Good Morning. Hello. How are you? #1448
sick mom, missed a friend's memorial, two days of work in New York, a punk in a Michael Buble shirtEmma needs some work
Good morning! I am back! Back to GMHHAY, back home. It is very exciting. I am no loner cut out for travel. It’s too much. The beds, man. The beds. Thin blankets, the wrong pillows. Nice pillows, to be sure, but not my pillows. Can’t handle it. Can’t handle it.
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Two day work meeting, hosted in the hotel I always stay in. Barely left the hotel. I did not go out carousing with friends and hit a bunch of bars, I got enough sleep and I got my work done. I felt simultaneously very proud of this and utterly embarrassed and sad. Spring in SoHo! I didn’t partake. I am such a bore. Each night I spent over ten hours trying to get enough sleep. I did not get enough sleep. What the hell is wrong with me.
My coworker and old dear friend Kristen commented in the morning when I told her I didn’t go out, I just slept, but that I was sad and embarrassed about it: “you did the right thing and it feels so bad.”
But I did get a lot of work done, we have a shiny new roadmap, we have a plan, everyone is in sync, and I am pretty into it all, so that is good. I did what I set out to do. And literally nothing else.
Except, while I was in this two days of all-day meetings:
1) My mom suffered some sort of kidney failure and is in the hospital. It is very stressful. It is very concerning. It is somewhat touch-and-go. She has been there three days now and her creatine levels have only improved slightly, her blood oxygen is still very low. No one is sure what’s going on. It is occurring to me as I write this that people do not publicly write these things they just sort of silently endure until it turns out one way or the other, but I guess I am telling you. It is messing me up. I am worried about her. I talk to my sister and aunt and her doctors often. Actually I should probably call the hospital now.
(as an aside, thank you mom and dad for doing your homework and assigning POA and medical directive to your kids so the hospital will talk to me. Everyone needs to get on this.)
2) My wife lost her longest, biggest, most steady work contract. Well, it will be “paused” at the end of the month (so thank you for the notice, given that they didn’t have to do that.) She has had this gig as her dominant income source for more than five years. So if you have any web or graphic design work you need done, drop her a line. I bet she will be soon going into one of those update-my-portfolio k-holes I haven’t seen her go into in… five, six years. That’ll be a nice nostalgia hit.
3) My daughter had a weird freak-out at school where she just decided she didn’t want to do one of the assignments, it was “boring,” and was eventually sent to the principal. It seems like it was a one-off, though she does not seem to like this particular reading assignment. This all seems fine, but it is frustrating to me because the school does not give you the tools to decode it, or seem interested in decoding it themselves. Like… is it the content of the reading assignment? Something that causes anxiety? Is it that she is intellectually bored? Is it, like, the time of day it happens, what happens before it? No idea. No one seems to want to figure it out. And, I mean, yeah, probably a one-off, so whatever. But I do hope if it happens again, a bit of digging into an explanation happens.
4) As I got to New York, my friend Scott texted and told me that there was a memorial bar night thing happening on Wednesday for our departed friend David Klass. I was leaving New York about two hours before it started. Were I younger or not suffering from hysterical epstien barr at the moment, I probably would have tried to re-arrange my schedule and stay an extra night to go to this. I had made a promise during pandemic that I was never going to miss another memorial for a departed friend again, and this is the second time in five years I have broken that promise to myself and I am super sad about it. But my body just couldn’t handle it, and with the situation with my mom I couldn’t handle it emotionally. I feel terrible. I drank a glass of ultra-rare VI Akvavit experimental sample akvavit in his honor when I got home, and god, that shit is so good. David really was magical.
All this is to say I am in a pretty emotionally raw place after the trip. I am often in a pretty emotionally raw place after trips.
We are listening this morning to a new Sonic Youth release, live in Chicago at Cabaret Metro, 19… mmmm… gonna say 87? It is really good. Thurston banters more than he did in the late years, which is very weird. I would like to applaud Sonic Youth for, even in the face of a seemingly acrimonious divorce, keeping the re-issue and live library release train going. It is getting to the point where Sonic Youth have more releases posthumously than they did when they were a band. Actually let’s look that up. Wow, yes. Ignoring the Simon Werner a Disparu soundtrack, which came out the year they broke up, there now have been twenty-nine releases when they were a band, and Ride the Tiger here looks like it is the twenty-ninth postumous release. Lotta those posthumous releases don’t have physical releases yet, though. Most of them are just Bandcamp releases. Still. Props.
Spent a large segment of yesterday wandering around the Newark Airport. I flew into Newark because at one point we were thinking of doing this meeting in Jersey before everyone said “naw dawg,” and I remembered that back when I lived in SoHo, Newark was actually pretty quick to get in and out of. And man! With congestion pricing? It was crazy. Ten minutes into the city. I had the driver drop me off right at the mouth of the tunnel, by the old Barbarian office, and I walked through SoHo and past my old work and apartment and had a good nostalgia K-Hole. There is a Dunkin Donuts on Canal now. Well, a second one. Right next door to the backside of my old apartment on Howard Street. Man. I woulda loved that.
Yesterday while I was back at Newark I saw an ape man gutter punk change out of a Crass t-shirt in the bathroom. My god, that guy was so hairy. But the best is what he changed into: A Michael Buble World Tour T-Shirt. Fuckin excellent.
Walking around EWR for, oh, four hours, in my fragile emotional state, with the political situation going on in the world, you know. Crowds. It’s interesting. It is actually impossible to tell which people are shell-shocked and aware of all that’s going on with our government, and which are blissfully unaware or indifferent. Because of course, we don’t look different, do we? And we are just tryin go get by as well. So we kinda look normal in public? The whole thing has a very Matrix feel, which is such a shitty metaphor these days but we can reclaim it, it’s our movie not theirs.
Emma took Jane to school this morning, so I was allowed to sleep as long as I wanted again, this time with my pillows, my mattress, my blankets, and… I feel pretty good? I dunno. Maybe I have the flu. But at least for the first time in a week I got nine hours of sleep and it kind of feels like it. I miss being awake. Being awake is so awesome.
I have a ton of catch-up work to do today, taxes for two or three different entities, tech calls, bills to pay, etc. I am a bit overwhelmed. Leaving home, man. It’ll fuck you up.
I am excited to see my daughter. Got in last night after she was in bed, Emma took her to school. But we both have tomorrow off and I am gonna spend the day with her. It’s gonna rule. My daughter rules.
I don’t have a playlist for you today I haven’t even thought about playlists in days. Oh you know what I will tell you a quick story. Kathleen Yearwood Ordeal. Some thirty years ago I was introduced to her, then known as Kathleen Yearwood, and her album Book of Hate, which I have loved forever. Recently I realized a) her name is now appended with Ordeal, b) while she is still not on Spotify, she does have a Bandcamp page, and on it she has one of those offers that for like a hundred bucks you can buy her entire discography, so I did, so c) for the last several weeks I have been working my way through fifteen or twenty albums by this avant-garde Canadian folk singer and my god every one of them is amazing. What a career. It’s amazing to have this abundance of Kathleen Yearwood Ordeal in my life, after only having one album for 30+ years. She is awesome.
So I present to you my first effort at linking to an individual Bandcamp track in GMHHAY. Let’s see how Buttondown handles it:
https://kathleenyearwoodordeal.bandcamp.com/track/a-photon-goes-from-place-to-place
Okay. Until tomorrow. Thank you for your patience during my absence.
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Thanks for reading.
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Good Morning, Hello, How Are You vol 1.