can you just keep your tips and tricks to yourself? Get all the brown stuff off, get some of the shit on there that makes it white, floss me, but don’t give me a bag full of fucking homework!"
John adds that there is a lot of shame involved and Merlin doesn’t have any cavities. At the time when he would still go to the dentist, because they are jackals, the hygienist would give him the same Xerox each time about if he doesn’t floss he will get a heart attack (see RL23). It has been conclusively shown that some stuff in the plaque will get into your body and it will get you a heart attack. The Cavity Creeps are figuring out a way to get in and make cavities in your heart!
Peeing in bottles (RL44)
Merlin has to clean his office because it is really awful right now. Although he doesn’t have any Mickey’s Big Mouth full of pee, but he has one jug he keeps right here for podcast and he will clean it up within at least a day or two of being done.
When John was touring on the road he would use a Gatorade bottle to pee because it has a big wide mouth and 32 oz (1 l). A typical bladder can hold maximum one liter. If you really have to pee, never grab anything that is less than a liter or you are going to be in a sad sorry state, which comports with John’s experience. He has never filled a large Gatorade bottle, but a single service size of Gatorade is just not quite enough.
Going over is embarrassing, particularly if you are in the back of a tour van that is hurdling across the roads of North Dakota and you have to pee and the driver, in this case probably John, says that he is not going to stop. He is playing two roles in this scenario: He is the driver who is not stopping, but he is also the guy in the back who wants to pee, like that Alanis Morissette video: ”Isn’t it ironic?”
Merlin has to pee really bad right now. After they wrap up right now he wants to measure it and compare results with John, but John doesn’t have to pee right now. The maximum bladder capacity Merlin could find on the Internet was 1 liter, which he wished he had known during his life because it would have changed the way he thought about bottles.
Dasani water (RL44)
John has never allowed any Dasani bottle into any piece of his property, not only because Coca Cola supports apartheid, but the way that they create the Dasani water taste is by filtering it through a dead raccoon. You can taste it! At a certain point they have to change the raccoon out, but that water is so terrible!
They add salt and whatever minerals come out of a dead raccoon. It is the worst worst worst! If Coca Cola can convince people that this pollution is refreshing water, then we should employ the Coca Cola company to convince the Pakistanis that they do not really care that much about Cashmere and maybe we can end war! It is a fucking Jedi mind trick!
The Coca Cola company has thrown $1 billion at the marketing of this product, they filtered this polluted water with added salt through a dead raccoon and put it in unappealing looking bottles that you find everywhere and some places exclusively serve Dasani water. They have done such an amazing job of convincing people that this pollution is nutrition that we should employ them to go to Cashmere and say: ”Listen everyone: We are going to make a free state of Cashmere and an open city. Everybody can come and Pakistan and India, you guys can just relax and you can stop funding the terrorists in Afghanistan because that is all about India, too!”
Gatorade was invented at the University of Florida. The flat iron steak was also invented there 15-20 years ago (actually in 2002) when they discovered a new way to geometrically cut up a cow to get a nearly perfect piece of steak. They just cut it up from a different angle!
John throwing jugs of pee at the police station (RL44)
see also a short version in JG522!
In his 20s John used to live in a warehouse loft for 4 years. It was a big warehouse and John had built a room for himself over in the corner. He didn't have a bathroom or a kitchen, but the bathroom was shared with all the other artists and dog breeders and it was a gross scene. They didn’t have running water and John would buy gallon jugs of water.
John did not like to get up from his bed in the middle of the night and walk across this giant warehouse down the hall where somebody was probably having a midnight art opening and somebody else was welding something to go to this bathroom that was literally a mile (1600m) away. It was one toilet that had been slapped together by somebody, not a bathroom you would be comfortable in, but the wind would come through the cracks.
John kept an empty gallon jug under his bed and when he woke up in the middle of the night to pee he would do it in his gallon jug and due to his hoarding tendencies he sometimes ended up with 3 or 4 gallon jugs of pee under his bed. It was very embarrassing when a lady would come over. Typically most ladies wouldn’t discover it, but every once in a while you get a nosy lady who wants to see what is under your bed and then she will ask: ”What is all this apple cider?"
The warehouse loft backed up on the police station and there was an alley between the warehouse and the main precinct house. It was right before and during the WTO era at a time when he still felt somewhat legitimately mad at the police for being there protecting them. If you leave pee in a milk jug under your bed for not very long at all it takes on ammonia quality and really smells like cats! If the pee was fresh John would dump it in the toilet, but standing there at a communal toilet with a gallon jug of pee is not a thing that makes you think: ”I am flourishing!” - "Good morning Mrs. Johnson!" - "Hello Mr. Hooper!" - ”Dunk dunk dunk dunk!”
If the pee had turned to ammonia and rotten pee John did not want to stand in the toilet and go ”dunk dunk dunk” because it was terrible, and he would open the bathroom window and hurl the gallon-jugs of pee at the back of the police station (Merlin totally loses it) They would explode and it would be terrible ammonia-pee over everything. The alley is certainly still a super-fun site! All the way back to the predecessor of Supertrain, John’s dad’s Alaskan train, John has always enjoyed throwing things out of windows.
There are certainly people listening who think that peeing in a jug is disgusting, but if you have not peed in a milk jug and you are able to do it, then John highly recommends you do it today! It is a great feeling! If you have access to a window, then chuck it! It was a big old warehouse window and John could wind up within the bathroom so that he was really hucking this stuff. At some point surely someone was walking by on the busy street at the end of the alley and happened to glance down the alley just as a milk jug full of orange pee came out of a third-story window, hit the building across the street and exploded. They must have thought to themselves: ”C’est ce sei”
Merlin wonders if there were cops who went out to smoke, but John thinks that even before he lived there this alley was a magnet area for pee. The cops in Seattle are disencouraged to smoke because it looks weird when a cop smokes. It is not the old days where you could have cops standing around smoking!
Merlin’s daughter is frequently treated to cops cocking shotguns because Merlin lives almost right next to a police station, too! They are probably making sure it is empty. Finally they went and asked them because they had noticed that when they were loading up their cop car they got a giant-ass rifle and another giant-ass rifle and one of them is orange. Merlin asked if the orange one was for training purposes and not a real rifle? A child’s toy gun has to have an orange tip because kids were getting killed by holding up toy guns and cops thought they were real guns. Cops are also killing kids holding up a sandwich wrapped in tin foil because it could be munition.