This week, Merlin and John talk about:
The Problem: Toreadors were everywhere, referring to paintings from Spain that were popular in the 1950s that were still everywhere in the 1970s.
The show title refers to the port of Fort Lauderdale that seems not to be prepared to receive 5 cruise ships every day with 4000 passengers each although it happens every single day. They do not have Global Entry, but only some traffic cones and some retirees.
John starts the show singing ”I am going hungry! Yeah!” (probably from the song Hunger Strike by Temple of the Dog).
On the way in to his office John passed a truck that had a Soundgarden Louder Than Love bumper sticker, a new sticker on an old truck, and it really put him into a spin. Where do you get a new Soundgarden Louder Than Love bumper sticker? Maybe at the Sub Pop store at the airport, they were on Sub Pop in the early days.
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 Please do not quote these texts directly without applying your own editing first!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.
Merlin’s software cough button (RL143)
Merlin sounds sick and he is going to try to hard to ride the cough button, a hacky keyboard-based cough button, although he could get a hardware cough button, but he doesn’t know if he is going to stick with the podcasting stuff all that long, so he doesn’t want to go crazy. He has an app called MuteMyMic that allows you to hit a button and it will mute your mic. It is ad-supported and occasionally it pops up pink noise unless you pay, just one more fucking eel.
John’s computer is a beige IBM 8086 and he is running machine language, so he needs the Shareware version of this app.
Burning a CD or DVD being outdated (RL143)
The other day their friend Adam Pranica asked John to just burn a CD of a thing and John could, but didn’t know where to get a blank CD, and then Adam remembered that he had a USB-drive on his key chain.
Merlin has a pretty old - by any standard except perhaps John’s - desktop computer from 2006 because he is really cheap and he hates buying computers. It is running some very old hacked-up software that he is not proud of because Apple’s upgrades are designed to kill old computers. He bought it a year before his daughter was born and he had the presence of mind to buy a MacPro with two optical drives for reading discs, but they don’t write. Maybe he was expecting that at one time he would want to watch two movies at once. He has a BluRay burner/ripper thing that is kind of janky.
It has become as rare as a fax machine to need to make a CD or DVD. When you could first make CDs on a Mac it seemed amazing because it was the coin of the realm and being able to drop it into a CD player was the most amazing thing in the world. John has given Merlin unreleased stuff on CDs in the past, but now that feels like such an unnecessary middle step because you are going to rip it and get it back as a file on your computer. It is like people wanting you to fax a form, but that still happens to John every week.
The first iMac John saw that looked like cough drops did have a CD reader, but it couldn’t write to it and it also didn’t have a floppy drive, so how would you write stuff from it, and the owner said there was no method to do that. John was astonished that you would spend that much money to buy a thing that you could not export from. It was a very controversial choice. Today it is getting even crazier because with the laptops they make one of the constraining factors is consistently the ports on the side. Now you do not get an optical drive on a laptop and they are also too thin to have an ethernet port, even USB is pretty thick. They should get Gruber and Siracusa on this podcast so they can talk about Apple.
Apple Watch (RL143)
John is excited about the Apple Watch! The other day at the grocery store the guy who was checking him out was wearing a giant 2-dimensional gold crown on a chain, and John wanted to ask if that was about Ethiopia or Reggae, but then he realized that he was not meant to ask what the crown was about. Merlin thinks that if you are wearing a crown on a chain you are throwing it out there that you want people to talk about it, but the guy was sending a very palpable ”Do not engage me in conversation” vibe, which is unusual in the 21st century, and John respected it and did not make chit-chat.
On second glance John noticed that the guy was also wearing a giant technology watch and now he really wanted to talk to him about the watch and use it as an inroad to then talk about the crown, but the guy continued to be very capable and very uninterested in conversation. John should be thinking about other things anyway, he should be having deep thoughts, and he wouldn’t even have thought it again if Merlin hadn’t just asked him about the Apple Watch.
John has noticed about Nokia that whenever Apple announces something that Nokia comes out with a slightly bigger maybe more capable and still less desirable version of it right away. Samsung is pretty good that, too. It was a watch that by it empty screen suggested an infinite capability and perhaps he could videoconference with his handler or hack into the mainframe.
Merlin says they haven’t talked in a long time, but need to put out a show today.
Going on the JoCo Cruise together, Fort Lauderdale (RL143)
John and Merlin have been on a cruise. Fort Lauderdale is a very small airport with live wild birds in it. Tom Arnold was there and he seemed nice, Merlin’s lady saw him at the place where you buy water and candy.
Merlin being at the airport way too early, people talking on the phone
A lot of things could have been planned better on Merlin’s part, there was a miscommunication, and they ended up getting there at around 10am and raced off the boat and immediately to the airport, and then they flew out at 8pm and had a nice long day to really take in the airport, which was a trial. He treated his family to the Chili’s Too twice and each plate was more disappointing than the last. When John ate there once his meal came with a single kernel of corn on top. They have about 850 drinks and a microwave oven. Merlin’s kid was very patient, considering the circumstances.
They found a quiet area where there weren’t too many people around. People love to talk on their phone at the airport, and it is only in airports Merlin realizes how much other people talk on their phone more than he does. They make a lot more calls and they also talk on the phone for a very long time, often very loudly, and much longer than he does. He does anything he can to try to… he has phone-calls with people, like with John or with clients, but the goals of getting on the phone is to get off the phone. One of the conversation he witnessed was so boring, of a woman talking to her young daughter, and no matter what the girl said her mother had an annoying karma-suck response. It went on for an hour! At the end of a trip Merlin is always really ready to not be on a trip anymore. Also, don’t ask him about the United lounge!
John showed up at this airport several hours later for a flight that was scheduled to leave at 6pm, and Merlin was already there with his whole family, and John’s flight left on time and Merlin was still there. There was tons of snow in Boston, there were huge delays, and it was a day where the cruise ship defecates all the people out of its bowls and sends them on their way through this tiny little airport, plus there had been a bike race that day, it has just been a clusterfuck all around for everybody.
Chaos every time when a cruise ship arrives in the port although it happens 5 times every single day
John has done 7 pleasure cruises now and he is proud of that with an asterisk in there somewhere and one of the insights he has gleaned is that the first time you get off a cruise and you try and make it through Fort Lauderdale or the port of Orlando to the airport you have that feeling that an entire cruise ship just emptied out and now this town is trying to deal with this unprecedented influx of people. It is like the beginning of Godfather II where all the immigrants are standing around waiting to move and the guy is talking to you and you only speak Italian and then he stamps you on the forehead.
Every single day in Fort Lauderdale 5 cruise ships dock and empty out and has for 15 years. The whole purpose of the Fort Lauderdale airport is to be the lower intestine of this whole process and it is squeezing these poops through and out into the airplanes. All the roads in Fort Lauderdale, the whole container yard, all those different people with different security badges that are yelling at you when you walk out of the cruise ship terminal happens 5 time a day every day.
The first time you are doing this you understand why these people seem incompetent and why this process is so janky. How would you process 4000 people all at once? The whole debarking process takes from 7am until 12pm because there are so many people, so many bags, and so much customs, it is crazy, except if you did it every day, in which case it would over time presumably stop being crazy and start being a matter of course, and yet it never is, and every time it seems like the people there who are running the system are like: ”What? Oh shit! Is that boat here already! Oh fuck! We should open two lanes!”
Customs and TSA have spent millions of dollars implementing a Global Entry system which allows passengers who are in the program, including John, to speed through customs onto reentry into the country. You have assured the government that you do not intend to bring any vermin-infested bread-fruit back into the country and immediately throw it on the ground, you have proved to them that you are just a normal person who is neither a drug smuggler nor an Al Qaida operative, and you do not need to be retina-scanned again by some person who passed a job interview in Florida for a security job. And yet, they don’t have this system in cruise terminals. It is the simplest thing, just a couple of ATMs over to the side.
The Boise International Airport surely has a Global Entry kiosk for the 15 people who come from Calgary every day in their DeHavilland Beaver, but for a cruise ship terminal where 5 ships disgorge 4000 passengers each they do not, but they have some traffic cones, some retirees who they have pinned some Western airline’s wings on their shirt and said: ”You are in charge of security!” and people are standing in line as though it has never happened before.
You have to go through a giant hangar when you get off the boat and you have to stand in the longest line you have ever been in your life and it seems like the regular building wasn’t available that day, but you know that building was built for no other purpose, and yet it feels repurposed. The first couple of times John did it he was really sympathetic to Fort Lauderdale and he has found the town of Fort Lauderdale actually to be really charming. They talk about statues and figurines that you can buy in all the many art galleries in town, not just Thomas Kinkade the Painter of Light, but all of his spiritual and artistic peers.
Art auctions on the cruise ship with heavy 1950s Spanish aesthetics
The perceived high end art that was on display on this cruise for the big auction was some of the most amazing stuff Merlin has ever seen in his life. It is common in San Francisco and everywhere in Las Vegas you see this epic beyond-kitschy art that is meant to be very high end, the painting is never just a painting, but it got inch-thick imposto and you can practically feel it. Here are seven paintings of Mohamed Ali and Garfield the cat in the aesthetic of SkyMall where you can have a zombie crawling out of the ground in your backyard, that over-real aesthetic, but a little cartoony and much bigger than life.
So much of what John experienced when he was a kid was the hangover from the 1960s. All the furniture in the waiting rooms of places, all the art: Everything was brown an orange, carpety and metally, maybe with some weird dark wood. Spain had been very popular some time in the 1950s and there was a lot of Toreador art, a lot of heavy neo-Spanish looking furniture in places with super-thick coatings of oil, oversized wooden chairs that were supposed to be at the same time opulent and rustic. It was meant to feel old and portentous and rich. It was Spain, not Spanish colonial in the New World, like in Zoro.
Everybody today is so fascinated and fixated on mid-century modern, imagining that they are all going to live in the glass house with no decoration and just minimal low-slung couches and chairs. Merlin’s parents’ generation thought that looked cheap and all their furniture was oversized for the room it was in and there were way too many baroque-y rococo curly cues, very few things had right angles, it was all just bombastic Liberace-furniture. People forget that the mid-century aesthetic was much more Liberace humping El Cid than it was Don Draper laying on a low-slung couch.
The cruise art is the spiritual descendent of that fake opulent, vaguely mediterranean aesthetic that is one step away from doe-eyed children. Merlin can’t get away from thinking about SkyMall or Spencer’s or Ghalager’s, which were basically head shops where you could get your posters and your slightly off-color bachelor-party gifts, the little balls that clank into each other and go back and forth (Newton’s Cradle, see OM10).
Merlin bought a lot of posters there or presents for Mother’s Day. The overriding aesthetic was not so far from what John jokes about that the app-class guys are having nothing but a poster of a girl on a Lamborghini in their $15 million house, where they feel like they need to buy something to put in there to make this place classy and they know just enough to know that their 14.000 sqft house looks un-lived-in because they only live in the kitchen and the TV room.
John had a pretty good friend who made some Rock’n’Roll money and who had lived with his parents until he was in a Rock band and then all of a sudden he was rich and he bought a really big mid-century modern house for himself. He hadn’t really fully domesticated himself and he was waiting to get married, and he lived in this 5-bedroom house, he had a bed in his bedroom and some folding-chairs in the living room as a place for people to sit, and he had a game-room with the biggest TV you could buy at the time and all the stuff that he cared about.
It was very difficult to have a party there because there was no place to sit and there was nothing to look at. They would sometimes go there for Poker games. John would imagine him coming home on those days where he was just by himself, he would come in, throw his keys in the key jar, stand in the entry and survey the thousands of square feet at his disposal, and then go right into the game room and close the door. John is still not sure if it was sad of wonderful. Now he is married and he lives in a beautiful home that is beautifully decorated.
Merlin’s parents in 1976 bought French Rococo furniture for the house that looked like something out of Goodfellas, but it was all so poorly made out of hollow wood and it had curly cues that you would hope would denote a certain kind of fanciness.
John’s Richard Nixon blow-up punching dummy (RL143)
John bought at one of those shops one of his all-time favorite things in 1978: a 3.5-foot tall punching dummy that was blow-up and weighted on the bottom in the shape of a Shmoo except it was called Kick Tricky Dick and it had Richard Nixon screen-printed on it front and back and you were meant to kick it when you were mad. John got it at a head shop in a mall and he was so proud of this thing and it was displayed prominently in his room. He hasn’t thought about that in years.
John’s mom moving to Seattle after she left his dad, getting poster tube cardboard furniture (RL143)
When John’s mom left his dad they moved to Seattle, they had no money, and in the perfect expression of who she was and what her aspirations were. She was not going to go in debt to some usurious credit situation at a furniture store, so their entire furniture was made of red-painted poster tubes that were connected with white L-shaped plastic connectors, almost like pool furniture, except literally made out of cardboard. A lot of the joints were 3-way so you could have one in the top-tube and then two in a 90-degree angle to one another to make the two sides of the table, and you would build cubes out of poster tubes that were just big enough that a child could stick their hand inside the tube.
Over the top was a piece of whiteboard-colored plastic and that was your coffee table. There was actually furniture that you could sit on made out of these cardboard tubes and by combining the right combination of these plastic connectors you could make it strong enough to hold an adult. This was their living room furniture for a long time. It was modular and you would buy the pieces and put it together yourself, and because of the nature of it you were building and rebuilding them every single day because as a kid you could take the furniture apart, and as an adult you would take it apart just out of fascination.
It was amazing and couldn’t have been cheaper to produce and John can’t believe that it is not still a feature. It is terrible dorm room furniture because the first time somebody got drunk and leaned on something it would be destroyed, you had to be somewhat ginger, you couldn’t climb on the coffee table or it would break in 700 ways. This was her solution! She needed furniture for their house and she found this. Maybe she had just gone to the drug store and found a bunch of stuff and painted it herself, but it had a quality that made it clear that this was somebody’s business plan who had thought this up.
John has never seen it anywhere else. A few of those items stayed with them all the way through the mid-1908s. They played another formative role in his life: The coffee table was the first thing to go because you not only wanted to put books on it, but you wanted to put your feet on it, and it was just not strong enough to have somebody put their feet up and the first time some guy threw his feet up there it started to sag.
When John was learning his multiplication tables his mom decided that she was going to sacrifice what remained of the coffee table and took the top off the coffee table, leaned it up against the wall, and with a black marker made a giant times tables on it (see RW42, RL378). They would sit and John would study his times tables on this giant coffee table piece of plastic and then it went back on the remaining end-life of the coffee table face-down and they continued to use it as a table for a while and they would flip it up to do their times tables until eventually it all went to the landfill. She used every part of the buffalo.
Covering furniture with plastic in the 1970s (RL143)
Merlin’s daughter is getting to an age where she likes looking at old family pictures. The other night she found a bunch that confirmed something that Merlin had thought he was misremembering, but they were actually a family who would always put plastic on the nice furniture. Back then it was not uncommon to arrive at a point where you had a place that you were renting and maybe you were making a little more money than before, you were mostly making ends meet, and furniture companies were very aggressive about putting no or just a small amount of money down and you can get an entire room.
By the mid-1970s when Merlin’s family did arrive at that point they had to really take care of everything, and his mom put a plastic cover on the new appalling couch that had replaced their old appalling couch that made it really uncomfortable and ugly, but you had to keep the couch nice, it was just the kind of thing his family did. John’s family definitely did not do that, but he would go to people’s houses that had covered the furniture. He always assumed you left the covers on the furniture until special guests came and then you took the covers off, but no-one ever did.
John’s mom moving to Alaska to a nice house in a nice neighborhood, the room where her kids were not allowed in (RL143)
When John was already living in Alaska with his dad his mom got a good job and moved to Alaska and had a nicer house than his dad. Times have changed and fortunes have switched around! Then she moved again to a much nicer house in a nice neighborhood no less and she had leveraged herself pretty highly at that point, specifically to get her dream home in a nice neighborhood, right before John was going into High School.
She had timed it very purposefully so that during the time John was going to High School they lived in the nice neighborhood, fulfilling her own dream and also trying to facilitate his path through life. She perceived that if he started High School from the nice neighborhood he would have social leg up. He would not be going home with the school bus to the poor neighborhood, but he would be living in the rich neighborhood with the rich kids who were going to go to the good schools, a move that was conscious of the social undercurrents.
It was part of her fantasy, too: Both to have the nice house and to be the mother of the kid… she was the only single parent in the whole neighborhood, everybody else was married with kids, and they ostracized her for being a single woman and the other women all presumed that she was there to steal their husbands, and the local husbands would come by on Saturday afternoon and stand there with their rake: ”How is it going over here? Do you need any help?” There was weirdness about being a single woman, particularly a single mother, and John heard from a lot of kids about the suspicion and fear about a woman living on her own with two kids in a nice house.
John’s mom was very definitely standing with her head held high and her chin out: ”That’s right! I bought the corner house on Stanford and Princeton and I am a single mom and fuck you!” John loved being in the rich neighborhood, although he learned to hate it because rich kids are assholes and now he needed the right alligator on his shirt, but his mom was not willing to put an alligator on one of his shirts, not in a million years! She still maintained her farm ethics and she was going to repurpose the coffee table multiple times.
She also bought a set of furniture for the living room that her kids were not allowed to sit on. It was the first time anything like that had ever happened and all of a sudden John and Susan weren’t allowed in the living room. ”What am I? A fucking cat? I am allowed in the God-damn living room! I am the son of this house! I am the sion of this legacy!” and he would sit in the living room and she would come in and go: ”Get off those couches!” and hit him with the spray bottles.
The furniture was light pink verging into white and for several years they weren’t allowed to go in there except on Christmas morning and if somebody came by, which she made every attempt to prevent ever happening. No-one ever came by, she never had anybody over for tea, she kept the blinds closed and she might have gone in at night and stand in the doorway of her perfect living room and it gave her a tremendous satisfaction. She had finally purchased a house that was big enough that there could be a room in the house that no-one used and she set it up in her perfect vision and she would be damned.
John getting drunk and passing out on his mom’s pink couch (RL143)
She didn’t put plastic over it, but she later wished she had because when John started drinking he got shitfaced every single time, there was not a single time he had just 2 beers, it was never explained to him and it never occurred to him that there was another way to drink wine coolers of champaign except as much as you can get away with. Later on somebody suggested that they would have a couple of beers and John wondered what the point of that would be.
One time John came home, somebody dropped him off, got him to the front door, and ran, and John made it into the front room, peed himself, took off all his clothes, and then fell asleep on her pink couch, and he woke up in the morning to her sitting in the pink chair. She had seen him drunk before, but what made this moment special was that his dad was also there who was not often invited into his mom’s house, had been invited over.
She obviously wakes up at 5am, came downstairs, saw him drunk with his pee clothes in a firesale path into her living room, him naked on the couch, and she had time to have breakfast herself, call his father, tell him to come over, and then they woke him up at 9am and he had to hear the first of many alcoholism lectures from his two parents combined, working together as a team. It was an auspicious Christening of those pink couches!
Everybody was worried about the fact that John was recapitulating the family curse because his older brother and his father’s father and his father himself had all gone down this path, and John could only imagine if your 15 year old kid is not just coming home drunk, but you know what the end-game of this story is, they were super-worried! It never occurred to John that he was anything but an alcoholic from the very beginning, from the first time he had a drink.
John’s dad was a recovering alcoholic from before John was born, and Alaska in the 1970s was like Dodge City, everybody was shitfaced all the time, people would go to lunch and would come back to their job running the pipeline and be 6 Martinis in and their job was to control the pressure of the oil running through the pipes. It was a culture of abuse! John had heard about alcohol and had seen it all around him and with his dad’s critique of it, but bars were the only place to socialize and they would go into bars and sit there and there were people getting in gunfights and John’s dad would be walking over to them, going: ”You ever thought about going to alcoholics anonymous?”
From the first time John ever had a drink he knew that he was an alcoholic, it never occurred to him that he wasn’t, and his performance as a young drinker reinforced that he was, so when his parents woke him up this morning and said: ”You are exhibiting the signs of an alcoholic! It is a very bad road to be on and you need to take a really hard look at it!” - ”Asked and answered! I have already taken a hard look at it! I am an alcoholic! Where do I sign up for the alcoholic adventure?” and they did not anticipate that.
John probably did not actually communicate that, but he looked chastened and nodded and sat there with his head spinning, saying: ”I am sorry, I try not to do it again!” and he said that for 10-12 more years and no-one in his life realized that he knew he was a fucking alcoholic who was trying to plumb the depths of that. He knew about the concept of a bottom and he was trying to find his.
Alcoholics Anonymous (RL143)
The first time John was at an AA meeting, one of the guys who was probably 30 said: ”I don’t know why I am here. The cops made me come here because I got 5 DUI’s!” and the whole meeting breaks up and everybody was laughing. ”Dude, if you got 5 prosecuted DUI’s where they have taken your license you have a drinking problem!” - ”What are you even talking about? I just go drink like a normal person!” You saw it on his face when he had a dawning realization.
In most AA-meetings there is no crosstalk, but this guy was inviting it. Commenting on what other people are saying is not part of the culture. You say your piece and then the next person says their piece and you don’t even obliquely refer to what the other person just said. If the person is saying bullshit the presumption is that if they stick around in AA meetings long enough they are one day going to realize that they have been full of shit all this time. There is nothing new in those meetings, and sometimes some guy is giving you 15 minutes of the worst self-justifying bullshit and there is nothing you can do. You can go to AA for years and not see anything.
It is like the 5 stages of grief and it is weird that there are people in so many different stages of the process, particularly since one of the dominant characteristics of alcoholics is that they want to tell everybody how to do it, it is baked into the concept. Everybody in the room is sitting there quietly and in their own minds saying: ”Aw, fuck! If I could just stand up right now and explain why this person is doing it wrong!” It is an alcoholic trait to be the expert, it is why John is a supporter of that program because it is a fascinating multifaceted experiment in psychology.
Constantly finding a new level of humility is the core of it and it is why it works: The people who manage to get there are experiencing the toughest route to zen, which is being confronted every day with people who are exhibiting all the things about yourself that you hate the most, and not being able to do anything except listen. Every single person in an AA wants to take it over and be the chief and no-one can. There are people with 40 years of sobriety there and others who have 60 days of sobriety and they want to take the meeting over and tell everybody how to do it.
Thinking you made it and you will never go back
There were multiple times John quit drinking for 6 months, but the final time when he was really going to AA all the time and was trying to be sober instead of just being forced to be sober or experimenting to be sober. He had been to the edge, he had stood and looked down, he lost a lot of friends there, and he was in this to win this and at 6 months he felt amazing, he had this thing on lock, but invariably you come to the next hurdle, which is that it is not a thing that you can ever have on lock.
You reach the point where you got the sense that you have turned a corner and there is no way you could go back, and the next thing that comes out of your mouth is: ”Since there is no way I could ever go back there is no reason why I shouldn’t have one drink because it is fucking New Year’s Eve and there is no way I am going to ever be an alcoholic again, so what is the harm in having one little tiny drink?”
AA has been so bastardized! There are people even now who are paying $5000 a week to be in an AA-style rehab where ultimately it isn’t AA-style because if you have someone in charge and if you have bars on the windows, or if you have any kind of coercion then it is not AA: The courts routinely send people to alcoholics anonymous as part of their punishment and when the basket goes around the room and everybody puts a dollar in just to pay for coffee, those people put in their little green and yellow slips that they get from the court so that somebody at the AA meeting signs off on it and they can take it back to their parole officer and say: ”Yeah, I went to AA!”, but as soon as that element is there it is no longer AA.
It is entirely possible that somebody sits in a forced AA situation for 6 months and somewhere along the line realizes that this is actually getting through to him, but when you are about 6 months into getting sober you get the feeling that you are so lucky and you wish that everybody in the world would hit this moment where they need to be in AA because it is such a fascinating and humbling experience and you have an insight now that you couldn’t have had otherwise that you wish everybody shared. It is like the first time you take LSD and you think everybody in the world should take LSD one time.
Going to AA is very similar. There are a lot of people out there laboring along and this knowledge is so useful that you wish everybody shared it, but the fundamental thing about a guy that has been sober for 40 years who keeps going to AA is that he keeps learning things about himself from listening to people who have been sober for 60 days, and that is not something you can duplicate, or package and put a price on. The reason he is there and subjecting himself to that, which is uncomfortable and so bad, and yet you are there because you want whatever that is.
Talking to a Rock star whose manager told him to quit drinking
Last year John got a phone call from some manager, a thing that happens periodically, saying: ”I know that you are sober. One of my artists is struggling and I would like to ask you to talk to them.” - ”Of course!” In this particular case it was an artist that John had never met, a big Rock star who was younger and getting in a lot of trouble being drunk, and he is like: ”My manager said I should call you!” - ”Do you want to stop drinking?” - ”I am screwing up my life!” - ”That doesn’t mean you want to stop drinking!” - ”Well, I am, if I don’t do something I am going to ruin my career!” - ”That doesn’t mean you want to stop drinking. People fucking ruin their families, destroy their kids, burn their house down. Do you want to stop drinking?”
They talked 6-8 times late at night, most of the times he was fucked up, and every time he wanted to argue with John, like: ”Jim Morrison is my hero and so is (Charles) Bukowski and so is Hemingway!” - ”But do you want to stop drinking or do you not? If you want to die like Bukowski, then go for it! Why are you calling me?” Everybody in his life told him he had to stop drinking and they put him in touch with John, but John doesn’t give a fuck if he stopped drinking.
”If you want to stop drinking then I got some recommendations and I will talk to you on the phone as long as you want. If you don’t and you want to talk to me on the phone about it, I am happy to talk to you on the phone about it, but I am not going to argue with you about how Jim Morrison is your role model. Go for it! If you want to drink and ruin your life, it is totally beautiful, it is unbelievable, you are like a shooting star, man! But if you want to stop drinking it sucks, it is hard, it is bullshit, but it is a thing that you either want or you don’t, and if you don’t, then don’t waste everybody’s time!”
What ended up happening is that he some drunken night called John at 4am and was talking to him about Bukowski. John has read every Bukowski everything and he saw Bukowski at 75 years old in that documentary kick his girlfriend. He was an asshole and if you want to be like him, why do you call me at 4am? Call your girlfriend and tell her how Bukowski you are! Somebody then got him into an expensive recovery program and now he pays a chaperone to tour with him and he is in that Metallica situation where they are paying some guy to sit in the room with them and be like: ”I am hearing you say that you love Bukowski and I am getting paid $15.000 a week to tell you: Why don’t you have some hummus?”
When you see that from outside you think that this is not tenable because as soon as he can sneak away he is going to take two OxyContin and then he is going to come back and pretend to be sorry and maybe he can keep that going through the life of his band. This guy wanted the exact same thing John wanted: To be able to drink like the people in the stories and to have all the glamorous problems of the people in the stories, which is to say the fist fights and the broken bottles and the women who are so sad and weeping over you.
He also wanted it like in the stories to result in a Pulitzer Prize winning novel and a Grammy winning record that ultimately will cause everyone to forgive him, and he doesn’t want to wake up with a broken nose, but he wants to have given the other guy a broken nose. He has a fantasy, just like John did, how it is going to play out, and when it starts not playing out like your fantasy you feel like all you got to do is make some minor adjustment, maybe talk to some guy who is going to give you a couple of secrets about how you can keep drinking and partying and raging, but stop waking up with a broken nose.
People being disappointed that their fantasy doesn’t match reality anymore
This is the problem in so much of life and why AA might help people who aren’t alcoholics, people whose lives start to deviate from the fantasy they had in mind and they still cling to their fantasy harder and harder. Their lives resemble that fantasy less and less and their reaction is to be disappointed and increasingly bitter as they frantically grasp at the fantasy of what they thought it was going to be and find more and more seemingly valid reasons for why they have been denied that fantasy that they deserve. It is the man or it is people misunderstanding them.
This is what the whole wedding planner industry is based on: You have an idea that you are the bride and the bride looks like this on her wedding day and she feels like this on her wedding day and suddenly you are 26 years old and you don’t feel like that, and you meet somebody and now they are cast in the role of the prince and they made to make you feel like you are supposed to feel on your wedding day, and the prince character goes: ”What? I am just a guy you met in a bar!” - ”No, you are the groom and your job is to make me feel like I am supposed to feel on my wedding day!”
There is a huge industry of people who make you look like you imagined you were going to look on your wedding day, but there is very little you can do about how you imagined you are going to feel on your wedding day, and a lot of people go into their wedding already disappointed that they don’t feel like they thought they should feel, and that is true of so much of what we do and the hardest thing in the world is to be here now and realize that you are neither the guy who throws the punch nor the guy who is punched, but you are this guy who has been punched and doesn’t want it, not Bukowski.
John has been sober for 20 years and the reason anyone who has been sober for 2 years would go to an AA meeting is that it still is a present problem. He wakes up every day and he still goes: ”I don’t want to be the guy who gets punched, I want to be the guy who throws the punch!” - ”You know what, guy? What you should be is a guy sitting there listening to a guy who is 60 days sober saying that same thing!” That will help you a little bit, and it is a version of life and a way of looking at life that is unflinching, but it is the closest philosophy to reality that John has ever seen, and that doesn’t appeal to a lot of people, himself included. ”You want reality? I am reality!” - ”Push a dollar in the basket, asshole!”