This week, Dan and John talk about:
The show title refers to John being able to move into his house, but not doing it quite yet, meaning he is between the two realities of his future and his present.
John moving into his new house (RW218)
John having back pain for carrying heavy boxes
It is going pretty darn good, but John has a bit of a back problem because he stressed it a little bit, he was moving some rocks, he was doing some heavy raking which made him ache, he was sleeping in a bed that was too soft, and he was moving a lot of heavy boxes with books and didn't give the ache a chance to recover and now it hurts. His sister swears by Epsom baths and he took two of those. It doesn't feel like a disc or anything, it just feels pulled. He has been laying on a heating pad for the last couple of days, but Dan thinks that is the problem right there.
They talked about Dan’s prior back issues before and the cool guy who chronicles everything John ever said can tell where they talked about that, probably in relation to the time when John’s daughter jumped and kneed on his back, which is when he slipped his disc. The one thing that all of the different doctors said was that although a heating pad feels good and it does have its uses and can be good for increasing circulation and things like that typically, but you want to do cold, not hot because what you actually are trying to do in the acute stage of a back injury or any kind of injury is to reduce inflammation and the best way to do that is with ice and the ice also has a numbing effect and will reduce the pain as well.
John’s back injury is mild and ongoing. He likes a really stiff mattress. His dad used to put a piece of plywood between the box spring and the mattress and John got these lovely Caspar mattresses because they have been so generous (as a previous sponsor) and and they are very firm, so he can’t wait to get back to his good old bed.
Living with his daughter’s mother
The million dollar question is now how exactly the rollout of John moving to his house is going to happen. He could be 100% completely living in his new house. It is not done, there is tons of work to do, there would be constant work going on, always a ladder in the living room, there is carpet going to be installed in the next couple of weeks in a couple of rooms, but: Are the bathrooms ready? Yes! Is there a bed in the master bedroom? Yes! Does his daughter have a bed? Yes! Couch in the living room? Yes!
If these were normal circumstances and John were a normal person who really wanted to get started living in their new house, for the last two weeks he could have been staying there every night. It has been very difficult because his little family at the house one mile away is reluctant for him to go and they are not incentivizing it. For a long time it felt like when his house was ready his little family would incentivize it by saying: ”Why don't you get out and live at your house now?” His daughter many times over the last year said: ”I can't wait for you to move into your house!”
She is really excited about having a second bedroom, as any daughter would, because she will be able to correct all the decorating mistakes that she made in the first bedroom. She can use all purple whereas in the first bedroom her favorite color wasn't purple yet and some decisions were made that can't be unmade. Also she tends to be a little brusque or brutally candid and she wants uninterrupted mom-time because her mother is more lenient and they will curl up on the couch and watch Clone Wars, whereas dad is always saying: ”Why don't we go hit a baseball?” John is just a pain in the neck to her a lot of the time.
But in the last couple of weeks when the move became more and more real, she started to pull back a little bit on the enthusiasm for John to go and he can feel the two of them fretting. More important even than that is that John never used to want other people around, he is somebody who fights habit, he didn't have any habits, he didn't ever eat a meal at the same time, he didn't really ever do anything from one day to the next. If he were sitting and looking at the ingredients of a dinner at the same time than the day before he would almost certainly not intentionally, but subconsciously get distracted by some BB stacking exercise. There aren't enough hours in the day that it makes sense that someone would never eat dinner at the same time unless there was something happening in his brain.
Here at this house they still don't eat dinner at the exact same time every day, but there is at least a dinner. That is the other thing: Living alone there were many times where there wasn't ever a dinner, there was not even any food that day because John was an untreated bipolar person and sometimes he would forget to eat and sometimes all he would do in a day was eat. It is a lot harder to live that way with other people around, especially a child.
Trying to find incentives to do something, not go on patterns alone
John thinks about incentives a lot in his interactions with other people because a lot of people in the world, their habits and interactions with other people are foregone conclusion. They graduate from college and they start a job and there doesn't appear to be a third option besides looking for a job and not find one, or the rare kid that moves back in with their parents and plays video games, or the rich kid that does a grand tour of Europe, but there is not the option for most people of: Don't graduate from college and start a band!
It is true in relationships, too, particularly if you are married. Marriage comes with so many built-in features and some of them seem like features, but they are really bugs, but you don't have to think about it, which is where a lot of marriages go wrong: People don't communicate with each other because they assume that the marriage will take care of it, that the conditions of the marriage are so well-established that there couldn't be any misunderstanding and of course there is always misunderstanding about what the conditions and those words even mean.
A lot of John’s interactions with people, romantic and otherwise, aren't governed by laws of any kind or habits other than mutual interest and: ”Is this better than not?” and ”Does this seem fruitful?” He is not somebody that thinks about the future, which has been a lifelong quality. He doesn’t think about the future or plan for the future until just recently when I realized he was 52 and there is some necessity in planning for the future unless he wants to be 92 years old and still talking to Dan once a week about his personal problems, which will be hilarious. When you are 92 and you are talking to someone else who is very old: ”I just can't seem to get my girlfriend to give me any space!”
It would be nice to get to a certain age and not have to hustle. The thing about not thinking about the future, not planning for it, and just not imagining it… John thinks about the past all the time and he thinks about the present, but even the immediate future, even later today, he only has the very vaguest sketch of how it is going to go, what he is going to do, where he is going to be.
John never getting bored, preferring solitude over relationships if there is no incentive
What ends up happening is that he thinks about present and future relationship decisions in terms of incentive, like: ”Here we are, we have a choice: We go out tonight or do we not? Do we choose to have a fight instead of watching TV? What are we fighting about? What is the project today and what are the incentives?” As someone who never feared being alone… if he has a superpower it is that he doesn’t get bored… everything in addition to being alone and just entertaining himself with his imagination there has to be a compelling reason to do it.
It doesn't have to be an incredibly compelling reason because sitting and entertaining himself with his imagination is not the end all be all, but John likes to dance, he wants to eat food that somebody else made, it is not hard to get him in motion, but it has to be better than his baseline, which is: ”Fine!” This creates problems because a lot of people do things as part of their daily or weekly routine that they have no incentive to do. It is not fun, it is not what they want, and a lot of times it characterizes their entire relationship: ”I don't really want to be in this relationship, but I am in it. I signed a contract or we own a house or we have kids or this is what is expected or if I broke off this relationship my family and my culture and my church and my town would turn against me, or it never occurred to me to stop being in this relationship because I never thought about it!”
The question: ”What is my incentive?” to do anything, to move in any direction, doesn't come up as often for a lot of people because the routine and the expectations paper over the question of: ”Why would I do this?” John is on the bleeding edge a lot of times of needing to ask and answer that question: ”Why would I do this? Is this better than not doing it?” and he phrases that question to himself a lot, which becomes a problem in romantic relationships because romantic relationships have a lot of busy work and difficulty in them that a lot of people endure because they are thinking about the future and they want a relationship in the future, they know they do. They don't want to be alone, they want love, they want hugs and kisses, they want a partner, they want somebody sitting there when they get home and John never had that need and he doesn’t know whether it is nature or nurture.
Both of John’s grandfathers lived alone when they could and his father's mother raised her children by herself and his mother's mother died at a young age, and his mother lives alone and his father lived alone and when his mother and father divorced in 1971 neither got remarried and he can count his mother's boyfriends on one hand from 1971 to the present, and his dad's girlfriends that they knew about he can count on three fingers. He had relationships that they didn't know about, but that in and of itself is telling, it is a family tradition in a way. His sister never married, is 50 now, not in a relationship, and she seems unburdened by it.
A lot of people don't look for short term incentives because they are picturing long term incentives and ultimately the longest term incentive is: ”I don't want to be alone, so the difficulty I am having with this person, the lack of agreement, the negotiations, the bickering,… it is all going to work out in the long run because in the hazy distance I can picture a time when we will have figured all this out because how hard can it be? We will get to our our paradise and it will just be like the final scene in Raising Arizona, the dream of the future sequence!”
The dream of the future sequence is a big part of a lot of people's lives because a lot of the problems that you feel like we are having right now but are not going to have in our dream of the future are not problems that go away. They aren't simple solutions. Marriage doesn't solve them, time doesn't solve them, and John learned that lesson with his mental illness, his chronic depression, his neuro-atypicality: All through his 20s and 30s he thought that it couldn't possibly not cure itself. A lot of people feel this about their alcoholism: ”Oh, I drank like that in my 20s, but I can't possibly keep drinking like that in my 40s! and then they are 39.5 and they are like: ”Wow, it has only gotten worse, but it can't possibly keep getting worse!” and it does.
The lack of any version of that dream of the future in him, and it is not that he has one and is pressing it down, but he just never had one, and it is part of why he spent so many years living where the day took him. John never characterized it as ”living in the moment” because he spent a lot of time living in the past, so he is not some Zen hippity hop who goes from lily pad to lily pad and has no sadness, but he spends a lot of time brooding and in dark places, but he never future-fucks himself, saying: ”This isn't going to work!” He definitely says: ”This song is garbage!” and he is going to stop working on it. He stops himself often, but in the moment.
It happens in relationships a lot where people make a presumption that they can see into the future. like: ”You are going to do this if I don't do that, or if we don't establish this now, then you are going to do this!” - ”You have no idea what I am going to do!” John doesn’t have that confidence that you can predict what is going to happen.
Those questions of: ”Why would I?” He understands: ”Hey, I want you to go with me to my sister's wedding!” Of course he doesn’t want to, but that is a responsibility when you are in a relationship with somebody and maybe he finds an incentive that he doesn't share: ”I will go see your weird sister's freaky and totally messed up wedding! I want to do this because this is better than television.!” He wouldn't say that, and he would have to care about someone very little to not try to accommodate all of their needs that they are generous enough to share with him.
It is situations like: ”We are in a relationship, I really like you, but we fight constantly and you don't seem to share my view of the world and I don't have very much confidence that we can bridge the gap. It seems like we are on a path to fight all the time and I have seen it happen enough and I worked hard to come up with strategies, but it seems like fighting all the time is our baseline. What is my incentive to keep going in this relationship?” It basically comes down to: ”I really like aspects of our relationship…” and it sounds cold, but you shouldn't click in or lock into a lasting pattern that isn't better than nothing.
John being both a particle and a wave
John’s home is finally close to done and capable of sustaining life. He has Internet installed, most of the lights work, there are beds and the furniture that is necessary, but he doesn’t feel the incredible incentive to be alone, he feels much more incentive to let it ride, but letting it ride is a Heisenberg state and a lot of his life has been characterized by a Heisenbergian lack of interest in declaring whether he is a particle or a wave and as long as he doesn’t declare it it is not a situation where the the act of someone else viewing it establishes it. When other people look at him they think they see either a particle or a wave, but that doesn't fundamentally establish John’s nature. Only when he is the observer his nature coalesces.
John is in that state where he has yet to be observed by the Grand Observer and his family here is really observing him and they do want him to become a particle and so often he has been a particle in the last year that it feels like the nature is established, but that is not necessarily true. A month from now when the house is utterly inhabitable, not just capable of sustaining life, but it is all there the question becomes: ”Do you now rent out your furnished home to Alaska Airlines to be a retreat for high ranking pilots?” Once the House is done it will be a nice place. It has an acre of ravine that John has been gradually transforming into not quite a parklike setting yet, but it is interesting to look at. The House will be fun, it finally has fun tile and it has a fun vintage-y vibe and and it is a manageable size.
Is there a scenario where in observing himself John would say: ”Rather than move into this house what you have purpose-built for yourself, there is a room in the basement next to the bomb shelter which is already soundproofed by its very construction to be a recording studio where you have all the gear, you have it all in mind, where you are going to go down there and really start digging into this back catalog of music that you haven't had a basement for…” John’s musical interior life always needed a basement and the farm didn't have a basement and it was very hard for him to ever get comfortable playing loud music in an aboveground room. Music always felt like a thing that you played in the deepest room in the house with all the doors locked.
That has been true of every band practice space he ever had. They were all made of cinder block. They all had at most a window somewhere that you could reach eventually. The Long Winters practice space had zero windows, but you could go through two doors and be outside, and that was true of The Bun Family Players and The Western State Hurricanes practice space: There was one window that didn't open and you had to go through two doors to get outside and they were all made of cement.
Now John has a house that has that feature exactly: A room made of cement in the deepest corner and he is so excited to get in there and set up his equipment and be able to be loud and leave the microphones up and not have that room also have to function as a daytime room.
Is John really going to coalesce into a particle that sleeps in the spare bedroom of his daughter's mother's house where every time he kicks off his shoes in the living room, somebody goes: ”Your shoes are in the living room!” with a house with a recording studio in the basement that is a mile away? No, John is not going to do that! That would be Science Fiction. It isn’t really possible to move in over there and continue to walk over here every day and have dinner at the same time and watch an hour of episodic television and then go home. It might be the pattern for a while because it will be something that feels very familiar, but eventually and probably soon a day will come where he will say: ”Oh, it is pizza night. Well, you guys have fun!”
It is going to be the end of the quarantine where these two girls here will have more opportunity to go do things. They will have the opportunity to go have dinner with friends, they will have the opportunity to go to the movies, and part of what has made John such a particle over the last year is that we all have become that and no.one is at liberty. But in this moment, in this intermediate time and place, John doesn’t feel a ton of incentive to fill up the refrigerator over there with mustard and then say: ”It is Taco Tuesday! You guys have fun! I am just going to sit here in this house by myself and eat a frozen pizza on the floor!” because he doesn’t have a dining room.
Being able to granularly compartmentalize decisions
Not looking very far into the future or being able to tell it, John cannot tell you what the other side of this borderland is. It will probably be a gradual transition, it already feels much more graduated than he expected. He has been saying for months and months: ”Well, when I am living in my house, X will happen!” and there are people in his life who are looking at their watch: ”When is X going to happen again? Because you have been talking about it for a long time!” - ”When I move into my house X is going to happen!” and someone said the other day: ”If you wanted X to happen you could have moved into your house!”, so John is beginning to doubt that X is going to happen.
John’s incentive to make X happen isn’t great enough to overpower the inertia to turn his potential energy into kinetic energy. It is not that he doesn't expect X to happen, it is not that he doesn't even want X to happen, but the idea of X happening is not a sufficient kinetic energy to get him in motion, and that is troublesome for people who want X to happen, but it is also to people that John is able to compartmentalize decisions at such a granular level. Because it often feels to them like: ”The whole thing hangs in the balance, whether X happens or not!” - ”I don't think it does! X is its own thing and you can make decisions around it, whether X is a particle or a wave doesn't need to be determined for you to work out the physics of whatever your future dream state is!”
Sleeping at his new house
John is absolutely right now between as between realities as he has been in a very long time and in the past when he was between realities like this there were no clear boundaries on either side, but it was truly: ”Well, I might walk out of the house today and meet the woman I am going to marry, or I might walk out of the house today and not sleep again until I am in Budapest!”, but now it is: ”I am pretty sure that tonight I intend to stay the night at my new house!”, but he has not announced that yet. He has spent a couple of nights there, but those couple of nights did not immediately light the use and set the move in motion.
John has been moving out of a shipping container. His stuff was all in storage in a pod and the pod got delivered and he moved out of the pod and they came and got the pod. Now John got is a bunch of books in boxes marked: ”Books”, none of which he particularly needs right now. His copy of The Sun Also Rises can sit in that box for a little while longer, but there are books that he would sure like to have access to. Unfortunately they are all in boxes undifferentiated marked ”Books!” In the process of pulling stuff out of those boxes he has put probably eight full boxes and two garbage bags worth of stuff in a big corner of the garage called: ”Going to the thrift store!”
John is culling, which was always part of the plan, but none of it is burning with a white hot fire, none of it dislodges him. Part of the materialism of all this he has not yet opened a box and the ghosts pour out and he thought: ”Well, this is it! Now that this box is open I can't leave this stuff and go one mile away to have Indian food with my family. No, no, no, now that this box marked ”Pink Wingtips” is open I see what I have been missing: To walk around the world in pink wingtips!”
None of that is an incentive and the only incentives are that he wants to return to a place where he has complete space and quietude and the 24 hour clock goes back to being a 28 hour clock, which is how the clock really works for him. He can't have a 28 hour clock in a house with other people, particularly when they are going to school and they have work. There is no 28 hour oscillation, but that is where his own nature is. What the son is doing has never been less relevant to a person. When the guitars are little maids all in a row and the podcast microphones are moved and at the ready, when his job decamps…
If John doesn’t stand there guarding his podcast table it becomes a LEGO table and then it becomes a craft table, but the LEGO stayed there and then it becomes an American Girl doll table, but the crafts and LEGO also stayed there and there is no room for anything. His guitars are pushed into a corner next to some Calico Critters and a Barbie RV that if it were up to him would be deep in a landfill by now, but it is not up to him. There is also a Playmobil Castle, all while John is allowed to have two guitars there. If John had a room where all this stuff had a place, that may be the thing where it is just like: ”I have to go to my house because that is where I work and by necessity that is where where I be!”
John’s relationship to loneliness, becoming inured or comforted by the other people around him
John has never experienced loneliness before. He felt loneliness as a child a lot, but he and his sister called it The Empty Feeling, which was those times when you are laying in bed at night and you feel that there is a bottomless chasm. Dan thinks back to an earlier episode where they were talking about this and John said that he either doesn’t feel loneliness, or if he feels it it is not an unpleasant feeling. Does John feel it now because he has become acclimated to having people around you because he had no choice, almost like a Stockholm syndrome kind of thing that he is now so used to these people being with him that he feels that he needs to somehow perpetuate that?
In some ways it is the opposite of Stockholm syndrome in that he has not become inured to the noise that a child makes every minute of every day, especially his Frankenstein-booted child who stomps around and weighs 100 pounds, but sounds like she weighs 7000 pounds and she is a screamer and a yeller and just the sounds of people around him that would have irritated him, that would have intruded and woken him up… he is sensitive to his environment, the feeling of: ”Come on! Enough! You have been in the kitchen for 40 minutes. How long does it take to make a peanut butter sandwich?”
All of that he is not only inured to, but he likes it, it is the sounds of other people. He wouldn't go as far as to say he is comforted by it, but maybe this is the term and he is uncomfortable saying it because he never liked to admit that he needed comforting because that was part of how he survived his childhood: He never was comforted, so he didn't need it, but now it is: ”Oh yeah, there are people around and I know who they are, I know what they are doing!”, like you look over at the control panel and all the status lights are green.
When John is at his house by himself he is very comfortable because his house is very comfortable to him, he can sit in the living room and just watch the sun arc across the sky, which is how he spent so many of his days, he really enjoys that, but there is now a part of him that is even a little bit anxious in wondering: ”Are they okay? I wonder if they are okay right now!” When there is a bump in the night John is the one that gets up and he definitely doesn’t go outside in a bathrobe with a sword anymore because he doesn't has any swords here or even a bathrobe. This morning there was some 7am bumping and there were some landscapers wandering around and no-one else is getting up because they know that he is going to get up when there is a bump.
He is worried that a bump is ever going to be anything bad, but they will worry about bumps as soon as he is not here all the time and he worries about their worry. All this is very new to John. He has had a lot of experiences in the last few years, when he was struggling with anxiety he had a lot of fresh understanding of how anxiety affects people and how debilitating it can be and how many people in his life have talked about anxiety for years and he didn't understand what they were talking about and was wondering: ”Is this one of those things where you bring a pet on an airplane because you have anxiety and it is just a made up thing?” and then he had it and realized that this is an incredibly debilitating condition and he can only imagine what it would be like for someone that even had it 2% worse than he does, and his does not seem to be a terrible or chronic case of it.
Understanding anxiety
John is having anxiety related to airplanes, which is the most common one. He sat next to his friend Jesse Sykes, the musician who had a terrible fear of airplanes. They were on tour and they were going to somewhere together and she was absolutely having an attack sitting in the seat next to him and at the time he just couldn't understand what was happening. He talked her through take off by explaining what all the sounds were and it calmed her down, but he could not understand what was happening to her, but now he does. Every one of these events in recent years has increased his understanding and empathy for people in the world and he has now this new experience of: ”Oh, I get why you would put up with a lot of bullshit from other people in exchange for feeling comforted!”
What is John’s incentive there? He was never above being comforted, the first time a girl petted his hair he was sitting at a table in a squat and a girl reached over and started massaging his hand. She was a massage therapist, which was one of the 30 jobs that you could have when you were a 24 year old pot dealer and she was massaging his hand and nobody had ever touched his hand, certainly not so intimately. They were just sitting at a table in the middle of the party and she was just massaging his hand absently, she was not trying to seduce him, but she had these skills and she liked him and he was sitting there and she started to do this as part of having a conversation. John had never felt more beloved and part of the world. It was such a simple gesture!
John’s daughter has experienced so much human touch that none of it will be alien to her. There is never going to be a moment in her life, unless it is with her first boyfriend, where she will feel like she wasn't touched enough.
One time at a very small party, they were baked out of their minds, John’s friend Louis reached over while they were talking and he pulled on his earlobes in a gentle way and made them pop. Dan doesn’t like this story, it is horrible! It was wonderful because it felt so human, he had given him an experience that he never had that was just incredibly human. How many times does someone unstick your ear canal from the sides of your head?
Can people change? Can John change?
The question: ”Can people change?” is something we all ask ourselves all the time, and the cynics say: ”No!” and the optimistic say: ”Yes!” In his own life John has watched people close to him change for the better and the worse and profoundly, not just have a bad day, but go down or come up, but in the main he has not seen most people change. The people that he has known for 30 years are still themselves and approach the world the same way and have not at any point said: ”I don't feel or think or act like I once did!”, even in siloed ways.
John has known some people who lost their religion and lost their framework, which is a profound change, but so much of the change is just: ”I no longer go to this building and I no longer read aloud from this book!” as opposed to somebody really having reflected on their core selves and decided at some point: ”If you believe in a karmic cycle, if you believe that each life you are here to address some thing and then the next time you come back and you either have to repeat that step or you go on to the next!”
The number of people who in the course of their own life said: ”I am going to make that evolution to the next level here presently, visibly, and not have it be a deathbed reckoning, but have it be a thing I can watch transpire!” are so few. Most people are here to learn a lesson and they double down on it. They spend their lives grinding away at that lesson. It is not always a bad lesson, a lot of people spend their lives feathering their bed. Is John capable of profound change in this life?
BONUS CONTENT
The ending of the show, people stripping silence (RW218)
When they end the show they will play the national anthem as the closing music and people stand with their hand over their heart. Often Dan will you say: ”That is the end of the show!” sometimes when John is in the middle of a hanging thought or when he just stops and thinks about something and stares up at the ceiling and Dan is like: ”Show is over!” How much pregnant pause does he leave before the music comes in? It depends on what exactly John was saying because if it was a jokey light ending he might not leave very much time, but today he is going to want some breathing room. So many of the podcast apps out there, even the very good ones like Overcast have this horrible feature where you can skip silence and it is going to eliminate that.
Dan would never use it because the whole reason he is listening to a podcast is to enjoy the human conversation. There is a segment of their audience and podcasting in general who have so many podcasts to listen to that the choice is to listen to it faster with the silence pulled out of it or not listen at all and Dan used to universally say: ”You are a horrible person if you skip the silence!”, but he no longer feels that way and would much rather have people listening than not listening, he is not a monster, but for this show especially when John is telling his stories the pacing and the timing is important and Dan would really hate to change the way John meant the story to be told.
Dan does his morning news show during the weekdays and if someone wants to listen to that at double speed, by all means, double it up! But this is a personal story of John and his life and they are sharing things and Dan doesn’t want to hear that at double speed with the silence cut out. He doesn't ever want to cut out the silence anyway, even if he is listening to an hour long podcast and it is going to save him five minutes. Dan’s time is precious, but not that precious, and that five minutes of pacing and pauses are intentional and he want to experience that.
If Dan was sitting across the table from John, both having an Affogato, and John was telling a story, part of that story is John pausing, gettin a little bit of that ice cream, looking at Dan a little bit, making a point and part of that point is that pause. To strip those out of a conversation with someone would just be pure madness and Dan doesn’t know if people who are listening with an app that removes the silence even hear the pause that he puts in there or not, even if they are listening at a single speed, but they are stripping out the silence.
Dan likes to leave a little bit of space because he likes that last message to carry a little bit if it is important like that. He wants there to be a couple of breaths. If John is pausing as he is winding it down to that, then Dan wants to leave that same pause to match it, but people won't even hear that if they are cutting that silence out. People say that they listen to podcasts at two times speed and then they accidentally listen to it 1x and they sound drunk. People say that they wish they could listen to Roderick on the Line where they cut Merlin by a third of speed and then they boosted John by a third.
How are things with COVID and the vaccine? (RW218)
How is it going over there in in Dan land? It is fine, it is all right. It is weird COVID times. John got his vaccine two days ago. In Washington there was a shot available and John was over the age line for it, and he got his mom living very close to him, she is at his house every day, and his daughter is going back to school and Washington is about to open it up. John does not admire queue jumpers, he would not be jumping the queue, but on Sunday night he went online and said: ”I am 52 years old and I have high blood pressure and I have an 87 year old here and a 10 year old here!” and the Internet was like: ”You are amazing! Get your shot!” and most of the places were sold out, but he found a Fred Meyer 3 miles from here, and they had a lot of appointments available the following day.
It was a very nice little room and a nice person doing the job and she said she was doing 30 of this a day and John say: ”You are really going to get good at sticking a needle in people!” and she laughed and then gave him the shot. It felt very much like John should mark it as an historic event and if he still tweeted he probably would have felt very much like this was a thing he needed to definitely document and have on hand. John didn't do that, but he did stand in the moment and say: ”Well, what do you know? I will remember this. This does feel personally historic. Thank God that this has happened!” John got the Pfizer one, one that people seem happy about.
Dan is a little bit too young and a little too healthy in order to be able to get it yet, so he is waiting. It opened up on the 29th of April (probably March), so everybody is eligible now, but that doesn't change the fact that you have to be able to go and get it somewhere. There are two different places you can sign up for, one of them is City of Austin and the other is through UT Health, University of Texas Health, and apparently you would have signed up on both of them or one of them, and then they will email you when you are eligible and tell you where to go and when. Dan did that on both of them. People have told him that you can hang out outside of the CVS at night and depending if they happen to have a couple left over at the end of the day and you are there hanging around, then you can get that.
A buddy of Dan’s who lives in Dripping Springs, which is very far south outside of Austin where people who have lived in Austin for a long time are moving now that Austin is becoming San Francisco. He told Dan that there is a CVS on such and such a corner, you got to call them, don't go to the website, and then they can get you in, but only if you call it this one time of day and you got to ask for this one person. It seems weird. One of Dan’s friends who is a video editor is driving to Corpus Christi to go get one tomorrow, which is a 4+ hour drive. Someone else is going to San Antonio to get hers. Dan is not willing to do that because it feels wrong. By the time that Dan is eligible to actually get it the herd immunity will be everywhere and he won't have needed to get it.
John also doesn’t want to game the system. There are a lot of people in life that are gaming systems, trying not to pay their taxes, and in general trying to pull a fast one, and John understands why people would want to bend the rules as much as they could, but: ”How do you justify that? How do you feel good about that?” John is not trying to bend the rules here because that is why there are rules, that is what we established. John says that as someone who in the middle of the night will run a red light because: ”Come on!” You don't stand around at a red light when you can see five miles in every direction, you get on with your life. But you don't play some game where you get a vaccine without deserving one, unless you really put some thought into it.
If we are all getting the vaccine and right now they are throwing some on the floor, they are not filling appointments, and three weeks from now they are going to open it up to everybody and there are going to be lines around the block, then why not get those of us who are on the cusp, get it done now. It is the opposite logic of: ”Please don't get coronavirus right when everybody else is getting it because you are going to overflow the hospitals! Please do get the vaccine when not everybody else is getting it so you don't overflow the lines!”
It feels very much like the day that we are all vaccinated here is going to be a wonderful moment. Every single person that Dan knows who has gotten it falls into one of two categories: The first category is they got it because they had a health condition of some kind that made them eligible for it. Or two: They drove to some other town hours away to get it. He doesn’t know anyone who lives in Austin and got it at the CVS because they emailed them.
Getting involved in your parents’ divorce as an adult (RW218)
Hi John and Dan,
this is Dan from Strasbourg. I emailed once back in 2019 (see RW166), still Canadian, still 1.90 meters tall, still 85 kg.
I wanted to ask you guys about divorce, particularly the divorce of one's parents. I am in my mid 30s and after 40 years of marriage my parents seem to be moving towards divorce. My question has to do with how much should children be involved in the divorce of their parents? I know that when each of your parents divorced, you were both quite young, so perhaps the case of adult children is or should be vastly different than that of actual children. Nevertheless, as things are becoming increasingly ugly between my parents, I feel like I am being drawn more and more into their dysfunctional relationship.
I am being told stories about things that were said and done by one or the other from years and even decades ago, being asked implicitly or explicitly to take sides on one issue or argument from the past, etc. More recently, my mum has begun asking me to confront my dad, framing this as a way for me to demonstrate my support for her. I am extremely uncomfortable being put in this position. I think that it is deeply unfair to ask a child, an adult child I will grant, but still, to involve themselves in this way in a dispute between their parents.
To be honest, I think it is inappropriate for one or both of them to be telling me of all the faults and misdeeds of the other party. I tried to explain to both of them that I can't and won't allow the status of their relationship with each other to damage or influence my own relationship with each of them. To that end, I have refused to confront either parent, and I am now in the habit of switching conversational subjects quite forcefully sometimes when one of them starts in on another list of grievances that have been accumulating for decades.
The problem is: I often worry that I am full of shit. Maybe it is entirely reasonable to have my opinion of a relationship with Person A be influenced by how I see them and behave with person B or how I am told they behaved. Am I just being a coward and taking the easy way out by avoiding confronting my mom or dad? Isn't this the role of any responsible adult if they see or are told of an injustice or maltreatment, they have a duty to involve themselves and try to do something about the situation? For as long as I can remember, my parents have had what I would describe as a difficult relationship, perhaps even an unhappy one. When I was younger I just thought this was more or less normal because how would I really know any different? It was only as I grew up I began to realize how dysfunctional their relationship is and was.
However, I don't feel like I am in any position to mete out or blame or judge who was right or wrong at various points through their decades long marriage. I really feel like I need another perspective on this. As mentioned above, I know you are both quite young when your parents divorced, but did you involve yourself or take sides? Where you asked to? Where you purposely kept out of it? Did you wish that you had or hadn't gotten involved? Did you confront one parent on behalf of the other, either during the divorce or in the years afterwards?
Thanks! — Dan.
John’s reply
John thinks that their listener should not feel at all guilty. He has zero obligation to engage in his parent's petty bickering and he is at the moment that every grown person has to deal with, which is that his parents are behaving like children and he is behaving like an adult. It is a terrible transition when it happens to us and it happens at different times, but one day you arrive at a place where you are the adult in the room and you can't be forceful enough in telling them both to fuck right off. This is their problem, involving him is selfish and immature, and it is a childish selfishness where they are sacrificing his well-being for their short term gain, which is just how children are.
The rude awakening is that they are no longer the grownups in the room, but that is also a wonderful moment because you realize that you are and it forever changes your relationship with your parents and now your only challenge is to not treat them like babies, but that is what they are doing. The answer would be very different if one of his parents was incredibly abusive and cruel to the other his entire life and we all hate that parent and now they are getting divorced and the victimized parent is finally standing up for themselves and the bully is is trying to convert us all. If it was a situation like that John wouldn't consider that he was between them as much as he would be trying to protect the vulnerable, but in a situation he describes it just sounds like they are bickering themselves to death and: ”God, get out of there!” and also kick them in the ass on your way out.
Dan’s reply
Dan couldn't possibly agree more completely with what John just said and he really said it. He will even go a step further and say that when their listener realized he is the only adult he may have been the only adult all this time and not realize it. He is not only absolutely within his rights to be doing what he is doing, but it is required of him and instead of changing the subject Dan wants him to say: ”Don't talk to me any more about this! I am not going to respond to it and the next time you do it, if we are on the phone I will hang up and if I am in person I will get up and leave. This is between y'all, I don't need to know about it, I don't want to know about it!
”You guys need to work this out on your own. I am not going to take sides. And I am not going to show favoritism in either regard. You guys are going in different directions. That is fine. You can be my mom and you can be my dad and that is how it is going to be and if I don't see you altogether anymore, that is fine, I will see you separately, but I not picking a favorite, I am not taking sides, and that is the way that it is going to be!” He needs to have that conversation with each of them separately and if they don't like it then just don't see them for a while and see how much they like that.
The one thing that you have as someone's kid is that they will always want to see you and you can wield that as power over them, especially if they are getting separated or divorced because they will want to see you more than ever, that is the whole reason that they are trying to get you on their side: As they break this relationship up they are looking for stability and they are looking for something that gives them that feeling of security and that is you! You can tell them: ”Here are the conditions that I will see you: You don't bring this stuff up anymore! I want you to be doing well. You need help around the house? I will help you out around the house! You need to move a box? I will lift the box! I am almost six feet tall, apparently and I can change a light bulb that is up on the high shelf for you, but I am not taking sides and I am not talking about it anymore and I don't want to know about the bad things that happened! Just leave it there! You guys want to figure it out? You figure it out!”
When John’s parents got divorced he was 4 years old, but they were getting divorced for another 30 years. Dan was also about 4-5 years old when his parents got divorced and as a child it wasn't something he was happy about, but he saw them go from a situation where there were two people who were always arguing and unhappy to two people who were apart, but much happier. Even at 5 years old he was able to see that pretty clearly and pretty quickly: Wow, they both seem happier now that they are not together!” They would give him books: ”Your parents are getting divorced and it is not your fault!” - ”Why would it be my fault?” It never occurred to him, he didn't do anything wrong, but a lot of kids do feel that it is their fault and Dan is hopeful that their listener is not feeling that or that they are not saying something like that to him.
Dan knows many adults in their late 20s / early 30s whose parents are getting a divorce and them it is absolutely soul-crushing. He actually thinks it might be easier in some few ways for it to happen when you were the age that Dan and John were when their parents got divorced than if it were to happen decades later. One person was 28 and she was like: ”Oh my God, my parents are getting divorced!” Her world-view was screwed up because of this and you would think on the one hand that as an adult you should have developed coping skills that would help you cope with something more than a 4-year old.
When Dan was 4 he didn't like the idea that they were doing it, but he just rolled with it and went with it and it was nothing he could do about it. When he thought about it more he actually thought: ”I only had a few years of life and although it felt bad in a lot of ways, he didn't have the cognitive ability to really start to internalize it or process it in a weird way!” He also doesn’t have like their listener 30-some years of the concept of: ”My parents are married. They have been married my whole life!” There is a lot to deal with if something like that falls apart when you are 30 because you have 30 years of looking back on something and saying: ”It has always been this way!” Dan doesn't know if it is easier or harder.
Dan’s mom had boyfriends and guys that she lived with for a period of time and Dan just wanted her to be happy. When he was in his twenties and she was dating somebody, his concern was: ”It this person going to make her happy? Is he good for her? Can he take care of her?”, and it wasn't so much like: ”She should be with my dad!”, he hadn't felt that for decades. Dan doesn’t know what it would be like to be an adult whose parents are getting a divorce and how that changes or what the mental dynamic is there, but if his mom met a guy now and decided to live with them and they were happy or get married he would be thrilled for her. Dan can't imagine if he would have felt something different if they were breaking up, his guess is that as an adult it would be easier.
John’s reply
It depends on whether or not, as in their listener’s case, your parents seemed miserable and fought for most of your life and you can absolutely understand why they are getting a divorce and it seems like it should have happened a long time ago, or whether your parents divorce is something that just comes out of nowhere and it turns out that something weird and terrible has been going on in your parents' marriage all these years that you didn't know about and they seemed perfectly happy and now all of a sudden your world is turned upside down.
In their listener’s case it just sounds like: ”Oh, right!” and that is pretty easy. The trouble in John’s family was that his parents were full of rage and never forgave one another and continued to argue about little things and big things for decades after, so John got put through all the things that their listener is getting put through, but in the worst possible years, which is between the ages of 5-15 because his folks, although very bright people, didn't have the sense to keep the kids out of the fight, John in particular.
If your parents got divorced when you were 4 years old and then they both went and remarried and got on with their lives, getting divorced at 4 would be a great time. You had both parents there for your young years and you get the benefit of both and then right about the time when you as a kid are starting to experience your first independence then all of a sudden you got two better-off people, but in John’s case it was like: "Your parents split up and then you continue to see them both and they continue to rehash the war, increasingly involving you as you get older!” and doing all the things that their listener is saying.
They never said they got divorced because of John, that would have been crazy, but they definitely said: ”You should know all the things that the other one did!” - ”What? I am 12 years old, I absolutely should not know all the things that the other one did, let alone as recounted by an incredibly unreliable narrator in both cases!” They were not a neutral party, no one ever took him inside and said: I was a friend of both your parents and they were both great people and also kind of crazy. If there was one favor an adult could have done him at any point in his life, it would have been to say: ”Hey, by the way, your parents are great, totally amazing, and also nuts, so don't feel bad. Hang in there, kid!”
How to handle romance when it starts to become boring (RW218)
Hi!
Repeat letter-sender and dual citizen Patreon supporter, Road Work and John Roderick here. I don't know if you are still requesting personal info, but about me: I work in tech, transwoman, respectable income, 33 years old, 5’11” and loving it.
I am writing regarding a question about romance. I have been scared lately that romance isn't something I am capable of feeling. What I previously identified as romance is a friendship to women I think are cute. If I am being really honest, the closest I get to romance is an attraction to someone who simultaneously intimidates me and makes me laugh. A complicated twain of things. I have never been jealous in a relationship. I am curious if John, since he is nominally single, can talk about his forays with romance, not with any one person in particular, but his relationship to and thoughts on romance. How do you identify it? What do you do after things become boring? How do you extrude the idea that it is the chase that is fun and not the work?
Love you! — Erin.
Most of the situations John would identify as romantic are only romantic as a shock in the moment, like: ”Holy shit! We are standing on a cliff and it is sundown!” and often a shock in a bad way: ”Oh no! This is a romantic situation. How did I get here?”, but because he is so worried about expectations, even with someone he has been in a sexual relationship with, the idea that now they have held hands watching the sun go down into the ocean that they have crossed some Rubicon and that romance now has entered in such a way that it is impossible to go home again.
Or realizing it retroactively where what seemed like a friendly situation, being enamored with or impressed by or in awe of someone that is cute and then he looks back at a thing and goes: ”Oh wait, that was a romance!” That has an element of retrospective feeling sometimes a little bad or sad that he didn't have a better sense of what he was experiencing in the moment. John is super-scared of it, frankly. Because it feels so pregnant and because it feels so imbalanced in his own life as it sounds like it does yours, he can't think of a time when he was with someone in a romantic setting and they were there with equal standing.
John was driving last night because he went out in the middle of the night to get the makings for chocolate chip cookies. He doesn’t listen to the radio in his truck because he only has an AM radio and why bother, but he was driving his daughter's mother's very sinister looking Audi with satellite radio in it and Billy Joel’s song Tell Her About It came on. In listening to the words of it: ”Tell all your crazy dreams. Let her know you need her. Let her know how much she means.” the entire time he was thinking: ”Do not fucking tell her about it! What, are you kidding?”
Thinking back to the 1980s, there were basically two situations and two interpretations of that song. On one hand it is a boy, being very gender normative because the song is, who likes a girl and is worried she doesn't like him enough and listens to the song goes: ”Oh, what I need to do is tell her all about my crazy dreams and my feelings!” and then does it and the girl is: ”Thanks, but no thanks. TMI!” or it is a girl listening to the song and she puts the song on a mixtape or tells him: ”Listen to this song!” and the guy is never going to tell her all his crazy dreams and she is just pushing him away with her neediness. It is a very needy song and it is being sung from the perspective of like: ”Let me tell you how romance works!” It is definitely barely how romance works unless you are in a situation where you are two equal parties, which only happens where you met your betrothed on the first day of college.
You are there at freshman orientation, you look across the crowded room and there she is. You are both freshmen, you are both 18, you fall in love, you go to her dorm in the night and you decide to get married and you get married and you live together for the rest of your life. It is the only situation that John can imagine because your High School loves and you go to different colleges: forget it. And if you have had more than four relationships in your life: forget it! How can you ever meet and there isn't ever after an imbalance of interest.
John is very damaged in this regard. There have been times where he has set up a dinner or bought flowers or taken someone down to the pier where the lights were twinkling on the water and most of the times he felt under duress, which is to say under duress imposed by the world, not under duress by the person. She wants a romantic thing, that is what the world expects, he should try, ”Here I go!” and then he is just squirming. There have only been a small handful of naturally romantic moments where you just stumble into one.
John’s first romantic experience
One of the best was where John didn't even know what was happening, he was out walking around the city and saw this girl that was already a very close friend and he likes her very much and they were very close already and she was coming the other way and they smiled and greeted each other and she says: ”Close your eyes!” and he closed his eyes and she said: ”Leave them closed and hold my hand!” and he closed his eyes and held her hand and she put her Walkman headphones on his ears and it was playing a mix tape that she had made and she started to walk and he kept his eyes closed and held her hand.
All the city sounds were blotted out by this mix tape and he was completely at her mercy. She was guiding him with her hands as they walked through a warm spring day through downtown Seattle during rush hour, people all around us, cars, pedestrians everywhere, and she was navigating him through the city. For a while he knew where they were, but then eventually he had no idea where they were because they had gone around corners and the mix tape was really great and John just relaxed into trusting her utterly and she took him all over the city. He was reluctant to ever open his eyes and he never cheated.
She was the type of person who just spontaneously bumped into John on the sidewalk and she didn't even say: ”I know!”, but she was just: ”Do this!” and you could see that she was just having the thought in the moment. That was one of the more romantic events of John’s life and they did not become lovers for another five years after that. At the end of that day John said: ”Wow, that was amazing!” - ”I know, right?” - ”Jeez, you want to go to a show?” - ” Great!”, but it was all: ”Cool, bro!” She was much more attuned to the romance of it and realized that it was romantic and maybe was in love with him, but he was: ”Herp a Derp! Oblivious!” Only five years later did they fall in together.
John’s second romantic experience
John had a very romantic night walking around the city with a girl one time where by the end of the night it really felt like: ”Oh my God! This is a situation where we just went out for a walk and now it feels like this is it and we are in love after one night of just roaming the town together, follow-the-leader hopping-up-on-park-benches type of cruise-around-the-city, talking!” and they got back to her apartment and he sat on the couch, bathed in a very unfamiliar glow: ”How did I find this person? How did I find this partner out of nowhere? I never would have… I think she is beautiful! This has been like one of those magic nights!”
She was in the kitchen and they were getting ready to go back out. It was the middle of the night, but they had stopped at her apartment and were probably on their way to John’s apartment and it felt: ”This is the beginning! Tonight is the night!” and she was talking from the kitchen and she said something about her ex-boyfriend Brian and John said: ”Brian!” - ”His friend Scott told me something!” - ”Brian and Scott?” - ”Yeah, Brian!” and she mentioned some defining feature of Brian and John realized that Brian was John’s Brian and Scott was John’s Scott.
John had heard about her and about their awful breakup many times. It was very fresh in Brian's life and devastating to him and he had confided in John and he had never met this girl because he had become close friends with Brian while they were in the last days of their relationship and they were dude friends and John never met his girlfriend. He started to laugh a tragic laugh because 4 minutes ago he believed that this was a life-changing night together, and now he realized he can't possibly date her because it will destroy his friend and they would have to move to another planet because Brian and Scott are just the beginning of an entire social world that is also her social world. The fact that they didn’t know each other was a complete anomaly because they both knew everyone in common.
When John said it to her her face fell and she was like: ”No, no, no, no, please, no! Have this not be true!” - ”I am sorry, it is true!” and she also recognized the horror. They just stood there and there was nothing you could do but laugh the most rueful broken desperate laugh because John also heard everything about her from the worst possible source. They weren't coerced by what Brian had to say about her, he believed that she was a wonderful person as an independent, but there just wasn't a way forward.
Maybe if John were a true romantic he would have said: ”You know what, damn everyone to hell! It is just you and me and we will fight them all, we will fight every demon, and Brian will be broken-hearted, but that is nothing compared to our love!”, but John just wasn't that kind of person. Maybe he is too political or too considerate, that empathy or consideration for others sometimes comes at his own expense. Those are two examples of real romance and in both cases it was accidental and in every other case, any time he realized that it was romantic in the moment he just felt panic. That is still true.
Dan’s reply
Dan thinks it is an interesting email in general. The idea of romance is something that has been really cultivated and transformed by movies and Hollywood into something that is unrealistic and gives people an unrealistic expectation of what real life is or potentially could be. That is not to say that you can't have the kind of romance that happens in a movie, but to think that that is the only kind or the right kind or even something that is realistic or likely to happen is not a safe attitude to have. What is more realistic is what John was saying: To just say: ”Let's experience what we are experiencing right now and not name it!” That is more freeing because if you go with the Hollywood idea of what romance is, then of course everyone is going to say: ”I never really had a real romance!”, but that is not true.
Dan wonders why their listener didn’t elaborate as to why they can't feel romance. He wants them to right back and explain what they mean by that when they say that romance isn't something that they think that they can feel.