RL64 - Sunset University

This week, Merlin and John talk about:

The Problem: Let’s say you had a two-frog cannon, referring to students having sex at Catholic schools, it is like shooting two frog cannons at each other that fire 25 frogs each like a blunderbuss and some of them are going to hit each other.

The show title refers to John wanting to open his own school and calling it Sunset University because he found a bunch of headphones from his elementary school called Sunset Elementary.

John’s setting are all screwed up.

Raw notes
The segments below are raw notes that have not been edited for language, structure, references, or readability. Please do not quote these texts directly without applying your own editing first! These notes were not planned to be released in this form, but time constraints have caused a shift in priorities and have delayed editing draft-quality versions to a later point.

John buying headphones from his elementary school at a salvage yard (RL64)

The other day John was at an architectural salvage yard and there was a whole bin of old headphones with cheap plastic padding like from in a secretarial pool or a library. They all had ”Sunset” written on them with black pen, which was the name of John’s childhood elementary school up in Shoreline. These were the actual headphones in the library of the elementary school he went to when he was a little kid and lived in Seattle, so he bought them all.

He might have watched The World at War with those on his head, he watched microfiche, he watched filmstrips, he probably took French lessons. Of course they are terrible headphones and there is no reason that the Chinese beat us to the moon while we were listening to stuff on these terrible tinny headphones. It feels like the sound has to go through a tiny pinhole to come out into your ear, but John loves them anyway and he has between 5-22 of them.

John wanting to start a school (RL64)

Merlin thinks that John should start a school and John has been wanting to do that his whole adult life, and with Roderick on the Line they have started an Internet college like the University of Phoenix. Merlin has a diploma from Bazooka Joe from Phoenix and is technically an electrician now. The neighborhood Merlin lives in is called Sunset and John could have a satellite location there. It is a real pain in the butt to get into a good school right now and it is extreme rare to get into a John Roderick school.

If John would call it Sunset University it would be very inviting to an older demographic because they are in the sunset years of their education and they should come to Sunset University where the chairs are comfortable and the headphones are like you had in elementary school. Anybody can open a university, it is like being a doctor: You just say you are one. If you and your friend meet a bear on the trail you don’t have to be faster than the bear, but you just have to be faster than your friend, and that would be the motto of Sunset University, they just had to translate it into Latin. You have presumably been into a lot of colleges, but none of them have met your needs, and this is the last school you will ever need.

John meets a lot of people all the time who have never been to college, although you get the impression that everyone has been to college. It is very costly and it is not worth anything. John met an Australian couple the other day who were traveling in America and they had two daughters ages 9 and 13, neither kid had ever been to school, but they were both educated by their parents and travelled around together. They weren’t even hippies, they were just a little bit Punk and all of them were wearing Doc Martens.

Merlin thinks it is not that hard to do a better job than the schools right now, which is all the more reason for John to start one. It is an opportunity! Maybe the reason people kept their kids out of school is that it never met their needs or their children’s needs. John knows what they need!

John would have to figure out what their equivalent demographic split at Sunset University is going to be because any university needs tension between the X-professors and the Y-professors. You need McCartneys and Lennons (from The Beatles). One side should be prissy Bay Area software people who are really uncomfortable when they go off book, but who are secretly titillated by it.

The other half of the processors are Wild Man Fischer types who have never been to college themselves, but were for a while living in a tree outside of Jackson Hole, Wyoming and then they hitchhiked down to Mexico and built a stone fortress out of broken seashells and then they were a whitewater rafting guide, guys like that. You have to bring those two wings together and pretend that everybody is the same because without that they would be at war or openly hostile with one another.

Merlin wonders what the monetary model of John’s school would be. Maybe he could get some of his friends to write some grants, or some retired senators who would want to have their name on an arch. John knows the mayor and the Rock’n’Roll county administrator, although none of those people have any money. John had been starting a whisper campaign for months, suggesting that he would be appointed to the board of directors of a hot up-and-coming software companies, and he has gotten a few nibbles, but nobody has pulled the trigger yet, and this are John’s prime scimitar-wielding years!

Dreaming of time traveling back to school, sex in college and High School (RL64)

John was having another time travel dream the other day, traveling back to High School and into his High School body. He was trying to think if he would do a better job this time or if he would fuck it up even worse. The jury is still out. The only places Merlin goes in dreams are shopping malls, his High School, his college, church camp, and The Ringling Museum in Sarasota, which is a dark ride at Disney World like It’s a Small World with Rubenesque women paintings. It is just as John describes: Going back to school, but being himself now, and he does equally as poorly.

John would probably get more tail than he got in High School because he got zero tail in High School, which Merlin finds so hard to believe. Even with Kelly, but she is a doctor now and had two kids, so she presumably knows about the human anatomy now. At the time John had the sense that good kids didn’t go too far. He was very governed. Merlin felt betrayed by people who were able to smoke pot and fingerbang, he never had access to that, and today he understands that people want to be finger-banged.

Going to college made it only worse for Merlin because it had some brassy patina of political correctness to it and he would do finger-banging, but feel bad about it sometimes. The only difference between college and High School for John was that girls were wearing a lot more perfume in college and there was a thick layer of Obsession (by Calvin Klein) in the air everywhere he went. Merlin’s first college girl friend whom he met during the first week of school was a big Obsession user. He has a great memory of it, listening to The Cars and finger-banging and she had a really nice jam box that could play a cassette on repeat. The smell still reminds him of that time.

John went to a Catholic school for the first two years of college (Gonzaga University), which are places where people drink a lot and have a lot of reckless sex with one another, like when Amish kids get kicked out of their Amish town, it is the Catholic Rumspringa. The expectation is that by Junior year you have found the person you want to marry, but during those first two years people are just throwing down Gin & Tonic and then hooking up. If you had two frog cannons that shot multiple frogs at once, like a blunderbuss of frogs, and they were aimed at each other and you are shooting 25 frogs at a time in two different directions, some of those frogs are going to hit and that is what sex at a Catholic university is like.

When John arrived at Gonzaga University where he spent his first 1.5 years of college until he was asked to depart it was explained to him that there were two types of Jesuits: One type is the hyper-intellectual homosexual man, who was either put into the priesthood by their terrified parents or he had an older brother who was going to inherit the family business and he ends up going into the priesthood. Those are very traditional societies (see OM95).

This means that half of John’s professors were incredibly smart and clearly gay priests who lived an incredibly diverse intellectual life, and the other half were former jocks like Football players and Basketball players who came up in Catholic school athletic programs, and when their athletic career was over they were kept in the church family and were given a life in the Jesuitical order. Everybody recognized that their president was from the jock side and nobody had any respect for him as a thinker, but he was a glad-hander and backslapper and fundraiser.

John never understood it because to become a Jesuit took years of study, but as time went on he realized that even though it does take years of study the Bible was the only book and even if you were a dumb Basketball kicker you can over the course of 5 years memorize that one book. It is true of all religion: You memorize one book and when anybody says anything to you, you just say something out of the book and it seems you are a genius or a saint.

John’s sister could have become an Olympic skier (RL64)

John’s sister realized 15 years after the fact that she had been put on the Earth to have been an Olympic skier, but she had bailed out of skiing because she wanted to smoke pot and hang out with skaters. All her competitors, the girls that could never catch her on the ski race mountain ended up being the US Olympic team for that era. Her friends and nemeses went on to be the US ski team and non of them were medalists, but she was a better skier than they were. She realized it many years later that this was her thing and if she had been an Olympic skier her whole life would have order and a context that it is lacking now. (see also RW73)

People who don’t want to split the restaurant bill evenly (RL64)

Eddie Murphy recorded Raw when he was 20 years old and we are still listening to and debating and arguing about music that The Beatles made when they were the same age, and John encounters sometimes 20/21 year olds who are fully adult and fully actualized. They do not appear to be wrestling with ”How do I keep from crying in public?” It took John years to understand that at any given meal that you eat in a restaurant with a group of other people you should always put in more money than you owe or better still you should just buy the dinner!

When Merlin had his real job back in Florida and they would go out to some Sushi/Barbecue place there were always a couple of guys who take out their Hewlett Packard calculator and want to break it down who had more Edamame, but: ”Look, guys! Let us split it n-ways, I can not spend my 20s listening to you guys arguing over $6 tab. Hand me the bill, I will pay it, and we will never discuss it again!” If you go to a party, don’t ask if you should bring ice, but always bring ice! Don’t ask if you should take out the trash, but grab the trash! The trash cans are either in the garage or more likely outside.

You still see 40 years olds when the bill comes looking at it as if it contained some hieroglyphic information that they are afraid is going to get translated by the wrong scientist and instead of animating the good God is going to animate the bad God, that they will accidentally pick up the Abby Normal brain (from Young Frankenstein), and this little piece of paper that is telling everyone that they owe $21-27 each is vibrating on the table and some people are levitating it with their anxiety. Just round it up to $30, throw the money down and get on with your life!

John being very concerned about money in his early 20s (RL64)

John walked into adulthood with an anxiety of money, a hyper-consciousness about not wanting to get short-changed. Money seemed to be the language that human beings used to determined who was getting over on whom. He wasted many years trying to make sure that he didn’t get short-changed $0.30 when the simple wisdom was all along that you should paper the path in front of you with your gratuities, you should put your money to work because the number one usefulness of money is to make your anxiety about money go away.

Learning that was a turning-point for John, but it came too late to free up his spirit at 21 years old. He would show up in a town in Spain at 11pm when the rain would be pouring down and he would be soaked to the skin, and he would see a little pension, walk up three flights of stairs, knock on the door, and a little Spanish woman would open the door: ”Si?” - ”Do you have a chambre? El casa del chambre, por favor?” - ”Yes, it is 1500 pesetas” and John would have it in his mind that the room should be 1300 pesetas and he would try and haggle with her, but he was a bad haggler and she would say: ”No, sorry, that is the price, it is 11pm, you are standing here dripping wet!”

John would say: ”Well: No, then!” and turn around and walk down into the rainy night and sometimes walk around town for another two hours, but he won. He was looking for the magic room that was going to save him $2 and sometimes, the greatest nights in his life, were when he ended up back at that woman’s door two hours later, ringing the buzzer, and she wouldn’t answer, all because he was imagining that the $2 symbolized savvy and that he was a knowledgable person who wasn’t going to bee rooked by this 70-year old Spanish woman who was renting out a room in her house, that he was wise, when in fact he was a fool.

When John meets somebody who never had that burden, who by virtue of how they were raised or by virtue of the grade of milk that their mother used in their Kraft Macaroni & Cheese came into the world with more generosity of spirit or less confusion about what constituted wisdom.

This is part of the problem with matriculating young students in Sunset University: The older students would be distracted by their envy and resentment as the young people who were so much better at this just began their lives of graceful progress through time. Merlin says that he understands you don’t get rich spending money, but on the other side, the ones arguing over a $4 chicken finger bill in Tallahassee Florida were the PhDs that were earning three times as much as he did at the time. John would argue that you do get rich spending money.

Money is fake, John’s relationship with money (RL64)

The fashion now is to think in certain quarters that making money and being a success in business is a woo woo proposition and if your Buddhism is correct and your spirit is open and your Chakras are aligned that money is going to fall from the heavens, but that is a mind rape that John hates with every emotional scimitar in his bathrobe. He does believe that being generous, tipping bellmen and the guy who opens the door for your taxi, even though it is clear to all parties involved that he has not performed very much of a service, but that is what we have agreed.

To preserve that $1 for yourself is to live in a world where you are not fully embracing the social contract and by definition you are therefore not going to prosper. Money is fake! To treat it like it is real and to preserve it like it matters is to miss the point of it entirely. That is not to say that you should be a wanton with it, you should count it and know what it represents, but it is just a symbolic thing.

The last 5 years of his life John has been living in a weird relationship to money where all of a sudden he has a bunch of it and he lives off of it for a long time and all of a sudden he has more. Every time he has a bunch of it he thinks he is made in the shade and he is going to keep getting big bunches of money like this, it is going to be arriving in bales and he should go out and buy himself a really useless watch or electric car. Then he lives off of this bale, like the horse that comes into the barn and nibbles at the end of his bale for a couple of years and then the money is gone and if John succumbs to the feeling of: ”The money is gone! I used it all up! I blew it!” he can get into a real panic, but all of a sudden the door opens and another bale comes in.

John has realized that money is totally fake. When people work for a paycheck that comes very regularly and there is a very clear correlation between: ”I worked 40 hours and 40 hours is worth x dollars, here come the dollars!” then money and time become very real-feeling and it feels that if you stop working for a moment the money will dry up and there will never be more or you have to find another place like this where you work 40 hours. John has just realized that money is absolutely just a handful of seashells and it is not the thing to guard or to treasure.

That is why John never does anything anymore, but he sits in the front window of his house with his elbows folded on the window sill, looking down the street for the truck that is going to back up with the money bale, and every day it doesn’t come. Merlin agrees with a lot of that. Having a job is a kind of conditioning where it has been made clear to you that this is the bar and when you hit it a pellet come out and if you start doing it for long enough it is going to cause a lot of anxiety when you think of a world where you are going to miss a couple of pellets.

We forget that we are natively made to eat grass in the field. The pellet is not our natural reward. John doesn’t want to be too woo woo either, but you will find yourself in a field of flowers and you will miss the bar and the clear connection you had between this mechanical action and what you considered your sustenance.

John’s life has been a progress of learning to feel like money is not the thing. When he was 16 years old he was consumed with the idea of money as an abstraction and as a real thing, he collected coins, he collected silver bars, he would go to gem and numismatic shows in Alaska where guys who were mining raw ore would come and just sell buckets of dirt to each other. He used to buy raw copper that had been mined out of a vein of copper, it was like a crumbled-up baseball of pure copper and was only $1-2, and he would not do it because he thought it was going to be worth more money or he was going to trade it with his friends or fashion it into jewelry, but the idea that we had collectively agreed that this metal was precious appealed to him and he wanted to own it for himself.

You would think that at 16-17 years old he would have made life choices that had put him in a closer relationship with money, that he would have become a stock broker or somebody who plays with money and makes money out of nothing, but for whatever reason he took the love of money in all its many forms and basically. chose to be a dancer. John has sheet of uncut $2 bills on his wall, he loves money and he worships money!

John used to carry a chain wallet like a Bourne Identity style safe deposit box with $600 worth of tiny folded-up $20 bills in the currencies of all the different nations of the world. In a lot of ways it was a simple love, a little display, a little game, and a little thing he could monkey with with his fingers. He has chosen a life in the arts where money is 17 steps down on the Maslow hierarchy, and where it is so long after the show before the smoke clears enough that anybody is even thinking about money again, and that tension has been in his whole life.

If John had gone into stock brokering and had just been interested in solving math problems to create money and then collecting money, that may have been his duck and he may have been a more realized person, if also not as broad a person. His life would have had a targeted self-knowledge that he sees in people.

Getting introduced to the world of adults by getting his first bank book, getting stocks for Christmas (RL64)

When John was a little kid and he got a quarter ($0.25) he would put it in a shoe box until he had a shoe box that he could barely lift and he had to keep it under his bed because he couldn’t lift it. He would close and lock his door and sit on his bed and take the money in big handfuls and pour it over his head. He loved it! He could feel the money and he was literally bathing in his wealth. Eventually his mom convinced him to take it to the bank and hand it in and the woman behind the counter gave him a bank book where they had typed $117 and his box of quarters was gone, but in its place he had this bank book that looked like a passport and he could take it out and stare at it.

By taking him to the bank John’s mom was initiating him to the culture of adults. Now that he had a bank book his money had joined the big stream and he was part of the big operation. So many times in his young life, like when he got his first checkbook, somebody initiated him into the big operation, the world of adults who were trading money and stock, and he was fascinated by it and wanted to be a part of it, and yet nobody took him all the way and explained the next step beyond having a bank account.

People bought him stock for Christmas and he was thrilled, he would open the newspaper and look for his penny stocks that was trading in the $0.75 a share realm and he had 100 shares and he got to watch it change, go up to $1.50 and then plummet to $0.40 and then plummet off the bottom of the stock exchange when it fell to $0.02 a share and was delisted. One of the companies he invested in in 1980 made some kind of hose that was used on the Space Shuttle, but it turned out that your business wasn’t going to thrive just making one hose. John has watched his fortunes go up and down, but he is a hoarder, not a trader.

Merlin’s daughter collects bottle caps, he collects comics, and that is the same impulse as somebody who collects money. People don’t ask themselves enough how they want to spend their day. If you become a manager and you don’t like going to pointless meetings, you have the wrong kind of job. if you love money, but don’t like being around bankers, you picked the wrong job. John wanted a job at a stock brokerage or a bank that involved him going into a big Scrooge McDuck room behind a giant circular vault door and pouring money on his head.

Merlin thinks of a scene at the end of the movie Taking of Pelham One Two Three where Martin Balsam has his cut and he dumps his entire share of cash on the bed and starts rolling around in it, and that was appealing to Merlin. When John was a kid he liked the trope of the heist movie or the bank-robbery movie, especially any movie where they would knock over Fort Knox. Force 10 from Navarone is definitely in the Top 4 movies that informed his entire young life. It is the classic film where there is a British guy who is an explosives expert, the black guy is a hand-to-hand combat guy, and they go on a mission and blow up a dam.

Any movie that involved a vault full of money, a guy pushing a cart with gold bars on it or a room that was full of explosives or guns were John’s inspirations and he has spent his entire life trying to figure out how it is that he is going to be a bank robber who is robbing banks to defeat the Nazis. That is his missing limb!

Prisencolinensinainciusol (RL64)

Force 10 from Navarone, Taking of Pelham One Two Three, and From Russia with Love are all featuring Robert Shaw. In From Russia with Love he has blonde hair and is getting punched in the stomach by the wife of Kurt Weill. She was in a lot of his productions. In the movie Von Ryan’s Express starring Frank Sinatra they steal a train and the German girl they kidnap with the train, the mistress of the German baddie who then turns the tables, was actually Italian (Raffaella Carrà) and she did the dancing in the Prisencolinensinainciusol video. John needed to explain that video by Adriano Celentano to Merlin who had never heard of it.

It is a killer song! The backing track is a crazy loop, it got horns and proto-fuzz distortion and in a way he invented rap. John listens to it still all the time! A couple of years ago it was stuck in his head and he had to watch it once a day for a year.

Hamburger Hamburger Bang Bang (RL64)

When John first went to college there was a Japanese kid living in the dorms and he didn’t speak English very well. One day they were sitting around drinking and smoking pot and John’s friend Bob asked him: ”How do you imitate Americans in Japan?” and he stood up, cocked his arms out of the side like he was dueling in an old Western town and he said: ”Hamburger Hamburger Bang Bang!”

Leaders affecting change in style by example, not by law, people not dressing up anymore (RL64)

Before Merlin and his wife had a child and could go places they used to go to the Y (YMCA gym) in the morning and Merlin would do a bit of a workout and he would go into the sauna where everybody spits. There would always be two Russian guys who would talk just short of yelling although they were 6 inches away from each other, but they were clearly friends and they kept coming back. Russian people are still very mad that Peter the Great cut off their sleeves, they are mad about a lot of things.

The fashion for centuries there had been to have really long sleeves on your garments, but that was not in keeping with the Russia he wanted that was going to emulate the court in France and he wanted Russia to be a European country. He also had them shave their long beards. If he had just demonstrated that shorter sleeves were more efficient… Kennedy did not set out to kill the hat industry, Clark Gable did not set out to kill the T-shirt industry, but they let it begin with themselves. If Kennedy had said: ”I hereby outlaw the hat!” every Tea Partier in the country would be wearing a hat now.

There is a great shot of Kennedy and (Lyndon B.) Johnson walking in a rain storm across an air field and Kennedy doesn’t have an overcoat on but is just in his suit and Johnson showed up like all the other guys with an overcoat and he realized he was going to look like a pussy and he takes the overcoat off, but he was savvy enough to know not to show up at a no-coat party wearing a coat.

It is like the scene in the movie MacArthur where his assistant is reading fan mail aloud to him during the war and then he reads a letter from a little kid who asks why he is always carrying a bamboo cane, if he was lame, but it was just an affectation. MacArthur had the cane, the corn-cob pipe, the glasses, the gold braid on his hat, he had more affectations than Truman Capote, he had a duffle bag full of props, he was a prop comic except he was the general of the Army. Then he slowly walks across the room, throws his bamboo cane in the trash and everybody laughs.

When Merlin was in military school the guys you would really respect in the administration were the people who clearly had been in the military, in particular the Marine who ran the Naval Academy. He looked like a million bucks and he had no reason to dress like that, but he looked great. Part of it is status, but part of it must be that you are out in the shit, but you still look awesome in this time of privation and violence.

You can find the place inside the Brooks Brothers machine where they still tailor uniforms for officers who come from a certain background. If you are a psion (?) of a prominent family and you join the Navy you don’t just get issued a uniform, but you get a uniform tailored just as all of your clothes have been tailored. John’s dad refused to wear jeans because they were clothes for enlisted men, but until very recently it was true that the clothes made the man and you could tell by a person’s tailoring where his station was in life.

Some time in the 1960s when people started to have disposable income you saw that guys were spending a lot of money on flashy clothes and then Ralph Lauren introduced the idea of clothes that looked like the clothes of people with money and you could just buy those clothes without going to J. Press or without inheriting it from your father. Now we live in a world where in Seattle there are no dress-codes in any of the restaurants because some of the richest people in the world live in Seattle and dress like slobs.

You can put Steve Balmer in a $10.000 suit and it would look like he had been sleeping in it. People will show up to the nicest restaurant in town in a fleece jacket and some Dockers and we are all expected to admire them for their commitment to comfort or their street credibility, but that has intentionally undermined the traditional ways we could tell one another apart. Now if you see a guy in a really great suit, chances are he is a young guy who is spending his disposable income on clothes.

Being able to disrespect the rules is the wrong kind of power, it is an adolescent expression of power. It is why John is mad at the entire world. Merlin finds it cool that people in New York still dress up to go to dinner and stuff. How else are you going to know that you are in the Pretenders if you are not walking against a tide of guys in Bowler hats and umbrellas, walking across the Thames. That is how the guys in Pink Floyd knew that they were in a band, too! Now the only place you can find that is in New York City or in Vienna. Everything Merlin knows about Vienna is from the Falco song Vienna Calling.

Missing the culture of the day when in college (RL64)

John misses West Berlin. Merlin thinks of the movie Wings of Desire with the two angels in the library and the trapeze lady and Columbo (Peter Falk). In 1987 John was already going from half-rack of Schmidt to half-rack of Schmidt. There are Hitler rage videos where Hitler is freaking out from the movie Last Days in the Bunker (Downfall) and that actor, Bruno Ganz plays an angel in it. It is really good!

As soon as John left High School and became a dedicated drinking person, from 1987-1997 there are huge holes in what he knows about popular culture because he didn’t have any money and he was not living above ground. He would never be in a bar that had TVs. Merlin hates all the TVs! He feels the way about college. Star Trek New Generation started and for everybody that is just a little bit younger this series is a big touchstone for them, just as Star Wars was for Merlin.

He also just missed Transformer, he was a Micronauts guy. John still has a handful of Micronauts. Merlin was in a bubble that he is very happy about and he is glad he was removed from even hearing stuff on the radio and having a break from that. In High School you are hyper-aware of every new cultural thing and right about when Peter Gabriel’s So came out John just went off the reservation.

Both Merlin and John associate that with starting college. Then John came back to the world some time in 1997 and saw Peter Gabriel being bald with a super-creepy beard, walking with a limp and wearing an ankle-length leather trench coat, or is he confusing him with Rob Halford? Merlin would love to see Peter Gabriel riding on the stage with a motorcycle. John would love to see a collaboration between Rob Halford and Peter Gabriel where Moby does the music. Merlin knows that Peter Gabriel plays flute and Rob Halford plays a kind of flute.

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