This week, Merlin and John talk about:

The Problem: John’s mouth is his own, referring to John’s Halloween wolf mask that is just the top half, the ears, eyes, and nose, while the mouth is his own.

The show title refers to the teenage boys that John once chased off his property and that he suspects might give him toilet paper for Halloween, and one of them doing a knock-and-run at his front door once.

John clears his throat at the beginning of the call, like he was about to say something really important.

Merlin asks John if he is feeling good, but what is good?

It is November 1st, ”rabbit rabbit” (see RL411, RL287).

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 Please do not quote these texts directly without applying your own editing first!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

Merlin’s family member fighting about a wedding ring (RL442)

Merlin’s very special lady friend recently found herself in he middle of some family drama. Merlin’s brother in law follows him on Twitter, which is pretty weird, but otherwise he doesn’t think that his family listens to his shows. There is a disagreement about the dispensation of the wedding ring of Merlin’s late beloved mother in law Pauline Cudworth, born Dec 1929, which is definitely sentimental, but also valuable.

Two of her family members start going at each other and it all begins with the most passive-aggressive text message: ”Hey, the thing we talked about a long time ago with mom’s ring, isn’t there some rule that everybody follows about who gets that based on who has the oldest daughter, isn’t that a thing?”, like Cousin Greg from Succession. It escalated very quickly. When a person is texting to you and begins with ”Thank you for your input on this!” and they start speaking in a way where they do not use contractions anymore and they text that way back and forth.

Merlin’s lady friend is getting texts from both of them, like: ”Can you believe this!” They are both grown-ass people and grandparents. This kind of thing happens between people and Merlin’s advice is that text is not the place to settle those things. You can smell the escalation that this is not going anywhere good when they stopped using contractions.

It is just like a couple that gets into fights and they both turn to somebody to pick a side and be a sympathetic ear, and once it is resolved you not only will have had all this aggravation, but you will also not come out of it looking good. If anything, they will gang up on you. Merlin would always try to stay out of something like that!

John having a very strained relationship with two of his neighbors (RL442)

John got a text message from the one neighbor he doesn’t like, asking him for the phone number of the other neighbor he doesn’t like, and they really super-duper don’t like each other. They are right next door to each other, but they probably want to settle this over email.

John’s relationship with those two women could probably not be any worse. Maybe it would be worse if they would be suing each other. For a very long time it has been very strained, very fake-friendly, fake-polite texts and fake-polite over-the-fence head-nods, but they all know what the deal is. One of them is the one who threw trash over John’s fence (see RL426) that was not her trash, but it fell from the sky. Further layers of excavation have revealed that her kids learned i from her because she is throwing all of her gardening detritus, there is stuff over the fence, feet-deep, that could only have come from her.

The other one is the one that threw wheel barrows full of egg shells over on John’s property, both of them traditionally for decades have encroached on his property when it was owned by an older couple that couldn’t keep it up anymore, and he ravine go overgrown with blackberries and you couldn’t see through the bramble, and those two neighbors started dumping their garbage over the fence, which is just insane. It would even be insane if we lived in North Florida or in Nairobi, and it is insane in Normandy Park, Washington.

When confronted, they both in their own way and style became not apologetic, but defensive in a way that suggested that they had not done anything wrong and that they had every right to do these things. As he is watching the drone footage that he can see of himself in his head as he is talking to them, he knows that this is a situation where he in the past while just trying to say the right thing and do the right thing has managed to escalate and he doesn’t even know how. Even looking back, how did he escalate that? He said ”Please!” six times! It must be something in his voice or in his face that makes people defensive.

In the same way there must be something in his voice or his face or his tone that when he talks to police officers they call him ”Sir!” and they apologize for disturbing him, and when he talks to a neighbor, saying: ”Hey, it is 3am, can you turn your stereo down?” or ”Hey, can you stop throwing your old paint cans over my fence?” they always blow him off and get mad. If John had sent his sister over there they would now be having Christmas together.

John is on not-good terms with either one of them, he had Hunter Mclean (see RR3) build a fence between John and the daycare, but that has only just kept the plastic garbage bags from blowing over the yard. His yard goes to where the survey stakes are, not to where they put their last rhododendron, and in some cases there is a difference of 15 feet.

The first conversation John had with either of them was: ”Hi, I am your new neighbor! That whole thing where you are a great gardener and you just keep on gardening right over the line like a hedgehog, where you are terraforming your neighbor's yard, that is a great thing and I am amazed by everything you have done, but the property line is here and I know it is here. It is not a thing that after I live here for 5 years you say you thought it was somewhere else. Let’s just establish we both know where it is! The 95 year olds that you were taking advantage of didn’t know or care, but I am the middle-aged guy who does care!” John didn’t even do it in a dick way!

John thinks that winter is coming and there is a war brewing with him and he really hopes there is a war brewing between them, but while there is a lot of mutual animosity, there aren’t the stakes between them than there are between each of them and John, he just wants to encourage them to tilt against one another because maybe they will use up some resources in a boundary dispute and they will leave their flanks unprotected. The enemy of my neighbor is also my neighbor!

John is not off the hook with them and it will probably get worse before it gets better. He is the only one who has bridged he communication gulf between them, they haven’t talked in over 10 years, and it has only been hostile. The other lady who is not the daycare lady has pulled a little switcheroo on John where you have a dispute with somebody and they go: ”Well, what about…?” and they bring in some irrelevant thing.

She sent an arborist to John’s house, some random guy she employed who had no idea he was being used in a psychological terror. He said that there is a tree on John’s neighbor that his neighbor is worried might fall onto her driveway and she had asked him to take a look at it and make an estimate for removing it and she said she will split the cost of having it taken out. John had never heard anything about this, but they walked down to the tree in question and the arborist explained what was going on, like the top is dead and this could break off but it could also live for another 20 years.

It was a very old and very big tree and removing it would cost maybe $5000, but because it could not fall on her house, but maybe part of it could fall on her driveway, John said that he is prepared to pay to clean up the tree that falls in the driveway. Let’s let God decide! She didn’t even come over like a person, but sent her workman to tell John how much he is supposed to pay for a thing that is a non-thing. Because John is going to take her garden away and replace it with native bushes, she was going to turn the tables on him and find a problem with the tree in his forest.

Even if the tree fell, there is no indication that it necessarily was going to fall as she thought. She claimed that she is scared every time she drives under it, but John doesn’t think that is true. If she had said: ”Can I pay this guy to take it down?”, she is a wealthy person and it is not a question about the $5000. John does not want to have a shared money project with this person. One some level everything is going to be fine in the grand scheme of things, but in the meantime there is all this stuff.

In the very short term John needs to do the freaking laundry because he let the house go too far and everywhere he looks there is some unfinished thing, he need to take the trash out, do the dishes, do the laundry, hang up stuff, send packages back, but it might already be too late for that.

In the medium term he probably needs to get Hunter Mclean back out and build some more fences. Merlin says there is the Robert Frost line that good fences make good neighbors. He never does anything with his PayPal account because he feels like he is putting his hands in a dragon’s mouth if he does the most trivial thing, if i ain’t broke don’t fix it. You don’t want to engage affirmatively and say to do this project, but like Rush said: If you chose not to decide you still have made a choice and you are getting wrapped up in this bullshit.

John's neighbors are not that exactly NPR ladies / wine moms, but they both drink wine and they are both moms. One of them for sure was into Fleetwood Mac, the other one seems more like a Jethro Tull, but what John really wants is a guarantee (reference to The Godfather)… they are both different ages, 65 and 75, which might seem like splitting hairs, but as Mr. Show says: Those are different generations, one is into Star Wars and the other one into that Empire Strikes Back shit. One of them feels like she is upper class and one of them is very decidedly middle class proud.

Both of their houses are worth more to them as money than they are as houses. They could do something new, move into a smaller place, get a 2-bedroom apartment somewhere, move to Mexico, they are both divorced, but they both have grown sons who failed to thrive and are idiots in different ways. They surely know each other, they were next-door neighbors, they are both 30 now, and how does John not hear from the neighborhood any story that they interact with each other at all. There is a forest that borders their yards and they never hopped over the fence and met each other?

John want to convince both of those ladies to sell their houses to young families who have children that are about 10 years old and that can be playmates of John’s daughter, and the screamy loud one-half-licensed daycare center will go away, but the boys are what scares John. They are both 30 year old failure to thrive, in one case drug-addict and in one case flop, and John doesn’t want them activated, he wants them in front of their television.

What John NEEDS to do is just chill out and let go let God. He can put up a lot of fences and they are not going to stop him, they are just over there vibing and John can feel the vibes over there. A new family has moved over on the other side and they are so friendly with each other, they even asked John to look after their house while they are gone for a day and of course he would love to do it.

If John had to focus his energy on one of them he would choose the daycare 1000%. She is a bad actor just because of the pure tonnage of garbage that she threw over the fence in the course of 30 years. There is a moral failing there. The problem is that if you pick a fight with somebody you need to be prepared to go the distance and there is darkness over that fence and they are prepared to go further than what John is. John has a friend who works in early childhood development in the region and she said that the thing about daycares is that they are what they are, there are all kinds of regulatory agencies and people come and inspect and you have to get approved. Don’t even tip a toe in that universe!

Merlin makes some very questionable suggestions what John could do against the daycare that were meant to be funny.

John being concerned about getting toiletpapered for Halloween (RL442)

Last night was Halloween and John was pretty concerned that he was going to get toiletpapered. He had gone into some conflict with some teens (see RL431) and on further reflection he realized he overreacted and was so stupid, he was in a bad place that day, and it was the culmination of a really bad week, and he sounded like Howard Dean, shouting off the names of states, with his voice cracking ”What are you doing on my lawn!” Merlin once listened to a podcast about this.

There were two possibilities: Either those kids were Juniors and this was their Senior year, and then John is definitely getting toilet paper tonight. Merlin is not sure they still think about it like John does still think about it. A couple of months later John was out of town, driving across he country with his family (see RL434), and he had installed a whole set of Internet security cameras that were invented by a company in Seattle that are kind of good, not great, not the one that rhymes with Ding.

It is local to the Northwest, and they are $25 up front, battery powered, there is an app that every time you pull it up something is getting updated, it is buffering, it is loading, but when it is working John can in real-time from his phone look at the 6 cameras he has nailed up in the trees around there and it will record 25 seconds of video in response to motion detection.

When he was in Ohio his phone notified him that something was happening at his house, which normally is an Amazon delivery, but this was at 10pm, and he looked on his little cameras, and up the driveway came one of the teens, recognizably Dylan, wearing his swim team T-shirt. He came to the front door, looked for a door bell, but there is none, and then knocked at the door and ran as fast as he could. Merlin’s wife calls that ”ding dong ditch”.

This kid was doing something on a Friday night and probably asked his friends to pull over. He was obviously not alone, but John didn’t see any of his friends because he doesn’t have cameras pointed at the street, like a crazy person, and it would ding motion detection 60 times an hour because cars are going by. John did think throughout the summer that he is still on their radar and on their minds, and as a teenage problem causer you get your crosshairs on a crotchety old man, and why not yank his chain for a while.

The other option is that they were Seniors and they have already gone off to college. Halloween came and John turned all the lights off in his house because he was not prepared for trick-or-treaters and also his house isn’t in a safe location for them because they would have to cross a street and John doesn’t want to make it a problem for them. In San Francisco there are famous trick-or-treat destinations like West Portal or Hayes Valley and people were putting up police tape to indicate that they are not part of the fun. John saw that also in his neighborhood, but kids were ducking under the tape and ringing the doorbell.

John came back last night and his house had not been toiletpapered. He did a lengthy perimeter check and none of his traps had been sprung and nobody was thinking about him at all. This must mean that this was their Senior year and those kids are now off at the University of Arizona somewhere and by the time they get back at Christmas they won’t remember him and John thinks he is off the hook with them.

John’s family dressing in Harry Potter characters for Halloween, doing the Michael Jackson Thriller dance (RL442)

John’s house is situated on the street in a way that, with the lights off, no kid or parent is going to mistake it as an opportunity unless you are a teenage vandal. He turned all the cameras on, but he had fatherly responsibilities and had to take his own kid trick or treating and couldn’t do what he really wanted to do, which is be in camouflage in the trees, waiting. He was out with his child, dressed as a werewolf. His daughter wanted to be Hermione and she got all the gear, but didn’t like the wig. They have gone through all the Harry Potter, it was Shakespeare that John is saving for prison (see RL76).

John asked her who else from Hogwarts she wanted to be instead and she named some character that sounded like Slobodan Milošević, a great spell-caster. She and her mother went to the Boo-in-Burien, the new style of thing where the kids go up and down Mainstreet USA and all the stores have a person out front, giving those little candies out, which is a great innovation. Merlin likes that, he is not against retail Halloween. Marlo’s mom was Bellatrix Lestrange (also from Harry Potter), she loves to dress up and she is hot to begin with and she put all he money into it and had the corset and the boots and a giant black crazy wig, she looked just like her. Merlin gets all: ”Come on! Fuck me gently” about that.

John was driving around to the local furniture stores while they had fun at Boo-in-Burien because there were too many people there for him, too many with dogs, and no one was keeping moving or getting out of the way, he couldn’t be in this environment. They had a wonderful time and then they ran home, completely changed their outfits into zombie costumes, and did the Michael Jackson Thriller global dance-off that they had been practicing for weeks, learning all the movies, and they had bought 1980s business lady suits and covered them in fake blood, ripped them all up, and put zombie make-up on. This was on Saturday before Halloween, apparently people all around the world were doing the Thriller dance and were synching it all up into a supercut video.

Last night it spiraled back around, Hermione was back in play, and her mom was the little old lady witch from Hogwarts called Dame Maggie Smith, the head of the house. She had a whole other Hogwarts-based costume, it is ringing a lot of Merlin’s bells right now, not to make i creepy. This meant that John also needed to come correct. One of the problems that they always faced in his family is that Marlo’s mother will spend 1.5 hours getting ready for a fancy ball while John is sitting there, smoking a pipe while draped in a bear skin, and when she is just about ready he will put on a suit and come out after 5 minutes, and by societal standards they will look equally ready although she looks like something that belongs in the heavens while John looks like a guy who put on a suit 5 minutes ago.

Merlin’s ex’s dad was a classic 1980s business man who wore 3-piece suits, and every Halloween he would be something where he could wear a suit. One time her mom was a Harem girl from I Dream of Jeannie and her dad was an oil baron with his 3-piece suit and a slightly racist towel in a ring arrangement on his head.

John has found a couple of years ago a wolf mask that is just the top half, the eyes, ears, and nose, but his mouth is his own, and just by absolute luck the rubber hair of the mask is the exact same color and coarseness as his actual beard and hair. It is a $7 rubber mask and when he puts it on it immediately blends into his own hair and face and becomes terrifying, he gets off a little bit easy compared to others who spend a lot more money. John also has a selection of different colors of velvet cloaks because over the years if you see one, you have to of course get it.

Last night John had on a cloak and his wolf mask and Marlo said he was Professor Lupin, immediately converting his thing into something better. John didn’t even know that Professor Lupin existed.

John’s cape that he bought at Merlin’s Walgreens (RL442)

John bought a cape one time at Merlin’s local Walgreens (see RL20) and it was a tremendous look and it is still in play. He has worn it on stage. Barsuk has even used some of Merlin's photos of John smoking a cigar and wearing a cape. It is a powerful look and there was a cop there with the cop lights on. John wore that cape on stage at a show. They never used to do this. They were playing a show at the old Sit & Spin, which was a laundromat / Rock-club in Downtown Seattle, and the headliner was The Park Boys (?), an evolution of Sweet Water (John first thought of Stillwater from Almos Famous), they were a big deal in the early 1990s. It was the transition between post-Grunge Glam and pre-Indie integrity wars.

The Park Boys were playing through giant MESA/Boogie stacks and their sound was really trebly, Glam proto Pop Metal. It was an interesting time where people were trying different stuff. Six months later Death Cab for Cutie was on that very same stage, playing Fisher Price instruments staring at their feet, pretending they didn’t know which way the microphones were pointing.

John had never seen a Seattle do this, where the band went on stage and started playing, but the lead singer wasn’t there. There was a long ramp on one side of the venue that went up to the stage and here came the lead singer, he had been in the room the whole time, they all knew it, there is no backstage, you just wheel yourself up on the stage, and he came up the ramp in full swagger with sunglasses on, a boa trailing behind him, and the room really reacted: ”Wow!” because it was not a Seattle thing to do. You could do that anywhere, but to do it in earnest would be a real step over.

Merlin’s band Parachute Pants used to dress in silly 1980s garb, which is one thing because they were having fun with it, but in this case they were from Bellevue from the East side and they probably didn’t care. They were from Seattle, just from the Kirkland / Redmond side of it, and the vibe there is different, it is way more Pearl Jam than it is Mudhoney.

After John bought the cape he was playing a sold-out show at the Crocodile, and he asked his bandmates to just go out on stage and start playing. Everybody in the audience was just thinking: ”What the fuck is happening?” because they were not even jamming on one of their songs, and then John came out with that full vampire cape on, he swooped across the stage, did all kind of Dracula stuff with the cape, he had his guitar, and took it into the paint with the amount of vampire showmanship that he brought to that. This was peek Highwater Sta-Prest Jeans and too-tight T-shirts Indie Pop, there were very few capes in Rock’n’Roll at the time. They tried their best to shift gears into their firs song, which was probably Carparts and it was very hard, and eventually he took the cape off, swooped it around his head, and threw i over.

Later he heard that in the audience there was Andrew McKeag, the ultimate Rock guy with a black Les Paul, long hair, very handsome, a lot of charisma, he has played with a lot of Rock bands, and he is the longest-serving guitarist in the Presidents of the United States of America, and he turned to Mike Squires and said: ”This is the most Rock’n’Roll thing that has happened in Seattle in 15 years!” (see RW16) and no-one in the audience had any idea and could possibly appreciate it.

John was trying to be Alice Cooper! Once you are up there in the lights and the music is going and you are wearing a cape, something happens inside of you. John didn’t want to take this cape off and nobody in the audience wanted that either, or if he took it off he should have nothing underneath it, but he doesn’t like the no-clothes-on-stage.

The movie Naked, David Thewlis (RL442)

Last night John had on a cloak and his wolf mask and Marlo said he was Professor Lupin, immediately converting his thing into something better. John didn’t even know that Professor Lupin existed, the actor (David Thewlis) is Johnny (from Naked), he has been in everything, and John can see a David Thewlis resemblance, he and John don’t look like one another, but there is a resemblance, they both have the gravitas of a well-regarded English actor. He has done a lot of comedy and like John he is very funny. Naked, a Mike Leigh movie that came out in 1993 when John was still on drugs, was his debut role.

It was only in arty theaters and only arty people saw it. John didn’t have money to go to the movies, but a girl he was seeing took him because he wanted to see it with him. It is about a guy who is a drunk asshole, uses all the people around him, and talks incessantly about a litany of bullshit, he is violent and also pathetic. For John it was a very uncomfortable movie to watch because he is so despicable. It is like Merlin seeing Pretty in Pink with the girl he didn’t take to the prom and some things that happen in that movie were a little too close to what had happened in real life.

Naked was uncomfortably close to John’s real life, and although he is not despicable like this character, he is not that far from it and might put on the brakes 13 inches from the line that the character was 1 inch over. He is the star of this film, but not the hero and it became an indelible performance in John’s mind, although his partner didn’t take him there as an intervention, she had just read in the newspaper that this was an edgy, cool, junky movie for cool kids that wear all black. Halfway through John was going to lean over and ask her if he could crash at her place tonight, but that would have been a bad move. He did crash at her place anyway, though.

The actor became familiar to John in the acting world and any time he saw him he recognized him. A later serious girlfriend when she was upset but teasing would always call John for ”Johnny” in the same way that the lead actress would address the David Thewlis character and John would wince again in a long series of winces. He is a Senior Wincess!

John’s ravine being cleaned up, exposing a line-of-sight to his neighbors (RL442)

The whole creek restoration thing by the county is now all in motion. John had 20 kids over here, and that is only the beginning. He told both his neighbors that they are going to notice a lot of people in his yard, they all have reflective vests on and are wearing floppy rain hats and they are all in their early 20s because they are hippie environmentalists with degrees in bio-diversity.

John sleeps at night in the altogether, he just wants to be his natural self from head to toe. When he lives alone by himself in a home and he gets up in the night he will not put on a garment to go from here to there, and in the morning he might make it all the way to the kitchen to put the coffee on, walking around, especially in the summertime. On the ravine-side the house is made out of windows. A lot of windows work both ways and he doesn’t have curtains because why would he? The house is situated in such a way that you cannot see the neighbors, but it is only forest out the window.

But as the county begins to remove the invasive species there will come a day when youthful pass away and one of these neighbors could conceivable from an upstairs bedroom with a powerful pair of binoculars begin to see through the foliage if they were super-devoted and creepy, which John is going to assume that they are. Merlin thinks: ”Hakuna Matata!” and if they get a glimpse of little John that is on them, but John is not an exhibitionist.

What is kinky? (RL442)

The other day John’s sister asked him what people mean when they say someone is kinky. They started talking about it and he explained to her that at a certain point kink became very mainstream, and especially in San Francisco it became a whole Shibboleth that you were a certain kind of hip. It is a very 1970s word and it used to mean pretty much anything that wasn’t procreative missionary sex. Susan was asking in the context of people using that word in their profile on a dating app.

John explained that it is a category of thinking about sex, but if someone leads with it you can guess that they have a lot of stuff to tell you how they feel about things, it is not even coded, but they are going to steal your panties. In the 1990s in Seattle when people led with it, it often felt like they were going to review their smug text about how vanilla sex was boring. It is the ”I can’t get off unless…” conversation which seems kind of sad.

John did an episode of The Omnibus on the merkins, the fake pubes (see OM400). In 2015 all of a sudden zero body hair became the fashion in the world and John knows some people who made some Lasik choices, assuming that there would never be a day in history where they would ever want to have pubic hair again. When you are 28 you probably do think that, but now you can already see pubic hair coming back and God bless it.

John’s own kinks boil down to one thing: Just show up at his house wearing nothing but a puffy coat. Anything else is fine. If you ring John’s door bell in an ankle-length sleeping-bag coat with puffy sleeves, a 1980s Russian lady coat, and you come in and John takes your coat and there is nothing under it, then anything else… you don’t need to pinch his nipples! Merlin wants everybody to be happy, it is not his judgment to make what they like, he just doesn’t want them to talk about it.

White van with a murder-clown driving down the street on Halloween (RL442)

Last Saturday, the day before Halloween, John was walking down the street in the neighborhood and there was a white van coming toward him and slowed down, but there was no place to turn, and as John looked at it it slowed way down and inside was a scary murder-clown who was staring at John as he rolled by. It was such a good murder-clown that John was chilled to the bone. It was the greatest Halloween costume John had seen in years, just driving around, slow-rolling on people, and after the horror passed John was like: ”Bravo, sir!”

John wondered what *he* was doing, he could get a white van and drive around, it doesn’t just have to be on Halloween. If that had happened in March it would have been more horrifying than on Halloween because no-one expects a murder-clown. Is John a professional or not? At all? In life? Does he care enough to send the very best? Something has to give, John can’t let his mind be carried away by these people! He has to do something! What the fuck was this? This was a super-weird episode!