RW171 - A Computer in a box
This week, Dan and John talk about:
The show title refers to John’s custom-built iMac that he had ordered almost a year ago and that he still hasn’t opened, but it is still in the box and is a constant reminder of defeat.
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 Please do not quote these texts directly without applying your own editing first!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.
The state of John’s new house (RW171)
John was a little perspiring because he had been doing some yard work this morning in his new house. He is not living in it, but he is in a place where he can't move in yet because he has work to do and it is a heavy enough project that he can't do it by himself and has to hire some people to help, and hiring people is not John’s favorite thing or his strong suit. Once you hire them you gotta have a plan and John has to do some work before he can start. Although John now owns this cool house and he is ready to live there, but he is not able to move in there for two more months.
Today, out of a feeling of frustration, not resignation although that is always a threat, rather than go inside and do the prep work he needed to be doing he went out and took his frustration out on some English Ivy for an hour and a half. Decades of coiling up guitar cables and power chords has prepared him to coil up miles and miles of English Ivy biomass, but pulling it out of the ground, although it is relative to other plants fairly easy to dislodge, it goes for miles, so you grab ahold of a an English Ivy vine and you start pulling and you could just keep pulling and pulling. You are pulling up logs and raccoons and frogs and they are all up in this bundle with you. It is heavy work!
John is living in a neighborhood now where most of the yards are meticulously maintained by hired landscapers who come in trucks with multiple power-tools and they clip everything so that it is just like Bob Ross's hair. That has never been John’s way although he used to work as a landscaper and has nothing against hiring landscapers, but for whatever reason all of the shirking of labor that he does in his regular life he loves to get into the dirt and the branches and clip and chomp and do all the things. John’s property will take a decade to clear and it will break him doing it. Eventually once he gets it all sorted he will probably hire some people to do things that he doesn’t want to have kill him.
John really looks forward to it. He enjoys the work on the house, but it is very easy to look at some carpentry that is ready to be capented and say: ”Oh boy, I should just let that wood season for another day or two!”, but if you put him out in the yard with a pair of gloves and you say: ”Go do that!” he will happily do it and will not even think about it twice. He just goes right out and start weeding or pruning or whatever. The yard is a big part of what John loves about his new place, but what he doesn’t love right now is that he is not living there and he can't even.
The whole reason John is able to own a home is because of this show and their amazing patrons who support the show at patreon.com/roadwork and there is going to be benefits to that soon, they have been talking about some Patreon benefits, one of the coolest ones John ever saw! No, it is because 15 years ago his band had two good years and rather than spend the money that he made, which, amateurized over the 15 years he had been in a band, came to about $1000 a year in profit, it came at once and he put all the money into the down payment on a house.
It was at a time when the market was high at the time everybody thought it was going to keep going up forever, but of course it spent eight years in a total slump. John had money in a house and most of his friends when they got a similar windfall from their band at whatever time, some of his friends got much bigger windfalls, but they bought a car, they bought some guitars, they bought some fancy dinners, they bought a lot of booze. Then John sold his house this year and he suddenly understood the whole American capitalist process. He didn't do anything, but the money just grew on its own in the form of real estate.
John bought this house for considerably less than he sold his last house for. It was a good deal because the house needed fixing, and his whole plan all along was that he didn’t want to sell his house and buy a more expensive house, even though that is probably what most people do. John just didn't believe in it, it should work the other way, he put a lot of work into that house and should start again with another shabby house, so that is what he did, he is very glad, but he went into the bathroom and took a piece of loose tile off, he knew what was waiting for him, there was some dry rot, and he began to take the tile down to find the extent of the dry rot.
John knew this dry rot was there. There is absolutely no way that there wouldn't have been dry rot in this wall. It is not the reason the house was inexpensive, it is one of many reasons, and John’s problem of course was that he has seen a lot of houses where somebody went in and dealt with the dry rot that they discovered and made it fixed, but the problem with that is: you have no idea how fixed it is. Did they go in and spray that dry rot with a can of WD40 and put some lows tar paper over it and I spackle it? Or did they go in and take every little bit of bad wood out and rebuild the thing and put in water barriers and so forth?
John didn't want to buy a house that somebody else had maybe not done a good job, he wanted to do the good job himself, but as he pulled the tile up he started to see that there was some dry rot that had attracted carpenter ants and that had also produced some crazy sort of inner wall moss plus giants spiders and there was a seagull in there maybe. John knew this was all in his future and this is also work he likes to do. He is not scared by it because he knows you just have to tear it out and put new better stuff in and you try and do a good job.
John is a little bit too meticulous of a construction person because it is just his nature, he is not somebody who puts four nails in when one will do, but he is someone that will work to get the dovetailing to be perfect or work to have all his joints be beautiful even though they are going to get covered over with drywall. If he were hiring someone to do the work and they spent as much time he would be very mad at them, but because he is doing it he is just happy as a little clam. If he bent a nail he will take it out and work on making it straight again rather than throw it in the garbage and take a new nail because he doesn’t want to waste nails that are perfectly fine. It is not that he is frugal, it is some other thing.
Dan wonders that if you bend a piece of metal and bend it back if it loses some of its inherent strength or integrity or something. If you are making a sword in a forge: No, it makes the sword stronger, but if you are bending a nail and then bending it back you have compromised it, but the thing about a nail is that most of the time when you put a nail into something it is not like the nail is particularly weight-bearing. The nails just tack it together most of the time. Sometimes the nails do some heavy heavy lifting, it depends on the nail, it depends on the spot. The weight is always going to fall back on another nail!
John has been pulling this stuff down and has reached the extent of the problem, but the project creeps of course because since you are here you might as well wire it all for sound and put Nest in everywhere and make it so that all of your light bulbs can talk to you and you can get stock quotes on them. John is not doing that, but the plumbing is galvanized which was fine until he pulled the wall down, at which point why put the wall back up before you replace the old plumbing? The old plumbing is not bad, but why wait for it to go bad?
That stuff is where John needs to hire people. Then of course John’s good friend Ben (King) is an architect and when you have a friend that is an architect and you buy a house you owe it to them to let them design your house for you, which is more of a favor John is doing for him. He is: ”Hey John, can I help you redesign your house?” - ”Okay, fine!" He has come up with a very elegant solution to some of the qui flow problems that were happening. People weren't as conscious of Qui in Normandy Park Washington in 1955 as maybe they should have been, but Ben got high Qui for a guy from Texas. He is one of them philosophical Texans.
Texas has almost 30 million people and they are all in Austin right now it seems based on the traffic Dan has, it has gotten really bad there. Countries with 30 million people: Angola, Ghana, Mozambique, Yemen, Nepal, Venezuela, Madagascar. These countries all have a population similar to Texas. Peru, Uzbecistan. Yemen has in terms of land area 527.000 sqkm, but Texas is almost 700.000 sqkm. You got more elbow room in Texas than you do in Yemen!
Once the guys are there to do the plumbing John figured why not have them do the tiling, which John would have done meticulously when he was 32 but now that he is 51 he doesn't want to tile, his knees hurt, and if they are going to do the tiling and the plumbing John might as well farm out the electrical to them. John could do that, but it is tough work on your hands, electrical work really hurts your knuckles! All that is going to cost money of course and take time and it is going to be even more involved because John is going to be standing there the whole time going: ”So what do you do right there? What's that?” John is going to try not to do that and that is why he is going to be out in his yard pulling up English ivy and every once in a while he will come in and say: ”How is it going in here?”, but it is going to cost him twice as much if he stands around talking. Once it is done snug as a bug in a rug.
John not having packed up his computer (RW171)
John sent a text to John Siracusa yesterday. In February of last year (2019) his laptop quit, totally fritzed, and John was in a panic because this time last year he was in a really tough spot because he had decided that podcasting was going to be a thing that he really was invested in, it was going to be his new career. He had been doing it with Dan and Merlin for a long time as a fun sidebar, but now he had these two other shows and was spending so much time on them and neither one of those shows was producing any income and they were five times more work and then John’s computer died.
He called John Siracusa, he asked everybody and it was really John who was the most enthusiastic to reply, and he designed a computer for him. He said: ”Here is what you want, here are all the specs, it is a custom job!” and John pulled the trigger because he has a friend that works at Apple, he called them, he wanted this computer, let's get it going! He said: "Why don't you send your laptop and see if it can be fixed?” and the apples were like: ”Well, it can kind of be fixed. Maybe it is more worth it to just get a new one” - ”Yeah, but isn't there something you can do? *wink wink*” They got John’s laptop working again.
In the meantime this big computer showed up that John ordered that Siracusa had designed, but at that point John was selling his house and he didn't open the box and put the box in the corner. Then he was sleeping on the couch here at his baby momma's house and the computer went into storage. There wasn't a place to put it, it is a big desktop! At the time he was thinking he was going to set up a big studio and have a big computer on the table hook all his cables into it and it is going to be connected to speakers and it is going to be in a room that has lighting and all this stuff. John had this vision, but of course the vision came before the space or the time. Sometimes that happens: "What I need is a switchblade!” and you go get a switchblade and you don't need a switchblade or you think you will need a switchblade in two years when you finally get initiated into this gang.
John got nervous about this computer being in the storage space and he brought it over here to his baby momma's house and tucked it under the shelf in the entryway of the house where it sat and now he has a new house and has moved the computer over there and we are coming up on the year anniversary of him buying this computer in two months and it has never been opened. That feels maybe not like a personal victory. John is always looking around for evidence of his own failure and incompetence and this is a thing that sits there in the entryway of this house and now in his new house and just broadcasts to him every time he looks at it that he is a numbskull.
When John thinks: ”Well, maybe I should save the day and open the box and set up the computer!”, but set it up where, dude? Put it where and do what with it exactly?
John had a vision, and this is maybe a recording studio mentality, where everything was wired, where the connections were all connected. Like in Moby’s studio he did the thing that a lot of dudes who build studios want to do, dudes and dudettes, which is he has one of every kind of synthesizer (they have a short discussion how Moog is pronounced and that you have to say it wrong to normal people) Also, the Theremin that gets played on Pet Sounds is not a Theremin but an instrument that was made to sound like a Theremin, but is actually controllable because a Theremin is very hard to get in pitch. The actual instrument is called Tannarin (see here), which is a Theremin, but with keys (see Electro Theremin). Dan mentions the stylophone toy instrument he had as a kid.
Moby’s studio is very inspirational because he did what every studio owner dreams of doing, which is he hooked up all of his synthesizers in racks where they are all patched in all the time. You don't have to get the thing out and figure out how to plug it in, but it already has its own channel in your patch bay and if you want to use your Juno 60 you push a button and there it is. John had that dream and the problem with having a laptop is every time you pick it up and take it somewhere you unplug it. Although you are not unplugging it from much, but only from USB and Power, but then you took it upstairs and now you are down there and you want to do something and you got something else running on the other one.
John is a professional podcaster and he wants a dedicated computer that he is going to use for two things only: Making music and making podcasts. He is not going to sit on it and go on Amazon, he is not going to look at the Internet on it, he is just going to do his recording on it. His old janky laptop that doesn't work anymore he can use to look at reddit and just whatever, throw it in the garbage. It ends up that John is still using the laptop that got repaired and he has this computer in a box which represents this dream John has been talking to Dan and everyone about for a year and a half now.
This dream that what his life looked like in 2017 is not going to be his life forever and now it is almost 2020 and John has still not completely made the switch and this computer is just one more…
When John packed up and left his house he forgot to bring a belt. He has a lot of belts and he put all the belts in a bag and put the bag of belts in a box and the box with the bag of belt went into a bin and then that bin went into a larger box and it got put into a space somewhere. John wears belts, he had a belt on the day before, he probably had a belt on that morning, but for whatever reason all the belts went into the bag which we went into the box and for the last eight months John has not had a belt and his pants have been falling.
He could have bought one, but he has enough belts, he doesn’t need a new belt, but he can't find those belts and he is not going to see those belts again until he is fully moving into his new house and all his things are there and he is going through boxes and he opens a box and there is a bag and he goes: ”That is the bag I put the belts in!”, but in the meantime his pants are falling down and he is at an age where that is not cute anymore. It is not even cute when you are 20, but now it just looks: ”Oh, a guy…” You start to get that old man build where your pants don't stand up, that is not how John wants to look. That is just an example!
John could go buy one, but but that would just I don't know that would feel even more of a defeat and he would be committing to living like he is living, which is to say out of bag rather than saying: ”No! My eyes are on the prize! I am already almost in my new house with a new bath-mat, all the dry rot is gone, and then I find my bag of belts and I can mark it as victory and feel the triumph and the accomplishment!”, but the last thing John wants to hear from any of you computer people that his unopened computer is obsolete. He wants you to tell me that it is fine and is going to last forever.
Even though in the grand scheme of things computers are extremely expensive things, but all you have to do is get in one car crash and the computer feels like a very small expense relative to how expensive it would be to be in a car crash. Every month you pay a mortgage payment that is, depending on where you live, probably the cost of a computer just to keep a roof over your head. Money is fake, it is a construct.
John has managed to pull defeat from the jaws of victory in the last 20 minutes and he doesn’t know how he did it. Dan thinks John’s computer is probably fine, it will probably do everything John needs it to do, it is not obsolete yet. Dan’s family iMac was from cash she was from 2013 and was slowly having a hard drive failure, things just kept getting slower and slower and slower and it didn't matter, it was not a software thing, it was a hardware thing, and in order to update the hard drive you got to take the whole screen off. There are these little kits that you can buy from iFixit with little suction cups on the front and special tools that cut around the edges of the screen to break the adhesive and the kit even includes brand-new adhesive to let you stick it back on perfectly and make it factory fresh. Dan did that and it was like a brand new computer, it felt much faster because they were going from a spinning drive to an SSD, it was a wonderful experience and it has now become Dan’s son's primary computer and he uses it to do his homework and play games, mainly playing games. This is a computer that is six years old and John’s one year old computer is not obsolete, it will be fine, John just lost a year of its potential lifespan.
The last computer John had he was still using it 12 years later, although that is not a good thing. That was another part of why he felt like he needed to get this computer pronto because he had these other computers that were failing right in front of his eyes with the smoke pouring out of them. The Anna Banana computer and the other computer, these old computers, you couldn't even buy cables that connected them to new things and John wasn't going to be able to get his stuff off of them if he didn't move fast and it may even now be too late. Dan says there really aren't any good computers out there if you really think about it. Dan has a really good computer, but it is really not that good.
John interviewing Mark Morris at a book event (RW171)
John has been reading a book lately, a paper thing. John’s friend Wesley Stace, who lived in Seattle for a long time, an Englishman in America, a Cambridge boy, is a musician and novelist who lives in Philadelphia now. He co-wrote / ghost wrote the autobiography of Mark Morris, a famous choreographer and dancer who grew up in Seattle and then went to New York and became a internationally acclaimed choreographer. He is retired and doesn’t himself dance anymore, but he is still designing dances and he has written an autobiography about his fascinating life. He is coming to Seattle to do a book reading at the Town Hall, a big venue, a former Christian Science church that has become the place where all the literary events happen, a literary event that is too big to happen at the bookstore.
Mark Morris is going to be In Conversation with John who is going to be talking to him about his book and about his life at the Town Hall. It is an example of the type of thing that John can mature in to doing as a member of the Seattle Arts Community. He is not seeking it, but he is getting this kind of call now rather than invitations to play a benefit show for the junkie foundation. Now they call him when they need somebody to talk to Mark Morris about his life in dance. John said: ”Yes!” because he is interested in him and in it.
John also doesn’t want to be an elder statesman whose purview is limited to music. He never wanted to just be the old Rock person because he never was really that good of a Rock person. Not talking about his music, but Rock people that are good at it are true believers and John never was a true believer, really. He always was a Rock person in context and never fully. Rather than slouch into only doing things that are: ”Hey, let's get the band back together!” the idea that Seattle culture would find a place for him as someone who did events at town hall that were broadly cultural, let's talk to this person, let's talk to that person, and who is going to do that with us? Even though John doesn’t actually want to leave the house if he can help it, he said yes to this and he is excited. It is not that he is stepping into this arena, but he will do a few of these and then he might be on the short list of people for them to call when it is time to do it again.
John’s friend Megan Phelps Roper who was the spokesperson for the Westboro Baptist Church wrote a book recently called Unfollow. She came to town and did a book reading and John was her interviewer at her event as well, but they each other from the world during that period. John was her interlocutor as a friend, but Mark Morris is somebody John doesn't know and he is not part of the dance world. This is a new evolution.
John was reading this book, a hardcover book, and he was thinking when was the last time he read a hardcover autobiography of somebody. It has been a long time and John used to have hardcover biographies or autobiographies of people laying around on every flat surface! John was enjoying it! He sometimes have to remember… He will be sitting there, looking at his phone and since he is here he might as well look at Twitter and play a couple of games of mahjongg and pretty soon it is 11pm and he snaps out of it and wonders: ”Wasn't I doing something? Something else? Oh, I was reading a book! Where did I put the book?”
John is really digging it and he is immersing himself in a culture. He likes to think that he knew something about modern dance 15 years ago because he went to a lot of performances, but he doesn't know anything about dance and it is invigorating to listen to him talk about it as art because of course talking about it as art the things he is saying are true of when you talk about any art. He is an unapologetic advocate for the idea of art and for the power of art and he is unapologetic about his own attitude toward art. If you try to interrogate him he will turn the tables on you, he is aggressively himself, and that is exciting, too, given how mealy-mouthed everybody is these days, how apologetic everybody is. It is nice to read a book by someone who is constitutionally unwilling to apologize for something they are not sorry about, which is loving dance or doing what they want.
John is excited about the event, which is unusual because he wants to do a good job. John doesn't mean that he doesn't normally want to do a good job, but he has been working a little bit harder lately to try and do a good job and not be content to sashay his way through things.
BONUS CONTENT
Dan has a lot of e-mails. Some of them are hot off the presses! If you have something that you want to send to John and Dan, go to 5by5.tv/contact and there will be a link for Road Work. Click that link, that will launch your email application, but keep the subject line intact please because Dan has a filter that he searches by.
Follow-up gifted kids (RW171)
Hi John and Dan!
My name is Elijah. Feel free to use it if I receive the honor of a letter read during the show! I'm 6’1”, 240-ish pounds, blond haired, blue eyed, 36 years old, studied geology in college, and work as a contractor for a large Cincinnati based company who specializes in consumer goods. I'm sure you can make an accurate assumption as to which one.
The newest episode of Road Work (by 11/19, see RW169) really spoke to me towards the end as John was talking about gifted kids and gifted programs. I myself was labeled as gifted in school and of the six or seven classmates of mine who also received that label only one was in the top ten of my graduating class. Everything John said about gifted students just ”getting things” seemed spot-on in my experience and I certainly only really learned things that were actually interesting to me. In addition to this, as a callback to a previous episode about not really fitting into any one group but instead being more or less accepted in many groups is also pretty self-descriptive.
I wonder if this is something of a commonality with gifted folks. I guess this is really my only question. Consider this more of an attaboy-sort-of letter and keep being who you guys are and keep making All the great shows!
All the best! Elijah
Dan is assuming that was Elijah Wood, the actor, but he doesn’t lives in Cincinnati. Cincinnati has two major companies that could fit the description: One of them is Kroger, the grocery conglomerate, and the other is Procter & Gamble, both based in Cincinnati and both could plausibly fit the definition that he offered.
As a fellow gifted student labeled, Dan totally knows exactly what John was saying, what he was talking about. If it came to English or writing, that came so easy to him, he aced every English class he was ever in, and he was smart enough to know not to take the AP classes because he needed those A's in college. It was the one thing he knew that was easy. He was pretty good at science, but that required work, actual investment of time and studying and he didn't like that.
Both of Dan’s kids went to the public school here in their district, and it is a pretty good school, but this year Dan’s daughter has just been having the toughest time with her teacher who doesn't explain things well, she feels like she is not getting it and she is being left behind. She is a very good student, she is making A's, but there is a lot of struggle for her with the teacher. Dan’s son goes to a different middle school which is actually a private school. Dan spent most of his education in public schools and he likes public schools, so moving him to a private school was a big choice for them, but now they might be sending their daughter to his school because the teachers are so good there and it is so much smaller and they get so much more individualized attention.
It is clear that she is gifted, she is quite smart, and a gifted student in a big class can wind up feeling very left out or isolated from the other kids because in so many situations the gifted kid it is so easy for them. They don't need to walk from A to B to C to D to E, but they can jump from A to E if it is something they are good at. Otherwise, at least in Dan’s case, they have to do all the work. There is something, and that was what to Dan always defined or identified gifted, that they can make that very fast jump and be accurate most of the time. Sometimes if you jump from A to E you are going to miss something and you will be wrong, but most of the time you get it right.
Dan used to have a boss who was very very very very smart and Dan would start explaining a situation or a problem or a scenario to him and after 20-30 seconds he already got it. Dan wasn’t over-explaining it to him, he was explaining it to him the way that he had explained it to everyone else and it had taken them a while to get it, but he got it right away and Dan used to be like: ”Greg, you don't have it, I know you don't!”, but he did! Some people fully do get it, and that is what gifted really means. You can make those leaps that other people have to step through 1, 2, 3, 4, but for you just 4.
Feeling you waste time and don’t put in the hours (RW171)
Hello!
I, 25 year old, 6’4.5”, 200-ish pounds. I am a longtime fan of the Roderick / Mann / Benjamin love triangle. I have written to you guys before, but not Road Work I don't think. I am wondering about discipline, self-esteem and a kind of imposter syndrome. The short version is: How to get out of the negative feedback loop of feeling like one is severely lacking in terms of work ethic and not doing the work to remedy that?
The somewhat longer version: I am a graduate student in science (brain stuff) and I am realizing I have long had a weird kind of not-quite Imposter Syndrome. I feel grateful in a way that I have not ever felt like I don't belong in science or in success, or rather: I know many or even most people feel that way and that it is all right and it helps to be white, male, and from a financially stable academic family.
But I seem to have developed a bit of a discipline complex. Basically I know I have some very strong abilities, but I have long felt like all the energy and excitement and desires and plans and ambition inside me have no way of getting out, e.g. expressed as doing in creating things, for me writing music and the scientific work, important to me. I feel undeserving of being where I am, not because of who I am, but because of what I do or don't do. I feel that I do not put in the hours I wish I did that others do and what are prerequisite to making anything of myself.
I don't get the results I am perfectly capable of getting, and I don't reach out to those around me like I want and ought to. I think of myself as a person who skated by on some real talents, but never learned how to fully steer the ship of my mind and so never really became myself. I know it is not particularly helpful to beat oneself up for this, but it is a kind of insidious loop: Feeling lazy, then feeling paralyzed by it, anticipating more of the behaviors I hate, and thereby imagining them into existence.
I think I am very similar to John in temperament and personality, but not necessarily life circumstances. So I wonder what he thinks about this state of affairs, but I am also curious what Dan thinks as a person who I suspect may be less familiar with feeling a lack of discipline or ambitions, fulfilled as I imagined. I hope John doesn't take offense at that. I think your opus demonstrates discipline and ambition. I just suspect you may know these feelings a bit better.
This may or may not be pertinent to the above, but I would also like to hear more about your mourning the lives that will never be. I think the tough part is knowing which lives are really dead, which potential versions of yourself could still be realized, and the proper changes and which are not really doing you any good being yearned for.
Subtext: I should quit my program to become a musician, editor and/or linguist and/or a park ranger. Thanks for everything you do. — Z
It comes down to the idea of wasting time, the idea that some people waste time and other people don't. Some activities are time-wasters, or you are just wasting time, and other activities are fruitful and necessary and positive. John has always struggled with the fact that he felt like the things that he wanted to be doing in any given moment were just wasting time. The people John admired for being motivated and driven were ones that didn't want to waste time. They didn't want to waste time on that, they don't want to waste time standing around here, they don't want to waste time talking to you about this. they want to get on doing the thing and they feel like there is not enough time in the day to do all of the work that they want to do, the exciting progress they want to make on the thing, whatever their thing is.
What John wanted to do was waste time, which meant that they are worth other things what he wanted to do. He wanted to master a language, he wanted to learn the piano, he wanted to do so many things, and everything he did do was wasting time. John doesn't know how to have a different attitude about this time that we all have, this limited amount of time that we have. Depending on the moment time seems unlimited, it seems like we all have an unlimited amount of time, it seems like time is interminable, but on the other hand where do we find the time? That is all just cliche like bad standup comic stuff, it sounds like George Carlin in 1974.
There are plenty of people who never waste time, but who don't actually really make anything useful or beloved or valuable in their life. They will wake up in the morning, they are busy busy busy, and they don't want to waste a single moment of time, they are working working working all the time, but they are just working, they are just churning, they are not making anything beautiful or lasting. Then there are the people that we all aspire to be who are driven and geniuses. Jimi Hendrix didn't just just pick up the guitar and start playing that way, he worked his ass off. There are so many examples!
There are heroes, even more than the ones who just seemed to put pen to paper and all of a sudden they write beautiful things and then they collapse on the floor, but the ones that are industrious, who seem like the role models at least for John, but he always failed to live up to that model. It goes at the root of everything that we talk about on this show. The feeling of potential, of failed, of lost lives, missed opportunities, and it is all down to when it was time for John to go play the piano when he was 11 he didn't want to, nobody made him, so he didn't. It is not like he forgot about the piano. Crucially he didn't hate the piano, he didn't resent it either, he just didn't want to in that moment go play it and nobody made him and so he didn't learn it.
John was curious about it, he walked past it every day and touched the keys with his hands and thought: ”Wow, I sure like to know how to play it!” Who do you hate for that? Why should that be a constant companion now, this family circus Not-me-Ghost, except the ghost says ”Not You!” on its shirt. Billy's dad says: ”Who learned to play the piano when they were a kid?” and ”Not you!” slinks through the train over and over. Whom can John blame, who is he furious at? He can't be mad at anybody but himself! But why is he mad at himself?
It is not that John hates the 11 year old himself that didn't play the piano, because the 11 year old John hated himself already. He knew that he should be practicing the piano, and John has walked with that sheepskin on his shoulders his whole life. The 11 year old felt awful about it, the 15 year old felt awful, both because he was mad at the 11 year old and also because he knew that he could do it, but he wasn't doing it either. Now John is 51 and every single day of his life he has toted that sheepskin and he just adds to it every day! He looks at the piano and he goes: ”Oh shit, I could be practicing it!” and that is true of everything that he hasn’t done. Why? What is the idea? How is he wasting time? That all has to be based on the idea that he owes his time here on Earth to someone, that he has been granted this time and it came with obligations.
John never once in his life screamed at somebody: ”I didn't ask to be born!” That seems the craziest thing to say! Not only because nobody did. That is not the way that you think about an obligation, and life has always felt like one to John.
John has quoted Leonard Cohen before when he said that his reputation as a ladies man always made him laugh ruefully as he thought about the 50.000 nights he spent alone. When John first read that it really resonated with him, not that John has a reputation as a ladies man, but he was Seattle’s third best looking in 2002. The idea that Leonard Cohen seemed so exotic, he dated so many famous beauties, and lived such an exotic life, and obviously you can just picture him night after night, sitting lonely and wondering what it is all about and then picking up a magazine that says: ”Leonard Cohen with another fabulous beauty!” and he is just thinking about how that relationship ended and how it was miserable for them both.
As the years have worn on, that remark has really sunk in with John at a lot of different levels because he knows that based on these podcasts and people's responses to them and John’s own feeling about what his purpose is, he understands that there are plenty of people there think that John has done cool things. John doesn’t think there are probably very many people who say: I wish that I were like John Roderick, but a lot of people say: ”I wish I were kind of like John Roderick, except better in the following three or four ways!” John is a stepping stone role model and he wishes he had done some of those cool things, but he wish he had a better attitude about it and produced a slightly different result.
John spent so much time in this personal doubt cloud, but also in a state of mild agony all the time. It is a lifelong habit of feeling like John was in debt to someone or something, or in debt to some obligation that he wasn't clear about that he had not himself signed up for, but also there is nobody to resent for it. No one ever said: ”You owe us!”, but John just felt it and has defaulted on it or feels like he has defaulted on it his whole life. There are a lot of people who default on that and feel defiant or proud.
Part of what appealed to John about the Punk Rock communities that he was adjacent to in a lot of his youth was that there were smart people there who defaulted on that obligation and were indignant about it, were proud and defiant. The first time that John sat with with a friend and she was describing what her tattoos meant to her, and this was at a time before people had tattoos, every one of these tattoos was her attempt to claim ownership over her physical self. John was really rocked by that because it revealed to him that he didn't really feel particular ownership over his physical self. Not only didn't he feel it, but when she described that to John it felt like an alien idea to feel like you were entitled to feel ownership over yourself.
John recoiled from it because it felt hubristic: ”What do you mean you own your body enough that you can just tattoo the names of your dogs on it? How dare you!” - ”It is mine! That is the thing!” She wasn't fighting John, but she was trying to enlighten him and she was saying it because she was trying to convince herself. ”It is mine! I can do what I want with it!” That is important to know. If you want to put the word ”Fuck!” on your forehead in indelible ink for the rest of your life you can do it! It is your body! John was like: ”That is outrageous!” because he felt like his body didn't belong to him, but it belongs to who then? And you are just leasing it and you should return it in as good a shape as you can to get your deposit back?
And yet, that is really kind of a feeling and it was part of the reason that for a long time John did recoil against tattoos because he felt like you guys are putting deep scratches in the paint, that is not going to come out! Somebody is going to deny you your deposit!
Contacting your ex-partner to tell them that you are sorry (RW171)
> Hi Dan and John!
I would like to remain anonymous, but for the purposes of this email you can call me Matt. A while back John spoke briefly about his past relationships that didn't work out and he said that he wished he could just have the chance to sit down with them and talk about why things went wrong. My question is related to this. About 11 years ago I was in a serious relationship with a girl named Ashley who I had been friends with and dated on and off since we were both in 8th grade. To keep a long story short, after dating for about a year and a half my dumb 23 year old male brain started to kick in because I thought I was being trapped in a serious relationship.
Instead of breaking up with her I slowly started to push her away emotionally until it basically broke her down and she was forced to break up with me, crying and yelling at me in my parents’ front yard while the neighbors watched and laughed. She drove away and I haven't seen or talked to her since that day over 10 years ago. Fast forward to the present day, we have both moved on with our lives. She is married with children and I have been with my girlfriend for eight years, but it still bothers me to this day that I was such a dick to someone that was such an important part of my life for so long.
My question is: Is it weird to just send her an email out of the blue to apologize for something that happened a decade ago, or should I just forget about it and let it go. How would you guys handle this?
Thanks! You are the best! Matt
Matt is a creature after John’s own heart. All of those things that he described doing a 23 are things that John did at 23 for the exact same reasons and then they produced the exact same results. The problem is first of all you are in a long term relationship with somebody and the conventional wisdom surrounding that is that you shouldn't be thinking about Ashley or trying to make amends, but that conventional wisdom also is whatever, that is just people talking, that is just other people's laws.
Nothing keeps you from sending that letter, but you cannot expect a reply from her. You are welcome to send that if you feel like you want to, but if you are expecting a reply from her you are going to be disappointed because she is never going to reply the way you want her to. Even if she did reply the way you want her to, which is basically to write and say: ”Thank you so much for saying that! You have relieved a great burden from my heart and I am grateful to you for this selflessness!” or whatever it is that you hoped, or if she says: ”I have never stopped loving you. Run away with me!” - ”Oh my God! I have never stopped loving you!” and you ran away together and you live the rest of your lives and this is a story you tell your grandchildren, none of that is going to happen probably.
She will either ignore you or she will write back: ”Thanks!”, or even if she writes back and says: ”Wow, thanks! Good of you, good to hear! I'm glad…”, whatever. You are not going to feel better. You are looking for absolution of some kind, a resolution for a thing that there isn't resolution for or absolution for. Dan adds that the other thing to consider is what is the cost to her to tell her. He is thinking very much about himself and how he feels and what he wants. Is he doing this for himself or is he doing it because he thinks it will be better for her? That is also important to examine, what you are hoping to get out of it and does it help her!
It is probably not! If John thinks back and picks somebody that broke his heart from the long list, if he got a letter or an email from that person that said: ”Hey sorry I broke your heart, John! I messed up!”, does he want to get that email? Probably not! There are a couple of people that if they came to him and said: ”I was in love with you and I didn't know how to say it!” it would only make it worse because what are we trying to do? Recapture the lost time? No! What you ultimately want is to change the way that you feel that you are being judged by your own history. You want to make up for things and communicate that growth and self-knowledge and who do you say it to?
Unfortunately we don't have big Elks Club meetings where we each get up in our turn and go: ”I just like to say to everyone in the room how much I have grown in the last few years. Let me tell you a story!” and then everybody applauds and we all get drunk. We don't have in our lives much opportunity to be proud to crow about the things that have happened to us in the context of our defeats and to contrast our own sorrow and triumph. A lot of us, particularly now, live in a state of constant apology, not just the Merlin Mann style of prefacing every remark with the fact that he is privileged and it is deeply problematic just because he is terrified of people yelling at him on the Internet, that weird timidity that has come over the world that has basically taken all the joy out of life for some people. John fights that and refuses to let that take the joy out of him.
It is something that even is more profound than that, which is just that none of us want to seem that we are boasting, none of us want to seem that we are calling attention to ourselves, there is a thing in our modern life where to even really refer to yourself or your own accomplishments without prefacing it somehow or deprecating yourself is like grossly egomaniacal. What you really want to do when you walk through the day is have an opportunity to say: ”I really was pretty bad to some people when I was younger and I am a lot better now!” and unless you got a fucking podcast, where do you get a chance?
You don't want to talk to your present love about that stuff! John’s had a romantic life that started when he was 8 probably to the age of 86 when he died. All John knows as his son and one of the closest people to him is that he had some girlfriends in High School that were like High School girlfriends, he got married to his first wife and had three kids, he got married to John’s mom and had two kids, and he had some girlfriends that John knew when he was a kid growing up with him that he could name, half a dozen people maybe from 1970-2007. John’s dad's romantic life was a major vein running through his whole existence! All of it is lost to time! The only shards of it that still exist are in the memories of those various women who still live and whichever men they knew in common that are still alive, probably very few of those. He left no record of it!
When John thinks about this show and the podcast that he has done in the last few years John has recorded massive swaths of his life, his thinking and his existence, but he only hints at his romantic life, refers to it obliquely, has a couple of code names for people, makes these passing comments like: ”Oh, one time I went on a date in a helicopter! Did I tell you about the time that I dated a shark?” or whatever, but John would love to be able to tell the story, to give a complete picture of what it has been like to be John in his romantic emotional heart-life, his relationship with women and the way sex and love have played out.
John would love to be able to have a podcast where he just talked about that, but he can't! None of us can! You can't reveal those intimacies with people, it would be off-putting to listen to someone talk about their life that way, there is so much opportunity for braggadocio that isn't… They get letters from people all the time: ”Well, let me just tell you, pretty popular with the ladies!” John knows what they are trying to say and why they want to say it, but we have to tiptoe around it because we can be so gross! And why is that gross? Why is it gross to say:" "I am an attractive person and people have liked me. People find me attractive. I have broken people's hearts. They wanted me more than I wanted them.”
It is so much of a natural part of all of our lives, but we don't allow any format to talk about that stuff candidly or confidentially, and it is one of our burdens that we carry that with us all the time, we carry our little pneumatic tube from the bank that has our deposit in it and it has that little lid that slides over to one side, that has a major third of our existence on this planet, and if you have a couple bros that you talk about your life with, maybe you show them a little bit of it, you show some of it to the person that you are currently in love with, but where else does it go? It is awful, really!
Outro
Dan and John say they want to talk about their Patreon Christmas Present after the show and they will reveal it on the main show.