Good Morning. Hello. How are you? #1443
Too much sleep, snapping turtle, Tolkien update, Mrs. Davis, half a ramen, life angst, Post Harbor., computer angst
Good morning hi how are you I went back to bed after dropping Jane off today because eight and a half hours was not enough sleep and now I have cumulatively gotten ten hours are you jealous? I feel groggy and weird. I need caffeine. I have a meeting soon. I will probably never finish this today. Maybe this is it, man. Maybe this is the day GMHHAY ends. If I were a youtuber I would put a photo of myself in a bikini looking doe-eyed with a big yellow headline IS THIS THE END? And then it would just be a video about weaving or something, no explanation for the clickbait headline.
Join the GMHHAY slack. Reply to this email and ask for an invite if you’re a human who likes chatting with other humans about topics such as these within!
Update from yesterday our turtle is a snapping turtle, not a box turtle. Their lifespan is 30-40 years. Our pond is 30-40 years old. It is conceivable that the turtle just died of old age. I am still really sad about that turtle. Emma’s gonna make me move it with a snow shovel. We should probably bury it. Poor turtle.
We are listening today to a post-rock band called Post Harbor. (with the period). The album is They Can’t Hurt You if you Don’t Believe in Them. It is mayhaps a smidge more epically intended than the band can pull off but it is more epic than I could pull off. I like it. I enjoy the plaintive violin. Pretty solid.
Having a bit of a hard time this week with (gestures vaguely) all this. Stupid tarriffs, absolute bullshit illegal cutting off of congressionally appropriated aid to Ukraine oh and today they’re gonna break another law and dismantle the department of education? Which is also congressionally appropriated? And no one is going to do anything about it. But I’m sure Hakeem Jeffries will issue a strongly worded statement.
But someone burned down a supercharging station and republican congresspeople are whining saying they can’t hold town halls and they are being protested when they go home, so I guess that is nice.
Life is finite, man. We only have so many days on this planet, so many trips around the sun as Kacey Musgraves said. I don’t want to spend any more of it in front of this computer. I love writing but can I just get up and walk away and do something else with my life once I am done with the writing each day? I don’t want to sit here anymore working on SOC audits and insurance and m&a and adtech I just don’t. I’m fifty-two years old there is more to life than this as Björk said. I wonder what a Björk-Kacey Musgraves collaboration would sound like. Shit I shouldn’t even think such things out loud cuz some over-eager AI will hear me and hallucinate it.
Speaking of which did anyone else watch Mrs. Davis? My god that was a good show. And the plot twist about the AI? Just majestic and so, so dead on. What a show.
(This, incidentally, is why I am building a recording studio. Because I don’t want to make my music on a computer).
Here is an existential question for you: how do you make half a ramen? Do you make all the noodles, then divide them in half then ickily store the uneaten half in the fridge? Or can you, like, use a bandsaw to cut a dry ramen pack in half that’s the answer isn’t it?
I suppose the answer is actually use straight ramen noodles and just divide the bunch in half but that is so much less fun. I’m gonna need a band saw.
I want to keep eating my lunch ramen but I need it to be half as big but I still need to actually boil it because the whole reason I want it is for the soupy vegetables but it is getting absurd to put all this work into one teeny tiny small cup-and-a-half of broth. I could probably make the broth in bulk then just re-boil it to soften up my vegetables huh? Yeah okay. Reboiled broth and straight noodles.
But curly noodles are so much more fun.
I want to go to Tom and Jerry’s tomorrow and see Rex do we think it’s worth it to blow a grand to go drink at a bar for a night? I mean… yes, of course, right?
Just a wee Tolkien update for you, we are now on The History of Middle-Earth Volume 9, aka The History of Lord of the Rings Volume 3, Sauron Defeated. Just read through the first few drafs of the Scouring of the Shire. I always thought of Scouring as Scarring, like the part where Saurumon and his cronies mess the place up. But it’s actually like a scouring pad, like cleaning it, like with Frodo et al return to the Shire and clean shit up. Sauron is such a jerk, man.
I am reading these books on the Kindle. I bought all 12 volumes as a bulk deal, though they did not electronically deliver me book 10, so that is an impending bureaucratic nightmare on my horizon. I should also say, in a bit of virtue signalling, that Amazon sucks, but I am locked into the Kindle. But the way I get around this is the same way I handle music: the digital copies are in addition to the physical copies, I already bought the physical books of the History of Middle Earth. Not that the do-nothing sloths that are Tolkien Estate Administrators need more money. Boy those guys get my goat.
Anyway, it’s still pretty interesting, watching Tolkien figure out how to write Lord of the Rings over, like, ten years. He keeps thinking he’s almost done, just one or two more chapters, and then those one or two turn into ten or so chapters, but the last one or two of the new ten chapters, turn into another ten or so chapters and on it goes, expanding and expanding from one book to three plus a ridiculous appendix. He’s been dealing with a paper shortage his whole life, what with multiple world wars and all (mental note, stock up on paper for the impending collapse). He writes drafts in pencil then writes drafts over those drafts. He writes on the back of his Oxford students’ papers. Christopher Tolkien even names a few of these students, I looked ‘em up, just some normal dudes in America or England who happened to be mentioned in the History of Middle-Earth if that were me I would frame that page on my wall or something.
It’s weird to me I haven’t really gotten bored in, oh, five, six thousand pages. I’ve never really read a book — let alone eight now — about the act of writing. I mean, I’ve read, like that Stephen King book on writing and Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird and that one crappy one everyone says is great but I hated that I do not remember the name of. But those are books on how to write, not, like, actual detailed histories of the process an author took to write something. I do wish Christopher delved more into the circumstances of Tolkien’s life while writing: if you weren’t paying close attention to the year’s you’d miss that WWII even happened. I understand someone else has written another book that’s that story: the biographical account of Tolkien’s life as he’s writing Lord of the Rings. If I am still feeling the curiosity, after I finish the rest of History of Middle-Earth, a re-read of Lord of the Rings and maybe his letters, well, then, maybe I’ll pick that up.
But I do have two new volumes of Anaïs Nin’s unexpurgated diary to get back to which, now that I am thinking about it, is actually a kinda similar endeavor huh. With more sex. Boy I cannot wait to find out if Anaïs kept boning all over creation even into her elderly and cancerous years. I have faith, I have faith.
All right well I better go do my job today. I am good at it. It pays okay. The people are good. Provided the planet doesn’t fall apart, we are endeavoring to do something not evil and even kinda good. Someone should do it, even though it’s a thankless and pedantic pursuit, fighting en vogue and basically-legally-sanctioned oligopolies.
I would like to issue a thank you to my daughter who did not mercilessly steal my seat last night when I invited her downstairs for some daddy-Jane Youtube time. She actually let her conscience get to her and let me sit in my seat. That was nice.
I don’t have a playlist for you, and I have a meeting soon so I can’t make one for you, so I am just going to give you this Jesus and Mary Chain song that has been going through my head for about 48 hours now. Not depressed nope nope nope.
Until tomorrow. May you sleep soundly.
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Thanks for reading.
And hey! Maybe buy one of my books!
Good Morning, Hello, How Are You vol 1.