This week, Dan and John talk about:

• John’s first cross-country running race (Early Days)
• John never threw up (Aging)
• John remembering all the details in his stories (Stories)
• Having bad OPSEC (Attitude and Opinion)
• John looking for a house (Mid-century modern)
• John’s daughter wanting him to be happy, the adult and the child inside him (Personality)
• Pronunciation (Language)
• John leaving the piano behind (Objects)
• Anna Banana selling John’s clothes in the Pretty Parlor (Objects)
• John’s photograph from the lunar orbiter (Objects)
• Stolen valor (Objects)

Bonus-content for Patreon supporters:

• John looking for a house (mid-century modern)
• Witnessing a goose and her goslings get killed on the freeway (Stories)
• Dan witnessing somebody getting hit by a car (Dan Benjamin)
• Thinking you know that a relationship is not going to go well anyway (Relationships)

The show title refers to John thinking about leaving a note in clothes he was selling in order to tell the future owner about the history, but he wouldn’t want to sign it with his name because he didn't want to come across like a big shot who thinks he is a celebrity and his ownership of the thing imparts some additional value to it.

This morning John barfed, maybe because of the new house that came on the market, or the stress of it all. He didn't sleep a wink last night, not for a single minute because of it.

Draft version
The segments below are drafts that will be incorporated into the rest of the Wiki as time permits.

John’s first cross-country running race (RW162)

John was on the cross-country running team, but he was terrible. The first time he ever actually raced in a competitive cross-country race against all the other High Schools in town was at a golf course in Anchorage called Russian Jack golf course. All the High School boys lined up, John was at the starting line, but he had never been in a race before.

His friend Matt Olnes, the champion of their team, leaned over and said: ”At the starting gun you need to try and get out ahead of the pack!” They would start 50 boys across, five boys deep, which is a huge crowd, but it then narrows down to a single track a quarter of a mile up, and Matt was saying: ”You need to get out ahead because once the crowd narrows down you are going to be stuck somewhere!”

The gun went off and John took off like a shot and got way out ahead. By the time they got to the single track portion he was 300 yards ahead of everybody, hauling ass, like: ”Whoa, I'm the greatest cross-country racer in history!” He had no idea because he had never been in a race before! The people standing on the sidelines, all the adult and other kids, were cheering and had looks of complete astonishment, like ”Whoa, who is this an Olympic-class runner?”

At the end of a long stretch the course did a big 120 degree turn and went straight up a hill. John turned and could see the whole crowd. He was far ahead of them, but he was not winded. He was cruising and he hit this hill, but about 3/4 the way up he run completely out of gas. He had just blown everything in the first 6 minutes of his race and by the time he got to the top of the hill the first runner went by him and then 90 High School boys ran past him. John could just hear them snicker as they went by. Whatever it was, a 5K or a 7K, John came in dead-last, five minutes behind the last racer, just dragging ass. As he crossed the finish line he barfed.

John was absolutely humiliated and confused. Matt walked over and said: ”I meant you should get out ahead of the pack! You were not supposed to sprint, you gotta keep some in reserve!” John was never a successful cross-country racer. Later on in the season he was in the back 30 and beat other kids to the finish line. He wasn't always last, but he he didn't want to do it anymore.

John never threw up (RW162)

John doesn’t throw up even when he is sick or when he eats bad food and has food poisoning. Until the last few years he could count the number of times in his life he had thrown up. In the past he could get so drunk that he was a dead man walking but he never blacked out and always remembered everything. He was shitfaced blind all the time, but he never threw up. He would just lay there while the room was spinning, unable to really move. His sister throws up all the time, even as a little kid, every time she got sick, while John didn't even understand why people did it. Maybe life would have been easier if he had? Whatever is bothering you goes away.

In the last couple of years John had food poisoning a couple of times because he eats a lot of pizza that he finds under in the bed and he goes to strange restaurants that aren't always fine, where the sign out front says: ”This restaurant did not pass inspection!”, but somehow they are still open and he is like: ”Seems good!” All this stuff that Don Schaffner yells at him about (see FS122).

John remembering all the details in his stories (RW162)

Dan wonders how John remembers these stupid little details. Either his memory is absolutely ridiculously great, or it is all made up and Dan is not sure which it is. John remembers people's names, the locations of things, and the size of the lug nut that went on this particular truck’s thing

This fact makes it infuriating to argue with John because when people say: ”I told you I said blah blah blah…” he will say: ”Well, actually, what you said is this…” When people recall what they said two months later they always change three words in the recollection of what they said, but those are the three words that convey all the meaning of the argument. Then the person goes: ”Fuck you!”

Having bad OPSEC (RW162)

Over the years various people have told John that he needed to practice better OPSEC. He talks about his house, he talks about where he lives, and there are intrepid people, or maybe not even intrepid people but regular creeps, who find it easy to find where he lives, which is bad policy on his part. Some are just doing it because they can: ”That's bad OPSEC, let me find out where he lives!”, some just want to watch the word burn, like: ”Oh, I can hack a Ford Fiesta, let's do it!”, but and there might be some who think: ”I want to know where he lives because I want to go visit him!”

One time about five years ago John was driving home to the farm and noticed there was a sticker on a STOP sign two blocks from his house that said #supertrain. It was a message, telling him that his OPSEC was bad. It was some street sign that he eventually would interact with and go by it, so eventually he would see it. They didn't come to the house, they didn't put it on his mailbox, and they never tweeted him about it, but it was just a little joke between us.

In a way John admired it because that took some restraint and there was a cleverness, even. But he also realized that he had given away too much, that it was a vulnerability, and part of the reason why that person put that sticker there was that John talked all the time about how his house was his citadel. It was a friendly warning.

John didn’t give away his address, but he mentioned many times what his house looked like and he mentioned some news item and some other thing and this person triangulated. They presumably got into the neighborhood and drove around until they saw the house. It involves some work, but it is the type of thing John does as well: ”I got nothing to do, I guess I'm going to go walk around this house in the middle of the night!” It was done with a certain amount of respect, like: ”Hello, fellow weirdo!”

John is torn because he wants to share with everyone who listens and who cares: ”Here is what is cool about the house! Let me tell you more and let me show it to you!”, but then 30.000 people will know where he lives and if you take the law of averages over 30.000 people and the nature of this show, maybe 11 of them are creeps. John is not a female comedian, it is not that 4000 of them are creeps!

John looking for a house (RW162)

Another house came on the market and when the listing showed up four different people sent it to him within 15 minutes of it going live. He wasn't aware that so many people were following along, among others his across-the-street neighbor, which is some indication that this was a good match, given that about 80 houses a day come online in Seattle. John went to see it this morning and it is a total wreck in some ways which hopefully will scare people away.

The house was built in the 1950s and was still owned by its original owners who almost certainly either just died or are so old that they can't live there anymore. It is completely untouched and has all the original light-switches. At some point in the 1980s they put in a new stove, at some point some water got into the basement, it needs a new furnace, a new hot water heater, a new electrical panel, and in so many other ways it is a thing that hopefully will scare off all the people.

It meets almost every one of John’s list of criteria for a house: It is private, it is untouched and unrestored, it has a full basement, it has the space he needs, it is exactly one mile from the house where his daughter and her mother live and where John is staying now, which is 3 minutes by car and however long it takes you to walk a mile.

At John’s present age, if he was hustling, he can walk a mile in 12 minutes. When he was young he could do a seven minute mile, but he was never much of a runner although he was on the cross-country running team. Dan used to jog on a regular basis back in High School and college, and he could do under a six minute mile easy.

John found out about this house at 9pm and he immediately jumped into the car. The house is not occupied and John spent 45 minutes prowling around in the dark, looking in, and checking things out. He saw some things that were concerning, but overall it was: ”Whoa!”

The basement, which is an important part of the house, is not completely unfinished, just haphazardly finished, but there were signs that water had gotten in over the years. If the owners were 90, water probably started getting in but they didn't go downstairs anymore and didn't do anything about it. When you walk into the basement of a house and there is a fan going in there, then the real estate agent has put that in and you know it smells musty or moldy. The water damage is confined to the basement. One wall of the basement is underground and it is not like the house sits in a puddle, but there is a cement wall where water has seeped in.

The furnace was from 1900, but these are easy things to fix. When John had lived on his farm for a while and had fixed up some things, he learned about what he described as a homeowner monetary unit, an HMU, which was $5000. Anything you do on a house is going to cost one homeowner monetary unit at least, maybe two, and if you are going to replace the roof it is two or three, depending on where you live. Looking at this house, even through the windows in the middle of the night, there was one homeowner monetary unit, and there was one, and there was another one.

John could see $15.000 worth of work to be done from outside, but that didn’t deter him because that has nothing to do with the bones or the style of the house. You just call a guy and pay him $5000! Thanks to the transactional truth of John’s current situation he will be able to throw $5000 at some guys. Other people walk in and say: ”I need to replace the kitchen, I need to replace the bathrooms!”, but John doesn’t have to replace the kitchen or the bathrooms because he loves them, they are perfect! All he has to do is replace the mechanicals, which is not nothing.

John was walking around last night, poking and prodding, before he came back and his daughter's mother asked him a question about the house and he got in the car and drove back to it because it is only one mile from here. He was prowling around it again in the dark again at 11:00pm and when he came home he was tired, he hadn't gotten a lot of sleep the night before, he was ready go to bed, he went to bed, laid down and just sat in his bed and thought about the house until dawn. He got up, had some coffee, and he went over to the house to tour it in the day. All the things he had seen from outside were true.

The owners of the house had clearly been Boeing Aerospace people. One door in the house had stickers from all the Apollo missions, meaning that Dad had worked on the Apollo program, which is pretty cool! There was the shadow of a giant sticker on a child's bedroom door that said Boeing 727A, so Dad clearly worked on the 727 program. The 727 was retired in 1984, the house was being built in the early 1960s, and whatever kid lived there had put that 727 up on his door. John is super into the fact that this house has an aerospace connection.

John was up all night long and this morning his daughter asked: ”What am I going to have for lunch today?” They talked about what was going to go on her lunch pail and she was coughing. ”Are you sick?” - ”No, I just have a cough!” and she wiped some snot off her nose ”You have a runny nose! Are you sick?” - ”No, I just have a cough and a runny nose!” - ”All right, have a nice day at school. I hope that you don't spread it to everyone, but you are assuring me that you are not sick!” As soon as she was out of the house John started to cough and he was coughing and coughing and then it became an uncontrollable cough. Cough cough cough cough cough cough cough cough cough cough hard cough hard cough.

When it was time to tour the house John was outwardly calm and he even felt inwardly calm. ”Time to go tour the house!” cough cough cough cough cough, and then he coughed so hard that he had to go to the bathroom and he coughed until he started dry heaving. He dry-heaved into the sink for 40 seconds, which is a long time. It didn’t make any sense because he didn’t feel sick, but maybe that was some kind of sympathetic cough or maybe his nerves were coming out. John doesn’t just throw up for no reason‚ but this he was emotionally invested and super stressed-out.

John toured the house with his real estate agent and told her he wanted the house. She will make an offer on it today and if they don't accept it then they will talk to the real estate agent and beat any other offers! She recommended to offer asking price, give them 40% downpayment, and John doesn’t need an inspection.

The electrical panel in this house is by a company called Northern Pacific from back in the day and is so bad that the state has declared this kind of panel unsafe and when you buy a house you need to replace it. John has seen enough of them and as soon as he opened the electrical box it was like: "Well, it has got a Northern Pacific panel, got to come out!" That is a homeowner monetary unit.

The hot water heaters is so old it doesn't even have any energy efficiency stickers on it, so that has got to come out! There are no washer and dryer, so John has to buy those and that is at least a homeowner monetary unit. The house has an oil-burning furnace, which probably still works fine, but John has been very interested in heat pumps lately, so if the furnace has to go he will put it in a heat pump and that is expensive.

John has been through it so many times and what is an inspector going to tell him? He is going to walk around and say: ”Well, that has got to go!” - ”Yeah, I know!” All the inspector can do is put a marble on the floor and say: ”The floors aren’t level!” If John would remember to bring a marble he could have figured that out. John is making an offer and the paperwork for the offer may come in right now, and if it does then he just has to sign it.

John is hoping that the amount of updating that the house needs scares people away. It is priced competitively and is not expensive relative to the house he made an offer on two weeks ago, but he is hoping that it is not one of those real estate ploys where they price it low and then people go crazy. John's agent said they will just make an offer at asking price and maybe they will take it!

Dan’s fingers are crossed for John! John is the kind of person who doesn't do well when he doesn’t have a secure base of operations and listening to him talk over the last few weeks he feel this seems very true. Dan is very much the same way. Part of the stress is that John has been looking for a house for a long time, but he hasn’t seen anything. He doesn’t want to not have a house anymore, and he wants to get on with his life!

If John gets the house he would be in by Halloween. Then he will begin the process involving the storage space and the shipping container that are just sitting out there full of his things, which means: ”Not everything that he took out of his old house is going to go in to the new house!” Things are going to come out one at a time and he is going to hold them up and evaluate: ”Does this belong here, or is this from an earlier time?” and that also is catharsis!

Seeing all those Apollo stickers and that Boeing 727 stuff John recognized it is a house owned by one of those dudes and he is going to put his silly-ass thrift-store Earth picture up on a wall somewhere with pride and the cycle of life goes on! John is going to have to find a 1960s flight suit to wear around the house, and maybe he will buy a Corvettes like all the astronauts had during Mercury and start driving around in a Corvette! Why the fuck not? Just go the whole hog! It certainly would establish a new aesthetic for John!

John’s daughter wanting him to be happy, the adult and the child inside him (RW162)

Yesterday as they were driving John's daughter said just out of nowhere: ”I just want you to be happy! I don't know why you are not happy!” - ”You know baby, inside me there is a kid who is always happy. He likes to play. He is a goofball. He likes to tease and tickle and have adventures and be fun, but also inside me there is an adult who is really strict and who is mean to that kid. He is not mean to you, he is not generally mean to other people, but he is really mean to the kid that lives inside me, and anytime that kid inside me seems like he is having fun, the adult inside me cracks on him and tells him he has no right to have fun and tells him that he is being bad. And that adult is a real bummer and the kid in me is always sad because he doesn't get to have fun.”

They drove quietly for a while and then she said: ”There is something like that in me!” - ”What is it in you?” - ”There is a puppy in me that is calm, a furry cream-colored puppy, but there is also a red puppy, and when the red puppy gets mad he convinces the calm puppy to also be mad and then they are both mad” John nodded and they drove along for a while. That was different from John’s story, but she is eight and she is describing an inner life that is complicated. John doesn’t know whether she is mimicking, but she seemed to know what he meant and she seemed to be concerned about it. She also didn't just say: ”I have that!”, but she was quiet about it. John has been stewing on that for a little bit.

She is a happy child for the most part, just generally a happy person. She is also very empathetic and she has never understood why John is not happy. She tries to make him better, she tries to make him happy, which is sweet, but when she looks back at her childhood he doesn’t want it to be characterized by the fact that her dad was so down. John has Resting Depressed Face, but it is also evident that when he is at rest he is thinking and if he is thinking he is generally thinking something that doesn't make him light-hearted.

If he is sitting on the couch staring into the distance he looks complicated and then she bounds into the room and says: ”Let's play!”, but John is far away and has to return to Earth first and shake off that form of psychic exhaustion. He is not physically exhausted, but he is burdened and he is not always able to do it. She says: ”Come on, let's play!” - ”Yeah, I want to, but unfortunately I am on a far-off moon, trying to colonize it and things aren't going very well. People are starving!” - ”Huh, okay, that doesn't make any sense!” - ”Well, yeah, that is true, but it is none the less real!”

Will she accept that when she will be a teenager? It doesn't matter, John is not someone who's like: ”Let's go toss a ball around!”, but he will do it because he recognizes that it is important. Yesterday they went to the swimming pool. John does take her places and they do things, but he always has this friend in toe who is there to remind him that he sucks. With any luck the new House will take away a kind of additional stress he has been carrying for the last year and a half and also take away some other stresses, the stresses that he felt about his old house and his old life.

Part of the idea behind having a new house was that he would transform in ways that enabled him to forgive himself a little bit. Maybe it will? Maybe having a new house with all its original 1950s light fixtures will mollify him? It is a plan at least! It is more than not-a-plan, and not-a-plan is John’s normal state, so at least he had a plan for the last year.

Maybe after having completed the plan he will feel like people feel when they make a list of to-dos and cross one off. People told him his whole life: ”Make a list of todos and cross them off, it will make you feel better!”, but the first thing on his list of todos is always: ”Finish your novel!” He has been working on a heist movie screenplay, he got his walk-book, finishing college was always right up there on his to do list, and he finally did that.

Pronunciation (RW162)

Dan heard ”Wok book” when John said "walk book" and he thought it was a book about cooking because John often pronounces the L in Walk. He also says ”Often” with the T. It changes from sentence to sentence. If he were to say: ”How often do you go to the store?”, there is no t in that, but if Dan were to ask: ”When do you go to the store?”, he would say ”Often!” with the T. John definitely says ”Airbody” (everybody), like an Atlanta pronunciation, but it is a regionalism of the Northwest, too. His daughter's mother teases him for it.

John leaving the piano behind (RW162)

John did some good things when he left the house. He was sad to leave his piano and he listened to a couple of recordings of him playing the piano. He can't do it right now because he gets all: ”What did I do?”, but by leaving the piano he established a benchmark of sentimentality and if he pulls something out of a box and goes: ”… but this is the belt buckle I wore the night that a girl told me that my hair was dumb! I can't get rid of this belt buckle, it is a reminder of that humiliating moment!” then he can say: ”You left your mother's piano on which you learned the piano and wrote all your piano songs, and you are going to keep this belt buckle?” It is a great line in the sand! If he is going to keep something it has to be more important and have more of a justification than keeping the piano.

Anna Banana selling John’s clothes in the Pretty Parlor (RW162)

John’s friend Anna Banana owns a store called Pretty Parlor. John had a lot of stuff he was going to eBay, but he never did and he her called up after not having seen her in a while. She came out to his house and looked at all of his clothes, all the coats made for the queen and all the suits that were worn to the Kennedy inauguration and all of the crazy shit.

She said: ”I will take it all! I will take everything!”, and because most of his stuff is autumn and winter stuff, this fall the Pretty Parlor is going to roll out some Roderick clothes. She is going to put a little sticker on the price tag, like for example everything in the store with a green dot came from the Roderick collection.

It was really great to get rid of this stuff and it was really validating that she thought it was worth something. A lot of the burden was: ”I can't just give this away! This coat was made for the queen and it was worn to the Kennedy inauguration, how do you just give this away? It is too good, it is too important, too special, too much of a piece of history to just get rid of!”, just like the house John made an offer on: You don't want to tear this kitchen out of this house! John doesn’t care if it works! It belongs there! It is the heart and soul of the place!

For Anna Banana to say: ”I am a mercantile person, I don't want anything in my store that won't sell. I don't want anything in my story that isn't nice, and I will take all of your crazy clothes!” was for John: ”It makes me feel good and it makes it easier to unburden myself of these things!” Not only does she get it, but she can represent it to the clientele. She is going to tell them what is cool about it, she is hopefully going to make money on it, and it doesn't end up in a random thrift store.

John loves thrift stores and he gives so much stuff to thrift stores. If he buys something for $5 and he wears it for five years, by the time he wants to get rid of it he will give it back to the thrift store because he got his $5 out of it, but a coat that was made for the queen? You can’t just give that back to the thrift store! When John found it he was rescuing this coat from a worse fate. Now Anna Banana is going to sell it to somebody and she is going to charge enough that this person is going to value that coat. It may end up in a thrift store again someday, but its life was prolonged and it gave more love and it received more love.

John hoped that by finding homes for things, not just shooting them out of a barrel, not just throwing them into a dumpster, but finding people whom those things now belong to, the pain of it is somehow eased. John left his piano with the people who bought his house and they will treasure it. His mom had done a bunch of research on that piano 40 years ago and she wrote up a little thing that said: ”This piano was made in this year, it was made by this company at this time in this location at this factory. Here is the serial number.”

She put that information on a little plaque inside the piano. It has its metadata, which is her version of sending it out into the world, except she did it for her children. That little plaque sat in the piano for 40 years and now somebody else looks at it. Maybe they would have been able to find all that information now anyway, but for those 40 years where there wasn't an Internet it involved having gone to the library.

John should have left a little note on the inside pocket of some of his coats: ”Dear future owner of this coat! This coat was worn to the Kennedy inauguration! I don't know that for sure, but looking at it and knowing what I know, I bet you it was! Signed: Former owner” Dan thinks John should identify himself to lend additional credibility to the story, but we will have to be vigilant against ego. John would love to find a garment and in the pocket find a letter that told him something about the garment. Anything he bought he would want to know more!

John’s photograph from the lunar orbiter (RW162)

John has a photograph that he had found in a thrift store in the area around the Boeing skunkworks, a picture that is about four feet (120 cm) long by 18 inches (45 cm) high, a copy of the very first photograph taken of the Earth from a lunar orbit. It is black and white and was sent back to Earth in the form of many stripes of film because the camera could only take pictures in narrow bands. It was a celebrated photograph! A later version of it is the big blue marble in space, but this was the first one and it is pretty ragged looking. This is a big heavy item that was clearly framed in the moment with a 1960s frame with glass.

At some point a couple of years ago John was talking about it to Merlin (see RL296 in July of 2018) and got some responses from people who said that this was a souvenir that was given to people who worked on the space program. One version of it was eight feet long (245 cm) and went to the people at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Other copies went to people who worked on the program. These pictures are somewhat prized because they are rare and they have a historical connection to Apollo. John was intrigued by that and he was pleased and chuffed that he had this thing, but he didn't look any deeper into it.

The other day when John moved his stuff this framed photo was leaning against a wall and he took notice of a scrawled name written on the back: It said Bill Johnston (Edwin W. “Bill” Johnston). John went online, wondering who Bill Johnston was. There is a commonly known list of Apollo heroes and he wasn't on that, which was a bummer.

How did this thing end up at a thrift store in Auburn? John went on Boeing, but couldn't find anything. He kept looking and eventually he realized that Bill was a nickname for this guy and he found stuff out about him. He had worked at Rockwell and he was in charge of the X15 project, the rocket-powered airplane that was the first airplane to go up into space. The X15 pilots went up to over 100.000 feet and they actually got astronaut wings because technically they were in space. Neil Armstrong was an X15 pilot, and the Chuck Yeager guys from The Right Stuff.

This Bill Johnston went by a lot of different names and he was an author of a couple of papers about some of the surfaces on the X15. The heat that is generated by these vehicles on reentry would burn them up and they didn't have a material that could deflect that heat, so they made heat tiles where the whole point of them was that they were going to degrade as the ship came back into the atmosphere and would burn off. Bill Johnston was working on that project and he was talking about it in those papers.

Then John lost the trail of this guy and didn't find anything about him past 1967. He was pretty confident at this point that this picture belonged to Bill Johnston who worked for North American Aviation which got absorbed into Rockwell, but he didn't find anything about Rockwell and he went on Twitter (see tweets 1, 2, 3) and within three hours the genius universe of Twitter librarians and detectives had found all this information about him, including a magazine advertisement for Rockwell that said: ”With a staff like this, of course you are going to make it to the moon!” It had a picture of six white dudes with pocket protectors and there was Bill Johnston under some other name E. W. Johnston, and E stood for Edwin.

Now John has the story of this guy and his lunar photograph had become really imbued with history. He printed out the magazine ad and all the information he had found about him and taped it to the back of the photo, and whatever happens to this photo the people of the future will at least know about E.W. Why was he not on the list of Apollo famouses? You could still see why he got this picture because he worked with Neil Armstrong on the X15 project. A lot of the dudes from X15 ended up being part of space NASA, not just rocket NASA, and somebody had said: ”We got to get one of these pictures to E.W.!”

Stolen valor (RW162)

John worries about stolen valor! He does not want to represent himself as a Mercury astronaut and if he were to drive around Seattle in a 1950s Corvette, dressed in a flight suit, it would be a very weird cosplay. John does not even wear a Long Winters T-Shirt when performing on stage. By the same token, he doesn’t think that he would put a note in a jacket and sign it ”Your friend John Roderick!” because he is concerned at thinking even for a moment that his ownership of it imparts some extra value.

If he puts a Filson bag up on eBay and there are two people, one of them in New Zealand and one of them in England, who both want not just a Filson bag, but one that John has talked about on a podcast, he certainly wants to give those two people an opportunity to bid it up more expensive than a regular Filson bag, but putting it online and saying: ”Hey everybody, it is me, John Roderick, a celebrity! Want to buy my Filson bag? It had my underwear in it!” feels like a tendency he should combat in his own self: ”Do not fall into the trap of thinking that you are important!”

It is fine for people to tell you that you are important to them and it is nice to be appreciated and John is always grateful when someone does, but it is a little bit like telling people you are woke or saying that you are an ally. It is not a thing that you claim, but it is an award that other people bestow upon you. You can tell someone that they are an ally, you can compliment someone on being woke, but you cannot say of yourself that you are woke. How do you know? You can say that you want to be thought of as woke, but ain’t woke until you hear it from somebody else, and even then they might be just trying to give you some shine. Act woke, but don't claim it. It is not a badge! You have to act it and live according to it!

This feels like a similar kind of thing: "It is a FIlson bag, sell it!" If you talk about it and say: ”I am selling some Filson bags!” and then other people look at it and it is up to them, but you don't put a letter inside a jacket and say: ”Signed Mr. Big Shot!”

There is always going to be somebody out there who is trying to take the piss out of you. Even if 99% of the people in the world don't think that, there is always some Pitchfork writer who saying: ”This guy thinks he is so cool!” You have to combat a fear of caring about those assholes. There are many things you have to guard against! Life is complicated! If John was driving around in a 1950s Corvette, wearing an orange flight suit with a NASA patch, maybe life would be less complicated because he would have made some crazy ass choices that would all speak for itself. That would be John’s business card: ”Here he comes!" You are not going to miss this guy.

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