RL78 - Driving Lesson Costume

This week, Merlin and John talk about:

The Problem: I can text more picture, referring to a misspelling in an ad for a GMC Suburban on the Internet that John wants to buy.

The show title refers to John having thought about his daughter’s first driving lesson for years and having a special costume that he will put on for that occasion that contains a scimitar and some brass spy glasses.

The audio starts with a few seconds from some TV Show where a guy says: ”Don’t hit back!”

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 Please do not quote these texts directly without applying your own editing first!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

Learning about menstruation (RL78)

John was just watching a gynecological comedy video for teen girls. Tampons are very important and John will have to learn more about those things, although by not being a girl he has dodged a bullet there. Now that he has a daughter he has to know things about things he doesn’t know anything about. Merlin remarks that you don’t need the most detailed topographical map to sound like you are a cartographer. He couldn’t draw one The Highland is high and the Lowlands are low and I will be in Scotland before you (reference to the Scottish song The Bonnie Banks o’ Loch Lomond that contains the line And I’ll be in Scotland a’fore ye)! Merlin is now going to call vaginas Loch Lomond.

You don’t get to be John’s age without having some experience with women’s periods, Merlin calls it riding dirty. The first time a guy confided in John in High School that he had sex with a girl who was on her period John asked what it was like and the guy said it was kind of just the same, which meant nothing to John, and then he said: ”except sandpapery” because there is a lot of extra flotsam. John was afraid of it for a long time until he learned not to be afraid. They wonder what the guy equivalent of having your period is.

Something like a wet dream is a whole different deal and both John and Merlin have never had one of those in their lives. They might not even exist, like the female orgasm it might just be mass-hysteria. Like the G-spot it is something that was invented by Masters and Johnson, it is like snipe-hunting, like you take a girl down to watch the submarine races. You get a boner, you are having a dream of sexy time, and then you just cum all over your bed? It seems impossible! If the timeline had been a little different and Merlin had become self-educated a little later, maybe he would have busted a pool, but he never did.

The Great Texas Dynamite Chase, dirty movies and magazines (RL78)

They were aware of Playboy magazines a long time before they knew what anything was, to Merlin it was like a socket wrench, he just didn’t know what to do with it, he just wanted to read the cartoons while his friends kept flipping to the boobies. When you are 8 years old the only thing to know is that it is a thing to hide that you shouldn’t have, and that is sexually exciting.

John became aware of dirty movies through Visions in Anchorage, and he saw for the first time a dirty movie called The Great Texas Dynamite Chase (see RL32 and OM216). It was the first time he ever saw boobs in motion, a 1970s soft-core porno that tried to have a plot, but also had simulated sexual encounters. It is about a guy like the Duke brothers who was on the lam from the cops and picked up two hitchhikers in Daisy Duke shorts and they went on a bank-robbing spree and used dynamite as their weapon.

It was right in John’s wheelhouse, blowing up cop cars and cabins and they were having simulated sex. John knew what he wanted to do as he was growing up, he wanted to be the English guy with a suitcase full of bombs. John hasn’t seen that movie since, but it is burned into his head and he doesn’t even know if it is one of the great movies or if it is on Netflix. Does Netflix have dirty movies? A lot of stuff you can’t even get anymore today.

There was a wonderful window around 1982 when Merlin’s house had cable although they were not a wealthy family. They had Showtime, HBO, and MTV and it was like $15 a month, so Merlin saw some simulated sex and so much of that stuff they talk about got burned into his brain, like Stripes, Escape from New York, The Benny Hill Show, Alien, and some of those movies he would literally watch 6 times in a month because they were on constant rotation. On Showtime After Dark there were the kinds of movies John was just talking about.

Worrying about having your daughter grow up into a young woman (RL78)

During John’s whole life women have been very confusing, they have been people he admired and had entanglements with, he talks to them occasionally, he objectifies them all the time, and now he has a daughter and none of those methods work: He has no interest in objectifying her, he still struggles to talk to her because she is 2.5 years old, and he looks into her future as a young woman and an adult woman and is struggling to figure out how he can help her do this and he is scared to death.

When Merlin’s wife was pregnant her family threw a wonderful baby shower up in Rhode Island and one of his favorite family members, one of his brother in laws, an awesome guy and successful lawyer, was standing outside the door, already three sheets to the wind, and he said: ”Enjoy it while you can! Believe me, it changes when she hits about 11, with the sexting and the pictures and the snaps” Merlin’s wife is the youngest of 7 and all of her older siblings should all be fucking dead because they were permanently drunk driving through the 1970s, and now they are worried about taking photos of your cooch.

Around the time of Merlin’s Sophomore year drunk driving was the causes célèbre where there would be big campaigns on campus where they would drag a crashed car into it and they had to peel a kid out of it what was left of him. Merlin worries about that for a selfish reason because he doesn’t know how to handle it, but there is not that much you can do about it, you try to equip a kid to not be a dumb shit, but it is ironic that this guy who is now a very successful personal liability lawyer is worried about Merlin’s daughter’s future when he was out there literally drinking a case of beer a night.

John is going to equip his daughter with flame throwers. Although they were in the 1970s/80s consuming massive quantities of drugs and alcohol all the time and unsuperviseadly driving muscle care which cannot turn once they are moving in a straight line, at 120 mph with the headlights off and other wonderful things that characterized the 1980s, they were still all more or less in the dark about sex even after the sexual revolution. They were much less aware of the whole panoply of sex, John certainly was. Then Herpes and AIDS became a thing from when Merlin was in Junior High and he knew more about Herpes than he knew about vaginas. Herpes basically made 10 really painful vaginas on your penis.

They were downtown last week when Merlin’s daughter was wearing her Spiderman hoodie when he had to angrily correct three people who were calling her for Spidergirl. ”Fuck you, it is Spiderman, asshole!” Let her be Spiderman, it is fine, stop being so gender normative!

Bathroom selfies, sexual exchange over texting (RL78)

The kids with the pictures of their nakedness, like even teenage girls taking pictures of their boobs and stuff… this is not a thing John is happy about as a father. Merlin wonders that on all the selfies that ladies take in the bathroom, why do they look at the screen instead of at the lens? You know they are taking more than one, but can’t you just tap to get the focus and then look at the lens like a gentleman? The problem with girls of this generation is that if they look at themselves in the mirror they automatically make a duck face and you don’t want a duck face picture no matter what, so looking at the little screen and seeing yourself at one remove somehow breaks the duck face spell.

If Merlin were the kind of person who still read Roland Bart he would think about this a lot because the whole act of taking a photo of yourself in a mirror as a thing… you could almost take 500 selfies, adjust them for size, and they would basically be exactly the same silhouette, and they are always looking at the screen. John thinks that selfies are meaningless out of context and the point of a selfie is never the photograph itself, but that it is happening in real time and you know that the person who is sending you this picture is at that moment somewhere across town or across the world, getting naked for you now. If you go back and look at them later, you think: ”Oh, this is actually not a very good picture!” because now it is not happening.

In the immediate moment, a sexual exchange over texting is a form of communication, not an actual form of pornography, which is why taking those pictures out of context and sharing them on 4Chan is not the point of it. John is still looking at 4Chan because he needs to maintain his relationships with his online communities, his Pete Townshend albatross to bear. There are a lot of forums he has to visit and it takes up half his day.

A few years ago Merlin did a bit of light consulting for an independent record label and he told them that to understand most people on the Internet it is useful to remember that everybody out there is grooming a new version of their personality in real time in front of people. At the time MySpace was really big you had these horrible pages with the flashing things and the dancing bananas, but every single bit of bling on that page was about a brand association of some kind, a way of saying: ”I align myself with this!” and how do you make yourself the kind of company that someone would like to align themselves with?

John looking for a 1970s GMC Suburban (RL78)

John is looking for an old Suburban, but he doesn’t talk about a widow or a guy with a rake who is standing in his front yard. He has been looking at classic cars on the Internet for 15 years before there even was an Internet and the other day he was driving down the road somewhere in some rental car and some guy blew past him in an Austin-Healey and John is not getting any younger, he is already over the threshold where he is no longer a young guy in a hot car, but he is a middle-aged guy in a hot car and he doesn’t even have a hot car yet!

He doesn’t want to be a guy who looks like Wilford Brimley from the Diabetes commercial in a hot car, when you see a nice Camaro and inside is a 76-year old guy with diabetes. Because he grew up in that era, he keeps thinking that the only guys driving around in cars with Cragar rims or any kind of car with SS on the back are guys with a ducktail style beard and a pack of cigarettes rolled up in his T-shirt, like Harrison Ford or possibly Matthew McConaughey, but in reality they are decaying corpses. John doesn’t want to be that guy!

Somehow John has lost the ability to choose after looking for so long, but the other day he decided that he wants a big classic 4-wheel-drive Suburban. His taste is very specific, he wants a 3/4 ton from the late 1960s / early 1970s that only have 3 doors, but very cool doors, and he also likes the mid-1970s Suburbans. The problem with loving these cars is that they were flogged to death by people. You didn’t buy one and polish it and keep it in your garage, but you joined the forest service or you took it to tree-etnam out in fucking Nowhereland and at the exact moment the rust ate it from within it would fall apart from outside and it would turn into a pile of dust, meaning there are very few of those left.

John was wondering if someone owned the domain oldsuburban.com, but because he is an old man he accidentally typed it into Google instead and the first site that came up that was not a paid advertisement was a site that had not been updated since 2001 and it literally had dancing bananas, flash animations and a little counter at the bottom. The site was so hard to even be there, not just that it was hard to navigate and understand, but it was hard to even be there with all these things moving, all the question marks and things written in Comic Sans. That used to be the Internet, wherever you went!

Merlin’s next-door neighbor when he was a kid in the 1970s had a Suburban and the thing barely fit in the driveway. It was almost like a bus. John’s friend Kevin had one in the early 1980s and it was school bus yellow and he was just a 16-year old kid and he had such control over this vehicle, they would be speeding along down the street in Anchorage. They would have plowed the snow into a center-berm that was 4 feet tall of snow between the lanes of traffic, and Kevin could at 60 mph could pop the Suburban up, high-center it on this snow berm, kick on the emergency break that was a pedal on the left, and flip this Suburban around that it was pirouetting like a ballerina.

This was before anyone ever wore seatbelts and they were sliding around like ball bearings, thinking that it was great to be an American and this was the greatest time to be alive. They were listening to the Scorpions, driving this Suburban, and no-one could stop them, they drove this car like the Millennium Falcon. It stuck in John and now he is in his 40s and has a midlife crisis and wants to get exactly that Suburban, it is his Lolita, he wants this big freaking truck that gets 7 miles to the gallon.

Merlin’s friend Chris from college had an Austin-Healey Sprite and he thinks John would look so large in one of those. He is more partial to the big Healeys rather than the little ones, like the Austin-Healey 100. One time in Sarasota they were standing at a light and they were lower than a driver-side window and Chris said: ”You see that Yamaha over there? That has got a bigger engine than my car!” They could push-start it any time.

John’s problem with shopping for a Suburban on the Internet is: People who are selling old Suburbans are the number one misspellers of the word ”Original”, they all put an extra ”o” in that word so it says ”origional”. The one that John wants to buy has no punctuation marks in the whole ad and it says:

”I have a lifted 73 Suburban on 35s built motor has headers full exhauste [sic] intake carb has cam runs and drive great origional [sic] paint has nice weld wheels and pretty good tires interior’s like new no rips or tears [sic] has rubermake no carpet has dule shocks and has custom front drive line please call for more information have title in hand in my name I can text more picture”

Reading this makes John fighting for breath because he is reading it aloud in his head and it doesn’t scan well. Part of him feels like it is from Jabberwocky (Poem by Lewis Carroll) and part of him thinks it is E. E. Cummings because it might as well be. John is going to call this guy and talk to him about his truck and he is not going to say: ”Has full exhauste intake carb has cam runs?”, but he is just going to ask about the truck and whatever he replies John will hear with no punctuation. Maybe John will give him $1000 less than what he is asking and add a lightly used copy of Strunk & White (The Elements of Style).

John also has The Ann Landers Encyclopedia (A to Z: Improve Your Life Emotionally, Medically, Sexually, Socially, Spiritually by Eppie Lederer). Merlin will thrown in some Erma Bombeck because his humor is in the process of becoming like her’s. That is the problem with aging and becoming conservative: You start to laugh about jokes about pot holders. ”My new perfume is baby poop!”, is a joke made by Scott Simpson a while back, he had kids before Merlin.

Is the Internet a net-positive? Becoming more conservative with age (RL78)

Not long ago John saw a kid who had to be still in High School at 17 years old, driving an Austin-Healey 3000 with his High School girlfriend sitting next to him, their hair blowing in the wind, and he knew that his father must be some criminal defense attorney or worse, and they live in a big waterfront house with a waterski boat parked out front, and he is driving this Austin-Healey to town because his dad threw him the keys and said: ”Go crazy at the Junior Prom!”, but John really wanted to run this kid off the road. It just wasn’t right, it was some 90210 shit that shouldn’t happen in Seattle.

Rich people also having their problems

Merlin follows a Tumblr called richkidsofinstagram. People kept sending John a link to this back when he sometimes used to tweet that life is hard for everybody and everybody wakes up in the morning and goes: ”Oh boy, here we go!” There is nobody who has it easy. Eric Clapton’s son fell out of a hotel window, everybody got a tragedy, and being rich doesn’t solve anything. People pushed back: ”No, bullshit!”, and John got set a lot of links to this Tumblr with all these smug little twerps taking pictures of themselves in their dad’s plane, and after spending 20 minutes with this thing he realized he never saw so many miserable people in his life.

Merlin says there are few things in life more lonely than being unsympathetic, although it is a first-world problem or a white whine, but everybody does have their problems. John can’t help but think that there is no-one on Instagram who is really living a good life. Merlin tried it twice. How many desaturated pictures of birds on a telephone wire do we need? John has always felt like he lived somewhat in a ghetto of a certain kind of thinker, being associated with the University, wearing a guitar for a living, but in his life on the Internet he is seeing the borders of it and he is not sure that this is the enlightened and beautiful capital of Futuretown that everybody thinks it is. As Kurt Vonnegut said: It is a bunch of bacteria drowning in their own shit, not realizing that they are making Champagne.

The early vision of the Internet that didn’t hold up

John doesn’t know if the Internet is a net-positive. The first time he heard about it back in the early 1990s he imagined it like every futurist as the sum total of human knowledge, a completely free and neutral space where intelligences can mix with one another unencumbered by their physical attributes or their class, a bit like Tron, but as a library, a completely blank space, a pure white dessert that can be fresh and new an intelligent. Now it seems more like a swap meet at an old drive-in where people are playing Three-card Monte, yet there is also the hovering billboard from Blade Runner and the ads are yelling at you.

The lack of a middle ground, everybody is being a radical

John has always self-identified as a radical, but he has also always been very impatient of the kind of institutional radicalism that characterizes the Left. You want to disassociate yourself with people on the Left saying that Christopher Columbus was a genocidal maniac, we have all read it, but just because somebody wrote it doesn’t make it true. The hyper-ridgeousness of the edge does a lot of work of pushing the boundary, but it also devalues the middle fringe, which is actually getting work done.

The problem now is that on the Internet, if you take a stand anywhere against the fringe you are posited immediately as a member of the opposite fringe. The nuances are getting beaten out of everywhere except in little pockets on Matt Haughey’s site. There are places where people are talking, but they increasingly feel like little domes of silence where very few people walk in, they check their swords and pistols at the door, and for the time they are going to be there they agree to the rules of decorum and the agree not to call anyone a Hitler or a baby-raper, and not to write in all caps.

But the rest of the Internet? You follow a news story, you end up on a news site that is talking about this funny lady who rescues bats for a living, how cute, and you decide to watch the video, and you make the mistake of of scrolling down, and the first comment says: ”If it wasn’t for Obamacare, bats wouldn’t get sick!” and there are 1500 other comments. Unless you are prepared to go into an ivory tower somewhere on the Internet to talk to people, there is nowhere to be where you are not oscillating between clickbait news item, pop-up ad, and ignorant people screaming ignorantly at each other.

John realizing he is becoming more conservative with age

John was walking down the street in normal life and he was wrestling with the feeling that at the age of 44 he was at a point in his life where a natural kind of conservatism is starting to enter his thinking, the famous adage by Churchill that if you are not a Liberal at a young age you don’t have a heart, and when you are not a Conservative when you are an old man you don’t have a brain. This natural Conservatism comes into your life in your mid-40s when you have just seen enough and you look around and think: ”Yeah, alright kid! But here is how life really works!” and you are not willing anymore to be imposed upon so much, you start to appreciate a little bit of quiet and a little bit of comfort. You shake your fist at people whose stereos are too loud.

It is a quality of middle age that you need to resist, this inexorability of building a taller fence. As John was resisting his own natural trend to personal conservatism he was arguing with himself in the voice of these Internet templates and he jumped back out at himself and rejected this model. You can not accuse everyone of classism, racism, or sexism who doesn’t conform to the most radical interpretation of any scenario. There is a middle that is really where we should all aspire to be.

Being shouted down when you see both sides of a thing

John heard the Internet ringing in his ears as he was walking along, trying to navigate his aging and he realized the Internet was a legitimately bad influence. People are not rewarded on the Internet for having middle-opinions, or middle-brow views. No-one is rewarded for compromise or for seeing both sides of the story. The person who says: ”Can’t we all get along? Let’s see both sides of this!” is shouted down immediately. To be the character in a novel who is mostly totally disagreeable, mabye even evil, but they have a redeeming quality, that is often enough to make a story and to make the world go round.

The Internet is rewarding people for extremism in very subtle ways, and it is depriving people of the natural reward they should be feeling when they say that they see both sides of this. In the past that was how civilization got built: People got to a certain age and started to see the other side a little bit now and everyone would stroke their chins and take another puff on their pipes and maybe they would resolve that property difference or the question of whether the beer is too hoppy.

Now we have created a place that we are going to invest our time and intellectual energy in, and the combination of anonymity and distance from one another means there are no physical consequences, no risk of of a punch in the nose, we are creating a human environment where radicalism is rewarded, and that is going to have disastrous consequences.

Radicalism today doesn’t cost anything anymore

According to Merlin the problem with that radicalism is that it doesn’t have a cost. Martin Luther King would never have had an impact if he had sat at home, eating fucking Cheetos, and typing on Twitter, or asking people to support his fucking fund run. He went out there and threw himself on the levers. It doesn’t cost anything, but you still get your ribbon for being the fucking Che Guevara in 140 characters, even if you haven’t really done anything, and you get to be a sniper character, trying to pluck out people on the other side of the DMZ who don’t agree with you.

You stay entrenched, and there is nothing to be gained by developing a more nuanced or intelligent argument, and the kind of problem that used to be mostly restricted to pro wrestling and Congress now goes everywhere because there is a permanent state of identifying and getting personal branding based on which kind of sniper you decided to be and whom you decided to pick off and whom you high-fived for getting a shot-off, and it doesn’t cost a fucking thing.

Not wanting to be taken advantage of anymore, shielding yourself off

John has noticed that it also devalues the instances where somebody does jump up and says something radical because they are immediately dismissed as a troll. He is at a turning point in his life where he has to tell himself at a daily basis that every day there is some reason where he feels like that the easy path in middle age is to confirm stereotypes, confirm biases, and your heart-worn experience allows you to not be tolerant. You turn a certain point, no matter your proclivities, and you decide you don’t want to be taken advantage of anymore, you don’t want to be a rube or a fool, and inevitably that causes a certain hardening.

You no longer give money to panhandlers where you once did, you no longer roll your window down to a guy running up on the street with a broken fan belt. It is a gradual process. John has done nothing but laugh in the face of anyone approaching him holding a fan belt for 15 years. Increasingly he is fighting a battle against himself about the creeping transition toward comfort away from struggle, and struggle rewards you in ways that comfort can not, and struggle requires that you not succumb to cliché and stereotype and that is increasingly difficult.

As John Hodgman is fond of saying: You cannot run as fast as you did when you were 20, nor can you think as fast, and it is additional work to wake up in the morning and tell yourself that you are going to approach every person as an individual today and you are going to take on scenarios that you think you know the answer to already, and increasingly he finds that his online life is not especially helpful. Maybe if he was on MetaFilter exclusively?

Merlin quotes the great drunk John Wayne during his Stanford Commencement Speech: ”I didn’t say that for clapping!” He only goes back to MetaFilter twice a month and looks at the most-faved posts. It has become too big and has lost the sense of personhood. We are all in our own little car, honking our horns at people because of a millisecond misdecision on their part. Do you want to get better at that, or do you want a louder horn? Journalists are not all liberals, but they seem like that because they like asking a lot of annoying questions. You don’t necessarily become more conservative when you get older, but you have seen a whole lot of people’s radical ideas and you know which ones worked and which one didn’t.

Questlove’s essay describing that his appearance is scaring people, John getting pushback when posting it

Questlove wrote an essay on the Trayvon Martin Case. He is the Roots drummer who plays on the Jimmy Fallon show. It is a very thoughtful personal essay in the style of someone who is simply saying how it is for him, a personal and touching anecdote that you cannot argue with, it is not a political comment at all except that at the end he ties it to the national conversation.

He is describing his private experiences as a large black guy with a gigantic Afro, and his success and his fame and the fact that he is a beloved person who now lives in a door-manned building, having achieved everything that he set out to and more, but he is still subject to a kind of treatment where people are scared of him because of how he looks and he has been aware of that his whole life, but it still wears him down over time in a way that everybody can relate to. If only more people wrote with this kind of simple candor, if our national conversation included voices like this, like Obama’s speech to the same effect!

John posted a link to it, saying that everybody should read this great thing, and he immediately got a bunch of pushback in the form of: ”Well, this is not the whole story!” and he was astonished how primed the world is to reject even the best-hearted attempts to say that we are not here to take your guns. In 1975 Time Magazine was the only national den that everybody read, and something like that would never appear in Time Magazine, but also we had no sense of the great hundreds of thousands of people who read Time Magazine every week and threw it against the wall and said that those were a bunch of Jimmy Carter communists, like the police office from A Confederacy of Dunces (Novel by John Kennedy Toole). Now we have insight into all these dark corners.

The people who are following John on Twitter are presumably not a broad cross-section of America, but they are a self-selected group of Indie twerps and comedy computer-nerds and people who are animating bird-GIFs to appear. Merlin has never felt worse about three nouns than ”comedy computer-nerd”, it is depressing, but it is a big part of John’s demographic.

But even among those people: The guy who commented on John’s Questlove post is probably not a racist or a gun-nut in the Idaho mountains, but he is probably a kid who feels like he has to take this oppositional position because there is no place in his world to read something and go: ”Hmmm, well… that is interesting!” He has been called a racist so much for expressing middle-of-the-road views that he is beginning to feel that maybe he is a racist, and he is being pushed to the right by living in a world where there is no room for him to be slightly to the right of the middle. John is more and more reading people on the Internet who are taking stances who they really don’t own, but they have been nudged there by the fact that there is no room there to say that there are two sides to every coin.

Merlin repeats his point that the problem is that it doesn’t cost anything. John is feeling the cost because he actually fucking cares and inhabits the point of view, which is costly, and it makes bruises on John’s heart like an apple at the bottom of a bin.

Merlin interrupts the programming because he has to pee

John going to lunch with his dad friends, his daughter having become a real person (RL78)

Today John went to lunch with his young dad friends. The other guys’ babies are all much younger and John is up until know the one with the most experience who can say: ”Listen, it gets better… Here is the deal: Don’t give them a pacifier because then they are going to be the pacifier baby!” Today one of them had a little baby strapped into a carriage who couldn’t move and the other one has a baby that is so little that he left it with the mom, and John was the only one with the 2.5 year old sitting on the lap, going: ”Daddy, we have to go!” - ”Hey, we are having lunch with some friends!” - ”We have to go!”

Now John is the one with the kid who is behaving like a little person rather than a fat little bug in a basket, and John’s friends are in the same situation he was in two years ago where they think that this kid is not turning out too well, and John’s parenting is on display. He goes to the supermarket and she starts yelling about Daddy’s pipi and he has to look around, saying: ”No, it is not like that! We are potty-training!” while the cops and the Sheriff’s department are already pulling up.

Merlin also gets a lot of penis-talk. They were walking home from school the other day and she told him that her new band is going to be called Bird Penis Fart Poop, which was pretty good! Merlin has dulled out a lot of fucking wisdom about being a father and along the way people have told him it is complicated, so he is done being fucking wise. His brother in law with the drinks (see RL77) recommended three books to Merlin before he could go in and take a leak. He was pretty close to wearing a pink Oxford-cloth shirt tucked into his jeans. He was the quarterback in High School, but he was not a dork, he went to a really good school, he is a lawyer and a smart guy, but like anyone with a daughter 10-years and older he is broken by life.

On Wednesday is going to be their last daddy-daughter-comics-day before she starts elementary school! ”Is she going to wear her Spiderman costume?” - ”Which one?” - ”Nerd!” Now she is into Project Runway! Merlin is done being wise, he has nothing to share. You are going to fuck up a lot and you have to be okay with that. John is fine with it, and fortunately the child has a mother. Merlin thinks it must drive John crazy to not be able to help her more. With fully grown adults and people on the Internet he is trying to apply a certain amount of helpful pressure.

The other day John realized that he is prejudiced against delicate people. Merlin can’t believe that John only realized that now, but John had not identified them as a subspecies before and had not seen it as a full-blown prejudice. Merlin thinks that is like Bull Connor saying that he realized that sometimes he is a little intolerant of black people (He used a form of the n-word). Some delicate people were just hearty people that needed some help and some were legitimately delicate and needed to be protected from the sun. There are bird people with thin bones.

John’s mom suggests that some time in the human past people were selectively choosing very delicate women to be their court ladies and unfortunately some little boys were born with similar traits.

Now John wonders that maybe he is so sturdy because there is an inner class issue dating back to Britannia, he was bread to pull a plow, and he is mad at the bird people with their bird skulls and their blue veins that he can see through their translucent skin because he is still pulling the plow. He applies pressure to the world in the hopes that he can make the part of the world that connects with him a little sturdier to its own benefit, but he cannot apply the same pressure on his little daughter past a certain point because she most definitely is who she is.

Any amount of pressure on her beyond just the normal: ”You will call me Sir in this house!”, any attempt of trying to shape her like: ”Hey honey, I want you to consider the crew team!” is not going to work. She is already showing a preference for certain kinds of books over certain other books, like she prefers the potty book featuring a duck over the potty book featuring a pig, and of course there is one with both ducks and pigs that is the bestseller.

John’s instinct has always been to get right inside people’s heads to tinker, but now this little person has come to him through some magic witchcraft and John cannot tinker much with her because most of other people’s weakness is a product of some pussy upbringing or some bullshit they learned in college and that they have been applauded for, but every personality trait pf his daughter, none of them can claim responsibility for and he just needs to get out of her way!

Merlin used to say that his daughter brought out the best of him, but he now is pretty sure she brings out very near the worst in him, and that is only his own fault. He used to think that the worst fight he is going to have with himself is being a helicopter father, which he still is. Tonight they were watching the Project Runway Season 2 finale and he wanted to sit still to see if Chloe wins, but his daughter was really tired, spinning around and coming very close to hitting her head on a corner of something, which Merlin has a real paranoia about.

Both John and Merlin had a gash in their head at one time when they were kids. In the same way that if you made it through the depression you don’t want your kids to be hungry and you save money. John had a gash in his head and Jewish Geld poured out, which actually saved his family. He was the gelden-goosen-scheisse!

Merlin wants to be like a big brother that his daughter admires, he wants her to like him and to think he is cool, and he wants to be able to say something very wise to her and see in her eyes how she realizes how very right he is. More and more often he realizes though how completely full of shit he is. From the beginning he believed that he should get out of her way and let her become the person she is going to be, but now he has to put his money where his mouth is. He is very supportive of whatever she wants to do, as long as it is about comics, and right now she is really into drawing.

John planning for his daughter’s first driving lesson (RL78)

John has already rehearsed her first driving lesson so many times. First of all he is going to put on his driving lesson costume with a brass spy glass and a scimitar, some cyberpunk modern Major General, and he will have bought and restored a car just for this moment. Her first driving lesson is going to last a month and a half and they are going to leave the home… this is all getting her ready for Tierra del Fuego (see RL47).

She is going to be 15.5 years old and she is going to tell him that she wants to learn how to drive a car, and he is going to walk over to an oil painting on the wall, slide it over to the side, punch in a 15-number code into a keypad, and the floor is going to slide open and they are going to go down into a mine shaft where the Batmobile awaits. Before she will be allowed to get into the car there will be a 5-hour long checklist and they are going around the car and look at everything and she is going to test the tensile-strength of every single spoke in the wire wheels of this Austin-Healey 100 and she will say: ”I would rather never drive!” - ”You are not ready!”

John worries that he will be giving her driving lessons when she is 7 and she is sitting next to him, trying to look at her Dora the Explorer coloring book and John will tell her: ”See what this semi is doing right now? This could cause an accident! If I had not been looking 15 seconds ahead we would be in a very different lane right now. Do you understand that, young lady?”

Merlin showing his daughter Kung Fu movies (RL78)

Merlin has been showing his daughter Kung Fu movies, he is probably going to turn her into one of those people who believe they are superheroes and fight crime in Downtown San Francisco, like X-23. She might also turn into a superhero assassin. Every single time you have ever seen a Kung Fu movie with awesome fighting in it, the very first thing you want to do as soon as that scene ended is to jump in the air and kick somebody in the face.

The worst that came out of Merlin’s mouth last week was that he wanted her to show her a scene from Ip Man and one from Enter the Dragon, but only if she would promise that she won’t start hitting and kicking things. It worked out half great. She is 5.5 years old and she is smart enough to know that Merlin is full of shit and she has done nothing but kicked him for 5 days and he deserved every single one of them. What did he think he was going to get?

Last night John put the baby to bed, she was feeling a bit fuzzy and didn’t want to, and he offered her to watch some Michael Jackson videos. They watched Billie Jean and the watched Beat It and by the end of Beat It she was standing on the bed, dancing a 2.5-year old Michael Jackson dance. John was confident that he could still reel this in, it wasn’t going to mean that she was going to be on living color (Merlin remarks that John sounds like his dad and John imitates his dad for a while).

The video to Billie Jean not only makes no sense, but is deeply, profoundly cheesy plus creepy, and yet every second that Michael Jackson is on the screen is an unimpeachable moment. John is not going to show it her again, but Beat It is massive! Holy cats! It is like an entire season of 21 Jump Street! There is so much going on in that! Because John’s daughter is a toddler she still lives in a world where there is not a tremendous differentiation between dream land and awake land, and certainly when she is around Daddy who although he can’t conjure an orb (see RL74) can seemingly conjure many things like Macaroni and Cheese or music on the stereo or Michael Jackson on the iPad. Daddy is amazing, still!

John showed her a Teletubbies for the first time not very long ago and she has only seen one episode, but they still say: ”Uh oh, Tinky Winky!” which has removed itself of any connection to Teletubbies and it has just become a catch phrase in their family that means: ”You are done goofed!” Their friend of the show John Siracusa has something that Merlin really wished he had gotten his hands around earlier: He has an older son and he refuses to even acknowledge that the Star Wars prequel trilogy even exists. They are there, and if they find the Blurays that is okay, but he is not going to acknowledge that they exist. Merlin thinks that Teletubbies needs to be on that level. You have to be very carful what you introduce because you never know what will stick. John deeply admires that concept.

Outro

Is Siracusa some kind of Italian name? There is no ”z” in Siracusa. He is the smartest guy who listens to the show. When it comes to ethnic people John’s grandparents were racist primarily against Italians and Irish for good reason, and as more and more musicians revert to the music of John’s great-grandparents, which in the words of Carl Newman (from Zumpano) is shouting over fiddles, John feels like his retro affectation is going to be racism against Catholics. Fucking papists!

Unless otherwise stated, the content of this page is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License