RL99 - White Ribbon

This week, Merlin and John talk about:

The Problem: They tried to give John a peanut butter trap, referring to dentists wanting to implant John a contraption for his missing front tooth that looks like a peanut butter trap.

The show title refers to John not having defined success and seeing everything as a failure, not having allowed himself a blue ribbon ever, but only a few 3rd place white ribbons.

John plays a few notes on the harmonica after answering the phone. He stayed in bed until the absolute last minute and sat down to record the podcast immediately. He ran past the thermostat so that by the end of this recording it will hopefully be warm in the house.

Merlin’s daughter has given him a slow-motion cold and it has just become a cold 10 minutes ago and now his mouth tastes funny.

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 Please do not quote these texts directly without applying your own editing first!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

Blues Driver vs Blues Traveler (RL99)

John forgot to turn off his Boss BD-2 Blues Driver guitar pedal last night and now the battery is dead. ”You got a vest for that harmonica, mister?” (reference to John Popper’s harmonica vest, but he is the Blues Traveler). He went to one of his concerts back when he knew a guy who was his keyboard tech. After the show they went onto the tour bus and there was one for Mr. Blues Traveler and one for the rest of the crew, like a separate Popper Mobil.

John never met him, but he met all the rest of his band and crew and on the bus they had Tupperware containers with 20 different kinds of marijuana and they were headed to Canada the next day and the tour manager was talking about the fact that they needed to stop in Bellingham and rent a hotel room for all the pot and guns and leave in in the hotel, go to Canada, and come back the next day to get their stuff back (see RL415).

Different body shapes, Mr. Peanut (RL99)

Merlin thinks John Popper has lost a disturbing amount of weight because he got the stomach stapling, but he is up and down and fluctuates a lot. Some people are destined to have a certain body shape, like a beard-shaped face. Merlin has met big body people who work out constantly and lose every ounce of body fat they got on them and they just look like a tan canoe, it just looks wrong and less healthy in some ways. A pear shaped person should remain pear shaped and not try to become a peanut shaped person. God has made us in many splendorous ways and we should celebrate every one of our differences.

Merlin wonders if Mr. Peanut explored any other lines of work before he became a professional promotional cannibal. John thinks that he was a titan of industry, why else would he dress that way and be so cocky? He probably came to prominence during the era of American history where the peanut was the ascendent Legume, but until the end of his days he spent every day wondering whether George Washington Carver would be around the next corner and make him into something a little too interesting. Jimmy Carter was a peanut farmer and an engineer on submarines. He was a man of many talents and a man of a lost era, a gentleman and cavalier.

The word ”family” having become a code word, family farms (RL99)

Merlin doesn’t like the phrase Family Farm, it is a red herring, because what if you family is really fucking rich? It makes you think of the Ma and Pa out there in their tin-roof shack with a borrowed rake and the wind blowing. 40 acres (16 hektar) and a mule! It is one of those thought-terminating clichés and when you hear it you are not allowed to say anything more because then you are going after the guy with the overalls.

This is the thing about Central/Western Ohio and about Central Germany and Bavaria: The farmers are the richest people in the community. They own the most land and it is very fertile and over hundreds of years they have built up their properties with beautiful barns and multiple big houses and the crops they are growing are expensive. The farmers are the prosperous conservative bürgers of the community. Growing up in the 1980s John had the same idea that farmers were hard-working people to feel a lot of common cause and American empathy with, they were the salt of the Earth, and when you to these places you realize that farmers can be the real Cadillac-driving fat cats.

The farmers are also the political and social obstacle to change, they are conservative and not at all John Cougar sucking on a chili dog (from the song Jack And Diane by John Mellencamp), but they are wearing white linen 3-piece suits. There is nothing wrong with being successful and having a lot of money and dressing like Mr. Peanut, but something about the word ”Family” in the last 25 years post-moral-majority and during the George HW Bush era has become a heavily charged word about Family values, whether something is Family-friends, Family-owned businesses like Walmart, Family farms like the ones that own giant parcels of our great United States. Family is one of the cop-out words that ends the conversation.

On the corollary the word urban became synonymous with black and family is now a euphemistic code word for a white Christian nuclear family. Now gays are trying to extend the franchise of family and the Left is trying to say that they are also a family, a polyamorous family of Zoroastrians, and they all want to be included in the family definition and all the rights that go with that. The pushback makes you recognize that the reason we see the word family all the time is that it is a code word, just as Evangelicals have code words that only other Evangelicals recognize, and at a higher level Family is a political code word for white people.

It has the implication of important distinctions that we don’t even need to talk about anymore. Like black people have broken homes, while we stays married and have kids. Mexican people have 4-5 families living in one house and God knows what they are getting up to there. Family is Mom, Dad, Grandma, Grandpa, and then the other Grandma and Grandpa who live in Florida. Merlin has that!

John never knew either of his grandfathers and he only met one his grandmothers but she died before John was 2, meaning he had no grandparents. John’s mom’s mother died in the 1930s and his dad’s dad died in the 1950s and his mom’s dad he met when he was an infant, but he died in the 1980s and his dad’s mom died in 1970. He didn’t know any of them, but he is none the worse for it. People love him, he has friends.

How John’s mom at 22 felt she was too old for Rock’n’Roll (RL99)

People did not live as long, but they also used to ride a lot harder. Merlin’s mom graduated from High School in 1954 at a fairly diverse urban High School and everybody in her year book looks 50 years old. John’s mom was 20 in 1954 and around that time, maybe in 1956 was the birth of Rock’n’Roll. Right now when you were 22 years old at the birth of a new music form or art form you would be a soldier of that form. The kids that were 22 when Indie Rock was ascendent were John’s life-long fans.

And yet when Rock’n’Roll came in John’s mom was contemptuous of it because it was music for children and she was already listening to Jazz music, being sophisticated, drinking drinks out of cocktail glasses. You had arrived at your majority and you weren’t going to go back to hang out with bobby socksers. Now she has come full circle and she loves Rock music. Both John and Merlin are living a prolonged childhood and everyone John knows is, too!

John not being sure about how much he is into Jennifer Aniston (RL99)

Jennifer Aniston is John’s lodestone, his Starcaster. She is about John’s age and she certainly was considered a sex symbol and very attractive girl when she was in her young 20s, she came out of nowhere, she might have been on a few different pilots before Friends, but none of us had ever seen them. She had a little bit of a chubby face with chipmunk cheeks and she had that iconic hair, she looked a little bit like Jennifer Grey. John had the feeling that he should be more attracted to her than he was. Everything lined up with this girl, he liked her face, he liked her moxy, he even liked her silly hair, this girl should really get him going, but for some reason she doesn’t completely.

John would be over at somebody’s house where Friends would be on, which is a code for ”I didn’t watch Friends!” because John didn’t have a TV, and he would be really zoomed in on Jennifer Aniston because he wanted to find some clear moment where he would be either be totally into her or realize she doesn’t do it for him, but he could never find the breaking point. Because of the fashion of the 1990s they always dressed her in clothes that were just baggy enough that you couldn’t quite get a picture of the silhouette and he was wondering what was under all those baggy sweatshirts.

When you look at Courteney Cox (also from Friends) you know she is a skinny girl with big boobs and past experience has taught John you had to be careful with that type, you just can’t trust them. Jennifer Aniston was a little bit thicker, and maybe she is a small-busted girl that is a little bit thicker, and that is a girl you can trust. Her clothes were vexing him! As time has gone on Jennifer Aniston evolved alongside John and he is always looking out of his side mirror at her, saying: ”Does she do it for me yet?”

Over time you see enough celebrity beach photos of her in her bathing suit so you no longer have to guess and now she is 45 years old, she is still a very attractive woman, and John can still not decide. They might have a Chemical thing that prevents them from ever being together. At one point he was asked to audition for a film that she was making in Vancouver where there were Indie Rock bands as part of the plot, and maybe her romantic lead was an Indie Rock musician, but he seriously considered auditioning for the film, but he was missing one of his teeth and he didn’t see himself being cast not only as the lead, but maybe it just wasn’t his time yet.

John objecting to the cabal of dentists (RL99)

You don’t see many characters missing a tooth in any role, even as henchmen, and if a henchman is missing a tooth it is usually a side tooth. Merlin adds that Hee Haw had a high tolerance for tooth spaces. John was missing one of his front teeth for a couple of years and it was very prominent and at the time he just didn’t register how profoundly that was sending a message to casting agents that he wasn’t quite ready.

John objected to the cabal of dentists and the way they run our culture. They just assumed that he was going to wear a flipper tooth that was going to be a peanut butter trap, a whole metal apparatus that was going to sit there and collect peanut butter all day and was a torture device, but they were telling him that his other option was to walk around without a tooth and they told him that he was going to wear it, but John resisted and went: ”Oh, really? Well, watch me now!” Merlin finds dentists so frustrating and he wonders why he can’t just get his teeth cleaned without a lecture. The reasons we all live to be 100 years old is that we have dentists, they are our life givers.

Last time John got a terrible lecture from a young dental hygienist where he got snippy with her. ”I know how to brush my teeth, you don’t have to show me!” as she was getting her little demo toothbrush and fake mouth of teeth and: ”Let me show you how to brush your teeth!”

Why they don’t talk about spirituality on this show (RL99)

The other day John was talking to Chris Ballew of The Presidents of the United States of America and he was admonishing him that he and Merlin never talk about the spiritual realm. They are not Buddhists, per se. Merlin continues to mock John by trying to imitate him poorly. When John was introduced to these concepts many years ago he always imagined that he would at one point be pursuing a Siddhartha-like spiritual life where he would sit on a bridge and study the river and a year would pass.

Merlin interrupts John and talks directly to Chris, explaining that this is exactly why they don’t talk about this stuff and he offers to send him some of the episodes that have never aired, but John wants them to remain in a salt mine in Utah.

They have a Dominican friend in the hills of San Francisco and he is probably up in a cold cell for half the day, but he also spends a lot of time on his iPhone. The Dominicans these days aren’t flagellating themselves like they used to. Merlin wonders if he has some e-flagellation happening where he swings his iPhone over his shoulder and makes a sound. Merlin is fine to talk about these things, he is a level 3 Shaolin monk with high dexterity, a pretty good charisma, and quiet walking. He loves that thing where monks can fall down a wall.

John never played D&D enough to get out of the ”Let’s go to war!” stage. Real D&D players spend a lot of time getting water from the well. Merlin is the same way with Rock’n’Roll, D&D, or history where he hasn’t participated in it, he has just read about it, but he is not alone in this and there are a lot of people who just read about D&D a lot.

It is the same thing with Buddhism: They just want to get to the good part where all your cares melt away. You just climb up to the top of the ladder and look down on everybody. It is the 9-rung ladder of Buddhism:

  1. egolessness
  2. pissing from the high ground
  3. acting all fancy
  4. talking about vegetarian food
  5. watching the river, then not watching the river
  6. first there is a mountain, then there is no mountain, and then there is a mountain
  7. paradoxes, there is no number 7
  8. you do not talk about Fight Club
  9. location, location, location!
  10. Were you just not listening to number 9?

At this point Merlin changes the topic hard.

Follow-up: John being on a juice fast, not drinking coffee, being a substance abuser (RL99)

John completed his juice fast to 93% because on the afternoon on the 3rd day he realized that a juice fast is a terrible idea that does not suit him at all. He spent the last 6 months weaning himself off of sugar and then he went on some crackpot scheme where for 3 days he just drank concentrated sugar water because that is what juice is, even kale juice. By the end of the 3rd day he was in a terrible cycle where he would drink a glass of juice, feel great for 20 minutes, and then he would almost completely shut down like the Scarecrow in the Wizard of Oz and he would drag himself over to the couch where he would lay in a half-comatose state until it was time to get up and make another juice. The sugar went right through him and it felt like poison.

By the end of the 3rd day he was wondering what he was doing to himself. He was only seeing this through to notch the ”3 Day Juice Fast” off of his belt somehow, the world’s saddest bucket list together with ”Visited Judy Garland’s Grave Site”, ”Read the Artist’s Way”, and although he was really into it on day one and pretty solid on day two, even day three it was the thing he protests his juice fast now, and it is not hunger or a question of willpower, but it was a recognition that by day 3 he was just poisoning himself every time he drank a glass of juice and he decided it was terrible, had some food, and immediately felt better.

In the plus column he did quit drinking caffeine and is now completely off caffeine, which took 5 days for the pain to out of his joints, meaning that as he gets older it is taking longer for him to wean himself off of caffeine. It used to be 3 days in and out, but now it is 5 days. Not drinking alcohol and eliminating juice and soda pop from his diet, the number of interesting drinks John can have is really low. He can drink fizzy water with lime in it all afternoon, but: ”Come on!” He also doesn’t want to become a tea person.

In his nature John is a substance abuser, he wants to abuse substances and if you give him a substance to abuse he will and in college it was Mountain Dew and he would drink 64oz (ca 2l) of Mountain Dew every afternoon and he felt amazing. You can’t do that as a 45-year old and what he did have was his good old reliable friend coffee.

He didn’t just 3 large cups of coffee in the morning, but then he would get out to lunch and have a couple of cups of coffee with whoever he was having lunch with, at dinner he would get a cup of coffee, so every day 6 cups of coffee and sometimes more. It was his only friend after he has quit smoking cigarettes, too. As a substance explorer, to have a little crutch, somebody who is always there for you when your mind starts to get away, when your fingers start to move.

Merlin doesn’t understand why you can’t just eat all the vegetables and fruits instead of juicing them. You throw a mastiff of spinach into the blender (see RL98) and you get a thimble of spinach juice and you say: ”Wow, all this spinach went into this thimble!”, but you forget that there is a huge hopper like a dumpster behind the juicer where all the spinach actually went and looks like cooked green matter, like ground-up Hulk.

There are two cultures at war here: There are people talking about your blood and the relative viscosity of the sugar in it, and there are people talking about your gut and how you need to get all the hardened fecal matter out of your bowel (see RL23) and need to take all this juice, but now you are hypoglycemic and have cleaned out your colon. There is a holistic way to approach living that involves the 9-rung ladder of Buddhism, or maybe they are up to 13 now, and the 12th rung is colon cleanse and the 13th rung is Merlin ringing the bell on him.

John doesn’t want to sacrifice the hard-won gains he has made in his blood just to flush out his ass. Ultimately the substance abuse gene sits there all the time, throbbing, looking for something to do. For a long time magazines or comic books scratched that same itch and John was reading magazines 6 hours a day. They lull you in and now John is picturing the little Clippy from Microsoft Office: ”Would you like to read The Atlantic?” - ”Actually I do want to read all this!” It is brain food and you come out all informed, but it is on a superficial level and it is mostly stuff that is interesting, but non-essential. Life is passing you by and those were 6 hours you didn’t go roller blading.

One appeal of crazy diets, cult-like religions or get-rich-quick-schemes is that they make it seem like the black box of your soul or your personality can be understood and there should be a way that a steady stream of this going in will cause a reliable and confident stream of this coming out. If you simplify your life, you stop sinning, you pray more, you do good work, and you tithe you can pretty much expect that a good life is going to come out on the other side. If you simplify your diet enough and quit eating all that shit and get down to something as simple of natural organic plants, then you can expect that your health will improve and your body will operate better.

It is the eternal quest: Whether or not you are a substance abuser, you are trying to reach that equilibrium to where you stop noticing it being bad, you eventually notice it getting better and eventually you stop noticing anything happening at all and you just feel normal.

Defending substance abuse as the reason to live (RL99)

John has been reflected a lot on the attitudes he has carried with him for many years and that he sees in people around him. There was a time when John would say to himself: ”What is the point of life if I can’t have a cigarette?” and he meant that, he didn’t want to live in a world where he is restricted from anything, not only a world where his experience is truncated, but where he is measuring his food or he is in any way apportioning experience to himself in a restricted way. Living fully meant living without limits.

Today John hears that in various forms from fully grown people all the time as a response to any attempt to control oneself beforehand, the logic of: ”If I couldn’t eat steak, why would I live? ” or alcohol or pizza. The presumption is that the food stuff or experiences are the key of life, they are the prize, the reason. The ultimate one is when you ask how a priest can live a celibate life, giving up sex before you even had it. Why would you live? John remembers thinking like that very clearly, imagining getting injured in a way that you were deprived of the primary reason to interact with people, if you are not trying to have ex with them or their sisters.

Pizza is great, John is not anti-pizza, but being able to have pizza or sex are not central having an enjoyable and profound human experience. Imagine somebody like Stephen Hawking who is confined to a chair and not even able to communicate without great effort and yet he still is deriving great pleasure from being alive and he is living a full life, all happening in his mind.

Every one of those experiments John makes, he goes out in the world and gets a lot of push-back, especially from Rock’n’Roll people: ”I ate a cigarette today, just to spite you!” That sounds like Jason Finn. He would dip a cigarette in liquid cocaine and stick it up his ass just to spite John. You don’t want to be a drag either and just be boring, and you don’t want to follow a path outside of everything you ever knew and are no longer able to participate.

Having eliminated all vice with the exception of inter-personal vices he is still able to be right in the center of a Bacchanalia and not feel either that he is disincluded or that he is bringing anybody down. People all around him are high all the time and they know how John feels about it and how he feels about them, and yet John doesn’t inhibit them, partly because by having cut all those things out of his life he does not register any fewer problems in his own life. He has eliminated the following problems: He no longer wakes up in jail, he no longer is hacking cough for 20 minutes when he wakes up in the morning.

John was having a conversation with a good friend the other day who told him that he has an amazing memory, but it is hard to say because he doesn’t know how it is like to be inside other people’s minds. For years he assumed that people were lying of faking when they said that they didn’t remember stuff, sometimes stuff that happened just recently. It is a bone of contention with people where they would say: ”I ran into Maisie Glotz!” - ”What did Maisie say?” - ”She said everything is cool!” - ”No, what exactly did she say?” - ”I don’t remember!” That inability to remember conversations as though they were scripts for a play.

John can sometimes months later recall the conversation and the whole arc of it and what the salient point of it was and what that person was thinking while they were talking. He is recording that stuff, but not intentionally, it is just happening and he always assumed that happened for everybody. Even when he was the most fucked-up on drugs and alcohol he never really blacked out and he never woke up in the morning and failed to remember why his pillow was covered with blood. Some of the fallout of that is that he cannot forget some of the episodes he would most like to forget and people who don’t have that kind of memory are blessed because the psychic injuries they had when they were young fade quickly and become a smear. John can go back to every bad episode and relive the thing in TechniColor detail if he allows himself to, and that is not fun.

Arriving in Istanbul on his walk across Europe (RL99)

On his walk across Europe John was in constant combat with himself for months on end, but he actually walked the last 3 days even though every voice in his head was screaming at him to get on a fucking city bus to the airport and go home, but he fought those voices and walked all the way to the Hagia Sofia and no part of him could rob himself of that, but he also couldn’t give himself a blue 1st place ribbon because of the fact that he spent the whole time fighting himself instead of walking on a magic carpet in Buddhist bliss.

John should have had no possessions, he should have just walked from loving stranger to loving stranger, basking in the glow of his humanity, and he should have arrived in Istanbul where they should have made him pascha of all the infidels, but none of that happened, so no blue ribbon, but white ribbon for effort for getting there. For the rest of his life John will be reflecting on the fact that he once walked from Amsterdam to Istanbul and that he only gave himself a 3rd place finish, which is crazy!

Being constantly dissatisfied, the parabola of the 84th problem (RL99)

Cutting out all the drugs and everything that he could take refuge in against reality has eliminated all the side effects with them that are specific to each individual drug, like the hangover from Gin is different than the hangover from wine, but John has all of the problems integrating with reality that he always had and the story of the black box is that not only when you join Scientology will you stop being an alcoholic, but also all the root problems are going to go away, too, which is true of every religious cult and every diet plan.

For John there has never been a thing, either a drug he took or quitting doing that drug that made it any easier to get up in the morning. That is why Speed is so tantalizing because it does make it easier to get up in the morning.

Merlin talks about the parable of the 84th problem in which your 84th problem is that you want to get rid of of your other 83 problems. That story has more resonance with Merlin over the years, especially because he knows how true the part is where he has 83 problems. He talked a lot about this on his other show (probably Back to Work) where he is coming to realize and accept that he will always be an anxious person who will always find a primary thing to worry about and several secondary things to worry about and a seemingly endless collection of tertiary things to worry about. Even getting rid of the number one, there will be a field promotion of one of the secondary problem. Also: You often prefer the problem you know instead of the problem you don’t know.

The language of recovery is so fraught. If you say something like ”run away” John is automatically impelled to say: ”I don’t mean running away in the sense of being cowardly!” Many alcoholics have a knee-jerk response to it and they feel like doing drugs and being drunk is heroic and they are not running away from their problems, but they are fighting because their lives feel full of strife, heroic fight, and contest. They stumble out of the bar at night, they run into some street person, they go on some adventure and it all feels very Greek to be living the life. You get nightly quests, and sometimes that quest is just: ”Can I get home in this condition?”

Since he stopped drinking the number of times John walks into the front door of his house, collapses on the floor and goes: ”I made it home!” are a lot fewer because it is not that big of a deal to get home, and he misses that daily excitement of triumph and conquering adversity that you put into your life with drugs and alcohol, but also with food and sport and all this action that seems very heroic and in the end all that happened is that you made it home.

The ghost that haunts John, his main brokenness, is that he does not have a definition of success. There is no success in his life because he does not allow there to be, he has not defined success and therefore everything is a failure and his greatest triumphs are still failures. He never congratulates himself, he never accepts congratulations, and at the end of the day he looks up at his blue ribbon wall and there are no blue ribbons on it, but there are three white ribbons that he has allowed himself to deserve for 3rd place in the greatest events in his life.

As John is talking about doing a weekly show (Roderick Rendezvous) his very close friends who are aware of this problem have leaned in and said: ”What does success look like for you in this? What do you hope to accomplish?” and not only can he not answer them, but he is rushing into a new project and he hasn’t even sat with himself and digested the possibility. Is he just doing it and every day is a new opportunity for failure? That problem haunted him when he was a little kid, all the way through school, it was a big part of why he turned to drugs and then he was hoping that quitting drugs and alcohol would be a triumph that would break the back of that forever, but he really only gave himself a white ribbon for quitting drugs and alcohol, too.

John cannot delight in his achievement and he wouldn’t even ask to do that, but just not to have his instinct be to denigrate his own achievement at every turn, which is the Welsh troll and he doesn’t know how to solve it. Over the years people have put 1000 black boxes in front of him and said: ”If only you accept this black box, you go in one side, you come out the other!” Psychology is one of them, Zoloft is one of them, exercise and nutrition, The Power of Positive Thinking by Norman Vincent Peale, etc. He has tried a lot of them, he denied a lot of them on principle, but he honestly doesn’t know. Maybe he should write post-it notes ”Do it!” and put them all over the house.

You cannot claim art (RL99)

Merlin is surprised that John had such good success getting on stage and rocking out. He seemed to find an unselfconscious rocking-outness on stage that is somewhat at odds with his obsession with white ribbons. He doesn’t seem to be overthinking things as much in the middle of a guitar solo. There is something about the electric and the acoustic guitar, different things, that provide a psychological bed and for the length of a show he feels safe with the guitar. He knows what they can do, he knows that they create a bubble around him, and within that he is critiquing his own performance. If you talk to him in the first 5 minutes after a show he will tell you that it was the worst show that anyone had ever seen, but while he is on stage in that bubble he feels very safe.

John does doubt his competence while he is on stage, assuming John Hodgman is not interrupting him (referring to the show they did together, see RL47), in particular because playing guitar is a thing that a lot of people do and he is conscious of the fact that there are people in the room that are better guitar players and yet he knows what he is doing. Playing guitar is individual enough that if he is doing a good job of playing guitar like him it is unassailable.

Some of the best guitarists have come up to him after shows with an unmitigated look of pleasure on their face and have said that it was an amazing show. Although they are by all metrics a better guitar player he is saying that John communicated his guitar to the room in a way that he admires and is impressed by. It is something that John has practiced, and practice gives you the confidence. There is something magic about the guitar.

Also when it comes to lyrics John is infamous for writing what turns out to be awesome lyrics at the last conceivable moment. There are lyrical turns that he put down that are immune to his Nazgul of self-criticism. They can just stand in the open and the Nazgul flies over and shrieks, but they don’t have to run and cower in a hole. There are more of those even than John would publicly admit, those are some of the things he is proudest of. That stands and a lot of time he doesn’t even know where it came from, he can’t claim it really, but it came from him and he admires it as something he has done, but that doesn’t get him writing lyrics tomorrow.

You cannot quite claim art because it came from an admixture of luck and inspiration, influence, experience, timing, what you ate for breakfast. If it isn’t unintentionally a Bo Diddly or Pretenders song and if it actually is its own thing, it is really difficult to not sound like a total asshole to say anything but: ”I am not sure how that came out, but it did!”

In contrast to the conservative response to Obama during the last election where they were all touting: ”I made that! I made that” because Obama had said ”You didn’t build that!”, which was obnoxious and child-like. Did you not drive on public roads? Did you not drink public water? What kind of person stands there and says: ”I made that!”? It is a 3-year old’s idea of ownership and pride, and it isn’t a pride that John recognizes.

If you think too much it is only natural to think that you didn’t ever really make anything, and that is what the conservatives are so upset about. They are angry because they think the Democrats are trying to steal their family and their pride from them, but they are not, they just don’t have any family pride themselves and they are trying to smear everybody with it with their gayness, and their big gay black polyamorous penises rubbed all over their family pride.

The other day somebody accused John of being polyamorous. John replied: ”Don’t you talk like that to me!” - ”Polyamorous means: Loves a lot of things!” - ”That seems pretty broad! Polyamorous has become a way of saying: I am a Furry, but I love a Bronie!”

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