Good Morning. Hello. How are you? #1421
Mid-life crisis shit, death shit, but the important question: what do Hobbits do about radon?
Good morning, hello hello hello. Tuesday. Bullshit. 6:30 AM. Bullshit. It is just so inhumane, getting up this early. And I went to sleep early too! Just sucks.
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Jane and I had a big argument last night. Well, no, that’s not true. She had a great old time, I got sad and upset. She did this trifecta perfectly engineered to upset me. She ran to her chair and, as usual, didn’t sit in it properly, and thusly fell out of it. And I annoyingly, parentally said “this is why mommy always reminds you to sit in your chair all the way.”
And she proceeded to perfectly, unrelentingly lie that no, that never happened, mommy never said that. Just absolutely ignoring reality.
Then she ignored her mother when she asked her to sit at the table instead of running around. Just running around the dinner table like a lunatic, ignoring the kind request of the woman I love like her words didn’t even matter. Of course, Emma can handle this fine, but I am not good at watching Jane do this sort of thing I get very “protective” of my wife (no good has ever come of a man saying this, I realize).
Then she started assaulting me while I was trying to eat. Like trying to grab my phone out of my pocket and batting me or something, while I just said “stop please,” over and over. She was doing all of this in fun, just a joyous mood, which, you know, could have made it cute.
But the unrelenting ignoring of the truth and wishes of others was just too much for me, and I told her I was upset. She did some rote fake apology and I said no, that wasn’t good enough, to leave me alone until she was ready to apologize for real, and she understood why I was upset. She was genuinely shocked by this whole affair, that’s when things “got bad.” She was deeply upset about it even this morning. And while we did make up this morning and it was quite nice, she did not at any point acknowledge what was so upsetting.
So, you know, what was even the point of me doing any of that I guess.
Just so tired of the Trumpian lying, straight-up denial, constant deflecting in the face of overwhelming evidence. I mean, I am sort of proud of her? It’ll come in handy in a world full of grifters and sexists. But don’t do it on me, man.
Anyway I probably shouldn’t have made a big deal about it but, like, how do you get through to someone like that, who has learned they can just railroad everything to get what they want? Is it even worth it? Do I even want to kill that sort of… unbridled ambition and determination?
Which ties into my own shit these days. I realized last night that, oh, no, I thought I went through my mid-life crisis in my 40’s. I thought that whole period where I struggled to overcome ambition and ego and started to learn to just be a human being, not a slave to “productivity hacks” and “whast people think” was my mid-life crisis.
But I am coming to realize no, there’s a real mid-life crisis. There is something darker: there is the realization that it’s not just that we are all gonna die, it’s that we’re all dying right now.
My old friend Renée (who I really need to catch up with on one of these trips to Alaska I hope she goes to the solstice dance since I missed Dave’s memorial this weekend) informed me that another high school friend, Karl Kalen, died. Karl and I haven’t talked since High School, really. We’re Facebook friends but Renée explained he kept losing his password and making new accounts. He was not online, and he didn’t live in Fairbanks anymore so I didn’t see him on my trips up there, so. you know, not in touch.
But in high school we were close, same circles with Drama, where was just amazing and brilliant, and same circles with the weirdo “waver” kids, where he was one of the truly eccentric, brilliant, visionary weirdos that I deeply admired because I was still just an insecure kid (fun fact, I still am!).
So, yeah, I dunno, man. Is it right/wrong to be upset about the deal of someone you’ve not been close to in 35 years, yes, of course it’s okay. And is it my own baggage with my cousin Mikey, with Dave, with all that’s happened, already, this year (okay Dave was on Christmas but still)… is that baggage accentuating my sadness over Karl? yes, of course.
In 2020, during the pandemic, I lost my father, I lost… four, five friends? Suicide, weird heart conditions, brain aneurysms, all sorts of shit. But now. Who the fuck knows. Three deaths in four weeks, no cause for any of them, in the depths of winter. At least the 2020 wave had the courtesy to wait until March.
And it is really hitting hard now that this life of having friends, this thing that meant so much to me for my entire existence, since I got those first true, real, amazing friends in high school: this life necessarily will lead to nothing but a life of constant loss.
And, look. I am a rebel even in the face of implacable life facts, and I will just keep on making friends, because fuck it what else is there in life but the connections we make.
But god damn. I am not particularly good at people dying, even casual friends. And I don’t see how I’m going to get better at it, even as it ramps up to 10, maybe 20 a year??
Until, of course, I go.
But I’m not going, I’m not going to die, I’m never going to fucking die. I have a studio to finish building and a last laugh to get.
I was informed that yesterday I put the same image in the GMHHAY edition twice and did not, in fact, put an image of the amazing yellow rubber doorstop. My mistake. Here it is:
We are listening to the fantastic shoegaze band Colour of Spring. No albums for them, I don’t think. An EP (brilliantly titled E.P.) and a lot of singles and a spit single. But god, they are so good. I wonder if they play live.
Are we really going to transition from a cris-de-coeur about death and life to some DeepSeek analysis? No, no we are not. Sorry, ideas notepad but you do not real my life. Thank U, Next.
Oh, this seems fitting. So, Sunday was Ozempic day and I pulled out my little refrigerated box and it had one shot left in it and I tried to give it to myself but… the pen didn’t work? I couldn’t “cock” the thing to spit out a dose. And I realized a few things:
a) I always kind of in my head thought that the actual dose of the drug was in the six little capsules they give you along with the pen. The capsules that have the needle in them. But it just occurred to me that those little capsules obviously do not have liquid in them. So… the liquid must be in the pen?? That is crazy.
b) so this means that my pen is not broken, it is probably just out of medicine. And I do recall that last cycle, I thought the pen was broken, and I used the new pen with an old needle, thinking I was being clever. But no! The pen’s not broken. It is just out of medicine.
c) So where did this all go wrong? (This should not be letter C because I did not realize this and this is a list of realizations, but letter C is, in fact, a mystery, a thing I have definitively not yet realized). At what point, two months ago, ish, did I mess this whole thing up? And how do I keep from doing this again.
Anyway, now I am two days out from taking the drug and last night I was commensurately ravenous, ate everything in site and gained two pounds last night, so that’s just fucking awesome.
Hey important question: What do hobbits do about radon? Is there no freakin radon in the Shire? Tolkien modeled the Shire after England, after abandoning Tol Eressa as his model. Maybe he shoulda stuck with that: Tol Eressa didn’t have people who lived in the freakin ground.
Maybe Hobbits are immune to radon and maybe that’s why they live in the Shire and no one else does becasue they all die from radon. Except if Men or Dwarves lived in the shire they wouldn’t live in the ground.
Oh shit. What about Dwarves.
Shit.
That’s it for today, please consider buying some Girl Scout cookies. I had like nine Lemonades last night they are so good.
Send me photos of your Girl Scout cookie order. Thank you, reader Tim, for being the first to send in a photo.
As you were.
Justa mix for you today. Mostly new stuff, some we’ve been mining for a bit now. You know how it is, I like to give albums more than one chance, mood determines a lot. Gave the new Ringo Star a spin this week, I enjoyed it, I like country, I like the Beatles. I like the new Brian Jonestown Massacre single, cautiously optimistic about the new Samia, not a fan of the new SZA, into this Woodsman band thank you whomever alerted me to them might have been Aug? New Franz Ferdinand is a fun little romp. Still very fond of the new Kim Deal, though I guess it’s a couple months old now. Oh and the Innocence Mission, man. Great album. It’s like if the Sundays never stopped putting records out. The Sundays still make music you know. Maybe someday we’ll hear it. We did get Eyes Wide Shut and AI, after all.
Have a friend as good as Spielberg was to Kubrick who finished your last film for you and put Ministry in it.
Until tomorrow. I’ll feel better, I promise.
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Thanks for reading.
And hey! Maybe buy one of my books!
Good Morning, Hello, How Are You vol 1.