This week, Dan and John talk about:

The show title refers to John during his drug years afflicting daredevil violence upon himself, like: ”Watch me! Hold my beer!”

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 Please do not quote these texts directly without applying your own editing first!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.

Heat wave in Seattle (RW226)

It is going to be 100+ degrees (38°C) in Seattle this weekend and that is not cool, which is not something they normally do and so everybody is freaking out and nobody knows what to do. John’s long-standing policy when it gets above 90 degrees (32°C) in Seattle is that sometimes he will rent a hotel room. Nobody has air conditioning, it is not in their homes or businesses, really, and he will just get a hotel room, close the blinds, turn on the AC, lay in bed, and watch Sex in the City and sleep 15 hours and then hopefully he will break and it will be over.

It is always going to be 3 hot days, you endure one, maybe you endure two, and then the hotel is the thing that you do at the end. This weekend it is supposed to be hot starting tomorrow and then for the foreseeable future, so John thought he will go out to the coast to Neah Bay, to Forks where the vampires are, get a little hotel, look out over the water, it will be cool out there, but the problem is all the hotels on the Washington coast are run by people who live out on the Washington coast. He called six hotels and no-one answers the phone and their websites don't have any functionality, they are one page that says: ”We are a hotel on the Washington coast!”

You call the number, it rings and rings and rings, you hear a physical answering machine pick up: ”Hello! It is the Inn at Neah Bay. Please leave a message at the tone!” - ”Oh my God! You are hotels. There is no-one there?”, but it is because the front desk clerk is also cleaning the rooms and is also running a fishing guide business. It is almost certain that there is not a single one of these places that has a room and John might have to go all the way down to Aberdeen, but nobody wants to stay in Aberdeen and even those might be full. John got this life hack and everybody else has hacked the hack and he doesn’t know what he is going to do.

The crazy thing about the interior of Alaska is that the weather is extreme in both directions. Up in Fort Yukon where John worked at the gold mine, way North of Fairbanks, in the winter it gets 80 below zero there (-60°C), or at least that is the lowest temperature, the minustest temperature that is basically possible. It is not only that you spit in the air and your spit freezes before it hits the ground, but you can throw vodka in the air and it will freeze before it hits the ground. When alcohol starts freezing, that is when you are in trouble. But in Fort Yukon it has also been 100 degrees Fahrenheit in the summer (38 °C).

In Anchorage it often is nice in the summer, it is wonderful and it would get 80 degrees (27°C) on on a fairly regular basis, but 100 degrees is crazy. In Seattle in John’s entire life he has never seen it go above 100 degrees. They are talking about 105 degrees (40°C) and that is bananas. They closed John’s daughter's school in advance, they sent out an email today that said: ”We are not equipped to deal with that!” Nobody knows what to do. They were honest, like: ”We can't deal with 105 degrees. We don't want to kill your children. Head for the basement!” A lot of houses in Seattle don't even have basements, so…

Trying to find a hotel at the coast (RW226)

It is going to be terrible and if John can't find a hotel out on the coast… people love these hotels on the coast in summertime, it is the whole thing. He is used to going out to Neah Bay in the dead of winter when nobody is there and half the time the hotels have padlocks on them because who wants to go out there then? It is freaking the end of June, of course these hotels are booked and not answering the phone. Why bother? Who could be calling them? Vampire hunters?

The motels would go to the home improvement store, buy garden sheds, put a window in them, and then that would be a room that they would rent you. Now there are all these crazy huge Montana-style log hotels with chandeliers made out of antlers. It has been a long time since John has been out there, but it seems like times have changed! It has gotten discovered, that is what it is. John is sitting here talking about it, which is just going to attract more people. In Texas it gets up to 105 degrees (40°C) as well. It is 92 degrees (33°C) in Austin right now.

Even the campgrounds are probably full. Dan has camped a number of times, but not recently and never in Texas. A friend also drives a Ford F-150, similar to Dan’s, and she was saying that she has a tent that expands over the bed and then there is also an air mattress that perfectly fits inside of the bed of the truck and you open the tailgate and that is your staging area for stuff and inside the tent is all air mattress with the tent over it, and that would be the perfect way to go. Those are very popular out in the Northwest.

In Oregon half the cars on the road have some kind of tent on the roof because everybody is very outdoorsy here. The problem is that they are all going to those parking lot campgrounds where you pull your cool truck in, but you are just parked right next to some other dope with a cool truck and there is your campfire and their campfire and then they pull out a boom box and they start playing Hotel California.

In Alaska you legitimately can go find a place where there is nobody else and if there are a bunch of people you just keep driving until you get someplace where there is nobody. John has a friend from Texas who said the other day that it is hard to camp in Texas because there are almost no public lands in Texas. All the land is owned by cowboys and ranchers, it is all private, and in order to camp in Texas you have to either squat and risk getting shot or go up to the ranch and say: ”Can I sleep on your back 40?”, but out here in the West it is all public land, a lot of it. BLM land, national parks, state parks, so there are lots of places to go, but there are also lots of people now.

There are more people now (RW226)

We used to think that we wanted more people. A long time ago when John was a kid they thought: ”We will have a world's fair world to attract people. Come on out!” and now everybody up here is like: ”No more people, everyone go home. Go back where you came from!”, but you can't do that. There is no ”Stay out!” anymore because it is not that those ”more people” are coming from California and Arizona, but there are freaking more people. When John was a kid the population of the United States in 1975 was 216 million, and there are 328 million now, so fully 110 million more and they got to go somewhere! Where did you put 100 million more people in the US because they sure as shit are not living in Nebraska and Kansas!

The population of Kansas was 2.2 million in 1975 and there are 2.9 million in Kansas now. Washington in 1975 was 3.5 million people, but now it is 7.5 million people. Kansas has grown by 600.000 people, Washington has more than doubled in size, and all the people want to live down in that tiny little sliver of land between the water and the mountains, you can't count over in Ellensburg because there is no way anybody out there wants to live. You live in the middle of an apple orchard or live worse in a coulee and nobody wants to live there, not even in a Grand Coulee because you would be 600 feet underwater!

John getting Guanfacine for his ADHD (RW226)

Other people diagnosing John with ADHD for a long time

People who are listening to the podcast have been very generously diagnosing John with attention deficit disorder (ADHD) for a long time (see RL413). Merlin talks about his attention deficit disorder quite a bit and he has has traditionally treated his attention deficit disorder with stimulants, which is the favorite technique of most prescribing doctors. You give somebody Ritalin, you give them Adderall, you give them things that buzz you so fast that they turn you around and then all of a sudden you have all this focus. It really changes your day, depending on where you are on the Adderall bell curve and whether or not you are maybe taking one too many or certainly if you crush it up and snort it, which is an off-book use of Adderall.

John was diagnosed with attention deficit disorder back when he was a kid and it was a brand new diagnosis. Over the years plenty of doctors have tested him for it and concluded that he had attention deficit disorder, hyperactivity, whatever, and he always rejected the diagnosis just as he did the bipolar one because it just sounded like quackery and all these maladies seemed to be just newly invented, but all the people on the Internet are saying he has this thing and it would be helpful to him to have it treated.

Contrasting John with Merlin you would not see a ton of commonality if you said: ”Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder manifests a certain way.” Merlin seems more hyperactive than John, who is slow moving and slow talking. The problem is that John can't finish anything, but he is incredibly distracted by not only anything in the world, but also his mind and he just can't seem to put more than four blocks in a row before he flames out.

Changing his primary doctor, being out of Lamictal

John had run out of his Lamictal, his bipolar medicine, and he had a new primary care doctor who was not meeting his needs. He hadn't been to see his psychiatrist in over two years and he couldn't get a prescription because he had his primary care doctor do it and he has a new one because his old primary care doctor went and started heading up an eating and weight clinic somewhere at the hospital where John used to see her. Now he had to contact his psychiatrist, which he did somewhat reluctantly, but they had a Zoom call where they talked about things and John talked about attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.

The danger of abusing his medicine

They both agreed that John did not want to take any kind of stimulant because of his history with drugs. A lot of times people with a drug problem go to a doctor because they are experiencing anxiety, as John was a couple of years ago, and the doctor says this is a time release drug, it shouldn't affect their recovery and it is perfectly safe to take Adderall because it is a medicine and it is perfectly acceptable to take this anxiety medication which is basically a downer because it is a medicine and they are a doctor. Then invariably the drug addict likes it and then takes two and then takes four and then starts crushing it up and then is on drugs.

Chris Cornell was a guy in recovery and he didn't like to fly and some doctor gave him a prescription for anti-anxiety medication, which was a benzo, and he started taking two on those days when he had to fly and then he started taking four. John was never a speed freak or anything. You get to the end of the day and your antihistamine is wearing off, but you have a dinner party to go to, or do you have a Rock show to go to and you know it is going to be late and you think: ”Well, the medication is wearing off. I will just take one extra, just the one time!”

Then you have gone through the door, you have taken more than the one you were prescribed and you are going to do that again for sure and pretty soon you are going to take two in the morning because you are already taken two, why not take them together. John didn’t want anything to do with that and if there is no other treatment for it, then so be it, but John was not going to take speed. The doctor said: ”I wouldn't prescribe speed to you anyway because you are taking this bipolar medicine and speed is going to throw you really for a loop!”

Guanfacine against ADHD

He prescribed John a medicine called Guanfacine two days ago. The great thing about Lamictal when he prescribed it to John is: ”We have no idea how this works. We tried for a long time to make medicine that worked with bipolar, and we were always screwing it up, lithium or whatever. It did that thing that people always were afraid of, dulled them, and it had all these side effects. Lamictal is an anti-seizure medicine and then people that had severe seizures who also were bipolar reported that the medicine had this other effect and pretty soon we realized this was incredible medicine for a lot of people.”

There is no explanation because bipolar is not related in any way to seizures. It is just some basic chemistry and it goes in there and it washes around and somehow pastes over the malfunctioning receptor that caused you to be manic depressive. With the Guanfacine it is the same thing: They developed it as a blood pressure medicine, but it is a terrible high blood pressure medicine that doesn't work at all, but it was discovered to treat ADHD in some people. John is very pleased with the way that Lamictal works with him.

ADHD and bipolar are completely separate disorders that have completely separate causes and you can have both and you can treat one and the other one runs rampant. John could have treated his attention deficit disorder and it wouldn't have had any effect on the bipolar. Standing here as a guy who was just slumping through life you wonder exactly how carefully are we calibrated or what is the normal.

A disorder implies there to be a normal

If he has those ”disorders” that means that there is an orderliness that we would not only describe as normal, but that that normality is achievable because we are not saying that these are high performance drugs and that we are going to optimize your performance and put you into another category of somebody that can catch a Frisbee without looking and somebody that can make a delicious white sauce with no lumps and you can also do math in your head and get your work done and sleep eight hours a day and not lose your erection. Nobody is saying that. They are saying that they are bringing you up to normal.

We are living now in a world where at least on the Internet that he used to go nobody is even using the word normal anymore. What is normal? There is no normal! Normal is normative! Not only do we not use it, but it is bad because life is a rainbow. This is one of the ”hold two contradictory ideas in your hands at the same time” If there is no normal, then what am I taking these medicines to do? Why are these disorders? If these aren't disorders, if these are just part of a spectrum of consciousness, then are these high performance drugs? Is John trying to get some perfect balance where all of a sudden he is a ninja? And if that is true, why is he not taking both speed and LSD?

If somebody said: ”Take half a tab of LSD and one line of cocaine every six hours!” John could get a lot done and be firing on all cylinders and be making cool art and probably be very interesting on podcasts, and he would say: ”Why not take a whole tab of LSD in two lines of Coke?” and then honestly he would sound like Merlin, and he says that with love, but we are not trying to do that, we are not trying to make John a high performance cyborg, but the whole premise of this medicine is that he has an imbalance that is treatable and that treatment is seeking to balance him.

The fear of losing your edge as an artist

The fear that artists always have is that you are going to end up like all the other dads at the swimming pool who are just standing around in their cargo shorts talking about sport and that is not what anybody wants. All John wants to do is be able to work on a project and see it through to completion, and when somebody says: ”Which tile do you like? This green one or this other green one that is imperceptibly different but definitely you can perceive it because you are a crazy person!” John can pick the tile, but what he can't do is say: ”…so let's buy it!” He says: ”I like that tile better, but should we buy it today or should we keep looking? See if there is better tile, see if there is a better deal!”

Bipolar was incapacitating. He loved the high times of bipolar because he was the Silver Surfer, he was screaming through outer space on his silver surfboard, but the downer times got deeper and deeper and longer and longer. He has never been suicidal, he never practiced overt self-harm, it was just the low-grade self-harm of bad relationships and bad food, but the comatoseness, the listless inability to find any light or joy in life. He wasn't even seeking joy, he was just seeking any feeling like: ”Oh, that was a good sandwich!” or: ”Hey, that was a fun conversation!” He couldn't even get to that.

The medication worked! John is still a pouty goth, but he doesn’t fail to bask in the sun when it comes out. He is trying to get to the normal of him. Or is he creating a new normal through this process? Dan has read somewhere that once you have taken your mind frequently enough to those higher elevated places that later on it can't get itself there ”normally”, in other words you can feel happy, but you will never feel as happy as you did that one time on the drug that gave you that feeling and it is an actual physical thing, your brain's receptors are changed or something.

John starting drugs late compared to other kids

John didn't start doing drugs until he was 17, he is not somebody that was doing drugs at 13 and he knows a lot of people that did start doing drugs that are younger than that and were regular drug users at 13/14. John waited until he was 17, but your brain is still developing and it is in hot mode into your early/mid 20s and they were trying to figure out what the problem with him was going all the way back.The first time he was diagnosed with attention deficit disorder was before the diagnosis even existed. They tried to give him Ritalin when he was 8 or 9. They were trying to address his dysfunction when he was young.

John being at the top of standardized tests

All the way through school if you were measuring children based on standardized tests you would have had no problem with him. He was in the 99th percentile of everything that they tested you for until 9th or 10th grade where the math score started to taper a little bit and he was in the low 90s in math, but in everything that wasn’t math he was still right up on the line and he was a national merit scholar. If you went by standardized testing, John was a fine kid, but they went on all the other things: Can you complete a project? Can you stay focused in class? Can you not be disruptive? Can you not be what they would have at the time called the spaz?

John was never a kid that was just completely freaking out out of control, but he was crafty, he had guile, he was working adults, he was working kids, he was trying to control his environment by emotionally manipulating grown ups and he was ten times as disruptive as a kid that just couldn't sit still because he couldn't sit still, but he wasn't just spraying spittle, he was over taking the sockets out of the wall and when it was discovered what he was doing, it was like: ”You are unsafe at any speed!” and by the time John started taking real drugs there wasn't any question that he had long ago left normal functioning behind.

Drugs as a form of self-medication

A lot of the psychiatrists he saw in his 20s said that he was self-medicating and he was taking these drugs because you had these other disorders and he didn’t know how to deal with it, there is emotional damage and he was trying to manage it with pot, acid and largely beer. Also violence, mostly against himself, but not suicidal violence, but daredevil risk taking violence, like: ”Watch me! Hold my beer!” John was the ultimate Hold My Beer Guy. You can jump a bicycle over that? Watch me! I don't even have a bicycle, but I am going to borrow your bicycle and I am going to try and jump that thing and you are 100 pounds lighter than me and you have practiced and I am going to try it anyway and then crash.

That was also a way of dealing with his emotion. That all makes sense. You hear it said and you go: ”Oh yeah, right! Self medicating!” John knows people who were forever changed in their mind by drugs. He knew them before, a lot of this is hallucinogens, and then there was a break, their mind broke. The drugs changed them. But he has also known people that have done Herculean quantities of every drug you could in every admixture possible, and if they were on this podcast right now, they would just be as normal as the day is long because they are either off drugs or they have always coped, they are the ones that sat in the chair just as tweaked as the rest of us, but they were not combing the carpet for the crack that they didn't actually drop, but thought maybe they had dropped.

Did it affect John? No! It changed his views, but it didn’t deaden or alter him chemically, it didn't send him into a thing, but it does contribute to his overall self-image and story as someone that is a borderline loser. John was never a dirtbag, but a borderline loser, like a rich kid that never does anything, except not rich enough to inherit daddy's business anyway, but rich enough that he never had a Camaro, but not so rich that he didn’t have to work.

John’s self-image as a borderline loser, society trying to change kids, gifted programs

That self-image as a borderline loser is really connected to the fact that he had a lot of peers growing up who were normal, did their schoolwork, got good grades, brushed their teeth, went to college, got jobs out of college that were professional. These were his peers and John was never able to do any of those things. They were occupying the exact same space and time. John was riding around in Eric's dad's Caprice Classic, but that of the six of them only one of them is going to go to school in the morning and be in big trouble the moment he walked in, be in pre-trouble, and suffering all the shame of that and the stress.

If anything, stress affected his brain chemistry more than drugs. He has been bathing in stress since he was in 4th grade when he was failing to meet people's expectation and he couldn't tell you why. In this culture we love to try and correct our problems by trying to change kids, changing school, changing what we teach them. We are doing that not because there is anything wrong with kids, not because human beings come into the world already racist, or if they do that is a different problem to solve than just changing your curriculum.

We live in a racist world, all the grown ups are suffering or we perceive institutionalized racism, so what are we going to do? We are not really having very much success changing adults so we are going to go down to the six year olds who are innocent and don't see racial distinctions between one another and we are going to get in there and fuck with their little heads and tell them that they are racist and tell them that they can't be racist, like: ”You didn't know you were racist, but you are and you can't be!” - ”What the fuck did I do?”

Meanwhile we absolve ourselves of confronting our own racism or of dealing with it systemically as grown-ups. We just fuck with kids and they fucked with John from the beginning because they are not capable of saying: ”The schools are messed up!”, or: ”A kid like this belongs somewhere else!” You got all these other kids and they are all fine. This kid belongs somewhere else and the problem is there is no somewhere else. We don't have somewhere else. You create gifted programs and you populate gifted programs with a hodgepodge of kids, some of them are just good at math, that is all they are, and they are in the gifted program with John who is not going to be a math person. He is good at math.

The tests only measure so much: ”Oh, 99th percentile! You belong with this kid that can do differential equations when he was 9 years old!” - ”No, I don’t! He doesn't want to play with me either because he doesn't want to play imaginative games or inhabit stories. He doesn't even know what that is!” Then you got kids in the gifted program that are not gifted at all, but their parents want their kids to be called gifted and so they intervene. An intervening parent can basically get their kid put anywhere because the administrators are overburdened and pretty soon you got a kid that just got pushy parents and he is in the gifted program and he is a drag.

John didn't need to be in a gifted program, he needed to go build trail. They didn't need to teach him to read, they didn't need to teach him social studies. He was going to learn that stuff. They need to teach him how to canoe. The stuff that was the hardest for him was that summer camp stuff: How to put up a tent? But we are not capable of that, so they belted him to a chair and told him he was a racist or that there was something wrong with him because he couldn't sit still and he memorized all the bones in the body over a weekend.

Guanfacine being an alpha blocker blocker

John is two days into this new drug Guanfacine, which sounds like Guano. They are giving him penguin shit they go out to where the puffins roost and they scrape their poop off the rocks. The doctor said it is an alpha blocker blocker. They have no idea what they are talking about and they admit it. They don’t know what it does, they couldn't duplicate it. It is just like licking a toad in the rainforest. They discovered that the people that lived around these toads would lick them and that is how they ran their government.

Apparently it blocks the alpha blockers and it is the Alphas that are helping you have executive function and make lists and regulate your thoughts and John got too many blockers, so this is blocking the blockers. John may be making that up because he may also have a disorder where he imagines conversations with a psychiatrist. He might not even be taking Guanfacine.

John does have high blood pressure and he is already taking a couple of high blood pressure medicine, but they only get him down to right below the line and he is still 116 over 89, which sounds good to them because he used to be 140 over 110. The blood pressure is probably a result of the stress that he lived in because all he has ever known from a teenager to adulthood has been a feeling of constant stress and as someone who is under constant stress he deals with it pretty well. He internalizes it and it has been a jackhammer on his soul, but he doesn't take out that stress too much on other people, although he is pretty irritable, but he tries not to be mean and it is not easy because so many people deserve meanness.

John’s superpower of being able to detect other people’s weaknesses

John knows that if he gets into a confrontation with somebody in the world he is going to feel that stress so intensely, the reservoirs of stress all open up, it pours out of him because any kind of criticism or confrontation he reacts to it as though he is really being attacked by someone who is dangerous. A lot of times it is just somebody that is calling something to his attention, or just a regular confrontation that you might have with somebody, but controlling his reaction to being confronted…

This is one of the major benefits of him being off social media because he would babble along on social media just as happy as a little clam and then someone would say something that he interpreted as confrontational, but a lot of times it is just somebody that is either trying to joke or just didn't calibrate their words or was legitimately being confrontational, but he would feel that red rage well up in him at the temerity, the gall that some stranger would have to correct his thinking, to offer a corrective to something he said in 140 characters, and he would turn his cannons on them and just blast them out of the water.

A lot of times they would reply: ”I am sorry, I was just trying to be funny, I didn't mean to… I am a big fan!” and John would have spent five tweets just laying waste to them, and then the smoke would clear and he would be like: ”Oh, sorry! I thought that you were saying something else!” The things that he said, the damage that he did, was Intense because of that feeling of being attacked.

John has seen this in a lot of people in the world that don't recognize their power when they feel cornered and they see themselves as a victim of the circumstance and that justifies their outside outsized reaction, but to the rest of the world they don't seem like a victim at all or that they are in any jeopardy. John is big, ferocious and articulate, so there is no way that he is pushed into a corner, but internally he feels like he is under siege, like he is a small person that is being ridiculed. He feels the threat intensely, so he doesn't see how crazy he looks and how scary he is because he is responding to what he thinks is an existential threat.

It is only when he sees it in other people and goes: ”Wow, you are really scary right now!” and see the person's confusion and they are feeling: ”What do you mean I am scary? You are the one that is attacking me!” - ”Well yeah, but you are really big and you are pounding the wall and it is an outsized reaction because all I asked you to do is clean the blender and you are punching the wall? That is nuts!” Then you try and get inside them and you realize that asking them to clean the blender is really an indictment of their character and they don't see that punching of the wall as feeling really dangerous to everybody else in the room because they have an infantile response.

John is not a wall puncher, but he is an acidic verbal jouster. He knows where people's vulnerabilities are. If there is extrasensory perception, one of the things that John can do is look you up and down, talk to you for five minutes and know exactly what your greatest fear is. When he was a teenager and really felt threatened by other people he exploited that ability and it made him awful. He didn't use it until he felt cornered, but where do you feel cornered the most? It was great when he got picked on because he was a bully destroyer.

There is nothing better than being the middle of a High School hallway and somebody decides they are going to pick a fight with him and he splattered their emotional blood on the walls and they limped away and never bullied him again and all the other kids in the hall all laugh and it is just exactly what you would hope to do against a bully, but it is a terrible skill to employ against your friends when you feel left out or when you feel mildly ribbed, just the usual High School stuff.

John manipulating adults when he was younger

John didn't have control over that power and used it wantonly. It wasn’t even unintentional because he intentionally hurt people who did deserve it. He wrestled some control over it and holds his tongue. When he sees somebody’s greatest fear now he has empathy and employs that knowledge in the service of good. He tries to get to know them better, tries to say things that will assuage that fear, at least in their interactions with him, and he compliments people for things that they are self-conscious about, like: ”Wow, that was really good what you just said! You really wowed them!” and he is trying to help instead of turning that into a bad thing, unless he feels cornered and then he still has control over that power, but in service of destruction, and that is awful.

You don't encounter that many bullies in life and if John gets off his path in one direction he is dangerously close to being a bully because he can get what he wants by pushing people down. We all have gifts and we all see things differently, and a lot of people have zero intuition about other people or zero interest in them, and John has tremendous interest in other people and a lot of intuition. This is why as a kid he was able to manipulate adults. He could see what was motivating adults and they couldn't see what was motivating him, so he could tell them things, he could easily discern what they wanted and what they hoped. They all wanted to be the heroes.

They wanted to be the grown-up that helped this troubled kid, they wanted to employ their education in child psychology or in pedagogy. John knew that and he could see what they were going for. Most of the time when you impact a kid they just stare off, but John would say: ”Oh wow, I have never really thought about it that way. That is really… thank you! I think from now on I won't have that problem anymore! I really feel like today really changed me!” He wasn't that devious, but they pat down their jacket and go: ”My work here is done!” and as soon as they turn their backs John was standing on the desk with a knife in his teeth.

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