Wiretap - Best Perfect Day Ever

Episode Date: August 3, 2020

After 50 years of marriage, a couple enters a love competition and puts their devotion to the test.

We're in the midst of the dog days of summer. And it's called that because during this period, Sirius, the dog star, rises with the sun in the morning. Not because it feels like several dogs are breathing their humid breath on you all the time. Can you tell he's a cat person? Hello, I'm Neil Kerkstel. And I'm Chris Houghton. We're the co-hosts of As It Happens.

But throughout the summer, some of our wonderful colleagues will be hosting in our place. We will still be bringing you conversations with people at the center of the day's major news stories here in Canada and throughout the world. You can listen to As It Happens wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC podcast. I'm Jonathan Goldstein, and you're listening to Wiretap on CBC Radio 1. Today's episode, Best Perfect Day Ever, in which hamburgers are philosophized, pencils are sanctified, and love is quantified.

Hey, Cous Cousin Kenny That's right What a pleasant surprise We haven't gotten together in a long time Yeah, I guess I've been sort of busy What's new? I've got a new business

Another new business Catwalkers is done Catwalkers.com and that's finished Maybe not the best idea Doesn't matter Because I've got a winner here Best Perfect Day Ever.com Best Perfect Day Ever.

I make the best perfect day ever for you. Uh-huh. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to give you, at cost, your best perfect day ever. You just have to pay... Kenny, when you say you, you're being rhetorical here, right? No, I'm talking about you. Tomorrow, I'm coming to your house at 7 a.m. 7 a.m.

Ding-dong. That's a little early. Are you answering the door? Ding-dong. Can you open the door, please? If I must. I did it for you. Welcome to your best perfect day ever, Jonathan Goldstein.

Have a seat while I take out your perfect day breakfast. Half a grapefruit, lovingly serrated with a knife. Yeah, I'm not the biggest fan of... Perfect breakfast. You finished that. I dress you in your favorite clothes. You address me. Yeah.

That out we go. Mm-hmm. I carry you. You carry me. Downstairs to my van that is full of? I don't know. McDonald Rappers. Owls and falcons, your favorite.

What do you mean my favorite? You love animals. Wait a second. Is this connected to that airmail aviary business you had? I have a few left over, and they do not like eye contact. No. Just leap right in your face, so I'm going to put a pillowcase over your head. A pillowcase.

And we get to our first event of your great day. Tubing on the river. It's a great thing about tubing on the river is you don't have to get out to go to the bathroom. That is disgusting. You used to love that. Remember how much fun we used to have. Kids, we had that splash fight, and you got sick from the water. I almost drowned, Kenny.

Memories of the good times. Next, we go for lunch. Where? Strip Club buffet. Mm-mm. I don't even like buffets. You have to share a spatula. Wing walking on a biplane.

Snip your cable, plummeting in free fall. Then, bring, bring, on your cell phone. Hey, it's me, Kenny. Pull your shoot, buddy. While I'm in a free fall. Boom, you're dangling from a tree branch. I come in beside you, boom, dangling from a tree branch. I've covered your shoes and meat.

Wait, why meat? Just to attract the bears. Okay, Kenny, I'm not doing this with you. This is by no stretch of the definition my perfect day. Okay, just whatever. I just thought we could maybe connect on some level and probably isn't your perfect day. No, no, it isn't.

But, you know, when I was a kid, My perfect day was usually hanging out with you and I don't get that anymore Kenny I look You don't ever talk to me anymore Now I'm

You know All I've got is a van full of birds of prey And just you know you couldn't give me A day of your life Okay fine I could give you one day All right I'll be over at 8 o'clock First of all we get in the van

And I cranked the two I have the time of my life. We're rocking down the road. Then, skeet shooting, naked. Why are we naked? It's too solve danger. Then, after the sword fighting, it's a Scrabble tournament.

Stripper edition Scrabble. If cousin Kenny has taught us anything, it's that the pursuit of the best, perfect, anything, is doomed to failure. failure. The problem is that perfection seems to lie beyond the human pale, existing in the realm of mathematics, say, where one can speak of perfect lines and perfect forms. But trying to achieve such perfection in the physical universe, that kind of thing has been known to drive men mad. With that in mind, I bring you David Reese, professional pencil sharpener. I contacted him at his

workshop in upstate New York. My name's David Rees, and I have an artisanal pencil sharpening business, and if you send me money and a pencil, I'm going to sharpen it and return it to you. And you're serious about this. I literally have a pencil sharpening business. My pencils are all over the world, and they're also in the personal collections of a lot of writers like Elizabeth Gilbert and Amy Sedaris and Neil Gaiman. And then in addition to those people, just to hundreds and hundreds of people in all sorts of professions, you know, school teachers, students, artists.

But why don't these people just sharpen their own pencils? What's so great about your sharpening? Well, doing it by hand, people find interesting. And also just this idea that an individual guy is just going to sit there and consider your pencil and try to put the best point on it that he can. It's not just like shoving it into an electric pencil sharpener or something. And so how did this come about? You've always been a fan of pencil sharpening? This is what happened.

I had a job working for the United States Census, and on the first day of staff training, as a door-knocker, they had us all open our little bags of supplies. And inside the bag, there were some number two pencils and a little tiny pencil sharpener. And the census trainer said, okay, everybody sharpen your pencils. So we all stood around a trash can

and twisted the pencils inside the sharpener and watch the little shavings unfurl within the slit of the sharpener and fall into the trash can. And it had been a long time since I'd sharpened a pencil, and I remember that I thought, wow, this is really satisfying. Forget about working for the census. I wish there was a way to get paid to just sharpen pencils all day. Like, this is the best thing so far. And so not only did you, in fact, start a pencil sharpening business, but you've also written a book about pencil sharpening. Yeah.

Yeah. It's called How to Sharpen Pencils, a Practical and Theoretical Treatise on the Artisanal Craft of Pencil Sharpening. It has 18 chapters on pencil sharpening techniques. Yeah, I mean, it's incredibly thorough. I mean, there are seven pages with warm-up exercises, and you name all these different kinds of pencil points. Well, there's names for the pencil points, but there's also names for the parts of the pencil point, which is the innovation of this book. I created a taxonomy for parts of a pencil point that, to my knowledge, had never been identified before, like the collar bottom and the collar top. Which are? The collar of the pencil point is the exposed cedar that separates the unshaped yellow shaft from the exposed dark graphite. And so by reference to the collar bottom, the collar, and the collar top, you can identify and analyze and celebrate the aesthetics of a pencil point with. greater articulation.

I mean, you've named all kinds of things that I'd never really thought about. Like, there was one particular kind of curly pencil shaving, which you refer to as Malady's ruffled skirt or something? Yes, abandoned on the floor in the throes of our lovemaking. And a lot of people will request a particular type of sharpening technique based on the type of shavings that they want to have. You cannot produce the kind of apple peel or ruffled skirt shavings by a single-bur hand crank sharpener or even by a pocket knife.

And how do you feel about mechanical pencils, which don't actually require any sharpening? There is a brief chapter in my book on mechanical pencils. It's a sentence long. It's just... It's mechanical pencils are bullshit. Right. There's something about mechanical pencils that just really rubs me the wrong way. But the real truth of the matter is I rarely use pencils at all because I'm left-handed. and if you write with a pencil across the page and you're left-handed,

by the end of the afternoon, it looks like you spent the day like karate-chopping chimney sweeps. Do you have the book in front of you? I do have the book in front of me. Could you read the paragraph on page 114 that starts, This is a stylish pencil point? This is a stylish, well, let me say this. The pencil point that we're referring to was made by a double-burne-hand-crank sharpener, as the El Casco, which happens to be the most expensive hand crank sharpener in the world.

So just to give your listeners some context. This is a stylish pencil point indeed, manifesting a peculiar sophistication that seems so resolutely European, we can scarcely believe it was conjured in an American workshop. When presented with such a point, the natural inclination for many pencil enthusiasts will be to treat it as an art object. They would no more think of applying this point to the page than they would think of eating a Faberjeet egg or going pee-Pee in Marcel Duchamp's famous art toilet. This natural inclination, or could it be intimidation, is forgivable.

But the client is also encouraged to discover those pleasures available when the pencil is put to use. I mean, for you, it seems as though, looking at an unsharpened pencil is sort of like the way I would imagine Michelangelo looking at a block of marble or something. That's a great analogy. So you kind of see the perfect object that exists in that pencil?

Well, I mean, now we're edging dangerously close to the fundamental anxiety that consumed me while I was writing this book. And I did become kind of obsessive about it. Kind of. And maybe that's because I was in a weird place in my life and my marriage was ending and I was kind of under-employed and under-stimulated and I kind of just latched onto this thing. and didn't let it go until I felt like I had a pretty good understanding of everything there is to know about pencils. But, yeah, I did spend a lot of time wondering about the concept of an idealized form. Is the pencil's idealized form when it's sharpened or unsharpened? So there is always an element of risk or the possibility of failure when you decide to put a point on a pencil.

you are potentially ruining it or frustrating yourself with a substandard point it would be very easy to leave all our pencils completely unsharpened and completely platonic except then we wouldn't be able to write with them so given that you have to sharpen this pencil how do you know when it's a perfect point now the way that I dealt with this was

every pencil I sharpened for a client gets numbered I have a system of zero through 10, where obviously 0 represents an unsharpened pencil, and 10 represents the absolute pinnacle of pencil sharpness. And in all my two years of sharpening pencils, I think there was one time when I made a 9, and it was a really kind of intense moment, because it was just, you know, some random customer who had ordered a pencil, and I remember sharpening it, and it was just one of those moments where I nailed it and I pulled it

out of the device and it was just whoa this looks amazing like a cartoon of a pencil. It looks more like a rendering of an object than an actual object in the world

if you know what I mean. Yeah. And I was pretty excited. I can't remember if I included a note to the client like you must never use this. That's kind of how I felt about the pencil. Speaking of pencils, you've asked me to bring some material to this conversation.

Yeah, I would like to talk you through the process of sharpening a pencil with a straight blade. I have a box cutter. I have a number two pencil. Great. And I went to the hardware store to get some fine grit sandpaper, as you requested. Right. And I don't know if this is fine enough. I was able to get the 180...

Grit Can you I usually do 320 but I'm sure 180 will work Okay So let's do this Take the box cutter in your dominant hand and take the pencil

In your non-dominant hand Okay Place the blade Maybe one inch down From the end of the pencil It may be 10 to 15 degree angle Okay And you simply push with the thumb

Of your non-dominant hand The hand that's holding the pencil Wait I'm sorry I would be using the thumb on my dominant hand that's holding the blade. I beg your pardon, Jonathan. I want you to use the thumb on your non-dominant hand. Doesn't that seem counterintuitive?

Have you tried it yet? Oh. You know what? I'm trying to do it freehand and I... And you're bleeding. No, but it is actually a trickier. Now, we don't want to get too excited and actually gouge into the graphite by mistake.

Wait, aren't we trying to create a point? We are going to be creating a point, but are we going to be creating it with the box cutter? That's the question. Oh, oh. jumping ahead. That's where the sandpaper comes in. Exactly.

So we finally found a podcast that speaks to you. Pure Bliss. It's so good that when you finish the final episode, it leaves a hole in your heart and your schedule. What now? Personally, is here for you. It's a collection of true stories that explore what it means to be, well, human. The best part, there are six incredible seasons to dive into, with more on the way.

Personally, get lost in someone else's life. Available now, wherever you personally get your podcasts. For as long as I've known him, my friend Josh has been caught up in his own obsession, something he calls the theory of clean and dirty. Let me try to explain. This theory of his purports that foods are either dirty or they are clean. For example, sushi and grilled cheese sandwiches, according to Josh, are clean, whereas General Tau chicken and scrambled eggs are dirty. Why?

Josh says that it just is. Does clean and dirty have to do with aesthetics, nutrition, or any other discernible factor in the known universe? according to Josh, no, it does not. In fact, it's something that Josh claims to just know intuitively. Even though it makes no sense at all, there's something inherently provocative about his dualistic system, perhaps in the way it points to a realm of universals, of pure ideas, ideas in the platonic sense, that is, an abstract realm that exists beyond the mutable material world, but is no less real. for our inability to grasp it.

And so I recently decided to give Josh one last chance to make his theory understood to me. We went out to his favorite diner, a place called T-Luix, where we bought, or rather I bought, because such is the price of learning, one of almost every item on the menu, so that Josh could, through example,

show me the difference between clean and dirty. Look at the different fries we have here. Ask me individually about each one of these. Okay, we have waffle fries, home fries. Stop right there. Waffle fries are very, very clean. Home fries dirty. All right, and why is that?

There is no why. Clean and dirty are the best approximations in the English language for the concepts I'm trying to explain to you. Let me give you an example. Ribs. I'm gonna say dirty. They are dirty.

Buffalo wings on the other hand. Are dirty. No, they're clean. Makes no sense to me. Yet. Okay, what about this hamburger before us? It says a hamburger clean or dirty. The way you make a hamburger clean is as follows. You've just pressed the palm of your hand into the hamburger. Your filthy palm in I had into the hamburger.

What I did was flatten the hamburger, and the flatter the hamburger, the cleaner it is. Okay, so it's about flatness. It's not about flatness. Flatness is just one of the... many facets of it. Okay, what else have we got on the table here? Coffee, tea. I mean, coffee could be clean or dirty if you don't know what you're talking about, but of course it's dirty,

and tea is clean. Coffee is dirty even without cream or sugar? What, cream or sugar are some magic sacraments that make something? No, the coffee is... The palm of your hand just made something clean. You make it sound so crazy. I'm spiritual. I'm not crazy. Okay, let's turn to the Smarties and the M&M.

The Smarty is the cleanest food in existence. We have a bag of M&Ms. Clean as well. Filthy. I wouldn't... It's another candy-coated chocolate. It's like saying Ashton Coochard. He's an actor, right? Paul Newman's an actor.

Same thing. What's the difference? No, it's like saying the Olson twins are the same thing, which they are. Not even remotely the same comparison. Some possible clues might be in crispness and density texturement. Do you try to eat more clean foods than dirty foods? I trend towards the clean When I say that I trend towards the clean

It sounds as if dirty things are bad They're not They're just, you have to It's like a yin-yang sort of thing So does this all have to do with some kind of like Personal mythology There's nothing to do with my personal preference There's nothing to do with me at all

You understand what I'm saying No, I don't Sushi is the cleanest food on the face of the earth After grilled cheese and smarties Why? Again, I am merely the vessel Let me ask you a question Mint, clean or dirty? From everything that I've learned from you today, clean.

You are completely correct. This is what I think. I think you're fighting your natural impulse to understand. Mutton. Filthy. Ah. Raisins. Dirty.

Correct. Because they look like cockroaches, right? Not at all. Because currents that are small raisins, those are very clean. You know what? Okay, let's get you back on track here. How about boiled potatoes? That's an easy one.

That's clean. Horribly dirty. What's wrong with you? Boiled potatoes are? Because, see, now you're thinking about what you're supposed to say rather than feeling it. Pancakes, clean, dirty. Pancakes with syrup? Very clean.

So syrup on something makes it clean on pancakes. Syrup on waffles makes them dirty. Waffles on their own are clean. If you're having it with a cup of coffee, clean. I thought coffee's dirty. French toast makes it clean. You know what? I will say this, John.

For once, you're actually convinced. convincing me that there may be some promise in you, that you're willing to learn. Put it that way. If filling my head with garbage is learning, then I guess I am. I like that positivity. Perhaps there are some things that simply cannot be understood by reason, that just need to be accepted on faith. Just as there does not exist a machine that can accurately measure a neurotic's consistent.

of cleanliness or dirtiness, there can be no machine that can measure the love in one's heart, or can there. Earlier this year, Stanford University hosted the world's first ever love competition. Contestants were asked to subject themselves to an MRI for five minutes and during that time loved someone as hard as they could, while scientists measured their brain activity, taking note of the dopamine, serotonin, and oxytocin levels in their neurological pathways. The results were surprising. An 11-year-old boy came in second by thinking of his brand-new baby niece. But first place, went to a man named Kent Peltz, who thought about his wife of 50 years, Marilyn, who also participated in the study.

Hello. Hi, Kent Peltz. I called up Kent and Marilyn. to get a sense of whether something as pure and ideal as love could ever be measured by physical means. Here's Kent, describing being put to the test. I was instructed to just hold in my mind how much I loved Maryland. And it wasn't hard for me to remember back to how romantic it was when we first met and first fell in love and first got married.

So it was really easy for me to think about that. And Marilyn, what were you thinking of? I was thinking about universal love. I used a quote from Ram Dass that the whole purpose of marriage was to come to God together. So that's what I was thinking about. And so you weren't thinking of specific images from your life together? You were thinking more abstractly? Yes.

The experience of being in the MRI was a beautiful one because I just went into a total state of like meditation. and I just felt love for everything. And did you guys enter into this thing competitively, like to beat each other and win? Like, oh, I'm going to show you love, pal. Not quite that strongly. But we are competitive. We are competitive. So, Marilyn, did you feel a little beaten when you lost?

But, I mean, even to say beaten, I guess, is to win because you're loved so much. Yes, yes, that's it. Yeah, that's right. That's exactly how I felt. Yes, yes. So you guys have been married a half a century now. How did you initially meet? We met on a blind date on a Friday. And he called me at 7 a.m. the next morning when we hadn't gotten home until 12 or 1.

So I called her Saturday morning and said, can you go out just tonight, Saturday night? And she said, no, I have to go back to school this weekend to graduate. I said, well, how about Sunday night? She said, no, I won't be back yet. I said, how about Monday night? So we met on Friday. We went out on Monday night. I asked her to go out again on Tuesday night.

We went out on Tuesday night, and I asked her to marry me on Tuesday night, and she said, yes. Wow. It just happened really fast. There was no question in our mind. The universe just moved when we met. It was just something very significant about our coming together. And your love is as strong as it was all those years ago, you guys? Oh, I think it's much stronger, yeah.

I do think it's much more mature. Yeah, it's a much more mature love, yeah. Because, I mean, Kent, during the competition, it sounds as though you focused on the early years of your relationship. Was that a part of your game plan? I mean, do you think the intensity of early love is easier to measure than a love that deepens over time? Well, those early years were just really innocent, and they were the most blissful. there comes a point in a relationship where marriage is work. It's not always easy.

That's why we say we've been married and divorced thousands of times, but all is to the same person. Just because you change so much over 50 years. We do, and I would say that's one of the biggest advantages in our relationship is we allow change. Kent is a hip shooter. I'm impulsive. Yeah, he's very impulsive. He jumped out of a, you know, dove into a swimming pool from a second story. window and those were the kinds of things that really attracted me to him but that and this is what

we have discovered with most couples what you marry the person for becomes the nemesis in a few years you love it at first and you love it it's what you're attracted to so his impulsivity one time he took all the insides out of my father's organ because it would move easier and i was so angry to the point where okay am i willing to leave this guy over this one. This is the last straw. And I had to really get a hold of myself and say, now, is this object in front of me more important than the relationship that I've built? And somehow or another, it allowed me, it allowed me to grow spiritually and learn to make peace with it. So the relationship was always more important than neither of us as individuals.

I mean, we all have these really bizarre neurotic behaviors. So re-evaluating when you need to be right and when you need to suspend, you need to be right. That's what it takes to make a really powerful relationship. And if you can hold that consciousness, both partners, you'll create something amazing. On Wiretap today, you heard Sean Cullen, Joshua Carpatti, and David Reese, author of the book How to Sharpen Penciles. To have your own pencil sharpened to perfection, visit artisanalpencilsharpening.com. You also heard Kent and Marilyn Peltz. Learn more about their story and their couple counseling workshops at Forever Just Married.com.

Wiretap is produced by Mira Birdwin Tonic, Crystal Duhame, and me. Jonathan Goldstein.