This week, Merlin and John talk about:
Table of Contents
|
The Problem: John feels like ripping America out of the wall, referring to John’s alarm system beeping randomly, making him want to rip it out of the wall and not only that, but all of America, because all companies are providing the same shitty service these days.
The show title refers to John wanting to found his own secret organization that is reality is an intelligence service. He might call it The Roderick Group because that is one of those names where you get no idea what they do.
They start the show singing each other’s names. John sings the usual, Merlin a variant of Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love To Town by Kenny Rogers and The First Edition. It is early!
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 Please do not quote these texts directly without applying your own editing first!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.
The saying The Worm Has Turned (RL83)
The worm has turned! (by Shakespeare) John has used that phrase forever and he thought that it meant ”Now the shoe is on the other foot!”, but in fact it means literally that even the worm one day will rise up if you insult him enough. If you step on the worm, even the worm will turn. Merlin likes that definition better. John feels he can no longer use that in the events of his everyday life, but he has to save it because it is a heavy phrase. In almost every instance where he uses it the other person is the worm and he would be singing their anthem.
Like Samuel L. Jackson in Pulp Fiction: He is saying a Bible verse over and over and at the end he realizes it means something else. He is going through a transitional period, maybe he is laying his guns down? (lyrics of Lay Your Gun Down by In This Moment).
Being a progressive in the current entitlement culture (RL83)
John has been laying his guns down lately and he doesn’t know what is going to come of it. The other day someone wrote him a very nice letter. They all joke that this podcast is helping people, but then there is the next level where people say: ”All kidding aside: It really does help!” and there are multiple levels above that. Merlin saw a lot of nice responses to that, too and it is almost like John’s follow-up on the Welsh Troll. In this letter they said that John should compile his thoughts into some kind of volume because that would be a very helpful manual to people.
John doesn’t agree with that because more and more he is renouncing his own code. Although people are terrible draggers and bad citizens who need corrective measures, and although many people every day should get a light punch in the nose, some should get a stronger punch in the nose, John no longer feels confident that history isn’t against us. It seemed to be just a passive phase where the culture is so concerned about ”Where is my parade?” and there is overwhelming focus on rights that are being infringed upon and a constant licking of our wounds and a doubling down on our pique, but maybe this is the language now and this is the way that people think and speak?
The insidiousness of it doesn’t mean that it isn’t the new truth, and John doesn’t want to be on the wrong side of history, even though history has turned wrong. He needs to be able to tell people that there is a better way or a more elegant way without fuming so much because fuming is the most neutered and infertile response to anything. John has to engage this culture on its terms, but he resents it.
Merlin thinks that John’s recent attitude makes sense. When you are in a club and somebody slaps you with a white glove, you are totally entitled to punch that people on the nose. A lot of people who don’t know how are emailing John gloves, and that doesn’t scale.
There is the apocryphal guy who believes in a gentleman’s handshake and then the unscrupulous developer shows up with bulldozers and tears down his house because the guy didn’t read the fineprint. Although we all agreed that the guy who believes in a gentleman’s agreement is morally and ethically the hero of that poem, he still got his house torn down. You have to learn to read the fineprint! More and more it seems like the fineprint is oversensitivity, hyper-consciousness of language to the exclusion of meaning and a complete focus on the surface-realms of umbrage, insult, and very little interest in generalism.
These are the college kids that even 20 years ago would sit and debate the finer points of… (Merlin didn’t let John finish the sentence), but right now transgender rights are indistinguishable from liking Android and people want to have the same kind of heated argument that goes nowhere that comes down to: ”I wish more people agree to be like me!”, which history has born out as not a very fruitful way to go. If you want a parade, then go start your own fucking parade and don’t care who comes and don’t care who likes it or not! That is empowerment!
Empowerment is not sitting around, waiting for people to use the right word to make you feel like a whole human, but to live your life the way you want and being imperturbable about the people who see you as less than you want to be. There is no amount of parsing language that is going to fucking improve that. The best way for that to evolve is for everybody who wants to be in that parade to all walk in the same direction and not worry who likes it or not.
If John had chosen in college to be an electrical engineer, which is a good-paying job, he would now be living in a culture of engineers, sitting around at their drafting tables, their AutoCAD terminals, and their function machines. Engineers tend to be very process oriented and within that culture John would be able to adopt whatever world-view he wanted to and maintain it irrespective of what the outside world is doing because he is living in his engineer igloo or his Miners & Trappers Ball gang.
Instead John has chosen to be a progressive who is engaged with the leftist culture of the world. He is not a wonk, but he spent his whole life being engaged in the culture of ideas, and this is where the culture of ideas seems to be trending. So often he gets letters from people who work in universities and who appreciate what they do, and at the end of the page the always feel very good-naturedly to add one little tag sentence saying something about how we need to take more feminist theory classes or how ping-pong is ping pong, some good-natured, but still pointed lecture that we are doing it wrong.
It always comes from the same place: They love that John and Merlin are thinking outside of the mental apartment blocks, but in the end they are also confident that they are doing it wrong and that joke racism isn’t funny and that joking isn’t funny when it comes to those uber-serious topics of identity. Because John has chosen progressivism as his language, he can’t make himself invulnerable to that, he can’t say: ”You don’t get it! You are not hip!”, but he has to engage progressives on their turfs.
Things like that don’t bother Merlin. Everybody is entitled to an opinion. It is nice that people want to make a connection. We all have a personal brand of how we want the world to see us and what things we choose to associate ourselves with, and part of the brand are stories that have to have a beginning, middle, end, and they have to not have plot-holes. When you have a story in your head about how something goes and then you find out something like that the dumb lawyers drove drunk, you can’t help but have that not sit right in your head and you turn it over because it doesn’t fit the story or the brand.
This gets heavily amplified on the web and in social media interactions because we stop noticing the huge amount of DNA that has us be similar, mostly people who can afford to have a computer and an Internet connection, and it goes into a narcissism of minor differences about this one thing we can’t reconcile in that story, and that is what people get fixated on. There have always been bad parties and we have always had the ability to walk aware from them, you and your racist friend!
John’s alarm system (RL83)
When John first moved into his house his neighbors told him that he had to get an alarm because there are a lot of break-ins and enterings, but John has his own security system in the form of tiger traps and a collection of swords in an umbrella stand by the door. But the insisted that a friend of them got broken into 3 times, although they had dogs, but the thieves just threw some steaks up on the porch, the dogs ran out to get the steaks, the thieves ran in and shut the door behind the dogs and took everything.
John agreed to get an alarm system, but like any other time when you want to order a service, just like ordering the phone or the Internet, it is a whole menu of different services and attendant charges, and the menu is never right. John cancelled his cable because he was insulted that his Internet cost $100 and cable was $5 extra. It is why he doesn’t subscribe to the New York times because the Sunday issue is $8 a month and then you can get it every day of the week for $8.25. Fuck you!
John got an alarm system installed, but because he doesn’t have a land line he had to get an alarm system that was cellphone based so that when somebody breaks into your house it can send an alert over the cellular wires. He knew that this thing was a placebo that would never protect him from burglary or fire or from anything, but anytime he leaves his house he pushes the buttons on the wall and it gives him a reassuring series of beeps and he can walk out of the house, secure in the knowledge that there is a fake thing guarding his house that is somehow going to act as a deterrent against whatever meth-y burglar wants to get in his house.
It is a cheap-ass system and when it went off none of his neighbors would hear it, let alone respond to it. Calling the company itself there would be so many dropped calls that it would take 20 minutes to send the message and then the cops would be there 4 hours later. Just recently, after being in John’s house for 4-5 years, the alarm has decided to have a malfunction and now it just beeps at random times. John called the company and went through a whole process with their customer service person where she tried everything she could to fix it from a long distance to no avail, and now it wakes John up in the middle of the night.
Not only does John feel like ripping it out of the wall, but he feels like ripping America out of the wall. This company called Monitronics knows that it is a shit service, it is a national company that is probably owned by a series of off-shore shell companies and ultimately it is probably owned by Halliburton. It is a pyramid scheme that is trying to get more customers all the time, but they are not trying to provide service. While John is talking his alarm is beeping multiple times in the background.
When John left Verizon (RL83)
Since John got his first cell phone he had been on Verizon for 8 years and he wanted to get an iPhone, but they didn’t have it. He told the lady that he had been on month-to month for 5 years and he was going to cancel his service because he wants to get an iPhone and had to go to AT&T although he didn’t like them any better. She told him that he came in 1.5 years ago when he dropped his phone in the bathtub and at that time he signed a new contract, which means he is not on month-to-month anymore, and it will cost him $300 to get out of this contract.
That is their game: They didn’t tell him that he was signing a new contract, but they offered to give him a brand-new phone for only $25, which sounded nice! When John was talking to this woman on the phone he was so mad and he said: ”This is your idea of customer service? I will never use Verizon again!” - ”You are calling to cancel your Verizon service. Why would I think you were going to use Verizon again?” - ”Life is long, lady! There are another 50 years of me interacting with phone companies and you are burning this bridge right now over some couple hundred bucks. That is your attitude and next time you will have the iPhone and like a little patient lamb I will just be led over to be tied up at your coral!”
John being frustrated about customer service, ant exterminators wanting him to sign up for a plan (RL83)
John is back to wanting to put a flamethrower to everybody, but that can’t continue to be his method. Him wanting to tear America out of the wall makes Merlin very emotional. Every one of those companies is a shit storm. How many people do you see walking around in a Verizon shirt and being really happy? All those start-ups down in San Francisco just shovel that shit out the door and let people deal with it and they will have their $100 million and be onto the next garbage pile.
Merlin had a similar galling experience with customer service that really killed him when he wanted to do something with his phone plan and they told him that he had just re-upped his contract a few months ago when he had added tethering so he could use his phone to connect his iPad to the Internet and he asked them to charge him extra for something that really is an invisible non-service, and that renewed his contract with them, which is really gracious of them: You pay for it and then you get that!
Merlin really wished he could just deal with people and have a relationship where he didn’t constantly have to monitor exactly how and when he is being fucked. Whether or not that is a company that keeps emailing him stuff even though he never signed up for anything. What you pay for a phone really adds up and it makes Merlin’s world small and makes him do stuff. Right now he has his phone forwarded to Google Voice because he doesn’t get real phone calls anymore. This afternoon he got a call that he didn’t know what it is about because he doesn’t speak Spanish. It might be about Refined Mortgages, but Merlin doesn’t even have a mortgage.
John had an exterminator come to fix his ant problem. The woman on the phone told him that because ants are really hard to eradicate they would have a guy come out with a free estimate, and of course the guy came out at 8:30am on the one day when John had somewhere to be at 9:15am. The guy said it was a $275 process to get rid of the ants and John agreed, he was not going to send him away or comparison-shop, but he just wanted him to get rid of the ants now.
He pulled out some paperwork to sign John up for a plan because ants are really hard to get rid of and usually they will kill the ants and then they come back. If John will sign up for a plan for $49 a month, then every time they will come back it will just be a $79 charge, but if John won’t sign up, then every time they will have to charge him $300 again. Does that mean John will pay them $49 a month forever, or at what point will they be confident that the ants won’t come back, but ants are really hard to eradicate.
John had him come out to kill some ants and he did not think he was joining a club or a cult or whatever thing this is. The business model of half of the American companies is that people will sign up for Direct Pay and forget about it. John would just sit here like a milk cow for the next 20 years while this company will just deduct $50 a month for the ants to never come back. In the end the guy killed the ants and it has been two weeks and John hasn’t seen an ant, but he wouldn’t be surprised to eventually catch that guy in the bushes with a bucket of ants.
The other day John went out and saw a hive of ants in his driveway, he went in the house very patiently, put the mail in his mail jar, put the keys in the key cup, took his coat and shoes off, put on his loafers and his cardigan sweater, went into the kitchen, boiled a pot of water, carried it out into the driveway and poured it down the ant hole. It was total carnage and he heard a million souls scream out all at once and then go silent and he felt no remorse, but he felt only peace.
Merlin’s daughter taking on John’s bits, throwing a garbage can through the window (RL83)
Yesterday Merlin drove back from his sister in law and he listened to When I Pretend to Fall all the way through. At some point Merlin turned around to his daughter and told her that this was Uncle John. John is known in Merlin’s household for doing something podcasty with him and they listen to his records a lot, but what his daughter knows him for mainly is something she can recite from memory: ”What are we going to do?” - ”You go outside, you take off your clothes, you throw a garbage can through the window and you set the place on fire!”
After John first suggested that as a palliative for dealing with the stuff on Merlin’s daughter’s burger they went back to that place in Merlin’s neighborhood and he looked the woman in the eyes and said: ”This is my daughter. She is 5 and it is very important that when you make her burger that is has exactly three things on it: It should have some bread in the form of a bun, it should have a meat burger and it should have cheese, but there should be absolutely nothing else on it!” and then Merlin’s daughter added that if they got it wrong they would go outside, take off their clothes, throw a garbage can through the window and set the place on fire.
This proves that we get to tell our own story for a while, but if the story is really good then eventually it is not our own story anymore and it becomes somebody else’s story.
Merlin having no demerits in military school (RL83)
Merlin did really poorly in biology. When he was in 7th grade in military school he had perfect grades and perfect deportment. He had straight As and he was the only person in his company of 120 kids who didn’t have a demerit all year because he was scared. Then he went into consumer math in 8th grade and it was downhill from there.
John in the Civil Air Patrol (RL83)
John often reflects on his cadet years in the Civil Air Patrol. There were a couple of points along the way where his life could have gone a very different route. He was in the Civil Air Patrol in Alaska in the 1970s and most of the facilities that they were afforded by the Air Force at the time had generally been built in World War II. Whenever the Air Force built a new building and moved into it, they would abandon the World War II building and then the Civil Air Patrol was giving access to these shabby places. There was a weird military mothball smell to everything, the doors all shut really solidly, but there was a sense that there was black mold in the walls and it was always very cold.
None of it felt like that pursuing a career in the military was going to be a safe and enveloping environment. John was on a military base in his early teens, but they were completely disinterested in him, in his thought, or in who he was, but he was being judged entirely on his deportment. Whatever people find in the military culture, like they want the challenge or they want to excel and succeed in a realm where excellence is measurable, those things were not communicated to John in an appealing way and he always felt estranged in that environment.
Although John was the biggest military Army nutcase as a kid and he went into that cadet program with a real passion for it, he came out the other side disaffected. It wasn’t a good cultural fit, even before… it was not like John went to bootcamp and said: ”Wait a minute! There is no room in here for my artistic sensibility!”, but he was 12 years old and he just didn’t get off on it while he watched other kids really get off on it.
John’s dad being member of the Quiet Birdmen (RL83)
John’s dad was a Colonel in the Civil Air Patrol. Being the Wing Legal Officer entitled him to wear a white turtleneck, a blue blazer, and a crest with an eagle grasping a propeller in gold braid on the pocket of his jacket (something like that probably) as his uniform. It was incredible, such a bad-ass and he was the only one while everybody else was in Air Force uniforms. As Wing Legal Officer, like with everything he did he assumed that 80% of the rules of the organization didn’t apply to him.
He was also a member of a secret organization called the Quiet Birdmen, an organization founded after World War I by former fighter aces, a group that started meeting in some Italian restaurant in New York City in 1920. You could not join them, but you had to be tapped and invited by the current membership, it only cost $1 to join and then you were a life member. Eddie Rickenbacker, Charles Lindbergh and Neil Armstrong were members. John still has all of his dad’s Quiet Birdmen stuff. He has talked to other children of Quiet Birdmen and after their fathers died someone from the Quiet Birdmen showed up to collect the membership card and all their paraphernalia. That didn’t happen in John’s case and he challenges all his listeners to try and come get it, but you have to go nose to nose with the old Monitronics (John’s alarm system).
John’s dad would go to Quiet Birdmen meetings, of which there were many in Alaska because that is where old astronauts go to retire. It was like with fraternity and he would not tell John the secret Phi Gamma Delta handshake. John even asked him on his death bed and he said: ”No chance!” and he died with it. He was even more secretive about the Quiet Birdmen and when John asked what happened at those meetings he would just say that everybody else gets drunk and they would tell dirty jokes. It didn’t sound like him for a second and John didn’t believe it.
Of all the other shit that his dad was into, John wondered what the Quiet Birdmen were up to. If you go online and try to figure it out online, it is like the Bohemian Grove: You get a glancing overview, but everything else is secret, so ”Go fuck yourself!” Why in the hell would Warren Buffet sit out in the trees with Henry Kissinger for a week? What is in it for him? They would just say that they would tell dirty stories. Merlin is guessing teenage girls.
John is scared enough of the organization that he would not try to impersonate a Quiet Birdmen. The average age of them is probably 84 and they would know in an instant when John would walk in the door: ”What is this? A flap or an aileron?” - ”Eh..” - ”Show me your hands!”
Merlin having his dad’s freemason lighter on display (RL83)
Merlin is the first one in three generations who is not in any secret organizations. His grandfather and father were in Scottish Rite, his mom was in Rainbow Girls (International Order of the Rainbow for Girls) and her ”boyfriend” who was a figure skater was in DeMolay. Those are secret organizations and you are not allowed to talk about it, but it is not secret enough that you don’t know what the logo looks like.
Merlin had his dad’s old lighters on display in his office at his first job where he had a private office that he could decorate. It was maybe 15 cool old lighters from Korea and stuff like that. One of them had the symbol with the compass and the G from the Freemasons in it and when a local printer came in to talk about a job and asked Merlin if he was a Mason, but that was just his dad’s lighter. They guy asked Merlin if he was interested to join and he said it like he was offering him a lollypop from a white van, and as Merlin declined he slid his card across his desk and said: ”Let me know when you are ready to become a man!” and Merlin is still not ready and he buried the lighter.
Short-sheeting someone’s bed (RL83)
The only thing that made military school appealing to Merlin was some teen comedies he had seen involving military school and a book he got out of the library in 6th grade on Westpoint. It all seemed extremely orderly, he learned how to make Hospital Corners (when making the bed), and he was really into it for a while. He knew about short-sheeting a guy’s bed, but he never deployed it. When John was in the Civil Air Patrol they short-sheeted people’s beds all the time and you pull up in the sheets and you notice it is not a bed but an envelope, which was hilarious!
John learned this technology when he was 12 years old, but he has never had the opportunity to short-sheet someone’s bed, although he is always looking for it. Who makes their bed? He could do it with Jonathan Coulton on the cruise, but he would have to get into his room and everybody has a key-card. It would probably be most effective on Paul Sabourin’s bed. It seems unfair because once you learn it you should be able to use it for the rest of your life and John still thinks about it.
Why John is not part of a secret society (RL83)
John does feel that there was some important moment in the 50s montage of his young life where he should have gone through some fraternal hazing where slightly older peers dressed in ropes paddled him, put hot wax on him, or made him perform a ritual, which sounds like just another weekend in Germany, but John experienced Germany all by himself. He was in those hailed halls, but there was nobody there to drip hot wax on him.
His dad would say that John was too lippy, by which he meant the presumption of somebody who talks as much and as floridly as John does. He is not stoic enough and not John McCain-y enough. He is also not strictly speaking a team playing, but there is no John in team. He wouldn’t leave a man behind! If he were interrogated in a foreign prison he would instinctively have a lot more to say than just his name, rank, and serial number. Maybe some of the things he would say would be obfuscating, maybe he would create a whole mind picture in his interrogator’s little notebook and they would be teasing out all the hidden meanings for years.
You cannot overstate the value of someone who appears to be cracking under pressure and flooding them with misinformation, and that would be John. The problem is that you have to give them some real information, at least the easy stuff, because they would go out and vet some of it and would think that he must be telling the truth.
John wanting to start his own secret intelligence organization The Roderick Group (RL83)
There has always been a role for John in America’s intelligence services, but they are always so fixated on if you have ever done drugs, but if that is your litmus test, all you are ever going to get is squares. As soon as he became familiar with the idea that there were agents and operatives, he doesn’t want to be run by somebody else, maybe except the director of operations. He doesn’t want to be an asset, he is nobody’s fucking asset, he is his own asset, and he doesn’t want to be recruited by some dingeling and not have the full picture.
A lot of it is just going to be extremely tedious, you sit around a safe house for 4 years and all of a sudden your digital watch beeps three times, and you think: ”Huh?” just as someone blows the door, which is your signal to watch something with binoculars for 2 years.
Many secret organizations like the Quiet Birdmen and the Freemasons are dying on the vine because they were not successful in recruiting a new generation. Just like the guest house hostel for snipers (?), what if John started a secret organization that was actually a civilian intelligence service, like a Halliburton made up entirely of British guys with explosives in their suitcases and renegade Captain Haddock style retired agents that never were actually employed. It is all about different levels of clearance. You get all the spycraft, the tunnel-digging, the fake IDs, the counterfeit money, the false passports, but without danger. Merlin had a variety of those organizations in 5-6th grade, together with org-charts of who would be vice-president under him.
Merlin suggests that it would be like a reverse business and they would not advertise in the Yellow Pages, but they would go to people and say: ”You need a bit of help from The Roderick Group!” With names like that you cannot tell anything about what they do and the business card just says ”The Roderick Group”. For example, doesn’t the RAND Corporation sound like they make cogs? For a long time John thought they made crackers until he realized that they were fully illuminati. How long would The Roderick Group be in operation before the Illuminati contacted them to feel them out, and they would realize that they are an imminently serious organization with a great font and really nice looking flowcharts.
John being the anchorman for the UFOs (RL83)
John sometimes sits down Indian style late at night, he focuses on his third eye and he asks himself what he is here for. Over the years he has gotten a lot of conflicting messages from himself and Retired Director of the CIA was a false flag for a long time and his mind was telling him something that just wasn’t possible. What it was really getting at was that when the UFOs come they are going to need a human envoy, someone to represent humanity who has everyone’s best interest at heart. They can’t pick somebody from the United Nations, certainly not from the United States because they are all compromised.
John is fairly confident that the UFOs have vetted him completely now with the owl ambassadors (see RL26), which is part of the application process, as John builds more and more people who understand that his word is his bond, and it is all in service of this future calling where they arrive with giant motherships hovering over the capitals of the Earth, and during a couple of days everybody will freak out, but there is no communication from them, when the F-16s go up their instruments will just go haywire, although nobody will be hurt.
Just as all the world’s governments and all of our technology is revealed to be impotent against these superior UFOs all the television sets and all the radios all crackle at once, they come on, and it will be a green screen with John’s face translated into all the languages in the world which he speaks fluently because of the Babelfish that is put inside his ear, and he says: ”People of Earth! Hello! I am a fellow earthling who has been charged with this task to speak on behalf of the UFOs who have come in peace! Send me your questions in self-addressed stamped envelopes to The Roderick Group .biz!”
Earthlings would recognize instantaneously that John is a straight shooter. The UFOs often have to appear to humans in the form of dead fathers, but to John they can appear in their natural state and he will comprehend even if their natural state is just an energy ether or a bean pot or whatever it is that aliens are in their natural environment. They might be a trans-dimensional Z/28 (Chevy Camaro) or whatever it is. Merlin hopes they are not ants!
It sounds like a very lonely job, but that is the kind of sacrifice John is prepared to make for his people. We won’t have a lot of bargaining room because they have superior technology and have caught us with our pants down, but will count on their sense of humor and on them recognizing that we have lots to offer, we are good dancers, we have spicy food, and John will give them a tour of some cool spots, like the Medina in Fez where there are a lot of good sights and smells. He will be a tour-guide Loveboat-style.
The UFOs might have arrived to mine the molten platinum core of our planet and to spoil us and they are basing this on having watched our television channels in their space outpost, but there is a lot more to us than that and John is going to make a White Castle slab out of India’s sacred cow just for them, he is going to take them down to Florida, but if they change the tides even by a few meters, then all Florida is going to be under water.
Yesterday John threw some crumpled aluminum foil into the recycling side of his bicameral garbage can that had food matter on it, but Supertrain is not going to happen because we wait for it, because we are throwing food-soiled aluminum foil in our recycling until they start recycling it. Let them put it in landfills because then there will be more raw aluminum for when the crane comes that had a little bit of spaghetti sauce on it and has been deemed unusable. Supertrain is going to fix all that!
When John really searches his feelings and wonders what he is here for: Retired Director of the CIA? Maybe! UFO envoy? Absolutely! It may already be happening and the softening that has been happening over the last couple of months may just mean that they felt John was a bit too acerbic and they are starting to put obstacles in front of him like security guards (see RL82) and alarm companies and pie. Maybe he has to get off the sugar a little bit to be receptive to their wisdom?
John started doing cheat days where he would eat like he used to eat on Saturdays after having eaten a largely carb-free week, but he doesn’t like them anymore. He had a cheat day last Saturday, it all tasted fine, but then he feels like shit for three days afterwards. Even though he has granted himself the cheat day option he is still not going to eat wheat and he can’t even believe he is saying this, he sounds like a crazy person. Maybe the UFOs are really monkeying with him? If you had told him a year ago that he would give himself one day a week where he could eat pasta and he would eschew it even on his cheat day, even using the phrase ”cheat day”, John sounds like a guest on the Dr. Phil program. Maybe they are putting estrogen in his food? Now the beeping alarm downstairs is starting to make sense and they are fucking with him through that and John is starting to crack up!