ANON
Remember....
BLIEDEN
Yeah.
ANON
I have no name...
BLIEDEN
Right.
ANON
And there is no me as a real person.
BLIEDEN
Hi there. That's the voice of the anonymous man I interview man I
interview on this show. I'm Michael Blieden and this is Episode 10 of The
Cold Bath. I just got back from a friend of mine's wedding and this is a
friend of mine who doesn't really listen to this podcast and it got me
thinking I have a few friends who don't listen. I actually got a call from a
friend of mine the other day who lives in another city and he was like I
can't even make it through one episode. I can't stand it. And not only do I
understand but I feel like in this episode I'm even struggling with why do I
do it. Why do I keep having these conversations. I mean, there's an
upside, and there's a downside. So I dedicate this episode to my friend
who just got married and to all my friends who can't listen. This one is
for you. You left me these messages yesterday. These messages about
global warming.
ANON
Right.
BLIEDEN
Which by the way infuriated me. Infuriated me. I mean it was the first
time where I was like, oh god dammit. Really? I was just so...like personal
anger. Like...so I had to look at it. I had to sort of bring what we do into a
deeper emotional context for myself like why..why...why do I sort of enjoy
it that you're shitting on something that I believe so deeply and why and I
doing this at all. You know, like what is it that I get out of...you know
there's something that you do in terms of like...you know..ripping down
the facades of certain things and that includes crossing some boundaries
that I have. Why do I do it? What does it satisfy in me. What is there in
me that loves it. And at the same time I was also very jealous of you that
you had those things to say. Even if it was trashing
the...environmentalists, global warming. I was so jealous that you had
such a strong point of view to come from.
And I didn't even...you know...I had one...yesterday I had one rant
yesterday where I had something to say.
ANON
Mmhmm.
BLIEDEN
And that was over the following thing. Here's the story. Here's what I
ranted about yesterday. My wife has this metal thing that you use for
getting zits off your forehead.
ANON
Mmhmm.
BLIEDEN
And I didn't know how to use it. And I though oh, you know, I'm not going
to see anyone today. I'm going to pick some zits on my forehead. And of
course I came away looking like I had chicken pox. Or like I was a heroin
addict who was picking his face. And then they called me for an audition
for a commercial for a diet remedy and I went in there looking like I had a
disease.
ANON
Mmhmm.,
BLIEDEN
Not to mention which in trying to cover it up I went into my wife's
makeup which she doesn't like because last time I left it. It's like a
telescoping lipstick but it's coverup so you twist it and the bottom
telescopes up, you put the makeup on, you twist it the other way it goes
down you put the cap on. Anyways, I put the cap back on without
telescoping the makup down so I squished the makeup in the cap which is
something my wife would be furious...anyway you see
I was trying to cover my face with makeup and...you know this is the
thing that I was upset about yesterday was that I ruined my forehead and
made my acne really bad.
ANON
Right.
BLIEDEN
You know it's just a different. It's just a different frame of reference for my
day.
ANON
See you are still alive. So you're experiencing the problems of the living,
and I'm trying to live as much as I can the non living experience. I'm
becoming pure energy like in one of those science fiction shows.
BLIEDEN
(laughter) You're becoming a being of pure energy.
ANON
That's it.
BLIEDEN
Oh god that is really really really funny.
ANON
What is...what is the tool called, um... because they had withdrawn them
from the market for years. It's just a little metal bar of spring steel or
aluminum and it has a hole in either end. A little tiny hole and a small
hole and you press them against your skin. It's a blackhead remover.
BLIEDEN
Oh yeah.
ANON
That's what it is. And they removed them from the market because people
were damaging themselves so much with it. It's something that, you
know like a knife a gun, enormous care is needed in its use. Anything
you're gonna...any piece of metal you're gonna press against your
skin...that's why we have people called surgeons.
BLIEDEN
I wrote a...the first play that I ever wrote um...it's a very complicated play
about a guy that goes crazy. He goes into an institution then writes a play
about how he went crazy and invites his family into the institution to do a
reading aloud of the play, which is a play of him going crazy? And it's
them recreating their own role in what drove him crazy and why he's in
the institution. So the play that I wrote consists of the characters
reading the play about themselves and then discussing whether or not it's
true. Anyways, I put in it this rant at the very end. The mother, who I
wanted to show sort of why this character went crazy and I think part of
it was his like genetics, he probably imbalanced and then he had this
mother who was overbearing and paranoid. And it sort of comes out in
the end and she has this long rant about how you know, the earth is
heating up and I wrote it to sound crazy. Like I wrote it in 1999.
ANON
Right.
BLIEDEN
And um...she had these lines like "every time I step on the gas pedal I'm
killing us all." All this shit right? And I wrote it to be way over the top.
And it ends with this monologue about how the moon is receding from the
Earth. Which is true, about you know whatever, a foot a year or
something like that. Which you know, if nothing else kills us, when the
moon finally breaks away from our field of....it'll throw the tides off. You
know, our atmosphere will go crazy. So if nothing else there's that. I was
trying to cast her as the greatest apocalyptic thinker of all time. So we
did a reading of the play at a college on the East Coast. This was last
year. And it didn't sound that crazy anymore. It just sounded like a left
wing nutbird who you actually hear. It didn't sound crazy anymore. But
it represents the way that I feel. Except for the moon thing. But again,
and we've talked about this, but I do. I drive around with that fear all the
time.
ANON
Do you remember the first words of "Sex, Lies, And Videotape."
BLIEDEN
No.
ANON
I believe they are, "Garbage. Do you remember that scow with all the
garbage?"
BLIEDEN
Yeah.
ANON
Well these are the anxieties that modern people, meaning people from
very successful intact societies, where the Vandals are not coming in
every day. These are the new things they think about. Self-hatred is a
stage in a society's development. When things become too good, too well
ordered, the young rebel because the wildness in them is not being
satisfied by the staidness of society. And I thought that's the wildness
that particularly young males are looking for and it is why they are so
dissatisfied with the staidness of a well ordered society and it makes them
look for reasons why they're so crazy. And they're so crazy just cause
they're young males.
BLIEDEN
Well there isn't too far to look anymore if they want turmoil I mean, this
city alone I feel like...sometimes I feel like this city's coming apart. I know
that five years ago, and I'll tell you this is the most middle class thing I
can say, but five years ago there wasn't grafitti everywhere. I mean it's
everywhere now.
ANON
I believe you, although I have never noticed it.
BLIEDEN
Really?
ANON
Well I grew up in New York where it was de riguer. It was just on
everything. There were.
BLIEDEN
I would love to think of it. Is it just well now it's just accepted so it's just
more like New York, I should change my paradigm.
ANON
I don't know, I mean if people were running around shooting people cause
they wore a red or blue t-shirt I'd say "we should be putting a stop to this."
But I don't own any buildings so it doesn't bother me that some kid spray
paints, by the way they never spray paint anything that I can make out.
BLIEDEN
I know. It's so funny. It's really funny to me the idea that you and I would
sit here and talk about what grafitti means because it's not meant for us
to read but I swear to god, what the fuck are they writing. Seriously.
ANON
The NYPD has a book. A big book. Now it's probably on computer, but on
my day it was in a book. And some lieutenant kept the book and it was
every item of repeated grafitti in the five boroughs.
BLIEDEN
But sometimes it's not even English. But you're saying as much as they
could spell it out?
ANON
It wouldn't matter what language it was in. We speak Chinese, we speak
Serbo-Croatian, NYPD is great. I mean they understand every language
spoken in the five boroughs. They know someone who does.
BLIEDEN
But I tell you something there's some grafitti that I see everywhere. Like
the same word. In fact there's this one word EPYON and I see it
everywhere. I've seen it in West LA, I've seen it downtown, I've seen it in
Hollywood, I've seen it in Westwood, I've seen it in...did I say West
Hollywood, which is where I live? I mean I've seen this word everywhere.
I don't know if it's an acronym, I don't know if it's a name. But this
person has a legitimate ad campaign for their idea.
ANON
Ah, I just found this page on Global Warmin'.
BLIEDEN
Oh, let's go.
ANON
That's just Global Warmin', I-N. Huh?
BLIEDEN
Let's do it.
ANON
I saw this movie about Global Warmin. Oh yeah? It's called An
Inconvenient Woman, How I Can Take The Nomination Away From She
Who Must Be Obeyed. You know, Her. The Mary Jo Buttafucuo of
American Politics. Anyway, that's what the movie is all about. It is a
campaign commercial for Gore, by the way, any cheap trick told in a
political campaign is legitimate. Going through your bookshelves I
found...
BLIEDEN
I've got a lot of great books that you've told me to buy. All Marketers Are
Liars.
ANON
All Marketers Are Liars. I don't remember telling you about it.
BLIEDEN
Oh you know what you didn't. Actually because of my conversations with
you, I have such a bent that my wife bought that for me. She goes "you
would like this."
ANON
Well it's very good. The only thing that I don't like is that you can't see
the tip of his false nose. It's a pinocchio nose but you only see his head
and three quarters of the nose.
BLIEDEN
Alright let's get back to this Inconvenient Truth thing, you know I
mean...look. Pretty much everything you say I'm like that's...either I'll say
"that's brilliant," or "huh, I couldn't have imagined it that way," or "wow
that's scary," but the global warming thing is the only thing that you say
where I'm like, "you're fucking wrong and you're....why? Why are you
stuck on that idea?" That's the only subject in all of the subjects that we
talk about. And there are so many inconsistencies with your view on
Global Warming.
ANON
Look, man has a need for the infinite. If you see the brilliant movie made
about Elizabeth the First. She decides, I think into her thirties, maybe
forty, she will become a virgin. She's been a normal woman since she was
a teenager, but now she's going to become a virgin. This is why. She
doesn't want to marry the King of Spain. She doesn't want to marry the
King of France, but she wants people to get off her back. So she decides
into her thirties...and this doesn't happen with a normal person. This
only happens with Madonna. With people who have elaborate, clumsy,
kind of useless power, like Rosie O'Donnell. All of us have nutty ideas but
there is no staff to record our nutty ideas and call up a lot of journalists
and start promulgating these nutty ideas. Elizabeth had a little bit more
power than Rosie. She's the greatest ruler in British history and she
comes at a time when Britain is on the balls of its ass. And after she's
begun this process, which was largely through piracy. In those days they
would have said "privateers". Privateers were...you have a very small
navy or a fucked up navy...
BLIEDEN
Right.
ANON
And you tell every cutthroat who can sail, "go get'em. Go get those pesky
Spanish. Go get'em. And we only expect a small cut of the treasure. And
this way they destroyed Phillip II's navy. It didn't happen in that one
storm...
BLIEDEN
She basically used Blackwater.
ANON
She used Blackwater. Look, some Italian, a contemporary of Macchiavelli
said the language of power is as limited as the language of lust..
BLIEDEN
...as the language of lust.
ANON
And, you know, because we're talking to adults, and not children because
you can't say things on network television, you can fuck'em, you can
suck'em, you can spank'em, you can tie'em up. There's a limited.
BLIEDEN
We've used that in another show. I may use it again just because it's so
funny every time you say it.
ANON
There's a limited number of things you can do in sex and there's a limited
number of things you can do in applying power.
BLIEDEN
Oh, you know what? The first time you said that quote I didn't even get it.
The first time you said it, the language of lust...the language of power is as
limited as the language of lust I thought you were saying "it's unlimited.
Anything's possible in lust." It's the opposite you're saying.
ANON
Oh no. Yeah.
BLIEDEN
There's a limited number of things you can do in sex.
ANON
It's no the Karma Sutra Encyclopedia remember. It's not the Wikipedia
Karma...
BLIEDEN
It'd be a different saying if they said the limit...the language of power is as
limit...limited as the Kama Sutra.
ANON
Yeah. But it's really quite narrow. Normal people.
BLIEDEN
You know they've...we got really distracted. So you're talking about
Elizabeth. You're making a point about Elizabeth...cause I was about to
talk about pornography.
ANON
Elizabeth decided that she would not be married to the King of Spain. She
would be married to England. Meaning get off my ass I'm going to not be
any man's wife. I'm going to rule and I'm going to rule independently. But
to do that, she had to give up her humanity. And if you don't want to give
up your humanity, you cannot be a political leader. I feel very sorry for
Hillary Clinton, George Bush, John Edwards, Al Gore. Everybody.
Because they must sacrifice their humanity for power. A lot of people
don't think that's a bad trade. But in the case of someone who has the
ultimate power of Elizabeth I, someone who takes a country which is just
really gone down hill and rebuilds it, she had to sacrifice her
happiness...she would have been much happier married to one of these
idiots....
BLIEDEN
So remember you started saying this in response to my tirade about your
global warming ideas.
ANON
Well it just...just that man wants to touch the infinite, and apparently they
cannot live without fulfilling this desire and global warming is exactly....
BLIEDEN
See I know you've said that you think global warming is the new religion
but let's say you're right, that man needs a religion. That in and of itself,
just to apply pure logic, that may be true and global warming may be true.
So just because you're making a good point about humanity doesn't mean
that...
ANON
I understand. About the time of the American Civil War, for which there's
superb records, till 1970, when I was very much alive, everybody who
read about this phenomenon, wrote about it, believed, because science is
not a matter of consensus, ah...if the consensus of scientists say...
BLIEDEN
I know where...don't get too far because I want you to make your point.
ANON
Right. They believed, and you can look this up. Just go to a library and
look this up. This will not be on the internet because things before 1970...
BLIEDEN
Gobal Cooling.
ANON
Global Cooling.
BLIEDEN
Global Cooling, you're talking about global cooling.
ANON
Global cooling was the consensus science belief.
BLIEDEN
Okay, and again that may be true. You can't make a point that just because
someone has contradicted themselves because science or consensus has
contradicted itself, that it's wrong. Often times people do an about face
and their second idea is better than the first.
ANON
There's an old expression that I learned from the judges. A man
convinced against his will, will be of the same opinion still. There is no
way that what I have to say will affect people who've been hearing from
30,000 sources the opposite.
BLIEDEN
That's it for this episode. The next two episodes were recorded
immediately after the Virginia Tech shootings. The discussion very
quickly turned to the topics of guns and if you'd like to learn anything
about guns you'll find a very willing teacher in Mr. A. Here's a little
sample.
ANON
Am I urging civilians to run into gunfire? No. But in these circumstances
where you have no choice, they should know a little bit about how the gun
actually mechanically operates so they could save themselves.