RW215 - The Valentine

This week, Dan and John talk about:

John still being in Hawaii, snorkeling, but not seeing any turtles (Hawaii)
The relationship between Hawaii and Alaska, Hawaii becoming very expensive (Hawaii)
John being the same age as his mother was when he graduated from High School (Early Days)
John having a farewell ceremony for his swim trunks (Objects)
The Valentine with the little girl plucking the flower (Early Days)
John having been living out of a single closet for a year, his storage locker, 75 ties (New House)

Bonus-content for Patreon supporters:

Not having had emails (Podcasting)
Continuing being in a band after COVID and the band leader being an alcoholic (COVID)
Audience demographics (Podcasting)

Raw notes
The segments below are raw notes that have not been edited for language, structure, references, or readability. Please do not quote these texts directly without applying your own editing first! These notes were not planned to be released in this form, but time constraints have caused a shift in priorities and have delayed editing draft-quality versions to a later point.

John still being in Hawaii, snorkeling, but not seeing any turtles (RW215)

John is broadcasting live from under the Banyan tree at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel, which is not true, but it is a reference to an old Jazz radio program where they had a live big band from under the Banyan tree at the Royal Hawaiian. John is at the Queen Kapi’olani Hotel, which is not far down Waikiki, looking out the window at a beautiful view of Diamond Head, and it has been monsoon weather with a lot of flooding and crazy rain. Last night there was a big thunderstorm with lightning and crazy torrential rains which John had never seen in Hawaii. John’s daughter is very anxious about lightning and thunder.

John is leaving O’ahu tonight and he is sorry to see it go. On this trip he realized that he has made Hawaii part of his religion and he has never been comfortable with that kind of thing. He always felt that this is not a thing that you get to do with Hawaii because Hawaii is its own thing and you can't have a personal relationship with Hawaii. He has always been suspicious of people that say: ”I think of Paris as my place!”, but Paris is not really your place! John makes no claims to have adopted any Hawaiian spirituality for himself, but he has incorporated it into his outlook.

This time the weather was very crazy and while he did quite a bit of snorkeling it was always in rough water. It was very different from Maui. Although he had a couple of wonderful days snorkeling he never quite relaxed all the way down to where he hoped to get and he never saw a turtle. The turtle has arrived at a point and in a place in John’s trip and in his meditations that it feels significant, although not a portent, and he spent a lot of time out in the water thinking: ”You are here and you just do your thing and try and get your breath regulated and the rest will come!”

John doesn’t like people around him when he is snorkeling, he doesn’t even want to be aware of other people. Whatever his process is out there he is going into a smaller and smaller place, not a place where he is going to say: ”Okay, now I am ready to have fun!” it is never like that, it is always going down. Yesterday one person that was part of his party shouted: ”Hey, a turtle over here!”, speaking to John, and he was so offended! They were out in the open ocean, protected by a reef, but in some cove, really getting bounced around, and he was trying to stay a long way from them.

There is a philosophy of: ”You shouldn't swim alone or snorkel alone!” but John has no confidence that any of these people are going to be able to firemen-carry him back to the beach when they are 600 yards offshore. He doesn’t want a buddy, whether he needs one or not. Although you are 600 yards offshore some of these reefs are three feet under the water. If he got in trouble he could just stand up. If you look down off the side of the reef the water is 40 feet deep and you would get cut to shit standing on one of those reefs, but you wouldn't die.

John did not want to be shown where a turtle was, he was really - not offended because it is not their fault, but he very strongly felt like if a turtle wants to see him, that is one thing, but he is not out here to see a turtle, he can’t be. If he is out here to see a turtle, then everything is different. A turtle always has to be the one that makes that choice, meaning The Turtle much more than any one individual turtle making that choice, because any individual turtle is having their own experience in the day. If the turtle wants to interact with him, that is completely independent of whether anybody around him saw a turtle.

It is easy to misunderstand, John doesn’t blame anybody for saying: ”We are here to see the turtles! John loves to see the turtles! Oh my God!”, but as he is out there he doesn’t want to see the turtles, but he wants for the turtle to feel like he is ready. Dan wonders if it is like when the dog came and found him and he spent the whole evening with the dog and the dog wasn't even real (RW60). Who knows if the turtles are real! John didn't see a turtle on this trip, but he is not upset at all and he is not bummed because he never got there and that is just as important to know and understand as whatever it is that the turtles are there to show him. Whatever would have happened if he had seen a turtle, it is just as meaningful that he didn't. John still feels very blessed about it.

These are all new and uncomfortable formulations for him, to even acknowledge that he has a spiritual practice around this, certainly because he does take this with him back to the mainland, it is the whole aspect of it, not just having been on a Hawaiian vacation, but a year-round thing. In the contrast between Alaska and Hawaii as a kid they thought they saw the whole world, that they understood the extremes and the boundaries. Of course neither Alaska nor Hawaii are the real world.

The relationship between Hawaii and Alaska, Hawaii becoming very expensive (RW215)

Dan doesn’t know anybody else other than John who has spent time in Alaska and Hawaii. It just somehow really fits with John’s personality. A lot of Alaskans are very familiar with Hawaii and vice versa. They are the 49th and 50th state and they are as close to one another as either of them are to anywhere else. You can get from Alaska to the mainland of America in 3 hours and it takes 5 hours to go to Hawaii, but it still feels like you are closer to Hawaii in a way. Alaska Airlines and Hawaiian Airlines used to fly for $99 back and forth. It is much weirder that Hawaiians have visited Alaska because Alaskans have a reason to go to Hawaii.

Until John first went to the United States outside of Seattle he had a much bigger sense of what the world was by comparing and contrasting these two places because Honolulu was similar size to Anchorage. Anchorage in the 1970s had dirt streets if you went further out than Lake Otis Pkwy and Northern Lights Blvd, and Honolulu had grass huts 4 blocks off of Waikiki. There were tiki torches burning everywhere there in the 1970s, and now neither place is really recognizable in any comparison to what they were in the 1970s. None of this prepares you to go to San Francisco and find a coffee shop and order pancakes. At least in the old days, in neither place would anybody yell at you. Nobody yelled at you really in Honolulu or in Anchorage, whereas they will in San Francisco.

To say that there is a place in John’s life for Hawaii is to ask for or hope for there to be a place in Hawaii for him. The two things aren't necessarily related or one can be true and the other isn't. There maybe isn't a place for him in Hawaii, although there is a place for Hawaii in him, but he is increasingly comfortable with the idea that there is a place in Hawaii for him, it has just become very expensive there, not just around the resorts, but it is incredibly expensive to be anywhere in Hawaii now.

This is very strange because the Hawaiians themselves don’t have any money. Hawaii did not used to be expensive in that way. For a long time it felt: ”Sure, it is expensive if you stay at the Royal Hawaiian, or if you stay right on the beach in a big hotel, but there are a lot of other ways to be in Hawaii!” and now there are fewer and fewer of those ways. If you get some little shack up in the hills, it still is going to be expensive, and these little shacks down in the towns that are close to the beach (not on the beach mind you!) are $1 million for a two bedroom house. There isn’t any way that John would live in Hawaii, that seems really crazy.

John being the same age as his mother was when he graduated from High School (RW215)

About a week ago John realized that he is now the exact age to the month that his mom was when he graduated from High School. His dad was 52 when he was 3-4 years old and he has always been far away in age from any memory of his dad that there has never been any way to compare it. The first time he looked at his dad and said: ”Wow, my dad is really old!” when he was 62 or something, but his mom was his age his senior year and he has a pretty clear picture of what his mom's life has been since then because it has been his adult. She is 87 now.

It is like the Brimley/Cocoon Line or all those games that John and Merlin play, like: ”It is the same distance from The Beatles Red Album as you are from the moon landing!” All those games are fun and scary and weird, but after a while you think: ”I have had friends for 30 years, that is not amazing anymore!” It is much more interesting to say: ”I have had this T-Shirt for 30 years!”, but even that: The longer you go without throwing that T-shirt away the bigger that number is going to be.

John having a farewell ceremony for his swim trunks (RW215)

John had a pair of swim trunks that he bought in Hawaii in the 1990s and he took them on his walk across Europe and only wore them two times there. They have been in his drawer, he has worn them every summer, but they are tattered, and he put them on on this trip and they just didn't fit anymore, there was something in the architecture of them, they were completely faded, and John left them behind in Hawaii. He can't do something like that without having a small ceremony, but it was a very small ceremony, just between him and the swim trunks: ”Okay, I am sending you back, it is appropriate for me that I leave you here in Hawaii where we met for the first time, but I am not going to throw you in a wastebasket, I am going to hide you somewhere, but this is the last we are going to talk about it. You have served me well. Farewell!”

There is a belief, maybe it is the Shinto religion, maybe it is part of Buddhism, not necessarily that physical things are alive, but there is a respect for things, even if that respect is directed at the people who made the things, the craftsmanship of making the thing, connecting to the materials that were used, to the tree that gave its life to build the chair, paying a respect to something. Dan doesn’t do Zen meditation, but Vipassana meditation or what the kids call mindfulness meditation, which is all the rage now. 15 years ago, no-one had heard about it and now everyone is getting to benefit from it with apps, which is really cool.

One of the things that Dan learned when he was studying a little bit about Zen meditation is that they will often bow to their cushion that they are about to sit on. There is a lot of respect paid about items, and it seems like John taps into that, and he wants to understand more about why because off the top his head he doesn’t know anyone else that might have had a ceremony for a pair of swim trunks. It makes sense that he did, but Dan doesn't understand what the inspiration for that was, probably because he has zero sentimentality about anything physical.

John talks about it in terms of sentimentality because he doesn’t know another way to talk about it, but it is really not sentimental as much as it would have felt very disrespectful to not give the swim trunks a little ceremony, given the length of time of their service, given the many places that they had been together. The swim trunks would feel slighted because the swim trunks didn't ask to be born, but they also didn't ask much from him, they were pretty selfless in the sense that most of the year they lived in a dark drawer, but then they got brought out and very exciting things happened. They went to the Caribbean, they went to Europe, they went to Hawaii, they have been all over, they have been in warm water and cold.

John wished he could avoid the ceremony and that he could hand the swim trunks off to a valet and say: ”Will you see that these swim trunks get a decent burial?” because he would have felt that the contract was fulfilled, that the loop was closed, if he had been able to do that, but in the absence of a valet, in the words of Ben Kingsley in the movie Sneakers: ”I can't kill my friend, but I can have this guy kill my friend!” He feels that way about anything that he had a relationship with for any length of time. When he walks down any boulevard and sees something in the gutter that obviously was a child's toy, but even something that just had a long use, and he sees it disposed of unceremoniously, it gives him a pain not just for the for the child that lost its toy, but for the toy, which has to be distinguishable from sentimentality.

John’s dad was an Animist. His friends growing up were all Japanese and his spirituality, the stuff that he talked about, his values, he certainly never made an explicit connection to Shinto, but also didn't connect his behavior to having known a lot of Japanese kids growing up, having played in Japanese neighborhoods, but his spirituality was very connected to ancestor worship and to a thumbnail sketch of what John understands about Japanese approach to the spiritual world. He wasn't quite at the level where John is where he is giving funerals to pencils, but when John is going through the natural world and the city he is not just saying ”Hello!” to crows, but he interacts with buildings the same way. Everything has a spirit!

it is the same with a complete lack of belief in ghosts, but also a grave sensitivity to ghosts and a conviction that there are no such thing as UFOs, but also a very profound consciousness of UFOs. He tries not to let that intrude, but he does schlep things past their expiration date and he does stand at the side of a building getting knocked down and instinctively has a little ceremony for the building that incorporates hopefulness for the new building or at least an understanding of the cycle.

He doesn't just walk around mourning all that has been lost, he is very hopeful about all the things that are new, he likes a new pencil. There is not much cost in giving a pencil its own rites. It is not like he builds a ship for it and sets it on fire, but if he collected enough pencils he might build a funerary ark for the lot of them. It is not entirely a gift to have that relationship to things, it is a burden somewhat.

When Dan was a boy, everything John was describing was exactly how he related to things in the world. He vividly remembers that and it is not as simple as sentimentality, it is more than that. Dan felt burdened by it, too because it wasn't possible to just throw something away or to not use something or ignore something, he almost had to do something special or you would wind up having to keep the thing forever. ”I can't get rid of that!” It was a conscious change for Dan that happened well into his adulthood when he started to distance himself from that kind of stuff consciously.

It is not that Dan when he looks at something today that he thinks that it doesn't have a value or that he doesn't respect what went into making it or that he didn't have a great time with it, but he felt like he was the one that was carrying those things, he was carrying the weight of that burden and responsibility to those things, but getting nothing back from it. Maybe it was a little bit fear based in a superstitious way: ”If I don't send this thing off in the way it should be sent off or acknowledge it or respect it or think about it or save it forever then there will be a comeuppance for that!”, the same way that you wouldn't have a friend and then completely ghost them because that is not nice and the friend's feelings would get hurt and you wouldn't want the friend to go to you, for example.

Is there a consciousness to the swim trunks or the pencil? Is there that belief in John that something is actually in receipt of his goodwill or is it the universe in general that he is paying tribute to? John definitely will use a pencil that is clearly deficient because the idea of not giving it its fair shake feels unfair. John will walk under a ladder all day, he will let a black cat cross his path, his favorite number is 13, although opening an umbrella inside seems like a noob move, he throws salt over his shoulder and knocks on wood, but as jokes, as a Western tradition, A little bit of folk voodoo. He doesn’t feel the fear of consequence, it is all in the heart.

The Valentine with the little girl plucking the flower (RW215)

In grade school, probably third grade John got a bag of a Valentines at the store because even back in 1976/77 every kid had to give a valentine to everybody in class (see RL158). They weren't monsters, not like those kids that grew up in the 1960s that could just give Valentines to the people they wanted. There was a valentine with a picture of a little girl who had been ”he loves me, he loves me not” with a flower, pulling the petals off, and in this one drawing that was done by some industrial cartoonist working in the sweat mines of drawing valentines, this little girl was sitting there with a flower in one hand and at her feet were all the petals that she had plucked off of it, and she was down to one petal on the flower.

It was conveyed by the power of the drawing that the last pedal was: ”He loves me not!” and the little girl was crying because she had come to this realization and she didn't have the heart to pull the final petal off. The caption of the valentine said something like: ”I will be devastated if you don't love me!” This was a pretty sophisticated emotional journey to put on a Valentine in a bag with a bunch of other Sweetheart-stuff and ”be mine!” cupid stuff. Although this was into an area where they had to give Valentines to every kid, it was not all the way to this contemporary era where you buy a pack of Valentines, but there is only five kinds and you just get six of each kind. John saw some pack of Valentines the other day where the lack of variety was an insult to everyone involved.

This was the only one of these in this bag and John was so moved by the plight of the little girl that he definitely couldn't give this Valentine to anybody because he didn't know what it was like to feel that way about someone, but also: How could you burden someone with this story? John kept the valentine for himself and it became a relic. He took it out and studied it, he used to draw it, he would sit with a pencil and a piece of paper and he would draw the Valentine, trying to connect with what it was about the drawing that was so effective, but he carried that Valentine with him for years and would reflect upon it, and it never failed to move him and he still has it.

It is still effective, the pregnancy of that moment, particularly of not wanting what is inevitable to come to pass and thinking that you can stop it and knowing that you can't. There was no deviousness in her, she didn't stand there with the last petal and say: ”I am just not going to pluck it so this terrible end won't come to pass!” She knew that she had a responsibility to pluck that final petal and it was an awful responsibility. In the story the girl’s feeling of obligation and her feeling that it was out of her hands, it had been decided, she had chosen this flower, the flower was the arbiter, she didn't have to have chosen it, she didn't have to begin this doomed game in the first place, she could have left the flower in the ground, but she made the choice and set the course of action in motion.

She had arrived at the conclusion and there is no turning back, you can't throw the flour down and go: ”It doesn't matter! Hahaha, it doesn't count!” if you don't get the result you like. Her moment of reckoning really resonated with John as an 8-year old. You need to be careful what spells you try to cast! The drawing and the Valentine itself became an emblem for John, just that the image became an emblem, but the item became like a shard of the true cross. That is the thing that John can't account for, but he would have fought you over that Valentine, he would have thrown many things into the fire before he would let that Valentine be taken from him, and it is tied up in it. Those two sides of the story are not divorced from one another.

John having been living out of a single closet for a year, his storage locker, 75 ties (RW215)

If John is in a store and walks past a bunch of pencils, it is not like every one of them is crying out to him, but if he looks at 10.000 pencils and one of them is different enough, that catches his eye and that it feels like it is at a disadvantage, he will against his will make a special relationship with it. That never happens to the pencil that seems like the perfection of the form. He is never seeking that, he is never seeking the best pencil.

On the other hand he is seeking the online review for the best possible steak knives, he doesn’t go online and ask Amazon: ”What is the steak knife that sells the poorest and let me help its caused by buying it!” If he is going to buy an SUV he wants what J.D. Power and Consumer Reports agree is the best SUV, but if he is not looking and he becomes aware of a thing and there is no other way to say it but that it calls out, it is often not the best one. He is not responding to the tallest, straightest tree, it is a Charlie Brown problem.

John thinks about the choice that Dan made and the idea that there is nothing in his house that isn't in service right now, more or less, although he did have a bunch of stuff piled up during the first half of his life and he does know what it is like and he is responding to that experience with this new lifestyle. They talked about this a lot when John was trying to sell his house and buy a new house. A lot of those conversations have gone dormant because his new house became a place in between worlds, he never fully moved into his new house, and the reckoning that was so pregnant two years ago has not yet come, but in a way it profoundly has.

For a year John has been living out of a single closet. People in his life ask him: ”If you could get into your storage container, what are the 10 things that you feel you miss the most?” - ”There is nothing in all of my storage container that on a day to day basis I miss!” He doesn’t think: ”Oh, I wish I had that one shirt or that painting of a turtle that I found that one time or that ceramic Eiffel Tower that was once a bottle of Prosecco that I used to display so proudly, I really need it now!” John doesn’t need any of those things and very rarely does he think: ”I wish I had a second pair of shoes!” He has gotten the one pair of shoes that he wears every day, a pair of Blundstones, so wet and dirty that it would just be nice to have a second pair.

In his storage container he has 30 pairs of shoes and in answer to the question: ”What do I miss?”, did he Marie Kondo himself more dramatically than she would ever suggest? Everything John owns he can put in one closet, and yet he has a full shipping container full of all of the belongings that came out of his last house, and that was after a full year of getting rid of stuff where he felt like he was really cutting close to the bone.

One time his friend Jesse was visiting and she was going through his ties, saying: ”You have over 100 ties, we need to cull some of your ties!” He used to wear them all the time for a decade. There wasn't a single tie he owned that he hadn't worn. Did he need 100 of them? She was picking these ties up and holding them up because she had the understanding and the respect to not just sweep them into a bag. She knew that John would have a story and wanted to hear why that tie mattered or was important, and they managed to take probably 25 ties out of the bunch and it felt like they had done a lot of work that day, he had made a lot of sacrifices and she had been very patient and helped him take these ties out.

When she left she felt like she had been helpful, but her parting words were: ”You still have 75 ties!” - ”I know, but as far as I can go right now, that is as reduced a pile as I can make!”, but now the day that John moves into his new house and opens up that shipping container and brings those things into the house and opens that box and finds those 75 tires, not one of which he has thought of in the last two years since he put them in that box, since Jessie handed him the tape and he put them in that box and put the box in a stack of boxes. What is his relationship to those ties now? It would be a lot easier to take another 25 times out, leaving him with only 50 tires and a feeling of accomplishment, but the honest fact is: John needed zero of those ties and continues to need zero of them, probably. There are plenty of men in the world who have one tie or none ties.

That is not how John is going to approach opening that box. There will be a feeling of being reunited with all those wonderful ties and all the stories they contain. There is a voice that says: ”When you see the box that says ties on it, don't open it, just put it right over in the thrift store pile!” and John doesn't have a very long standing or close relationship with that voice. That voice isn't some old friend. He doesn't think of that voice as an enemy or a competitor, that voice just feels like someone on a cruise ship dock with a clipboard who sees 10.000 people a day, an anonymous voice with no accent.

The voice that would argue with it would say: ”Oh, but there are a couple of my dad's ties in there that I can't possibly get rid of!” and that would be the reason the box got opened and once the box got opened all the Genies poured forth. That is the thing John is going to have to confront in the next couple of months because it is not just a box of ties, it is all the 3-foot tall Prosecco bottles that aren't Prosecco bottles that John and a group of friends opened together when they were standing on top of their Eiffel Tower in their Paris, it is just a Prosecco bottle that he got at an estate sale that looked like the Eiffel Tower that he thought was clever or glib.

It is not just sentimentality, it is glibness too that he carries around, among others. He has an entire quiver of tricks of the mind that are all tricks of the heart. They have less to do with fear and more to do with desiring a fulness. John doesn’t know if they are proxies for a love that he has too many receptors for and not enough access to.

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John definitely feels he has a lot of receptors for love, but he doesn’t allow much of it… He always say that because he takes the blame for everything, and his love receptors don't have mates at every level, and he makes atomic level bonds with elements that are unstable. He is definitely not a simple molecule.

Not having had emails (RW215)

John saw an email or two where people were like: ”I sent this in before, it must have gotten lost!”, but that depends on what the subject line was. In some cases email sure can get lost. It happens! It is why do you need to keep inbox zero, if only there was a guy who could summarize that and put that together.

Whatever is going on, maybe because of COVID, Dan gets so many emails now compared to the last few years, it is beyond manageable that it is definitely possible that some got lost, or maybe he saw the email and didn't want to read it. He is a content curator and don't be offended if he said that he didn't have any emails, it means he didn't have any that would be appropriate, interesting or whatever other bizarre qualifications he might use to determine if an email should be read on the show.

For example if you are a hardcore strict vegan and someone puts down some ribs from Franklin Barbecue and says: ”This is what I got for lunch!”, to the vegan there is nothing to eat for lunch. Maybe these emails that the people sent in, maybe it is not that Dan didn't get them or that they got lost, maybe they just sucked! More likely, though, is that he lost track of them. If you have sent us an email that didn't get read, by all means send it again, and if you don't ever hear it, then it definitely means it just didn't cut it, vt.5yb5|krowdaor#vt.5yb5|krowdaor is the easiest place.

Continuing being in a band after COVID and the band leader being an alcoholic (RW215)

Dear Dan and John,

I am a musician, kind of. I am in a band, or I was in a band, I am not really sure. Before the coronavirus pandemic of 2020 we would play shows at breweries, wine bars and music clubs around town. We were working on putting together our first EP and we used the money from one of our last gigs back in March to purchase drum mics for our home studio in one of the guys’ basement.

But then there was the whole COVID thing and none of us wanted to get COVID and all of us have different levels of risk factors and immunities and all of us need to work to earn money to survive, so it made sense to postpone band meetings and rehearsals indefinitely. And then there was the whole thing where COVID took way longer to get sorted out than any of us realized. During that time one of the best and most beloved venues for local musicians had to close forever, unable to keep paying the bills. It is devastating!

While I know that our little music scene will find a way to keep going, I am just having a really hard time imagining what going to shows will be like when we get through to the other side. So my band seemed to have a lot of momentum at the beginning of this year and I was having a lot of fun making music with my friends, but now everything seems frozen. I am not a founding member and my role is somewhere between essential and auxiliary as trumpet player and horn section leader, there is one other horn player.

Some of the guys have been meeting one on one to work on writing new music, but I haven't really been a part of that process, so I am feeling disconnected. To make things worse or at least more complicated: During the summer a lot of shit went down between our band leader and one of the other musicians which made the latter feel super-uncomfortable. As a result, the wronged party and their best friend have left the band permanently. We are still able to play without them, but I feel like it really changes the vibe of the group that they will be gone. We lost band members before, but not like this and not because of personal drama.

John, our bandleader is an alcoholic. We have all known that for a long time, but in the past I guess it has always seemed like he is high functioning enough to get the job done. So even though we felt sad for him, we never really considered it a big enough problem to be disruptive. Now though I am having a hard time ignoring it, especially since it is affecting the feelings of personal safety of my band mates. Years ago I was in a relationship with a recovering and relapsing alcoholic, it is painful for me to think back on those days. Unfortunately, our bandleader is starting to remind me more and more of my ex and bringing back those bad memories.

I am worried that when the pandemic is over there won't be a band for me to go back to, even if I did want to, but I am strongly considering not working with our band leader anymore for the sake of my own mental health. This makes me so sad because I really loved being in the band and I don't think I have what it takes to start my own or be a leader. I am an ensemble musician with no ensemble. As a trumpet player it is not like I can just find another band to join that plays my type of music. Everything is either Dance Pop or Guitar Rock or Experimental, unless I want to get tied up in the Jazz scene, which I am just not emotionally prepared for. What do I do?

Love! — Ramona Flowers

Sent from my iPhone.

At the beginning of the journey of this letter John really thought this was going to be a question about: ”Who owns those drum mics?”, but we burbled along into a whole different set of questions.

The Corona thing, John can't imagine how any music scene is going to come back intact. Seattle has an extremely vibrant and architecturally self-supporting music community that, when this is all over, most of the clubs will come back, most of that world will return, but what band has survived this? If there are bands with four people who were quarantined together and they have continued to practice and write music throughout this past year, they are going to come back with four incredible records of their best work, but that is probably not the case for most bands.

The songwriting process

How much of that process of writing a song within the context of a band is a group effort vs an individual effort? Every single band, any two musicians who are collaborating with each other, every single instance is completely unique and individual. Negotiating contribution and ownership of songs is one of the very complicated things about being collaborative with other musicians.

John was in a band called The Bun Family Players where the guitar player wrote riffs but not songs and he would bring guitar riffs and John would turn them into songs. John was also capable of writing his own songs without his help and he would bring him a complete song and he would try to find a guitar riff that went with it. Over time John also started to feel like he could also write guitar riffs. Every band has this problem and Ramona Flowers being in the horns, there are a lot of different positions in a band where you are probably not going to write the song from the trumpet. Writing songs is is a thing, it is a strength, it is something hardly anybody can do.

Harvey Danger tried to write songs collaboratively and they succeeded, but it is very difficult to do. A lot of bands like Nada Surf or The President of the USA are bands where one person writes all the songs, but they split the credit because that is a method of keeping a band together, where you say: ”Well, we are a band and even though I am writing all the songs I am just going to split it three ways with you guys because you deserve to benefit from every aspect of our success!”

There are a lot of bands that don't do that. Kurt Cobain had a deal like that until Nevermind became a success and then he went back and said: ”Actually, you guys each get 10% because it would be insane for me right now to hand you both $20 million for these songs that I wrote!” Everybody else in the scene went: ”Oh, interesting!” and there were probably a lot of drummers that were getting cut into the songwriting of their band's chief songwriter who probably shuddered and felt a cold wind.

Matthew Caws from Nada Surf said somewhat under his breath: ”That is why I still have a band, that is why I still have these same guys playing with me after all these years!” because he gave them a third of the songs. Matthew is not a sharp talker, but the implication definitely is: ”That is why you don't have a band!” and that is partly true. If John had given all of the initial guys a quarter of the songwriting, would they still be together? No! They would be probably in even more protracted dispute.

When John started The Long Winters and the Western State Hurricanes, they weren’t supposed to be a band, they were supposed to help John record his demos, so they went in very clearly with: ”These are 10 songs of John's and we are going to help him!” and that established a dynamic. That was true of The Long Winters, too: They went into the studio and were going to make a record of John’s songs. Sean had songs, Chris Walla had songs, but that was not what this record was going to be. This was John’s songs. From that time on John has never recorded a song that wasn't written entirely by him, but he is not somebody that writes the drum parts.

Ben Gibbard, when he writes a song, he will play the drums on his demo tape and hand it to his bandmates and say: ”Do what you want with it, but here is the fully realized demo with bass parts and drum parts and harmony vocals!” and his bandmates are free to reinvent those parts, but…

Back to the questions

Ramona is asking eight different questions. How to stay in a band with an alcoholic songwriter during a pandemic? But really the question is about how to manage your emotions as a band member when you are in a band that doesn't feel stable, and that is what every band member has to do and that is why there are so many jokes about bass players and drummers being checked out. People who play those roles in bands tend more often than not to have to let water roll off their backs because they have worked with singers and songwriters a lot and they know that a lot of time you just have to step out of the way and let those people crater or burn up or figure it out and get back to work.

As a trumpet player you can always present yourself to any Pop band or Indie Rock band and say: ”Have you ever thought about putting horns on your music?” and almost any songwriter will say: ”Wow!” When John had horns play with The Long Winters it was always incredible, it is a great feeling. You can always put horns on something, any style of music. To be a journeyman is definitely a way to be a musician in the world, but John wouldn't know how to do that and still feel really connected to the songs, not to the music, but to the songs.

The series of questions in that letter and the fact that it is also COVID-related and we are standing in the doorway of what it is going to look like coming out the other side, we all just have to shake our feathers and see if we still float.

Audience demographics (RW215)

Hello!

Stats: long time, not first time, 6’4.5”, 195 +/- 10 pounds, 26 years old, Leo, soon to be erstwhile doctoral student.
I am just curious: How do you guys feel about the demographics of your listenership? I don't get the impression you worry a ton about attracting or catering to a certain kind of listener, but I was struck when Dan was reading the T-shirt suggestions that most or all of the names appeared to be male and I would venture to say skewing toward younger white American males, though obviously impossible to say from a list of names.

I ask as a male-presenting introverted white guy in their 20s, and sometimes I feel a little strange when I hear people describe themselves ”and I see myself”, or at least people who an outside observer would probably group with me based on superficial criteria. I am not sure why this should make me feel odd, perhaps some filter bubble anxiety, but I listen to lots of other podcasts and books from lots of other kinds of people, so I don't think it is that, nor do I identify particularly closely with how I imagine I am categorized, though arguably that itself reflects certain privileges.

For me personally I think it has something to do with my discomfort at being seen and imagining myself as an object of scrutiny. Of course I could also be over interpreting what is really just a selection bias for who listens to podcasts, who support someone Patreon, and/or who feels important enough to want their letter read. To be clear, I don't think it is such a mystery why people like me would listen to the same things I do. I guess I am just wondering if this also makes either of you feel some kind of way or if you recall any analogous situations in your own lives, either when you were younger or now.

Anyway: I love all the great shows and I am really glad they are going strong, especially during recent months and years. Peace and be well! — Z

PS: My Fridays are already missing a certain war movie show, but then again, this could also be an opportunity for the Roderick Siracusa Power Hour that we have been praying for.

Dan’s reply

It is interesting because as podcasters they know almost nothing about their listeners. Any time that you do some kind of a listener survey the only people that take the time to reply are the super-fans and the super fans are not actually a really good representation of your listenership, in the same way that millions and millions of people are watching football games every Sunday, Monday night, and sometimes Thursday, but very few of those people will ever go to an in-person football game. The ones that do may only go once in their life. Dan has been to one. Of the people that Dan knows who enjoy watching the NFL, most of those people have never gone to a football game and would never even consider it. Dan would never consider going to another one. Never!

Does this mean that those people don't love football or that they don't love the team or that they wouldn't maybe go if they had the chance or circumstances were different? No, we can't make those assumptions! But if you were to ask: ”How many people actually go to football games?” it is not that many people relative to the population and relative to the number of people who are actually watching and caring about the football games.

The reason Dan makes that analogy here is that it is the same thing whenever you try to do any demographic research or survey or try to get any information at all about your podcast. The only people who will even bother to respond are people who are already really into it, the same way that only people who are really into their team would consider going to spend all of that money on a football game and go to it. They don't know anything about their listeners, but when they have done surveys they can get maybe an example of a gender distribution and maybe an income distribution, maybe an educational distribution.

There are ways to extrapolate that data once you get a sample of a certain size, and the numbers generally tend to stay the same. If you were to run a poll and you get 100 respondents and 30% of people say one thing and 70% of people say the other thing, if you were to increase that to 1000 respondents, those percentages aren't really going to change very much, and if you extended it to 10000, they are still not really going to change that much. There is a certain sweet spot where you get enough feedback and you know this is the picture, but you can't do that with the demographics of listeners.

To answer this question: They have no idea who their listeners are and it would be very wrong to make assumptions that the people who are on Patreon who responded to that are a good representation of your listener base. That is not true at all. Those people who are responding there are simply the people who a) saw that post, because most people don't even go to the Patreon, and b) felt like they had an idea and wanted to respond. All of these sets of conditions, you are not getting a good picture of who our listeners are, but you are getting a good picture of the kind of person who wants to respond to that kind of post and that might simply be what what kind of people want to do that, and maybe of that sub, sub, sub, sub subset of people, there are not a lot of women in that category, but that is not a representation of what their listeners are at all.

Maybe the guy who does all the research on John’s shows (Jochen) and has the Wiki site knows the percentage of women who have written into the after show (see RW216)? It feels like almost a 50:50 split! They have a lot of female listeners! Making any kind of assumption about who their listeners are based on feedback from that one Patreon post is not safe and not a good conclusion to make because it is not accurate. Dan guarantees they have more men listening than women, no doubt about that, but many of the shows that Dan does there is almost no women listening and on this show he knows that they have a lot. This is probably the closest to evenly balanced of any show Dan has ever done.

Also: Don't categorize yourself at all! Don't worry about who you identify with at all! Don't try to imagine yourself as an object of scrutiny or not, because it is irrelevant. It doesn't matter what other people think about you if you are being your genuine self, as long as you are not being a jerk. Don't worry about it, it doesn't it doesn't matter at all, there is no reason for you to feel like an object of scrutiny. As far as discomfort at being seen: Don't be seen if you don't like it! It is all about what you share!

It is an interesting question because it is always interesting to do these shows and not really know who is listening. There is a number of people that are listening, they know the numbers kind of, but they don't know really anything about them and that is weird.

John asking on his Patreon for people to introduce themselves

John just had an interesting experience over having started a Patreon of his own and then starting a message board associated with it on a thing called Discourse. He often posts things in the middle of the night because he is up in the middle of the night. The response to that Patreon was very immediate and it seems like all the people that were going to show up did in the first five days. By day two or three they had 98% of the response and for the last month and a half the growth has been 1-2% new people.

John posted a thing that said: ”Introduce yourself! Who are you?” in the middle of the night, assuming that it is there when his fellow Americans wake up. It was the middle of the day in Europe and in Australia, New Zealand, Asia, and the initial response to the post was from people who are wide awake. In a very short amount of time a lot of people replied and as the thread went on, they were all expressing this kind of amazement like: ”Wait a minute, you are in Wolverhampton? I am in Wolverhampton!” and nobody could believe how many people there were from the UK, Germany, Sweden, Denmark, Australia, New Zealand.

But then it started to widen out and there were two different people on the Patreon: All the people that listen to John’s shows, then a much smaller group of people that reply or respond, a much, much, much smaller group of people that would join a Patreon ever under any circumstances, and then a much smaller group of people within that subcategory that would reply or that would post. In that group, two different people from Saudi Arabia who both were not American were English expats working in Saudi Arabia, but were Saudis, then also people from Israel and people living in Asia were talking among themselves, like: ”Wait a minute! I thought I was the only person from Brighton and Hove that ever would have even heard of of these shows, but now I realize that there are dozens of people just from my area who have gone through all these different filters and are here commenting!”

It was amazing because all of this was happening before the Americans woke up. By the time the Americans woke up, if you were to walk into that room, you would think that all of John’s fans were from around the world, there were no Americans in the thread at all. Then they started to trickle in and by the end of the day it had restored that: ”Oh well, probably everybody on this thing is from America!”, you could even hear people start to revert back to that presumption. But for a brief time it was really astonishing to see, it was a moment in time that thread could only have been that because by the following day the fact that the Americans were all asleep and the Europeans were all awake the differentiation was all static now.

John’s reply

About feeling scrutinized: When John was 25 it was a long time before identity politics existed anything close to the way they do now. It was a long time before any of the contemporary concerns about demographics were something that your average 25 year old would feel or think about in their own life. John also felt scrutinized by forces real and imaginary, and it inhibited him in wanting to travel places, it is why he never went to Asia as a traveler, he traveled all around the United States and Europe, but he was nervous about being so conspicuous that he deprived himself of the experience of going to Japan and to Thailand and all these countries that he wishes he had visited when he was young. Now he can go travel to those places, but he has less freedom and less of the opportunity, or a different kind of opportunity. John could have spent a year hitchhiking around Bali in his late teens / early 20s, but he didn't because of that feeling of not wanting to be scrutinized and feeling very definitely like he would be scrutinized.

Our contemporary sensitivities, if John were 25 now he would absolutely, as their correspondent is doing, connect those feelings to the socio-political concerns of our time and think about it in terms of equality and demographics and whether or not he has an additional responsibility. John felt those feelings 30 years ago in very different contexts and it makes him think that those feelings are a real and separate thing. What social construct we attach them to is a reflection of the fashion of the time. Part of the problem of youth is that you imagine that you are the first one to ever feel this way, but it is surely true of people who fought in World War II.

It is a component of being 25, not necessarily a component of being 25 in a time when people are very conscious of identity, in particular racial identity, gender identity, sexual orientation. John hears from their listeners who are trans or non-white or non-binary or women, and he often hears from them in one on one correspondence, part of it because their experience as a listener of Roderick on the Line or of Road Work or of Omnibus they want to communicate not as a member of a demographic, they don't want to be the black listener of Roderick on the Line, they just listen to Roderick on the Line. They don't want to be singled out and differentiated and scrutinized because the flip side of what their correspondent is saying is that they are defying the demographic expectation just by liking what they like.

John meets people over the years that listen to the shows and there was a listener who was a traveling musician and John went to see him when he played in Seattle and they were sitting at the bar and talking. They had been corresponding for several years sitting, he is coming from the South, from a Jazz tradition, and John said quite naturally as he does to every person: ”How did you discover my shows? How did you discover the podcast?” and you could feel because he was black that there was an implication in what John was saying: ”How would a black person listen to the show? How could you have discovered it?” He doesn't know how many black people listen to the show or how many talk to John about it.

Even though they were friends and even though they had been through this a lot, he felt like he needed to give John a minute of: ”I am a nerd, I discovered the show because I am into nerd stuff, of course I discovered it!” He felt defensive and John was asking a question that he asks every person. It was obvious that he wanted to interact with John and the shows not as a demographic, not as a person that was going to get singled out and put on a pedestal, like: ”Wow, look at our diversity!”

John hears from a lot of people and you could see it in the response to their Patreons, too: ”I don't want anybody to celebrate me. I just like the show and I just want to give to this Patreon and I don't want to be used to counteract the perceived imbalance, to make it seem like not everybody that listens to the show is 25 and white!”, and that all predates our current era, too. That goes back to the dawn of time, but also imagine being a black Country Western fan! There are millions, and yet it doesn't conform to our idea.

John understands the feeling of scrutiny, and it is very important not to fall into a very tempting trap, which is to feel like those are new feelings and they are only related to this idea that demographics and that a show is validated or invalidated by how diverse an audience is that for any cultural product you have to look at who is reading it to know whether or not it is good to read, you have to look at who is watching it in order to know whether or not it is good to watch. We used to ask: ”Are the smart people watching it?” and that ends up being the only criteria that you ever need to use. Dan would rather have just the smart people. Who cares anything else about them? If they are the smart people then they are going to work out the other questions and you all can work out the other questions among yourselves!

page revision: 1, last edited: 07 Apr 2022 19:41

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The Story of John Roderick

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