This week, Merlin and John talk about:

The Problem: John was only allowed to pick two flavors, referring to his daughter’s mother’s dad offering 5 buckets of ice cream at her 25th birthday, but everybody was only allowed to pick two.

The show title refers to John’s daughter’s mother’s father who told him to be careful with the gravy because they didn’t have a lot of it for Thanksgiving. Merlin said that he would never do that because he is not a Gravy Cop.

Raw notes
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Merlin buying extra gravy for leftovers (RL445)

Merlin is pretty proud of himself. He started buying jared gravy as a backup for Thanksgiving. John has a lot of thoughts on this. Merlin has themed dining nights and one of them is a practice Thanksgiving and early last week they had a private three person Thanksgiving-ish dinner that his wife made, there were lots of leftovers, but even though they had a quart of human gravy they blew through it all and when it came time for leftovers there was no gravy left, and what is the point then?

Now Merlin keeps a jar of gravy around just in case he needs to douce (?). Homemade stuffing especially is born for gravy. John has been chasing the perfect turkey-, beef-, and cream-gravy across the universe, they are literal pools of sorrow and relatively few waves of joy as he has searched for them. ”Gravy Pots was one of the great Bluesman, he always plays sitting in a chair, his name is Robert Gravy Pots (?)”, but he never found a gravy that didn’t have a little bit of industrial processing taste because it is so delicate that it takes on a little bit of the flavor of every machine it touches. John has two boxes of turkey gravy he found at Trader Joe’s.

Merlin’s daughter being into Bubble Tea (RL445)

Merlin and his daughter are now both addicted on iced coffee, and that was a mistake. It is the devil! She likes a thing called Boba Tea (Bubble Tea), Merlin never had it before, he didn’t want it because it has balls and he doesn’t want to suck balls for fun. It is weird hear her order a drink like an adult! Merlin saw a good YouTube video about supply chain problems and Boba in particular is like bread balls. Merlin had a sip of her noxious drink and it had all the performance characteristics of shit gravy, like somebody didn’t fully blend the flour in it.

John’s daughter’s mother’s 25th birthday party where everybody had to pick 2 flavors of ice cream (RL445)

The first time he met his daughter’s mother’s stepfather, who is not a stepfather because he actually legally adopted her when she was a little girl, plays a very large role in the family, he is a towering person. On her 25th birthday party, a gathering at Josh Rosenfeldt’s house, he came down and brought 5 containers of ice cream from the famous Bellingham ice cream parlor called The Rusty Mallard (probably Mallard Ice Cream) that everybody swears is the best ice cream they ever had.

There were all these Rock musicians who came to celebrate her birthday that were in their late 20s and 30s, some of whom have been on national television, he had them all line up at the kitchen bar, one at the time with their ice cream bowls, and he was going to dish out the ice cream. He asked: ”What two flavors do you want?” and because it is [[Bellinghamming |Bellingham]]] everybody went along and picked two flavors.

When it came to John he said: ”You brought 5 flavors down from Bellingham, they are sitting here on the counter, melting. I would like a little bit of each one of the 5 flavors!” and he looked at John and said: ”Pick two!” This was a long time before John and his daughter’s mother were in any kind of relationship. He was just a friend of the family. John has encountered this ”pick two” thing other places, it might be a Washington problem.

At Merlin’s local gelato place he can get a small with two scoops, and his daughter always gets a chocolate and a vanilla.

This was a variation on we can all agree on cheese where someone in the process has an idea of how it is going to go and when someone else comes along and says: ”I would like it a different way!” it is not okay because they had a plan and this was not part of the plan. John had two scoops, he ate them, he came back, and he said he would like to try two more scoops and eventually he was going to get all 5 flavors. It was not that they were running out, they were only like 8 people at this party who were all 30 years old, he was not trying to serve 45 people.

He and John have a long, good, and healthy relationship and he is wonderful with John’s daughter, and now the years ago pick-two story has gone deep into the archives and nobody remembers it anymore, although it used to be on the we can all agree on cheese level of legendary story about ”this guy” and John, and sometimes John can’t tell whether ”this guy” is actually him or the other way around.

John’s Thanksgiving at his daughter’s mother’s parents, having not enough gravy (RL445)

John’s Thanksgiving was at his daughter’s mother’s parents’ house in Bellingham Washington. They made a full spread and John is not invited to help because everybody has a job. As John was standing there her father was stirring the gravy and he asked John in a very generous gesture to try the gravy and give him the gravy nod. It was delicious, but looking at it he noticed it was not enough gravy and he didn’t want to say that he had to double it somehow.

It was very thick, it was very piquant, it was salty, it had all the elements, but they needed to double it, and John thinks you can do that, you can throw a stick of butter in there, you can go to the cupboard and get two things of Trader Joe’s boxed gravy, somehow you can get ahead of this problem, but John didn’t have the power to do that because it wasn’t his kitchen and he was nervous about it. Merlin would get nervous, too, because he puts gravy on everything!

John’s daughter set up the table, she got her granddad on one end and John on the other end, it was built for this situation, the two patriarchs, like the scene in Brokeback Mountain. John was looking at the very small amount of gravy and he is conscious of the fact that these are Bellingham people who eat like birds. Their idea of what a portion is a probably healthy and appropriate-sized portion for a grown adult, but it is not what John thinks of a portion.

Merlin’s friend Dennis always used to say that your beef should be 3oz (85g), which is about the size of a deck of cards, while Merlin thinks it should be more like a shoe of cards, like 6 decks of cards (500g). He wants to tuck in his napkin and then get a ribbon if he finishes it, which he will, and he will get the ribbon. Even if you give him a fucking Filet Mignon he wants it to look like Richard Dreyfuss’ devil’s tower (from Close Encounters of the Third Kind), he wants it to be a sideways loaf of bread made of steer. John suggests that the solution to this is to slice it very thin when you are eating it because then you get as many bits and flavor opportunities, but to Merlin it sounds like an eating disorder.

Four of the seven people at the table eat like birds, and John was mentally measuring out the teaspoons of gravy that they are going to use, but then he looked at his daughter who eats with gusto. Merlin referenced the song I Eat With Gusto, Damn! You Bet by Jonathan Richman. Her mother eats like a normal person, neither like a bird nor with gusto, but John himself was going to need more gravy than anyone else in the room and there will be an optics issue there.

John put a little gravy over here, a little on that, and a little on that, and by the time he put his 5th tiny little dribble of gravy on his 5th portion he hears from the other end of the table his daughter’s mother’s father: ”Be careful with that gravy, there is not a ton to go around!” John knew this was coming and he knew he needs more than everybody else, but knowing that this was an optics problem he let the gravy go around the table already and was going to be the last to take gravy. The eat-like-birds crowd is not going to take seconds, but the Gravy Cop had his eye on John. He knows that gravy is a precious commodity, but he was the one who was in a situation where he would have doubled that gravy.

John got an email from a very good friend this morning where he told John stuff that they both know that John already knows, but always phrased in a ”Let me push back a little bit!” This was a situation where John was a 53-year old and he knew how much gravy there was and how much gravy everybody was going to eat, he was 7 steps ahead of him, but he still can’t not say it. At the end of the meal there was no gravy left and John was not in a position to go into the gravy terrine and try to sop up the leftover, that is a bad optic. What kind of monster are you?

If the apocalypse happened today and John was in his house and had 20 minutes to put together the costume he was going to live the rest of his life in, he would take that boxed gravy and add it to his Chewbacca bandolier. He would have some shotgun shells, a Letherman tool, and two boxes of gravy because they were the last two boxes of gravy on Earth.

Merlin never wants to give anyone anything that encourages disordered eating, and because he is so anxious about it he might actually be making it worse. He never remarks on somebody’s food, how they eat it, or whether they eat it. He has seen many family relationships go to shit because of all the things they are scared to say about how they dislike and are disappointed by each other. It all happens at the dinner table: Issues of control, all the emotional tumult of a nuclear family gets played out in how people eat, and Merlin would never say to somebody that they ate too much of his gravy, because he is not a Gravy Cop.

Merlin’s sister in law, who makes real Thanksgiving, is a chef who owns a catering company and she is thrilled when people are standing around her kitchen eating her fucking food. She loves it! She is the opposite, the ”Don’t forget the sauce!” person. Merlin doesn’t like having food explained to him, it is not his first time dining here, but if it were he would not like you to explain what Tapas means, please don’t, and please don’t tell him how to deploy the gravy! It makes him uncomfortable hearing this!

John argues that you can’t give someone else eating disorders and for people older than 8 years old eating issues are going to be their responsibility. Merlin counters that it is like saying: ”Is your hair supposed to look like that?”

The waitress at Shelly’s saying that John’s daughter can eat what she wants (RL445)

One traumatic experience for John was when they went to a restaurant in his neighborhood called Shelly’s Breakfast, Lunch, and Dinner when they first moved in, a diner that is only open until 3pm, and it has the look of a beloved local institution, that has been there forever and that everybody in the neighborhood loves, the only place in the whole neighborhood where you can find a normal American breakfast. They went in with their family and it felt like this is going to be their new place.

As they were sitting at their big table, the server came over, a woman in her late 50s, early 60s, and she was a little harried because breakfast is a tough gig. They have a multitude of jobs and every one of them has a story as long as their arm, but it is also a job and you can do it well or poorly, like any job. If you have a public-facing job where you interact with people and you don’t like people and you don’t like your job, don’t be surprised John is not excited about your job performance!

She was not doing a bad job, she was obviously a competent server, she was not doing the hipster thing where she takes 40 people’s breakfast order and doesn’t write it down. John’s daughter had until that point eaten everything, but now at 6-7 years old she was not eating everything anymore, she was not eating anything, and she had realized that at certain times during the day you can legitimately just get a sugar bun and depending on who is there with you, you can go an entire day eating just 4 sugar buns if you play your cards right.

When Merlin’s daughter was little she one time asked if she could have some butter and Merlin said: ”You can have a little!” - ”I want a little and a lot!” You are going to feed the child mostly bread, sugar, and cheese, you used to feed a kid Polony, but John’s daughter has never even had Polony although they sing the Polony song.

John’s daughter said she wanted a sugar breakfast and John leaned over and suggested to add an egg to have a little protein that makes it not just syrup on top of a cinnamon roll, and the server standing there in her harried hen-pecked energy said under her breath ”She can get whatever she wants!” No-one else at the table heard it and John couldn’t believe it, it treads a little into beandad territory where someone on the outside looks at some evidence and says: ”My father used to tell me that I couldn’t eat a sugar breakfast and now I am in the hospital!”

When they left the restaurant John said to his family that he was never going to go in there again and he explained what happened and John’s mom got really mad and turned around and went back in and she wanted to speak to the manager. The manager was the waitress in question, and John’s mom, confronted by this turn of events, just turned around and walked out. Susan would have gone at her! Susan was there, but she took a pass this time!

John’s mom knows how the world should run and she has rules upon rules, but she is not confrontational in the sense that she is going to go toe to toe with somebody in the lobby of a restaurant. She wanted to lodge a complaint because this waitress made an inappropriate remark in a next-level way while they were being served. ”Don’t tell your clients how to feed their children!” Now they don’t go to Shelly’s, they drive by and they don’t see it. There are plenty of other breakfast places in Burien, and it wasn’t a thing where they had already established a great relationship with this restaurant, but they went in, they tried it out, and the culture they experienced made them not go there anymore.

That woman is not living in a vacuum, she said it out of a sense of performative righteous advocacy, she did not really care about John’s daughter or that anything she said was going to make a profound difference, she just thinks that her opinion matters and she wanted to perform her righteous indignation with the idea that it might shame John into something.

John’s daughter bossing around people at Ballard Locks (RL445)

One time John was chaperoning his daughter’s pre-school to the Ballard Locks (see RL285), a big crazy seen, John once too Merlin and his wife there, and the whole school was there, a whole bunch of 3.5 year olds, and they were trying to navigate them through this very tight space where you can fall into the water on either side with boats coming and guys from the Corps of Engineers everywhere, it is a crazy zone and a wonderful place like form a Richard Scarry book.

John’s daughter even then was exhibiting her irascible nature, and as 4 parents and 2 teachers were trying to get their kids through this very confined space that is an industrial area, she was trying to direct the action in her 3.5 year old voice. ”No, you go over here! No, you belong here! No, you stand here!”, trying to run the show, today we would say that she is assertive. John has read all the books, articles, and opinion papers how we knock down assertive women and elevate assertive men, but this is a real situation in the moment where the last thing that needs to happen is that this 3.5 year old directs the event.

John has no fear that she is not going to grow up to be an assertive woman. If he could give her a pill that would take 10% of it away he would! John told her: ”Darling, this is not the time to boss this event!” and he used the word ”boss” because kids know what that means. ”Sweaty, the boss right now is not you!” and standing over to the right there was a guy in a US Army Corps of Engineers uniform who worked at the lock, maybe 37 years old, tall and very handsome, with lots of tattoos and a beard, he looks like the person for a woman in her middle age on Tinder who is tired of dating software engineers or living in this dumb Indie Rock world, he looked like Tom Hardy with light-brown shoes, a guy who works for a living.

He was not running the lock, but he was moving stuff around there, and he said out loud: ”We don’t use the word boss to young women like that anymore!” as though he at the lock had read a book that John hadn’t, and as if John was going to stop and go: ”Huh? What?” and he was going to explain it to John and one day his daughter was going to be president because he stopped him before he choked off her nature. John didn’t say anything to him either because he had work to do and didn’t want a kid to die on his watch and have it be his daughter’s responsibility because then it falls to him.

Replying to things online that aren’t our business (RL445)

It is a tricky things in this modern age because we are used to replying to things online that aren’t our business. It is the very definition of Twitter. None of this is your business! Were never supposed to know that many things about this many other people, let alone having a strong opinion about it, let alone feel the obligation to dive in on it, it is completely psychotic, and you are rewarded for how pungent your opinion about somebody else’s shit is.

John is increasingly not going to real-world places where that is the temperature in the room and he is staying away from places where somebody is going to lecture him or finds it appropriate to make a comment. Merlin doesn’t like being in potentially hostile situations, he has nothing to gain from it and he doesn’t want to fight with people. In no way is there something to be gained from arguing with somebody in a Target parking lot. For some people it is their whole fucking deal!

People don’t like confrontation, but everyone feels now like they are a knight on a crusade, tilting their fucking lance at Jerusalem, but they are Ronin, they serve no master, they don’t know who their master is anymore and each one is their own, but they have that crusader feeling, they are not trying to accrue wealth and power to themselves, they are trying to defeat injustice, there are cosplay knights templar everywhere!

John feels like someone in Time Bandits, he got transported somewhere, he got the map, and he is trying to get through this situation and it turns out that the Knights of Ni (reference to Monty Python and the Holy Grail) are here and also the devil and also Julias Caesar and also Bill & Ted, while John is flying through the universe in a phone booth, trying to get the stuff together for his presentation so he doesn’t have to go to military school.

Low/Heigh Ceiling and Low/Heigh Floor food (RL445)

Merlin introduces that concept of Low Ceiling, Heigh Floor. A high ceiling thing has the potential to be extremely good. The floor is where it gets interesting, and high floor means that almost every version of this will be okay. Chicken Cordon Bleu is a fairly low ceiling food because the best Cordon Bleu you ever had in your life is fine, but it also can be a very low floor food. Having worked in restaurants he knows the kind of stuff to avoid. But if the place has ”steak” in the name you should probably order steak, if the place has ”sea food” in the description or has an anchor or a lobster on, you probably want to get sea food.

Meatballs are a high floor food because Merlin has not had that many incredibly bad meatballs in his life, neither has he had that many incredibly bad gravies, but he had some pizza he super didn’t like and was very expensive, it is no high floor food, although people say it is the new bacon and there is no bad pizza, but there is!

If you tend to prefer not to have a lot of wheat and maybe have one slice of lettuce, Merlin sometimes after his first slice of pizza will just grab a handful of the toppings off two other pieces and he might just eat the topic, and now he has two pieces of wet bread and he can’t believe that he was just about to eat that much wet bread. John thinks that is a very anti-social thing to do, unless he is the only owner of that pizza.

If Merlin has a couple burgers and he takes off all the bun except for a little bit and he looks at that fucking pile of bread that he has taken off, he goes: ”Ugh, that is crazy, why would I eat that much bread?” The great Dan Benjamin says: ”If I am going to have a cheat day, my cheat food is not going to be corn!”, which is a really good point. If you are on one of his bizarre cult-fad diet things that he thinks is normal and you are going to have a date and maybe you get garlic fries, which have a pretty high floor, or if you are at the ball game.

When Merlin looks at that giant pile of bread he realizes that pizza is a ton of wet bread with shit on it. If John is at a place where they don’t have double burgers, he will get two burgers, throw two of the buns away and make his own double burger. The Big Mac has 3 pieces of bun for 2/10th = 1/5th of a pound of beef (90g), is that what we are doing here? John had never applied the ”there is too much bun” concept to pizza before.

Opening a sauce-based restaurant (RL445)

Merlin is practically a lifestyle gravyist and he thinks it is a fairly high floor item. John stood in line behind Merlin at a gravy bar. The day he hits his number and Living Roy (?) handed him a piece of paper and said he won $2 billion, the first thing he is buying is not even going to be a Coke-machine, but an in-house in-built sauce deployment system that is somewhere between a soda gun and a car wash, and his wife would love this. It is like pump chili (see RL13), except for gravy, and chili is a kind of gravy in some ways. He wants to be able to pull down a nozzle and just deploy Au Jus, white sausage gravy, not a problem. Holy shit dog, that would change everything!

John always wanted to open a restaurant old style like in the 1980s that was in a reclaimed industrial space, San Francisco is full of these, and it had picnic tables in it, it would be an echoey room, it was before there were laptops, and you could get sandwiches, soups, it wasn’t fancy, it was just coffee, chili, clam chowder, chicken noodle soup, grilled cheese sandwiches… college towns have them, and there was one called Balyeat’s Coffee Shop in John’s mom’s home town (Van Wert Ohio) where they went back to visit in the 1980s and they had a full ham, a full turkey, and a full roast beef on the counter under a serving heating lamps and if you ordered a ham sandwich they would go over and slice the ham off of the freaking ham. This is what restaurants used to be!

Merlin thinks this is why a lot of men join fraternal organizations: You get to go to a dinner like that and a black man in a white Chef’s Toque cuts you up the beef that you want and he never says that you took too much. Like Dan Aykroyd in The Blues Brothers when he holds up his glass and shakes it at Pee-wee Herman (Paul Reubens, playing the waiter): ”More! More!” when they go out and try to get the Major D (?), the horn guy (played by Alan Rubin) to be back in the band: ”How much for the little girl?” John is also thinking of David Cross: ”Keep ’em comin’, Gleep Glop…!”, he still says that 40 times a week!

Think about a restaurant called sauce or saucier that is just designed around the fact that you had every sauce. Merlin had that idea already back in 2006. What if we back-solve from sauce, as John Siracusa would say, where they ask you what sauces you are into and then they will bring stuff for you to dip in the fucking sauce!

John holding his first cooking day in his new house (RL445)

John has a whole set of glass sealed-top freezer containers. He has been living in his house for a long time, but he had not yet done a cooking day like he did yesterday. Every time he goes to the grocery store he buys a pound of hamburger and then he gets home and realized that he already had a pound of hamburger, but you can never have too many. Then there is a cooking day when you deal with all those frozen pounds of hamburgers, and he puts on his little apron and he cooks all the hamburger and he portions it out and freezes it, and while he is doing that he also has all of the mushrooms and all of this stuff and he makes different sauces while he is at it.

Then he gets the biggest pot he has, fills it all the way with water, and puts as much spaghetti in it as he can get in there, sometimes 4 boxes of spaghetti, you have to stir it with a wooden spoon, and then you liberally butter and salt it, put some pepper on it, and you put it into those freezer containers in individual portions, so now you have butter spaghetti that microwaves very well and that you can use as a side or under some sauce, it is what you get in any spaghetti restaurant, they didn’t boil that for you, and now you made that for yourself!

Merlin always wants a savory treat. ”Do you want a slice of cake?” - ”No! Do you have any brisket? Or any mushroom sauce?” Think about the times you leave a restaurant and ask to have the rest of it to go, you will have a lot of sauce and not very much meat and you need some buttered spaghetti under that!

Yesterday John also made a big chunky stew in a Crock Pot where after people had been serving themselves they had taken the lion-share of the junks and you got stew with just a few pieces of meat left, but mainly you got stew sauce, and John put it over the top of some buttered spaghetti. There are some vegetables in a stew that you don’t want on spaghetti, like cooked carrots or little teeny onions, but it is very easy to just eat those right off the top.

John likes alfalfa sprouts and roast beef sandwiches, but he doesn’t want sprouts on a sandwich, so you get a sandwich in a hippie restaurants, you take those sprouts off and you just eat them as an Amuse-bouche. John also doesn’t want pickles on a hamburger or capers in his beef tartare (see RW78, RL424) because anything with capers tastes like capers.

Now John feels like a big fat hen sitting on a nest of eggs because he got a larder full of spaghetti underpinnings.

Stouffer’s was the very high end when Merlin was a kid. They talked about their french bread pizza (see RL185), that was just such a treat! John believes that their lasagne is: You have to have a pretty good home-made lasagne to warrant the 7 hours it takes to make a lasagna.

When Merlin was driving home from their very nice Thanksgiving visit they stopped to get a coffee and he needed to urinate, and he grabbed a Starbucks-brand cold-brew unsweetened hand grenade of coffee that goes down way too easy. Merlin doesn’t need sugar and half&half, although his daughter likes half&half in it.

Merlin wants LEGO-brand blocks for food and he would like to start a strategic reserve of things and things to put on the things, John has really inspired him.

John having a doctor’s appointment, getting his own CPAP machine (RL445)

Today John has a doctor’s appointment right after they are done, and the doctor said he wasn’t even allowed to put cream in his coffee this morning. The last time he had a cop of coffee with no cream in it was a long time ago, and if he is in a truck stop and they have no cream he will just leave. Merlin’s lady is like that.

Two days ago John spent an hour and a half in a facility in a bunker down in Kent Washington and he left with his new CPAP machine (see RL439). He did not buy the black market machine, it has been two months. He got an email from a listener who was a sleep doctor in Alabama and he was going to prescribe him a CPAP-machine so he didn’t need to go on the black market like a monster, and John didn’t reply to him because he was already deep in the system and he decided to do what they say, drive up to Issaquah three different times, stick this thing in his ear and this other thing in his other ear, he is going to sit on hold on a phone tree for 45 minutes 5 different times, he is going to do all of it.

This is just how he got into the relationship with Millennial Girlfriend: He was going to follow through, she said that he was her boyfriend, okay he was her boyfriend, these people told him he had to sit on a phone tree and he was going to do it. He had this doctor that had emailed him, but the problem was that initially he tweeted at John, but John is not on Twitter and it took a while to get to him. You literally get a prescription for that machine like you would get for penicillin.

John went to this bunker and a woman sat across the table from him and explained how to use this machine that literally has one button and also an instruction manual, and you couldn’t screw it up, but this is how the medical profession works. Now he has it at home in a little bag and for the last 3 days he walked by and he hasn’t opened it yet because he is terrified of it. She put it on him in the office and she turned it on and he felt like he was going to die.

She put a different style of mask on it and John felt like he was drowning, and she got a third mask that looked like the oxygen mask for a B-52 pilot, while the original mask looked like the masks in the Original Dune, with nothing in his nose, and it still made him feel like he was about to die, but he could manage it. Maybe it is a life-saving technology that is right over there, and when he finally puts it on he is going to dream of angles, but it is like his diploma (see RL270): If he doesn’t open it it is a Schroedinger’s CPAP-machine.