This part is bonus content only for Patreon supporters and if someone came across this episode who is not a patron, they must be hackers and they are doing wrong!

There is no aspect of this additional content supply chain that gives the listener any more right to be dissatisfied with things. Starting to do something like this is often an opportunity for people to feel in some sense more proprietary because it is not free content and people think they are paying for it. They are paying out of the goodness of their hearts because they like the show and they are getting this as a bonus, but they are not paying for the bonus content. If people have some problem with it, write Dan and do not get dissatisfied!

For this part of the show Dan and John want to get emails from listeners to vt.5yb5|krowdaor#vt.5yb5|krowdaor, or listeners can go to 5by5.tv/contact and click the email link there which will send the email to Dan and John. You can literally ask anything you want to ask! There is no guarantee that they will read the email or talk about it. They have already received some emails and Dan has not cross-checked if these people are actual donors, but if they are not, they will never hear the answer anyway.

Missing the manic phases of bipolar (RW121)

A while ago you said that people listen to this podcast so they wouldn’t feel alone. When I heard that, a tear came to my eye because I had felt that for a long time. Your conversations remind me of those I had when I was younger and had friends with more than one interest. I truly appreciate the show and look forward to each episode.
I have bipolar disorder. When you started to take Lamictol, did you miss the manic phases or were they so destructive that it is better without them? Mine were always hyper-productive and now I’m not depressed much, but I haven’t accomplished anything substantial in a while.
— John from Pennsylvania

A lot of people in the creative world are worried about pursuing a treatment for mental illness because they are afraid that it will dull their edge. The old mental illness drugs, especially anti-depressants, did do that and were often prescribed to bipolar-people incorrectly. You would see the dead look come over them! It might be somewhat age-dependent, but John's manic phases were all where his best ideas came from or where his productivity really was, because John made everything he made in a frenzy of creativity.

Walking across Europe from Amsterdam to Istanbul is not an idea that you come up with in a state of relaxed and patient strategizing about how your life is going to go, but you come up with this in the middle of the night, you burn everything and by the time the spell wears off you are already somewhere in the Czech republic, going ”What have I done?”, but then you can’t go back because you are a bipolar person and tell yourself that you have to see this through! That is how John made all his records and did all his tours. By the end of the last major Long Winters tour he was smoking two packs of cigarettes a day and sleeping 3 hours a night, which feels amazing, but it is not sustainable.

Untreated mental illness does not get better because time goes by or because you have thought about it more. It just gets worse and worse and John got worse and worse as he got older. The depression got worse and the highs got lower and lower. John wasn’t soaring up in the sky, but when he felt mania it didn’t even return him to a state of normalcy. As a downside, the floor dropped out of it and John’s capacity for emptiness was boundless, but he could not get full again.

When John started taking Lamictol, he got restored to his natural self, which is a little manic, maybe 10% more manic than what is regular. If he is just being his normal self, he is already making questionable decisions all the time. It has been wonderful! John hadn’t had years where he was sparkling like a Roman candle for maybe 10 years before that.

John ran for Seattle City Council 100% in a manic episode, because he didn’t plan that for 2,5 years, but he was sitting with a group of friends around a Dim Sum and said that something needs to happen in Seattle politics because this is ridiculous and one of them told John he should run for City Council and John said ”I should! Let’s do it!” Two weeks later he was running for city council! That is not how you do politics! He made a viable go at it, but it was absolutely the kind of decision you make when you are feeling mania rather than being deliberative.

The drug continues to be extremely good for John. He cannot look back and say that he was burning up the world and this drug took all his creativity away, because his creativity was long gone and what he has now is way better. John was very dramatic at 30 years old and he could smoke cigarettes for 20 hours a day, sleep under a car every once in a while, and he spent 3 months in bed. It is unclear if he would have been able to trade the drama he felt about his life and start taking Lamictol when he was 30.

Life feels so simple most of the time when we are just walking around, but if you have a mental illness, if you are especially dramatic or if you are suffering from some mental malady, that is also very real. People living in the normal world do not actually appreciate how real that his until somebody they love commits suicide or does something crazy.

Most people in the normal world are always shocked by these things. The whole world of mental illness, even the idea that we call it illness, is super-duper real and it is legitimate to ask yourself if you want less drama or if you want to live fast and die young and burn the candle at both ends. You can choose to be ill, you can choose to be an alcoholic, you can choose to be a pedophile, and if you are getting more out of being mentally ill, it is viable, but here is a caveat and if you are mentally ill you do not know that.

John can say it now because his bipolar is managed and he can look back and see what he is trading. He would not trade what he has right now for that, because he has seen both. If you have never had your mental illness balanced, of course you are going to say that you choose drama, because you are mentally ill. The problem with depression and illnesses is that from within you are thinking that you are making rational choices, but you are not! Your choices are governed by the pathology of your mind. John would not go off Lamictol. Their listener sounds like they have tried it and they are feeling themselves hobbled by it.

John wonders if it is really productivity they are looking for, because productivity is a weird way to assess how well you are doing. John is somebody who feels that life is worth living if everything around him is on fire, because it just feels more alive than if all the gardens are carefully planted and tended. That causes problems for others and for John’s own life, but it also has some wonderful aftereffects in the lens. John has great experiences, but you cannot have perfect knowledge!

Even though we know that mental illness is not treatable, our culture still talks as though it was. People say ”Get help!” or ”Find someone to talk to!”, but there is no cure for Borderline Personality Disorder and you can’t just call a crisis line to make the pain or the mental confusion go away, but we say that to people all the time. ”Try harder”, ”Smile at people!”, which is the dumbest possible shit you could say, as though there was a normal, as though being that normal was what everybody wanted, as though once you get there you never fall out of it again. It is all just bananas! If you have the will, the ability and the capacity to care enough to find a solution, you have miles of road ahead of you! John is very frank and it is not something we are accustomed to hear.

What ended up being true for John is that he had enough. It is why he stopped doing drugs: He had enough and he understood that more was not going to make him any better or even keep him stable, but more was just going to be worse and he finally got to a point with manic depression where he was not going to think his way out of this and he was not getting better on his own, but it was only getting worse and every more day without trying something else was just on a path to worse.

Both with the drugs and the mental illness John was able to say that he didn’t want worse, but he wanted better! Today he looks back and is grateful for having made these choices. There is something in him that wanted life to get better and maybe his exploratory nature told him that this town was bad, let’s go the next town. He believed that he could move from a state of sadness to something else, but it required some constancy of hope which is not always possible for people to access.

You have to make your own choices, whether you take medicine or do drugs. John can now look at things and ask: ”Is relationship drama still good for you? Do you still really like dramatic relationships with people who are a little unstable? Or would you rather leave that town and go to a different town with other trade-offs?” In that case, John is still good here in this weird and fucked-up town and he will stick around for a little bit.

Rickenbacker guitars (RW121)

While I wouldn’t dream of talking to you about Stratocasters, I would like to know your thoughts on this *ahem* non-canonically colored 1988 Rickenbacker 360-6. The color is original, a limited run. I realize that this visual image isn’t ideal for podcast discussion, but if anyone could make this interesting, it is you. It is my only electric guitar, I bought it used from the Palomba Music in Port Chester, New York in 1996 for $350.
Thanks for all the great shows!
— Jason

This question was written in British English and Dan will make an exception but from here on out they will only accept question written in correct American English with correct American pluralization, like companies are a single entity. The reader included a picture of the guitar.

Every year around Thanksgiving time John does a show at the big theater in Port Chester, New York where they re-enact The Last Waltz and John plays the role of Neil Diamond.

Rickenbacker is an American company with a German sounding name. One of their signature things, which they started doing in the 1980s and continue to do, is that all bright, chrome, shiny bits on a guitar like the tuning pegs, the bridge and the pick-up covers, which are normally either silver or old or nickel, are matte black like on this one.

Their guitars were used by The Beatles and The Birds and people loved them in the 1960s for their very jangly sound. They were not very metal or hard-rocky, so after the 1960s jangle sound went away and everything got very heavy, nobody used Rickenbackers for the most part through the 1970s. In the late 1970s The Mods, The Jam and a lot of the 1980s bands started to use them again. The Jam looked back at The Who and Pete Townshend was famously playing Rickerbackers. In the 1980s there was a lot more jangle pop and Rickerbackers were popular, but when Grunge and those heavy bands came out, Rickenbackers were not good for that music and people stopped playing them again.

John’s main guitar during the years when he was coming up in Seattle, during the early years of The Long Winters, and on his first two albums was a 1966 Rickenbacker 330, which is probably why this question came. It was a natural wood color and the finish was put on very thin and had worn away so that it seemed like it was just made of wood. Nowadays Rickenbackers get a really thick coat of lacquer and John doesn’t like it because it is too shiny.

In the early 1980s there was an automobile style called the Euro Style where all the chrome was blacked out or removed from the car. It was initially a street style that then became part of the Volkswagen GTI for example, where the trim was famously painted black instead of silver. It was a whole look throughout the 1980s. This guitar is exactly painted in the Porsche 911 Guards Red color with blacked-out trim, so it is the exact color scheme of a Porsche 944 or 911 from 1986 and it is meant to conjure that image. You are not limited to playing the music of the late 1980s, but it is just a style. You can’t play metal very well with this guitar or really even hard rock, because it is very treble-y and is meant to cut you right in the middle of the head.

John’s guitar was additionally modified with humbucking pick-ups from an early 1970s Gibson rather than the original single-coil ones and it had a different sound, but you can still hear the Rickenbacker in it. You can play Johnny Marr and punky music on it quite well, but if you want to run a big amp with a ton of distortion on it, you are going to look for something else.

John’s view on sexuality (RW121)

John, on a few rare occasions, you have alluded to bi-sexual experiences or relationships, but never gone into much detail. If you don’t mind sharing, what’s your story? I’m a man and consider myself about 96% straight. I had a few rendezvous in college and have only told my wife and one friend about it. Thankfully she thinks it is great. It feels like there is still a public stigma with male bisexuality and I hate that I’m adding to it by not being ”out”. But there it is! Maybe one day. And Dan, anything to share? Love the show and thankful you guys make it!
— Justin

Dan would think he is 100% straight because he never had any bisexual or gay experiences, he has never to his recollection thought about it or been in a situation where he thought this was something he wanted to do. There is really no juicy story and nothing of interest there at all. One time Dan's friend in High School told him that he had had a dream about them both, but he would never tell Dan what happened in the dream.

For John, even starting in High School, sexuality is a continuum. John was sexually curious across a pretty wide aperture, but he was also naturally very inhibited about sex of all kinds, like talking about sex and seeing sex represented. Until he was in his 20s he would flinch when people kissed in the movie theater. There are a lot of terms to use for someone like that and John would not use the word sexually repressed, but he was an extremely sensitive person, not meaning easily offended or injured in this case, but having a sensitivity to other people, what they were doing, and what they were feeling. Emotions were overwhelming and he was easily overwhelmed by stimulus and easily stimulated about everything. That is why he doesn’t listen to music around the house, because it is too stimulating for him to have music playing in the background.

Sex felt very dangerous to John, and it wasn’t just because of the AIDS era, but that kind of intimacy with people was threatening to John’s well-being. He was curious and thought about both boys and girls as sexual creatures. John had varying interest in them individually and didn’t think of people as classes of people, yet he didn’t attach a ton of other stuff to it. He didn’t find certain people interesting, both men and women, who others would think were really attractive or really compelling and the people he did find sexually interesting were outliers and fringe people. It was just another thing that set John apart.

As he got older, John didn’t have some lucky moment where he met a person whom he really connected with and that person was also sensitive and the two of them formed a small universe together where they were able to experiment in safety, but John continued to feel that he was in the wilderness and the more intimate he was with a person, the more he was in danger. He was circulating at first with other normal alternative kids who were also confused, and as time went on he went through some dangerous people. For most of his life he has been interested primarily in people who were charting their own course and that is not normally the kind of person who is going to provide a safe environment for you. The same is true for John and he has not always been a safe environment for other people either. When he imagines the future, he always imagines that he is going to be a safe environment for the next person he will meet, sexually, but when he looks back, he wasn’t really a safe environment like he had hoped.

As time went on, John realized that he was attracted to a certain kind of being and their gender is a lesser factor. Their beauty, their comeliness, their nature, their presence, how they interact with John chemically: His signals alert to a certain person rather than to a class of people. The lack of that safe environment early on meant that he never felt very secure. His decisions are certainly not reliable and he is not a super-good decision-maker when it comes to ”Should I get in the car with this person?” and there were an awful lot of times when he shouldn’t have gotten in that car.

There have been a lot of missed opportunities, too. There were meaningful moments where John didn’t get in the car when he should have, because he was scared and felt constrained by fear in not ever really feeling safe. This is true for relationships with men and women: John never had just someone take him by the hand. He was always big, loud and gave the appearance of confidence, so the expectations of a lot of the people he would naturally be attracted to were that he would take them by the hand.

That is exactly the challenge: The people John is attracted to are not demure but crafty and, for a lack of a better word, consciously small. They want to interact with John who is consciously big, but they recognize that John’s bigness is as much of a cloak as their smallness. There is no room in John’s bigness to be in an intimate sexual relationship with someone else who is trying to be big, but there is a whole universe of people who are comfortable to be small and that is where they fell most themselves.

Talking about people who are intentionally small is a new language for John, a new way of seeing the world and the idea that you would choose to be small is still very threatening to mainstream people. It is also a gender issue because we are constantly telling young people to be as big as they can be and we show them big strong role models, while there are other role models who are small and smart and crafty and sly, but you don’t want to be that, which is a bummer!

We are at an exciting point in history right now because we do have these concepts now and during the second half of the 20th century we have arrived at a place where we can talk about a lot of the things that we have uncovered in the last 25 years, but unfortunately we are in a period where we are disallowing ourselves the option of talking about them. For example this listener asking John about bisexuality is a thing you couldn’t have asked somebody 25 years ago, not even privately, and that feels like a fantastic development.

In John’s Internet culture and Liberal 21st century culture there are a lot of cultural expectations around how you talk about bisexuality: You have to be liberationist and you have to be out! Their listener is afraid of not being out, but his outness is irrelevant. He is afraid that he is doing the world wrong and he is not helping other bisexuals by not being himself, but that is not the point. If you want to be out, be out!

John understands the liberation. Not being out is not just a question of it not being fashionable or not being politically defensible in our modern culture, but of course it is! You can’t talk about it unless you also can talk about not being out. You are not talking about it honestly and you can’t talk about sexuality without talking about big and small. Not everybody can be big, not everybody is a fucking hero, not everybody is a top and not everybody is going to be president of the United States.

When you walk around with a T-shirt that says ”The future is women”, 100% of little boys are like ”Oh!” You think that you are helping, but there are a lot of boys and girls for whom that is just another thing they have to get over later on down the line. We are always trying to help by getting in little kids’ faces saying that this is the right way and these are the wrong ways, but Fuck! It is so hard! Just to leave people alone!

John is attracted to men and women who exhibit the qualities that he finds attractive, who have a certain appearance in the world, who cast a shadow in the world, and who feel like they belong with John and have a role with him. John does not think of himself as being a half of a whole, but a lot of people will say that when they couple with someone. John has always seen himself as a whole being, not absent any portion and when he sees himself in partnership with someone, he is performing and they are performing.

John is performing a role of largeness and they are performing a role of smallness. You have to be pretty self-aware and liberated to know that about yourself. A guy with a beard who is 6 feet tall does not appear to John as a sexual creature at all, while he of course understands that other people think he is attractive. He can see one and find him a handsome guy, but he doesn’t feel any sexual interest, even if that person says that he is very soft. They are repping a place in the world that doesn’t belong close at hand to John, which is an area where John’s understanding has evolved over the years.

When John was kissing boys in his early 20s, a lot of it was an expression of Punk Rock: ”We are not bound by your stupid world, man!” John’s first adult job was in a gay bar. He was the straight kid mascot in that gay bar that gradually became a Rock club. They hired more and more straight kids to be in the Rock club and it became a staff of young straight kids working a bar that was half gay bar half Punk Rock club.

Those were exciting times! John was young and had a very blond mustache and was fetishized as a small, because he was young and doughy. To the degree to which he was fetishized as a big, smalls don’t typically make the first move and so the people who were moving on him were people who saw him as a peach or a tidbit. But he was not a fucking tidbit, he was something else!

John could see why they were chasing him: He looked like a mink, but he was not their mink and he didn’t have the empowerment to understand that the ones who looked like minks to John, boys and girls, who were fluttering their eyelashes at him from across the room, needed him to be assertive. Times have changed and John is fully grown and understands better what people's expectations of him are. He still doesn’t really ever feel wholly safe, but he knows that people look to him as a safe place for them and that is what he aspires to be and keeps trying to be: A place where people can come and feel protected and guarded.

The struggle is ongoing all the time and John is gratified that we are working so hard to explain to all the fucking snorks in the world that there are a lot of different sexualities and that there are a lot of different expectations. People should not be judged afar and put into pigeonholes, because that is not an effective way. In sexuality you should not exclusively refer to people by class, because people are individuals and sexuality is very individual.

John is super-dismayed that this conversation has become so politicized that we are not talking about it in any reasonable terms. We are making sweeping generalizations in the other direction and say that there are 75 genders, which is not a very effective way to accomplish what we are trying to accomplish. We want to liberate people, make sex accessible, find your place in the world, be comfortable and find a safe place, but not prioritize safety over everything, because safe is not how you live life!

Life is dangerous! We can’t speak frankly about it because sexuality has been captured and politicized in this era where the fun is drained out of a lot of people’s lives and they are never going to get it back. A lot of people of John’s generation will be 75 years old and go ”Fuck! Why did I lose my youth to being angry about how sex is represented rather than by trying to find my own path where I realize what I need and where I find people for whom I am what they need?”

We still don’t know how to talk to teenagers about sex. All we do is jam shit down their throats, ideas that they are not capable of comprehending. No-one wants to talk to teenagers about sex and characterize sex as fun. It is dangerous, but it is going to be dangerous no matter what you do! You can get as many signed consent forms as you can find, but it is never not going to be dangerous, that is just the nature of it!

Getting in a car is dangerous, life is fucking dangerous, you just have to go in and find the person who is looking for you and you have to find a person you are looking for and they are so often not the same person. Good luck, God bless! Falling in love with your High School sweetheart and marrying them and having 8 kids is just not what happens to most people and the rest of us have to do the best we can.

Getting stopped by fans (RW121)

Yesterday, Dan saw 2001 at the Alamo Drafthouse and he took his boy who is almost 11. There are apparently 2 versions of it, one is 70mm, which is the original that people saw when it came out, the other one that Dan saw was the 4K restoration that was color-corrected and updated.

It was very charming that there was a legit 15 minute intermission during the movie and Dan was talking to his son about the movie until somebody said ”Dan!” a couple seats over and it was a wonderful listener named Garett, the best civil engineer in Austin as far as Dan can tell, who wanted to say hi and who loves the show. Dan encourages anybody to come up to him and say Hi because nothing makes his day more than hearing from somebody who listens to the show and loves the show.

John is still equally recognized as the Long Winters guy and the podcast guy. Rock people tend to be a lot more ”Hey man, love your band!” and are not as shy, because they are just listening to your band and they do not think that they know you in person. John was at a music festival over the last two days and people came up and said ”Love your band!”, but the podcast fans are often shy, because they have more they want to say.

They want to come up and say ”Hey, I just wanted to say…”, but they have also heard from a lot of podcasters and nerds that they do not want their fans to come up to them and so they think that is part of the culture. Nerd culture is based around the idea that social anxiety is a feature, not a bug. People are saying not to come up when they are with their family and don’t take a picture! Dan agrees that it is different if people ask if they can get a picture with him, but not people creeping around.

Someone took a picture through their car window while standing at a stop light of John standing on the sidewalk with Adam Pranica, just in the middle of the city on a busy street, and they posted it or sent it to John, and that is exactly what John wants, that kind of candid private detective photograph, how cool! What the fuck? What are we so afraid of? At least John is not afraid of being seen or being talked to, even if he is with his kid. Absofuckinglutely!

When John says ”Don’t at me” or that he doesn’t want to hear replies, what he is really saying is ”Don’t be a fucking dick!”, John doesn’t want to use Will Weaton’s catch phrase, but if you have a problem with what Jon said online that you feel like you need to either correct him or think John needs your education, go fuck yourself! But if you just want to talk about stuff and have thoughts about stuff? Of course! Don’t pigeonhole him or put him against the wall in a bar and talk to him about your medication for an hour, because that is just rude. Use normal judgement! But always come and say Hello, even if you don’t want to talk. Just wave your hand and go ”Hi!” It makes John warm inside! Say something nice! Every time!