Good Morning. Hello. How are you? #1416
Deaths, injuries, studio construction, introspection about art and construction, developing rules of the road for surviving politics, Girl Scout Cookies order time!
Good morning. Whoops. I forgot Jane has no school till Thursday. Whoops. Got up at 6:30 for no reason. Whoops. Made breakfast. Whoops. She is going to some day camp today (god I hate that we call these things camps, in my day, grumble grumble). But I don’t know which one. I know which ones she’s going to this week, but not the order. I am a (musical sting)… bad parent!
Attention Facebook readers: GMHHAY is leaving Facebook, migrating to Slack. This will be over a few months, and we’ll be completely off by March. I love you all. Please come join us in Slack. The invite link is in the comments below.
How you feeling? I am… not great! Let us enumerate:
My first cousin Mikey died. He was young. I do not know how he died yet. It is very sad. I am very sad. He was a good guy, and I always liked him. We do not have a big family — if I could all my aunts and uncles and cousins, there are 13 of us. I feel horribly for his mom, my aunt and his wife: an absolute angel. I will be going to Alaska for his funeral soon.
I had thought hey, kill two birds with one stone here (unfortunate metaphor) because I heard rumor of one of several of the memorials for my recently passed friend Dave, but it is looking like they will not line up. That is unfortunate.
Cecile Richards died. Met her a couple times through one of my old bosses, who was a lifelong friend and major planned parenthood donor. Always respected what she did, a true pioneer, like her mom.
I have not met many celebrities, but two of them that I have met have passed in the last week so, I guess everyone take care of Shakira please.
I seem to have torn a muscle in my right bicep. I was trying to shimmy a (reasonably sized, 4×4’) sheet of OSB subfloor into position, getting the tonge into the groove (a technique I am absolutely terrible at and have not yet mastered) and I just.. I guess I tried to move it sideways and up and out all at the same time or something and twisted my arm just so. So now the space between my shoulder pain (fused neck) and elbow (three years of tennis elbow and counting) is now filled with pain as well, giving me a nice, consint pain from my neck to my forearm. Freakin great.
I’ve only really been working on the attic studio for… three weeks? And I’ve already sustained a major injury. This is gonna go just great. Who was I kidding.
After laying in a pile of sawdust on the floor of the attic and moaning for a while, I got up and… just kept working. Got something like 5-ish more pieces of subfloor in place this weekend, which is a big improvement over last weekend’s one piece. We have placed the equivalent of 5.25 large 4×8 sheets of subfloor down. This works out to 168 square feet. The attic is 3,700 square feet, so that is not really that great. But the area of the attic that is the hard part — the part that already has a subfloor down, and crappy fiberglass insulation underneath it, works out to about 1,600 square feet. The other parts will go much faster (if I ignore how much duct manipulation I’ll have to do). So, you know. Let’s say 9 more weekends for the main floor. That is.. not terrible? March? ish? April if I factor in funerals and whatnot.
(Jane is now downstairs with me and she is hugging me and wants you to know: “I am hugging my daddy.” It is pretty great)
I swear to god this attic is keeping me sane. I watch this one soundproofing Youtube guy and he’s such a jerk and he keeps posting videos about how you shouldn’t do this or that or whatnot and I am breaking all his rules. He says you should have a budget, I don’t have a budget. He says you should pay people to do things to get it done faster so you can focus on music, says the guy weirdly focused on YouTube and his studio design consultancy but I guess his extra-curricular activities don’t count. I am not paying people to do things. I want to do this myself. The journey is the reward, etc. etc. I will warrant that even with all the injuries this project gives me, I will still be in better physical and emotional health two years from now if I do this myself. My body is remembering how to move in every direction.
I do sometimes kinda think it is stupid to spend years building a whole studio before you make music again. That seems like the apotheosis of the emotional problems I’ve had with art my whole life: you can’t do it until you have this or that piece of gear, or space, or instrument or whatever. But I think maybe I don’t care? Making music is lovely but it is not the be-all, end-all of my existence. My writing and, I am realizing, this actual construction project, matter to my creative and emotional state just as much.
We also got the new Plex up and running but I think we’ll save that as a topic for tomorrow.
And then we have the inauguration. I am not processing it particularly well. I am angry at all of them, disgusted, embarrassed. I am intolerant of speculation. I have never been one to “blame the media” but their complete capitulation this week, unable to describe Elon’s Sig Heil for what it is, falling over and complying in advance. Yeah, fuck that.
I’m ridiculously disgusted with most of the Democratic party, which is a real shame what with them supposedly being my party and all. I’m disgusted with their fundraising emails. I’m disgusted with their messages of bipartisanship, even though I get perfectly well what they’re doing, staying out of the way and letting the monster eat itself. It’s nice when Internet randos say something like “don’t comply in advance, fight.” But not a single leader is giving us a single means to “fight.”
I’m sick of the billionaires, I’m sick of the tech oligarchs, their absolutely toxic mix of genuflection and ego. I’m sick of them poisoning products that I need to use with their AI and their syophantry (sychophantism? hrm Mirriam Webster says “sycophancy”) and their college freshman Ayn Rand bullshit. I am desperately looking for a single fucking figure in my industry who has the balls to say these people and things suck. But… nope.
I realized a few things this week:
Not gonna put my head in the sand. Will keep track of things. But:
I’ll do it on my time
I won’t spend hours doomscrolling
I just wish there was some fucking corner of the internet these people didn’t infect. Our new Slack group has shown incredible promise, now that we have relegated politics talk to a special channel that I can choose to look at or not. It would be swell if I could, like, tell Bluesky to only give me 5 minutes of Trump bullshit in my feed then shut it off, but it can’t, and my god, so many people spend their entire lives up there posting constantly about this shit. Not for me, not for me.
My friend Rex has a (rough) theory that, depressingly, Reddit is the only last non-toxic corner of social media and I suspect he’s right. I suspect I just need to get really into construction Reddits or something.
I don’t want to speculate about the future. I’m not playing that parlour game. I remain confident this dude is going to die pretty soon and this whole thing will implode in the next few years. But I don’t really want to rely on it or talk about it. And I don’t want to spend my time predicting things. I hate predicting things in the best of times. I don’t find it useful. And in this case, it actively upsets me. I will focus on taking things as they come.
I will not engage in fatalism or complying in advance. I cannot stand it when someone posts “this EO is illegal” then all the comments are knowing, wise, cynics who say “oh you poor chile look at you thinking laws matter.” The dude has not won the word, he will not be in power forever, he has not completely sidelined the courts. It is not over! The mid-terms politicking starts in, like, 11 months. The courts will block things (mental note: look for orgs to donate to that are fucking suing to stop these shitty EOs). It does no one any good to give up, to act like the game is over. It matters that things are illegal!
We did a good job last time with our massive resistance! He tried so much shit that did not work! I cannot fathom why everyone is just giving up on that this time. Resist is not a clothing logo!
All right. I will stop.
Next line of important business: GIRL SCOUT COOKIES. Jane’s Girl Scout Cookie store is open. Order some cookies! This weekend we did the “Girl Delivery” of all the cookies to the neighborhood it was so fun. We also ordered one box of each type of cookie, and tried them all.
So, without further ado, here are all the (east coast) Girl Scout cookies, ranked:
Caramel DeLites
Lemonades
Thin Mints (beloved but never quite as good as you remember)
Adventurefuls
Trefoils
Peanut Butter Patties
Peanut Butter Sandwich
Toast-Yay!
Gluten-free Caramel Chocolate Chip
Jane does not agree with my ranking. She says her favorites are 1) Peanut Butter Patties, 2) Adventurefuls, and 3) Caramel deLites.
This is not to say that Toast-Yay!s are bad! They are almost good! This is their last year. I think they should have done a re-work — but more sweet, but more cinnamon — rather than cancel them. I will be sad that effort discontinues.
Jane also tells me that today’s camp is gymnastics camp so thank god I do not have to wake my wife up and admit to being a bad parent here.
Anyway, order some cookies! Woo! Cookies!
Jane is sitting next to me. She says: “Cookies are very yummy. Buy some cookies! They’re very yummy!”
Let’s see what we have for a playlist for today. Looks like we have a shoegaze playlist for you today. All new, most of the bands are new to me. Except for Yume Bitsu. Everything else is within the last year. Saw Rocket a couple weeks ago. Like the album more than I liked their live show.
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Thanks for reading.
And hey! Maybe buy one of my books!
Good Morning, Hello, How Are You vol 1.