Good Morning. Hello. How are you? #1408
Feedback and thoughts from yesterday's death post, update on the record buying resolution, plans to get GMHHAY off Meta properties, a school messaging mystery.
Good morning good morning. Brr. Cold. Ready for this cold snap to end. I messed up and it got to 30.4 degrees one night in the greenhouse for an hour or two. I think everything is okay? Stressful!
We are listening to Closer by Joy Division this morning, clear vinyl 2020 repressing, remastered, because I have never owned it on vinyl before, which is weird. Such a great record, I’ve loved it for… 35 years? Woah.
Regarding the record-buying new years’ resolution:
We had 24 un-listened to records in the backlog on Jan 1
Three more records have arrived since then, but also I know about eight are coming because one day about six months ago I impulsively bought the entire Sault discography at once, and they finally just shipped.
I have been listening to these records pretty much continuously since I got home — so I haven’t made a dent at all in the “to investigate” playlist yet. But it’s been great, I love it, and seriously I could do this forever.
Which is great because Spotify sucks and I need to quit them.
Spent most of yesterday listening to a 3-LP Black Rebel Motorcycle Club Live in Paris album and man they are so good live. It came with a DVD. I ripped it. It’s in Plex if you are a Plex friend of mine.
You have probably noticed through the years that I take a photo of every colored vinyl, and post them in GMHHAYs. I have a backlog of about 50, so never you fret: despite the resolution, the photos will continue for quite a while.
I am very excited to no longer have to deal with Discogs Sellers’ absolutely chaotic packing tendencies. NB I do not need five old beat-up 70’s records protecting my album, nor do you need to add a bunch of tape to a record mailer that already has a sealer on it. Gah. Will not miss.
When will the last record arrive that I purchased in 2024? My money is on June. I will keep you apprised.
Lotta good commentary on yesterday’s post, thank you all for the kind words. My whole schtick here is writing down and giving word to the things we all think — profound or mundane — that we feel alone in and boy this one hit the mark. Some collected thoughts, feedback, commentary:
This desire to know how a friend died seems to be very widespread — easily a top-ten post in terms of number of people who wrote in. But it is not universal. A few people said explicitly that they do not want to know in many situations.
A quote from my friend Elisabeth about how hard it is to go through this phenomenon: ""It’s not yours because it’s not your direct feeling but it still is yours, like you’re on a boat and the wake shakes things.”
My friend Jes made a very good point that sometimes no one knows. Autopsies are not automatic in America (are they anywhere, I wonder?), they can be expensive and — most relevantly here — they can often take forever. I hadn’t considered this, even though I knew it: I remember very well from not too long ago that it took, oh, six months for the coroners to tell us that Sinead O’Connor did not kill herself. It seems weird that we do not, as a society, have some sort of convention, or language to explain and handle this? Like it is weird the papers never say something like “it wasn’t suicide or violence but no one knows what it was it could take six months to know.” Hrm I guess they do sometimes say that. I dunno I gotta chew on this point.
My friend Mark wrote me to point out two historical causes of our current societal approach to this:
AIDS. There was such a stigma about AIDS that everyone got all evasive about causes of death. I am old enough to remember this. I am also old enough to remember to have known at the time that it was bad, Silence=Death, etc. Etc. But I do think he is very right that the whole thing left a lasting impression on American’s habits in this regard.
Suicide prevention, glamorization. I also think Mark is right that this is often a motivation, in the cases where it’s suicide. However I do think it is very misguided. I don’t have any data handy, but I do tend to loosely keep an eye on suicide rates in America, and they fluctuate, even as our societal habits in this regard do not. It might be a minimally contributing factor, but I do not think it’s anywhere near a driving factor. I have some personal experience in this, with a “death wave” happening in my high school. The thing is, though, the death that set it off was not a suicide, but a murder (man Alaska is rough). The whole school mourned and a day or two later someone killed themselves. It seems to me that it is the very obvious mourning and tragedy that motivates as much as the actual method of death god this is morbid. Also information is so, so vital. I have helped stop a few suicides in my day, and 100% of how my half-assedly-and-unintentionally learned skills I used to stage these interventions came from actively talking about it back when that school death wave happened earlier in my life.
Please don’t harass the family. We need to know, but this is our problem. Someone wrote to me about how intrusive, prying, and demanding several people were when they were going through this, not offering to help, just demanding answers that they did not have.
Anyway, we are gonna move on. Bit exhausted revisiting several friends’ past deaths. Maybe a small chapbook is in my future: handbook to having your friend die or something, 20-30 pages. This was all a first pass, and hastily written: the lack of editing is GMHHAY’s secret weapon and its achilles heel.
Most tech companies are in the doghouse these days, but we are gonna focus on Facebook today because of three recent acts (very into bulleted lists today apparently):
Asshole donated $1MM to Trump’s “inauguration” which we all know is going to be, like, an off night in a Texas roadhouse but will have collected $100MM and will so obviously be pocketed. Asshole Zuck did not, of course, donate $1MM to Biden’s inaugural. None of them did. Compliance in advance.
He recently added a new board member, CEO of UFC, absolute 100% Trump sycophant. The board member, not Zuck. Well, both of them now. The board is powerless at Meta so, then, what does this mean? It is a signal, a capitulation, and a welcoming of spying.
Complete abandonment of fact checking and also the moving of several teams of moderators from California to Texas “to remove the appearance of bias.” Amazing Orwellian doublespeak. A middle school teacher would give you a zero if you wrote that sentence.
Really, though, I’m just so sick of him, so sick of the ecosystem. And I barely use it. I come up to Facebook to post GMHHAY, and then I participate in the comments. I use Threads still. I don’t really use Instagram anymore or even really look at it.
So, then, this is the contours of my plan. But since you guys are involved, I can’t just go do it. Well, I can just go do some of it, but not other parts (more bulleted lists woo):
Stop using Threads, delete it from my phone. I think I will post my daily GMHHAY link there still, from my desktop? I’m torn on this one point. Debating.
Stop posting GMHHAY to Facebook. This is the big one. I was thinking I could post, like, just the subhead and link, like I do on Threads. But unless you can turn off comments, it will stay sticky. I am very torn about this one because, despite many of you leaving Facebook and just emailing me your comments, I know it’s not the same. Substack had a comments section on posts, Buttondown does not. So if I leave Facebook, I lose the community.
SO, what I am thinking is that we make either a Slack or a Discord group for GMHHAY. Private group, not on Meta. I think this could be pretty great even if its just the 10-20 most active FB posters. But it would involve work from you guys. So let me know what you think. But I am in a few other private chat groups and they are all pretty marvelous. Shit maybe it’s just a giant SMS group ha.
I don’t really want to do this, I want Meta to be a moral company but it’s clear it never will be, is getting worse, and I kinda hate myself for being up there. But I love you guys. But I feel trapped. So can’t we all take the plunge together? That would be so great.
Jane is very into being early to school these days. We have been first in the car drop-off line the last two days. Prior to break, we were getting there at 7;15 or so and were third or fourth. We’ve been moving up in line since then. Yesterday we took advantage of the 2-hour delayed start time and left even earlier and we were first. Today we left the house five minutes earlier and made first by about 45 seconds, really just the whim of the single traffic light.
But the weird thing is, three days ago the school sent out one of their oblique, utterly confusing emails where they said “don’t let your kids out of their car before 7:30, no gate lice, someone will signal.” And I do not know what this means! Oo a numbered list this time:
No one does let their kid out of their car before 7:30? Everyone is really good about it. Like I am parked right in front of the door. I can see. There are no gate lice. Only kids outside or going in before 7:30 are the teacher’s and staff’s kids.
So why this email? Are we doing something wrong? If so, can you explain?
There is no one signaling! There never has been! I am up front! I can see this!
I thought, prior to yesterday, that maybe it was, like, a FIFO sort of thing, and they only signaled to the first car, which, even though I was third or fourth, I can’t really see properly cuz of a bend in the road. But yesterday I was first! And there was no signal. At 7:30:30, I did see a staffer meandering toward the front of the line, but a bunch of staffers come out, every day, to assist the small kids get out of the car. Was this one staffer also walking to signal me? Unclear!
Except today I was first again, and there was no staffer at all!
It is real weird to me that all the staffers who help the kids are always late every morning, but I forgive them, 7:30 sucks as a work time. But, weirdly, they were all also late yesterday when 9:30 was a work time? Why? I am so confused!
90-something percent of Americans have smart phones, definitely pushing 100% at this school. Of those, virtually everyone has the phone set their time automatically from a time server. We are all running on the same time these days! All the parents have accurate, synchronized clocks and all the parents wait till 7:30 to send their kids out and there is definitely not someone signaling us, and if they’re late every day, isn’t that their problem? And if they’re late every day, why send us an email telling us to do something differently?
It’s a real mystery. This school routinely sends out utterly incomprehensible emails that my overthinking, accuracy-needing brain cannot handle.
If there is a bad place, and I end up in it, this is a perfect way to torture me.
Oh shit no playlists ready. Oh whew this goth one is almost done let’s just add a great song from Closer to make it topical and that awesome Tear Garden song that came on shuffle this week. Boom. Bob’s your uncle. Bought that Cold Cave on vinyl as one of my last records of the year, listened to it yesterday, so good, they are so good. Not many actual albums for such a long career. I don’t remember most of these they are from two months ago. I will give this a listen again today. Oh and the one good song from Bloodflowers. That’s not fair, Rick, there are like three good songs on Bloodflowers.
Until tomorrow, friends. Let’s get off Facebook. We can do it. You can be a Discord or Slack user. You can do it. Got a preference?
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Thanks for reading.
And hey! Maybe buy one of my books!
Good Morning, Hello, How Are You vol 1.
but, but, but—here i am in the comments section! 🍠 HERE!!!
I literally learned about the comments section TODAY ha. I just saw all your previous comments! You shoulda chided me at the brunch that I wasn't answering!