This week, Merlin and John talk about:

The Problem: John got a pretty bad rash, referring to John getting a rash from a sauna or spa facility which are like petri dishes for all kinds of things.

The show title is referring to Jesse Thorn being a well-dressed man who has a $5000 luggage set that will also include a Cravat Brush Holder Case and a tie case.

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 Please do not quote these texts directly without applying your own editing first!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 going swimming, how it would be to die by drowning (RL95)

John just walked in the door after having been to the swimming pool where he did some swimming. He is not a very good swimmer, he is a good bobber, but as soon as he starts to swim it becomes a combination of boredom and panic. He is on the verge of panic, but also bored shitless, which is pretty much Merlin’s whole life. The whole time John was choking back a pure freak out. He swam his whole life and there is no reason for that, but it is related to the psychology of swimming. John is not naturally buoyant, he sinks like a stone.

One time when he was in Greece there was a big rock and he swam out around past the rock and got out into the chop and the moment he realized he had gone too far, it was too late to go back and also too far to go forward and the waves were hitting the rock so he couldn’t get up on that sheer cliff and hold onto it. Obviously he drowned and died and this is all a dream. Even in a YMCA swimming pool he is always pushing down the panic that he will take a mouthful of water and by the time they get to him he will be a corpse.

John’s buoyancy depends on what he has been eating, and since he cut out the weed he is even less buoyant and less bloated. Merlin took a certified class with the Red Cross about the basics how to float and so on, and it seems that most people have +/- 5% roughly the same buoyancy. Taking a big breath makes you more buoyant. Merlin’s mother in law vill float in anything although she is a little 80-year old stick of a lady who is just 3 feet tall. The water doesn’t want her, but the water wants John, or maybe it is the bottom that wants him, the center of the Earth. Merlin recommends him to read that Watchmen comic.

Of all the deaths, once you take the first big lung full of water, you will have an overwhelming feeling of calm, it doesn’t hurt anymore, and it sounds like a very dignified way out. John thinks about drowning in the context of a ship going down, and here he is: bobbing and how much does he want to live? Those guys who swim and find a buoy or make friends with the giant tuna that will create a raft for them, it sounds like a lot of work! Out in the ocean after the first thing that nibbles on his foot he will have a hard time holding back the desire to say: ”You know what? It has been a good run!”, understanding that your body is pre-programmed to drown painlessly and you are back in the womb. Salt-water out, salt-water in, and something in your lizard-brain is just: ”Oh, fucking thank God!”

Merlin is so good at giving up things as it is, he could be very dignified in that death, it would be a dream for him! Being lost at sea alone is epic! ”Whatever happened to Merlin?” - ”Lost at sea! Nobody knows!” What are you going to do? Surviving on a deserted island? Or get sunburned and be in saltwater for a couple days? No thanks!

If you ever really read the poster for the Hemlich Maneuver, which is only in Spanish now, not even in English: If somebody tells you that they are choking, they are not choking because it says: ”Check if they can speak, breathe, or cough!” Merlin learned from his friend who is a lifeguard that if somebody out there who is splashing around like in Jaws must be drowning, but a drowning person doesn’t move. Lifeguards look for people who are pretty far out and not doing well, but they are not flopping around.

If John was Quint on the USS Indianapolis (form the movie Jaws), what is he going to do? You also have to think about water temperature, like with the Titanic. Even if the water is 50 degrees (10°C) is so freaking cold. Memorial Day 1978 Merlin’s friends opened their pool in Ohio and they were all determined to get in because it was the first day of swimming season, and they spent 6 hours trying to get into the water because it was so cold. Imagine being in there for half an hour?

Jumping into the cold water after a sauna, spa facilities (RL95)

It is a common practice in Alaska to be in the sauna and right as the steam room has become so intolerably hot that you can’t breathe anymore and your entire body is cooking you get out, run across the snow to the end of the dock in the half-frozen lake, and jump into the water that is just on the cusp of freezing. This goes right into the part of Merlin’s life where he never wants to have to fill that out on a form and have to explain this to somebody. The shock in that moment is so extreme that it blanks out everything. John has done this multiple times because after you have done it once it becomes very addictive. It knocks the soul out of you and you are an empty vessel for a few seconds and then it all comes rushing back in and it is like being stabbed with a million needles.

If Merlin is at a really tricket-out Marriott Hotel and they got all of the locker room facilities he will utilize all of the facilities. You can’t get that steam room hot enough for him! Lately it has become clear to him though how unhygienic a steam room is. John got a pretty bad rash from a spa facility not that long ago, either the hot tub or the sauna. A steam room is like a little petri dish and it is dripping off of the ceiling. Merlin likes it good and hot in the sauna and then he will jump in the shower, a super middle-class white guy version of jumping into an Alaskan lake. John’s dad used to call that an executive workout.

Scented oils, soaps, and shower sprays (RL95)

Everything has changed for Merlin since he got a new Menthol shower spray, he has to get a squeaky to scrape the ladies off the side. Is he just covering himself with Vicks VapoRub? He needs very little provocation to slather himself in Tiger Balm and it is incredibly comforting. Tiger Balm was always John’s LSD go-to. When he would take LSD he will always have a little trip kit: a pack of Camel filters, a 1/8th of weed, a bottle of water, two Grolsch beers, an apple, and Tiger Balm, because when you are really tripping together with some other trippers and you are back to monkey status where you are just picking nits out of each other’s hair one of the great things to do is rub a little Tiger Balm on your friend’s temple. There are a few other items in John’s trip kit.

Merlin makes his own shower spray according to a recipe off the Internet. Last year he got some as a stocking stuffer for his lady and he loved it so much that he ordered some off Amazon, but it turned out that what he ordered was dog menthol spray for if you wash your dog and you want it to smell good. John bought some shampoo that is designed for horses’ manes and tails called Mane ’n Tail and it works great! It came conveniently in a 50 gallon (190 liter) drum. Merlin’s recept is a few drops of Camphor, some Eucalyptus, some Witch-hazel and Water, you shake it up and you spray it when you are running your super-hot shower to get it steamy and it is like a spa in your home.

It is a fairly recent phenomenon that women are making their own balms, soaps, medicaments and gels. After the dream of making your own jewelry and selling it on Etsy, making unnecessary soap has become a really popular thing. There is a lot of soap with little sticks in it now. John was gifted a couple of bars of soaps with sticks in it from some fans at one of their shows recently and one of them he is using as his current bathroom soap. The other one was flavored with Patchouli oil and when he brought it home everyone who uses his house as their common area would come in and go: ”Whoa, whoa! What dreadlocked person has been in your home?” People kept putting it deeper and deeper into nesting Tupperware containers until it finally nested its way right out of the house.

There are certain smell-related cosmetic things including Patchouli, Musk, Drakkar Noir, Calvin Klein Obsession where you smell it once, you put a little on, and something happens that you stop noticing how much of it you are using. If you can smell the Patchouli then it is too much. When it comes to Calvin Klein Obsession you never smell it anymore today. It is always one girl, when Merlin will smell that for the rest of his life it will always be exactly one woman, the same is true for John.

It imprinted on him in 1987, her name was Maureene (for Merlin it was Lynn in 1986) and it was so thick on her like fog in Santa Cruz, she put it on with trowel, and yet when John will be on public transit in a strange town there will be someone who didn’t get a series of important memos and phone calls telling them to stop wearing Calvin Klein Obsession in the early 1990s and John will be right back at Maureen’s feet while she toyed with him like a catnip ball. Merlin has enjoyed fragrances for himself in the past, like he would put on grandpa’s Hai Karate.

John getting makeup from his mom until when he was 8 years old (RL95)

John’s mom would give him her old makeup and he had a little make-up purse and he would make himself beautiful until he was maybe 8 years old because as he went to live with his dad between 8-10 and he didn’t have access to it anymore. His bag of makeup was one of John’s prized possessions and he would play dress-up and make his face up and he cannot imagine that this wasn’t causing a little bit of concern in 1976. His mom was very encouraging and whenever she got to the end of it or she didn’t like the color she would give it to John and he had tons of options!

Looking back at it later when he was in his 20s nobody ever said a thing about it, looked at him sideways, or made any kind of untoward comment while John was happily burbling along, making himself pretty, wearing high-heeled shoes and the feather boas, parading around. These days he would be concerned they would sign him up for sex reassignment surgery. At the same time he was playing with guns, too, but that is not to say that women don’t play with guns.

John having very blonde and almost invisible eyebrows (RL95)

The other day John was watching the Sean Connery movie The Russia House where he is playing an exaggerated character who in some ways is just a slightly drunker John 10 years from now and he was wondering why Sean Connery was so beautiful even at 60 years old and he realized that Sean Connery has very interesting eyebrows. He has salt & pepper beard and hair in this film, but his eyebrows are two fuzzy South American caterpillars. John’s eyebrows are really blonde that are barely visible from across the room. They never fully arrived and stayed this blonde wispy nothing.

It is also why John looks so different with his glasses off because the frames give him some eyebrow and put some black contrast around his eyes. Without it from his hairline to his tie it is like some dishwater being poured into a bowl of sand. John paused the movie, went into the bathroom and drew some eyebrows on himself, which made him look discomfortingly different. There was a little bit Groucho Marx going on. John never wanted to stop playing with makeup, but he would still do it if he wouldn’t have to represent all these Punk Rock ethics.

Merlin started thinking of Joe Pesci’s character in JFK, David Ferrie who has fake eyebrows that look liked drawn on with a sharpie. On the continuum of middle-aged male vanity, where does dying one’s eyebrows fall? It is not like getting a fancy haircut, spending a bunch of money on brown shoes, getting a chemical peel, or botox. For some people it would be a step back in the male vanity hallway, but for John it would be a giant leap. For a guy who cuts his own hair and shaves dry with a $0.99 razor, to put coloring in his eyebrows to give his face more definition is too vane, and yet God ripped him off a bit with these non-eyebrows.

John would rather have no eyebrows than a weak chin, but they seem like a small thing as the great chemist in the sky is putting all the little droppers of stuff into his cauldron and making a guy. He got the eyebrow dropper and he went: ”Nah, not this guy!”, which seems a little bit odd. Painting on his eyebrows will be one of those non-obvious things if he did that and people would wonder what was different with him, but they wouldn’t go down the route of: ”Did you paint on your eyebrows?” Most people wouldn’t notice at all and other men wouldn’t notice if he started wearing an Indian head dress everywhere he went.

John had a friend back in the 1990s, a guy man by the name of Frank who was 10 years older, and he was a Basque and his last name was spelled with a series of X’s, T’s and I’s. The pronunciation sounded like some Italian name, but the way it was spelled looked like somebody was changing the Marquee at a movie theater and threw all the X’s on the ground. Frank had absolutely the reddest hair, red eyelashes, red eyebrows, a handsome, flamboyant guy, a well-known character in Seattle. One time John met him walking down the street and he didn’t recognize him at all because he had dyed his hair, eyebrows, and also eyelashes black. He was utterly a different person!

If John took his glasses off and dyed his eyebrows he wouldn’t have to change another thing and his best friend wouldn’t recognize him. Merlin thinks that it just wouldn’t register and people would just think that John looks better, but they wouldn’t know why and they might think it was because he cut out the weed. Lonely sandwich (Adam Lisagor) has good eyebrows, also Dan Benjamin, a lot of the people that Merlin works with are eyebrow people and John is some eyebrow desert.

A lot of guys are insecure about their beards and they think that the stuff that Chuck Norris and Steven Segal use that makes their beard look like they were giving cunnilingus to a cat and their face was covered with Mentholatum, literally eating pussy. Chuck Norris is fake looking and his beard is the fakest thing about him because it is way too dark for a man of his age. The problem with being a young guy who puts that paint in his beard is the same: Your beard will be too chemical looking because if you have a blonde beard people can see that in your eyes.

Merlin suggests that John needs one lady he trusts (stop you right there!) who is good with makeup and who could do it gradually and with the right color so it wasn’t too much. It is the same as with the Calvin Klein perfume: You might think that it looks great which would make you overdo it as a form of personal fetishization. You look good with your teeth unyellowed, you should get them whiter or get veneers put on.

John might think that a little bit of color in his eyebrows looks great, but all of a sudden he got 3-finger eyebrows on either side like Mussolini or Groucho Marx. He needs to do something, though, whether it is wearing Run D.M.C. glasses / Nabil (Ayers) glasses that give him raccoon eyes or whether he should start dying his eyebrows a little bit. Merlin thinks John should not have any trepidation about this because he is a performer and this is his work. Maybe he should get some makeup?

John doesn't have big eyebrows that you can’t see because they are blonde, but he barely has eyebrows and as he gets older the hairs that he has up there are starting to grow really long and he is already getting wizard eyebrows without there being very much there. One Brezhnev sticks out and the rest of his eyebrows belong on an 11-year old girl. John would have to fraudulently put eyebrows on himself or have them surgically implanted.

Shaggy haircuts, moisturizing, coming into middle age (RL95)

John thought about this in the context of the Mod Haircut, like Ronnie Wood before he joined the Rolling Stones, like a shag, a Paul Weller. Merlin thinks that they both are well into the age where they need to think carefully about shaggy hair because it makes you look tired. Maybe people in middle-age who are still wearing a shag haircut are actually just tired.

Merlin doesn’t trust his own instincts. He is usually a grotesquery. He got his eyes examined and will get some new glasses and every single pair of glasses he put on looked asinine and not nearly as good as the ones his sister in law threw away (that Merlin had gotten from John). He looked like someone who wanted to be a Danish architect for Halloween that was 60 years old, they were all very angular and Nordic. If he got a shaggy haircut he would pretty soon be on the Robert Evans path and start moisturizing and stuff.

Lack of moisturizing might be a problem for John because he get itches and then puts super-hot scalding water on the place where he itches. Merlin is going through a lot of Hydrogen Peroxide now, which is a recommendation by John. It has changed his game and he uses it on every part of his body. It foams and burns and lets you know it is working. John recently told his doctor that he is using a lot of hot scalding water and Hydrogen Peroxide to cure all his problem because it is 1920 and in his head he is at a Kellog facility on Lake Erie and they are giving him wheat grass juice enemas and he is eating a lot of Steel-cut Oats and scalding himself and pouring Hydrogen Peroxide into the wounds, and the doctor asked if it has occurred to him that those things both dry his skin and he might be experiencing itching because of the unauthorized treatments he is giving himself and maybe he should moisturize.

Was this an Estee Lauder emergency room? John doesn’t want to become a guy who moisturizes, but maybe that is another sign of middle age. Merlin got some Kiehl’s Cream as a stocking stuffer and it felt really good, but that is how they get you! It is not even a masculinity thing, but it is a complexity thing and it is very expensive and then you become a guy who can’t go on that trip because you forgot your cream. You will be propped up by cream, a girdle, your eyebrow pencils. Merlin recommends a back brace, it makes you really slender.

John found a picture of Paul Weller in a purple shirt with a fat tummy. He looks like an old lesbian, like the singer of The Psychedelic Furs. There is a Tumblr with men that look like old lesbians and Merlin looked at every single page and was sad when he got to the end. Merlin is a big fan of Paul Weller, but in a lot of these photos he looks like he had a makeover for a time, like he put this look together for a while and it was hard to sustain. That haircut is not going to take care of itself! Because it is a signature look he can’t just get away from it and start wearing his hair like a normal guy.

John has always tried to avoid things like that. Whenever people start talking about his beard too much he shaves it off just to be difficult, and the problem with that is that as he gets old he doesn’t want to do that anymore because it is just too agonizing. Whenever he goes to Europe people are always happy to tell him that he should never shave his beard because his face does not look as good without it.

Those haircuts are very choppy. When Vanderslice started to cut his hair really hip and really young John’s initial feeling was that it was a little too Chernobyl, like somebody had gotten a little too many rads. John is thinking of Ronnie Wood or Keith Richards in 1977: Spikey but long! John might look like a Vayra. It is like buying a Corvette: Right up to the point where he feels like he has earned his right or in his mind he can pull it off he will already be so far past being able to pull it off and he will look like such a dope. Also: Keith Richard: Great eyebrows and black hair!

John not eating wheat anymore, thinking of joining a fitness club (RL95)

John has been losing weight because he stopped eating wheat, but he has now plateaued at a weight that had formerly been his fat weight until he was 35 and that he hardly ever got to, and when he did he was ashamed. But some time in his 40s he went screaming past his top weight with his top down, stereo on, hair blown in the wind, and the top weight was in the rear-view mirror and he was flipping it double birds, peeing in a milk carton, heading down the Highway. When he now stopped eating wheat he lost all that secondary top weight and got back to top weight neighborhood and he stalled. Cheat-day became cheat-weekend and so on, but when he eats wheat John still feels terrible.

For Merlin it is really simple: He doesn’t have the cycles or the interest to dive into a banans diet with a brand name, but all he does is to avoid wheat unless he can’t, and eat as much protein as possible. He is not worried how much fat is in it, and things like Beef Jerky has butt-tons of protein and will give you energy and you will feel better. If he instead tucks into this 2 pound of fucking Chow Mein he feels like shit. If he goes to KFC he will be out for 2 days.

John is no longer accruing to himself what he was smugly calling the tangential benefits: He told himself that he did not stop eating wheat to lose weight, but because of some bullshit reason and then it turned into real and he was also losing weight, but now he is not doing that anymore and it feels like he has a medical condition and he is back in a fucking brace, back in his Polio crutches, and he is still a fat guy but he can’t eat spaghetti anymore.

The other day John was at the mall and he saw an LA Fitness and became curious what it represents. It is a chain of fitness places and now John is toying with the idea of joining a fitness club, but Merlin doesn’t want John to get bulky. John’s skin doesn’t tan and Merlin does not like to look at extremely fit old guys, he rather sees a saggy old guy with saggy old guy skin who happens to have muscle bumps. It is horrifying! John is looking at a picture of Paul Weller and his skin is the color of oxblood, he has literally a Cordovan shoe of a face, he has a fringe of hair in salt and pepper that looks like somebody put a Chamois on his head, and he looks amazing, but if he took off his shirt it would look like somebody hung two small brown purses on a tree, and not in a good way.

The same is true for Nick Lowe, he also looks very good and he is rich because he has a song on the Bodyguard sound track and rising tide rises all Lowes, which is the most successful soundtrack of all times. The Posies had a song on Reality Bites soundtrack, which represented in that moment in time a thing people wanted to buy. As Chris Ballew says: He is thinking of retiring and getting into the cheque cashing business.

John bidding on tie cases on eBay (RL95)

Ever since John has discovered eBay a week ago… it is the wrong place for him to be, first of all. This eyebrow thing is another example of the creeping materialism in his life where if he is really honest and is searching his feelings he is trying to solve a different problem than a lack of eyebrows. He is trying to put eyebrows on a basketball, he is drawing a face on a volleyball and is investing his friendship in it, and one day the sea will take Wilson back (from the movie Cast Away) and where will John be then?

The other day John was on eBay and he realized that he didn’t even know that a tie case existed. It is a small piece of luggage that holds your ties, it is a total Jesse Thorn thing. All the fancy people like Hermes and Christian Dior and Gucci all make tie cases out of Corinthian leather and will sell them for $300-500 or in the case of Luis Vitton for $1500 with not even a tie in it, but it is just a piece of luggage that is the size and shape if half a tie and you are meant to fold your tie a couple of times and put it in there and this case will keep it protected. As Jesse Thorn is stacking his latest set of $5000 luggage, next to his Cravat Brush Holder Case he has at least one tie case.

He didn’t even know there was such a thing and now he wants one. At the same time he has a thrift store mentality and the point is not to get a thing at fair value, but to find a thing that is ridiculously underpriced because nobody notices it. John sees things in thrift stores all the time where they know what it is and have priced it reasonably and he is contemptuous of it because reasonable price is not why he is there, he is there to beat the game and find the diamond in the rough.

John was looking at a very handsome tie case that was only $9.99 and he bid on it and two days later he came back and it was $75 because it is Hermes, which is a ludicrous item to own, let alone to pay real money for, let alone to fight other anonymous people over. Then he found another tie case by a luggage company called Ghurka and he bid $9.99 and a couple of days later it was $55 with 3 days left to run.

He got emotionally worked up because other people are stealing his tie cases and he did not even know what a tie case was a week ago, he does not need a tie case, he is 45 years old and he has never needed one before. These tie cases are precisely items of conspicuous materialism. If you can make a holster out of cardboard and packing tape you could make a fucking tie case. It is a (Thorstein) Veblen good: You get it just because it is fancy. John doesn’t usually stop the car and get out to give Merlin a round of applause, but this Veblen reference was very nice!

Eventually John found a tie case by Christian Dior and the owner didn’t know what it was and nobody else bothered because it didn’t say Dior on it, but there was a little emblem that was some early Dior stamp. John doesn’t care about Christian Dior, he doesn’t have a single item of that brand, it means nothing to him, but the fact that there was this thing of value that the owner and the other customers didn’t recognize was a thing he was very excited that he bid on it and won it on $5 and $6 on shipping. Now he got a vintage Christian Dior tie case which the next time he will see Jesse Thorn he will waggle in front of his nose so he can smell the Corinthian in the leather and he is not even going to put ties in it, he will just carry it around in the hopes he will run into Jesse Thorn and he will be like: ”Why do you look different?”