RL450 - The Dawn and the Dusk

This week, Merlin and John are talking about:

  • Merlin learning about himself how little of certain things he really understands (Merlin Mann)
  • John being okay with having been wrong about things, having never done the same thing twice (Attitude and Opinion)
  • John getting to bed early, waking up rested, and feeling good about it because he thought he could never do it (Sleep)
  • How John met Ted Nugent back when he was in High School in Alaska (Early Days)
  • John no longer seeing his psychiatrist, but a psychologist (Depression)
  • John writing on his book about his walk across Europe, writing a 15-page essay influenced by Beandad (Currents)
  • What Merlin gets from writing, the book he was supposed to write that gave him a really bad time (Merlin Mann)
  • Follow-up: Richard Garnett apparently listens to the podcast (Currents)

The Problem: John made a divot, referring to John always sitting on the right side of his couch, making a divot in the cushion over time.

The show title refers to the fact that the dawn and the dusk are no social constructs, but they are just as they are and you have to work with them when it comes to your sleep schedule.

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 Please do not quote these texts directly without applying your own editing first!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 learning about himself how little of certain things he really understands (RL450)

Merlin does not like learning about himself. Self-knowledge is for suckers! According to his Wisdom Project you haven’t fixed a problem if you don’t understand what caused the problem and/or you don’t understand what you did to make it better. Life is not all beer and Skittles! The older he gets the less he gets, and getting how much he doesn’t get is a form of self-knowledge that he doesn’t prefer.

John was in the middle of reading a blog about all of the unexploded ordnance in No Man’s Land in France (called Zone Rouge, created after The Battle of Verdun) and how they closed up big stretches of it because it is toxic and explosive when Merlin was asking to delay the show for 15, 20, and then 30 minutes. Merlin had decided to break all his audio and then trying fix his audio, and he went on a Ken Burns kick watching his World War II documentary The War.

As Merlin gets older he becomes a bit more vulnerable and open to the idea that he is not perfect. This weekend he has been working on an audio thing, which is a long story, and he was saying to a friend who makes a lot of the software applications for podcasters that he loves so much about what he does, but so much about the technology behind the scenes he doesn’t understand and when he is trying to fix his setup because he has some audio bleed he has no idea what is happening. At this point John got muted by a ghost in the machine and took a while to unmute himself.

Right now John just sits on his couch and he noticed that at the right end of the couch where he sits every day the cushion is starting to have a John-shaped divot, but he doesn’t want to go through life leaving divots everywhere he goes, so he decided to sit on the left end of the couch with his laptop on the couch and his Apogee Quartet on the coffee table right next to his copy of David Copperfield and he is living large.

When John records with Ken he is sitting at a table in a proper room, and for the last 4 months Ken has been saying that he hears a buzz, and John will verify that the buzz is also on the audio and then he will wiggle everything and gently hit a couple of things until the buzz goes away. Merlin also has a buzz when he plugs in his guitar cable and he should probably solder it in better. John doesn’t mess around with solder because he is the world’s worst solderer. Merlin is the world’s worst supergluer, so maybe they should start a shop? He tried to superglue magnets into keycaps and it just got everywhere.

When you buy things at the guitar store they will tell you that there is a lifetime guarantee, but when you then bring your cable back they will tell you that you have to send it back to the manufacturer yourself, you can’t just bring it back there, so there is your lifetime guarantee!

John being okay with having been wrong about things, having never done the same thing twice (RL450)

John is learning stuff about himself right now that feels not bad. Just recently he has been experiencing the sensation of having been wrong, not only about elections in Georgia (see RL353 when Merlin gets really mad at John about his opinion about the election to the Georgia secretary of state), but he was wrong about things and now something has changed in him and he is willing to have been wrong about things. In a lot of those things he has been wrong about himself.

Usually he is so hard on himself that it is weird to have been wrong about himself and have that be actually a lifting of a weight. He thought he needed this or he thought he was this way, and that way he thought was immutable and there was nothing he could do about that, and to have: ”You are wrong!”, a thing he tells himself all the time as a cut-down, actually be a revelation in terms of: ”Wait a minute, I am doing this thing right now that I didn’t think I could do, that I thought I would never do!”

The hardest one has always been that he is just a simple man as God made him, and habits, sitting and making a divot on the couch, doing the same thing every day, having dinner at 6pm, being regular is not bad, negative or a failure. He always thought the if he did something once it was a mistake, if he did it twice it was jazz, if he did it three times it was the new melody, and if he did it 4 times it was starting to get stale and if he did it 5 times it was a cliché, which meant he never did anything 5 times! They somehow reference the TV show King Lear based on a play by William Shakespeare.

The problem was that this extended to relationships. If John was dating somebody and he went over to her house on Tuesday and Wednesday, even if he would go over there and they would kiss, by Thursday he felt that after two days he would need to have a day where he didn’t go over to her house, and she would not understand why that was the case. The idea John had about himself was that he was improving and you don’t repeat the same melody!

Already as a kid he knew that you can’t walk the same way to school every day, even if you have determined that it is the fastest way, at least when you come to that tree you have to go around the other side of it today because maybe there is a leprechaun with a pot of gold? Digging a rut, making a trail, feels soft. ”Two roads diverged in the wood and I took the one less travelled by”, it is right there in the poem (The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost)!

John getting to bed early, waking up rested, and feeling good about it because he thought he could never do it (RL450)

During the last two weeks every day at 10pm John has been looking at his time piece, thinking: ”I should be getting ready for bed!” One month ago at 4am he would look at his time piece and he would say: ”Ah, boy! Do I really have to go to bed? It is 4am, you have to get up at 10am, and every second you stay awake now is eating away at your precious sleep which you need to live!” and at 5am he would say: ”You have to get up at 10am! What are you doing to yourself?” He did this for years, but for the last 3 weeks at 10pm he pulls his time piece out, yawns, and tells himself: ”Time for bed!”

He has been waking up between 7-8am all on his own, his eyes open, and he is awake, and he has slept for 8 hours! He gets up, pads in his stocking feet, his little pointy-toed slippers with the little tassel at the end of the toe, he pats his little jewel-encrusted tortoise (reference to Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban) and he has his morning ablutions, he goes into the kitchen, makes a coffee, and it doesn’t feel like labor.

Not only has he believed for decades that this was impossible for him to do, but he also equated it with everything that he didn’t want in life: Being regular, mid-century modern architecture, Republican Party politics. Thousands of times he has been still awake at 6-7am out in the streets, trying to find his way back home, and he has seen people bustling! It was all the things he didn’t want to be and he could never do it, although he was broken by the lack of sleep and he couldn’t even conform to his own bodily needs, constantly fighting himself every day.

He trained himself to believe that about himself and he felt cursed. He wanted to live in a 27 hour day, stay up until 4am, sleep 8 hours, and wake up in time to be part of the world. There is dawn that is made by God and there is a dusk, and in Seattle the dawn and dusk in January are pretty tight. 8:30am is the dawn and 4:30pm is the dusk. They are not social constructs, the bowler hat people - daylight saving time not withstanding - did not put the dawn where they wanted it to try and frustrate John, but the the dawn and the dusk are just there and you choose! For billions of people the dawn and the dusk have no bearing on how they feel about themselves.

Every day for his whole adult life he has opened his eyes and his first thought is: ”Where am I in relation to dawn? How much have I used already? How much have I squandered? How much do I have left?” You have to get to the bank, the model train store closes at 4pm because those guys are in bed by 8pm and how are you even going to start building a model train? Instead John was living in a dark world full of vampires with nobody else there, they don’t like each other, it is like alcoholics: You get done drinking, you say you are not going to drink anymore because alcoholics are assholes, and then you get out into the world of normals, claim you are a normal now, but it is clear right away you are not, and you end up finding solace only with other alcoholics who have stopped drinking, and they are the worst people!

Now that he wakes up in the morning, his usual first conflict of the day: ”How much have I squandered? How disappointed should I be of myself?” is off the table! Instead he looks out, the sun is coming up and he thinks: ”What am I? A farmer?” - ”Yes! I am a farmer!” Now the coffee is a bit of a treat, not something he has to get inside him so he starts to be able to think halfway through the show with Merlin.

There are still 30 things in a day that John chastises himself about. Yesterday at 2pm he asked himself why he didn’t have any food today yet, and he pulled out some Trader Joe’s Chicken Parmigiana out of the freezer, microwaved it, plated it, went out to his dining room table that sits six, sat there alone, started to eat it, and about halfway through he thought that this was one of those miserable bachelor meals. It was not very good, he took a bite and the middle of it was cold and he had to get up and re-microwave it. It felt like punishment food! It was bad!

It was not the worst, he has eaten way worse, he has been way sadder, he sat at much larger tables alone, but although he is the master of his own decisions and can have any food he wants, he chose this one for himself and he caught it and he noticed it and questioned his decision. There are no fresh vegetables in this meal or anything fresh, he has chosen it because it is the path of least resistance. If he is capable of getting up at 7:30am, is he capable of eating better than this on his own when he is not performing for someone by eating a vegetable?

A couple of times in the last 3 weeks he has gotten derailed, he looked at his time piece and it had been 1am and when he asked himself how he got there, in every instance his answer was: ”my phone!” He was reading about unexploded World War I ordnance, following some dumb-ass thing, he made the mistake of reading the news, and every time of reading the news is like: ”This white girl went missing!” or ”Listen to what Trump said today!” It is awful!

He must have clicked on something that was like: ”Did you know how Eddie Van Halen tuned his guitar?” and now his phone - through the portal of Google News - thinks that every day he wants to hear what Ted Nugent said about Eric Clapton (see RW249) and that his song with Van Morrison (The Rebels) didn’t go far enough in being against vaxers, or whatever.

Over the last 3 weeks John has gotten to the 1am place, turned off the lights and went to sleep, he woke up at 7am anyway, and he got up out of bed, got a coffee, sat down and started to work on something, and the next night he went to bed at 10pm. He doesn’t curse the day before the twilight (a Hungarian proverb according to John) and he doesn’t despise the dusk, and he gets back on the rails.

Merlin counters with a Polish proverb: ”Not my circus, not my monkeys!” and his friend Marco (Arment) says: ”It is not my fault, but it is still my problem”, which happens to John all the time although he has never had a problem where he didn’t think it was his fault.

Although it seems like the sleep is good for John there is still a voice as he looks out the window right now that says: ”Yes, you sound good because you have surrendered onto the comfortable middle! You own a property and you sit there going: ’Taxes are sure high!’” and he hears the voice of Jochen saying: ”You used to do interesting things, but now it seems like you watch a lot of television!” Merlin thinks that before you can get better you need to stop getting worse and it sounds like John stops getting worse.

How John met Ted Nugent back when he was in High School in Alaska (RL450)

John has gone 40 years of his life, not caring what Ted Nugent thinks. He saw him one time in 1987 when he and his friend Peter were baked in the middle of a winter day, walking around Downtown Anchorage, there was nothing to do, but when you are stoned everything is amazing, and they went past the Convention Center which at the time was newly built on 5th Avenue, and there were a bunch of dudes that very clearly were on some sober event. In Alaska you can tell because they looked so haggard as if they were always drunk, but clearly none of them were dunk, and John has a special eye for that. Also these guys would otherwise never be at the Convention Center. They would be on 4th Avenue, but this was 5th Avenue, which is like the difference between Washington D.C. and Baltimore, they couldn’t be further apart.

John said to one of the guys: ”What is going on?” - ”Ted Nugent is playing!” and John and his friend Peter decided to march right into one of those big convention room where all the folding chairs were facing what today would be a PowerPoint demonstration, he was the entertainment for a sober event because he is famously in favor of marrying 13-year olds, but he is against drugs. The stage was 2 feet high, the room was lit with fluorescent lights. There were hundreds of dudes in big overcoats that they got for free from the pipeline, nobody was looking at the stage, and John and Peter walked all the way up to the front row, right up to the stage, and there was nobody in the first couple of rows because every single one of those 600 dudes were the kind of guys who never sat in the front row of class.

There was a bar in Spenard in Anchorage called Mr. Whitekeys Fly By Night Club (John says Mr. Whitekeys Flying Circus). Mr. Whitekeys was a Weird Al or Dr. Demento type. He would write a show and he had a cast and they would perform parody songs about Alaska, which was a big thing in Anchorage in the mid-1980s, there was no hotter ticket. He would make fun about current political events, or they would dress as salmon. He seemed smart, even when he was wearing a top hat and a bow tie that squirted water out of it.

As John sat down in the front row and looked up onto the stage, the backing band was already there and it was Mr. Whitekeys and his band. John had seen his show several times with his girlfriend’s parents who would laugh themselves stupid watching this show while his own parents were skeptical about it. Mr. Whitekeys was not in his tux and tails, but he was dressed as a Rock person, which was like seeing Captain Kangaroo on the street wearing jeans. Then out a side door up onto the 2-foot tall stage came Ted Nugent with his guitar and the band launched into Great White Buffalo, which was the most searing great white buffalo John had ever seen - it was 8 minutes long, the band was killing it, Nugent was all over the place, and although John and Peter were baked they were sitting there with their head thrown back.

John and Peter used to sneak into strip clubs, that is where they saw Lola (see RL44, but with another friend or maybe John changed the name)), pulling their hats down low and drawing a little ink pen mustache on, but that was not even in the Top 10 of ”How did you get there?” kind of things, and here was Nugent in the middle of the day in a convention center sober party with Mr. Whitekeys’ band called The Fabulous Spamtones. As Nugent was done with the song John and Peter thought they had just seen the greatest thing in their lives, and then he gave a 5-minute long speech about how he never once in his life has used drugs because drugs are for losers, and he sang this to a bunch of guys who had only not been on drugs for 16 hours. He did just not read the room and he did not get it.

John no longer seeing his psychiatrist, but a psychologist (RL450)

John recently stopped seeing his psychiatrist because he is a medical doctor and met his wife when they were residents at 24 years old, they get married, had 3 kids, and live in a beautiful house and they ski on the weekends and they are very healthy. His practice of talk therapy involved him replying to John when he would say: ”I stay up all night and never go to my girlfriend’s house more than 3 days in a row because it feels like I am making a divot on her couch and who wants to do that?” - ”Well you know, one thing you might try is marrying your High School sweetheart when you are 24 because that really worked for me!” He doesn’t know another world except the one he lived in!

He is a nice guy, he treated John’s bipolar, but that is the difference between a psychiatrist and a psychologist…

The lady doctor (who once said: ”I didn’t come to you!”, see RL257) one day told John very unceremoniously that she was leaving her practice because she had been appointed the Swedish Hospital weight clinic, not ”weight loss”, but it is about weight in some ways, and all of a sudden John was without a doctor again. She was a similar age and she was supposed to be John’s doctor until they were both in their 80s. John had been abandoned by so many doctors!

Merlin interrupts John to talk about his mechanic Jerry who was a 65-year old gay man who got eye-surgery and retired and sold the place, he was the one who kept telling them about the timing belt.

John’s mechanic was a Grunge Rock bass player who also fixed Eddie Vedder’s car who one day retired to open a bar and he didn’t know anyone else he could recommend to John instead.

John is seeing a psychologist now who just sits there for an hour and listens, and he made it clear to him that he is a podcaster who talk about his problems with his friends and he doesn’t know why he is here except that he needs to get his bipolar medicine and he outgrew his psychiatrist.

Merlin and his shrink still zoom once a month because his prescription requires to have monthly check-ins, but they mostly talk about home automation.

John goes to his guy every week in person, sits down on the couch, the guy asks: ”What has been going on?” and John will talk about this and that, things that have been bothering him and that have been weighing on his mind, and the guy will just listen for an hour. He is engaged, he is totally there, he does get John’s jokes, he is a nerd, it is a bit like talking to somebody from the JoCo Cruise who is smart, but also not 100% on John’s wavelength, like going to see Storm once a month. When John says something like: ”Well, this would not be popular to say, but I believe it is true!” he goes: ”Mhmm” and he doesn’t recoil. Merlin would like to hear things like: ”Eh, I heard worse!”, and John’s guy said not that long ago that it is really great to talk to somebody doesn’t feel like they are on the absolute verge of exploding, which was a wonderful compliment.

John writing on his book about his walk across Europe, writing a 15-page essay influenced by Beandad (RL450)

John has been writing every morning in his book about his walk across Europe which has been an albatross around his neck for 22 years, this book that he wanted to finish in 2001, that he should have finished in 2006, and he is still working on it after almost everybody in his life is telling him to just move on and write something else because this thing is a 450 page drag. John has made a ton of progress over the years and he is working on it again and is enjoying it very much.

All of the attitudes and the polemics that John felt have been new in his life in he last 7 years… in 2015 something changed, and in the space of 9 months Twitter went from really fun to really awful. John doesn’t even have that strong a feeling about Bernie Sanders, but he wanted to scream at others about him. All the things he has been saying, all the screeds he has been rehearsing as he drives in and out of town, he is now reading this book that he wrote in 1999 and he is saying exactly the same things about contemporary life in the 1990s. John was shocked about realizing that fact!

About 4 months ago John wrote a 15-page thing about life. aA lot of it is knock-on effects of BeanDad, he is always processing that he is out now, he has been rejected, and he is never going to be invited back. What does that mean? Is he free to say whatever he wants? No! It doesn’t feel like that! What is he? On a key level he feels liberated, but in a big way he is still in exile, he is still ostracized, and he wrote this 15-page thing that was influenced by that. What if he wanted to a benefit auction for a local cause? Is somebody going to come up to him and say something? John has zero idea how cancelled he is because he is not in a world where he would know. He doesn’t put a thing on Twitter and then get replies of any kind.

A month later he started working on his book, he got 3 days into it and he read a 4-page thing that was almost in the same language, the same words, about how alienated he felt from the world of 1999. It felt weird at first, then it felt spooky, but also good. John lived 22 years after having written that, unaware that his attitudes and perceptions are consistent. What does he do with that? Maybe he can take these things and put them to bed? Maybe he doesn’t have to keep making this argument to himself? Maybe he can go: ”Yes, these are my feelings I no longer have to come up with a justification for them all the time!”, but he still can’t say them aloud or publish them anywhere!

What Merlin gets from writing, the book he was supposed to write that gave him a really bad time (RL450)

Merlin feels the same way and he has been writing again too on his Wisdom Project with all the good advice he has ever heard. It is nice to disappear into something for a little while and to get to do it on his own terms. He enjoys getting up at a decent hour before the family got up and working on it.

Ken has written 15 books, but Hodgman, those guys who have written books as well? John no longer feels at liberty to ask Hodgman what it is like to write. When Merlin was writing his book, before it became a drag and a thing he hated, did he enjoy it? He liked writing all the stuff that made people want him to write a book. Writing for his website was really fun! A lot of non-failure in adult life is getting out of your way, which is especially true for adolescence.

Merlin felt fortunate because it was a style of writing that he likes and he thinks he is good at, but one of the biggest troubles with writing the book was that he has nobody else to blame for it and he kept getting in his own way because of what he thought the book needed to be and it kept getting bigger and bigger, and doing anything but that bigger book felt like a disloyalty to the reader and to himself. It is really fun to write, it takes him away from MSNBC and Twitter and all the noises outside. He did a whole episode with Siracusa about how proud he is about himself for noticing and rejecting the attractive nuisances that have screwed him up in the past.

When Merlin was writing for the web he had his greatest successes and enjoyments writing between 1500-4000 words, but writing 50.000-70.000 words is a really different thing, and he doesn’t know what made him think he could just do that like it was the same kind of thing. No John is his therapist, how does that make him feel?

John’s mental health is so much better writing a little bit every day than it was when he wasn’t, and he credits waking up earlier in the morning because it is giving him time to do it, and it is the writing every day that is making him feel proud because he did something.

Follow-up: Richard Garnett apparently listens to the podcast (RL450)

Last week talked about Richard Winfield Garnett, the lawyer (see RL449, John’s bandmate in The Truly Awful Band who needed to read up on it), and apparently he listens to the show and within an hour he sent an email to all of John’s friends from High School with a link to the show, going: ”Guess what!” and the only thing that saved John is that Rick has no idea how to link to a podcast and also none of their mutual friends have any idea how to click on a link or have ever listened to a podcast and there were 4 replies going: ”I clicked on it and nothing happened!” and somebody else was like: ”My father doesn’t love me!” and the topic was gone. Merlin suggests that John should have him as a guest on one of his other programs. Maybe he has his own podcast called Above The Law or something, it is no world where super glue is (?)

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