This week, Merlin and John talk about:

The Problem: John was on a couch, under the weight of 25 garbage can lids, referring to him being on all kinds of drugs and alcohol at the same time when he was 23 years old, wearing as many protections as possible against his feelings.

The show title refers to John feeling like he looks like a little boy that somebody hit with a Grotesquerie Ray when he wears clothes that are a size too big that he bought to look smaller at the time.

The audio starts with a few seconds of the TV show theme of The Hulk Cartoon, saying ”Doc Bruce Banner, belted by gamma ray, turned into The Hulk”.

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 Please do not quote these texts directly without applying your own editing first!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’s slippers (RL88)

John’s feet are cold. He is wearing a sweater, but he forgot to put slippers on and has just wrapped a jacket around his feet. Merlin is amazed that John got slippers, but John doesn’t live in California, he has slippers! Merlin’s house has the original furnace from 1922, which means there is a chimney blast coming straight up the middle through one of the ports and nothing comes out of the other ones. John’s dad used to say: ”The coldest winter I ever spend was a summer in San Francisco!” John has three pairs of slippers, an old pair of elk skin slippers from the old days from Alaska, a more modern pair and a pair that was given to him as a Christmas present that are from the Ugg brand.

John hears himself transitioning into his dad’s voice all the time.

Merlin started buying multiples of his staple articles of clothing and he still can’t find them. He has 6 different Carhartt caps and it is unusual when he can find one of them. It is the Swiss Army Knife of head gear, it keeps you warm, you can take a nap in it.

John doing a show in New York, rocking a new pair of skinny jeans (RL88)

John was just in New York and he just took the plunge and bought some skinny jeans. Merlin has been envious of John and a lot of his other friends all week because they were sitting around, talking about dicks in New York, and Merlin was sitting there watching Chinese movies. Merlin was the missing element and John wished he had been there. Sean was on point, he was hilarious, it was a giant love fest.

A year ago John and Jonathan Coulton were playing a Christmas show down at the city winery in the lower part of Manhattan in the meatpacking Soho’s (John talked about being on tour with Jonathan Coulton in RL59). He jumped up on stage during sound check in a cavalier way as a 40-something guy who was not going to take the stairs, and the crotch of his pants ripped out. This is what it has come to! John is lucky he didn’t throw his back out.

John ran out of the venue to buy a pair of pants and he went shop to shop through the West Village shopping area and every pair of pants was $500. He went to a flagship Ralph Lauren store and asked where the SALE table was and the guy in the shaw-color sweater was just shooing John out the door. He was in a strange world because he had grown used to that anywhere in America he could go 10 feet in any direction and find a $10 pair of pants Made in China, and now all these pants were hand-stitched by some Italian grandmother and he just needed a pair of pants.

Then somebody recommended him to go to Uniqlo, which was a giant H&M style place where all the clothes were from Japan, it is like Target for Hipsters, but they had no pants bigger than a 32 waist. Eventually somewhere in the back of the store on some dad shelf he found a pair of pants that fit him and that he actually really liked, it was an area for the dad that accidentally got dragged into the store where his daughter wants to go shopping, like a hardware store with a section of toys. The largest size they carry is 36, so you have to be kind of a fit dad. John is not quite fit, but he is a tall dad at 6’3” and at the most he was edging at 250 pounds, which is pretty bad because he was shuffling around like a Gollum through the streets of Prague.

Now John was in Manhattan again, walking around on the Lower East Side, getting lost looking for Todd Barry’s house, and he saw the Uniqlo and remembered that he had a great time in there last year. He went in again, looking around, and there was a big pile of skinny jeans, a thing that John had been opposed to on general principle. They have been a punchline for him, particularly when an older dad goes into a store like this and thinks to himself to get some of those skinny jeans.

Now John got those skinny jeans and he loves them and he doesn’t know what to make of it. He is always trying to gauge if he is missing some crucial cue that he is verging into self-parody. He does not want to be the dad who dyes his air orange. You see older guys who are still wearing tailored clothes and they look great, but then you look over at the guy who is wearing a Nirvana T-shirt and has a roach-clip earring, and they do not look great! He missed some turned.

John bought those skinny jeans was walked down the street and he found that he was legitimately rocking them! They are comfortable and inexpensive, but now he is on some precipice and when he came back to his house after his trip to New York he was looking at his closet and found that none of those clothes were skinny enough for him anymore. They were all blousy and John doesn’t want blousy pants now that he is a member of the skinny jean generation.

It is hard to buy oversized clothes when you are already an oversized person. In most stores the largest possible size they had used to be the thing John needed to buy, but now we are living in a XXXL world. The XL-section of any rack in the thrift store used to be 5-6 freakish items at the end of the scale with a 17.5” neck, but now there are XXXXL clothes. John has a lot of sport coats that don’t fit him at all because they are too large and when he bought them he was trying to make his size seem smaller by wearing a too-big jacket, so now he looks like a little boy who somebody hit with a Grotesquerie Ray.

John being on a low-carb diet, setting more and more unrealistic goals (RL88)

With his new food paradigm (going on a low carb diet, see RL79) John has lost a little weight and he has more energy and is back to feeling youthful. The John of a year ago in skinny jeans would have looked like a blue double-scoop ice cream cone, but now he likes to think that his legs are one of his best features and he is feeling good and wants some clothes that fit him a little bit better.

Where he is now, having changed his eating enough that he feels better, he looks better, and his clothes fit better he is now struggling against this radical tendency to be dissatisfied with where he is now and set a new goal for himself that is totally unrealistic and soul-destroying. If you would have told him 3 months ago that he would look and feel like he does today he would have said: ”That is the goal!”, but having achieved the goal he has a creeping body dysmorphia, this addict behavior of wanting to become Jack LaLanne and to swim across San Francisco bay towing 5 tug boats with his teeth, to become a total freakish hard-body exercise nut who talks to everybody about gluten intolerance on public transit.

John is perverting an unequivocally good thing into a mania which he will then fail and he will snatch disappointment from the jaws of victory every time! Now he is trying to talk himself out of that and just be a fit dad. After he began thinking about this new world of possibility he immediately came up against a hard wall at the end which is mortality, and you think that you are going to get into the best shape of anybody and become immortal and live forever and never get sick and you never die, but you are actually still 45, the clock is ticking, and you are decaying right before your own eyes.

Celebrities suddenly becoming old people, Jack LaLanne, musicians on drugs (RL88)

Jack LaLanne has always been an old guy in Merlin’s lifetime, but every year at his birthday he would do another increasingly less strictly amazing feat, like pull a locomotive with his teeth. A lot of them involved his teeth. He felt like a sweet grandpa who at least was trying, he was 4’11” (150cm), he was always wearing a full-body high-waisted creepy shiny jumpsuit and looked like George Costanza’s father, none of which John was aspiring to, even as a child. He is pretty strong for an old guy, but mostly he is an old guy.

Clint Eastwood, Harrison Ford age, and all those Hollywood stars were always much older than John, but they were in their vital middle age and persisted in it even when they were 60 years old when they were still sex symbols. Jack Nicholson at 60 years old was still paired with 24 year old actresses, and it wasn’t 100% cool, but we still were projecting a tremendous vitality on him. Now they are genuinely old people, and watching Clint Eastwood totter around like a small ent is making John sad with melancholy.

Merlin just saw a trailer for the new Captain America movie with Robert Redford (Captain America: The Winter Soldier). He is still a good-looking guy, but he is definitely an old guy and his face looks like a Chippendale couch. Harrison Ford was in a Jackie Robinson movie (called ”42”) and Merlin didn’t recognize him at first. He is not getting the old lesbian look, though, Merlin was looking at the website the other day called men who look like old lesbians, you can’t unsee that!

George Clooney is still an extremely handsome middle-aged guy, Harrison Ford is in his 70s, and when John said that he made a scrunchy nose face like a UK person which he never does otherwise. Even if you don’t get plastic surgery you do start to look a bit like a woman as you age. The first time John saw that in action was when he saw The Psychedelic Furs. He (Richard Butler) looked like a skinny little grandma, and John was astonished at the gender-bender-iness. As a Rock star you are always gender-bending, but not all the way to ”I am your grandma!” Merlin believes Dudley Moore and Keith Moon got that as well.

John is still astonished at how young Keith Moon was when he died (drummer of The Who, died at age 32). Merlin just did his monthly viewing of Quick One, While He’s Away, which is the greatest Rock’n’Roll performance of all time. Even when you watch him with the giant headphones doing Who Are You he was 32 years old, but he looks like 60!

The same with Keith Richards (from the Rolling Stones), within a period of 2 years they look like completely different people. There was a period when he looked like an old witch and then he started looking more like a pirate, but now he just looks like a Landjäger, a Cheroot that somebody stubbed out in an ash tray. It is physiological factor of him being literally 5’2” (157 cm), all the guys in the Rolling Stones are so small and you could put the entire band in a pint glass and then put probably half a spray-can of whipped cream and it wouldn’t overflow the glass. They were bread to chase rats down holes, they are a different kind of human being from the lumbering stone-trolls that were John’s ancestors.

There are YouTube videos of Ron Wood (from the Rolling Stones) on stage being shitfaced in the 1990s and even though he is one of the richest and most successful musicians in the world you can’t help but feel sorry for him because he is so dogged by the feeling that he has to wake up and drink 4 bottles of cognac a day because he has never known anything different. Merlin doesn’t find this as appealing as he used to.

Merlin was reading about the making of Exile on Main St., the one with Rocks Off, where the French police were raiding Keith’s house. It sounds like poor Charlie Watts was always a normal English guy who drank tea and had a job playing drums, and it must be miserable to be in an environment like that where everybody is fucked up all the time. Heroin doesn’t make things good. The idea of sitting in a basement in France doing heroin is not Merlin’s idea of him, although he sometimes feels it would be nice to dick around for a week.

John quit drinking, first using drugs to provoke feelings and then as a protection against feelings (RL88)

John has not had a mind-altering substance, any alcohol or drugs, in almost 20 years, but he has resolutely refused to live in a sober ghetto of life and he spent almost all his time around people who are on drugs, and some of his very good friends are seriously still on drugs and being in denial of what being a drug person means for them short and long term. Almost every day he is confronted with the question again why people take drugs and if he wants to go back on drugs.

John quit drinking in 1994 right before the Single Malt Scotch revolution and the artisanal flavored alcohol scene and there are a lot of alcohols he missed out on, he quit around when Rolling Rock got popular. Wine snobbery was always a thing, but in the late 1990s there came all the whiskey talk, like this is from the barrel that Sir Walter Raleigh once pissed in on his way to… John drank a lot of whiskey, and maybe it wasn’t great whiskey, a lot of times it was the worst whiskey, Ten High out of a gallon plastic jug, but he did not have a lot of melancholy about not savoring the great whiskeys.

But as far as pharmaceutical drugs go, to whatever degree new technologies have produced new ways of feeling like your hands are like two balloons, there is no new high he missed out on except maybe bath salts or Sativa, some new herbal thing you smoke and have 2-minute long PCP hallucinations, it is really big with a certain kind of William Gibson-adoring Cyberpunk. Also, all drugs are headed towards inhaler status and people are inhaling their weed and it is going to be like Dune where everybody walks around with a tube in their mouths.

Every day John is confronted anew, sometimes in the company of people he adores, but who at a certain point in the night are fucked-up with pinned eyeballs and not doing good and no longer fun. Is there something about that that is appealing? Does he pursue this anymore, even in his imagination? Why are his friends even in middle age still that attracted to this? It is not an academic question because it comes up over and over and John’s relationship with these people is hamstrung, not because there is a gulf between them because he doesn’t do drugs, but because there is a gulf between them and everyone.

Where is the glamor in taking drugs when it transitions from being 22, testing your limits, to being 42 and this is your pattern? John sees people in all stages of being fucked up and he knows what it feels like from inside and he doesn’t understand how it retains this hold on people beyond just the physical need that manifests itself in their minds as an emotional need.

The other day John was watching a special with Trey Parker and Matt Stone going to the Oscars in dresses about 15 years ago (in 2000) and it was on the 3rd page of every newspaper and they were on LSD. In the footage of them on the red carpet they were clearly tripping balls. That is a pretty cool thing to have done, but even that, watching them with their eyes bugging out and their mouths really dry and that the joke was going to wear off and they were going to have to go in and sit on a chair for 4 hours, surrounded by monster lizard people in very expensive clothes? It was cool to have done, but it was probably not cool to do.

John’s early experiences with drugs were a tremendously powerful and positive dance with feeling because as a young person his emotions were completely walled off and he did not have a way of expressing joy or fear, but all emotions got channeled into either depression or sarcasm, which was the positive of the two (see RL24). When he discovered drugs it was exciting because all of a sudden he had a relationship with feeling and you could drink three Bartles & Jaymes and suddenly be available to people and be in a room and feel a new relationship with positive feelings and a nuanced relationship with negative feelings. He could yell at his friend about a thing that he would never confront him about during normal waking hours.

As time went on and he was 23 years old he was on a couch with his 25th beer in one hand and a pot pipe in his other hand and a dip of chewing tobacco in his lip and a cigarette burning in the ashtray and an 1/8th of mushrooms wearing off in him, thinking that he needed something like a shot of tequila, feeling like he was laying on this couch with a shield on him and a garbage can lid on top of that, a silver blanket that keeps you warm in winter, and a big sign that says: ”Don’t touch!” How may layers of protection against feeling does he need?

John was using drugs to reveal feeling to himself and reveal himself to feeling, but drugs don’t equip you to incorporate real feeling into your life and those feelings become overwhelming because you are not developing skills to grow in those feelings, which means you are surrounded by intense feelings that you can’t incorporate and then you are trying to protect yourself against your feelings. As time went on he was on this couch under the weight of 25 garbage can lids, just trying to feel safe. And what the fuck was that dip of chewing tobacco supposed to do?

As time goes on and you get to be 40 years old and you have been using drugs and alcohol as your substitution for feeling or as a proxy for your actual feelings or as your Compressor/Limiter for feelings, you start to get scared because you don’t have another way of compressing and limiting feelings and they feel like they may have unlimited power and if you don’t have those things to damp them down maybe unleashed they will poison you or destroy you the second you get the chance. Without your garbage can lids you are just a naked scallop pulsating on the beach, waiting for the seagull of feelings to pluck you from your shell.

Merlin has done a lot of really exotic stuff and he wonders whether there are things about his cognition that got thrown off of true by psychedelics. He smoked pot to laugh at stuff, not so much for feeling, but maybe his sights got knocked off to the left or the right a little too much from those days.

John still has flashbacks in the sense that he revisits a thing that he only ever saw under psychedelics, not the VietCong stuff that he sees, that is in real time and happening now, but those moments when you realize through psychedelics how small and inane human endeavor is and how beautiful and Koyaanisqatsi it is. He will still see a small cast of light that excites that part of his brain, but he was not broken or even bent out of true by drugs, as much he was by the punishment that he inflicted on himself during those years. He didn’t need to punish himself so hard and it made him a different person.

The whole business of scheduling drugs, particularly now that pot is legal in Washington State, the huge advocacy that people feel that pot is a medicine or a sacrament or it is better than alcohol, and there are people who would never smoke a cigarette who are smoking pot up and down. We get pressured into thinking of drugs on a schedule: Heroin and crack are somehow way out in the distance while pot and Aspirin are here in the foreground. There is the whole gateway-drug idea. John tried and had a profound experience with all of these drugs and they all have a magical piece of the puzzle to deliver, and he has watched people suffer under all of these drugs.

The people in their 40s who are laboring under their marijuana addiction are just as much at disadvantage than the people in their 40s who are still heroin addicts and are managing that problem. Over the course of 20 years of smoking pot, like any drug or any food, if it is both the reward for a job well done and a good day, and also the consolation for a bad day, then it is what you are doing instead of sitting and thinking what happened today and processing your feelings.

You are interjecting it in between your real lived experience and the very necessary proto-dreaming that we all need to do at the end of the day, and if you are not doing that then you are in a kind of whirlpool where you just go back out the next day, hoping that it doesn’t happen again, but you are introducing another element into the reflection that you are telling yourself is calming you or is necessary to unwind at the end of the day, but is unwinding what you need to be doing? Or do you need to be wondering what happened and what to do differently.

John knows a guy in Seattle who runs a multi-million-dollar-enterprise and every day he gets up in the morning and makes a bunch of decisions that keep his business going and keep the money coming in, and then he goes out to lunch and by 2pm he has had a handful of pills, 4 lines off the back of a toilet, he spent $600 at lunch and consumed two bottles of something and then he goes back to work and from 2-6pm he continues to make business decisions, basically undoing the work he does every morning.

Somehow he makes it and gets to the end of the day, borderline date-raping his assistant, everybody in town is like: ”This guy, Oh my God! Somebody stop him!”, but of course nobody can and it is one thing to confront a guy who is vomiting on himself on the sidewalk in front of the bar, but it is another thing to confront a guy who is helped into his limo by his two assistants. He is running a business at a level that escapes John, he doesn’t get up at 5am and makes 6 hours of super-good business decisions before taking his first handful of Percocets, he got up this morning and drank coffee out of a beer mug in the bathtub, reading about Sandra Bullock, and he has not made an assistant feel weird about herself in 48 hours.

Merlin calls it the Possibilities of Self, which are very hard to understand when you are young, and if you do a whole bunch of blow your Possibilities of Self can seem extremely ambitious and you feel pretty good about the future. In Merlin’s case, LSD could show him Possibilities of Self that he wouldn’t have had access to in such a incontrovertible and bald way, seeing things with a clarity he couldn’t before, but he doesn’t know when that turns into something that becomes problematic. He is glad that he had a safe place to fuck around with those Possibilities of Self for a small amount of time and he is glad he didn’t keep trying to figure that out too much too often for 20 more years.

This is the thing about trying to come up with a cool drug policy for the future: John does believe that everybody who is curious should try every drug, even more than once, but there is a moment where you are chasing the dragon and trying to recapture the feeling that you had. If you took LSD a couple of times a week for a whole summer you would have had a whole variety of experiences and it would be mind-expanding and an overall net-positive for you, but at the end of the summer you would already start to feel like this trip isn’t getting you to the place that some of those trips in mid-summer did.

With cocaine, mushrooms, MDMA, heroin, and certainly crack you do it the first time and you think: ”Holy mother of God!”, the second time you can’t believe you are there again, and that climb doesn’t fall off immediately and you keep climbing and the 5th time you do it you have the tendency to think that you have found your new thing, like that time when John was really high, driving around Anchorage with his friend Peter, listening to Thick as a Brick and deciding that Jethro Tull was going to be his new band (see RL62) and was going to set him apart. Almost immediately after that it is diminishing returns.

How can we approach drugs as a culture and say it is like Rumspringa: You leave the village and you go on your drug odyssey. John meets people all the time who have never taken a drug. Really? Jesus, man! Try some drugs, they are astonishing! You should not take LSD and get on the subway by yourself, but if you went out to the beach with some friends (see RW19)! Merlin worries about his neuroplasticity at this point.

John understands that psychedelics are not strictly an addictive drug and when he is 50 years old maybe he wants to go out to the Northern coast and stand on a wind-swept rock and take some LSD and watch the whales, but then he recalls those times when he would be sitting on the quad of his college, naked, wrapped in a blanket, trying everything he could to keep the complete panic out of his mind. Imagining himself now with his complete lack of plasticity? He can’t even imagine what the recovery of that would be!

One time John was hitchhiking and ended up in Durango Colorado and he got into a pickup truck with a guy who asked him if he wanted to go to a party and take some Acid, which John absolutely wanted. On the surface of it this party was a cool scene, a country house on some land with a bunch of cool cats and pretty girls in flower-print dresses and dogs lolling around on the porch, but as John walked in there was no welcoming and he was out in the woods at this house party and he was coming on some Strychnine-y Acid and no-one was friendly and he felt like he was on the edge of falling off this precipice.

He sat in a chair on the porch and he was petting this dog, saying to the dog: ”Dog, you and me are going to get through this together!” and the dog just walked off. After that John just went walking in the woods and he eventually found another house party and ended up sitting on the living room floor, stacking paper clips for a couple of hours until the cops busted the party and John was so glad to see them because he felt like he and the cops had a long-time understanding with one another.

The whole night long John was just staving off panic, particularly at the beginning when he knew this was an 8-hour thing and for the next 8 hours he was going to be chain-smoking Camel Filters, stacking paperclips, trying to talk to any receptive pet, hoping that the cops or somebody else interesting comes around, and it was an uncool scene. John still reflects on that sometimes. Eventually he came down off the Acid and he was at some place and went to sleep on the couch and woke up in the morning and that is where he was. He had his little pack of underwear and socks, and he woke up at this new house with these new unfriendly people, charmed his way into a cup of coffee and started off walking down the road, just like Bruce Banner at every episode of The Incredibly Hulk, only now he can’t find his slippers.

The audio ends with a few piano notes from The Lonely Man Theme from The Incredible Hulk by the Daniel Caine Orchestra.